Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650 9780812297478

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Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650

Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650

Eric Weiskott

Un iver sit y of Pen nsy lvan i a Press Phil adelphi a

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 978-0-8122-5264-4

To Sofia

contents

List of Abbreviations

ix

Note on Quotations and Scansion

xi

Preface Introduction. Modernity: The Problem of a History

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PART I. ALLITERATIVE METER, TETRAMETER, POLITICAL PROPHECY Chapter 1. English Political Prophecy: Coordinates of Form and History

25

Chapter 2. The Age of Prophecy

47

Chapter 3. The Ireland Prophecy and the Future of Alliterative Verse

58

Chapter 4. Tetrameter: The Future of Alliterative Verse

74

Chapter 5. Where Have All the Pentameter Prophecies Gone?

90

PART II. ALLITERATIVE METER, PENTAMETER, LANGLAND Chapter 6. Alliterative Meter and Blank Verse, 1540–1667

103

Chapter 7. The Rhymelessness of Piers Plowman

123

Chapter 8. Langland’s Meter and Blank Verse, 1700–2000

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co n t en ts

PART III. TETRAMETER, PENTAMETER, CHAUCER Chapter 9. Chaucer and the Problem of Modernity

153

Chapter 10. Chaucer’s English Metrical Phonology: Tetrameter to Pentameter

161

Chapter 11. The Age of Pentameter

178

Conclusion. From Archive to Canon

197

Appendix A. English Prophecy Books

207

Appendix B. Some Texts of English Verse Prophecies Not Noted in NIMEV

211

Appendix C. Compilers, Scribes, and Owners of Manuscripts Containing Political Prophecy

219

Appendix D. The Ireland Prophecy

227

Notes

231

Bibliography

259

Index of Manuscripts and Rare Printed Books

283

Index of Anonymous Poems

285

General Index

287

Acknowledgments

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a b b r e v i at i o n s

CR Crum DMLBS DOE ELH ESTC May and Ringler ME MED NIMEV OE OED OF ON RES Ringler SAC STC

YLS

Chaucer Review Margaret Crum, ed., First-Line Index of English Poetry 1500–1800 in Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library Oxford Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources Dictionary of Old English English Literary History English Short Title Catalogue Online, http://estc.bl.uk Steven W. May and William A. Ringler Jr., Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First-Line Index of English Verse, 1559–1603 Middle English Middle English Dictionary Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, A New Index of Middle English Verse Old English Oxford English Dictionary Old French Old Norse Review of English Studies William A. Ringler Jr., Bibliography and Index of English Verse in Manuscript 1501–1558 Studies in the Age of Chaucer A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640 Yearbook of Langland Studies

n o t e o n q u o tat i o n s a n d s c a n s i o n

Quotations In quotations from manuscripts and in the edited text of the Ireland Prophecy in Appendix D, capitalization, lineation, punctuation, and word division are editorial, and italics indicate the expansion of scribal abbreviations, except that the ampersand is silently expanded to and. In quotations from early printed books, capitalization, lineation, punctuation, and word division reproduce the original, and italics indicate the expansion of typographical abbreviations. In quotations from edited texts of English alliterative poetry including Appendix D, | or a tabbed space represents the caesura between the a-verse and the b-verse. Scansion S represents a metrically stressed syllable, and x represents a metrically unstressed syllable or its equivalent through elision. For example, a normal line of iambic pentameter is xSxSxSxSxS.

Preface

This book issues from a particular disciplinary-historical context. I belong to a generation of literary scholars for whom periodization is a foregone conclusion. Period specialty was the essential element of our applications to graduate programs. The minimum price of entry to academia was to designate oneself a medievalist, a Victorianist, and so on. I entered the English PhD program at Yale University in 2009 as an ‘Anglo-Saxonist.’ Scholarly subspecialization by time period is old news, but it has assumed a professional importance for my cohort that feels like an intensification as compared with previous generations. We were encouraged to find common cause with peers studying our period in other disciplines, a dream of transdisciplinary period coherence that James Simpson has queried on general principle.1 Meanwhile, the provision of full-time academic jobs in which to deepen and transmit specialist knowledge continued its decline. Hyperspecialization is an expression of the neoliberalization of higher education, the obverse of the casualization of academic labor. The fragmentation and rationalization of knowledge shapes the smallest details of professional existence, down to who is in the room. Toward the end of my time at Yale, in 2012, the early modernists in the English Department’s Medieval and Renaissance Colloquium, true to their period, filed for a divorce from the medievalists. Periodization arose as an intellectual topic for the group(s) only at our farewell meeting, when the divorce had already been finalized. (I choose the metaphor of divorce advisedly. John Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643–44), prompted by Milton’s desire to secure a divorce from his seventeen-year-old wife Mary Powell, also proposes a divorce from a reading practice he names, for the first time in English, “literalism,” henceforth a keyword in anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, and anti-‘medieval’ rhetoric.2) Not being in the room has its consequences. Invested with a political valuation, the narrative of modernity locates premodern literature and its study at the margins of the field. The episode at Yale recapitulated, at a trivial level of particularity, the historical drama whereby modernity, via the Renaissance,

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detached itself from something it could then name as its Other. A symptom of this estrangement is that medievalists are expected to engage with the theories and methods central to later periods of literary study, whereas postmedievalists can afford to ignore medievalist scholarship.3 “We understand their language, but they don’t understand ours,” a medievalist friend once observed, with double meaning. We sometimes find ourselves in the position of witnessing ‘new’ scholarly movements, associated with later periods, that unwittingly resemble the work we have been presenting and publishing for years. Medievalists who wish to speak back to theoretical and methodological trends in the field are expected to represent ourselves as newcomers, or emissaries from a faraway land. Medievalists bear some responsibility for this dynamic. When we accept modernity as the limit of our intellectual energies, we consent in our own professional marginalization. Medieval/Renaissance, or med/Ren, is a standard specification for pre-1700 English literature teaching positions at colleges and smaller universities. In these cases, the exigencies of institutional resources under austerity have reunified a partitioned literary terrain; but the nonnegotiable elective is always Shakespeare. In a sense, medievalists aren’t in the room whether we are in the room or not. There is a history behind this. In Why Literary Periods Mattered, Ted Underwood traces an important part of that history. Underwood’s book centers on the early nineteenth century. Yet its arguments about the formation of English studies return again and again to the teaching and literary representation of the Middle Ages. More even than Underwood indicates, the book demonstrates the foundational importance of medievalism to the discipline of English. Walter Scott is the hero, or villain, of the book. According to Underwood, English studies conformed to Scott’s vision of historical cultivation to an extent that presentday English professors might be embarrassed to realize. Underwood first describes this vision in its natural setting, Scott’s early Waverley novels and other contemporary novels, poems, handbooks of chronology, and public discourse about history. Underwood shows that a paradoxical proposition about history, that our inability to understand a prestigious cultural past is “the true source of cultural prestige,” gained currency in imaginative writing during Scott’s lifetime (1771– 1832).4 Curiously, Romantic writers thought of history as constituted by “the contrasts, gaps, and perspectival dilemmas that make it difficult to grasp one’s connection to the past.”5 Then comes a left turn. A Scottian sense of historical difference was “institutionalized as the organizing framework of historical and literary education.”6 Underwood tracks the introduction of periods into literary and historical curricula at King’s College London and University College London

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in the 1840s. Emphasizing the status quo of the 1820s and 1830s, in which London professors regularly taught the whole gamut of English literature in one term, Underwood conveys the strangeness of periodization. Here, too, medievalism looms large. The old nonperiodized curriculum, as against the raciallinguistic factionalism of Scott’s Ivanhoe, had emphasized continuity between ‘Saxon,’ ‘Norman,’ and ‘English’ phases of language history. The first course taught in the new, periodized format was a course given by Frederick Denison Maurice on the General Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Underwood’s argument has a social dimension. The form of historical understanding displaced by Scott and other writers had been a vision of social continuity identifiable as a fantasy-projection of the aristocracy. Regency-era writers instead stressed the unknowability of the past, but Underwood diagnoses this conception of history in turn as expressive of a specifically middle-class ethos. The speakers of John Keats’s sonnets can’t afford the Grand Tour but can feel “an immediate experience of the alienation produced by historical time.”7 Unlike the aristocratic Oxbridge universities, which succumbed to English studies only in the late nineteenth century, King’s and University College were founded, in the late 1820s, with the explicit charge to educate “tradesmen and yeomen.”8 Maurice avowedly started with Chaucer because (Underwood’s words) “the age of Chaucer dramatizes the essentially bourgeois foundation of English nationality.”9 In one of Maurice’s letters, a characteristic bourgeois experience, a visit to the British Museum, triggers the theologian and professor to rhapsodize about historical and spiritual transcendence. The covertly middle-class aesthetic of Scott’s historical novels became the covertly middle-class sensibility of literary studies. More embarrassing news for English professors. We inhabit a truly bizarre cul-de-sac in Underwood’s story. Periodization is today a familiar object of critique within and beyond medieval studies. The history and limitations of periodization are the stuff of whole books, conferences, journal essay clusters. The trendy English Institute devoted a conference to the topic over a decade ago, in 2008. When the Yale early modernists divorced the medievalists, everyone knew to arrange a periodization-themed sendoff, as self-defeating as such an event would, by definition, be. We have internalized the ultimate artificiality of periodization. But the overall structure of the English department curriculum has scarcely changed since the 1840s. Underwood published Why Literary Periods Mattered in 2013. He could have published it, without altering a word, in 2020. The professors have only interpreted the curriculum, in various ways; the point is to change it. Having absorbed its principal rival, comparative literature, in the middle of the twentieth century, periodization is, if

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anything, more dominant than ever as the governing principle of literary studies.10 Underwood historicizes this principle and brings its bourgeois politics back into focus, rescuing us from “amnesia about the whole history of the discipline before New Criticism.”11 In doing so, he incidentally shows that medieval Britain always had a simultaneously intimate and distant conceptual relationship to the field of study that proposed to analyze its literature. Historiographically speaking, medieval is not one period among others with which it is on an equal footing. English studies was founded on, as well as founded against, the medieval. The discipline of English contributes its small part to, in Kathleen Davis’s formulation, “the medievalism at the heart of the theoretical enterprise of modernity.”12 The presently existing dynamic between medieval and the rest of the field imposes on medievalists an impossible choice between a demonstration that medieval literature differs from modern literature (justifying periodization) and a demonstration that it does not (forfeiting its historicity). The choice is impossible because the political claims of modernity permeate the fundamental disciplinary concepts. These are the concepts behind MLA-interview or job-talk questions of the form, “What does [text] tell us about [topic] in general?” To speak these concepts is already to speak the language of modernity. I want to emphasize that this is neither a peculiar character failing on the part of postmedievalists (as if more virtuous colleagues would ask the right questions) nor a general problem of institutional power (as if the tables could be turned and medievalist categories made into the unmarked terms of engagement for literary study—if only!). The whole problem of fundamental disciplinary concepts points instead to a self-contradiction inherent in the structure of modernity as a presentist European yet universalist narrative category. A similar dynamic plays out more subtly between the subfields of Old English and Middle English, which parted ways in the nineteenth century. My first book challenged this periodization from the perspective of alliterative verse. As with the medieval/modern divide, work that traverses the two times clusters around a small number of established longue durée topics, such as historiography, religious prose, and book production. In addition to its intellectual ramifications, Old/Middle periodization has professional ones. Old English and Middle English specialists have few occasions on which to be in the same rooms. Old English specialists attend the conference of the society formerly known as the International Society for Anglo-Saxonists;13 Middle English specialists attend the New Chaucer Society, International Piers Plowman Society, or International John Gower Society conferences. The Modern Language Association

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recognizes a separate “Old English” forum. Even at the Kalamazoo, Leeds, and Medieval Academy of America medieval studies conferences, which enforce no formal periodized subdivisions, paper sessions in English studies usually address one period or the other. While everyone becomes a medievalist in relation to other colleagues in our departments, the privileging of fourteenth-century literature in journals, lecture series, and hiring is unmistakable. Within late medieval English studies, the divide between Chaucer and everything else repeats the pattern of exclusion and distortion characterizing the medieval/modern and Old English/Middle English divides. Through the explosive medium of early print culture, Chaucer is the one English author whose writings directly connect the Middle Ages to those who study the Middle Ages. As such, Chaucer was always prone to attain the status of a temporal exception. Study of Chaucer enjoys (suffers from) the same inclination to universalize, to colonize adjacent intellectual terrain, that marks modernity. Late medieval English studies tends to adopt a Chaucerian perspective on the field. Through the fault of no particular person, this local periodization finds its institutional elaborations. The New Chaucer Society is the wealthiest scholarly society dedicated to Middle English literature; its biennial conference is the largest platform for new ideas in the field; its journal, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, is arguably the most prestigious venue for new scholarly work, though I like to think the Yearbook of Langland Studies gives it a run for its money. Scholars of late medieval English literature divide their activities in the MLA between two forums, “Chaucer” and “Middle English.” Such a bifurcation, paradoxical on its face, signals that Chaucer matters as much as all Middle English literature, including Chaucer. Before 2016 the Middle English forum was named “Middle English Language and Literature, Excluding Chaucer”: a field defined by a Chaucershaped hole. An incident several years ago perturbed this state of affairs, momentarily turning the organization of MLA forums into a political issue for late medievalists focusing on literature in English.14 In 2014 the MLA leadership formally questioned the value of retaining an author-based forum, then known as a division. The fallout was predictable but instructive. Concerned to oppose retrenchment of medieval studies in the MLA, Chaucerians responded at the 2015 convention with vigorous defenses of Chaucer as a locus for indispensable critical conversations. Ironically, one implication of the defense of Chaucer was to problematize the existence of a separate division on Middle English. Discomfort with—and yet reliance on—Chaucer’s status as ur-poet was palpable in the MLA sessions defending the division on Chaucer. “Why Chaucer Now?” asked a

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roundtable organized by the division on Chaucer. The Middle English division hosted a roundtable entitled “Rethinking the Place of the Author.” All five participants adverted to Chaucer. As I recall, the speakers in “Rethinking” found themselves arguing that Chaucer’s historical centrality enabled his name to transcend authorship and thereby to convene other types of critical discourse valued by the MLA membership. This was an apt statement of the situation, but circumstance dictated that it appear as a subdisciplinary strength, not as the historiographical/methodological problem that Chaucerian universalism is for the field. The result of this activity in 2015 was to ward off the attempt at reorganization from above. Conference-goers can again take Chaucer for granted, ceding problems of periodization to MLA governance. This book is my response to the prevailing distribution of professional time. It is an attempt to write my way past the window frame through which I entered the academy and toward a truer conception of the experiences latent in early English verse. The two, interrelated targets of the book’s historiographical revisionism are modernity and Chaucer. The book articulates a general judgment. The forms of academic knowledge characteristic of the last two hundred years thoroughly distort understanding of earlier European metrical cultures, even as they recover those cultures for examination in the first place. Suspending the medieval/modern periodization reopens possibilities for historicism. In particular, this book sets out to undo the retrospectivism of disciplinary formation. The goal is to think of English metrical traditions as themselves unfolding historical times, whose experience initially bore no relation to the later historical accretions through which we inevitably conceptualize English poetics today, such as the canonization of Chaucer, the dominance of pentameter, the usurpation by English of the social and intellectual spaces of Latin, Enlightenment historiography, nationalism, the institution of English departments, and free verse. Literature enacts a “movement toward a future that is ultimately inapprehensible,” to borrow Davis’s summary of Bede’s philosophy of history.15 Belated readers like ourselves, burdened with awareness of the literary future that in actuality transpired, must try to recapture the, as it were, apophatic trajectories of literary history. This book works through the friction between prospect and retrospect, practice and theory, life and analysis.

introduction

Modernity The Problem of a History

In 1807 a nineteen-year-old Lord Byron wrote in his journal: “Chaucer, notwithstanding the praises bestowed on him, I think obscene and contemptible:—he owes his celebrity merely to his antiquity, which he does not deserve so well as Pierce Plowman, or Thomas of Ercildoune.”1 Byron’s remark juxtaposes representative texts from all three major English metrical traditions: alliterative meter (William Langland’s Piers Plowman), tetrameter (the anonymous Thomas of Erceldoune), and pentameter (Geoffrey Chaucer). As conceded by the “notwithstanding” clause, Byron’s opinion ran counter to received wisdom. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers were crazy for Chaucer; Piers Plowman had not been printed since 1561. In 1803 Walter Scott inserted part of the political prophecy Thomas of Erceldoune in the second edition of his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, an antiquarian anthology, where Byron evidently found it.2 Connecting Chaucer, Piers Plowman, and Thomas of Erceldoune for Byron was their “antiquity,” in other words, Byron’s historical alienation from them. Between Byron and these texts, which we would now classify as medieval, stood an absolute temporal dividing line. But even absolute dividing lines may, in an imagined future, move. Byron ends the journal entry with a bitter indictment of his own literary moment, in the form of a prophecy: “Taste is over with us; and another century will sweep our empire, our literature, and our name, from all but a place in the annals of mankind.”3 The literature and culture of the 1800s will one day join Chaucer, Piers Plowman, and Thomas of Erceldoune in antiquity, and the juxtaposition will not be flattering for the 1800s. In seeking to take Chaucer down a peg, Byron alludes to a literary-cultural status quo before Chaucer became ‘the father of English poetry,’ just as he

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envisions a literary future after current tastes have gone irredeemably out of fashion. Yet the recognition of different possible histories of English verse aesthetics is already mediated for Byron by a fundamental periodization—ancient/ modern, a reminder that ancient/medieval/modern periodization has not always been in force. According to Byron, it is “merely” Chaucer’s “antiquity” that lands him in high literary esteem. Piers Plowman and Thomas of Erceldoune are more authentically ancient. By analogy, it is merely the future antiquity of contemporary literature that will afford it “a place in the annals of mankind.” This book excavates the metrical histories that underlie Byron’s contrarian comment. Meter and Modernity suspends traditional periodization and reinscribes it in the histories of alliterative meter, tetrameter, and pentameter, with a focus on political prophecy, Langland, and Chaucer.4 The result, as for Byron, will be to challenge the historical centrality of Chaucer’s poetic innovations and to displace the authority of present-day definitions of literary value. Before Piers Plowman, Thomas of Erceldoune, and Chaucer became ancient, they were modern, and each in their own way.

