Overview

Pearl is a moving elegy written in the late fourteenth century, in which a grief-stricken narrator struggles to come to terms with the death of his baby daughter. He meets her, now transformed into a beautiful young lady, in a dream, where she attempts to bring him to understand the place of death in the divine plan, and where he is granted a sight of the heavenly Jerusalem. Pearl is celebrated as a jewel among medieval poems, although it is the most challenging of the four works by the anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This new critical edition is designed to offer the maximum support for the reader of the poem. The text is accompanied by a close translation, and each of the twenty sections of the poem is provided with an introductory headnote as well as a running commentary. A general introduction supplies the necessary background information, on manuscript and authorship, form and structure, sources and influences, style, vocabulary and verse-form. The bibliography selects the most significant of the extensive critical studies. Written for both the specialist and the general reader, this book is an essential guide to this profound and complex poem. Designed as a replacement for E. V. Gordon’s standard edition of 1953 this is the only edition of Pearl to be accompanied by a literal translation and a full literary commentary and is the fruit of the author's 40 years of teaching medieval literature.

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9781802078947

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Reviews

'Turville-Petre is a major scholar of the literature of the later Middle Ages, and his work on the literary and philological contexts of Middle English poetry… has had an enormous impact on the field. There can be no doubt that his reading of Pearl in this edition is attentive and thoughful, the product of decades of sustained scholarship, thought, and teaching.' David K. Coley, Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 'Turville-Petre’s Pearl can indeed serve as the new go-to edition for serious study of the poem. Much of the pleasure and excitement of reading Pearl, for this reader at least, comes from stumbling over its hard words and unusual turns of phrase, turning for help to the experts and finding even more of its richness and strangeness in the process of that discovery.' Craig R. Davis, The Medieval Review

'Turville-Petre is a major scholar of the literature of the later Middle Ages, and his work on the literary and philological contexts of Middle English poetry… has had an enormous impact on the field. There can be no doubt that his reading of Pearl in this edition is attentive and thoughful, the product of decades of sustained scholarship, thought, and teaching.' David K. Coley, Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 'Turville-Petre’s Pearl can indeed serve as the new go-to edition for serious study of the poem. Much of the pleasure and excitement of reading Pearl, for this reader at least, comes from stumbling over its hard words and unusual turns of phrase, turning for help to the experts and finding even more of its richness and strangeness in the process of that discovery.' Craig R. Davis, The Medieval Review ‘Quite simply, there is no better way to study Pearl than in this edition.’ Alastair Minnis, Medium Aevum ‘This edition and translation of Pearl is the latest book to emerge from this important scholar’s learning and philological acumen. … Ideally suited to introduce Pearl to readers who are new to it, and to give non-specialists who love poetry ready access to its Middle English. … That this edition also conveys Thorlac Turville-Petre’s long-considered, graceful thinking on the poem carries another valuable benefit.’ Yearbook of Langland Studies

Author Information

Thorlac Turville-Petre is Professor Emeritus at the University of Nottingham. His many authored works include Reading Middle English Literature (Blackwell, 2007); Description and Narrative in Middle English Alliterative Poetry (LUP, 2018); (with J. A. Burrow) A Book of Middle English, 4th edn. (Blackwell, 2021) and Pearl: A Critical Edition (LUP, 2021).

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