It’s All Elemental, My Dear Watson
This literary element creates a sense of rhythm in a work by repeating the same beginning consonant sound in side-by-side or nearby words.
What is alliteration?
This poem is an important text from the Anglo-Saxon period that has an anonymous author.
What is Beowulf?
This is the number of husbands the Wife of Bath has had at the church door.
What is five?
What is chivalry?
This type of genre features a long narrative poem.
What is the epic?
Poets used this element to replace the people, places, or things in a poem with a descriptive phrase or compound word
What is a kenning?
During the Anglo-Saxon period, people spoke this Germanic language.
What is Old English?
In the Pardoner’s Tale, the three ruffians go searching for this personified figure but ironically find their own instead.
What is Death?
In this social structure, the king or lord was at the top, while the peasants or farmers were at the bottom.
What is feudalism?
In medieval romance, the main character’s honor and virtue are challenged through this type of episode, like the Green Knight and Sir Gawain’s exchange of blows.
What is testing?
In this type of story, there is a larger story that contains other stories within it.
What is a frame story?
Anglo-Saxon culture had this kind of code, which valued traits like courage, loyalty, and physical strength.
What is an honor code?
According to the Wife of Bath’s tale, this is what women most desire, which the knight learns from an old woman.
What is sovereignty? (or mastery or control)
Much like the Anglo-Saxon honor code, chivalry prized this type of skill, but also valued courtly behavior and religious devotion.
What is military skill?
In this genre, an author makes fun of something, using humor to expose truths about people, institutions, or society, like in South Park (or the Canterbury Tales).
What is satire?
In Old English poetry, this was a structured break in the middle of a line designed to create rhythm and make memorizing the work easier.
What is a caesura?
In Anglo-Saxon culture, it was common to do this action, which meant you proudly and loudly shared (and maybe even exaggerated) your achievements.
What is boast?
In the General Prologue, Chaucer uses this literary technique when he describes religious figures like the Monk and Prioress who are more concerned with worldly pleasures than spiritual duties, showing a gap between their expected behavior and reality.
What is irony?
Marriage in the medieval period was often this, meaning that it involved giving and getting something like a transaction
What is transactional?
Epic poems are written in this type of language, meant to make them sound more authoritative.
What is formal?
This literary element means that the audience expects something different from what actually happens.
What is irony?
The Anglo-Saxon period ended in 1066 CE with the invasion of this duke from Normandy.
Who is William the Conqueror?
Both the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner explore a central theme about the corrupting influence of this vice, though the Wife of Bath uses it to gain power in marriage, while the Pardoner preaches against it while practicing it himself.
What is greed?
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an example of this literary genre, popular beginning in the 12th century and continuing throughout the medieval period.
What is medieval romance?
This genre often explore the tensions between chivalric ideals and human realities, often asking, “Can we really ever measure up?"
What is medieval romance?