Recent studies have demonstrated the existence in fifteenth and even fourteenth-century England of “bookshops” to which scriveners, limners, and perhaps members of the bookbinders' craft were attached in a sort of lay scriptorium for the purpose of producing books as they were ordered by patrons. Out of such shops, located, it would seem, principally in London, rather than out of monastic scriptoria, came the bulk of English secular literature. Many of the MSS. of the Canterbury Tales are authoritatively said to be “shop-made,” and the same claim is made about the mid-fourteenth-century Auchinleck MS. Mrs. Loomis, moreover, argues convincingly that the shops of the early stationers sometimes included translator-versifiers whose routine task it was to turn French prose romances into English verse, generally into highly conventional and pedestrian couplets.

It is now generally agreed that the prose History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, commonly referred to as the English Faust Book, is the source from which is derived Christopher Marlowe's Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Yet, though the main flow of Marlowe's story stems from this source, the total impression left by play and history is very different. There is great poetry to account in part for the difference. There are bursts of eloquence in the magnificent speeches on hell, on the desire for knowledge and power as great as the mind of man may conceive, on the compulsion of Helen's beauty. But these are not enough to account for the grip of the play on all who have known it through the centuries, for the overwhelming sense of the vital importance of what happens in the soul of Faustus, for the terror and pity and awe which the events on the stage produce in the mind of even the most skeptical in the audience.

During the wedding feast in Heinrich Wittenwiler's Ring* one of the peasants notices how quickly the food is disappearing; so

Er wolt eim fresser legen ab
Und sprach: “Her Guggoch ist ein man,
Der selber lieder tichten chan
Von Dietreichen dem Perner.“

Tricked by the flattery, Guggoch sings a popular song about the great Gothic emperor while the others greedily devour the food. The purpose of this essay is to explain why Wittenwiler chose this particular song for his peasant bard.

Attempts to establish just grounds for war are as old as civilization itself. The seriousness of the attempts, however, and the nature of the difficulties which men encountered in making their formulations have varied from age to age, in accordance with prevailing assumptions and values. The problem of rationalizing war or integrating it into the social-intellectual structure undoubtedly became most acute with the triumph of Christianity, which was committed to peace but lacked the means of abolishing war. Early Christian thinkers were much occupied with the problem of determining under what conditions good Christians might engage in war and, notwithstanding the paucity of the results, there has hardly been any relaxation of the effort in medieval or modern times.

The fifth book of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival tells the story of Parzival's visit to the Grail Castle, where he beholds the Grail and its attendant mysteries and fails to ask the question which would have restored the stricken king to health and made Parzival the guardian of the most sacred and precious object this side of Paradise. Parzival's reception by the King is preceded by an episode of twenty-two lines that, taken at face value, is entirely out of keeping with the atmosphere of the situation about to be witnessed and with the interpretation of its elements in a much later part of the story. Not only every modern reader feels it to be off key, but the scribe of one of the manuscipts—G—also presumably found it offensive in its context and left it out. The episode runs as follows:

Parzival has been courteously received by the Fisher-King's domestics. He has been disarmed and allowed to wash, his beauty has been admired, he has been given a costly mantle to wear, and he has been complimented on his knightly bearing. At that moment a messenger enters and with peremptory gestures and a voice shaking as though with anger summons the guest to appear before his master. Parzival suspects foul play: his sword is not in sight. He clenches his fist so that the blood spurts from under his nails. The attendants forestall an act of violence by explaining: Sir, this man is a privileged prankster, for all that we are sad. Pray, restrain yourself and don't be angry. He only meant to announce that the Fisher is ready to receive you. Parzival is then conducted into the great hall.

