Brit Lit Final

Renaissance

"rebirth"; following the Middle Ages, a movement that centered on the revival of interest in the classical learning of Greece and Rome

Primary Sources

-information consist of actual records, first-hand accounts of events and experiences. -information that expresses an author's original ideas or findings from original research -eyewitness accounts of history. They include letters, diaries, speeches, and interviews.

Secondary Sources

-records that explain or interpret primary sources -later writings and interpretations of historians and writers. Often secondary sources like textbooks and articles provide summaries of information found in primary sources. -information consist of descriptions and explanations that are created after a historical event has already taken place

Shakespeare

English poet and dramatist considered one of the greatest English writers (1564-1616)

A Modest Proposal

Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" is a form of satire. In literature, satire is a literary attack on folly or vanity by means of humor, usually intended to improve society. Satire is impossible to take seriously, but it usually highlights a real problem.

Surprised by Time Sixteenth Century

Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603; King James VI of Scotland, whose mother was Mary Queen of Scots, was named her successor to the English throne.

Sonnet

a poem of fourteen lines using any of a number of formal rhyme schemes, in English typically having ten syllables per line.

Allusion

a reference in a literary work to a person, place, or thing in history or another work of literature

Sir Francis Bacon

developed the scientific method

Verse Poetry

poetry that has both a consistent meter and a rhyme scheme

Blank Verse

unrhymed iambic pentameter

Paradise Lost

• (1167) an epic poem by the 17th century English poet John Milton. The poem concerns the Christian story of the rise of Man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. • John Milton • Epic simile • Epic • Makes Satan seem like a hero • The fall of man • written in blank verse

Beowulf

• A hero who fights Grendel, Grendel's Mother and a fire breathing dragon; protagonist • Written by an anonymous author • Alliterative verse • Beowulf poet • Classic hero • A story of three battles Beowulf fights • Communicates that the only way to be remembered is through heroic deeds • This is the oldest piece of written English literature

Morte d'Arthur

• A work by Sir Thomas Malory which combines many of the French and British elements of the Arthurian tradition • One of the first books to be printed - 1485 - after Caxton invented the printing press in 1476

The Middle Ages

• Also known as the medieval period, the time between the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD and the beginning of the Renaissance in the fourteenth century. • The Middle Ages is a vast literary time period. It stretches from the collapse of the Roman Empire in Britain (ca. 450) to the beginning of the Renaissance (ca. 1485). • The period is subdivided into three parts: Anglo-Saxon literature, Anglo-Norman literature, and Middle English literature. • Some scholars view the Middle Ages as the beginning of ideas that continued developing well into the sixteenth century; others feel the Middle Ages were "created" by sixteenth-century writers who wanted to emphasize the originality of their contributions to literary culture. • Old English was spoken by the Germanic invaders of Britain; Old French or Anglo-Norman was spoken in Britain after the Norman Conquest of 1066; and Middle English, which appeared in the twelfth century, displaced French as Britain's official language by the end of the fourteenth century. • Monasteries and other religious houses were the major producers of books until they were dissolved by King Henry VIII in the 1530s (at which point the king assured the nobility's loyalty to himself by giving them much of the former monastic houses' lands and assets); commercial book-making enterprises began around the fourteenth century. • Religious houses were the major consumers of books during the Middle Ages. Nobles began purchasing and commissioning books during the Anglo-Norman period; later, in the fourteenth century, wealthy urbanites also entered the book market. • The word "medieval" comes from the Latin medium(middle) and aevum(age).

King Arthur

• Arthur and his knights, although believed by most medieval people to be historical, are almost entirely products of legend and literature, made up by many authors writing in different genres, beginning not long after the fifth and early sixth centuries, the time when he supposedly lived, and culminating with Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur in the latter part of the fifteenth century. The very absence of historical fact to underpin the legends about Arthur left writers of history and romance free to exploit those stories in the service of personal, political, and social agendas. • The man who inspired the Arthurian legend would have been a Briton, a leader of the Celtic people who had been part of the Roman Empire and had converted to Christianity after it became the official religion of Rome. At the time, the Britons were making a temporarily successful stand against the Anglo-Saxon invaders who had already occupied the southeastern corner of Britain. The Roman Empire was crumbling before the incursions of Germanic tribes, and by the late fifth century the Britons were cut off from Rome and forced to rely for protection on their own strength instead of on the Roman legions. • Arthur was never a "king"; he may well have been commander-in-chief of British resistance to the Anglo-Saxons. In the Welsh elegiac poem Gododdin, composed ca. 600, a hero is said to have fed ravens with the corpses of his enemies, "though he was not Arthur," indicating that the poet knew of an even greater hero by that name. According to a Latin History of the Britons around the year 800, ascribed to Nennius, "Arthur fought against the Saxons in those days together with the kings of Britain, but he was himself the leader of battles." Nennius names twelve such battles, in one of which Arthur is said to have carried an image of the Virgin Mary on his shoulders. • In the twelfth century, though, Arthur did achieve a quasi-historical existence as the greatest of British kings in the works of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and Layamon. At the same time, Arthur was flourishing in Welsh tales as a fairy-tale king, attended by courtiers named Kei (Kay), Bedwyn (Bedivere), and Gwalchmai (Gawain). It was in the French literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that Arthur and his knights came to embody the rise, and eventual decline, of a court exemplifying an aristocratic ideal of chivalry. • The legendary king of the Celtic Britons and his nephew were eventually adopted as national heroes by the English, against whose ancestors Arthur and Gawain had fought, and that is how they are presented by William Caxton in the Preface to his edition of Malory's Morte Darthur in 1485, the same year in which Henry Tudor, who thanks to his Welsh ancestry made political capital of King Arthur, became Henry VII of England. Caxton valiantly, and perhaps somewhat disingenuously, seeks to refute the notion, "that there was no such Arthur and that all such books as been made of him been but feigned and fables." Yet even after Arthur's historicity had been discredited, his legend continued to fuel English nationalism and the imagination of epic poets.

