including headings Mesopotamia, India and the Vedas, Mahabharata and Ramayana, China, Twin sources, Bible and Homer, ...
including headings Dolce stil nuovo, Beatrice and the Vita Nuova, Dante, politician and exile, Divine Comedy, Petrarch and Laura, ...
including headings Nibelungenlied, German courtly poets, Meistersinger, Luther, Goethe and Schiller, ...
including headings French romance, Chanson de Roland, Troubadours and courtly love, Arthurian romance, François Villon, ...
including headings Roman comedy, Cato and Caesar, The Gallic War, Cicero, orator and correspondent, The Augustan Age, ...
including headings Twin sources, Bible and Homer, The Homeric question, Written texts of Homer, The oral tradition, Origins, ...
including headings Alliterative verse, Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain, Chaucer at court, Troilus and Criseyde, The Canterbury Tales, ...
The final flowering of Sanskrit literature takes place at the courts of the Gupta dynasty. By this time the spoken languages of India have long been evolving in their own separate directions. Sanskrit has become a litera...
The Reformation, with its emphasis on receiving the word of God in one's own language, brings great benefit to Wales. In the mid-16th there are fewer than 250,000 inhabitants of the principality, yet the Protestant gover...
The great medieval hero of Spanish epic and romance is known even in his own day as El Cid, from an Arabic phrase meaning 'the lord'. His real name is Rodrigo Diaz, and his fame derives from his brilliant successes in th...
With the renewal of interest in Greek literature in the Renaissance, Plutarch is published in Greek and Latin in Italy in the early 16th century and is subsequently translated into French (1559) and from French into Engl...
Although Greece is geographically close to Italy, and Greek literature is highly prized in ancient Rome, western Europe loses touch with its Greek intellectual roots during the centuries after the collapse of the Roman e...
The library at Alexandria aims to be a comprehensive collection of Greek literature, written on papyrus. There is a policy of seeking out texts of all available works, to be collated and edited by a team of scholars.
The shared memories of the Nordic people, first written down in Iceland literature, have been recited and sung wherever Germanic tribes have settled - including the central lands of Germany itself. In the southeast of th...
The Heian period, with the Japanese capital at Kyoto, is distinguished by literature as elegant and subtle as the style of the court itself. As in China, poetry is here considered an essential element of civilized life....
