Alliterative Verse in Middle English

While it involves a wide range of poetic works and critical studies, alliterative verse in Middle English is readily approached as a discrete subfield. Alliterative verse is typically defined as poetry featuring long lines that consist of two half-lines separated by a caesura, with each half-line containing two stresses, with a variable number of syllables intervening before, between, and after these stresses. A range of possible patterns mark these stresses, though the most common pattern features three alliterating, and a fourth, non-alliterating stress, and is scanned as aa ax. This definition of alliterative poetry is already reductive, however, since it presents unrhymed alliterative verse as a kind of pure form. In fact, alliterative long lines were not infrequently combined with rhyme, and a number of poems have such loose alliterative metrical principles as to put pressure on any attempt to produce clear rules of alliterative form. Scholars studying alliterative verse in Middle English will quickly realize that the diversity of approaches to prosody and form is matched by the wide variety of genres, social and historical contexts, and themes that define Middle English alliterative verse. The subject of such verse is particularly notable for its literary historical disputes. Often focusing on the question of the existence of an Alliterative Revival—that is, a sudden reappearance of alliterative verse in the fourteenth century, after an alleged period of dormancy after the extinction of Old English alliterative verse—scholars of Middle English alliterative verse spend considerable time theorizing the geographical, cultural, and political contexts of alliterative works. Moving from more generalized studies of alliterative literature and culture to a survey of major works and subgenres, this bibliographical analysis seeks to equip scholars studying this subject with a sense of the key texts, themes, and methodologies in an otherwise dizzying array of works and fields. As a field that is acutely invested both in literary history and the study of prosody, alliterative poetry in Middle English offers scholars a unique opportunity to fuse close engagement with poetic works with large-scale reflections on literary history, on linguistic and poetic development, and on the question of which theoretical methodologies allow us to gain the most insights into an often anonymous, sometimes obscure body of late-medieval poetry.