There's One Surviving Copy of This Tale of King Arthur's Knights. A Researcher Just Unlocked Its Secrets.

Yahoo

28-03-2025

An MIT professor discovered that the Pearl Manuscript from the 1300s has more to it than just four unconnected medieval poems.
Professor Arthur Bahr found that along with the tale 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,' the poetry-filled book features plenty of additional aspects far beyond merely words on a page.
Bahr has a new book covering the unique aspects of Sir Gawain and the other three poems in the Pearl Manuscript.
When MIT literature professor Arthur Bahr spent some time with the manuscript officially dubbed 'British Library MS Cotton Nero A X/2,' it opened his eyes to the mysteries surrounding the legendary tale 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.'
The single-bound volume—know more commonly as the Pearl Manuscript—is easily best known for being the only written source of the most famous story of one of King Arthur's most famous Knights of the Round Table. It dates to the 1300s and, alongside the story of Sir Gawain, includes the only surviving copies of three other medieval poems—'Pearl,' 'Cleanness,' and 'Patience.'
Many medieval bound volumes were simply different documents bound together—something that has long been fascinated Bahr. But, according to his recent analysis, the Pearl Manuscript is much more than just words on paper.
'My argument is that this physical object adds up to more than the sum of its parts, through its creative interplay of text, image, and materials,' Bahr said in a statement. 'It is a coherent volume that evokes the concerns of the poems themselves. Most manuscripts are constructed in utilitarian ways, but not this one.'
Bahr undertook a complete re-examination of the tome, complete with spectroscopic analysis and mathematical investigation, to try and understand this historic text more entirely. In the process, Bahr discovered some of its secrets, which he put together in his own book, 'Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight.'
'The more you look,' he said, 'the more you find.'
And there was plenty to find. To start, through the spectroscopic analysis—an examination technique in which different wavelengths of light are used to investigate an object—Bahr was able to show that the volume originally featured simple line drawings that were later filled in with colored ink. Additional study of the physical manuscript (rather than the digital images) allowed him to see that the parchment on which these drawings were created was animal skin.
Animal hide was not an uncommon material for books to be crafted from at the time—in fact, that's what 'parchment' is. What is uncommon, however, is the particular way in which the parchment was used in the 'Patience' poem. The piece is a reworking of the biblical story of Jonah (the man who survived being swallowed by a whale), and perhaps to provide a more visceral experience for the reader, the parchment was reversed so that the 'hair' side of the material faced the reader rather than the 'flesh' side (as is the case with the other three poems).
'When you're reading about Jonah being swallowed by the whale, you feel the hair follicles when you wouldn't expect to,' Bahr said. 'At precisely the moment when the poem is thematizing an unnatural reversal of inside and outside, you are feeling the other side of another animal
As for the the tale of Sir Gawain—who was not only a member of King Arthur's legendary Round Table, but the king's nephew—it comes alive thanks to a combination of the parchment's textures, poems' construction, and intricate illustrations.
'It's a very MIT kind of poem in the sense that not only is the author, or authors, obsessed with math and geometry and numbers and proportion, they are also obsessed with artifact construction, with architectural details, and physical craft,' Bahr said. 'There's a very 'mens et manus' [mind and hand] quality to the poems that's reflected in the manuscript.'
While the authorship of each of the poems is unknown, most experts believe every piece contained within the Pearl Manuscript was written by the same person. Sequentially, the manuscript starts with 'Pearl,' followed by 'Cleanness,' 'Patience,' and ending with 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,' which Bahr described as an eerie, surreal tale of courage and chivalry.
Bahr said that not only are the four texts thematically linked, but when looked at together the 'manuscript starts to cohere into a wrought, imperfect, temporally layered whole.'
The tome is also, it turns out, surprisingly mathematical. For instance, both 'Pearl' and 'Sir Gawain' are written to be exactly 101 stanzas long, which Bahr believes is an intentional imperfection, as a 'perfect' poem would have 100 stanzas even. 'Pearl' is based around the number 12, with all but one of its stanzas featuring 12 lines—another proposed intentional imperfection. There are also 36 lines per page throughout the entirety of the manuscript (notable in a time when books were written by hand and could have as many or as few lines on a page as the writer wished), and both 'Pearl' and 'Sir Gawain' possess numerically consistent structures.
Daniel Wakelin of Oxford University said in a statement that Bahr's take presents 'a bold model for studying material texts and literary works together.'
Bahr believes that the medieval reading experience was determined by how the reader interacted with the book itself. 'Materiality matters,' he said. Taken as a whole, Bahr said that from a knight at the round table to 'Pearl,' this bound volume from the 1300s is a more complex piece of visual and textural art than anyone had ever seen before.
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