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Introduction: Fayre Formez in a Medieval Christian Poet
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INTRODUCTION Fayre Formez in a Medieval Christian Poet IN THIS study I aim to define and describe the poetics of a major medieval poet, a poet who is a skilled and careful craftsman, who writes primarily about biblical subjects, and who explicitly concerns himselfwith the truth ofChristianity and the problems of fulfilling God's will. Because I am primarily interested in the Pearl poet's art and its forms, I do not draw on social, political, or economic contexts, although there are places in his poetry when such might be valid, and there are aspects of his work that have been successfully explored in such terms. I I often make use of, or at least work in the context of, formalism and new criticism , critical approaches belonging to earlier generations of this century. More recent work, especially in narrative, has contributed somewhat to my study of the poet, although for the most part his own texts and sources have provided the inferences I make about his narrative art. The poet's sources are particularly important and revealing, since three of his four poems draw heavily on biblical texts, not just for their subjects and stories, but for their assumptions about history and narrative and about signs and patterns and how to interpret them. INor do I subject the poetry to a feminist reading, which has proved fruitful for SiT Gawain and the CTeen Knight especially. For a good feminist reading of Gawain, see Sheila Fisher's article, better and certainly earlier than the recent one by Geraldine Heng. Muscatine's book, Poetry and Crisis in the Age of Chaucer, provides a cultural context, rather than the social, political, or economic backgrounds so favored by the new historicists, but this I feel is particularly appropriate with a poet as traditional, literary, and biblical as the Pearl poet. There are, of course, many articles, too numerous to name, that provide historical backgrounds for particular aspects or passages in the four poems. Some ofthese are more useful than others and will be mentioned where relevant in my discussion . 1 INTRODUCTION I do go outside the texts and their immediate sources to adduce evidence from the poet's culture, particularly from art and biblical exegesis, as well as from other medieval poetry, both English and continental vernacular. The Pearl poet is a learned poet, with an impressive grasp ofbiblical studies, but he is also a poet writing in a native vernacular tradition that is, at least fictionally, an oral tradition.2 At the same time, he is a courtly poet, in the sense that he presumably writes for a courtly audience, for he often includes matters of interest to courts, like feasts and hunting, and he uses the literary forms and conventions found in poets, such as Chaucer and Gower, whom we know to be affiliated with, or writing for, courts. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example, the poet shows a detailed knowledge of such late medieval courtly pastimes as hunting and heraldry, practices that were still more French (or Norman) than English, as is clear from their Anglo-Norman vocabulary; and, in Pearl, on the other hand, the narrator employs the language and conventions of courtly love lyrics.3 In both Gawain and Pearl, the poet exploits the respective genres of romance and 2The discussion oforality and oral formulaic verse does not really concern me here, since for one thing 1 think the dichotomy of oral versus literary a false one for the late Middle Ages (if it's ever valid). What 1 do think important are the places (in Gawain especially) when the poem assumes that there is a present audience listening to a reciting narrator. For a very smart discussion of this aspect of orality in the Ricardian poets, see Burrow (Ricardian Poetry 13-14). On the issue of oral formulaic, see, for example, Waldron, "Oral-Formulaic Technique "; and, for an argument against the oral character of even Old English verse, L. D. Benson, "Anglo-Saxon Formulaic Poetry." The question as to whether the practice of alliterative verse was revived in the fourteenth century or had developed in an uninterrupted line from Old English poetry is still debated; Turville-Petre takes the middle position (perhaps leaning more towards revival), that the late medieval alliterative poets "consciously- and by gradual stages - remodelled a written tradition of alliterative composition [including prose as well as verse) that led back only by rather tortuous routes to Old English verse" (17). 31 am...