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THE GAWAIN-POET

Sophister Option

Dr. Brendan O’Connell (oconneb2@tcd.ie)

Noah’s Ark, Cleanness, British Library, Cotton Nero A.x. (art. 3), fol. 55/59v-56/60r

Course Description and Reading List 2017-18

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Course Description This one-semester course focuses on the works of a remarkable medieval poet, the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In addition to his most celebrated work, he is believed to be the author of three other exceptional Middle English poems: Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience; all four works surviving in a unique copy, British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x. Pearl, a poetic masterpiece, is a father’s moving lament for his lost daughter and a profound statement of the gulf between the physical and spiritual, the human and the divine. In sharp contrast, Cleanness offers a startling, apocalyptic vision of mass death and destruction, portraying human depravity and divine retribution in unforgettable depictions of the biblical Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Altogether more witty and playful, Patience tells another biblical narrative: the story of Jonah and the Whale. This miniature masterpiece describes one man’s hopeless and comic struggle with his destiny, and in many ways anticipates the final poem in the manuscript, the splendid Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Beginning with a Christmas game in which the uncanny Green Knight presents Arthur’s court with a lethal challenge, this wonderful narrative charts the fortunes of its hero, Sir Gawain, as he navigates a world full of danger, temptation and unwelcome revelations. While each poem will be considered in its own right, we will also highlight ways in which each text illuminates its neighbours, and ask what features unify the output of this brilliant but elusive master of medieval literature. Class Schedule Week One: Introduction and Pearl (lines 1-180) Week Two: Pearl (lines 181-660) Week Three: Pearl (lines 661-1212) Week Four: Cleanness (lines 1-556) Week Five: Cleanness (lines 557-1156) Week Six: Cleanness (lines 1157-1812) Week Seven: Study Week Week Eight: Patience Week Nine: Patience Week Ten: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Week Eleven: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Week Twelve: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Middle English: While the dialect of the poems can be challenging, students always comment that the poet’s extraordinarily skilful use of language is one of the most rewarding aspects of this course. While we will spend a little time on close reading, most of the seminars will be based on literary analysis of the poems, and anyone seeking a good grounding in reading Middle English is encouraged to draw on some of the many excellent resources available, including METRO: http://metro.fas.harvard.edu/.

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Editions

A complete edition of the poems is an essential purchase. Some students may already have J.J. Anderson (ed), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience (Everyman, 1996). This is a dependable edition, and perfectly reliable for personal study. It is recommended, however, that students acquire one of the following, both of which have much more extensive notes: Andrew, Malcolm and Ronald Waldron (eds), The Complete Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 5th edn (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007). This edition has excellent notes and glossary; while all texts are to be read in the original, the 5th edition also includes a very good prose translation on CD-ROM, which may prove useful (this is not in earlier editions). Putter, Ad and Myra Stokes (eds), The Works of the Gawain Poet: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience (London: Penguin, 2014). This edition is likely to become the standard student edition; it contains very detailed footnotes and explanatory endnotes. A superb resource for those interested in the manuscript and its contents is the Cotton Nero A.x project, with links to images of each page of the MS. It can be found online at: http://gawain.ucalgary.ca/

Preliminary Secondary Reading The volume of secondary material on the Gawain-poet can be very daunting. You will find a lot of articles are now available on JSTOR, Project Muse, and other online sources, but it is a good idea to invest in an introductory study of all four poems. I would recommend buying any one of the following, all of which are excellent: Anderson, J.J., Language and Imagination in the ‘Gawain’-poems (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005) Bowers, John M., An Introduction to the ‘Gawain’ Poet (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2012). Some of Bower’s readings are problematic, but this is a thought-provoking study with lots of useful historical context. Putter, Ad, An Introduction to the Gawain Poet (London, 1996) Spearing, A.C., The Gawain Poet: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). A classic, reliable introduction, but now a little outdated, and Spearing’s later works modify some of the assumptions implicit in it.

