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In his monastery at Jarrow, completes his history of the English church and people
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Beowulf, the first great work of Germanic literature, mingles the legends of Scandinavia with the experience in England of Angles and Saxons
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The material of the Eddas, taking shape in Iceland, derives from earlier sources in Norway, Britain and Burgundy
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William of Ockham advocates paring down arguments to their essentials, an approach later known as Ockham's Razor
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Duns Scotus, known as the Subtle Doctor in medieval times, later provides humanists with the name Dunsman or dunce
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A narrator who calls himself Will, and whose name may be Langland, begins the epic poem of Piers Plowman
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Chaucer completes Troilus and Criseyde, his long poem about a legendary love affair in ancient Troy c. 1387
Chaucer begins an ambitious scheme for 100 Canterbury Tales, of which he completes only 24 by the time of his death -
Erasmus and Thomas More take the northern Renaissance in the direction of Christian humanism. William Tyndale studies in the university at Wittenberg and plans to translate the Bible into English
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Marlowe and Shakespeare are born in the same year, with Marlowe the older by two months 1587
Marlowe's first play, Tamburlaine the Great, introduces the swaggering blank verse of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama 1590
English poet Edmund Spenser celebrates the Protestant Elizabeth I as The Faerie Queene 1592
After tentative beginnings in the three parts of Henry VI, Shakespeare achieves his first masterpiece on stage with Richard III