Somerset and Watson, Truth and Tales

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My review of Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media, ed. Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015), appears in Arthuriana. Here’s the opening of the review:

This collection, dedicated to Richard Firth Green, grew out of the fourth annual meeting of the Canada Chaucer Seminar (Toronto, April 2012). The volume’s fourteen essays move across and between the large topics of popular culture, orality and literacy, and media studies, with a primary focus on medieval English literature and culture.

The contributions are organized into three central sections: ‘Repetition and Continuity: The Claims of History’ (Thomas Hahn, Stephen Yeager, M. J. Toswell, and Fiona Somerset), ‘Cultural Divides and Their Common Ground’ (Alastair Minnis, Michael Johnston, Lisa J. Kiser, and Barbara A. Hanawalt), and ‘New Media and the Literate Laity’ (Nicholas Watson, Robyn Malo, Kathleen E. Kennedy, and Michael Van Dussen). These are bookended by two single-essay sections entitled ‘The Truth of Tales 1’ (Green) and ‘The Truth of Tales 2’ (Andrew Taylor). Intersecting the editors’ chronological/methodological groupings, one can discover various subconversations about, e.g., vernacular theology (Toswell, Minnis, Watson, and Malo), merchants and their books (Johnston, Malo, and Kennedy), the way in which literature encodes human-animal relations (Somerset and Kiser), and London law (Hanawalt and Kennedy).

[…]

Of especial interest to readers of Arthuriana is Somerset’s essay on Lawman’s Brut. […]

listening to syntax

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

At Poetry by the Sea: A Global Conference in Madison, CT, I participated in a critical seminar called “Listening to the Line.” My gratitude to Natalie Gerber for the invitation, and for organizing and leading the seminar. What follows is a modified version of the opening frame and closing paragraphs of my paper, “Listening to the Syntax of Alliterative Poetry.” This paper is not a fully developed critical argument but an attempt at an exposition, for a non-medievalist audience, of a historical perplexity from my area of specialization:

Historical background

The term ‘alliterative meter’ denotes the unrhymed meter used in Old English poetry, as in Beowulf (?eighth/tenth century); in Early Middle English alliterative poetry, as in Lawman’s Brut (c. 1200); and in Middle English alliterative poetry, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth century). This verse form does not survive to the present day: sometime in the middle of the sixteenth century, the alliterative meter was deselected from the active repertoire of English verse forms.

Modern scholars inevitably approach the alliterative meter with expectations molded by the experience of scanning accentual-syllabic poetry. Such expectations are generally unhelpful for appreciating the historically significant aspects of the alliterative meter, however. A useful opposition for capturing the difference between accentual-syllabic verse forms and the alliterative meter is deductive/inductive. Deductive meters, such as iambic pentameter, consist of the concatenation of perceptually similar metrical units (feet, syllables, etc.). As a result, they have a predictable beat (hence ‘deductive’), even if this beat is only ever notional. Inductive meters, such as the alliterative long line, consist of the juxtaposition of perceptually dissimilar metrical units. As a result, they have no predictable beat, not even a notional one. Instead, the pattern of each metrical unit must be discovered on a case-by-case basis through the application of specialized rules for the assignment of metrical stress (hence ‘inductive’).

Weird syntax

Just as Middle English alliterative meter disrupts many of the expectations that modern readers have learned to bring to modern verse, so too the syntax of Middle English alliterative poetry disrupts the syntactical expectations involved in parsing canonical English poetry from Geoffrey Chaucer to Robert Frost. From a modern perspective, the syntax of Middle English alliterative verse can seem weird, unnecessarily complex, or archaizing. This perception captures something important about the syntax of alliterative verse, but it is also the result of left turns and blind alleys in literary history, which have alienated modern commentators from the alliterative tradition. In this sense, the strange syntax of Middle English alliterative verse measures the historical distance between fourteenth- and twenty-first-century literary cultures.

