Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The Pearl-poet's engagement with the Bible produced some of the most challengingly profound works of poetry in Middle English literature. For three of the four poems contained in British Library MS Cotton Nero Ax, biblical stories and teachings provide their narrative structure and their plot. Further, individual lines and local episodes are saturated with biblical allusions, quotations, and cross-references. The Bible was the primary and most fertile source for the poet's theological imagination, providing the springboard for searing meditation on how, in the later fourteenth century, one might come to terms with God. The language of the Vulgate finds its equal in a writer able to rework its words into a poetics that moves with ease between the sublime, the grotesque, the intellectual, and the comic. But this is not mere virtuosity; it is a measure of the poet's integrity that his word-craft is inseparable from his examination of often harrowing social and theological problems.Who was this poet? The dialect of the manuscript suggests north Derbyshire, or the Staffordshire/Cheshire borders (Bennett, 1983, 1997; Cooke and Boulton, 1999). The poet was clearly well versed in theology and is most likely to have been a priest attached to a provincial aristocratic household, but he also seems to have had intimate knowledge of London (Bowers, 2001). The audience for the poet's work is ... log in or subscribe to read full text