It isn’t possible to encapsulate or summarize the literature of the Middle Ages in a volume of this length. The idea behind this volume was something different: It was to select a few basic works, works which have been widely read over the centuries since they were written, and which are still widely read today, and to use them to provide a very brief, and very basic but still reasonable introduction to this vast literature. In a few cases we were able to provide the complete text of a given work, but in most cases, for reasons of length, we had to rely on excerpts to give an idea of the nature of the work it represents. It is certainly hoped that many readers will find at least a few of the works represented here by excerpts interesting enough to seek out their complete texts.
Even in a brief anthology such as this, it has been possible to represent in some degree the amazing variety which characterizes the literature of the Middle Ages. In this volume we have religious works written in the 4th (St. Augustine), 6th (Boethius), and 15th (Thomas à Kempis) centuries, a historical work from the 8th century (Bede), a heroic poem from perhaps the 9th or 10th century (Beowulf), a philosophical autobiography from the 12th century (Abélard), and a wealth of stories told in various ways from the 12th and later centuries (Marie de France, the anonymous authors of The Mabinogion, Boccaccio, Chaucer). We end with a play from the 15th century (Everyman).
The human desire to tell a story—sometimes one’s own story, sometimes some other kind of story—is much older than the Middle Ages. But these centuries do certainly provide many curious and entertaining manifestations of this desire. Some of them are captured in this anthology.