Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650

By Eric Weiskott

What would English literary history look like if the unit of measure were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? The earliest poems in English were written in alliterative verse, the meter of Beowulf. Alliterative meter preceded tetrameter, which first appeared in the twelfth century, and tetrameter in turn preceded pentameter, the five-stress line that would become the dominant English verse form of modernity, though it was invented by Chaucer in the 1380s. While this chronology is accurate, Eric Weiskott argues, the traditional periodization of literature in modern scholarship distorts the meaning of meters as they appeared to early poets and readers.

In Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650, Weiskott examines the uses and misuses of these three meters as markers of literary time, "medieval" or "modern," though all three were in concurrent use both before and after 1500. In each section of the book, he considers two of the traditions through the prism of a third element: alliterative meter and tetrameter in poems of political prophecy; alliterative meter and pentameter in William Langland's Piers Plowman and early blank verse; and tetrameter and pentameter in Chaucer, his predecessors, and his followers. Reversing the historical perspective in which scholars conventionally view these authors, Weiskott reveals Langland to be metrically precocious and Chaucer metrically nostalgic.

More than a history of prosody, Weiskott's book challenges the divide between medieval and modern literature. Rejecting the premise that modernity occurred as a specifiable event, he uses metrical history to renegotiate the trajectories of English literary history and advances a narrative of sociocultural change that runs parallel to metrical change, exploring the relationship between literary practice, social placement, and historical time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780812297478

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Meter and Modernity

in English Verse,

1350–1650

Meter and Modernity

in English Verse,

1350–1650

Eric Weiskott

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press

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purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may

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Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-8122-5264-4

To Sofia

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations

Note on Quotations and Scansion

Preface

Introduction. Modernity: The Problem of a History

PART I. ALLITERATIVE METER, TETRAMETER, POLITICAL PROPHECY

Chapter 1. English Political Prophecy: Coordinates of Form and History

Chapter 2. The Age of Prophecy

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

Chapter 4. Tetrameter: The Future of Alliterative Verse

Chapter 5. Where Have All the Pentameter Prophecies Gone?

PART II. ALLITERATIVE METER, PENTAMETER, LANGLAND

Chapter 6. Alliterative Meter and Blank Verse, 1540–1667

Chapter 7. The Rhymelessness of Piers Plowman

Chapter 8. Langland’s Meter and Blank Verse, 1700–2000

PART III. TETRAMETER, PENTAMETER, CHAUCER

Chapter 9. Chaucer and the Problem of Modernity

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

Chapter 11. The Age of Pentameter

Conclusion. From Archive to Canon

Appendix A. English Prophecy Books

Appendix B. Some Texts of English Verse Prophecies Not Noted in NIMEV

Appendix C. Compilers, Scribes, and Owners of Manuscripts Containing Political Prophecy

Appendix D. The Ireland Prophecy

Notes

Bibliography

Index of Manuscripts and Rare Printed Books

Index of Anonymous Poems

General Index

Acknowledgments

ABBREVIATIONS

NOTE OF QUOTATIONS AND SCANSION

QUOTATIONS

In quotations from manuscripts and in the edited text of the Ireland Prophecy in Appendix D, capitalization, lineation, punctuation, and word division are editorial, and italics indicate the expansion of scribal abbreviations, except that the ampersand is silently expanded to and. In quotations from early printed books, capitalization, lineation, punctuation, and word division reproduce the original, and italics indicate the expansion of typographical abbreviations. In quotations from edited texts of English alliterative poetry including Appendix D, | or a tabbed space represents the caesura between the a-verse and the b-verse.

SCANSION

S represents a metrically stressed syllable, and x represents a metrically unstressed syllable or its equivalent through elision. For example, a normal line of iambic pentameter is xSxSxSxSxS.

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 labor. The fragmentation and rationalization of knowledge shapes the smallest details of professional existence, down to who is in the room. Toward 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, detached 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 English. 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 presentday English professors might be embarrassed to realize. Underwood first describes this vision in its natural setting, Scott’s early Waverley novels and other contemporary 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 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. Here, too, medievalism looms large. The old nonperiodized curriculum, as against the raciallinguistic factionalism of Scott’s Ivanhoe, had emphasized continuity between ‘Saxon,’ ‘Norman,’ and ‘English’ 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 century, King’s and University College were 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 whole 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 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 whole problem of fundamental disciplinary concepts points instead to a self-contradiction inherent in the structure of modernity as a presentist European yet universalist narrative category.

A similar dynamic plays out more subtly between the subfields of Old English and Middle English, which parted ways in the nineteenth century. 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 English 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 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 literature in journals, lecture series, and hiring is unmistakable.

Within late medieval English 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 writings directly connect the Middle Ages to those who study the Middle Ages. 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 English 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, signals that Chaucer matters as much as all Middle English literature, including Chaucer. Before 2016 the Middle English forum was named Middle English Language and Literature, Excluding Chaucer: a field defined by a Chaucershaped 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 Middle 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 roundtable organized by the division on Chaucer. The Middle 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 problems 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 toward a truer conception of the experiences latent in early English 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 today, 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 were, apophatic trajectories of literary history. This book works through the friction between prospect and retrospect, practice and theory, life and analysis.

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 were 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 imagined future, 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 century 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 father of English poetry,’ just as he 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.

*   *   *

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 English 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 battles. 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 century, 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 England 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 by fanaticism and feudalism. If modernity was characterized by an open future and historicism, then the Middle Ages were characterized by eschatology and anachronism.

Twenty-first-century literary scholars inherit these 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 these 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 English meters—alliterative meter, tetrameter, and pentameter—were all practiced both before and after 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 earlier 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 century 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 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

What would English 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 English 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 these 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 English political prophecy, a major understudied literary archive. As a future-oriented genre spanning the twelfth to the seventeenth century 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 these 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 English political poems have failed to join a modern literary canon in large part because 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 English 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 these 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 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 English 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 English 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 political prophecy, first as a genre unto itself⁷ (Chapters 1–2) and then according to metrical tradition (Chapters 3–5). The question posed in Chapter 5, Why were 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

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 were, I contextualize the historiographical claims of post-Enlightenment writers as the latest salvos in long-running battles over the past, present, and future of English poetry. 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 century as the great 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 others, I describe the late fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries as a phase of English literary history without Modernity but full of impulses toward modernization.

By ‘modernity,’ then, I emphatically do not mean modernism, the twentiethcentury 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 English writers, scribes, and readers feel modern or contemplate metrical novelty.¹⁷ On the