In a central passus of Piers Plowman, in a vision-within-a-vision, the figure Kynde calls the Dreamer by his first name and places him at the summit of ‘a mountaigne þat myddelerþe hiₒte’, offering him a privileged perspective from which he might survey all of creation (B.11.324). As the Dreamer understands it, he is meant to use the natural world as a repository of lessons that will lead him to love of God: ‘I was fet forþ by forbisenes to knowe,/ Thorugh ech a creature kynde my creatour to louye’ (B.11.325–26). Such a description aligns the Vision of Kynde with the Latin tradition of exemplarist contemplation and its authorizing metaphor of the liber or speculum naturae. Rooted in Augustine's theory of signs in the De doctrina Christiana, reflected in the nature allegories of Chartres and the meditations of the Victorines, and fully systematized by Bonaventure in the thirteenth century, exemplarism expresses a Neoplatonic worldview that Marie-Dominique Chenu describes as a ‘symbolist mentality’. It proposes that the created world, like a book written by God, bears the imprint of its creator and that human beings have the capacity to ‘read’ or see spiritual lessons ‘reflected’ in nature. In a well-known formulation, Alan of Lille alleges that ‘[e]very living creature is like a book and picture and mirror to us’.