Introduction

   To compose an encyclopedia of “medieval literature” of the world is a daunting prospect, since it involves a significant period of time (more than 1,000 years) and a remarkable number of literary traditions (European, Middle Eastern, Persian, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean—and important subcategories of each). Nevertheless, this book is intended to make general sense of that dizzying array of texts and traditions for beginning students of the era, by selecting the foremost texts and writers from each of the major traditions of Europe and Asia. While there are also African and American texts based on oral traditions that may extend back into medieval times, the written texts that we have of these compositions are modern renditions of ancient oral material, and so I have not included them here.

   Because this book is written in English for English-speaking students, I have included a greater number of entries from Old English and Middle English than from other literatures. Because English is best understood in the context of European literature, a significant number of texts and writers from French, Provençal, German, Italian, Old Norse, Celtic, Spanish, and Portuguese literature are also included, as well as the most important writers from late classical and medieval Latin literature that formed the basis of early medieval literature in Europe. The following pages also include entries concerning the major writers and texts from classical Arabic and Persian literature, as well as Indian, Chinese, and Japanese, and, to a lesser extent, from the literatures of Korea and of eastern Europe—entries that provide a worldwide context for the more familiar literature in English. For the most part, the entries included here have been suggested by popular anthologies of world literature, of Western literature, and of English literature. I have included entries from texts that are often used in introductory college or advanced high school classes, since the primary intended reading audience for this book comprises beginning students in these kinds of classes and their instructors who seek some background information. Entries concerning English literature are expanded to include any number of texts that might be taught in courses in medieval English literature or that might shed light on such texts. All entries are followed by a selected bibliography of books and, for more often-studied writers or texts, articles intended as a recommended reading list for those students who want to look further into the topic. A comprehensive bibliography of works on the medieval period in general, and on the most commonly taught writers in particular, appears at the end of the volume.

   Before delving into the very specific details of the individual entries that follow, it makes sense to consider first what we mean by the phrase “medieval literature.” The term medieval, derived from the Latin for “middle period,” was an invention of European scholars of the Renaissance, or early modern era, who conceived of themselves as returning to the superior cultural tradition of classical Greece and Rome. Their conception of the 1,000 years that had intervened between classical antiquity and their own time (between roughly 500 and 1500 C.E.) is reflected in the epithet by which they chose to label that span of time— “Middle Ages”—suggesting that the important accomplishments in literature, art, science, philosophy, and culture took place either in antiquity or in the contemporary early modern world, and that little of any consequence had taken place during that intervening millennium. Such a view ignores technological accomplishments such as the invention of the heavy compound plow, the adoption of the stirrup and the horseshoe, the expanded use of the water- and windmill, and the creation of movable type—foundational developments in the history of human civilization (Hollister 1978, 65–67). The view also ignores the monumental aesthetic achievements of the great Gothic cathedrals, as well as, on a lesser scale, the intricate miniatures of illuminated manuscripts. It ignores the primary position of Saint Augustine in Western thought, as well as the complex philosophical arguments of scholastic thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, and the invention of the scientific method by Roger Bacon in the 13th century. And of most immediate concern for purposes of this particular book, that view ignores the literary achievements of Dante (the “chief imagination of Christendom,” as he has been called), of Chaucer (the acknowledged “father of English literature”), and of such lesser-known figures as Chrétien de Troyes—apparent inventor of the courtly romance, the direct ancestor of the European novel—and the Provençal troubadours, the first poets in western Europe to write poetry in the vernacular, and the inventors of an attitude toward love (often called the “courtly love” tradition) that pervaded Western thought for centuries. Looking beyond the pejorative connotations of the term medieval, however, there is a sense in which the medieval world is in fact a “middle” period. The ancient world had established a body of texts that proved foundational for European culture, and primitive myth had given way to more sophisticated religion, while at the same time the great empire that had united much of the ancient Mediterranean was crumbling. An old world was indeed going through a transition by the fifth century. A modern world was coming into being 1,000 years later, characterized by a more secular and less universally religious outlook, a greater reliance on scientific thought, a more widespread use of the vernacular in literary and other texts, a more mercantile economy, and new and unprecedented connections between and among cultures, including Africa and the Americas, that had not existed before. Many of these trends, of course, had begun earlier, but the Middle Ages form the long transition from the ancient to the modern world.