A Female Monarch in a Male World Sixteenth Century

• Because she was Anne Boleyn's daughter (Boleyn was never recognized as legitimate by Catholics and was beheaded by Henry VIII) Elizabeth's claim to the throne was precarious. • Queen Elizabeth I's reign was the more remarkable when one considers that contemporary social expectations equated rational thought with masculinity, and irrational passions with femininity. • Elizabeth, who had received a rigorous humanist education, positioned herself as ruler by appealing to historical precedent (other female rulers, such as the biblical Deborah), to legal theory (dividing her person into a mortal "body natural" and an immortal "body politic"), and to the love of her courtiers and people. • Opposition to her absolute rule was regarded as treasonous and impious. The queen and her spymaster Walsingham controlled a massive spy network to enforce her authority. • Poets and painters represented the "Virgin Queen" Elizabeth as comparable to the mythological goddesses Diana, Astraea, and Cynthia, and the biblical heroine Deborah. • Elizabeth cannily exploited her unmarried state to pit various political factions against one another.

"For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for its end. Let whoever can win glory before death."

• Beowulf • Beowulf poet • States theme • Spoken by Beowulf • Defines their worldview

Grendel's Mother

• Beowulf • Beowulf poet • Wants revenge • Killed by Beowulf • Lives in a cavel • An unnamed swamp-hag, Grendel's mother seems to possess fewer human qualities than Grendel, although her terrorization of Heorot is explained by her desire for vengeance—a human motivation.

Acceptable Academic Sources

• Can't use website sources • Databases • Scholarly Journals and articles

'Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight'

• Doctor Faustus • Christopher Marlowe • Chorus speaking • Epilogue • Engraved on Marlowe's tombstone

"Now hast thou but one bare hour..."

• Doctor Faustus • Christopher Marlowe • Doctor Faustus speaking • Going to hell in one hour • Wants to stop time

Restoration Literature Eighteenth Century

• Dryden was the most influential writer of the Restoration, for he wrote in every form important to the period―occasional verse, comedy, tragedy, heroic plays, odes, satires, translations of classical works—and produced influential critical essays concerning how one ought to write these forms. • Restoration prose style grew more like witty, urbane conversation and less like the intricate, rhetorical style of previous writers like John Milton and John Donne. • Simultaneously, Restoration literature continued to appeal to heroic ideals of love and honor, particularly on stage, in heroic tragedy. • The other major dramatic genre was the Restoration comedy of manners, which emphasizes sexual intrigue and satirizes the elite's social behavior with witty dialogue.

The Kingdom in Danger Sixteenth Century

• Elizabeth's reign was marked by numerous plots against her life by both Protestant and Catholic extremists. • The most famous of these assassination plots was the one that resulted in the death of Elizabeth's second cousin, the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, who also had a claim upon the English throne. • After Elizabeth had Mary Queen of Scots beheaded, King Philip II of Spain sent his huge fleet of ships, the Spanish Armada, to invade England and reclaim it for the Catholic Church. The English successfully fought the Spanish at sea, and the Armada was destroyed in a storm.

Middle English Literature in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

• English gained ground gradually as Britain's main language. By 1200, poetry and prose were being written in English (not just French) for educated readers, and many readers were French-English bilingual. By the end of the thirteenth century, merchant-class and noble children learned French as their second language. • In 1348, the bubonic plague, or Black Death, destroyed one-quarter to one-third of the population of Europe. The scarcity of laborers following the plague gave laborers some power and possibility of social mobility. The Lollards (from "lollers," a slang word for unemployed transients), were one such group; they were the followers of social reformer John Wycliffe. • William Langland's poem Piers Plowman investigates the social potential of this moment. Langland's poem is part of the "Alliterative Revival," a fourteenth-century style of poetry-writing that uses earlier Anglo-Saxon versification practices. • The fourteenth century saw the expansion of the merchant class and international trade, trends visible in Geoffrey Chaucer's career as a civil servant and in his portrait of the Merchant in The Canterbury Tales. • A new canon of literary giants comparable to the ancients in status emerged in the fourteenth century: these included Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. While Chaucer and Langland's works exist in several copies, the work of the poet who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight(an Arthurian romance) and three other poems, exists only in a single copy. • Christian visionary writings, such as Julian of Norwich's "Showings," formed another important literary trend in the fourteenth century. • The fifteenth century saw the production of mystery plays, or cycles of plays that dramatized Bible stories, by city guilds, which were organizations representing trades. • The morality play, in which personified virtues and vices struggle for man's soul, was also popular in the fifteenth century. Productions of morality plays by professional players served as the forerunner of early modern professional theater of Elizabeth I. • Sir Thomas Malory's fifteenth-century English translation and retelling of thirteenth-century French romances about King Arthur, Morte Darthur, renewed the popularity of tales of the knights of the Round Table and their quest for the Holy Grail. • In 1476, William Caxton introduced moveable type to England, thereby drastically increasing the speed at which books could be made in multiple copy and dispersed to readers, as well as decreasing their cost of production. One of Caxton's first successes was a print edition of Malory's Morte Darthur.

Renaissance Humanism Sixteenth Century

• English travellers to Italy had glimpsed the Renaissance (meaning literally, rebirth), an artistic and literary movement based on recently discovered classical texts and artifacts from ancient Greece and Rome. • For Renaissance thinkers, man was the measure of all things; yet man was also capable of changing and fashioning himself. • Humanists like Erasmus changed outmoded school curricula to reflect the kind of learning they felt best prepared young men for public service. • Young aristocratic and genteel men were educated by private tutors or in grammar schools. Education included the medieval trivium(grammar, logic, rhetoric) and quadrivium subjects (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music), but devoted an increased attention to Latin—the language of diplomacy, the professions, and higher learning—as much for its moral, philosophical, and political truths as for its elegance and rhetorical force. • Young aristocratic women were educated in modern languages, religion, music, and needlework, at home or in other noble houses. Women were increasingly taught to read; however, they were not necessarily taught to write. • Humanist admiration of classical authors and increasing national pride in the expressive power of vernacular English led to many English translations of classical texts during this period.

