ABSTRACT
Middle English (ME) literature the topic of this chapter encompasses a wide variety of genres and styles. It shows The Owl and the Nightingale poem, and much else written during the ME period, differs from Old English (OE) poetry is that it uses rhyme rather than alliteration as a major stylistic principle. The rhymed lines are in pairs they are couplets. Because the lines have eight syllables, the scheme is called octosyllabic couplets. But not all poetry of the time was rhyming rather than alliterative. Indeed, some of the period's best poems were part of what is known as the Alliterative Revival. Fourteenth-century English literature was dominated by the figure of Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer's book was very popular, and appeared in some eighty-three manuscripts. The best known of these is probably the illuminated Ellesmere manuscript, now in California. Many of the tales are written in ten-syllable rhyming couplets, and some of the stories are in prose.
