Langland's Line

Sponsoring Organization(s)

International Piers Plowman Society

Organizer Name

Ian Cornelius

Organizer Affiliation

Yale Univ.

Presider Name

Rebecca Davis

Presider Affiliation

Univ. of California-Irvine

Paper Title 1

The B-Verses of Piers Plowman and the Alliterative Tradition

Presenter 1 Name

Eric Weiskott

Presenter 1 Affiliation

Yale Univ.

Paper Title 2

A Tale of Three Williams: Meter and Authorship at the Beginning of the Alliterative Revival

Presenter 2 Name

Kristin Lynn Cole

Presenter 2 Affiliation

Pennsylvania State Univ.-York

Paper Title 3

Langland's Latin B-Verses

Presenter 3 Name

Ian Cornelius

Paper Title 4

Responding to Recent Developments in Langland's Prosody

Presenter 4 Name

Thomas Cable

Presenter 4 Affiliation

Univ. of Texas-Austin

Start Date

8-5-2014 3:30 PM

Session Location

Fetzer 2020

Description

What do we mean when we say that Piers Plowman is written in alliterative verse? The metrical form of late Middle English alliterative verse has been substantially clarified in the last twenty-five years, thanks to a run of highly productive research activity for which Thomas Cable has provided a valuable review. However, the scholarship to date has devoted its attention most productively to the “formal corpus” of alliterative verse—that is, to a group of poems always recognized as more regular than Piers Plowman. As a result, the task of clarifying Piers Plowman's metrical form is interpretable, at least initially, as a problem of comparison: that is, a testing of Langland's verse against the metrical norms evident in poems of the formal corpus. This session takes stock of recent advances and suggests new ways forward, with regard to issues ranging from the authorship of William of Palerne to Langland's use of Latin.

Lawrence Warner