[…]

Conclusion

Readers will have noticed by now that syntactical inversions in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight cluster in the second half of the line, and often at the very end of the line. There is a metrical reason for this asymmetrical distribution. While syntax may seem like its own, independent domain, in alliterative verse meter and syntax are best understood as two expressions of a single internalized metrical grammar. Many of the inversions discussed here occur in part for metrical convenience. So for example, “as I in toun herde” “as I heard in town” (Gawain 31) avoids a pattern with two long dips (*as I herde in toun). Patterns with two long dips were not part of the metrical system of the second half of the line in fourteenth-century alliterative verse. Thus meter and syntax work together to create normative lines. There is an analogy to be made to the way that Donald Wesling describes the interface of meter and syntax in modern accentual-syllabic meters (Wesling, The Scissors of Meter).

Syntax also takes on a life of its own in Middle English alliterative verse as a marker of poetic artifice. Even if they strike modern readers as unnecessarily complex, syntactical inversions in Middle English alliterative poetry seem to have signaled a high and serious poetic style. And alliterative poetry is nothing if not serious: in addition to the gold-and-tinsel Arthurian antiquity of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the corpus includes the apocalyptic/homiletic/satiric masterpiece Piers Plowman, the luridly anti-Semitic Siege of Jerusalem, the high-chivalric Destruction of Troy, and a number of allusive political prophecies inspired by the Prophecies of Merlin embedded in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1138). There are no straightforwardly comedic or celebratory alliterative poems, or at least none that have survived. The affect of alliterative narrative is characteristically high-minded and sententious. Encoding and deciphering elaborate syntactical inversions made up an important part of the cultural value of composing and reading (or hearing) this poetry.

Finally, we might inquire why Middle English alliterative verse exhibits the stylized syntactical inversions that it does. To answer this question requires comparing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to earlier alliterative poems. Such a comparison reveals that syntactical inversions had always characterized the alliterative tradition. In the openings of Beowulf and the Brut, we find, e.g., “þrym gefrunon” (prose order “gefrunon (þone) þrym” “heard of the might”) (Beowulf 2) and “at æðelen are chirechen” (prose order “at are æðelen chirechen” “at a splendid church”) (Brut 3). Neither of these arrangements was characteristic of Old English or Early Middle English prose syntax, and thus, inferentially, neither was characteristic of the poets’ normal spoken syntax. The syntax of fourteenth-century alliterative verse, then, shows historical pressure from earlier phases of this metrical tradition. If so, the often contorted syntax of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight expresses a relation of belonging in metrical tradition. Writing “baret þat lofden” instead of “þat lofden baret” “who loved battle” was not only syntactically permissible and metrically expedient; it also amounted to a prise de position in late medieval English literary culture. By contrasting the syntax of Middle English alliterative verse with that of other Middle English literature (where such inversions are rare to non-existent), we can begin to delineate the cultural stakes of alliterative meter and its weird syntax.

metrical cultures before 1800

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

I’ve organized a panel for MLA 2016 (Austin), entitled “English Metrical Cultures before 1800.” The panel has now been selected for inclusion in the conference. The panel will feature papers from Ian Cornelius, Megan Cook, and Joshua Swidzinski. Here I reproduce the opening and closing of the rationale for the session:

Yopie Prins, Meredith Martin, and other scholars have called for a ‘historical poetics’ that would reevaluate the received narrative of English literary history by recovering alternate ways of theorizing and experiencing poetic form. In her award-winning Rise and Fall of Meter, Martin argues that meter mattered in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English culture, and in ways that were strategically obscured by later polemicists and practitioners. The emergent field of historical poetics, conceptualized as the study of the reciprocal relationship between meters and cultures, represents an exciting new way of synthesizing formalism and historicism in the study of English literature.

Thus far, historical poetics has been most strongly associated with the study of nineteenth-century British poetry. This panel proposes to take a longer view onto the histories of English poetry, in order to explore continuities and change in English metrical cultures over time. The panel features one paper from each of the periods of English literary history before 1800: medieval, early modern, and the eighteenth century. While the panel has a wide chronological range (c. 1000-1800), the three papers cohere in their close focus on specific feedback loops between English meters and English cultures. Even more specifically, each of the essays situates ‘English’ ‘metrical’ cultures in a reciprocal relationship with non-English and/or non-metrical cultural forms. Each of the papers articulates a historically specific answer to the chiastic question: How do meters form cultures, and how do cultures form meters? Through its large chronological sweep and narrow thematic focus, this panel promises to bring together attendees addressing similar research questions in disparate periods of literary history.

