soon as the craze of symbolism spreads to profane or simply moral matters, decadence is manifest. Froissart, in Li Orloge amoureus, compares all the details of love to the various parts of a timepiece. Chastellain and Molinet vie with each other in political symbolism. The three estates represent the qualities of the Virgin. The seven electors of the Empire signify the virtues; the five towns of Artois and Hainault, which in 1477 remained faithful to the house of Burgundy, are the five wise virgins. In reality this is symbolism turned upside down; it uses things of the higher order as symbols of things of the lower order, for these authors in effect raise terrestrial things to the higher level by employing sacred conceptions merely to adorn them.
The Donatus moralisatus, sometimes, but erroneously, ascribed to Gerson, mixed up Latin grammar with theology: the noun-substantive is the man, the pronoun means that he is a sinner. The lowest grade of this kind of mental activity is represented by works like Le Parement et Triumphe des Dames of Olivier de la Marche, in which each article of female costume symbolizes a virtue—a theme also developed by Coquillart.
“De la pantouffle ne nous vient que santé
Et tout prouffit sans griefve maladie,
Pour luy donner tiltre d’auctorité
Je luy donne le nom d’humilité.”[1]
In the same way shoes mean care and diligence, stockings perseverance, the garter resolution, etc.
It is clear that to the men of the fifteenth century this genre did not appear so silly as it does to us, otherwise they would not have cultivated it with so much gusto. We are thus led to conclude that, to the mind of the declining Middle Ages, symbolism and allegory had not yet lost all their living significance. The tendency to symbolize and to personify was so spontaneous that nearly every thought, of itself, took a figurative shape. Every idea being considered as an entity, and every quality as an essence, they were at once invested by the imagination with a personal form. Denis the Carthusian, in his revelations, sees the Church in fully as personal a
- ↑ The slipper only gives us health And all profit without serious illness. To give it a title to authority I give it the name of humility.
