[In the following essay, Schotter considers the theme of Pearl to be the inadequacy of both images and human language to convey the idea of the Divine.]

Any Christian visionary writer must confront the problem of how to convey the Divine in human terms. Throughout history theologians have spoken of two ways, the positive, which proposes analogies for God, and the negative, which denies that any analogies are valid. The two ways tend to work in a dialectical manner, the latter continually warning against the idolatry that the former might encourage.¹ The author of the fourteenth-century English Pearl confronts this traditional problem when he tries to convey the kingdom of heaven to his readers. His solution is to suggest it by various analogical devices, while at the same time using a naive dreamer as a warning against taking them literally. Among the devices that he chooses are parables (those of the vineyard and the pearl of great price), images (the paradisal garden, the Lamb, and the New Jerusalem), and an enigma (the Pearl maiden herself). It has often been pointed out that by using the maiden to criticize the dreamer's earthbound perception of these analogies, the poet makes the inadequacy of images inconveying the Divine an explicit theme of the poem.² I would like to argue that he makes the inadequacy of language in conveying the Divine an implicit theme as well. He uses the limitations of his specific poetic medium—the West Midland dialect of Middle English on which alliterative poetry was based—to explore the general problems of language in its attempt to express the ineffable. For at the same time that he exploits the most splendid resources of his medium, he includes some of its pedestrian characteristics as a warning against excessive trust in language. His rhetorical concerns thus take on a theological dimension as he uses human words to try to convey God's Word, while paradoxically insisting that it is impossible for them to do so.³

In this respect the poet follows Augustinian sign theory, which, although it is profoundly distrustful of signs of any kind, justifies the use of both words and visual images for Christian purposes. Saint Augustine frequently pointed out that words are inadequate to convey an ineffable Godhead, saying, for instance, in De Doctrina Christiana,

God should not be said to be ineffable, for when this is said, something is said. And a contradiction in terms is created, since if that is ineffable which cannot be spoken, that is not ineffable which can be called ineffable. This contradiction is to be passed over in silence rather than resolved verbally.⁴

And yet, Augustine argued, if man could not use language to express God he could nevertheless use it to praise Him, and the Christian preacher, moreover, was obligated to spread God's Word with human words as best he could.⁵ Since language was a mediation made necessary by fallen understanding, rhetoric was a weapon with which God's friends should be armed, despite the danger that their hearers might enjoy beautiful language for its own sake. Such idolatry could be prevented if language would warn against its own inadequacy—if the signs would warn against being taken for the thing they signified.⁶ The justification for using human language was to be found in an analogy with the Incarnation, for if language had fallen with Adam, it had been redeemed by Christ's condescending to take on human flesh—and, therefore, human speech.⁷

Augustine held, furthermore, that a similar incarnational model justified using a low style to express the Word of God: the gap between literary styles was insignificant compared to that between human language and Divine. In reformulating Ciceronian rhetoric, he abandoned the distinction between three levels of style which was based on subject matter, arguing that no aspect of the Christian story could be considered "low." Hence, as Erich Auerbach has shown, he urged the Christian rhetorician to adopt a sermo humilis—a low style for a lofty theme.⁸ In this way Augustine was able to defend the style of the Old Latin version of the Bible to the cultivated Romans who thought it barbarous, even while he continued to use elaborate figures of speech in his own writing.

The Pearl-poet does not put forth his linguistic principles at all, let alone do so with the explicitness of Augustine. But Augustinian sign theory persisted in Europe through the fourteenth century, as can be seen in Dante's dependence on it to justify the use of the Italian vernacular for elevated literary subjects.⁹ It is likely, therefore, that our poet's thoughts on language were informed by Augustine's. I would like to argue that he perceived the gap between the high and low elements in his own alliterative poetic tradition in the same way that Augustine perceived that which stood between the styles of Ciceronian and biblical Latin. And furthermore, although in trying to convey the heavenly vision he employed the high elements, he also used the low elements of his tradition to warn against them. In this way he sought a sermo humilis in which to achieve a poetic incarnation of the Word of God.