* * * When did modernity begin? This question has been asked and answered continuously since the nineteenth century, when the narrative of modernity stabilized and the discipline of English studies came into its own. It is an attractive question, because it holds out the possibility of staging a decisive break with the past. It is also a loaded question, because decisive breaks with the past always appear as missiles in ideological battles. The question erects a historical problem and sets the terms of any possible answer. In England, nineteenth-century writers consistently answered that modernity began in the sixteenth century, at the time of the Reformation and the advent of humanism. This was no neutral assessment. In building a time and place called modernity, post-Enlightenment writers reconstituted centuries of conflict and eccentricity as an arrow pointing toward secularized Europe. In England, the arrow pointed toward the British Empire. Paradoxically, Henry VIII’s new religious regime and the humanists’ self-conscious rearticulation of a classical past secured England a place in secular modernity. Across Europe, the arrow pointed away from a time and place henceforth known as the Middle Ages. ‘The Middle Ages,’ a surprisingly young idea, is the negative image of the ideological territory claimed for modernity. If modernity was characterized by secularization and imperial order, then the Middle Ages were characterized

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by fanaticism and feudalism. If modernity was characterized by an open future and historicism, then the Middle Ages were characterized by eschatology and anachronism. Twenty-first-century literary scholars inherit these judgments. Faculty hiring, curricula, academic publishing, and the very tools of critical analysis are shaped by the basic distinction between modernity and something historically prior to it but, in fact, conceptually codependent with it. How can one study the Middle Ages or modernity without accepting the secularist and imperialist historiography of which these chronological categories are expressions? But how can one reject secularist and imperialist historiography without squandering two hundred years of research directed at objects of inquiry called ‘the Middle Ages’ and ‘modernity’? Whatever else it has come to represent, the question of modernity is a question of scholarly method. This book frames the question of modernity as a question of meter. Rejecting the premise that modernity occurred as a specifiable event, I use metrical history to renegotiate the trajectories of English literary history between roughly 1350 and 1650. The edges of the project are ragged, defined neither by the calendar nor by watershed political events but instead by the shapes of literary traditions. The three major English meters—alliterative meter, tetrameter, and pentameter—were all practiced both before and after 1500, the conventional dividing line between medieval and modern English literature and the midpoint of this study’s chronological range. I set the three poetic traditions in comparative perspective in order to explore how the metrical ecosystem developed between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. I find that the relationship between meter and modernity in the English tradition has been a reciprocal one. The histories of English verse forms reflect but also refract the familiar story of a sixteenth-century swerve in time; the medieval/modern periodization as instituted in the nineteenth century clarifies but also distorts critical understanding of metrical practice. My claim is not that nothing changed from earlier to later poetry, but that, in their variety, the histories of English verse forms undermine the unitary historical narrative modernity tells about itself. Literary history must be disaggregated by meter. The early sixteenth century is the historical center of the book. This is the period of English literary history served most poorly by the medieval/modern periodization. I demonstrate the stylistic flexibility of English literature during this time, which comprehended politically dangerous prophecy in prose and verse, English-to-English translations of alliterative verse prophecies into tetrameter, the last alliterative poems, and the first poem in blank verse (unrhymed

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pentameter). Rather than a hiatus between Chaucer and William Shakespeare, the early sixteenth century was a period of vital literary experimentation. This introduction has three movements. First, I outline the book’s structure and discuss the three key terms in the title, meter, modernity, and English. I then describe the critical methods informing the book, attending to the historical theories of the art historian George Kubler and the social historian Reinhart Koselleck, the mathematical process known as discretization, and the methodology of historical poetics. Finally, I situate this book among previous studies of the medieval/modern periodization in English literature.

Meter What would English literary history look like if the unit of literary history were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? My primary objects of study are three intertwined verse histories.5 I have arranged the three parts of the book according to the chronology of poetic traditions. Alliterative meter, the earliest form of English poetry, precedes tetrameter, or isosyllabic four-stress meter, which first appeared in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Tetrameter precedes pentameter, which Chaucer invented in the 1380s. Parts I–III consider the three traditions in every combination of two: alliterative meter and tetrameter, alliterative meter and pentameter (in the form of blank verse), and tetrameter and pentameter. By juxtaposing contemporary poems in different meters and tracing metrical traditions through time, each part of the book isolates historical factors informing the choice of meter in English verse. The narration of literary history in metrical sequence but therefore out of chronological sequence performs, on the level of scholarly order of presentation, convolutions of historical time available to experience between 1350 and 1650. The conclusion summarizes these histories and redistributes them into a universal narrative. Each part of the book views its pair of metrical traditions through the prism of a third term. Part I scrutinizes alliterative meter and tetrameter in the context of English political prophecy, a major understudied literary archive. As a future-oriented genre spanning the twelfth to the seventeenth century in multiple forms, prophecy makes an ideal platform from which to reconsider literary modernity. Parts II and III reassess the verse practices and afterlives of the two most prominent fourteenth-century English poets, Langland and Chaucer. Reversing the historical perspective in which modern scholars conventionally view

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these authors, I read Langland as metrically precocious and Chaucer as metrically nostalgic. Attention to the genre of political prophecy is continuous in Part I, with briefer discussions where appropriate to the arguments of Parts II and III. However, prophecy has a broader relevance to this book. Prophetic style gives the form of historiography against which my arguments are pitched. From Merlin to Martin Luther King Jr., prophecies characteristically obscure their own history and the contingency of their first reception, encouraging us to read them as though they always pointed unerringly to the present.6 While passing over prophecy, literary historians ironically reproduce its teleological habits of thought when they position the Chaucer tradition of pentameter verse as the destination for the alliterative tradition and tetrameter tradition. Prophecy has been thought to be the quintessentially premodern genre, yet the congruence between its modes of historical representation and the formation of modern historiographical consensus flies in the face of such a periodization. Considered as a tradition, prophecy illustrates a truth about historical experience. Because history has always already begun, the present is always out of sync with itself. Put another way, prophecy, like history, is always in the process of becoming itself; its full arrival into singular being is possible only in theory, or in retrospect. By placing Chaucer last in sequence in the three parts of the book, I mean to indicate how literary canons emerge from poetic traditions. In its double focus on prophecy and on early metrical traditions, Part I fills in some of the literary surround missing from many critical accounts of Langland and Chaucer. These brilliant poets did not come from nowhere. Their innovations need to be seen in metrical-historical context. By the same token, Part I makes an extended claim for the literary value of archival texts. Anonymous English political poems have failed to join a modern literary canon in large part because of the post-1450 reception of Chaucer. The perceived marginality of anonymous poetry in general and of political prophecy in particular is, I suggest, one factor contributing to a failure of imagination in modern historiography of early English literature. Together, the three parts of the book advance a narrative of sociocultural change that runs in parallel with metrical change and the movement from anonymous prophecies to named authors. Here, I specify versification as a literary complement of social formations. The scope of these arguments narrows as the book progresses, beginning with English society as a whole and ending with a small group of well-connected men. The history of metrical modernization, from alliterative meter to tetrameter to pentameter, reflects the centralization of

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insular book culture and the gradual canonization of Chaucer. The story of sociometrical constriction begins with the ability of political prophecy to draw persons from all sectors of society into the same conceptual arena. It ends with the pentameter tradition begun by Chaucer, which was, for two centuries, primarily a phenomenon of men socially situated within or adjacent to the English or Scottish royal courts. I contend that pentameter proposes a certain social exclusivity, one which is easily mistaken for the conditions of English literary production at large. On the basis of the historicity and cultural significance of literary form, I discern an Age of Tetrameter (c. 1250–1450), an Age of Prophecy (c. 1450– 1650), and an Age of Pentameter (c. 1450–1950). The second two are neither medieval nor modern periods by the lights of traditional periodization. Put differently, prophecy and pentameter through their literary transformations encode different periodizations from the one that came to dominate study of these centuries. Alliterative verse history is a fourth way of keeping time, but, as the default verse form before the invention of syllabic English meters, alliterative meter did not enjoy an Age. I equate genre and meter to the extent that either may supply the organizing principle of a literary epoch. However, the two domains of literary practice are analytically separable and also recombinable according to different aesthetic priorities, and subject to various historical contingencies. Genre and meter are kept relatively independent in the structure of Part I. This part of the book makes a study of political prophecy, first as a genre unto itself 7 (Chapters  1–2) and then according to metrical tradition (Chapters 3–5). The question posed in Chapter 5, Why were so few political prophecies written in pentameter?, connects the two domains and exposes a single socioliterary settlement that threads through all three parts of the book.

Modernity Expanding the meaning of modernity back into the centuries it excludes, this book questions the teleologies that organize contemporary historical research.8 I am not concerned with demonstrating an increase or decrease in the quantity of modernity in English verse between 1350 and 1650, but with tracking its changing literary forms. Moving from Modernity to modernity, as it were, I contextualize the historiographical claims of post-Enlightenment writers as the latest salvos in long-running battles over the past, present, and future of English po-

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etry. Both proponents and critics of the medieval/modern periodization tend to accept that the break came around the year 1500, but Kathleen Davis has documented how the division as presently conceived was implemented later, through Enlightenment historiography and European imperial nationalism.9 As often, historiography and history run in tandem. Dietrich Gerhard argues that the most fundamental economic, political, and social reorganizations in Europe came in the eleventh and eighteenth centuries. He describes the period c. 1000–1800 as “Old Europe.”10 Jacques Le Goff recommends a similar periodization on similar grounds.11 Andrew Cole, writing in the tradition of Marxist historiography, likewise proposes a fundamental change in economic and intellectual conditions in Hegel’s lifetime (1770–1831).12 C. S. Lewis had written of a similar temporal scheme as early as 1955.13 Michel Foucault, though neither a historian nor a medievalist, described the turn of the nineteenth century as the great watershed in the history of European culture and its study.14 Across his published work, Foucault designates a classical period (époque classique) of momentous transition, c. 1650–1800. Old Europe makes a comfortable fit for early English verse, running roughly from the production of the first surviving manuscript collections of English poetry c. 1000 to the first scholarly editions of Piers Plowman (1813) and Beowulf (1815). The first recorded instance of the word medieval dates to right around the same time, 1817, as David Matthews has brought to light.15 Between these termini, English verse was in continual production but only exceptionally the object of critical discourse. The literary field visible to the first professors of English literature, hired by London universities in the 1820s and 1830s, was more or less coterminous with Old Europe.16 In line with Davis, Gerhard, and the others, I describe the late fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries as a phase of English literary history without Modernity but full of impulses toward modernization. By ‘modernity,’ then, I emphatically do not mean modernism, the twentiethcentury European-American aesthetic movement that often stands for the larger concept. Chronological telescoping of the sixteenth century to the eighteenth and the eighteenth to the twentieth is symptomatic of the historiographical problem to which this book gives an answer. The metrical-historical arguments of the book operate at two scales. On the small scale, I read moments at which early English writers, scribes, and readers feel modern or contemplate metrical novelty.17 On the large scale, the Age of Tetrameter, the Age of Prophecy, and the Age of Pentameter mark the extension of literary traditions into an unknown future. These two scales of

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reading and writing modernity depend on one another. Consider, for example, the prophecy books discussed in Part I and listed in Appendix A, the earliest of which date from the 1440s or 1450s. For fifteenth- century scribes, the genre of political prophecy corresponded to a new organization of the manuscript book and a new orientation toward literary time. The scribes responsible for these books made any number of individual and independent decisions, but their activities cumulatively broached a new era of English literary history. I draw one general conclusion about the texture of metrical time.18 Across different sociopolitical contexts, founding the metrical future meant haunting the metrical past. What retrospectively appears as a point of prosodic origin was experienced by contemporaries as an act of prosodic recovery. Belated readers like ourselves are prone to misconstrue the literary-historical temporal directionality of metrical form, but the ambiguity is a consequence of the symbiosis between tradition and innovation, which can only be defined with reference to one another. The dialectical relation between the future and the past of English verse characterizes Langland’s synthesis of English, French, and Latin poetics as well as John Milton’s blank verse, the reprinting of English prophetic texts after 1650 as well as Ezra Pound’s modernism. Along a different historical axis, the same goes for the English Reformation, which appeared to many of its proponents as a recovery of an earlier religious settlement. No less a polemicist than John Foxe averred in 1571, in an edition of the Old English gospels, that “the religion presently taught & professed in the Church at thys present, is no new reformation of thinges lately begonne, which were not before, but rather a reduction of the Church to the Pristine state of olde conformitie, which it once had” (The Gospels of the Fower Euangelistes Translated in the Olde Saxons Tyme, STC 2961, ¶. iir). Foxe’s phrasing poses religious reform in terms of personal penance, the reductio ad pristinum statum. In this, it mirrors Piers Plowman B.10.322–35 (cited from Piers Plowman, ed. Kane and Donaldson), a religiopolitical prophecy that circulated widely as a standalone text in Foxe’s time. These transhistorical resemblances trouble the logic of periodization, which typically hierarchizes species of historical imagination. Medievalists have often been eager to assimilate their materials to that logic, even when challenging it. A providential historicism, whereby innovation is understood as “a recuperation of the past,” was not restricted to the late medieval centuries, as Lee Patterson would have it. Conversely, premodernist modernities were not as “definitively and irrevocably closed” as Patterson supposes.19

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My approach to modernity is materialist as opposed to nominalist.20 I explore literary modernity avant la lettre. The various senses of modernism, modernity, and modernness emerged in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The most overtly historiographical meaning, OED Online, ‘modernity,’ 1b (“An intellectual tendency or social perspective characterized by departure from or repudiation of traditional ideas”), dates only from 1900. The attested word senses from the seventeenth century, OED Online, ‘modernity,’ 1a (“The quality or condition of being modern,” 1635) and ‘modernness’ (“The quality or state of being modern,” 1653), are synonyms and are still quite far from expressions of a settled historical perspective. Latin modernitas had no schematic historiographical meaning; it denoted “modern times, the present day” (DMLBS Online, ‘modernitas’), an orientation toward the present experienced by anyone at any time. Medieval authors could use Latin modernus as an adjective or a noun to draw a contrast with the ancients (antiqui). However, this was an exceptional usage. The Latin noun normally signified “contemporary person” (DMLBS Online, ‘modernus,’ 2a), as distinct from both the distant or recent past (DMLBS Online, ‘modernus,’ 2b) and the future (DMLBS Online, ‘modernus,’ 2c). More than Modern English modernity, Latin modernitas and modernus retain the neutral sense of their common ancestor, the adverb modo ‘just now.’ Even in its original, Latin meaning, the English word modern is attested only from the late fifteenth century (OED Online, ‘modern,’ A.1, 1456). Periodizing meanings of the word appear much later.21 One must wait until the turn of the seventeenth century for the schematizing meaning of period to enter the English language (OED Online, ‘period, n., adj., and adv.,’ A.1.3a, 1596). Latin periodus meant “circular movement,” “course or extent of time,” or “complete sentence” (DMLBS Online, ‘periodus, perihodus,’ 1, 2, and 3a).22 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Dark Ages, medieval, and Middle Age(s) became technical terms for a discrete historical period after antiquity but before modernity.23 Last of all, periodization became nameable as a historical problematic (OED Online, ‘periodization,’ 1898; ‘periodize,’ 2a, 1911). The histories of words bear out Davis’s historiographical claims. Only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did the medieval/modern periodization become a general operating principle of European historical understanding. Clearly, the words modern and modernity and their antonyms will be of no use in an investigation of modernity prior to 1650. Rather than focusing on keywords, this book tracks the material practices to which the words would come to refer. I contend that, just as alliterative meter long predates alliterative (first attested

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in 1754),24 English meters think through modernity long before modernity and its institutional apparatus.

