NOTE: This purchase provides access to the recordings a previously live class. Almost 20 hours of instruction.

Our customer service coordinator will email you the login info and instructions for the course.

C.S. Lewis says it is “worth while to spend some labour on ‘putting ourselves back’ into the universe which our ancestors believed themselves to inhabit. What their work means to us after we have done so appears to me not only more accurate (more like what they intended) but also more interesting and nourishing and delightful.”

In the previous class, we focused on the Heavens, the sphere of the Moon and everything beyond, which was seen as perfect and unchanging. In this, we will discuss the world we inhabit, the sub-lunary world of change and chance in all its beauty, glory, and terror, presided over by Nature and Fortune, and inhabited and haunted by those mysterious beings whom Lewis calls the Longaevi, the long-livers, the fey folk.

In the first class, Kelly Cumbee will describe the medieval concept of Nature, and we will see how Nature is revealed in Dante’s Hell. In the second and third classes, we’ll read together Lewis’s The Silver Chair and Shakespeare’s King Lear in order to see how those works embody the medieval idea of Nature.

This course is envisioned as part of a series of mini-classes on Medieval Cosmology.  The classes may be taken in any order.

This is a three-session class.

Instructor: Kelly Cumbee

Class 1: Dante’s Hell

Class 2: The Silver Chair 

Class 3: King Lear