S a r a h S t a n bu ry
10 interrupt the action and may seem, to modern tastes, protracted. Arthur’s
S A R A H S TA N B U RY
The Gawain-poet
Cleanness, one of two homilies attributed to the Gawain-poet, ends on a
wild night of partying, spectral apparitions, and mayhem. Embellishing
an episode from the Book of Daniel, Cleanness tells how King Belshazzar
invites his own demise through his sacrilegious use of holy vessels and can-
delabra that his father, Nebuchadnezzar, plundered from the Temple of
Jerusalem. Not only are we told about Solomon’s holy vessels, as in the
biblical Book of Daniel, but we are also shown them in a description of
exceptional visual coherence. The gold cups are worked to resemble castles,
with gilded turrets and pinnacles encrusted with parrots and flowers made
of gems. The candlestick, so massive it must be brought in on a cart, is cast
in gold in the shape of a tree, its branches filled with colorful birds. Like the
vessels, the candlestick embodies spiritual, material, and aesthetic value. Its
beauty is its truth and its truth its beauty. It is, that is, a symbolic object as
well as a merely useful or beautiful one. Belshazzar’s failure, his “unclean-
ness,” lies in his failure to see these relationships. He uses the vessels at a
drunken party, and hence he dies.
Although Belshazzar makes a fatal error in his assessment of the power
of sacred objects, he is correct in his appreciation of their beauty. Delight
in the aesthetic qualities of things not only marks the account of holy
vessels in Cleanness, but also characterizes descriptions of many types
in all four of the poems that are normally identified as the work of the
anonymous Gawain-poet. The four late-fourteenth-century poems of
British Library Cotton Nero A.x., Cleanness, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight, and Patience, the other homily, are generally believed to
be the works of a single poet. This consideration is based partly on their
compilation together in one manuscript copied by a single hand and illus-
trated by a single illuminator, but also on the predominance of shared
themes and habits of style, among them long passages of descriptive enu-
meration that present, in great detail, in the surface textures of the pleas-
urable, and especially courtly, world. Indeed, descriptive passages often
139
feast in Gawain is a gorgeous picture of excess – so many dishes there is
hardly room for them on the table. Other objects of the rich life detailed
in these poems include gems and jewelry; textiles, including tapestries
and high-fashion clothing; architectural interiors and castle facades; and
chivalric equipment, such as armor and tack for horses, as witnessed in
the account of green trappings on the Green Knight’s steed. Rural land-
scapes and urban architecture are also described – the menacing forest of
Wirral in Gawain; the transformed garden in which the narrator wanders
in Pearl and the New Jerusalem that he is shown by the maiden; or the
violent storms that affl ict Noah in Cleanness or Jonah in Patience. And
as with the holy vessels in Cleanness, surface textures can veil meaning.
Things of the world appear as if organized by the gaze of viewers in the
text, yet those viewers are repeatedly cast as innocent, or like Belshazzar,
even ignorant about the significance of what they see. The Gawain-poet
engages his characters, and readers as well, in an interpretive project or,
we might say, visual hermeneutic, where places and objects are known
and presented through acts of perception. In a world of brilliant and even
illusory surfaces, the individual is very much alone.
The vivid descriptions, particularly of places, clothing, and furnishings
that might speak to courtly, aristocratic tastes, have long been noted by
scholars, some of whom have looked to that material world for clues about
the poems’ dates or authorship. While readers have agreed that the poems
are unusual in their presentation of a coherently visualized world, they have
offered different explanations of its purpose or achievement. Early com-
mentators suggested that description is essentially ornamental in service
of purely aesthetic goals. Subsequent studies recognized that the technique
of organizing space around a point of view of a character within the text
seems to offer us a commentary not only on the world but also on the
mind of the perceiver within the text. Parlayed through an eyewitness point
of view, description, especially in Gawain, turns the world seen into an
objective correlative of a character’s mind or commentary on his emotions.
