English and Continental Poetry in the Fourteenth Century

Introduction

Whan that Aprill with his shoures sooteThe droghte of March hath perced to the roote…Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;And specially from every shires endeOf Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,The hooly blisful martir for to seke,That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

With these words Geoffrey Chaucer begins The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400), arguably the poetic masterpiece of fourteenth century England and certainly a stout cornerstone in the monumental edifice of the English literary tradition. Critics have long praised Chaucer’s choice of the pilgrimage as the overarching frame for a highly varied collection of individual tales, and readers are often advised of its particular virtues of providing a theme of religious renewal and community enterprise against which are set, for example, the delightful boorishness of the Miller, the outrageous iconoclasm of the Wife of Bath, the earnest pondering of how man and woman are to live together in what G. L. Kittredge called the “Marriage Group,” and the insouciant extortion of the wily Pardoner. However, perhaps readers are not often enough reminded of the milieu in which The Canterbury Tales was created, the context which it in part reflects. It is crucial to a faithful reading of any literary work that readers take a moment to review its cultural and historical background, and never is such a review more needed than for this tumultuous period that proved to be the poetic flowering of the late Middle Ages.

Historical context

The fourteenth century was an era of great literary achievement in the face of governmental, economic, and religious near-apocalypse. No sooner had Boniface VIII declared his own gaudy papal jubilee in the year 1300 than his chief secular opponents, Philip IV of France and Edward I of England, began to contest his power. Working from the solid church and state amalgam that was the bequest of the thirteenth century, Boniface had aroused the kings’ resistance in 1296 with the Clericis laicos papal bull, which asserted the Roman Catholic Church’s right to levy taxes. Two years after the jubilee, he issued the more famous Unam sanctam, intended to establish the primacy of the Church in unambiguous terms by subordinating all human creation to the authority of the pope in Rome. This anachronistic attempt at absolutism, destined to fail in an era in which social and political evolution was ever accelerating, precipitated the withdrawal of the Papacy from Rome to Avignon, initiating in 1309 the Babylonian captivity of popes that was to last until 1376 and presaging the ultimate schism in the Church, which was healed only two decades into the fifteenth century at the Council of Constance. With the loss of a generally accepted central government for Christianity, as well as numerous other disasters, many of the philosophical and religious syntheses of the previous century also foundered.

As prominent as any dogma inherited from the thirteenth century was Saint Thomas Aquinas’s apparent reconciliation of faith and reason in his Summa theologiaea (c. 1265-1273; Summa Theologica, 1911-1921). Blending the newly rediscovered Aristotelian logic and his own brand of Christian humanism, Thomas erected a cathedral-like intellectual monument to celebrate the fusion of human reason and divine grace. John Duns Scotus (c. 1265-1308), a Franciscan, had begun to pry faith and reason apart, however, and William of Ockham (c. 1280-1350) finished the dismantling through the application of his well-known “razor.” Ockham insisted that human knowledge should be restricted to the immediately evident, thus making it necessary to discard the grand latticework of categories assembled by Aquinas and others. The Nominalist movement, so called because of its dismissal of the Thomistic nominae (or categories), also provided the impetus for a series of scientific developments at the universities of Oxford and Paris. To replace the Aristotelian notions of streams of air as the medium for physical motion, for example, Jean Buridan (c. 1295-1358) offered a theory of original forces that was to be transferred fruitfully to studies of heavenly bodies. Remarkably, Nicholas of Oresme (c. 1330-1382) described the universe as a mechanical clock, an idea all the more brilliant since such timepieces had been perfected only in his century. Along with these discoveries, and others such as the cannon, eyeglasses, and the mariner’s compass, came the evolution of modern scientific method in the nominalist emphasis on observed phenomena.

To be sure, however, Ockham’s was not the only heresy to come to prominence in the vacuum of formal religious authority created by the withdrawal of the Papacy. As rationalism lost its footing in the Christian worldview, mysticism increased markedly and became a pan-European movement, finding its focus in Germany, for example, with the writings of Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327). Interest in astrology and alchemy was likewise on the rise; and Chaucer especially revealed a fascination with the courses of the stars and planets and their supposed influence on the world of men. One of the more engaging and curiously modern heresies involved the professions of the Free Spirit reformers, who advocated unrestrained sexual freedom and other apparent vices in the pursuit of individually achieved deification. Nearly as influential as Ockham’s nominalist beliefs were the attacks of John Wycliffe (c. 1320-1384) on the presumptions of the Avignon popes. Refusing to credit any clergy with the power they claimed unless they were in a state of divine grace, he championed the Englishmen who resisted the financial demands of the Papacy and later questioned the existence of Church government and even the Eucharist itself. In many ways Wycliffe, a strident religious dissenter and yet the originator of the first English Bible, well represents the maelstrom that was Christianity in the age of Chaucer and his contemporaries.

As religion passed through a series of challenges, reforms, and counterreforms, losing in the process the comparatively well-regulated syntheses of the preceding century, secular developments followed suit. England and France entered the fourteenth century with their governments reasonably intact, but in both cases a succession of less-than-qualified leaders and a sequence of catastrophic events brought the countries to their political knees and, not inconsequently, to the Hundred Years’ War. On the French side, Philip the Fair (Philip IV), opponent of Boniface, had placed the monarchy in a position of strength at the cost of considerable financial strain on his constituency. When he died in 1314, his successor Louis X was quickly forced to agree to charters limiting his power and transferring a great deal of authority to a confused baronial system. After two more Capetian kings of unremarkable achievement, the rule passed to the inept Philip VI, who set about establishing an adversarial relationship with his English counterpart Edward III, an ongoing conflict that led eventually to open warfare. In mid-century, John the Good assumed the throne, only to be taken prisoner at the Battle of Poitiers. Even as these monarchs followed one another to death or infamy, Edward III was in the process of declaring himself king of France; the French, in a weakened condition, had to curb his presumptuousness in 1360 by consenting to the conditions of the Treaty of Brétigny, awarding Gascony, Calais, and Ponthieu to the English in return for Edward’s renunciation of his claim to their monarchy. While John’s son Charles V (reigned 1364-1380) was able to reorganize his country and help the English to exhaust themselves and relinquish newly won territories, the century ended with France in the hands of the incompetent Charles VI, and the advantage once more passed to its opponent.

England likewise started the fourteenth century struggling with Boniface. Edward I (reigned 1272-1307) fostered a typical thirteenth century cooperation between the monarchy and the legislative powers, reformed the judicial system, gave order to ecclesiastical activity, and controlled feudal tendencies. His son Edward II, however, was at best a shadow of his father. He suffered a humiliating defeat by the Scots at Bannockburn in 1314 and gave no evidence whatever that he was qualified for leadership. In 1327, he was forcibly deposed by the parliament, and his fourteen-year-old son, Edward III, was appointed the nominal regent. At first the young man was only a figurehead manipulated by his mother Queen Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer, but three years after his accession he toppled them both, sentencing Mortimer to death and stripping the queen of all power and holdings. With the monarchy in hand, this English Orestes then set about providing a focus for growing English nationalism by erasing the Shameful Peace with Scotland from popular memory through a series of successful battles to the north. Thus, Edward III showed his ambitions and talents early in his fifty-year reign and also revealed, not incidentally, a penchant for nationalistic assertion that was to lead to severe, even crippling, problems for the nation he so stoutly defended.

The most serious and debilitating result of this martial activity was the Hundred Years’ War with France, which opened in 1337 when Edward ordered the Gascon fleet to attack shipping in the ports of Normandy. As mentioned above, a context for these actions already existed in the quarrel over the French crown and the efforts of Flanders to gain its independence, and this single event was merely one of many subsequent skirmishes along the English Channel. Important events included the naval encounter of 1340, the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360, and the gradual reversal in favor of the French in the late fourteenth century. At the same time, the spirit of British nationalism that fueled Edward’s war machine also manifested itself in other ways: The Statute of Praemuniere (1353) forbade Englishmen to bring their appeals to a foreign (that is, papal) court, and the first of the Navigation Acts (1382) stipulated that English goods must be carried by domestic ships only. When the official change from French to English as the language of the law courts (1361) is added to this list, it becomes apparent that the rising tide of nationalism was nearing its peak. Unfortunately, the advent of Richard II in 1377 created another incompetent monarch to rival Edward II. The century closed in an undistinguished manner, with Richard desperately resorting to execution of his enemies in 1397 and suffering his own death two years later.

In Germany, the political situation was even worse. The inheritor of an unwieldy coalition of states headed by scheming princes and under attack by the Papacy, Albert of Habsburg tried to bring order to the empire but was murdered in 1308 by his nephew. The puppet emperor Henry of Luxemburg (VII) made a foolish expedition to Rome in an attempt to bring Italy back into the fold but was poisoned in 1313. His successor, Charles of Bohemia, dismissed papal claims with his Golden Bull of 1356, but his concentration on Bohemia at the expense of the empire as a whole left his nation vulnerable to attack, and the French and Swiss made steady gains throughout the fourteenth century. Notwithstanding this unrest, the German cities made some strides forward in urban management in the form of administrative innovations, paved streets, fire protection, and public health. At about the same time, the Serbian people made their first heroic effort to throw off the Ottoman yoke at the celebrated Battle of Kosovo (1389), where the Serbs and their leader Knez Lazar went down to a defeat that was to serve as the seedbed of a fierce nationalism and an extensive cycle of heroic poems.

