Middle

English
Period
 THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD

 Extends from Norman Conquest(1066) to the Renaissance

 Three phases in Europe:
 Early Middle Ages ( 5th c to 10th c; in England, this is old English Period)
 High Middle Ages(11th to 13th c)
 Late Middle Ages (14th to 16th c)
 French influence in culture and society
 Feudalism; Strict social hierarchy
 Three Social classes( Called Estates)
 Aristocracy( King,barons and knights)
 Episcopacy( Clergy)
 Peasantry
The Aristocracy

 The kings ruled by “Divine Right” theory

 The right to rule
 Is granted by God
 Is passed on by Heredity
 Barons were the king’s direct subordinates
 Aristocracy spoke French and read poetry
 Associated with the ideals of Chivalary
Chivalry

 Knights constituted the lower nobility who became

identified with the ideals of chivalry during the late
Middle ages.
 A boy under training as a knight was called a squire.
 Chivalry was a knight’s code of behaviour
 Songs about knights were sung by troubadours
The Episcopacy

 The clergy were divided into

 High clergy( who were like the Barons)
 Low clergy( who were like the serfs)
 The church leaders held great power and were active in politics
and governments
 A diocese was like a spiritual manor headed by a bishop
 Many bishops also governed real manors
 Spoke and wrote in Latin( prose)
The Peasantry

 The serfs/peasants
 Live in bondage and were treated mercilessly by the nobility and
high clergy
 Were treated like animals,and were sold along land
 The peasants believed that their after-life would be in heaven
 The peasants lived a life of squalor, superstition and ignorance .
Early Middle English Period (11th to 13th c)
 Transformation of the English language
• Simplified in spelling, grammar
• Influence of Norman French
• London became the administrative centre
• This later determined the spoken and written forms of standard English
• Aristocratic society and taste for French Literature
• This affected the nature and scope of English literature
• Militaristic culture
• England became aggressive, confident and militaristic, which later
determined the boundaries of a vast empire.
• England entered the full current of European life; enriched by cosmopolitan
cultures and literatures
England in the 14th century

Population increased, leading to calamities

like the Black Death in the Late Middle
Ages
• Economy prospered
 Intellectual, spiritual and artistic flowering
in the Christian monasteries
Late Middle English Period
 14th to 16th century, following High Middle Ages
• Beset with famines, plague and revolts
• Great Famine (1315-17)
• Black Death (1348 onwards)
• Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453)
• Peasants’ Revolt (1381)
• Fall of Constantinople (1453)
• Invention of printing by movable types (1456)
• Wars of the Roses (1455-1485)
• Awakenings of Renaissance and Reformation
Middle English Literature: An Overview

 Extensive influence of French literature

 Major genres
• Allegory (Piers the Plowman)
• Tales of Chivalry and Adventure (Gawain and the Green
Knight)
• Arthurian Legends (Morte d’Arthur)
 Period of Chaucer
Dream Allegory: Famous Examples
 Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose, French)
• Guillaume de Lorris (c. 1230)
• Jean de Meung (c. 1270)
• Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy, Latin, 1321)
• Dante Alighieri
• The Pearl (English)
• 14th century elegy
• Anonymous
• Piers Plowman (English, c. 1394)
• William Langland
• The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls
(English)
• Geoffrey Chaucer (14th century)
Later works with elements of Dream
Allegories

Pilgrim’s Progress (John Bunyan, 1678)
• The Triumph of Life (P.B. Shelley, 1824)
• The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream (John Keats, 1819)
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Caroll, 1865)
• News from Nowhere (William Morris, 1890)
• Finnegan’s Wake (James Joyce, 1939)
Chivalric Romances

 Knighthood and chivalry were favourite themes in

medieval literature
• Originated in France.
• Chivalric romances were written in prose or verse and
concerned adventure, romance and courtly love
Elements of chivalric romance

 Idealization of the hero

• Hero’s identity is mysterious
• Hero’s willingness to comply with the lady’s caprices
• Use of the supernatural to generate suspense
• Emphasis on dangerous and dramatic events
• Encounters with dragons
• Jousting tournaments
• Magical enchantments
Famous Chivalric Romances
• Chrétien de Troye
• 12th century
• French
 King Horn
• Anonymous
• 13th century
• English
 Parzifal
• Wolfram von Eschenbach
• 13th century
• German
Famous Chivalric Romances