[…]

Together, these three papers will expand the chronological frame of historical poetics and demonstrate the dynamism of meter as a culturally significant practice in English literary history. In particular, they will present three historical case studies of the way in which English metrical cultures emerge from cultural formations not traditionally associated with English meter as such. Austin, Texas, would be a particularly appropriate venue for this panel, since the English Department of the University of Texas at Austin currently employs or has employed several distinguished specialists in pre-1800 English prosody and poetics (Mary Blockley, Thomas Cable, Winfred Lehmann, and Lisa Moore).

paradigms of literary history

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

At the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI, this past week, I presented a paper in the panel entitled “Old English Language and Literature,” held in honor of Antonette diPaolo Healey. Thanks to Maren Clegg-Hyer, Haruko Momma, and Samantha Zacher for including me. Here I reproduce the opening frame and closing paragraphs of my contribution, “Paradigms of Literary History in Old English Metrics”:

In 2008 Nicolay Yakovlev submitted a doctoral thesis at Oxford entitled “The Development of Alliterative Metre from Old to Middle English.” Little known outside the field of metrics, and still unpublished, this thesis has already been felt to mark a significant juncture in the history of the study of alliterative meter (Cable, “Progress in Middle English Alliterative Metrics”; Cornelius, “The Accentual Paradigm in Early English Metrics”). With a rare combination of conceptual clarity and philological precision, Yakovlev traces a continuous history of composition in the English alliterative meter, stretching from Beowulf through Lawman’s Brut through Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and on into the sixteenth century.

In excavating this metrical longue durée, Yakovlev synthesizes prior work in alliterative metrics but also challenges it in two major ways. First, he articulates a new theoretical paradigm for Old English meter. Where most previous commentators described Old English meter as accentual, Yakovlev describes it as morphological. The second salient innovation in Yakovlev’s thesis is his threefold focus on Old English, Early Middle English, and Middle English verse. By applying a consistent terminology to all three phases of the alliterative tradition, Yakovlev is able to sketch a series of transformations directly connecting these three phases in one centuries-long catena of metrical practice. The result is a more dynamic model of the alliterative tradition as a whole, and a more contextualized view of individual developmental moments within that tradition.

While Yakovlev’s principal subject is metrical evolution, his work should also be understood as an important contribution to the study of English literary history. Although in theory Yakovlev accepts the traditional periodized terms ‘Old English,’ ‘Early Middle English,’ and ‘Middle English,’ in practice his thesis blurs the boundaries between these three segments of continuous metrical and linguistic history. Yakovlev’s contribution to the study of medieval English literary history is most evident in his third chapter, where he rehabilitates Lawman as a card-carrying member of the alliterative tradition. Considered irregular or defective by nearly all prior researchers, the meter of Lawman’s Brut serves Yakovlev as the fulcrum of a lengthy metrical history. Yakovlev’s thesis takes its place among other recent studies in metrics and literary history that have begun to conceptualize forms of continuity across the Old English/Middle English divide (Minkova, “Diagnostics of Metricality in Middle English Alliterative Verse” and “On the Meter of Middle English Alliterative Verse”; Russom, “The Evolution of Middle English Alliterative Meter”; Thornbury, Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England; Treharne, Living Through Conquest; Weiskott, “Lawman, the Last Old English Poet and the First Middle English Poet” and “Phantom Syllables in the English Alliterative Tradition“; Yeager, From Lawmen to Plowmen).

Renewed interest in the metrical and literary longue durée suggests the value of retracing the historical affiliations of two fields of inquiry often pursued in isolation from one another. In this essay in the history of ideas, I show how models of metrical history have had correlates in the realm of literary history and vice versa. The conjunction of literary history and metrical history remains implicit in much scholarship on alliterative verse from the eighteenth century onward, but I will argue that the two fields have often been regarded as congruent. In offering this disciplinary history in parvo, I mean to contextualize Yakovlev’s accomplishment by revisiting the sequence of earlier research activity that his thesis simultaneously crystallizes and exceeds. More generally, I seek to explore the way that metaphors and periodization structure critical inquiry.

