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Period: 731 to 800
The Venerable Bede
In his monastery at Jarrow, completes his history of the English church and people -
Period: 800 to 949
Beowulf
Beowulf, the first great work of Germanic literature, mingles the legends of Scandinavia with the experience in England of Angles and Saxons -
Period: 950 to 1300
Eddas
The material of the Eddas, taking shape in Iceland, derives from earlier sources in Norway, Britain and Burgundy -
Period: 1340 to 1367
William of Ockham
William of Ockham advocates paring down arguments to their essentials, an approach later known as Ockham's Razor -
Period: 1340 to 1367
Duns Scotus
Duns Scotus, known as the Subtle Doctor in medieval times, later provides humanists with the name Dunsman or dunce -
Period: 1367 to 1375
William Langland
A narrator who calls himself Will, and whose name may be Langland, begins the epic poem of Piers Plowman -
Period: 1387 to 1469
Chaucer
Chaucer completes Troilus and Criseyde, his long poem about a legendary love affair in ancient Troy c. 1387
Chaucer begins an ambitious scheme for 100 Canterbury Tales, of which he completes only 24 by the time of his death -
Period: 1524 to 1549
William Tyndale
Erasmus and Thomas More take the northern Renaissance in the direction of Christian humanism. William Tyndale studies in the university at Wittenberg and plans to translate the Bible into English -
Period: to
Marlowe
Marlowe and Shakespeare are born in the same year, with Marlowe the older by two months 1587
Marlowe's first play, Tamburlaine the Great, introduces the swaggering blank verse of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama 1590
English poet Edmund Spenser celebrates the Protestant Elizabeth I as The Faerie Queene 1592
After tentative beginnings in the three parts of Henry VI, Shakespeare achieves his first masterpiece on stage with Richard III