Compare the Ethical Poetic of Later Middle Ages: A decorum convenient distinction

Allen chooses texts whose commentary tradition provides the greatest opportunity for completeness. The most important of these is Ovid’s . Medieval readings of Ovid bring into focus a number of major literary questions—the problems of fable and fiction, of unity imposed by miscellany poetry, of allegorical commentary, and of Christian use of pagan culture—all in connection with text which furnished medieval authors with more stories than any other single source except possibly the Bible. Allen also studies commentaries on the of Boethius, the of Statius, the of Martianus Capella, the medieval Christian hymn-book, and the of Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Together these texts represent the range of medieval literature—a literature which, Allen concludes, was taken as direct ethical discourse, logically conducted and artfully organized within a system of language that also assimilated the natural world and sought to absorb its audience.