The certain elements of alliterative poetry can be considered low is a reflection of the complex sociolinguistic situation of Middle English in the fourteenth century: after three hundred years of domination by French, the language was being used increasingly for imaginative literature, but because of the great dialectal differences, those who used it had little sense of shared literary values. Rather than one standard literary dialect, as South East Midland was to become in the fifteenth century, there were several dialects, of which West Midland, with its traditional alliterative poetry, was just one.¹⁰ All Middle English poetry was prone to infelicities of style, because of its dependence on conventional devices left over from an earlier, simpler age when performance, if not composition, was oral.¹¹

Such devices, which might be called "low" elements, include both general topoi and more specific verbal formulas. While the topos I shall discuss in Pearl— that of "inexpressibility"—is part of the general European tradition which Middle English inherited, the formula, se wyth syƷt, is specific to alliterative poetry. Formulas developed largely out of the requirement that the poetry alliterate three words per line, a situation which led poets to choose stereotyped groups of words, such as on erthe or sothly to say, on purely phonetic grounds.¹² The resulting style, wordy and highly conventional, has not been well regarded by modern critics, one of whom objects that alliterative poets show an excessive tolerance to "pleonasm, and sometimes to sheer vacuity of expression."¹³

But while the style of alliterative poetry as a whole has been little esteemed, that of the Pearl itself has been consistently praised, often for qualities which are just as characteristic of its tradition as the empty formulas: writers speak of a "high style" in which poets use words "as if they were jewels" and resort to "elaborate and colourful rhetoric for sheer pride of craftsmanship."¹⁴ One characteristic of this style is the use of certain archaic adjectives, many of them "elevated" because they appear only in poetic contexts, to describe courtly and heroic subjects—adjectives such as bryƷt clere, mery, ryche, and schene.¹⁵ In employing not only these words, but also such examples of the medieval rhetorician's "difficult ornament" as word-play, stanza-linking, and complex rhyme scheme, Pearl is acknowledged to be the most exquisite example of the alliterative high style that we have.

The poem has received praise not only for using the high elements, but also for transcending the low ones. But such a view overlooks the poet's intentional use of low formulas for a rhetorical purpose. For although he exploits all the resources of the alliterative high style at the supreme visionary moments—when the dreamer catches sight of the paradisal garden, the maiden, and the New Jerusalem—he also introduces at those moments certain low elements which work with the high in a dialectical fashion to warn against the distractions offered by beautiful language. By undercutting his own linguistic virtuosity, he demonstrates that language, for all its power, is inadequate to convey the Word of God. He thus uses the limitations of his own vernacular literary language to point out the limitations of human language in general.

In this process of undercutting, the Pearl-poet uses what J. A. Burrow considers the most common device with which Middle English poets dissociated themselves from their inherited literary medium: the naive narrator.¹⁶ While the Pearl dreamer is apparently unaware of the conventional nature of his stylistic devices, the poet is extremely aware, and uses these elements to dramatize the limitations of human language. His strategy becomes especially clear in the debate section of the poem, where the poet has the maiden, as his spokesman, correct the dreamer's misconceptions.

The alliterative formula which the dreamer uses to describe his vision of heaven, se wyth syƷt (or se wyth yƷe), is one which points to the inadequacy of both words and images. Of all the formulas that have been criticized as being mere fillers to facilitate composition, this has been singled out as one of the most meaningless, something to be fitted in whenever a poet needed a second half-line alliterating on "S."¹⁷ Marie Borroff, however, has justified its use in certain contexts where emphasis on vision is significant, notably in the work of the Pearl-poet himself. For she argues that when in Sir Gawain the members of King Arthur's court think that nothing so extraordinary as the Green Knight has ever been "sene in þat sale wyth syƷt er þat tyme, / wyth yƷe" (seen in that hall with sight before that time, with eye), the double pleonasm in the formula underscores the court's stupefaction, and slows down the action in a way appropriate to a mood of wonder.¹⁸

I believe that the poet uses se wyth syƷt self-consciously, fully aware of its limitations, both theological and rhetorical. The former lie in the faith which it implies in the ability of visual images to accurately convey the Divine. The dreamer in using the formula to describe his vision thereby expresses this faith; the poet, however, wants us to recognize that we see God through such images "through a glass darkly," rather than, as in heaven, "face to face" (I Cor. XIII. 12). The theological limitations of the formula are further underscored by the fact that it is often used by the narrators of secular alliterative dream visions to express their astonishment at the splendor of earthly marvels. By putting the formula in the Pearl dreamer's mouth, the poet classes him with such dreamers as the narrator of Wynnere and Wastoure, to whom the king is one of the handsomest lords that anyone ever "sawe with his eghne," or that of "Summer Sunday," to whom Lady Fortune is such a woman as he never "sey … wiþ syƷth."¹⁹

