The Process of Salvation in Pearl and The Great Divorce

2000

Examines the influence of Eliot’s early poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” on Lewis’s dream vision fantasy The Great Divorce

Speculum, 2014

suggests that it outlasts the age of the codex. In a particularly provocative statement, she writes: "what we consider 'poetry' is built on the remains of lyrics seen in the material formation of the songbook" (5). In its four chapters, the book traverses a wide stretch of literary history. The introduction lays out the premises and arguments of the study. Chapter 1 turns to a comparative analysis of two works rarely, if ever, treated as similar "anthologies": the Carmina Burana and the Libro de buen amor. Galvez defends this bold conjunction by well-informed and often subtle readings. Chapter 2 focuses on the Occitan tradition, exploring the ways in which the troubadours' insertion of their own name, especially in the tornada, functions to bestow a kind of unity on what might otherwise remain a disjointed series of discrete lyric pieces. This chapter contains a particularly compelling analysis of Arnaut Daniel's "nominal self-invocation" that illuminates both the troubadour's works and the influence he exerted on Dante and Petrarch. The third chapter, "Shifting Mediality: Visualizing Lyric Texts," examines the iconographic elements of the medieval songbook, moving from the Occitan chansonniers to the Codex Manesse, or Große Heidelberger Liederhandschrift. The fourth and last chapter travels in history as well as space, studying the art of the songbook in fifteenth-century Iberia. Its subject is "the cancionero as a literary object in its own right" (168), which Galvez presents as the crucial element of a "ritual" performance. As a whole, the book succeeds admirably in situating the Occitan, German, and Castilian songbooks in a new and comparative perspective. It is, of course, not exhaustive in scope; certain characteristic elements of the medieval codex fall outside its purview. Music, as Galvez notes (4), might well also have been taken into account; but one can see the reasons that she limited herself to literary and iconographic considerations. In her conclusion, Galvez stresses the "postmodern" quality of the medieval songbook: "work, author, and literature seen as anthology, assembly, or pastiche constantly in process of formation, quotation, and deformation" (216-17). Those remarks raise the question of the immediate aftermath of the anthology and the rise of the single-authored book, from Dante and Petrarch forward to the Renaissance. There is a relation to be explored between "postmodern" and "modern," between songbook as "assembly" and songbook as an author's own conception, a relation that plays no small part in "what we consider 'poetry'" today. Those wishing to explore that subject, too, will want to learn from Galvez's Songbook.

CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, 2017

Pearl and Revelations of Divine Love are both narratives fundamentally entrenched in death. These death experiences are different: Julian has a near-death experience while the Dreamer is driven by grief at the loss of his daughter. This juxtaposition reveals a close relation between these two works not solely as medieval writings about death, but also as pieces driven by trauma.

2021

The fourteenth-century Middle English poem Pearl, authored by the anonymous Pearl-poet, survives in a manuscript known as London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero A.x. This dream vision, narrated by a grieving father, tells the story of his journey to Paradise, where he encounters his infant daughter, now older, regal, and wise, proffering admonishments with the authority of God to her tearful father. meeting with her in Paradise. Drawing on Caroline Walker Bynum’s work on medieval European conceptions of death and resurrection, J. Stephen Russell’s work on the dream vision genre, and Karl Steel’s work on oysters as liminal figures, this thesis reads Pearl’s function as a dream vision as a rhetorical strategy that demonstrates new ways of conceptualizing the ambiguities of death and the afterlife. As the Dreamer attempts to reconcile the disparity between what he sees (bodily decay), and what he is asked to believe (the Christian promise of resurrection), the poem argues that this di...

