"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is perhaps the best-known Arthurian romance in the English language, praised by Tolkien as ‘the best conceived and shaped narrative poem of the fourteenth century, indeed of the Middle Ages, in English.’Its story is well-known: New Year celebrations at Camelot are disrupted by the fearsome and strange appearance of the Green Knight who challenges Arthur's court to a game consisting of an exchange of blows; the Green Knight’s survival of the beheadi...

"Patience" is the third of the four poems of the Pearl manuscript, a fourteenth century work contemporaneous with Chaucer, Langland and Gower, and acknowledged as a minor masterpiece in its own right.The poet’s usage of the word patience reflects two broad senses: that of accepting misfortune and submitting to physical or mental suffering, and that of waiting, holding back, and exercising moderation and self-control. In the opening section of the poem the poet offers a lengthy disc...

‘Lovely pearl, which it pleases a prince to set radiantly in gold so bright….Alas! I lost her in a garden; through the grass to the ground it slipped from me. I languish, grievously wounded by the power of my love for that spotless pearl of mine.’"Pearl" is the first of the four poems of the Pearl manuscript, a fourteenth century work contemporaneous with Chaucer, Langland and Gower. It is widely acknowledged as a masterpiece of medieval English literature. In the poem the...

For students of Middle English, Andrew and Waldron’s The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript has been the key edition of the four Pearl poems for over thirty years. With the changing needs of today's students in mind, the editors produced a complete prose translation of the four poems—the best known of which is "Sir Gawain" and the "Green Knight".The near-literal translations are intended to facilitate understanding of the four poems—to lead readers to, rather than away from, th...

"Cleanness" is the second of the four poems of the Pearl manuscript, a fourteenth century work contemporaneous with Chaucer, Langland and Gower. Cleanness tells several stories, all related by theme–the disastrous consequences of uncleanness, and the good fortune to be had by being clean.The poet carefully constructs a complex accumulation of stories and examples, whose main source is the Old Testament. The three major stories are the Flood, then Sodom and Gomorrah, followed by Bel...