The recognition of levels of discourse in Chaucer's writings is no new thing, but it has hitherto been associated more often with aesthetic appreciation than with linguistic analysis. We have been aware that Chaucer was a great master in the adaptation of subject matter to style. We have observed how skilfully he was able to modify figures of speech, rhythms, and choice of words—in short, the rhetorical elements of his discourse—to its content, whether exalted or moderate or lowly (grandis, mediocris, humilis), according to the well-known medieval doctrines of composition. He himself spoke more than once of the requirements for such adaptation in matters of vocabulary “the wordes moote be cosyn to the dede” (CT A 742; cf. H 208), and burel folk in literature should accordingly use earthy terms, while clergy and aristocrats employ different words appropriate to their stations. But he does not specifically mention other matters of language which also serve to mark off, not only the various social levels, but the different types of situation which affect the structure of speech by one and the same person. The handling of sentence structure and syntax may also be shown to manifest a fine correlation with the demands of literary form and intention in Chaucer's work.

It has been generally agreed that there are glaring faults in Chaucer's elegy for Blanche and that, in spite of occasional beauties, the 'prentice hand is but too apparent. Critics have found the poem tedious, disconnected, and ill-proportioned, languid in its beginning and abrupt in its conclusion, frequently lapsing in taste and in meter, deficient both in humor and in self-fulfilment. Coulton's verdict—“obviously immature and unequal, but full of delightful passages”—would seem, judging by the printed comment, to be that of most sympathetic readers; though many have emphasized the negative rather than the positive half of the judgment. Because I believe that much of the disparagement has arisen from misunderstanding, I invite reconsideration of a work of art that has been rated a good deal lower than it deserves. It may be that characteristic values inherent in the more archaic of Chaucer's writings will reassert themselves in the course of our scrutiny. There have been signs latterly that a truer appreciation is in the making, as in the comments of Wolfgang Clemen and James R. Kreuzer, and to this impulse I wish to add what force I may. Generally, however, the older critical impatience yet prevails.

The exact dates for the majority of the writings of John Lydgate have not been ascertained. Occasionally Lydgate tells specifically when he composed a poem by inserting into it a statement concerning the time of composition which makes the dating somewhat obvious; other poems have been dated according to style and versification, age of manuscripts, and topical allusions to historical events. The present paper discusses the dating of four of Lydgate's works—Temple of Glas, Troy Book, Siege of Thebes, and The Title and Pedigree of Henry VI—by means of the astronomical allusions in these poems.

[Elements as they are added one by one to form a sentence progressively limit the semantic range of all that has preceded. This causes beginning elements to have a wider semantic range than elements toward the end. The concept of linear modification thus developed knits together a number of otherwise heterogeneous manifestations of sentence order in English, and provides a plausible theory of adjective position.]

The linear geometry of the sentence imposes certain relationships upon the elements that compose it. These relationships are conveniently expressed as dichotomies. Two dichotomies are, figuratively, spatial: they are contiguous versus separate (A is next to B or is distant from B) and within versus without (A is contained within B or is outside B). Two dichotomies are temporal : first versus last and before versus after. While it does not follow that any of these pairs necessarily has linguistic importance, given their location at the very foundation of sentence structure it would be strange if they had not been seized upon for some use in communication. I think it can be shown that all of them have, probably in all languages, though I am concerned here only with the last two, the temporal dichotomies, and even with these, only in two languages.

There is a persistent Welsh tradition, going back to very early times, that there were poets in the sixth century, among whom [A]neirin et Taliessin “in poemate brittannico claruerunt.” To these poets Welsh scholarship has given the name of Cynfeirdd or “Primitive Poets.” Recent research has done much to establish the fact that some of the poems credited to them are genuine productions of the early seventh century, and others, including those centering around the name of Llywarch the Old (Hên), belong to the mid ninth century. There are, however, sceptics who refuse to admit the existence of native poetry at such an early date, and hold that all the poems (except two short ones that were actually written down in the ninth and tenth centuries), belong to a period after the Norman Conquest.

Despite its deceptively simple theme—a farmer's son wants to become a knight but comes to a grievous end and is hanged—the Middle High German poem known to us as the Meier Helmbrecht by Wernher the Gardener is not easily integrated as to its literary genre among the literature contemporary with it—probably the sixth or seventh decade of the thirteenth century.