Civilization, Medieval, in literature.

Geoffrey Chaucer's poem. The Parliament of Fowls, has been acknowledged as an
intricate dream vision of balanced contrasts of ideas, double entendre words, classical
models, and rules of courtly love. Examining the heretofore unexamined voices invented
by Chaucer's narrator, l found that the ancient grammatical term of "middle voice,"
employed in recent linguistic criticism and theory, served to place the narrator inside his
world of reading, dreaming, and writing. As critic and poet. Chaucer offers the reader
new ways to think about ancient literary themes of reading. writing, listening, and telling
stories about love. The reader remains free to enjoy the narrator's voices in Parliament
from the opening line, "The lyf so short, the craft so long to Ierne," through the roundel
and closing.

Many scholars agree that portions of Paradise Lost show the influence of mystery
and morality plays from the Middle Ages, yet it is difficult to establish the availability of
these plays for John Milton. He wrote the poem during the Puritan Revolution in
seventeenth-century England when medieval drama was suppressed and suspect because
of its Catholic origins and content. As a Puritan propagandist, Milton might have been
expected to share the Protestant distrust of medieval Catholic culture. However, he
evinced his broadmindedness both by holding theological views that were nearer to
Catholic than to Calvinist orthodoxy, and by making substantial literary use of medieval
sources. Although the revolution of which he was a part made it difficult for him to
access medieval biblical drama, there were avenues through which these plays were
available, in texts or performances, to Milton as he composed Paradise Lost.