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Nigel wrote:
Alga wrote...
I dug out Chaucer. "The Parliament of Fowls" is a charming
Valentine's
Day poem. The poet has been reading Scipio Africanus...
<Click!! >
(What was that? Oh no, it was the sound of Nigel switching into Mindless Pedantry Mode...)
Nothing to do with Crowley, and even less to do with Wolfe, but when Chaucer writes in "The Parlement of Foules" that he has been reading "Tullyus of the Drem of Scipioun", he almost certainly means that he's been reading Macrobius' commentary on Cicero's "Somnium Scipionis" ("the Dream of Scipio"). "Tullyus" refers to Cicero's full name: Marcus Tullius Cicero.
You're completely right: "Tullyus of the Drem of Scipioun."
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Not sure I'd completely agree with the notion that the narrative tour of heaven and hell had completely died out by the mid-14th century...
Depends
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quite what you mean. It long persisted as a literary trope in various forms, particularly in the various mutations of Renaissance epic, up to and including Milton, of course, in the 17th century.
But maybe you meant something more specific.
Yes, I did, sorry to be foggy. But you are once again right: post-Dante it beome a very popular literary trope. During the thousand years that stretched from about 400 to 1400, it was related as truth, however, by a surprising number of people. That's why I made the UFO reference.
Thanks, Adam, for the page citations for LB.
-alga