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The Meaning of the Middle English Pearl

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Marie Padgett Hamilton*
Affiliation:
University of Arizona, Tucson 25

Extract

A solution to the mystery of Pearl must meet certain tests if it is to answer the questions: What is typified by the jewel and the jewel-maiden, and how are they related? What is the symbolic import of the story? Specifically, as J. P. Oakden has indicated, the gem must stand for something which the poet could represent as a pearl and at the same time as a maiden who had died in infancy and had been redeemed by Christ. Further, says Oakden, it must signify something that the poet (or his protagonist speaking in the first person) “lost, mourned, and could recover through the grace of God, strengthened by partaking of the Blessed Sacrament.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 70 , Issue 4-Part-1 , September 1955 , pp. 805 - 824
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1955

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References

Note 1 in page 805 Alliterative Poetry in Middle English, ii, 70.

Note 2 in page 805 Sr. Madeleva, Pearl: A Study in Spiritual Dryness, pp. 192–193; and Sr. Mary Vincent Hillman, “Some Debatable Words in Pearl and Its Theme,” MLN, lx, 243.

Note 3 in page 805 St. 61, especially ll. 729–732: “per is be blys bat con not blynne / pat be jueler so3te bur3 perré près, / And solde aile hys goud, bobe wolen and lynne, / To bye hym a perk wat3 mascelle3.” Cf. D. W. Robertson, MLN, lxv,159.

Note 4 in page 806 Note her account of Christ's cleansing her garments before crowning her “in virginity” (766–768).

Note 5 in page 806 Cf. Sr. Madeleva's views, op. cit. My debt to Sr. Madeleva is considerable and hereby is gratefully acknowledged. My theory was full grown before Sr. Mary Hillman's interpretation was published.

Note 6 in page 806 Pearl, ed. Ε. V. Gordon (Oxford, 1953), 1–12.

Note 7 in page 806 S. P. Chase, The Pearl … An Modern Verse, translates erbere as ‘garden plot.’ Gollancz in his ed. of 1921, Pearl, An English Poem of the XlVth Century, Edited with Modern Rendering, translates it ‘garden’ and insists upon this meaning, but obscures it by adding, “The poet is thinking of the graveyard as a garden.” Gordon glosses erber(e) as ‘a grassy place in a garden, often among trees.‘

Note 8 in page 807 Songs and Hymns of the Earliest Greek Christian Poets, tr. Allen W. Chatfield, p. 106.

Note 9 in page 807 Emile Mâle, Religious Art in France in the Thirteenth Century, tr. Dora Nussey, p. 214.

Note 10 in page 807 A commonplace. See. e.g., Aquinas, Summa Theologica, “Treatise on Man,” Q. 102, Art. 4: St. Athanasius, The Incarnation of the Word of God, Newly Translated into English by a Religious of C.S.M.V. (1947), pp. 28–29.

Note 11 in page 807 Ed. Samuel Clegg, 1919, p. 57.

Note 12 in page 807 Giles and Phineas Fletcher's Poetical Works, ed. F. S. Boas, Vol. i, p. 21. Cf. Donne, “The Harbinger to the Progress,” in The Progress of the Soul, 11. 9–11.

Note 13 in page 807 Migne, Palrologia Latina, clxxxrn, 164.

Note 14 in page 808 For the Pretiosa margarita of the parable as eternal life or blessedness see Gregory the Great (PL, lxxvi, 1115); Bede (PL, xcii, 69); Rabanus Maurus (PL, cxii, 996); Walafri-dus Strabo (PL, cxiv, 133); Bruno Astensis (PL, cxlv, 192); Hugh of St. Victor (PL clxxv 794); and at least five other writers in PL. Cf. D. W. Robertson, MLN, lxv, 160.

