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731
Go to Bede (673–735) completes his history of the English church and people
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800
Beowulf, the first great work of Germanic literature, mingles the legends of Scandinavia with the experience in England of Angles and Saxons
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950
The material of the Eddas, taking shape in Iceland, derives from earlier sources in Norway, Britain and Burgundy
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1300
Duns Scotus, known as the Subtle Doctor in medieval times, later provides humanists with the name Dunsman or dunce
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1340
William of Ockham advocates paring down arguments to their essentials, an approach later known as Ockham's Razor
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1340
A narrator who calls himself Will, and whose name may be Langland, begins the epic poem of Piers Plowman
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1375
Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir in The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature (3 ed.)
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1385
Troilus and Criseyde in The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature (3 ed.)
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1387
Chaucer begins an ambitious scheme for 100 Canterbury Tales, of which he completes only 24 by the time of his death
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1469
Thomas Malory, in gaol somewhere in England, compiles Morte d'Arthur – an English account of the French tales of King Arthur
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1510
Erasmus and Thomas More take the northern Renaissance in the direction of Christian humanism
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1524
William Tyndale studies in the university at Wittenberg and plans to translate the Bible into English
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1549
The first version of the English prayer book, or Book of Common Prayer, is published with text by Thomas Cranmer
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1567
The Book of Common Prayer and the New Testament are published in Welsh, to be followed by the complete Bible in 1588
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Marlowe's first play, Tamburlaine the Great, introduces the swaggering blank verse of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama
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Shakespeare's central character in Hamlet expresses both the ideals of the Renaissance and the disillusion of a less confident age
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James I commissions the Authorized version of the Bible, which is completed by forty-seven scholars in seven years
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Ben Jonson writes The Masque of Blackness, the first of his many masques for the court of James I
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The satirical voice of the English playwright Ben Jonson is heard to powerful effect in Volpone
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Shakespeare's last completed play, The Tempest, is performed
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John Smith publishes A Description of New England, an account of his exploration of the region in 1614
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The poems of Massachusetts author Anne Bradstreet are published in London under the title The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America
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Devoted fisherman Izaak Walton publishes the classic work on the subject, The Compleat Angler
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Ayatollah Khomeini declares a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his Satanic Verses
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Racing Demon launches a trilogy on the British establishment by English playwright David Hare
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Alan Bennett's play The Madness of George III is performed at the National Theatre in London
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English poet Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats deals openly with AIDS
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English novelist Sebastian Faulks publishes Birdsong, set partly in the trenches of World War I
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Vikram Seth publishes his novel A Suitable Boy, a family saga in post-independence India
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Louis de Bernières publishes Captain Corelli's Mandolin, a love story set in Italian-occupied Cephalonia
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The poems forming Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters describe his relationship with Sylvia Plath
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A schoolboy wizard performs his first tricks in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
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Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen dramatizes the visit of Werner Heisenberg to Niels Bohr in wartime Denmark
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The Amber Spyglass completes Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials
