Paper 105A: History of English Literature – From 1350 to 1900
Assignment of Paper 105 : Reason’s Dawn: How English Literature Transformed from God’s Voice to Man’s Vision
Reason’s Dawn: How English Literature Transformed from God’s Voice to Man’s Vision
Academic Details
Assignment Details
Paper Name: History of English Literature – From 1350 to 1900
Paper No.: 105A
Paper Code: 22396
Unit: 1 – Chaucer to Renaissance
Topic: Reason’s Dawn: How English Literature Transformed from God’s Voice to Man’s Vision
Submitted To: Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, MKBU, Bhavnagar
Date of Submission: 10th November 2025
Table of Contents
Abstract
Keywords
Research Question and Hypothesis
Introduction
The Intellectual Context: From Scholasticism to Humanism
5.1. The Scholastic Tradition: Logic, Faith, and Authority
5.2. The Birth of Humanism: Rediscovering Classical Light
In Literature : The Transition
6.1. Geoffrey Chaucer: The Human Heart within Medieval Faith
6.2. Thomas More: Reason within Reverence
6.3. Edmund Spenser: Allegory and the Renaissance Ideal
6.4. Christopher Marlowe: The Mind in Revolt
Language as Liberation: The Rise of Vernacular and the Power of the Press
7.1 Education and the Humanist Ideal
8. Legacy and Influence of Humanism on English Literature
8.1. Humanism’s Moral Continuity
8.2. The Feminine and the Human
9. Conclusion
Abstract
From cloisters and cathedrals to universities and royal courts, English literature became a mirror of the human spirit awakening from theological confinement. This paper traces how the shift from Medieval Scholasticism to Renaissance Humanism transformed English literary imagination between Chaucer and Marlowe. While Scholasticism sought truth through divine authority and logical precision, Humanism rediscovered man’s dignity, intellect, and moral freedom. By examining key authors Chaucer, More, Spenser, and Marlowe this paper explores how language evolved from religious obedience to creative autonomy. As Hanna H. Gray suggests, the Renaissance pursuit of eloquence was not merely linguistic but moral, symbolizing a civilization’s turn from celestial command to human conscience.
Keywords
Humanism; Scholasticism; Faith and Reason; Medieval Literature; Renaissance; Individualism; Classical Revival; Chaucer; Thomas More; Spenser; Marlowe
Research Question
How did English literature between the medieval and Renaissance periods reflect the intellectual transformation from the theological certainty of Scholasticism to the rational and moral freedom of Humanism?
Hypothesis
English literature from Chaucer to Marlowe embodies the gradual humanization of faith: where once language served theology, it came to celebrate human reason, experience, and self-awareness transforming divine authority into artistic inquiry.
1. Introduction
“The quill once bowed to scripture; now it sketches the soul.”
The period between 1350 and 1600 marks not only a linguistic evolution in English but an intellectual reawakening. Under Medieval Scholasticism, knowledge belonged to the Church, and literature echoed the pulse of theology. Latin was the gatekeeper of truth, and imagination was confined within moral allegory. Yet, as Europe rediscovered the classical world, a new faith emerged not in divinity alone, but in humanity itself.
Hanna H. Gray, in “Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence,” calls this shift “a moral re-education through language.” The Renaissance redefined eloquence as both art and ethics reason expressed through beauty. English writers adopted this ethos, turning poetry and prose into instruments of intellect.
Where Scholasticism prized logic and hierarchy, Humanism valued clarity, persuasion, and emotion. Literature became the meeting point of two worlds: divine truth and human thought.
Image 1: A medieval scholar at candlelight, representing faith bound by text and logic.
2. The Intellectual Context: From Scholasticism to Humanism
2.1 The Scholastic Tradition: Logic, Faith, and Authority
In the late Middle Ages, Scholasticism structured learning as a ladder toward divine truth. Willemien Otten describes its aim as “the systematic ordering of faith through dialectic.” Knowledge was vertical descending from God to man. Literature mirrored this structure: allegories such as Piers Plowman or moral treatises relied on symbolism rather than character.