English But what is, or was, English? The verse histories explored in this book unfolded within a literary-cultural ambit I call the English literary field, a concept that is coterminous neither with the English language nor with the kingdom of England. Pierre Bourdieu defines the literary field as “the space of literary prises de position that are possible in a given period in a given society,” and prises de position “arise from the encounter between particular agents’ dispositions (their habitus, shaped by their social trajectory) and their position in a field of positions.”25 Bourdieu introduced the theory of the literary field in his essay “The Field of Cultural Production” (1983) and a book (1993) of the same name, with primary reference to modern French literature. He refined the theory in The Rules of Art (1996), where it is partially abstracted from the literary. Especially powerful is his (Marxist) insight that the literary field takes the form of “a field of strug gles,” “a permanent conflict,” in which “social agents, which may be isolated individuals, groups or institutions,” compete to accrue value in light of the arrangement of the field and their own socially conditioned dispositions (habitūs).26 For Bourdieu, literary style is embedded socially and historically at once. He borrows the concept of habitus from medieval European culture, with the difference that for Bourdieu habitus is internalized and unconscious, whereas for premodern phi losophers and theologians habits were typically conscious and aspirational. Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field informs the arguments of this book, particularly insofar as these pertain to the relationship between versification and social structures. Field theory is suited to analysis of early English literary culture because it locates forces of cultural production at a different level from the autonomous individual, the language, or the nation-state, none of which opens the most effective aperture into early insular verse history. Instead, Bourdieu posits a virtual field of play both constraining and responsive to the continuous history of cultural decision-making. As Ian Cornelius comments, in a Bourdieusian essay on late medieval English culture: “A field is virtual because, rather than corresponding directly to a geographical or political unit, to a genre or a medium, its dimensions are drawn by the motivated and normative visions that cultural actors have of one another.”27

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For my purposes, the English literary field is the literary field referring to English literary forms, again with the caveat that the label English is reducible neither to language nor to geography. I argue that metrical traditions helped set the parameters for “literary prises de position that are possible,” what Bourdieu equivalently terms “the space of possibles,” in English verse between 1350 and 1650.28 Poetic tradition forms the space of possibles; literary history is the record of actual position-taking. The social determinations of early English meter cannot be fully appreciated in a monolingual or national perspective. Accordingly, the book locates English metrical practice in multilingual socioliterary milieux, from the literary archive of political prophecy, which comprehends Welsh, Latin, Anglo-Norman/French, English, and Scots, to Chaucer’s English/ French/Latin/Italian metrical innovations. Translation, both within and across languages, provides most of the occasions for my readings of literary novelty. This is unsurprising. Translation often served Anglophone poets as a juncture between past and future. The literatures of pre-Enlightenment Britain illustrate Sheldon Pollock’s theorem that language traditions emerge in terms of earlier, more culturally prestigious language traditions.29 Vernacularity is a relational not an ontological condition, as Denis Feeney has recently demonstrated in the case of the earliest Latin literature vis-à-vis Greek.30 For example, Part III describes Chaucer’s literary achievement as a form of translated prosody. To understand the historical meaning of Chaucer’s verse, I suggest, one must keep in view the act of translation as such.

The Shapes of Time In The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962), George Kubler expresses the idea that the history of art is composed of many simultaneous, unsynchronized histories. Stated more abstractly, for Kubler different historical series shape time differently. Although the title would seem to indicate a single shape, Kubler speaks of “the manifold shapes of time.”31 As against the totally periodized view of culture as a lens with a center radiating outward, he urges the metaphors of a cross-section and “a mosaic of pieces in different developmental states, and of different ages” in any given historical moment.32 By attending to the historical logic of types of formally coherent sequences of iterative artistic activity, “a linked succession of prime works with replications, all being distributed in time as recognizably early and late versions of the same kind of action,” Kubler sought to illuminate the differential capacities of historical experience.33

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He derived what he felt the historical disciplines lacked, a typology of “ways for things to occupy time.”34 At a certain convenient level of abstraction, these ways are not in limitless supply, but Kubler emphasizes that they are not commensurate with one another, either. If different historical series shape time differently, then reductions of one series into another necessarily misrepresent historical structuration. I take traditional literary periodization to be a superstructure responsible for such reductions across an unlikeness of historical kinds. Politically based literary periodization has a totalizing effect on interpretation, what Kubler calls “an illusion of classed order.”35 The reader has before her either ‘medieval’ literature or ‘modern’ literature, ‘Romantic’ or ‘Victorian,’ never both and never neither. The lines may wiggle, but the divisions are permanent. In my first book, I set out to liberate metrical history from categorical subordination to other forms of history, especially language history and political history.36 I continue that project here. Following Kubler, who makes excursions from art to literature, this book counts English poetry among those things of which he theorized the history. In place of a linear series of retrospectively meaningful cuts in time, I propose a multiplicity of concurrent open-ended periods.37 Synchrony and disjuncture between the Age of Tetrameter, the Age of Prophecy, and the Age of Pentameter, or between these and other Ages constructed on other grounds, such as the Age of Chaucer and Tudor England, continually spur recognition of the provisional nature of periods. When the late fifteenth century may be the Age of Prophecy, the Age of Pentameter, Tudor England, or all three, the spell of periodization has been broken, and its institutional politics can no longer pass without comment. These are not merely different periods but different kinds of period. In combination they put the quality of historical time into question. In a similar vein to Kubler, the social historian Reinhart Koselleck writes of “the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen) that can be contained within a concept” when concepts are viewed as expressions of historical perspective, possessing “historical depth.”38 That is, conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) shapes time other wise than the calendar. Koselleck envisages historical time in the plural. There are “many forms of time superimposed one upon the other,” “a coexisting plurality of times.”39 Kubler expresses an equivalent insight into the historicity of cultural products: “Every thing is a complex having . . . traits, each with a different systematic age.”40 Kubler and Koselleck elaborated their theories of historical time within highly traditional narratives of modernization, but the Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen ought to be discoverable before Modernity with a capital M and in other histori-

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cal series. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work in postcolonial studies and the philosophy of history suggests how this might be done. Like Kubler and Koselleck, Chakrabarty apprehends “a plurality of times existing together, a disjuncture of the present with itself ”; unlike them, he is prepared to specify European modernity as one of these times.41 Kubler draws inspiration from scientific terminology, and perhaps a comparison between literature and mathematics will not go amiss here. Periodization in literary studies is analogous to discretization in mathematics. Discretization is any process of representing a continuous signal in discrete units for the purpose of analysis. Mathematicians and statisticians recognize discretization as a general procedural problem. Each discretization method has its strengths and weaknesses. Researchers aim to minimize discretization error but do not expect to eliminate it. Literary historians are less advanced. Periodization based on political history is the only discretization method in common use. And it is institutionalized in the distribution of professional subfields, so that the status of politically based periodization as one among many plausible methods of divvying up the literary field invariably tends to recede from consciousness. In mathematical terms, this book extrapolates alternative discretization methods from the field of metrics.

Can Meter Matter? I anticipate a general methodological objection. A number of the poetic texts considered in this book, especially the political prophecies, appear ill-suited to metrical analysis. Prophecy spanned verse and prose, circulated in prose format in manuscript irrespective of literary form, and escaped the nineteenth- and twentieth-century philological ministrations supporting scansion of Langland and Chaucer. Prophecy books collect specimens of a literary genre, not a verse form. Metrical analysis, a marginal critical activity in any case, seems unhelpful in view of the circumstances of the production and dissemination of political prophecy. Moreover, most of the prophecies have not yet been edited critically, an activity that many believe should precede and inform scansion. Can metrical study of prophecy be justified? This question is intelligible as a special case of the suspicion that meter can’t matter in literary studies nowadays. Such a judgment, implicit in a wide swath of literary scholarship that has nothing to say about the making of verse, does not come from nowhere. Literary scholars traditionally understand the formation

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of the field as a vacillation between form and history: an Old Historicism, keyed to political history, coexisted with German-style philology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, followed by the valorization of the literary text as a self-contained object in the New Criticism, followed by the revaluation of history in the New Historicism and various strands of cultural studies, followed, most recently, by a New Formalism.42 Critical practice often transcends the ostensible opposition between form and history, but the terms remain unavoidable as badges of affiliation. Debates over the field or method known as historical poetics illustrate the limitations of badges. No sooner had Meredith Martin, Yopie Prins, and others called for formalism to become historicist than Jonathan Culler, Simon Jarvis, and others called for historicism to become formalist. Some of this work concerns lyric poetry, rather than meter, but the relationship between formalism and historicism is explicitly at issue in either case. As Virginia Jackson observes, twenty-first-century critics cannot agree whether they have forgotten how to read poems and need to remember or are “caught inside a poem” and need to escape.43 Nominalistic disagreement over the meaning of historical and poetics, which makes it possible for two intellectual factions to contradict one another with two chiastically equivalent proposals, distracts from deeper similarities between the two positions. Both versions of historical poetics question the use of descriptive scansion. Prins cautions that “practical application is not the point of historical poetics.”44 Elsewhere, she dismisses metrical analysis as “a merely technical, seemingly ahistorical approach to the scansion of a particular text.”45 Martin’s Rise and Fall of Meter takes Prins’s admonition to heart, exploring meter as a cultural idea and a disciplinary topic but categorically not as a historical practice. Martin’s subtle close readings find their entry points through metafiction and biography: her illustrative poems are about prosody and/or composed by prosodists. Jarvis, though recommending a poetics that “takes technique to be . . . the way in which the work of art most intimately registers historical experience,” describes metrical scansion as useless for the purpose to which it is normally set, the abstraction of general principles from “some particular performance.”46 Jarvis’s dismissal of metrical theorization as “an aprioristic fantasy” and Martin’s contention that poetic forms constitute “fantasies” in the cultural and critical unconscious resemble one another more than the fervor of their polemic suggests.47 These pronouncements on poetics all express the poststructuralist anxiety that philology’s critical object is politics masquerading as historical truth. For Prins, prosodic scholarship is a “literary genre” in which one can diagnose the dreams and prejudices of its authors.48 Jarvis rebuts the reduction of

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poetics to politics—“The formula politics of style . . . diminishes politics to its least complex moment, that of wearing a badge, and then makes style be that badge”—but at the expense of metrical study.49 Jarvis and Prins agree that metrics is a faux science, like alchemy, whose operations are of historical interest (Prins) but ineffectual for their purported aim (Jarvis). Both scholars project a highly particularized literary landscape, against which the generalities of metrists just clunk. These objections to metrical study deserve an answer. If meter is reducible to the ideology of historical practitioners or modern prosodists, then meter is an inappropriate lens onto premodern poetry. Metrical study, in that case, would embody the pathologies of early literary activity. The specter of twenty-firstcentury scholarship assuming the form of, say, fifteenth-century propaganda is enough to give one pause. Yet it is, ironically, the deprioritization of metrics in literary criticism that gives teeth to the idea that metrics can compromise literary criticism. Jarvis’s and Prins’s suggestion, at their most polemical, of the pure particularity of the literary object points scholarship back toward a pretheoretical belletrism that they would both readily condemn. Poststructuralism relies on the procedures it abjures.50 Martin must hang her readings on descriptions of verse form, even as her book implicates the concept of meter in war and nationbuilding. Prins relegates metrical scholarship to the status of primary literature, but she also builds on it in a nimble discussion of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s and Arthur Hugh Clough’s metrical practices.51 Of course: for if one really disclaimed all critical techniques with histories, there would be no techniques left. Jarvis’s and Prins’s insistence that metrical theory fails to account scientifically for metrical practice gives away the ground it claims, since the idea of scansion as an infallible truth-discovery mechanism survives the critique intact. The presumption that formal analysis robs texts of their historicity leaves out of account the historicity of form itself, which saves metrics from being “merely technical.” Martin’s and Prins’s descriptions of the ideological stakes of prosodic theory would become more, not less, historical if coordinated with description of poetic forms in their aesthetic richness and historical dynamism. This is the substance of Jarvis’s counterarguments. But if Jarvis prefers to seek the historicity of verse in the particulars of style, emancipated from metrical theorization, his analyses are still expressions of theorization—in reasoned denial of itself. To sum up, neither version of historical poetics fully reconciles the need for detailed description of verse (Jarvis) with ideological critiques of same (Prins). A more basic response to the skirmishes over historical poetics is to observe that the escape from poetics to prosody, recommended by one side and

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resisted by the other, is impossible for premodern poetry in English. Jarvis and Prins spar over the extent to which historical metrical practice mirrors historical metrical theory, but this question holds limited relevance for early English verse, most of which was composed before the first treatises on English prosody appeared in the late sixteenth century. English writers studied grammar and metrics throughout the medieval centuries, but overwhelmingly those of the Latin language. Even French, the second literary language of England following the Norman Conquest, received exposition only from the thirteenth century.52 That exposition was sporadic and principally directed toward facilitating language acquisition, not theorizing versification. Poetics, properly a part of rhetoric, rather followed than instigated vernacular grammatical learning. The first manual of French lyric poetry was Eustache Deschamps’s L’Art de dictier (1392). Grammars and/or artes poeticae for Irish, Icelandic, and Welsh had appeared, in that order, by the early fourteenth century.53 English lagged behind. Although elementary grammars by Ælfric (fl. late tenth c.) and John Leylond (d. 1428) were written in English, the object language remained Latin. Between Ælfric and Leylond, Latin grammars composed in England were in Latin. In such a sociolinguistic climate, study of English poetics was unthinkable. Even after the appearance of the first treatises on English prosody in the 1570s and 1580s, there were still three centuries to wait for the establishment of a discipline called English and the elaboration of descriptively adequate theories of English meters.54 In the meantime, literary classicism motivated learned men to investigate English meter while severely constricting the terms of the investigation. Early publications in English prosody are shaped by two ideological structures, which are two sides of the same coin: the vocabulary of Latin grammar and the topos of the insufficiency of the English language. The earliest contributions to the subject, George Gascoigne’s Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Ryme in English (1575), James VI of Scotland’s Revlis and Cavtelis to Be Observit and Eschewit in Scottis Poesie (1584), and George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589), exhibit both ideological structures vividly. Gascoigne and Puttenham present the English language as an unwieldy vehicle for the prestigious (quantitative) metrical patternings described by Latin grammar. At every conceptual level, the grammatical tradition shapes the objects of inquiry wrested from vernacular poiesis. James, while more perceptive on metrical form and addressing a geographically distinct literary archive, likewise labors to bring vernacular literary practice under the governance of Latin poetic regulation.

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The authors of early prosodic treatises give valuable indications of the ideology of literary practice. Yet their accounts of that practice are inevitably partial in Bourdieu’s double sense of the word: incomplete, and shaped by their socioliterary situation.55 While a vocal minority of poets endeavored to imitate classical quantities in English verse, most poets continued to compose the same unnamed, untheorized accentual(-syllabic) meters known to Langland and Chaucer. In order to appreciate their contortions, one must pair cultural contextualization of the treatises with formal description of actually occurring English verse. In other words, one must compare theory and practice. The alternative is to equate practice to theory a priori, thereby dispensing with culturally significant nuances of poetic technique and centuries of research progress in the field of metrics. This has been Martin’s and Prins’s choice, the enabling gesture of a Victorianist incarnation of historical poetics, but it is not an available choice for study of poetry in English before Gascoigne. Historical poetics will never be historical enough until it can notice that the cultural situation taken for granted by Martin and Prins, the circulation of technical prosodic metadiscourse in and around poetic discourse, is a recent phenomenon in the broader sweep of English literary history. Jarvis’s dictum that verse is “an institution, a series of practices as real as the belief in them and the capacity for them,” makes a better fit with the study of English poetics before prosody.56 The case of early English poetics vindicates his caveat that “the history of verse thinking is not the same as the history of representations of verse thinking.”57 If the two historical series were really conformant, there could be no history of early English poetry whatsoever. Metrical form cannot be held to one side in the contextualization of verse. To reject metrics as a fantasy of absolute, dehistoricized knowledge is to accede, per negativum, to that fantasy. Metrics is indeed historically contingent, inherently political, and prone to self-confirmation, as Martin charges. In this, metrics resembles all other approaches to the study of literature. The choice between affirmation of metrics and acceptance of the limits of historical interpretation is a false one. Metrical form is indeed a literary correlate of politics and ideology. Precisely because it lives in history, however, it refracts as much as it reflects. Poets never make metrical choices in a vacuum. Metrical histories pressurize individual moments of creation and reception, just as political histories pressurize individual moments of action and affiliation. Bourdieu’s field theory enables us to see that a simple mapping of social formations onto literary formations does not do justice to either domain, since the literary field with its historically particular configuration, and cultural agents with their socially particular habitūs, always mediate between the two kinds of form. Bourdieu criticizes Russian

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formalism and mechanistic historicism for the same reason: from opposite directions, both methods pursue a direct equation between social relations and the logic of literary practice.58 Following Bourdieu, it should be possible to move beyond the symmetry of these positions. Ideally, metrics accomplishes the very dialectical movement between general and particular, form and history, literary practice and social stratification, that its critics accuse it of short-circuiting. Ideally. Jarvis, Martin, and Prins are right that metrists have failed to articulate the historical stakes of their work, at least beyond a coterie. Some metrists bracket questions of change and continuity as a research expedient, while others make meter into history by subordinating it to language history. In either case, there is a disciplinary irony: the historicity of the metrical system remains opaque for many of those dedicated to theorizing it. There is an opportunity, then, for rapprochement between metrics and cultural history. In this book, I draw on the traditions of metrical scholarship to describe the forms of early English poetry and reintegrate those forms into the project of historical poetics. The metrical and historical meanings of English verse are inextricable from one another. When its scope includes poetic traditions and their cultural connotations and not only “the scansion of a particular text,” metrical analysis is historicism from the inside out.

