David K. Coley, Death and the Pearl-Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2018, 220 pp.

Abstract

David K. Coley (Associate Professor of English, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia) has produced an intriguing new book examining the four poems of the Pearl Manuscript, Cotton Nero A.x. – Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – in the context of late-medieval English and European plague treatises, texts, and discourses. Coley considers the Black Plague as a cultural trauma, which deeply affected the poet, who, motivated either by subconscious post-traumatic feeling or conscious artistry, used the same language and exempla used in plague texts in key passages of his poems. Coley indicates that his goal in the book <?page nr="470"?>is “to investigate how the history of the medieval plague experience might be simultaneously forgotten and remembered in late medieval literature” (5) and, more specifically, to examine: