II. WHAT THE MIDDLE AGES READ
BY PROFESSOR W. A. NEILSON
THE HISTORY of English literary criticism may be said to begin with Sir Philip Sidney’s “Defense of Posey.”〖Harvard Classics, xxvii, 5–51; and cf. Professor Bliss Perry’s lecture on “Theories of Poetry” in this series.〗 A few treatises on rhetoric and prosody preceded it, but it was with this book that there reached England the first important influx from the main current of the Italian and French criticism of the Renaissance. In the preceding centuries men had, of course, expressed opinions about books; but these were random and personal, backed by no theory, part of no system, the casual utterances of men who merely knew what they liked.