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Pearl In 2015, an entire issue of the online journal Glossator (9), was devoted to Pearl, with articles on each of the poem’s 20 sections or fitts. Available at: http://glossator.org/2015/03/30/glossator-9-2015-pearl/ *Aers, David, ‘The Self Mourning: Reflections on Pearl’, Speculum 68.1 (1993): 54-73 *Barr, Helen, ‘Pearl – or “The Jeweller’s Tale”’, Medium Aevum 69.1 (2000): 59-79 Beal, James, ‘The Pearl-Maiden’s Two Lovers’, Studies in Philology 100.1 (2003): 1-21 Bishop, Ian, Pearl in its Setting (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968) *Bloomfield, Josephine, ‘Stumbling toward God’s Light: The Pearl Dreamer and the Impediments of Hierarchy’, Chaucer Review 45.4 (2011): 390-410 Bowers, John M., The Politics of ‘Pearl’: Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001) Clopper, Lawrence M., ‘Pearl and the Consolation of Scripture’, Viator 23 (1992): 231-45 Coley, David K., ‘Pearl and the Narrative of Pestilence’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 35 (2013): 209-62 Conley, John (ed.), The Middle English Pearl: Critical Essays (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970). Useful but uneven collection. Fein, Susanna, ‘Of Judges and Jewelers: Pearl and the Life of Saint John’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 36 (2014): 41-76 Fletcher, Alan J., ‘Pearl and the Limits of History’, in Anne-Marie d’Arcy and Alan J. Fletcher, Studies in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts in Honour of John Scattergood, (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005) Gatta Jr., John, ‘Transformation Symbolism and the Liturgy of the Mass in Pearl’, Modern Philology 71.3 (1974): 243-56 Garrison, Jennifer, ‘Liturgy and Loss: Pearl and the Ritual Reform of the Aristocratic Subject’, Chaucer Review 44.3 (2010):294-322 Gilbert, Jane, Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 151-90 Ginsberg, Warren, ‘Place and Dialectic in Pearl and Dante’s Paradiso’, ELH 55.4 (1988): 731-53

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Kirk, Elizabeth, ‘The Anatomy of Mourning: Reflections on the Pearl Dreamer’, in M. Teresa Tavormina and R.F. Yeager (eds), The Endless Knot: Essays on Old and Middle English in Honor of Marie Borroff (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 215-25 Harper, Elizabeth, ‘Pearl in the Context of Fourteenth-Century Gift Economies’ Chaucer Review 44.4 (2010): 421-39 Horgan, A.D., ‘Justice in The Pearl’, Review of English Studies, New Series 32.126 (1981): 173-80 Macrae-Gibson, O.D., ‘Pearl: The Link Words and the Thematic Structure’, Neophilologus 52 (1968): 54-64, rpt in John Conley (ed.), The Middle English Pearl: Critical Essays (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970), pp. 203-19 Meyer, Ann R., Medieval Allegory and the Building of the New Jerusalem (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003), esp. chapters 5 and 6. *Mitchell, J. Allan, ‘The Middle English Pearl: Figuring the Unfigurable’, Chaucer Review 35.1 (2000): 86-111 McDaniel, Rhonda L., ‘“Maysterful mod and hyghe pryde … am heterly hated here”: Losing Pride and Finding Oneself in Pearl’ (Interdisciplinary Humanities 30.1 (2013): 72–87 Owen, Corey, ‘The Prudence of Pearl’, Chaucer Review 45.4 (2011): 411-34 Petroff, Elizabeth, ‘Landscape in Pearl: The Transformation of Nature’, Chaucer Review 16.2 (1981): 181-93. Roper, Gregory, ‘Pearl, Penitence, and the Recovery of the Self’, Chaucer Review 28.2 (1993): 164-86. Salter, Elizabeth, ‘Medieval Poetry and the Figural View of Reality’, in Middle English Literature: British Academy Gollancz Lectures, ed. J.A. Burrow (Oxford, 1989) Spearing, A.C., ‘Symbolic and Dramatic Development in Pearl’, Modern Philology 60.1 (1962): 1-12

-- Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 137-73 (SGGK and Pearl)

Spyra, Piotr, ‘Beyond the Garden: On the Erotic in the Vision of the Middle English Pearl’, Text Matters 3.3 (2013): 13–26 Stanbury, Sarah, ‘The Body and the City in Pearl’, Representations 48 (1994): 30-47

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Storm, William M., ‘The Arbor and the Pearl: Encapsulating Meaning in “Spot”’, Glossator 9 (2015): 1-19. Each article is this issue of Glossator deals with a separate ‘fitt’ or section of Pearl; this article deals with the first fitt. Terrell, Katherine H., ‘Rethinking the “Corse in clot”: Cleanness, Filth, and Bodily Decay in Pearl’, Studies in Philology 105.4 (2008): 429-47 *Vance, Eugene, ‘Pearl: Love and the Poetics of Participation’, in Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (eds), Poetics: Theory and Practice in Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1991), pp. 131-47 Watkins, John, ‘“Sengely in Synglere”: Pearl and Late-Medieval Individualism’, Chaucer Yearbook 2 (1995) Watson, Nicholas, ‘The Gawain-Poet as Vernacular Theologian’, in Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (eds) A Companion to the Gawain-Poet (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 293-313 Watts, Ann Chalmers, ‘Pearl, Inexpressibility, and Poems of Human Loss’, PMLA 99 (1984): 26-40 Vasta, Edward, ‘Pearl: Immortal Flowers and the Pearl’s Decay’, in Conley (ed.), Critical Essays (see above), pp. 185-202. *Texts marked with an asterisk (*) are useful starting points

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Cleanness

Bahr, Arthur, ‘Finding the Forms of Cleanness’, Studies in Philology 110.3 (2013): 459-81 *Brzezinski, Monica, ‘Conscience and Covenant: The Sermon Structure of Cleanness’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 89.2 (1990): 166-180

--‘Cleanness of the Question of Images’, Viator 26 (1995): 181-93. (Published under the name Monica Brzezinski Potkay)

Calabrese, Michael, and Eric Eliason, ‘The Rhetorics of Sexual Pleasure and Intolerance in the Middle English Cleanness’, Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History 56.3 (1995): 247-275 Citrome, Jeremy J., ‘Medicine and Metaphor in the Middle English Cleanness’, Chaucer Review 35 (2001): 260-80 Clopper, Lawrence, ‘The God of the Gawain-poet’, Modern Philology 94.1 (1996): 1-18 Coley, David K., ‘Remembering Lot’s Wife / Lot’s Wife Remembering: Trauma, Witness, and Representation in Cleanness’, Exemplaria 24.4 (2012): 342-63 Crawford, Donna, ‘The Architectonics of Cleanness’, Studies in Philology 90.1 (1993): 29-45 Frantzen, Allen J., ‘The Disclosure of Sodomy in Cleanness’, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 111.3 (1996): 451-464 *Glenn, Jonathan A., ‘Dislocation of Kynde in the Middle English Cleanness’, Chaucer Review, 18.1 (1983): 77-91 Horrall, Sarah M., ‘Cleanness and the Cursor Mundi’, English Language Notes 22.3 (1985): 6-11 Horrox, Rosemary (ed), The Black Death (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). Collection of sources about the Black Death, a number of which refer to Noah’s Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Ingledew, Francis John, ‘Liturgy, Prophecy, and Belshazzar's Babylon: Discourse and Meaning in Cleanness’, Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23 (1992): 247-279 Keiser, Elizabeth B., Courtly Desire and Medieval Homophobia: the Legitimation of Sexual Pleasure in “Cleanness” and its Contexts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) *Lecklider, Jane K., Cleanness: Structure and Meaning (Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 1997). Exceptionally useful book-length study of the poem.

