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  • An Introduction to the Gawain Poet by John M. Bowers
  • Ad Putter
John M. Bowers, An Introduction to the Gawain Poet. New Perspectives on Medieval Literature. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012. pp. xvii, 205. ISBN: 978–0–8130–4015–8. $69.95

In this lively book on the Gawain poet, John Bowers provides a thought-provoking introduction to the poet’s works. There are various rivals on the market, but while Bowers makes good use of previous scholarship, his introduction is by no means ‘more of the same.’ In the first place, Bowers’ approach is distinctively historicist, as anyone familiar with his earlier book, The Politics of ‘Pearl’ (2001), might have expected. Taking his lead from Michael J. Bennett, Bowers finds a context for the poet’s concerns (such as his interest in courtliness) in the political ties between Cheshire and King Richard II. Also innovative is Bowers’ choice to include St. Erkenwald which he attributes to the Gawain poet. This poem, too, is in the Cheshire dialect; there are suggestive verbal similarities between it and the Cotton Nero poems; and the attention paid to form in all these poems offers another parallel. Like Patience and Cleanness, St. Erkenwald is written in four-line strophes; the placement of large capital letters—one at the [End Page 110] start of the poem and one at line 177—divides the poem (of 352 lines) exactly in half. I am not convinced, however, by the idea (originating with Russell Peck) that the number eight offers a numerological key to St. Erkenwald. The Cotton Nero poems which clearly are numerological, Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, are very explicit about their operative numbers (12 and 5x5 respectively), but St. Erkenwald makes nothing of the number eight. (True, the poem and sections of it are divisible by eight, but in a poem written in four-line stanzas, that is hardly remarkable.) Bowers’ suggestion that St. Erkenwald draws on the Beatitudes—as Patience and Cleanness certainly do—could perhaps supply the missing numerological motive (for there are eight Beatitudes), but since neither Bishop Erkenwald nor the Pagan Judge suffer persecution I fail to see how the poem ‘develops its thematic core’ from ‘Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice’s sake,’ nor can I hear in line 340 ‘another echo of the Beatitudes’ (p. 88). That said, the question of common authorship is an open one, and it is good to see St. Erkenwald included in the discussion.

After a chapter devoted to the life of the poet (necessarily based on limited internal evidence), Bowers begins with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. His discussion will give students a good sense of both the poem and the key critical debates that surround it. Years of experience of teaching this poem shine through; for example, Bowers comments that ‘Gawain works so well in the classroom partly because it is about one thing that students and teachers all understand—tests’ (p. 49). Gawain and the other poems are also made accessible through comparisons with other classics of English literature. For instance, the Lady of the Castle, who has obviously read a good many chivalric romances, is likened to Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey: like her, she is a ‘female reader familiar with the literary genre in which she casts herself’ (p. 39). And Pearl, Bowers remarks, ‘stands as a forerunner of the Graveyard School popularized in the eighteenth century by Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. The difference is that the burial ground is never acknowledged as a burial ground’ (p. 109).

The chapters on Cleanness, Patience, St. Erkenwald, and Pearl are similarly engaging. Literary, historical, and theological contexts are explicated, but witty observations lighten the tone. God in Cleanness is ‘super clean’ (p. 58), and the poet has ‘an almost obsessive-compulsive urge for tidiness’ (p. 59). In his chapter on Patience, Bower makes the odd reference to Julian of Norwich’s Showings, but we come down to earth with the wry remark that ‘personal contact with God does not fill Jonah with the same joyous enthusiasm described by Dame Julian’ (p. 79).

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