The title of this chapter, ‘Alliterative Poetry’, deliberately evades an ‘Old Historicist’ literary formulation – indeed, perhaps the most significant ‘Old Historicist’ failure in Middle English studies. By long-standing custom, this chapter should be entitled ‘The Alliterative Revival’. Such a sobriquet presupposes that scholars know clearly what alliteration is and how it is used in Middle English literary culture, that such alliterative usage at some point had died and at some later point experienced a quasi-divine resuscitation, and that this return to life comprised a single ‘revival’. All these propositions strike me as dubious, as is a further claim, always implicit in traditional discussions of ‘The Revival’, that this was a regional poetry of the north and west.

Such formulations depend upon a classic example of abstract principle driving the construction of historical evidence – and thus, of what constitutes a literary historical problem. For in offering these propositions, ‘Old Historicist’ scholars prioritize the surviving archive on the basis of a humanistic belief in the (transhistorical) ‘literary excellence’ of certain poems (and thus, incongruously, for a tradition in the main anonymous, of godlike authors).