of German creative artists. Similarly the story told by Malory has inspired many English writers. Spenser's "Faerie Queen" owes much to it, and although we have no evidence that Shakespeare even read it, we know that Milton was contemplating an Arthurian epic in 1639. Tennyson, in "The Idylls of the King," Swinburne, in "Tristram of Lyonesse," Morris, in "The Defence of Guenevere" and several other poems, and Matthew Arnold in "Tristram and Iseult," were all moved to write great poetry by Le Morte d'Arthur, while Mr. Maurice Hewlett has drawn on it for his contemporary romances. An Anomaly 89 FRANÇOIS VILLON, POET AND THIEF The literary history of the Middle Ages finishes with François Villon, the unlucky French poet-thief, who was born in 1431. He was a robber and a murderer, his life was spent in the vile Alsatias of Paris, he was frequently imprisoned, only escaping execution as if by a miracle, and at the end he vanished from the scene no one knows how or where. The date of his death is unrecorded, the place of his burial unknown. Villon took the old French poetic forms, the Rondeau, the Rondel, and the Ballade, and gave them new life and new beauty. His verse is instinct with melancholy. He mocks at life, he boasts of his sins, but he writes all the time in the shadow of the gallows, and fear of the horror of death never leaves him. He seems to epitomise the pain and fear of the Middle Ages as Dante epitomises their grandeur and their ideals, and Chaucer their happy laughter. Villon lives for us in Swinburne's beautiful poem: Prince of sweet songs made out of tears and fire, A harlot was thy nurse, a God thy sire; Shame soiled thy song, and song assoiled thy shame Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name. BIBLIOGRAPHY W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages, and F. J. Snell, The Fourteenth Century. St. Augustine's Confessions (Pusey's translation). The Lay of the Nibelungs, metrically translated by Alice Horton and edited by Edward Bell. To this is prefixed The Essay on the Nibelungen Lied, by Thomas Carlyle. H. J. Chaytor's The Troubadours. Paget Toynbee's Dante Alighieri. Petrarch's Sonnets, Triumphs, and other Poems. Forty Novels from the Decameron, with Introduction by Henry Morley. Malory's Morte d'Arthur. H. de Vere Stacpoole's François Villon, his Life and Times. Political Theory of the Middle Ages by Dr. Otto Gierke, trans. with Introduction by F. W. Maitland. Adamnani, Vita S. Columbae, edited by J. T. Fowler with Translation. THE RENAISSANCE § 1 THE NEW LEARNING The Causes of the Awakening R ENAISSANCE means rebirth. The epoch of European history that is known as the Renaissance was the period of the revival of learning, with the consequent impetus to literature and art, that occurred in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. For six hundred years after the death of St. Augustine, Europe was enveloped in a mist of intellectual darkness, the ancient classic learning being preserved in only a few monasteries. The dawn came slowly, with the magnificent conception of the wonders of life to be found in Dante; with the joy of living so evident in Chaucer. With the Renaissance, the sun burst forth in fresh glory and revealed itself in the development of ideas and in new-found beauty of expression. The causes of the awakening can be only summarised here. The capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 was followed by the exodus of Greek scholars to Italy, carrying with them the knowledge of Greek literature that the west of Europe had almost entirely lost. A century earlier the Italians had learned from the Moors to make paper, and, most important of all, the first printing press was set up at Mentz in Germany, ten years before the fall of |