For all of these reasons, Lewis could assert, in his Cambridge address, that “the greatest of all divisions in the history of the West” is “that which divides the present from, say, the age of Jane Austen and Scott.”33 More important than the gap between, say, Egypt and Greece, or ancient Rome and the Christian era, or between the medieval period and the early modern period, was the transformative period that he himself had been born at the very end of.
