Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
11-14-2023
Publication Title
The Sound of Writing
Pages
84-107
Publisher Name
Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Location
Baltimore, MD
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.
Identifier
9781421447261
Recommended Citation
Cornelius, Ian. “Prosodic Protocols and Interruptions of Them in Piers Plowman.” In The Sound of Writing, edited by Christopher Cannon and Steven Justice, 84–107. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Copyright Statement
© 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press
Comments
Author Posting. Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press. This material first appeared in The Sound of Writing. Christopher Cannon and Stephen Justice. pp. 84-107. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.