ABSTRACT
The Middle English period may be defined chronologically as the period from 1100 to 1500. Some scholars prefer to date the beginning from 1150, and, so far as literature in English is concerned, there is much to be said for this view. It is not merely because little or nothing in English has come down to us from the first half of the century and what has, such as the Old English Annals (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) carried on at Peterborough until 1154, is better thought of as a continuation of what went before, but because the changes in the Old English language, especially the wearing away of inflections, and the reflection of these changes in the orthography reach a point about 1150 which justifies our setting at this date the boundary between Old and Middle English. When we consider, however, that English literature is rightly to be thought of as the literature written in England,1 reflecting English life and thought, whether it is written in English or in French or Latin, we may with equal justice begin our present survey with the opening of the twelfth century. The adoption of 1500 as a closing date has only the convenience of a round number to recommend it. However, most of fifteenth-century literature belongs indisputably to the Middle English tradition, and those developments at the end of the century which look forward to the Renaissance of the next are not of a revolutionary character and may be considered as faint stirrings of the new spirit helping to remind us of the complexity characteristic of any period, rightly considered, of literary history.2