Yet, as several critics have noted, there are tensions between the spatial
coherence the descriptions present and the eyewitness, who is after all a
product of the text. These tensions quickly generate problems in interpret-
ation. Discernment becomes a central challenge both to the protagonist and
to the reader. In Gawain, it even becomes part of the narrative’s elaborate
game. Description, organized according to the mechanics of perception,
works to dramatize the limits of human vision. The search for “trawthe”
(honor; fidelity) in Gawain or for spiritual consolation in Pearl is circum-
scribed by the workings of the gaze.1
140
 The Gawain-poet
Recent work has also drawn particular attention to the conson-
ance between spiritual crisis and the picture of courtly life. While some
readers have argued that the visual theatricality of the poems, especially in
Gawain, levels a critique at the artificiality of courtly manners and fashion,
more have felt, to the contrary, that the material culture of courtly life as
described in these texts illustrates the system of ethics that they promulgate
and even speaks to a particular readership, illustrating an allegiance, as one
reader puts it, to “high-medieval feudalism.”2 The concern with expensive
objects and clothing, with feasting, and with behaviors marked by elabor-
ate rituals of courtesy speaks to the interests of well-to-do lay readers. The
depiction of courtly pleasures in these poems is designed to appeal to aris-
tocratic patrons and even, it has been suggested, to occlude the very ethical
crises the poem present. Helen Barr notes Pearl’s “mercantile conscious-
ness” and Felicity Riddy suggests that the poem, through its emphasis on
pearls, becomes itself an aesthetic object.3 Both of these arguments accord
well with John Bowers’s contention that the poem’s aristocratized values
were targeted specifically for Richard II, hypothesized as the poet’s royal
patron, who was reputed to be fond of jewels and ornament.4 Even starkly
critical of the courtly values in the four poems, David Aers argues that
all of them envision a perfect consonance between the Church and aristo-
cratic values, submerging possibilities of real personal transformation in
the idealization of courtliness. The poet’s Christ, he writes, would be “a
divine Sir Gawain.”5
The ethical demands exacted in these texts may be consonant with the
structures of late medieval chivalry, but the extent to which individuals
change remains an open question in these texts. Does the Pearl-dreamer
truly move into a new state where he understands divine grace? Does Sir
Gawain attain a meaningful Christian humility? Does Jonah learn patience?
The theatrical presentation of material culture actually sharpens the focus
on individuals, particularly Jonah, Gawain, and the Pearl-dreamer, who
respond to ethical demands articulated in confrontations between human
and supernatural or divine beings. It may be, as well, that poetic techniques
of lexical accumulation through multiple synonyms, elaborate numerology,
and complex prosody in rhyme scheme and alliteration also further a pic-
ture of a world that is both intricate and ordered and in which heaven
seems to mirror courtly life – the divine court a refraction of the royal one.
The individual who reads visual signs does so in the world, not against it,
accommodating himself to the disciplines of courtly Christianity. The per-
sonal trial or quest framed by the known world – even when the familiar
locations morph into exotic places – is one of following spiritual commands
while living the good life.
141
S a r a h S t a n bu ry
In presenting detailed, spatially coherent descriptions of the natural world
and courtly life, the four alliterative poems of Cotton Nero A.x. are similar
to other late medieval English poems that rely on alliteration as a principle
of form and meter. Like other fourteenth-century alliterative poems writ-
ten in the north and northwest of England specifically, these poems also
display, with exceptional skill, a distinctive “ornamental verbal density.”6
Indeed, verbal density may be not only a thematic or topical characteris-
tic of alliterative poems but also a special property of alliterative prosody.
Alliteration, which tends to draw on the same distinctive vocabulary, often
regional and often originating from Anglo-Saxon words, requires a rich
stock of synonyms. Lists, which often occur within descriptive passages in
the Gawain-poems, make particular demands on language in alliterative
verse. Lists are taxonomic, groupings of items in categories that lay out
the world in its order and also its multiplicity. Lexical demands increase
even more when terms for those objects also begin with identical sounds.
In the list of gemstones decorating the holy vessels in Cleanness we see this
kind of elaboration: “Ande safyres, and sardiners, and semely topace, /
Alabaundarynes, and amaraunz, and amaffised stones, / Casydoynes, and
crysolytes, and clere rubies …” (lines 1469–71) (And sapphires and corneli-
ans and lovely topazes / Alamandines and emeralds and amethyst stones /
Chalcedonies and chrysolites and clear rubies).7 In alliterative poetry, lan-
guage itself partakes in the sumptuous variety and pleasures of the world.
