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Abstract: We are pleased to present The Elusive Progress of Prosodical Study: Essays in Honor of Thomas Cable, a special issue organized by guest editor Nicholas Myklebust. Taken together, the articles of this issue celebrate Professor Thomas Cable as impactful scholar, teacher, mentor, and friend. For over five decades, Cable’s precise analyses have guided and refined the development of English metrical studies, adding to our knowledge of medieval poetics and authorial practice, particularly as regards historical linguistics and grammar, and the prosodics of alliterative meter from Old English to Middle English.The subjects chosen by the contributors to this issue testify to the energetic scope and influence of Cable’s ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-17T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: 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 ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-17T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Whereas Thomas Cable’s work on Old English poetic meter has greatly furthered our understanding of the underlying principles that govern verse construction, progress in the study of the relation of meter to poetic style has been considerably more elusive. Relatively few studies have ventured to draw any correlation between Old English poetic meter and poetic style. In a forty-page section on Old English in a bibliography of studies devoted to Germanic alliterative meters, hardly more than a page is required to cover the subject of style.1 Among the works listed are studies either affirming or denying a role to cursus in Old English poetry, studies of metrical and alliterative variation as poetic devices, studies ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-17T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: When Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400, the decasyllable he invented in the late 1370s and raised to prominence in the 1380s and 1390s lay precariously in the hands of scribes and rivals.1 The new metrical line introduced into vernacular English an unprecedented host of rhythmic resources by which poets might test the boundaries of formal experimentation, but it also relied tenuously on esoteric rules of grammar that survived solely as vestiges in metrical codes.2 In particular, technical matters such as the function of final -e proved vital to the meter’s early reception. As a structural tool, final -e clarified the line’s shape, procuring weak syllables, or offbeats, that draw attention to the prominent strong ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-17T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Things change. This fact incurs an interpretive problem for the historical disciplines. To distinguish phases in a historical series is not yet to explain how the series came to be formed. An accounting of difference over time differs from an exposition of internal mechanics, just as a collection of documents and snapshots differs from a biography. The drawing of contrasts approaches the historical object from the outside, assigning it always to one side of a retroactively erected frontier in time. Evidence for migration across the frontier, from there to here, can only be logged at the port of exit and the port of entry. The journey remains undocumented. In contrast to that, the narration of continuity attempts ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-17T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Our understanding of Middle English alliterative verse meter has greatly advanced since the late 1980s, when Hoyt N. Duggan and Thomas Cable independently discovered the existence of rules governing the b-verse of the alliterative long line. The rules govern the b-verses of the poems that belong to so-called “classical” alliterative corpus, which consists mainly of poems composed in the North or the North-West Midlands, such as the works of the Gawain poet, Alexander B, and The Siege of Jerusalem. Thanks to their breakthrough studies, the subject has gained renewed interest among scholars. Following Cable and Duggan, a number of important studies, including those by coauthors Ad Putter, Judith Jefferson, and Myra ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-17T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In a concise and elegant argument published in 1991, Thomas Cable demonstrated that the lines of Cleanness, a fourteenth-century poem in English alliterative verse, have a uniform final cadence.1 Whatever rhythmic variety may unfold within the poetic line, each line closes with a trochaic constituent.2 The elegance of the demonstration consisted in Cable’s way of moving outward from a basic structural feature of alliterative meter, universally acknowledged in modern scholarship. Lines of alliterative verse are bipartite, consisting of two unequal half-lines divided by a fixed caesura. Certain words, Cable showed, appear routinely at the end of the first half-line (a-verse), but never, or almost never, at the end ... Read More PubDate: 2023-04-17T00:00:00-05:00
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