MIDDLE ENGLISH READER EDITED BY ALBERT STAN BURROUGH COOK PROFESSOR OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY ALBERT STAN BURROUGH COOK ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 315.9 The Athenæum Press PREFACE Only two questions need to be satisfactorily answered in order to insure for Middle English literature a much larger place in college courses than it has hitherto occupied. These two questions are: Is the literature of this period worth reading? and, Can it be read without a learned apparatus so formidable as to constitute a serious deterrent? The first question I have endeavored to answer in the Introduction; and to the second my affirmative reply is indicated in the whole method I have followed. This book, then, has been framed, not in the interest of grammar, or of dialectical study, or of lexicography, but of literary enjoyment and profit. It has been made somewhat copious, that those who desire only easier selections may be able to avoid the harder, that it may be possible to examine certain species and ignore others, and yet that the more comprehensive student shall have before him a fairly full conspectus of the literature as a whole. If I have not failed in my attempt, the texts included ought not to be much harder to read than if they were Elizabethan, and those who read them will be acquainting themselves with an earlier and no less important age. Authorities vary with respect to the limits of the Middle English period, the variation as to the beginning being between 1100 and 1200, and as to the end between 1400 and 1500. Some scholars, such as Sweet, call the language between 1100 and 1200 Transition Old English, and that between 1400 and 1500 Transition Middle English. In this book Middle English is assumed to cover 11001500. In two instances, works only to be found in manuscripts of later date than 1500 are assigned, on what seem to the editor sufficient grounds, to the fifteenth century. The classification here observed is according to literary species, and not according to dialect or chronology. The species of literature are, however, not so clearly delimited in Middle English as in V 295525 |