THE MEDIEVAL DREAMS, SERMONS, AND ROMANCES OF THE GAWAIN-POET
Of all medieval English poets, Chaucer is the most famous and highly-regarded, but the second-most may be the anonymous author of at least four poems written in Middle English and bound together in a unique manuscript (known collectively as "The Pearl Manuscript"): Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the last of which has inspired multiple feature films. Chaucer has justly been called “the Father of English Poetry,” but the Gawain-poet (aka the Pearl-poet) arguably composed the most intricately beautiful narrative poetry in English. In this course we will read Modern English translations of each of the poems of the Pearl Manuscript in relative isolation then consider them as a cohesive collection with emphases on the poet’s language and poetic form as well as his philosophy and theology.
Class begins on Tuesday July 29th, at 5pm Pacific (8pm Eastern), and continues for EIGHT Tuesdays. Last class will be on September 16th, 2025.
For the purposes of this course, there is only one single-volume collection of our
readings that I can recommend: Marie Borroff’s The Gawain Poet: Complete
Works: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, Cleanness, Pearl, Saint
Erkenwald (New York: Norton, 2011). Unfortunately, her translations are not
printed alongside editions of the original Middle English. Although it’s possible for
those so inclined to read the poems in their original form, doing so is significantly
more difficult than reading Chaucer’s Middle English—and remember that
Shakespeare’s works are technically written in Modern English and thus much
easier to read than Chaucer’s.
Although a number of editions and modernizations of the Pearl-poet’s individual
works are available (mostly of Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight),
besides Borroff's there is only one edition that includes translations of all of the
poems in a single volume, and I CANNOT recommend the translations by Casey
Finch in Complete Works of the Pearl Poet. (My distaste for this translation
seems to have been unanimously accepted when I alluded to such during a
conference panel sponsored by the International Pearl-Poet Society some years
ago.)
Jane Beal, herself a translator of Pearl, has a great little website that includes a
page that lists all the editions and translations of these poems of which I am
aware: https://medievalpearl.wordpress.com/pearls-editionstranslations/.
Comparing the translations can be a fruitful exercise, and some of them are
freely available online. The only translations she lists for Cleanness and
Patience, however, are the ones by Finch and Borroff.
Course Content
Week One - 7/29
About Instructor
Course Includes
- 8 Lessons
- Course Certificate