Medievalbookshop — AEG0067 Blanch & Wasserman, From Pearl to Gawain

Bargain books on the Middle Ages and all related subjects

See also | Gawain-Poet | Pearl | Gawain & the Green Knight |
Secondhand book for sale
Scanned image of the book’s front cover

Robert J. Blanch and Julian N. Wasserman.
From Pearl to Gawain: Forme to Fynisment.
Published Gainesville: Florida U.P., 1995.
ISBN 0813013488;
ISBN-13: 9780813013480.
Binding: hardback, stitch bound.
Size: 158×235×20mm.
Page count: 207pp inc. 34 monochrome illustrations.
Main language: English.
Unused bargain: this copy is still sealed in its original shrink-wrap, so has not been inspected internally; the wrap has the usual mild scuffs and marks from long-term storage, some white residue from a small sticker on the front.

This item £20.00
P&P inc. within the UK
(delivery outside the UK not currently available)

Weight without packaging: 539g.

How to order this book

Despite lip service to the proposition that the Pearl manuscript is the product of a single author, critics usually treat the four poems as isolated entities. The two authors of this work — who individually and together have produced a formidable body of research, criticism, and bibliographic study of this anonymous fourteenth-century poet — set forth a different thesis. They assume not only that the works share a common author but that they are connected and intersect in fundamental ways.

They begin with the observation that the four Cotton Nero poems, taken together, extend from Creation to the Apocalypse and then transcendence to the heavenly Jerusalem. Comprising the entire scope of "History," the poems share a Creator whose active intervention in human affairs bespeaks a providential history that is the product of divine Will. Beginning with this premise, the authors discuss a series of interrelated themes (language, covenants, miracles, the iconography of the hand, and the role of the intrusive narrator) that successively arise from their initial observation. Every discussion treats all four poems, using each individual work to gloss the others.

While this study builds on centuries of previous scholarship, much of what Blanch and Wasserman explore has never been discussed elsewhere. Some of the material — in particular their reading of the Green Knight’s offer of weapons to Arthur’s court, and the thematic significance of moral "handiwork" in the Gawain poems — not only breaks new ground but challenges accepted interpretations.

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