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.
Author(s): Ian Cornelius
Series: Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 99
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2017
Language: English
Pages: X+224
List of Tables vi
Acknowledgments vii
Notes on the Text viii
List of Abbreviations ix
Introduction: What Was Alliterative Poetry? 1
1. An Unwritten Medieval Treatise 23
2. The Accentual Paradigm in Early English Metrics 44
3. The Origins of the Alliterative Revival 67
4. The Fourteenth-Century Meter 104
5. The End of Alliterative Verse 130
Epilogue: Edmund Spenser's Poetry Lesson 147
Notes 155
Bibliography 193
Index 213