Modern Philology, Vol. 112, No. 1 (August 2014) (pp. 56-75)

The Review of English Studies, 2007

Speculum, 2009

Humanities

In this essay, I give an alternative reading of Chaucerian resonances that fill Lydgate’s The Temple of Glass by analyzing the poem’s allusions to the House of Fame. I argue that Lydgate, as a poet who was well read in Chaucer and considered as his most prolific imitator, comprehended the experimentations of his ‘maister’. Taking into account Meyer-Lee’s study on the House of Fame, which explores Chaucer’s efforts to transform the value of the literary field of late medieval English poetry to better suit his then transitional social position, I assert that by borrowing details of setting, time and place from House of Fame, Lydgate implies his use of the framework set up by Chaucer to adopt his alteration of literary value. In doing so, Lydgate emulates Chaucer’s idea of the literary as an autonomous discourse, which would fundamentally allow him to write courtly productions even from his rather peculiar position as a monk. An analysis of the relations between Lydgate’s poetry and hi...

The Hymn of the Pearl is a ballad about a quest for one magic jewel and a set of magical or religious garb. Seemingly composed in the second century, it survives in only two manuscripts, both preserved at the British Library. Beautiful and fascinating, the HP has shown itself to be true to the skill of its hero, the anonymous young man and his heavenly, aquiline letter; - it has exercised a kind of magic over its readers. It is in fact one of the most beautiful products of Syriac literature, and perhaps one of the most hotly debated. This ballad was inserted in the text of Acts of Thomas, a third century Syrain apocryphal book from Edessa, most probably in the 10th or 11th century. The motifs and symbolisms in the hymn offers several interpretations. Majority of the interpreters have tried to explain it as a Gnostic text. This article tries to find a non-Gnostic meaning to the different motifs and symbolisms in the Hymn of the Pearl.

Glossator, 2015

When the Dreamer asks the Pearl-Maiden, “What kind of thing may be that Lamb / that he would wed you as his wife?” (ll. 771-72), she answers by describing the communal inclusivity of her spiritual marriage to Christ, John’s spiritual vision of the New Jerusalem, and the crucifixion itself. She emphasizes the symbolic representation of Christ as Lamb and the theme of redemption made possible through Christ’s death. Although the Dreamer’s question appears to be motivated by an earthly jealousy, the Pearl-Maiden attempts to lift his understanding into a heavenly realm. Her words specifically foreshadow the vision the Dreamer will experience of the New Jerusalem and the bleeding Lamb later in the poem. Her explanation acts as both invitation and preparation, not only for the dreamer, but also for the reader. This essay considers the concept of spiritual marriage, as developed in the Bible and later Christian commentary tradition, and the poet’s exegetical glossing, through the Pearl-Maiden’s speech, of biblical texts like Isaiah, Revelation, and the Gospels, which aims to foreground the theological importance and intimacy of the crucifixion in the context of late medieval affective piety. Ultimately, the Pearl-Maiden’s dazzling answer to the Dreamer’s question is all about how death, though it temporarily deprives the lover of the beloved, has been conquered through the redemptive sacrifice of Christ. While the Dreamer is not yet ready to accept this, the Pearl-Maiden’s answer constitutes an important step on his journey toward consolation. The manner in which the Pearl-Maiden describes the crucifixion catches the reader in a spiritual vision with implications for the reader’s own spiritual formation and pilgrimage through the sorrows of life toward surrender to God in the light of heaven.