In Italy, the internal strife characteristic of the period stemmed primarily from the withdrawal of the popes to Avignon. With Philip IV and Edward I in open defiance of Boniface’s edicts, and with the time of absolute clerical authority on the wane, there was little choice but to abandon the politics of Rome and to seek refuge under the French imperial banner. Meanwhile, the customary infighting in Italy grew worse, with the merest and most superficial unity existing between the southern Kingdom of Naples and the northern despots. A touch of neoclassicism emerged for a moment in the reforms of Cola di Rienzi, who rose to power in 1347, but the age made his visions of reinstating antiquity anachronistic, and he was driven into exile and murdered in 1354. The popes began to try to return to Rome and reinstall themselves in 1367; nine years later, when Urban VI resisted all attempts to depose him, and his “successor” Clement VII retreated to Avignon to establish a rival papacy, the Great Schism was begun. All in all, Italy was not a pleasant place to live in the fourteenth century, as the writings of Dante confirm.

Almost precisely in the middle of the century, the Black Death struck Europe, reducing the total population of most countries by half to two-thirds. As the frequency of themes of morbidity, pessimism, and death in all of the arts indicates, this pestilence had a profound effect on the medieval mind, in addition to its decimation of the populace. Traveling along trade routes from China through Italy, Spain, and southern France, by July, 1348, it had reached Normandy and the English coast. Medieval medicine was apparently powerless against the more virulent of the disease’s two forms, and it passed unchecked into Ireland and Wales over the next two years, only to return periodically throughout the rest of the century. In addition, people had earlier had to contend with the disastrous crop failure and famine of 1315, caused by floods that were also to recur regularly for many years to come. For these and other reasons, economic disaster became the rule of the day, and overtaxed market systems, alternating surpluses and shortfalls of agricultural and manufactured goods, the backsliding of emancipated serfs into the feudal equivalent of slavery, and general social upheaval led to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

As the authority of the Church and of secular government languished, the Thomistic unity of faith and reason unraveled, the Black Death claimed half of Europe, antifeminist and anti-Semitic movements gained momentum, and the economic and social institutions of the thirteenth century trembled and then fell, people were forced to experiment and adapt in order to survive. Reform and renovation proceeded in all areas, with various degrees of success and almost no visible effect until the fifteenth century. However, in the middle of the worst confusion and turmoil the Middle Ages was to know, the arts underwent truly radical change and produced a remarkable number of discoveries and true masters.

Artistic and literary context

Emblematic of this transformation was the Italian painter Giotto (c. 1266-1337), a genius who cast aside his shepherd’s crook to become the first great postclassical painter. What Giotto accomplished was phenomenal: He replaced the formal, stylized, two-dimensional Byzantine representations with a more realistic artistic idiom that imitated nature in all its beauty and with all its flaws. His Madonna Enthroned (c. 1310) and Death of St. Francis (c. 1318-1320), for example, illustrate his technique of creating depth, movement, and fidelity to nature. While the Italo-Byzantine style continued in a modest way on a separate line (an example is Simone Martini’s Annunciation of 1333), Giotto’s techniques spread north rather quickly, first in the form of manuscript illumination (as in the work of Jean Pucelle, beginning c. 1325) and later in architecture and portraiture. Giotto’s painting played a large part in bringing Europe to the brink of the Renaissance.

As the conventional use of Latin declined and the vernaculars became more prominent all over Europe, great authors began to mold the new tongues for literary purposes. Like Giotto, the Italian poet Dante (1265-1321) reached beyond traditional models and the tenor of the times to create his masterpiece, La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802). Dante wrote his epic poem while he was a political exile wandering through northern Italian cities in search of a patron; however, even though topical allusions to the political and social problems of his beloved Florence abound, his work rises above contemporary strife to glimpse the path to God: in the hands of his guides, Vergil, representing human reason, and then Beatrice, who as the symbol of divine love leads the pilgrim Dante to the heaven where reason cannot take him, he accomplishes the journey of Everyman and allegorically points the way to the Christian’s true reward. Dante’s countryman Petrarch (1304-1374), who, in addition to establishing so many of the Italian sonnet conventions, contributed to most of the literary and philosophical genres of his day, stressed the importance of human mortality in the face of theological dogma and displayed an atavistic tendency to return to the ancient philosophers in his search for truth.

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), author of Decameron: O, Prencipe Galetto (1349-1351; The Decameron, 1620), a collection of ten “days” of ten stories each, tried to develop a more worldly poetic language. His famous tales are told by seven young women and three young men who flee Florence to escape the ravages of the Black Death and for ten days amuse themselves with stories of cuckolding, murder, and other fantastic pursuits. Especially since it now appears that Chaucer had not read The Decameron and thus conceived the analogous structure of his The Canterbury Tales independently, the genre of tales unified by a framing story should be considered a typically fourteenth century form in its originality and response to the demands of individuality on traditional genres.

Medieval texts

Some characteristics of medieval texts were particularly prominent in this age of experimentation and reaction to change. Authors in this period suffered very little from the more modern “anxiety of influence,” and there were compelling reasons for their resistance to this literary disease. In the fourteenth century—and virtually throughout the Middle Ages—no special value was placed on originality: Stories, characters, events, and situations were almost always borrowed, either from another source or from the word hoard of convention, or simply translated from Latin or one of the vernacular tongues, in whole or selectively. Poets did not so much strive after fresh and mysteriously engaging material as they molded known material to their own designs; they were in the main retellers rather than creators, and this procedure characterized not only their subject matter but also the ways in which they shaped it. As has been shown time and again, the rhetoric of medieval poetry was codified by such writers as Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Bernard Silvestris, and Alanus de Insulis. Fourteenth century poets had available to them handbooks concerning such topics as the proper method of picturing a woman’s beauty—proceeding vertically through a catalog of her features from “tip to toe.” These conventional methods of description were advocated by poets and expected by their audiences, as were what Ernst R. Curtius has called topoi, or narrative commonplaces, such as the ubiquitous garden of earthly delights, the locus amoenus. Form as well as content was traditional, and each aspect of the poetry was all the more expressive because of its typicality in other works and consequent connotative power. Twice-told tales and time-tested rhetoric were the order of the day, and so modern notions of aesthetics must be adjusted to take faithful account of these medieval values.

Such stories and established methods of telling them imply a particular kind of text no longer extant in a modern literary milieu consisting of finely crafted objects virtually complete in themselves. The Romantic legacy of originality marks the end of texts with an active history behind them, but the poem that reaches out into its traditional context to complete its form and content is, par excellence, a medieval phenomenon. The process had begun with earlier medieval oral traditions—Anglo-Saxon, Old French, and Hispanic; in the case of the oldest texts, such as Beowulf (c. 1000) and the Chanson de Roland (twelfth century; The Song of Roland, 1880), the tradition is paramount, and the poet is a member of a succession of bards who transmit more than they compose. With later medieval texts, the individual author is firmly the master of his or her own literary fate, and yet the debt to tradition is still great. The medieval text, in short, has diachrony: It reaches back to earlier narratives or lyric moments and it speaks through a grammar of commonplaces and rhetorical figures assembled and approved by tradition. The more innovative writers of the fourteenth century grasped tradition with consummate ease, reformulating its lexicon of tales and grammar of rhetoric, and passed beyond it to create formerly unheard harmonies on the basic melodies of the canon. These original melodies remain, however, and give the newer compositions a fundamental strength. Indeed, it is well to remember that even the great iconoclast and innovator, Chaucer, was the inheritor of a rich traditional legacy, which he invested brilliantly with his often startlingly fresh ideas for literary works, and that both the intensely dramatic and psychological Troilus and Criseyde (1382) and the great send-up of medieval romance, “Sir Thopas,” bear testimony to his creative use of poetic tradition.

Arthurian legend

One of the strongest of medieval traditions, and one that was to reach forward to the Medieval Revival of the Victorian era, to the classic American tale-telling of Mark Twain, and beyond, into the modern era, was the cycle of legends surrounding King Arthur and his knights. This central character of countless tales was probably a sixth century historical figure celebrated in Britain for his heroic defense against Saxon invaders; like the Serbian Knez Lazar after his fall at Kosovo in the late fourteenth century, Arthur was especially revered after the Celts were defeated and subjugated by the Germanic attackers. Of his earliest history little is known—some Welsh sources from about 600 (such as the elegy Gododdin) refer to his martial accomplishments, and the priest Nennius chronicles the victories over the Saxons as well as local legends, but by 1100, in Wales, he had become a full-blown legendary hero of romantic adventure and the leader of a band of men who were themselves larger than life. From this Welsh origin, the legend of Arthur spread to the Cornish, who claimed him for their own, and then to the Bretons, who through their French-Celtic bilingualism were able to spread the insular tradition to the Continent: Largely by means of oral transmission, a medium that was to remain a channel for diffusion of romance materials throughout the Middle Ages, the tales soon passed from Wales to France, Provence, Italy, Sicily, Germany, and parts of Asia Minor. Even the great Arthurian masterworks of Chrétien de Troyes in France and Wolfram von Eschenbach and Gottfried von Strassburg in Germany trace their origins to this Breton connection.

Arthurian legend entered the learned tradition through Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1136; History of the Kings of Britain, variant version before 1155; vulgate version 1718), a delightful, wholesale fabrication that passed as the standard historical account until the sixteenth century and was even adapted into French by the Anglo-Norman poet Wace around 1155 as Le Roman de Brut, in which form it also enjoyed wide currency as a source for English romances, directly and through Layamon’s Brut (c. 1205). Meanwhile, the French romancers were developing the attached legends of Lancelot, Tristram, Gawain, and the Grail. In the twelfth century, Arthur’s knights and court occupied the center of their attentions, while in the thirteenth, they combined individual tales, greatly expanded the contemporary cycles of tales, and further Christianized the originally animistic and magical Grail stories. It is from this French efflorescence that the English tales of Arthur begin to develop in the second half of the thirteenth century, the legends having come full circle back to their origins in Britain, albeit in much modified form.

