SOURCE: Lewis, C. S. “Allegory.” The Allegory of Love, pp. 98-109. New York: Oxford University Press: New York, 1958.

In the following excerpt, Lewis analyses the Anticlaudianus as a secular rather than a religious work, noting that its importance lies in the influence it exerted on writers like Castiglione and Spenser.

The Anticlaudianus¹ of Alanus ab Insulis is a work in every respect inferior to the De Mundi Universitate, and may be described as nearly worthless except from the historical point of view. From that point of view it is important. It was written to be a kind of pendant to Claudian's In Rufinum. In that glorified lampoon Claudian had tried to give an original turn to the abuse of an enemy by a setting of the allegorical mythology which was congenial to his age. In the opening of his first book Allecto is introduced lamenting the return of...