Name: The discarded image
ISBN: 9781107604704

The discarded image

Paints a lucid picture of the medieval world view, providing the historical and cultural background to the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This, Lewis's last book, has been hailed as 'the final memorial to the work of a great scholar and teacher and a wise and noble mind'.

What Hacker News says

velcrovanMar 2023

If you are interested in an actual “window into the medieval mind”, I have found none better than C.S. Lewis’s little-known book “The Discarded Image”. It is well-sourced, comprehensive, crunchy, and extremely readable. https://portalconservador.com/livros/C-S-Lewis-The-Discarded...

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dkuralSep 2022

These two books I read recently are real gems / eye openers for me, which changed my view on many things:

Robert C. Allen - The Industrial Revolution: A very short introduction (don't be fooled by the book series, every sentence carries its weight).

C.S. Lewis - The Discarded Image (we get so many things wrong about what people before us thought and why).

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AidevahSep 2022

Agreed on The Discarded Image, it really is very good. I've read it together with Huizinga's The Autumn of the Middle Ages and they both provide fascinating insights into not just how people lived but more importantly what they thought. Medieval Europe is absolutely fascinating and it's great to be shown around by someone as erudite as Lewis and Huizinga.

If you liked The Discarded Image, Lewis's book on courtly love (The Allegory of Love) is also very good. Courtly love is such an inscrutable subject for moderns and I only wish more people wrote as intelligently on the subject as Lewis did, since everything from Petrarch's sonnets to the 16th century Madrigals and beyond are only intelligible if one possesses some understanding of how courtly love works. Now if only I have time to read through Gower like Lewis suggested...

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dwighttkApr 2022

I recommend C.S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image if this article resonates.

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ReraromJan 2020

Fiction:

Mordecai Roshwald, Level 7

Alexander Dewdney, The Planiverse

Joseph Heller, God Knows

Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

Non-fiction:

Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man

Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts

C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image

Michael E. Brown, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming

Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads

Michael Harris, The Atomic Times

I may add guilty pleasures like the Legacy of the Force series, but I don't think this is what people here are looking for.

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chevasMay 2018

They believed the universe was ordered and maintained by a celestial hierarchy with the Creator at the top. Places like Middle Earth and Narnia are metaphors of the model. Lewis's "The Discarded Image" is not an easy read, but would help anyone who wants to know more. A more current and more easily understood starting place would be Michael Heiser's "The Unseen Realm", which is squarely theological / Christian in nature, but still thoroughly academic. Heiser's book carries continuity with Lewis's book, but Heiser has done the work to make the material more readable for the masses by footnoting a lot of the references and for the person who really wants to dig in, he's provided supplemental material.

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