1. Christian writers like the Beowulf poet looked back on their pagan ancestors with which of the following?
(A) admiration and elegiac sympathy
(B) bewilderment and visceral loathing
(C) nostalgia and ill-concealed envy
(D) bigotry and shallow triumphalism
2. The use of “whale-road” for sea and “life-house” for body are examples of what literary technique, popular in Old English poetry?
(A) symbolism
(B) metonymy
(C) appositive expression
(D) keening
3. Who would be called the English Homer and father of English poetry?
(A) Geoffrey Chaucer
(B) Sir Thomas Malory
(C) Bede
(D) Caedmon
4. What was vellum?
(A) unrhymed iambic pentameter
(B) the service owed to a lord by his peasants (“villeins”)
(C) parchment made of animal skin
(D) a prized ink used in the illumination of prestigious manuscripts
5. Only a small proportion of medieval books survive, large numbers having been destroyed in:
(A) the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s
(B) the Peasant Uprising of 1381
(C) the Anglo-Saxon Conquest beginning in the 1450s
(D) the wave of contempt for manuscripts that followed the beginning of printing in 1476
6. What is the first extended written specimen of Old English?
(A) Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy
(B) Saint Jerome’s translation of the Bible
(C) a code of laws promulgated by King Ethelbert
(D) Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People
7. In Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry, what is the fate of those who fail to observe the sacred code of blood vengeance?
(A) banishment to Asia
(B) conversion to Christianity
(C) everlasting shame
(D) being buried alive
8. Which statement is not an accurate description of Old English poetry?
(A) Irony is a mode of perception, as much as it was a figure of speech.
(B) Its formal and dignified use of language was distant from everyday use of language
(C) Romantic love is a guiding principle of moral conduct.
(D) Its idiom remained remarkably uniform for nearly three centuries.
9. Whose descriptive painting of social surroundings is strong and vivid, rich in detail, of a less intense quality than that of Dickens and more faithful to average truth?
(A) Thomas Hardy
(B) William Makepeace Thackeray
(C) Jane Austen
(D) Eliot
10. Which novelist was well-acquainted with the psychology of the Utilitarianism and had readily accepted the “Doctrine of Evolution”?
(A) Virginia Woolf
(B) Thomas Hardy
(C) Eliot
(D) Charles Dickens
11. Who has the most famous tragic-comedies to his credit?
(A) William Shakespeare
(B) Alexander Pope
(C) Christopher Marlowe
(D) Jonathan Swift
12. About whom is it said that his “work is among those in which the men and women of our time have found their own restlessness most accurately mirrored”?
(A) Charles Dickens
(B) Thomas Hardy
(C) David Herbert Lawrence
(D) Leigh Hunt
13. Who had placed the deeper vitality of the Shakespearean plays in the creation of characters?
(A) Dr. Johnson
(B) A.C. Bradley
(C) Dryden
(D) None of these
14. Through which character of Paradise Lost did Milton personify his pride & temperament?
(A) Satan
(B) Adam
(C) Eve
(D) None of these
15. Which hero made his earliest appearance in Celtic literature before becoming a staple subject in French, English, and German literatures?
(A) Beowulf
(B) Caedmon
(C) Arthur
(D) Augustine of Canterbury
16. Toward the close of which century did English replace French as the language of conducting business in Parliament and in court of law?
(A) tenth
(B) fourteenth
(C) thirteenth
(D) twelfth
17. Popular English adaptations of romances appealed primarily to:
(A) the royal family and upper orders of the nobility
(B) agricultural laborers
(C) the lower orders of the nobility
(D) the clergy
18. Which royal dynasty was established in the resolution of the so-called War of the Roses and continued through the reign of Elizabeth I?
(A) Windsor
(B) Tudor
(C) York
(D) Lancaster
19. From which Italian text might Tudor courtiers have learned the art of intrigue and the keys to gaining and keeping power?
(A) Dante’s Divine Comedy
(B) Machiavelli’s The Prince
(C) Boccaccio’s Decameron
(D) Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso
20. Who wrote Il Cortigiano (The Courtier), a book that was highly influential in the English court, providing subtle guidance on self-display?
(A) Machiavelli
(B) Pirandello
(C) Boccaccio
(D) Castiglione