Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650

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Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650

Eric Weiskott

Un iver sit y of Pen nsy lvan i a Press Phil adelphi a

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contents

List of Abbreviations

ix

Note on Quotations and Scansion

xi

Preface xiii Introduction. Modernity: The Prob­lem of a History

1

PART I. ALLITERATIVE METER, TETRAMETER, PO­LITI­CAL PROPHECY Chapter 1. En­glish Po­liti­cal Prophecy: Coordinates of Form and History

25

Chapter 2. The Age of Prophecy

47

Chapter 3. The Ireland Prophecy and the ­Future of Alliterative Verse

58

Chapter 4. Tetrameter: The ­Future of Alliterative Verse

74

Chapter 5. Where Have All the Pentameter Prophecies Gone?

90

PART II. ALLITERATIVE METER, PENTAMETER, LANGLAND Chapter 6. Alliterative Meter and Blank Verse, 1540–1667

103

Chapter 7. The Rhymelessness of Piers Plowman 123 Chapter 8. Langland’s Meter and Blank Verse, 1700–2000

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viii co n t en ts

PART III. TETRAMETER, PENTAMETER, CHAUCER Chapter 9. Chaucer and the Prob­lem of Modernity

153

Chapter 10. Chaucer’s En­glish Metrical Phonology: Tetrameter to Pentameter

161

Chapter 11. The Age of Pentameter

178

Conclusion. From Archive to Canon

197

Appendix A. En­glish Prophecy Books

207

Appendix B. Some Texts of En­glish Verse Prophecies Not Noted in NIMEV 211 Appendix C. Compilers, Scribes, and ­Owners of Manuscripts Containing Po­liti­cal Prophecy

219

Appendix D. The Ireland Prophecy 227 Notes 231 Bibliography 261 Index 000 Acknowl­edgments

285

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Preface

This book issues from a par­tic­u­lar disciplinary-­historical context. I belong to a generation of literary scholars for whom periodization is a foregone conclusion.

Period specialty was the essential ele­ment of our applications to gradu­ate programs. The minimum price of entry to academia was to designate oneself a medievalist, a Victorianist, and so on. I entered the En­glish PhD program at Yale University in 2009 as an ‘Anglo-­Saxonist.’ Scholarly subspecialization by time period is old news, but it has assumed a professional importance for my cohort that feels like an intensification as compared with previous generations. We ­were encouraged to find common cause with peers studying our period in other disciplines, a dream of transdisciplinary period coherence that James Simpson has queried on general princi­ple.1 Meanwhile, the provision of full-­time academic jobs in which to deepen and transmit specialist knowledge continued its decline.

Hyperspecialization is an expression of the neoliberalization of higher education, the obverse of the casualization of academic l­ abor. The fragmentation and rationalization of knowledge shapes the smallest details of professional existence, down to who is in the room. T ­ oward the end of my time at Yale, in 2012, the early modernists in the En­glish Department’s Medieval and Re­nais­sance Colloquium, true to their period, filed for a divorce from the medievalists. Periodization arose as an intellectual topic for the group(s) only at our farewell meeting, when the divorce had already been finalized. (I choose the meta­phor of divorce advisedly. John Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643–44), prompted by Milton’s desire to secure a divorce from his seventeen-­year-­old wife Mary Powell, also proposes a divorce from a reading practice he names, for the first time in En­glish, “literalism,” henceforth a keyword in anti-­Jewish, anti-­Catholic, and anti-­‘medieval’ rhe­toric.2) Not being in the room has its consequences. Invested with a po­liti­cal valuation, the narrative of modernity locates premodern lit­er­a­ture and its study at the margins of the field. The episode at Yale recapitulated, at a trivial level of particularity, the historical drama whereby modernity, via the Re­nais­sance,

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d­ etached itself from something it could then name as its Other. A symptom of this estrangement is that medievalists are expected to engage with the theories and methods central to ­later periods of literary study, whereas postmedievalists can afford to ignore medievalist scholarship.3 “We understand their language, but they ­don’t understand ours,” a medievalist friend once observed, with double meaning. We sometimes find ourselves in the position of witnessing ‘new’ scholarly movements, associated with ­later periods, that unwittingly resemble the work we have been presenting and publishing for years. Medievalists who wish to speak back to theoretical and methodological trends in the field are expected to represent ourselves as newcomers, or emissaries from a faraway land. Medievalists bear some responsibility for this dynamic. When we accept modernity as the limit of our intellectual energies, we consent in our own professional marginalization. Medieval/Re­nais­sance, or med/Ren, is a standard specification for pre-1700 En­glish lit­er­a­ture teaching positions at colleges and smaller universities. In ­these cases, the exigencies of institutional resources ­under austerity have reunified a partitioned literary terrain; but the nonnegotiable elective is always Shakespeare. In a sense, medievalists ­aren’t in the room ­whether we are in the room or not. ­There is a history ­behind this. In Why Literary Periods Mattered, Ted Underwood traces an impor­tant part of that history. Underwood’s book centers on the early nineteenth ­century. Yet its arguments about the formation of En­glish studies return again and again to the teaching and literary repre­sen­ta­tion of the ­Middle Ages. More even than Underwood indicates, the book demonstrates the foundational importance of medievalism to the discipline of En­g lish. Walter Scott is the hero, or villain, of the book. According to Underwood, En­glish studies conformed to Scott’s vision of historical cultivation to an extent that present-­ day En­glish professors might be embarrassed to realize. Underwood first describes this vision in its natu­ral setting, Scott’s early Waverley novels and other con­ temporary novels, poems, handbooks of chronology, and public discourse about history. Underwood shows that a paradoxical proposition about history, that our inability to understand a prestigious cultural past is “the true source of cultural prestige,” gained currency in imaginative writing during Scott’s lifetime (1771– 1832).4 Curiously, Romantic writers thought of history as constituted by “the contrasts, gaps, and perspectival dilemmas that make it difficult to grasp one’s connection to the past.”5 Then comes a left turn. A Scottian sense of historical difference was “institutionalized as the organ­izing framework of historical and literary education.”6 Underwood tracks the introduction of periods into literary and historical curricula at King’s College London and University College London

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in the 1840s. Emphasizing the status quo of the 1820s and 1830s, in which London professors regularly taught the ­whole gamut of En­glish lit­er­a­ture in one term, Underwood conveys the strangeness of periodization. H ­ ere, too, medievalism looms large. The old nonperiodized curriculum, as against the racial-­ linguistic factionalism of Scott’s Ivanhoe, had emphasized continuity between ‘Saxon,’ ‘Norman,’ and ‘En­g lish’ phases of language history. The first course taught in the new, periodized format was a course given by Frederick Denison Maurice on the General Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Underwood’s argument has a social dimension. The form of historical understanding displaced by Scott and other writers had been a vision of social continuity identifiable as a fantasy-­projection of the aristocracy. Regency-­era writers instead stressed the unknowability of the past, but Underwood diagnoses this conception of history in turn as expressive of a specifically middle-­class ethos.

The speakers of John Keats’s sonnets ­can’t afford the ­Grand Tour but can feel “an immediate experience of the alienation produced by historical time.”7 Unlike the aristocratic Oxbridge universities, which succumbed to En­glish studies only in the late nineteenth c­ entury, King’s and University College w ­ ere founded, in the late 1820s, with the explicit charge to educate “tradesmen and yeomen.”8 Maurice avowedly started with Chaucer ­because (Underwood’s words) “the age of Chaucer dramatizes the essentially bourgeois foundation of En­glish nationality.”9 In one of Maurice’s letters, a characteristic bourgeois experience, a visit to the British Museum, triggers the theologian and professor to rhapsodize about historical and spiritual transcendence. The covertly middle-­class aesthetic of Scott’s historical novels became the covertly middle-­class sensibility of literary studies. More embarrassing news for En­glish professors.

