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 […]
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 […]
Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle Say ‘medieval literature’ and a few names will spring to mind: Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante, the anonymous author of Beowulf. But where does one start exploring the wonderful and colourful world of medieval writing? Here are our ten recommendations, which give a sense of the rich panoply […]
A brief overview and summary of Confessio Amantis, John Gower’s medieval poem The most famous English poem of the entire fourteenth century is Geoffrey Chaucer‘s The Canterbury Tales, a vast collection of stories borrowed from European medieval and classical sources. But there is another English poem from the fourteenth century, which […]
Some fun facts about medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer 1. One of Chaucer’s earliest poems was ‘An ABC’, an acrostic which he wrote for people to use in prayer. Like much of Chaucer’s work, ‘An ABC‘ was a Middle English translation of a French work, in this case a prayer written […]