The Unity of Middle English Alliterative Poetry

Abstract

The basic unity of Middle English verse corpus has often been asserted. In 1970s, Geoffrey Shepherd conceded enormous variety of poems in style and outlook, but argued that they stand in a continuum whose terms are moral insight and historical truth'';1 Thorlac Turville-Petre claimed that we are here dealing with a 'school' of poets, though one that embraces a huge variety of styles and subjects;2 Derek Pearsall, while warning against over-emphasis on . . . an agreed that the existence of an 'school', comprising a central 'classical' corpus of poems closely related in formal and stylistic character and with a definitely West Midland and North-Western regional bias, can hardly be denied;3 and Arlyn Diamond postulated a new or redefined genre, alliterative romance.4 Several different approaches coincide here: Shepherd's is thematic, Diamond's generic, and that of Pearsall and Turville-Petre metrical and dialectal, or regional. The very number of approaches raises problems: these seem heterogeneous, not always harmonious, ways of reaching agreement on a fundamental unity. What kind of unity is meant, and what is force of quotation marks placed around word school? (Pearsall's classical corpus, after all, comprises thirteen unrhymed aalax poems spread over a century;5 even in distinctive case of translations from