A History of English Literature

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 ...

Scho fondeth in hire briddes forme, tries If that sche mihte hirself conforme, To do the plesance of a wif, As sche dede in that ...

surviving the Black Death, the French wars, the Peasants’ Revolt, the Lords Appellants’ challenge to Richard II, and Richard’s d ...

of sound, to the House of Fame (Rumour, but also Poetry), a bewildering place described in Book III. The poem breaks off as Chau ...

love, an owl who will never be a nightingale. Boethius, Dante, Langland and the poet ofPearl dream to seek enlightenment, but Ch ...