The Medieval Tapestry
Musings on medieval literature and tradition
Welcome to The Medieval Tapestry!
The course I hope to take with this Substack is to cover a variety of medieval and Elizabethan traditions, culture, and literature. Medieval cosmology is complex and beautiful, connecting the physical to the divine and weaving all of creation together in the sublime Great Chain of Being.
Martin Lings, a student and friend of C.S.Lewis, writes in his book Shakespeare’s Window Into the Soul
“In life we have no view of the whole: we see only bits and pieces here and there, and our view is quite distorted. What is near to us we look at with feverish subjectivity; what is not near to us we look at with more or less cold objectivity. Above all we fail to see the pattern. It is as if life were a great piece of tapestry and as if we looked at it from the wrong side, where the pattern is obscured by a maze of threads, most of which seem to have no purpose… Shakespeare holds out this smaller piece of tapestry to us in the theater, between ourselves and him. He is on the right side of it and we are again on the wrong side just as, unlike him, we are on the wrong side of the great tapestry of life. To begin with we look at the rather chaotic maze of threads with the same cold objectivity with which we view the threads of our neighbors’ lives. But little by little, as the play goes on, we are drawn into it and become more and more bound up with its threads... By the closing of the play we have become objective once more, but with a higher objectivity that is completely different from the initial one; for Shakespeare has drawn us through the tapestry and out the other side, so that we now see it as it really is, a unity in which all parts fit marvelously together to make up a perfect whole.”
Martin Lings, Shakespeare’s Window into the Soul, pp. 195-196
Although Lings is speaking of Shakespeare here, one could argue this pertains to all medieval tradition. Modern society loves to hone in on a minuscule fact and keep it separate from the whole. The medievals show us that everything is connected. They make the world smaller so that we can see the whole instead of focusing on merely a part. This is the medieval tapestry.