From Allegories to Novels  

"George Henry Lewes has observed that the only medieval debate of any philosophical value is the debate between nominalism and realism. This opinion is rather temerarious, but it emphasizes the importance of the persistent controversy provoked at the beginning of the ninth century by a sentence from Porphyry, which Boethius translated and annotated: a controversy that Anselm and Roscellinus continued at the end of the eleventh century and that William of Occam reanimated in the fourteenth."

"To the best of my knowledge, the allegorical genre has been analyzed by Schopenhauer (Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I, 50), by De Quincey (Writings, XI, 198), by Francesco De Sanctis (Storia della letteratura italiana, VII), by Croce (Estetica, 39), and by Chesterton (G. F. Watts, 83). In this essay I shall consider only the last two. Croce denies the allegorical art; Chesterton vindicates it. I agree with the former, but I should like to know how a form we consider unjustifiable could have enjoyed so much favor."

"The passage from the allegory to the novel, from the species to the individual, from realism to nominalism, required several centuries, but I shall attempt to suggest an ideal date when it occurred. That day in 1382 when Geoffrey Chaucer, who perhaps did not believe he was a nominalist, wished to translate a line from Boccaccio into English, E con gli occulti jerri i Tradimenti (“And Treachery with hidden weapons” ), and he said it like this: “The smyler with the knyf under the cloke.” The original is in the seventh book of the Teseide; the English version, in “The Knightes Tale.”