Medieval Literature – Page 3 – Interesting Literature

Five Fascinating Facts about Piers Plowman

Curious facts about a classic medieval poem

1. The poem contains the first known reference to Robin Hood. Although the earliest known full ballads and stories involving Robin Hood date from the fifteenth century, the brave redistributor of Nottinghamshire’s wealth (though Robin Hood originally lived in Yorkshire) makes his debut – at least his known debut – in William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman, a long dream-vision poem dating from c. 1370-1390. In the poem, a man named Will falls asleep in the Malvern Hills in England, and experiences a series of religious visions which are presented allegorically.

A Short Analysis of ‘Sumer Is Icumen In’

A summary of a classic medieval poem

English poetry begins with a stag breaking wind. Or, at least, it does if you pick up the wonderful The Oxford Book of English Verse, where the short song, ‘Sumer is icumen in’, begins the book’s chronological selection from eight centuries of English poetry. Dating from the mid-thirteenth century, over a hundred years before Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, ‘Sumer is icumen in’ is therefore one of the earliest examples of English poetry. Here is this wonderful medieval poem along with a short analysis of its meaning and language.

Five Fascinating Facts about John Lydgate

A short biography of a medieval poet

1. John Lydgate wrote one of the first true epic poems in the English language. Lydgate’s Troy Book runs to a whopping 30,000 lines, making it one of the longest poems in the English literature (as well as one of the earliest Lydgate was born in around 1370 and died in about 1451). To put that in perspective, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, itself not exactly a short work, is just over 17,000 lines. In other words, Lydgate’s Troy Book is big. (Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is 35,000 lines long, and so beats Lydgate’s poem. And The Faerie Queene is a gargantuan epic.)

Five Fascinating Facts about John Gower

Fun facts about the life and work of an overlooked medieval English poet

1. John Gower appears as the Chorus to Shakespeare’s Pericles. In Pericles, Prince of Tyre, written by William Shakespeare and (probably) George Wilkins, ‘Gower’ appears at the start of the play to introduce the scene. When Shakespeare (and his collaborator) wrote Pericles, John Gower (c. 1330-1408) was slightly better known: throughout the fifteenth century and arguably later, he was seen as one of the twin pillars of great English poetry, along with Chaucer – an important founding figure of poetry written in English. But where Chaucer’s reputation has lasted, Gower has suffered relative neglect.

A Summary and Analysis of the Medieval Poem ‘Pearl’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Pearl is one of the jewels in the crown of medieval English poetry: a real gem of a poem. Part-elegy, part dream-vision (a popular kind of poem in medieval literature: see Piers Plowman for another prominent example), and part Christian allegory, the poem is by an unknown author who may or may not have been (but probably was) the same writer who gave us Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.