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MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE (3._middle_english_literature.doc)

Middle English Literature

The Middle English literature is dated from 1066 to 1485.

What happened in 1066:

1066 – Norman Conquest

Harold II is crowned king the day after Edward the Confessor dies. Tostig and Harold Hardraada of Norway invade England: Harold defeats them at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, killing both; Battle of Hastings: 19 days after battle of Stamford Bridge, William of Normandy lands at Pevensey, defeats and kills Harold; William I, the Conqueror, first Norman King of England (to 1087)

What happened in 1485:

1485 - Battle of Bosworth Field: Henry Tudor, with men, money and arms provided by Charles VIII of France, defeats and kills Richard III in the decisive (but not final) battle of the Wars of the Roses (= civil wars fought in medieval England from 1455 to 1487 between the House of Lancaster and the House of York).

The historical background is formed by the continual wars with France. The unrest that followed in England lead to the outbreak of civil war 1455. It was a dynamic struggle between the House of York and the House of Lancaster. All over Europe in the 14th century the practices of the Roman Catholic Church faced strong criticism. The leading figure in England was John Wycliffe who translated the whole Bible into English.

Language

Althought it is possible to overestimate the degree of cultural shock which the transfer of power in 1066 represented, the removal from the top levels of an English–speaking political and ecclesiastical  hierarchy, and their replecement with a Norman–speaking one, both opened the way for the introduction of French as a language of polite discourse and literature.

Even now, after a thousand years, the Norman influence on the English language is still visible.

This period of trilingual activity (English, French and Latin) developed much of the flexible triplicate synonymy of modern English.

kingly – English

royal – French

regal – Latin

Deeper changes occured in the grammmar.

Differences between Middle and Old English

1. There is the extreme reduction in inflected forms from Old  English and Middle English.
2. The system of declension of nouns was radically simplified.
3. The verb system also lost many old patterns of conjugation.
4. Many strong verbs were reanalyzed as weak verbs.

Division of literature

Even during what has been called the 'lost' period of English literary history, the late 11th to mid-12th century, Old English texts, saints' lives and grammatical texts, continued to be copied, used and adapted by scribes. From the later 12th and 13th century there survive huge amounts of written material of various forms, from lyrics to saints' lives, devotional manuals to histories, encyclopaedias to poems of moral discussion, though much of this material remains unstudied.

This includes the works of William Langland, the Gawain Poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, Gower, Malory and others. Best known is Chaucer himself in his Canterbury Tales and other shorter poems.

Mythology – King Arthur and his Knights of Round table, Robin Hood, Middle English religious writing – awareness of woman ( Blessed Virgin, Mother of Christ…)Middle English non-religious writing – love poems , patriotic songs, carols for x- mass and Easter, political songs.

1. Lyrical texts are short, personal, and subjective and express authors´ feelings. Often this brevity is achieved by use of comparison, contrast, and allegory; in addition, internal ryhme is a frequent poetic device. Most of the lyrics we have today were originally created to be sung by one person and were set to the lyre. None of them were ever intended to be published and were not until the seventeenth century.

Middle English Lyrics were not meant to be read or written down. Most Middle English Lyrics are anonymous.

2. Dramatic texts (Folk, Mystery, Morality, Interludes) – place of origin, the Christian ChurchFolk Plays
   - sometimes took the form of energetic dance

- very minor, and the real drama of the Middle Ages grew up, without design and by the mere nature of things, from the regular services of the Church.

Liturgical plays and Mystery Plays- the conditions under which the church service, the mass, was conducted during all the medieval centuries.

- dramatizing the services

- first, inevitably, to be so treated was the central incident of Christian faith, the story of Christ's resurrection.

- during the ceremonies on Good Friday, the day when Christ was crucified, the cross which stood all the year above the altar, bearing the Savior's figure, was taken down and laid beneath the altar, a dramatic symbol of the Death and Burial; and two days later, on 'the third day' of the Bible phraseology, that is on Easter Sunday, as the story of the Resurrection was chanted by the choir, the cross was uncovered and replaced, amid the rejoicings of the congregation.

- the list of plays thus presented commonly included: The Fall of Lucifer; the Creation of the World and the Fall of Adam; Noah and the Flood; Abraham and Isaac and the promise of Christ's coming; a Procession of the Prophets, also foretelling Christ; the main events of the Gospel story, with some additions from Christian tradition; and the Day of Judgment.

The Morality Plays

- semi–religious plays

- cycle of plays based on incidents from the Bible

- by the end of 14th century gradually replaced Mystery Plays.

