General Information about Enlighteners in the English literature

What was the Holy Grail?
In medieval legend, the Holy Grail is the cup from which Jesus Christ drank during the Last Supper before his crucifixion. The same cup was used by Joseph of Arimathea to catch drops of Christ’s blood as he hung on the cross. Joseph brought the holy relic to Britain where it was eventually concealed in a mysterious castle surrounded by a blighted landscape.
Though no historical evidence supports the existence of such a cup, legend endowed the Holy Grail with miraculous qualities of regeneration and spiritual self-realisation for the knight who found it. The mystic qualities of the vessel may be a legacy of Celtic mythology, which features magical cauldrons that provided endless amounts of food and drink. Some belonged to gods, while others were kept in enchanted lands beyond the reach of ordinary mortals.
What’s known about the history of the manuscript?
Until 1934, William Caxton’s printed edition of 1485 was thought to be the earliest surviving version of Malory’s text. That year a librarian at Winchester College, Walter Oakeshott, was organising a display of the college’s most interesting books when he discovered this manuscript in a safe. He determined that the text had been written sometime between 1471 and 1483 by two scribes working together.
Clues on its pages proved this was one of the manuscripts used by William Caxton in the preparation of his Le Morte Darthur. Pages fresh from his press had been laid on the manuscript and the wet ink accidentally transferred reversed images of Caxton’s distinctive type faces. So it’s probable that the manuscript was in Caxton’s Westminster workshop during the early 1480s.
The printer may even have borrowed the manuscript from one of Malory’s family members. Some 50 years later, a reader called Richard Followell wrote his name and a short rhyme in the margin of one page. Followell lived at Litchborough in Northamptonshire, where a branch of the Malory family was still lord of the manor.
How Winchester College acquired the manuscript is not known. It was purchased by the British Library from the Warden and Fellows of the college on 26 March 1976.
9.The code of chivalry in the Medieval literature.

Romance Literature

In the medieval period the term "romance" meant a long narrative in verse or prose telling of the adventures of a hero. These stories of adventure usually include knights, ladies in distress, kings, and villains. The material for the medieval romance in English was mainly drawn from the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. This subject matter is sometimes called the "Matter of Britain".

Central to the medieval romance was the code of chivalry, the rules and customs connected with knighthood. Originally chivalry, (from the French word "chevalier", which means "knight" or "horseman") referred to the practice of training knights for the purpose of fighting. The qualities of an ideal courtly knight in the Middle Ages were bravery, honor, courtesy, care of the weak, respect for women, generosity, and fairness to enemies. An important element in the code of chivalry was the ideal of courtly love. This concept required a knight to serve a virtuous noblewoman (often married) and perform brave deeds to prove his devotion while she remained chaste and unattainable.
The code of chivalry and the ideal of courtly love were still in evidence during the Renaissance as well. Knights and courtiers who wrote on courtly themes included the Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Sir Walter Raleigh. Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney wrote highly formalized portraits of ideal love.
Medieval romance and its attendant codes of chivalry and courtly love faded in the Age of Reason during the XVIII century, but in the nineteenth century, Romanticism brought back the ideals of chivalry.
Treatment of the romance themes of chivalry and courtly love are still the topics of literature. Historical fiction often attempts to recreate the world of the Middle Ages.
FABLES AND FABLIAUX
In urban literature fables and fabliaux were also popular. Fable is a short tale or prolonged personification with animal characters intended to convey a moral truth; it's a myth, a fiction, a falsehood. It's a short story about supernatural or extraordinary persons or incidents. Fabliaux are funny metrical short stories about cunning humbugs and the unfaithful wives of rich merchants. These tales were popular in medieval France. These stories were told in the dialects of Middle English. They were usually comic, frankly coarse and often cynical. The urban literature did not idealize characters as romances did. Fabliaux show a practical attitude to life.
In Middle English literature the hero of earlier times now became the man of romance, as love poetry began to come in, first of all from the south of France. Women began to appear more in poetry, usually as objects of desire and perfection, but later also as very human beings with feelings of their own. The literature of Europe, particularly France and Italy, began to influence English writers, and there was a clear desire to begin a purely English tradition in literature and in history. However, wars and tragedies null look place. There was still to be the Hundred Years War between France and England (1337—1453), as well as the Wars of 1 lie Roses between the royal houses of Lancaster and York for the throne of England. And in the mid thirteenth century the Black Death brought illness and death to millions of people all through the country. There were social problems, too, with the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
The first histories, by the Venerable Bede (eighth century), Nennius (ninth century) and Geoffrey of Monmouth (about 1136), 1 crated a sense of national historical and mythical identity. The name of King Arthur became important as a figure from the dark past of history, and he later became a symbol of English history for many centuries. Layamon, one of the first authors to see himself as a writer of history, put together Brut (late twelfth century), an epic history which took British history right back to classical Greek and Roman sources.
Brut brought together many themes and figures which returned in later literature, and is an important text in the history of writing in English, just at the time when English was developing as a language and a culture. The popular culture of ballads and songs grew at the same time nit the first great masterpieces of English literature were written. There was also a major text for women, but written by a man, The Ancrene Riwle or The Ancrene Wisse. It is a book of advice for women who want to join the religious life (the title means rules of wisdom for nuns). It was probably written about 1220, and is considered one of the greatest prose works in Middle English.
Norman Invasion (1066)
Battle of Hastings - the Normans (powerful Norman Frenchmen) defeated the English and started a conquest of England. Two most important effects:
French becomes official language of politics and power; thus, enormous influence on Old English.
England begins unifying under a French political system, much of which is still with us today.
10.Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the culmination of the Arthurian romances.
Like most medieval literature, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight participates in several important literary traditions that its original audience would have instantly recognized. Medieval poets were expected to re-use established source materials in their own works. Modern readers sometimes mistakenly take this as evidence of how lacking in creativity and originality the Middle Ages were. In reality, much of the interest of medieval literature comes from recognizing how one work of literature pulls against those that came before it, makes subtle changes from its sources, and invests old material with new meanings. One can read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as simply a rollicking tale of adventure and magic or, alternatively, as a lesson in moral growth. However, understanding some of the literary and cultural background that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight draws upon can provide modern readers with a fuller view of the poem's meaning.