The Routledge History of Literature in English PDF

The Routledge History of Literature in English The Routledge History of Literature in English covers the main developments in the history of British and Irish literature, with accompanying language notes which explore the interrelationships between language and literature at each stage. With a span from ad  to the present day, it emphasises the growth of literary writing, its traditions, conventions and changing characteristics, and includes literature from the margins, both geographical and cultural. Extensive quotations from poetry, prose and drama underpin the narrative. The third edition covers recent developments in literary and cultural theory, and features: a new chapter on novels, drama and poetry in the twenty-ﬁrst century; examples of analysis of key texts drawn from across the history of British and Irish literature, including material from Chaucer, Shakespeare, John Keats and Virginia Woolf; an extensive companion website including extra language notes and key text analysis; lists of Booker, Costa and Nobel literature prize winners; and an A–Z of authors and topics. The Routledge History of Literature in English is an invaluable reference for any student of English literature and language. Ronald Carter is Research Professor of Modern English Language in the School of English Studies, University of Nottingham and is well-known for his work at the interface of language and literary studies. He has written, co-written and edited over forty books, most recently a second edition of Language and Creativity (Routledge Classics) (). John McRae was appointed Special Professor of Language in Literature Studies in the School of English at Nottingham University in  and is now Teaching Associate. He has been a Visiting Professor and Lecturer in more than seventy countries. His publications include Literature with a Small ‘L’ (/), The Language of Poetry (Routledge, ) and the only critical edition of Teleny by Oscar Wilde and others (–). Praise for the second edition: ‘An expansive, generous and varied textbook of British literary history... addressed equally to the British and foreign reader.’ m a lco l m b r a d bu ry ‘An enormously ambitious and wide-ranging work.... Students of writing are bound to be indebted to it – and it has a clarity of structure and analysis that everyone will welcome.’ a n d rew m ot i o n, Poet Laureate and Professor of Creative Writing, University of East Anglia ‘Must stand for many years as a thoroughly well grounded survey of English Literature.’ s u s a n b a s s n e t t, University of Warwick ‘This is the ideal combination of serious content and readability.... Bang up to date in every way.’ s h e l l ey re e c e, Portland State University, USA What readers said about the ﬁrst edition: ‘The writing is lucid and eminently accessible while still allowing for a substantial degree of sophistication.... The book wears its learning lightly, conveying a wealth of information without visible eﬀort.’ h a n s b e rt e n s, University of Utrecht ‘Very accessible to students at all levels. A good starting point for research.’ s o n i a z y n g i e r, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro ‘Amazingly up-to-date.’ j u l i a m ü l l e r, University of Amsterdam ‘An excellent account of the development of English literature reﬂecting recent developments in literary theory and in cultural studies. The Language notes are a useful addition.’ p ro f. j u rg e n k a m m, Passau University, Germany ‘The book is clearly written and is a very valuable support to students. The focus on the modern period is especially helpful and the Language notes are an excellent innovation showing links between the study of English language and literature.’ p ro f. yo s h i f u m i s a i to, University of Tokyo The Routledge History of Literature in English Britain and Ireland third edition ronald carter and john mcrae Third edition published  by Routledge  Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX RN and by Routledge  Third Avenue, New York, NY  Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business ©  Ronald Carter and John McRae The rights of Ronald Carter and John McRae to be identiﬁed as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections  and  of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act . All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identiﬁcation and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Carter, Ronald, – author. | McRae, John, author. Title: The Routledge history of literature in English : Britain and Ireland / Ronald Carter and John McRae. Description: Third edition. | Abingdon, Oxford ; New York : Routledge, . | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identiﬁers: LCCN  | ISBN  (hardback) | ISBN  (ebook) Subjects: LSCH: English literature—History and criticism. | Great Britain—Intellectual life. | Ireland—Intellectual life. | English language—History. Classiﬁcation: LCC PR.C  | DDC .—dc LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ ISBN –––– (hbk) ISBN –––– (ebk) Typeset in Adobe Garamond and Frutiger by ReﬁneCatch Limited, Bungay, Suﬀolk Visit the companion website at www.routledge.com/cw/carter In memory of Alex and Jean McRae and Lilian and Kenneth Carter | vii contents List of illustrations xiii Preface to the Third Edition xiv the beginnings of english: Old and Middle English 600–1485 Preface  Contexts and conditions  Personal and religious voices  Language note: The earliest figurative language  Long poems  French inﬂuence and English aﬃrmation  Language and dialect  Language note: The expanding lexicon: Chaucer and Middle English  From anonymity to individualism  Women’s voices  Fantasy  Travel  Geoﬀrey Chaucer  Langland, Gower and Lydgate  The Scottish Chaucerians  Mediaeval drama  Malory and Skelton  Language note: Prose and sentence structure  the renaissance: 1485–1660 Contexts and conditions  Language note: Expanding world: expanding lexicon  viii | Contents Renaissance poetry  Drama before Shakespeare  From the street to a building – the Elizabethan theatre  Renaissance prose  Translations of the Bible  Language note: The language of the Bible  Shakespeare  The plays  The sonnets  Language note: Shakespeare’s language  The Metaphysical poets  The Cavalier poets  Jacobean drama – to the closure of the theatres,   Ben Jonson  Masques  Other early seventeenth-century dramatists  Domestic tragedy  City comedy  The end of the Renaissance theatre  restoration to romanticism: 1660–1789 Contexts and conditions  Language note: Changing patterns of ‘thou’ and ‘you’  Milton  Restoration drama  Rochester  Dryden  Pope  Journalism  Scottish Enlightenment, diarists and Gibbon  The novel  Criticism  Language note: The expanding lexicon – ‘standards of English’  Johnson  Sterne, Smollett and Scottish voices  Drama after   Poetry after Pope  Language note: Metrical patterns  Melancholy, madness and nature  Contents | ix The Gothic and the sublime  Language note: Point of view  the romantic period: 1789–1832 Contexts and conditions  Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge  Language note: Reading Wordsworth  Language note: The ‘real’ language of men  Keats  Shelley  Byron  Rights and voices and poetry  Clare  Romantic prose  The novel in the Romantic period  Jane Austen  Language note: Jane Austen’s English  Scott  From Gothic to Frankenstein  The Scottish regional novel  the nineteenth century: 1832–1900 Contexts and conditions  Dickens  Language note: Reading Dickens  Victorian thought and Victorian novels  The Brontës and Eliot  ‘Lady’ novelists  Late Victorian novels  Victorian fantasy  Wilde and Aestheticism  Hardy and James  Victorian poetry  The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and after  Language note: The developing uses of dialects in literature  Victorian drama  Language note: Reading the language of theatre and drama  x | Contents the twentieth century: 1900–45 Contexts and conditions  Modern poetry to   Language note: Reading Hardy  Later Hardy  Georgian and Imagist poetry  First World War poetry  Irish writing  W.B. Yeats  T.S. Eliot  Language note: Modernist poetic syntax  Popular poets  Thirties poets  Language note: Reading Auden  Scottish and Welsh poetry  Twentieth-century drama to   Irish drama  D.H. Lawrence  Popular and poetic drama  The novel to   Subjectivity: the popular tradition  The Kailyard School  Provincial novels  Social concerns  Light novels  Genre ﬁction  Modernism and the novel  Forster  Conrad and Ford  D.H. Lawrence  Woolf and Joyce  Language note: Irish English, nationality and literature  Novels of the First World War  Aldous Huxley  Rooms of their own  Ireland  Early Greene and Waugh  Thirties novelists  Contents | xi the twentieth century: 1945 to 2000 Contexts and conditions  Drama since   Language note: Drama and everyday language  Poetry of the Second World War  Poetry since   Martians and gorgons  The novel since   Writing for younger readers – so-called children’s literature  Later Greene  Post-war Waugh  Orwell  Dialogue novels  Language note: Discourse, titles and dialogism  The mid-century novel  Amis, father and son  Golding  Fowles and Frayn  Novel sequences  The campus novel  Falling in love... ... and blood  Muriel Spark and others  Margaret Drabble  Lessing, Hill, Dunmore and Weldon  Iris Murdoch  Internationalism  Rotten Englishes  New modes of modern writing  Language note: English, Scots and Scotland  The contemporary Scottish novel  The contemporary Irish novel  Endings and beginnings  the twenty-first century Contexts and conditions  The novel since   How to be both  States of the nation  xii | Contents Who would want to stay?  the freedom of all of angland here in my heorte  Wars and times and perspectives  Genre ﬁction  All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye  Poetry since   Drama since   Twenty-ﬁrst century drama – Blasted to Hangmen  Endings and beginnings  Timelines  Acknowledgements  Select bibliography  Key Texts  Index  | xiii illustrations Figure  Linguistic boundaries and external inﬂuences  Figure  English possessions in France  Figure  An Elizabethan playhouse. De Witt’s drawing of The Swan, c.  