Works
This colorfully-titled medieval romance was written by the anonymous Pearl-poet.
What is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?
The word 'Britain' is derived from 'Brittania,' which is the name given to the island by these Mediterranean invaders who conquered the early Celts.
Who are the Romans?
He is the Father of English.
Who is Geoffrey Chaucer?
It is the much cooler Italian name for the 'turn' of a sonnet.
What is volta?
It is the power that the minority party in the Senate has to block legislation on the Senate floor by talking and talking until the bill is pulled off of the floor.
What is a filibuster?
This morality play was originally produced by a medieval guild at a religious festival.
What is a Everyman?
It is the name of one of the three Germanic tribes that settled in the early Dark Ages.
Who are the Angles, Saxons, or Jutes?
This technically-innovative renaissance poet invented several original verse forms, including his own sonnet form. Sadly, he never got his dream job as court poet for Queen Elizabeth I.
Who is Sir Edmund Spenser?
A group of four lines in a poem. (An English sonnet has three of them and a couplet.)
What is a quatrain?
When a 2 kg lab cart moving at 4 m/s West collides with a 4 kg lab cart moving at 2 m/s East, this is the combined momentum of the two carts.
What is 0 kg m/s?
In this story, a group of rowdy drunks goes looking for Death...and finds him.
What is "The Pardoner's Tale?"
This event in 1066 marked the end of the Dark Ages in England.
What is the Norman Conquest?
He is the father of the sonnet form, one of the first pioneers of the Renaissance movement.
Who us Francesco Petrarch?
The general name for writing that is not verse, like you find in novels, letters, ordinary speech, and this sentence.
What is prose?
It is the practical judgment that helps us decide the goodness of an action and must be followed in all circumstances.
What is a conscience?
An anonymous woman from the Dark Ages, exiled by her husband, describes her lonely life in the wilderness.
What is "The Wife's Lament?"
This global health catastrophe of the Middle Ages led to the death of nearly half of the people in Europe, as well as a persistent obsession with death.
What is the black plague?
This heartbroken diplomat introduced the sonnet form to England and was dumped by Anne Boleyn.
Who is Sir Thomas Wyatt?
It's when the audience knows something that a character in the story doesn't realize they know.
What is dramatic irony?
This is the word for the science of fresh water.
What is limnology?
A stubborn medieval married couple would rather let their house be robbed than lose the Quiet Game and have to do THIS (which is the title of the poem).
In the Middle Ages, this was a long series of conflicts between England and France.
What is the Hundred Years' War?
The person who wrote Beowulf.
Who is Anonymous? (Or The Beowulf-poet.)
This S-word is the act of identifying stressed and unstressed syllables in a line.
What is scansion (or scanning)?
It is the derivative of f(x) = sin x.
What is f'(x) = cos x?