Death and the Pearl Maiden

The COVID-19 pandemic (still ongoing at the time of this writing) has made viscerally clear how massive the scale of infectious disease can be. Having seemingly penetrated all places at all levels of society since March 2020, COVID-19 seems to haunt anything and everything in our era—even when we are not explicitly addressing it.The scale of the Black Death of 1347–1350, along with the recurring outbreaks of bubonic plague, surely seems, even to our pandemic-jaded eyes, vaster and more horrific. We might well expect such a deadly pestilence to feature everywhere in late medieval literature—and yet, unlike their Continental European counterparts, Middle English poets did not produce a massive body of literature on plague. While many will insist there is in fact silence about plague in British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x, we might wonder if we simply have not been attending carefully enough to recognize the impact of bubonic catastrophe on these poems.In Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England, David K. Coley takes up precisely the task of tracing the literary response to the Black Death in the Cotton Nero poems. In a clearly argued and highly engaging study, Coley intriguingly argues that, despite any overt references to plague, the poems Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are each suffused with verbal and conceptual signs of a “pestilential discourse” (p. 191). Linking fascinating studies of infectious disease and trauma theory with deft and well-informed close readings, Coley offers a timely and rewarding monograph that both enriches our appreciation of medieval pandemics and introduces thoughtful speculation about plague's submerged impact upon these masterful poems.Coley's introductory chapter offers a superb summary of current thinking about the Black Death. While providing excellent sources for those wishing to study bubonic plague, Coley discusses the shockingly high mortality rates of the Black Death itself, reveals the consensus about Yersina pestis as the organism involved, and explores the symptoms of plague that brought so much death and trauma to Europe, Asia, and North Africa. I was especially fascinated by Coley's discussion of the importance of rivers and trade routes in the disease's spread, since this shows how the very dynamism of medieval society magnified the plague's effects, as well as by Coley's demonstration of how the cyclical nature of outbreaks ensured that the trauma of plague lasted for generations. Turning to Trauma Studies to explore the ways a collective sense of catastrophe may fester well beneath the surface of many literary texts, Coley explains his project's task of analyzing a profound and multifaceted “response to the pestilence” within the poems of the Cotton Nero manuscript—here assumed, as in most scholarship, to be the work of a single author (p. 15). While keeping in mind the larger issue of the relatively muted response to plague in Middle English literature more generally, Coley shows that he will probe the Cotton Nero poems to demonstrate the power of locating the signs, however submerged and indirect, of this poet's engagement with the “transformative cultural trauma” of plague (p. 25).By opening with a chapter focused on Cleanness, Coley shows that it is not the manuscript order of the poems but trauma itself that dictates his argument's flow—for Coley's work on Cleanness powerfully combines the issues of catastrophic suffering and the bearing of witness that recalls the work of poetry itself. In an engrossing engagement with trauma theory, Coley reads Cleanness as juxtaposed between two modes of bearing “traumatic witness”: though its programmatic recounting of a history of suffering is “antimimetic,” the poem's “compulsive imagistic and semantic repetitions” follow the “mimetic” path imagined by many trauma theorists (p. 34). After presenting a portrait of Lot's wife as a singular figure of bearing witness who “literally becomes the traumatic event that she witnesses” (p. 36), Coley identifies a kind of throbbing energy created in Cleanness as the poet's insistent “dwelling upon the emotional and physical excess” of “catastrophes” moves us beyond a purely “Christological” program and into a more insistent focus on the “impulse toward memorial preservation” for its own sake (p. 39). Arguing that many of the most grisly images of Cleanness may be meant to invoke the world of plague, Coley dwells on the poet's frequent emphasis on the “human costs” of “disasters” (p. 43). Making an intriguing case for seeing plague as the trauma behind all of the catastrophes driving Cleanness, Coley asks the thought-provoking question whether a poem so focused on bearing witness to trauma is in fact addressed not to the dead but to those who survived, however traumatized, to live in a postplague world.Coley's second chapter links analysis of Christian imagery with close