Letteratura inglese

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Data:	13.02.2001
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In 55 b.C. Cesars’s legions crossed the Channel and started the colonisation of the Island.
The roman conquest of Britain was completed under the Emperor Claudius.
To defend their possessions in Britain the Romans built a huge wall called Hadrian’s Wall.
The roman presence can be traced in the foundation of major cities: Londinium, Manchester, Winchester.
The Britons
The Romans gave the name Britannia to their new province on the name of its original inhabitans, the Britons.
Pre-Celtic People in Britain had built a civilisation of which the best known monument is Stonemenge.
The celtic tribes adapted themselves in roman civilisation and became christians after the conversion of the Emperor Costantine.
The earliest british written records are a few inscriptions from pre-roman times known as runes.
The roman presence in Britain protected it against saxons pirates but after the withdrawal of the Romans, northern tribes invaded Britain and settled there.
The Angles, Saxons and Jutes came down on Britain from northern Germany and Jutland on the authority of a statemont by the venerable Bede the first historian of the English church and people. The Britons initially fought against the Anglo Saxons, then they retreated to the inner parts of Wales. Their fight producted stories around a legendary leader called King Arthur.
The germanic element
The new invaders all shared a common germanic heritage. They believed in independence rather then grouping into bigger confederations and this explains why for centuries England was divided between several different kingdoms. The kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex did rise to a dominant position

The warlike ideal implied that the king had to do all the things that were essential to that society better than anyone else. He had to be loyalty, brave, generous and warrior. He had to be willing to risk his life as often as was needed because it was considered the supreme honour.

The rules had to prove themselves better the common people, especially in battle . It was also a male dominated society. Germanic society was totally ruled by men.

A king’s glorious life had to be sung by a poet or bard, to be remembered and make an impact on future generations.
The poetic genre for the depiction of eroic lives and deeds was the epic.

The Vikings entered in the country after the anglo-saxons invasion. When they were later defeated by king Alfred the great they ritired to the North and East Midlands.

Christianity was an element of stability for the country and the effects on british culture were very important.
The new religion already present in some parts of the island had an enormous effect on cultural life in general and on literature.
The conversion to Christianity implied familiarity with the written word, the Bible.
This obviously contrasted with the mainly oral culture of the Anglo-Saxons.
The old English language
The history of the language spoken and written in England is divided into three periods: Old English from the time of the first invasion of the northern tribes in Norman in 1066. Middle English from 1066 to the end of the fifteenth century and Modern English.

Old English was a throughly Germanic language and contained few Latinate words.

The Latin alphabet was first introduced into England by Irish missionaries.
Runes were letters of an old alphabet used in northern Europe by German and Scandinavian
tribes:

Anglo Saxon Literature
Venerable Bede at the beginning of the eighth century wrote that Britain was divided into four people: English, Welsh, Picts and Scots. They had one faith and one language in common: Christianity and Latin. Christianity had brought to England the idea of a written literature was in Latin.
In the Middle Age cultivated people wrote and spoke Latin because it was the second language.
Most important poets and historians were: st. Aldhelm from Wessex , Venerable Bede and Alcuin .

Oral Literature
In the seventh century there already existed in England the scribes , persons who knew the art of making fair copies of a text.
The earliest monuments of literary England were: heroic pagan poems such as Beowulf. Many of these poems were not written but orally recited for perhaps two or more centuries before they were recorded on paper. These poems were sung by epic singers or bards.
They accompanied themselves on the arps.

Alliteration is the ripetition of the same initial consonant sound in different words within a singol line.
The kenning is a highly formalised compound metaphor.
Riddles were short descriptions of familiar objects in as impenetrable and difficult a language as possible.

Pagan poetry
Pagan poems relate the deeds of the great warrior kings of pre-Christian England
In the Germanic society described in Beowulf the most important qualities are courage and loyalty.

Beowulf
Beowulf was written in old English and it’s the first anglo-saxon poem.

The poem relates the deeds of Beowulf, nephew to the King of Geats, how he went to the aid of the king of Denmark whose Royal Palace haunted by the monster Grendel and killed the monster and its mother.

