Abstract
Far from being a poem about the chivalric code, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is essentially concerned with religion. The Romance genre is used to reveal the shortcomings of the Church in the late fourteenth century, just as it begins to feel the first effects of early Renaissance humanism, and of religious reformers such as John Wyclif. Early and medieval Church doctrine, like the chivalric code, imposed a set of conditions which were effectively impossible to fulfill, and it must have seemed to many people that however strenuously they strove to comply, they were inevitably doomed to hell. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, possibly influenced by the teachings of John Wyclif, is a religious allegory in which the intractability of the chivalric code stands in for a Church assailed both for its corruption and intransigent absolutism. The doctrine of purgatory, which became orthodox only by the late thirteenth century, symbolizes the kind of relativist development envisioned by the Gawain author in his/her critique of obsolete and unworkable codes.
Highlights
S for the dead, the intervention of saints, the efficacy of relics and pilgrimages and the sacrament of confession
According to The Second Council of Lyon: “Souls are purged after their death, by purgatorial or purificatory penalties, and that, for the alleviation of these penalties, they are served by the suffrages of the living faithful, to wit, the sacrifice of the mass, prayers, alms, and other works of piety that the faithful customarily offer on behalf of others of the faithful according to the institutions of the church”. (Le Goff 1984: 285)
Article XXII (1562) of the Anglican Church, for example, maintains that “The Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and invocation of Saints, is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God,” while Article V names the books of the Apocrypha as being non-canonical
Summary
S for the dead, the intervention of saints, the efficacy of relics and pilgrimages and the sacrament of confession.
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