Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl ed. by Jane Beal and Mark Bradshaw Busbee (review)

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is still the likeliest candidate to represent the alliterative revival in medieval literature courses and British Literature surveys, but new editions and anthologizations, plus recent popular translations and magazine coverage, mean that Pearl is gaining purchase. Jane Beal and Mark Bradshaw Busbee’s Approaches to Teaching the Middle English ‘Pearl’ offers new perspectives and techniques to deepen student and instructor engagement with the text. It is a valuable resource for anyone teaching this fascinating poem.

The introduction provides an overview of the poem, its history, and its major critical themes. Most of these, such as the date of the manuscript, are widely accepted by scholars and prove quite useful, especially to teachers coming to the poem for the first time. However, some of the claims (such as the supposed influence of the Orpheus myth on Pearl) are hobbyhorses of the editors and do not belong in a general introduction such as this. Nevertheless, the brief summary of key topics is beneficial to those readers who will not dive into all of the specialized essays that follow.

Part One of the volume consists of Beal’s examination of classroom texts, including facsimiles, translations, anthologies, and a fair and weighted examination of dual-language editions (pp. 26–30). The strongest section of Part One is “The Instructor’s Library,” which acquaints readers with scholarship on the poem, from introductions and essay collections to monographs, dissertations, and multimedia resources. Beal demonstrates her broad and deep reading of Pearl criticism as she makes certain that teachers will have a firm grounding in cultural contexts and critical theory. While her inclusion of some texts (e.g. Tuchman’s Distant Mirror) is perplexing, the thorough survey of materials and the volume’s rich bibliography help to ensure that Pearl will indeed “become more widely read and better understood in the future” (p. 49).

Part Two of the volume, on pedagogical approaches, is divided into four parts: Historical Approaches and Contexts; Literary and Theoretical Approaches; Comparative Approaches; and Specific Classroom Contexts. The first section begins with A.S.G. Edwards’ consideration of the question of authorship, which is bound to come up especially with students not used to dealing with medieval texts. Edwards troubles the acceptance of a single author for the Cotton Nero A.x poems, but he spends a baffling amount of space (two of five pages) picking on numero-logical symbolism as an argument for the shared-author theory—something that strikes me as not particularly helpful for first-time teachers or non-specialists. Next, Laura Howes tackles the difficult issue of teaching the language of Pearl. She notes the significant obstacle represented by the Northwest Midlands dialect even for students already familiar with Chaucer’s Middle English, but she nonetheless advocates for using the original text whenever possible. By tracing the shifts in meaning and resonance of a single word (jueler) through the text, Howes demonstrates how such practice is informative and worthwhile for students. In their essay on the manuscript context, Murray McGillivray and Kenna Olsen walk readers through a series of exercises that compare manuscript images to an edition and to a transcription, followed by another exercise that lets students consider the differences between their print culture and the manuscript culture of the Pearl-poet. Further exercises include one based on the four manuscript illustrations and several where students produce their own transcriptions, from simple in-class or take-home selections to term projects producing a full, glossed edition of a fitt of Pearl. The section closes with David Coley’s formidable “Public Pearl.” Whether elegy or spiritual allegory, Pearl is “decisively introspective” (p. 81), yet Coley convincingly shows the pedagogical advantages of treating Pearl as a public poem. Doing so, he argues, allows us to put Pearl into dialogue...