12 Review

• Pre-Conquest Medieval Literature (aka the Old English Period)
• Post-Conquest Medieval Literature (aka the Middle English Period)
• The Renaissance
• The Restoration and Eighteenth Century

• That anonymous works must have been written by men.
• That women weren’t valued and had no opportunities beyond marriage.
• That romance was always romantic and always idealized heterosexual relationships.
• That religion was homogenous and that everybody understood God as benevolent, just, and male.
• That, except for servants and slaves, Europe was wholly white and people of color contributed nothing to its culture.

This semester we looked at two “topoi” or “commonplaces, which continue to be found in literature into the present day.  Know what each of these is, and be able to give an example or two from the literature we read:

• carpe diem!
• ubi sunt?

Be able to name the following:

• She was an anchoress who began her religious vocation after a near-death experience; in her famous visions, she compared creation to a hazelnut and referred to God as our mother.
• He was a successful black businessman of the eighteenth century, musician, composer, letter writer, family man, abolitionist.  His recipe for success?  Read voraciously, observe the world around you, and commit your observations to writing. Be humble, be compassionate, be generous, be kind.
• She was a fifteenth-century entrepreneur, wife, mother of fourteen, visionary, and world traveller. Some thought she was a saint, others denounced her as a heretic.  Archbishops thought she gave advice worth listening to.
• Forced to drop out of college because he couldn’t afford the tuition, he became a renowned essayist and lexicographer.  Despite success and celebrity, he struggled throughout his life with what we now recognize as major depression.
• This former slave earned the money to purchase his freedom. His career was mostly spent at sea, though he studied in London to be a hairstylist.  He toured through England promoting his immensely successful autobiography.  His efforts helped end Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.
• He “invented” the legend of King Arthur as we know it.  His Arthur was a kick-ass conqueror.  His Merlin was a proto engineer.  His Morgan le Faye was a ruler, mathematician, healer, and inventor.
• One of his raunchier poems compared having sex to being bitten by a flea.  He also addressed anguished sonnets to God, begging him to batter his heart and to ravish him.  No man is an island, he wrote in his most famous meditation, which concludes, “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”  Robert Openheimer claims that he was thinking of this poet when he gave the first detonation of an atomic device the code name “Trinity.”

• Marriage and cloth-making were her means to success.  Some modern critics have hailed her as a porto-feminist, yet the man she loved most was the one who cracked her ribs and made her “somewhat deaf.”
• A man of contradictions: eloquent and savvy strategist; rapist and prototypical deadbeat dad; outwardly confident, yet inwardly wracked by doubt.
• Her virtue was rewarded.  Or feigned.
• An unparalleled warrior and a peace-weaver.

• In this earliest horror story written in English, the protagonist faces three monsters.
• A prototype of the comics genre that depicted, in word and image, the Norman Conquest of 1066.
• An early example of science fiction created by an author who declared that if you don’t like the world you live in you should create the world you want!
• This engraver’s insertion of the dearly departed into family portraits is a precursor of photoshopping.