The rhetorical limitation of se wyth syƷt, on the other hand, is simply that it is hackneyed. It is useful for pointing up the inadequacy of words for expressing the Divine, for it allows the poet to undercut the effect of the language of the alliterative high style. Thus, in the midst of describing the maiden's dress with such elevated phrases as "beau biys" (fair linen), "al blysnande whyt" (all shining white), and "Wyth precios perleƷ al vmbepyƷte" (with precious pearls adorned all about), the poet inserts a "low" formula when he has the dreamer call her pearls the loveliest "þat euer I seƷ Ʒet with myn ene" (that ever I saw yet with my eyes).²⁰

That the poet is using se wyth syƷt pointedly in this case is suggested by the fact that the maiden soon repeats the formula when reproaching him for depending on the evidence of his eyes. She scolds him for believing that she is still alive, simply because he can "wyth yƷen [her] se" (1. 296), and goes on to say

I halde þat iueler lyttel to prayse
Þat leueƷ wel þat he seƷ wyth yƷe,
And much to blame and vncortayse
Þat leueƷ oure Lorde wolde make a lyƷe,
Þat lelly hyƷte your lyf to rayse,
ÞaƷ fortune dyd your flesch to dyƷe.
Ʒe setten hys wordeƷful westernays
Þat leueƷ noþynk bot Ʒe hit syƷe
(ll. 301-308)

I hold that jeweler hardly worthy of praise
Who believes fully what he sees with eye,
And worthy of blame and lacking courtesy
Who believes our Lord would tell a lie,
He who faithfully promised to raise your life,
Though Fortune caused your flesh to die.
You take his words entirely amiss
You who believe nothing unless you see it.

The dreamer doubts the resurrection, she says, because he believes nothing unless "[he] hit syƷe," and believes everything that he can "seƷ wyth yƷe." By using a formula which the dreamer himself has used—one which has been tainted by having been used to describe too many secular marvels—the maiden points out at once the inadequacy of images and the inadequacy of words for conveying the Divine.

Later in the poem, when the dreamer has made some spiritual progress and is granted a vision of the Heavenly City, the same formula is used to emphasize his dependence on the book of Apocalypse, the source of his vision, and on St. John, its mediator. "As John þe apostel hit syƷ wyth syƷt, / I syƷe þat cyty" (As John the apostle saw it with sight, I saw that city, ll. 985-986), says the dreamer, and his continued allusion to John's seeing the New Jerusalem (emphasized in the refrain of this stanza group) becomes almost iconographic, like the image of St. John peering through a door into heaven in the popular illuminated Apocalypse books.²¹ But although the dreamer is using the formula to authenticate his vision, the poet is using it to point out the dreamer's too earthly perception. This is further suggested by the fact that in contemporary mystical writings St. John's vision is classified in Augustinian terms as a "spiritual" one, which, because reliant on figures and images, is inferior to an "intellectual" vision—presumably the Beatific Vision—involving the sight of God face to face.²² The Beatific Vision is a major concern of the poet's in his biblical narrative Purity, where it is generally expressed by the formula se wyth syƷt or se wyth yƷe.²³Pearl, however, must be characterized as a failed Beatific Vision to the extent that the dreamer never sees God's face. It is likely therefore that the poet, in having the dreamer use se wyth syzt to describe what he does see, is pointing up the limited, mediated quality of the vision, as well as of the language with which he recounts it.

The second kind of conventional language which the poet uses to call attention to the inadequacy of words is a rhetorical commonplace—the "inexpressibility topos."²⁴ This topos is not by any means limited to alliterative poetry, but is part of a larger literary inheritance. As a strategic device of self-deprecation for the purpose of winning the audience's approval, it was, indeed, traditional. But as Burrow has shown, this strategy became greatly intensified among fourteenth-century English poets who were trying to accommodate themselves to their awkward medium.²⁵ In the Pearl the inexpressibility topos is used to suggest that the poet recognizes the limitations of the alliterative style—that he is deliberately using conventional apologies for the conventionality of his language. For while the dreamer uses these apologies conventionally, the poet expects us to recognize them as justified—expressions of the inadequacy of language not only on a rhetorical, but also on a theological level.