 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

• Anonymous
• 14th century
• English
 Le Morte D’Arthur
• Sir Thomas Malory
• 15th century
• English
Alliterative Revival (c. 1350-c.1500)


Resurgence of alliterative verse which was popular in the Old English
period
• Probably due to the nationalistic spirit of the post-Black Death years, and
a reaction against French poetic styles
• Examples
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (by the Pearl poet)
• The Alliterative Morte Arthure (anonymous)
• Piers Plowman (by William Langland)
• The Destruction of Troy (John Clerk from Lancashire)
• Poetry by William Dunbar
 Dante Alighieri
(1265-1321)
 Born in Florence, in Italy
• Belonged to the Florentine political group called White Guelphs
• Works helped establish the Tuscan dialect of Latin, upon which
standard Italian is based.
• Fell in love with Beatrice Portinari at age nine
• Wrote the first sonnets in world litt addressed to her
• She died in 1290
• Dante turned to writing
Dante’s Works

 Convivio (The Banquet) – long philosophical poems

• Monarchia – political philosophy
• On Eloquence in the vernacular – Latin essay
supported the use of vernacular language in poetry
• Eclogues
• Le Rime (The Rhymes, a collection of lyric poems)
• Vita Nouva (The New Life) – collection of courtly
verse on his love for Beatrice
The Divine Comedy
 Three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso
• Written in three-lined terza rima stanzas, rhyming aba bcb cdc etc.
• 100 cantos: 34 in Inferno, 33 each in Purgatorio & Paradiso
• The number three is part of the numerical symbolism of the Divine
Comedy
• Three is the number of the Holy Trinity
• There are nine circles of Hell (3 times 3); nine levels of Paradise (with the
Garden of Eden at the summit as a 10th level)
• Dante’s Satan is a three-headed monster.
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75)
 First great writer of prose in any modern language
• Initiated several literary forms
• Filocolo is the first Italian prose romance
• Filostrato is the first Italian verse romance other than those
written by minstrels
• He also wrote the first Italian idyll
• Teseida a poem on the story of Theseus, Palamon and Arcite
(retold by Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc)
• Wrote a life (biography) of Dante
• Wrote a number of encyclopedic works in Latin which were
widely read in England
• (Probably) invented ottava rima
Decameron (1349-53)
100 stories told over a period of 10 days
• 7 young women and 3 young men flee
Florence during the Black Death and take
refuge for two weeks in the countryside
• They spend hot afternoons by telling
stories
• Each day the group selects a king or
queen who determines the general theme
of stories of that day
 Francisco Petrarch (1304-74)
 Influential scholar who was crowned the Poet Laureate in Rome
• Travelled widely to discover manuscripts of works by classical
writers
• Father of Humanism
• Established that there is no essential conflict between classical
and Christian thought
• Fell in love with Laura, whose beauty he describes throughout his
poetry. This later takes on a Christian dimension
 Works by Petrarch
 Wrote more than 400 poems, mostly sonnets, in Italian
• 366 of these are in the sonnet sequence Canzoniere
• Themes
 Beauty of Laura
 Haunting sense of the passage of time
 The vanity of earthly endeavours
 Conflict between spiritual and earthly values
• Familiar Letters is one of the many volumes of letters (epistles)
written by Petrarch in Latin
 Petrarchan or Italian Sonnet
 The sonnet originated in Italy in the 13th c.
• Petrarch perfected the sonnet
• 14 lines of iambic pentameter divided into an octave (two quatrains) and
a sestet
• Caesura in between
• Rhyme scheme: abba abba cdc cdc / cde cde
• Employed artificial love-theme and Petrarchan conceits:
• Far-fetched images
• Idealized and exaggerated comparisons applied to the disdainful mistress
(cold, cruel and beautiful) and to the distresses of her worshipful lover
• Blason convention: detailed description of the body
Other English works of this period

 Layamon’s Brut (c. 1190)

• Long poem about the history of Britain
• Named after Britain’s mythical founder Brutus of
Troy
• Based on Wace’s Roman de Brut
• Last alliterative poem before the Alliterative
Revival
 Other English works of this period
 The Owl and the Nightingale
• Poet overhears an owl and a nightingale debating on which is
better, happiness or sorrow
• One of the earliest examples of “debate poetry”
• Ancrene Riwle (or Ancrene Wisse)
• Guide for anchoresses (a monastic profession)
• Anchorite life was popular in Europe, esp. England, at this
time
Thank You
Everyone.