Of the considerable number of fourteenth century poems concerning Arthur or his knights, a handful stand out as deserving of special attention. Perhaps foremost among them are Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1400), by the Pearl-Poet, and the two poetic tales of Arthur’s death, the alliterative Morte Arthure (c. 1400) and the stanzaic Morte Arthur (c. 1360). The former, composed in alliterative long lines in the same Northwest Midlands dialect that characterizes Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the stanzaic version, derives mainly from Wace’s translation of Geoffrey and legends of Alexander, and it presents its portrait in both epic and tragic terms. Because of its relatively high density of conventional diction and typical scenes, it has been described as either a memorized or a traditionally composed poem; it is not far removed from the oral tradition that spawned its phraseology and narrative design. The alliterative poem represents what Larry Benson calls the “chronical tradition,” an ostensibly historical account of battles and warriors rather than of romance and carefully drawn, individualized characters.

The stanzaic version, Morte Arthur, however, is a true romance composed in eight-line stanzas of four-stress lines and represents a deftly managed condensation of the French prose La Mort Artu (c. 1225-1230). It includes Lancelot’s encounter with the maid Astolat, his defense of the queen, the usurpation of the kingdom by Mordred, and the events leading up to Arthur’s death. Unlike the alliterative version, this poem depends more on a fast-paced, streamlined narrative with emphasis on action rather than on conventional romance tropes, an economical texture that no doubt played a part in attacting the close attention of Sir Thomas Malory as he composed his classic Arthurian works in the next century.

Gawain poems

While no fourteenth century poems specifically about the wizard Merlin survive, owing perhaps to the lesser influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini (c. 1150) as compared to his seminal History of the Kings of England, and while the only verse tale involving Lancelot in any significant role is the stanzaic Le Morte d’Arthur (1485), by Malory, a great many poems about Arthur’s knight Gawain survive from the late medieval period. Primarily because Gawain was prominent in both Geoffrey and Wace, as well as in the French romances of Chrétien, the English romancers celebrated his chivalric prowess and, it may be safely said, by their literary attention assigned him the highest rank of all who honored Arthur at the famous Round Table. Apart from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the best known of these tales is Ywain and Gawain (c. 1300-1350), a translation and condensation of Chrétien’s Yvain: Ou, Le Chevalier au lion (c. 1170; Yvain: Or, the Knight with the Lion, c. 1300) and the only extant Middle English version of any of the great French romancer’s works. As is the general rule with Anglo-Norman or French originals and their English descendants, the continental poem bristles with sophisticated literary conventions that reflect its intended courtly audience, while the English adaptation often uses proverbial or colloquial expressions more in keeping with its popular constituency. Syre Gawene and the Carle of Carelyle (c. 1400) is also aimed at a popular audience and shares with its better-known counterpart the elements of temptation and beheading. In addition, the second episode of The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne (after 1375) consists of the common challenge to Gawain and incorportes the hunting scenes that are juxtaposed to scenes of courtly wooing in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Finally, the Libeaus Desconus (c. second quarter of the fourteenth century), not much read today but extremely popular in its time, included the story of Gawain’s bastard son Guinglain, whose emergence from personal obscurity combines the biographies of his father and Perceval. Possibly the work of Thomas Chestre, the author of Sir Launfal (c. 1430), this romance is ordinary enough in its execution but boasts a fair number of analogues, among them the Middle High German Wigalois (c. 1209) by Wirnt Von Grafenberg and the Italian Carduino (c. 1375) in addition to the inevitable French parallel Le Bel Inconnu (c. 1190).

Perceval, Grail, and Tristan poems

The Perceval legend is rare in the medieval English poetic tradition, but alongside Malory’s later prose is found the fourteenth century romance Sir Perceval of Galles (c. 1300-1340) and the more ambitious and justly famous German Parzival (c. 1200-1210; English translation, 1894) of Wolfram and Perceval: Ou, Le Conte du Graal (c. 1180; Perceval: Or, The Story of the Grail, 1844), the last romance composed by Chrétien.

The Grail poems, Christianized in twelfth century French versions by association of the magic platter, and later cup, with already existing legends surrounding the Eucharist, are likewise few in English during this period, the only avatar being the fragmentary Joseph of Arimathie (c. 1350).

Tales of Sir Tristram prove scarcer still, the sole examples being found in the thirteenth century Sir Tristram, in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, and in a phantom twelfth century text by one Thomas of Britain that provided the basis for Gottfried’s monumental but incomplete Tristan und Isolde (c. 1210; Tristan and Isolde, 1899). If the relative paucity of Arthurian poems in certain areas is frustrating, caused in part by the eternal problem of damaged, destroyed, and lost manuscripts, it should be remembered how freely and widely these tales circulated, even without the aid of writing, throughout the Middle Ages, and therefore how rich the Arthurian tradition must have been.

Alliterative revival

The latter half of the fourteenth century saw the burgeoning of unrhymed alliterative verse commonly called the alliterative revival. Like many terms canonized by usage in literary histories, this rubric is in some ways a misnomer. In the absence of hard and unambiguous information, it is customarily assumed that the rejuvenation of the alliterative verse form reflects a kind of continuity not only with the thirteenth century Brut of Layamon but also with the poems in the Anglo-Saxon type of alliterative meter five centuries earlier. Although the former connection is generally acknowledged, the latter is much more tenuous and cannot at yet be demonstrated. It would be better to consider the revival essentially a Middle English phenomenon, a poetic renaissance that took place when the cultural, linguistic, and historical time was right.

To appreciate the explosion that took place about the year 1350, one should note Derek Pearsall’s striking observation that, while only twenty-eight lines of unrhymed alliterative verse survive from the period of 1275 to 1350, the figure rises to more than forty thousand lines during the period from 1350 to 1425. Clearly something significant happened to precipitate this poetic deluge, and scholars have long been laboring to uncover and describe the forces that were or might have been at work. One suggestion is primarily historical, although with innumerable ramifications in other areas: It explains the rapid rise of English alliterative poetry as a response to the vacuum created by the demise of the Anglo-Norman tradition, a reflex of the progressive reaffirmation of things English, and especially English language and literature. Other critics locate the impetus of the revival in the activity of monastic orders, which in the later Middle Ages were much involved in the social and economic as well as religious spheres. Still others have attributed this resurgence to the patronage of the ruling classes of the west of England, and some have found the verse to be propagandistic of this or that group or opinion.

Whatever the complex of origins at the root of the movement, however, most critics agree that the revival was a phenomenon that began in the north and soon spread to the northwest and southwest Midlands areas, that it was a typically fourteenth century flowering of literary excellence far outstripping anything immediately before or after it, that the movement was transitional between oral and written composition and transmission in its often consciously artistic permutations of traditional conventions and patterns, and that it represents the increasingly English character of literary tradition.

Poetic genres

Literary traditions seldom follow well-worn or predictable pathways; rather, they seem to meander this way and that, ever evolving and changing their own defining characteristics. As so many editors of anthologies and teachers of medieval survey courses have come to recognize, this truism is particularly apt for the fourteenth century. Although the period was never at a loss for models in the various European literatures, and although not a few contemporary writers were content to follow unquestioningly the rules of composition bequeathed to them implicitly in the assortment of genres at hand and explicitly in sources such as the handbooks mentioned above, many poets struck out bravely beyond the frontiers of generic and rhetorical propriety to discover new modes of artistic expression.

The result of this iconoclasm is at once a rich legacy of experimentation and a correspondingly heterogeneous mix of poetic types. In confronting this achievement, one must be careful not to diminish its richness and complexity by insisting on too rigid a taxonomy to contain it. Some of the commonly used labels, such as the venerable “romance,” do have bona fide literary identities and deserve the title of genre on the basis of classical critical criteria. Others, such as “didactic poetry,” are obviously the offspring of descriptive necessity and can lay no claim to constituting an integral group within the poetic tradition; clearly, it would be difficult to locate many medieval poems that are not in some manner didactic. With this caveat in mind, then, some general remarks about the maze of fourteenth century genres can be made.

The romance

Although it may boast of being the most widespread and significant poetic form of the fourteenth century, the romance is not a genre that lends itself easily to brief definition. A general profile of the English romance can be assembled, however, and certain cycles or groups among its extant representatives can be distinguished. The English romance, a creature of the mid-thirteenth through the fifteenth century, was composed in a bewildering variety of verse forms as well as in prose, the major types of versification being the four-stress couplet, the tail-rhyme stanza (with a large number of different rhyme schemes), and the four-beat alliterative meter, sometimes in stanzaic format. The romancer followed the typical medieval method of borrowing par excellence, the source most often being a French original that was adapted into English, with original touches added by the poet, or simply translated in whole or in part. Stories concerned the adventures, both martial and amorous, of knights and their opponents and ladies, and were told with the greatest “willful suspension of disbelief” imaginable, a fantastic quality that fairly characterizes the genre as a whole. The narrative voice of most romances leads one to the conclusion that the primary aim of their composers was entertainment, and in fact there is evidence that many of the poems were meant to be read before audiences, both popular and courtly. This tendency did not, however, absolutely preclude a didactic intent; in some of the more finely crafted romances, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the chivalric and religious undercurrents are plain in the overall design of the work.