Canterbury Tales

• Frame-tale narrative • Written by Geoffrey Chaucer • Uses a combination of different languages • A collection of stories • Written in the late 1300s

The Reformation Sixteenth Century

• In the early sixteenth century, England's single official religion was Catholicism, and the head of the Church was the pope in Rome. Catholic liturgy and the Bible were in Latin, which few lay people understood. • In Germany in November 1517, Martin Luther protested against corruption in the Catholic Church and began the Protestant movement that became known as the Reformation. • The European Reformation promoted two central ideas: 1)sola scriptura: only the Scriptures have religious authority and not Church clerics or traditions; and 2)sola fide: only the faith of the individual (not good works or rituals) can effect his or her salvation. • England's Reformation was motivated principally by King Henry VIII's greed and his succession difficulties: Henry had failed to produce a legitimate son and heir with his queen, Catherine of Aragon. • The pope refused to grant Henry VIII his desired divorce from Catherine, which would have allowed him to marry Anne Boleyn. Henry had his marriage to Catherine declared null and void under English canon law, married and crowned Anne Boleyn, and was excommunicated from the Catholic Church. The king then enacted a parliamentary Act of Succession requiring all male subjects to confirm the new dynastic succession under oath, and in the Act of Supremacy, declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England. • Between 1536 and 1539, Henry VIII seized the lands and wealth of England's Catholic religious houses and redistributed them amongst his followers. • Protestant rule in England continued after Henry VIII's death as his son Edward (a boy of ten) took the throne for six years (1547-1553).The Book of Common Prayer and the 42 articles of religion which form the basis of Anglicanism (the Protestant Church of England) were written by Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, during Edward's reign. • From 1553 to 1558, England returned to Roman Catholicism under Henry VIII's daughter by Catherine of Aragon Mary I, who gained the nickname "Bloody" Mary from her persecution of Protestants. • In 1558, when the childless Mary died, Henry VIII's daughter by Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth, was crowned queen. Elizabeth brought back Protestantism and strengthened it by fining Recusants (people who didn't attend Anglican services) and making university degrees and positions in the state or in the Church of England all contingent on swearing an oath confirming the royal supremacy. • More radical Protestant groups, such as the Puritans, who wanted to dismantle the Church of England's hierarchy, sprang up during Elizabeth I's reign. • England's official faith underwent rapid, radical shifts during this period: from Roman Catholicism under the pope, to Catholicism under the English king, to Protestantism, to Roman Catholicism, and back to Protestantism.

The Caroline Era Early Seventeenth Century

• King Charles I and his wife Henrietta Maria, patronized artists including Peter Paul Rubens and Sir Anthony Van Dyke. • Court masques during this era emphasized chivalric virtue and divine beauty or love, as symbolized in the marriage of the royal pair. • While courtier poets wrote love lyrics that celebrated both platonic and physical love, in the world outside the court, Puritans opposed what they saw as the court's immoral excesses. • William Prynne exemplifies the most extreme Puritan views, as well as the inseparability of literature and politics in this period. Prynne wrote against stage plays, court masques, mixed dancing, and other forms of entertainment promoted by the court. For expressing these views in print, Prynne was severely punished: he lost his academic degrees and his job, was imprisoned, had his books burned and his ears cut off.

Mary Tudor

• Known as Bloody Mary • Arrested sister • Had the public on her side • Ruled for 5 years • Died of cancer • Daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon who was Queen of England from 1553 to 1558 •She was the wife of Philip II of Spain •When she restored Roman Catholicism to England many Protestants were burned at the stake as heretics

Literary Principles Eighteenth Century

• Literature from 1660 to 1785 divides into three shorter periods of 40 years each, which can be characterized as shown below. • 1660-1700 (death of John Dryden): emphasis on "decorum," or critical principles based on what is elegant, fit, and right. • 1700-1745 (deaths of Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope in 1744): emphasis on satire and on a wider public readership. • 1745-1784 (death of Samuel Johnson): emphasis on revolutionary ideas. • England's Augustan age was modeled on that of Rome, when Augustus Caesar re-established stability after civil war following Julius Caesar's assassination. English writers, following the restoration of King Charles II, felt themselves to be in a similar situation, in which the arts (repressed under Cromwell) could now flourish. • English writers endeavored to formulate rules of good writing, modeled on classical works, but with a new appeal to the passions, in simple, often highly visual, language. This embrace of new (neo) aims and old models is called "neoclassicism." • Horace's phrase,ut picture poesis(meaning "as in painting, so in poetry") was interpreted to mean that poetry ought to be a visual as well as a verbal art. • Augustan poets began the century's focus on nature, by examining the enduring truths of human nature. • The classical genres from which Augustan writers sought to learn included epic, tragedy, comedy, pastoral, satire, and ode. Ensuring a good fit between the genre and its style, language, and tone was crucial. • Augustan writing celebrates wit, or inventiveness, quickness of thought, and aptness of descriptive images or metaphors. • The heroic couplet (two lines of rhymed iambic pentameter) was the most important verse form of Pope's age, for it combined elegance and wit. Poets also continued to use blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter, not closed in couplets). • Not just aristocrats and classically educated scholars wrote verse: ordinary people also began to write poetry, often featuring broad humor and burlesque, thereby creating a distinction between high and low verse.

The Restoration and The Eighteenth Century

• Neoclassicism became preferred writing style. The Restoration and Enlightenment reflect political turmoil and restoring monarchy. • Rise of the Middle Class • The Restoration period begins in 1660, the year in which King Charles II (the exiled Stuart king) was restored to the English throne. • England, Scotland, and Wales were united as Great Britain by the 1707 Act of Union. • The period is one of increasing commercial prosperity and global trade for Britain. • Literacy expanded to include the middle classes and even some of the poor. • Emerging social ideas included politeness―a behavioral standard to which anyone might aspire―and new rhetoric of liberty and rights, sentiment and sympathy.

The Emergence of New Literary Themes and Modes Eighteenth Century

• Novelists became better known than poets, and intellectual prose forms such as the essay proliferated. • The mid-eighteenth century is often referred to as the "Age of Johnson" after the renowned essayist Samuel Johnson, who in 1755 wrote one of the first English dictionaries to define word meanings by employing quotations taken from the best English writers, past and present. • By the 1740s the novel rose to dominate the literary marketplace, with writers like Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and Laurence Sterne defining the form and its modes of representing the private lives of individuals. • The late eighteenth century saw a medieval revival, in which writers venerated and imitated archaic language and forms. One important development of this movement was the Gothic novel, which typically features such forbidden themes as incest, murder, necrophilia, atheism, and sexual desire. • Late eighteenth-century poetry tends to emphasize melancholy, isolation, and reflection, in distinction to the intensely social, often satirical verse of earlier in the period.

Medieval English

• Old English, which has an almost entirely Germanic vocabulary, is a heavily inflected language. Its words change form to indicate changes in function, such as person, number, tense, case, mood, and so forth. • The introduction in the anthology gives detailed rules for pronouncing Middle English: in general, sound aloud all consonants except h; sound aloud the final "e"; sound double vowels as long; and pronounce short vowels as in modern English and long vowels as in modern European languages other than English.

