Chris Cannon (English & Classics, Krieger School of Arts & Sciences)

Sayeed Choudhury (Sheridan Libraries)

Mark Patton (Sheridan Libraries)

The history of English meter before 1500 has been difficult to write because we cannot tell from the way poetry was written down how it sounded. Geoffrey Chaucer is the central figure in this story, the inventor of iambic pentameter, the staple of English verse until the 20th century, even though the norms of Middle English grammar suggest that his verse was still sometimes irregular. This project will use a database of all of Chaucer’s words tagged for its grammatical function (and his contemporary John Gower), now tagging each word metrical function—compared throughout with the metrical function of Gower’s words as a control—to ask what happens to Middle English grammar if Chaucer’s verse was always regular.