We inhabit a truly bizarre cul-­de-­sac in Underwood’s story. Periodization is ­today a familiar object of critique within and beyond medieval studies. The history and limitations of periodization are the stuff of w ­ hole books, conferences, journal essay clusters. The trendy En­glish Institute devoted a conference to the topic over a de­cade ago, in 2008. When the Yale early modernists divorced the medievalists, every­one knew to arrange a periodization-­themed sendoff, as self-­defeating as such an event would, by definition, be. We have internalized the ultimate artificiality of periodization. But the overall structure of the En­glish department curriculum has scarcely changed since the 1840s. Underwood published Why Literary Periods Mattered in 2013. He could have published it, without altering a word, in 2020. The professors have only interpreted the curriculum, in vari­ous ways; the point is to change it. Having absorbed its principal rival, comparative lit­er­a­ture, in the ­middle of the twentieth ­century, periodization is, if

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anything, more dominant than ever as the governing princi­ple of literary studies.10 Underwood historicizes this princi­ple and brings its bourgeois politics back into focus, rescuing us from “amnesia about the ­whole history of the discipline before New Criticism.”11 In ­doing so, he incidentally shows that medieval Britain always had a si­mul­ta­neously intimate and distant conceptual relationship to the field of study that proposed to analyze its lit­er­a­ture. Historiographically speaking, medieval is not one period among ­others with which it is on an equal footing. En­glish studies was founded on, as well as founded against, the medieval. The discipline of En­glish contributes its small part to, in Kathleen Davis’s formulation, “the medievalism at the heart of the theoretical enterprise of modernity.”12 The presently existing dynamic between medieval and the rest of the field imposes on medievalists an impossible choice between a demonstration that medieval lit­er­a­ture differs from modern lit­er­a­ture (justifying periodization) and a demonstration that it does not (forfeiting its historicity). The choice is impossible ­because the po­liti­cal claims of modernity permeate the fundamental disciplinary concepts. ­These are the concepts ­behind MLA-­interview or job-­talk questions of the form, “What does [text] tell us about [topic] in general?” To speak ­these concepts is already to speak the language of modernity. I want to emphasize that this is neither a peculiar character failing on the part of postmedievalists (as if more virtuous colleagues would ask the right questions) nor a general prob­lem of institutional power (as if the ­tables could be turned and medievalist categories made into the unmarked terms of engagement for literary study—if only!). The w ­ hole prob­lem of fundamental disciplinary concepts points instead to a self-­contradiction inherent in the structure of modernity as a presentist Eu­ ro­pean yet universalist narrative category.

A similar dynamic plays out more subtly between the subfields of Old En­ glish and ­Middle En­glish, which parted ways in the nineteenth c­ entury. My first book challenged this periodization from the perspective of alliterative verse. As with the medieval/modern divide, work that traverses the two times clusters around a small number of established longue durée topics, such as historiography, religious prose, and book production. In addition to its intellectual ramifications, Old/Middle periodization has professional ones. Old En­g lish and ­Middle En­glish specialists have few occasions on which to be in the same rooms.

Old En­glish specialists attend the conference of the society formerly known as the International Society for Anglo-­Saxonists;13 ­Middle En­glish specialists attend the New Chaucer Society, International Piers Plowman Society, or International John Gower Society conferences. The Modern Language Association

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recognizes a separate “Old En­glish” forum. Even at the Kalamazoo, Leeds, and Medieval Acad­emy of Amer­i­ca medieval studies conferences, which enforce no formal periodized subdivisions, paper sessions in En­glish studies usually address one period or the other. While every­one becomes a medievalist in relation to other colleagues in our departments, the privileging of fourteenth-­century lit­ er­a­ture in journals, lecture series, and hiring is unmistakable.

Within late medieval En­g lish studies, the divide between Chaucer and every­thing ­else repeats the pattern of exclusion and distortion characterizing the medieval/modern and Old En­glish/Middle En­glish divides. Through the explosive medium of early print culture, Chaucer is the one En­glish author whose ­ iddle Ages to t­ hose who study the M ­ iddle Ages. writings directly connect the M As such, Chaucer was always prone to attain the status of a temporal exception.

Study of Chaucer enjoys (suffers from) the same inclination to universalize, to colonize adjacent intellectual terrain, that marks modernity. Late medieval En­ glish studies tends to adopt a Chaucerian perspective on the field. Through the fault of no par­tic­u­lar person, this local periodization finds its institutional elaborations. The New Chaucer Society is the wealthiest scholarly society dedicated to ­Middle En­glish lit­er­a­ture; its biennial conference is the largest platform for new ideas in the field; its journal, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, is arguably the most prestigious venue for new scholarly work, though I like to think the Yearbook of Langland Studies gives it a run for its money. Scholars of late medieval En­glish lit­er­a­ture divide their activities in the MLA between two forums, “Chaucer” and “­Middle En­glish.” Such a bifurcation, paradoxical on its face, ­ iddle En­glish lit­er­a­ture, including signals that Chaucer ­matters as much as all M Chaucer. Before 2016 the ­Middle En­g lish forum was named “­Middle En­g lish Language and Lit­er­a­ture, Excluding Chaucer”: a field defined by a Chaucer-­ shaped hole.

An incident several years ago perturbed this state of affairs, momentarily turning the organ­ization of MLA forums into a po­liti­cal issue for late medievalists focusing on lit­er­a­ture in En­glish.14 In 2014 the MLA leadership formally questioned the value of retaining an author-­based forum, then known as a division. The fallout was predictable but instructive. Concerned to oppose retrenchment of medieval studies in the MLA, Chaucerians responded at the 2015 convention with vigorous defenses of Chaucer as a locus for indispensable critical conversations. Ironically, one implication of the defense of Chaucer was to problematize the existence of a separate division on M ­ iddle En­glish. Discomfort with—­and yet reliance on—­Chaucer’s status as ur-­poet was palpable in the MLA sessions defending the division on Chaucer. “Why Chaucer Now?” asked a

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roundtable or­ga­nized by the division on Chaucer. The M ­ iddle En­glish division hosted a roundtable entitled “Rethinking the Place of the Author.” All five participants adverted to Chaucer. As I recall, the speakers in “Rethinking” found themselves arguing that Chaucer’s historical centrality enabled his name to transcend authorship and thereby to convene other types of critical discourse valued by the MLA membership. This was an apt statement of the situation, but circumstance dictated that it appear as a subdisciplinary strength, not as the historiographical/methodological prob­lem that Chaucerian universalism is for the field.

The result of this activity in 2015 was to ward off the attempt at reor­ga­ni­za­tion from above. Conference-­goers can again take Chaucer for granted, ceding prob­ lems of periodization to MLA governance.

This book is my response to the prevailing distribution of professional time.

It is an attempt to write my way past the win­dow frame through which I entered the acad­emy and t­ oward a truer conception of the experiences latent in early En­ glish verse. The two, interrelated targets of the book’s historiographical revisionism are modernity and Chaucer. The book articulates a general judgment.

The forms of academic knowledge characteristic of the last two hundred years thoroughly distort understanding of ­earlier Eu­ro­pean metrical cultures, even as they recover ­those cultures for examination in the first place. Suspending the medieval/modern periodization reopens possibilities for historicism. In par­tic­u­lar, this book sets out to undo the retrospectivism of disciplinary formation. The goal is to think of En­glish metrical traditions as themselves unfolding historical times, whose experience initially bore no relation to the l­ater historical accretions through which we inevitably conceptualize En­glish poetics t­ oday, such as the canonization of Chaucer, the dominance of pentameter, the usurpation by En­glish of the social and intellectual spaces of Latin, Enlightenment historiography, nationalism, the institution of En­glish departments, and ­free verse. Lit­er­a­ture enacts a “movement ­toward a ­future that is ultimately inapprehensible,” to borrow Davis’s summary of Bede’s philosophy of history.15 Belated readers like ourselves, burdened with awareness of the literary ­future that in actuality tran­spired, must try to recapture the, as it w ­ ere, apophatic trajectories of literary history. This book works through the friction between prospect and retrospect, practice and theory, life and analy­sis.