Beelzebub

• Paradise Lost • John Milton • 2nd in command • Turned into a serpent • Suggests that they should go to the new world

Adam and Eve

• Paradise Lost • John Milton • Ate from the forbidden fruit • Were cast out of Paradise • Blamed each other

"All he could have; I made him just and right..."

• Paradise Lost • John Milton • God to His Son • Free will • God wants a genuine response

"Greedily she engorged without restraint, and knew not eating death"

• Paradise Lost • John Milton • Narrator speaking • Eve eats the apple • Climax

"The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."

• Paradise Lost • John Milton • Satan speaking • Hell's just a state of mind • Lying to himself

The Elizabethan Theater Sixteenth Century

• Permanent, free-standing public theaters date only from Shakespeare's lifetime, although there was a theatrical tradition stretching back to the play cycles and mystery plays of medieval times. • In addition to the medieval plays linked to religion and the Church calendar (including the morality plays that continued to be performed in the sixteenth century), early plays were also acted in town and guild halls, marketplaces, inn yards, or the streets by companies of players who traveled and performed under the protection of a patron, whose livery they wore. • Before public theaters were built, playing companies often performed "interludes," or short staged dialogues on religious, moral, and political themes. • By the late sixteenth century, many church men (especially Puritans) opposed the theater. • Prominent dramatic modes included the violent revenge tragedy, in which a wronged protagonist plots and executes revenge, usually destroying him- or herself as well; the history play, featuring national stories of rebellion, war, or conspiracy; and comedies based on those by the Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence. • Christopher Marlowe's adoption of unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse, revolutionized theatrical expression. • Elizabethans also enjoyed masques, jousts, tournaments, processions, pageants, bear-baiting, executions, and other forms of entertainment. • By the 1590s, four major playhouses just outside London's city limits (and beyond the rule of city authorities hostile to drama) competed for business. Competition and the habitual play-going of their audiences created a market for new plays. • These theatres were oval-shaped, with an unroofed yard where lower-class "groundlings" could watch the play and roofed seating areas for the gentry. The stage thrust forward into the crowd, which surrounded it on three sides. • There were no scene breaks or intermissions. Players were shareholders in their acting companies, and play scripts written for the particular members of each repertory company were valuable properties, jealously guarded from rival performers and printers. • Plays were performed in the afternoon and could draw people away from their work. No women appeared on stage; boy actors played the female roles. These conditions gave rise to objections that the theater was morally debased—Puritans, for example, charged that the sight of boys dressed as women would excite illicit sexual desire.

Writers, Printers, and Patrons Sixteenth Century

• Poetry continued to circulate in manuscript, copied by professional scribes or by readers into personal anthologies (commonplace books). • There was no author's copyright, no royalties, and no freedom of the press during the sixteenth century. All presses were owned by members of a guild called the Stationers' Company. Only books approved by six privy councilors or the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London were licensed for sale. There was no sense that writing could become a professional career. • Works of history and religious treatises were particularly subject to censorship, due to their political implications. Devotional works were among the most marketable and popular books. • The prestige accorded a book's subject or its author could be gaged by its size and format (folio, quarto, octavo, etc.). • Writers sought financial reward and preferment from wealthy patrons to whom they dedicated their works; patrons in turn hoped to have their achievements, intellect, and generosity praised.

Jacobean writers and Genres Early Seventeenth Century

• Poets and writers of prose alike moved towards jagged, colloquial speech rhythms and short concentrated forms. • Writers, most notably Ben Jonson, John Donne, and George Herbert, promoted new forms including love elegy and satire (modeled on classical works by Ovid and Horace), epigrams, verse epistles, meditative religious lyrics, and country-house poems. • Jonson, a Londoner, earned his living from writing for the commercial and court theaters and receiving patronage for his poems and his court masques. Jonson became an influential figure through his decision to collect and print his works, and his mentorship of a group of young poets (known as the Tribe, or Sons, of Ben), which included Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace, Sir John Suckling, Edmund Waller, Henry Vaughan and Robert Herrick. • Donne, a friend of Jonson's who also spent much of his life in or near London, wrote poems and sermons that are intellectually challenging and characterized by learned terms and unusual analogies. Donne's poems circulated in manuscript, and most were printed after his death. Critics view Donne as the founder of a metaphysical school of poets, which included George Herbert, Thomas Carew, Richard Crashaw, John Cleveland, Abraham Cowley, and Andrew Marvell. • Herbert left a privileged social position to become an Anglican priest in the small rural parish of Bemerton. Unlike Jonson's aspiration to monumental status in print or Donne's showy performances of witty self-doubt, Herbert's writing promotes other models of poetic agency: the secretary taking dictation from a master or a musician playing in harmonious consort. Herbert destroyed his secular verse and left his religious verse to a friend to publish after Herbert's death. • The prose essay, invented by Michel de Montaigne, first appeared in English translation in 1603 and influenced writers including Francis Bacon and Sir Thomas Browne. • Female writers from the nobility and gentry, who were better educated than most women of the period, began to appear in print, too. These women included Aemilia Lanyer, the first English woman to publish a volume of original poems, and Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland, the first English woman to publish a tragedy.

Sixteenth Century

• Protestant and Catholic Reformations • The crowning of King Henry VII in 1485 marks the start of the Tudor dynasty and this literary period. • During this period, English evolved from a language that did not enjoy international prestige into a language enriched by writers including Shakespeare, Marlowe, and translators of the Bible.

Tudor Style: Ornament, Plainness, and Wonder Sixteenth Century

• Renaissance literature is the product of a culture devoted to rhetoric, or the art of verbal persuasion and argument. • Certain syntactic forms or patterns of words known as "figures" (or "schemes"), usually identified by their Greek or Latin names, were used to heighten the expressive power of English. • Elizabethans enjoyed pattern and ornament in language, clothing, jewelry, gardens, and furniture. Such ornaments were intricate but perfectly regular in design. • Despite their preference for regular patterns and ornaments, the looseness of sixteenth-century syntax allowed for language to twist and turn flexibly. • Renaissance poetry is not interested in representational accuracy or "realism," but in the power of exquisite, ornamented workmanship to draw the reader into its world. • Philip Sidney's Defense of Poesy, the most important piece of literary criticism in the sixteenth century, defines the major literary modes or kinds available to writers: pastoral, heroic, lyric, satiric, elegiac, tragic, and comic. The poetic conventions of these modes helped to shape poetry's subject matter, attitude, tone, and values; in some cases (e.g., the sonnet), they also governed formal structure, meter, style, length, and occasion.

