Introduction

This is a history of European literature from its beginnings to the present day. The early stages of European literary history bring us back to the eighth century BCE (the eighth century before the Common Era; the eighth century before the year 0 according to Western time reckoning). In those times, people in Europe lived in relatively small, basically agrarian communities. Writing was not entirely unknown, but it was rare and used for simple practical purposes. There were songs and stories, but nobody had an idea of literature as a special category nor a conception of Europe in anything like its present sense. Whether or not anybody had an idea of history is a matter of what you choose to mean by that word. There was human memory of things past, and things past shaded off into myth. The next few centuries would bring important changes.

Our history of European literature will take us from those early times to our own now. Much will be said not only about literature but also about the changing material and intellectual conditions against the background of which literary works were created and experienced. Literary works will be brought into a kind of narrative history and related to the societies in which they came into existence.

We have divided our history into four big temporal blocks: before 400?CE, 400-1500, 1500-1800, and 1800 to the present. In this introduction, we will first give a bird's-eye view of European history and literary history and then comment briefly on the three concepts of literature, Europe, and history.

European Antiquity

In the period before 400?CE, we find ourselves in what is often called Classical Antiquity or the Greco-Roman world. Greek and Roman culture are in focus simply because in Europe only Greece and Rome have left a written record behind from these times. Celts, Germanic peoples, Slavs, and other tribes did not, not yet.

At the beginning of our history, Greece was not really a country but rather a culturally and linguistically related galaxy of city-states, mainly in present-day Greece and along the west coast of what is now Türkiye, but also spread out, through colonies, in places all around the Mediterranean and also around the Black Sea. The Greeks created a rich and surprisingly original civilization. In the field of verbal art, they developed epic, dramatic, and lyric traditions that came to play a hugely important role in later literary culture. In the fourth century BCE, one Greek king, Alexander the Great, even established a very short-lived empire in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. Greek civilization also gave room for oratory, philosophy, history writing, philology, and tentative natural science.

The Italian city-state of Rome gradually increased its sphere of influence during the centuries leading up to the year 0: in Italy, then in the western Mediterranean, and then in the eastern Mediterranean. Greece and the areas influenced by Greek culture were among the regions swallowed up by the steadily growing Rome. When Rome, having transformed into the Roman Empire, reached farthest, in the second century CE, it also included important parts of geographical Europe.

While still agrarian, the Greco-Roman world at the height of its development was very far from the situation we described where the eighth century BCE was concerned. Big cities were strewn across the Roman Empire, and Rome itself may have had something like 800?000 inhabitants around the year 0. With respect to intellectual culture, Rome very much assimilated, adapted, and elaborated on the Greek achievements. In poetry, epics enjoyed the greatest prestige, lyric poetry much less. Oratory was highly important. There were also a number of significant writers of history. Philosophy remained more of a Greek specialty. Written texts still had to be copied by hand, which naturally restricted their circulation. The degree of literacy was low, and what we would call literature was to all intents and purposes associated with a small male elite.

Medieval Europe

The Roman Empire suffered a gradual collapse, first under the pressure of Germanic tribes from the north that the Romans were, ultimately, unable to hold back. In the process, there emerged a divide between west and east. While the Western Roman Empire disappeared and Western Europe broke down into a variable mass of smaller territories, an Eastern Roman Empire with Byzantium/Constantinople (now Istanbul) as its capital remained. However, from the seventh century on, the rise of Islam resulted in Arab conquests of much of the Middle East. The Byzantine Roman Empire still continued to exist, more and more beleaguered, until Constantinople fell to Ottoman (Turkic) forces in 1453. Arab powers also took over northernmost Africa and also the Iberian Peninsula (which was then wholly or partly in Arab hands until 1492).

During the early centuries of the Common Era, a profoundly important intellectual shift was underway. Christianity, one of the oriental religions competing with traditional Greek and Roman beliefs, slowly went from being a persecuted doctrine to representing the commonly held faith. Organized as a Christian Church, it converted, little by little, all of Europe, establishing a network of parishes, monasteries, and bishoprics. In Western Europe, this was the Catholic Church, working in Latin. In Eastern Europe, this was the Orthodox Church, with Greek and Church Slavonic as its main languages.

In Byzantium, Greek culture lived on until the very end of this period. Through the missionary activity of the Church, many of the Slavonic peoples in Eastern Europe were won for the Orthodox faith. In Western Europe, it took time for significant cities to reestablish themselves and for larger and more stable political entities to arise. The Church was for a long time absolutely central to intellectual life, also to literature. Roman authors were among the ones who had their texts copied in monasteries, along with the new Christian literature: hymns, legends, religious philosophy. A Church drama emerged. At the same time, some in the small literate elite composed new works not in Latin or Greek but in languages of every day speech: Romance, Germanic, Celtic, or - in Eastern Europe - Slavonic. Some of these works built on oral traditions from the earlier illiterate non-Roman tribes. With the successive emergence of duchies, kingdoms, and courts, a court culture and a court poetry arose.

The rise of a written vernacular literature was profoundly important. The languages of the Churches retained their key role in religious contexts, and in Western Europe, Latin was to remain the favored language of the learned world for many centuries to come. But the gradual appearance of written folk languages that became more and more developed and richer in means of expression and areas of use completely changed the literary landscape all over Europe.

One can say that Europe as we know it came into being during the years between 400 and 1500. As we saw, by 1500, Arab powers had taken over what was once Roman south of the Mediterranean, and Byzantium had fallen to Ottoman (Turkic) armies. With this, geographical Europe came to possess an important measure of cultural distinctiveness since, by then, practically all of Europe and few places outside of Europe had embraced Christianity. (However, the Balkans and the areas immediately to the north of the Black Sea now formed part of the Muslim Ottoman Empire.)

Later times came to look at much of this era as the Middle Ages or the Dark Ages - the sad period of decline between the glorious Roman Empire and the again shining present. But after the initial breakdown, Western Europe slowly reinvented itself. New economic and technical solutions were found, as if made possible by the relative lack of central control. The later centuries of this period were a time of rising capitalism and technological inventiveness which made the leading powers in Western Europe, in 1500, a dynamic group of societies beginning to assert themselves in the wider world. Byzantium and Eastern Europe did not really participate in this development.

Early Modern Europe

The decades around 1500 saw a number of significant things happening in Europe. Several larger and durable states had been formed by now: in Western Europe at least Spain, France, Portugal, and England. Spain and Portugal launched ambitious naval expeditions designed to find a sea route to India for the precious trade in Indian spices, a way bypassing the Near East, which was under Arab control. When trying to reach India by simply sailing west, the Europeans met with the continent that came to be called "America" and with its "Indian" inhabitants. Soon, a means of reaching India by rounding Africa was discovered. Such exploratory ventures came to lay the ground for European colonialism. Spain and Portugal, and France, and later England, invaded the Americas, all at horrific costs for the native peoples of these continents.

Within Europe itself, there were serious conflicts of several kinds. In religion, varieties of Protestantism broke away from the Catholic Church, which led to protracted wars in which religious zeal and aspirations for political dominance were intertwined. And the existing social system, dominated by the nobility - into which the warrior class had morphed - and by the priests, was being more and more challenged by the rising bourgeoisie associated with trade and manufacture and by the lower...