NORTON READING QUIZ #1

QUIZ ON THE 1ST FIVE PAGES OF NORTON’S INTRODUCTION
Answer these questions as specifically and thoroughly as you can during this period. Some questions require more elaboration and inference while others require greater accuracy and specificity. Write your responses clearly and legibly on your own paper. Begin!


1. What work marks the beginning of the medieval period of English literature?
2. When was it written?
3. What work marks the end of the medieval period in English literature?
4. When was it written?
5. What even marked the shift from Old English to Middle English?
6. When did this happen?
7. What three major Germanic tribes from northeastern Europe took over many of the outlying areas of the receding Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th centuries?
8. What earlier culture shared the “same general organization” of these tribes?
9. What “chief spiritual force” did they also share that “in their earliest periods, shaped their history and their literature?”
10. To whom was this “ideal” restricted?
11. “In cultures whose religion, unlike Christianity, offers no promise of an afterlife,” what serves as the “closest substitute for immortality?”
12. What members of such societies made this form of “immortality” possible?
13. Who was sent by Pope Gregory as a missionary to King Ethelbert of Kent in 597?
14. Why was he sent there?
15. How successful was his mission?
16. What impact did this have on English literacy?
17. What “remains our most important source of knowledge about the Anglo-Saxon period?
18. How are “Christian ideals and heroic ideals antipathetic?”
19. What impact did this antipathy have on the survival of works from this period?
20. How did Old English poets “make the alien world of the Bible intelligible to their hearers?”