Figure  Illustration from Tristram Shandy  xiv | preface to the third edition From the earliest stages of the ﬁrst edition Malcolm Bradbury and Richard Walker have been generous and constructive in their help and advice. Sir Malcolm Bradbury’s contribution to the book has been characterised by the generosity of spirit, acuteness of observation and sustained interest in teaching remarked on by so many friends and colleagues on the occasion of his untimely death on  November . We and our colleagues at Routledge add here our thanks for Malcolm’s unique contribution to the teaching and study of literature in English. At the later stages, Alan Durant and Helen Phillips provided painstaking and detailed suggestions. Carole Hough, David Parsons, Miquel Berga, Werner Delanoy, Hans Bertens, Angela Smallwood and Kathryn Sutherland gave valuable insights and comments. Revisions in ,  and  were assisted by many colleagues in the School of English Studies, University of Nottingham, most particularly by the work of Macdonald Daly, Janette Dillon, Josephine Guy, Brean Hammond, Peter Haworth, Dominic Head, David James, Peter Stockwell, Sean Matthews, Jim Moran and Julie Sanders. We alone are, of course, responsible for what remains. In our shaping of the second and third editions we also responded to the interest taken in the book by non-native teachers of English world- wide and to the comments from readers who had adopted the book in universities and colleges. We feel it now oﬀers a distinctive and broader language focus, more detailed treatment of the twentieth and twenty- ﬁrst centuries and is even more student and reader friendly. The third edition contains revisions and updates, a wholly new chapter on the twenty-ﬁrst century to date, a wider apparatus of commentary for students on Key Texts (see pp.ﬀ) and for the ﬁrst time an accompanying website www.routledge.com/cw/carter comprising further updates on writers and topics, further language notes and Key Text commentaries, literary prizes and updates to the bibliography. The website will be maintained and updated on a regular basis. The companion website logo Preface to the third edition | xv will appear in the margin when further relevant material can be found on this website. Louisa Semlyen, Nadia Seemungal and Helen Tredget at Routledge have seen the project through with equal dedication. Particular thanks are also due to our Production Editor, Ruth Berry, together with her copy- editing and indexing team, for her sharp editorial eye as well as for her patience and support to us on what has been a complex edition of the book. Jeremy Hunter was in so many memorable ways almost a co-author of the ﬁrst and second editions. Malachi Edwin Vethamani was equally helpful in the preparation of the current edition. To all, and especially to Jane and Bala, we oﬀer our thanks. Ronald Carter and John McRae Nottingham and London December  November  March  The beginnings of English old and middle english 600–1485 |  A man will turn over half a library to make one book. (Samuel Johnson) The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted: and yet the great majority trust to nothing else. (Thomas De Quincey) preface The very ﬁrst writings in what is now Great Britain were in several diﬀerent languages – Latin of course, since the Romans had occupied these islands for some four centuries; Gaelic and Irish and Welsh also found written expression. Of course most literature was part of an oral tradition, and it was rarely written down until much later. The ﬁrst texts we have, from more than , years ago, come down to us in Old English, and over the centuries they show inﬂuences of Norse and Viking, Anglo-Saxon and French invaders, as well as local regional dialects. Only after about , when what we call Middle English took over, does literature in English begin to sound, look and feel like the English we use today. By the time of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, published in , the English language is recognisably modern. But the themes and subjects of all these centuries of writing, between the departure of the Romans and the birth of Shakespeare, are not only recognisable – they are familiar to us all: they are the themes, concerns, images and expressions of all humanity, of all stories, of all reﬂections and poems and prayers. There are heroes and lovers, there is joy and pain, there is hope and comfort, faith and doubt, success and failure, life and death, a constant preoccupation with past, present and future and the transitory nature of all human things. Above all, there is the imaginative representation of all these concerns set down in wonderfully rich and constantly evolving language, from the  | Old and Middle English – earliest times to the very recent: here Martin Amis celebrates a ﬁctionalised rough area of present-day north London: To evoke the London borough of Diston, we turn to the poetry of Chaos: Each thing hostile To every other thing: at every point Hot fought cold, moist dry, soft hard, and the weightless Resisted weight. Martin Amis Lionel Asbo: State of England () This poetry, in a modern novel, could have been written at almost any stage in the history of English and its literature. Here it is poetry of modern urban chaos – in earlier centuries it might have been wars, local and international. It might have been the chaos of the emotions. Writers are always drawn to chaos and conﬂict, to what is eternal and what is changing. The subject is not just the state of the nation, before and after it became the United Kingdom, but it is also the story of English and Englishes, of the language that made the literature, and the literature that made the language the richest in the universe. contexts and conditions Literature is as old as human language, and as new as tomorrow’s sunrise. And literature is everywhere, not only in books, but in videos, television, radio, CDs, computers, newspapers, in all the media of communication where a story is told or an image created. It starts with words, and with speech. The ﬁrst literature in any culture is oral. The classical Greek epics of Homer, the Asian narratives of Gilgamesh and the Bhagavad Gita, the earliest versions of the Bible and the Koran were all communicated orally, and passed on from generation to generation – with variations, additions, omissions and embellishments until they were set down in written form, in versions which have come down to us. In English, the ﬁrst signs of oral literature tend to have three kinds of subject matter – religion, war, and the trials of daily life – all of which continue as themes of a great deal of writing. There is a vast expanse of time before the Norman Conquest in , from which fragments of literary texts remain, although these fragments make quite a substantial body of work. If we consider that the same expanse of time has passed between Shakespeare’s time and now as passed Contexts and conditions |  between the earliest extant text and , we can begin to imagine just how much literary expression there must have been. But these centuries remain largely dark to us, apart from a few illuminating ﬂashes and frag- ments, since almost all of it was never written down, and since most of what was preserved in writing was destroyed later, particularly during the s. The fragments that remain conﬁrm that the motivations and inspira- tions for producing literature, and for listening to it, or later, reading it, are the same all through history: literature can give comfort and consolation (as religious literature often does), can illuminate and mirror our problems, and can aﬃrm and reinforce social, political and ideological standpoints. The spread of Anglo-Saxon, then English, as a language was one of the most signiﬁcant elements, over several centuries, in moulding a national identity out of all the cultural and linguistic inﬂuences which the country underwent. Icelandic and Viking, Latin and French, Germanic and Celtic – as well as many local linguistic, cultural, and social forces – were all part of the Anglo-Saxon melting pot which would eventually become English: the language of England, then of Britain. c. Withdrawal of the Roman legions from Britain c. Anglo-Saxon and Jutish invasions from North-West Germany Early sixth century Reign of King Arthur (in Wessex; to )  Establishment of Saint Augustine’s Christian mission at Canterbury – Viking invasions (Danish and Norwegian) in Scotland, northern and eastern England  England united, under King Egbert of Wessex Ninth century Danish invasions; occupation of eastern England  Partition of England (under King Alfred the Great) – England reoccupied Danish-held territories  Danish Conquest (monarchy, –)  Death of English King Edward (the Confessor); election of Harold, son of Godwin, as king. Norwegian forces defeated at Stamford Bridge (near York) norman conquest: Harold defeated by William of Normandy at Hastings  | Old and Middle English – Fifth-century England Figure  Linguistic boundaries and external inﬂuences. Varieties of Old English largely correspond to the borders of the seven kingdoms, as shown on the map above, although the Mercian dialect was widespread in Essex, and the West Saxon dialect dominated in Sussex and south-western parts of Kent Contexts and conditions |  Ninth to tenth centuries United England 802 Ninth century: Danish invasions Danish states (to north-east of heaw line): E. Analia and Danelaw (hive boroughs) o/X) Northumbria 876 Partition m b E. Anglia/Danelaw subj. 917 Northumbria subj. 926 Danish Conquest 1013  | Old and Middle English – personal and religious voices That evil ended. So also