A History of English Literature

Contents The new writing 36 Handwriting and printing 36 The impact of French 37 Scribal practice 37 Dialect and language change ...

As printing and Protestantism established themselves, the manuscripts in which vernacularwriting survived, outdated and possibly ...

Dialect and language change Even when English had attained full literary parity with French in the reign of Richard II (r.1372–9 ...

The resulting confusion encouraged a loss of inflection. Element-order became the indicator of syntax and of sense: subject–verb ...

Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.’ These lines draw on a scene in Dante’s Inferno. In Limbo, at the threshold of the under ...

As literacy spread in western Europe, the international Latin clerical culture was rivalled, from Iceland to Sicily, by vernacul ...

and the moving of Stonehenge from Ireland to Salisbury Plain. Geoffrey’s legendary history of the Island of Britain was put into ...

The first developments of Geoffrey’s Arthurian material were in French. After Wace came Marie de France, the first known French ...

Richardson’s Pamela in the early 18th century, and to the happy endings of the novels of Jane Austen in the 19th century. Fantas ...

‘Scholasticism’, the philosophy of the university Schools, such as that of Thomas Aquinas (c.1225–1274), was later regarded as t ...

Boccaccio, a lesser name than Petrarch or Dante, but on myn auctor, Lollius.The name ofLollius is to be found in the first line ...

An hendy hap ich have y-hent, lucky chance received Ichot from hevene it is me sent, I know From alle wommen my love is lent has ...

‘The Nut-Brown Maid’, drinking songs, Robin Hood ballads, and mnemonics like ‘Thirty days hath September, / April, June and Nove ...

Bernard of Clairvaux, although there had been mystical writing in English since The Dream of the Rood in the 8th century. Rolle ...

that is to say in my understanding, by which sight I saw he is in al thing.’ ‘He was hanging up in the air as men hang a cloth f ...

Ricardian poetry The reign of Richard II saw the arrival of a mature poetic literature in Middle English. Besides lyr ic and rel ...

Ac on a May mornynge on Malverne hulles but hills Me byfel a ferly, A wonder befell me, offairy me thoughte; from fairyland it s ...

Some putten hem to the plow, themselves pleyed ful selde .... very seldom One such worker is Piers (Peter) the Plowman, after wh ...

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Clerical and romance traditions meet in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the finest English vers ...

the lady which makes the wearer invulnerable. He gives the lord the kisses but conceals the sash, receiving in exchange the skin ...