NOTE ON BOOKS
For the language: Anglo-Saxon can be learned in Sweet’s Primer and Reader (Clarendon Press). Sweet’s First Middle English Primer gives extracts from the Ancren Riwle and the Ormulum, with separate grammars for the two dialects. But it is generally most convenient to learn the language of Chaucer before attempting the earlier books. Morris and Skeat’s Specimens of Early English (two volumes, Clarendon Press) range from the end of the English Chronicle (1153) to Chaucer; valuable for literary history as well as philology. The nature of the language is explained in Henry Bradley’s Making of English (Clarendon Press), and in Wyld’s Study of the Mother Tongue (Murray).
The following books should be noted: Stopford Brooke, Early English Literature (Macmillan); Schofield, English Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer (Macmillan); Jusserand, Literary History of the English People (Fisher Unwin); Chambers’ Cyclopædia of English Literature, I; Ten Brink, Early English Literature (Bell); Saintsbury, History of English Prosody, I (Macmillan); Courthope, History of English Poetry, I and II (Macmillan).
Full bibliographies are provided in the Cambridge History of English Literature.
The bearings of early French upon English poetry are illustrated in Saintsbury’s Flourishing of Romance and Rise of Allegory (Blackwood). Much of the common medieval tendencies may be learned from the earlier part of Robertson’s German Literature (Blackwood), and Gaspary’s Italian Literature, translated by Oelsner (Bell). Some topics have been already discussed by the present author in other works: Epic and Romance (Macmillan); The Dark Ages (Blackwood); Essays on Medieval Literature (Macmillan).
The history of medieval drama in England, for which there was no room in this book, is clearly given in Pollard’s Miracle Plays, Moralities and Interludes (Clarendon Press).