The Period Before Chaucer

The Late Middle Ages or Late Medieval Period was the period of European
history generally comprising the 14th and 15th centuries (c. 13011500).
The Late Middle Ages followed the High Middle Ages and preceded the
The poem is the third longest of Chaucers
onset of the early modern era (and, in much of Europe, the Renaissance).
works, after The Canterbury
Tales and Troilus and Criseyde and is
possibly the first significant work
in English to use the iambic
pentameter or decasyllabic couplets which
he later used throughout the Canterbury
Tales. This form of the heroic couplet would
become a significant part of English
literature no doubt inspired by Chaucer.

The prologue describes how Chaucer is

Geoffrey Chaucer, known as the Father of English literature, is widely
considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first
poet to be buried in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey
Born: 1343, London, United Kingdom
Died: 25 October 1400, London, United Kingdom
Period: Late Middle Ages
The Nun's Priest's Tale is
one of The Canterbury
Tales by the Middle
English poet Geoffrey
Chaucer. Composed in
the 1390s, the 626-line
narrative poem is a beast
fable and mock epic
based on an incident in
the Reynard cycle.
reprimanded by the god of love and his
queen, Alceste, for his workssuch
as Troilus and Criseydedepicting women
in a poor light. Criseyde is made to seem
inconstant in love in that earlier work, and
Alceste demands a poem of Chaucer
The Book of the Duchess, also known as The
Deth of Blaunche is the earliest of Chaucer's
major poems, preceded only by his short poem,
"An ABC," and possibly by his translation of The
Romaunt of the Rose.
15th Century
Age of Humanism
From Chaucer to Spenser 1400-1599

The 15th century was a barren period in About the text:

Text name: The Letter of Cupid
English literary history. It was nearly two Alternative Cupido unto whose commandment; Lespistre de Cupide
names:
hundred years after Chaucer's death Content: The poem The Letter of Cupid was written by Thomas Hoccleve (c.
1368 - c. 1426). Written in 1402, it is probably the earliest, precisely
before any poet came whose name can datable poem in the English language. The text is a loose adaptation of
Christine de Pizan's Epistre au dieu d'Amours and has slightly more
be written in the same line with his. He than half of the French text's length. The poem defends women
against anti-female satire and attacks by men. For a more
was followed at once by a number of comprehensive assessment of the poem's content and attitude towards
women, see Fenster & Carpenter-Erler (1990: 165-167).
imitators who caught the trick of his Genre/subjects: love, letter, men and women, feminism
Dialect of original East-Midlands
language and verse, but lacked the composition: Thomas Hoccleve worked as a civil servant in London. Quite a lot of
details are know about Thomas Hoccleve's life. For background
information on his life and dated poetry, see for instance Knapp (2009)
Thomas Hoccleve or or Furnivall (1892: vii-xxix).
Occleve was an Date of original 1402
English poet and clerk. composition: The last two lines of the poem indicate the year of composition and are
generally taken as authentic:
He is seen as a key "the yere of grace / Ioyful and Iocunde
figure in 15th-century A thousand and foure houndred / and secounde."
(The year of grace so joyful and jocund
English literature. A thousand and four hundred and second.)

John Lydgate of Bury was

a monk and poet, born in
Lidgate, near Haverhill,
Suffolk, England.
Lydgate's poetic output is
prodigious, amounting, at
a conservative count, to
about 145,000 lines.

Hoccleve's writings and the regulation of

language in late-medieval England--
"Th'entents is al" - princely reading and
political interpretation-- voices of
translation and the sources of the
"Regiment"-- "Regiment" and the governing
body-- the afterlife of the poem - Hoccleve
manuscripts, readers and critics.
James I was considered to
be an intellectual and did
write several books.
An interesting book on
witchcraft came about after
his return from Krondborg
where his marriage to Anne
took place. This book was
the result of his attendance
at the North Berwick Witch
Trial. Apparently, several
people were accused of using
the black arts to create a
storm hoping that it would
sink the ship carrying James
and Anne back to Scotland.
He became quite troubled
about this threat from
witchcraft and wrote his
book on demonology. As a
result, hundreds of women
were put to death for
supposedly being witches.
At the heart of the century of rapid change lies the
Puritan Revolt of 1640-60. The century together with
the English Revolution was a time of intense ferment in
all areas of life religion, science, politics, domestic
relations, culture. That ferment was reflected in the
literature of the era, which also registered a heightened
focus on and analysis of the self and the personal life.
However, little of this seems in evidence in the elaborate
frontispiece to Michael Drayton's long "chorographical"
poem on the landscape, regions, and local history of
Great Britain (1612), which appeared in the first years of
the reign of the Stuart king James I (1603-1625). The
great seventeenth-century heroic poem, Paradise Lost,
father of empiricism.[6] His works argued for the
possibility of scientific knowledge based only
upon inductive and careful observation of events
in nature. Most importantly, he argued this could be
achieved by use of a sceptical and methodical approach
whereby scientists aim to avoid misleading themselves.
While his own practical ideas about such a method,
the Baconian method, did not have a long lasting
influence, the general idea of the importance and
possibility of a sceptical methodology makes Bacon the
Frontispiece of "Sylva Sylvarum", Bacon's
work on Natural History. In the top, a Sun
with the name of God written in Hebraic
characters within, surrounded by angels,
sending light rays to the Earth.
The frontispiece to Sir Francis Bacon's Instauratio
magna (Great Instauration) of 1620 depicts a ship
sailing through two classical columns into an open
sea; it symbolizes moving beyond the limits of
classical (i.e., ancient Greek) scholarship into a realm
of potential unlimited natural knowledge.
In his epigrams, elegies, and occasional
poems here collected, Ben Johnson
displays his directness of expression rare
in English verse. In recent times, his work
has been revived by poets and readers who
find in it a clarity which sets it apart from
his more fashionable contemporaries as
his work is a model for a style at once
polished and urbane.