The Norman conquest and after
Duke William of Normandy conquered England after the battle of Hastings. William I the Conqueror proved introducing into England the norman organisation of the state, which was in fact a fedual system, it consisted in a centralised state.
The king had absolute power . The barons were nobilites aristocratic or big landers. The knights received their land from the barons and in exchange for it pledged to follow them to war or in military expedition. The peasants, walked the land and were bound to their feudal lord.

England was now for the first time united kingdom. Henry II introduced a new system by which the barons could pay the ministry of finance a sum of money in order to be relieved from having to lend their knights to the king for military service.

Under Henry II there also came the first great clash between the crown and the church in England. Henry emanated the Constitution of Clarendon that estabilished a new procedure: clerks or clergymen , who previously could only be tried by the bishop’s court, now had to be tried by the king’s court first, which therefore took precedence.
Thomas Becket was the Archbishop of Canterbury and was sent to exile in France for seven years because he wanted judicate the Constitution of Clarendon.
On his return to England four of the king’s knights murdered him in Canterbury Cathedral. He was made a martyr and saint by the Roman Church.

Richard I better known as the lion heart and celebrated as a legendary figure for his courage and personal charme was often abroad because he took care about his possession in France.

Magna Charta
King John forced to grant the Magna Charta. Common People couldn’t stand to pay so many taxes, so they revolted against the king and he was forced to make the Magna Charta.
The Magna Charta can be best understood as a democratic body of laws within an aristocratic social system.

The foundation of modern Parliament
Under the reign of Henry III two members from each borough were sent to the Parliament. This was the beginning of the future House of Commons. Under Edward I is generally referred to as the Modern Parliament, to indicate it was a model for the future modern Parliament.

England advocated of their possessions in France. War with France broke out when Edward III claimed the vacant throne of France as, through his mother, he was the grandson of the France king Philip the Fair. Economic factor played a major role in a war . called the Hundred Years’ War.
The conflict was often interrupted by other tragic event as Black Death which swept through all western Europe and in England.
Under the reign of the English king Henry VI the French obtained victories thanks to Joan of Arc .
John Wycliffe attacked the supremacy of the Pope, the worship of relics and the habit of paying for masses. He was the first to translate parts of the Bible from Latin into English.
The Lollards attacked corruption in the Church, asked for social reform but were persecuted and many of them put to death.
Another form of popular revolt was caused by the Poll Tax, a new form of taxation that asked 15 shillings forever male in the family over fifteen..
The War of the Roses was fought between the two noble houses of York (white rose) and Lancaster. (red rose). The war was won by Henry Tudor, of the Lancaster party, who defeated Richard III. The Yorkish king, and became Henry VII of England.

A multilingual Nation
The sudden Norman takeover had important consequences for English culture. Old English was spoken by the common people but literary level was put aside in favour of French that became the language of Government and the law and of Latin which continued to be the language of the Church and of culture.
When works written in English were again produced in aristocratic circles they exemplified completely new forms and genres, of French and Italian influence, and were written in a completely new, Latinate, language: Middle English. The works of Geoffrey Chaucer are an example of these new tendencies.

The French Influence
France dominated every aspect of medieval cultural life. French influence is not a peculiar aspect of conquered England, but a general characteristic of medieval Europe. The great Arthurian romances and the later prose romances dominated English production in this genre.
The new poetry used the form of a dream or vision to present an allegorical or symbolical world in which psycological aspects of the esperience of love could be discussed.

A book revolution seems to have occurred in Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. There was no technological revolution comparable to the invention of printing in the fifteenth century but ad enormous increase in the demand for books and written materials of all kinds.

Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer was the first important writer. He was born in a middle-class family .. His father, a wine merchant in London, sent him to be a page in the household of Prince Lionel, the third son of reigning King Edward III.
He became Justice of the Peace and the Knight of the Shire for Kent.
We know about Chaucer’s life not because he was a great poet but because he was an ble government servant.
Chaucer’s production id traditionally divided into three phases: French, Italian and English.
His most important works are:
The Roman de la Rose – The Book of the Duchess that was written in honor for this lady, John Gaunt’s first wife. – Boethius – Troilus and Criseyde – the Canterbury Tales, a collection of tales, covering most medieval literary genre, allegedly told by a group of pilgrims travelling together to Canterbury.