may this! (Deor’ s Lament) The ﬁrst fragment of literature is known as Caedmon’ s Hymn. It dates from the late seventh century (around ). The story goes that Caedmon was a lay worker on the estate of the monastery of Whitby, in Northumbria, and the voice of God came to him. His hymn is therefore the ﬁrst song of praise in English culture, and the ﬁrst Christian religious poem in English, although many Latin hymns were known at the time. It was preserved by the monks of Whitby, and it is not certain whether the few lines which have survived through the ages are the complete hymn or not. Christian monks and nuns were, in eﬀect, the guardians of culture, as they were virtually the only people who could read and write before the fourteenth century. It is interesting therefore that most of the native English culture they preserved is not in Latin, the language of the church, but in Old English, the language of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. It is the voice of everyday people, rather than of a self-conscious ‘artist’, that we hear in Caedmon’ s Hymn, and in such texts as Deor’ s Lament (also known simply as Deor ) or The Seafarer. These reﬂect ordinary human experience and are told in the ﬁrst person. They make the reader or hearer relate directly with the narratorial ‘I’, and frequently contain intertextual references to religious texts. Although they express a faith in God, only Caedmon’ s Hymn is an overtly religious piece. Already we can notice one or two conventions creeping in; ways of writing which will be found again and again in later works. One of these is the use of the ﬁrst-person speaker who narrates his experience, inviting the reader or listener to identify with him and sympathise with his feelings. The frame of reference of these texts is to the Latin exegetical commentaries and liturgical texts. The Seafarer, for instance, while describing much of the day-to-day life of the seafarer, also reﬂects a close familiarity with contemporary interpretations of the Psalms. The speaker in Deor’ s Lament recounts the day-to-day trials of life, naming several heroes of Germanic origin and their suﬀerings, with the repeated chorus, ‘That evil ended. So also may this!’ Having gone through the heroic names, he arrives at his own troubles: he was a successful bard, or minstrel, who sang for an important family, but now another bard has taken his place. This is the ﬁrst poem in history about unemployment, but with a refrain that the bad times will pass! Personal and religious voices |  And so I can sing of my own sad plight Who long stood high as the Heodenings’ bard Deor my name, dear to my lord. Mild was my service for many a winter, Kingly my king till Heorrenda came Skilful in song and usurping the land-right Which once my gracious lord granted to me. That evil ended. So also may this! The Seafarer and The Wanderer, along with various other texts, were preserved in The Exeter Book, a manuscript containing only poetry, which dates from the end of the tenth century and is still kept in Exeter Cathedral library in Devon. Like Deor’ s Lament, these are two elegiac poems of solitude, exile, and suﬀering. The theme of the solitary outcast, with no help or protection from a noble lord, is found again here, and memory plays a signiﬁcant part in the speaker’s thoughts. He recalls ‘old legends of battle and bloodshed’ and wonders ‘Where now is the warrior? Where is the war- horse?’ This reﬂects the biblical tradition of questioning epitomised in the famous ‘Ubi sunt?’ (Where are they?). The only reply he can give in his own context is ‘In the night of the past, as if they never had been.’ He who shall muse on these mouldering ruins, And deeply ponder this darkling life, Must brood on old legends of battle and bloodshed, And heavy the mood that troubles his heart: Where now is the warrior? Where is the war-horse? Bestowal of treasure, and sharing of feast? Alas! the bright ale-cup, the byrny-clad warrior, The prince in his splendour – those days are long sped In the night of the past, as if they never had been. (The Wanderer ) So there is a clash between past and present, between remembered glory and the despair of the moment. But there is always some consolation, some hope for the future, usually ending with a hope of heaven. The speaker – the ‘I’ of the poem – is a ﬁgure who will return again and again in literature through the ages, described here as ‘the sage, in solitude, pondering’.  | Old and Middle English – Lo! I will tell the dearest of dreams (The Dream of the Rood ) It would seem that the church, in preserving texts in Old English, was aware of a particularly English linguistic and cultural identity which, over the centuries, it would nurture in its own written works in diﬀerent genres, as the language moves towards Early Middle English in the thirteenth century. The genres include: history, such as the Venerable Bede’s Latin Ecclesiastical History of the English People and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; devotional works for those dedicated to a life of religious observance, such as the twelfth-century Ancrene Rewle; and the beginnings of a philosophical tradition in the writings of Alcuin and Saint Anselm. Translations of parts of the Christian Bible were made, such as the Book of Genesis, a version of which was for a long time believed to be the work of Caedmon. This was translated from Saxon into Old English. In its use of the local language, it is a conscious attempt to strengthen the position of the Christian faith throughout the island and to assert a local linguistic and cultural identity. Perhaps the most clearly Christian of Old English texts is The Dream of the Rood (the ‘Rood’ is the Cross), perhaps as early as the end of the seventh century. One version of this is found on the Ruthwell Cross, a standing stone in Dumfriesshire (Galloway), in what is now southern Scotland, quite close to Northumbria where the original was written. One fascinating feature of The Dream of the Rood is the large number of words, phrases and images used for the ﬁgure of Christ and his cross: a tree, a glorious gold cross, a simple bare cross, and a cross with a voice which speaks of its own transformation from tree to bearer of Christ. As with many texts of the time there are many references to Latin hymns and liturgy embedded in the text. It is a highly visual text, full of joy and suﬀering, light and darkness, earthly reality and heavenly bliss. Lo! I will tell the dearest of dreams That I dreamed in the midnight when mortal men Were sunk in slumber. Me-seemed I saw A wondrous Tree towering in air, Most shining of crosses compassed with light. There is a certain level of reﬁnement here, and some complexity of expression. The text presumes an ability in the receiver who hears or reads the story to identify on more than one level the meanings and references the text contains. This is an important feature of all literature, in that it is representational more than simply referential: it shows, illustrates and Personal and religious voices |  exempliﬁes, often in very reﬁned and sophisticated ways. Anglo-Saxon literature is full of images. The speaker in The Seafarer, despite his suﬀer- ings as ‘my bark was beaten by the breaking seas’, rejects land, and the town, because his ‘heart is haunted by love of the sea’. ‘Bark’, meaning the wood from which the ship was made, stands for the whole ship; ‘haunted’ takes the idea of a supernatural presence and places it in the speaker’s heart. As The Dream of the Rood gives us images of suﬀering and redemption, The Seafarer gives us images of ships and the sea. Each provides images of human life, using the tree, the cross, the sea, to stand for aspects of human experience, including, again in The Dream of the Rood, the sense of being alone – without human protection and in need of spiritual support from the cross. This is my heart’s desire, and all my hope Waits on the Cross. In this world now I have few powerful friends. All the texts in the oral tradition in Anglo-Saxon literature are poetry: they were written down probably many years after they were ﬁrst per- formed. Most are short; Beowulf is the only long epic poem. What they have in common is their verse form, a double line with a break in the middle (called the caesura, from the Latin). This gives the verse its distinct- ive rhythm, which the minstrel or scop would use in performing the text for his audience. The use of alliteration, repeated sounds, is another characteristic of Old English verse. The Ruin is a splendid example of this. see key texts p.. LANGUAGE NOTE The earliest figurative language Old English poetry is characterised by a number of poetic tropes which enable a writer to describe things indirectly and which require a reader imaginatively to construct their meaning. The most widespread of these figurative descriptions are what are known as kennings. Kennings often occur in compounds: for example, hronrad (whale-road) or swanrad (swan– road) meaning ‘the sea’; banhus (bone-house) meaning the ‘human body’. Some kennings involve borrowing or inventing words; others appear to be chosen to meet the alliterative requirement of a poetic line, and as a result some kennings are difficult to decode, leading to disputes in critical interpretation. But kennings do allow more abstract concepts to be com- municated by using more familiar words: for example, God is often described as moncynnes weard (‘guardian of mankind’). Old English poetry also contained a wide range of conventional poetic diction, many of the words being created to allow alliterative patterns to be made. There are therefore numerous  | Old and Middle English – alternatives for key words like battle, warrior, horse, ship, the sea, prince, and so on. Some are decorative periphrases: a king can be a ‘giver of rings’ or a ‘giver of treasure’ (literally, a king was expected to provide his