The very quality of accumulation or descriptive density in these poems
also works to underwrite, however paradoxically, a sense that material or
bodily things are ephemeral. The practice of organizing descriptive pas-
sages according to the real or implied gaze of textual eyewitnesses has the
effect of both joining the world to the viewer and also of limiting knowl-
edge of the world to what that viewer can see. As with the holy vessels
in Cleanness, physical objects or structures present their own fantastical
or spectacular surfaces independent of how we might understand or use
them; yet the poems’ protagonists are also spiritually accountable for their
response to those surfaces. David Lawton has noted that important char-
acteristics of alliterative poetry are the goal of penance, and the struggle to
live up to Christian and courtly ideals.8 Penance is dramatically expressed
at the end of Gawain when Gawain adopts the green girdle as his own
personal baldric of shame. Penance also emerges powerfully in the other
poems as well. The Pearl dreamer, lectured by the maiden on the impor-
tance of accepting divine grace, fi nally discovers himself excluded from
heaven; Jonah in Patience faces the narrow discipline of following divine
law; and the reader in Cleanness is witness to repeated examples of hairline
distinctions separating the clean from the unclean. Penance and courtly
142
 The Gawain-poet
accumulation work in a kind of synergy. Penance, of course, requires a
temptation and often then a world to renounce; and as we see in the bed-
room scenes of Gawain the vivid descriptions can in some cases offer up
the courtly life as a trap or seduction. Lexical accumulation – or we might
say the materiality of these poems – gives dramatic framing to private acts
of penance. This is not to say that the Gawain-poet subjects the material
world to a moralizing or penitential critique. Far from it; the poems are
remarkable for the pleasure they take in recording the physical, and espe-
cially courtly world. Description, then, poses a riddle, as characters within
these narratives struggle to live up to Christian ideals while surrounded
by distracting places and things. Without denying the senses, how can we
“steer the heart,” to borrow a phrase from Patience, in a world that is so
rich in its pleasures?
Pearl
Pearl, fi rst in the manuscript, gives this question dramatic play in its story
of a lost object, framed as the story of a jeweler who has lost a pearl
in a garden. In this dream vision, told as are all medieval dream visions
through fi rst-person narration, the jeweler steps from the garden where
he “lost” his pearl into a dream-like landscape where familiar objects are
quickly defamiliarized. As he searches for his pearl and then fi nds it again
in radically changed form, we learn that the pearl is in fact a dead two-
year-old girl, most likely his daughter, and the work of the poem is the
work of mourning and acceptance. An allegory of spiritual discovery in
the tradition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the poem is situated in a lush and
transforming landscape, its topography shifting from a spice garden to an
Eden-like landscape and fi nally to a vision of the New Jerusalem, the heav-
enly city as described in the Book of Revelation. Each of these locations
is described with a rich accumulative vocabulary of delightful things: the
spot where his pearl was lost is now covered with “gilofre, gyngure, and
gromylyoun” (line 43; gillyflower, ginger and gromwell); the dream-land-
scape is adorned with tree trunks of indigo, the gravel “þat on grounde con
grynde” (line 81), comprised of oriental pearls; and the twelve foundations
of the New Jerusalem are each a single stone – jasper, sapphire, chalced-
ony, emerald, and more.
Pearl uses a hybrid versification and exploits techniques of rhyme, verbal
concatenation, and even numerological ordering to achieve a complexity
unmatched in Middle English poetry and perhaps rivaled only by Dante’s
Comedy. Each of the poem’s 101 stanzas – a number that evokes both per-
fection and flaw – has twelve lines that not only alliterate and rhyme, but
143
S a r a h S t a n bu ry
also connect through a repeating word, a technique called concatenation.
Words repeat but also change in meaning in an elaborate punnology.9 In
the fi rst stanza group, for instance, the link-word spot means place and
blemish; date in the ninth stanza-group means both limit and time of year
or day; in group 16, mote means castle or city as well as stain. Alliteration,
rhyme, and concatenation build the paradox of accumulation and change
into prosody; words and sounds repeat in nearly every line but at the same
time they transform. Poetic form does the work of mourning by returning,
in haunting recapitulations, to the lost thing and then moving on.