Hand in hand with the fantasy element in medieval romance goes idealization, readily transmuted to instructive purpose, and convention. Because the genre made use of oral traditional forms by cultivating stock characters, attitudes, and action patterns, it tended to present the immediate and particular against the larger canvas of the generic. Commonplaces, story patterns, verbal tags and formulas, and stock scenes were all among the elements at the romancer’s disposal, and the fantastic, the ideal, and the typical merge in a text enlivened by its traditional context. The responses of heroes, the undertaking of quests, the wooing of ladies, and the games of courtly love are expected subjects; the audience read (or better, listened) to the story of Sir Launfal or Morgan Le Fay with a deep sense of its “reality” in the romance tradition and without nagging worry that its content was in modern terms quite unrealistic. To enter the world of medieval romance, to join the poet’s quest, was willfully to renounce the corporeal and mundane in favor of the mysterious, the adventurous, and the magical.

More often than not the quest proved successful, the journey culminating in the medieval equivalent of a Hollywood ending. Innocence and even naïveté prevail, as the Perceval tradition well illustrates, and virtue is almost always rewarded. With little regard for historical accuracy, the romancer felt free to embroider a dull sequence of events either with his own personal literary design or, more frequently, with a pattern that was part of his poetic inheritance. He favored feasts and public ceremonies of all sorts for his courtly audience, more worldly embellishments for a popular group. In either case, however, his English poems were, as remarked above, generally less sophisticated than their French originals, in part because their intended audience was also less sophisticated.

As the useful taxonomy in Manual of the Writings in Middle English (1967) by John Wells and J. Burke Severs indicates, the great variety of English romances can profitably be viewed in ten groups: poems that derive from legends concerning early Britain; King Arthur; Charlemagne; Godfrey of Bouillon; Alexander the Great; Troy; Thebes; the long-suffering Eustace, Constance, Florence, or Griselda; the Breton lay; and a miscellaneous category that includes works of Eastern origin, historical poems, and didactic pieces. An alternate method for classifying and interrelating romances is the approach of Laura H. Loomis and Maldwyn Mills, a tripartite division of chivalric, heroic, and edifying. The first group contains those verse tales most like earlier French romances in their primary concern with love and chivalry, inorganic combination and recombination of stock elements, and typical location in a magical or exotic domain. The second type characteristically treats the hero as a member of a collective force and highlights societal expectation in addition to heroic achievement. In the third group, the most important values are suffering and endurance in the face of just or unjust punishment, with the possibility of eventual transcendence as the protagonist’s reward.

The most famous entry in the first Wells/Severs category, that of native English romances, must certainly be King Horn (c. 1225), a tale told and retold in many forms throughout the medieval period. Within the fourteenth century are The Tale of Gamelyn (c. 1350-1370) and Aethelston (c. 1355-1380), two poems that are probably English in origin and for which, unlike most other works in this group, no surviving sources in French have been discovered. The Tale of Gamelyn presents a lively composite of a number of familiar folktale elements, most prominently the benevolent outlaw behavior associated in the popular imagination with Robin Hood, and contemporary social commentary, as imaged in the hero’s overturning of a corrupt judge and court. Moreover, there are criticisms of monastic and mendicant orders of clergy, humor, psychological realism, and the cherished happy ending, the last perhaps as much the gift of folktale as the emblem of the romance genre as a whole. The quite Anglo-Saxon Aethelston, a patently unhistorical tale of the victorious leader at the Battle of Brunanburh, is even more qualified for inclusion in the Loomis-Mills group of “heroic” romances, for not only is it unrelieved by episodes of love and chivalry but it also figures forth community values and obligations at the expense of individuals. Aethelston stands falsely accused until a trial by fire proves his innocence; the same trial determines the treason of his blood brother Wymound, and matters are soon set right through execution. A third verse romance, William of Palerne (c. 1350-1361), amounts to a popularized translation of the French Guillaume de Palerne (1194-1197) and follows the return pattern so common in this and other categories.

The lyric

The miscellany of surviving Middle English lyrics extends throughout the period 1200-1500 and resists the application of general ordering principles and specific dating. Many of these works, however, take on a variety of identifiable aspects, even though the poets are themselves generally anonymous, and with good reason since many of the poems and virtually all of the constituent motifs and phraseology were in the public domain. As Raymond Oliver puts it, the poems have three intentions: to celebrate, to persuade, and to define. In the first case, the setting is a ritual occasion, such as the spring season, a wedding, Easter, or, preeminently, Christmas; the large collection of traditional carols belongs to this category. Lyrics intended to persuade customarily adopt a stance on particular actions and explain them in a coherent fashion, the contemptus mundi theme being a common subject for treatment. The third case, definition, bears on a position or doctrine and is almost always religious in nature. Other characteristics of the lyrics include their impersonal, generalized attitude and lack of interest in personality and psychology, features reflecting the poems’ presentation in oral performance.

Many of the topics and themes common to other fourteenth century literature can be found in much abbreviated form in the lyrics. An example is the courtly lover’s plaint, such as the justly famous “Blow, Northern Wynd” (c. 1320), or, perhaps most classically, in “Now Springs the Spray” (c. 1300): “Nou sprinkes the sprai./ Al for love Icche am so seek/ That slepen I ne mai.” The employing of a seasonal marker to impart an archetypal momentum to a brief narrative, another familiar medieval device, also typifies many of the lyrics, such as this one (c. 1320):

Somer is i-comen in,Loude syng cuckow!Groweth seed and bloweth meedAnd spryngeth the wode now.…

This famous poem preserves, as do others of the period, an elaborate set of instructions for performing its music. More than other contemporary genres, however, these poems manifest the influence of French and Latin traditions in their multilingual phraseology: Where they are not straighforwardly macaronic, they are often brimful of borrowings. Their rhetoric is also very different from that of other forms; again in keeping with their customary composition for oral performance, the rhetorical figures ordering the poems lean toward the paratactic in structures such as anaphora, parallelism, and repetition of words and phrases. Larger patterns follow suit, with emphasis on stanzaic organization, narrative patterns based on ritual, liturgical, or seasonal events, and repetition of segments. Alliteration and assonance occur frequently, and the meter is accentual; as a rule, Rossell Hope Robbins’s suggestion that the levels of prosody and versification are commensurate with the complexity of the subject well summarizes the matter and takes account of the whole spectrum of lyrics, from the plainest and most popular song to the most sophisticated tract on human mutability.

As Oliver notes, surviving Middle English lyrics differ considerably from contemporary continental traditions in their anonymity and lack of concern with individual psychology. German, Latin, and French lyrics of the period often treated ostensibly biographical or other personal issues, most notably the poems of François Villon (1431-1463?) written in the form of a last will and testament, but also the works of Walther von der Vogelweide (c. 1170-c. 1230), Hugh Primas of Orléans (wrote c. 1150), and the German Archpoet (died c. 1165). Comparisons with Old English material, particularly with elegiac lyrics and gnomic poetry, show a large number of alliterative and rhetorical features in common, and the further development of the Middle English lyric can be seen in the poetry of John Skelton and William Dunbar in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Those lyrics that can be placed in the fourteenth century (at least on the evidence of surviving manuscripts) show a representative spread of topics and concerns, from the sometimes vulgar recountings of nature in all its earthiness, to Christmas carols that have managed to survive to this day, to celebrations of spring and religious renewal, to earnest contemplations of the transience of human life and meditations on liturgical moments and their meaning. The lyrics constitute a rich miscellany, a backdrop of tradition that helps to contextualize the entire medieval period.

Didactic poetry

Under this heading are grouped, for the sake of convenience, poems whose intent is chiefly religious and instructional and that do not easily stand alongside better-defined counterparts in other genres. Although it is quite true that much of fourteenth century verse could be called didactic, this category should include only works not generically appropriate for inclusion elsewhere. One such work is Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne (1303-c. 1317), a thorough recasting of the Anglo-Norman Le Manuel des péchés (thirteenth century), by William of Wadington. The subject of Mannyng’s poem is vast: A good deal of Christian church doctrine, including the Ten Commandments, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Sins of Sacrilege, the Seven Sacraments, the Twelve Points of Shrift, and the Eight Joys of Grace, comes under his scrutiny. He occasionally leavens his theological lessons, perhaps intended for a specific audience of novices of Sempringham, with realistic detail and reaction, and, like Chaucer after him, he knows the edifying potential of a good story:

For lewde men Y undyrtokeOn Engylssh tunge to make thys boke;For many ben of swyche manereThat talys and rymys wyl blethly here.

Mannyng also composed The Story of England (c. 1338), a chronicle of historical events from the Biblical flood to the reign of Edward I, and he may be responsible for an adaptation of Saint Bonaventure’s Meditations on the Life of Christ (mid-thirteenth century).

Another primarily didactic poem of this century is the anonymous Parlement of the Three Ages (c. 1350), which employs two of the most characteristic medieval narrative devices, the dream vision and the debate. An example from the alliterative revival described earlier, this tale concerns the Nine Worthies and thus connects itself with the Alexander legends and their form as romances, but the most fundamental structure of the poem is as a moral lesson on the transience and mutability of all things earthly. The poet reviews the Worthies, wise men, and lovers, all from the perspective of the “vanity of human wishes,” combining tried and true stories, topoi, and narrative patterns with a vigorous alliterative language that recalls at points the hearty realism of Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry as well as the later Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Less realistic but perhaps more rewarding stylistically and aesthetically, the elegiac Pearl (c. 1400), attributed to the Pearl-Poet, concerns the author’s infant daughter who dies in her second year and inspires in her father a debate over divine wisdom and mortal expectation. After ascending to heaven, she tells him of her spiritual happiness and explains temporal misconceptions in God’s ordering of the universe. Just as he tries to cross over to her, the poet awakes from his dream vision with his head on her grave, forever reconciled to her loss. A highly allegorical work, Pearl recalls numerous biblical figurations from Revelations and elsewhere and presents its simple dream-vision narrative and complex allegorical latticework in a style both nominally typical of the alliterative revival and yet uniquely its own in the concomitant development of stanzaic patterns. Many critics have sought, and arguably found, numerological sequences that relate in some way to biblical and patristic sources, a not uncommon phenomenon in medieval texts. Other poets likewise turned to the dream and debate as methods for active mediation of the earthly and spiritual worlds, but few achieved the delicate interweaving of alliterative idiom and theological instruction that the Pearl-Poet displays.