[…]

By the end of the nineteenth century, then, the consensus view of metrical history had been thoroughly integrated into the study of literary history. Scholars of this period further developed organicist and naturalistic metaphors for literary and metrical history. In 1895 Jean Jules Jusserand connected the difficulties of dating Old English poems to an anecdote from Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars: “Anglo-Saxon poetry is like the river Saone; one doubts which way it flows.” For William John Courthope, writing in the same year, Old English meter was a species that went “extinct” after the Conquest, “instinctively” giving way in the face of isosyllabic and rhyming verse forms. In 1898 George Saintsbury referred to the apparent reemergence of the alliterative meter in the fourteenth century as a “resurrection” and a “revolt”: meter as revenant and meter as armed resistance. Particularly noteworthy is Gummere’s description of the Piers Plowman meter as “a sort of Indian Summer for the old Germanic metre.” Gummere’s metaphor implies a decisive break in continuity followed by a rare and inevitably short-lived return to prior conditions. In the following century, metaphors of revival and reflorescence would become the most prominent way in which alliterative meter and literary history intersected in critical discourse.

This paper has traced the emergence and consolidation of teleological models of Old English metrical and literary history. My largest aim in narrating this disciplinary history was to show why literary history should continue to be a central focus of literary studies. In the late twentieth century, discourses of organicism became unsavory to literary scholars and provided the impetus to divorce the study of literary history from metrics in particular and philology in general. Yakovlev’s thesis, however, holds out the possibility of rapprochement. After Yakovlev, it should be possible to write a literary history for alliterative verse without decay, without progress, with no resurrections and no Indian summers—indeed, a literary history without events.

meter across discipline

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

At the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI, this past week, I presented on a roundtable entitled “Form across Discipline.” Thanks to Shannon Gayk and Former: The Working Group on Form and Poetics for including me. My contribution, “Alliterative Meter across Discipline,” was as follows:

In my published writings I introduce the methodological concept of ‘verse history,’ or literary history articulated through the history of poetic form. Conceived as a medievalist contribution to the emergent field of ‘historical poetics,’ this research aims to coordinate formalism and historicism in the study of medieval English poetry. Verse history represents a method for historicizing meters and poetic style while measuring received conceptions of literary history against the development of literary forms. The specific focus of my work is alliterative poetry, from Old to Middle English. In this report from the field, I survey the transdisciplinary evidence from which I have sought to build a new history of alliterative verse.

Verse history is the history of a tradition of composing poems in a certain meter. As such, my research into the alliterative tradition is grounded in the field of metrics. It is an exciting time to be studying the alliterative meter. In the coming years, as specialist scholarship in this area reaches a wider audience, literary historians’ understanding of the norms governing this meter will radically change. For Old English, Thomas Cable argues convincingly that the principle of four metrical ‘positions,’ i.e., syllables or syllable-equivalents, is more fundamentally important than a count of strong stresses. The textbook definition of Old English meter needs to be revised. For Middle English, metrical specialists have now defined a restrictive set of accentual patterns for the ‘b-verse’ or second half of the alliterative long line. Middle English alliterative meter is not nearly as unregulated as 150 years of scholarship made it out to be. Finally, in a fundamentally important but still unpublished doctoral thesis, Nicolay Yakovlev synthesizes the study of Old English meter and the study of Middle English alliterative meter in a single theoretical framework. With a rare combination of conceptual clarity and philological precision, Yakovlev traces a continuous history of composition in the English alliterative meter, stretching from Beowulf through Lawman’s Brut through Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and on into the sixteenth century. Though Yakovlev does not develop the literary-historical implications of his metrical history, his study invokes a much more historically durable object of inquiry than scholars have meant of late by the term ‘alliterative tradition.’

A second source of evidence about metrical traditions comes from medieval writers themselves, in the form of testimonia. Surviving medieval comments on vernacular verse forms must, however, be treated with extreme caution. For its entire 900-year history, the alliterative meter constituted an untheorized cultural practice. This meter was deselected from the active repertoire of English verse forms in the middle of the sixteenth century, but the professional study of alliterative verse did not commence until the eighteenth century. When medieval writers seem to be mentioning or noticing the alliterative meter, it is almost always because they are mentioning or noticing something else. To take the most famous example, Chaucer’s Parson’s allusion to “rum, ram, ruf by lettre” is not primarily intended to denigrate alliterative verse but to characterize the Parson as one totally lacking in poetic skill. The difficulty of mapping medieval testimonia about poetic form onto modern analytical categories illustrates the extent to which such testimonia emerge under pressure from other kinds of historical discourse.

