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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 March 2022
Medieval poetic forms defy classification, and yet medievalists trade in postmedieval formalist taxonomies—sometimes without reflecting on their history. This essay takes up the case of the “bob and wheel,” a rhyming flourish best known from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas. This form, which has no given name or firmly set shape in the manuscripts in which it is found, was codified by the philologist Edwin Guest in 1838. This essay tracks the history of the interpretation of the bob and wheel across time, from the Middle Ages to the present day, and finds that it has been imagined as a tail, a game, and a cog in a machine. These phantasmic images have not only represented but also influenced readers’ experience of this form—reflecting and diffracting, bringing before-unseen patterns of meaning into focus and resonating with before-unheard synchronous frequencies.
I would like to thank Katherine Churchill for asking the question that got me started and Arthur Bahr for showing me how to find the answer.