Above all, Pearl – along with the other poems in the Gawain manu-
script – is courtly. Dialogue in the poem is couched in formalities that
underscore a hierarchal vision of both human as well as spiritual relation-
ships. When the maiden fi rst greets the dreamer she bows low and removes
her crown, a gesture that marks her status as his daughter and not as a
queen; a bit later, when she rises up, puts her crown back on, and begins to
lecture him on his errors, she asserts her status as queen of heaven through
this gesture of command.10 Heaven is equally courtly in its structure and
principles. Mary is the “queen of courtesy,” and the dreamer’s visual the-
ophany when he sees the New Jerusalem pictures a centripetal kind of wor-
ship. The bleeding lamb, or Christ, is centered on high amid its worshipers.
As one reader remarks, the social order of heaven is a fully “aristocratized
theology” specifically targeted to appeal to a lay readership.11 The phys-
ical world described in the poem also seems magnificent in ways designed
to appeal to the tastes of a worldly gentry interested in aesthetic pleasure.
Some readers, arguing that Pearl was written in the 1390s, have based the
case in part on the consonance between Richard II’s love of luxury and
his “courtly francophilia.”12 Pearl could be, that is, not only a Christian
consolation but also an elegy targeted to a particular worldly court.
By organizing its quest through the gaze of a narrator who is, at the
end, excluded, the poem heightens the emotions of longing, linking pen-
ance with desire, both for things of the world and for the afterlife. Is the
dreamer transformed by his visionary quest, or is he still in a state of desire,
even though the object of desire may have changed from a lost pearl or girl
to heaven? The narrator is excluded from heaven in part because of his
acquisitiveness; he longs to hang on to his pearl – his daughter – even after
he knows she belongs to heaven. In the fi nal stanzas, after he awakens, the
narrator accepts the daily sight of the Eucharistic wafer during the mass as
a substitute vision, but his acceptance may not convince all readers of the
poem. “More and more,” the refrain of the third stanza group, could well
serve as the refrain for the poem as a whole. Longing, however changed in
its goals, remains the poem’s enduring emotional and thematic arc.13
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 The Gawain-poet
Cleanness
Cleanness and Patience, alliterative homilies that retell Old Testament
stories to illustrate a single virtue, seem on the surface very different from
Pearl in structure, genre, and tone, though the poems are similar enough to
each other that it seems probable they were written or compiled as paired
texts. Yet like Pearl and Gawain, both advocate behaviors that would be
fully legible to men and women of the fourteenth-century gentry. Both
picture relationships with God in terms of courtly behaviors and ethics.
Cleanness is structured according to a complex numerology, a feature it
shares with Gawain and Pearl and one that seems targeted to an unusually
well-educated audience.14 Both homilies, furthermore, visualize places and
objects with close attention to detail and to the mechanics of visual percep-
tion. Even though Cleanness differs from the other three poems in telling
a series of narratives rather than a single story, it also organizes descrip-
tions according to visual logic, a technique that makes conduct a matter of
perception and response; comportment and ethics are a matter of how we
see, know, and use the world of things.
In Cleanness, the equation between “clean” conduct, courtliness, and
religious rectitude is explicitly evoked through alliteration, as the words
“clean” and “court” repeat as a pair throughout the poem. The goal, we are
also told repeatedly, is to see God in his court, a reward that will come from
clean acts; the punishment for moral or especially bodily filth is exile from
that home. This rather severe disciplinary narrative, drawing on the Bible
as well as on the liturgy, retells three Old Testament stories that illustrate
uncleanness, acts defi ned primarily by the violation of literal or figurative
bodies: Noah’s Flood, brought as a punishment for bodily sins against
nature; the destruction of Sodom, punishment for sodomy; and the death
of Belshazzar and the Chaldeans, destroyed as fitting retribution for their
idolatrous uses of the holy vessels. The emphasis throughout on images of
vessels or containers and on feasting suggests that “body” in this text also
has an allegorical dimension as Christ’s body, or the Eucharist, and that
violations of the body are also sacramental perversions. The pointed denun-
ciation of sodomy, an attack furthered through the poem’s highly unusual
praise of non-procreative heterosexual pleasure (lines 701–08), may be, as
some readers have argued, directed explicitly against homosexual priests,
represented as unfit for handling the Eucharist.