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introduction

Modernity The Prob­lem of a History

In 1807 a nineteen-­year-­old Lord Byron wrote in his journal: “Chaucer, notwithstanding the praises bestowed on him, I think obscene and contemptible:—he owes his celebrity merely to his antiquity, which he does not deserve so well as Pierce Plowman, or Thomas of Ercildoune.”1 Byron’s remark juxtaposes representative texts from all three major En­glish metrical traditions: alliterative meter (William Langland’s Piers Plowman), tetrameter (the anonymous Thomas of Erceldoune), and pentameter (Geoffrey Chaucer). As conceded by the “notwithstanding” clause, Byron’s opinion ran ­counter to received wisdom. Eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century readers w ­ ere crazy for Chaucer; Piers Plowman had not been printed since 1561. In 1803 Walter Scott inserted part of the po­liti­cal prophecy Thomas of Erceldoune in the second edition of his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, an antiquarian anthology, where Byron evidently found it.2 Connecting Chaucer, Piers Plowman, and Thomas of Erceldoune for Byron was their “antiquity,” in other words, Byron’s historical alienation from them. Between Byron and ­these texts, which we would now classify as medieval, stood an absolute temporal dividing line. But even absolute dividing lines may, in an i­ magined f­ uture, move. Byron ends the journal entry with a ­bitter indictment of his own literary moment, in the form of a prophecy: “Taste is over with us; and another c­ entury ­will sweep our empire, our lit­er­a­ture, and our name, from all but a place in the annals of mankind.”3 The lit­er­a­ture and culture of the 1800s ­will one day join Chaucer, Piers Plowman, and Thomas of Erceldoune in antiquity, and the juxtaposition ­will not be flattering for the 1800s.

In seeking to take Chaucer down a peg, Byron alludes to a literary-­cultural status quo before Chaucer became ‘the f­ ather of En­g lish poetry,’ just as he

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envisions a literary ­future ­after current tastes have gone irredeemably out of fashion. Yet the recognition of dif­fer­ent pos­si­ble histories of En­glish verse aesthetics is already mediated for Byron by a fundamental periodization—­ancient/ modern, a reminder that ancient/medieval/modern periodization has not always been in force. According to Byron, it is “merely” Chaucer’s “antiquity” that lands him in high literary esteem. Piers Plowman and Thomas of Erceldoune are more authentically ancient. By analogy, it is merely the ­future antiquity of con­temporary lit­er­a­ture that ­will afford it “a place in the annals of mankind.”

This book excavates the metrical histories that underlie Byron’s contrarian comment. Meter and Modernity suspends traditional periodization and reinscribes it in the histories of alliterative meter, tetrameter, and pentameter, with a focus on po­liti­cal prophecy, Langland, and Chaucer.4 The result, as for Byron, ­will be to challenge the historical centrality of Chaucer’s poetic innovations and to displace the authority of present-­day definitions of literary value. Before Piers Plowman, Thomas of Erceldoune, and Chaucer became ancient, they ­were modern, and each in their own way.

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When did modernity begin? This question has been asked and answered continuously since the nineteenth ­century, when the narrative of modernity stabilized and the discipline of En­g lish studies came into its own. It is an attractive question, ­because it holds out the possibility of staging a decisive break with the past. It is also a loaded question, ­because decisive breaks with the past always appear as missiles in ideological b­ attles. The question erects a historical prob­lem and sets the terms of any pos­si­ble answer. In ­England, nineteenth-­century writers consistently answered that modernity began in the sixteenth c­ entury, at the time of the Reformation and the advent of humanism. This was no neutral assessment. In building a time and place called modernity, post-­Enlightenment writers reconstituted centuries of conflict and eccentricity as an arrow pointing ­toward secularized Eu­rope. In ­England, the arrow pointed ­toward the British Empire. Paradoxically, Henry VIII’s new religious regime and the humanists’ self-­conscious rearticulation of a classical past secured E ­ ngland a place in secular modernity. Across Eu­rope, the arrow pointed away from a time and place henceforth known as the ­Middle Ages.

‘The ­Middle Ages,’ a surprisingly young idea, is the negative image of the ideological territory claimed for modernity. If modernity was characterized by secularization and imperial order, then the ­Middle Ages ­were characterized

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by fanat­i­cism and feudalism. If modernity was characterized by an open ­f uture and historicism, then the M ­ iddle Ages w ­ ere characterized by eschatology and anachronism.

Twenty-­first-­century literary scholars inherit t­ hese judgments. Faculty hiring, curricula, academic publishing, and the very tools of critical analy­sis are ­shaped by the basic distinction between modernity and something historically prior to it but, in fact, conceptually codependent with it. How can one study the ­Middle Ages or modernity without accepting the secularist and imperialist historiography of which t­ hese chronological categories are expressions? But how can one reject secularist and imperialist historiography without squandering two hundred years of research directed at objects of inquiry called ‘the ­Middle Ages’ and ‘modernity’? What­ever ­else it has come to represent, the question of modernity is a question of scholarly method.

This book frames the question of modernity as a question of meter. Rejecting the premise that modernity occurred as a specifiable event, I use metrical history to renegotiate the trajectories of En­glish literary history between roughly 1350 and 1650. The edges of the proj­ect are ragged, defined neither by the calendar nor by watershed po­liti­cal events but instead by the shapes of literary traditions. The three major En­g lish meters—­a lliterative meter, tetrameter, and pentameter—­were all practiced both before and a­ fter 1500, the conventional dividing line between medieval and modern En­glish lit­er­a­ture and the midpoint of this study’s chronological range. I set the three poetic traditions in comparative perspective in order to explore how the metrical ecosystem developed between the ­fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. I find that the relationship between meter and modernity in the En­glish tradition has been a reciprocal one.

The histories of En­glish verse forms reflect but also refract the familiar story of a sixteenth-­century swerve in time; the medieval/modern periodization as instituted in the nineteenth ­century clarifies but also distorts critical understanding of metrical practice. My claim is not that nothing changed from e­ arlier to ­later poetry, but that, in their variety, the histories of En­glish verse forms undermine the unitary historical narrative modernity tells about itself. Literary history must be disaggregated by meter.

The early sixteenth c­ entury is the historical center of the book. This is the period of En­glish literary history served most poorly by the medieval/modern periodization. I demonstrate the stylistic flexibility of En­glish lit­er­a­ture during this time, which comprehended po­liti­cally dangerous prophecy in prose and verse, English-­to-­English translations of alliterative verse prophecies into tetrameter, the last alliterative poems, and the first poem in blank verse (unrhymed

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pentameter). Rather than a hiatus between Chaucer and William Shakespeare, the early sixteenth ­century was a period of vital literary experimentation.

This introduction has three movements. First, I outline the book’s structure and discuss the three key terms in the title, meter, modernity, and En­glish. I then describe the critical methods informing the book, attending to the historical theories of the art historian George Kubler and the social historian Reinhart Koselleck, the mathematical pro­cess known as discretization, and the methodology of historical poetics. Fi­nally, I situate this book among previous studies of the medieval/modern periodization in En­glish lit­er­a­ture.

Meter

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What would En­g lish literary history look like if the unit of literary history ­were not the po­liti­cal reign but the poetic tradition? My primary objects of study are three intertwined verse histories.5 I have arranged the three parts of the book according to the chronology of poetic traditions. Alliterative meter, the earliest form of En­glish poetry, precedes tetrameter, or isosyllabic four-­stress meter, which first appeared in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Tetrameter precedes pentameter, which Chaucer in­ven­ted in the 1380s. Parts I–­III consider the three traditions in ­every combination of two: alliterative meter and tetrameter, alliterative meter and pentameter (in the form of blank verse), and tetrameter and pentameter. By juxtaposing con­temporary poems in dif­fer­ent meters and tracing metrical traditions through time, each part of the book isolates historical ­factors informing the choice of meter in En­g lish verse. The narration of literary history in metrical sequence but therefore out of chronological sequence performs, on the level of scholarly order of pre­sen­ta­tion, convolutions of historical time available to experience between 1350 and 1650. The conclusion summarizes t­ hese histories and redistributes them into a universal narrative.

