puns and poetic style

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My essay on wordplay in the Old English poem Exodus appears in Etymology and Wordplay in Medieval Literature: Poetry, Hypothesis, and Experience in the European Middle Ages, edited by Mikael Males. This collection, published in the Brepols Disputatio series, grew out of a 2013 conference at the University of Oslo. The essay, entitled “Puns and Poetic Style in Old English,” asks a historical question and uses poetic style to begin to answer the question. Here are the opening and closing paragraphs of the first section:

English poetry written in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries comes down to modern scholars with little secure information about date of composition, authorship, or place of composition. The Old English poetic corpus comprehends an array of genres and topics, from brief monologues to riddles to lengthy biblical narratives. Cutting across these categories is a single poetic metre and a highly conventionalized poetic style. Old English verse, characteristically sententious, utilizes paronomasia and wordplay to achieve particular literary effects. Yet writers from this period have left behind no ars poetica recording their perceptions of English metre or poetic style. Medieval English poets practiced literary form at a time when vernacular poetics had not yet become an academic subject or a sustained cultural discourse. As such, the best available evidence for the cultural status of vernacular poetry in this phase of English literary history may be the poetry itself. This essay identifies extensive wordplay in one Old English poem and reads this wordplay as an index of the tastes and aims of a long-lost interpretive community.

After surveying the evidence for the dating, circulation, authorship, and localization of Old English poetry, this essay assesses older and newer critical approaches in Old English studies, with special attention to work on wordplay and poetic style. In light of the scant evidence for traditional categories of contextualization afforded by most Old English verse, I argue that poetic style can sometimes provide more precise answers to pressing literary-historical questions. The second section identifies and discusses several puns on nautical terminology in the Old English Exodus, a 590-line narrative poem very loosely based on Exodus 13. 18—14. 31 and attested uniquely in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11 (late tenth c.). Junius 11 also contains Genesis and Daniel, longer and more straightforward versifications of those biblical books, and Christ and Satan, an imaginative dialogue in verse. I direct consideration of wordplay in Exodus toward an understanding of the genre and purpose of the poem, in order to begin to answer the question posed by Roberta Frank in 1988, ‘What kind of poetry is Exodus?’

[…]

Despite sustained attention to this topic within Old English studies, the meaning of paronomastic strategies remains incompletely understood. What, precisely, were puns thought to accomplish, and by what means did authors signal them or audiences apprehend them? The following investigation of nautical puns in Exodus will not answer these questions directly, but I hope to offer both a reorientation of the problem in terms of poetic style and an illustration of the ways in which the study of style, in a fragmentary corpus, can reveal the practices of otherwise unknowable literary communities. I read wordplay in Exodus as an indication of its author’s attitudes toward language and knowledge. At the same time, I seek to extrapolate from literary practice to textual interpretation and from interpretation back to practice, confirming the importance of wordplay for the interpretation of Old English poetry in general but also suggesting some ways in which a particular composition may be seen to reflect its (now lost) literary-cultural context. In the process, puns in Exodus will emerge as significant literary strategies and crucial historical evidence. In comparison with other Old English poems, wordplay in Exodus seems to me at once more insistent and less obviously derivative of Latin exegetical modes. For that reason it may repay the individual treatment it receives in the remainder of this essay.

a Beinecke fragment

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

In a 2013 essay in the Journal of the Early Book Society (JEBS), Ralph Hanna announced the discovery of two new manuscript fragments of the Middle English poem Speculum Vitae. These fragments supplement the handlist of Speculum Vitae witnesses in Hanna’s 2008 edition of the poem. I have discovered a third unrecorded fragment of the poem in Yale’s Beinecke Library, and my note announcing the discovery (“Another New Fragment of Speculum Vitae“) now appears in the 2014 issue of JEBS. Here’s the opening description:

In the Beinecke Library, the printed book with the shelfmark 2008 2479 is a copy of the De regulis iuris of Dinus de Mugello (b. 1254) printed at Lyons in 1562. Two strips of vellum cut to about 25x165mm were used as endpaper guards in this copy. The front endpaper guard contains fragments of a Vulgate Bible in a fifteenth-century Gothic book hand. The back endpaper guard contains fragments of a hitherto unrecorded copy of the fourteenth-century Middle English poem Speculum vitae. The text is copied in a workmanlike late fifteenth-century anglicana script, in prose format rather than in verse lineation. A somewhat inelegant two-line blue initial Þ with red flourishing appears at the beginning of the fragmentary text. The first line of each couplet is closed with a red virgule, and, after the opening initial, each couplet is headed by a red paraph and a red slashed-line initial.

