Alliterative revivalism: Oppositional poetics in late medieval Britain

215 Pages·2005·1.885 MB·English

by  Randy P. Schiff

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
Santa Barbara
Alliterative Revivalism: Oppositional Poetics in Late Medieval Britain
A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy
in English
by
Randy P. Schiff
Committee in charge:
Professor L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, Co-Chair
Professor Carol Braun Pasternack, Co-Chair
Professor Richard Helgerson
September 2005
UMI Number: 3186842
UMI Microform3186842
Copyright2005 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company.
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The dissertation of Randy P. Schiff is approved.
______________________________________________
Richard Helgerson
______________________________________________
Carol Braun Pasternack, Committee Co-Chair
______________________________________________
L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, Committee Co-Chair
June 2005
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
While it would be impossible to acknowledge everyone who has helped me in the
completion of my degree, I would like to thank the people who have been of direct
assistance in the writing of this dissertation. First and foremost, I would like to thank
the members of my committee, upon whose generous advice and guidance I have
been so fortunate to rely. To Professor Richard Helgerson, I express thanks for our
conversations on regional identity and literary history, as well as for all your
feedback and the fine model of your prose. To Professor Carol Braun Pasternack,
who inspired my passion for manuscript culture, I am grateful for the wealth of
insights and criticism you provided on every aspect of my work; I could not have
come this far without the aid of your critical eye. I send out my most special thanks
to Professor L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, who not only guided me as co-chair of my
project, but was also both adviser and mentor from the first day of my graduate
career; while your name may have changed slightly since we began, your
commitment to helping me cultivate my vision never wavered. I would also like to
thank others who have helped improve various aspects of my work. I am uniquely
indebted to Professor Carolyn Dinshaw, who both inspired me to become a
medievalist and first introduced me to the pleasures of alliterative verse. Professor
Michael O’Connell offered insights on regionalism that inform Chapter 1, Professor
Jody Enders and my colleague Stephen Deng provided valuable advice about
Chapter 4, while Professor Frank Grady helped inspire my reformulation of Chapter
5. I would also like to thank Professors David Marshall, Maurizia Boscagli, and Paul
J. Hernadi, each of whom graciously offered advice on the overall thrust of my
thesis. I must also thank all of the staff at the manuscript archives of the Bodleian
Library at Oxford University, the British Library, the Cambridge University Library,
and the Huntington Library, for so generously aiding in my research. To my friend
David Calvert I am indebted for his fielding of questions about regional identity in
Britain. While I would like here to thank all of my friends and family, I am
especially grateful to my parents, Barbara and Neal Schiff, who have supported me
in my work every step of the way. Most of all, I thank Maki Becker, for waiting so
patiently as I completed this project.
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VITA OF RANDY P. SCHIFF
EDUCATION
Bachelor of Arts in English, University of California, Berkeley, May 1994 (highest
honors)
Masters of Arts in English, University of California, Santa Barbara, June 2000
Doctor of Philosophy in English, University of California, Santa Barbara, July 2005
(with certificate of emphasis in European Medieval Studies) [expected]
PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT
1999-2005: Teaching Assistant / Teaching Associate, Department of English,
University of California, Santa Barbara
2004-2005: Developer, Voice of the Shuttle (Professor Alan Liu)
2002-2005: Research Assistant (Professor David Marshall)
2000-2001: Teaching Associate, Writing Program, University of California, Santa
Barbara
2000-2002; 2004: Research Assistant (Professor Candace Waid)
PUBLICATIONS
“Rise of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,” in Great Events from History: The
Nineteenth Century (Salem Press) [forthcoming]
“Abraham Cowley,” “John Fletcher,” and “Katherine Philips,” in Great Lives from
iv
VITA OF RANDY P. SCHIFF (cont.)
History: The Seventeenth Century(Salem Press, 2005)
“The Declaration of Rights” and “Licensing Acts,” in Great Events from History:
The Seventeenth Century(Salem Press, 2005)
“James V,” “Mary of Guise,” and “Nest verch Rhys ap Tewdwr, the ‘Helen of
Wales,’” in Great Lives from History: The Middle Ages and Pre-Renaissance
(Salem Press, 2005)
“Anglo-Scottish Wars, 1513-60,” “The Battle of Ancrum Moor,” and “Yorkshire
Rebellion, 1489,” in Great Events from History: 1454-1600 (Salem Press,
2005)
FIELDS OF STUDY
Major Field: Studies in Middle English Literature
(Adviser: Professor L.O. Aranye Fradenburg)
Studies in Middle English Literature: Late Medieval Verse
(Professors L.O. Aranye Fradenburg and Carol Braun Pasternack)
Studies in Textual Criticism: Paleography
(Professor Carol Braun Pasternack)
Studies in Literary Criticism: New Historicism
(Professors L.O. Aranye Fradenburg and Richard Helgerson)
