MARCO NIEVERGELT. Allegorical Quests From Deguileville to Spenser.

Abstract

Nievergelt sets himself two weighty and interrelated tasks in this study: the first of these is to provide a genealogy for a tradition of allegorical quests, which has roots in Deguileville’s paradigmatic Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine and which had by the time of Spenser become so pervasive in early modern thought that it often served as an unarticulated template for ontological speculation. The second task is to use these texts to contribute to the further collapse of a false dichotomy between ‘metaphysical’, medieval views of the self and a decentred or conflicted subjectivity emergent at the dawn of the modern age, and to replace it with an acknowledgement of the persistent dialectic between these two visions of the self. This fragmented self was, he argues, a result of the thought process of medieval metaphysics, and was always articulated in contradistinction to a vanishing metaphysical self. To these tasks Nievergelt brings an impressive weight of research and—perhaps even more crucially—a willingness to cross artificial boundaries between periods and national literary traditions, something that allows longer arcs of continuity and evolution to become visible.