ABSTRACT
The landscapes of mediaeval literature are landscapes of meaning, brimming with significance. They relate at once to human meanings and purpose; and they lend themselves naturally to the mystic's vision. Like the landscape at the beginning of Piers Plowman, this one is exactly portrayed and recognizable, at the same time it is a significant landscape, brimming with response to human meanings and purposes. For the aesthetic and human detachment, and the underlying self-consciousness, there can be no doubt that some impulse came from Dante. Geoffrey Chaucer can translate Dante's sublime passages so as to transfer nearly all the effect into English. It would surely be too much to suppose that here Chaucer has in mind Dante's comparison of the world in God to a book bound up by love, although he probably does have in mind the dazzling that Dante experiences in Paradise before his human sight is made heavenly.
