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Notes:

1. Contrary to popular belief, the medieval period cannot be characterized as entirely barbaric. During this period, national literatures in the vernacular appeared.
2. Due to their disparate influences, literature and culture in medieval Europe were very diverse, drawing from different, often conflicting sources.
3. Composed around 850, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf speaks about the warring lifestyle of the Germanic and Scandinavian groups that conquered the Roman empire.
4. Not only does the Song of Roland set the foundation for the French literary tradition, but it also establishes the narrative about the foundation of France itself.
5. Writing in the twelfth century, Marie de France helped establish the major forms and themes of vernacular literature, especially for what we now call romances, novelistic narrative's that deal with adventure and love.
6. The thirteenth-century story Thorstein the Staff-Struck is a short example of the Icelandic saga tradition that speak's about the lives of men and women who lived in Iceland and Norway between the ninth and eleventh centuries.
7. Beginning in Provence around 1100, the love lyric spread to Sicily, Italy, France, Germany, and eventually England.
8. The Divine Comedy offers Dante's controversial political and religious beliefs within a formal and cosmological framework that evoke's the three-in-one of the Christian Trinity: God the Father; God the Son; and God the Holy Spirit.
9. Best known for his Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio was one of the many medieval writers who contributed to the revival of classical literary traditions that would come to fruition in the Italian Renaissance and later spread to other parts of Europe.
10. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight revives the "native" Anglo-Saxon tradition first seen in Beowulf that had apparently been submerged between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries following the Norman Conquest.
11. Although Chaucer's Canterbury Tales does not appear to be overtly political, it was written during a period of considerable political and religious turmoil that would eventually give rise to the Protestant Reformation.
12. Anonymously written plays such as Everyman focused on morality or were dramatic enactments of homilies and sermons.

