Editing Alliterative verse (section)

=== Historical context ===
The survival—or revival—of alliterative verse in 14th Century England makes it, like Iceland, an outlier in medieval Christian culture, which came to be dominated by Latin and Romance verse forms and literary traditions.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Pearsall |first1=Derek |last2=Burrow |first2=J. A. |title=Medieval Writers and Their Work: Middle English Literature and Its Background 1100-1500 |journal=The Modern Language Review |date=January 1986 |volume=81 |issue=1 |pages=164 |doi=10.2307/3728781 |jstor=3728781 }}</ref><ref name="Weiskott 2016"/> Alliterative verse in post-Conquest England had to compete with imported, often French-derived forms in rhyming stanzas, reflecting what must have seemed like the common practice of the rest of Christendom.<ref>{{cite book |doi=10.1093/oso/9780198827429.001.0001 |title=The Oxford History of Poetry in English |date=2023 |isbn=978-0-19-882742-9 |editor-last1=Cooper |editor-last2=Edwards |editor-first1=Helen |editor-first2=Robert R. }}{{page needed|date=December 2023}}</ref> Despite these disadvantages, alliterative verse became the preferred English meter for historical romances, especially those concerned with the so-called Arthurian "Matter of Britain",<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Kossick |first1=Shirley |title=Epic and the Middle English Alliterative Revival |journal=English Studies in Africa |date=September 1979 |volume=22 |issue=2 |pages=71–82 |doi=10.1080/00138397908690761 }}</ref><ref>{{cite book |doi=10.1515/9783110432466-005 |chapter=Text-Types and Formal Features |title=Handbook of Arthurian Romance |date=2017 |last1=Moran |first1=Patrick |pages=59–78 |isbn=978-3-11-043246-6 }}</ref> and to be a common mode for political protest, through Piers Plowman and a variety of  allegories, satires, and political prophesies.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Weiskott |first1=Eric |title=Political Prophecy and the Form of Piers Plowman |journal=Viator |date=January 2019 |volume=50 |issue=1 |pages=207–247 |doi=10.1484/j.viator.5.121362 |s2cid=225004957 }}</ref><ref>{{cite book |doi=10.4324/9780203392737_chapter_xv |chapter=Piers Plowman and Other Alliterative Poems |title=The Middle Ages |series=A Literary History of England |date=1967 |pages=240–248 |isbn=978-0-203-39651-3 |editor1-first=Albert C. |editor1-last=Baugh |editor2-first=Kemp |editor2-last=Malone }}</ref> However, as with Icelandic [[Rímur|rimur]], many 14th-Century poems combine alliteration with rhyming stanzas.<ref name="Duggan 1977 223–247">{{cite journal |last1=Duggan |first1=Hoyt N. |title=Strophic Patterns in Middle English Alliterative Poetry |journal=Modern Philology |date=February 1977 |volume=74 |issue=3 |pages=223–247 |doi=10.1086/390723 |s2cid=161856195 }}</ref> Increasingly, however, the alliterative verse tradition was marginalized relative to other English verse traditions, most notably the metrical, rhyming tradition associated with Geoffrey Chaucer.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Weiskott |first=Eric |title=Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650 |publisher=University of Pennsylvania Press |year=2021}}{{page needed|date=December 2023}}</ref>