The poetry we call 'alliterative' is recorded in English from the seventh century until the sixteenth, and includes Caedmon's 'Hymn', Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Piers Plowman. These are some of the most admired works of medieval English literature, and also among the most enigmatic. The formal practice of alliterative poets exceeded the conceptual grasp of medieval literary theory; theorists are still playing catch-up today. This book explains the distinctive nature of alliterative meter, explores its differences from subsequent accentual-syllabic forms, and advances a reformed understanding of medieval English literary history. The startling formal variety of Piers Plowman and other Middle English alliterative poems comes into sharper focus when viewed in diachronic perspective: the meter was in transition; to understand it, we need to know where it came from and where it was headed at the moment it died out.

Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter

This book provides a systematic account of the meter of the Old English Beowulf from a strictly synchronic perspective. Drawing on recent developments in prosodic phonology, as well as paying close attention to philological details, the work examines the paradigmatics and syntagmatics of the hierarchical integrated metrical units in their underlying configurations and surface manifestations through association with linguistic material. The meter of Beowulf is presented here as an open-ended, prototype system of rules and representations that leaves areas of indeterminacy and ambivalence at its periphery; it is a code for determining metricality in gradient terms since it is subject to a complex of linguistically motivated preference conditions. The metrical system of Beowulf consists of two subsystems, differing in level of abstraction, one of metrical types and one of metrical schemes, with a set of linguistically determined derivational rules mediating between the two; the metrical rules and representations are shown to be in large measure isomorphic to linguistic structure; and finally, behind diverse metrical phenomena a ubiquitous principle of maximal contract is found to be in operation. Exhibiting a firm command relevant data, capable devices, and a solid understanding of the research history, the book constitutes a synthesis of the multiplicity of contesting accounts that have been advanced in the traditional scholarship.

The metrical organization of Beowulf : prototype and isomorphism

English Alliterative Verse tells the story of the medieval poetic tradition that includes Beowulf, Piers Plowman, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, stretching from the eighth century, when English poetry first appeared in manuscripts, to the sixteenth century, when alliterative poetry ceased to be composed. Eric Weiskott draws on the study of meter to challenge the traditional division of medieval English literary history into Old English and Middle English periods. The two halves of the alliterative tradition, divided by the Norman Conquest of 1066, have been studied separately since the nineteenth century; this book uses the history of metrical form and its cultural meanings to bring the two halves back together. In combining literary history and metrical description into a new kind of history he calls 'verse history', Weiskott reimagines the historical study of poetics.

English Alliterative Verse : Poetic Tradition and Literary History

This article offers a new interpretation of the pilgrimage framework for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I argue that the Tales have an ironic relationship to books that bear them, one that confronts r...

Are The Canterbury Tales a Book

Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter [abstract]

Among the most unorthodox theories of Old English meter currently in play is Nicolay Yakovlev’s proposal that it was not accentual.1 According to Yakovlev, the standard verse form of Beowulf owed its metricality neither to a fixed count of “major” stresses, nor to a minimal set of recurring accentual contours, but instead to a relatively simple count of four metrical positions per verse. Given this point of departure from received understandings, the success or failure of Yakovlev’s theory rests largely on his ability to define a metrical position and show how the words and syllables that make up actual verses of Old English map onto a basic four-position frame. For this task he is able to draw on a deep file of prior scholarship. For, if Yakovlev’s theory is directly contrary to what we might term the modern vulgate understanding of Old English meter, it is also a direct development of the single most important contribution to this modern tradition, that of Eduard Sievers.2 Sievers demonstrated that most verses of Old English conform to one of five basic rhythmical patterns.3 This has

The Accentual Paradigm in Early English Metrics

This essay examines the moral and political thought of John Gower9s poem on the English Rising of 1381, situating it within three contrastive fields: Gower’s moral project, his Virgilian intertext, and the practices of moral community employed by the rebels of 1381.

Gower and the Peasants' Revolt

The metrical theory devised by Eduard Sievers and refined by A. J. Bliss forms the basis for most current scholarship on Old English meter. A weakness of the Sievers–Bliss theory is that it occupie...

Ian Cornelius

Papers

Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter

The Accentual Paradigm in Early English Metrics

Gower and the Peasants' Revolt

The intricacies of counting to four in Old English poetry

The Origins of the Alliterative Revival