Pearl and the Narrative of Pestilence

I begin this article not with Pearl itself but with several visual analogues of the fourteenth-century poem. The first, the idiosyncratic biblical picturebook now known as the Holkham Bible, was produced in London between 1327 and 1340, four or five decades before Pearl was written and at least eight years before the first appearance of the plague in England. In its scope and its structure, the Holkham Bible is a product of the typological sensibility that informed medieval Christianity as a whole; it dwells first on several scriptural and apocryphal episodes from the Book of Genesis and then turns to the “fulfillment” of those episodes in the life of Christ, the Passion, and the Apocalypse. Among the more arresting of its images, the illustrations comprising the Passion sequence stand out for their “stylized gruesome, gritty realism,” as well as for their emotional intensity and their unflinching focus on the bodily pain suffered by Christ (Fig. 1).¹ By presenting his pale skin covered with dark spots and oozing wounds, the Holkham Bible succeeds in offering both a startling realization of Christ’s Passion and a grisly if inadvertent portent of things to come: Christ resembles nothing so much as the doomed Florentines that Giovanni Boccaccio would later describe covered in the “macchie nere o livide” (dark or livid patches) of the plague.² While the blood that drips from his stigmata and wounded

Fig. 1.

The covering of Christ’s loins; Christ’s side pierced. From the Holkham Bible. © British Library Board (MS Additional 47682, fol. 32v). British Library, London.

side is a vibrant red, the patches and spots covering Christ’s battered corpus are a mottled blue-black, equally appropriate to the pestilence as they are to the Passion. When the Holkham Bible depicts Christ enthroned several folios later (Fig. 2), the black spots are gone. Though red blood still flows from his five holy wounds, the resurrected Body is healed and whole and radiant. Christ is transcendent here, a redeemed and redeeming figure “withouten spottez blake.”³

Fig. 2.

The New Heaven and the New Earth; Christ returns; The last trump sounds. From the Holkham Bible. © British Library Board (MS Additional 47682, fol. 42). British Library, London.

It will rightly be objected that I am playing fast and loose with chronology by linking the Holkham Bible to the pestilence. Nonetheless, I would argue that images like those presented in the manuscript—the spotted and bleeding Man of Sorrows transcended by the luminous Christ enthroned—are important to the cultural imaginary that comes to surround the disease not because such images are contemporaneous with the plague but rather because they precede it, providing a ready frame through which to understand the sufferings of victims and offering a flexible cultural context into which their own spots and boils might be assimilated. Staying within the realm of the visual arts, we might also consider the “plague crucifixes” that proliferated in the wake of the pestilence, particularly in Germany and other northern European countries, as functioning in this way—using well-established traditions of Christian iconography to respond to the physical and emotional horrors of the disease.⁴ More evocative still is the monumental altarpiece painted by Matthias Grünewald for the Antonine Monks of Isenheim, a hospital order that cared for individuals suffering from plague and other disfiguring diseases such as ergotism and leprosy.⁵ Supported by a pre-della depicting Christ’s entombment and flanked by panels representing Saint Sebastian and Saint Anthony (the former a well recognized plague saint), the Isenheim Altarpiece’s Crucifixion features a spectacularly contorted Christ in visible agony, his flesh, like that of the Holkham Bible’s Christ, covered in the blue-black wounds of his buffeting (Fig. 3). In its open position, Grünewald’s polyptych likewise culminates in an image of the Ascension in which Christ’s spotless Body, free of the scourges of the Passion save the five holy wounds, is inseparable from the nimbus of golden light surrounding...