Each part of the book views its pair of metrical traditions through the prism of a third term. Part I scrutinizes alliterative meter and tetrameter in the context of En­g lish po­liti­cal prophecy, a major understudied literary archive. As a future-­oriented genre spanning the twelfth to the seventeenth c­ entury in multiple forms, prophecy makes an ideal platform from which to reconsider literary modernity. Parts II and III reassess the verse practices and afterlives of the two most prominent fourteenth-­century En­glish poets, Langland and Chaucer. Reversing the historical perspective in which modern scholars conventionally view

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t­ hese authors, I read Langland as metrically precocious and Chaucer as metrically nostalgic.

Attention to the genre of po­liti­cal prophecy is continuous in Part I, with briefer discussions where appropriate to the arguments of Parts II and III. However, prophecy has a broader relevance to this book. Prophetic style gives the form of historiography against which my arguments are pitched. From Merlin to Martin Luther King Jr., prophecies characteristically obscure their own history and the contingency of their first reception, encouraging us to read them as though they always pointed unerringly to the pre­sent.6 While passing over prophecy, literary historians ironically reproduce its teleological habits of thought when they position the Chaucer tradition of pentameter verse as the destination for the alliterative tradition and tetrameter tradition. Prophecy has been thought to be the quintessentially premodern genre, yet the congruence between its modes of historical repre­sen­ta­tion and the formation of modern historiographical consensus flies in the face of such a periodization. Considered as a tradition, prophecy illustrates a truth about historical experience. ­Because history has always already begun, the pre­sent is always out of sync with itself. Put another way, prophecy, like history, is always in the pro­cess of becoming itself; its full arrival into singular being is pos­si­ble only in theory, or in retrospect.

By placing Chaucer last in sequence in the three parts of the book, I mean to indicate how literary canons emerge from poetic traditions. In its double focus on prophecy and on early metrical traditions, Part I fills in some of the literary surround missing from many critical accounts of Langland and Chaucer. ­These brilliant poets did not come from nowhere. Their innovations need to be seen in metrical-­historical context. By the same token, Part I makes an extended claim for the literary value of archival texts. Anonymous En­g lish po­liti­cal poems have failed to join a modern literary canon in large part b­ ecause of the post-1450 reception of Chaucer. The perceived marginality of anonymous poetry in general and of po­liti­cal prophecy in par­tic­u­lar is, I suggest, one ­factor contributing to a failure of imagination in modern historiography of early En­g lish lit­er­a­ture.

Together, the three parts of the book advance a narrative of sociocultural change that runs in parallel with metrical change and the movement from anonymous prophecies to named authors. ­Here, I specify versification as a literary complement of social formations. The scope of t­ hese arguments narrows as the book progresses, beginning with En­glish society as a ­whole and ending with a small group of well-­connected men. The history of metrical modernization, from alliterative meter to tetrameter to pentameter, reflects the centralization of

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insular book culture and the gradual canonization of Chaucer. The story of sociometrical constriction begins with the ability of po­liti­cal prophecy to draw persons from all sectors of society into the same conceptual arena. It ends with the pentameter tradition begun by Chaucer, which was, for two centuries, primarily a phenomenon of men socially situated within or adjacent to the En­glish or Scottish royal courts. I contend that pentameter proposes a certain social exclusivity, one which is easily mistaken for the conditions of En­g lish literary production at large.

On the basis of the historicity and cultural significance of literary form, I discern an Age of Tetrameter (c. 1250–1450), an Age of Prophecy (c. 1450– 1650), and an Age of Pentameter (c. 1450–1950). The second two are neither medieval nor modern periods by the lights of traditional periodization. Put differently, prophecy and pentameter through their literary transformations encode dif­fer­ent periodizations from the one that came to dominate study of ­these centuries. Alliterative verse history is a fourth way of keeping time, but, as the default verse form before the invention of syllabic En­g lish meters, alliterative meter did not enjoy an Age. I equate genre and meter to the extent that ­either may supply the organ­izing princi­ple of a literary epoch. However, the two domains of literary practice are analytically separable and also recombinable according to dif­fer­ent aesthetic priorities, and subject to vari­ous historical contingencies. Genre and meter are kept relatively in­de­pen­dent in the structure of Part I. This part of the book makes a study of po­l iti­cal prophecy, first as a genre unto itself 7 (Chapters 1–2) and then according to metrical tradition (Chapters 3–5). The question posed in Chapter 5, Why w ­ ere so few po­liti­cal prophecies written in pentameter?, connects the two domains and exposes a single socioliterary settlement that threads through all three parts of the book.

Modernity

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Expanding the meaning of modernity back into the centuries it excludes, this book questions the teleologies that or­ga­nize con­temporary historical research.8 I am not concerned with demonstrating an increase or decrease in the quantity of modernity in En­glish verse between 1350 and 1650, but with tracking its changing literary forms. Moving from Modernity to modernity, as it w ­ ere, I contextualize the historiographical claims of post-­Enlightenment writers as the latest salvos in long-­running ­battles over the past, pre­sent, and f­ uture of En­glish po-

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etry. Both proponents and critics of the medieval/modern periodization tend to accept that the break came around the year 1500, but Kathleen Davis has documented how the division as presently conceived was implemented ­later, through Enlightenment historiography and Eu­ro­pean imperial nationalism.9 As often, historiography and history run in tandem. Dietrich Gerhard argues that the most fundamental economic, po­liti­cal, and social reorganizations in Eu­rope came in the eleventh and eigh­teenth centuries. He describes the period c. 1000–1800 as “Old Eu­rope.”10 Jacques Le Goff recommends a similar periodization on similar grounds.11 Andrew Cole, writing in the tradition of Marxist historiography, likewise proposes a fundamental change in economic and intellectual conditions in Hegel’s lifetime (1770–1831).12 C. S. Lewis had written of a similar temporal scheme as early as 1955.13 Michel Foucault, though neither a historian nor a medievalist, described the turn of the nineteenth c­ entury as the g­ reat watershed in the history of Eu­ro­pean culture and its study.14 Across his published work, Foucault designates a classical period (époque classique) of momentous transition, c. 1650–1800.

Old Eu­rope makes a comfortable fit for early En­glish verse, ­running roughly from the production of the first surviving manuscript collections of En­glish poetry c. 1000 to the first scholarly editions of Piers Plowman (1813) and Beowulf (1815). The first recorded instance of the word medieval dates to right around the same time, 1817, as David Matthews has brought to light.15 Between ­these termini, En­glish verse was in continual production but only exceptionally the object of critical discourse. The literary field vis­i­ble to the first professors of En­glish lit­er­a­ture, hired by London universities in the 1820s and 1830s, was more or less coterminous with Old Eu­rope.16 In line with Davis, Gerhard, and the o­ thers, I describe the late ­fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries as a phase of En­g lish literary history without Modernity but full of impulses ­toward modernization.

By ‘modernity,’ then, I emphatically do not mean modernism, the twentieth-­ century European-­American aesthetic movement that often stands for the larger concept. Chronological telescoping of the sixteenth ­century to the eigh­teenth and the eigh­teenth to the twentieth is symptomatic of the historiographical prob­lem to which this book gives an answer.

The metrical-­historical arguments of the book operate at two scales. On the small scale, I read moments at which early En­g lish writers, scribes, and readers feel modern or contemplate metrical novelty.17 On the large scale, the Age of Tetrameter, the Age of Prophecy, and the Age of Pentameter mark the extension of literary traditions into an unknown ­f uture. ­These two scales of

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reading and writing modernity depend on one another. Consider, for example, the prophecy books discussed in Part I and listed in Appendix A, the earliest of which date from the 1440s or 1450s. For fifteenth-­century scribes, the genre of po­l iti­cal prophecy corresponded to a new organ­ization of the manuscript book and a new orientation ­toward literary time. The scribes responsible for ­these books made any number of individual and in­de­ pen­dent decisions, but their activities cumulatively broached a new era of En­g lish literary history.

