Ethan Campbell, The Gawain-Poet and Fourteenth-Century English Anti-Clerical Tradition. Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications / Western Michigan University, 2018, pp. 238.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 427-429
Author(s):  
Jane Beal

In the past four years, there has been a flurry of valuable new work on the poems of the Gawain-poet (also known as the Pearl-poet), which includes new editions, translations, monographs, pedagogical studies, and online resources. Among the editions and translations are Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron’s excellent facsimile edition and translation of Cotton Nero A.x (Folio Society, 2016), Simon Armitage’s verse translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl (W.W. Norton, 2008 and 2016 respectively) and, I allow myself to mention, my own dual-language edition-translation of Pearl with supplementary materials for collegiate teaching (Broadview, forthcoming). Academic monographs include Piotyr Spyra’s Epistemological Perspective of the Pearl-Poet (Ashgate, 2014), Cecelia Hatt’s God and the Gawain-Poet: Theology and Genre (Boydell & Brewer, 2015), my Signifying Power of Pearl: Medieval Literary and Cultural Contexts for the Transformation of Genre (Routledge, 2017), and Lisa Horton’s Scientific Rhetoric of the Pearl-Poet (Arc Humanities Press, forthcoming). Editors Mark Bradshaw Busbee and I have published Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl (MLA, 2017), which contains insightful pedagogical essays from several professors. The journal Glossator provides a complete commentary on each section of Pearl, available online (<ext-link ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://glossator.org/2015/03/30/glossator-9-2015-pearl">https://glossator.org/2015/03/30/glossator-9-2015-pearl</ext-link>/), and additional resources are available at “Medieval Pearl” (<ext-link ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://medievalpearl.wordpress.com">https://medievalpearl.wordpress.com</ext-link>). Now Ethan Campbell’s The Gawain-Poet and the Fourteenth-Century English Anticlerical Tradition joins the ranks, making a meaningful contribution to our understanding of the poet in his cultural milieu.

PMLA ◽  
1936 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-36
Author(s):  
Gordon Hall Gerould

The end of the fourteenth century, when Geoffrey Chaucer wrote, was one of the periods of great accomplishment in English literature. Chaucer did not stand alone. Wiclif's prose, the admirable poetry that Gower composed in three languages, and the powerful satiric verse of Piers Plowman give ample evidence of this. Among the poets of the time no one except Chaucer was greater than the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Pearl, whose name and personality are still unknown. Though a learned man of the world like Chaucer, he wrote in the dialect of northwestern England rather than of London, which must have seemed difficult to most readers even in his own time. Why he chose such an obscure dialect has never been understood. The writer of this paper calls attention to the eloquent defence of his native speech that Dante made in his Convivio, and suggests that the Gawain poet may have been inspired by it to do for his own dialect what the great Italian had done for Tuscan.


PMLA ◽  
1931 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-181
Author(s):  
Coolidge Otis Chapman

In the fourteenth century all good Englishmen were singers. How large a part music played in the life of the time is apparent in Chaucer, who, as Burney remarks, ‘never loses an opportunity of describing or alluding to its general use, and of bestowing it as an accomplishment upon the pilgrims, heroes, and heroines of his several poems.’ The carved figures in the minstrels' gallery at Exeter Cathedral and the Angel Choir of Lincoln are lasting memorials to the universal popularity of music in that day. While the cleric devoted himself to the music that lent beauty to the services of the church, the layman delighted in the music of the banquet, the battle, and the chase. Edward III. himself kept a band of household minstrels that included ‘trompeters, cytelers, pypers, tabrete, mabrers, clarions, fedelers, wayghtes.’ Le Art de Venerie, written by Twici, huntsman to Edward II., reveals a highly developed hunting music, and the martial music is mentioned by Chaucer in the Knight's Tale (A. 2511–12):Pypes, trompes, nakers, clariounes,That in the bataille blowen blody sounes.Born into such a world as this, the poet of Pearl and Sir Gawain bore the deep impress of the popular taste. His own taste was of wide compass, and included an appreciation of instrumental and vocal, secular and ecclesiastical music.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhongfeng Tian

Abstract Traditionally strict language separation policies in dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs reflect parallel monolingualism and have been criticized as failing to recognize the sociolinguistic realities of bilingual students (García, Ofelia & Angel M. Y. Lin. 2017. Translanguaging in bilingual education. In Ofelia García, Angel M. Y. Lin & Stephen May (eds.), Bilingual and multilingual education, 117–130. Cham: Springer International Publishing). To recognize the dynamic nature of bilingualism and leverage bilingual learners’ full semiotic and linguistic repertoire as a resource, this study looks at how to strategically and purposefully develop flexible and multilingual educational spaces in a third grade Chinese Language Arts (CLA) class in a Mandarin-English DLBE program in the New England area, U.S. Drawing upon Sánchez, María Teresa (Maite), Ofelia García & Cristian Solorza. 2018. Reframing language allocation policy in dual language bilingual education. Bilingual Research Journal 41(1). 37–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/15235882.2017.1405098, translanguaging allocation policy framework, the researcher and the teacher co-designed and implemented translanguaging documentation, translanguaging rings, and translanguaging transformation spaces in the CLA class throughout the school year of 2018–19. Taking the form of participatory design research (Bang, Megan & Shirin Vossoughi. 2016. Participatory design research and educational justice: Studying learning and relations within social change making. Cognition and Instruction 34(3). 173–193. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370008.2016.1181879), this collaborative inquiry demonstrates that translanguaging pedagogies could promote student engagement, contribute to their academic learning, and build home-school connections. It aims to provide authentic, sustainable knowledge for both researchers and practitioners to better serve bilingual learners in DLBE programs.


PMLA ◽  
1945 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-23
Author(s):  
Coolidge Otis Chapman

The reading habits of the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Purity, and Patience remain a fascinating and fruitful field of study. Much has been written about the books the poet read, or may have read, but it is unlikely that the catalogue of books owned or read by him has by any means been completely reconstructed. Of the books he certainly knew, the Vulgate is of first importance for its influence upon the poet's thought and style. Certain, but less important, are the Romance of the Rose and the French text of Mandeville. Of the books very probably read by him the Divine Comedy stands first, followed by the Vita Nuova and the Convivio, Boccaccio's Olympia, and the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius. Less probable is his reading of Tertullian's De Patentia and De Jona et Ninive, the Travels of Marco Polo, Peter Comestor's Historia Scholastica, the Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry, the French lapidaries, and a few others still less certain.


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