I have a new essay on David Perry’s blog, How Did We Get into This Mess?, called “What Is Education For? – To Kill a Mockingbird and Medieval Literature.” It’s about Biloxi School District’s decision last month to ban (then partially unban) To Kill a Mockingbird.
the revolution of poetry that you never heard of
the authorship of St. Erkenwald
At the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI, this past week, I participated in a panel discussion entitled “Alliterative Traditions,” held in memory of Larry D. Benson. Thanks to Susanna Fein, Daniel Donoghue, and Nicholas Watson for including me. Here I reproduce the opening frame and closing paragraphs of my contribution, “The Authorship of St. Erkenwald: Why Are We Having This Conversation?”:
St. Erkenwald is a romance in English alliterative verse, found uniquely in a late fifteenth-century manuscript anthology of hagiography. The plot of the poem is as follows: in the seventh century, Erkenwald, bishop of London, discovers a tomb beneath St. Paul’s Cathedral covered in indecipherable carvings and containing the undecayed body of a pagan judge, who begins to speak to the astounded onlookers; after interviewing him about his life and death, Erkenwald unintentionally baptizes the judge by reciting the baptismal formula while shedding a tear.
From its first printing in 1881, St. Erkenwald has often been ascribed to the anonymous poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the other Middle English poems in British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x. The case for the Gawain poet’s authorship rests on internal evidence. Before 1965, co-authorship of St. Erkenwald and the Gawain poems was orthodoxy; after 1965, proponents of co-authorship came to occupy a marginal position in scholarship on both poems. The difference was a carefully argued essay by Larry Benson (“The Authorship of St. Erkenwald“). In my contribution to this panel discussion in Benson’s memory, I ask what is at stake in this particular philological debate.
The authorship of St. Erkenwald is a small problem with big implications for literary history. It radiates outward from the study of one alliterative poem to related issues: most immediately, the oeuvre of the Gawain poet, but also the literary culture of the Northwest Midlands in the fourteenth century, the value of style as historical evidence, the status of authorship in metrical tradition, and the increasingly suspicious literary-historical concept of an Alliterative Revival.
[…]
The irony of the co-authorship debate is that it has been unkind to St. Erkenwald, which figures in anthologies and criticism, if at all, as an optional addendum to an important foursome of poems. Like Beowulf, St. Erkenwald may have been stupendously unimportant, unread, unimitated, and quickly forgotten by contemporaries. Of course, modern scholars are under no obligation to take a medieval view of the poem’s literary merits (I certainly do not); but, equally, the poem is under no obligation to yield intelligible answers to modern questions. St. Erkenwald deserves separate treatment in any case, not because it is a work of genius that transcends its tradition, but because it epitomizes its tradition. I think Larry Benson understood this; he framed his 1965 essay as a rescue mission. “[T]he most unfortunate effect of the attribution,” he wrote, “is that it has obscured the real literary value of [St. Erkenwald]” (394-95).
My forthcoming monograph on English alliterative verse represents an extended attempt to demonstrate and contextualize the “real literary value” of St. Erkenwald, together with two earlier alliterative poems of exceptional historical significance: Beowulf and Lawman’s Brut. The only concerted close reading in a book otherwise concerned with metrical and cultural history comes in the fifth chapter, and it is devoted to St. Erkenwald. The central question of St. Erkenwald, I argue there, is the central question of the alliterative tradition: how to uncover and understand the distant past. Consequently the narrative proceeds in two discrete stages, excavation and interview. The hinge comes after line 176, precisely halfway through this 352-line poem.
The literary arguments of this chapter rely directly on Larry Benson’s withering critique of the case for co-authorship. In 2016, St. Erkenwald can stand on its own as an important and worthwhile alliterative poem. For it is in one way, at least, a more perfect poem than Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: it crystallizes the problem of history with none of the distractions of chivalric romance. In 1965, Benson dramatically redirected a critical conversation that, ironically because of his contributions to it, we are now ready to stop having.
tradition and literary history
My first book, English Alliterative Verse: Poetic Tradition and Literary History, is published by Cambridge University Press (2016).
English Alliterative Verse tells the story of the medieval poetic tradition that includes Beowulf, Piers Plowman, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, stretching from the eighth century, when English poetry first appeared in manuscripts, to the sixteenth century, when alliterative poetry ceased to be composed. The book draws on the study of meter to challenge the traditional division of medieval English literary history into ‘Old English’ and ‘Middle English’ periods. The two halves of the alliterative tradition, divided by the Norman Conquest of 1066, have been studied separately since the nineteenth century; this book uses the history of metrical form and its cultural meanings to bring the two halves back together. In combining literary history and metrical description into a new kind of history called ‘verse history,’ English Alliterative Verse reimagines the historical study of poetics.
Individual chapters consider (1) Beowulf; (2) prologues to Old English poetry; (3) Lawman’s Brut, an alliterative verse chronicle of the twelfth century; (4) prologues to Middle English poetry; (5) St. Erkenwald, an alliterative romance of the fourteenth or fifteenth century; and (6) the alliterative tradition in the sixteenth century.
A version of Chapter 3 appears in an edited volume devoted to Lawman’s Brut. I have also edited two late fifteenth-century alliterative poems, The Ireland Prophecy (Studies in Philology) and The Vision of William Banastre (in an edited volume devoted to early English poetics), and I have brought to light two sixteenth-century excerpts from Piers Plowman (Review of English Studies). These new texts inform the arguments of Chapter 6. Four articles bring the arguments and methods of the book to related topics: the relationship between metrical history and language history (Modern Philology); the meter of Piers Plowman (Yearbook of Langland Studies); the history of modern scholarship on medieval verse (ELH); and the historical study of poetics (Modern Language Quarterly).
alliterative meter and literary history
My article, “Alliterative Meter and English Literary History, 1700-2000,” appears in ELH. This article historicizes the methodology of my first book by asking how eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century students of alliterative poetry conceptualized the relationship between metrical history and literary history. I contend that the divergence of metrics and literary history in the late twentieth century was a direct response to 250 years of sustained interaction between the two fields. I argue that post-2000 research on alliterative meter holds out the possibility of rapprochement between literary history and philology. This article grew out of a conference presentation earlier this year. Here’s an abstract for the article:
Nicolay Yakovlev’s 2008 Oxford thesis has already been felt to mark a significant juncture in the history of the study of English alliterative meter. This essay describes Yakovlev’s conceptualization of metrical history as a paradigm shift in study of medieval English literary history. The central section of the essay charts the scholarly study of alliterative verse, 1700-2000, focusing on the braiding of political, literary, linguistic, and metrical histories. The essay concludes by considering the intellectual significance of a non-teleological English literary history and pointing out some of the shapes it might take, focusing, as throughout, on the alliterative tradition.
Eric Weiskott 
You must be logged in to post a comment.