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 Frank Swannack Coley, David K., Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England (Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture), Columbus, The Ohio State University Press, 2019; hardback; pp. 236; 10 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$99.95; ISBN 9780814213902. Death and the Pearl Maiden tackles a literary mystery that has puzzled late medieval scholars. The plague known as the Black Death, which caused millions of deaths in Europe and England, is hardly mentioned in late medieval English literature. David K. Coley offers a complex, multifaceted, and often brilliant explanation of why the unflinching descriptions of the Black Death’s devastation in European texts make England’s underwhelming literary response disturbingly conspicuous. Coley focuses on four Middle English works preserved in the British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x, article 3 (Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) written at the height of the endemic between the 1370s and 1390s. Coley argues that the collected poems powerfully meditate on the plague and its cultural aftermath, eschewing a direct account. His argument uses trauma as a literary tool because traumatic events negotiate the fraught space ‘between acknowledgement and suppression’ (p. 6). The need to voice untold horrors becomes muted by their very nature. Coley’s analytical method is split between providing insightful readings, and self-critical comments. Early in the Introduction, he admits that the texts being examined contain no substantial evidence of engaging with the plague. He adds that his thesis is entirely speculative and based on allusive references. [End Page 195] His admission, however, becomes a critique of the New Historicist approach requiring that literature has a direct and clearly traceable engagement with historic events. Throughout the study, the pattern of anticipating the critical response to his readings enables Coley to add another layer to his speculative insights. Death and the Pearl Maiden examines first the second poem from the MS Cotton Nero A.x, Cleanness. The poem’s descriptions of dismemberment and death graphically adapted from the Book of Genesis resonate with the Black Death. By looking back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s wife acts as a ‘traumatic witness’ to catastrophic events (p. 34). She embodies Coley’s thesis as being a readable symbol for an unspeakable traumatic event and its silenced victims. The analysis of Pearl begins with an illustration of Christ’s crucifixion from the Holkham Bible (1327–40). As it precedes the Black Death, the image is startling both in its prescience and how it undermines Coley’s thesis. The illustration shows Christ’s body covered with blue-black spots and sores. Coley’s point is that the illustration provides a common context in which the sins of the world can be absorbed into any pestilence-influenced text. The illustration also shows that because Pearl contains many references to bodily sores and swellings, it does not necessarily signify the Black Death. Perhaps in recognition of such criticism, Coley augments his argument through the poem’s references to odours and summertime that resonate further with the medieval experience of the plague. Patience adapts the biblical story of Jonah, who, fleeing from God’s command to go to Nineveh, ends up in a whale’s body for three days. Before analysing the poem, Coley discusses intriguing research on the psychology of flight. Rather than escaping the terror, flight involves fleeing to familiar enclosures, even if it means more danger. By magnifying Jonah’s notion of flight without refuge in Patience, Coley provides a convincing historical context to the futility of trying to escape the Black Death. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Coley examines the female character Morgan le Fay. He argues that she represents the cultural changes the Black Death thrust upon England. The plague’s devastation of over half of England’s population created a labour shortage, giving aristocratic women greater autonomy in social and economic affairs. As the monstrous sorceress and crone, Morgan le Fay personifies the immoral female sexuality associated with the spreading of the Black Death. Furthermore, as the Lady of the Manor’s associate, her influential presence in...