readings of Pearl to argue that this poem, while never directly referencing plague, is in fact profoundly shaped by the “trauma of the pestilence” (p. 65). While making many intriguing connections between key images in Pearl and plague symptoms, Coley slowly builds a case that there is a “saturation” of plague language that blends with the poet's “totalizing frame of Christian soteriology” (p. 82). Coley deepens our appreciation of much imagery in this poem linked to its (potential) focus on a father and child, highlighting how, tragically, late medieval plague was in its later outbreaks often a “disease largely of children” (p. 75), while also showing how the complicated politics of mourning during a deadly pandemic may ground the poet's imagination of a dreamer who both “celebrates and mourns his lost daughter” (p. 87).In what I found to be an especially rewarding chapter, Coley dwells on how two competing impulses during plague time, “flight” and “enclosure,” become poles between which the poet generates the portrait of a profoundly “flawed but sympathetic figure” (p. 95) in the Jonah of Patience. Making effective use of medieval chronicles and poems, Coley convincingly demonstrates how deeply ingrained was the sense of the “impropriety of plague flight” (p. 100), before showing that readers of Patience surely understood Jonah's problematic response as an entirely relatable, because human, example of acting upon “raw panic” (p. 102). After showing convincingly that the example of Nineveh's “deliverance” was frequently used in medieval texts to “encourage” (p. 106) individuals to pray for relief from plague, Coley makes a strong case for seeing the grotesque enclosure of the “whale's belly” (p. 115) as a strong sign of Patience being a pestilential poem. After some absorbing discussion of the relative dangers of pastoral care during plague time, Coley closes with a fine reading of the poem's opening frame signaling a deeper interest in the “plight of England's poor” (p. 114) during an era when one's lower social status increased the likelihood and extent of one's suffering during the pandemic.Coley's Patience chapter makes a fascinating argument for a turn in the Cotton Nero manuscript away from the “apocalyptic certainty” of Pearl and Cleanness, towards the “anxious and contingent” worlds of Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Coley's chapter on the latter poem offers a stimulating reading of the “anxious narrative energy” of a romance whose response to both plague and the vibrant economic world it created is inflected by the values of a “decaying seigneurial culture” (p. 127). After making a convincing case for the presence of powerful women in Hautdesert being linked in part to “demographic” (p. 134) effects of plague that favored the fortunes of aristocratic women, Coley provides an interesting argument that the sexual freedom of women at Hautdesert may have generated an especially intense and dangerous energy due to medieval medical and moral concerns about a linkage between “lechery” (p. 135) and plague. In a compelling argument that links the dangers associated with female sexuality with the “cracked landscape, ominous vapors, and surging waters” (p. 140) of the Green Chapel, Coley proceeds to assert that Gawain's own resistance to sexual activity in the poem might be linked to behavior encouraged by medieval religious texts and images fearing a direct connection between “lechery” (p. 150) and plague. Coley's reading of Gawain's infamous misogynistic outburst as indicative of a persistent “social conservatism” (p. 160) resistant to changes in the wake of plague seems to me to accord well both with socioeconomic history and the poem's own nostalgic insistence on its presenting the distant past.Coley concludes the volume with a return to the larger issue of a relative quietness about plague in Middle English literature (with Langland a singular exception). Suggesting that the “courtly nature” (p. 181) of so much Middle English poetry may explain some of the aversion to direct engagement with the stark realities of plague, Coley also speculates that the “very unproven nature of the vernacular” (p. 187) in a Middle English culture still finding its high-cultural footing may also explain the relative reticence of Middle English poets on the subject. Closing with the view that his simultaneously close and sustained engagement with the Cotton Nero poems has exposed a “pestilential discourse” that is “under-recognized” (p. 191), Coley points fruitfully to the way his rich and well-sourced work might guide scholars seeking other signs of Middle English literary response to the unimaginably horrific Black Death—and the traumatizing afterlife experienced by those who lived to tell of it

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Literature · Pandemic · Poetry · Silence · Wonder · History · Medicine · Philosophy · Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research