   In this same sense, the term medieval has recently come to be used in referring to other literatures as well, so that roughly the same period can be seen in China or in India or the Middle East, for instance, when they all were moving from the ancient world and its foundational texts such as the Bible, the Confucian classics, and the Vedas into a new era from which the modern world would develop. The rise of Islam made Arabic the dominant language of the Middle East, and the Koran the new chief literary inspiration. Japanese culture began to rival that of China, and Japanese literature grew through Chinese models. More vernacular literatures rivaled Sanskrit as the literary language of India, so that regional classics were composed in Tamil, Bengali, and Kannada. There are some ways in which life in many of these areas of Europe, Asia, or North Africa was similar. Clearly the majority of people everywhere were peasants, usually working the land owned by members of a powerful aristocratic class. Monarchs generally sought support of powerful nobles and gathered the nobility around them, enabling them both to keep an eye on their most powerful vassals and to augment and display their own wealth and glory by the quality and number of their courtiers. Thus the royal courts of Europe, India, China, Japan, Iraq, and Persia were generally sites for the display of pomp and grandeur, vi Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature where courtiers might feast and obtain valuable gifts and where poets (integral members of the court) might write of the sovereign’s virtues, commemorate the martial accomplishments of the king or his vassals, and celebrate the beauties and the loves of the noble courtly women (“The Medieval Era” 2004, 1).

   Another aspect of life in medieval times through most of the world is the profound influence of religion on most aspects of everyday life. Christianity survived the fall of the Roman Empire as the one institution that still unified the parts of the defunct empire, and Christianity spread throughout all of Europe during the Middle Ages, with the Roman pope dominating western European culture in a way that transcended national boundaries. In the Middle East, Islam was born and spread rapidly from Arabia east to India and west across North Africa to Spain. Although Hinduism, in a variety of sects, remained the chief religion in India, Buddhism spread from India into China, Korea, and Japan. In those countries it rivaled the native Taoism and Confucianism of China and Shinto of Japan, and literature in these countries often reflects the blending of Buddhism with the native traditions. In Europe, the literature more often reflects clashes between older pagan and newer Christian beliefs. Clarifying and defining the dominant religion as against religions it was coming in conflict with became important to theological writers across Europe, the Middle East, and southern and eastern Asia, and this close attention to theology influenced, as well, much of the writing of poets and storytellers, so that Dante Alighieri, the greatest medieval poet of Europe, constructs in his Divine Comedy a detailed picture of the medieval Christian view of salvation and damnation,while the great Persian poet Jalaloddin Rumi writes thousands of mystical verses reflecting ascetic Islamic Sufi mysticism, and in the Bengal region of eastern India the Vaisnava saints (like Vidyāpati and Chandidāsa) were writing allegories of mythic encounters between their god Krishna and earthly women (“The Medieval Era” 2004, 4). Of course, each regional literature represented in this volume has its own unique aspects as well, and in many cases the literature of this middle period represents a pinnacle of literary achievement for that culture. The classical age of Arabic literature begins with the composition of the Koran, received, as Muslims believe, by Muhammad in the seventh century. The Arabic tribes united under Muhammad’s successors, and within 100 years took Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Libya. Under the Umayyad dynasty, the Islamic caliphate extended from parts of India across the Middle East and northern Africa into Spain to the Pyrenees. It was the largest empire the world had yet seen.

   With its new status as a world power and with Arabic as a common language, Islam soon developed a significant literary culture. The Koran itself was written in rhymed prose and provided a model for subsequent writers and poets. The life of the Prophet (Muhammad) also became an important literary subject, initiated by Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad’s first biographer. The tradition known as adab became the dominant literary style among cultured Muslims. It was an aristocratic style that stressed decorum, learning, and elegance, and used difficult meters and allusions that only the initiated would understand. Among later writers, love became an important theme, as it is in the Dove’s Neckring, an autobiographical description of the many manifestations of love by the 11th-century scholar Ibn Hazm. Poetry was also abundant, particularly in the form of the qasída, an ode that had developed a standard form by the eighth century and survived for hundreds of years, though already by the ninth century its form was being parodied by the remarkable and innovative poet Abu Nuwas. But surely the most popular and influential literary text to come out of medieval Islam is The Thousand and One Nights, a huge collection of tales from India, Persia, Egypt, Iraq, and elsewhere, framed by the famous story of Scheherazade. Scorned for centuries in the Islamic world because of its low style, the text has become a classic of world literature. A number of the best-known Islamic writers of the medieval period are philosophers, like Al- Ghazali and Averroës, whose commentaries on the philosophy of Aristotle became an important influence on scholastic thought in Europe. But with the discouragement of philosophic inquiry under the caliphs of later medieval Islam, Islamic learning and culture began to wane by the 14th and 15th centuries, though the most remarkable world traveler of the period, Ibn Battūta, published the story of his travels at this time. Islam is not the only world culture that reached its cultural apex in the medieval period. Many scholars consider the Tang (T’ang) dynasty (618–907) to be the high point of Chinese imperial culture. The first half of the period was characterized by political stability and military expansion. Governing the vast empire demanded a huge bureaucracy, which the Tang officials staffed with bureaucrats who earned their positions through civil service examinations, the most prestigious of which included the impromptu composition of a poem. With this kind of cultural emphasis on the art of poetry, every educated Tang bureaucrat was a competent poet, and incidental poems composed for everyday occasions abound in collections of Tang poetry. Thus the major Tang poets reveal a good deal of their own personalities in their poems. The best known of them also illustrate the religious diversity of Tang China: Li Bai (Li Po), the highspirited Taoist, is perhaps China’s best-known poet; his friend, Du Fu (Tu Fu), was a Confucian chiefly concerned with family and with social responsibility; and their contemporary Wang Wei, a high-ranking government official, was a devout Buddhist. Although the last half of the Tang dynasty was characterized by political instability, great Tang poets continued to compose memorable poetry, and the period remains the influential central point of Chinese culture, in painting and the other arts as well as poetry.

