Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England by David K. Coley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England by David K. Coley Katherine H. Terrell david k. coley, Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2019. Pp. xi, 220. isbn: 978–0–8142–1390–2. $99.95. In Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England, David K. Coley asks why the trauma of the Black Death, which by some estimates killed 60% of England’s population in the fourteenth century, seems to have left such scanty traces in the period’s vernacular literature—particularly compared to the more extensive contemporary responses from mainland Europe. Not only did the plague test the faith of the English people, but the decimated population also had to contend with new economic and social realities, including the dissolution of communities, a lengthy labor shortage, and changes in gender relations. Taking the poems of British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x as a test case, Coley sets out ‘to investigate how the history of the medieval plague experience might be simultaneously forgotten and remembered in late medieval English literature’ (p. 5). He argues that the poems of the Pearl-poet ‘are both suffused with the plague and offer a distinguishable literary response to it’ (p. 22). The book is divided into four chapters, one on each of the anonymous Pearl-poet’s works: Cleanness, Pearl, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, plus an introduction that sets out the book’s conceptual and historical framework, and a conclusion that interrogates why the flowering of vernacular literature in England’s fourteenth century seems to have so little to say about the Black Death. Coley suggests that the ‘forgotten history’ of the plague surfaces in different ways throughout the four poems: at times as an unconscious manifestation of trauma, at others as a direct and conscious evocation of plague rhetoric and a commentary on the social changes that resulted from widespread calamity. As none of the poems he discusses ever directly reference the Black Death, his reasoning ‘necessarily relies on patterns of suggestion and implication, on semantic and narrative parallel, even on informed conjecture’ (p. 7). This provocative strategy is largely successful. Though readers may take issue with specific readings, the larger patterns that Coley establishes build up to a convincing account of the plague’s presence in these four works, and a compelling reason to reevaluate the traces of the Black Death throughout fourteenth-century English literature. In the first chapter, Coley argues that the biblical calamities of Cleanness poignantly manifest the unspeakable trauma of the plague, standing witness to both loss and recovery. Chapter Two draws a parallel between the language of Pearl and that of contemporary medical writings about the Black Death, convincingly suggesting not [End Page 139] only that we should understand the poem’s lost child as a plague victim, but also that the poem can then ‘be recognized as a meditation on the personal, soteriological, and even eschatological shocks that the pestilence inflicted’ (p. 89). In the third chapter, on Patience, Coley contextualizes the flight of the reluctant prophet Jonah in the light of fraught responses to approaching contagion, reading Jonah as ‘a flawed but sympathetic figure through whom the poet explores the moral, theological, ethical, and even medical dimensions of resisting God’s pestilential wrath’ (p. 95). In a particularly rich reading, the fourth chapter demonstrates how bringing an awareness of the social and economic changes wrought by the plague to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight opens up the poem’s treatment of gender hierarchies and ‘its ambivalence over female desire and sexual agency’ (p. 128). The conclusion challenges us to ask not, ‘Why didn’t English poets write about the plague?’ but ‘Why did English poets write about the plague in the ways that they did?’ and to venture beyond the poems of MS Cotton Nero A.x to answer the question. Katherine H. Terrell Hamilton College Copyright © 2020 Arthuriana