The senses and their understanding by the medieval laity is an exciting arena in which many authors of the golden age of Middle English vernacular literature exercised their exegetical ability and literary craftsmanship. This book examines the representation of the divine by the anonymous fourteenth-century Pearl-poet, through a close reading of his three “scriptural” Middle English poems, Cleanness, Patience and Pearl, against the background of the culture of sensorium in late medieval England.

In this book, individual corporeal senses and general ideas about sensory perception will be investigated, as well as the non-physical senses. By bringing the Pearl-poet’s treatment of the sensorium－both of God and of humans－into the focus of attention, Dr Bao illustrates how human interpretation of sense-perceptible signs, and their decision to regulate sensory experience accordingly, play a significant role in the poet’s “vernacular theology”, and in the spiritual life of late medieval English laity.

14世紀中古英語頭韻復興運動中的翹楚詩人“珍珠”的全部作品僅有一份手稿存世（大英圖書館柯頓·尼祿A.x手稿）。本書立足於對《珍珠》手稿中三首基於經文的長詩（《清潔》《堅忍》《珍珠》）之中古英語原文的訓詁和細讀，研究“珍珠”詩人對神性的理解，並探討詩人對中世紀感官文化及相關思想史背景的反刍。

無論在理論或實踐層面,感官及對感官認知的態度在中世紀人道德、宗教、情感模式的形成中都扮演關鍵的角色，深入研究感官文化的一個重要途徑就是文學作品。本書每一章節聚焦《珍珠》手稿的一部作品，研究其中示例人物如何通過規範自己的感官經驗，將“抑肉揚靈”的古典感官論中被貶抑的“身體感官”轉化為一種通往救贖的路徑。本書還將通過探討“內感官”“精神感官”“神秘感官”等概念在文本中的呈現，比較中世紀感官論與現代感官論的關鍵差異。作者在語文學—文學解讀的基礎上，同時考察8—15世紀手抄本中對感官的圖像學表述，試圖梳理並書寫一種形成於圖文互動過程中的文學感官史。

Huiyi Bao (PhD, University College Dublin) is Assistant
Professor at the Department of English, Fudan University. Her research
focuses on Old and Middle English poetry, and on the textual-pictorial
engagement in illustrated medieval manuscripts. She is the author of one
monograph in Chinese, The Art of Middle English Lyrics (2018), and of
more than ten peer-reviewed journal articles both in English and in
Chinese. Medievalist, poet and literary translator, she has published
two books of poetry, A Pagan Book of Hours (2012) and I Sit on the Edge
of the Volcano (2016); one book of essays, Annal of the Emerald Isle
(2015); and one book of criticism, Scriptorium (2018). She is the
translator of twelve books from English to Chinese, including Complete
Poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Ariel by Sylvia Plath, Good Bones by Margaret
Atwood, and Immram and Isle: Works of Four Contemporary Irish Poets.
She was awarded the China Bookstore Prize, DJS-Poetry East West Award,
and Literature Ireland Translator’s Bursary. She taught at Trinity
College Dublin before joining Fudan, and is currently vice-director of
the China-Australia Creative Writing Centre (CAWC) at Fudan, and
editor-in-chief of Homings and Departures: Selected Poems from
Contemporary China and Australia (2018).

包慧怡，本科畢業於復旦大學英文繫，愛爾蘭都柏林大學英文繫中世紀文學博士，現為復旦大學英文繫講師。研究古英語與中古英語詩歌，及中世紀手抄本中的圖文互動。著有學術專著《中古英語抒情詩的藝術》（2018），在國內外核心期刊發表學術論文十餘篇。已出版詩集《我坐在火山的邊緣》(2016)、《異教時辰書》(2012)，文學評論集《繕寫室》(2018)，散文集《翡翠島編年》(2015)；並出版譯著十二種，包括伊麗莎白·畢肖普詩集《唯有孤獨恆常如新》、西爾維婭·普拉斯詩集《愛麗爾》、瑪格麗特·阿特伍德散文詩集《好骨頭》《島嶼和遠航：當代愛爾蘭四詩人選》等。獲中國首屆書店文學獎、DJS—詩東西評論獎、愛爾蘭文學交流會國際譯者獎。曾任教於都柏林聖三一學院，現任復旦大學中澳創意寫作中心副主任，主編有《歸巢與出發：中澳當代詩選》(2018)。

