"Þe ʓatez stoken watz neuer ʓet": London, the New Jerusalem, and the Materiality of Entre in Pearl and The Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode

When the dreamer is blessed with a vision of the New Jerusalem in Pearl, he remarks that "Þe ʓatez stoken watz neuer ʓet, / Bot euermore vpen at vche a lone."¹ With gates that are never shut, open at every lane and byway, this is a city that is decidedly and provocatively open. Furthermore, it is a city that advertises that openness in its material form: "Þurʓ woʓe and won my lokyng ʓede; / For sotyle cler noʓt lette no syʓt" (1049–50). The dreamer's gaze passes through wall and dwelling unobstructed. The New Jerusalem is a transparent city, both materially and symbolically; the dreamer can see through it, and its ideal nature is clearly visible. More than this, following Jonathan Hsy's suggestion that the city is a "mode of thought," the Pearl-poet can think through the city.² In the Middle Ages, the New Jerusalem from the Book of Revelation was both a template for the ideal city and, as Keith Lilley has shown, "a model on which to fix images of other cities," in particular, real, earthly cities.³ In Pearl, the New Jerusalem is a model for thinking about the late medieval English city of London, although as we shall see, the ideal cityscape that the poet imagines could also extend to other cities such as York, a location that Joel Fredell has recently proposed as an alternative origin for the Cotton Nero manuscript.⁴ Walled, gated, and far from open at every turn, the lived experience of the medieval city as reimagined by the Pearl-poet is both familiar and strange, recognizable and reconstituted.

The connection between London and the New Jerusalem in Pearl has been argued by John Bowers in The Politics of "Pearl" and will be briefly rehearsed here, as this article builds on and develops his discussion. A linchpin of Bowers's argument is the poet's description of the city's size as "twelue furlonge space" (1030), which is "almost exactly the breadth of London-Westminster in the 1390s," rather than 12,000 furlongs as in Revelation.⁵ Bowers further substantiates his reading of the poem as London-based through thematic, aesthetic, and contextual echoes.⁶ Pearl's concerns with city governance "reflect royal interest in the status of London as the capital of the nation," he argues,⁷ and the poem's depiction of the New Jerusalem gestures to Richard II's quarrel with the city of London in 1392 and the elaborate pageant staged for the king's reentry into the city, described by Richard Maidstone in his Concordia.⁸ The Pearl-poet's interest in visual and symbolic display bespeaks the Ricardian court, a culture "so saturated with artworks of every variety that eventually the regime made the fatal mistake of itself becoming more artifice than reality."⁹

In this essay I argue that materiality is crucial to the relationship that is established between the New Jerusalem and the late medieval city, a relationship particularly evoked through the city gates. Though Bowers argues that the interplay between material culture and "literary arte-fact" situates the manuscript in late fourteenth-century Ricardian London, he stops short of fully examining the city's material form. When Bowers discusses the gates, he focuses on their symbolic role in exploring "the ideal relations between an urban population and its royal lord."¹⁰ These relations are evident in the poet's selective recounting of the Book of Revelation, whose apocalyptic imagery is omitted in favor of the description of the New Jerusalem as the "perfect city constructed from the most costly materials, surrounded by massive walls and richly inscribed gates, washed clean by a river of pure water, and most importantly populated by a harmonious and trustworthy citizenry worshipping their divine lord in the image of the Lamb."¹¹ The inscription of the twelve sons of Israel on the gates similarly foregrounds "the practice of royal self-promotion," because the sons are "carefully arranged...