   Medieval Japan was culturally dominated by China until the Heian period (704–1186), when Japanese literature and culture came into its own. Still influenced by Tang China, Heian Japan was renowned for its refined court culture, where ceremony and religious ritual dominated the lives of the noble class. As in China, the accomplished Heian gentleman was expected to be able to compose poetry as well as master other art forms (such as music, painting, and calligraphy), and to conduct himself according to refined, proper forms of etiquette, a code of behavior (called miyabi) not unlike the expectations of courtesy in European courts of the time. Buddhism, which influenced the Heian aesthetic sensibility (called aware) concerning the transient beauty of the world, was imported from China and modified by native Shinto beliefs. During this period, the Japanese cultivated simplicity and brevity as aesthetic principles and created the short 31-syllable verse form called the tanka, which in modern times developed into the haiku. Imperial collections of poetry, most notably the Kokinshū, were begun during this period, and Japan’s greatest writers were also active:Murasaki Shikibu, author of Japan’s most acclaimed work, The Tale of Genji, wrote in the early 11th century, as did Sei Shōnagon, whose Pillow Book established a new kind of autobiographical prose text. Both of these classical writers were women, an unusual aspect of Japanese literature attributable to the fact that Japanese men of the time wrote in the “official” language of Chinese, leaving women to develop literature in the vernacular.

   The subsequent periods of Japanese culture saw the rise of the samurai class that replaced the Heian court, creating a society of noble warriors not unlike the chivalric knights of medieval Europe. The classic Tale of the Heike dates from this period. The final centuries of the medieval period in Japan saw the rise of Nō theater under its most important artist, Zeami. These are still considered classical achievements in Japanese literature, but none matches the cherished accomplishments of the Heian era.

   The literature of India during the middle period reflects a quite different cultural situation. Though the northern part of the Indian subcontinent was united briefly under the Gupta Empire early in the period, that unity fell apart in the sixth century, and South Asia returned to a collection of independent regional kingdoms that fostered enormous cultural diversity. In this India was somewhat like Europe at the time, and like Europe, the subcontinent had a single traditional common language, Sanskrit, but a large number of vernacular languages that began developing their own literary traditions during this middle period. Sanskrit was, of course, the traditional language of Hinduism, which was the religion of the vast majority of Indians, despite competition from Buddhism and Islam (which had reached India by the eighth century). But the use of Sanskrit was not limited to religious texts: Sanskrit literature from the second to the 16th century includes every literary genre known at the time. The fourth-century Brahman Kālidāsa is generally recognized as India’s greatest dramatist, and most important Sanskrit poet.

   But essentially Sanskrit, like Latin in Europe, seems not to have been used in everyday situations, and regional vernaculars became increasingly important for literary expression. Tamil, the language of southernmost India, was the first to develop a vernacular literature. Mystical lyric poetry in the bhakti (or “devotional”) tradition was first produced among Tamil poet-saints devoted to the worship of ´Siva, such as Campantar, Appar, and Cuntarar. The greatest Tamil poet, however, is generally conceded to be Kampan, who translated the Sanskrit Ramayana into Tamil verse in the 12th century.

   Regional devotionalism was spurred in part by the influx of Muslim Turks into India in the 12th century, fleeing from the conquests of Central Asia by Genghis Khan. Many of these Muslim refugees were highly educated and formed an elite class that ultimately assumed power in India, establishing the Delhi Sultanate in 1206. Their religion had a strong appeal among the lower castes of Hindu society, since Islam was a classless religion. The bhakti movement, which emphasized personal devotion to the Hindu gods (partly inspired by Sufi mysticism in Islam), spread rapidly among the Indian people as a reaction to the appeal of Islam. In the 11th century, in the southern region of Karnataka, devotees of ´ Siva (most important, Basavanna and Mahādēviyakka) began writing distinctive poems in the Kannada language. Later, in the 14th and 15th centuries, poets in Bengali dialects of eastern India (notably Vidyāpati and Govindadāsa) were writing devotional songs to Krishna, incarnation of the god Vishnu. The rich variety of Indian literatures is one of the remarkable delights of the middle period.