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ABSTRACT
Alliterative Revivalism: Oppositional Poetics in Late Medieval Britain
by
Randy P. Schiff
The concept of a single “Alliterative Revival” (the resuscitation of alliterative meter,
beginning in the mid-fourteenth century) has come under recent critical scrutiny,
with questions both about possible continuity with Old English verse and the
historicity of regional cross-connections. Informed by the New Philological focus on
the materiality of literary texts, Alliterative Revivalism: Oppositional Poetics in Late
Medieval Britain seeks to steer scholarship towards questions of current social
practice, rather than continuity, first isolating the influence of a “Revivialist” literary
criticism that has established the literary historical framework for this debate, and
then proceeding to isolate regional zones in which late medieval alliterative verse
can be fruitfully contextualized. The dissertation begins by tracing key critical
interventions that have resulted in the marginalization of alliterative verse within the
literary canon, isolating a literary historiographical “Revivivalism” that has insisted
on a monolithic model of a fundamentally provincial “Alliterative Revival,” thereby
obscuring the current social significance of alliterative verse (Chapter 1). My
analyses pursue the hypothesis that there is some justice to the view that, in general,
alliterative texts feature subjects that are significantly “other” with respect to
regional, ethnic, and socioeconomic identity to those of the powerful Southeast
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(Chapter 2). Examining the culture of military careerism in the Northwest Midlands
and its manifestation in relevant poems, the dissertation then argues that the social
and economic influence of the Northeast Midlands must be included in analyses of
regional anxieties about militarism (Chapter 3). Turning to anti-imperialist
Arthurian texts from the English North and southern Scotland, I maintain that the
texts of which I treat need to be conceived as originating out of a trans-national
Anglo-Scottish marcher zone (Chapter 4). Exploring the poems of the “Piers
Plowman Tradition,” I then argue for the need to conceive of a Southwest Midlands-
London nexus, in which collaborative composition and bibliographical culture
fundamentally marks influenced by the work of Langland (Chapter 5).
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Table of Contents
1. Beyond the Backwater: Re-Historicizing Alliterative Meter…………………..1
Resituating Difference: Critiquing the Revivalist Insistence on the
Singular……………………………………………………………….7
Bridging the Backwater: Revitalizing Late Medieval
Alliterative Verse………………………………………………..…..22
2. Other Voices: The Alliterative Empowerment of the Peripheral……….…...37
Politicizing Poverty: Oppositionality and the Reception of
Piers Plowman……………………………………………………...39
Alliterative Outlaws: The Poaching Subject………………………………..53
Learning from the Conquered: The Instructive Other in The
Siege of Jerusalem…………………………………...……………...61
3. Alliteration, Arthur, and Empire in and around the
Northwest Midlands……………………………………………….71
Armed and Alliterative: Re-Integrating a Dynamic Northwest Midlands…..78
Truest Treason: Women and the Alliterative Unsettling of
Arthurian Empire………………………………………………...….87
4. Borderland Subversions: Anti-Imperialism in The Awntyrs off
Arthure and Gologras and Gawane………………………………108
Romantic Dispossession: the Negotiation of Lordship in The
Awntyrs off Arthure………………………………………………..116
Widening the Marches: Resistance to Nationalism in Gologras
and Gawane……………………………………………………….133
5. Bags of Books and Books as Bags: Political Protest and the
Piers Plowman Tradition…………………………………….…...143
Decomposing Mum and the Sothsegger: Theorizing Collaboration
in the Southwest Midlands-London Nexus………………………..149
Negotiating Difference: The Heuristic Value of Authorial and
Regional Identities…………………………………………………172
Bibliography……………………………………….…………………….….…….180
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CHAPTER ONE
Beyond the Backwater: Re-Historicizing Alliterative Meter
Walter W. Skeat, in his seminal 1868 essay on alliterative verse, argues that
literary critics, in order to move forward in the framing of the “rules and laws of
English prosody” (xii), must cast their eyes inward, reconsidering the foundational
assumptions of their own discipline. For Skeat, his contemporaries have developed
“absurd and mischievously false terminology” for the study of English verse because
they have uncritically applied the “temporal” (i.e., quantitative) system of Greek and
Latin verse to the “accentual” (i.e., stress-based) corpus of English verse (xi).
Significantly, it is in the context of classifying alliterative verse that Skeat makes a
more general call to nationalistic sensibilities, urging scholars to seek out “genuine
English terms” to apply to the prosodic description of texts in any form of English
verse (xii). Although Skeat’s terminological suggestions did not reshape the
language of prosody—we still speak of the iamb and trochee, for example, rather
than the “genuine English terms” Return and Tonic suggested by Skeat (xii)—his
reframing of the critical language for “English” prosody allowed for the formulation
of a viable model for the scansion of the alliterative long line. Indeed, Skeat’s
general claims for the shape of the alliterative line—that of a four-stress line, with
two half-verses each of two major stresses divided by a caesura, with stresses
1