In 1970, an article by Thomas Cable, then twenty-eight years old, appeared in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology.1 An elegant meditation on the interdependence of grammatical and metrical structures in Old English verse, this inaugural work not only marked a turning point in historical metrics; it also launched the career of a scholar whose influence would shape medieval prosodical studies for the next half-century. In that article, Cable attends equally to technical problems of daunting complexity in the description and modeling of Germanic meters and to the logical constraints that bind, inform, and empower scholarly inquiry. This balance of clarity on highly specialized topics and care for the integrity of discourse as a practical culture of exchange values would become a signature of Cable’s intellectual style. In that first publication, Cable gracefully combines probing analyses of Old English adverbial and subordinate clauses with observations on prosody in the manner of an entrelacement, and the effect, not least for its ease and buoyancy, continues to impress. As Cable cautions early in the article, when dual categories in a system interact, “it is necessary to examine both . . . at once” while also “avoiding assertions about either that rest, in circular fashion, upon unproveable assertions about the other” (81). In this simple statement, Cable showcases the prudence and insight for which he is justly esteemed. A field of study, he shows, cannot thrive as a mere taxonomy; it must integrate into its project the host of interrelations it shares with adjacent or reciprocal fields of study. However, in this ambition, all fields prove themselves vulnerable to hasty habits of thought. To map the inter-effects of parts in a composite system entails more than an agile mind; it requires a moral interest and even a sort of personality. As George Orwell observes, “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”2 Since 1970, Cable has dedicated himself to that struggle, and he has done so with elan, humor, modesty, and industry.This special issue of The Chaucer Review celebrates Cable’s work and career. His forty-year performance as a teacher and mentor molded generations of academics from Terry Brogan to Ad Putter, and his five-decade record of scholarship has refined and reoriented the space of critical inquiry in metrics and medieval studies with its reach, rigor, and dexterity. From the beginning, Cable has engaged the most recalcitrant questions in the history of English prosody and resolved them with a delight in nuance and an appreciation for historical and aesthetic contexts conspicuously absent in much of the philological literature. In doing so, he has shown that subjects regarded prejudicially as an irrelevance in all but the most arid, inscrutable scholarship may harbor questions of lively, widespread significance for all audiences. In 1986, in a series of presentations, he challenged long-standing assumptions about the fourteenth-century alliterative line and offered a new narrative of alliterative verse that reclaimed its varieties of meter as a prestige array of the highest literary achievement.3 Critics had long dismissed the internal structure of the alliterative line as slovenly or whimsical, an ad hoc tool recruited to serve dubious cultural and aesthetic ends. Cable establishes that the line’s two major internal parts, the a- and b-verses, adhere strictly to a set of prescriptive, asymmetric rules constraining the number and placement of dips and lifts, or weaker and stronger beats, a finding independently confirmed by Hoyt Duggan that same year.4 In 1991, Cable published The English Alliterative Tradition, his second monograph and a study documenting connections among Old and Middle English prosodies that offers, among other insights, the claim that Old English meter is syllabic rather than accentual and continuous with the meters of Middle English alliterative verse—a claim bolstered by Cable’s wary distinction between epiphenomenal outputs of a metrical grammar (or superficial byproducts rather than formal first principles) and a metrical grammar’s actual and active parameters.5 In 2007, Cable returned to the alliterative line, locating a key constraint on the final dip of the b-verse that clarifies the line’s logical structure and showing that, as in Old English, Middle English meters control for syllable weight, a feature of the language no longer operative in the phonological grammar of any dialect of the period and therefore, as Eric Weiskott describes it, a sort of “phantom.”6 Cable demonstrates that this constraint plays an essential role in the artistry and expressive potential of the alliterative line and in the integrity of meter as a temporal and perceptual event. That year represents something of an annus mirabilis, with major publications by Nicolay Yakovlev and by Ad Putter, Myra Stokes, and Judith Jefferson corroborating Cable’s results.7As these contributions attest, Cable attends assiduously to the interplay of description and theory, careful to