The same author is also credited with two other poems in the Gawain manuscript, Cleanness (c. 1400) and Patience (c. 1400). The former presents the tales of the Biblical flood, a popular subject since Anglo-Saxon times and usually thought to prefigure the Apocalypse; the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; and the fall of the sacrilegious Belshazzar, concerning itself chiefly with the impurity of the situations that incurred God’s punishment. The poet counterposes the sinful figures in these three biblical stories—and again the numerology seems more than accidental—to the three positive figures of Noah, Abraham, and Nebuchadnezzar, whose respect toward God is rewarded with mercy. Although not so intensely allegorical as Pearl, Cleanness still motivates the reader to compare the three main stories with other biblical sources and, perhaps most of all, to consider the tropological implications for his own life. Similarly, Patience, the fourth of the poems in the Gawain manuscript, retells the narrative of the Book of Jonah, although the general medieval fascination with steadfast faith throughout the worst imaginable adversity, as evidenced so widely in the edifying romances of Griselda and company, must also serve as a background for this alliterative expatiation. This shorter poem is also the most personal of the four, portraying each of its characters with considerable realism and finesse, and offering a glimpse into the psychology of Jonah, particularly his human frailty. As a whole, the works of the Pearl-Poet must be numbered among both the best and most memorable of the didactic poems of the fourteenth century and the most complicated representatives of the alliterative revival.

Political and historical poetry

During the fourteenth century there arose a fair number of poems that chronicled various historical epochs and events with a political purpose in mind. The earliest of these are eleven poems by Laurence Minot (1300?-1352?), written between 1333 and 1352, on the successful campaigns by Edward III against the Scots and the French. Responding to earlier English defeats, in particular the Shameful Peace with Scotland following Edward II’s defeat at Bannockburn in 1314, Minot sought to eulogize the king’s achievement and foster the cause of nationalism. The first and best known of his works, Halidon Hill (c. 1333), commemorates the young monarch’s retributive victory that regained control of the northern border and soothed the political as well as territorial wounds inflicted on the English psyche but warns against thoughtless celebration lest the nation be deceived by Scottish “gile.”

John Barbour’s The Bruce (c. 1375) celebrates Scottish nationalism in an account of the heroic actions of King Robert the Bruce and his faithful comrade-in-arms Sir James Douglas that stretches to more than thirteen thousand lines. Beginning with historical facts and bringing to his work classical and medieval models as well as a lively sense of mythic narrative, Barbour recounts the heroic accomplishments of Robert, including the Battle of Bannockburn and Douglas’s unsuccessful attempt to bear the fallen king’s heart to the Holy Land. As Charles Dunn and Edward Byrnes observe in Middle English Literature (1973), the poem finds its thematic center in Robert as the quintessential defender of Scottish liberty and in Douglas as the equally paradigmatic loyal follower. In this and other ways, The Bruce eludes categorization, whether as chronicle, political poem, epic, or myth; in the final analysis it remains a work sui generis, one most typical of the mélange of later fourteenth century verse forms.

The anonymous author of Thomas of Erceldoun (c. 1388-1401) also combined a number of stock medieval generic characteristics to forge a unique kind of narrative. Although parts of the story share with Halidon Hill and The Bruce certain real battles as subjects, and although the hero of the work, one Thomas Rymor of Earlston, is historical, the poem also interweaves common folktale elements and other features typical of medieval romance. The main narrative frame concerns Thomas’s love affair with an underworld queen and his consequent ability to foretell the future. As well as the queen’s predictions about clashes between Scotland and England, the poet presents certain other auguries of indistinct relation to the first group. Dunn and Byrnes note that Thomas of Erceldoun typifies a pan-European medieval technique in its assignment of known historical facts to the visions of a seer or prophet and attachment of especially attractive prophecies not yet fulfilled to the historical record; once assembled, the entire package was apparently submitted as a political tour de force.

Precursors to Chaucer

Apart from the many engaging and accomplished poems treated above under various generic categories stand some individual authors and works that, by virtue of both their own artistic excellence and their influence and modern appeal, deserve special attention. Among this latter group are William Langland’s The Vision of William, Concerning Piers the Plowman (c. 1362, A Text; c. 1377, B Text; c. 1393, C Text; also known as Piers Plowman), the Pearl-Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (1386-1390; the lover’s confession). Each in its own way helps to set the standard of poetic achievement that is the legacy of the late fourteenth century or “Ricardian” period, as J. A. Burrow has named it, and together these three poems constitute a crucial context for the genius of Chaucer.

Piers Plowman

William Langland’s Piers Plowman is extant in three recensions, labeled the A, B, and C texts. The three combined are divided into two parts, “The Vision of William, Concerning Piers the Plowman” and “The Life of Do-Well, Do-Better, and Do-Best,” which articulate, respectively, general and individual problems of evil and corruption, both offering solutions for the good Christian during his stay on earth. The vision portrays the ruin of contemporary society in allegorical terms and, perhaps responding in part to the social upheaval that racked the everyday lives of fourteenth century humanity, suggests the humble and simple virtue and obedience of the plowman as an antidote to temporal discord. In the second section, the poet conducts an allegorical search for the ideal Christian existence, starting within himself and then undertaking a quest through various liturgical and philosophical domains under the guidance of a series of mentors. With his journey complete, the dreamer’s vision turns from its focus on higher abstract truths to their practical implementation in contemporary society.

Langland’s poem is, as much as any medieval work, uniquely his own, but one can trace a few analogues and parallels to fill out its literary context. Tracts such as Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne are typical of many such instructional poems and prose works of the period; some of the most familiar include Dan Michel of Northgate’s Ayenbite of Inwyt (1340, a translation of La somme des vices et des vertues by Laurentius Gallus) and Chaucer’s “Parson’s Tale.” These poems and similar works were commonly consulted by writers for liturgical details and traditional literary accounts associated with church dogma. Also of influence was the well-developed sermon tradition of the later Middle Ages, which became a learned craft memorialized in handbooks (Ars praedicandi), much like the Ars rhetoricae or Ars poeticae employed by poets in search of commonplaces of description or narrative action. In fact, several whole works are at least formally similar to Piers Plowman, such as Guillaume de Deguileville’s The Pilgrimage of Human Life, of the Soul, and of Jesus Christ (c. 1330-1358), as well as more general classical and other foreign models of allegorical quests and seeking after divine truth. Although superficially Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight appear to be strange bedfellows, the fact remains that Langland’s poem is also a manifestation, and a brilliantly executed one, of the alliterative revival. Even so, as with all of the best works of the late fourteenth century, Piers Plowman is best assessed on its own merits as an earnest and able contemplation of its time, in this instance against the backdrop of the Christian drama.

To appreciate the earnestness of this finely crafted allegorical latticework, it is necessary to view the poem in its literary historical milieu. Recalling the desperate state of affairs in late fourteenth century England—the Church in corrupt disarray since the preceding century, the Avignon Papacy just coming to an end, the Black Death having run rampant only twenty-five years before, the long-standing social discontent crystallizing in the Peasants’ Rebellion of 1381, the condemnation of Wycliffe’s teaching in 1382, and the blatantly incompetent rule of Richard II, one can well imagine how a poem such as Piers Plowman came to be composed and why, if the extremely large number of extant manuscripts is any testimony, it found a large and sympathetic audience long before being taken up by scholars and critics as one of the masterpieces of its time. In a century racked by uncertainty, the spiritual journey of Everyman in search of truth must have served a social as well as aesthetic purpose; given the prevailing problems, it may not be too daring to characterize one function of this “poem of apocalypse,” as Morton Bloomfield calls it, as cathartic or therapeutic. In the medium of poetic art, Langland and, vicariously, his countrymen could respond to a sometimes corrupt and vacuous clergy with satire and wit; they could counter a monumentally intransigent and self-centered government with lessons on taming Lady Meed; and, most crucial, they could combat the socially exacerbated sickness of mortality by imagining, in great allegorical detail, a religious restorative. Langland proposed a journey not unlike that of Dante, a dream of transcendence of the earthly sphere, and a vision of God uncomplicated and unsullied by the catastrophic events of his time. Even if Piers Plowman ends with the Antichrist in power, the Church under attack, and the world as yet unredeemed, the dreamer has a new understanding of what lies beyond his immediate environment as a defense against apocalypse. The search will continue.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Another of the jewels in the crown of the alliterative revival, the Pearl-Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight represents a very different sort of literary masterpiece from Piers Plowman. Melding together games and story patterns from Celtic folklore, attitudes and values from a highly developed and thoughtful Christianity, and the ritualistic procedures of courtly love, it achieves a fusion of medieval ideas unique in the fourteenth century. An Arthurian hero, Gawain, in place of his monarch, takes up the challenge to behead the Green Knight and, should the marvelous fellow survive, to allow him the same privilege a year hence. Gawain accepts what critics have viewed as both a Christmas prank and the initial act in a story of vegetative renewal and cleanly lops off the Green Knight’s head; not the least discouraged, his adversary gathers up his lost part and, reminding Gawain of his pledge, rides off to unknown regions. Too soon the annual cycle is complete and the day arrives for the honorable knight’s departure to fulfill the bargain; Gawain leaves Arthur’s court and eventually finds himself at the castle of one Bercilak and his lady, an honored guest enjoying their hospitality. Here the plot begins to thicken ominously. While the lord and master is off on his daily hunting expedition, not incidentally for three successive days, his wife acts as courtly temptress of their guest. Gawain finds himself suspended between two medieval romantic codes: Either he must follow the precepts of chivalric behavior and, refusing the lady’s advances, honor his host’s hospitality as a true knight of the Round Table, or he must gallantly bow to the pressures of courtly love and, accepting the lady, fulfill another set of expectations. Of course he cannot do both, especially since he agreed with Bercilak to exchange any booty won on their respective hunts, and so he is caught in a logically insoluble quandary. After weakening the third day and accepting a kiss, Gawain leaves the castle and soon encounters the Green Knight, who turns out to be Bercilak in disguise. Submitting to the promised return blow, the hero flinches once, receives a second feint, and on the third swing of the ax is slightly injured, just enough to compensate for his minor indiscretion on the third day of the earlier test. The Green Knight then gives him the lady’s “girdle” or sash, a symbol of femininity since classical times, to wear around his belt in remembrance of the whole affair, and Gawain heads back to Arthur’s court with his life and his knighthood intact.