The norm against which clerical or bodily perversions are measured,
however, is courtly life. As Elizabeth Keiser has argued, the poem’s indict-
ment of sodomy and celebration of heterosexual pleasure both work to
idealize the properly masculine courtier, a “connoisseur and practitioner of
145
S a r a h S t a n bu ry
the festive decorum which makes the good life imitate art.”15 The perfect
example of this good life is the feast, whose rituals of decorum are violated
by the serf in rags. In the story of the wedding feast that opens the poem,
cleanness is exemplified by seating arrangements in which each guest is
seated according to his rank (lines 115–17); fi lth, embodied in the guest
who arrives in his rags straight from the fields, violates the festive life.
Peasant labor intrudes into the halls of the rich – peasant labor, “fyled
with werkkez” (soiled with work), that makes no effort at concealing what
it is. The holy vessels abused by Belshazzar at his feast at the end of the
poem extend the performance of magnificence broadly to encompass both
liturgical performance and also aesthetic reverence. The ideal courtier is
also a devout and obedient parishioner who values aesthetic beauty in the
service of Christian ritual. The rich man, the poem seems to say, takes the
surest way to the kingdom of heaven, particularly if he obeys the laws of
the Church.
Patience
In Patience, a much shorter homiletic narrative also based on a text from
the Beatitudes, courtliness is manifested not through beautiful things
but through the poem’s central didactic goal: restraint. Patience or “steer-
ing the heart,” the goal named in the poem, is also the practise of self-
mastery that is a central goal of courtliness.16 In failing to obey God,
Jonah fails to demonstrate patience as well as obedience to the commands
of a superior. The ethos of aristocratic comportment is also evoked in
accounts of distinctly non-courtly spaces. Descriptions of place drama-
tize exile from God’s court by picturing alternative interiors: the hold
of the ship, the whale’s belly, and the little hut made of ivy. Like Pearl,
Patience uses description to align a central character, through the logic
of his perception, with the world as he experiences it. A look at one short
passage can serve to illustrate techniques of alliterative wordplay that
guide the aesthetic of the poem as a whole. In the belly of the whale, one
of the great descriptive passages in Middle English literature, the poet
leads the reader through the sensory world that Jonah touches but cannot,
in the dark, even see:
He glydes in by þe giles þur
glaym ande glette,
Relande in by a rop, a rode þat hym þo
t,
Ay hele ouer hed hourlande aboute,
Til he blunt in a blok as brod as a halle.
(lines 269–72)
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 The Gawain-poet
[He glides in by the gills through slime and fi lth,
Rolling in by the gut, which seemed to him a road,
Constantly heel over head hurling about
Until he stopped in a compartment as wide as a hall.]
This passage conveys movements of Jonah’s body, gliding, rolling, hurl-
ing. When he stops, the verb is “blunt,” a word that as an adjective can
mean “stunned” or “dazed.” Clearly those meanings are also present
here. Alliteration, richly accumulative, aligns Jonah rolling body with the
whale’s interior, as verbs depicting his motion pattern with nouns parsing
the whale’s anatomy: “relande in by a rop,” “blunt in a blok.” Alliteration
emphasizes relationships of physical scale – Jonah’s small helplessness and
the whale’s massive gut – and also underscores likenesses, and again these
are likenesses to the court, or at least human habitation. When Jonah comes
to a halt, it is in a place as broad as a hall, the great room in a manor or
castle. Description visualizes his body within the whale; it also tells us what
he knows or how he compares things, which is to roads and halls. At this
point in time, this is all he can feel and ascertain.
