My review of Stephen Yeager, From Lawmen to Plowmen: Anglo-Saxon Legal Tradition and the School of Langland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), appears in Studies in the Age of Chaucer. Here’s the opening of the review:
This book constructs a new genealogy for the Piers Plowman tradition of Middle English alliterative verse. Through a combination of discourse analysis and close reading, Stephen Yeager situates the Piers Plowman tradition in a literary and documentary longue durée extending back through twelfth- and thirteenth-century alliterative verse to the tenth/eleventh-century homilist Wulfstan.
In the introduction, Yeager forswears belief in the continuity of alliterative meter and nominates “Anglo-Saxon legal-homiletic discourse” (p. 4) as a pre-Norman-Conquest ancestor for “the school of Langland.” Chapter 1 defines this discourse as a symptom of transitional literacy, expressed in a cluster of self-authorizing rhetorical strategies, such as proverbs and alliterating lists. Chapter 2 reads the rhetorical, generic, codicological, and cultural contexts of Wulfstan’s writings as exemplary of this discourse. Chapters 3 and 4 take the recopying of Old English texts at Worcester as the occasion to explore the ideological functions of Anglo-Saxon discursive forms in three twelfth- and thirteenth-century alliterative poems: the First Worcester Fragment, the Proverbs of Alfred, and Lawman’s Brut. Chapters 5 and 6 read similar discursive forms (now fraught with new ideological functions) in two post-Langlandian alliterative poems: Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger. In the conclusion, Yeager indicates how his arguments recontextualize other canonical Middle English poetry.
This account of the evolution of a group of formal strategies from Old to Middle English succeeds on a number of fronts. […]
This month, I composed a translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in 101 tweets, corresponding to the 101 stanzas of the original Middle English alliterative poem. This project was inspired by Elaine Treharne’s translation of the Old English poem Beowulf in 100 tweetsand Alice-Catherine Jennings’s translation of the Old French poem Song of Roland in 291 tweets. To create my translation, I cross-referenced Neilson’s translation with the original Middle English text.
I was thinking about Gawain because I have been reading it with my undergraduate seminar, Literary Approaches to the Past. One of the themes of the course is the way that attitudes toward the distant past find expression not only in literature but also in the material conditions of its production, transmission, and reception. We began with William Caxton’s printed edition of Thomas Malory’s MorteDarthur,and we will end with Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. In late April, we will visit the Burns Library at Boston College to explore rare books and manuscripts relating to the course content.
Gawain occurs in only one manuscript copy, known today as British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x. Unusually for a manuscript of medieval English poetry, Cotton Nero A.x has illustrations depicting scenes from the four poems it contains, including Gawain. I chose to include images of the manuscript text and manuscript illustrations at appropriate points in my translation, because I felt that this was an opportunity for medieval and modern text technologies to speak to one another. Ironically, in this my translation comes closer to reproducing a medieval experience of reading Gawain than modern critical editions, which tend not to include images of the manuscript text or the illustrations.
Translating Gawain in 101 tweets was an exercise in concision; it also taught me two things about the poem as a poem. First, I was reminded that this is a poem of lists: lists of clothing items, lists of food, lists of animal parts, lists of landscape features. Many of the tweets took the form of a list. Second, the third section of the poem is very long. The poet devotes more attention to Gawain’s stay at Hautdesert Castle, its three hunting scenes interlaced with three bedroom scenes, than to any other event in the poem. This imbalance teaches us something about the poet’s conception of the poem as a narrative; it also raises questions about the conventional modern title for the poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which refers only to the action of the first and fourth sections.
This past October, I gave an invited talk for the Harvard English Department Medieval Colloquium. My gratitude to Erica Weaver and Helen Cushman for the invitation. My talk, entitled “Alliterative Meter and the Alliterative Tradition after 1450,” was drawn from the final chapter of my first book. Here’s the opening paragraph of the talk:
Alliterative meter after 1450 has received much less attention than its fourteenth-century ancestor. As a result, basic questions about metrical phonology and metrical typology remain unanswered. Yet if the alliterative tradition exerted significant pressure on adjacent literary forms before 1450, as argued in the previous chapters, then mapping the forms of post-1450 alliterative meter promises to sharpen understanding of post-1450 English literary culture as a whole. This chapter traces the generic, codicological, textual, and cultural contexts for alliterative meter in the century before it disappeared from the active repertoire of verse forms. In doing so, this chapter lays the groundwork for a new literary history of the sixteenth century. After surveying the extant alliterative poems composed after 1450, I describe the systemic changes manifested in alliterative meter in this period, completing the formal evolution set out in previous chapters. The second section considers mid sixteenth- to mid seventeenth-century print and manuscript evidence for the reception of earlier alliterative meter, focusing on the two manuscript texts of ScottishField (1515-47), Robert Crowley’s first edition of Piers Plowman (1550), and Crowley’s own poetry. I reconstruct scribes’ and authors’ perceptions of the alliterative meter in the period after the conclusion of active metrical practice but before the advent of modern metrical theory. I conclude by arguing that the contribution of the alliterative tradition to the so-called invention of modern literature has been underestimated by literary histories that enforce an absolute division between ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ periods of literary activity.