warriors with gifts after they had fought for him). Beowulf stands out as a poem which makes extensive use of this kind of figurative language. There are over one thousand compounds in the poem, totalling one-third of all the words in the text. Many of these compounds are kennings. The word ‘to ken’ is still used in many Scottish and Northern English dialects, meaning ‘to know’. Such language is a way of knowing and of expressing meanings in striking and memorable ways; it has continuities with the kinds of poetic compounding found in nearly all later poetry but especially in the Modernist texts of Gerard Manley Hopkins and James Joyce. The only other poet whose name has come down to us is also probably Northumbrian: Cynewulf, who probably lived in the eighth or ninth cen- tury. He has been credited with writing many poems (at one time The Dream of the Rood was thought to have been his work) but he is only deﬁnitely known to have written two poems in The Exeter Book and two in another collection, now in the chapter of Vercelli in Italy, known as The Vercelli Book. This is a collection of prose as well as poetry on exclusively religious themes. Cynewulf ’s poems are all on religious themes, such as stories of saints, The Fates of the Apostles, and Christ’s Ascension. long poems The ruinous deeds of the ravaging foe (Beowulf ) The best-known long text in Old English is the epic poem Beowulf. Beowulf is a constant presence in English Literature and culture – it was made into to a very successful Hollywood movie in , is constantly on television, and has inspired poets and novelists all through the ages. The former Irish Nobel Literature laureate Seamus Heaney, who published a new translation in , talks about its universality of themes, despite being a narrative of ancient heroic battles and their aftermath: For every one of us, living in this world Means waiting for our end. (lines ,–) Heaney here underlines the theme of transitoriness, life and death, which is found throughout Old English writing, and is perhaps a more intriguing theme for twenty-ﬁrst century readers than heroic struggles. That said, the Long poems |  hero’s ﬁght with Grendel, the monster of the fen, takes on universal reson- ances of all humanity’s constant struggles against the elements of darkness. Tragedy, futility and the passing nature of all things become more vital for readers today than any gloriﬁcation of antique heroism. Heaney quotes the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam’s words “nostalgia for world culture” to describe his own discovery of the richness and translatability of the lan- guage, “illumination by philology” as he calls it. Beowulf himself is a classic hero, who comes from afar. He has defeated the mortal enemy of the area – the monster Grendel – and has thus made the territory safe for its people. The people and the setting are both Germanic. The poem recalls a shared heroic past, somewhere in the general consciousness of the audience who would hear it. It starts with a mention of ‘olden days’, looking back, as many stories do, to an indeﬁnite past (‘once upon a time’), in which fact blends with ﬁction to make the tale. But the hero is a mortal man, and images of foreboding and doom prepare the way for a tragic outcome. He will be betrayed, and civil war will follow. Contrasts between splendour and destruction, success and failure, honour and betrayal, emerge in a story which contains a great many of the elements of future literature. Power, and the battles to achieve and hold on to power, are a main theme of literature in every culture – as is the theme of transience and mortality. The language of Beowulf is extremely rich and inventive, full of imposing tones and rhythms: there are a great many near synonyms for ‘warrior’; many compound adjectives denoting hardness; many images of light, colour, and blood; many superlatives and exaggerations to underline the heroic, legendary aspects of the tale. It is, at the same time, a poem of praise for ‘valour and venturous deeds’, a tragedy, since the hero inevitably dies, and an elegy, since it recalls heroic deeds and times now past. Beowulf dies at the moment of his greatest triumph – ‘Beowulf, dauntless, pressed on to his doom’ – ﬁfty years on from the killing of Grendel, but then has to face the newest threat: a dragon – ‘the hideous foe in a horror of ﬂame’. But the poem looks to the future as well, as power passes to ‘Wiglaf, the lad’, the kinsman who fought at Beowulf’s side. The old hero dies; long live the young hero: That was the last ﬁght Beowulf fought That was the end of his work in the world. When the battles are lost and won, the world is for the young, and the next generation must take on the responsibilities of the warrior king. Beowulf can be read in many ways: as myth; as territorial history of the Baltic kingdoms in which it is set; as forward-looking reassurance.  | Old and Middle English – Questions of history, time and humanity are at the heart of it: it moves between past, present, and hope for the future, and shows its origins in oral tradition. It is full of human speech and sonorous images, and of the need to resolve and bring to fruition a proper human order, against the enemy – whatever it be – here symbolised by a monster and a dragon, among literature’s earliest ‘outsiders’. Beowulf spoke, the son of Ecgtheow: ‘My dear lord Hygelac, many have heard Of that famous grapple ’twixt Grendel and me, The bitter struggle and strife in the hall Where he formerly wrought such ruin and wrong, Such lasting sorrow for Scylding men! All that I avenged!...’ With such a repeated concern for time past, time future and time present, it is perhaps understandable that the date of composition of Beowulf cannot be accurately pinned down. Opinions among critics and scholars vary from the sixth to the eleventh century. Recent scholars have challenged the general opinion that it dates from the middle of the eighth century, around the year , making it as much as three hundred years later. This is an area of study where there is much controversy and debate – and no consensus. Beowulf is the beginning of a heroic tradition, emphasising strength and the territorial imperative. But Beowulf is also, in a way, a text that comes close to its listeners when performed in the hall of a castle, using spoken language – words which everyone can understand and remember. The structure of Beowulf involves a main plot featuring animals and mon- sters with only the sub-plot involving human beings. The two narratives are interlaced with conﬂicts between the two groups and even a sermon on human behaviour. Beowulf suggests what a hero is, and how important the hero is as a focus of public attention and admiration. For he was of all men the worthiest warrior In all the earth, while he still might rule And wield the wealth of his lordly land. Beowulf has always attracted readers, and perhaps never more than in the s when at least two major poets, the Scot Edwin Morgan and the Irishman Seamus Heaney, retranslated it into modern English. Heaney’s version became a worldwide bestseller, and won many awards, taking one of the earliest texts of English literature to a vast new audience. Long poems |  Bold in battle ﬁghters fell Weary with wounds. Death covered earth (The Battle of Maldon) By way of contrast, another text whose subject is war, The Battle of Maldon, is less fanciful. It is again a poem, but more a documentary of the battle than a gloriﬁcation of warlike values. It recounts a defeat, stressing blood- shed and loss, commemorating a battle in the year . As against most of the texts of the time, The Battle of Maldon may have been written down fairly close to the time of the events it describes, and this may contribute to its more factual, less ‘ﬁctional’ tone. This can be read as a rather more realistic depiction of the necessity of victory, and therefore the need for a hero. However, yet again, there is an ongoing debate about whether The Battle of Maldon is to be seen as a more distanced work of literature than a more or less contemporary ‘semi-documentary’ account, with a celebration of honour, ﬁdelity and bravery in the face of defeat. Like all Old English verse, The Battle of Maldon uses the divided line to create the rhythm, the sound of battle. Honour in battle. Then ﬁghting was near, Honour in battle. The hour was come Doomed men must fall. A din arose. Raven and eagle were eager for carnage; There was uproar on earth. Perhaps Beowulf, in having three generations of mythical monsters as the principal enemy (Grendel’s mother, Grendel and the son), is more suited to the myth-making hero it extols. It is fascinating, how- ever, that two such diﬀerent approaches to war – which is a constant theme in literature – should emerge at almost the same time, in a world which was constantly at war. We do not know who the authors of Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon were, but the texts clearly show diﬀerent authorial points of view. Even an anonymous text almost always has something of an author’s personality in it, although texts in the oral tradition probably underwent many changes at the hands of individual scops, or bards. The concept of an author, the single creative person who gives the text ‘authority’, only comes later in this period. Most Old English poetry is anonymous, even though names which are in no way comparable, such as Caedmon and Deor, are used to identify single texts. Caedmon and Deor might indeed be as mythical as Grendel, might be the originators of the  | Old and Middle English – texts which bear their names, or, in Deor’s case only, the persona whose ﬁrst-person voice narrates the poem. Only Cynewulf ‘signed’ his works, anticipating the role of the ‘author’ by some four hundred years. Alfred the Great, king of the West Saxons at the end of the ninth century, was known as the translator of Cura Pastoralis, a guide