Notes
Notes Introduction I. Scholars interested in exploring the wider breadth of alliterative writing have recently decried the undue scholarly privileging of this formal strain as ignoring the diversity of alliterative poetic traditions: Salter, English and International, 170-79; Mcintosh, "Early Middle English Alliterative Verse"; Hanna, "Defining." I do not wish to further this privilege by selecting only these poems out for treatment , but it does seem to me that the shared themes that mark them as noteworthy within (rather than exemplary of) alliterative writing have been underexplored. To see what makes these alliterative romances unusual within alliterative poetry arguably will cast light on the breadth of the tradition itself For a study which admirably explores the breadth and variety of alliterative poetry, see Scattergood, Lost Tradition. 2. Lawton, Middle English Alliterative Poetry, 1-19. 3. A historical interest has been consistently noted in descriptions of late medieval alliterative romance and the most recent assessments make it a major theme. To my knowledge, however, this book is the first to pursue it within and between separate poems and to discuss it in terms of the performance of past/present confrontations. In his 1970 Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture ("Nature of Alliterative Poetry'') Geoffrey Shepherd compellingly generalized about "these backward gazing poets" (68) who play in genre-transcending ways along the continuum between "moral insight and historical truth" (72). Ralph Hanna argues that alliterative poetry in general pursues its historic investigations in order to provoke suspicion about the violent foundations of lordship. "Alliterative Poetry." Within Lawton's collection, both Derek Pearsall and Rosalind Field treat historicity as a distinguishing mark. Middle English Alliterative Poetry, +5-+7, 57. +· Rosalind Field discusses the correspondences between Anglo-Norman and alliterative romance and the ways their concern with historical specificity sets them apart from continental romance: "Anglo-Norman Background;" Susan Crane explores how Anglo-Norman romance and its Middle English descendants construct specifically insular romance traditions that are very useful in foregrounding alliterative romance. Insular Romance. My study does not centralize alliterative dream-visions, allegories, and satires, such as Winner and Wastoure, Piers Plowman and its followers, the didactic Cleanness and Patience, and the otherworldly Pearleven though Pearl spectacularly stages the incommensurabilities between historical and eschatological ways of knowing through a difficult conversation with a dead Notes to Pages 2-5 girl. For a detailed study which historicizes Pearl within the milieu of the court of Richard II, see Bowers, "Pearl in its Royal Setting;' and The Politics ofPearl. I omitted other alliterative romances, such as William of Palerne and the indefatigable Destruction ofTroy, for reasons of space. 5. Lawton, "Unity"; Hanna, "Defining;' 55· 6. Stephen H. A. Shepherd interestingly suggests that the romance theme of the value of others and outsiders (virtuous pagans, chivalric sultans, admirable enemies, etc.) links Langland's Piers Plowman to many of the romances which accompany it in manuscripts. "Langland's Romances?' 7. The poems I have chosen experiment along each of these three generic axes; the third in particular is one of the most profitable tensions in the whole genre and is a particular crux in St. Erkenwald, which uses the soteriological framework of the inventio genre to probe at the foundational strategies of civic institutions . Monika Otter shows how historically self-conscious and institutionally strategic the inventio genre (and its textual/historical extensions) can be; her Inventiones ends by showing how St. Erkenwald transforms the conventions ofthe hagiographical inventio genre by metaphorically expanding the range of past-present interactions and thus fostering a historical self-consciousness that can acknowledge historical difference. Inventiones, 157-58. 8. Patterson, Negotiating the Past; Patterson, Chaucer; Knapp, Social Contest; Strohm, Social Chaucer; Strohm, Rochon's Arrow; Strohm England's Empty Throne; Fradenburg, "'Voice Memorial'"; Carolyn Dinshaw discusses the late twentiethcentury use ofthe medieval as a space for the abjection ofthe primitive and the perverse . Getting Medieval, 183-206. 9. See Chapter r. ro. Lawton, Middle English Alliterative Poetry, 2 n. Hanna, "Defining;' 55. 12. Paul Strohm approaches this incident psychoanalytically as a Lancastrian resignification of Richard II's deposition in "Trouble with Richard" and it becomes a centerpiece in his book, England's Empty Throne, ror-27. 13. The Brut, 2: 373· r+. Versus Rhythmici, in Memorials ofHenry V, 63-75. 15. Froissart, Chronicle, 398. r6. Ibid., 399. 17. Elmhami Liber Metricus de Henrico Quinto, in Memorials ofHenry V, 158; Walsingham, St. Albans Chronicle, II7. r8. Strohm mobilizes Kantorowicz's description of the king's two bodies to argue that the haste and comparative scantiness...
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