Text:
* blue words within the text indicate important notes to remember

1. During the Middle Ages, the classical civilization of Greece and Rome was radically transformed as a consequence of contact with Germanic tribes from the north, Christians from Palestine, and Muslims from the Arabian peninsula and northern Africa. Due to such disparate cultural forces, medieval Europe was hardly unified, politically or culturally, by 500. Within the next thousand years, common ideas and values emerged such as consensual government, recognition of religious difference, and individualism. Though these ideas and values have come to be associated with "the West," they were not always practiced at home and were seldom practiced in occupied territories. Contrary to popular belief, the medieval period cannot be characterized as entirely barbaric. During this period, national literatures in the vernacular appeared. Known as "the busy millennium," the medieval period in Europe produced literature concerned with religious faith and the appropriate use of physical force. Though characters from medieval European works are often discussed as archetypal individuals who seek to understand themselves and their destinies better, many of these works borrow from culturally specific non-Western traditions. That these characters were later exported back to non-Western parts of the world as part of the colonial education system may account for their so-called universal appeal.
2. Due to their disparate influences, literature and culture in medieval Europe were very diverse, drawing from different, often conflicting sources. Cultures were literate and oral; Germanic and Latin; Arabic, Jewish, and Christian; secular and religious; tolerant and repressive; vernacular and learned; rural and urban; skeptical and pious; popular and aristocratic. The contradictions of such diverse sources make simple classifications of the Middle Ages as the "age of faith" misleading. Christianity was a means of unifying populations, often by demonizing Islam and Judaism. Song of Roland exalts Christianity over Islam; yet were it not for Islamic scholarship, much of Greek literature would have remained inaccessible or been lost to Christian scholars. Some of the stories in Marie de France's Lais and Boccaccio's Decameron transgress Christian models for moral behavior, but these works remain alert to the complexities and dilemmas that faith to any religious doctrine entails. Similarly, classification of the period as the "age of chivalry" misses much of the realities. Though chivalric ideals celebrated unwavering valor in the face of danger, loyalty to one's leader, intense concern for personal honor, and capacity to experience romantic love, most members of medieval society, especially non nobles such as churchmen, urban dwellers, and peasants, equated it with the heavy-handed imposition of force upon those least able to resist. The conflicting duties of a full-hearted lover and a loyal warrior become a central theme in works such as Song of Roland and Beowulf. Deeds of war and deeds of civilization are inextricably entwined, anticipating the almost unimaginable horrors of twentieth-century European history.
3. Composed around 850, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf speaks about the warring lifestyle of the Germanic and Scandinavian groups that conquered the Roman empire. Exploring how heroism becomes intimately connected with violence, Beowulf asks why violence is so integrally linked to the edification of societies. Emerging from an oral tradition, it has been argued that the poet of Beowulf distinguishes between his Christian present and the pagan past of pre-Christian Germanic Europe in a nonjudgmental manner. Grendel and his mother, the nemesis of the hero Beowulf, are however, also interpreted to be descendants of Cain, who was condemned by God to wander the earth for murdering his brother, Abel. It is perhaps for this reason that being a wanderer or outlaw, or being without a home is considered by Westerners to be one of the worst conditions of the human world.
4. Not only does the Song of Roland set the foundation for the French literary tradition, but it also establishes the narrative about the foundation of France itself. The Song of Roland describes the way that France abandoned its Germanic past as a loose confederation of powerful families and accepted its future as a Christian nation united by loyalties to king and country. Despite the title, it is Charles the king, later crowned Charlemagne the emperor, who is the poem's protagonist. In their battles against the Saracens, the Muslim invaders from Spain, national and supranational loyalties transcend tribal conceptions such as those by Roland's Frankish stepfather Ganelon. The poem's incitement of nationalistic impulses is dependent on an ill-informed depiction of the Saracens. They are shown as idolaters and worshipers of Muhammad and Apollo. In actuality, Islam rejects religious images, regards Muhammad as a prophet, not a god, and is monotheistic. Based on historical events, the poem was written in Anglo-Norman but composed in continental French around 1100.
5. As far as we know, Marie de France is the first woman writer in France. Writing in the twelfth century, Marie de France helped establish the major forms and themes of vernacular literature, especially for what we now call romances, novelistic narratives that deal with adventure and love. She also wrote lais, short narratives of love, adventure, and the supernatural, which, like the Arthurian legends of her romances, are of Celtic origin. She wrote in Anglo-Norman, a French dialect spoken by the nobility of postconquest England. In addition to its stylistic and formal achievement, her work conveys genuine concern for contemporary social issues, particularly the relative absence of rights for women.
6. The thirteenth-century story Thorstein the Staff-Struck is a short example of the Icelandic saga tradition that speaks about the lives of men and women who lived in Iceland and Norway between the ninth and eleventh centuries. While some stories are fictional and others are based on real historical persons, almost all of the stories of this tradition are anonymous.
7. The medieval period also saw a revival of classical poetry as performance, especially the lyric. The most common theme is love—or courtly love, as it is often called by scholars. As the term lyric implies, values were derived from noble society. Beginning in Provence around 1100, the love lyric spread to Sicily, Italy, France, Germany, and eventually England. Some lyrics were written in Latin to express religious devotion.
8. Thirty-one of Dante's early lyrics are collected in a work called the Vita nuova or New Life, as it is sometimes called in English. These poems recount his love for Beatrice, the name that the poet gave to a young woman who died in 1290. Through poetry, Dante Alighieri transcended human love and invented a new form of poetry. By writing his Divine Comedy in the vernacular rather than in Latin, he helped to make possible the various national traditions of postmedieval literature in Europe. The Divine Comedy offers Dante's controversial political and religious beliefs within a formal and cosmological framework that evokes the three-in-one of the Christian Trinity: God the Father; God the Son; and God the Holy Spirit. The Comedy itself follows a threefold pattern with three canticles: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Moreover, the Comedy is written in terza rima, a verse style that Dante created, with three lines interlocked by a repeated rhyme word—a verbal equivalent to the three-in-one of the Trinity. Though Virgil serves as Dante's guide, there are many examples of the way in which Dante marks the difference between his own Christian beliefs and Virgil's pre-Christian ones. One of the most marked features of the work is the punishment of sinners in the Inferno. Rather than being subjected to retribution that merely fits the crime, they are condemned to commit their sins for eternity, as taught by Augustine in his Confessions. The endless act of sinning becomes the punishment. As they address Dante, the sinners simultaneously reveal and conceal their moral corruption.
9. Best known for his Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio was one of the many medieval writers who contributed to the revival of classical literary traditions that would come to fruition in the Italian Renaissance and later spread to other parts of Europe. Drawn into circle of court writers around Robert of Anjou, Boccaccio wrote courtly tales of love in Italian verse as well as treatises on history, classical mythology, and geography in Latin prose. Most of his literary production deals with love and its illusions and delusions, especially faithfulness and treachery. The one hundred stories of the Decameron evoke the diversity and energy of fourteenth-century Italy. Boccaccio situates his tales of sexual misadventure within the historical context of the bubonic plague of 1348–1350. Escaping the traumas of the plague, seven young women of good families and three young men establish a sort of alternative society in an estate in Fiesole, where they amuse themselves by telling stories. In contrast to Dante's work, the greatest goal of these young people is pleasure. For Boccaccio, literature provides not only a legitimate pleasure, but a restorative one. The Decameron celebrates the pragmatic and relativist values of the merchant class from which Boccaccio derived. If one story suggests an ethical "lesson," the next will invariably contradict it. As it does now, money bought certain privileges in medieval Florence.
10. Crafted in an alliterative style by an anonymous author near Birmingham, England, circa 1380, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an atypical Arthurian romance. Centering on a single knight, the poem tells the story of a fallible hero who ultimately proves to be human and not a picture of perfect human virtue. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight revives the "native" Anglo-Saxon tradition first seen in Beowulf that had apparently been submerged between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries following the Norman Conquest.
11. Geoffrey Chaucer has often been considered the greatest English poet, and his Canterbury Tales have been a centerpiece of English literature. Chaucer's awareness of literary traditions from continental Europe, the Middle East, and Asia is apparent in the structure of the Canterbury Tales. Though the collection itself is incomplete, it incorporates tale-telling traditions from non-English traditions. Although Chaucer's Canterbury Tales does not appear to be overtly political, it was written during a period of considerable political and religious turmoil that would eventually give rise to the Protestant Reformation.
12. Drama was never a popular medieval genre but gained a certain following in the later centuries of the era. Developing from a religious tradition centered around dramatizing the resurrection of Christ, short plays were performed on Christian feast days. Anonymously written plays such as Everyman focused on morality or were dramatic enactments of homilies and sermons.