The Age of Revival learning

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         This Blog is an Assignment of paper no.: 105(a) History of English literature from 1350 to 1900. In this assignment I am discuss with brief overview of The age of Revival Learning.

Personal Information 

Name:- Mansi B. Gujadiya

Roll Number:-14

Enrollment Number:-4069206420220013

Batch:-M.A SEM -1 ( 2022-23 )

Email ID:- mansigajjar10131@gmail.com

Paper Number:-105(A)

Paper Code:-22396

Paper Name:- History of English literature from 1350 to 1900

Submitted to:- English department MKBU

Topic:- Brief overview of The Age of Revival Learning 

THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING (1400-1550)

Introduction 

 

             The period of 150 years after Chaucer’s death is comparatively a blank, especially in poetry. Writers started imitating Chaucer’s verse style, but lacked his genius. More focus on Classical Learning, prevented the growth of native literature.

 HISTORY OF THE PERIOD

 Political Changes.

             The century and a half following the death of Chaucer (1400-1550) is the most volcanic period of English history.

           Henry V led his army abroad, in the impossible attempt to gain for himself three things: a French wife, a French revenue, and the French crown itself.

         The battle of Agincourt was fought in 1415, and five years later, by the Treaty of Troyes, France acknowledged his right to all his outrageous demands.

         When Henry died in 1422, leaving his son heir to the crowns of France and England.  His son, Henry VI, was the shadow of a king, a puppet in the hands of powerful nobles,who seized the power of England and turned it to self-destruction. Meanwhile all his foreign possessions were won back by the French under the magic leadership of Joan of Arc.

This age has witnessed rebellions like –

Cade’s rebellion (1400 - 1450)
The War of Roses (1455 - 1485)
          

  Cade’s Rebellion:

• Uprising against policies of Henry VI
• Led by Jack Cade, an Irish man of uncertain occupation, living in Kent
• Cade’s followers mostly comprised of peasants, small land owners, men of property and even some churchmen.
• Followers of Cade objected forced labor, corrupt courts, seizure of land by nobles, heavy taxation.
• Cade and his followers defeated a royal army in Kent and entered London where they executed the land treasurer.
• The royal tropes fought the nobles to a standstill.
• In an arranged truce Cade presented a list of his demands to royal officials.
• The officials assured Cade that the demands would be met and Cade in turn handed over a list of his men so that each could receive a royal pardon.
• However, instead of meeting the demands, Henry VI demanded Cade’s arrest.
• Alexander, the new sheriff of Kent, followed Cade and caught him. There, Cade was mortally injured and he died on his way back to London.
• Though Cade died but protest against the government continued even after his death.

War of Roses

• Name given to a series of civil wars between two royal families with rival chains to the throne.
• War takes its name from the two roses that symbolised the two houses among the English aristocracy – The House of Lancastor, the red rose and The House of York, the white rose.

           Cade’s Rebellion (1450) and the bloody Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) are names to show how the energy of England was violently destroying itself, like a great engine that has lost its balance wheel.

           The frightful reign of Richard III had marked the end of civil wars and the self-destruction of feudalism, and made possible a new growth of English national sentiment under the popular Tudors.

            In the long reign of Henry VIII the changes are less violent, but have more purpose and significance. His age is marked by a steady increase in the national power at home and abroad, by the entrance of the Reformation “by a side door,” and by the final separation of England from all ecclesiastical bondage in Parliament’s famous Act of Supremacy. CAXTON’S PRINTING IN THE YEAR 1486

 

        Printing was brought to England by Caxton (c. 1476), and for the first time in history it was possible for a book or an idea to reach the whole nation.

          Schools and universities were established in place of the old monasteries; Greek ideas and Greek culture came to England in the Renaissance, and man’s spiritual freedom was proclaimed in the Reformation.

The Revival of Learning.

           The Revival of Learning enlightenment of the human mind after the darkness of the Middle Ages.

            The term Renaissance, though used by many writers “to denote the whole transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world,”[106] is more correctly applied to the revival of art resulting from the discovery and imitation of classic models in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

           We use the term Revival of Learning to cover the whole movement, whose essence was, according to Lamartine, that “man discovered himself and the universe,” and, according to Taine, that man, so long blinded, “had suddenly opened his eyes and seen.”

 LITERATURE OF THE REVIVAL

            The hundred and fifty years of the Revival period are singularly destitute of good literature. Men's minds were too much occupied with religious and political changes and with the rapid enlargement of the mental horizon to find time for that peace and leisure which are essential for literary results. Perhaps, also, the floods of newly discovered classics, which occupied scholars and the new printing presses alike, were by their very power and abundance a discouragement of native talent. 