Elizabeth I

• She was 25 when she ascended the throne • Survived 3 assassination attempts • Never got married • Skilled politician • Led England's Golden Age • Virgin Queen (1533-1603)

"But a little thing more..."

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight • Gawain poet • Sir Bertilak to Gawain • Alliterative verse • The Green Knight is saying that nobody is perfect

Sir Bernlak

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight • The Gawain poet • Host at the castle • Everything is green • Decapitated • Green knight fought by Gawain, wife tried to trick Gawain into being dishonorable, cut Gawain

The Pentangle

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight • The Gawain poet - anonymous • Gawain's symbol • Located on his shield • Five Fives • A five pointed star • Symbol of Truth

Continuity and Revolution Eighteenth Century

• Some critics place the end of the eighteenth century at 1776 (linking it to the American Revolution); others at 1789 (the beginning of the French Revolution); still others at 1798 (the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads). • Later Romantic writers, who valued the idea of originality, also prized the meaning of "revolution" which signified a violent break with the past and often represented their work as offering just such a break with tradition. However, changes to literary forms and content occurred much more gradually than this use of the word "revolution" might suggest.

Anglo-Saxon Literature Middle Ages

• The Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes were the three related Germanic tribes who invaded the Roman province Britannia (England) around the year 450, after the Romans withdrew. • The name "English" derives from the Angles. • As the Germanic tribes invaded, native Britons withdrew from England to Wales, where the modern-day version of their language is still spoken. • The widespread adoption of Christianity in the seventh century had an effect on literacy, as laws, histories, and ecclesiastic writings were propagated by the church. • The Anglo-Saxons were invaded in turn by the Danes in the ninth century. • Anglo-Saxons had a tradition of oral poetry, but only circumstantial evidence of this tradition remains in manuscripts―most remaining Old English poetry is contained in just four manuscripts. • Admiration for and performance of Germanic heroic poetry continued into the Christian era. • Values of Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry include: 1) kinship relations rather than geography form the idea of a nation; 2) generosity is expected on the part of the lord (from Old English words meaning 'protector' and 'loaf'), who leads men in war and rewards them with a share of the booty; 3) on the part of the lord's men, what is valued is loyalty until the lord's death, and revenge killing (or eternal shame if vengeance is not pursued) after it. • Old English poetry is often elegiac. It often combines Christian texts with Germanic heroic values. • Old English poetry uses a special, formal poetic vocabulary, including devices like synecdoche, metonymy, and kenning (a two-word compound in place of a more straightforward noun; e.g., "lifehouse" for "body"), and frequently employs irony. • Began orally, mainly 2 categories heroic- told achieves of warriors and elegiac- laments the loss of someone or something, Beowulf emerges from it, national epic of England

Eighteenth Century Literature

• The Augustan era of writers like Swift, Defoe, Pope, Addison, and Steele was rich in satire and new prose forms that blended fact and fiction, such as news, criminal biographies, travelogues, political allegories, and romantic tales. • Early eighteenth-century drama saw the development of "sentimental comedy" in which goodness and high moral sentiments are emphasized, and the audience is moved not only to laughter, but also to sympathetic tears. • The theatre business boomed; celebrity performers flourished; less important were the authors of the plays. • James Thomson's poems on the seasons, beginning with "Winter" (1726), carried on the earlier poetic tradition of pastoral retreat and began a new trend of poetry focused on natural description.

Geoffrey Chaucer

• The Canterbury Tales • Mixed languages • Social poet • Born in middle class • Wrote in Middle English

Literature and Culture Early Seventeenth Century

• The English civil wars were disastrous for English theater. Parliament abolished public plays in 1642, with the result that performances were rare and often conducted in semiprivate locations. • Courtly patronage collapsed along with the king's government, as the usual networks of manuscript circulation were disrupted. • Many royalist "Cavalier" writers wrote in locations removed from the hostile center of parliamentary power. These writers included Katherine Philips (who circulated poems in manuscript in Wales); Margaret Cavendish (exiled with the queen in Paris, Cavendish published two collections of lyrics upon her return to England in 1653); and Thomas Hobbes, exiled in Paris, who wrote Leviathan, a defense of absolute sovereignty based on a theory of social contract. • Autobiographies and memoirs by royalists Lady Anne Halkett and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and by republican Lucy Hutchinson demonstrate the way in which the revolutionary era placed women in novel circumstances and introduced new subject matter into their writing. • Most writers of this period were royalists, but Andrew Marvell and John Milton sided with the republic. • Milton supported the revolution because he was hopeful that it might lead to religious toleration for all Protestants and freedom from censorship. Milton wrote sonnets and pro-revolutionary treatises but is best known for his epic blank-verse poem,Paradise Lost, which tells the story of the Creation and man's fall from divine grace and expulsion from Eden.

Anglo-Norman Literature Middle Ages

• The Normans (a contraction of "Norsemen") took possession of England in 1066. The ruling class in England during this period spoke Old French. • Four main languages circulated in England during the Anglo-Norman period: Old French or Anglo-Norman; Latin (the language of clerics and the learned); Old English; and different branches of the Celtic language group. • Anglo-Norman aristocrats loved the old Celtic oral tales sung by Breton storytellers. These tales were called Breton "lays." • Breton lays were developed by writers like Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes into the form known as "romance." Romance was the main narrative genre for late medieval readers. • A chivalric romance (from the word "roman" meaning a work in the French vernacular tongue) focuses on knightly adventures (including ethical and spiritual quests), knightly love for and courtesy toward ladies, and the display of martial prowess against powerful, sometimes supernatural foes. • The most famous example of knightly chivalry was the legendary court of King Arthur. • Romances, in which a knight must prove his worthiness through bravery and noble deeds, can reflect the social aspirations of members of the lower nobility to rise socially. • French sources and writers were influential; however, works like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Early Middle English religious prose texts for women such as Ancrene Wisse show the continued development of the English language during this period.

