Medieval English Literature

Anglo-Saxon and Middle English literature had many things in common. The educational work of King Alfred was continued all through the Middle Ages. Chaucer translates Boethius,...

Chaucer has sometimes been represented as a French poet writing in English—not only a ‘great translator’ as his friend Eustache Deschamps called him, but so thoroughly in sympat...

All through the time between the Norman Conquest and Chaucer one feels that _the Court_ is what determines the character of poetry and prose. The English writers almost always h...

In dealing with Anglo-Saxon literature it is well to remember first of all that comparatively little of it has been preserved; we cannot be sure, either, that the best things ha...

If this claim be disallowed, then the first is St. Godric, the hermit of Finchale in the reign of Henry II—his hymn to Our Lady and the hymn to St. Nicholas. These are preserved...

It is one of the common difficulties in studying ancient literature that the things preserved are not always what we would have chosen. In modern literature, criticism and the o...

France sets the model for comic as well as romantic poetry, in the Middle Ages. In romance the English were not able for a long time—hardly before Chaucer and Gower—to imitate t...

Allegory is often taken to be the proper and characteristic mode of thought in the Middle Ages, and certainly there is no kind of invention which is commoner. The allegorical in...

Readers are drawn to medieval literature in many different ways, and it is hardly possible to describe all the attractions and all the approaches by which they enter on this gro...