Symbolism Book List

Following is the books list I'll be using this year to teach the inaugural course on Symbolism at our new college.

Dictionary of Biblical Imagery General Editors: Leland Ryken, James C. Wilhoit & Tremper Longman III
On Christian Teaching by Augustine (selections)
Cratylus by Plato
Signs and Mysteries Revealing Ancient Christian Symbols by Mike Aquilina
Genesis
Through New Eyes by James Jordan
The Elizabethan World Picture by E. M. W. Tillyard
The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature by C. S. Lewis
Folklore and Symbolism of Flowers, Plants and Trees by Ernst and Johanna Lehner
Dictionary of Symbolism by Hans Beidermann
The Book of Beasts by T.H. White
The Theology of Arithmetic translated by Robin Waterfield
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by JK Rowling
War in Heaven by Charles Williams
Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves by Edmund Spenser, ed Roy Maynard
Pieter Bruegel: 1525/30-1569 (masters of Netherlandish Art) by HF Ullman
Alchemy: The Great Secret by Andrea Aromatico
Heraldry: An Introduction to a Noble Tradition by Michel Pastoureau
Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert Poems

Cosmological Harmony

Cosmological harmony was actually one of the few ideas on which philosopher, scientists, and theologians of Bach’s time were agreed. Newton, for example, could not imagine that a world so orderly as this one could have occurred by “natural Cause alone.” A “powerful, ever-living Agent…governs all things,” he concluded, “not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all.”

—James R. Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment

Musical Counterpoint and the Cosmos

The constant motion of the heavens is thus analogous to the perpetual revolution of the parts in a well-constructed piece of double counterpoint, whose inversions mirror the perfection of heaven and provide earthly beings with a glimpse of God’s unending order, a prelude to the heavenly concert.

But the relationship between these phenomena was more than simply one of likeness: the mechanics of the heavens were not simply allegorized by double counterpoint, they were manifested in its workings.

—David Yearsley, Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint