The Later Middle Ages

Many different traditions of Criticism that Habbib talks about in this chapter; Neo-Platonism, Carolingian, and accessus, these are just a few of them. The first one Neo-Platonism promoted poetry and also in esoteric wisdom. Carolingian's mains purposes were commentaries and also emphasized on knowledge. Finally, accessus is an introduction to a curriculum author (172-173). The first section of this chapter goes along to show the different phases throughout the middle ages to show where criticism has changed over the years. The next sections talks of the rhetorical and how they work with poetry. Habbib seems to like the rhetorical thoughts of writings. The next section that goes along with literature and how to look at them is by using logic. Habbib uses St. Augustine in this section along with with Aristotle. Their works seem to fit into the realm of logic, because logic help to develop scholasticism. Which people that that scholastics seemed to think that poetry and literature were not logical, but they then decided to place them with the theology.

Habbib talks of the Transcendentals whose ideas are "one," "true," and "good." These were the main ideas that came from Aquinas. The main aspect of these people were to prove that God was the one, and poetry was considered not one of these because they were not unified. With unity transcendental also talked of the "beauty", which had three things that was required for beauty; integrity, proportion, and splendor of form. It is interesting to find out throughout the section of Allegory and Aquinas, that Aquinas first ideas of what poetry, literary, and allegory are, change so dramatically throughout the years. The way that Aquinas first concluded that poetry had nothing to do with God and that it was against the writings because they use metaphor and many other aspects that promote an unreal type of thinking.