The sources behind this lively tale include a mixture of originally Celtic elements and common romance motifs, but whatever the actual source materials with which he worked, the artistic achievement of the Pearl-Poet remains uniquely his own. The archetypal frame provided by the self-renewing Green Knight promotes ideas of recurrence and inevitability and is made to surround a series of ironic and playful games engaged in by the much-tried hero, the lady temptress, and the lord Bercilak. There is clearly no escape for Gawain, nor is there meant to be: The fall of Gawain as Everyman is in fact remarkably innocuous given the pressing circumstances, as the Green Knight’s mercy (but justice) with his sharp edge illustrates. Gawain loses a battle as, from one point of view, the entrapment made inevitable by his mortality eventually draws blood; the Green Knight must be repaid, just as surely as the next Christmas season will announce the rebirth of God. The hero’s fallibility also becomes his religious and moral sinecure. Chastised by a natural, postlapsarian error, he shows himself—and in the process humanity—to be the better for the test. What he loses with a kiss and a flinch from the blade he repays, Christlike, with his wound, and ever afterward the girdle remains as a symbol of his transcendence of mere mortal frailty. Gawain, like Oedipus, solves a riddle and wins a contest; by surviving the complex contest of conventions and circumstances, he comes to epitomize the triumph not only presaged by Christ but also, optimally, mirrored in Everyman’s experience of earthly life. For all this, the vehicle for this highly serious investigation of mysteries remains a virtual cadeau, a Christmas jest: When all is over, when the tale is done and the poet adds “Honi soyt qui mal pence” (“Evil be to him who thinks evil”), Chaucer’s immoral morality and playful hermeneutics seem very near indeed.

Confessio Amantis

Gower’s much praised Confessio Amantis forms one third of a trilogy of poems by Gower on the evils that assail the individual and state and on methods for overcoming them and achieving virtue. He first completed the Anglo-Norman Mirour de l’Omme (1376-1379), and then the Latin Vox Clamantis (1379-1382); Confessio Amantis is universally proclaimed his masterpiece. A straightforwardly and severely moral work, it functions chiefly through a barer and more economical allegory than does Piers Plowman, but one that is in its way equally powerful. Again, there is the familiar dream-vision structure in book 1, with the poet Gower imagining a meeting with the God of Love, the Queen of Love, and the Queen’s priest Genius. The priest then treats the dangers of earthly love and the Seven Deadly Sins, one after the other, for most of the remainder of the work, teaching the poet-lover in good medieval style through a series of illustrative stories. Finding himself absolved of his afflictions, the poet is able to bid Venus farewell, turn to reason for guidance, and pursue the lasting spiritual rewards of moral virtue.

Several features of the Confessio Amantis deserve special comment. First, in addition to the dream vision, allegorical commonplaces, and discussion of the Seven Deadly Sins, the poem is thoroughly medieval in its juxtaposition of human versus divine love, a topic as old as the Anglo-Saxon elegies The Wife’s Lament or The Seafarer (both c. tenth century). Of course, no poem could well function more differently from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but the two works do share the story of medieval man learning his human shortcomings and profiting from the lesson. The Confessio Amantis delivers its instruction in a less immediate, more austere manner, agreeing in tone and structure with Piers Plowman, but it seems worthwhile to note that Gower’s moral allegory and the Pearl-Poet’s romance do affirm the same values and, once the particulars deriving from generic differences are deemphasized, can be seen to offer similar prescriptions for getting on in the world. At the same time, one should remember that the Confessio Amantis is not, like Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a product of the alliterative revival, and that both its subject and the rhymed couplets of its verse hark back to foreign as well as native models, as indicated by the vision’s considerable debt for its story line to Le Roman de la rose (thirteenth century; The Romance of the Rose; partial translation c. 1370, complete translation 1900). The first portion of this work was written in the first half of the thirteenth century by Guillaume de Lorris and the second portion between 1275 and 1280 by Jean de Meung. As an obviously well-educated and widely read man, Gower had no shortage of models for his poetry, and he turned his conception of proper human attainments into a clear and readable narrative intended both to instruct and to entertain. That such a work, rigorously formal in attitude and design yet a paragon of literary attractiveness, could exist beside Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and even complement its purpose is a measure of the poetic cornucopia of the fourteenth century.

The Canterbury Tales

Towering over all of fourteenth century poetry are the poems of Chaucer. In nearly every imaginable manner Chaucer epitomizes his age and its literature. In the midst of social anguish and turmoil, he focused his genius on matters of supreme and permanent importance. As a thoroughly medieval author, he borrowed freely and imaginatively from English, French, Italian, and Latin sources. Refusing even more than his contemporaries to be hide-bound by generic or rhetorical constraints, he frequently pushed the rules of genre and poetic composition to the breaking point, creating in the process some works that defy classification in their brilliant originality. Especially typical of late fourteenth century or Ricardian masters, he managed to achieve affecting and enduring aperçus into the pilgrimage of humanity and the ceaseless ritual games between men and women.

Chaucer’s most ambitious work, The Canterbury Tales, is also the most typical literary document of its age. At a time when uncertainty and doubt threatened to send most social and political institutions careening into disaster or disrepute, when Langland was composing his monumental allegory of salvation as a bulwark against religious and cultural apocalypse, Chaucer managed to assemble a company of remarkably disparate individuals and to lead them on a pilgrimage of hope, a journey that would discover their common humanity in a startlingly novel fashion. If creative response to the breakdown of hard-won but outmoded syntheses was an important theme in this period, then The Canterbury Tales epitomizes that solution: In presenting his panorama, Chaucer uses most of the major contemporary genres but subordinates them to a new design; he introduces God’s plenty of personalities but finds a way to integrate them into a believable community; he has his pilgrims discuss many of the burning social, religious, and philosophical issues of the day but never lets debate or pedantry obtrude on the collective function of the group; and he achieves a realism and naturalism of characterization far beyond that of any contemporary work without ever abandoning either his finely crafted, brilliantly conceived narrative voice or the structure, large and small, of the stories themselves and the work as a whole. When one adds the tremendous range of his learning, so apparent in the variety of sources and the skill with which he re-creates them, and the outright appeal of the poem for generations of audiences, it becomes no exaggeration to call The Canterbury Tales both Chaucer’s masterpiece and the masterwork of the entire fourteenth century.

As might be expected, such a poem seems to have been largely the product of the poet’s later years, of his mature style. Still influenced by the French tradition of romances and dits amoureux that served so importantly as models in his earlier writings, and having digested the contributions of the Italian poets and transmuted this literary gold into an indigenous English coin, Chaucer struck out on the kind of creative, original venture that only a lifetime of exposure to experience with traditional materials could foster. Scholars customarily associate the year 1386 with his conception of the plan for The Canterbury Tales, but he may well have been working on the project beforehand. Perhaps the next year he composed the immortal “General Prologue,” from a textual viewpoint the key to all that follows. Opinions on other aspects of chronology vary as well, but the tales themselves probably occupied Chaucer for most of the rest of his life. The unfinished state of the work and its tangle of manuscripts indicate that he probably composed significant parts of the poem up until his death, but one should also remember that The Canterbury Tales was, like most medieval poetry, intended for oral performance and not primarily as a written text.

One of the influences on Chaucer’s poem was the Italian novelle tradition, a loose aggregation of tales brought together by an outwardly unifying fiction. Although Giovanni Sercambi did write such a collection in the general form of a pilgrimage about 1374, it is important to note that neither this nor any other group of novelle could have provided more than a suggestion for the complex and dynamic frame of The Canterbury Tales. Likewise, the richness of the “General Prologue” derives not from the considerable number of sketches written at the time, but most vitally from Chaucer’s genius for weaving conventional topoi, rhetorical rules, character types, and at least some real personalities into a fabric distinctly his own. Of the sources and analogues for the tales themselves, it may be said that the mélange of genres and possible parallels is as diverse as the company of pilgrims, including, besides the novelle, the French fabliau tradition, the romance, the saint’s life, the folktale, the medieval sermon, the miracle story, the epic, and the mock-heroic poem. No form passed through Chaucer’s hands without considerable elaboration or some sort of modification; often his contribution consisted of turning the genre to his favorite purpose of social satire, and at times his reworking was so complete that, as in the case of the superbly farcical “Sir Thopas,” he created a virtually new genre.

