Middle English Literature
in the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Centuries
GAZZARA

1200 poetry and prose written in English (not just
French)
◦ educated readers; many French-English bilingual
◦ late-century merchant-class and noble children learned French as
their second language

1348 bubonic plague, or Black Death
◦ destroyed one-quarter to one-third of the population of Europe
 scarcity of laborers some power and possibility of social mobility
◦ e.g.: Lollards (from "lollers," a slang word for unemployed
transients)
 followers of social reformer John Wycliffe.

Relevant text here: William Langland's poem Piers
Plowman
◦ part of the "Alliterative Revival," a fourteenth-century style of
poetry-writing that uses earlier Anglo-Saxon versification practices
Middle English Literature in the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Centuries

14th-Century expansion of merchant class and
international trade
◦ visible in Geoffrey Chaucer's career as a civil servant and
in his portrait of the Merchant in The Canterbury Tales



New key players: Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch
Work of author of 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
Fourteenth-Century Influences
15th century rise in production of mystery plays, or cycles of
plays that dramatized Bible stories city guilds, which were
organizations representing trades
 Morality play personified virtues and vices struggle for man's
soul

◦ productions of morality plays + professional players LEADS to early modern
professional theater of Elizabeth I

Sir Thomas Malory’s 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

1476 William Caxton moveable type to England
◦ drastically increased speed at which books could be made in multiple copy
and dispersed to readers
◦ decreases their cost of production
◦ One of Caxton's first successes was a print edition of Malory's Morte Darthur
Fifteenth-Century Influences

Old English:
◦ almost entirely Germanic vocabulary
◦ a heavily inflected language
◦ words change form to indicate changes in function,
e.g.: person, number, tense, case, mood, and
the
like

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
Medieval English

Same verse form for 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 AS ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE in OLD
Matching (or similarly-sounding) consonants for alliteration; a vowel alliterates
with any other vowel.
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
 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
Old and Middle English Prosody

Chaucer slyly pretends that the Miller’s
fabliau is “cherles tale”—but remember
the narrative voice is NOT that of the
drunken Miller but that of the POET
satirizing the courtly affectations of the
costume, manner, speech and behavior of
the petit bourgeois characters.
The Miller’s Tale

The wooing of both Nicholas and Absolon
satirizes the typical language and
gestures of courtly lovers, and of course
Alison, whom they are pursuing, is NOT a
lady.
The genre of the MILLER’s tale is fabliau
(plural fabliaux): a short, funny, often
bawdy narrative in low style, imitated and
developed from French models.
 These are narratives in which those who
win do so not through virtue (as in a
moral exemplum) or through virtue
coupled with high birth (as in romance).

Winners are instead the clever, and often
the young and attractive clever.
 Fabliaux are stories about material gain
and bodily comfort for the winners, and
REVERSE for the losers.
 Such “justice” as they represent is
concerned only with getting even, or, to
use Chaucer’s term, “quitting.”

Their narrative style is streamlined,
focusing as it does on those objects that
will be used (e.g., tubs, hot pokers).
 They are umembarrassed about
mentioning bodily parts unmentionable in
romance.
 These stories are, in short, materialist,
representing a world of material facts and
needs to be exploited by the clever.

Genre: Fabliau with lots of allusions to
Bible stories, perhaps by means of the
mystery play.
 Setting: Oxford, with well-described urban
architecture: the house with a shotwindow (small casement) onto the street,
the barn, the church, a smithy: university
buildings do not appear.

The Miller’s Tale

Versions of “privee” appear some fourteen
times (plus its near synonym “derne”),
meaning secret, arcane, intimate,
unknown, private, clandestine, discreet,
stealthy, and the like, comically tying
together the specialized scholarly
knowledge of Nicholas, sexual behaviors,
notions of manners, theological mysteries,
marriage, town gossip and publicity, and
perhaps, even the privy.
Key Words
Lexis: Some romance words of mockdelicacy collide with salty terms for body
parts like “ers,” “queynte,” “buttok,”
“haunche-boon,” “hole.”
 Key Passages: The blazon of Allison, lines
125-62; Absolon’s aubade, 590; sexual
euphemism, 444-48.
 Tropes: Nice puns on “queynte” (167-68,
a rime riche); “berde;” during the famous
kiss (629, 634).

Lexis, Key Passages, Tropes
What is the religious material doing in this dirty
story?
 Are all the characters punished at the end?
According to poetic justice, where does each of
their faults lie?
 What view of the “private” does the story
present?
 Does it matter that the story is set in Oxford?
Why don’t we see any university buildings?
 What, exactly, do Alison and Nicholas enjoy?

In groups: prepare responses to
any three of the following—will
not be collected