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.

the alliterative tradition in slow motion

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

This past weekend, I presented a paper at the New England Medieval Conference in Boston. I’ve also been elected to a three-year term on the steering committee of this traveling medieval studies conference. The theme of this year’s conference was Slow Catastrophe. My paper, “The English Alliterative Tradition: A Cultural Formation in Slow Motion,” summarized two key moments from the metrical history narrated in my first book. Here’s the opening and closing of my talk:

In the early eighth century, English poetry first found its way onto the manuscript page. When it did, it appeared in an early form of alliterative meter, now known as Old English meter. In the middle of the sixteenth century, alliterative poetry disappeared from the active repertoire of verse forms. By then, Chaucer’s pentameter had become the default English meter. These are the outer chronological limits of my subject. In the 800 years in between, the alliterative tradition functioned as a gigantic and slow-moving cultural institution.

The alliterative tradition was gigantic: over 300 poems survive, many of them thousands of lines long. The alliterative tradition was slow-moving: the major changes in the metrical system took centuries to crystallize. And the alliterative tradition was an institution: for 800 years it stood as a set of cultural practices, or habitūs, from which poets drew or against which they staked their literary projects.

This paper engages a long view on the alliterative tradition, surveying its development over nine centuries. This poetic corpus is usually divided in two: Old English verse over here and Middle English alliterative verse over there. Capitalizing on recent progress in alliterative metrics, I will discuss alliterative verse as a single, continuous tradition.

The alliterative tradition predated the first treatises on English prosody, which appeared only in the late sixteenth century. Medieval English poets and their audiences had no explicit theory of alliterative meter and no way to reconstruct metrical history. Like a long-term geological event, the development of the alliterative meter took place gradually and imperceptibly. This paper therefore emphasizes distance over closeness, the longue durée over the “Eureka!” moment.

Most of alliterative verse history comprised a series of non-events. This poetic tradition was characterized by long-term stability in metrical form, poetic vocabulary, and cultural prestige. In order to throw this stability into relief, I focus on two significant events. The first is the demotion of alliterative meter in favor of syllabic English meters in the thirteenth century. The second is the desuetude of alliterative meter in the sixteenth century. From the perspective of the alliterative tradition, both of these events could be described as catastrophes. I propose that these events gain their fullest cultural meaning in the literary-historical longue durée.

[…]

These two events in the history of alliterative verse should also be viewed as major turning points in English literary history generally. The schism between alliterative verse and English poetry in the thirteenth century laid the groundwork for the developments of the fourteenth. The deselection of alliterative meter in the sixteenth century signaled the completion of processes of centralization in literary culture, anticipating what would come to be recognized as modern English literature.

At this point, some of you may be wondering how the fourteenth century fits into all of this. As a period of expanded production of English texts, the late fourteenth century has rightly claimed pride of place in Middle English studies. However, part of my polemical purpose has been to suggest that the fourteenth century in English poetry must be read against the twelfth, thirteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were indeed The Grounds of English Literature, as Chris Cannon argued in 2004, though I have tried to add a metrical dimension to his literary argument. Further, study of Middle English literature is bound to produce incomplete historical understandings so long as it walls itself off from the Old English centuries. Properly to contextualize Lawman’s Brut or even Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, we need to be conversant with the eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries in English poetry. For it was then that alliterative verse was consolidated as a written poetic tradition, long before the introduction of syllabic English meters. These centuries were also The Grounds of English Literature, as Cannon fails to acknowledge. Indeed, longitudinal study of alliterative verse challenges the very division of medieval English literary history into ‘Old’ and ‘Middle’ subperiods.

The status of the alliterative tradition as an independent historical series is perhaps most evident in its points of contact with other kinds of history. I have touched on three in this essay. First, the history of the book. We saw that the demotion of alliterative verse in the thirteenth century was expressed through changes in textualization. After 1450, the advent of print technology recalibrated the English literary field once again. Second, textual history. In the thirteenth century, the textual history of Lawman’s Brut replayed larger trends in alliterative verse history. In the sixteenth century, the excerpting and revision of earlier alliterative poems constituted literary activity in its own right. Third, the history of literary genres. In the thirteenth century, the emergence of a French-inspired English genre called ‘romance’ reinforced the promotion of new, French-inspired English meters. Lawman’s Brut, as a proto-alliterative romance, holds an important position in alliterative verse history and English literary history as well. In the sixteenth century, a monomania for political prophecy was one symptom of the advanced marginalization of alliterative verse.

In conclusion, a word on critical method. Traditionally, the writing of literary history has focused on choices (Gower chooses to compose in English) and events (the Alliterative Revival). This configuration of a research field recalls the methods of a certain kind of political history. Even literary scholars who would disavow an easy equation between political and literary history, however, tend to perpetuate its effects, the focus on choice and events as the parameters within which literary history becomes intelligible. Yet composition in the alliterative meter was not a choice in any sense before the invention of non-alliterative meters in the twelfth century: if one composed poetry in English at all before c. 1150, one inevitably composed alliterative poetry. Certainly later English poets recognized the metrical choices that lay before them in the vernacular, but they do not appear to have constructed a metadiscourse about those choices. I structured this paper around two events in the history of a poetic tradition. In doing so, however, I suggested that most of alliterative verse history comprised a series of non-events. The alliterative meter underwent profound evolutionary change between the eighth century and the sixteenth, but the changes were so gradual as to be imperceptible to individual practitioners. None of them was an event in any journalistic sense.

Has the time come for an Annales School of literary history? In this paper, I’ve highlighted what such longitudinal analysis might offer to study of alliterative verse.

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.

The Ireland Prophecy

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

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. The Ireland 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 The Ireland 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 The Ireland Prophecy on historical grounds, I turn now to consider its metrical form. The Ireland 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 The Ireland 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 The Ireland 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.

Here is a companion site for this essay, part of a larger digital project.

Here are images of the Ireland Prophecy in manuscript context (not included in my publication):

London, Society of Antiquries, MS 101 (late fifteenth c.)

Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS 441C (olim Williams 219) (sixteenth c.)

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.