note the tendency to lock oneself into systems of notation that beg the question rather than challenge the model. This tendency is particularly pronounced in historical metrics, in which methods are prone to confirming the absence or presence of a pattern already assumed to be absent or present in the data. As a corrective to this confirmation bias, Cable has consistently stressed the human, cultural functions of meter. Where evidence for a pattern arises through technical analysis, that evidence must be consonant with, and informative for, historical and aesthetic contexts on which medieval studies depends. One may think of this practice as a principle of intuitive access. If a lay reader cannot enter the conversation, then the argument likely conceals something specious. And if a theory requires overly elaborate methods to describe a meter, then the description likely is suspect, and the theory almost certainly is in error. Simple tools, Cable contends, rarely fail us, and one does well to draft techniques that reflect the intuitive processes of transmission that surely define the audition and performance of medieval metrical art. This modus operandi has led Cable to regard many intransigent problems as clues about how better to align questions of metrical change with codicology, textual criticism, hermeneutics, and poetics.Cable’s work on Old English meter offers an especially striking instance. For more than two centuries, scholars have struggled to explain the placement of clitics in clausal positions throughout the half-lines of the verse. Clitics are small, light words, such as prepositions and determiners, that attach to a phrasal head. However, in Old English meter, they sometimes migrate to positions that should not host them syntactically. Whereas philologists typically seek only a grammar to generate the extant distribution, Cable seeks both the grammar and an answer to the question of how one must think in Old English metrical forms such that these distributions spontaneously arise in the performance of the art. The difference in approach is subtle but significant. Since the 1970s, historical metrics has operated on the model of generative grammar to identify and reconstruct formal sets of rules for metrical systems. This generative approach introduces a laudable standard of empirical rigor, but it also divorces metrics from literature as a historically conditioned form of culture. Indeed, because it assumes an isomorphism, or one-to-one structural relationship, between a language and its meter, it forces questions of literary style ultimately to reduce to questions of linguistic structure, and leads prosody into a dubious practice of technical analysis disconnected from and uninterested in the scholarship and theory of literature. As a consequence, despite their descriptive power, such grammars are mechanical and counterintuitive as models of literary style. Since the 1970s, Cable has worked to complement the algorithms of generative grammar with models of the aesthetic and cultural conditions within which attested patterns organically occur and unattested patterns do not.8 In his work on Old and Middle English meters, Cable focuses on small problems that test that veracity of the formal, theoretical systems on which they depend: the distribution and count of lifts and dips in an alliterative line, the length of vowels in the alliterative line’s final dip, the serial order of ascending lifts in the Old English hemistich, and the presence or absence of nonmetrical syllables in the half-line.9 Cable concedes that historical metrics must give an exact description of these patterns and that such descriptions issue from a formal grammar. However, to be reasonably confident that the model describes actual structure and not the shadow of its own programming, one must attend to these problems because the model invests disproportionate weight in them. One might call these problems pressure points in a metrical theory. They are test cases for theoretical frameworks, and they have long attracted Cable’s attention because they serve as expedient loci for exploring how to think about meter as a human, and therefore a cultural and bodily, experience. This practice offers an economical alternative to a generative program and invites literary perspectives on linguistic questions, where a generative program precludes those very questions as mud in the water and aims to minimize such interference as noise in the signal.Cable’s alternative approach reclaims accessibility in metrics, restores metrics to the field of literature, and reframes metrics as a cultural history embodied in real persons. For this reason, his research has targeted these pressure points, probing them for rules in a formal grammar and for patterns of culture one may call literature. In an early essay published in Modern Philology, Cable explores how anacrusis may prove less an impediment to understanding Old English verse than a key to unlocking its secret.10 In that article, Cable argues that anacrusis as practiced in such poems as Beowulf must be