Note 15 in page 808 Noted by Gollancz, 1921 ed., pp. xxvii–xxciii; Sr. Madeleva, op. cit., p. 95; Sr. M. V Hillman, p. 243; D. W. Robertson, p. 160. Richard Delbrueck in The Art Bulletin, xxxiv (June 1952), 142, discusses the pearl as an early Christian symbol of “the soul redeemed the Christian purified through baptism.” For Patristic and medieval testimony see Cornelius â Lapide's celebrated digest, Commenlaria in Scripturas Sacras, xv, 334; The Bool of the Knight of La Tour Landry, ed. T. Wright (EETS, o.s. 33), p. 158; Sermon 84 in Selec, English Works of John Wyclif, ed. T. Arnold, i, 286–287.

Note 16 in page 808 Sum. Theol., “Treatise on Man,” Q. 102, Art. 2.

Note 17 in page 809 Here, e.g., are excerpts from St. Bernard's Sermon 81, Cantica Canticorum, ed. Samuel Eales, pp. 495–496: “Life is indeed the soul which is living, but it lives not other whence than from itself, and on this account we speak of it with propriety, not so much as living, as being itself life… . The soul of man alone can reach the higher life, in as much as it is seen to have been constituted as life by Him who is Life… . God is Life; the soul also is Life; it is then like unto God, but it is not equal to Him.”

Note 18 in page 809 Catholic Encyclopaedic Dictionary, articles on “Original Sin” and “Grace”; Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, article on “Innocence.” Edwin Wintermute's statement, MLN, lxiv (Feb. 1949), 83–84, is right as far as it goes: “The pearl means sanctifying grace, the possession of which is essential to the enjoyment of the Kingdom of Heaven.” Cf. W. K. Greene, PMLA, xl, 814–827: Pearl “as a whole was designed to illustrate the doctrine of Divine Grace.”

Note 19 in page 809 In this line (302) I reject the Oxford leuej, ‘believes,’ in favor of louez (MS, Osgood) ‘praises’ or ‘loves.‘

Note 20 in page 809 Louisa Twining, Symbols and Emblems of Early and Mediaeval Christian Art, pp. 141, 142–146; F. R. Webber, Church Symbolism, 2nd ed. rev., p. 362. Cf. Mâle, p. 250, on minia- tures of the Assumption depicting the soul of the Virgin as a child borne in Christ's arms. In El Greco's Burial of the Count of Orgaz the departing soul is a babe carried heaven-ward by an angel. Cf. the souls in Abraham's bosom.

Note 21 in page 810 For a general treatment of the motive see Mary A. Ewer, A Survey of Mystical Sym- bolism, and W. R. Inge, Christian Mysticism, 5th ed., Appendix D. The Atonement as a divine romance is well handled by R. W. Battenhouse, PMLA, lxi 1049–51. For the Redemption in terms of chivalric romance see Sr. Marie de Lourdes le May, The Allegory of the Christ Knight in English Literature, Catholic Univ. (1932); and W. R. Gafihey, PMLA, xlvi 155–168.

Note 22 in page 810 The Goodman of Paris, tr. Eileen Power, p. 60. Cf. Chaucer's “Melibee” and its source. Melibeus' daughter Sophie, wounded by his three enemies (the world, the flesh, the devil), is equated with his own soul.

Note 23 in page 810 P. S. Allen, Medieval Latin Lyrics, p. 223.

Note 24 in page 810 St. Bernard, Sermons on the Canticles, tr. by a Priest of Melleray, i 306, in a glowing account of the soul in her jeweled nuptial garments, specifies that her gems are pearls, symbolizing virtues. For other references to the jewels of the soul as virtues, see Hugh of St. Victor, The Soul's Betrothal Gift, tr. F. Sherwood Taylor (1945), pp. 22–23; Albertus Magnus, De Laudibus B. Mariae Virginis, lib. xii, 4.9.7., as cited by Fletcher, JEGP, xx, 11 : Honorius of Au tun, PL, clxxii 859–860, 966.

Note 25 in page 811 Dante's Drama of the Mind, pp. 9–10.

Note 26 in page 811 Cf. Sr. Madeleva, p. 132: The maiden of the vision “is the personification of his [the poet's] own soul in the state of such potential perfection … as is congruous to it at this time of his life.”

