My note, “An Overlooked Excerpt from Thomas of Erceldoune,” appears in Notes and Queries. This note describes a previously unknown text of a Middle English prophetic quatrain and identifies this quatrain as an excerpt from a longer Middle English verse prophecy attributed to Thomas of Erceldoune. Here’s the opening paragraph:
The New Index of Middle English Verse (NIMEV) 23.5 is a cross-rhymed prophetic quatrain, beginning ‘A bastar [sic] schall come owt of the west.’ To date, this text has been identified in Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 26 (olim Hengwrt 133), 117, and Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Llanstephan 53 (olim Sherburn E.1), 513. Peniarth 26 is a large collection of prophecies in English, Latin, and Welsh; the bulk of the manuscript can be dated to 1456 on the basis of an inscription written on p. 83 in that year. Llanstephan 53 is a large collection of mostly Welsh poetry copied (and in many cases composed) by poet James Dwnn of Montgomeryshire, Wales, c. 1647; the text of “A bastar schall come. . .” near the end of this manuscript, in a portion copied by one “Tho[mas] P.,” was recorded by John Gwenogvryn Evans in his catalog entry but is not noted at NIMEV 23.5. In this note I describe a third text of NIMEV 23.5 and then identify this quatrain as an excerpt from a much longer cross-rhymed poem in three fitts, known as Thomas of Erceldoune (NIMEV 365).
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).
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.
Certain syntactical ambiguities in Old English poetry have been the focus of debate among students of metre and syntax. Proponents of intentional ambiguity must demonstrate that the passages in question exhibit, not an absence of syntactical clarity, but a presence of syntactical ambiguity. This article attempts such a demonstration. It does so by shifting the terms of the debate, from clauses to verses and from a spatial to a temporal understanding of syntax. The article proposes a new interpretation of many problematic passages that opens onto a new way of parsing and punctuating Old English poetry.
In this essay in the history of poetic style, I demonstrate that the sequence in time of Old English half-lines sometimes necessitates retrospective syntactical reanalysis, a state of affairs which modern punctuation is ill-equipped to capture, but in which Anglo-Saxon readers and listeners would have recognized specific literary effects. In the second section, I extrapolate two larger syntactical units, the half-line sequence and the verse paragraph, which differ in important ways from the clauses and sentences that modern editors impose on Old English poetic texts. Along the way, I improve the descriptive accuracy of Kuhn’s Laws by reinterpreting them as governing half-line sequences rather than clauses. I conclude with a call for unpunctuated or minimally punctuated critical editions of Old English verse texts.
My article, “The Ireland Prophecy: Text and Metrical Context,” appears in Studies in Philology. The article provides a first critical edition and verse-historical contextualization of a little-known late fifteenth-century alliterative verse prophecy found in seven fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts. Here I reproduce brief selections from the edition and commentary:
New Index of Middle English Verse (NIMEV)366.5/2834.3/3557.55 is an alliterative verse prophecy extant in six fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscript copies. The Ireland Prophecy, as I title it, has received scant 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 mid-fifteenth-century politics. The work offers at least one first-rate literary effect, the compound adjective bryght-breneyd ‘clad in bright chain-mail coats’ (62a). Another remarkable feature of the poem is an acrostic spelling out I-R-L-A-N-D ‘Ireland,’ over the space of two lines (ll. 83–4). In one manuscript the acrostic is ciphered in early Arabic numerals, where A=1, B=2, and so on. TheIreland Prophecy 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 Ireland Prophecy also testifies to the continuity of the alliterative tradition across the Old English/Middle English divide, as I will argue. In what follows I introduce the manuscript texts of TheIreland Prophecy and present a critical edition of the poem with textual notes. The second section contextualizes the metrical form of the poem in terms of the durable poetic tradition to which it belongs. The third section draws out the literary-historical implications of this metrical contextualization.
[…]
S m[u]sid in [m]i[n]des [a]n[d] merk[e] [ther] a P The tothe correctid [ther] tides mikel tene S sett by hymself in set an I. throne sæte With [t]rayn they be tynt trowe [þ]ow non oþer Þese liouns bees lusked and lased on sondir struck; bound And thair landes [l]ost for longe tyme Thair men shal be mangled and mordred with moode Without any mercy robbed on rowe Thair wodys shal be wasted wit thow it wele The donne dere in thaire denne be dryven to þe dethe Þair fforestes be foreyd þair flockes awey ffett Þair stedys shal be stroyed and stoln fro þayr steddes Þair castells shal be cnocked thair knyghtes cast in care Þair tresore shal be trussed and trilled with trayne loaded up; wheeled off <ON With brybory and with bragge bost shal men blow And mykyl tor[vell]e and tene shal tyde in þat tyme trouble <ON torveldi But þis bale and þis boste blowyn til an ende. […]
Having suggested a post-1450 date for TheIreland Prophecy on historical grounds, I turn now to consider its metrical form. TheIreland Prophecy 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 TheIreland Prophecy; the meter of the poem, 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 TheIreland Prophecy, and point to one avenue for future research.
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 Ireland Prophecy 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.
My review of The Cambridge Companion to “Piers Plowman”, ed. Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), appears in Speculum. Here’s the opening of the review:
This volume is the second of its kind. ACompanion to “Piers Plowman”, ed. John A. Alford (Berkeley, 1988), marked a high point of sophistication and diversification in the study of this challenging Middle English poem. Following in the tradition of Alford’s volume and capitalizing on research progress since 1988, Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway’s Companion offers a panoptic view of major issues in the historical and literary interpretation of Piers Plowman.
The contributions are organized into three parts: “The poem and its traditions” (Helen Barr, Ralph Hanna, Steven Justice, and Jill Mann), “Historical and intellectual contexts” (Robert Adams, James Simpson, Matthew Giancarlo, Cole and Galloway, and Suzanne Conklin Akbari), and “Readers and responses” (Simon Horobin, Lawrence Warner, and Nicolette Zeeman). The volume’s tripartite arrangement (for a medieval poem obsessed with trios and trinities) invites linear reading, leading, in a familiar critical arc, from the poem qua literature, to its wider historical contexts, and finally to its importance for subsequent histories. At the same time, each essay is designed as a self-contained introduction to the poem.
Eric Weiskott 
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