phonologically licensed (it must obey the rules of the Mercian dialect), but it must also boost the perceptual strength of the line, making the line easier to parse. In anacrusis, the unprompted appearance of an extra, nonmetrical syllable at the beginning of a line tests the predicted distribution in a data set and the theoretical framework that predicts that distribution. A strict linguistic rationale will not suffice: although it accounts for the distribution, it fails to explain why the pattern arises. Cable’s solution appeals to the perceptual advantage a literary device can offer an audience organizing real-time stimuli and refigures the model to test the cognitive and not just the linguistic conditions that tolerate a variation from a norm. Similarly, Cable’s work on Kaluza’s Law in Old English, a model of the environments in which short syllables may comprise a lift (typically a prohibited pattern in Old English), identifies such patterns as the logical consequences of prior cognitive constraints on language processing. Again, the motivating interest is not what the pattern is, but rather, given what the pattern is, how a mind must think or what it must know to recognize the pattern as an acceptable part of meter and culture—a question Cable explores still more vigorously in a recent article entitled “How to Find Rhythm on a Piece of Paper.” Collected in the volume Critical Rhythm: The Poetics of a Literary Life Form edited by Ben Glaser and Jonathan Culler, this article asks not what meter is but rather what it does and what one must know in order for it to do what it does.11 Noting that meter is an embodied series of perceptual events rather than a formal textual object, Cable outlines a program for attending both to experiential time in meter and to the body as a literal site for metrical knowledge.Even as a junior scholar, Cable served as an ambassador for why meter matters—why it is no trivial or pedantic exercise but an essential part of the literary adventure—and for how one may generously explore meter as a literary phenomenon and show audiences how a niche interest in syllables and beats informs some of the most urgent queries in medieval studies. Metrists do not study clicks in a Platonic clock but rather the neural timing of bodies that make and consume literatures and are, in a real sense, the literature they make. In Cable’s work, a confluence of methodologies illuminates the most promising practices of twenty-first-century metrical study and maps paths in and out of medieval studies, speculating on points of contact among concurrent methods and inviting interdisciplinary conversation on such questions as why literary forms change and how one recovers them.Today, medieval studies approaches an inflection point in interdisciplinary approaches to literature and language. Building on Cable’s work, historical metrists are now capable of telling more and better stories about where and how formal systems evolve in both networks of competing codes and multiply accessed literacy strategies, and these stories offer an invaluable chance to share the gains of metrical reconstruction with a wider audience of medievalists, even as they challenge the disciplinary reflex to confine knowledge to the sealed hermeticism of academic shells and insular specializations. From Cable’s example, and from the articles in this issue, medieval studies may reconcile competing histories of English poetry that arise alike from literary-critical and philological perspectives, fostering collaboration in pursuit of a common goal.With that goal as its focus, this issue adopts two complementary objectives. First, it takes up interrelated problems in the reconstruction and description of Old and Middle English meters that Cable locates at the intersection of prosody and literary history. These problems foreground a neglected interdependence between metrical and non-metrical matters and underscore opportunities for metrists and non-metrists to collaborate in an integrated field. Second, the issue explores these case studies as possible paths forward for an interdisciplinary historical metrics as a way of understanding the challenge of encountering the past. With five articles from a diverse group of scholars, the issue knits together these goals by situating each in a basic ontological question with direct epistemological implications. Where or in what does meter truly inhere? Is meter a linguistic artifact recoverable or knowable primarily as sound and sense, or is it more elusive (a phenomenological action in a mindscape) and more intimate (a movement in one’s own body)? And how does literary style inform or reflect the outputs of formal and cultural systems? Each question raised in the articles follows from an insight gleaned from Cable: particular problems in the reconstruction of medieval meters encode a sort of metadata in which the methods and values of historical metrics embed themselves in formal structure. The articles target two such problems: formal salience in the metrical codes of medieval verse, and the optimization