Reason and Imagination in Chaucer, the Perle-poet, and the Cloud-author: Seeing from the Center (New Middle Ages)

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This book makes the compelling argument that Chaucer, the Perle-poet, and The Cloud of Unknowing author exploited analogue and metaphor for marking out the pedagogical gap between science and the imagination. These writers take up an Aristotelian confidence in reason as a proof model for works of the imagination.  St. Augustine, too, had argued persuasively that we might well train ourselves "to discern in the light of reason what [we] already hold by faith."  By the 12th century, John of Salisbury, in his Metalogicon, had argued that "sensation is the progenitor of science."  Chaucer, the Perle-poet, and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing set out models for such instruction—for seeing from the center—as they map the pedagogical energy of the browsing imagination. Here, Linda Tarte Holley adds definition to arguments that still gain our attention and energies in the twenty-first century.