Conditions of Literary Production Eighteenth Century

• The Stage Licensing Act (1737) established a form of dramatic censorship in which the Lord Chamberlain pre-approved and licensed all plays for performance in London. • Censorship of other print material changed radically with the 1710 Statute of Anne, the first British copyright law not tied to government approval of a book's contents. • Copyrights were typically held by booksellers. • The term "public sphere" refers to the material texts concerning matters of national interest and also to the public venues (including coffeehouses, clubs, taverns, parks, etc.) where readers circulated and discussed these texts. • Thanks to greatly increased literacy rates (by 1800, 60-70 percent of adult men could read, versus 25 percent in 1600), the eighteenth century was the first to sustain a large number of professional authors. Genteel writers could benefit from both patronage and the subscription system; "Grub Street" hacks at the lower end of the profession were employed on a piecework basis. • Women published widely. • Reading material, though it remained unaffordable to the laboring classes, was frequently shared. Circulating libraries began in the 1740s. • Capital letters began to be used only at the beginnings of sentences and for proper names, and the use of italics was reduced.

Mephastophilis

• The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus • Christopher Marlowe • Faustus' errand boy • Demon summoned • Deal-maker • A devil whom Faustus summons with his initial magical experiments. • Mephastophilis's motivations are ambiguous: on the one hand, his oft-expressed goal is to catch Faustus's soul and carry it off to hell; on the other hand, he actively attempts to dissuade Faustus from making a deal with Lucifer by warning him about the horrors of hell. • Mephastophilis is ultimately as tragic a figure as Faustus, with his moving, regretful accounts of what the devils have lost in their eternal separation from God and his repeated reflections on the pain that comes with damnation.

Christopher Marlowe

• The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus • Was a spy • Rabble rouser • Accused of being gay • Died young • used unrhymed iambic pentameter or blank verse

The Court and The City Sixteenth Century

• The Wars of the Roses, fought during the fifteenth century between the royal houses of York (whose emblem was the white rose) and Lancaster (the red rose) ended with the death of Yorkist King Richard III at the battle of Bosworth Field. Henry Tudor was crowned King Henry VII and married Elizabeth of York, uniting the rival houses. • The wars had impoverished many aristocratic landholders; Henry VII seized this chance to consolidate and centralize power in his court. • The court was a place steeped in intrigue and ambition where elegance, ease, and the ability to decipher words with multiple meanings (in poetry no less than in politics) were prized abilities. Court tastes in music, dance, poetry, theater, and masque shaped the taste of the nation. • London was Europe's fastest growing city: it grew from 60,000 people in 1520 to 375,000 in 1650. • The sixteenth century saw a gradual transition from manuscripts to books printed with moveable metal type. Manuscripts and texts that were medieval in tone retained prestige; printing made books cheaper and more readily available. • Literacy increased throughout the period, reinforced by the Protestant practice of ordinary lay persons (not just church clerics) reading the Bible themselves.

The Revolutionary Era Early Seventeenth Century

• The beheading of King Charles I, which took place on 30 January 1649, was a cataclysmic event in English history. The assumption that kings ruled by divine right was overturned as commoners accused the king of treason and executed him. • Some historians believe that long-term social and economic changes led to rising social tensions and conflict, particularly among the educated, affluent gentry class, who were below nobles but above artisans and yeomen in the social order. This class was growing, but traditional social hierarchies did not grant them the economic, political, and religious freedoms they desired. • Other historians (the "revisionists") believe that short-term avoidable causes of the English civil wars included luck, personal idiosyncrasies, and poor decisions made by individuals. • Between 1640 and 1660, new concepts emerged that became central to bourgeois liberal thought for centuries to come―that is, religious toleration, freedom from press censorship, and the separation of church and state. • These ideas came from three disputed questions: 1) What is the ultimate source of political power? 2) What kind of church government is laid down in Scripture and therefore ought to be established in England? 3) What should the relation be between church and state? • Frustrated with Parliament's frequent refusal to endorse taxes that would help the Crown, King Charles I had dissolved Parliament three times by 1629 and subsequently ruled for more than ten years without a Parliament at all. • In 1640, the so-called Long Parliament convened to assert its rights. Parliament did not disband when the king would have liked but instead remained in session, abolishing extralegal taxes, trimming the bishops' powers, and arresting, trying, and executing Archbishop Laud and the king's minister, the Earl of Strafford. • Parliament disrupted not only the usual governance of the state and but also the usual censorship of the press. Weekly newsbooks that reported on current domestic events from various religious and political perspectives flourished. • In July 1642, Parliament voted to raise an army, and by August, England's First Civil War (1642-1646) had begun. • Parliament and the Presbyterian clergy that supported it aimed to secure the rights of the House of Commons, to limit the king's power over the army and the church (though not to depose the king), and to make Presbyterianism the national faith. • However, the Puritan forces were not solely made up of Presbyterians. There were a variety of dissenters from the Church of England as well (Congregationalists, Independents, Baptists, and others). Each of these groups had different ideas about what policies and faiths ought to be tolerated. • In 1648, after negotiation and a brief Second Civil War, the king's army was defeated. King Charles I was imprisoned on the Isle of Wight. • As long as the king remained alive, there was the possibility that one or more factions might support him. Leaders from Cromwell's New Model Army therefore expelled royalists and Presbyterians, who still wanted to come to an understanding with the king, from the House of Commons. The remaining part of the House of Commons became known as the "Rump Parliament." They abolished the House of Lords, tried the king for high treason, and executed him. • After King Charles I's execution, the Scots and the Irish, who had not been consulted about the trial, proclaimed the king's eldest son, the exiled Prince Charles, the new king. Oliver Cromwell and his army brutally crushed rebellions in Scotland and Ireland. • Cromwell was sworn in as "Lord Protector" of England for life. His son Richard ruled from his father's death in 1658 until General George Monck called "full and free" elections in Parliament, which opened seats again to supporters of the monarchy as well as of the republic. • The new Parliament recalled the exiled prince, proclaiming him King Charles II on May 8, 1660. • The period that followed is called the Restoration, for it saw the restoration of the monarchy and the court, the Church of England, and the professional theater. • Monarchy was now limited, however; Parliament retained legislative supremacy and the power of taxation and assembled by its own, and not the king's, authority. • The journalistic debate that had begun in the 1640s continued to grow. Modern political parties developed out of what had been the royalist and republican factions during the civil wars.

