About This Issue

Abstract

We are pleased to present The Elusive Progress of Prosodical Study: Essays in Honor of Thomas Cable, a special issue organized by guest editor Nicholas Myklebust. Taken together, the articles of this issue celebrate Professor Thomas Cable as impactful scholar, teacher, mentor, and friend. For over five decades, Cable’s precise analyses have guided and refined the development of English metrical studies, adding to our knowledge of medieval poetics and authorial practice, particularly as regards historical linguistics and grammar, and the prosodics of alliterative meter from Old English to Middle English.The subjects chosen by the contributors to this issue testify to the energetic scope and influence of Cable’s scholarship. R. D. Fulk analyzes “the aesthetics of metrical usage” in some striking lines of “aural punctuation” (Eduard Sievers’s type A) that show up in Beowulf and other Old English poems. Eric Weiskott pursues four grammatical arguments that could underlie the direct evolution of Old English meter into Middle English alliterative meter; his chief examples are drawn from Exodus and Patience. Nicholas Myklebust examines the afterlife of Chaucer’s decasyllabic meter as it was consciously adapted in John Walton’s fifteenth-century translation of Boethius. Delving into the intricacies of alliterative meter in the poems of MS Cotton Nero A.x, and especially in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Noriko Inoue shows how the rules governing an “extra-long” dip in the a-verse can be further elucidated beyond the analysis of Judith Jefferson and Ad Putter. This special issue’s fifth contributor, Ian Cornelius, addresses the metrics of Piers Plowman, widely recognized to be the utmost alliterative outlier; assessing the vocalic quality of syllables and the placement of word divisions in final dips, he concludes that “Langland allows semantic and expository priorities to override prosodic form.”The range of prosodical study inspired here by Thomas Cable is self-evidently expansive, with the collective authors’ explorations roving through the Old English Beowulf and Exodus, as well as through the Middle English canon of Chaucer, the Gawain poet, and Langland. This special issue’s articles exemplify the patient, focused intricacy needed for successful metrical analysis. They also display the incremental steps forward in our understanding of medieval poetical forms and rythymic styles that continue to follow in the wake of Cable’s pioneering work.