Professor Ad Putter of Bristol University’s Department of English has been awarded £357,430 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for a project that will investigate the verse forms of Middle English romances.
Together with Chaucerian verse and alliterative poetry, the romances are one of the three great tributaries of narrative verse in medieval England. The tradition began with King Horn, written around 1220, and continued into the 1570s when the stream of printed editions of verse romances finally dried up.
The romances were originally intended for a listening audience and, although they are still widely read today, modern readers no longer inhabit their sound worlds. This research project aims to rediscover these lost worlds through studying the aural qualities – rhyme and rhythm – of the poetry.
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