To surround his tales of life and love, Chaucer constructed what is frequently called a frame but which might better be labeled a purpose or context. Unlike the Italian analogues that postulate a nominal unifying fiction and leave the matter quite undeveloped, the pilgrimage is ever evolving, with the poet shifting the focus this way and that to sustain the fiction and to allow his characters their remarkable range of expression and interaction. Intimately allied to the pilgrimage conceit is the naïve, impressionable narrator who keeps it alive—the poet-pilgrim Chaucer who mourns his lack of literary aptitude (“My wit is short, ye may wel understonde”). Behind this wide-eyed, good-natured fellow, of course, stands the poet Chaucer, manipulating the unbounded enthusiasm of his narrator with consummate skill and a keen sense of irony, allowing his audience a double perspective on characters and events. Indeed, it is impossible to separate the pilgrimage context from its somewhat clumsy but ever-willing rhapsode. If Chaucer’s characters come alive and interact in ways unique to The Canterbury Tales, a large part of the credit is due to a combination of his narrator’s unfailing and irrepressible humanity with the poet’s own perspectives on the fascinating heterogeneity of humankind.

From this union of authorial design and naturalistic narration springs the vivacity of the “General Prologue.” After setting the scene and creating the rationalizing fiction, the narrator begins an exacting introduction of his society in microcosm, epitomizing each character type and endowing each pilgrim with a memorable individuality. His small community allegorizes fourteenth century society—and it does not: Taking advantage of traditional associations, Chaucer not infrequently adorns a character with the “tell-tale detail,” such as the Prioress’s brooch, the Miller’s wart, the Wife’s deafness or scarlet hose, or the Pardoner’s waxy yellow hair. Details and the actions and habits that they either imply or actually represent come nimbly into play, as the narrator balances expectations based on character types against the exceptions to those règles du jeu. Such is Chaucer’s mastery of the poetic medium, however, that he expresses even these singularities in the form of medieval rhetorical commonplaces. Drawing on conventional techniques of poetic description, and especially on the notatio-efficito method of portraying inner qualities or liabilities in a character’s specific physical features, he encodes some of his most subtle and iconoclastic observations on a character in the metalanguage prescribed by poetic handbooks. Sometimes an overabundance of one of the four humors—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile, postulated since the Greek physician Galen and common in medieval medical lore—leads to a judgment on a person; in another case a term with lascivious associations, such as the Wife’s quality of being “gap-toothed,” mitigates or seconds other aspects of a description. Employing to the hilt the narrator’s unremittingly naïve euphemisms (only he could call as notorious a swindler and reprobate as the Pardoner a “noble ecclesiaste”), Chaucer delicately balances traditional expectation and individual design, managing to make time for implicit commentry that ranges from ironic to bawdy to sincerely religious.

Chaucer’s portraits are elaborately crafted, to be sure, and just as certainly very carefully hung. Critics have pointed out various possible schemes for the arrangement, many of them founded on the ideas of the various estates or social classes of medieval provenance. Donald Howard suggests that the order of presentation is a mnemonic structure or aide-mémoire analogous to medieval formulations reported by Frances Yates; that is, three groups of seven, each group headed by an ideal figure: the Knight, followed by the Squire, Yeoman, Prioress, Monk, Friar, and Merchant; the Clerk, followed by the Man of Law, Franklin, Guildsman, Shipman, Physician, and Wife; and the Parson and Plowman (brothers), followed by the Miller, Manciple, Reeve, Summoner, Pardoner, and Host. Howard argues that these mnemonic constructs were so much a part of medieval literary consciousness that it would be only natural for Chaucer to employ them in his art. This scheme for the introduction of the characters seems credible enough. It does, however, leave out a character who is in many ways the most important of all: Chaucer the pilgrim. Throughout the “General Prologue,” but particularly in the thirty-two lines that intervene between the introductions of the Pardoner and the Host, the narrator is introduced as another in the company, an appealing fellow who begs his readers not to hold him directly responsible for what he reports because he can only repeat what was said by others. It is very much in the innocent nature of Chaucer the pilgrim to issue such a disclaimer before he begins the recital of romance, fabliau, and the other genres that make up The Canterbury Tales, and the reader may also sense the guiding hand of the poet finishing off the characterization of yet another pilgrim, the narrative liaison between poet and poem and the lifeblood of the pilgrimage frame.

Harry Bailly, the Host, soon takes nominal charge of the enterprise, sets the rules for tale-telling (two while riding to Canterbury and two on the way back from each pilgrim), and has the participants draw lots to determine who will start. The cut falls to the Knight, and the tales begin as they should in the social sphere of fourteenth century England with the pilgrim of highest rank opening the proceedings. “The Knight’s Tale” turns out to be a story and a type of poem appropriate both to its teller and to its position in the work as a whole. As an adventurer in the service of the Christian God, and as “a verray, parfit gentil knyght” quite the opposite of that over-courtly bon vivant his Squire, he lends dignity and a sense of purpose to the community by relating an intricate Boethian romance that reaffirms the social order that he leads. Drawn primarily from Boccaccio’s Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia (1339-1341; The Book of Theseus, 1974), with a great deal of the favorite medieval device of compression, this chivalric tale was probably first composed as a separate piece unconnected with The Canterbury Tales and only later fitted into its present place. Whatever the nature of the lost version mentioned in the prologue to The Legend of Good Women (1380-1386), the extant tale chronicles the tragic and eventually ennobling love of the young knights Palamon and Arcite for a lady Emelye. The misfortunes of earthly life are seen as “perturbations of the spheres” and the story moves like Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde from mortal myopia to a larger perspective under the aegis of Theseus. The variety of contributions to follow are to an extent rationalized by this tale, which remains a philosophical anchor and moral standard for the entire work.

No sooner has the stately knight finished justifying the ways of God to his fellow pilgrims than the drunken Miller counters the propriety and high style of the initial tale with his coarse, irreverent fabliau of carpenter John’s cuckolding. The Miller is so impatient and rude, in every way the antithesis of the first teller, that he interrupts the Host’s request that the Monk be next and, ever so characteristically, barges straight ahead to “quite the Knyghtes Tale.” His own words introduce an important structural principle, that of “quiting” or repaying, which will account for the presence of the tale to follow as well. This lowlife character offers the furthest remove imaginable from the philosophical complexity of “The Knight’s Tale” by telling an uproarious story of how Nicholas the clerk planned and carried off the seduction of the carpenter’s wife virtually before her husband’s eyes. Not only is the Miller “quiting” the Knight, but also, the lower class is challenging the views and values of the upper. Animal instincts and scheming are being played off against higher passions and earnest moral deliberations, and perhaps most significantly, the dynamics of the community of pilgrims—both as individuals and as representatives of their vocations or types—is starting to take shape. “The Miller’s Tale” deals not with Boethius but with bawdiness: the clever Nicholas, the doltish John, the unspeakably fey parish clerk Absolon, and the concupiscible young wife Alison engage in a fast-paced charade that rides roughshod over courtly love, religious duty, matrimonial fidelity, and all available aspects of contemporary morality. At the same time, the Miller stumbles through a real, if homely, alternative to the deep pondering and austerity of “The Knight’s Tale” and helps to set the tone and outer limits of Chaucer’s investigation of humanity.

The lonely Reeve, who brings up the rear of the assemblage, then reacts violently against what he judges to be the Miller’s personal insult of a trade he has practiced and, “quiting” his foe, responds with a fabliau about the cuckolding of a dishonest miller. Some tales later Chaucer introduces a justly famous character, Dame Alys or the Wife of Bath, as vigorous, self-serving, and lecherous as the Reeve is biting, sarcastic, and “colerik.” Her prologue consists of a boisterous, happy biography complete with accounts of her five husbands and how she achieved mastery over all of them. Often linked to the antifeminist sentiment of the period, ironically evident in her fifth husband’s book of misogynist exempla, the Wife commands the stage of The Canterbury Tales by misquoting and misapplying biblical and patristic authorities, by celebrating the lustful nature that led her to ogle Jankyn (her fifth husband) during her fourth mate’s funeral, by discoursing on male and female genitalia with a crudity that would do the blockhead Miller proud, and generally by providing the community of pilgrims with an inextinguishable source of gleeful iconoclasm, good will, and high spirits. Very rarely in any literary period is there so vivacious and singular a character as the Dame; like a medieval Falstaff, she stands astride the work of which she is a part, to be remembered and cherished as a patroness of its art.

As the Wife boasts of her conquests in the prologue, the reader begins to understand that she is offering one possible solution to the problem of the contest for mastery between men and women. “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale” is one in a series of seven tales that Kittredge identified as the “Marriage Group,” a sequence that, he argued, was intended to present various possibilities for the seat of authority in marriage. The four most important members of this group are the Wife, the Clerk, the Merchant, and the Franklin. The Clerk tells a story of male dominance over a painfully patient Griselda which “quites” the Wife, and the Merchant spins the ubiquitous medieval tale of the elderly January and his young wife May, warning of the consequences that such a doomed alliance must bring. For her part, the Wife fashions a prologue that finds distant analogues in the very antifeminist writings that it parodies, but which remains after all a brilliant original; her tale, on the other hand, is the common story of the Loathly Lady and her miraculous transformation, analogues of which are found in Gower’s Confession Amantis and numerous contemporary romances. With the Knight under the thumb of the hag, whom he has promised to marry after she saves his life, Dame Alys makes her exit, no doubt supremely confident of the influence of her words on the audience she has been both entertaining and instructing. Even so, the reader may ask how well she has succeeded in making the patently outrageous palatable.