to living and spiritual education. Alfred launched a signiﬁcant programme of trans- lations into the vernacular, and had a major impact on the shift from Latin to English as a language of learning. He commissioned several more trans- lations, of history, geography, and even of Caedmon’ s Hymn into West Saxon, which became the dominant language in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, begun in the last decade of his reign, was probably inspired if not partly written by him. Alfred’s inﬂuence on translation into idiomatic accessible language took England ahead of the rest of Europe in beginning a tradition of language and literacy in the vernacular which in many ways marks the beginning of the long traditions of literature in English. french influence and english affirmation The world of Old English literature is a world of warriors and battles, a world where the individual, if not under the protection of his local lord, is a solitary outsider in a harsh and diﬃcult society. The world was to change, slowly but radically, as a result of the most famous single event in English history – the Norman Conquest of . The Normans (originally ‘North Men’) crossed the Channel from France, won the Battle of Hastings, and took over the kingdom of England, which legitimately belonged to the family of the new king, William the Conqueror. The Normans brought with them the French language and culture. The two centuries after the Conquest were a period of consolidation, as the two languages struggled to integrate: bilingualism was widespread, with French being widely read and written in England from the twelfth century to the late fourteenth century. It was, however, only after , when King John’s losses of French lands led the aristocracy to opt for England or France, that the Norman conquerors themselves began to develop a fuller English identity and a desire to use the English language. Subsequently, more and more French words entered the English language. Lay literacy developed widely at this time and books were commercially produced as English established itself as the language of writing for a growing reader- ship who bought and lent books. French inﬂuence and English aﬃrmation |  At this time, London established itself as the capital city. The charac- teristics of the dialect which came to be recognised as the London dialect show that its main inﬂuences came from the north: from the university cities of Oxford and Cambridge and from the Midlands, rather than from the south. It now began its rise to prominence as the dominant spoken English – although local dialects remained throughout the land, and are found again and again in the literature of the next hundred and ﬁfty years. Anglo-Latin was diﬀerent from Paris Latin, and Chancery English developed away from French in many ways. French was ﬁnally rejected only in , when King Henry V aﬃrmed English domination, territorial and linguistic, over what had by then become the nation’s oldest enemy. Lenten is come with love to town (Spring, c.) The idea of an author comes into English literature signiﬁcantly with Layamon, in the early thirteenth century. He wrote Brut, the ﬁrst national epic in English, taking material from many sources and recounting tales of the Dark Ages, the two centuries between the departure of the Romans at the beginning of the ﬁfth century and the ﬁrst traces of the culture of the Britons. He takes the story up to the arrival of Saint Augustine, the ﬁrst Archbishop of Canterbury, in , telling the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table – which will feature time and again in English literature as a mixture of history, legend, myth and magic. Layamon’s immediate source was a twelfth-century work by Wace, written in French, from Celtic sources, based on the history of Geoﬀrey of Monmouth. This traced the foundation of Britain back to Brutus, a great- grandson of Aeneas – hero of Virgil’s Latin epic, The Aeneid, and hero of the Trojan wars described in the Greek epics of Homer, in particular The Iliad. This search for classical (not Christian) roots is interesting, as it shows a wish for historical continuity, for heroic antecedents, and for an element of political myth-making. There had been earlier versions of the history of the country, but this was a conscious attempt to emulate classical epics. There will be many more ‘national epics’ throughout the centuries, as authors go back in his- tory in order to reinterpret the past in relation to the present. Often, these epics are manifestations of a time of crisis and transition in terms of national identity. Layamon is a case in point. He, in his own words, ‘put the book together’ as England was seeking to establish its ‘Englishness’; absorbing the immensely formative French inﬂuences which had come in  | Old and Middle English – with the Norman Conquest, but subordinating them to the dominant English culture. Among the French inﬂuences, in literary terms, was a new subject for minstrels, singers and poets. The warrior hero began to settle down, his territories now rather more secure, and to think of other things. He hung up his sword, took up a musical instrument, and began to sing of love. Until the Norman Conquest, there is hardly any love poetry in English literature. Clearly, land was more important than love. However, Old English poems such as The Wife’ s Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer could be said to belong to this genre: very probably some of the lost works of Old English will have been love poems. The new love theme comes from Provence in the south-east of France, where poets known as troubadours gave voice to the concept of courtly love. (The term was only coined several centuries later.) Love was an almost religious passion, and the greatest love was unfulﬁlled. This is the begin- ning of the concept of ideal love, chaste but passionate, which will give rise to a huge amount and variety of lyric poetry over the centuries. Very often, the focus of love takes on a religious note: it is no coincidence that worship of the Virgin Mary begins to spread in the twelfth century in Europe. This example dates from the ﬁfteenth century: I sing of a maiden That is makeles;... As dew in Aprille That falleth on the spray. Moder and maiden Was never none but she; Wel may swich a lady Godes moder be. At almost the same time, around , the good soldier was begin- ning to go oﬀ on the Holy Crusades, all the way across Europe to the Christian holy shrines of Jerusalem. While the menfolk went on Cru- sades, women were expected to wait at home – embodying patience, beauty and ideal virtue. Like many of the ‘roots’ of British history, this concept has classical origins. Penelope, the wife of Odysseus in Homer’s The Odyssey, waited twenty years, we are told, rejecting all suitors in the meantime. This romantic notion of ﬁdelity, with its feminine imagery – such as the rose, from Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose), possibly the most inﬂuential imported text of the Early Middle English period – establishes a code of behaviour, sets a value on chastity, and orders a French inﬂuence and English aﬃrmation |  subordinate role for women. The rose symbolises the lady’s love; the god of love is seen inside a walled garden, with the harsh realities of life and the masculine world outside. From this image, a whole allegorical and philosophical concept of love developed, although it would be mistaken to see Le Roman as a treatise on chaste love: it is full of sexuality, a multi-faceted examination of the nature of love in all its forms from the idealised to the earthy. The work had two authors, and gave rise to the ‘Question of the Rose’ in a controversy about its intentions: it ranges from misogyny to worship of the beloved, from immorality to chastity, so these contrasting philosophies have made the text both ambiguous and contro- versial. However, it is perhaps best seen as covering a great range, albeit from a male point of view and starting oﬀ a wide-ranging new tradition of love literature which can be both pure and earthy. The love literature of the next few centuries will do its best to uphold this new tradition, despite frequent temptations to bring love to a more realistic and earthly expression. It is interesting that the two strands of war literature and religious literature united to foster this new theme. Love is thus romanticised, instead of being allowed to become dangerous, anarchic, and subvert the order of things. It has its own emblems, symbols and patterns, but largely without the realistic elements of daily life. Realism, we will ﬁnd, often has to be kept down if literature is to aﬃrm the accepted dominant values of its time. As we have seen, French culture and language interacted with native English culture for several generations after the Norman Conquest. A common word such as ‘castle’ is a French loan word, for example; and the whole romance tradition comes from the French. But this sensibility, culture, and language becomes integrated with native culture. As well as the beginnings of what came to be called a courtly love tradition, we can ﬁnd in Early Middle English (around the time that Layamon was writing Brut) the growth of a local tradition of songs and ballads. The song lyric might celebrate the changing of the seasons, like ‘Lenten is come with love to town’ (from Spring), it might praise the glories of nature, it might even sing of love in a more direct way than the courtly poem. Summer is i-cumen in – welcoming the arrival of summer – is one of the ﬁrst such songs, and is usually dated around . Summer is i-cumen in, Lude sing, cuccu! Groweth seed and bloweth med And springth the wode nu.  | Old and Middle English – The ballad traditionally told a story, based on a character (like Robin Hood, unfortunate Lord Randal, or the Wife of Usher’s Well), in memor- able rhythmic verses. The ending was generally unhappy, in contrast with the simple, positive assertions of the song lyrics. The ballad Lord Randal is a question/answer dialogue, ending in his death: ‘What d’ye leave to your true-love, Lord Randal my son? What d’ye leave to your true-love, my handsome young man?’ ‘I leave her hell and ﬁre; mother, make my bed soon, For I’m sick at the heart and fain wad lie down.’ It is diﬃcult to put dates to most ballads, since they were collected for publication centuries after they ﬁrst appeared in the oral tradition. Some scholars date the earliest ballads to the thirteenth century, others trace them back to the ﬁfteenth century. Whatever the case, this is the beginning of a popular tradition of song, story, and ballad, which will run through every century. It is sometimes quite close in style and subject matter to the more ‘literary’ writings, but is often a quite separate, distinct and more unrestrained voice of popular dissent and dissatisfaction. language and dialect Writers in what we now call the Middle English period (late twelfth century to ) did not necessarily always write in English. The language was in a state of ﬂux: attempts were made to assert the French language, to keep down the local language, English, and to make the language of the church (Latin) the language of writing. The major growth of literature comes more than a century after Layamon’s Brut, and conﬁrms the range of potential languages for literature. Robert Mannyng based his lively Handling Synne, a verse treatise on the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins, on a French source. John Gower wrote his best-known work Confessio Amantis in English (despite its Latin title), but wrote others in Latin (Vox Clamantis) and French (Mirour de l’Omme). Geoﬀrey Chaucer wrote wholly in English and gave most of his works English titles, but derived his inspiration and found his forms in a wide range of European sources, including Latin and Italian. These European inﬂuences were largely channelled through London, now the capital city of the kingdom of England. The kingdom was quite diﬀerent geographically from present-day Britain: it extended into several regions of France, and (from ) included Wales, but did not include Scotland. Language and dialect |  Writing gave London language the beginning of its predominance as a means of artistic expression. The university cities of Oxford and Cambridge, where centres of learning were established in the thirteenth century, were also part of this cultural and linguistic aﬃrmation, which had London – base of the court, law, and trade – as its focus. The writers we know of lived in the city of London, but they did not write only about city life. Although the poet lived part of his life in London, William Langland’s Piers Plowman is largely based in the countryside; his origins are believed to have been in the west of England. Piers Plowman brings together English traditions and French romance inﬂuences. Many English dialects besides the language of London are found in the literature of the time. The texts are usually anonymous, unlike the London group’s works, but some can be identiﬁed as probably by the same hand: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, Pearl and Cleanness are examples. However, the provincial ‘Gawain poet’ cannot be deﬁnitively named. The fact that the four texts are found together in a manuscript dating from  may be no more than coincidence, but linguistic and stylistic aﬃnities suggest that they may be by the same poet. Texts such as Winner and Waster, Pearl, and Patience also form part of what is known as the Alliterative Revival, dating from about  to the early ﬁfteenth century. This growth of a distinctively English poetic voice recalls the Anglo-Saxon use of alliteration in verse several centuries earlier. In fact, although alliteration is seen as a distinctive feature of Anglo-Saxon texts, there is a greater body of alliterative verse from the time of this ‘revival’; and although it is usually called a ‘revival’, it is perhaps more correctly a ﬂourishing of the form, since it had continued largely uninter- rupted since Old English times. Most of the texts originate from an area of the country to the north and west of a line between the Wash and the Severn estuary – very far from London in terms of distance, culture and values. Layamon, in the early s, was, as we have seen, a ﬁgure who linked older historical traditions with modern Englishness. His is the ﬁrst voice in Middle English. As the use of English becomes less self-conscious, writers develop a more colloquial and familiar style, using idioms and proverbs to bring their writing closer to the reader. Since Latin (the language of religion) and French (the language of the conquerors) dominated the nation and its culture for almost two centuries, such writings are a valuable indication of the assertion of a national linguistic identity, despite the considerable diversity of dialects in use.  | Old and Middle English – Figure  The greatest extent of English possessions in France was reached during the Hundred Years’ War (–). After Scotland was liberated at the Battle of Bannockburn in , it was not until the Union of the Crowns in  that it became part of the United Kingdom. By then England had long since lost its possessions in France – Calais being the last in  Language and dialect |  LANGUAGE NOTE The expanding lexicon: Chaucer and Middle English A distinctive stylistic feature of the Middle English period was a rapid expansion in the number of words. These words often entered the language from Latin but by far the majority of imports were French (and, indeed, some of the Latin words may have arrived through the vehicle of French). Middle English vocabulary thus often has sets of words each with a differ- ent origin and each conveying more or less the same meaning but with different patterns of use. For example, some modern equivalents are: Old English French Latin ask question interrogate kingly royal regal holy sacred consecrated ﬁre ﬂame conﬂagration clothes attire house mansion domicile sheep mutton calf veal In each case, the Old English-derived lexical items are generally more frequent in English and more colloquial and are more central and core to the language; the words of Latin origin are more formal, learned and bookish in their use; the French words are considered to be more literary in function. It can also be noted that the French words confer a more elevated style on words used in domestic and culinary domains. French words also penetrated into the law and administration, heraldry, the arts, fashion, and hunting – areas of cultural and political dominance. The French words tended to spread from London and the court as well as locally from the lord’s castle. Many of these words came down from a higher social and cultural level and had no equivalent in English. By contrast, English and Scandinavian-derived words are more homely and much more part of a ‘ground-level’ daily life. After the Norman Conquest, the language of the Norman ruling class was Northern French. The language of the English court in the twelfth century was Parisian French, which carried more prestige than Anglo-Norman or other varieties. Until the second half of the fourteenth century the language of instruction in English schools was French. The following extract from the Prologue of Chaucer’s The Prioress’s Tale, illustrates the extent to which Chaucer made use of words of French or Latin via French origin, particularly for the expression of elevated praise: Lady, thy bountee, thy magniﬁcence, Thy vertu, and thy grete humylitee, Ther may no tonge expresse in no science. Yet Chaucer also makes extensive use of everyday colloquial speech which contains more Old English-derived words as in, for example, the following brief extract from The Summoner’s Tale : ‘Ey, Goddess mooder,’ quod she, ‘Blissful mayde! Is ther ought elles? tell me feithfully.’  | Old and Middle English – ‘Madame,’ quod he,‘how thynke ye herby?’ ‘How that me thynketh?’ quod she, ‘so God me speede, I seye, a cherl hath doon a cherles deede.’ The range and variety of Chaucer’s English did much to establish English as a national language. Chaucer also contributed much to the formation of a standard English based on the dialect of the East Midlands region which was basically the dialect of London which Chaucer himself spoke. Indeed, by the end of the fourteenth century the educated language of London, bolstered by the economic power of London itself, was beginning to become the standard form of written language throughout the country, although the process was not to be completed for several centuries. The cultural, commercial, administrative and intellectual importance of the East Midlands (one of the two main universities, Cambridge, was also in this region), the agricultural richness of the region and the presence of major cities, Norwich and London, contributed much to the increasing standardisation of the dialect. from anonymity to individualism These are the ground of all my bliss (Pearl ) Many texts from this period are described as ‘anonymous’, but it often happens that ‘anon’ has a distinctive voice or style, even though no actual name can be given to the author: ‘unknown’ might sometimes be a more precise term than ‘anonymous’, especially in the case of the troubadours. The anonymous verse characteristic of the beginning of the period shows some of the concerns which will preoccupy the later ‘named’ writers. The theme of nature becomes important in The Owl and the Nightingale, which dates from around . This poem uses the Latin genre of debate (conﬂic- tus) between two sides in a comic way, to show diﬀering attitudes and values, and uses the English countryside as a setting. The nightingale is described in a rhyme – which no longer works today – as she and theresat upon a fair bough and there were around blossoms enough [enow] This