The Context of Ideas Eighteenth Century

• The court of King Charles II championed the right of England's social elite to pursue pleasure and libertinism. • King Charles II authorized two new companies of actors. Women began to appear on stage in female roles. • Dogmatism, or the acceptance of received religious beliefs, was widely regarded as dangerous. • Charles II approved the Royal Society for London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (1662). The Royal Society revolutionized scientific method and the dispersal of knowledge. • The specialized modern "scientist" did not exist; Royal Society members studied natural history (the collection and description of facts of nature), natural philosophy (study of the causes of what happens in nature), and natural religion (study of nature as a book written by God). • The major idea of the period (founded on Francis Bacon's earlier work) was that of empiricism. • Empiricism is the direct observation of experience, which infers that experience (including experimentation) is a reliable source of knowledge. John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume all pursued differing interpretations of empiricism, and the concept itself had a profound impact on society and literature. • Writers (including women such as Mary Astell) began to advocate for improved education for women during this period. • Around 1750, the word "sentiment" evolved to describe social behavior based in instinctual feeling. Sentiment, and the related notions of sensibility and sympathy, all contributed to a growing sense of the desirability of public philanthropy and social reforms (such as charities for orphans). • Increased importance was placed on the private, individual life, as is evident in literary forms such as diaries, letters, and the novel.

The Early Seventeenth Century

• The death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 marks the beginning of this literary period. • Elizabeth I, also known as the Virgin Queen, was childless. Her relation, James Stuart, succeeded her on England's throne as King James I (in Scotland, his title was King James VI). • Elizabeth I's reign (1558-1603) is known as the Elizabethan period. James I's reign (1603-1625) is known as the Jacobean period, from the Latin for James,Jacobus. Charles I's reign (1625-1640) is known as the Caroline period, from the Latin for Charles,Carolus. • James I was an authoritarian who believed kings derived their powers from God, not from the people. This belief caused political tension between the king, the Parliament, and the common people—tension that intensified throughout James I's reign, and culminated in the beheading of his son, Charles I, in 1649. • Between 1642 and 1649, Royalist and pro-parliamentary forces fought a bloody series of civil wars on English soil. • Following the execution of the king and the end of the English civil wars in 1649, the general of the parliamentary forces, Oliver Cromwell, ruled England as a commonwealth (a democratic state governed without a monarch). Cromwell was known as the "Lord Protector" of England. • After Oliver Cromwell's death in 1658, his son Richard ruled briefly and ineffectually. • In 1660, Parliament invited King Charles I's eldest son to return from exile in Europe to rule England as King Charles II. King Charles II's restoration to power and England's restoration of monarchical rule give the period that followed the name the "Restoration. "

Religion and Politics in the Eighteenth Century

• The monarchical restoration was accompanied by the re-opening of English theatres (closed during Cromwell's Puritan regime) and the restoration of the Church of England as the national church. • Church and state continued to be closely intertwined. The Test Act of 1673 required all holders of civil and military offices to take the sacrament in the Anglican Church and deny transubstantiation; those who refused (e.g., Protestant Dissenters and Roman Catholics) were not allowed to attend university or hold public office. • King Charles II, though he outwardly conformed to Anglicanism, had Catholic sympathies that placed him at odds with his strongly anti-Catholic Parliament. • Charles had no legitimate heir. His brother James (a Catholic) was next in line to the throne. Parliament tried to force Charles to exclude his brother from the line of succession. Charles ended this "Exclusion Crisis" by dissolving Parliament. • The Exclusion Crisis in a sense created modern political parties: the Tories, who supported the king, and the Whigs, who opposed him. • Once crowned, King James II quickly suspended the Test Act. In 1688, the birth of James's son so alarmed the country with the prospect of a new succession of Catholic monarchs that secret negotiations began to bring a new Protestant ruler from Europe to oust James. • In 1688, William of Orange and his wife Mary (James's daughter) landed in England with a small army and seized power—an event known as the Glorious or Bloodless Revolution. • James II fled to exile in France. For over 50 years his supporters (called Jacobites, from the Latin Jacobus, for James) mounted unsuccessful attempts to restore the Stuart line of Catholic kings to the British throne. • Queen Anne, another of James II's daughters, was the next monarch (1702-1714). Anne's reign was a prosperous time for Britain, as the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713) created new trade opportunities. • England, Scotland, and Wales were united as Great Britain by the 1707 Act of Union. • As Anne, like Mary, had no heirs, the succession was settled upon the royal house of Hanover. A long line of King Georges (I-IV) ensued, which is why the eighteenth century is also known as the Georgian period. • We now associate the term "Whig" with liberalism and "Tory" with conservatism, but the principles behind these two parties remained fluid and responsive to political circumstance throughout the period. • Robert Walpole, a Whig politician who served under both King George I and George II, held a parliamentary seat from 1701 until 1742. Walpole was the first man to be described as a "prime" minister. • During King George III's long rule (1760-1820) Britain became a major colonial power. At home and abroad, George III's subjects engaged with a new rhetoric of liberty and radical reform, as they witnessed and reacted to the revolutions in France and America.

The English and Otherness Sixteenth Century

• The religious and political events of the Tudor era made people newly aware and proud of their national identity and led them to define those who lay outside that identity in new ways. • Elizabethan London had a large population of merchants and artisans from France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Germany. • The English also perceived the Welsh, the Scots, and the Irish as other and distinct from themselves. • Religious others in London included Protestant radicals such as the Puritans and Jews, who had been expelled from England by King Edward I in 1290 and who were not officially permitted to resettle in England until the mid-seventeenth century. • Racial discrimination was another kind of otherness; many Elizabethans regarded blackness as a physical defect. There is evidence of black slaves and servants in England at this time, and slavery was generally regarded as a profitable merchant venture—one in which Queen Elizabeth herself invested.