   In Europe, as well, variety is the chief characteristic of the literature. The medieval literature of Europe is most immediately influenced by the Latin classics of late Roman civilization, by the Christian tradition, and by the pagan Germanic tradition of the northern tribes of Europe early in this period. To some degree, Islamic and Jewish traditions, radiating chiefly from multicultural medieval Spain, exerted some influence on European literature as well. From the beginning, Latin was the primary medium of literacy, and the theological works of such church fathers as Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine dominated the early centuries of medieval Europe. Latin remained a language for theological and philosophical texts, but in the north and west of Europe, vernacular languages were becoming more common as literary vehicles. Old English literature became the first major vernacular tradition in Europe, best known for its treatment of earlier Germanic heroic themes in poems like Beowulf, but just as characteristically producing Christian texts like The Dream of the Rood, a poetic vision of the crucifixion of Christ. This old heroic tradition can be seen influencing later medieval productions such as the French Song of Roland, the German Nibelungenlied, and all of the literary sagas in Old Norse. More influential throughout Europe was the development of the vernacular poetic tradition of southern France, or Provençal. Here, poets like Bernart de Ventadorn and Guillaume IX, duke of Aquitaine, developed the poetry of courtly love, perhaps influenced in part by the Arabic poetry of Spain. The courtly love tradition, extolling the virtues of sensual love as the highest pleasure of the physical world and the greatest inducement to noble behavior, spread quickly to northern France, to Spain, Italy, Germany, and England. In northern France, the tradition spawned Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s highly influential and complex 13th-century love allegory called the Roman de la Rose. In addition, courtly love became associated with the chivalric romance, a new literary genre popularized by Chrétien de Troyes in which he recast old Celtic legends of King Arthur. The Arthurian legends spread throughout Europe as well, significantly to Germany, where poets like Wolfram von Eschenbach and Gottfried von Strassburg composed much-admired romances, and where poets like Walther von der Vogelweide set the standard for lyric love poetry in German.

   In Italy, lyric poetry in the courtly tradition became popular in the early 13th century, and from this beginning rose Dante Alighieri, the greatest writer of medieval Europe. Dante’s enormously influential Divine Comedy, written in the early 14th century, demonstrated that a great work of moral, philosophical, theological, political, and literary significance could be written in the Italian vernacular, and his two disciples of the following generation, Boccaccio and Petrarch (often called the first “humanist”), form with Dante the acknowledged high point of Italian literature. It was this group of Italian writers (in particular Boccaccio) that influenced the most important English writer of the later Middle Ages, Geoffrey Chaucer. Inspired in the late 14th century to write in his own Middle English vernacular, Chaucer produced such works as the tragic chivalric romance Troilus and Criseyde and the comic collection of tales in virtually every late medieval literary genre, The Canterbury Tales, demonstrating the narrative possibilities for the English language and earning him the title of “father of English literature.” Thus each of the major traditions of the middle period has its own unique aspects. But one of the remarkable developments of the medieval period was the increasing contact between world cultures. In Spain Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived together, while in India Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists coexisted in a multicultural environment. Viking adventurers from northern Europe traveled through Russia, into Muslim lands of the Mediterranean, and across the Atlantic, making the first European contact with the New World. The Crusades brought western Europeans into contact with Turks and Arabs of the Middle East. From northern Africa Ibn Battūta traveled through dozens of countries, farther than anyone in history had traveled before, and wrote of his wanderings, while Marco Polo visited China and described the lands of the East to an isolated European population. Ultimately Polo’s Venice and the ancient Byzantine capital of Constantinople became major trading centers, and a “silk road” was established across Asia to China. By the end of the middle period, Portuguese sailors had explored the coast of Africa and found a sea route to East Asia, while the Spanish had found a route to the New World.

   This interconnection of all the world’s people is one of the general characteristics of what we might call the modern world—along with an economic system based on trade and capitalism, a reduction of the influence of religion in secular affairs, and a new developing middle class that challenged older notions of class and social stability. Every one of these characteristics has its roots in later medieval developments. The world as it is today grows directly from the medieval period, a lively, varied, eventful era that produced some of the world’s greatest artistic achievements, particularly in the area of literature. The following pages explore many of the details of those varied and exciting literatures.