Rhythmic cognition in late medieval lyrics
BL Ms Harley 2253
pp. 577-608
in: Thomas Blake (ed), The Palgrave handbook of affect studies and textual criticism, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
This chapter examines the meter of the English vernacular lyrics collected in British Library MS Harley 2253, a fourteenth-century verse anthology. A long-standing problem in the history of English prosody, the Harley manuscript's meter seems ambivalently to belong to competing verse cultures, one alliterative and the other accentual-syllabic. By recontextualizing this seeming hybridity in light of medieval contemplative practices, this chapter argues that the Harley lyrics recruit conflicting prosodic cues from alliterative and accentual-syllabic meters in order to arrest the biological surprise response that occurs when rhythmic predictions fail. This is done, this chapter contends, to induce an apophatic or negative stance toward analytic categories and textual events. In the tradition of via negative theology, the verse performs a metrical "unknowing" in which wonder displaces certainty.