I draw one general conclusion about the texture of metrical time.18 Across dif­fer­ent sociopo­liti­cal contexts, founding the metrical f­ uture meant haunting the metrical past. What retrospectively appears as a point of prosodic origin was experienced by contemporaries as an act of prosodic recovery. Belated readers like ourselves are prone to misconstrue the literary-­historical temporal directionality of metrical form, but the ambiguity is a consequence of the symbiosis between tradition and innovation, which can only be defined with reference to one another. The dialectical relation between the f­ uture and the past of En­glish verse characterizes Langland’s synthesis of En­glish, French, and Latin poetics as well as John Milton’s blank verse, the reprinting of En­glish prophetic texts ­after 1650 as well as Ezra Pound’s modernism. Along a dif­fer­ent historical axis, the same goes for the En­glish Reformation, which appeared to many of its proponents as a recovery of an ­earlier religious settlement. No less a polemicist than John Foxe averred in 1571, in an edition of the Old En­glish gospels, that “the religion presently taught & professed in the Church at thys pre­sent, is no new reformation of thinges lately begonne, which ­were not before, but rather a reduction of the Church to the Pristine state of olde conformitie, which it once had” (The Gospels of the Fower Euangelistes Translated in the Olde Saxons Tyme, STC 2961, ¶. iir). Foxe’s phrasing poses religious reform in terms of personal penance, the reductio ad pristinum statum. In this, it mirrors Piers Plowman B.10.322–35 (cited from Piers Plowman, ed. Kane and Donaldson), a religiopo­liti­cal prophecy that circulated widely as a standalone text in Foxe’s time. ­These transhistorical resemblances trou­ble the logic of periodization, which typically hierarchizes species of historical imagination. Medievalists have often been e­ ager to assimilate their materials to that logic, even when challenging it. A providential historicism, whereby innovation is understood as “a recuperation of the past,” was not restricted to the late medieval centuries, as Lee Patterson would have it. Conversely, premodernist modernities ­were not as “definitively and irrevocably closed” as Patterson supposes.19

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My approach to modernity is materialist as opposed to nominalist.20 I explore literary modernity avant la lettre. The vari­ous senses of modernism, modernity, and modernness emerged in the seventeenth, eigh­teenth, and nineteenth centuries. The most overtly historiographical meaning, OED Online, ‘modernity,’ 1b (“An intellectual tendency or social perspective characterized by departure from or repudiation of traditional ideas”), dates only from 1900. The attested word senses from the seventeenth ­century, OED Online, ‘modernity,’ 1a (“The quality or condition of being modern,” 1635) and ‘modernness’ (“The quality or state of being modern,” 1653), are synonyms and are still quite far from expressions of a settled historical perspective. Latin modernitas had no schematic historiographical meaning; it denoted “modern times, the pre­sent day” (DMLBS Online, ‘modernitas’), an orientation ­toward the pre­sent experienced by anyone at any time. Medieval authors could use Latin modernus as an adjective or a noun to draw a contrast with the ancients (antiqui). However, this was an exceptional usage. The Latin noun normally signified “con­temporary person” (DMLBS Online, ‘modernus,’ 2a), as distinct from both the distant or recent past (DMLBS Online, ‘modernus,’ 2b) and the ­future (DMLBS Online, ‘modernus,’ 2c). More than Modern En­glish modernity, Latin modernitas and modernus retain the neutral sense of their common ancestor, the adverb modo ‘just now.’ Even in its original, Latin meaning, the En­glish word modern is attested only from the late fifteenth ­century (OED Online, ‘modern,’ A.1, 1456). Periodizing meanings of the word appear much ­later.21 One must wait ­until the turn of the seventeenth ­century for the schematizing meaning of period to enter the En­glish language (OED Online, ‘period, n., adj., and adv.,’ A.1.3a, 1596). Latin periodus meant “circular movement,” “course or extent of time,” or “complete sentence” (DMLBS Online, ‘periodus, perihodus,’ 1, 2, and 3a).22 In the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries, Dark Ages, medieval, and ­Middle Age(s) became technical terms for a discrete historical period a­ fter antiquity but before modernity.23 Last of all, periodization became nameable as a historical problematic (OED Online, ‘periodization,’ 1898; ‘periodize,’ 2a, 1911).

The histories of words bear out Davis’s historiographical claims. Only in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries did the medieval/modern periodization become a general operating princi­ple of Eu­ro­pean historical understanding.

Clearly, the words modern and modernity and their antonyms w ­ ill be of no use in an investigation of modernity prior to 1650. Rather than focusing on keywords, this book tracks the material practices to which the words would come to refer.

I contend that, just as alliterative meter long predates alliterative (first attested

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in 1754),24 En­glish meters think through modernity long before modernity and its institutional apparatus.

En­glish

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But what is, or was, En­g lish? The verse histories explored in this book unfolded within a literary-­cultural ambit I call the En­g lish literary field, a concept that is coterminous neither with the En­glish language nor with the kingdom of ­England. Pierre Bourdieu defines the literary field as “the space of literary prises de position that are pos­si­ble in a given period in a given society,” and prises de position “arise from the encounter between par­tic­u­lar agents’ dispositions (their habitus, ­shaped by their social trajectory) and their position in a field of positions.”25 Bourdieu introduced the theory of the literary field in his essay “The Field of Cultural Production” (1983) and a book (1993) of the same name, with primary reference to modern French lit­er­a­ture. He refined the theory in The Rules of Art (1996), where it is partially abstracted from the literary. Especially power­f ul is his (Marxist) insight that the literary field takes the form of “a field of strug­gles,” “a permanent conflict,” in which “social agents, which may be isolated individuals, groups or institutions,” compete to accrue value in light of the arrangement of the field and their own socially conditioned dispositions (habitūs).26 For Bourdieu, literary style is embedded socially and historically at once. He borrows the concept of habitus from medieval Eu­ro­ pean culture, with the difference that for Bourdieu habitus is internalized and unconscious, whereas for premodern phi­los­o­phers and theologians habits ­were typically conscious and aspirational.

Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field informs the arguments of this book, particularly insofar as t­ hese pertain to the relationship between versification and social structures. Field theory is suited to analy­sis of early En­glish literary culture b­ ecause it locates forces of cultural production at a dif­fer­ent level from the autonomous individual, the language, or the nation-­state, none of which opens the most effective aperture into early insular verse history. Instead, Bourdieu posits a virtual field of play both constraining and responsive to the continuous history of cultural decision-­making. As Ian Cornelius comments, in a Bourdieusian essay on late medieval En­glish culture: “A field is virtual ­because, rather than corresponding directly to a geo­graph­i­cal or po­liti­cal unit, to a genre or a medium, its dimensions are drawn by the motivated and normative visions that cultural actors have of one another.”27

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For my purposes, the En­glish literary field is the literary field referring to En­glish literary forms, again with the caveat that the label En­glish is reducible neither to language nor to geography. I argue that metrical traditions helped set the par­ameters for “literary prises de position that are pos­si­ble,” what Bourdieu equivalently terms “the space of pos­si­bles,” in En­g lish verse between 1350 and 1650.28 Poetic tradition forms the space of pos­si­bles; literary history is the rec­ ord of a­ ctual position-­taking. The social determinations of early En­glish meter cannot be fully appreciated in a monolingual or national perspective. Accordingly, the book locates En­glish metrical practice in multilingual socioliterary milieux, from the literary archive of po­liti­cal prophecy, which comprehends Welsh, Latin, Anglo-­Norman/French, En­glish, and Scots, to Chaucer’s En­glish/ French/Latin/Italian metrical innovations.

