alliterative meter and literary history

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

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.

prophetic Piers Plowman

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My article, “Prophetic Piers Plowman: New Sixteenth-Century Excerpts,” appears in Review of English Studies. This article grew out of archival work on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts of English political prophecy. I discovered two previously unrecognized excerpts from Piers Plowman while searching for something else entirely (an alliterative prophecy, which I did find).

The article has been named a Review of English Studies Editors’ Choice selection for 2017 and is available to download for free all year. Here’s the abstract:

In recent decades, a slew of textual discoveries has prompted a reconsideration of the sixteenth-century transmission and reception of Piers Plowman. Research on this topic began in 1989 with Sharon Jansen’s discovery of Piers Plowman excerpts in London, British Library, Sloane 2578 (mid sixteenth century) and has accelerated in recent years, refocusing questions of literary history, textual tradition, and the genres of Piers Plowman. A key conclusion of this new scholarship is that Langland’s poem circulated as political prophecy in manuscript and print in the sixteenth century. This article registers a new entry in the sixteenth-century archive of Langlandiana: two freestanding excerpts, each combining the same two passages from Piers Plowman B, in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C.813 (mid sixteenth century). The Rawlinson Piers Plowman excerpts, I argue, add incrementally to the case for a prophetic Piers Plowman in the sixteenth century and also indicate a richer codicological, generic, and metrical context for this period in the poem’s reception history. I begin by providing diplomatic texts of the excerpts and placing them in the context of Rawlinson C.813, the genre of political prophecy, and the alliterative tradition. I then argue through comparison and close reading that the prophetic Piers Plowman of the sixteenth century points up an underappreciated aspect of Langland’s poetic practice.

Piers Plowman and the alliterative tradition

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My article, “Piers Plowman and the Durable Alliterative Tradition,” appears in the Yearbook of Langland Studies. It’s scheduled to appear in early 2017 for 2016. This essay applies the methodology of my first book to the most widely copied and persistently idiosyncratic Middle English alliterative poem. Here’s the opening frame of the essay:

In recent years, the principles governing the alliterative meter 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 meter. Yakovlev’s 2008 Oxford dissertation, in particular, powerfully demonstrates continuity between Old English, Early Middle English, and Middle English alliterative meter. Indeed, this new research paradigm has begun to suggest the incoherence of the received period terms ‘Old English’ and ‘Middle English’ as such. Yet each of these metrical experts has bracketed Piers Plowman as formally aberrant. Duggan concludes that ‘Langland clearly did not always care to make his alliterative long line fit the conventions that governed other alliterative poets’; Cable confides, ‘I suspect that Langland knew the rules […] but felt free to break them’; Putter, Jefferson, and Stokes find Piers Plowman ‘metrically idiosyncratic’; and Yakovlev labels the poem ‘metrically deviant’. Because Piers Plowman is among the longest and most studied alliterative poems and by far the best attested in manuscript, its relation to the wider alliterative tradition emerges as a major question for metrists and literary historians.

This essay reconsiders the extent to which the meter of Piers Plowman conforms to that of the surrounding alliterative tradition. The first section summarizes progress in Middle English alliterative metrics, with emphasis on the observable metrical development that justifies reference to a durable alliterative tradition spanning the seventh through the sixteenth centuries. The second section compares the meter of Piers Plowman with the emergent metrical model, identifying major similarities and minor differences between Piers Plowman and other fourteenth-century alliterative poems. The third section explores the cultural implications of the similarities and differences, thereby situating Langland’s formal choices in the metrical landscape of late fourteenth-century London. I argue that Langland stands apart from other alliterative poets not because he flouts metrical rules but because of the peculiar way in which he fulfills them; I then argue that the meter of Piers Plowman reflects the interaction of a major diachronic and a major synchronic force, the durable alliterative tradition and Langland’s metrical landscape. A central aim of this essay is to bring progress in metrical study to the wider attention of Middle English specialists. To that end, I append a glossary of technical terms.

alliterative verse: a bibliography

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My bibliography “Alliterative Verse” appears in the digital Oxford Bibliographies in British and Irish Literature, edited by Andrew Hadfield. These bibliographies consist of citations of key scholarly works, accompanied by annotations and related to one another by commentary paragraphs. Here’s the introductory paragraph of my bibliography:

