THE MIDDLE AGES

• Cultural cades

• religion

• Literary forms: ballad, poems (G. Chouser)

• Litterature: mainly oral

• Kind of line: mainly alliterative rhyme

• Topics: religions and popular --> people were mainly illitterate

• Poetic features: based mainly on memory /repetition, incremental repetition, refrain, alliterative lines, assonance, consonance, rhythm
  

Books were very expensive in medieval Europe, and so there weren't very many of them. Each book had to be written by hand by a trained scribe (often a monk), and that took a long time. People who had books took very good care of them.

But even though books were so hard to produce, and most people couldn't read, there were still a lot of people writing books.
All of these books (except the Koran) were written in Latin, but in England, the epic poem Beowulf was written in Anglo-Saxon.

People gradually began to write more in languages that people still spoke instead of in Latin, and that made it easier for people to learn to read their work.
Then in the Late Middle Ages, in England, Chaucer wrote a series of great stories in English.

Geoffrey Chaucer was born about 1343 AD, probably in London, England, during the Hundred Years' War. The plague struck England when Chaucer was about five years old, but he and his family survived.

When Chaucer was about fourteen, he left home and became a page (a sort of servant). This was pretty normal in the Middle Ages, it was kind of like going to boarding school is for us.

When he grew up, Chaucer worked in the government, helping out various different rich men and kings. Even though Chaucer had a busy life working for the King as a customs official and various other jobs, he found time to write a lot of stories too. The first thing he wrote that we know about is the Book of the Duchess, which he wrote when he was about thirty years old. But the most famous stories Chaucer wrote are the Canterbury Tales.

The idea of the Canterbury Tales is that a group of people are traveling together to Canterbury on a pilgrimage to pray at the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket.

The Medieval Ballad

The Form
The distinctive quality of the ballads is certainly their spareness. The simplicity of language and syntax goes hand in hand with the extreme economy of expression. This stylistic choice finds its reason in the audience for which the ballads were intended: they were generally recited, or more frequently sung, by ministrels ( that is to say semi-prefessional performers ) in towns and villages or in hospitable castles. The ministrels could accompany themselves with a musical instrument, and the melodies set for the ballads were simple and haunting , occasionally accompanied by a dance. This setting obviously required an absolute simplicity in the form of the ballads: they had to be immediately understood by listeners, not readers. They use a simple vocabulary and maintain this simplicity even in the content: there are few objects and dramatic scenes in the ballads. They deal only with the culminating incident of the story,describe that event with intense compression, and avoid any comment. The imagery is simple and direct.

The types of ballad:

• Ballad of magic, about fairies, ghosts, witchcraft and transformation

• Border ballad

• Ballad of love and domestic tragedy

• Ballad of outlaws, for example Robin Hood
  
  

Ballad present the narrative not as a sequence of events, but as a series of rapid flashes. 

Language
The language is simple and often each stanza contains the repetition words or lines, for help the memorization of the text. The repetition of more lines was called refrain. 
The ballad universe was peopled with speaking animals, birds, fairies and witch. These characters are magic with supernatural power.