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  • An Introduction to the “Gawain” Poet by John M. Bowers
  • Rob Ellis
John M. Bowers. An Introduction to the “Gawain” Poet. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012. Pp. xvii, 205. $69.95.

John M. Bowers’s An Introduction to the “Gawain” Poet is not, of course, the first study of the Gawain-poet’s oeuvre. Indeed, it is not even the [End Page 395] first such study to title itself An Introduction to the “Gawain” Poet, echoing as it does the title of Ad Putter’s introductory volume published in 1996. Conscious of this critical heritage, Bowers declares that he offers a “new perspective” (xi) in two respects: first, he situates Saint Erkenwald alongside the familiar four poems contained in British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x, and second, he firmly contextualizes all five of the poems within the political, cultural, social, and theological life of the court of Richard II. Bowers’s ability to work across different media and different disciplines—as well as his close familiarity with Ricardian England—make him ideally placed to offer such a “new perspective,” and his book is a rich and accessible introduction to the works of the Gawain-poet. The volume provides an engaging overview of the poet’s work and features readings that are informed and compelling, if at times a little underdeveloped.

Following a short introduction in which Bowers carefully lays out the difficulties inherent in studying an anonymous author of an uncertain canon, the volume begins with an attempt at sketching in a “Life of the Author.” Bowers notes that constructing such a life is “extremely challenging” (1), but he nevertheless succeeds in producing a plausible picture of an “amphibious cleric” from Cheshire who was at home among both “the chivalric gentry and the educated clergy” (8). The following five chapters provide mostly self-contained studies of each of the Gawain-poet’s works in the order in which Bowers assumes them to have been written, namely: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Cleanness, Patience, Saint Erkenwald, and Pearl.

Bowers’s chapter on Sir Gawain typifies his approach throughout this volume. Working through it chronologically, he mixes close textual analysis with broader thematic and contextual discussion to provide a lively introduction to the poem. While the chapter inevitably covers many of the familiar topics of Sir Gawain criticism, Bowers’s contextualization of such issues as the court’s beardlessness and Gawain’s “unmanliness” (41) within the wider social dynamics of the Ricardian court gives an added vitality to his discussion. Through such contextualizing, Bowers argues that the poem is in part satirizing the “childish, unwarlike, and fashion-crazed behavior of the Ricardian court” (101). Bowers’s arguments are at times contentious, and his rather unforgiving characterization of Gawain as a “petulant teenager” guilty of “ego-driven hyperbole” (52) is unlikely to gain universal support. But overall, the [End Page 396] chapter is an engagingly written and useful appreciation of a poem that Bowers lauds as the “first great whodunnit in English literature” (49).

The following two chapters, on Cleanness and Patience, are perhaps the weakest in the volume. The standard of analysis remains high, and Bowers includes some insightful comments on each of the poems as he works through them. However, it remains unclear what is to be gained by bringing Bowers’s “new perspective” to bear on these two poems. He readily notes parallels between the events narrated in the poems and the events at Richard’s court: the “mania for personal cleanness” in Cleanness “corresponds to the standards of England’s royal court” (58); Belshazzar’s feast described in Cleanness is “perhaps alluding obliquely to the all-night revels hosted by Richard II” (68); and Richard’s “fury against London” in 1392 “resembles God’s destructive wrath against Nineveh” narrated in Patience (84–85). But these, and other examples, remain merely interesting parallels. The chapters lack a clear overarching argument to show how recognizing these potential associations alters, or at the very least inflects, our understanding of the two poems themselves.

The next chapter, on Saint Erkenwald, is stronger and fulfills the other aspect of Bowers’s “new perspective” by accepting the work as an...

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