The Pearl

A critical study of all four works attributed to the Pearl poet, this new book differs from most previous studies of the Pearl poet by treating all of his works as a whole -- that is, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, and Cleanness.

Despite lip service to the proposition that the Pearl manuscript is the product of a single author, critics usually treat the four poems as isolated entities. The two authors of this work - who individually and together have produced a formidable body of research, criticism, and bibliographic study of this anonymous fourteenth-century poet - set forth a different thesis. They assume not only that the works share a common author but that they are connected and intersect in fundamental ways. They begin with the observation that the four Cotton Nero poems, taken together, extend from Creation to the Apocalypse and then transcendence to the heavenly Jerusalem. Comprising the entire scope of "History", the poems share a Creator whose active intervention in human affairs bespeaks a providential history that is the product of divine Will. Beginning with this premise, the authors discuss a series of interrelated themes (language, covenants, miracles, the iconography of the hand, and the role of the intrusive narrator) that successively arise from their initial observation. Every discussion treats all four poems, using each individual work to gloss the others. While this study builds on centuries of previous scholarship, much of what Blanch and Wassermann explore has never been discussed elsewhere. Some of the material - in particular their reading of the Green Knight's offer of weapons to Arthur's court, and the thematic significance of moral "handiwork" in the Gawain poems - not only breaks new ground but challenges accepted interpretations.

Essays on Ricardian Literature develops issues and themes first broached in John Burrow's ground-breaking book Ricardian Poetry and incorporates a bibliography of his published writings, which have revolutionized critical appreciation of medieval literature. The contributors to this volume, all leading scholars in the field, explore such areas as the status of Anglo-Latin and the influence of French culture on the Ricardian court, offer radical rereadings of some more familiar works, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Patience, and demonstrate how closely the literature of the period is bound up with political and social conditions. Written in honour of John Burrow, to mark his deep and beneficial influence upon the study of medieval literature, the 15 essays in this volume combine to provide a detailed and thorough examination of medieval literature, from the Middle English romance and Italian Trecento poetics to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Langland's Piers Plowman.