The geography of sensory exile, of course, personalizes the fault of
impatience. It makes Jonah’s actions and the consequences of those actions,
as we say, very real. A penitential voice, a feature of alliterative verse in gen-
eral, emerges with particular power in this section, and it comes through
forcibly because exile has been so graphically evoked. Lodged in the whale,
Jonah says a long mournful prayer in which he acknowledges his distance
from God’s temple and promises obedience. If this prayer convinces – and
it apparently convinces God, who orders the whale to cough up Jonah on
the spot – it does so in part because the conditions of his exile have been
graphically detailed. Features of late medieval alliterative poetry – lexical
richness, descriptive precision, and a thematic emphasis on penance – work
together brilliantly in this passage, as they do throughout the poem in gen-
eral, through the agency of perception. Jonah’s regret or penitential moment
is fueled by his love for and exile from the world.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Of the poems attributed to the Gawain-poet, none is more descriptive or
penitential than Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the best-known
poems in Middle English. In many respects Gawain builds on familiar
romance conventions, borrowing narrative elements from Celtic sources but
most directly from French romances that develop from those of Chrétien de
Troyes. Many elements of the plot are familiar from Arthurian tradition:
the sidelining of Arthur to focus instead on one of his knights; the dramatic
147
S a r a h S t a n bu ry
challenge that happens on a feast day; elements of magic; the quest and test
of the hero’s masculine honor; inscrutable and dangerous women. As Ad
Putter says, romances were “simply the most popular form of literary enter-
tainment for the higher strata of society,” and Gawain is brilliantly crafted
to appeal to this small market.17
What sets Gawain apart from his French sources as well as from other
romances in English is the synergy between lexical accumulation, an eye-
witness point of view, and alliteration, though it is more correct to say
partial alliteration. Groups of alliterating lines are punctuated with short
rhyming codas, called “bobs and wheels,” that give the romance a stanzaic
form. Like Pearl and Patience, things of the world appear to us as they
appear to the protagonist; and as in those poems perceptual logic organ-
izes descriptions of people, objects, and places. With the exception of the
hunting episodes, which occur in Gawain’s explicit absence, the narrative
unfolds much as Gawain sees it. His challenge or test is to perform as a
perfect courtier in a world in which he has only immediate visual or sen-
sory information. The long and detailed description of the Green Knight’s
clothing when he shows up at Camelot on Pentecost offers the fi rst of
many dazzling visual traps for the eye: like Gawain, we survey him but
can’t quite figure him out: Why is he green? Why does he hold a holly
sprig as well as an axe? And why no armor? He seems constructed as a
blazon of mysterious visual cues. In spite of his monochromatic greenness,
he is also a model of late fourteenth-century court fashion, and hence the
challenge he directs to the court invites the viewer to an interpretive game.
Gawain’s penitential self-loathing at the end of the poem when he returns
to Camelot, a response many readers fi nd excessive, becomes credible if we
see it, at least in part, as his response to his own performance in the game.
He has, after all, failed completely to figure out the nature of the test and
the trick.
The poem produces a particularly English picture of chivalry that is
both contemporary and nostalgic, both native and continental. The allit-
erative long line, a traditional English form, domesticates its imported
sources, reprising French source material with a native prosody. Gawain’s
narrative is itself backward-looking, making us aware of history and
inviting us to speculate on nationhood and on national identity. The
poem begins with the founding of Britain, lending the poem an histor-
ical consciousness from the outset, and it imagines its ideals of honor,
“trawthe,” and fidelity as qualities belonging to a glorious past. However,
the poem’s descriptions give its nostalgia a highly contemporary patina.
Though the story takes place in sixth-century Britain, its elaborations of
fashion, home furnishings, hunting rituals, and castle design belong to
148
 The Gawain-poet
the fourteenth-century scene. The canvas is a local one melding legend-
ary English heroes with an English landscape and late fourteenth-century
baronial splendor. The poem’s eyewitness technique, particularly as par-
layed through its rich alliterative vocabulary, both personalizes and gen-
eralizes this drama of aristocratic masculine restraint; the hero’s personal
quest bespeaks much broader concerns about national identity and the
performance of the noble life.