Language functioned as moral geometry; precision was holiness.
However, by the fourteenth century, cracks appeared. John Marenbon’s essay “Humanism, Scholasticism and the School of Chartres” suggests that even early medieval thinkers began to “seek harmony between revelation and reason.” That seed of harmony would later bloom into Humanism. The scholastic method, though rigid, ironically trained minds to question form itself. Once logic was mastered, writers began using it against the boundaries of dogma.
Image 2: Gothic arches dissolving into open sky a symbol of reason expanding beyond theology.
2.2 The Birth of Humanism: Rediscovering Classical Light
Humanism entered England through the currents of translation, trade, and travel. The printing press, as Matthew Day notes in “William Caxton and Vernacular Classicism,” gave classical ideas a vernacular voice. Latin ceded space to English; Cicero and Plato joined hands with the prose of common men.
Paul N. Siegel, in “English Humanism and the New Tudor Aristocracy,” observes that Humanism in England was both moral and social a new education for a new political order. It valued civic virtue, literary grace, and reasoned speech. Through the study of classical texts, scholars saw man not as a fallen creature but as a rational image of divine potential.
John Addington Symonds’s The Revival of Learning captures this awakening as “the resurrection of the intellect.” The revival was not rebellion but renewal faith reborn through freedom. The Church’s Latin gave way to England’s own voice, as learning stepped from cloister to court.
Image 3: The first rays of sunlight entering a scriptorium— illumination of the mind’s dawn.
3. In Literature : The Transition
3.1 Geoffrey Chaucer: The Human Heart within Medieval Faith
Geoffrey Chaucer stands at the bridge between worlds. His Canterbury Tales transforms religious pilgrimage into human comedy. John H. Fisher calls him “England’s first modern mind medieval in faith, Renaissance in observation.”
Through the Wife of Bath, the Knight, and the Pardoner, Chaucer humanizes morality. Sin and virtue become lived experiences, not abstract terms. His use of English instead of Latin democratizes language, giving common humanity a literary pulse.
In a world of sermons, Chaucer writes dialogue; in a culture of sin and salvation, he writes irony and laughter. This human warmth marks literature’s first rebellion against rigid scholastic order.
Image 4: A lively group of pilgrims on the road—faith transformed into fellowship.
3.2 Thomas More: Reason within Reverence
Sir Thomas More represents the golden equilibrium of faith and reason. His Utopia imagines an ideal society guided not by revelation but by rational ethics. Patrick Grant, in his essay “Thomas More’s ‘Richard III’: Moral Narration and Humanist Method,” notes that More’s moral authority “emerges from the coherence of argument rather than divine fiat.”
He writes as both believer and logician a Christian who believes intellect glorifies God.
David L. Masterson adds that More’s humanist education “sought to shape virtue through cultivated speech.” In Utopia, that virtue manifests as social logic, not divine decree. The island of reason is thus both satire and scripture a humanist sermon dressed in philosophical discourse.
Image 5: A quill balanced between cross and compass faith and philosophy in harmony.
3.3 Edmund Spenser: Allegory and the Renaissance Ideal
With Edmund Spenser, Humanism takes on epic color. The Faerie Queene renews the medieval allegory but animates it with Renaissance optimism. William J. Long, in English Literature: Its History and Its Significance, remarks that Spenser’s poetry “combines moral purpose with imaginative freedom.”
Virtue is no longer imposed it is quested. Spenser’s knights embody the humanist virtues of courage, temperance, and reason, echoing Charles Trinkaus’s view that religion, in this age, became “an inward discipline of the mind.”
Through measured stanza and musical rhythm, Spenser turns faith into art an intellectual pilgrimage toward self-knowledge.
Image 6: A knight gazing into his polished shield the reflection of virtue as reason realized.
3.4 Christopher Marlowe: The Mind in Revolt
Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus dramatizes the climax of the humanist revolution. Faustus, the scholar who trades his soul for knowledge, represents man’s hunger for autonomy. His tragedy is the price of enlightenment: freedom shadowed by guilt.
