The years 2016 and 2017 have respectively witnessed the publication of two stimulating Cambridge University Press monographs on medieval English literary history: Eric Weiskott’s English Alliterative Verse: Poetic Tradition and Literary History (2016) and Ian Cornelius’s Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter (2017). There is much that these two books have in common. They are both fashionably written, both have much to say about metre and, most importantly, they bo...