The Evolution of Verse Structure in Old and Middle English Poetry: From the Earliest Alliterative Poems to Iambic Pentameter. Geoffrey Russom. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xii + 324 pp. $99.99.

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 1211-1212
Author(s):  
Megan E. Hartman
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Middle English Poetry ◽  
Iambic Pentameter ◽  
Verse Structure

Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350-c.1500

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Sawyer
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
John Lydgate ◽  
Thomas Hoccleve ◽  
New Methods ◽  
English Verse ◽  
Middle English Poetry ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bodies Of Evidence

This volume offers the first book-length history of reading for Middle English poetry. Drawing on evidence from more than 450 manuscripts, it examines readers’ choices of material, their movements into and through books, their physical handling of poetry, and their attitudes to rhyme. It provides new knowledge about the poems of known writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve by examining their transmission and reception together with a much larger mass of anonymous English poetry, including the most successful English poem before print, The Prick of Conscience. The evidence considered ranges from the weights and shapes of manuscripts to the intricate details of different stanza forms, and the chapters develop new methods which bring such seemingly disparate bodies of evidence into productive conversation with each other. Ultimately, this book shows how the reading of English verse in this period was bound up with a set of habitual but pervasive formalist concerns, which were negotiated through the layered agencies of poets, book producers, and other readers.

On the concept ‘popular’ in middle English poetry

1992 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 292-299
Author(s):  
Bradford Y. Fletcher ◽  
A. Leslie Harris
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Middle English Poetry
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