kind of debate, between the serious (the owl) and the light-hearted (the nightingale), can be seen to reﬂect the period’s concerns; torn, as it was, between religious issues and the new thoughts of love. Winner and Waster, from about , uses the debate form in a more serious way, contrasting the man who wants wealth in society with the carefree person who spends all his money. This is one of the ﬁrst allusions in literature to the importance of money, and contains a strong element of From anonymity to individualism |  social criticism: the Pope and his greedy priests are contrasted with the noble lords and their followers. But, like The Owl and the Nightingale, no ﬁnal judgement is given. The reader does not know who wins the debate, and must decide independently. There is a growing awareness, in the texts of this time, of an audience – a readership – and, consequently, a widening range of eﬀects is used. The audience would probably not have been limited to the dialect where the texts were written, but would have had a wide range of cultural reference – Latin, French and European. The audience was, however, limited to edu- cated court and aristocratic circles: although the production of literature was growing, mass literacy did not happen until more than ﬁve hundred years later. At this time there was suﬃciently widespread literacy among lay people for there to be a wide circulation of books lent and borrowed, the beginnings of a commercial readership more than a century before Caxton printed the ﬁrst books in English. King Horn, dating from about , is the earliest surviving verse romance in English. It is a tale of love, betrayal, and adventure, showing how English has assimilated the characteristics of French courtly stories, and adapted them to a local setting. The range of poems is now expanding rapidly: religious, secular, moral, and political themes are becoming the subjects for writing and reading. The Alliterative Revival, in the second half of the fourteenth century, and a growing literate readership, expands this range, and many more manuscript copies of texts are found, showing that writing and reading were spreading, and were not limited either to the capital city, London, or to highly educated readers. Story telling is a fundamental part of Middle English literature. Bible stories had been retold in the Anglo-Saxon period (versions of Genesis and Exodus in particular). Now, for example, Patience (from the late fourteenth century) retells the biblical story of Jonah and the whale, making it both comic and instructive (reinforcing the virtue of patience). Man’s smallness in relation to God is stressed, with Jonah compared to a mote of dust at a munster door/ so big the whale’s jaws were. The word ‘munster’ is interesting: interpreted as ‘minster’ or ‘cathedral’, it is clearly linked to ‘monastery’ and – if only in sound – to ‘monster’. But the intention is humorous as well as moral, and this is an important step in the handling of religious subject matter. Irreverence, alongside devotion, will become more and more frequent as a feature of writing about religion.  | Old and Middle English – Pearl introduces an original story, in a form which was to become one of the most frequent in mediaeval literature, the dream-vision. Authors like Chaucer and Langland use this form, in which the narrator describes another world – usually a heavenly paradise – which is compared with the earthly human world. In Pearl, the narrator sees his daughter who died in infancy, ‘the ground of all my bliss’. She now has a kind of perfect knowledge, which her father can never comprehend. The whole poem underlines the divide between human comprehension and per- fection; these lines show the gap between possible perfection and fallen humanity which, thematically, anticipate many literary examinations of man’s fall, the most well known being Milton’s late Renaissance epic, Paradise Lost. Inoghe is knawen that mankyn grete It is well-known that great mankind Fyrste was wroght to blysse parfyt; Was ﬁrst created in perfect bliss; Oure forme fader hit con forfete Our ﬁrst father then suddenly lost it Thurgh an apple that he upon con byte. Through an apple which he went and bit. Al wer we dampned for that mete All were damned for that meat/food To dyye in doel, out of delyt... To die in pain, out of delight... In a sense, Pearl is a forerunner not only of utopian writing about a perfect world, but it is also an examination of human limitations and knowledge; a theme which will recur in the Renaissance – in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Milton’s Paradise Lost and a host of other texts. It is more humanly direct and personal than these later works, giving the reader a sense of involvement in the narrator’s loss and incomprehension. The reader, in a sense, identiﬁes with the personal feelings expressed, and can share the emotions described. The most signiﬁcant anonymous text of the period is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, described as a ‘lay’ by the minstrel who tells it: If you will list to this lay just a little while I shall tell it straight away, as I heard it in the town. As with the opening line of Beowulf – ‘Lo! we have listened to many a lay’ – there is an implied listening audience and an explicit, personal voice of the bard. The lay derives from Brittany, and was a kind of French romance of the twelfth century, intended to be sung. There were several imitations of French lays in English. The lay was used to recount imaginative or legend- ary tales, ﬁction, rather than historical tales based on fact. Sir Orfeo, for example, transposes the classical Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice into this form in an English setting. Women’s voices |  women’s voices Marie de France, who was English, wrote in the late twelfth century twelve Lais, a series of short romances based on unwritten Breton songs. Marie’s was not by any means the only female voice of her time. Hrotsvitha, a tenth-century abbess from Saxony, is generally seen as the ﬁrst woman writer in Europe; Ancrene Wisse, also known as Ancrene Rewle, a book of advice on how to live, directed ﬁrst at nuns but clearly also to a wider readership of women, became one of the main texts of the thirteenth century – it dates from about . In the following century, Christine de Pisan in France was the ﬁrst woman to be a full-time, ‘professional’ writer – and one of the ﬁrst to question the authority of men’s writing. In her Book of the City of Ladies she comments on Lamentations of Mathéolus (c.), a misogynist satire, which Chaucer’s Wife of Bath also mentions: the sight of this book, even though it was of no authority, made me wonder how it happened that so many diﬀerent men... all concur in one conclusion: that the behaviour of women is inclined to and full of every vice. A text by Christine de Pisan, translated by Anthony Woodville, her Moral Proverbs of Christine, was the ﬁrst written by a woman to be printed in England by Caxton in . It is here that the word ‘authoress’ ﬁrst appears in English. Long before Caxton, however, there was a growing readership for Marie’s Lais, for books of instruction and devotion, and for ‘visionary’ writing. Julian of Norwich experienced such visions at the age of  on her deathbed, but made a miraculous recovery, became a nun and set down her visions in a probing, analytical discussion of such diﬃcult themes as faith, sin, and the motherhood of God. This is the conclusion of her challenging writing, given here in the original Middle English: Thus was I lerid that love was Our Lords mening. And I saw full sekirly in this and in all, that ere God made us, he lovid us: which love was never slakid no never shall. And in this love he hath don all his werke, and in this love he hath made all things proﬁtable to us. And in this love our life is everstand. In our making we had beginning. But the love wherin he made us, was in him fro withoute begynning, in which love we have our beginning. And this shall be seen in God without end, which Jhesus mot grant us. Amen.  | Old and Middle English – [lerid: taught; sekirly: surely; ere: before; slakid: diminished; no: nor; ever- stand: everlasting; making: creation; which i.e. that endless vision of God; mot: may] Margery Kempe is quite a diﬀerent kind of visionary writer but just as original in her way as Christine de Pisan, though less assured than Julian. She dictated her work The Book of Margery Kempe (to two men) as she could neither read nor write, but her woman’s voice speaks loud and clear down the centuries in her revelations of her psychological state of mind through the dramas of childbirth and intense sexual desires, towards her maturity and a life of contemplation. She speaks of herself in the third person as ‘this creature’, although she gives the book her own name. Moll Flanders in Daniel Defoe’s novel which bears her name is perhaps the nearest later self-castigating heroine of her own moral tale (again given in the original): Ower mercyful lord Crist Jhesu, seyng this creaturys presumpcyon, sent hire, as is wrete before, thre yere of greet temptacyon. Of the whech on of the hardest I purpos to wrytyn for exampyl of hem that com aftyr, that thei schuld not trostyn on here owyn self, ne have no joy in hemself as this creature had. Fore no drede, owyr gostly enmy slepeth not, but he ful besyly sergyth our complexions and owyre dysposycionys, and where that he fyndeth us most freel, ther be Owyr Lordys suﬀerawns he leyth hys snare, whech may no man skape be hys owyn powere. And so he leyd beforn this creature the snare of letchery, whan sche wend that alle ﬂeschly lust had al hol ben qwenchyd in hire. And so long sche was temptyd with the syn of letchory, for owt that sche cowd do: and yet sche was oftyn schrevyn, sche weryd the hayr and dede gret bodyly penawns and wept many a bytter teere and preyd ful oftyn to Owrye Lord