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Margery Kempe
A visionary and author of the earliest surviving autobiography in the English language. After the birth of her 14 children,  she experienced a vision of Christ speaking words of comfort.  She often talked and cried out to God. Her experience marked the beginning of her conversion. She recorded her spiritual life in the early 1430s. She persuaded a local priest to begin writing on 23 July 1436 and on 28 April 1438 he started work on an additional section covering the years 1431 only one manuscript exists.

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religious medieval period beowulf romance english anglo saxon ancient early latin books

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Malory was a real-life knight. But, sadly for him, he was born in the 15th century, a time of great upheaval in England.

The 14th and 15th centuries were marked by a series of unfortunate events that included the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, and the Wars of the Roses. That last one was a bloody and bitter civil war in which powerful factions of English nobility fought each other for control of the country.

Le Morte D'Arthur portrays a very romanticized vision of the knighthood-of-another-time. As in, it's a highly nostalgic text that looks back to a time where knighthood was still something noble, and a king could command the loyalty and love of his men. This time was not the 15th century.

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Le Morte Darthur, the first English-language prose version of the Arthurian legend, completed by Sir Thomas Malory about 1470 and printed by William Caxton in 1485. The only extant manuscript that predates Caxton’s edition is in the British Library, London. It retells the adventures of the knights of the Round Table in chronological sequence from the birth of Arthur. Based on French romances, Malory’s account differs from his models in its emphasis on the brotherhood of the knights rather than on courtly love, and on the conflicts of loyalty (brought about by the adultery of Lancelot and Guinevere) that finally destroy the fellowship.

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Geoffrey Chaucer, (born c. 1342/43, London?, England—died October 25, 1400, London), the outstanding English poet before Shakespeare and “the first finder of our language.” His The Canterbury Tales ranks as one of the greatest poetic works in English. He also contributed importantly in the second half of the 14th century to the management of public affairs as courtier, diplomat, and civil servant.

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Perhaps the chief characteristics of Chaucer’s works are their variety in subject matter, genre, tone, and style and in the complexities presented concerning the human pursuit of a sensible existence. Yet his writings also consistently reflect an all-pervasive humour combined with serious and tolerant consideration of important philosophical questions. From his writings Chaucer emerges as poet of love, both earthly and divine, whose presentations range from lustful cuckoldry to spiritual union with God. Thereby, they regularly lead the reader to speculation about man’s relation both to his fellows and to his Maker, while simultaneously providing delightfully entertaining views of the frailties and follies, as well as the nobility, of mankind.

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The Canterbury Tales, frame story by Geoffrey Chaucer, written in Middle English in 1387–1400.

The framing device for the collection of stories is a pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury, Kent. The 30 pilgrims who undertake the journey gather at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, across the Thames from London. They agree to engage in a storytelling contest as they travel, and Harry Bailly, host of the Tabard, serves as master of ceremonies for the contest. Most of the pilgrims are introduced by vivid brief sketches in the “General Prologue.” Interspersed between the 24 tales are short dramatic scenes (called links) presenting lively exchanges, usually involving the host and one or more of the pilgrims. Chaucer did not complete the full plan for his book: the return journey from Canterbury is not included, and some of the pilgrims do not tell stories.

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The name given to the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an alliterative poem written in 14th-century Middle English. Its author appears also to have written the poems Pearl, Patience, and Cleanness; some scholars suggest the author may also have composed Saint Erkenwald. Save for the last (found in BL-MS Harley 2250), all these works are known from a single surviving manuscript, the British Library holding Cotton Nero A.x. This body of work includes some of the most highly-regarded poetry written in Middle English.

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The poem known as Pearl was written in England in the fourteenth century. It exists today in a small vellum manuscript, one of the treasures of the British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x., as the first of four poems copied by a single scribe. Following Pearl are three more alliterative narratives, two of them, Patience and Cleanness, retellings of Old Testament stories, and the last the Arthurian masterpiece, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. All four poems were probably written by the same poet, but who that poet was remains a mystery, as indeed does much of the manuscript's history. There is little surprising about the absence of an author's name attached to one or all of these poems; until the fifteenth century and later, writers working in English seldom signed their work. English was perhaps deemed too common and "vernacular" to bear claiming in a world where French had remained the lingua franca of international courtly business and of English high culture since the time of the Norman conquest. What is more surprising is the apparent marginalization of these sophisticated and exuberant poems. To gauge the popularity of a text in a pre-print culture, we can often use the number of surviving manuscripts as a general guide. For Pearl, Patience, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, there remains only the one in which they have survived together. To gain a sense of a work's importance in its own time we can also pay attention to its critical legacy, the responses of contemporaries and followers, for popular narratives intercalate richly with other texts as writers read and borrow from each other. For the texts in the Pearl manuscript there exist only the vaguest of echoes in later writings to suggest that they were read or known at all. Yet these poems rank with the works of Chaucer and Langland for wit, virtuosity with language and prosody, learnedness, and sheer skill in telling a story.

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Marco Polo, who recently got his own TV series, was an Italian traveller who was born in 1254. He dictated stories of his travels throughout Europe and Asia to a cellmate after he was imprisoned during a war between Venice and Genoa, and the Travels was born. It became, by medieval standards, a bestseller, 150 years before the invention of the first modern printing press.

His account of his adventures sometimes has to be taken with a pinch of salt and is sometimes a little dull and slow-moving, but is a valuable insight into the medieval world (and Polo probably saw more of the world than anyone else living at the time). It’s one of the finest medieval books out there, for sheer breadth of geographical coverage!