Roger Ascham (1515-1568),

   

        A famous classical scholar, who published a book called Toxophilus (School of Shooting) in 1545, expresses in his preface, or “apology,” a very widespread dissatisfaction over the neglect of native literature when he says, “And as for ye Latin or greke tongue, every thing is so excellently done in them, that none can do better: In the Englysh tonge contrary, every thinge in a maner so meanly, both for the matter and handelynge, that no man can do worse.

           The fifteenth century was an age of preparation, of learning the beginnings of science, and philosophy, the suggestive mythology, and the noble poetry of the Greeks and Romans. So the mind was furnished with ideas for a new literature.

          The two greatest books which appeared in England during this period are undoubtedly Erasmus’s[108] Praise of Folly (Encomium Moriae) and More’s Utopia, the famous “Kingdom of Nowhere.”

           Both were written in Latin, but were speedily translated into all European languages.effect on subsequent literature, is undoubtedly the Morte d’Arthur, a collection of the Arthurian romances told in simple and vivid prose.

            Le Morte D’Arthur is the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, beginning with Arthur’s conception and birth, and concluding with his death at the hands of his bastard son, Mordred (perhaps due to his choice of name?).

             King Uther of England falls in love with Igrayne, the wife of one of his vassals. With the help of the wizard Merlin, he disguises himself as her husband and sleeps with her, conceiving a son, Arthur. Arthur is hidden away with another of Arthur’s vassals, Sir Ector, until one New Year’s Day some time after Uther’s death.

            Then, Arthur manages to pull a sword from a stone bearing an inscription that declares that anyone who can get that sword out becomes the King of England.

            Arthur’s reign begins in turmoil as an alliance of twelve northern kings, led by Arthur’s uncle King Lot of Orkeney, disputes his kingship. King Lot dies, however, in a fight with Sir Pellynore, and Arthur solidifies his kingship by marrying Gwenyvere, who brings with her a round table with room for 150, including 100 knights. With Arthur supplying forty-nine more men and a seat left for one as-yet-unknown, the fellowship of the Round Table is born.

            Arthur receives a demand for tribute from Lucius, Emperor of Rome. he goes to war with him, wins, and becomes emperor of Rome.

          At this point, the story diverges from Arthur to focus on a few of his knights.

            In “A Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake,” we learn that Launcelot has great success on many quests, and frees some of Arthur’s knights from their captivity in the dungeon of an evil knight, Sir Tarquin.

          “Sir Gareth of Orkeney” recounts the arrival in Arthur’s court one day of a mysterious young man This new guy soon proves his worth in a series of battles with a family of knights.

          “The Fyrste and the Secunde Boke of Syr Trystram de Lyones” tells the story of Sir Trystram, a Cornish knight whose love for the beautiful Isode gets him into trouble, since she happens to be the wife of his uncle, King Mark .

           Finally, the focus returns to Arthur’s court with “The Noble Tale of the Sankgreal.”

          Here, Arthur’s knights ride off in a search of the Holy Grail, the cup from which Jesus drank at the last supper, which possesses some seriously miraculous powers.only Galahad, Percyvale, and Bors – the knights who are chaste and pure, after all – are able to see it.

         Launcelot, the “best knight in the world” back in full form with “The Tale of Sir Launcelot and Quene Gwenyvere,” in which he successfully defends Gwenyvere against a charge of poisoning and rescues her from the evil clutches of Sir Mellyagaunce. Phew.

             All good things must come to an end, however, and “The Death of Arthur” finds Launcelot and Gwenyvere’s illicit love exposed by Sirs Aggravayne and Mordred.

            Mordred forges letters claiming that Arthur has died, and declares himself king. Soon after his return, Arthur and Mordred kill one another in the Battle of Salisbury Plain.but some people believe Arthur is simply in another place, from which he’ll eventually return to help England in the crusades.

          Of Sir Thomas Malory, the author, Caxton in his introduction says that he was a knight, and completed his work in 1470, fifteen years before Caxton printed it.

 

              It was to Malory rather than to Layamon or to the early French writers that Shakespeare and his contemporaries turned for their material; and in our own age he has supplied Tennyson and Matthew Arnold and Swinburne and Morris with the inspiration for the “Idylls of the King” and the “Death of Tristram” and the other exquisite poems

 Summary of the Revival of Learning Period. 

         This transition period is at first one of decline from the Age of Chaucer, and then of intellectual preparation for the Age of Elizabeth. For a century and a half after Chaucer not a single great English work appeared, and the general standard of literature was very low. There are three chief causes to account for this: 

•  the long war with France and the civil Wars of the Roses distracted attention from books and poetry, and destroyed of ruined many noble English families who had been friends and patrons of literature; 
•  the Reformation in the latter part of the period filled men's minds with religious questions; 
•  the Revival of Learning set scholars and literary men to an eager study of the classics, rather than to the creation of native literature. 

           Historically the age is noticeable for its intellectual progress, for the introduction of printing, for the discovery of America, for the beginning of the Reformation, and for the growth of political power among the common people.

Words:-1864

Image:-4

 

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