Allegory and Enchantment: An Early Modern Poetics

Allegory and Enchantment is about the genealogies of modernity and the lingering power of some of the cultural forms against which modernity defines itself: religion, magic, the sacramental, the medieval. Jason Crawford explores the emergence of modernity by investigating the early modern poetics of allegorical narrative, a literary form that many modern writers have taken to be paradigmatically medieval. In four of the most substantial allegorical narratives produced in early modern England--William Langland’s Piers Plowman, John Skelton’s The Bowge of Courte, Edmund Spenser’s TheFaerie Queene, and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress--allegory is intimately linked with a self-conscious modernity and with what many commentators have, in the last century, called ＂the disenchantment of the world.＂ The makers of these early modern narratives themselves take a keen interest in metaphors and postures of disenchantment. They fashion themselves as skeptics, spell-breakers, prophets against false institutions and false belief. And they often regard their own allegorical forms as another dangerous enchantment, a residue of the medieval past they have set out to renounce. In the context of various early modern crises of historical loss and revolutionary dissent, English poets from Langland to Bunyan become increasingly militant in their scepticism about allegory and about the theologies of incarnation that undergird it. But their self-regard also responds to paradoxes and anxieties at the core of allegory’s medieval poetics, and they discover that the things modernity has tried to repudiate--the old enchantments--are not as alien, or as absent, as they seem.