Translation, both within and across languages, provides most of the occasions for my readings of literary novelty. This is unsurprising. Translation often served Anglophone poets as a juncture between past and f­ uture. The lit­er­a­tures of pre-­Enlightenment Britain illustrate Sheldon Pollock’s theorem that language traditions emerge in terms of e­ arlier, more culturally prestigious language traditions.29 Vernacularity is a relational not an ontological condition, as Denis Feeney has recently demonstrated in the case of the earliest Latin lit­er­a­ture vis-­à-­vis Greek.30 For example, Part III describes Chaucer’s literary achievement as a form of translated prosody. To understand the historical meaning of Chaucer’s verse, I suggest, one must keep in view the act of translation as such.

The Shapes of Time In The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Th ­ ings (1962), George Kubler expresses the idea that the history of art is composed of many simultaneous, unsynchronized histories. Stated more abstractly, for Kubler dif­fer­ent historical series shape time differently. Although the title would seem to indicate a single shape, Kubler speaks of “the manifold shapes of time.”31 As against the totally periodized view of culture as a lens with a center radiating outward, he urges the meta­phors of a cross-­section and “a mosaic of pieces in dif­fer­ent developmental states, and of dif­fer­ent ages” in any given historical moment.32 By attending to the historical logic of types of formally coherent sequences of iterative artistic activity, “a linked succession of prime works with replications, all being distributed in time as recognizably early and late versions of the same kind of action,” Kubler sought to illuminate the differential capacities of historical experience.33

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He derived what he felt the historical disciplines lacked, a typology of “ways for ­things to occupy time.”34 At a certain con­ve­nient level of abstraction, ­these ways are not in limitless supply, but Kubler emphasizes that they are not commensurate with one another, ­either.

If dif­fer­ent historical series shape time differently, then reductions of one series into another necessarily misrepresent historical structuration. I take traditional literary periodization to be a superstructure responsible for such reducliti­ cally based literary tions across an unlikeness of historical kinds. Po­ periodization has a totalizing effect on interpretation, what Kubler calls “an illusion of classed order.”35 The reader has before her ­either ‘medieval’ lit­er­a­ture or ‘modern’ lit­er­a­ture, ‘Romantic’ or ‘Victorian,’ never both and never neither.

The lines may wiggle, but the divisions are permanent. In my first book, I set out to liberate metrical history from categorical subordination to other forms of history, especially language history and po­liti­cal history.36 I continue that proj­ect ­here. Following Kubler, who makes excursions from art to lit­er­a­ture, this book counts En­glish poetry among ­those ­things of which he theorized the history. In place of a linear series of retrospectively meaningful cuts in time, I propose a multiplicity of concurrent open-­ended periods.37 Synchrony and disjuncture between the Age of Tetrameter, the Age of Prophecy, and the Age of Pentameter, or between t­ hese and other Ages constructed on other grounds, such as the Age of Chaucer and Tudor E ­ ngland, continually spur recognition of the provisional nature of periods. When the late fifteenth ­century may be the Age of Prophecy, the Age of Pentameter, Tudor ­England, or all three, the spell of periodization has been broken, and its institutional politics can no longer pass without comment. ­These are not merely dif­fer­ent periods but dif­fer­ent kinds of period. In combination they put the quality of historical time into question.

In a similar vein to Kubler, the social historian Reinhart Koselleck writes of “the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen) that can be contained within a concept” when concepts are viewed as expressions of historical perspective, possessing “historical depth.”38 That is, conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) shapes time other­wise than the calendar.

Koselleck envisages historical time in the plural. ­There are “many forms of time superimposed one upon the other,” “a coexisting plurality of times.”39 Kubler expresses an equivalent insight into the historicity of cultural products: “­Every ­thing is a complex having . . . ​traits, each with a dif­fer­ent systematic age.”40 Kubler and Koselleck elaborated their theories of historical time within highly traditional narratives of modernization, but the Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen ­ought to be discoverable before Modernity with a capital M and in other histori-

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cal series. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work in postcolonial studies and the philosophy of history suggests how this might be done. Like Kubler and Koselleck, Chakrabarty apprehends “a plurality of times existing together, a disjuncture of the pre­sent with itself ”; unlike them, he is prepared to specify Eu­ro­pean modernity as one of ­these times.41 Kubler draws inspiration from scientific terminology, and perhaps a comparison between lit­er­a­ture and mathe­matics ­will not go amiss ­here. Periodization in literary studies is analogous to discretization in mathe­ matics.

Discretization is any pro­cess of representing a continuous signal in discrete units for the purpose of analy­sis. Mathematicians and statisticians recognize discretization as a general procedural prob­lem. Each discretization method has its strengths and weaknesses. Researchers aim to minimize discretization error but do not expect to eliminate it. Literary historians are less advanced. Periodization based on po­liti­cal history is the only discretization method in common use. And it is institutionalized in the distribution of professional subfields, so that the status of po­liti­cally based periodization as one among many plausible methods of divvying up the literary field invariably tends to recede from consciousness. In mathematical terms, this book extrapolates alternative discretization methods from the field of metrics.

Can Meter ­Matter?

I anticipate a general methodological objection. A number of the poetic texts considered in this book, especially the po­liti­cal prophecies, appear ill-­suited to metrical analy­sis. Prophecy spanned verse and prose, circulated in prose format in manuscript irrespective of literary form, and escaped the nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century philological ministrations supporting scansion of Langland and Chaucer. Prophecy books collect specimens of a literary genre, not a verse form. Metrical analy­sis, a marginal critical activity in any case, seems unhelpful in view of the circumstances of the production and dissemination of po­liti­cal prophecy. Moreover, most of the prophecies have not yet been edited critically, an activity that many believe should precede and inform scansion. Can metrical study of prophecy be justified?

This question is intelligible as a special case of the suspicion that meter ­can’t ­matter in literary studies nowadays. Such a judgment, implicit in a wide swath of literary scholarship that has nothing to say about the making of verse, does not come from nowhere. Literary scholars traditionally understand the formation

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of the field as a vacillation between form and history: an Old Historicism, keyed to po­liti­cal history, coexisted with German-­style philology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, followed by the valorization of the literary text as a self-­contained object in the New Criticism, followed by the revaluation of history in the New Historicism and vari­ous strands of cultural studies, followed, most recently, by a New Formalism.42 Critical practice often transcends the ostensible opposition between form and history, but the terms remain unavoidable as badges of affiliation. Debates over the field or method known as historical poetics illustrate the limitations of badges. No sooner had Meredith Martin, Yopie Prins, and o­ thers called for formalism to become historicist than Jonathan Culler, Simon Jarvis, and o­ thers called for historicism to become formalist. Some of this work concerns lyric poetry, rather than meter, but the relationship between formalism and historicism is explic­itly at issue in ­either case. As ­Virginia Jackson observes, twenty-­first-­century critics cannot agree ­whether they have forgotten how to read poems and need to remember or are “caught inside a poem” and need to escape.43 Nominalistic disagreement over the meaning of historical and poetics, which makes it pos­si­ble for two intellectual factions to contradict one another with two chiastically equivalent proposals, distracts from deeper similarities between the two positions. Both versions of historical poetics question the use of descriptive scansion. Prins cautions that “practical application is not the point of historical poetics.”44 Elsewhere, she dismisses metrical analy­sis as “a merely technical, seemingly ahistorical approach to the scansion of a par­tic­u­lar text.”45 Martin’s Rise and Fall of Meter takes Prins’s admonition to heart, exploring meter as a cultural idea and a disciplinary topic but categorically not as a historical practice.

