Alliterative Revivals is the first full-length study of the sophisticated historical consciousness of late medieval alliterative romance. Drawing from historicism, feminism, performance studies, and postcolonial theory, Christine Chism argues that these poems animate British history by reviving and acknowledging potentially threatening figures from the medieval past—pagan judges, primeval giants, Greek knights, Jewish forefathers, Egyptian sorcerers, and dead ancestors. In addressing the ways alliterative poems centralize history—the dangerous but profitable commerce of the present with the past—Chism's book shifts the emphasis from the philological questions that have preoccupied studies of alliterative romance and offers a new argument about the uses of alliterative poetry, how it appealed to its original producers and audiences, and why it deserves attention now. Alliterative Revivals examines eight poems: St. Erkenwald, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Wars of Alexander, The Siege of Jerusalem, the alliterative Morte Arthure, De Tribus Regibus Mortuis, The Awntyrs off Arthure, and Somer Sunday. Chism both historicizes these texts and argues that they are themselves obsessed with history, dramatizing encounters between the ancient past and the medieval present as a way for fourteenth-century contemporaries to examine and rethink a range of ideologies. These poems project contemporary conflicts into vivid, vast, and spectacular historical theaters in order to reimagine the complex relations between monarchy and nobility, ecclesiastical authority and lay piety, courtly and provincial culture, western Christendom and its easterly others, and the living and their dead progenitors. In this, alliterative romance joins hands with other late fourteenth-century literary texts that make trouble at the borders of aristocratic culture.

If a literary movement arises but no one notices, is it still a movement? In Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology, Dennis Wilson Wise argues that the answer is “yes.” Over the last ten decades, poets working in fantasy, science fiction, and horror have collectively brought forth a revival in alliterative poetics akin to what once happened in the mid-fourteenth century. Altogether, this anthology collects for the first time over fifty speculative poets—several of whom are previously unpublished—from across North America and Europe. Alongside such established names as C. S. Lewis, Patrick Rothfuss, Edwin Morgan, Poul Anderson, Jo Walton, P. K. Page, and W. H. Auden, this anthology includes representative texts from cultural movements such as contemporary neo-Paganism and the Society for Creative Anachronism. A lengthy critical introduction by the editor—written accessibly for a general audience—explains and contextualizes the Modern Revival for critics and readers alike, and extensive footnotes offer aids to anyone new to medieval history or Norse mythology. Overall, this indispensable anthology—the first major academic book to focus on speculative poetry—establishes where the medieval meets the modern in the hitherto unrecognized Modern Alliterative Revival.

A revisionary account of the 900-year-long history of a major poetic tradition, explored through metrics and literary history.

This reference is a comprehensive guide to literature written 500 to 1500 A.D., a period that gave rise to some of the world's most enduring and influential works, such as Dante's Commedia, Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, and a large body of Arthurian lore and legend. While its emphasis is upon medieval English texts and society, this reference also covers Islamic, Hispanic, Celtic, Mongolian, Germanic, Italian, and Russian literature and Middle Age culture. Longer entries provide thorough coverage of major English authors such as Chaucer and Sir Thomas Malory, and of genre entries, such as drama, lyric, ballad, debate, saga, chronicle, and hagiography. Shorter entries examine particular literary works; significant kings, artists, explorers, and religious leaders; important themes, such as courtly love and chivalry; and major historical events, such as the Crusades. Each entry concludes with a brief biography. The volume closes with a list of the most valuable general works for further reading.

This volume develops G. R. Russom's contributions to early English meter and style, including his fundamental reworkings and rethinkings of accepted and oft-repeated mantras, including his word-foot theory, concern for the late medieval context for alliterative meter, and the linguistics of punctuation and translation as applied to Old English texts. Ten eminent scholars from across the field take up Russom's ideas to lead readers in new and exciting directions.