Gawain’s attention to English geography and to the trappings of late
fourteenth-century aristocratic life may even comment directly on polit-
ical relationships in the last years of the fourteenth century. The striking
contrasts between two courts, one a distant baronial court in north Wales
and the other a royal castle, between a wild man and a knight, between wil-
derness and hall, suggest the poem may be commenting as well on tensions
between centralized authority and baronial power, between London and
the northwest Midlands or Wales. If the poems emerged within the patron-
age system of Richard II’s court, their disappearance may also have been
a strategic erasure following Richard’s murder in the Lancastrian usurp-
ation. These poems, for all their brilliance, appear to have been largely
unknown to subsequent readers until Gawain was fi rst transcribed in
the nineteenth century. Theories of patronage and then suppression are
consistent with arguments that early fi fteenth-century language policies
promoted Chaucer as poet laureate for a new dynasty and London English,
as opposed to regional dialects, as the language of the realm. With the
ascendancy of Henry IV, the new court may have exacted a repression of
signs of the deposed king, including poems, such as those of Cotton Nero
A.x., written in the Cheshire dialect and perhaps even commissioned under
his patronage.
These speculations, provocative as they are, have as yet no solid evidence
to support them. The authorship and history of the manuscript before its
appearance in the library of a Yorkshire collector in 1614 remain a major
unsolved literary mystery.18 It is thus even more tempting to search for the
patron and writer in the techné of description: textiles, armor, hairstyles,
and castle ornament. Yet even here evidence is slippery. The poems offer
an extraordinarily rich picture of fourteenth-century aristocratic life, but
whose life, exactly, or when it was lived remains uncertain, except to say
that the poems were produced in Cheshire between the middle and the end
of the fourteenth century. More certain are the dual concerns of four poems
with an ethics of self-mastery that follow laws of the Church as well as laws
of table, hall, and hunt. The author – learned, familiar with both the Bible
and with the liturgy as well as with continental romances, dream visions,
and lyric forms – must have been a cleric, almost certainly one who was
149
S a r a h S t a n bu ry
attached to a baronial or even royal house; and in that identity we can fi nd
a writer well poised to explore the difficult accommodations between often
antithetical codes of behavior. Certainly these poems bring the physical
world to life in ways that brilliantly dramatize the challenges of attending
to Christian doctrine as well as to social rules. The quest for consolation,
trawthe or patience is a quest to love the world.
NOTES
1 Sarah Stanbury, Seeing the Gawain-Poet: Description and the Act of
Perception (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
2 Charles Muscatine, Poetry and Crisis in the Age of Chaucer (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1972), p. 40; D. S. Brewer, “Courtesy
and the Gawain-Poet,” in Patterns of Love and Courtesy: Essays in
Memory of C. S. Lewis, ed. John Lawlor (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1966), pp. 57–66.
3 Helen Barr, “Pearl – or ‘the Jeweller’s Tale’,” Medium Aevum 69 (2000),
61; Felicity Riddy, “Jewels in Pearl,” in Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed.
Derek S. Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001),
pp. 143–55.
4 John Bowers, The Politics of Pearl: Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II
(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), p. 158.
5 David Aers, “Christianity for Courtly Subjects,” in A Companion to the
Gawain-Poet, p. 100.
6 Ralph Hanna, “Alliterative Poetry,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval
English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge University Press, 1999),
p. 493; Larry D. Benson, Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1965), p. 171–84.
7 Citations from the texts are taken from The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript:
Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Malcolm
Andrew and Ronald A. Waldron, rev. edn (Exeter University Press, 1987).
8 David Lawton, “The Unity of Middle English Alliterative Poetry,” Speculum
58 (1983), 92.
9 Sylvia Tomasch, “A Pearl Punnology,” JEGP, 88 (1989), 1–20; Ad Putter, An
Introduction to the Gawain-Poet (New York: Longman, 1996), pp. 147–51.
10 J. A. Burrow, Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge
University Press, 2002), p. 30.
11 Nicholas Watson, “The Gawain-Poet as Vernacular Theologian,” in
Companion to the Gawain-Poet, p. 312.
12 Bowers, Politics, p. 81; Ardis Butterfield, “French Culture and the
Ricardian Court,” in Essays on Ricardian Literature, ed A. J. Minnis,
Charolotte C. Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1997), pp. 82–120.
13 Maria Bullon-Fernandez, “Be
onde þe Water: Courtly and Religious Desire in
Pearl,” SP, 91 (1994), 35–49.
14 Donna Crawford, “The Architectonics of Cleanness,” SP, 90 (1993), 29–45;
Russell A. Peck, “Number as Cosmic Language,” in Essays in the Numerical
150