Textual criticism, by reconstructing historical forms of a poetic text, furnishes a third kind of evidence about metrical traditions. It often happens that the most historically significant aspects of a poetic text are also the most susceptible to scribal variation. This is true, for example, of Lawman’s Brut, whose conservative poetic lexicon gets a thoroughgoing makeover in one of its two surviving manuscript witnesses. There is still fundamental textual work to be done for alliterative verse. For the past two years I have been engaged in producing the first critical editions of two late fifteenth-century alliterative verse prophecies. Here is a teaser: one of the prophecies ends with a cryptogram spelling out ‘IRLAND’; the other is structured as an interview between one Sir William Banastre and God.

Scholars interested in the cultural history of meters might also examine the scribal texts of multiply-attested poems. Metrics and textual criticism have a long history of interdependence in English studies, in which one is most often subordinated to the other. Yet to reduce meter to its expression in a scribal text on the one hand or a reconstructed archetypal text on the other is to ignore a potentially significant layer of historical mediation. Nevertheless, it is possible to supplement verse history with documentary evidence precisely by recognizing the metrical competence implicit in scribal variants. In my first book, for example, I discuss the two extant manuscripts of Lawman’s Brut as evidence of metrical sensibilities, not in Lawman’s late twelfth-century Worcestershire but in the scribes’ own late thirteenth-century milieu.

A different kind of evidence comes from the field of codicology. Compilation and mise-en-page can indirectly reveal medieval preconceptions about literary form. For example, rhyming alliterating meters as in the Awntyrs off Arthure have usually been considered identical with the unrhymed alliterative meter. However, codicological evidence suggests that medieval compilers recognized a formal difference between (unrhymed) alliterative poems and alliterating stanzaic poems and acted on that recognition in the process of compilatio. For example: among the 392 poems in the massive Vernon MS, the two alliterative poems, Piers Plowman and Joseph of Arimathie, appear consecutively, while two poems in the rhyming thirteen-line stanza, the Disputation between Mary and the Cross (non-alliterating) and the Pistill of Swete Susan (alliterating), appear in sequence elsewhere in the manuscript.

Alliterative poems very often survive as fragments, so that they have been preserved in spite of, not because of, their literary form. This is the case with the Conflict of Wit and Will (late thirteenth/mid fourteenth c.), fragments of which were used to repair some margins in a 1507 printing of the York Missal. Why was this poem available as repair material in sixteenth-century Yorkshire? What, if anything, did the mender think about the poem? Little has been written on such book-historical questions, but they are crucially important if we are to catch these hints at the breadth and depth of the alliterative tradition as it existed for medieval practitioners.

And now for something completely different. My research into English alliterative meter has convinced me that the English language has no monopoly on this verse form. I believe I have identified a Middle English alliterative poem in Latin. The poem in question is Henry of Huntingdon’s twelfth-century translation of the Old English Battle of Brunanburh. To understand how Henry translated metrical principles from English to Latin, one needs not only a practical understanding of Early Middle English alliterative meter but also an ear for the nuances of the Latin language. For example, I posit that Henry makes use of both English-style metrical resolution, in which a quantitatively short stressed syllable plus the following syllable equals a long stressed syllable, and Latin-style synaeresis, in which adjacent vowels within a word coalesce into a single metrical position. Henry’s translation has usually been dismissed as a literary failure, but it can now be appreciated (I argue) as a specimen of twelfth-century English alliterative metrical practice.

In this paper I hope to have indicated the breadth of evidence and the diversity of theoretical approaches available to literary scholars interested in poetic traditions. I would like to close by observing that the methodology of verse history allows poetic traditions to emerge as important historical and cultural processes in their own right. The supposedly antagonistic relationship between form and history in English studies has always been more of a product of conflicting ideological commitments than an adequate description of critical practice. By synthesizing several forms of evidence across discipline, verse history reveals the value of taking a historical perspective onto literary form and a formal perspective onto literary history.