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*Spearing, A.C.; “Purity and Danger”, Essays in Criticism 30 (1980): 293-310

*Texts marked with an asterisk (*) are useful starting points

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Patience

*Anderson, J.J., ‘The Prologue of Patience’, Modern Philology 63 (1966): 283-7. Andrew, Malcom, ‘Jonah and Christ in Patience’ Modern Philology 70 (1973): 230-33 --‘Patience: the “Munster Dor”’, English Language Notes 14 (1977): 164-77

--‘Biblical Paraphrase and the Middle English Patience’, in Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor of Whitney F. Bolton, ed. Robert Boenig and Kathleen Davis, (Lewisburg PA, Bucknell University Press; London Associated University Presses, 2000), pp. 45-75

Berlin, Norman, ‘Patience: A Study in Poetic Elaboration’, Studia Neophilologica 33 (1961): 80-85 Benson, C. David, ‘The Impatient Reader of Patience’, in Text and Matter: New Critical Perspectives of the Pearl-Poet, Troy NY: Whitston 1991, ed by Robert J. Blanch, Miriam Youngerman Miller and Julian N. Wasserman, pp. 147-61 Craun, Edwin F., ‘Exemplifying deviant speech: murmur in Patience’, in Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature: Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker, (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1997), 73-112 Diekstra, F.N.M., ‘Jonah and Patience: The Psychology of a Prophet’, English Studies 55 (1974) 205-17 Easterling, Joshua, ‘Ascetic Desire and the Enclosed Body in the Middle English Patience’, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 40.2 (2014): 144-72 Eldredge, Laurence, ‘Sheltering Space and Cosmic Space in the Middle English Patience’, Annuale Mediaevale 21 (1982): 121-33 Hill, Ordelle G., ‘The Audience of Patience’, Modern Philology 66 (1968): 103-9

--‘The Late-Latin De Jona as a Source for Patience’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 66 (1967): 21-5

Jones, Caroline E., ‘A Lesson in Patience’, in Chaucer in Context: A Golden Age of English Poetry, ed. Gerald Morgan (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 63-82 Moorman, Charles, ‘The Role of the Narrator in Patience’, Modern Philology 61 (1963): 90-95 Palti, Kathleen, ‘The Bound Earth in Patience and Middle English Poetry’, Isle 20.1 (2013): 31-51

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Rhodes, James, ‘Vision and History in Patience’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 19 (1989): 1-13 Scattergood, John, ‘Patience and Authority’, in Essays in Ricardian Literature in Honour of J.A. Burrow, ed. A.J. Minnis, Charlotte C. Morse and Thorlac Turville-Petre, (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 295-315. Reprinted in Scattergood, John; The Lost Tradition: Essays on Middle English Alliterative Poetry, (Dublin; Four Courts Press, 2000) Schleusner, Jay, ‘History and Action in Patience’, PMLA: Publication of the Modern Language Association 86 (1971): 959-65 Spearing, A.C., ‘Patience and the Gawain-poet’, Anglia 84 (1966): 305-29

--‘The Subject of Patience: God as Mother and the Whale’s Belly’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29 (1999): 293-323

*Stokes, Myra, ‘Suffering in Patience’, Chaucer Review 18 (1984): 354-64 Vantuono, William, ‘The Question of Quatrains in Patience’, Manuscripta 16 (1972): 24-30 *Vasta, Edward, ‘Denial in the Middle English Patience’, Chaucer Review 33 (1998): 1-30 Williams, David, ‘The Point of Patience’, Modern Philology 68 (1970): 127-36 Wolfe, Elisabeth G., in ‘“Þaȝ hit displese ofte”: Monastic Obedience in Patience’, Christianity & Literature 62.4 (2013): 493–510