Speculum, 2004

Poetry Does Theology argues that in the late fourteenth century, English poetry transformed theology from a closed system into an open one, subjecting theology to the test of human experience through the vehicle of fiction. Rhodes advances this thesis through a discussion of Robert Grosseteste's Chateau d'amour (augmented by a section on the fourdaughters-of-God motif in Piers Plowman); the Pearl poet's Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience; plus St. Erkenwald and Chaucer's tales of the Nun's Priest, Prioress, Second Nun, Reeve, and Pardoner. In the case of ostensibly religious texts, Rhodes searches the narrative for evidence of an existential rather than a doctrinal perspective. In the case of the ostensibly secular tales of Chaucer, he sorts through the many voices, points of view, and positions represented by Chaucer's narrators and characters in order to glimpse the underlying religious sensibility. Although he prefers untheoretical language, Rhodes depends heavily on a binary opposition between the two terms in his title, an opposition that he seeks to clarify so that he might, in effect, deconstruct it. Rhodes consistently views theology as institutional, rigid, and confining, while he consistently views poetry (and fiction generally) as individual, flexible, and liberating. Theology is associated with "authority" (p. 50), a "status quo" (p. 74), and "abstraction" (p. 76), whereas poetry is associated with freedom, "availability and contemporaneity" (p. 75), and "complexity" (p. 76). Grosseteste serves mainly to illustrate this perceived gap between theology and poetry. Thus Rhodes maintains that Grosseteste used the vernacular for his poem Le chateau d'amour because he was unable to find sufficient authority in Latin for his view that the Incarnation would have occurred even if Adam had not sinned, and "he will not and dares not pronounce conclusively on this question without formal authority. But where he is tentative in his formal theology he is bold in his poem, finding in the latter a medium in which he could dare to experiment freely with his original insights" (p. 51). It does not seem to be Rhodes's intention to perpetuate the romantic and unhistorical belief that theological innovators had to resort to the vernacular because of the institutional church's hostility to theological heterodoxy, but the binary oppositions that are endemic in Rhodes's style too often seem to push the argument to that sort of extreme. In the passage just quoted, "tentative" versus "bold" is a small example, but the textual analyses are also organized around binaries. For example, "What stands in need of transformation or demythologizing in Cleanness is the defilement-purity doublet" (p. 94), while Chaucer's Reeve's Tale embodies "the very real conflict that existed in the fourteenth century between the theological ideal of marriage and the fact of human nature, between procreation and sexual desire, caritas and cupiditas" (p. 214). The tendency toward overstatement encouraged by such a style occasionally leads to some fairly splintery reading across the grain. Comparing him to the Wife of Bath, Rhodes calls Chaucer's Reeve "another old-timer who uses his prologue to tell his personal sexual history" (p. 211)-a wild misrepresentation, since in contrast to the autobiographically confessional Wife, the Reeve avoids specificity about himself, characterizing the unfulfillable desires of old men like himself in only the most general and proverbial terms. To then maintain that the Reeve "suffers from the same cultural prejudice that frustrates the Wife of Bath" (ibid.) on the subject of love and marriage is to convert the Reeve into a victim without an oppressor, while also ignoring the great divide of gender that makes the Reeve's case significantly different from the Wife's. Binary thinking also characterizes the theological side of the discussion, in which the fourteenth century's radical separations between God and man, church and people, learned and popular, Augustinians and Pelagians, and Latin and the vernacular languages all cul

Journal of Inklings Studies, 2020

While others have persuasively argued for the centrality of theōsis to C.S. Lewis’ theology, little attention has been paid to the sources through which Lewis came to his peculiar understanding of the doctrine as liturgical in the sense of being creative and contributive. Through a comparative reading of the painter scene in The Great Divorce and Ransom’s vision of the Great Dance in Perelandra, this essay seeks to outline the contours of Lewis’ conception of theōsis, bringing Lewis’ intimate knowledge of medieval theological sources to bear on his conception of the doctrine. After exploring the centrality of theōsis to the whole of Lewis’ theology, the second sections explores Lewis’ thoughts on friendship, as well as Dante’s influence, so as to arrive at a better understanding of the Beatific Vision as both mediated and unmediated. In the final section it becomes apparent that Lewis’ conception of theōsis, imaginatively epitomised in Ransom’s Vision of the Great Dance, is largely incomprehensible apart from what he calls in The Discarded Image "the medieval system," with particular reference to pseudo-Dionysius’ The Celestial Hierarchy.

2023

Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues

In this article we will closely read a responsum, written by the great posek Rabbi David ben Solomon ibn Abi Zimra (known as the Radbaz, Spain–Eretz Israel, c. 1479–1573), that revolves around the plight of a woman in Jerusalem around the turn of the sixteenth century. Her husband has disappeared, but he had sent her a get, by messenger. This document unfortunately was lost when she fled following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Our exploration of the responsum sheds light on a facet of divorce that is not commonly considered today. Divorce is not only a legal procedure for terminating a marriage mired in discontent, but it was also routinely employed to avoid ‘igun or widowhood, evidence that the Jewish legal system is subject to creative compliance.