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements iiiList of Abbreviations v

CHAPTER ONE: Introduction1

I. General Introduction and Aims of Research1

II. The Pearl-Poet and the Medieval Sensorium4

III. Historical and Ecclesiastical Milieu9

IV. Contemporary Religious Writings19

V. Ambiguous Divinity: The Pearl-Poet’s Representation 33

CHAPTER TWO:Cleanness: The Dialectics of Visio Dei, and Ocular Scepticism 40

I. Theme, Structure and Sources40

II. God Seeing and Being Seen: The Dialectics of Visio Dei 52

III. Seeing, Touching and Believing: Sensorial Scepticism 72

IV. Conclusion88

CHAPTER THREE:Patience: Auditory Epiphanies and the Dialogics of Interaction 91

I. Overview and Sources91

II. The Epiphany of the Ear98

III. Jonah’s Voice116

IV. Conclusion139

CHAPTER FOUR:Pearl: The Sensory Itinerary towards Jerusalem 145

I. Descent in the Erber: Corporeal Perception154

II. Advance in the Terrestrial Paradise: Spiritual Perception 169

III. Ascent toward the Heavenly City: Mystical or Psychosomatic Perception 188

IV. Conclusion205

CHAPTER FIVE: Conclusion211

Bibliography222

Acknowledgements

This book began as a doctoral dissertation presented to University College Dublin under the supervision of Doctor Niamh Pattwell and Professor Mary Clayton, to whom my most heart-felt gratitude goes. When I was writing my research proposal from China in 2010, I could never have imagined the kindness and generosity I was going to be showered with by them in the coming years. Without their constant and conscientious devotion of time, professional guidance, generosity with books and spiritual support, this book could never have taken shape the way it has. In their different ways, Niamh and Mary have been beacons during my PhD years, the light from which kept illumining my road long after I left Ireland.

Since then, many have witnessed the slow but steady metamorphosis from thesis to book of the current manuscript. Professor Vincent Gillespie and Dr Rebecca Stephenson, respectively my external and internal examiners, both gave valuable suggestions at my PhD viva, from which I have profited much. My gratitude also goes to: Dr Jane Grogan, Dr John Braniggan and Dr Naomi McAreavey who were on my doctoral transfer panel; Professor Danielle Clarke who then acted as Head of the School of English, Drama and Film; as well as every academic and administrative member at UCD who has helped me in one way or another. My friend Shimeng Zhou saw me through the darkest stage of writing with her exquisite Szechuan-style cuisine; Dr Lijing Peng and I shared many dreamy afternoons in the National Library of Ireland. I would also like to thank the following scholars and friends for their support during the PhD odyssey: Professor Harry Clifton, Professor Alan Fletcher, Dr Darragh Greene, Dr Sarah Nangle, Dr Sabine Rauch, Dr Fangzhe Qiu, Dr Wei Feng, Dr Jun Su, Huan Zhang, Huaidong Wang and Dr Yingyun Wang.

I gratefully acknowledge the UCD-CSC Scheme as my chief funding source in Ireland. I also received a Translator’s Bursary from Literature Ireland and the Centre for Literary Translation, Trinity College Dublin, where I taught as Associate Researcher.

The publication of this book has been aided by Shanghai Pujiang Program [16PJC005], and by a grant from the College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Fudan University, where I currently teach as Assistant Professor. My deep gratitude goes to Professor Weiguo Qu, Dean of the College, who has been a great support in many different aspects. I also wish to thank Professor Zheng Tan, who has always been generous with his scholarship, encouragement and help; Professor Xiaoquan Chu, who gave much assistance in my attempt to enlarge the

“medieval corner” of the college library; Professor Li’an Lu, who has

been an inspiration since my undergraduate years; Professors Gengxin Su and Qiong Zhang, who have offered very useful pedagogical advice in the courses we co-teach; Associate Professors Jianxin Zhu and Feng Duan, who helped me with creating a brand new undergraduate course, Reading Medieval English Literature. Friendship with members of

the poetry workshop “Rose of Sharon”, particularly with Associate

Professor Linjing Jiang and Dr Jie Chen, has been an inexhaustible source of joy and strength in the past three years.