Periodization and Its Discontents This book joins a long line of answers to the question of modernity from the perspective of other historical series. Though now pertaining to the whole field of cultural production, modernity emerged from particu lar discursive contexts, which continue to constrain scholarly attempts to grasp the significance or limitations of historical periods. Religious history and political history form common ground between periodization and its discontents. Religion and politics were the axes along which polemicists and historians elaborated the medieval/ modern periodization, particularly in the case of England, where religion and politics together reached a significant crossroads during the reign of Henry VIII. Henry’s break from Rome, considered as a religious or political event, furnishes the “single overwhelming source of change that exercises decisive pulling power on all others,” a hallmark of periodizing procedures in European historiography.59 Consequently, religion and politics have attracted special attention in critiques of the medieval/modern periodization, in studies by James Simpson and others.60 The prioritization of religious and political history over literary history cuts across

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the methodological differences between, for example, the New Historicism, Marxist criticism, and the history of ideas. The warping effect of the narrative of modernity is therefore especially powerful in the study of literary history, in which significant political events, long since rejected as origin points, still govern the segmentation of the literary field into pre-Conquest, Restoration, Victorian, and so on. That is, literary scholars have agreed in theory not to subordinate literary history to political and religious history, but the earlier, politically constituted literary periods survived this critique. Their political specificity having been bleached in the course of disciplinary history, the politically based literary periods became naturalized and so all the more intractable. To the extent that the narrative of modernity emerges from religious and political histories, poetics makes promising territory from which to launch a reconsideration. Hans Robert Jauss perceived this in 1979, arguing that “aesthetic experience” provides “the bridge” from medieval literature “to our present,” from modernity to Modernity.61 In sections on animal poetry, allegory, and exemplum, Jauss reads the modernity of medieval German literature off of the poetics of its genres. However, this initial effort to think medieval literary aesthetics in relation to modernity has gone almost wholly unanswered.62 The time is ripe to extend the dialogue between poetics and periodization into the field of English metrics. This book complements the subfield calling itself trans-Reformation studies, which focuses on ecclesiology and recuperates the early sixteenth century in English literary history from a completely different angle.63 The absence of one period term from the preceding discussion may seem glaring once it is pointed out: Renaissance. The word is as young as medieval, its closest antonym (OED Online, ‘medieval,’ A.1a, 1817; ‘Renaissance,’ 1a, 1836). Renaissance makes classicism in fourteenth-century Italy the organizing principle of a period of European history.64 The narrative of the Renaissance lends the force of an event to modernity, a periodizing procedure that the substitution of early modern for Renaissance leaves intact. Erwin Panofsky gave authoritative expression to this view in 1944 when he described the Renaissance, in contrast to earlier European classicisms, as a “total and permanent” reconfiguration of art and culture, “one fatally auspicious moment” of civilizational rebirth.65 The totality and permanence of ‘the’ ‘Renaissance’—note the obligatory definite article, capital R, and singular inflection—is the totality and permanence of modernity.66 Slotting into the medieval/modern periodization, ‘the’ ‘Renaissance’ is fully institutionalized in the contemporary university. Panofsky had studied preRenaissance European art and literature in depth; he argued that the Renaissance was of prime, not exclusive, importance to later European cultural history.

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Subsequent partisans of the narrative of the Renaissance have been less well informed and correspondingly more dogmatic in their pronouncements. Institutional pressures to subspecialize have formed three scholarly generations after Panofsky ill equipped and ill disposed to make sympathetic transhistorical comparisons. At this late stage of institutionalized medieval/modern periodization, which persists despite the growing embrace of the critique of periodization from some specialists working on both sides of the divide, many postmedievalists can deploy the Middle Ages as an unexamined foil to whatever they regard as most valuable in the history of culture. The Middle Ages, a self-enclosed segment of history from which we are irrevocably alienated, provides the necessary negative space in which modernity, via the Renaissance, happens.67 The so-called New Historicism, advertised as a renaissance of critical method, was founded in such a study, whose author, Stephen Greenblatt, later published a controversial prizewinning defense of the narrative of the Renaissance in the form of a nonfiction detective story.68 Medievalists, too, lean on the Renaissance, minimally as an end point for historical research but sometimes also as a reality. For both constituencies, the European Middle Ages become something they never were, a homogeneous “age of allegory” against which the complexity of modern thought can be measured.69 This book does not concern any renaissances, whether before or during the Reformation. As in my first book, I narrate metrical history without events.70 I do not hold, with Panofsky and most modernists, that there was “such a thing as an Italian, or main, Renaissance which started some time in the 14th Century and reached a climax in the 16th and the 17th.”71 Nor do I hold, with Le Goff and some medievalists and to the eternal annoyance of the modernists, that this renaissance was “a brilliant but superficial interlude” in what would still have to be called the Middle Ages.72 Gerhard’s notion of Old Europe is a useful heuristic counterbalance to the medieval/modern periodization as currently instituted, worth keeping in circulation, but the arguments of this book are not predicated on it. Conscious of the polemical nature of my stance, I offer as a strength of the book that the question of a renaissance never arises in it. I remain open to all periodization schemes, even the view, the standard one before Cristoph Cellarius and still evident in Byron’s journal entry, that there was no ‘medieval’ period at all. Ultimately at stake in the business of periodization is history. When we conduct literary interpretation entirely within the bounds of inherited period categories, we let disciplinary formation do our thinking for us. The narrative of

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modernity inculcates the problem of a history, a single story prone to proliferate when it is not actively questioned, as well as the problem of a history, the problem of doing justice to the past. If one may discover the past at all, one must search for it before, behind, and beyond retrospectively constructed tranches of time. The point is painfully obvious, and most painful for those of us who would interpret the oldest texts. One can wish for deperiodization, or else the reinstitutionalization of periodization on multiple, competing grounds (this book attempts to do this for meter). But for the foreseeable future, it is with the inherited periods that students of literature must come to grips. The poets, scribes, readers, and printers who lived before Modernity understood themselves as residents of the modern world. Of course they did. All human life has its “temporality (Zeitlichkeit).” 73 The challenge is to construct a history in which their cultural activities neither instantiate nor set off the later disciplinary categorizations that have excluded them from a time and place called modernity. Metrical style, itself now receding into the past, is one avenue to meeting this challenge.

chapter 1

English Political Prophecy Coordinates of Form and History

A nineteenth-century note in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1835, f. vr, offers a hypothesis and a censure: “It is probable that a great part of the subjects of this volume are in the hand writing of Ashmole himself copied from printed tracts——at least, for the greater part—He was exceedingly superstitious, and beleived in phrophecies, visions, and various absurdities. Yet this man was the founder of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.”1 The hypothesis is correct. Elias Ashmole (1617–92), astrologer and antiquarian, copied some of the later items in this collection of English political prophecy.2 Ashmole’s belief in “absurdities” appears here as supplementary paleographical evidence: this was the sort of material he would copy. Moving beyond the logic of scribal attribution, the conjunction Yet registers a discrepancy between political prophecy and modernity. The two cohabited in the mind of Ashmole, a collector of medieval arcana and the founder of the University of Oxford’s premier scientific institution.3 Many of Ashmole’s surviving manuscripts contain political prophecies. Four are organized around the genre: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole Rolls 26 (olim Ashmole 27) (late fifteenth c.) and MSS Ashmole 337, part 5; Ashmole 1386, part 3; and Ashmole 1835 (all late sixteenth/early seventeenth c.). With the clarity of an obiter dictum, the note in Ashmole 1835 expresses the historical stakes of political prophecy. The author of the note distances nineteenthcentury modernity from an alchemical seventeenth century, just as Ashmole’s antiquarian activities ostensibly distance his modern present from the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Yet, in consigning political prophecy to the past, the note joins a long line of anxious literary activity surrounding the genre, extending back beyond Ashmole’s life to the centuries that the

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nineteenth-century notator would recognize as medieval. From 1150 to 1650, political prophecy was always dangerous, and it always belonged to the distant past. For a twenty-first-century reader, the invocation of a defunct literary genre, like the spellings beleived and phrophecies, marks the Ashmole note itself as the product of an earlier era. Political prophecy has disappeared from the literary landscape, even as a target of derision. Was English political prophecy medieval or modern? To this question no answer can be given. The written tradition of political prophecy straddles the centuries now designated as medieval and modern. Public and governmental interest in prophecy peaked in the first half of the sixteenth century, the period of English literary history served most poorly by the medieval/modern periodization. Nor did political prophecy engender any recognizably modern literary progeny. The tradition ended with a whimper around the turn of the eighteenth century, after the political and religious upheavals that would herald modernity for later historians, but before the emergence of the modern discipline of English studies and its ideological complement, a literary canon. English political prophecy is an unmodern literary tradition, that is, a literary corpus resistant to established retrospective procedures of periodic segmentation. By forging a third way between medieval romance and the modern novel, prophecy lays bare the artificiality of the periodization that still occludes it. In Part I, I use political prophecy to work out the historical relations between alliterative meter and tetrameter. Pentameter superseded these two poetic traditions at the cusp of modernity as conventionally defined. Alliterative meter and tetrameter therefore pose problems of historical perspective congruent with the recursive and elliptical logic of prophecy itself and with the unmodern literaryhistorical shape of the prophecy tradition. Further, political prophecy has its own metrical specificity, a fact most legible in the near-complete absence of pentameter prophecies in surviving manuscripts. Because the genre is now unfamiliar, it is necessary to set out some coordinates of form and history before making a more intensive study of meter in relation to prophecy. This chapter summarizes the generic, metrical, linguistic, codicological, political, social, and textual dimensions of English political prophecy. This survey of the field reveals political prophecy to be a large, problematic, and underappreciated literary archive. The next chapter draws out this archive’s shape in time, and Chapters 3–5 disaggregate the prophecy tradition by meter.

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In the early twelfth century, a Monmouthshire cleric named Geoffrey published Historia regum Brittaniae. At the center of the Historia is the Prophetie Merlini, in which Merlin, at the request of the British king Vortigern, tells the future of the Saxon and British peoples (§§109–17; cited from Geoffrey of Monmouth, ed. Reeve). The Prophetie was probably composed separately from the Historia and certainly circulated independently from at least the late twelfth century. Geoffrey’s accomplishment was to weave together two strands of Welsh literary tradition. Henceforth, Merlin the prophet and Arthur the British king would travel together. The Historia and its vernacular adaptations exported both figures, recontextualized through juxtaposition, to non–Welsh-speaking audiences in Britain and on the Continent. Geoffrey’s insertion of a prophetic set piece into historical narrative bespeaks an attitude toward history that characterizes political prophecy as a whole. In early insular culture, prophecy expressed the same truth as historiography.4 Prophecy was “history written in the future tense.”5 Merlin’s prophecies begin not with an act of imagination but with two real dragons, one white and one red. Merlin discovers them at the bottom of a pool beneath Vortigern’s tower at the end of book 6 (§108), and they begin fighting at the beginning of book 7, the Prophetie (§111). Merlin opens his exposition by identifying the dragons with the Saxons and the Britons, respectively. The symbolic world of political prophecy, in which nations are dragons and lightning bolts shoot from Scorpio’s tail (§117.298), occupies the plane of reality. It is difficult to overstate the imposing stature of Geoffrey’s text for later writers and readers. The Prophetie has exerted a continuous influence on literary production in several languages from the twelfth century to the present. Britain knew other prophetic traditions, notably those associated with the Bible, Hildegard of Bingen, Joachim of Fiore, and Sibyl. Each of these connected the island to the European continent. However, none of these other traditions achieved the cultural and codicological density of Galfridian political prophecy in Britain. The number of individual prophetic texts in English, AngloNorman/French, Latin, Scots, and Welsh from the period c. 1150–1650 is very large.6 Except where other wise specified, in this book prophecy refers to the Galfridian tradition. Despite its importance in the main tradition of British historiography and its vigorous oral and manuscript circulation from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, English political prophecy has attracted relatively little modern critical attention. One could point to several reasons for the neglect. Perhaps most important is periodization. The tradition of political prophecy covers chronological

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territory divided between medievalists and early modernists in modern departments of English and history. Studies of prophecy typically do not traverse the English Reformation.7 The tradition is twice as easy to underestimate when only half of it enters a given reader’s critical consciousness. And then, prophecy tends to get lost in the larger swamp of historical and political writing.8 Moreover, the textual promiscuity of political prophecies baffles normal bibliographical procedures, which rely on the stability of incipits. The genre, being both nonnarrative and nonlyric, stymies modern reading habits. Prophecy collides two literary impulses, topicality and traditionality, that pertain to different kinds of modern critical analysis. In its longevity and dual orientation toward the past and the future, prophecy blurs the lines between cultural production and cultural analysis. Prophecy remains opaque to the kind of historicism that has little patience for dragons and lightning bolts. In prior studies of prophecy, large alliterative abstractions cluster around it: the people, poetry, politics, power, propaganda. These studies often succeed in describing specific connections between the prophecies and the abstractions, but sometimes at the expense of the interpretive complexity of the prophecies themselves. The reduction of political prophecy to historical facts—battles, successions, political affiliations—ironically bypasses the matrix of literary conventions that made interpretive closure so urgent and so elusive for earlier readers. For all these reasons, English political prophecy stands as a major understudied literary archive. Most prophetic texts are still unindexed, unedited, and untitled. In what follows I locate some stations of power in the field, situating meter among other historically significant dimensions of the genre. This survey lays emphasis on the last phase of active production of political prophecies, after c. 1450, when prophecy became an available organizing principle of manuscript collections and political prophecies in English began to predominate in books produced in England. Because prophecies are linguistically, politically, socially, and textually labile, the distinction between composition and transmission is evanescent in this literary tradition. My periodization according to the production of manuscripts is a strategy for bracketing the long series of literary and textual studies that would need to underlie any generalization about the composition of prophecies.

Genre Most immediately, political prophecy is a literary genre. The Prophetie Merlini presents its hallmark features: ascription of a prophetic utterance to an authori-

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tative figure from the past, animal symbolism, and political topicality. Specifically, Geoffrey bequeathed to later writers a vocabulary for negotiating the relationship between ethnicity and empire. Britons and Saxons in political prophecy do not simply refer to Celtic and English polities, as can be readily inferred from the number of English political prophecies, written in England for English audiences, that imagine a final showdown in which righteous Britons triumph over malicious Saxon invaders. For example, the alliterative Ireland Prophecy (NIMEV 366.5/2834.3/3557.55) predicts that “Þese liouns bees lusked | and lased on sondir” (“these lions will be struck and bound together,” 5; quoted from Appendix D), where “liouns” refers to Saxons, from the royal coat of arms of England. Yet the same poem looks to Ireland for the victorious king (ll. 83–86), in what is likely an allusion to Richard, duke of York, Lieutenant of Ireland from 1449. Within the logic of political prophecy as historiography, there was no contradiction between anti-Saxon and pro-Yorkist propositions. The realm of vatic symbolism enabled new forms of ethnogenetic contestation: through prophecy, the English claimed Britishness. Prophetic historiography displaced antagonism between actually existing polities in Britain onto the distant past of Brutus of Troy and King Arthur. By appropriating anti-imperialist prophetic British historiography, English writers could represent themselves as the exclusive possessors of political intentions. For the status of political prophecy as a special kind of writing, rather than an indifferent part of some larger whole—historiography, political literature, romance, or everyday life itself—one can turn to the Latin commentary that the Yorkshire friar John Erghome composed for the most amply attested fourteenth-century insular prophecy, the Latin verse Prophecy ascribed to the Austin canon John Thwenge of Bridlington.9 The commentary dates from the 1360s. Addressed to Humphrey de Bohun, seventh earl of Hereford, the dedication to the work explains Erghome’s humble decision to withhold his name. Erghome prefaces the poem with three literary prologues (præambula). The first is an Aristotelian prologue identifying the four causes of the work— material, formal, efficient, and final; the second explains “this prophecy’s modes of concealment [modos occultandi hujus prophetiæ]”; and the third, also in the tradition of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century scholasticism, summarizes the poem’s structure (divisio).10 Under the heading of formal cause (causa formalis) in the first prologue, Erghome specifies that the prophecy’s “mode of being understood [modo intelligendi]” is “enigmatic and prophetical, since [the author] imparts something else to understanding than what the terms mean according to the usual way of speaking [obscurus et prophetialis, quia dat alia

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intelligere quam termini secundum communem usum loquen[d]i significant].”11 A “prophetical” prophecy: tautology indicates the extent to which prophecy occupied its own headspace in early Britain. Prophecy is a strange sort of writing in which words might sometimes stand for things but at other times become things. In the second prologue, the seventh of the poem’s ten “modes of concealment” is “a term’s different meaning; for sometimes it is understood with reference to its material, sometimes with reference to its meaning [nominis diversa acceptatione; nam aliquando tenetur materialiter, aliquando significative].” As an example of the former, Erghome cites the line “If someone has a bull [taurum], he cuts off its head, and it becomes gold [aurum] [Si quis habet taurum, caput amputat, inde fit aurum].”12 As with Merlin’s dragons in Geoffrey’s Historia, this line fuses representation and reality. The bull is really a bull—it has a head—and at the same time it is really the letters t-a-u-r-u-m, of which t is the first (littera capitalis ‘head letter’). On the model of biblical and classical texts, Erghome subdivides the poem into sections (distinctiones), the sections into chapters (capitula), and the chapters into sayings (dicta) each comprising a few lines of verse. Each chapter is headed by a summative Latin rubric. The body of the commentary follows the text chapter by chapter. In this way, Erghome brought Bridlington’s Prophecy into conformity with other kinds of books he knew. His surviving booklist of roughly three hundred volumes, in which the Prophecy appears under “prophecies and superstitious [texts] [Prophecie et supersticiosa],” reads like a syllabus for eternal postgraduate study in the liberal arts.13 Such authorization of prophetic writing, however self-effacing, was exceptional. Most prophecies circulated without formal commentary or systematic ordinatio. Yet Erghome’s work leaves no doubt that writing or reading political prophecy was considered a particu lar, and particularly perilous, activity. At the end of his commentary he asks the earl of Hereford “that this book not pass through very many hands [quod iste liber manibus multorum non tradatur].”14 Even when mediated by thoroughgoing Latin exposition, prophecy represents an explosive danger. The opening lines of the Prophecy offer further reflections on prophecy as a literary form: Febribus infectus, requies fuerat mihi lectus, Vexatus mente dormivi nocte repente; Noscere futura facta fuerat mihi cura. Scribere cum pennis docuit me scriba perennis;

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Me masticare jussit librumque vorare. Intus erat plene scriptus, redolens et amœne.15 Jussit de bellis me metrificare novellis Qui sedet in stellis, dat cui vult carmina mellis. Si verum scribam, verum crede me fore scribam; Scripsero si vanum, caput est quia non mihi sanum. Non mihi detractes, sed falsa per omnia mactes. Nullus deliro credat pro carmine miro.16 (“When I was infected with a fever, rest was chosen for me; troubled in mind, I suddenly fell asleep at night; to come to know the future became my cure. The eternal Scribe taught me to write with quills; He ordered me to chew over and swallow up a book. Within me it was clearly written and delightfully fragrant. He who sits enthroned among the stars, and gives sweet poems to whom He pleases, ordered me to versify about the present wars. If I write something true, then trust that I am a faithful scribe; if I write something foolish, it is because I am not well in the head. Please do not disparage me, but punish me for all that is false. Let no one think I am crazy on account of this miraculous poem.”)

