Alliterative Verse in Middle English

by

Randy Schiff

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396584-0341

Introduction

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

General Overviews

Scholarship on alliterative poetry in Middle English is a massive field, both in terms of the range of materials studied and the long history of debate about how to historicize alliterative poems. Any scholar seeking to navigate the voluminous body of research on late-medieval alliterative verse should engage with key critical works that offer generalized studies of the subject. Some such works (with Oakden 1930–1935 being the most influential), in providing wide-ranging surveys and critical commentaries, reinforce the notion of a single corpus of alliterative verse simply by making poetry produced in the meter the subject of their works. However, most generalized studies couple surveys of alliterative poems with explicit literary historical commentary on the crucial questions of continuity (or lack thereof) with Old English alliterative verse, and the question of whether late-medieval alliterative verse was in any way unified (whether by origins, political interests, geography, or some other factor). Crucial studies of alliterative verse in Middle English sometimes take the form of influential monographs (such as Chism 2002 and Weiskott 2016), but ambitious statements on alliterative poetry have also been made by probing critical essays (such as Everett 1959, Lawton 1983, and Hanna 1999). The concept of an Alliterative Revival—the view that poets writing in Middle English explicitly brought back a form of verse that had become defunct at some point after the era of Old English poetry—looms over much of the scholarly material on the subject, with some works reinforcing such a model (such as Hulbert 1931 and Turville-Petre 1977), while others strive against it (such as Blake 1979 and Schiff 2011).

• Blake, N. F. “Middle English Alliterative Revivals.” Review 1 (1979): 205–214.

  A review of Turville-Petre 1977, Blake’s essay challenges notions of a single school for alliterative verse. Discussing the wide range of approaches and influences among alliterative works, Blake urges scholars to consider the diversity, rather than the unity, of alliterative poetry in Middle English.

• Chism, Christine. Alliterative Revivals. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

  DOI: 10.9783/9780812201581

  Organizing a critical survey of many key alliterative poems both by a focus on threatening figures and on the pattern of the past being revived in alliterative works, Chism uses such methodologies as postcolonial theory and feminism to deepen critical understanding of alliterative poets’ engagement with medieval social and historical contexts.

• Everett, Dorothy. “The Alliterative Revival.” In Essays on Middle English Literature. Edited by Patricia Kean, 46–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959.

  While providing a wide-ranging survey of the aesthetics and background of key alliterative works, this essay influentially critiques efforts to see later-medieval alliterative works as a distinct group radically postdating earlier material; rather, loss of relevant texts creates the illusion of a revival of alliterative works.

• Hanna, Ralph. “Alliterative Poetry.” In The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature. Edited by David Wallace, 488–512. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

  Provides a study of efforts to define alliterative verse, and also critiques efforts to group alliterative works into a single school or genre as both reductionist and problematic, for such perspectives detach alliterative works from the mainstream of Middle English literature.

• Hulbert, James R. “A Hypothesis Concerning the Alliterative Revival.” Modern Philology 28.4 (1931): 405–422.

  DOI: 10.1086/387921

  Historicizes 14th-century alliterative verse in Middle English by linking its patronage with historically conscious English nobles who sought to resist the influence of Francophile literature by cultivating a poetic culture reminiscent of these nobles’ views of the Anglocentric baronial rebels of the thirteenth century.

• Lawton, David A. “The Unity of Middle English Alliterative Poetry.” Speculum 58 (1983): 72–94.

  DOI: 10.2307/2846614

  This important essay places William Langland’s Piers Plowman at the center of late-medieval alliterative verse, arguing that the moralizing inclinations of Langland’s work suffuse and unite the key works of Middle English alliterative verse.

• Oakden, J. P. Alliterative Poetry in Middle English. 2 vols. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1930–1935.

  Providing a very influential survey of alliterative works, Oakden uses studies of both dialect and meter to sketch out a coherent hypothesis of a distinctly Middle English tradition emerging first in the West Midlands, and then spreading northwards. Remains an excellent resource for students seeking to study both the diverse range of alliterative poems and the unities that emerge from such investigations.

• Schiff, Randy P. Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011.

  Linking the insistence on a single Alliterative Revival with a reductive nationalism that imagined late-medieval English poets as both nostalgic and doomed to obsolescence, Schiff surveys a range of alliterative works whose inventiveness and individuality emerge most forcefully when placed in their local, rather than literary-historical, contexts.

• Turville-Petre, Thorlac. The Alliterative Revival. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

  This influential monograph, which surveys alliterative verse in Middle English as a form that was well suited for longer narrative, argues intensely for the notion of alliterative poets in Middle English as part of a single school that originated in the West Midlands.

• Weiskott, Eric. English Alliterative Verse: Poetic Tradition and Literary History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

  DOI: 10.1017/9781316718674

  Moving from the Old English era to the sixteenth century, Weiskott foregrounds metrical analysis in a literary historical survey that argues for continuity across these periods being revealed by alliterative poetry.