Medieval period 500-1500

• The beginning of long form writing.
• Most writing was in latin because the educated people who were able to write were predominantly priests and monks who were trained in latin.
• It was often based on Christian morality and Chivalry code such as honouring crusades etc.
• It also focused on courtly love: medieval tradition of love between a knight and a married noblewoman, first developed by the troubadours of southern France and extensively employed in European literature of the time. They were strictly not married.
• Latin was also common to use in this period because it was the language that the Roman Catholic Church used, which dominated western and central Europe.
• Catholic clerics were the intellectual center of society in the Middle Ages, and it is their literature that was produced in the greatest quantity.
• While medieval literature makes use of many literary devices, allegory is so prominent in this period as to deserve special mention. Much of medieval literature relied on allegory to convey the morals the author had in mind while writing—representations of abstract qualities, events, and institutions are thick in much of the literature of this time.