that he schuld preserve hire and kepe hire that sche schuld not fallyn into temptacyon. For sche thowt sche had lever ben deed than consentyn therto. And in al this tyme sche had no lust to comown wyth hire husbond, but it was very peynful and horrybyl unto hire. [seyng: seeing; Of... hardest; one of the hardest of which; purpos to wrytyn: intend to write down; for... hem: as an example for them; trostyn on: trust in; here: their; hemself: themselves; no drede: doubtless; owyr... enmy: our spiritual enemy (i.e. the Devil); ful besyly: very industriously; sergyth: searches, investigates; complexions: temperaments; dysposycionys: characters; freel: frail, vulnerable; skape: escape; wend: thought; al hol: completely; owt: aught, anything; cowd: could; schrevyn: confessed and absolved; weryd the hayr: wore a hair shirt; lever: rather; deed; dead; comown: have intercourse; peynful: painful]. Fantasy |  fantasy The fairy or fantastic world replaces the classical Hades (or Hell) in Sir Orfeo, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight takes this fantasy element to new heights. Sir Gawain is one of the Knights of the Round Table, the followers of King Arthur, who is so much of a presence in English history, myth and literature. Arthur is always seen, as in Layamon’s Brut, as the greatest of the English kings, all of whom are linear descendants of the Roman hero Brutus. The poem concentrates on one episode rather than on the whole story, and opens up an ambiguous treatment of the chivalric code of truth and honour. This code is part of the courtly love ideal, with a chevalier being the ideal knight whose behaviour is a model to all. But the chivalric tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is subverted and made impossible by the Green Knight’s oﬀering that his head be struck oﬀ as long as he can strike a return blow one year later.... he truthfully told them of his tribulations – What chanced at the chapel, the good cheer of the knight, The lady’s love-making, and lastly, the girdle. He displayed the scar of the snick on his neck Where the bold man’s blow had hit, his bad faith to Where the boProclaim; WhereHe groaned at his disgrace, WhereUnfolding his ill-fame, WhereAnd blood suﬀused his face WhereWhen he showed his mark of shame. The lay is used here to question the value of heroism and the value of historical myths. It brings human weakness to the fore, but at the end ironically reinforces belief in human capacities. Gawain, who knows that deep down he has traits of cowardice and treason and was only protected by a magic belt, the symbol of his contrition, which redeems him and makes him a human hero, returns in triumph to Camelot. The  stanzas of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight all end with this four-and-a-half line conclusion, in shorter lines, giving a rhythmic and narrative variation to the regular four-stress line of many earlier works. In these later Middle English texts, i.e. from the fourteenth century, there is generally a sense of optimism and high spirits which contrasts with the later questioning and doubt that will be found in much literature of the Renaissance.  | Old and Middle English – travel One of the ﬁrst books of travel, giving European readers some insight into the unfamiliar world of the Orient, was published in – in Anglo-Norman French. Called simply Travels, it was said to be by Sir John Mandeville, but a French historian, Jean d’Outremeuse, may well have written the book. It is a highly entertaining guide for pilgrims to the Holy Land, but goes beyond, taking the reader as far as Tartary, Persia, India and Egypt, recounting more fantasy than fact, but containing geographical details to give the work credence. Mandeville’s book whetted the Western European reader’s appetite for the travel book as a journal of marvels: dry scientiﬁc detail was not what these readers wanted. Rather it was imagination plus information. Thus, myths of ‘the fountain of youth’ and of gold-dust lying around ‘like ant-hills’ caught the Western imagination, and, when the voyagers of the late ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries found ‘new worlds’ in the Americas, these myths were enlarged and expanded, as Eldorado joined the Golden Road to Samarkand in the imagination of readers concerning distant lands. Mandeville begins a long tradition of writings about faraway places which created the idea now called Orientalism. He talks of rivers such as the Ganges, the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, which are, of course, all real. He suggests that Paradise may be somewhere beyond, but: Of Paradise ne can I not speak properly, for I was not there. It is far beyond... Paradise is enclosed all about with a wall, and men wit not whereof it is, for the walls be covered all over with moss, as it seemeth. And it seemeth not that the wall is stone of nature nor of no other thing that the wall is. And that wall stretcheth from the south to the north, and it hath not but one entry that is closed with ﬁre burning, so that no man that is mortal ne dare not enter. Not being able to describe Paradise, Mandeville, in attempting to give his writings credibility, concludes:... of that place I can say you no more. And therefore I shall hold me still and return to that I have seen. Such writings emphasise cultural strangeness and diﬀerence, and for many centuries they have conditioned Western perceptions of the societies they purport to describe. Geoﬀrey Chaucer |  geoffrey chaucer If no love is, O God, what fele I so? (Troilus and Criseyde) As we have mentioned, Geoﬀrey Chaucer used a wide range of cultural references from throughout Europe in his writing, but he wrote almost exclusively in English. This is highly signiﬁcant, not only in giving him his place as the ﬁrst of the major English writers, but in placing him as a pivotal ﬁgure who encompasses many of the earlier traditions, genres and subjects of literature, applying them in the context of a new, highly active and developing society. Chaucer was a professional courtier, a kind of civil servant. His writing was a sideline rather than a vocation: the full-time English writer was still a couple of centuries in the future. Chaucer was born into a family of wine traders; he was thus from the class of the new wealthy city gentleman. His work took him to Kent (which he represented in Parliament from ), to France, and twice to Italy, where he made the acquaintance of the works of writers such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Chaucer’s ﬁrst work, The Book of the Duchess, is a dream-poem on the death in  of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, the wife of John of Gaunt (third son of King Edward III). It is a poem of consolation, modelled on French examples: ‘She is dead!’ ‘Nay!’ ‘Yes, by my troth!’ ‘Is that your loss?’ ‘By God, that is routhe!’ [routhe: pity] The simplicity and directness of the emotion, and the handling of dia- logue, show Chaucer’s capacity to bring language, situation, and emotion together eﬀectively. The House of Fame (c.–) is another dream-poem, this time inﬂuenced by the Italian of Dante. It is the ﬁrst time that Dante’s epic of a journey to Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell – The Divine Comedy (c.–) – is echoed in English. Here Chaucer becomes a participant in his own writing. He is the ingenuous poet who visits the Latin poet Ovid’s ‘house of fame’ to learn about love. He brings together aspects of love which will become the frequent subject matter of poets throughout the ages. Cupid and Venus, passion and desire, innocence and knowledge, are all invoked, using the new verse form of the rhyme-royal stanza. (The name derives from its later use by Scottish King James I in his Kingis Quair, c..)  | Old and Middle English – The subject of love is taken up again in Chaucer’s two greatest poems before The Canterbury Tales: Troilus and Criseyde and The Legend of Good Women. The ﬁrst takes the Italian writer Boccaccio as its source. It brings together the classical Trojan war story, the Italian poetic version of that story, and the sixth-century philosophical work of Boethius, The Consola- tion of Philosophy. Like Layamon, Chaucer consciously uses other writers’ books, and deliberately gives himself the role of intermediary, relating, revisiting and reﬁning old stories. If Chaucer had never gone on to write The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde would remain as one of the outstanding poems in European literature of the mediaeval period. It has even been called ‘the ﬁrst modern novel’. Although this is an exaggeration, it serves to remind us of Chaucer’s considerable descriptive capacity both in terms of character and scene. Chaucer uses, as part of his authorial technique, the reader’s ability to recognise and identify with what is being described. These are the words of Troilus on the joys and pains of love; the ﬁrst line is a direct use of intertextual reference quoting Petrarch: If no love is, O God, what fele I so? And if love is, what thing and whiche is he? If love be good, from whennes comth my wo? If it be wikke, a wonder thinketh me, When every torment and adversitee That cometh of him, may to me savory thinke; For ay thurst I, the more that I it drinke. And if that at myn owene lust I brenne, Fro whennes cometh my wailing and my pleynte? This theme of the joys and pain of love becomes more and more important through Chaucer’s writing. In The Legend of Good Women, for example, he takes up an awareness that Criseyde, who is the symbol of inconstancy, has followed the wishes of men, and attempts to redress the balance in women’s favour. It is interesting that the views of a female audience are considered, although the stories of women who died for love are not necessarily standard romantic fare! Incidentally, this is the ﬁrs

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