RELIGIOUS LITERATURE. We may virtually divide all the literature of the
period, roughly, into (1) Religious and (2) Secular. But it must be
observed that religious writings were far more important as literature
during the Middle Ages than in more recent times, and the separation
between religious and secular less distinct than at present. The forms of
the religious literature were largely the same as in the previous period.
There were songs, many of them addressed to the Virgin, some not only
beautiful in their sincere and tender devotion, speaking for the finer
spirits in an age of crudeness and violence, but occasionally beautiful as
poetry. There were paraphrases of many parts of the Bible, lives of saints,
in both verse and prose, and various other miscellaneous work. Perhaps
worthy of special mention among single productions is the 'Cursor Mundi'
(Surveyor of the World), an early fourteenth century poem of twenty-four
thousand lines ('Paradise Lost' has less than eleven thousand), relating
universal history from the beginning, on the basis of the Biblical
narrative. Most important of all for their promise of the future, there
were the germs of the modern drama in the form of the Church plays; but to
these we shall give special attention in a later chapter.
SECULAR LITERATURE. In secular literature the variety was greater than in
religious. We may begin by transcribing one or two of the songs, which,
though not as numerous then as in some later periods, show that the great
tradition of English secular lyric poetry reaches back from our own time to
that of the Anglo-Saxons without a break.
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