Hugh Trevor-Roper, writing on The Intellectual World of Sir Thomas More, notes that the Renaissance mind “made man his own theologian.” Marlowe’s hero embodies that dangerous freedom. He rejects scholastic logic “Divinity, adieu!” and seeks divine power through intellect.
Unlike Chaucer’s pilgrims or More’s rational citizens, Faustus no longer balances reason with faith; he replaces one with the other. The moral of his fall is paradoxical: even rebellion proves humanity’s grandeur.
Image 7: A candle flaring too bright the brilliance and peril of unbound reason.
4. Language as Liberation: The Rise of Vernacular and the Power of the Press
“When words left the cloister, England found its voice.”
The transformation from Scholasticism to Humanism was not only philosophical it was linguistic. As long as Latin monopolized learning, the common mind remained voiceless. But with William Caxton’s press, English became both a cultural and intellectual revolution.
Matthew Day, in his study “William Caxton and Vernacular Classicism,” explains that Caxton’s translations “did not merely transfer words from Latin to English; they transformed authority itself.” The sacred hierarchy of knowledge began to dissolve. Ordinary readers could now access what was once reserved for theologians.
Language became liberation. Where Scholastic texts echoed sermons, Renaissance prose sang of discovery. Caxton’s printing of Chaucer, More, and later Spenser democratized the written word. This shift made Humanism not only an elite education but a public awakening.
John Addington Symonds, in The Revival of Learning, captures this change as “the victory of expression over submission.” The Renaissance spirit, he notes, “did not destroy religion—it gave religion a human tongue.” In that sense, printing was not rebellion; it was resurrection the resurrection of the Word in human form.
Image 8: The first English printing press, its ink-stained pages like wings unfolding.
4.1 Education and the Humanist Ideal
Education was the soul of Humanism. David Masterson emphasizes that the aim of Renaissance learning was “the moral cultivation of man through language.” The trivium grammar, rhetoric, and logic became not mere academic drills but ethical disciplines. To speak clearly was to think rightly; to write beautifully was to act virtuously.
Paul N. Siegel expands this in his essay “English Humanism and the New Tudor Aristocracy,” observing that education during this period shaped not only minds but manners. Literature thus became both art and instruction a civilizing force that replaced obedience with intellect.
This educational vision reflects the hypothesis of this paper: that literature evolved from a divine command to a human conversation. The act of reading itself became an act of freedom.
Image 9: A Renaissance classroom, the teacher’s hand tracing letters as symbols of reason.
5. Legacy and Influence of Humanism on English Literature
“The human word became the measure of divine meaning.”
By the late sixteenth century, Humanism had become the bloodstream of English letters. The poets and playwrights of the Elizabethan age inherited not only Chaucer’s language but his curiosity. Humanism’s mark lay everywhere in Shakespeare’s psychological realism, in Bacon’s essays of inquiry, and in Milton’s fusion of reason with revelation.
Charles Trinkaus, in “Humanism, Religion, Society,” argues that the Humanist legacy was not the death of faith but its transformation into moral introspection. Literature became theology’s twin: both sought truth, but one through scripture, the other through story.
This legacy continued through the seventeenth century, shaping not only content but consciousness. Writers no longer feared to question; they wrote to understand. The modern essay, the psychological novel, and even satire owe their roots to the humanist habit of doubt.
As Paul Oskar Kristeller wrote, “Humanism was not a doctrine, but a habit of mind.” That habit persists in every writer who believes words can shape worlds.
Image 10: An open book with a sunrise reflected on its pages the enduring light of learning.
5.1 Humanism’s Moral Continuity
Even as new philosophies arose empiricism, rationalism, romanticism the moral essence of Humanism remained. It taught literature to value the inner life as much as the outer order. The medieval soul was saved by grace; the modern one by conscience.
