A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009 - 558 pages Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II TALES The Middle Ages, like every other time among all peoples, were fond of stories. Certainly, through the period were composed and circulated hosts of tales of 'popular' and secular origin and cultivation, whose broad humor made them little acceptable to the more serious clergy, commonly prevented their being committed to writing, and made unlikely their preservation when they were written down. Again, speakers and writers with a didactic purpose early seized on the short narrative for illustration and enforcement of their matters. The results are the exempla, the apologues, the fables, the pious tales, the stories of the saints, that are found scattered through the greater number of the graver works of the period. As time went by, these narratives gained more weight, were more developed, were recognized more fully for their own sake as well as for their furthering of external ends. Their value for instruction was acknowledged through extraction of them from their matrices, and utterance of them in individual form as independent units or as members of more or less extensive collections of kindred pieces compiled as cyclopaedias or source- books. It was such treatment that begot, for example, the collections of fables; the bestiaries and the lapidaries; the collections of exempla, of moralized tales, of miracles of the Virgin; and the legendaries. Finally, both pieces of the humorous and pieces of the serious type were united by narrative connection into large wholes, as in the Seven Sages, the Decameron, the Confessio Amantis, and the Canterbury Tales. Representatives of all these classes of narrative, in the various stages, are extant in Middle English. This present chapter, however, must be confined almost exclusively to discussion of tales that are preser... |