State and Church Early Seventeenth Century

• The state's monetary difficulties during James I's reign were signs of conflict between the king and his people. The king was not supposed to tax regularly, except in time of war. However, declining Crown revenues, a demand for court honors and rewards, and the high costs of a court obsessed with feasting, drinking, and hunting all led King James I to impose illegal taxes. • King James I's peace treaty with Spain (1604) made the Atlantic safe for English ships and for exploration. • During James's reign the first permanent English settlements were established in North America (at Jamestown) and in the Caribbean. In 1611 the East India Company established England's first outpost in India. • In the north of England, coal mines developed; in the east, newly drained wetlands yielded crops for the growing population. Appreciation for the practical arts and technology as a means of improving human life influenced the scientific theories of Francis Bacon, who in turn inspired other scientists and inventors. • Sixteenth and seventeenth-century English people argued over many religious questions, including the form of worship services, the qualifications of ministers, the interpretation of Scripture, the form of prayer, and the meaning of Communion. • All people were legally required to attend Church of England services, and the form of the services was set out in the Book of Common Prayer. • In the 1580s and 1590s, Catholic priests and those who harbored them were executed for treason. Protestant religious minorities had suffered persecution too. Although his mother was the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, James I was raised in the strict Reformed tradition of the Scottish Presbyterian Kirk and was consequently welcomed by both parties. • James I's impulse towards religious toleration was halted by the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. A group of Catholics packed the cellar next to the Houses of Parliament with gunpowder, intending to eliminate much of England's ruling class at a single blast and leave England open to invasion by a foreign, Catholic power. • Discovery of the Gunpowder Plot renewed anti-Catholic sentiment in England. • The most important religious event during James I's reign was his newly commissioned, elegant, and diplomatic translation of the Bible, which remains known as the "King James Bible" today. • James I's second son, Charles, came to the throne upon his father's death in 1625 (James's first son, Henry, had died of typhoid fever years earlier). • King Charles I was financially more prudent than his father, but his refusal to allow powerful men and factions a share in the workings of the state alienated them, and he became cut off from his people. • While King Charles was an Anglican, his wife, the French princess Henrietta Maria, was Catholic. Their love of splendor and ceremony led Puritans to suspect Charles of popish sympathies. • Puritans were followers of the sixteenth-century reformer John Calvin. Puritans believed that salvation depended upon faith in Christ, not good works; they also believed that God predestined people to be saved or damned. • King Charles I's appointment of William Laud as archbishop of Canterbury (the ecclesiastical head of the English Church) further angered Puritans. • Laud promoted the idea that God made redemption freely available to all humans, who could then choose whether or not to accept God's grace and work toward their salvation by acts of charity, devotion, and generosity to the church. • In the 1630s, many Puritans emigrated to the colonies in New England, but those who remained in England were discontented.

Old and Middle English Prosody

• The verse form of all Old English poetry is the same: the verse unit is the single line. Rhyme is not often used to link lines in Old English. • Alliteration, or beginning several words with the same sound, is the organizing principle of Old English poetry. • A consonant alliterates with its match or with another consonant that makes the same sound; a vowel alliterates with any other vowel. • An Old English alliterative line contains four principal stresses, and is divided by a caesura (a pause) into two half-lines, each containing two stresses. At least one (and sometimes both) of the stressed words in the first half-line begins with the same sound as the first stressed word of the second half-line. The last stressed word often is non-alliterative. • Middle English verse can be alliterative (as above, though sometimes increasing the number of alliterative or stressed words); or, influenced by Old French, it can be in the form of alternately stressed rhyming verse lines. • Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are mainly in rhymed couplets, with five-stress lines.

Patrons, Printers, and Acting Companies Early Seventeenth Century

• Tudor social institutions and customary practices that supported and regulated writers changed only gradually before 1640. • The Church of England continued to promote writings including devotional treatises, tracts, and sermons. • Sermons were designed to explain Scripture, to instruct and to move, and they reached a large audience both in church and in print. • Many writers depended upon aristocratic patrons. Often patronage took the form of an exchange of favors rather than that of a financial transaction. A patron might give a poet a place to live, employment, or valuable gifts of clothing. • The reading public for sophisticated literary works was small. This audience was concentrated at court, in the universities, and the Inns of Court (law schools). Manuscript (handwritten) copies were an easy and effective way to circulate works. • Many writers' works appeared in print posthumously (e.g., Donne, Herbert, Shakespeare, Marvell). This practice, and the circulation of manuscript copies, often makes assigning concise composition dates to seventeenth-century works difficult. • Printing of literary works became more common, especially after Ben Jonson collected and printed his own works in an impressive folio. • Almost all printed works—except those printed at the universities—were printed in London, as a result of the monopoly on printing granted to the London Stationer's Company by King Henry VIII. • In exchange for the monopoly on printing, the Stationers were to submit all books for pre-publication censorship. Responsibility for a printed work, and ownership of that work, rested with the printer, not the author. Authorial copyright was not recognized until the early eighteenth century. • Commercial theater enabled a few writers (Thomas Dekker, William Shakespeare, John Webster) to support themselves professionally. Again, the theater companies, not the playwrights, owned the texts. Acting companies also had to submit works to the censor before public performance. • James I also promoted theater at court and acted as patron to Shakespeare's acting company, which became known as the King's Men. The intimate indoor spaces of court-affiliated theaters and the court's taste both affected the repertoire of companies like the King's Men.

Literature and Culture, Old Ideas and New Early Seventeenth Century

• Writers including John Donne, Robert Burton, and Ben Jonson invoked inherited ideas even though they were aware that these concepts were being questioned or displaced. • Old ideas that resonated with these writers included the Ptolemaic universe (in which the earth is fixed, and other celestial bodies orbit it); the four elements (fire, earth, water, and air) that were thought to comprise all matter; and the four humors (choler, blood, phlegm, and black bile), which were believed to determine a person's temperament and to cause physical and mental disease when out of balance. • Analogy and order were important concepts―e.g., the "chain of being" that ordered creation (God, angels, humans, animals, plants, rocks) had its analogy in the state (king, nobles, gentry, yeomen, laborers). Each level in this chain has its own peculiar function, and each was connected to those above and below it by obligations and dependencies. • A poet who compares a king to the king of the beasts is thus not forging an original metaphor so much as describing something that seemed an obvious fact of nature within this system of ideas. • William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of blood and Galileo's confirmation of Copernican astronomical theories were among the new ideas that began to be embraced toward the end of the period.

Caedmon's Hymn

• Written by Bede in the 7th Century • The hymn he sang praises God for His creation of the heavens and the earth. • An English monk by the name of Bede translated Caedmon's hymn and wrote about it in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. • Caedmon is considered to be the first English poet.

Doctor Faustus

• Written by Christopher Marlowe • Tragedy • Faustus gets power hungry • Faustus sold his soul to the Devil • Faustus dies at the end

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

• Written by the Pearl Poet - anonymous • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a splendid piece of literature written in alliterative verse. • It may well be the best example of an English medieval alliterative romance that emphasizes the chivalric ideals of loyalty to God, king, and lady.

Samuel Johnson

• Wrote A Dictionary of the English Language • The greatest literary figure of the 18th century • essayist

Jonathan Swift

• Wrote A Modest Proposal • famous for his satires

John Milton

• Wrote Paradise Lost