The Medieval Inheritance

The idea

The Middle Ages beyond Chaucer give the exam a set of genres and a handful of works it expects you to know. Romance gathered three Matters, of Rome, France and Britain, and the Arthurian legend grew by additions: Geoffrey of Monmouth's Merlin, Wace's Round Table, Chrétien's Lancelot. Marie de France wrote short lais from Breton tales, among them Launfal. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the finest English romance, sets a beheading game at Camelot's New Year feast, tests Gawain at a castle with three hunts and three temptations, and nicks his neck for the green girdle he hid, though his shield bears the pentangle's endless knot of virtues. It is written in the revived alliterative line, with a rhymed bob and wheel closing each stanza, the same line Langland used for Piers Plowman, an allegory told as dream visions. Malory gathered the whole legend in prison into Le Morte d'Arthur, printed by Caxton, which the anchor reads as nostalgic and cynical, with Lancelot at its tragic centre. Anonymous lyrics sang of spring, love, loss and faith, and the popular ballad told dramatic stories in song, changing as it passed from voice to voice. On the stage, the guilds performed mystery cycles from Creation to Judgment, and the Wakefield Master's Second Shepherds' Play set a stolen sheep in a cradle beside the true Nativity, while the morality play Everyman sent a soul to death attended only by Good Deeds. Julian of Norwich, an anchoress, wrote of divine love and of sin as behovely, and Margery Kempe dictated what is often called the first English autobiography. Sort a medieval text by whether it is drama or poem, story or feeling, and biblical, chivalric or allegorical, and most questions about this period name themselves.