Yunsong Tang, vice editor-in-chief at Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, has been extremely helpful with setting this book manuscript to print, as has my editor Huanxin Liu, whose patience never fails.

Finally, I wish to thank my family for their unchanging support for whatever I chose to do with my life. My father, tens of thousands of miles away during my years in Ireland, with whom I spent little time but from whom I received endless love and understanding, passed away from cancer eight months after I returned to Shanghai, leaving a blank in my life which can never be filled. This book is dedicated to his memory. My mother underwent unimaginable hardship in the years of my absence, and my beloved husband Peng Xie performed many family duties on my behalf. Thank you both for having constant faith in me and being my lasting sources of strength.

Shanghai, July, 2018.

Introduction

I. General Introduction and Aims of Research

The four poems in alliterative verse contained in the illustrated manuscript, London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A. x, are now generally considered to belong to the finest literature written in Middle English (Johnson, Voice ix). This recognition came rather late. Unlike Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland and other contemporary poets, whose major works survive in what is by fourteenth-century standards an abundance of copies, the anonymous author of Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has made his way to us in but a single manuscript. SGGK remained inaccessible to general readership until 1839, when it appeared in an anthology of Gawain romances edited by Sir Frederic Madden; the other three poems were undiscovered and eluded any scholarly attention until Richard Morris edited and published them in 1864 as the first volume for the new Early English Text Society.1 A scarcity of available copies may partly account for the poems’ long eclipsed fame, disproportionate with their quality, but their late emergence into critical attention may equally be the result of their limited circulation and popularity from the very beginning. The four poems did not have the linguistic advantage, like the contemporary Canterbury Tales, of being written in a metropolitan dialect which gradually evolved into the English of Shakespeare, and then into

The history of the discovery and rediscovery of the manuscript can be found in Moorman, The Works of the Gawain-Poet 10-16; and more recently in Andrew and Waldron eds., The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, 5th ed. 1-5, among others. Throughout this book, all quotations from the Pearl corpus are from Andrew and Waldron’s fifth edition (hereafter A&W) unless otherwise stated.

modern English. Rather, they are written in a West Midland dialect which, even at the time of their composition, was in all probability not readily intelligible to an average reader not from that part of the country.

The manuscript itself is usually dated around 1400. Scribal errors and other textual evidence suggest an earlier time of composition, roughly the latter half of the fourteenth century. Resorting to intertextual and linguistic clues about the poet’s reading, scholars have attempted to give individual poems a more precise dating. For instance, Ad Putter dates Cleanness in the last decades of the century, probably 1390s, based on its borrowing from Mandeville’s Travels—not the original French version circulating on the continent from about 1357, but the Insular Version that only became available to an English readesr at a later period (An Introduction 3). Charles Moorman suggests that Patience was written before 1377, when the Piers Plowman B-text is dated, since the latter “echoes” the former (Works 15). And it is generally agreed that the four poems’ order of compilation in the manuscript (Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and SGGK) almost certainly does not reflect the order of their composition, judging from their relative structural maturity and poetic competency.1 Other than that, a more sure-footed dating seems impossible at this stage, and we have to be content with the common ascription of the four poems to an anonymous Pearl-poet, or Gawain-poet, writing roughly between the 1360s and 1390s in the West Midland dialect of English.

It has to be admitted that no external evidence exists to point to a common authorship, other than the poems’ survival in the same manuscript. Similarities in the alliterative style used to be understood as indications of common authorship. Later metrical studies have shown, however, that the style is almost as anonymous as the alliterative poets themselves, collectively inherited and developed from “a common pool of formulas” as a continuation of “an ancient tradition of minstrelsy” (Spearing, Gawain-Poet 32-3), thus insufficient to establish a specific

See Blanch and Wasserman, From Pearl to Gawain: Forme to Fynysment 5. On the dating of the four poems, see also Vantuono ed. and trans., The Pearl Poems, Vol. 1, xix; xx-xxii; and Davenport, The Art of the “Gawain” -Poet 5-6.