If the Wife, Clerk, and Merchant offer what are finally unsatisfactory alternatives for the problem of sovereignty in marriage, the Franklin, “Epicurus owene sone” and knight of the shire, provides a final solution in a tale that Chaucer adapted from Boccaccio’s Il filostrato (c. 1335; The Filostrato, 1873) with elements from Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Breton lay tradition, and the common folktale motif of the rash promise. As Paul Ruggiers puts it in Art of The Canterbury Tales (1965), “The view of marriage which has in a sense been dismembered is reconstituted in terms of a balance between service and dominance, between human weakness and strength of character, between respect for self and respect for others.” Even the announced genre of the tale, a Breton lay, promotes the resolution by creating a fairy-tale world wherein forbidding complexities can be magically simplified and the nagging temporal concerns of an imperfect world dissolved in a romantic suspension of disbelief. Taking as his topic and argument the already demonstrated reality that “Love wold not been constreyned by maistrye,” the Franklin tells the story of Arveragus and his faithful wife Dorigen, whom Aurelius, the courtly lover par excellence, is, characteristically enough, pursuing. In resisting his suit, a rare abstinence in the world of The Canterbury Tales, she sets him a seemingly impossible task, saying that she will accede only if he manages to remove each and every stone from the coast of Britain. By consulting a clerk versed in Chaucer’s favorite science of astronomy, the resourceful Aurelius accomplishes the task and calls the lady’s hand.

The dilemma that now presents itself to Arveragus and Dorigen is clear-cut but morally insoluble: If she refuses Aurelius’s love, she violates her solemn promise; if she accepts him, he violates her contract of fidelity with her husband. As much as the outcome seems “agayns the proces of nature,” the quandary is real, at least for people as honorable and devoted to each other as this couple. Arveragus selflessly counsels his wife to uphold her part of the bargain and she reluctantly agrees, but such is the self-correcting nature of the world of “The Franklin’s Tale” that the once crafty and unabashed suitor takes pity on Dorigen’s obvious suffering and releases her from the promise, even proclaiming her fidelity as a virtue implicitly superior to the code of courtly love. True to its genre, the poem then completes the resolution by releasing Aurelius from his financial obligations through the kindness and mercy of the clerk he had surreptitiously hired to perform the impossible feat. Gentilesse, the Chaucerian idiom for nobility and delicacy of character, replaces governance as the ruling principle of conjugal relations, and the Marriage Group finds the answer it has been seeking throughout the community of pilgrims. “The Franklin’s Tale” thus represents a kind of testament to order in the human world as well as a coda to a set of literary preludes. In the midst of real and expectable social chaos, there is a bit of magic, a moment of harmony in a generally discordant world.

That discord is never more baldly evident than in the shameless words of the Pardoner, a marvelously vile and altogether reprehensible character who will offer, so he claims, a “moral tale.” It is difficult to see how such a man could bring it off: A seller of bogus absolutions and false relics, he takes as his theme the oft-quoted aphorism “Radix malorum est Cupiditas” (“The root of all evils is Greed”) and goes on to make a case for himself as the contemporary personification of Cupiditas. He straightforwardly and pridefully boasts of swindling well-meaning people searching for religious comfort in the form of supposedly genuine pardons, happy to deprive even the poorest widow of the money that would keep her children from starvation. Ironically true to his claim to be able to instruct although he is himself fast-fettered by sin, the Pardoner launches into a moral exemplum presented as a sermon. His tale, designed to illustrate the eventual retribution to be visited on gluttons and revelers and, by extension, on all those guilty of the deadly sins, is crudely told and leads into hollow strophes against what are of course his own flaws, followed by his customary shameless plea for money. His direct address of the Host as the pilgrim most in need of his services inflames Bailly and evokes his memorable threat to denature the Pardoner, a sentiment that the audience—especially the contemporary audience, who had to deal more and more with false sellers of writs as the authority of the Church continued to decline—must have applauded. It remains for the Knight, the embodiment of honor and social protocol and a tale-teller whose words have already served as balm for the ephemeral wounds of Everyman, to brave the verbal fray between these two and restore order to the pilgrim’s community.

As an entire work, The Canterbury Tales seems to stand incomplete. Only twenty-three of the thirty pilgrims mentioned actually tell a tale, even though the Host’s original arrangement called for no fewer than four apiece. The framing device, however, is a fiction that provides unity to a heterogenous collection; it is not a legal document. Especially since The Canterbury Tales were composed primarily for reading aloud before an audience, individual stories or groups of stories may well have enjoyed an existence of their own apart from the text as a whole. Chaucer may never have intended to “complete” his most lasting poem at all; having invented the fiction that would cause any number of tales to cohere, he may simply have turned his hand to those characters, issues, genres, and narratives that most attracted him. It seems more than a little pedantic, then, to insist that The Canterbury Tales remains incomplete, in the sense of “partial,” for Chaucer’s vision reached far beyond anything created by even his most talented contemporaries, and the tales he did compose bear eloquent testimony to the fertility of his design.

At the close of “The Parson’s Tale” there is one final twist of the narrative thread in The Canterbury Tales. Here Chaucer places his “retraction,” ostensibly a profession of faith accompanied by a confession of self-proclaimed wrongdoings in some of his poetic works. Critics have pointed out how the retraction has numerous literary precedents and analogues, perhaps the most striking of which is Boccaccio’s own rejection of his often bawdy tales in Italian in favor of learned Latin treatises. A reader may also take Chaucer’s protestation as another in a series of clever manipulations of his audience, accepting his prayer at face value as both a pious expostulation and a traditional tour de force but recognizing the retraction itself as a form of disclaimer—only this time on the part of Chaucer the poet rather than Chaucer the pilgrim. As has been seen, the narrator is more than adequate to the task of presenting The Canterbury Tales in a naturalistic and blameless way, and now the poet further relativizes not only this work but also all others that treat in any way lecherous, scatological, or otherwise irreligious subjects. If Chaucer’s retraction honestly professes faith in Christ and hope for eternal salvation, it also allows the poet and audience yet another perspective on the wonderful variety of pilgrims who have trod the stage of The Canterbury Tales: They are real, they are complete in themselves, and they collectively figure forth a uniquely engaging pastiche of characteristics, attitudes, values, and beliefs typical of the fourteenth century in particular and of humanity in general. Chaucer cannot retract that achievement.

Bibliography

Anderson, J. J. Language and Imagination in the Gawain-Poems. Manchester, England; Manchester University Press, 2005. A new interpretation of Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,which the author sees as reflecting the conflict between religious and secular groups that was waged throughout the century. Bibliographical references and index.

Andrew, Malcolm, and Robert Waldron, eds. Poems of the Pearl Manuscript. Exeter, Devon, England: University of Exeter Press, 2008. When this standard text, first published in 1978, appeared in 2007 in a substantially revised fifth edition, the new English prose translations were made available only on a compact disc. The 2008 volume contains the first print edition of these translations, which were intended to resemble the originals as closely as possible.

Armstrong, Dorsey. Gender and the Chivalric Community in Malory’s “Morte d’Arthur.” Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. Demonstrates how markedly Malory’s emphasis on gender identity departs from the treatment of gender in earlier Arthurian works, arguing persuasively that it is this theme that unifies the narrative.

Boitani, Piero, and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer. 2d ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Essays by various writers cover scholarship in the field and the application of new literary theories to Chaucer’s works. Bibliographic essay, chronology, and index.

Burrow, J. A. The Gawain-Poet. Tavistock, Devon, England: Northcote House, 2001. A highly respected scholar discusses each of the Pearl-Poet’s works, placing them in the context of medieval theory and practice. Bibliography and index.

Burrow, J. A., and Hoyt N. Duggan, eds. Medieval Alliterative Poetry: Essays in Honour of Thoriac Turville-Petre. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009. Includes several studies of Piers Plowman, as well as essays on the use of the alliterative form elsewhere.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. 3d ed. Edited by Larry D. Benson. Based on The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, edited by F. N. Robinson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Replaces Robinson’s standard text. Contains the complete works, along with informative introductory materials, new explanatory notes, glossary, index of proper names, and bibliography. Indispensable for students of Chaucer.

Hirsh, John C., ed. Medieval Lyric: Middle English Lyrics, Ballads, and Carols. Annotated edition. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005. An anthology of fifty poems, all written between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, except for five American versions included for the purpose of comparison. Introduction and helpful commentaries by the editor. Punctuation and capitalization of the Middle English poems have been modernized, and side glosses explain unfamiliar words. Three appendixes contain additional lyrics. Annotated bibliography.

Holton, Amanda. The Sources of Chaucer’s Poetics. Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2008. Defines Chaucer’s poetic techniques by comparing several of his works with their textual sources. Bibliography and index.

Mehl, Dieter. English Literature in the Age of Chaucer. Harlow, Essex, England: Longman, 2001. A comprehensive survey of the period. In addition to discussions of Chaucer and his major contemporaries, there are chapters on the Scottish poets and the Middle English lyric. Notes and bibliography.

Newman, Barbara. God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. A brilliant analysis of female figures in medieval Christian literature, suggesting that in fact the Church did not hold to inflexible monotheism. Bibliographical references and index.

Pearl-Poet. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Translated by Keith Harrison. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Annotated edition. An impressive new translation by poet Harrison. In the introduction, editor Helen Cooper places the work within the Arthurian tradition and comments on its poetic form and its narrative structure.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” “Pearl,” and “Sir Orfeo.” Translated by J. R. R. Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. Tolkien is known to modern readers mainly as the author of The Lord of the Rings (1955), but he was better known during his lifetime as a medievalist and professor of English literature at Oxford University. His translations of Anglo-Saxon works are considered classics. His son Christopher Tolkien, who edited the work, includes a glossary and an appendix on verse forms.

Saul, Nigel, ed. The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval England. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Provides a wealth of information on the social, cultural, and religious life of the period, covering topics as varied as the nature of national identity, the character of urban life, the great works of art and architecture, the details of religious practice, and the development of a vernacular literature. Illustrated with more than one hundred pictures—including twenty-four pages of color plates.

Scanlon, Larry, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Literature, 1100-1500. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Essays on the major authors and the dominant genres of the period. Chronology and bibliography.