My essay, “Alliterative Meter after 1450: The Vision of William Banastre,” appears in an edited volume devoted to early English poetics, edited by Lindy Brady and M. J. Toswell and published by Medieval Institute Publications. My essay provides a first critical edition and verse-historical contextualization of a previously unremarked late fifteenth-century alliterative verse prophecy found in two fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts. Here I reproduce brief selections from the edition and commentary:
New Index of Middle English Verse (NIMEV)1967.8 is a verse prophecy extant in two fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts. The Vision of William Banastre, as I title it, has received no critical attention and has never been edited. The poem combines the tradition of vatic, anti-Saxon prophecy inherited from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Brittaniae (ca. 1138) with oblique references to early fourteenth- and mid fifteenth-century politics. The work offers at least one first-rate literary effect, an extended simile comparing a hopeless siege to sailing upwind with no rudder (ll. 7–9). The organization of prophetic language into an interview with God, conducted by Sir William Banastre, has its own pleasures. The Vision furnishes important evidence of the circulation of alliterative verse and the development of alliterative meter in the sparsely documented period after 1450. The meter of the Vision also testifies to the continuity of the alliterative tradition across the Old English/Middle English divide. In what follows I introduce the manuscript texts of the Vision, present a critical edition of the poem with textual notes, and contextualize the metrical form of the poem in terms of the durable poetic tradition to which it belongs.
[…]
Part of þe visioun of Sire William Banastre knyght
“Lord, sey me for þe mayden love that thou þi modir calles What shall worthe of our kyng lord, yf it be þi wyll?” “I shall [þe tel], William and haue sone done: Ther shall a kyng prik westward propirly with pride And gedir hym an herd fast al out of towne army <OE hired And set hym in a seege til a full sory walle But þat shall be as nedelese þat þey seile þedir Als he þat buskes to a bote þat broken were þe rother And þe wynd of þe west were went hym agayne. […]
Having suggested a post-1450 date for the Vision on historical and textual grounds, I turn now to consider its metrical form. The Vision is in the variety of alliterative meter characteristic of the last phase of the alliterative tradition, before its disappearance from the active repertoire of verse forms around 1550. Recent developments in the study of alliterative meter can serve to contextualize the poetic form of the Vision; the meter of the Vision, in turn, can clarify and consolidate progress in Middle English alliterative metrics. In what follows, I summarize the consensus view of Middle English alliterative meter, compare it to the meter of the Vision, and point to one avenue for future research. I conclude by addressing the position of alliterative verse in late medieval literary culture more broadly.
Recent studies have gone some way toward solving the riddle of Middle English alliterative meter, while at the same time uncovering evidence of continuity between Old English meter, Early Middle English alliterative meter, and Middle English alliterative meter. The new metrical scholarship refocuses questions of literary history, poetics, and the cultural meaning of meter. In particular, the alliterative tradition appears to have been both more durable and more dynamic than proponents of a so-called Alliterative Revival supposed. These recent studies have focused on the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the period to which most of the extant Middle English alliterative poems can be referred. Alliterative meter after 1450 remains less well understood. Yet if the conclusions of this recent scholarship hold, late alliterative poems like the Vision belong to the same centuries-long trajectory of formal development that links Beowulf (?eighth/tenth c.) to Lawman’s Brut (ca. 1200) and the Brut to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth c.).
My essay, “Lawman, the Last Old English Poet and the First Middle English Poet,” appears in an edited volume devoted to this late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century poet, edited by Marie-Françoise Alamichel. The essay collection, published by L’Harmattan, grew out of a 2012 conference at the Sorbonne. My essay is a version of the third chapter of my first book. Here’s the opening frame of this chapter:
Alliterative poetry of the late eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries rarely refers to the Norman Conquest of England (1066). Every sour note has been wrung for maximum effect in modern criticism, but the implied contrast with pre-Conquest poetry is unconvincing. The Death of William the Conqueror (1087-1121) is alone in criticizing the Normans, which it does in a ham-fisted way that calls to mind a few spoiled monks, not the righteous indignation of the peasantry. The sense of a way of life coming to an end in Durham (1104-1109) and the First Worcester Fragment (late twelfth c.) has precedents in a variety of Old English poems. It is superfluous to add contemporary politics to the list of reasons why poets employed the topos. The pivotal event for post-1066 alliterative poetry was not the Conquest, but the publication of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Brittaniae (c. 1138). To judge from the extant corpus, alliterative poets’ fascination with the Arthurian past began in a Worcestershire priest’s massive verse translation of the Historia material, extant in two copies and now known as The Brut (c. 1200).
Scholars have always had the impression that theBrut is metrically “loose” in comparison with earlier and later alliterative poetry. In what follows this impression will be rejected. Careful study of alliterative meter yields a clear developmental arc connecting Beowulf to the Brut and the Brut to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight(late fourteenth c.). The new account of the evolution of alliterative verse advanced in this book challenges the view of Early Middle English poetry as the refuse of a more glorious tradition. When metrical change is seen as the predictable result of the passage of time rather than a symptom of decadence, alliterative meter can be appreciated as a dynamic institution rather than a gradually eroded edifice. This chapter clarifies recent scholarship on the meter of the Brut and extends it to other Early Middle English alliterative poetry.I show Lawman’s meter to be highly organized, directly related to Old English and to Middle English alliterative meter, and unrelated to Ælfric of Eynsham’s ‘rhythmical alliteration.’Through consideration of particular words and passages, the second section demonstrates how Lawman’s conservative style resembles that of his Old English predecessors, how the two manuscript versions of the Brut represent two different visions for the future of alliterative verse, and how Lawman’s treatment of the Arthurian past anticipates Middle English romance. By implicating Lawman and other Early Middle English alliterative poetry in a long verse history, I seek to answer recent calls for a revaluation of the twelfth century in English literary history.
Eric Weiskott 
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