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THE REVIVAL LEARNING IN LITERATURE
As kings grew more powerful, the need for officials trained in law and record-keeping increased. Initially, most royal officials in charge of those duties came from the Church. By the late 1100s however, the need for officials outside the Church to work in royal offices led to a rise in literacy. The Revival of Learning enlightenment of the human mind after the darkness of the Middle Ages. The term Renaissance, though used by many writers “to denote the whole transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world,”[106] is more correctly applied to the revival of art resulting from the discovery and imitation of classic models in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. We use the term Revival of Learning to cover the whole movement, whose essence was, according to Lamartine, that “man discovered himself and the universe,” and, according to Taine, that man, so long blinded, “had suddenly opened his eyes and seen.”

HISTORY OF THE PERIOD
=Political Changes= The century and a half following the death of Chaucer (1400-1550) is the most volcanic period of English history. Henry V led his army abroad, in the impossible attempt to gain for himself three things: a French wife, a French revenue, and the French crown itself. The battle of Agincourt was fought in 1415, and five years later, by the Treaty of Troyes, France acknowledged his right to all his outrageous demands. When Henry died in 1422, leaving his son heir to the crowns of France and England. His son, Henry VI, was the shadow of a king, a puppet in the hands of powerful nobles, who seized the power of England and turned it to self-destruction. Meanwhile, all his foreign possessions were won back by the French under the magic leadership of Joan of Arc. Cade’s Rebellion (1450) and the bloody Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) are names to show how the energy of England was violently destroying itself, like a great engine that has lost its balance wheel. The frightful reign of Richard III had marked the end of civil wars and the self-destruction of feudalism and made possible a new growth of English national sentiment under the popular Tudors. In the long reign of Henry VIII, the changes are less violent but have more purpose and significance. His age is marked by a steady increase in the national power at home and abroad, by the entrance of the Reformation “by a side door,” and by the final separation of England from all ecclesiastical bondage in Parliament’s famous Act of Supremacy. CAXTON’S PRINTING IN THE YEAR 1486 Printing was brought to England by Caxton (c. 1476), and for the first time in history, it was possible for a book or an idea to reach the whole nation. Schools and universities were established in place of the old monasteries; Greek ideas and Greek culture came to England in the Renaissance, and man’s spiritual freedom was proclaimed in the Reformation.

LITERATURE OF THE REVIVAL
The hundred and fifty years of the Revival period are singularly destitute of good literature Roger Ascham (1515-1568), a famous classical scholar, who published a book called Toxophilus (School of Shooting) in 1545, expresses in his preface, or “apology,” a very widespread dissatisfaction over the neglect of native literature when he says, “And as for ye Latin or greek tongue, everything is so excellently done in them, that none can do better: In the English tongue contrary, everything in a manner so meanly, both for the matter and handling, that no man can do worse. The fifteenth century was an age of preparation, of learning the beginnings of science, and philosophy, the suggestive mythology, and the noble poetry of the Greeks and Romans. So the mind was furnished with ideas for new literature. The two greatest books which appeared in England during this period are undoubtedly Erasmus’s[108] Praise of Folly (Encomium Moriae) and More’s Utopia, the famous “Kingdom of Nowhere.”Both were written in Latin but were speedily translated into all European languages. =Erasmus’s Praise of Folly= The Praise of Folly is like a song of victory for the New Learning, which had driven away vice, ignorance, and superstition, the three foes of humanity. It was published in 1511 after the accession of Henry VIII. Folly is represented as donning cap and bells and mounting a pulpit, where the vice and cruelty of kings, the selfishness and ignorance of the clergy, and the foolish standards of education are satirized without mercy. =Utopia= More’s Utopia, published in 1516, is a powerful and original study of social conditions, unlike anything which had ever appeared in any literature. More learn from a sailor, one of Amerigo Vespucci’s companions, of a wonderful Kingdom of Nowhere, in which all questions of labour, government, society, and religion have been easily settled by simple justice and common sense. In this Utopia we find for the first time, as the foundations of civilized society, the three great words, Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, which retained their inspiration through all the violence of the French Revolution and which are still the unrealized ideal of every free government. As he hears of this wonderful country More wonders why, after fifteen centuries of Christianity, his own land is so little civilized. Thomas More’s Utopia describes the travels of one man, Raphael Hythloday, to an undiscovered island that he considers being the best country on earth. In Book 1, Thomas More (not only