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Middle English literature is written, then, in the many dialects that correspond to the history, culture, and background of the individual writers. While Anglo-Norman or Latin was preferred for high culture and administration, English literature by no means died out, and a number of important works illustrate the development of the language.
Medieval literature is a broad subject, encompassing essentially all written works available in Europe and beyond during the Middle Ages (that is, the one thousand years from the fall of the Western Roman Empire ca. AD 500 to the beginning of the Renaissance in the 14th, 15th or 16th century, depending on country).
Scholarly opinion varies, but the University of Valencia states the period when Middle English was spoken as being from 1150 to 1500. [2] This stage of the development of the English language roughly coincided with the High and Late Middle Ages. Middle English saw significant changes to its vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and orthography ...
Besides the Middle English drama, there are three surviving plays in Cornish known as the Ordinalia. [43] [44] Having grown out of the religiously based mystery plays of the Middle Ages, the morality play is a genre of medieval and early Tudor theatrical entertainment, which represented a shift towards a more secular base for European theatre. [45]
'The Grave' is a poem preserved in a 12th century manuscript, MS Bodleian 343, at fol. 170r: over time, scholars have called it "Anglo-Saxon", "Norman-Saxon", late Old English, and Middle English. [80] [81] The Peterborough Chronicle can also be considered a late-period text, continuing into the 12th century. [82]
Pearl (Middle English: Perle) is a late 14th-century Middle English poem that is considered one of the most important surviving Middle English works. With elements of medieval allegory and from the dream vision genre, the poem is written in a North-West Midlands variety of Middle English and is highly—though not consistently—alliterative; there is, among other stylistic features, a complex ...
Old English religious poetry includes the poem Christ by Cynewulf and the poem The Dream of the Rood, preserved in both manuscript form and on the Ruthwell Cross. We do have some secular poetry; in fact a great deal of medieval literature was written in verse, including the Old English epic Beowulf .
The goliards were a group of generally young clergy in Europe who wrote satirical Latin poetry in the 12th and 13th centuries of the Middle Ages. They were chiefly clerics who served at or had studied at the universities of France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and England, who protested against the growing contradictions within the church through ...