Martin’s subtle close readings find their entry points through metafiction and biography: her illustrative poems are about prosody and/or composed by prosodists. Jarvis, though recommending a poetics that “takes technique to be . . . ​the way in which the work of art most intimately registers historical experience,” describes metrical scansion as useless for the purpose to which it is normally set, the abstraction of general princi­ples from “some par­tic­u­lar per­for­mance.”46 Jarvis’s dismissal of metrical theorization as “an aprioristic fantasy” and Martin’s contention that poetic forms constitute “fantasies” in the cultural and critical unconscious resemble one another more than the fervor of their polemic suggests.47 ­These pronouncements on poetics all express the poststructuralist anxiety that philology’s critical object is politics masquerading as historical truth. For Prins, prosodic scholarship is a “literary genre” in which one can diagnose the dreams and prejudices of its authors.48 Jarvis rebuts the reduction of

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poetics to politics—­“The formula politics of style . . . ​diminishes politics to its least complex moment, that of wearing a badge, and then makes style be that badge”—­but at the expense of metrical study.49 Jarvis and Prins agree that metrics is a faux science, like alchemy, whose operations are of historical interest (Prins) but ineffectual for their purported aim (Jarvis). Both scholars proj­ect a highly particularized literary landscape, against which the generalities of metrists just clunk. ­These objections to metrical study deserve an answer. If meter is reducible to the ideology of historical prac­ti­tion­ers or modern prosodists, then meter is an inappropriate lens onto premodern poetry. Metrical study, in that case, would embody the pathologies of early literary activity. The specter of twenty-­first-­ century scholarship assuming the form of, say, fifteenth-­century propaganda is enough to give one pause. Yet it is, ironically, the deprioritization of metrics in literary criticism that gives teeth to the idea that metrics can compromise literary criticism. Jarvis’s and Prins’s suggestion, at their most polemical, of the pure particularity of the literary object points scholarship back t­ oward a pretheoretical belletrism that they would both readily condemn. Poststructuralism relies on the procedures it abjures.50 Martin must hang her readings on descriptions of verse form, even as her book implicates the concept of meter in war and nation-­ building. Prins relegates metrical scholarship to the status of primary lit­er­a­ture, but she also builds on it in a nimble discussion of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s and Arthur Hugh Clough’s metrical practices.51 Of course: for if one r­ eally disclaimed all critical techniques with histories, t­ here would be no techniques left. Jarvis’s and Prins’s insistence that metrical theory fails to account scientifically for metrical practice gives away the ground it claims, since the idea of scansion as an infallible truth-­discovery mechanism survives the critique intact. The presumption that formal analy­sis robs texts of their historicity leaves out of account the historicity of form itself, which saves metrics from being “merely technical.” Martin’s and Prins’s descriptions of the ideological stakes of prosodic theory would become more, not less, historical if coordinated with description of poetic forms in their aesthetic richness and historical dynamism. This is the substance of Jarvis’s counterarguments. But if Jarvis prefers to seek the historicity of verse in the particulars of style, emancipated from metrical theorization, his analyses are still expressions of theorization—in reasoned denial of itself. To sum up, neither version of historical poetics fully reconciles the need for detailed description of verse (Jarvis) with ideological critiques of same (Prins).

A more basic response to the skirmishes over historical poetics is to observe that the escape from poetics to prosody, recommended by one side and

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resisted by the other, is impossible for premodern poetry in En­glish. Jarvis and Prins spar over the extent to which historical metrical practice mirrors historical metrical theory, but this question holds ­limited relevance for early En­g lish verse, most of which was composed before the first treatises on En­g lish prosody appeared in the late sixteenth c­ entury. En­glish writers studied grammar and metrics throughout the medieval centuries, but overwhelmingly t­ hose of the Latin language. Even French, the second literary language of ­England following the Norman Conquest, received exposition only from the thirteenth ­century.52 That exposition was sporadic and principally directed ­toward facilitating language acquisition, not theorizing versification. Poetics, properly a part of rhe­toric, rather followed than instigated vernacular grammatical learning. The first manual of French lyric poetry was Eustache Deschamps’s L’Art de dictier (1392). Grammars and/or artes poeticae for Irish, Icelandic, and Welsh had appeared, in that order, by the early ­fourteenth ­century.53 En­g lish lagged ­behind. Although elementary grammars by Ælfric (fl. late tenth c.) and John Leylond (d. 1428) ­were written in En­g lish, the object language remained Latin. Between Ælfric and Leylond, Latin grammars composed in ­England ­were in Latin. In such a sociolinguistic climate, study of En­g lish poetics was unthinkable.

Even a­ fter the appearance of the first treatises on En­g lish prosody in the 1570s and 1580s, ­there ­were still three centuries to wait for the establishment of a discipline called En­glish and the elaboration of descriptively adequate theories of En­glish meters.54 In the meantime, literary classicism motivated learned men to investigate En­glish meter while severely constricting the terms of the investigation. Early publications in En­glish prosody are ­shaped by two ideological structures, which are two sides of the same coin: the vocabulary of Latin grammar and the topos of the insufficiency of the En­glish language. The earliest contributions to the subject, George Gascoigne’s Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Ryme in En­glish (1575), James VI of Scotland’s Revlis and Cavtelis to Be Observit and Eschewit in Scottis Poesie (1584), and George Puttenham’s Arte of En­glish Poesie (1589), exhibit both ideological structures vividly.

Gascoigne and Puttenham pre­sent the En­glish language as an unwieldy vehicle for the prestigious (quantitative) metrical patternings described by Latin grammar. At ­every conceptual level, the grammatical tradition shapes the objects of inquiry wrested from vernacular poiesis. James, while more perceptive on metrical form and addressing a geo­graph­i­cally distinct literary archive, likewise ­labors to bring vernacular literary practice ­under the governance of Latin poetic regulation.

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The authors of early prosodic treatises give valuable indications of the ideology of literary practice. Yet their accounts of that practice are inevitably partial in Bourdieu’s double sense of the word: incomplete, and s­ haped by their socioliterary situation.55 While a vocal minority of poets endeavored to imitate classical quantities in En­glish verse, most poets continued to compose the same unnamed, untheorized accentual(-­syllabic) meters known to Langland and Chaucer. In order to appreciate their contortions, one must pair cultural contextualization of the treatises with formal description of actually occurring En­ glish verse. In other words, one must compare theory and practice. The alternative is to equate practice to theory a priori, thereby dispensing with culturally significant nuances of poetic technique and centuries of research pro­gress in the field of metrics. This has been Martin’s and Prins’s choice, the enabling gesture of a Victorianist incarnation of historical poetics, but it is not an available choice for study of poetry in En­glish before Gascoigne. Historical poetics ­will never be historical enough ­until it can notice that the cultural situation taken for granted

by Martin and Prins, the circulation of technical prosodic metadiscourse in and around poetic discourse, is a recent phenomenon in the broader sweep of En­glish literary history. Jarvis’s dictum that verse is “an institution, a series of practices as real as the belief in them and the capacity for them,” makes a better fit with the study of En­glish poetics before prosody.56 The case of early En­glish poetics vindicates his caveat that “the history of verse thinking is not the same as the history ­ ere ­really of repre­sen­ta­tions of verse thinking.”57 If the two historical series w conformant, ­there could be no history of early En­glish poetry whatsoever.

Metrical form cannot be held to one side in the contextualization of verse. To reject metrics as a fantasy of absolute, dehistoricized knowledge is to accede, per negativum, to that fantasy. Metrics is indeed historically contingent, inherently po­liti­cal, and prone to self-­confirmation, as Martin charges. In this, metrics resembles all other approaches to the study of lit­er­a­ture. The choice between affirmation of metrics and ac­cep­tance of the limits of historical interpretation is a false one. Metrical form is indeed a literary correlate of politics and ideology.

Precisely ­because it lives in history, however, it refracts as much as it reflects. Poets never make metrical choices in a vacuum. Metrical histories pressurize individual moments of creation and reception, just as po­liti­cal histories pressurize individual moments of action and affiliation. Bourdieu’s field theory enables us to see that a s­ imple mapping of social formations onto literary formations does not do justice to e­ ither domain, since the literary field with its historically par­ tic­u­lar configuration, and cultural agents with their socially par­tic­u­lar habitūs, always mediate between the two kinds of form. Bourdieu criticizes Rus­sian

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formalism and mechanistic historicism for the same reason: from opposite directions, both methods pursue a direct equation between social relations and the logic of literary practice.58 Following Bourdieu, it should be pos­si­ble to move beyond the symmetry of ­these positions. Ideally, metrics accomplishes the very dialectical movement between general and par­tic­u­lar, form and history, literary practice and social stratification, that its critics accuse it of short-­circuiting.

