Breaks the mould of traditional approaches to the canon. This book covers both high medieval and Tudor writing, showing how the coming of the Renaissance and Reformation displaced the earlier, hospitably diverse literary culture. It continues into the mid-sixteenth century, and registers the impact of Henry VIII's cultural revolution.

From roughly 1350, where the volume starts, a wide range of literary kinds flourished, in a wide range of dialects. Many of these texts can be described as a mixed commonwealth of styles and genres, such as Langland's Piers Plowman, Gower's Confessio Amantis, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the dramatic 'mystery' cycles, and Malory's Works. In the sixteenth century this stylistic variety gave way to a literary practice that prized coherence and unity above all. Some kinds of writing, especially romance, survived. Others, such as Langland's brand of ecclesiology, the 'Aristotelian' politics of Gower and Hoccleve, and the feminine visionary mode of Julian of Norwich, became untenable. Religious cycle drama outlived the 1530s but was suppressed within the next forty years. Sixteenth-century writing, by figures such as Wyatt, Surrey, and the dramatist John Bale, emerges in this book as the product of profoundly divided writers, torn between their commitment to the new order and their awareness of its painful, often destructive strictures.

General Editor's Preface
List of Illustrations
Note on Presentation of Texts
Introduction
1. The Melancholy of John Leland and the Beginnings of English Literary History
2. The Energies of John Lydgate
3. The Tragic
4. The Elegiac
5. The Political
6. The Comic
7. Edifying the Church
8. Moving Images
9. The Biblical
10. The Dramatic
Envoi
Author Bibliographies
Suggestions for Further Reading
Works Cited
Index