Medieval and Protestant

“In that way the Arcadia is a kind of touchstone. What a man thinks of it, far more than what he thinks of Shakespeare or Spenser or Donne, tests the depth of his sympathy with the sixteenth century . . . It gathers up what a whole generation wanted to say. The very gallimaufry that it is — medieval, Protestant, pastoral, Stoical, Platonic — made it the more characteristic and, as long as that society lasted, more satisfactory” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the 16th Century, p. 339).