Excerpt from A Catalogue of Medieval Literature, Especially of the Romances of Chivalry: And Books Relating to the Customs, Costume, Art, and Pageantry of the Middle Ages According to Hallam, the Middle-Ages form a period of a thousand years, beginning with the establishment of the Frankish kingdom in Gaul under Clovis and ending with the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII of France in 1494. The intention of the present catalogue is to give a list of "the books of the Middle Ages" including some belated growths which appeared in the Renaissance. This requires a slight modification of Hallam's limits. Medieval literature inherited much from classical and post-classical times, but its own distinctive characteristics ad their root in the eighth century, and the days of chivalry cannot be said to ave passed away before the death, in 1519, of Maximilian I, or the fall of Bayard in 1524. Our Middle-Ages shall therefore begin about a.d.750-800, when the national legends, in which the mighty events of the fifth century had been distorted or transfigured, began to take written shape; and the panorama shall lose with the strange allegorical pictures furnished by the Tewrdank of 1517 and he Weiss Kunig of 1519. Chivalry had its birth in Gaul, and the lingua rustica of earlier times, as oonas it attained to the dignity of a written speech, became the language fromantic and chivalric literature. The first step towards the creation of that terature was taken by Karl the Great, when, in the later years of the eighth entury, he committed to writing the ancient heroic ballads of the Franks. These arbara et antiqvissima carmina, as Eginhart calls them, were undoubtedly the teutonic poems which formed the original elements of the Nibelangen-lied and he Heldenbuch, and embodied traditions of the great wars of the fifth century, lended with the primeval mythology of the Gothic and Germanic race. The Prankish language died out of Gaul when the empire of Karl the Great was broken up by his grandsons, and the heroic ballads receded to the east of the Rhine, but not without leaving permanent memorials of their existence in the intellectual life of France. Many of the French romances which in the twelfth century celebrated the gesta of Charlemagne and his Paladins, were based upon the lays of Frankish minstrels. The bi-lingual character of the people of Eastern Gaul in the ninth century is shown by the extant record of the compact of 842 between Charles the Bald and Louis the German, which comprises the first written specimen of the French language. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.