So much has been written about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that it can be daunting both for students and for teachers. It is particularly difficult to undertake its preparation for teaching because students often do not know much about chivalry or the romance genre. For many of our students, even the old stand-bys of Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot are fading in cultural significance. Equally, they are likely to have little or no familiarity with Christian traditions. Clearly, diversity of backgrounds and skill levels can often be a significant challenge, but it is also true that many of us do not have the luxury of time in the classroom that we once did. In North America, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight might be presented to students in one term if on the graduate level, or in one seminar period, perhaps two, in a survey course at the undergraduate level. In Great Britain, it is also likely to be one text among others studied in a module at the undergraduate level. Therefore, how much is enough cultural history, Middle English or literary context to help students to understand the poem is a perennial question. However, if we add to that list of uncertainties what little the average reader knows about medieval Christianity or the history of fourteenth-century England, we might find that our class time is fully absorbed by conversations regarding context rather than the poem itself. How to address that balance is a problem that Professor D. Thomas Hanks speaks to in his chapter on the teaching of Malory.

Not much is known about the Gawain-poet, but it is clear that he knows a great deal about Christian culture and practice, though this need not imply that he was a priest. He could well have been a ‘clerk’, which P. H. Cullum defines as ‘a male person, who was in principle literate, and usually (but by the later fourteenth century not necessarily), in at least the minor orders’. The young men who were trained at the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge were often sent there in order to gain a profession, rather than to become priests.