- in its strict form the Morality Play was a dramatized moral allegory

- it tried to teach a moral lesson trough allegory

- abstract allegorical figures, either good or bad, such as The Seven Deadly Sins, Contemplation   and Raise-Slander                                                                                                                                        Later, all the plays concerned with Biblical themes moved from Churches to church yard and than to the town.

3. Narrative texts - Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Malory, Langland, Gower        

Interlude of the Bible- consist from OLD and NEW TESTAMENT - Old Testament was written mainly in Hebrew, is a collection of poems, plays, proverbs, prophecy, philosophy, history, theology – a massive anthology of the writings of the ancient Jewish people

- new Testament, originally written in Greek, contains the Gospels and the story of the spreading of Christianity by its first propagandists

Translation of the Bible was prosecuted, because the Church was afraid that the ordinary people might interpret texts of the Bible in his own way as opposed to the way of the Church. It was originally written in Latin in Medieval Europe.

John Wyclif, a clergy man who found many abuses in the Church and wanted to reform them, arranged the 1st complete translation of both Testaments in 1380. He wanted the access to the Bible for everybody.

AUTHORIZED VERSION
-King James I. of England wanted to translate Bible to the English
-In 1611 the work of 47 learned men was done and that translation known as the Authorised Version was printed

Pearl Poet – Gawain Poet

It is the name given to the author of Pearl – an alliterative poem written in Middle English.

Its author appears also to have written the poems Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience and Cleanness, some scholars have suggested he may also have composed Saint Erkenwald.

All these Works are known from a single surviving manuscript, the british library holding Cotton Nero A x.

Pearl may speak of a dead daughter, called Pearl, and poetry is exceptionally conversant with learning, shows an interest in technical vocabulary as a Christian virtue.

However, the Pearl Poet never refers to contemporary scholarship like Chaucer does, and shows much more of a tendency to refer to materials from the past (Arthurian legends, stories from the Bible.) than any new learning.

He used alliterative verse. The manuscript (Cotton Nero A x) is unusual for the time because it contains illustrations of the poems. Very few manuscripts of Middle English vernacular romances contains any illustrations.

The poem Pearl is doctrinal but its tone is ecstatis and it is far more deliberately atistic.

Apparently an elegy for the death of a small girl, the poem describes the exalted state of childlike innocence in heaven and the need for all souls to become as children to enter the pearly gates of the New Jerusalem. The work ends with an impressive vision of heaven, from which the dreamer awakes.

William Langland (Langlay)

Almost nothing is known of Langland himself. His entire identity rests on a string of conjectures and vague hints. It would seem that he was born in the West Midlands. The dialect of the poem is also consistent with this part of the country.

His famous work The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman.

The rest of our knowledge of the poet can only be reconstructed from Piers itself. There is in fact a wealth of ostensibly biographical data in the poem, but it is difficult to know how its should be treated.

This work is divided into A/B/C text. The C-text of Piers contains a passage in which Will describes himself as a „loller“ living in the Cornhill area of London and refers directly to his wife and child,                                              it also suggests that he was well above average heigh and made a living reciting prayers for the dead. However, it would be rash to take this episode at face value.

The distinction between allegory and „real-life“ in Piers is by no means absolute, and the entire passage is suspiciously reminiscent of the false confession tradition in medieval literature.

The detailed and highly sophisticated level of religious knowledge in the poem indicates that Langland had some connection to the clergy but the nature of this relationship is uncertain. The poem shows no obvious of churchmen but is rather even – handed in its anticlericalism, attacking the regular and secular clergy indiscriminately.

The poem Piers Plowman – the most significant is that it was written in forms very like the Old English alliterative, four–stress lines. It is a long, impassioned work in the form of dream visions, protesting the plight of the poor, the avarice of the powerful, and the sinfulness of all people. The emphasis, however, is placed on a Christian vision of the life of activity, of the life of unity with God.

Arthurian legends

Sir Thomas Malory

He stands out for his great work The Death of Arthur, which carried on the traditional of Arthurian romance, from French sources, in English prose of remarkable vividness and vitality. He loosely tied together stories os various Knights of the Round Table, but most memorably of Arthur himself, of Galahad, and of the guilty love of Lancelot and Arthur´s queen, Guinevere.

The dominant theme is the need to sacrifice individual desire for the sake of national unity and religious salvation, the later of which is envisioned in terms of the dreamlike but intense mystical symbolism of the Holy Grail.

John Gower

- was a poet and  a friend of Chaucer

- was born around 1330 into a prominent Yorkshire family which held properties in Kent, Yorkshire, Norfolk and Suffolk

- nothing is known of his education, though it has been speculated that he was trained in law. - - Gower's first work was Mirour de l'Omme (i.e. Mirror of Man), an allegorical poem in French meditating on the fall of man and the effect of sin on the world. Gower later latinized the title to Speculum Hominis, and later changed it to Speculum Meditantis to fit with the titles of his later works.