The passage, marked out as a preface (proemium), is a study in paradox. The prophetic dream vision is a symptom of fever (ll. 1–2) and cures fever (3 cura, with a pun on ‘matter of concern’). The author is God (ll. 4–8), and the author is a sick man (ll. 1–2 and 10). The prophecy is a transcription (l. 4 and 9 scribam2); it is a book ingested at God’s command (ll. 5–6 and 8); it is a new divine commission (l. 7). The text is already written or copied out (l. 6), and it has yet to be written or copied out (ll. 9–10). Do not think I am crazy because I wrote this poem (ll. 9 and 12), and sift the poem for falsehoods, because I am crazy (ll. 10–11). The narrator’s mental illness is reprised in the concluding lines of each of the three sections of the poem, so that it determines the shape of the whole work.17 Few political prophecies provide such an overt literary self-theorization, but they all travel the circuit between inspiration and insanity, a spectrum familiar from medieval dream poetry more generally. If the persona adequate to Chaucerian and Gowerian narrative is the lover (“ here . . . the author presents himself fictionally as a lover [Hic . . . fingens se auctor esse Amantem],” Confessio Amantis, gloss to 1.59; quoted from John Gower, ed. Peck),18 and the persona adequate to alliterative romance is the minstrel (“Full freschely and faste | for here a fitt endes,” “Fill

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[your cup] anew and quickly, for a section of the poem ends here,” 217; quoted from Wynnere and Wastoure, ed. Trigg), then the writer of prophecies plays the madman. Though its histories extend back through the twelfth century and beyond, political prophecy came to occupy a more central position in English literary culture after 1450. Fifteenth-century political prophecy existed in the shadow of English legislation of 1406 (never enacted) prohibiting the dissemination of false prophecies. The law responds to a perceived wellspring of subversive prophetic literary activity surrounding the deposition of Richard II, the accession of Henry IV, the Glyndŵr rebellion, and Lollardy. Like the near-contemporary Constitutions (1407 and 1409) of Archbishop Thomas Arundel for religious writing, the 1406 law officially stigmatized certain kinds of political writing and cleared space for others.19 Antiprophetic legislation had two discernible effects on literary practice: intensification of the need for coded language and promotion of statesanctioned prophecies. Both developments had taken hold by the middle of the fifteenth century, when political prophecy became an available organizing principle of manuscript collections. In the first half of the century political prophecy was, perhaps, too hot to handle for those with the means to commission or compile a manuscript. Two of the earliest extant prophecy books are Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 50 and London, British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra C.iv, both produced in the 1440s or 1450s. The late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the heyday of the genre of political prophecy and serve as the historical focus of Part I. A survey of the company it keeps in manuscript books will indicate the position of political prophecy in relation to other genres of writing. Its strongest affiliation, telegraphed already in the Prophetie Merlini, is with historiography. Prophecy books often contain historical items, and history books often contain prophecies. Political prophecies occur in manuscripts of Geoffrey’s Historia, such as Oxford, Jesus College, MS 2 (fifteenth c.), in which the Latin prophecy “Arbor fertilis” immediately follows the Prophetie without interruption and in the same large-text, wide-margin format. Political prophecy was also closely associated with heraldry and genealogy. These fields of knowledge held special importance as interpretive tools for decoding the symbology of prophecy, in which heraldic devices come to life as avatars of their real-world owners and ancestral feuds die hard. Ashmole 337, ff. 136–39, for example, contains an alphabetical list of heraldic devices and their users. Significantly, the list is alphabetized by heraldic symbol, not by name. Its ostensible function is hermeneutic not historical. Ashmole himself was Windsor Herald, and a pas-

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sion for heraldry was one possible motivation for his collection of prophecy books. Prophecy was sometimes categorized as a science, and it commonly appears alongside astrological and medical texts. The three fields share technical sophistication and an orientation toward the future. The Prophetie Merlini ends with an elaborate astrological allegory (§117). Erghome’s booklist files “prophecies and superstitious texts,” itself including astrological titles, next to astronomical and astrological books.20 Ashmole 337, ff. 65v–71, contains accounts and memoranda of the Elizabethan astrologer John Dee. Finally, prophecy could fall under the larger umbrella of wisdom literature, as in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 59 (mid-fifteenth c.), John Shirley’s compilation of John Lydgate’s poetry inter alia. Shirley’s book includes a sequence of authoritative prophetic and theological discourses in English and Latin. The attributed title of the poem beginning “The time approaches of necessity” (NIMEV 3487) shows Shirley locating prophecy in a larger field of sententious writing: “þe seyinges of wysemen of prophetes of poetes of philosophres of hooly men of gret and autorysed clerkes” (84v). At the turn of the sixteenth century, political prophecy begins to appear in a variety of more informal manuscript contexts. Three examples are Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lyell 35 (late fifteenth c.), a commonplace book partly copied by Reginald Andrew, Hampshire household official; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 487 (late fifteenth/early sixteenth c.), a theological and historical compilation by John Curteys, fellow of New College, Oxford; and British Library, MS Additional 28640 (early seventeenth c.), the notebook of John Rous, rector of Santon Downham, Suffolk. Each of these everyday books contains multiple political prophecies, whether in English (Additional 28640), Latin (Bodley 487), or both (Lyell 35).

Meter Metrical variety played right across the tradition of political prophecy. Geoffrey of Monmouth gave precedent for prophecy in prose, and prose was always well represented in prophetic writing. However, most political prophecies were composed in verse. Bridlington’s Prophecy employs leonine hexameters, the standard vehicle for long, serious medieval Latin poetry. Authors of political prophecy chose to work in alliterative meter, in tetrameter, occasionally in pentameter, and in other early English metrical forms. Political prophecy and alliterative meter increasingly overlapped after 1450, as in the Ireland

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Prophecy, one of the most prolifically copied surviving (unrhymed) alliterative poems. The best-attested alliterative poem, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, contains prophetic passages and circulated as political prophecy in the sixteenth century. Much of the remainder of English verse prophecy is in fourbeat lines, somewhere along the spectrum from accentual-syllabic tetrameter to accentual template meter.21 English verse prophecies in pentameter are rare before 1500, a symptom of the traditionalism of prophecy in comparison with the metrical avant-garde of Geoffrey Chaucer and his fifteenth-century poetic heirs. After 1500 English political prophecy in verse was increasingly copied in prose format. The trajectory from verse lineation to prose format runs counter to the prevailing trend in manuscript presentation of early English verse. Often prophetic verse texts appear embedded within prose paragraphs, making it difficult to identify and isolate poetry as such. This is particularly true of alliterative verse, in which adjacent verse lines are not linked by rhyme. Many prophetic verse texts copied in prose format show revision and errors that throw into doubt whether scribes experienced the texts as poetry. In some cases, poetic texts have been prosified, that is, reworded as prose, further complicating bibliographic identification of late texts of earlier poems. The layout of prophetic texts often reflected organization by prophet or year rather than literary form. The significance of meter in the tradition of English political prophecy therefore requires special demonstration. Chapters  3–5 make the demonstration. For now, it is worth previewing three categories of positive evidence for the impact of literary form on the production and consumption of political prophecy: scribal punctuation of prophetic verse texts copied as prose often reinforces line and half-line boundaries, as in the text of the Marvels of Merlin (NIMEV 1253.5/2613.5) in London, British Library, MS Additional 24663 (late sixteenth c.), ff. 4v–6r; verse texts copied as prose tend to cluster together, as in the run of verse texts in Ashmole 337, f. 112; and some prophecy books, such as Ashmole 1386, part 3, and the first compilation in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C.813 (early sixteenth c.), are entirely or almost entirely in verse.

Language The tradition of insular political prophecy begins in Welsh poetry such as Armes Prydein (tenth c.). Geoffrey presents the Historia as a translation from

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“a very old book in the British tongue [quendam Britannici sermonis librum uetustissimum]” (§2.9–10; I give the facing-page English translation), though this need be no more than a rhetorical flourish. Whereas Brut chronicles after the twelfth century passed from Latin through Anglo-Norman to English, Galfridian political prophecy proceeded more or less directly from Latin to English. Few Anglo-Norman/French political prophecies circulated in English manuscripts. Thomas of Erceldoune’s Prophecy in London, British Library, MS Harley 2253 (early fourteenth c.), f. 127r, represents contact between political prophecy in French and English, as a question by the countess of Dunbar reported in French (“La countesse de Donbar demanda a Thomas de Essedoune”; quoted from Medieval English Political Writings, ed. Dean) receives an answer in the form of the English prophecy. This staged exchange between Scottish figures excludes a third language, Scots, which served as the medium for later political prophecies. Notable among these is a group of poems printed in English in the Whole Prophesie of Scotland, England, & Somepart of France, and Denmark (1603) but found in Scots in London, British Library, MSS Cotton Vespasian E.viii (late sixteenth c.), ff. 16–28, and Sloane 1802 (late sixteenth/early seventeenth c.). The occasion of the printing was the accession of a Scottish king to the English throne, James VI/I—a key prediction of English political prophecies and another point of contact between languages of Britain. The double vernacularity of Thomas of Erceldoune’s Prophecy was precocious. Pre-1450 English manuscripts containing political prophecy are overwhelmingly in Latin, especially those further up the scale of formality than Harley 2253. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 186 (mid-fifteenth c.), a book of Latin political prophecy and history, threads English historiographical verse through Latin prose notes on the lives of English kings (ff. 42–63). Isolation of English from Latin, and hence the experience of the English as a discrete text, is here forbidden by adventurous compilation and languageneutral mise- en-page. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Ashmole Rolls 26 and Bodley 623, and London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian E.vii, three late fifteenth-century Yorkist prophecy books copied by the same scribe,22 all use English very sparingly. The more balanced pre sentation of Latin and English in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 56, and Dublin, Trinity College, MS 516, prophecy books roughly contemporary with the three Yorkist collections, is one indication of these manuscripts’ relative informality. By the early to mid-sixteenth century, the relationship between English and Latin has been reversed, as illustrated by prophecy books such

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as London, British Library, MSS Lansdowne 122, Lansdowne 762, and Sloane 2578, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Arch. Selden B.8, part R, and Rawlinson C.813. These late manuscripts sprinkle a few Latin prophecies in and among the English. Meanwhile, from Armes Prydein to the death of Ashmole, the production of political prophecies in Welsh proceeded apace. Several bilingual prophecy books, English/Welsh, survive, such as Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Llanstephan 119 (early seventeenth c.) (Ardudwy, Merionethshire23). Other surviving prophecy books are trilingual, English/Latin/Welsh, such as Peniarth 50 (Neath, Glamorgan24). These multilingual prophecy books illustrate the commerce in prophetic texts and ideas in and around the Welsh Marches.

Material Form Written testimonia and court records imply the extensive circulation of political prophecies by word of mouth and in loose sheets, 25 but manuscript books are the richest form of evidence for the genre. The formidable number of manuscript texts of prophecies suggests the cultural prominence of the genre and, ironically, helps account for prophecy’s location at the periphery of critical ken. Studies of political prophecy must exercise some principle of selection, whether linguistic, chronological, or thematic. Appendix A lists all the manuscript English prophecy books known to me, where English means prophecy books produced in England and/or containing prophecies in En glish or Scots. By these criteria, which are inevitably arbitrary but which, I would insist, do correspond to a real trend in post-1450 insular book culture, there are thirty-nine English prophecy books. Appendix A gives the place of production or pre-1700 provenance where this is known. The books come from all over the island: from Scotland; from northern and southern Wales; from Dorset, London, Staffordshire, Yorkshire, and beyond. For those manuscripts that have been localized, one can perceive a northward migration of prophecy book production from the fifteenth century (Hampshire, London, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Glamorgan, Shropshire) to the sixteenth (Staffordshire, Scotland) to the seventeenth (Oxfordshire, Merionethshire, County Conwy Borough, Flintshire, Cheshire, Scotland).

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As a group, the prophecy books share certain features. All but two of them are codices. The codices in Appendix A tend to be octavos, a sign of their private and informal functionality. Apart from the Yorkist books of the 1460s, collections of political prophecy are relatively downmarket products, wrought in casual handwriting and filled with household accounts, letters, signatures, pentrials, and other ephemeralia on paper or modest parchment. At the back of Arch. Selden B.8, part R, for example, is a short drinking song beginning “What aileth thee thou musinge man ta va vow, ta va vow” (301v). Attractive texts of political prophecies, such as the carefully penned English and Latin prophecies in Ashmole 59, ff. 72–84, the Lydgate anthology, owe their appearance to more prestigious adjacent items. The mise-en-page of prophecy books often has the character of a nonce solution. Yet scribes could devote significant energy to constructing paratextual apparatuses for reading prophecy. Vespasian  E.vii offers a neatly numbered contemporary list of incipits of fifty-six prophecies, with spaces for eight more (81r). Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg.4.31 (early sixteenth c.) presents Piers Plowman as “The Prophecies of Piers Plowman” (second front flyleaf, verso), complete with marginal glosses, cross-references, and a detailed table of contents (101v). The genre of political prophecy could inspire compilational activity even above the level of the integral codex. Rawlinson C.813 consists of two books, the first (ff. 1–98) from the early sixteenth century and the second (ff. 103–67) from the late sixteenth century. The two were evidently bound together in the seventeenth century with the intention of producing a compendium of English political prophecies. Political prophecy was, by and large, a phenomenon of manuscript culture. This was due partly to the string of laws criminalizing the publication of prophecy and partly to the poor fit between a socially capacious genre and a centralized book trade. The publication of the Whole Prophesie of Scotland (STC 17841.7) represents virtually the only time that a substantial manuscript archive of English political prophecy intersected print culture before 1650. The texts of the book arrived in print through significant spatial, temporal, and linguistic mediation. Some of them are versions of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century prophecies, and all of them are found in Scots language in Sloane 1802 and/or Vespasian E.viii. STC 17841.7 is an octavo, like Bodley 623 and Lyell 35. (All mea sure 14.5 × 10 cm.) The Whole Prophesie was reprinted many times in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth

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centuries. The selection and arrangement of texts in the Whole Prophesie show that it is not based on either of the two surviving manuscript collections of these poems.