Note 27 in page 811 PL, clxxxiii, 158, quoted by C. S. Baldwin, Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic, p. 174.

Note 28 in page 811 Three Medieval Centuries in England (1100–1400), p. 275, n. 21. Cf. ibid., pp. 174, 272, 275.

Note 29 in page 812 “Quia omnes homines fuerunt ille unus homo, scilicet Adam” (De Peccatorum Mentis, Cap. 10, as quoted by Lapide, xviii, 99).

Note 30 in page 812 Sum. Tkeol., ii (2nd number), Q. 81 (tr. by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province), p. 401.

Note 31 in page 812 “A Sawley Monk's Version of Grostete's ‘Castle of Love’,” in Minor Poems of the Ver- non MS. (EETS, 0. S. 98), Part i ed. C. Horstmann.

Note 32 in page 812 There is no textual warrant for the statement in modern renderings that the dreamer waited on the spot where the pearl fell to earth.

Note 33 in page 813 Aquinas, Sum. Theol., iii (3rd number), Q. 74, Art. 3.

Note 34 in page 813 Sermon 59 in Select English Works, i 179. This figure appears in beauty in Masefield, The Everlasting Mercy, and in recent poems by Thomas Merton; it is a common-place with the Latin Fathers: PL, xxxvii, 1279, 1730; li, 314; lxxv, 1150; cxii, 926, 1440; cxc, 256, e.g., Cf. Piers Plowman's acre.

Note 35 in page 813 Edmund Gardner (Dante and the Mystics, p. 284) reports that high festivals were regarded as specially propitious for revelations and spiritual consolation. Adam Davy in his series of visions about Edward Π dreamed by the ecclesiastical calendar (O. F. Emerson, A Middle English Reader (1948), pp. 227–232).

Note 36 in page 813 St. John Damascene on Holy Images, tr. Mary Allies, pp. 160–161, apostrophizing Mary in her Assumption: “Thou art a spiritual Eden, holier and diviner than Eden of Old, The heavenly Bread of Life … took flesh of thee.” Again St. John of Damascus describes her in the Assumption as “the living garden of delight, wherein the condemnation was annulled and the Tree of Life planted” (quoted by Gardner, op. cit., pp. 212–213).

Note 37 in page 813 See, e.g., Yrjô Hirn, The Sacred Shrine, pp. 438, 446–448; Lapide, viii, 76, 81, 142, 240; St. Peter Damian, PL, cxlv, 938; St. Bernard, Sermons on the Cantica Canticorum, ed. Eales, pp. 259–270; Alanus de Insulis, PL, ccx, 95,109.

Note 38 in page 813 Cf. Carleton Brown, Religious Lyrics of the Fourteenth Century, p. 12.

Note 39 in page 813 Alanus, PL, ccx, 64–65: ‘Campus dicitur humana Christi natura…. Hujus campi flos fuit Christus’ (“Elucidatio in Cantica Canticorum”).

Note 40 in page 814 Ibid., col. 91. Cf. η. 37 above.

Note 41 in page 814 Lapide, viii, 90.

Note 42 in page 814 St. Bernard, PL, clxxxiii, 1059–60 (quoted by Erich Auerbach, Speculum, xxi, 479–80, who also attributes the figure of the garden as the Resurrection to Gregory the Great and Richard of St. Victor).

Note 43 in page 814 Origen, PG, xi, 99, 375, as cited by Mâle, p. 134. H. R. Patch, The Other World, pp. 136, 143, 145–147, 153, cites Cyprian, Isidore of Seville, Bede, Rabanus Maurus, and St. Bonaventura as treating the Terrestrial Paradise as a type of the Church.

Note 44 in page 814 Patch, pp. 139, 153. Bernard of Silvester, De Mundi Universitate (ed. Carl S. Barach and Johann Wrobel, 1876), Lib. I, Part in, 1. 3., devotes 11. 360–414 to the medicinal plants in the Earthly Paradise.

Note 45 in page 814 PL, CLXXII, 423, 425.

