Reconstructing Alliterative Verse

The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter

Ian Cornelius

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781107154100
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108216487
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Table of contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on the text
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: What Was Alliterative Poetry?
• 1 An Unwritten Medieval Treatise
• 2 The Accentual Paradigm in Early English Metrics
• 3 The Origins of the Alliterative Revival
• 4 The Fourteenth-Century Meter
• 5 The End of Alliterative Verse
• Epilogue: Edmund Spenser’s Poetry Lesson
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index