Ren Descartes was a French philosopher,

mathematician, and scientist. Dubbed the father of
The Return of Romanticism
modern western philosophy, much of subsequent
Western philosophy is a response to his writings, The Victorian period formally begins in
Benjamin
which are studied closely "Ben" Jonson was
to this day. an 1837 (the year Victoria became
English playwright, poet, actor, and Queen) and ends in 1901 (the year of
Born: 31 March 1596, Descartes, Indre-et-Loire,
literary critic of the 17th century, her death). As a matter of
Francepaola.sdli@gmail.com
whose artistry exerted a lasting expediency, these dates are
Died: 11 February 1650, Stockholm, Sweden
impact upon English poetry and sometimes modified slightly. 1830 is
stage comedy. He popularised the
usually considered the end of
comedy of humours.
the Romantic period in Britain, and
Born: 11 June 1572, Westminster, The Bible in English Literature
thus makes a convenient starting date
United Kingdom for Victorianism. Similarly, since
Died: 6 August 1637, Westminster, Queen Victorias death occurred so
United Kingdom soon in the beginning of a new

Biblical literature, four bodies of written
works: the Old Testament writings
according to the Hebrew canon;
intertestamental works, including the Old
Testament Apocrypha; the New
Testament writings; and the New
Testament Apocrypha.
The literature of the
Bible, encompassing the Old and New
Testaments and various noncanonical
works, has played a special role in the
history and culture of the Western world
and has itself become the subject of
intensive critical study. This field of
scholarship, including exegesis (critical
interpretation) and hermeneutics (the
science of interpretive principles), has
assumed an important place in the
theologies of Judaism and Christianity.
In Memoriam A.H.H., a tribute to Tennysons
beloved friend Arthur Henry Hallam, was a
defining poem of the Victorian period. Dr
Stephanie Forward explores Tennysons
composition process, and considers how
the poem was received during Tennysons
lifetime and into the 20th century.
The Age of Reason presents common
deistic arguments; for example, it
highlights what Paine saw as
corruption of the Christian Church
and criticizes its efforts to acquire
political power. Paine advocates
reason in the place of revelation,
leading him to reject miracles and to
view the Bible as "an ordinary piece
of literature rather than as a divinely
inspired text". It promotes natural
religion and argues for the existence
In addition to the revival of ancient
of a creator-God.
The great intellectual movement of
literature, the humanist movement also
Renaissance Italy was humanism. The
encouraged a revival of ancient
humanists believed that the Greek and
philosophy. The medieval universities had
Latin classics contained both all the
been dominated philosophically by
lessons one needed to lead a moral and
Aristotle, but the humanists insisted on
effective life and the best models for a
the importance of other ancient
powerful Latin style. They developed a
philosophers as well--the Stoics, the
new, rigorous kind of classical
Epicureans, the Skeptics, and most of all,
scholarship, with which they corrected
the Platonists. The revival of Christian
and tried to understand the works of the
Platonism was the most important
Greeks and Romans, which seemed so
philosophical and theological movement
vital to them.
of the later fifteenth century.
Costanzo Felici, Historia de coniuratione Catilinae
(History of the Catilinarian Conspiracy)
n the High Renaissance, Rome was the
center of the literary movement known as
"Ciceronianism" that aimed to standardize
Latin diction by modelling all prose on the
writings of Cicero. The leaders of the
movement hoped thereby to make Latin
usage more precise and elegant; they
also hoped to establish a kind of linguistic
orthodoxy maintained by the authority of
Rome.
The Victorian Period
The Age of Reason
Marsilio Ficino, Epistulae (Letters)
Antonio da Rho, O.F.M., Tres Dialogi in Lactantium
One of the issues on which some
humanist intellectuals parted ways with
traditional scholasticism was the nature of
theology. Most scholastics believed that
theology was a science, to be learned
and taught by qualified professionals
trained in logic and familiar with the
recognized authorities. A vocal minority of
humanists, such as Lorenzo Valla and
Erasmus, challenged this claim, arguing
that "the philosophy of Christ," i.e. the
message of Christianity, could be learned
by any educated person who studied the
Bible with piety.