Note 46 in page 814 Cassiodorus (PL, LXX, 1078, 1105), Augustine (PL, XLIII, 153–55, 227–28), Gregory (PL, LXXV, 799; LXXIX, 513), Alcuin (PL, c, 653), Rabanus (PL, cxi, 530), Hugh of St. Victor (PL, cxxxv, 275), St. Ambrose ‘On the Mysteries‘ tr. T. Thompson (ed. J. H. Srawley, pp. 71–72); Lapide, viii, 73–74, 77–78, 87–88, 238–240, 641.

Note 47 in page 814 Paradise, xii, 70, 104; xxvi, 64; xxxi, 97; xxxii, 39; cf. xxiii, 71–72. The Church Militant fittingly appears in the Commedia in the hilltop setting of the restored Earthly Paradise (Purgatorio, xxix, xxx, xxxii).

Note 48 in page 814 Gardner, p. 290; Ewer, p. 61.

Note 49 in page 815 Lapide, viii, 641. Cf. xv, 566; xvi, 606, and Giles Fletcher, “Christ's Triumph and Death.” For the Garden of Gethsemane as the Church, see also PL, viii, 59.

Note 50 in page 815 Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain, reproduced in facsimile from the unique MS. Cotton Nero ?'. X. in the British Museum, introd. Sir I. Gollancz, EETS.

Note 51 in page 815 In his 1921 edition of Pearl, pp. xviii, 119, n. 41.

Note 52 in page 815 Among ME vision poems, hill-settings are found also in Piers Plowman, Winner and Waster, The Vision of Life and Death, The Shepherd on a Hill He Sat, and Quia Amore Langueo.

Note 53 in page 815 The incomplete subject-indices of Migne's PL yield some dozen references to mons as Ecclesia and numerous references to mons as Christus. In Pearl 678–79, the rendering of Ps. xxrv.3–4 (“Lorde, quo schal klymbe thy hygh hylle,” etc.), ‘hygh hylle’ translates the Vulgate montem Domini, which is glossed as Ecclesia in the 12th-century Allegoriae in Sacram Scripturam (PL, cxii, 1000–1002), formerly attributed to Rabanus Maurus.

Note 54 in page 816 See D. W. Robertson and Bernard F. Huppé, Piers Plowman and Scriptural Tradition, pp. 35–37.

Note 55 in page 816 See note 49, above.

Note 56 in page 816 Lapide, viii, 55–57.

Note 57 in page 816 Lapide, xv, 615 (cf. i, 26, 84; viii, 499), attributes this opinion to Origen, Tertullian, Athanasius, Epiphanius, Ambrose, Augustine, Cyril, “and others of the Fathers, Jerome excepted.” Cf. representations of the Crucifixion in medieval and Renaissance art with Adam's skull beneath the Cross.

Note 58 in page 816 Lapide, xv, 615: “Unde St. Ambrosius, in Cap. xxxiii Lucae, docet Christum [fuisse] in Golgotha crucifixum quia congruebat, inquit, ut ibi vitae nostrae primitiae locarentur, ubi fuerant mortis exordia.”

Note 59 in page 816 Patch, p. 135 and n. 6.

Note 60 in page 817 See, e.g., H. Oelsner's note to Dante's Purgalorio, xxxii, in the Modern Library ed. of the Divine Comedy, p. 388.

Note 61 in page 817 For Grail legends see D. Kempe, The Legend of the Holy Grail, EETS, 95, pp. xxvi–xxxvii. For religious visions and the Terrestrial Paradise see Patch, pp. 26, 88, 96, 97, 100, 103, 105, 111, 113, 115, 132, 137, and Arnold Van Os, Religious Visions, pp. 30, 31–32, 36, 64, 67, 72, 80, 162, 166, 171, 253. For fragrance in symbolic gardens seen. 63 below.

Note 62 in page 817 The Catholic Missal, arranged for daily use by Rev. Chas. J. Callan and Rev. John A. McHugh (1934), Introd., p. 31.

