Contents
The new writing 36
Handwriting and printing 36
The impact of French 37
Scribal practice 37
Dialect and language
change 38
Literary consciousness 39
New fashions: French and
Latin 40
Epic and romance 41
Courtly literature 42
Medieval institutions 44
Authority 45
Lyrics 46
English prose 48
The fourteenth century 48
Spiritual writing 48
Julian of Norwich 49
Se cular prose 50
Ricardian poetry 51
Piers Plowman 51
Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight 54
John Gower 55
Geoffrey Chaucer 56
The Parlement of Fowls 58
Troilus and Criseyde 60
TheCanterbury Tales 61
The fiftee nth century 64
Drama 65
Myster y plays 65
Morality plays 67
Religious lyric 67
Deaths of Arthur 68
The arrival of printing 70
Scottish poetry 71
Robert Henryson 72
William Dunbar 72
Gavin Douglas 73
Further reading 74
36
Overview
Literature in England in this period was not just in English and Latin but in
French as well, and developed in directions set largely in France. Epic and
elegy gave way to Romance and lyric. English writing revived fully in English
after 1360, and flowered in the reign of Richard II (1377–99). It gained a liter-
ary standard in London English after 1425, and developed modern forms of
verse, of prose and of drama.nThe new writing
Handwriting and printing
Medieval writing was done by hand. For the scribes, the period began and ended
with the unwelcome arrivals of two conquerors: Normans in 1066, and the printing
pr ess in 1476. English literature survived the first conquest with difficulty. The
record is patchy, but the few surviving manuscripts show that it was some genera-
tions before native literature recovered. Three centuries after 1066 it recovered
completely, flowering in different dialects under Richard II. One generation later,
London English offered a more stable literary medium.
Historians of English and of England agree that a period ends with the 15th
century. When the first printed English book appeared in 1476, the phase of Middle
English (ME) was virtually over: the language had assumed its modern form, except
in spelling. Soon afterwards, the Wars of the Roses, a long dynastic struggle between
supporters of Lancastrian and Yorkist claimants to the throne, ended in the victory
of the Lancastrian Henry Tudor in 1485. Henry made a politic marriage with
Elizabeth of York; they called their first son by the British name of Arthur. In 1492
Fe rdinand and Isabella drove Muslims out of Spain and backed the voyage of
Columbus to the Indies. In 1503 their daughter Katherine was married to Arthur,
who died; then to his brother Henry, who became Henry VIII. Henry divorced her
in 1533,leading to the break with Rome and a separate English nation-state with
strong central rule and a state Church following the Protestant doctrines of the
Reformation (see p. 81).Middle English Literature:
1066–1500
2
CHAPTER