Ideally. Jarvis, Martin, and Prins are right that metrists have failed to articulate the historical stakes of their work, at least beyond a coterie. Some metrists bracket questions of change and continuity as a research expedient, while o­ thers make meter into history by subordinating it to language history. In ­either case, ­there is a disciplinary irony: the historicity of the metrical system remains opaque for many of ­those dedicated to theorizing it. ­There is an opportunity, then, for rapprochement between metrics and cultural history. In this book, I draw on the traditions of metrical scholarship to describe the forms of early En­glish poetry and reintegrate ­those forms into the proj­ect of historical poetics. The metrical and historical meanings of En­glish verse are inextricable from one another. When its scope includes poetic traditions and their cultural connotations and not only “the scansion of a par­tic­u­lar text,” metrical analy­sis is historicism from the inside out.

Periodization and Its Discontents

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This book joins a long line of answers to the question of modernity from the perspective of other historical series. Though now pertaining to the w ­ hole field of cultural production, modernity emerged from par­tic­u ­lar discursive contexts, which continue to constrain scholarly attempts to grasp the significance or limitations of historical periods. Religious history and po­liti­cal history form common ground between periodization and its discontents. Religion and politics ­were the axes along which polemicists and historians elaborated the medieval/ modern periodization, particularly in the case of E ­ ngland, where religion and politics together reached a significant crossroads during the reign of Henry VIII. Henry’s break from Rome, considered as a religious or po­liti­cal event, furnishes the “single overwhelming source of change that exercises decisive pulling power on all ­others,” a hallmark of periodizing procedures in Eu­ro­pean historiography.59 Consequently, religion and politics have attracted special attention in critiques of the medieval/modern periodization, in studies by James Simpson and ­others.60 The prioritization of religious and po­liti­cal history over literary history cuts across

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the methodological differences between, for example, the New Historicism, Marxist criticism, and the history of ideas. The warping effect of the narrative of modernity is therefore especially power­ful in the study of literary history, in which significant po­liti­cal events, long since rejected as origin points, still govern the segmentation of the literary field into pre-­Conquest, Restoration, Victorian, and so on. That is, literary scholars have agreed in theory not to subordinate literary history to po­liti­cal and religious history, but the ­earlier, po­liti­cally constituted literary periods survived this critique. Their po­liti­cal specificity having been bleached in the course of disciplinary history, the po­liti­cally based literary periods became naturalized and so all the more intractable.

To the extent that the narrative of modernity emerges from religious and po­liti­cal histories, poetics makes promising territory from which to launch a reconsideration. Hans Robert Jauss perceived this in 1979, arguing that “aesthetic experience” provides “the bridge” from medieval lit­er­a­ture “to our pre­sent,” from modernity to Modernity.61 In sections on animal poetry, allegory, and exemplum, Jauss reads the modernity of medieval German lit­er­a­ture off of the poetics of its genres. However, this initial effort to think medieval literary aesthetics in relation to modernity has gone almost wholly unanswered.62 The time is ripe to extend the dialogue between poetics and periodization into the field of En­glish metrics. This book complements the subfield calling itself trans-­Reformation studies, which focuses on ecclesiology and recuperates the early sixteenth c­ entury in En­glish literary history from a completely dif­fer­ent ­angle.63 The absence of one period term from the preceding discussion may seem glaring once it is pointed out: Re­nais­sance. The word is as young as medieval, its closest antonym (OED Online, ‘medieval,’ A.1a, 1817; ‘Re­nais­sance,’ 1a, 1836). Re­ nais­sance makes classicism in fourteenth-­century Italy the organ­izing princi­ple of a period of Eu­ro­pean history.64 The narrative of the Re­nais­sance lends the force of an event to modernity, a periodizing procedure that the substitution of early modern for Re­nais­sance leaves intact. Erwin Panofsky gave authoritative expression to this view in 1944 when he described the Re­nais­sance, in contrast to ­earlier Eu­ro­pean classicisms, as a “total and permanent” reconfiguration of art and culture, “one fatally auspicious moment” of civilizational rebirth.65 The totality and permanence of ‘the’ ‘Renaissance’—­note the obligatory definite article, capital R, and singular inflection—is the totality and permanence of modernity.66 Slotting into the medieval/modern periodization, ‘the’ ‘Re­nais­sance’ is fully institutionalized in the con­temporary university. Panofsky had studied pre-­ Renaissance Eu­ro­pean art and lit­er­a­ture in depth; he argued that the Re­nais­ sance was of prime, not exclusive, importance to ­later Eu­ro­pean cultural history.

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Subsequent partisans of the narrative of the Re­nais­sance have been less well informed and correspondingly more dogmatic in their pronouncements. Institutional pressures to subspecialize have formed three scholarly generations ­a fter Panofsky ill equipped and ill disposed to make sympathetic transhistorical comparisons.

At this late stage of institutionalized medieval/modern periodization, which persists despite the growing embrace of the critique of periodization from some specialists working on both sides of the divide, many postmedievalists can deploy the ­Middle Ages as an unexamined foil to what­ever they regard as most valu­ iddle Ages, a self-­enclosed segment of able in the history of culture. The M history from which we are irrevocably alienated, provides the necessary negative space in which modernity, via the Re­nais­sance, happens.67 The so-­called New Historicism, advertised as a re­nais­sance of critical method, was founded in such a study, whose author, Stephen Greenblatt, ­later published a controversial prize-­ winning defense of the narrative of the Re­nais­sance in the form of a nonfiction detective story.68 Medievalists, too, lean on the Re­nais­sance, minimally as an end point for historical research but sometimes also as a real­ity. For both constituencies, the Eu­ro­pean ­Middle Ages become something they never ­were, a homogeneous “age of allegory” against which the complexity of modern thought can be mea­sured.69 This book does not concern any re­nais­sances, ­whether before or during the Reformation. As in my first book, I narrate metrical history without events.70 I do not hold, with Panofsky and most modernists, that t­ here was “such a t­ hing as an Italian, or main, Re­nais­sance which started some time in the 14th ­Century and reached a climax in the 16th and the 17th.”71 Nor do I hold, with Le Goff and some medievalists and to the eternal annoyance of the modernists, that this re­nais­sance was “a brilliant but superficial interlude” in what would still have to be called the ­Middle Ages.72 Gerhard’s notion of Old Eu­rope is a useful heuristic counterbalance to the medieval/modern periodization as currently instituted, worth keeping in circulation, but the arguments of this book are not predicated on it. Conscious of the polemical nature of my stance, I offer as a strength of the book that the question of a re­nais­sance never arises in it. I remain open to all periodization schemes, even the view, the standard one before Cristoph Cellarius and still evident in Byron’s journal entry, that t­ here was no ‘medieval’ period at all.

Ultimately at stake in the business of periodization is history. When we conduct literary interpretation entirely within the bounds of inherited period categories, we let disciplinary formation do our thinking for us. The narrative of

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modernity inculcates the prob­lem of a history, a single story prone to proliferate when it is not actively questioned, as well as the prob­lem of a history, the prob­ lem of ­doing justice to the past. If one may discover the past at all, one must search for it before, ­behind, and beyond retrospectively constructed tranches of time.

The point is painfully obvious, and most painful for t­ hose of us who would interpret the oldest texts. One can wish for deperiodization, or ­else the reinstitutionalization of periodization on multiple, competing grounds (this book attempts to do this for meter). But for the foreseeable ­future, it is with the inherited periods that students of lit­er­a­ture must come to grips. The poets, scribes, readers, and printers who lived before Modernity understood themselves as residents of the modern world. Of course they did. All ­human life has its “temporality (Zeitlichkeit).” 73 The challenge is to construct a history in which their cultural activities neither instantiate nor set off the l­ater disciplinary categorizations that have excluded them from a time and place called modernity. Metrical style, itself now receding into the past, is one ave­nue to meeting this challenge.

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