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A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads derive from the medieval French chanson balladée or ballade, which were originally "dance songs". Ballads were particularly characteristic of the popular poetry and song of Britain and Ireland from the Late Middle Ages until the 19th century. They were widely used across Europe, and later in Australia, North Africa, North America and South America.
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of twenty-four stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. It is widely regarded as Chaucer's magnum opus. The tales are presented as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The prize for this contest is a free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return.
Geoffrey Chaucer was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament.
Thomas Wright was an English antiquarian and writer. He is chiefly remembered as an editor of medieval texts.
James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps was an English Shakespearean scholar, antiquarian, and a collector of English nursery rhymes and fairy tales.
Poetry took numerous forms in medieval Europe, for example, lyric and epic poetry. The troubadours, trouvères, and the minnesänger are known for composing their lyric poetry about courtly love usually accompanied by an instrument.
Medieval literature is a broad subject, encompassing essentially all written works available in Europe and beyond during the Middle Ages. The literature of this time was composed of religious writings as well as secular works. Just as in modern literature, it is a complex and rich field of study, from the utterly sacred to the exuberantly profane, touching all points in-between. Works of literature are often grouped by place of origin, language, and genre.
"Barbara Allen" is a traditional folk song that is popular throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. It tells of how the eponymous character denies a dying man's love, then dies of grief soon after his untimely death.
"Hey Diddle Diddle" is an English nursery rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19478.
Thomas Crofton Croker was an Irish antiquary, best known for his Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825–1828), and who also showed considerable interest in Irish song and music.
Thomas Percy was Bishop of Dromore, County Down, Ireland. Before being made bishop, he was chaplain to George III of the United Kingdom. Percy's greatest contribution is considered to be his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), the first of the great ballad collections, which was the one work most responsible for the ballad revival in English poetry that was a significant part of the Romantic movement.
Songes and Sonettes, usually called Tottel's Miscellany, was the first printed anthology of English poetry. First published by Richard Tottel in 1557 in London, it ran to many editions in the sixteenth century.
Tail rhyme is a family of stanzaic verse forms used in poetry in French and especially English during and since the Middle Ages, and probably derived from models in medieval Latin versification.
The term Middle English literature refers to the literature written in the form of the English language known as Middle English, from the late 12th century until the 1470s. During this time the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English became widespread and the printing press regularized the language. Between the 1470s and the middle of the following century there was a transition to early Modern English. In literary terms, the characteristics of the literary works written did not change radically until the effects of the Renaissance and Reformed Christianity became more apparent in the reign of King Henry VIII. There are three main categories of Middle English literature, religious, courtly love, and Arthurian, though much of Geoffrey Chaucer's work stands outside these. Among the many religious works are those in the Katherine Group and the writings of Julian of Norwich and Richard Rolle.
The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry is a collection of ballads and popular songs collected by Bishop Thomas Percy and published in 1765.
"The Marriage of Sir Gawain" is an English Arthurian ballad, collected as Child Ballad 31. Found in the Percy Folio, it is a fragmented account of the story of Sir Gawain and the loathly lady, which has been preserved in fuller form in the medieval poem The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle. The loathly lady episode itself dates at least back to Geoffrey Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale" from The Canterbury Tales. Unlike most of the Child Ballads, but like the Arthurian "King Arthur and King Cornwall" and "The Boy and the Mantle", "The Marriage of Sir Gawain" is not a folk ballad but a song for professional minstrels.
Sammelband, or sometimes nonce-volume, is a book comprising a number of separately printed or manuscript works that are subsequently bound together.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Contact between Geoffrey Chaucer and the Italian humanists Petrarch or Boccaccio has been proposed by scholars for centuries. More recent scholarship tends to discount these earlier speculations because of lack of evidence. As Leonard Koff remarks, the story of their meeting is "a 'tydying' worthy of Chaucer himself".
References
- ↑ Lowndes, William Thomas; Bohn, Henry George (1865). "Percy Society publications". Bibliographer's Manual of English Literature. Vol. 6. pp. 59–65.
- ↑ "Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages" – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Society, Percy (4 December 1846). "Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages". Percy Society – via Google Books.
- ↑ Society, Percy (4 December 1847). "Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages: Popular songs, illustrative of the French invasions of Ireland". Percy Society – via Google Books.
- ↑ Chaucer, Geoffrey (4 December 1847). "The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Text with Illustrative Notes". Percy Society – via Google Books.
- ↑ Society, Percy (4 December 1848). "Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages: The Canterbury tales of Geoffrey Chaucer". Percy Society – via Google Books.
- ↑ "Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages". Printed for the Percy society by C. Richards. 4 December 1851 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Society, Percy (4 December 1851). "Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages: Notices of fugitive tracts, and chap-books". Percy Society – via Google Books.