Politics Political prophecies respond to and intervene in contemporary politics. The first prologue to Bridlington’s Prophecy affirms, under the heading of material cause (causa materialis), that “circumstances, from the beginning of this prophecy through to the end of it, which pertain to the realm of England are the materia of this prophecy [accidentia a principio hujus prophetiæ usque ad ejus finem concernentia regnum Angliæ sunt materia hujus prophetiæ].”26 In this late fourteenth-century description, the political world simply constitutes the literary thing. Chief among the objects of prophetic discourse is a small number of wars, monarchs, and rebellions, such as Edward III, the Glyndŵr Rising, and the Wars of the Roses. Bede’s Prophecy (NIMEV 4154.3) contains chronograms for the years 1399 and 1400 and appears to express solidarity with Ricardian loyalists in the heady first year of the reign of Henry IV.27 The Yorkist cause in the 1460s was a particular locus of prophetic activity. Not only the three Yorkist prophecy books discussed above, but also Hatton 56, Lyell 35, and other books trade on the rhetorical power of Edward IV’s claim to the throne. The circulation of the Ireland Prophecy in manuscripts localizable to Wales and the Welsh Marches, such as Llanstephan 119, implies local political meanings for the poem’s fixation on Richard, duke of York and earl of March. The representation of political events and figures in prophecy was cumulative not sequential. For example, Winner and Waster ends by imagining Edward III conquering Paris and marching into Cologne, a reenactment of the movements of the boar in the popular Prophecy of the Six Kings.28 The depiction of the boar, in turn, expresses aspirations for Edward III in terms of a boar who assails France in Geoffrey’s Prophetie Merlini (§115.114–16; cf. §112.39–41) and Arthur’s siege of Paris later in the Historia (§155). Prophetic texts moved through political history just as political history moved through prophetic texts. In the opening years of the fifteenth century, the chronicler and Lancastrian sympathizer Adam Usk applied lines from Bridlington’s Prophecy, originally aimed at Edward III of England and Philip VI of France, to Henry Bolingbroke and Richard II. 29 The steady

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supply of royal Edwards in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries sustained the popularity of The King Who Will Find the Holy Cross, many copies of which end by identifying the king in question as Edward. Attested in multiple languages, and mainly in prose, this prophecy dates from the early days of Edward IV’s first reign, and it survived to the very end of the sixteenth century.30 The 1406 injunction against false prophecies opened up a literary genre to propagandistic exploitation. Ashmole Rolls 26, Bodley 623, and Vespasian  E.vii direct prophetic discourse toward the exaltation of the newly crowned Edward IV and the denigration of his principal rival, the once and future Henry VI. These manuscripts, executed in moderately formal style by a single scribe, approach the status of official documents. Other official or quasiofficial books containing political prophecy include London, British Library, MS Arundel 66, a collection of astrological and prophetic texts made in 1490 for Henry VII; London, Public Record Office, SP 1/232, from the state papers of Henry VIII; and the Whole Prophesie of Scotland, which formed “part of [James VI/I’s] political arsenal.”31 Provincial hosts receiving Elizabeth I on progress often staged always-already fulfilled political prophecies starring the queen.32 Political prophecy not only mirrored the desires of magnates; it shaped them. The international successes of Arthur in the Historia and the animal protagonists of the Prophecy of the Six Kings spurred real English kings to military action during the Hundred Years’ War.33 The chronicler Thomas Walsingham reported that Richard II was much affected by Bridlington’s Prophecy and was convinced that certain lines referred to himself, fleeing to Ireland in 1399 on that basis.34 In 1405 the rebels Owain Glyndŵr, Edmund Mortimer, and Henry Percy reportedly made their Tripartite Indenture on condition “that they are the people about whom the prophet speaks, among whom the governance of Great Britain should be divided and apportioned [quod ipsi sint eadem personae, de quibus propheta loquitur, inter quos regimen Britanniae majoris dividi debeat et partiri],” probably referring to the northern dragon, western wolf, and Irish lion of the Prophecy of the Six Kings.35 On 25 August 1485, three days after the Battle of Bosworth Field, a herald proclaimed Henry VII’s victory as the long-prophesied victory of the redeeming British king at the ‘Battle of Sandeford.’36 The herald was not making an imaginative comparison between fictional and real events. He was identifying the irruption of prophecy into political history. The next year, Henry gave the name Arthur to his firstborn

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son.37 Ominously enough, a prophecy book caused Anne Boleyn to think twice about marrying Henry VIII.38

Social Context Part of the difficulty for modern scholars in coming to grips with political prophecy, I submit, is the social fluidity of the genre. Some studies of political prophecy describe it as propaganda, others as social protest. It was both. If romance was the genre of the urban gentry, and alliterative meter was the verse form of the clerical class, then political prophecy was the genre that could draw kings, monks, merchants, and commoners into the same conceptual arena.39 The social diversity of political prophecy challenges normal historicist reading practices, which would locate the meaning of individual texts in singular, knowable sociopolitical contexts. Geoffrey had represented the Historia as anti-imperialist historiography, once and future British resistance to Saxon hegemony. Whatever the status of this claim for Geoffrey, a socially mobile, multilingual cleric, the Historia was forcefully co-opted by elite imperialists almost immediately after its publication. Simultaneous movement up and down the social scale would characterize political prophecy throughout its history. Appendix C lists known compilers, scribes, and early owners of prophecy books and other manuscripts containing political prophecies, arranged roughly in order of social rank. Predictably, the ownership of manuscripts containing English political prophecy skewed toward the rich and almost exclusively toward men. Nonetheless, all sectors of literate society participated in the production and consumption of these books. Of special note is the abundant representation of both laity and clergy in Appendix  C. The bequest of John Malverne (d. 1422), rector of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-East in London, of “a book in red binding with sermons and containing the prophecies of Merlin [librum rubium cum sermonibus et continent’ prophecias merline]” to St. Dunstan’s is particularly striking evidence of the permeation of political prophecy through the social and intellectual spaces of English writing by the early fifteenth century.40 The canon of prophets used to authorize political prophecies was similarly diverse with respect to social class. In addition to Merlin, persons named as authors of prophecies include Bede; St. Thomas of Canterbury; the Scottish laird Thomas of Erceldoune (fl. thirteenth c.); William Banaster, M.P. for Lancashire (d. 1323); John of Bridlington; Piers the Plowman; Chaucer, to whom “When

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faith faileth in priests’ saws” (NIMEV 3943) was sometimes ascribed; and the elusive Cheshire native Robert/William Nixon. Like other early insular literary traditions, English political prophecy was heavi ly male in both authorship and readership. Lesley A. Coote, in a wideranging survey of English political prophecy before 1500, found no surviving manuscript of prophecy certainly owned by a woman.41 Yet women do appear as the actual or ascribed authors of biblical or political prophecies circulating in England, including Sibyl, Hildegard of Bingen, Bridget of Sweden, the Benedictine nun Elizabeth Barton, the lady Elizabeth Amadas (fl. early sixteenth c.), and Mother Shipton.42 Barton was hanged for her prophetic activities in 1534. It is noteworthy that the oldest of these women and female figures come from outside Britain and stand outside the tradition of Galfridian political prophecy. English women prophets such as Barton, Amadas, and the legendary Mother Shipton apparently began to enter cultural consciousness and the written record only after 1500, in step with the expansion of female authorship of poetry in English. Put another way, before 1500, English (male) readers could only accept women prophets mediated by exogenous languages, literatures, and manuscript traditions. One could hope for no clearer illustration of Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of the field of cultural production, in all its historicity and its imbrication within the experience of social power. Royal injunctions against dissident political prophecy, first in 1406 and then periodically throughout the sixteenth century, identified Galfridian prophecy as dangerous to the state. A 1542 act “Touching Prophesies uppon Declaracion of Names Armes Badges, &c.” sought to protect “suche persones as have and had suche Armes Badges or Cognisaunces or had suche lettres in theyre names” from “the greate perill and destruccion” of “false Prophesies,” namely, those promulgated by their social inferiors.43 The law took aim at both literary convention and political action. The representation of political agents as animals, heraldic symbols, or other totems held considerable power as propaganda but posed a commensurate risk as protest. It is characteristic of the social flexibility of the genre that English political prophecy after 1406 was both more fully integrated into the machinery of political propaganda than ever before and also more widely available to lay readers.44 Poignantly, the best evidence of the use of political prophecy by ordinary people comes from accounts and records of legal proceedings in the wake of legislation criminalizing unauthorized prophetic activity. Many of these official documents quote the offending text in part or in full. Some of the earliest recorded texts of English political prophecies appear in London, British Library, Cotton Roll II.23

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(mid-fifteenth c.) because of the association of vernacular political prophecy with the Jack Cade rebellion (1450), the focus of this collection of documents and poetry. The year 1538 alone saw at least three separate cases of the prosecution of prophetic activity, pertaining to a servingman named Richard Swann, a farmer named Richard Oversole, and a vicar named John Dobson and to the texts of the alliterating stanzaic First Scottish Prophecy (NIMEV 4029) (mid-fifteenth c.) and Marvels of Merlin (late fifteenth c.).45 While always refracted by the conventions of legal documentation and the social prejudices of the powerful, the texts embedded in these court cases attest to the incendiary power of vernacular political prophecy. Through these cases one can glimpse the politicization of the fear of social disintegration. The same fear drives the apocalyptic predictions of many political prophecies themselves, such as Thomas of Erceldoune’s Prophecy, which dreads the day “when laddes weddeth lovedis” (15). Bridlington’s Prophecy declares, “Through slit clothing I show you injured characters [Per pannos cæsos animos monstro tibi læsos],” referring to a contemporary sartorial vogue for clothing with jagged edges, and predicts changes in fashion at the vertiginous rate of eleven times per year.46 Fear of social reformation also stokes the imaginaries of poems influenced by political prophecy but inhabiting other genres. Winner and Waster, like Thomas of Erceldoune’s Prophecy, invokes a social mismatch as apocalypse scenario: when “boyes of blode | with boste and with pryde, / Schall wedde ladyes in londe | and lede h[em] at will, / Thene dredfull domesdaye | it draweth neghe aftir” (14–16). In Piers Plowman, which seems to take Winner and Waster as an imaginative starting point, the poor figure both as the saviors of society and the agents of its destruction. The ‘two monks’ heads’ prophetic set piece in Piers Plowman (A.7.302–7 / B.6.321–31 / C.8.341–52; cited from the Athlone editions) immediately follows a climactic depiction of social disorder in the Hunger scene. John Gower’s Visio Anglie, in a cruel inversion of Galfridian symbolism, represents the rebels of the 1381 uprising as gibbering animals.47 In William Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, Hotspur deprecates Glendower’s rebellious belief in the Prophecy of the Six Kings (3.1.144–51), known to Shakespeare via a brief discussion of the Tripartite Indenture in Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. In King Lear, a play fixated on societal implosion, the Fool recites a version of the tetrameter “When faith faileth in priests’ saws” (3.4.79–95). Both passages, and others in Shakespeare, show that strong associations between political prophecy, British historiography, and social satire survived into the seventeenth century. For writers whose horizons of expectation extended beyond political prophecy, the genre was a way to think the ideal social arrangement, al-

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ways in contrast to conditions presently obtaining or soon to obtain in the observable world.

Text Prophetic texts are best conceptualized as points mapped by the other coordinates of form and history. A handful of prophetic texts rise to the level of historical formations in their own right. Through its literary style and political utility, the Prophetie Merlini initiated a literary tradition. The Prophetie survives in more manuscripts by far than any other political prophecy. Bridlington’s Prophecy is probably the runner-up. It is the only prophecy with an integral commentary, which was stripped away soon after its initial publication in order to turn the poem outward toward new political realities. Three of the most commonly attested texts in English prophecy books are the Latin or English prose prophecy “Lilium regnans,” the English alliterating stanzaic First Scottish Prophecy and Marvels of Merlin, and the alliterative Second Scottish Prophecy (NIMEV 4008) (late fourteenth/early fifteenth c.). Citations of the Marvels in early sixteenth-century court cases and evident borrowings from the First Scottish Prophecy in a clutch of sixteenth-century English verse prophecies (see Chapters  3–4) confirm that those poems enjoyed wide currency. English political prophecy had a canon no less discernible than the Chaucer canon, but unmoored from any unifying idea of authorial persona. The preponderance of alliterative and alliterating poems in the canon transmitted by English prophecy books gives warrant for the focus on the intersection of the prophetic and alliterative traditions in Chapter 3. The textual histories of political prophecies are as complicated as the details of manuscript circulation and political conflict. Most prophetic texts lack editorial titles or even recognizable incipits. Indeed, it is not always clear what counts as a text in either the bibliographical or the literary sense, given that prophecies, like prophecy books, are often built of smaller, heterogeneous units. Crum, NIMEV, Ringler, and other bibliographical resources underreport texts of political prophecy, sometimes wildly, because of the practical and theoretical difficulties associated with distinguishing one text from the next. The incipits of prophetic texts itemized by these resources are not always on all fours. For example, Crum gives a single incipit (Crum A56) for a sequence of at least ten English verse prophecies, all divided from one another by prose interludes, in Ashmole 1835, ff. 19v–29r. The second verse text in the sequence begins “When þe blacke

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fleete of Norway is come and gone” (22v). A scholar searching for this text by incipit will not find it in Crum’s index. Despite the inherent difficulties involved, isolating and identifying texts of political prophecy remains an important project. Giving a title to a prophetic text discloses a literary archive previously invisible to analysis. Sharon L. Jansen did this when she named the Marvels of Merlin and made the poem the subject of an extended study. In this book, I refer to prophecies by modern editorial titles where established or else by incipit, in conjunction with Crum, NIMEV, and Ringler designations in the case of English poetry. Appendix B lists some texts of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English verse prophecies not noted in NIMEV, a first step toward refining scholarly understanding of the tradition of English political prophecy. Most of the texts come from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuscripts not consulted, or selectively browsed, by Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards in preparing NIMEV. In all, Appendix B lists over 140 texts.

Excursus: Religious Sectarianism Between the books combed through by Boffey and Edwards and those browsed by them lies the English Reformation, a historical event that has not featured in the foregoing discussion. Religious history, I contend, did not figure centrally in the development of English political prophecy. Prophetic literary activity fueled governmental and ecclesiastical suspicion around Lollardy and Catholic recusancy, precipitating anti-prophetic legislation in the 1400s and 1540s. But religious schism in England intensified the perceived threat of dissidence rather than creating it. The logic behind anti-prophetic legislation was social: horror at the prospect of social reorganization through political action and determination to deploy political prophecy as a weapon of social control. Lollardy and recusancy gave occasions for battle in the long war on social mobility. If so, it should not be surprising that prophecies and prophecy books yield contradictory information about the religious convictions of their makers and users. A revealing example, given its size and the specificity with which its religiopolitical moment can be known, is Sloane 2578. This is a paper codex comprising 117 folios. Jansen dates Sloane 2578 to 1554–56, during the reign of Mary I, and describes its compiler as “a Protestant sympathizer.”48 Such a descriptor, while conformant with the codicological and textual evidence ad-

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duced by Jansen, underscores the difficulty of locating political prophecy in religious history. In making the case for a Protestant compiler antagonistic to Mary I’s government, Jansen emphasizes references to the years 1554–56  in a handful of prophecies scattered throughout the manuscript.49 Yet the vast majority of items in Sloane 2578 existed before Mary’s reign and continued to circulate after Elizabeth’s accession. A host of pre-Reformation monarchs, noblemen, saints, and events populate the pages of the collection, including the usual panoply of prophetic authorities drawn from insular history and beyond. And these figures and events remained current in prophetic writing through the reign of James I. Sloane 2578 includes a program of marginal crossreferences, further imbricating individual items and figures within a network of prophecy. The manuscript contains multiple texts of the Second Scottish Prophecy, a poem that begins by imagining a translation of ecclesiastical authority from Rome to England: “When Rome ys remeuyd | in-to Englonde, / And ylke a preste has | [the] pope is powere in honde” (quoted from When Rome Is Removed, ed. Haferkorn). Writing at the end of the fourteenth century or the beginning of the fifteenth, the poet envisions an apocalyptic reversal of the center and periphery of Christendom. For a Protestant reader in 1554–56, these lines must now refer to imminent recatholicization under Mary I. The flexibility of dire predictions, even those concerning religious institutions, explains the durability of political prophecies across the Reformation. The Sloane 2578 compiler’s experience of political specificity and religious sectarianism can be recovered from the prophetic literary archive only at the cost of Sloane 2578 itself. The book exceeds its maker.