of a percept for delivery to an audience in the medieval context. Each problem comprises a pressure point on which the field exerts its force and in which the strengths and weaknesses of its methods and approaches reveal themselves. As a matter of historical knowledge, it matters minimally whether Chaucer’s line, for instance, permits a beat to move from the second position to the first. However, asking whether Chaucer’s line permits such a device coaxes to the surface contradictions and assumptions about how one knows Chaucer’s line in the first place. Any inquiry into Chaucer’s meter must proceed from that question. And similarly, to explain the irregular line endings in Piers Plowman or the curious patterns of punctuation in Old English verse, one must treat metrical reconstruction as a hypothesis of how poets and audiences think. Historical metrics is an act of epistemological recovery as much as it is a linguistic and literary analysis.A robust (and genuinely literary) approach to the study of meter obliges a redefinition of the metrical beat as an embodied event or moment of mental time. This definition relocates empirical or theoretical questions in the study of meter within the discourse of literary style and historical criticism. Essays by Eric Weiskott, Ian Cornelius, and Noriko Inoue address this challenge by modeling preconditions by which a meter may be understood by its historical audience; essays by Rob Fulk and Nicholas Myklebust complement this task by presenting dynamic alternatives to the static templates of medieval meters and, in their place, proposing interactive cultures of stylistic literacy and literary value. Together, these lines of argument trace a story of medieval English meter more fluid than rigid philological categories typically suggest. If one fails to locate meter in the context of literary study, and if one refuses to acknowledge metrical change as an embodiment of both cultural and cognitive processes, then a tractable ontology of medieval meter remains out of reach. Indeed, medieval studies and historical metrics must confirm not only their compatibility but also their interdependence, for as linguistic and literary analyses become less accessible to each other, the gains of each may be lost to wider audiences, and theoretical and empirical work of much promise may become parochial or obscure. To avoid this trap, one returns to the notion of prosody as epistemology and asks not merely what a meter is, but also how metrical change reflects a distinct style of knowing. Because a change in a metrical system reflects a change in cultural knowledge about that system, any description of the change must account for the real differences among systems or states—Old English meter is not Middle English meter and alliterative meter is not accentual-syllabic meter—and for the equally real interchange or continuity among systems. Further, such a description must educe a personhood from the formal proxy of language, as syllables and beats approximate real-time decisions in the mind and preferences in a culture, and it must frame metrical change as a shared or innovated cognitive style.Rob Fulk adapts this model to discuss the phenomenon of “aural punctuation” in Old English verse, in which a syntactic isolate fills the final half-line of a verse passage. Why would such a phenomenon arise? How did an audience understand it? How does the device affect the style of the art? And what, further, is the relationship between statistical models that predict the occurrence of aural punctuation and the stylistic preferences and practices of the literary culture? Fulk proposes that statistical models of aural punctuation fail to explain the reciprocal actions of stylistic effect and metrical type, in no small part because such models exempt the perception of verse form in an oral culture from their calculations. Placing a formal device in the context of an expressive medium, Fulk takes a particular pressure point in Old English meter and reframes it as a style of Anglo-Saxon thinking so that aural punctuation, like anacrusis, is less an intermediate representation than a reflex of aesthetic and cognitive practices. In so doing, he gives strong evidence that ostensibly impressionistic qualities of verse, such as style, can be modeled precisely if understood not as an aggregate of formal features but as a cultural action embodied in audiences—in which case, the project of historical metrics lies not in the fastidious reconstruction of past forms but in the use of those forms to reverse-engineer styles of thinking.Nicholas Myklebust likewise explores metrical effects as proxies for formal thinking to distinguish stylistic signatures in the verses of John Walton and Geoffrey Chaucer and to educe from differences in the poets’ techniques a culture of innovation in the first decade after Chaucer’s death. Where Chaucer’s meter is cagy, as in its treatment of the line’s initial offbeat, Walton’s is forceful and decisive. In its way, each tests the boundaries of late-fourteenth-century style by probing the