Note 63 in page 818 Aquinas, Sum. Theol., iii (3rd no.), Q. 83, Art. 5; Lapide, viii, 77–78, 85, 90; Select Metrical Hymns and Homilies of Ephraem Syrus, pp. 116–117; St. John Damascene on Holy Images, p. 197; Cassian, “Conferences,” quoted by Ewer, p. 51.

Note 64 in page 818 The immaculate gem mentioned at the close of stanzas 3, 4 and 5 may be Christ Himself as the Pearl of Great Price in the setting of His Church, the Second Adam having replaced the first. Yet it may well be the dreamer's soul restored to innocence and thus identified with the ecclesiastical garden.

Note 65 in page 818 Christ's dual nature? His human nature, sometimes symbolized by field or garden (n. 37 above)? Wyclif said in a sermon (Select English Works, i 286): “The manheed of Crist is ο margerite that worshipith his Chirche and confortith mennis hertis.”

Note 66 in page 818 Sr. Madeleva, p. 132.

Note 67 in page 819 PL, CXII, 852.

Note 68 in page 819 Thomas Merton, “Poetry and the Contemplative Life,” Figures for an Apocalypse (1947), pp. 95–111. This exposition, based on the Augustinian psychology, “the traditional substratum of Christian mystical theology” (p. 103), also looks back to the testimony of Gregory the Great, Aquinas, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Ruysbroeck, Bonaventura, and Bernard, and agrees with the views of Bonaventura and the Victorines (Hugh and Richard), which I quote below. See especially Merton, pp. 103–104, 108.

Note 69 in page 819 PL, cxci, 1662, as quoted by Sr. Rita Mary Bradley, “Backgrounds of the Title Speculum in Mediaeval Literature,” Speculum, xxix (Jan. 1954), 111–112; cf. 106–108.

Note 70 in page 819 R. E. Brennan, O.P., A History of Psychology from the Standpoint of a Thomist, p. 58.

Note 71 in page 819 W. R. Inge, Christian Mysticism, p. 141 and n. 2.

Note 72 in page 819 Ibid.; cf. Sr. Rita Mary Bradley, p. 108, quoting St. Basil.

Note 73 in page 819 Seen. 24 above.

Note 74 in page 820 See n. 8 above.

Note 75 in page 820 The Cypress Grove, pp. 52–58.

Note 76 in page 822 The medieval baptismal services in England are described by H. B. Swete, Church Services and Service Books before the Reformation, pp. 138–143; Wm. Maskell, Monumenta Rilualia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (2nd ed., 1882), i 3–43.

Note 77 in page 822 “The solemn renewal of this promise [the renunciation of Satan and his works and pomps] is a favourite exercise of piety, often undertaken in common at the end of a mission or retreat” (Catholic Encyclopaedia, article on “Baptismal Vows”).

Note 78 in page 822 PL, xxxv, 1571. Cf. D. W. Robertson, MLN, LXV, 158, who defines “world” in this utterance of Pearl's as “cupidity for temporalia.”

Note 79 in page 822 Lines 1113–16: “þa3 þou be man fenny / And al to-marred in myre, whyl þou on molde lyves, / þou may schyne þur3 schryft þa3 þou half schome served, / And pure þe wiþ penaunce tyl þou a perle worþe.”

Note 80 in page 823 See OED under betake and cf. F. A. Patterson, The Medieval Penitential Lyric, pp. 87, 120; C. Horstmann, Yorkshire Writers, I, 236; Minor Poems of the Vernon MS., i, 231 (lines 363–366); The Wyclifite New Testament, ed. Henry H. Baber, Luke 23.46.

Note 81 in page 824 Sum. Theol., iii, Q. 73, Art. 3.

Note 82 in page 824 “Grace” (Catholic Encyc.) : “The Friendship with God is one of the most excellent effects of grace… . According to the Scriptural concept (Wisdom, vii.14; John xv.51) this friendship resembles a mystical matrimonial union between the soul and its Divine Spouse” (Matt, ix.15; Apoc. xix.7).