Imagining the Bob and Wheel

Abstract

AbstractMedieval poetic forms defy classification, and yet medievalists trade in postmedieval formalist taxonomies—sometimes without reflecting on their history. This essay takes up the case of the “bob and wheel,” a rhyming flourish best known fromSir Gawain and the Green Knightand Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas. This form, which has no given name or firmly set shape in the manuscripts in which it is found, was codified by the philologist Edwin Guest in 1838. This essay tracks the history of the interpretation of the bob and wheel across time, from the Middle Ages to the present day, and finds that it has been imagined as a tail, a game, and a cog in a machine. These phantasmic images have not only represented but also influenced readers’ experience of this form—reflectinganddiffracting, bringing before-unseen patterns of meaning into focus and resonating with before-unheard synchronous frequencies.