Abstract
In premodern societies artificial prosody supplied an encoding protocol for the transmission of sound in writing. Focusing on the fourteenth-century English poem Piers Plowman, this essay examines mid-stream interruption, modification, or blending of prosodic protocols. In most cases the interruption takes the form of a mid-line switch from English verse to Latin prose. In a few cases, the switch is from English verse to Latin verse. These interruptions of protocol are part of the formal artistry and multilingual facility of Piers Plowman, encoding a great range of sound and some silence. They prompt readers to re-evaluate well-justified expectations that a line beginning in a given meter will end in that same meter. They also express Langland’s basic recognition that his English meter is bipartite, analyzable into constituent parts, which may be put to independent use. Langland’s use of independent half-lines remained unsystematic and experimental, and must sometimes be excavated from behind the normalizing tendencies of scribes and editors.
| Original language | American English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | English: Faculty Publications and Other Works |
| State | Published - Nov 14 2023 |