“Precios perle wythouten spotte”: Accepting the Unknowable in Pearl

The Chaucer Review, 2000

In her 1968 British Academy lecture, Elizabeth Salter announced that the Middle English Pearl invites a criticism which applies "the typological or figural method," one that works toward discovering in the text a historiography of "promise and fulfilment, most completely described and illustrated by the Scriptures, but discernible as a constant rhythm in every part of Christian experience, past, present, and to come." 1 But Salter's lecture was not the occasion for launching a large scale typological analysis, but rather a call for others to start thinking of Pearl differently, in line with the aesthetic demands of figuralism. Salter was thereby showing a way out of the notorious "elegy versus allegory" debates which had dominated critical reflection on Pearl for the first half of our century. The new critical orientation Salter proposed steered a course between, on the one hand, the historicism and autobiographicalism of the elegy hypothesis and, on the other hand, the reductive abstractions of allegory, while partaking of the insights of both approaches to the text's meaning: figuralism should direct us accordingly toward an apprehension of spiritual and eternal truths incarnate in concrete, historical facts. For many earlier commentators, however, Pearl in the defining instance had either a concrete historical referent (namely, the poet's own or perhaps his patron's dead daughter, whom the poem supposedly commemorates) or certain symbolic or metaphysical referents (for example, the pearlmaiden stands for virginity or the transformed soul). 2 Early twentiethcentury criticism was thus broadly polarized between an excavative criticism, centered on recovering the original historical conditions of the text's composition, and an exegetical criticism that was directed solely toward expounding Christian doctrine. Out of the context of this critical stalemate, Salter attempted a kind of harmonization of the elegy-allegory theories, what amounts to an ideal rapprochement of the two determinations of genre by way of Erich Auerbach's distinguished discussion of typology. But the question needs to be asked, is a typological reading of Pearl finally defensible? ticularly the way in which Pearl reflexively engages in resisting typology or figura, inasmuch as the figural aesthetic within which typology operates presupposes and preserves a stable continuity between eternity and the human historical continuum that the poem contests. As Boethius writes, adroitly abbreviating a sound medieval distinction between the celestial and the terrestrial, "God indeed is eternal, but the world is perpetual." 7 Just so, much of what the beatified maiden has to say from her eternal, synoptic perspective cannot be limited by reference to temporality, and, hence, is not amenable to a typological reduction. In the rational, figural view of reality described by Auerbach, both promise and fulfillment (or imago and veritas, type and antitype) are "within time, within the stream of historical life." 8 The second term fulfills and encompasses the first as along a temporal continuum, implying a steady advance toward closed or finite meaning. Yet the maiden in Pearl emphasizes that anagogic reality-the main inscrutable subject of her discourse and of the poem itself-is precisely not immersed in the stream of historical life. Nor is the anagogic realm exhausted by typological forecasting. If the text uses the resources of figuralism to make the point, then it finally dispenses with those very means by highlighting the ultimate inadequacy of the typological hermeneutic. As I will proceed to argue, Pearl is better understood, due to its anagogic scope, as parabolic instead of figural in its presentation.

The Middle English Pearl is known for its mixture of genres, moods and various discourses. The textual journey the readers of the poem embark on is a long and demanding one, leading from elegiac lamentations and the erotic outbursts of courtly love to theological debates and apocalyptic visions. The heterogeneity of the poem has often prompted critics to overlook the continuity of the erotic mode in Pearl which emerges already in the poem’s first stanza. While it is true that throughout the dream vision the language of the text never eroticizes the relationship between the Dreamer and the Pearl Maiden to the extent that it does in the opening lines, the article argues that eroticism actually underlies the entire structure of the vision proper. Taking recourse to Roland Barthes’s distinction between the erotic and the sexual to explain the exact nature of the bond which connects the two characters, the argument posits eroticism as an expression of somatic longing; a careful analysis of Pearl through this prism provides a number of ironic insights into the mutual interactions between the Dreamer and the Maiden and highlights the poignancy of their inability to understand each other. Further conclusions are also drawn from comparing Pearl with a number of Chaucerian dream visions. Tracing the erotic in both its overt and covert forms and following its transformations in the course of the narrative, the article outlines the poet’s creative use of the mechanics of the dream vision, an increasingly popular genre in the period when the poem was written.

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.

Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik, 2021

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

This article compares an eighteenth century treatise calling for the banning of church burial with a funeral sermon from the same period in relation to two questions. Where and to whom does that-which-remains after death belong? And how do the texts represent the nature of that-which-remains? The first section looks at the remains’ conceptual position in relation to the space of the church, and in relation to the living and the dead. The second compares the texts on the basis that one sublimates the body, denying its physicality, while the other acts to reinforce the flesh’s status as flesh. Drawing upon the thought of Heidegger and Derrida, the article concludes that both texts support arguments that eighteenth century considerations of the dead prefigure what would come to be the modern phenomenological understanding of death and the dead, arguing that they both engage with the phenomenological issue of death as the presencing of an absence.

Essays in Medieval Studies, vol. 35, 2021

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.

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.