Allegorists and Parodists Some Brief Remarks on Homer and Ovid, Some Reflections on Chrétien de Troyes and Geoffrey Chaucer

A respectable number of medieval parodies play off the liturgy or literature, ritual and rites of the Catholic Church. Yet the victim is often the high style of the epic. This difference, it seems to me, is more apparent than real. For the Homeric epics became Old Testaments for the ancient Greeks. Mined for ultimate truths, for an ethos to live by, the Homeric poems were allegorized to make even the most dubious passage acceptable.