*Texts marked with an asterisk (*) are useful starting points

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Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Arner, Lynn, ‘The Ends of Enchantment: Colonialism and Sir Gawain the Green Knight’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48.2 (2006): 79-101 Arthur, Ross G., Medieval Sign Theory and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Toronto & London: University of Toronto Press, 1987) Barron, W.R.J., ‘Trawthe’ and Treason: the Sin of Gawain Reconsidered (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980) Batt, Catherine, ‘Gawain’s Antifeminist Rant, the Pentangle, and Narrative Space’, Yearbook of English Studies 22 (1992): 117-39 Battles, Paul, ‘Amended Texts, Emended Ladies: Female Agency and the Textual Editing of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Chaucer Review 44.3 (2010): 323-43 Benson, Larry D., Art and Tradition in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1965) Borroff, Marie, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Stylistic and Metrical Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962)

--Traditions and Renewals: Chaucer, The Gawain-Poet and Beyond (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). See in particular ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Passing of Judgment’, pp. 97-113, and ‘Systematic Sound Symbolism in the Long Alliterative Line: Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, pp. 163-74

*Burrow, J. A., A Reading of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977) Clark, S.L. and Julian T. Wasserman, ‘The Passing of the Seasons and the Apocalyptic in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, South Central Review 3.1 (1986): 5-22 Ganim, John M., ‘Disorientation, Style and Consciousness in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, PMLA 91.3 (1976): 376-84 Lander, Bonnie, ‘The Convention of Innocence and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’s Literary Sophisticates’, Parergon 24.1 (2007) 41-66 Levine, Robert, ‘Aspects of Grotesque Realism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Chaucer Review 17.1 (1982): 65-75 *Mann, Jill, ‘Courtly Aesthetics and Courtly Ethics in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 231-65

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Martin, Carl Grey, ‘The Cipher of Chivalry: Violence as Courtly Play in the World of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Chaucer Review 43.3 (2009): 311-29 Miller, Mark, ‘The Ends of Excitement in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Teleology, Ethics and the Death Drive’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 32 (2010): 215-56. Not all will agree with the theoretical approach, but certainly a thought-provoking article. Moll, Richard J., ‘Frustrated Readers and Conventional Decapitation in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Modern Language Review 97.4 (2002): 793-802. Interesting account of the various Arthurian texts that associate Gawain with decapitation. Morgan, Gerald, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ and the Idea of Righteousness (Dublin: Irish Academic press, 1991).

--‘Medieval Misogyny and Gawain’s Outburst against Women in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Modern Language Review 97.2 (2002): 265-78

*Putter, Ad, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ and French Arthurian Romance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) Reichardt, Paul F., ‘Gawain and the Image of the Wound’, PMLA 99.2 (1984): 154-61. Rudd, Gillian, ‘“The Wilderness of Wirral” in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 23.1 (2013): 52–65 Russell, J. Stephen, ‘Sir Gawain and the White Monks: Cistercian Marian Spirituality and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 39.2 (2013): 207–26 Schiff, Randy P., ‘Unstable Kinship: Trojanness, Treason, and Community in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, College Literature 40.2 (2013): 81–102 Spearing, A.C., Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 137-73 (SGGK and Pearl) Stevens, Martin, ‘Laughter and Game in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Speculum 47.1 (1972): 65-78. Highlights the importance of the holiday atmosphere that fills parts of the poem. Thompson, Raymond H. and Keith Busby, Gawain: A Casebook (New York & London: Routledge, 2006). A collection of essays about the history of the Gawain character. Utter, Benjamin D., ‘Gawain and Goliath: Davidic Parallels and the Problem of Penance in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Comitatus 44 (2013): 121–55

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Warner, Lawrence, ‘Mary, Unmindful of Her Knight’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 35 (2013): 263-87 Woods, William F., ‘Nature and the Inner Man in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, The Chaucer Review, 36.3 (2002): 209-27 *Texts marked with an asterisk (*) are useful starting points