Alliterative verse refers to a corpus of approximately three hundred unrhymed English poems, spanning the period c. 650–1550 CE. Before the 12th century, there was only one way to write poetry in English. This verse form, known to modern scholars as alliterative Meter, stood in contrast to English prose, on the one hand, and syllabic Latin meters, on the other. From the late 12th century onward, French- and Latin-inspired syllabic English meters were introduced, throwing alliterative meter into relief in a new way. From the 14th century onward, poets also wrote poems combining alliterative metrical structures with stanzaic rhyme patterning, and these poems are traditionally grouped together with the unrhymed corpus. Sometime in the middle of the 16th Century, alliterative verse ceased to function as a metrical option in English literary culture. Whether found in large poetic anthologies or scattered among other kinds of writing, most alliterative poems exist in only one or two Manuscripts. The alliterative corpus comprehends an array of Genres, from brief monologues and riddles to lengthy narratives. Four long poems—Beowulf, Lawman’s Brut, Piers Plowman (see also the Oxford Bibliographies in British and Irish Literature entry titled “Piers Plowman”), and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight [see also the Oxford Bibliographies in British and Irish Literature entry titled “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”)—have attracted the most critical attention since the rediscovery of alliterative verse in the 17th Century and the 18th Century. Since the 19th Century, study of this poetic tradition has been subdivided along political-historical lines, with the surviving corpus segmented into Old English poetry and Middle English alliterative poetry to reflect the importance of the Norman Conquest of England (1066). Yet, scholars on both sides of the Old/Middle divide have pursued similar research questions in areas such as metrics and poetics, manuscript studies, and genre studies. Modern poets, especially in the 20th Century, have turned to alliterative verse for formal and thematic inspiration.

Piers Plowman in the sixteenth century

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

Last weekend at the Sixth International Piers Plowman Society conference in Seattle, I presented a paper entitled “The Meter of Piers Plowman in the Sixteenth Century.” Thanks to Emily Steiner for including my paper in a panel on metrical form and chairing the session. I reproduce the opening and closing paragraphs of the essay:

My title refers to two distinct historical developments. First, this is a paper about the English alliterative tradition after 1450. I ask what it meant to compose and read alliterative verse in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Second, this is a paper about the fate of Langland’s alliterative poem in the sixteenth century. As we will see, these two historical developments were closely related. I take them up in turn.

Contrary to prior critical consensus, recent work on English alliterative meter points to a continuous tradition of verse craft connecting Beowulf to Lawman’s Brut to Piers Plowman. The trajectory of this durable tradition after 1450, however, remains poorly understood. In contrast to the relative abundance of alliterative poetry dating from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, there are extant only eight alliterative poems datable to after 1450: two political prophecies containing coded references to the Wars of the Roses, four political prophecies in the printed Whole Prophesie of Scotland (1603), William Dunbar’s Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo (c. 1500), and Scottish Field (1515-47). Around the middle of the sixteenth century, the alliterative meter was deselected from the active repertoire of English verse forms.

The choice to employ the alliterative meter in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was far from a nationalistic gesture. […]

In conclusion, it is worth noticing the extent to which the last chapter of alliterative verse history fails to intersect the first chapter of the study of medieval English poetry. In the second half of the sixteenth century, Robert Crowley, John Bale, George Puttenham, Edmund Spenser, and the author of the Petition directed to her Most Excellent Maiestie were situated in an interregnum between medieval practice and modern theory. The sixteenth century witnessed the inauguration of medieval studies as a field of historical inquiry. However, the focus of the earliest publications was on Old English prose. Crowley’s edition of Piers Plowman is an aberration in many ways, and the experiment was not repeated until 1813. Crowley’s and Puttenham’s brief comments on Langland’s meter bear little resemblance to the increasingly sophisticated field of alliterative metrics in the eighteenth century and later, when this meter was recognized first as quantitative, then as an arrangement of identical initial sounds (‘alliterative,’ a postmedieval coinage), and finally and most enduringly as accentual. Within the interregnum between practice and theory, the experience of alliterative meter was to a large extent an experience of Piers Plowman. Accordingly, the more we learn about the uses and perception of Piers Plowman in the sixteenth century, the more we will learn about the final phase of the alliterative tradition and the literary-cultural atmosphere of the sixteenth century more generally.