Rating: 
Summary: Chairing, cheering, and chumping
Review: This is a superb, classic analysis of the mind of this age and its fruits. One does not hold the Chair of the subject area at Cambridge University without having a rather thorough command of it! Interesting how overwhelming brilliance in evidence and argument in a subject like this is lauded while it is thought bullying or coercive in another where one does not wish to be informed, confronted or convinced (Lewis' writings and Socratic debates in Christian apologetics)! In the 1950's, Lewis was on the cover of Time Magazine for the power of his lucid works with the subcaption, "His heresy: Christianity" (referring to the contrary bias of the academic community).
Rating:
Summary: Short and Dynamic
Review: This is definitely the best book written on medieval literature to this day. Although some consider Lewis's work dated, I firmly disagree. There have been no major discoveries in the world of medieval literature from his time until now; only paradigm shifts. Buy and read; share and review.
Rating:
Summary: fascinating, readable, superior scholarship
Review: This is one of Lewis's more difficult-to-find academic works. However, if you find it and read it, you will not be disappointed. I read the book on my own initiative while taking a master's class in Medieval literature. I probably learned as much from his book as I did from the whole class, and it opened up countless delightful possibilities for future enquiry. It also gave me a great idea for my final paper, which I'd been lacking the inspiration to write. What's more, this work is still respected in academia. Recently I was reading a Cambridge thesis on the subject of early printing (The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein) and came across a quote from _The Discarded Image_ (an uncited quote, which was annoying, but that's another story). Eisenstein quotes most authors in order to disagree with them, but she didn't disagree with Lewis (added to him, qualified him, but didn't disagree), which was unusual. Lewis was one of the few authors in her field that Eisenstein did not attack! I also passed _The Discarded Image_ along to one of my previous college professors and he decided to include ideas from it in his Survey of English Literature course. If you want to know how medieval men and women saw their world-their belief in supernatural beings intermediate between angels and devils, their admiration for all kinds of organization, their heavy reliance on the snippet of Plato to which they had access-read this book. You will never see the Middle Ages quite the same way again.
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