The period we know as "the Middle Ages" covers a span of more than a thousand years of British history, from the Roman withdrawal and Anglo-Saxon invasions of the fifth century to the rise of the Tudor dynasty in 1485. In terms of a surviving literary tradition, the period extends from Caedmon's Hymn at the end of the seventh century to the play Everyman around the beginning of the sixteenth. The term "Middle Ages," in other words, refers to well over half of English literary history. As well as being the longest period, it is by any measure among the richest and most varied.
In the Middle Ages, British society was arguably more multicultural than it has ever been since, at least until the last half-century. The literary languages of the period include Old English, Welsh, Irish, Latin, French, Middle English, and Middle Scots. Even within one of these languages, Middle English, medieval authors attained a diversity of tone and style rarely rivalled in later periods. Types of Middle English poetry range from the richly alliterative verse of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman:
And on a May morning, on Malvern Hills,
There befell me as by magic a marvelous thing . . .
to Chaucer's innovative and extraordinarily influential rhyming couplets in loose iambic pentameter:
Now sire, thanne will I telle you forth my tale
As evere mote I drinke win or ale,
I shall saye sooth: tho housbandes that I hadde,
As three of hem were goode, and two were badde.
In the sessions that follow you will read a range of works written over an eight-hundred-year period in half a dozen languages. We begin with the literature of the Anglo-Saxons, centering around Seamus Heaney's magnificent new translation of Beowulf. The course then focuses on the legendary histories that the various peoples of the British Isles used to explain their place among the nations, and the fictions that different social classes employed to justify their rule—or their rebellion. Individual sessions introduce Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the lives and writings of holy women, and the religious drama of the fifteenth century.