* * * This chapter has located English political prophecy in significant dimensions of form and history: genre, meter, language, material form, politics, social context, and text. The formal and historical facets of each dimension are best understood in relation to one another. Histories of metrical form pressurize the choice of meter for authors of political prophecies, just as the prophetic texts cited by commoners in the 1530s open new pathways in English social history. By exporting dragons and lightning bolts into lived experience, and importing political intrigue into literary discourse, prophecy demonstrates the reciprocity of form and history, literature and culture. Of course, the dimensions of form and history are an analytical convenience. In practice, they operate in concert. The relationship of any dimension to any actual instance of English political prophecy

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is the relationship of an axis to a point, identified in space by a set of coordinates. Taken together, the seven coordinates of form and history permit an estimate of the total cultural significance of English political prophecy. This literary tradition deserves attention as a large and problematic literary archive, which shaped policy and everyday life in early England. Above all, English political prophecy was a historiographical tradition. The literary style, languages, manuscript contexts, politics, and social placements of the genre all illustrate its fundamental orientation toward history writing. In this realm, prophecy proposed a structure of emotional experience later supplied by campaign speeches, partisan news, and films about the origins of present-day culture. Recognizing political prophecy as a tradition of historiography requires modern scholars to ignore the boundary supposedly dividing literature from history. It also requires us to appreciate the contingency of modernity as the measure of historical consciousness and literary value, a consideration that will recur in subsequent chapters with reference to metrical history. Prophecy, once a vehicle for experiencing the present, now challenges modernity as an alien, indeed actively rejected, disposition of cultural energy. The next chapter takes up these issues of periodization in relation to prophecy as a genre.

chapter 2

The Age of Prophecy

The period from c. 1450 to c. 1650 constitutes a distinct phase in the production of political prophecy. Call it the Age of Prophecy. In the longer history of the genre, the middle of the fifteenth century marks a turning point. For the Winner and Waster poet, Langland, and Gower in the late fourteenth century, political prophecy was only one stop on the tour of genres. As late as the first third of the fifteenth century, prophecy retained close conceptual and codicological ties to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Brittaniae (early twelfth c.). In the 1440s and 1450s, the first English prophecy books appeared, a new alignment of literary genre and book construction. In the 1450s and 1460s, the Jack Cade Rebellion and the Wars of the Roses catalyzed the dissemination of old and new prophecies. Several of the most successful prophetic texts, such as the First Scottish Prophecy, the Ireland Prophecy, The King Who Will Find the Holy Cross, and the Marvels of Merlin, are datable to these decades.1 Socioliterary conditions favoring the production of prophecy books remained in place through the reign of James VI/I. During this period, political prophecy occupied a prestigious position in the literary field. It motivated political action, shaped public perception of national politics, and captured the imagination of writers and compilers. The Age of Prophecy was marked by the self-similarity of its literary products. English prophecy books resemble one another more than they resemble earlier or later manuscripts containing political prophecies but organized on other principles. As late as the first decades of the seventeenth century, English political prophecy was being actively produced, as witness “A prince out of the north shall come,” which enjoyed a vogue in seventeenth-century commonplace books and manuscript anthologies. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the center of power in prophetic writing had shifted from manuscript to print.2 One determining factor must have been the Whole Prophesie of Scotland, England,

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& Some-part of France, and Denmark (first printed 1603), a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century runaway success. Among the prophecy books listed in Appendix A, only one certainly postdates 1603. The prosecution of prophetic activity in the sixteenth century began to shake political prophecy loose from the wider tradition of British historiography. In place of Merlin, the folk heroes Nixon and Mother Shipton ‘authored’ the prophecies that proved most popular with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century audiences. In the nineteenth century, political prophecy came to appear as an antique curiosity or a mental defect. Missing from this capsule description is language. To judge from such midfifteenth-century hits as the First Scottish Prophecy and The King Who Will Find the Holy Cross, the promotion of English in prophetic writing roughly coincided with changes in political culture and manuscript form. Yet the surviving manuscripts indicate a lag between the production and dissemination of English political prophecies. As we saw in the previous chapter, English prophecy books transmitted predominantly Latin texts until nearly the end of the fifteenth century. When English emerged as the default medium of prophecy, it did so precisely through its entanglements with other languages: Anglo-Norman/French, Latin, Scots, and Welsh. Prophetic texts shared sources, literary styles, symbols, and political targets across languages. And, of course, many texts traveled across linguistic lines. The direction of travel was not uniformly from Latin to the vernaculars. The Prophecy of the Six Kings jumped from Anglo-Norman to English, Welsh, and Latin, and the First Scottish Prophecy was translated from English to Latin soon after its composition. Overall, however, Latin ceded ground to English. By the mid-sixteenth century, English prophecy occupied the former cultural position of Latin prophecy. In the movement from language of authority to cosmopolitan vernacular, political prophecy resembled other areas of the literary field.3 Yet in comparison with other English literary genres, prophecy was a late bloomer. The mainstreaming of English literary activity occurred significantly earlier in romance, biblical translation, and historiography. These genres experienced the slow transition from manuscript to print in real time. Romance and historiography were both foci of William Caxton’s early printing efforts in the late fifteenth century; prophecy was not. By the mid-sixteenth century, romance, scripture, and historiography could be found as abundantly in English printed books as in English manuscripts; prophecy could not. The Whole Prophesie of Scotland shows that political prophecy could flourish in print when presented as the literary paraphernalia of political union, but the genre was generally ostracized from print culture. The new medium was never conducive to this kind of writing.

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To conclude that political prophecy was a conservative literary genre is already to accede to the teleologies that lead from manuscript to print and medieval to modern. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writers and readers lacked foreknowledge of post-Enlightenment literary modernity. For them, prophecy was a way to inhabit the modern political world. If romance was the genre of the Middle Ages, and the novel is the genre of modernity, then political prophecy was the genre of an overlapping intermediate period stretching from London, British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra C.iv (mid-fifteenth c.) to the anonymous pamphlet The Lord Merlins Prophecy Concerning the King of Scots (1651) (ESTC R202765). These three genres, if in unequal proportion, inflected all other English literary production. Prophecy is distinguished from the other two by transgressing the medieval/modern dichotomy, thereby evading full modern critical awareness. My neologism ‘the Age of Prophecy’ is meant as an invitation to reunite a balkanized literary dominion. Toward the end of the Age of Prophecy and afterward, political prophecy contributed to literary modernity—as a path not chosen. Already in the late 1370s or early 1380s, in the opening sentence of his De vaticinacione seu prophetia, John Wycliffe had rebuked his “colleagues [socii]” who prophesied “on the basis of the sayings of Merlin, Hildegard, and similar prophets, outside scriptural faith [ex dictis Merlini, Hildegardis et vatum similium extra fidem scripture].”4 However, Wycliffe’s wording makes clear that he is attacking a widespread cultural practice. In the early fifteenth century, the poet of the alliterative Mum and the Sothsegger could deprecate “prophecie” (1723a; quoted from Richard the Redeless, ed. Dean) and

1725

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how the peuple construeth And museth on the mervailles that Merlyn dide devyse, And redith as right as the Ram is hornyd, And helpe me the high God, I holde thaym halfe amasid. For there nys wight in this world that wote bifore eve How the winde and the wedre wol wirche on the morowe, Ne noon so cunnyng a clerc that construe wel couthe Ere Sunneday a sevenyght what shal falle.5 (1723b–30)

An argument a fortiori. Even in the early fifteenth-century Piers Plowman tradition of political alliterative verse, the backwardness of prophecy was thinkable.

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Believers must be “halfe amasid.” Yet the proverbial reference to the people who read as straight as a ram’s horn, that is, circuitously, ironically implies the poet’s intimate knowledge of prophecy. A taurus cornutus ‘horned bull’ appears in Geoffrey’s Prophetie Merlini (§116.210), and the same phrase, in reference to Edward III, begins one line of the Latin Prophecy ascribed to John of Bridlington, at the head of a passage that circulated independently.6 Two mid-fifteenth-century instances are Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 186, f. 12r, and London, British Library, MS Vespasian E.vii, f. 117v. In Mum and the Sothsegger, the glancing allusion to this excerpt (as I take it) qualifies the rejection of prophecy. Moreover, the target of the poet’s disdain in this case is not prophecy but errant interpretations of it (“construeth,” “museth,” “redith,” “construe”). Earlier (ll. 874–75 and 1309–33), the Mum poet affirms the significance of visionary experience, picking up on a key metaliterary passage in Piers Plowman on Daniel and Joseph (A.8.131–54 / B.7.149–76 / C.9.298–321). And then, discourses of insanity and error were intrinsic to prophecy: “If I write something foolish, it is because I am not well in the head [Scripsero si vanum, caput est quia non mihi sanum].”7 By the sixteenth century, it was possible to be more definitive.8 The Council of Trent (1545–63) banned a book of Merlin’s prophecies. Thomas Churchyard’s poulter’s measure poem Dauy Dycars Dreame (c. 1547) (STC 5225.5), which echoes the incipit of “When faith faileth in priests’ saws” and builds on prophetic passages from Piers Plowman, touched off a thirteen-book debate about the propriety of publishing prophecy.9 Churchyard’s chief interlocutor, one “T. Camel,” asserts: “But yet suche dreadfull whans & thens, which doth the matter marre / Were better quight, pulled out of syght, then shewed as they are” (Camelles Conclusion, STC 4527.2, no date, fourth unnumbered page). The debate was conducted primarily through the medium of septenary or fourteeners, a meter that enjoyed significant popularity at midcentury (see Chapter 4). In the 1540s, the debate about prophecy still had two sides. Henry Howard, earl of Northampton, inveighed against secular prophecies in A Defensatiue against the Poyson of Supposed Prophesies (1583). The book expends well over three hundred pages in denouncing “such toyes of vnstedfast trust, as neyther promise comfort in the present, nor assurance in the future” (STC 13858, A.4v). In 1588 the astrologer John Harvey wondered aloud in his Discovrsive Probleme Concerning Prophesies: Nay, is any deuise easier, or any practise readier, than to forge a blinde prophesie, or to coine a counterfet tale, or to foist in a new found old said sawe, or to set countenance vpon some stale poeticall fragment,

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or other antique record, or to play vpon the aduantage of som old memorandum, without rime or reason; or to gloze, and iuggle with knacks of the maker, where they may passe, and repasse for currant paiment; or finally, to reuiue some forlorne Merlin, or Pierce Plowman, or Nostradame, or the like supposed prophet? Alas, is this wise world so simple, to beléeue so foolish toyes, deuised to mocke apes, and delude children? (STC 12908, 2) Later, Harvey declares that he has no need “to ransacke Pierce Plowmans satchell” (62). The reference in both cases is not to the poem but to the character, considered as a prophetic authority. In a paradox typical of early print discourse, Harvey engages an array of English and Latin political prophecies while arguing against doing so. He positions prophecy as a “discovrsive” problem inherited from a simpleminded past, though some of his examples are in fact drawn from sixteenth-century compositions. His purpose in writing was to clear space for a reputable astrology. The next year, George Puttenham condemned prophetic discourse as a vice in poetry under the heading of “Amphibologia” (The Arte of English Poesie, STC 20519, 217). Puttenham rails against “all our old Brittish and Saxon prophesies,” since “by the comfort of those blind prophecies many insurrections and rebellions haue bene stirred vp in this Realme, as that of Iacke Straw, & Iacke Cade in Richard the seconds time” (218). Here, social unrest and poetic failure take the same literary form, that of “propheticall rymes” (218). Once again, there is a Piers Plowman connection. Rebels in both 1381 (“Iacke Straw”) and 1450 (“Iacke Cade”) adopted the Langlandian pseudonym ‘William Longwill.’10 Letters circulated around the time of the 1381 uprising draw on the apocalyptic social imagination of political prophecy and represent the rebels as co-conspirators of Piers the Plowman. Puttenham does not mention Piers Plowman in this passage, but the poem may have been on his mind. Earlier in the Arte of English Poesie, he comments briefly on “the Satyr of Piers Ploughman” (50). Like the Dauy Dycars Dreame debate, Harvey’s polemic, and Puttenham’s censure, Shakespeare’s deployment of prophecy in King Lear and 1 Henry IV occupies an equivocal place in the transition from production to repudiation of the genre. On the one hand, Shakespeare knew prophetic texts such as “When faith faileth in priests’ saws,” the source of the Fool’s prophecy in Lear, and put them to serious use in his drama. On the other hand, Galfridian prophecy, for Shakespeare, clearly belonged to the past. It appears only in plays set in pre-1500

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Britain: 1 Henry IV, Lear, Macbeth, and Richard III.11 The Lear prophecy may be authentic to its source text in its rhyming tetrameter form, but surrounded by Shakespearean blank verse it appears as something of a metrical atavism. The same is true of others of Shakespeare’s tetrameter incantations and spells, such as the witches’ chants in Macbeth, Ariel’s songs in The Tempest, and some of Puck’s discourse in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Sixteenth-century English writers could displace prophecy in space as well as time. In his travelogue Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bevvtifvl Empire of Gviana (1596), the courtier Walter Raleigh relates that “[Spanish governor Antonio de] Berreo confessed to me and others (which I protest before the Maiesty of God to be true) that there was found among prophecies in Peru (at such time as the Empyre was reduced to the Spanish obedience) in their chiefest temples, amongst diuers others which foreshewed the losse of the said Empyre, that from Inglatierra those Ingas shoulde be againe in time to come restored, and deliuered from the seruitude of the said Conquerors” (STC 20634, 100). A Prophetie Merlini for Peru. The prophecy in question, with others, resided in “their chiefest temples,” but this prophetic archive became discoverable by Europeans only at the moment of colonization (“at such time”). By referring prophetic discourse to the Inca, Raleigh implicitly asserts his and de Berrío’s modernity. Yet prophecy, however foreign, can still be true in 1596. The passage appears in the penultimate paragraph of the travelogue, where it performs a summative and exhortative function. Raleigh’s next sentence offers a chilling directive: “And I hope, as wee with these fewe handes haue displanted the first garrison, and driuen them out of the said countrey, so her Maiesty will giue order for the rest, and eyther defend it, and hold it as tributary, or conquere and keepe it as Empresse of the same.” Prophetic discourse contributes to the value of Inca land, and the prophecy of Spanish defeat lends urgency to the colonial agenda. Raleigh knew of what he spoke. Among his poetic compositions is a political prophecy, “On the Cards and Dice,” in pentameter (see Chapter 5). Francis Bacon, another Elizabethan courtier, published an essay on political prophecies in 1625. He quotes two sixteenth-century English verse prophecies, “When Hempe is sponne / England’s done” (The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, STC 1147, 214, representing the Tudor sequence Henry VIII— Edward VI—Mary I / Philip—Elizabeth I) and “There shall be seene vpon a day” (215, on “The Blacke Fleet of Norway”). The essay concludes “that they ought all to be Despised; And ought to serue, but for Winter Talke, by the Fire side. Though when I say Despised, I meane it as for Beleefe: For other wise, the Spreading or Publishing of them, is in no sort to be Despised. For they haue done much

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Mischiefe: And I see many seuere Lawes made to suppresse them” (216). Like Camel, Harvey, and Raleigh, Bacon knows something about the literary archive he is condemning. His distinction between disbelief and censorship reveals the extent to which the dynamics of print culture overdetermined official responses to political prophecy. Those dynamics derived from, and in turn defined, a particular social scene. Prophecy was matter “for Winter Talke, by the Fire side,” that is, not for the royal court in its capacity as the organ of public policy. Camel’s, Howard’s, Harvey’s, Puttenham’s, and Bacon’s finger-wagging must not be taken at face value. It is the expository expression of the ecclesiastical and governmental forces aligned against Galfridian prophecy by the late sixteenth century. When transferred from the subject of vernacular literature to the object of vernacular criticism—a new kind of writing, associated with the court—prophecy appeared as a scandal. There was a certain structural predictability to anti-prophetic diatribe. Print culture, public discourse, and Westminster increasingly overlapped during Bacon’s lifetime (1561–1626). As lord chancellor, Bacon occupied the same post as Simon of Sudbury, archbishop of Canterbury, whom Piers Plowman–inspired rebels had beheaded in 1381. That prophecy-tinged event provoked its own official responses. Now, in 1625, the official responses to prophecy were becoming the only responses. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Age of Prophecy had drawn to a close. The short printed pamphlet Mother Shiptons Prophesie (1678) (ESTC R217981) gathers together twenty-four heterogeneous pronouncements, including “A Prophesie very ancient in old Meeter” (6). The broadside Merlin Reviv’ d: Or, An Old Prophecy Found in a Manuscript in Pontefract Castle in York-shire (1681) (ESTC R1243) gives predictions in English tetrameter for 1650, 1660, 1666, 1680, and 1682. A notice to the reader at the foot of the sheet anticipates skepticism: “THough at the first View this Prophecy may seem to be an Invention of a late date, and not Written till time did Interpret it; yet upon strict search and Inquiry into the reality thereof, we have found convincing Evidence that it was certainly written many years before it came to pass; which for your satisfaction we shall briefly give an account of.” Like the title and subtitle of the broadside and the “Prophesie very ancient in old Meeter” in Mother Shiptons Prophesie, the notice to the reader in Merlin Reviv’ d self-consciously plucks an outmoded discourse back into modernity. Here, at the edge of the prophecy tradition, it is natural to inquire what literary or social forms continued the cultural work of prophecy after prophecy. If the Age of Prophecy ended in the late seventeenth century, what other field of action absorbed prophecy? One appealing candidate is historical writing,

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which developed a complex poetics of futurity in England in the seventeenth century across genres and beyond the confines of the Galfridian tradition: political prophecy in a different key.12 Another candidate is early modern statecraft itself, a realm of social activity that involved imagining and then realizing the political future. Print culture mediated both spheres. Whatever the most suitable answer, the repudiation of Merlinic prophecy after c. 1650 renders the question difficult. Narratives of secularization and modernization ensure that the inheritance of pre-1650 prophetic labor will look out of sync with its predecessor archive. Reinhart Koselleck, for example, opposes prophecy and statecraft in starkly periodized terms, assigning the former to premodernity and the latter to modernity.13 This comparison sets an ulterior historical limit to the purview of Koselleck’s conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), generating a flaw in the design of his research program. Yet between prophecy and statecraft there is an undeniable homology, the more so in the case of the already secular genre of political prophecy. John Dryden sums up this cultural shift within the span of a single career. Dryden gradually turned from a form of non-Galfridian political prophecy, in the 1650s, to a hermetically sealed aestheticism by century’s end.14 After 1700 the printed Whole Prophesie of Scotland kept political prophecy visible in English literary culture, if only as an atavism. In 1718 the royal printer James Watson reprinted it in Edinburgh “( from the best and most ancient Copies ) in Order to transmit to Posterity, those Pieces of Antiquity, in a better and correcter Manner than has been commonly practis’d these Hundred Years past” (ESTC T85466, 44). The complementarity between prophecy and history survives from the Age of Prophecy, but now prophecy represents “Antiquity,” a time capsule for “Posterity.” Watson’s book is the fruit of editorial labor, its text collected “from the best and most ancient Copies” and “better and correcter” than other printings. Watson’s interest in political prophecy fit into a larger concern with the literary past. He set the Whole Prophesie in black letter, a typeface that held strong though not irresistible associations with romance and antiquity after the ascendance of roman type in English-language printing.15 By the turn of the nineteenth century, political prophecy had exited the literary field. To the extent that it continued to circulate, it did so orally. The social stigmatization of prophecy, perceptible from its first appearances in writing, was now complete. In his Lives of the Scotish Poets (1804), David Irving noted that “the progress of knowledge and of reason has gradually impaired the absurd veneration with which [Thomas of Erceldoune] was once regarded: but among

