Christopher Cannon
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198779438
- eISBN:
- 9780191824562
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198779438.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature, World Literature
Middle English poetry was grammaticalized because it sometimes took the form of basic exercises of literacy training. This is apparent in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, which can look at ...
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Middle English poetry was grammaticalized because it sometimes took the form of basic exercises of literacy training. This is apparent in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, which can look at times–which was at times–a sequence of translation exercises joined together by an overarching grammatical metaphor. The movement from Latin to English verse in Piers Plowman also makes clear how these basic exercises trained the schoolboy to write his own English poetry. Although we often describe the “birth of Middle English poetry” as the function of some large-scale development in language or cultural history, that birth necessarily occurred again and again, in the exercises of an individual schoolboy who responded to a Latin prompt with English verse of his own. The frequent translation of English into Latin in Piers Plowman also makes clear that many of the “quotations” in this poem previously impossible to source were written by Langland himself.Less
Middle English poetry was grammaticalized because it sometimes took the form of basic exercises of literacy training. This is apparent in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, which can look at times–which was at times–a sequence of translation exercises joined together by an overarching grammatical metaphor. The movement from Latin to English verse in Piers Plowman also makes clear how these basic exercises trained the schoolboy to write his own English poetry. Although we often describe the “birth of Middle English poetry” as the function of some large-scale development in language or cultural history, that birth necessarily occurred again and again, in the exercises of an individual schoolboy who responded to a Latin prompt with English verse of his own. The frequent translation of English into Latin in Piers Plowman also makes clear that many of the “quotations” in this poem previously impossible to source were written by Langland himself.
