The Facts and Backgrounds of Literature

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MIDDLE ENGLISH (1066-1476) Summaries Of History, Literature, Language, And Social Conditions History The conquering and conquered races were gradually merged. Between kings and nobles raged never-ceasing struggles for power. On the battlefields and in Parliament were at length manifested the beginnings of...
More Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MIDDLE ENGLISH (1066-1476) Summaries Of History, Literature, Language, And Social Conditions History The conquering and conquered races were gradually merged. Between kings and nobles raged never-ceasing struggles for power. On the battlefields and in Parliament were at length manifested the beginnings of the power of the people. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were periods of protracted warfare and of the beginnings of religious discontent. Literature The great themes were religion and romance. Writings were usually burdened with unwieldiness of form, but showed imaginative power. The old English alliterative measure in poetry was largely replaced by the rimes and counted syllables of the French. Respect for authority was characteristic of the time; citations from ancient or established writers were numerous, and wholly original work sometimes sought the protection of pretended classical sources. French influence was strong. During the last hundred years came a strong Italian influence. Language For three centuries the clergy wrote principally in Latin, the nobility in French. English, threatened withextinction as a medium for literature, slowly took the lead of its rivals. Middle English had fewer inflections than Old English and hence used more prepositions and auxiliaries; it also discarded many Old English words (not those in common use, however), and adopted and anglicized many French words.1 The Midland dialect (used in London, in the universities at Cambridge and Oxford, and in the works of Chaucer and Wyclif) became the recognized literary language. Its pronunciation was nearer that of German, or in French words, of French, than is modern English. Social Conditions The important institutions of the Middle Ages were the church, chivalry...