audience for a limit in its capacity to process metrical information. The first position, or first offbeat, in all rising duple English meters constitutes a unique pressure point. And as aural punctuation in Old English comprises a pressure point to test hypotheses of Anglo-Saxon style and recover the phenomenology of Anglo-Saxon audiences and poets, so the pressure points of metrical inversion and stress clash in Chaucer’s and Walton’s meters invite readers to explore what these poets gain by invoking it ambivalently or conclusively, and, more pressing, what such a threshold tells us about metrical culture and formal knowledge in the early years of the English long line. By attending to pressure points in a metrical system, one finds that not all parts of a line are equal; some require subtler, more strenuous, or more complicated styles of thinking. When a literary culture reorganizes its practices, new (or newly modified) styles of thinking reshuffle the prosodic input to a meter, and as a result, multiple candidates for metrical forms emerge. Those candidates then compete in the most sensitive parts of the structure, and metrical change targets these parts precisely because they are vulnerable. Fulk highlights the verse-final syntactic isolate as especially sensitive; Myklebust looks to stress clash and inversion in the decasyllabic line. Both present metrical change as a matter of transition rather than rupture that inheres in the shared epistemologies of cultural codes of thinking in and with form, in which metrical positions act not as inert formal markers but as cognitive artifacts.Eric Weiskott leverages the explanatory power of an embodied metrical position to model the gradual development of Old English into Middle English alliterative meter. Focusing on the Old English Exodus, Lawman’s Brut, and Patience, Weiskott examines four complications of the Old English metrical system—resolution, verbal prefixes, irregular verses of five positions, and hypermetrical verses—to recast the evolution of one system into another as a series of “accumulated mental experiences that generate and sustain a metrical tradition” (p. 214), a logical implication of the hypothesis that metrical positions serve as outward signs of implicit cognitive structures that underlie canonical rhythms.Nowhere is this claim more contested and paradoxically better evidenced than in the twin eccentricities of alliterative meter: occasional hitches in the final dip of the b-verse, notably in Piers Plowman, and the so-called “extra-long” dips consisting of four or more weak syllables in the a-verse. Noriko Inoue sketches an asymmetry between the a- and b-verses in an alliterative line, contrasting the b-verse ban on a long final dip with the a-verse allowance of an expanded, line-internal dip. In a careful analysis of the Gawain poet’s technique, Inoue describes a constraint on the extended dips that bolsters the characteristic asymmetry of the alliterative line by compensating for a lack of a long initial or medial dip in the a-verse. In the work of the Gawain poet, the metrical position brokers this compensation, acting as a gatekeeper for perceptual and attentional cues and signaling to the audience what mental structures are most expedient in each case for “thinking” the poem. In this sense, the metrical position bridges two seemingly opposed traditions, alliterative and accentual-syllabic, inducing in each a certain optimal percept for the verse design. Myklebust argues that Walton’s use of schwa to target the most sensitive metrical positions in the decasyllable has a ready explanation in the extra cognitive load proximate beats carry to make the line perceptible to an audience. Working from the alliterative side of the same problem, Inoue observes the same phenomenological order at work in the a-verse of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Weiskott provides a theoretical framework that unifies the two modes in a single rubric by demonstrating continuities across metrical periods as well as metrical modes.Indeed, even the tangled versification of Piers Plowman, with its bewildering gamut of metrical curiosities, offers evidence to support the prediction that metrical change is less a break in a tradition than a simple and sensible change of mind. As Ian Cornelius notes, Piers presents something of a test for descriptions of alliterative meter in its handling of the final dip of the b-verse. The poem’s allowance of long final dips in the b-verse poses a problem both for those who would reconcile the license to the expected trochaic pattern one finds in such poems as Patience and Cleanness,12 and for those who would describe it as a formal irregularity.13 Cornelius proffers an alternative to each by examining the long dips in Piers not merely as serial positional structures but also as semantic and expository performances in which syllabic quality and word division inform and restrict the strange, singular cadence of Langland’s prosody. A metrical glitch such as the long dip in Piers reveals much about the style of thinking