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Ian Cornelius. Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, x + 219 pp., 6 tables, £ 75.00.

Reading Ian Cornelius’ book is always an enjoyable experience. He is a fluent and elegant writer, and confident enough in his material to turn reviews of scholarship into smooth and controlled narratives. Particularly enjoyable are his discussions of seventeenththrough to nineteenth-century approaches (46–53) and a deft review of contemporary work on Middle English metre (79–80). Along with such engagement with past work, there is a strong sense of this volume as taking part in an ongoing conversation with others in the field, in particular Eric Weiskott (a Boston colleague of Cornelius’) and Nicolay Yakovlev, an increasingly significant figure in the field of metrics despite his major work remaining, as yet, unpublished. The conversational mode often adopted here – discursive, doubting, suggestive – is highly productive and welcome. In broad terms, the major contribution of Yakovlev’s doctoral thesis, which has stimulated this conversation, is the demonstration that the later medieval shift away from the Old English alliterative long line is fundamentally a result of linguistic change, not due to a break in the alliterative tradition. Poetic metre is, then, a function of language, and the literary history of England is one of cultural continuity and individual experimentation, not one of breaks and reboots. This finding has enabled a number of studies exploring the continuity of literary ideas and engaging closely with metrical development, most notably Weiskott’s monograph on very similar subjects to both Yakovlev’s thesis and the current subject of review. The theoretical underpinning comes almost entirely from Yakovlev; Cornelius’ particular contribution here is his clear understanding of the continuously developing, permanently transitional nature of both scholarship on metrics, and metrical systems themselves. This enables him to call attention to what makes