Here are my photos of the strip of vellum containing the Speculum Vitae fragment (not included in my publication):

New Haven, Beinecke Library, 2008 2471

New Haven, Beinecke Library, 2008 2479, front endpaper guard (bottom)

New Haven, Beinecke Library, 2008 2471

New Haven, Beinecke Library, 2008 2479, front endpaper guard (top)

I have also forwarded these photos to my Yale colleague Liz Hebbard, who is curating the exciting Beinecke Library Medieval Binding Fragments in Books digital project via Flickr.

meter and textual criticism

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My article, “Alliterative Metre and the Textual Criticism of the Gawain Group,” appears in the Yearbook of Langland Studies. Here’s the opening frame of the essay:

Recent studies have gone some way toward solving the riddle of Middle English alliterative metre, while at the same time uncovering evidence of continuity between Old English metre, Early Middle English alliterative metre, and Middle English alliterative metre. The principles governing the alliterative metre in the fourteenth century have been discovered and elaborated by a series of distinguished scholars: Hoyt Duggan and Thomas Cable in the 1980s and 1990s, followed by Judith Jefferson, Ad Putter, Myra Stokes, and Nicolay Yakovlev in the 2000s. The new metrical scholarship refocuses questions of literary history, poetics, and the cultural meaning of metre. In particular, the alliterative tradition appears to have been both more durable and more dynamic than proponents of a so-called Alliterative Revival supposed.

The new metrical models should interest the textual editor because, cautiously applied, they can supplement other considerations in the editing of alliterative verse texts. This essay reexamines Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron’s authoritative edition of Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Certain readings, both editorial and scribal, now seem implausible in light of current metrical theory. In addition to their intrinsic interest for students of the Cotton Nero poems, my proposed emendations and non-emendations are meant to function as a case study in the application of metrical theory to textual criticism. I take as my models a recent essay by Stokes on metre and emendation in Gawain and another by Jefferson and Putter on the text of the Middle English alliterative poem Death and Life, though my understanding of alliterative metre and my editorial sensibilities do not accord with theirs in every detail. In what follows, I summarize two points of general agreement among metrists, review the stress assignment and metrical phonology of Middle English alliterative poetry, and track Andrew and Waldron’s understanding of alliterative metre across the five printings of their edition. The second section presents ten verses in the Cotton Nero poems in which metrical theory can be of service to textual criticism. In the third and final section, I review a recent essay by Ralph Hanna and Thorlac Turville-Petre and discuss two promising avenues for future research at the intersection of metrics and textual criticism: the alliterative metre of Piers Plowman and the shape of the a-verse in Middle English alliterative poetry.

Throughout, I argue that metre can be utilized as one dimension of editorial assessment in conjunction with other considerations, while remaining circumspect about its ability to furnish independent grounds for emendation. This essay seeks to lay the groundwork for future research by consolidating progress in alliterative metrics, illustrating the application of metrical theory to textual criticism in ten individual passages in the Gawain group, and exploring the theoretical and methodological implications of cooperation between metrics and editing. The combination of practical, theoretical, and methodological discussion is meant as a provocation to future studies that might address broader topics, for example the Gawain-poet’s metrical habits in general, as well as narrower ones, such as metrical approaches to a locus desperatus in the text of Piers Plowman.

Andrew and Waldron’s edition makes a worthy candidate for scrutiny, because it represents a comprehensive editorial achievement. I hope to show that metrical considerations can aid in the identification of implausible editorial emendations. More generally, I argue that the dialectical process of editing with metrical theory and theorizing metre with edited texts should serve as a reminder of the limits of cooperation between these fields of inquiry and hence the provisional nature of both metre and edited text as historical reconstructions. Andrew and Waldron’s hugely influential edition remains indispensable, but its lack of engagement with metrical theory on the level of editorial praxis undermines the plausibility of its text in several places.

displaying a ‘genius’ for the digital humanities

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

The Boston College Chronicle recently published an article about my use of Poetry Genius as a learning tool in an undergraduate Chaucer seminar. Here are the opening sentences:

The works of poet Geoffrey Chaucer, widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages, got a 21st-century spin by students recently in a class on the Father of English literature taught by Assistant Professor of English Eric Weiskott.

Using the “Lit” category on the “Genius.com” website — which Weiskott describes as “a large digital collection of lyrics and texts that can be annotated with text, images, and video in real time” — his students were assigned to each contribute 10 annotations to the site’s texts of Chaucer’s masterpiece The Canterbury Tales, the central work in his Chaucer course.

Weiskott brought the students’ work to the attention of Genius.com’s director of education, who was so impressed that he “generously offered to send us T-shirts,” Weiskott said, which were distributed in a recent class.

My students ran with this assignment, combining their newfound expertise in Chaucer with their digital literacy. As the fall term draws to a close, I am finding that each student’s ten Genius annotations make an ideal starting point for final paper brainstorming.