English 205:
Major Periods
And Issues

Medieval Lyrics to Milton

Autumn 2002
Taught by Micha Grudin and Meg Roland

For hundreds of years, poetry was the primary form in which writers expressed themselves. Legends, the role of women, kingship, love, death, life, God--all of these issues were addressed in the form of poetry or poetic drama. If it wasn't written in verse, it was hardly considered literary. In the 1400's, we might say with Thomas Malory, this began to slowly change and, over the next centuries, the prose essay as well as the novel began to emerge as vital literary forms in English. This term we will study a variety of English poetic and prose works from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries.

• English 205 Course Description
• Norton Anthology Online Topics
• Professor Kurt Fosso's English 205 Bookshelf
• Glosary of Poetic Terms
• Another Glossary of Poetic Terms
• Oxford English Dictionary
• Lewis and Clark College Writing Center

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Chaucer Resources:

• Chaucer MetaPage--audio Canterbury Tales!
• Prof. Larry Benson's Teach Yourself Chaucer Page (Harvard Univ)
• New Chaucer Society

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Listening to Sonnets:

• Thomas Wyatt's "My Galley" (audio)
• Sonnet Central Listening Room
• Shakespeare's sonnets read by the classic Sir John Gielgud--feel the power!
• Shakespeare's Sonnets

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Manuscripts and Maps

• Ellesmere Manuscript; Wife of Bath portrait
• Ranulf Higden's World Map, from the Polychronicon, 1350.
• First page of the Winchester manuscript version of Le Morte Darthur.
• A page from Caxton's printed edition of Le Morte Darthur.
• Ulm Edition, 1486, of Ptolemy's Geographia.
• A manuscript thought to be in the hand Thomas Wyatt (forthcoming)

This page was created by Meg Roland,
Visiting Professor of English, Lewis and Clark College.

Last updated on September 1, 2002.