required for such forms to emerge, and by considering openly where and how they emerge, one gleans some understanding of what it meant for late medieval poets not merely to think meter, nor merely for audiences to hear or read it, but also for how such competencies comprised an infrastructure of late medieval innovation. Indeed, much of what may appear fuzzy or baroque about medieval style may simply be a misunderstanding about forms of metrical knowledge. Where Weiskott’s and Fulk’s arguments verify a shared set of resources among diachronic meters, and where Inoue and Myklebust furnish evidence for shared resources, Cornelius, in his meticulous discussion of Piers, stages metrical thinking as the sine qua non of metrical analysis and metrical production and reception—that is, as the essential condition of knowing for scholar, poet, and audience, whether Anglo Saxon or Ricardian, alliterativist or syllabist. Cornelius shows that the structures of such formal systems harbor a stunning paradox: from Chaucer to Langland to the anonymous practitioners of Old and Middle English poetry, medieval meters are more regular than formerly believed, and more porous than formerly imagined. Evidence for this claim lies in the challenge of Langland’s cat-and-mouse tactic of using contrary cues to move audiences abruptly from one set of parsing strategies to another. In the case of the Piers, finding rhythm on a piece of paper could hardly be more intuitive. And yet medieval audiences delighted in the task. They could not have succeeded, and they certainly could not have enjoyed the challenge, had they not had access to the codes of competing metrical cultures and the mental structures such codes require. In this sense, Piers embodies the sameness-in-difference that meter, as a mental event, enacts and encodes.Together, these articles challenge three persistent hypotheses about medieval aesthetics: first, that Old and Middle English constitute autonomous periods marked by metrical discontinuity; second, that alliterative and non-alliterative meters comprise formally distinct aesthetic modes that do not interact; and third, that medieval meters tend to be too squishy or too rigid—either spilled water or relentless clockwork—to offer evidence of evolving cultural, aesthetic, and epistemological styles.These articles point to more promising conclusions. First, from the internal organization of Walton’s line, one can infer that any clear or easy notion of period or mode cannot apply, for although Walton’s line obviously is medieval and accentual-syllabic, its specific style of coherence—how it is built and used for expressive purposes—spans what one casually calls periods and modes, with resources shared with aural punctuation in Old English and perceptual cues in alliterative dips. This fuzziness invites a more global consideration of how best to situate Chaucer, in particular, with respect to the legacies of Old English verse style and Middle English alliterative meter.Second, evidence of multiply accessed literacies in competing metrical modes suggests that scribes, audiences, and poets understood both alliterative and non-alliterative forms, negotiating the subtleties of each with such fluency and ease that one is likely mistaken even to think of these traditions as autonomous. It is likelier that each appropriated the style and structure of the other, forcing later audiences to ask not only what the grammars of these meters are, but also, and more important, what their interactions reveal about the boundaries implicit in medieval aesthetic experiences and practices. Are such boundaries imaginary? Or do they reflect real trends in the production and consumption of medieval art?Third, by reading the local, we access the global. Through the lens of Walton, one sees a world refigured to include, rather than exclude, a complex network of inheritances implied in the mechanisms of metrical change. The principles gleaned by examining the structures of meter that persist across periods—or that survive changes in the aesthetic, linguistic, and phenomenological grammars of a given historical and cultural niche—serve as context for interpreting the singular or historically specific inflections that distinguish one moment from the next and one mode or poet from another. A description of Walton’s accentual-syllabic meter remains incomplete if it lacks an account of alliterative poetics, just as an analysis of Middle English must encompass the continuities essential to understanding how and why aesthetic conditions in Old English evolved into those of Middle English. Such a global perspective aims to map a space for the intersection of historical metrics and literary theory in medieval studies, a disciplinary metrical position in which philologists and critics draw reciprocally on each other’s work to probe deeply into the basic assumptions of the field and foster a consonance among the paths forward by supplying a complementary rather than a contradictory framework for the conduct and delivery of our deepest-rooted questions and values.