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the more ignorant of the vulgar he is still permitted to retain the name of a prophet.”16 For Irving, prophecy has become an object of historical interpretation. When, in 1807, Lord Byron recorded in his journal his low opinion of Chaucer’s poetry in comparison with “Pierce Plowman, or Thomas of Ercildoune,” he was intentionally aiming a missile at current thinking. Piers Plowman and Thomas of Erceldoune (NIMEV 365), which Byron connects perhaps through the genre of political prophecy, own a yet richer “antiquity” than Chaucer.17 By “Pierce Plowman, or Thomas of Ercildoune” Byron may mean these figures as prophetic authors, as opposed to the titles of texts. Byron opens an 1813 letter to the Irish poet Thomas Moore by alluding to “true Thomas, . . . He of Ercildoune,” a reference to the incipit of Walter Scott’s modernized version of Thomas of Erceldoune.18 In 1833 David Laing anonymously reprinted the Whole Prophesie of Scotland as Collection of Ancient Scottish Prophecies, in Alliterative Verse for the Bannatyne Club from the copy now known as Cambridge, MA, Houghton Library, STC 17841.7. The untitled preface begins: “It seems difficult for any one, at the present day, to be fully aware of that degree of fond credulity with which, at a period even within the last century, certain political prophecies were regarded and cherished by the partisans of opposite factions in this country [i.e., Scotland], which the least instructed peasants of a later age would probably treat with contempt and derision.” Here, the emergence of a modern present from the medieval past is transacted through class and literary genre. Modernity puts “the least instructed peasants” above even the noblest benighted “partisans” in the hierarchy of literary good sense. Modernization is also transacted through poetic form. The preface goes on to impugn “the obscure and almost unintelligible rhymes which then passed current under [Erceldoune’s] name.”19 It should be noted that, for Laing, the Middle Ages extend into the eighteenth century (“within the last century”). The preface simultaneously celebrates a break with the past and positions Scottish literary culture as belated. This double gesture—we are modern, but by the skin of our teeth—was characteristic of nineteenth-century medievalism in Britain. Recall that modernity began in the eighteenth century for the nineteenth-century notator of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1835 (late sixteenth/early seventeenth c.) (see Chapter 1). The preface to Collection of Ancient Scottish Prophecies ends by inviting readers to “detec[t] the sources of antiquated delusion.”20 In Laing’s brave new world, political prophecy has become a new kind of historical evidence and a new kind of literary game. Laing, like Watson, set the Whole Prophesie in black letter, a self-conscious archaism by the early nineteenth century.

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Like the Ashmole 1835 note, Collection of Ancient Scottish Prophecies wields the genre of political prophecy as an instrument in the periodizing procedure. So does Keith Thomas in the expansive chapter on prophecy in his Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971).21 In tune with Koselleck, Thomas numbers prophecy among the literary and religious behaviors that English subjects had to reject in order to become modern. Secular modernity, for Thomas, more than a discourse or a cultural paradigm, is the material fact that makes historical inquiry into political prophecy possible. Here, as in Collection of Ancient Scottish Prophecies, class appears as an index of modernization. Thomas’s subtitle promises Studies in Popular Beliefs. The researcher’s and audience’s distance from the past can be measured by literary genre, skepticism, and social standing. Thomas’s book is the most detailed study of English political prophecy between Rupert Taylor’s field-defining Political Prophecy in England (1911) and the flurry of research activity around prophecy by Caroline D. Eckhardt, Sharon L. Jansen, and others in the 1980s and early 1990s. In its large-scale and teleological historical claims, Religion and the Decline of Magic illustrates how political prophecy, as an object of disciplinary attention, is constituted by the ideological structure called modernity. The study of English political prophecy has suffered from the terms in which scholars have historically negotiated the fissure between medieval and modern. Periodization and its discontents have always shared religious and political history as common ground. English political prophecy contributed to these historical series, but in a fashion that has not animated a commensurate body of scholarship. In studies of prophecy, religious and political history too often appear as immutable background. Consequently, in studies of periodization, prophecy is mostly absent. Prophecy has fared poorly in the historicist atmosphere of literary criticism since the 1980s, because the genre’s implication in history emerges most clearly through the work of literary style—where historicism has learned not to look. For political prophecy, probably more so than for romance or the novel, naive historicism founders on the shores of literary technique. Historical contextualization can yet illuminate the ideological pathologies of prophecy, but thus far it has failed to account for the stupendous volume of creative effort poured into prophecy by early writers, readers, and compilers. That English political prophecy should have escaped the rehabilitating gaze of stylisticians is, ironically, a consequence of the historicist failure that makes rehabilitation necessary in the first place. As long as prophecy was understood to possess no literary value, it could only function as the embarrassing target of

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critical gestures drawn from the study of some richer literary corpus. Accordingly, many studies of political prophecy begin with an apology.22 The remainder of Part I aims to break this critical deadlock by demonstrating the stylistic subtlety and literary urgency of political prophecy through its metrical transformations. English political prophecy circulated in alliterative meter and tetrameter but almost never in pentameter. Chapters 3–5 ask why.

chapter 3

The Ireland Prophecy and the Future of Alliterative Verse

The genre of political prophecy had a differential effect on the English literary field according to metrical tradition. Some English prophecies take the form of prose paragraphs, but most are in verse. Of these, a disproportionate number inhabit two of the three major early English metrical traditions, alliterative verse and tetrameter. The impact of political prophecy on the alliterative tradition, which did not make it out of the sixteenth century alive, was profound. The appearance of a large number of prophecies in tetrameter or other four-stress forms demonstrates the cachet of this family of meters well into the sixteenth century, a feature of pre-Enlightenment English metrical culture that has been obscured by later developments. To determine why so few political prophecies employ the third major early English meter, Chaucer’s pentameter, one must combine internal and external perspectives onto metrical decision-making. Patterns of metrical affiliation and metrical avoidance reflect cultural forces pushing and pulling poets in a multimodal literary field. This chapter and the next two read the choice of meter in English political prophecy as evidence of attitudes toward modernity. The metrical forms of political prophecy, no less than its generic conventions, point toward imagined futures. I argue that authors of English verse prophecies wrote toward a literary future in which Chaucer’s pentameter hypothetically would come to appear as a fad. This chapter presents a case study in the metrical futures of political prophecy, featuring the Ireland Prophecy, a popular English alliterative prophecy composed during the Wars of the Roses. The next chapter presents two more case studies, “A windy summer a wet harvest” and “When Father Blithe the beggar can say two Creeds,” two little-known tetrameter/four-stress poems of

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the sixteenth century, inspired by passages from pre-1500 alliterative verse prophecies. Chapter 5 considers the case of the missing pentameter prophecies.

* * * Because of its historical and formal flexibility, English political prophecy challenges standard scholarly operating procedure. Notwithstanding the assurance from a modern scholar that “most medieval political prophecies . . . were not hard for educated contemporaries to understand,” the hermeneutics of prophetic reading were complex.1 The genre combines multiple forms of symbolism, connects and conflates historical, recent, and imagined future events, and serves every thinkable ideological end. To learn how contemporaries read prophecies, it is useful to consult explicit commentaries. Early commentaries on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetie Merlini arrive by different means at different interpretations. Already by the 1170s, in a Latin commentary by “Alanus,” probably the theologian Alain de Lille, one can discover the charge that people have been misreading Geoffrey.2 Alanus was referring to the political meaning of the Prophetie, the aspect of prophetic hermeneutics for which the most evidence survives, in the form of commentaries, propaganda, court cases, royal correspondence, and so on. Given the lack of any explicit comment on vernacular prosody throughout most of the Age of Prophecy, insight into metrical dimensions of prophetic reading seems out of reach. John Erghome’s first, Aristotelian prologue (late fourteenth c.) to the Latin Prophecy ascribed to John of Bridlington notes, under the heading of formal cause (causa formalis), that “the mode of writing . . . is metrical, viz., in verse and not in prose [modo scribendi . . . est metricus, videlicet in versu, et non in prosa].”3 Later, in commentary on the verb metrificare ‘versify,’ Erghome clarifies: “There are two modes of writing, viz., metrical, which is measured in number and foot, and prosaic, which consists in an unadorned style, like how documents or letters are written [duplex est modus scribendi, videlicet metricus, qui numero et pede mensuratur, et prosaicus, qui consistit in plano dictamine, sicut literæ scribuntur et epistolæ].”4 However, scansion scarcely appears in Erghome’s interpretive armature.5 The Latin grammatical and rhetorical traditions informing Erghome’s commentary, and well represented in his library,6 also conditioned the practice and theorization of the Latin quantitative meter used in Bridlington’s Prophecy. (The adjective metricus could denote quantitative verse in particular: DMLBS Online, ‘metricus,’ 2b.) If these scholastic traditions proved an insufficient inducement for Erghome to discuss Latin prophecy

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and meter in tandem at any length, prophecy and meter must have been all the more distant from one another in the case of vernacular verse. Surviving manuscripts and texts of political prophecy offer a basis for building inferences about the reception of meter. Prose format became the default for prophecy books around the turn of the sixteenth century, yet scribal punctuation of prophetic verse texts copied as prose often reinforces line and half-line boundaries. For some scribes, metrical form could have a visual correlate in punctuation. Prophetic verse texts copied as prose tend to cluster together, attesting to the salience of meter for those occupied with producing and consuming prophecy books. Some prophecy books are mainly or entirely in verse. Like the Exeter Book of Old English poetry, such manuscripts as London, British Library, MSS Cotton Vespasian E.viii (late sixteenth c.) and Sloane 1802 (late sixteenth/early seventeenth c.), and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Ashmole 1386, part 3 (late sixteenth/early seventeenth c.) and Rawlinson C.813, first compilation (early sixteenth c.), rebut the notion that literary form contributed nothing to the production of political prophecy. In the minds of the compilers of these books, a categorical discrimination has clicked into place: in versu, et non in prosa. This chapter and the next discuss cases of transmetrical translation, a further source of evidence for prophetic metrical cultures. Just as translation across languages illuminates the shapes of language traditions in motion, transmetrical translation brings the cultural meanings of meters to the surface of the literary act. In the end, the proof that meter matters must lie in the doing. I now turn to the first case study and the oldest of the three major early English metrical traditions. The Ireland Prophecy is an English alliterative prophecy extant in eight copies in seven fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century manuscripts: 1. Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, 441C (sixteenth c.), 16–18, 2. Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, 441C, 34–35, 3. Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Llanstephan 119 (early seventeenth c.), 179, 4. Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth 26 (midfifteenth c.), 112–13, 5. Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth 94 (late sixteenth/early seventeenth c.), 258–59, 6. London, British Library, Cotton Roll II.23 (mid-fifteenth c.), art. 10,

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7. London, British Library, Additional 24663 (late sixteenth c.), ff. 14v–16r, and 8. London, Society of Antiquaries, 101 (late fifteenth c.), f. 72v. Cotton Roll II.23 is a collection of political poems and documents in English centering on the Jack Cade rebellion of 1450. Society of Antiquaries 101 is a miscellany containing recipes, religious verse, political prophecies, and other items, in Latin and English. The others are prophecy books as discussed in the previous chapter and enumerated in Appendix A. Appendix D provides a critical text of the poem, for which Society of Antiquaries 101 serves as copy-text. Certain features of its prophetic style fix the poem in time. The Ireland Prophecy was composed in 1452 or 1453, to judge from probable allusions to John Trevelyan, a minor administrator under Henry VI, and Richard Neville, earl of Warwick. Trevelyan appears as “the rooke” (40a) and Warwick as “þe ragged tre” (40a) and “the bere” (42a), after their heraldic badges. Trevelyan and Warwick are clothed in the same symbolism, with contemporary annotations confirming their identities, in “The root is dead the swan is gone” (NIMEV 3455), another mid-fifteenth-century political poem found in Cotton Roll II.23.7 The Ireland Prophecy poet seems to portray Warwick, like Trevelyan, as a Lancastrian, positioning them “þe rede baner vnder” (40b). Before the copying of Cotton Roll II.23 and Peniarth 26 in the mid-1450s, this identification was possible only after 1452, when Warwick became visible as a military supporter of Henry, but before summer 1453, when Warwick changed strategy and threw his support behind the House of York. In any case, the poem cannot have been composed before the mid1440s, when Trevelyan entered the ser vice of Henry VI, and more likely not before 1450, when Trevelyan came to prominence in national politics as one of the targets of a complaint brought by the revolutionary Cade. Trevelyan’s connection with Cade may be what landed the Ireland Prophecy and “The root is dead” in Cotton Roll II.23. In keeping with the Galfridian prophetic tradition, the Ireland Prophecy stages the Wars of the Roses as a showdown between Britons and Saxons, in which the Saxons, apparently to be identified with the Lancastrians, get the worst of it.8 The poet figures the Saxons as lions, after the English coat of arms. This representation might have held additional resonance at a time when the Lancastrians occupied the English throne in the person of Henry VI. The poem ends with an acrostic that looks to Ireland for the victorious British king (ll. 83–86). The reference to Ireland is likely an allusion to Richard, duke of York, Lieutenant of Ireland from 1447 and actually on the island from 1449.

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Richard appears earlier in the poem as a northbound “fawkoun” (45a, 61a), after his badge, another identification mirrored in “The root is dead.”9 Yet the poem’s Yorkist sympathies, if such they be, are fully submerged in the conventions of political prophecy. The final sequence, in which the poet reveals the identity of the hoped-for savior, turns out to be a pastiche of lines and ideas from the Prophetie Merlini, the Middle English prose Brut, and other prophetic bestsellers. Reference to a hero who will “wynne þat was[ted was]” (78a) suggestively collides political prophecy with the discourse of economic management underlying the prophetically tinged alliterative dialogue Winner and Waster, from the previous century. In Cotton Roll II.23, the closing acrostic appears as a cryptogram in Arabic numerals, a decision that has more to do with the pleasure of concealment than the urgency of partisanship. (Under final cause (causa finalis) in his commentary on Bridlington’s Prophecy, Erghome amusingly files “that he [who knows this prophecy] will know how to say something that his fellows do not know [quod sciet aliqua dicere quæ sui compares nesciunt].”10) Of the seven manuscripts containing the Ireland Prophecy, only Cotton Roll II.23 has a Yorkist bent. Unlike the others, this manuscript presents the Ireland Prophecy for what its compiler expects will be an insider partisan readership. That the hero from Ireland is Richard can be little more than an educated guess, for modern scholars if not for many of the poem’s earliest readers. The status of the Ireland Prophecy as an alliterative poem reinforces and complicates its status as a political prophecy. Alliterative verse was a singularly durable poetic tradition. In its occupation of historical time it was like the button, of which George Kubler observes, “There are few events in the history of the button.”11 An important difference is that buttons are still in use. Between the early eighth century, when English poetry first found its way onto the manuscript page, and the mid-sixteenth century, when alliterative meter disappeared from the active repertoire of verse forms, the alliterative tradition functioned as a gigantic and slow-moving cultural institution. Twentieth-century critics perceived alliterative verse as a bipartite tradition, divided by a gap of roughly ninety years, c. 1250–1340, on the other end of which lay an event called the Alliterative Revival. According to current metrical research, the alliterative tradition is better conceptualized as continuous across the artifactual Old English/Middle English boundary.12 English political prophecy and alliterative meter became increasingly intertwined over the course of the fifteenth century. Most of the handful of (unrhymed) alliterative poems datable after 1450 are political prophecies. And some of the most widely disseminated English political prophecies are in alliterative meter or closely related forms: the ‘two monks’ heads’ and ‘Abbot of

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Abingdon’ prophetic set pieces from Langland’s Piers Plowman (c. 1370–90); the Second Scottish Prophecy (late fourteenth/early fifteenth c.); the alliterating, crossrhymed First Scottish Prophecy (mid-fifteenth c.) and Marvels of Merlin (late fifteenth c.), whose verse form could be described as alliterative meter with the jagged edges smoothed out;13 and multiple alliterative or alliterating stanzaic prophecies in Vespasian E.viii, Sloane 1802, and the Whole Prophesie of Scotland, England, & Some-part of France, and Denmark (1603). As measured by extant manuscript copies, the Ireland Prophecy, Piers Plowman, and the Second Scottish Prophecy are among the greatest hits of Middle English alliterative verse. Nearly half of the over 140 fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English verse texts in Appendix B represent alliterating or alliterative prophecies. Prophecy was very prominent within the last phase of the alliterative tradition, and alliterative verse was prominent within the prophecy tradition. The Ireland Prophecy owes allegiance to both traditions. Its affiliation with alliterative verse is evident in the details of poetic style. The poet employs a number of words found mainly or exclusively in alliterative verse: bent ‘battlefield’