the author but also the main character) arrives in Antwerp on a business trip where he runs into an old friend, Peter Giles and meets a new friend, Raphael Hythloday. Hythloday is a great traveller and has all sorts of controversial opinions, so the three of them head over to Giles’s garden to have an intense chat about whether or not it’s possible for philosophy to influence politics. Giles and More say it totally is, whereas Hythloday insists that politics and philosophy are irreconcilable. He ends by just randomly mentioning this place called Utopia. =Tyndale’s New Testament (1525)= Tyndale’s New Testament Is Greater than either of these books, in its influence upon the common people. Tyndale made his translation from the original Greek, and later translated parts of the Old Testament from the Hebrew. Much of Tyndale’s work was included in Cranmer’s Bible, known also as the Great Bible, in 1539, It was the foundation for the Authorized Version. =Wyatt and Surrey= In 1557 appeared probably the first printed collection of miscellaneous English poems, known as Tottel’s Miscellany. About half of these poems were the work of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503?-1542) and of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517?-1547). Both together wrote amorous sonnets modelled after the Italians, introducing a new verse form. Surrey is noted, not for any special worth or originality of his own poems, but rather for his translation of two books of Virgil “in the strange meter.” The strange meter was the blank verse, which had never before appeared in English. The chief literary work of these two men, therefore, is to introduce the sonnet and the blank verse, which in the hands of Shakespeare and Milton were used to make the world’s masterpieces. =Malory’s Morte d’Arthur= The greatest English work of this period, measured by its effect on subsequent literature, is undoubtedly the Morte d’Arthur, a collection of the Arthurian romances told in simple and vivid prose. Le Morte D’Arthur is the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, beginning with Arthur’s conception and birth and concluding with his death at the hands of his bastard son, Mordred (perhaps due to his choice of name?). King Uther of England falls in love with Igraine, the wife of one of his vassals. With the help of the wizard Merlin, he disguises himself as her husband and sleeps with her, conceiving a son, Arthur. Arthur is hidden away with another of Arthur’s vassals, Sir Ector until one New Year’s Day sometime after Uther’s death. Then, Arthur manages to pull a sword from a stone bearing an inscription that declares that anyone who can get that sword out becomes the King of England. Arthur’s reign begins in turmoil as an alliance of twelve northern kings, led by Arthur’s uncle King Lot of Orkney, disputes his kingship. King Lot dies, however, in a fight with Sir Pellynore, and Arthur solidifies his kingship by marrying Guinevere, who brings with her a round table with room for 150, including 100 knights. With Arthur supplying forty-nine more men and a seat left for one as-yet-unknown, the fellowship of the Round Table is born. Arthur receives a demand for tribute from Lucius, Emperor of Rome. he goes to war with him, wins, and becomes emperor of Rome. At this point, the story diverges from Arthur to focus on a few of his knights. In “A Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake,” we learn that Launcelot has great success on many quests, and frees some of Arthur’s knights from their captivity in the dungeon of an evil knight, Sir Tarquin.“Sir Gareth of Orkney” recounts the arrival in Arthur’s court one day of a mysterious young man This new guy soon proves his worth in a series of battles with a family of knights.“The First and the Secunde Boke of Syr Trystram de Lyones” tell the story of Sir Trystram, a Cornish knight whose love for the beautiful Episode gets him into trouble, since she happens to be the wife of his uncle, King Mark. Finally, the focus returns to Arthur’s court with “The Noble Tale of the Sankgreal.”Here, Arthur’s knights ride off in a search of the Holy Grail, the cup from which Jesus drank at the last supper, which possesses some seriously miraculous powers. only Galahad, Percival, and Bors – the knights who are chaste and pure, after all – are able to see it. Launcelot, the “best knight in the world” back in full form with “The Tale of Sir Launcelot and Queen Gwenyvere,” in which he successfully defends Gwenyvere against a charge of poisoning and rescues her from the evil clutches of Sir Mellyagaunce. Phew. All good things must come to an end, however, and “The Death of Arthur '' finds Launcelot and Gwenyvere’s illicit love exposed by Sirs Aggravayne and Mordred. Mordred forges letters claiming that Arthur has died, and declares himself king. Soon after his return, Arthur and Mordred kill one another in the Battle of Salisbury Plain.but some people believe Arthur is simply in another place, from which he’ll eventually return to help England in the crusades. Of Sir Thomas Malory, the author, Caxton in his introduction says that he was a knight, and completed his work in 1470, fifteen years before Caxton printed it. It was to Malory rather than to Layamon or to the early French writers that Shakespeare and his contemporaries turned for their material, and in our own age, he has supplied Tennyson and Matthew Arnold and Swinburne and Morris with the inspiration for the “Idylls of the King” and the “Death of Tristram” and the other exquisite poems.