- around 1377, Gower began work on Vox Clamantis (i.e. The Clamoring Voice), an essay in Latin verse. Like the Speculum Meditantis, it too treats of sinfulness, and criticizes the corruption of the society. It also provides a contemporary view of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Gower's moral and philosophical writings were highly praised by his peers.

- In 1386, Gower began work on his most acclaimed work, Confessio Amantis (i.e. Lover's Confession). Unlike his previous works, Gower wrote the Confessio in English at the request of Richard II who was concerned that so little was being written in English. It is a collection of tales and exempla treating of courtly love. The framework is that of a lover complaining first to Venus, and later in the work, confessing to her priest, Genius. The Confessio, completed around 1390, is an important contribution to courtly love literature in English. Some of the stories have their counterparts in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and one of the stories later served as the source for Shakespeare's Pericles, in which Shakespeare had Gower appear in the Chorus. Gower revised Confessio Amantis in 1393, replacing the praise of King Richard II with a dedication to Henry of Lancaster. In return, Henry presented Gower with an ornamented collar.
      

Next, Gower composed a series of Latin poems, as well as Traitié, a sequence of French ballads in rhyme royal. In 1397, Gower married Agnes Groundolf, probably his second wife. King Richard II was finally deposed by parliament in 1399, replaced by Henry Lancaster as King Henry IV. Soon afterwards, Gower composed a sequel to Vox Clamantis, the Cronica tripertita (i.e. Tripartite Chronicle), in which he condemned the vices of King Richard II and his court. In 1400, Gower dedicated and presented his French work Cinkante Balades (Fifty Ballads), which some attribute to his younger days, to King Henry. Old and blind, John Gower died in 1408.

*extract 1 – comparation of middle english vs. modern english)

Syððan wæs geworden þæt he ferde þurh þa ceastre and þæt castel: godes rice prediciende and bodiende. and hi twelfe mid. And sume wif þe wæron gehælede of awyrgdum gastum: and untrumnessum: seo magdalenisce maria ofþære seofan deoflu uteodon: and iohanna chuzan wif herodes gerefan: and susanna and manega oðre þe him of hyra spedum þenedon.

And it came to pass afterward, that he went throughout every city and village, preaching and showing the glad tidings of the kingdom of God: and the twelve were with him, and certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils, and Joanna the wife of Chuza Herod's steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto him of their substance.

1. Translation of Luke 8.1–3 from the New Testament

*extract 2 – short extract from Langland – Piers Plowman: The Prologue

William Langland (ca. 1330-ca. 1386) - Piers Plowman: The Prologue

1. full title - The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman.
2. there are some 45 MSS. of the 14th and 15th centuries
3. there are three versions of the poem, the A-text (ca. 1362), the B-text (ca. 1377), and
   the C-text (ca. 1393).
4. first printed 1550.
5. the author is thought to have been William Langland, native of Shropshire and later resident in London as a clerk in minor orders.
6. some think that he wrote only the prologue and first eight passus of the A-text and that the remainder, with the two later texts, is the work of other men.
7. the poem consists of a series of allegorical visions which satirize the political and
   social abuses of the time.

In a somer sesun, whon softe was the sonne,

I schop me into a shroud, as I a scheep were; (I arrayed myself in a garment as if were a shepherd.)

In habite as an hermite unholy of werkes

Wente I wyde in this world wondres to here;

Bote in a Mayes morwnynge on Malverne hulles (Malverne huller = Malvern Hills, between Worcestershire and Herefordshire, near the supposed birth-place of the poet).

Me bifel a ferly, of fairie, me-thoughte. (fairie = enchantment.)

I was wery, forwandred, and wente me to reste (forwandred = worn out with wandering.)

Undur a brod banke bi a bourne side; (bourne = burn's, brook's)

And as I lay and leonede and lokede on the watres, (leonede = leaned)

I slumbrede in a slepynge, hit swyed so murie. (swyed so murie = sounded so pleasantly)

Explanation:

An allegory is a short moral story. It is also a figurative sentence or discourse.

Writers use the allegory to present abstract ideas through concrete means--in the narrative form of prose, verse, or drama. Allegories usually fall into one of two categories: the political/historical allegory, and the allegory of abstract themes. In the later category, characters tend to represent traits like "Hope," "Hate," "Malice," etc.

An alliteration is the repetition of sounds in a sequence of words. Poets use alliteration to represent the action in the work.