Tag Archives: alliterative verse

The B Version Archetype

Posted on April 6, 2018 by Ian Cornelius

My essay-length review of John Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds., The “Piers Plowman” Electronic Archive, Vol. 9: The B-Version Archetype will appear in the Yearbook of Langland Studies 32. Here is the abstract: The B-Version Archetype, published on-line by the Piers … Continue reading →

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The earliest English poetry

Posted on January 17, 2018 by Ian Cornelius

[English 390, offered Spring 2018] In English, as in other languages, poetry was at first an oral form: it was passed down in recitation, not writing. The Anglo-Saxons (that is, the English-speaking inhabitants of early medieval Britain) learned to write … Continue reading →

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Lawmen and Plowmen

Posted on August 16, 2017 by Ian Cornelius

From my review of Stephen M. Yeager, From Lawmen to Plowmen: Anglo-Saxon Legal Tradition and the School of Langland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014): What did Old English literature contribute to the literary cultures of post-Conquest England? The question has … Continue reading →

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Reconstructing Alliterative Verse

Posted on July 30, 2017 by Ian Cornelius

Alliterative poetry is first recorded in English from the late seventh century, which makes it the oldest poetry in this language. Surviving poems include Cædmon’s Hymn, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Piers Plowman, several of the most admired works … Continue reading →

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English Quantity

Posted on January 20, 2016 by Ian Cornelius

[8 January 2016 in Austin, TX, at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, session number 218, “Quantity in English Verse: Linguistic and Neuroscience-Based Challenges to the Accentual Paradigm.” This short historiographical paper was the half-time show in our … Continue reading →

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Middle English Alliterative Poetry: ENGL 402

Posted on August 17, 2014 by Ian Cornelius

[a course description, updated for the F14 iteration. In the previous iteration we read part of Cleanness and The Siege of Jerusalem (combined with Patience to form a unit on the destruction of cities) in place of Pearl. The F14 course website … Continue reading →

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Meter in Seattle

Posted on August 14, 2014 by Ian Cornelius

Another cfp, this one for the Sixth International Piers Plowman Conference, to be held 23-26 July 2015, in Seattle, WA: Metrical Form. Papers on the meter of Piers Plowman and other Middle English alliterative poems. Possible topics include metrical variation … Continue reading →

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The Accentual Paradigm

Posted on May 30, 2014 by Ian Cornelius

An excerpt from my article “The Accentual Paradigm in Early English Metrics,” which has now appeared in JEGP. I seek to show how Old English poetry first came to be regarded as “accentual” or “strong stress” in nineteenth-century scholarship, and … Continue reading →

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Hoyt Duggan festschrift

Posted on May 30, 2014 by Ian Cornelius

I reviewed the festschrift for Hoyt Duggan in Yearbook of Langland Studies 27 (2013). The full citation for the book is Michael Calabrese and Stephen H. A. Shepherd, eds., Yee? Baw for Bokes: Essays on Medieval Manuscripts and Poetics in … Continue reading →

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Kalamazoo 2014: two sessions

Posted on July 4, 2013 by Ian Cornelius

I am organizing two sessions on Piers Plowman at the 2014 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo: “Langland’s Line” and “Piers Plowman and the Rich.” The first session concerns the poem’s meter; the second, the poem’s intersections with social history. … Continue reading →

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