In this moral continuity, one can trace the evolution of English ethics: from Chaucer’s laughter to Spenser’s virtue, from More’s reason to Marlowe’s rebellion. Each writer carried forward the dialogue between faith and thought, echoing Gray’s notion that “eloquence was the visible shape of inward grace.”
Image 11: A path winding through ancient manuscripts past voices guiding the modern soul.
5.2 The Feminine and the Human
While male scholars defined much of Renaissance Humanism, literature quietly opened doors for female expression. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath spoke with unapologetic wit; Spenser’s Una embodied virtue through compassion. Though the era remained patriarchal, the language of Humanism carried seeds of empathy. The elevation of individuality implicitly acknowledged every human voice as worthy of art.
The humanist value of selfhood would later empower female writers like Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish, proving that “reason’s dawn” was not owned by gender, but by the human condition itself.
Image 12: A woman reading by candlelight symbol of the quiet revolution of thought.
6. Conclusion
“When man found his voice, he did not silence God he learned to answer.”
The journey from God’s voice to man’s vision was neither rebellion nor rupture; it was revelation. Scholasticism had given English literature its discipline its structure, its moral compass. Humanism gave it breath eloquence, emotion, and individuality.
Through Chaucer’s laughter, More’s logic, Spenser’s grace, and Marlowe’s defiance, we witness not the destruction of faith but its translation into experience. The Word descended into the world of words, where reason and reverence coexist.
The Renaissance thus stands as the dawn of the modern mind: an age where thinking became sacred, and literature became the cathedral of thought. Its legacy endures wherever words dare to ask questions once reserved for heaven.
Final Image: A horizon lit by gold faith and reason rising together.
References :
Day, Matthew. “William Caxton and Vernacular Classicism.” Taylor & Francis, 2021, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0013838X.2021.1997472. Accessed 6 Nov 2025.
Fisher, John H. “THE NEW HUMANISM AND GEOFFREY CHAUCER.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 80, no. 1, 1997, pp. 23–39. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41178760. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.
GRANT, PATRICK. “Thomas More’s ‘Richard III’: Moral Narration and Humanist Method.” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, vol. 7, no. 3, 1983, pp. 157–72. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43444419. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.
Gray, Hanna H. “Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 24, no. 4, 1963, pp. 497–514. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2707980. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.
Kristeller, Paul Oskar. “HUMANISM AND SCHOLASTICISM IN THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE.” Byzantion, vol. 17, 1944, pp. 346–74. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44168603. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.
LONG, WILLIAM J. English Literature: Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English-Speaking World. Project Gutenberg, 2004, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10609/pg10609-images.html. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.
Marenbon, John. “Humanism, Scholasticism and the School of Chartres.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition, vol. 6, no. 4, 2000, pp. 569–77. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30222616. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.
Masterson, David L. “The Educational Contributions of Sir Thomas More.” Journal of Thought, vol. 32, no. 2, 1997, pp. 25–36. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42589491. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.
Otten, Willemien. “MEDIEVAL SCHOLASTICISM: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE.” Nederlands Archief Voor Kerkgeschiedenis / Dutch Review of Church History, vol. 81, no. 3, 2001, pp. 275–89. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24011332. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.
Siegel, Paul N. “English Humanism and the New Tudor Aristocracy.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 13, no. 4, 1952, pp. 450–68. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2707712. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.
SYMONDS, JOHN ADDINGTON. Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7). Project Gutenberg, 2004, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15400. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.
Symonds, John Addington. “The Revival of Learning.” Project Gutenberg, 1875, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/41924/pg41924-images.html. Accessed 6 Nov 2025.
TREVOR-ROPER, HUGH. “The Intellectual World of Sir Thomas More.” The American Scholar, vol. 48, no. 1, 1979, pp. 19–32. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41210475. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.
Trinkaus, Charles. “Humanism, Religion, Society: Concepts and Motivations of Some Recent Studies.” Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 4, 1976, pp. 676–713. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2860036. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.
Wordcount : 2728
Image : 11 ( all image generated by gamini AI )
