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Description and Narrative in Middle English Alliterative Poetry . Thorlac Turville-Petre. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018. Pp. x+221.

2019; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 117; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/704077

1545-6951

Eric Weiskott,

Medieval Literature and History

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewDescription and Narrative in Middle English Alliterative Poetry. Thorlac Turville-Petre. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018. Pp. x+221.Eric WeiskottEric WeiskottBoston College Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThorlac Turville-Petre has been thinking and writing about fourteenth-century English alliterative verse for over forty years. He authored a literary history of this form of poetry (The Alliterative Revival [Cambridge: Brewer, 1977]), edited an anthology of it (Alliterative Poetry of the Later Middle Ages: An Anthology [London: Routledge, 1989]), and coedited two major poems, The Wars of Alexander (with Hoyt N. Duggan, EETS, s.s., 10 [London, 1989]) and Piers Plowman (with John Burrow, The “Piers Plowman” Electronic Archive, vol. 9, The B-Version Archetype [Raleigh, NC: SEENET, 2018]). The book under review contributes a stylistic study. Description and Narrative distills wide reading and source hunting into an examination of the narrative emplacement of description in this poetic tradition.At the heart of the book are four chapters reading alliterative romances (chaps. 3–6: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Morte Arthure, Wars of Alexander, St. Erkenwald) followed by three chapters on topoi (chaps. 7–9: “Landscapes and Gardens”: Susannah, Pearl, Mum and the Sothsegger; “Siege Warfare”: William Langland’s Piers Plowman, Wars of Alexander, Morte Arthure, Siege of Jerusalem; “Storm and Flood”: John Clerk’s Destruction of Troy, Siege of Jerusalem, Patience, Cleanness). These are bookended by two introductory chapters defining the tradition and its peculiar lexicon (chaps. 1–2) and a speculative conclusion on the sources of Middle English alliterative descriptive technique (chap. 10).The book embodies the qualities of Turville-Petre’s scholarship to date: a focus upon alliterative verse, an ear for verbal nuance, and a determination to read English poems in their regional milieux and in the light of their French and Latin sources and analogues. Chapter 2 describes fourteenth-century alliterative verse as a bipartite field, subdivided by vocabulary and provenance into a northern group (Gawain, etc.) and a southern group (Piers, etc.). The book centers on the northern poems, a logical decision given the abundance of ornate description in them. Piers Plowman is far and away the most widely copied alliterative poem, but, as Turville-Petre explains, Langland was concerned to avoid the “luxuriant” (24) descriptive indulgence of historical romance. The readings of Gawain and Erkenwald are especially sharp. Here, Turville-Petre shows two alliterative poets themselves theorizing the function of description in narrative through hyperannotated persons, places, and things: shield, knight, castle, “chapel,” and tomb. The book discusses at length a number of relevant nonalliterative poems: Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthurian romances (47–48, 201–2), a Latin poem by Richard Maidstone (81–85, 93), Owayne Miles (123–24), Virgil’s Georgics (133–37), John Page’s Siege of Rouen (162–65), and Wace’s Roman de Brut (193–96). These readings, plus an engaging section on storms at sea in classical Latin poetry and Chaucer and Gower (167–72), sound the depths across language and generate some original suggestions about sources.A theme of the book is the mysterious relationship between literary representation and real life. Turville-Petre cites Roland Barthes’s concept of “l’effet de réel” or “lifelikeness” (36; compare 9, 113). The book is a study in mimesis, attending to a hillock visited by Gawain in glittering antiquity but seen in reality in contemporary Staffordshire by the poet (49–55), sieges in hell and in ancient Tyre, Metz, and Jerusalem conducted with fourteenth-century English military technology (148–62), the personification Youth immersed in a world of bright-bellied falcons that must have been familiar to the poet from actual hawking trips (203). Turville-Petre exercises due caution in asserting a biographical basis for descriptions that build on a topos, such as the locus amoenus in chapter 7, but he does not foreclose biographical explanations. “Experience and tradition are … not either/or” (113). The book affords a glimpse of poetic production at the interface of literary lineage and the workaday world.The speculation in the conclusion, while justified in terms of the preceding analysis, brings to the fore certain limitations in scope. The book does not mention any of several alliterative political prophecies. Replete with description, though devoid of narrative, prophecy gives a different angle onto the book’s twin topics. Short alliterative poems are also absent. The springtime lyric A Bird in Bishopswood is a natural fit for chapter 7, for example. At the same time, the book delivers a reading of Pearl (121–27), an alliterating tetrameter poem that does not belong to the alliterative tradition per the metrical theories endorsed by Turville-Petre (2 n. 3). In a section on “The Potential of the Form” placed rather late in the book (141–47), the conclusion that “battle is the ideal subject for the sound-symbolism activated by alliterative verse” (147) has an unsatisfying ad hoc quality in a book that has already chosen to highlight alliterative poems of war.The book lives in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Hence the absence of the prophecies, most of which postdate 1450. “Middle English” in the title describes a defensible, and traditional, segmentation of medieval English literature. When Turville-Petre comes to historicize alliterative style, however, that periodization becomes a hindrance. Chapter 10 contrasts descriptive passages in one thirteenth-century alliterative poem, Lawman’s Brut, with those in the later poems. Had Turville-Petre allowed himself to look back further, to the lavish descriptions in such Old English poems as Exodus and Judith, it would have been difficult to conclude that extravagant descriptions in fourteenth-century alliterative romance had exclusively Latin and French precedents (201–2). The synchronic purview of the book comports with the historical argument of The Alliterative Revival, whose claims for a fourteenth-century rebirth of alliterative poetry conflict with the conclusions of subsequent metrical research. Turville-Petre cites the prosodic scholarship of Hoyt N. Duggan but not the equally important work of Thomas Cable. In any case, Turville-Petre has not assimilated the historical implications of the new metrical consensus. Both Duggan and Cable posit a longer prehistory to the form of Wynnere and Wastoure. One can imagine a version of Description and Narrative that would have moved diachronically within the alliterative tradition, backward from the 1350s and forward from the 1440s.This book can be approached as a treasury of close readings of the Gawain group and related Middle English alliterative romances, with attention to sources, representation, and locality. On that basis, the book deserves praise, indeed gratitude, for its interpretive precision. Insofar as it contextualizes alliterative verse as a historical phenomenon, Description and Narrative is partial, requiring qualification in view of post-1977 scholarship on alliterative meter and further comparison to Piers Plowman, prophecies, and lyrics. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 117, Number 1August 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/704077HistoryPublished online May 03, 2019 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.