Quantifying Prosodic Variability in Middle English Alliterative Poetry

Interest in the mathematical structure of poetry dates back to at least the 19 century: after retiring from his mathematics position, J. J. Sylvester wrote a book on prosody called The Laws of Verse. Today there is interest in the computer analysis of poems, and this paper discusses how a statistical approach can be applied to this task. Starting with the definition of what Middle English alliteration is, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and William Langland’s Piers Plowman are used to illustrate the methodology. Theory first developed for analyzing data from a Riemannian manifold turns out to be applicable to strings allowing one to compute a generalized mean and variance for textual data, which is applied to the poems above. The ratio of these two variances produces the analogue of the F test, and resampling allows p-values to be estimated. Consequently, this methodology provides a way to compare prosodic variability between two texts.