Here as elsewhere the poet uses the dreamer to exploit the ambiguity of the religious and secular connotations of words. In a Christian context, the inexpressibility topos was an important device of the negative way, part of the "rhetoric of ineffability" by which mystical poets sought to express the Divine.²⁶ Words which admitted their own inadequacy were held to be less likely to lead to idolatry than those which took themselves for granted, as Augustine, following Plato and Plotinus, bad pointed out.²⁷ Dante of course makes the most notable use of the topos in such a context in the Paradiso, where he continually complains that language falls short of describing the Beatific Vision. It is possible, as one critic has argued, that the Pearl-poet knew the Divine Comedy, and it is even more likely that he knew the anonymous Middle English mystical work The Cloud of Unknowing, which refers to mysteries "whiche man may not, ne kan not, speke."²⁸ Certainly he would have been aware of the mystical Latin hymns which assert, in paradoxical terms, God's ineffability.²⁹ The poet could thus measure the dreamer against writers whose linguistic doubts were profound and theological. But despite the frequent use of the topos in Christian contexts, it was originally classical, and it occurred throughout the Middle Ages in secular descriptions of any marvelous subject to which "words could not do justice."³⁰ It even had a form specific to alliterative poetry in the formula it is to tor [too difficult] to telle, which the Pearl-poet himself uses in Sir Gawain to describe indescribable luxury.³¹

Although this alliterative form of the topos is not used in Pearl, other forms are. The dreamer's mistake is to apply them in the conventional secular sense, without a true recognition of the inadequacy of human language. Thus, he paints a dazzling picture of the paradisal garden which foreshadows the New Jerusalem, drawing heavily on the language of the alliterative tradition:

Dubbed wern alle þo downeƷ sydeƷ
Wyth crystal klyffeƷ so cler of kynde.
HoltewodeƷ bryƷt aboute hem bydeƷ
Of bolleƷ as blwe as ble of Ynde;

As bornyst syluer þe lef on slydeƷ,
Þat þike con trylle on vch a tynde.
Quen glem of glodeƷ agayneƷ hem glydeƷ,
Wyth schymeryng schene ful schrylle þay
  schynde.
(ll. 73-80)

Adorned were all the slopes of the hills
With crystal cliffs of so clear a sort.
Woodlands bright were set about them
Whose trunks were blue as the color indigo;
As burnished silver the leaves swayed,
That trembled closely on each branch.
When a gleam of the sky fell against them,
They shone very brilliantly with a bright
  shimmering.

The dreamer devotes fifty-five lines to the garden, making it appear like a locus amoenus in a secular alliterative dream vision.³² His understanding, if not his sincerity, is thus open to question when, in the midst of this description, he asserts that

Þe derþe þerof for to deuyse
Nis no wyƷ worþé þat tonge bereƷ.
(ll. 99-100)

To describe the splendor thereof
There is no one worthy who bears a tongue.

The poet puts this conventional disclaimer in the dreamer's mouth to warn against the beauty of the rest of the description, for he knows that the unworthiness of human speech is far greater than the dreamer realizes.

A similar strategy is used when the maiden appears to the dreamer in the garden. He takes her earthly guise for reality, describing her in the intensifying language of alliterative poetry, which is more appropriate to a romance heroine than to the beatified spirit of a child who died in infancy. As far as he is concerned, it is in keeping with this language that he claims inexpressibility when portraying the allegorical pearl on her breast:

A manneƷ dorn moƷt dryƷly demme,
Er mynde moƷt malte in hit mesure.
I hope no tong moƷt endure
No sauerly saghe say of þat syƷt.
(ll. 223-226)

A man's judgment would be utterly baffled
Before his mind could comprehend its value.
I believe no tongue could endure
Nor say an adequate word of that sight.

But despite his assertion that human judgment and speech are inadequate, and despite his earlier claim to having been struck dumb when first seeing the maiden (" I stod ful stylle and dorste not calle; / Wyth yƷen open and mouth ful clos," ll. 182-183), the dreamer goes on to describe her with all the resources at an alliterative poet's disposal. He thus lacks the humility of the pilgrim Dante, who, when Beatrice appears to him in a similar situation near the end of the Paradiso, resolves to remain silent, his poetic abilities having been so overcome that he cannot describe her beauty.³³ The Pearl-poet, then, exploits the simultaneous secular and religious connotations of the inexpressibility topos in order to emphasize the split between the dreamer's and the reader's perception. And because this topos is a commonplace, a piece of "used" language, it paradoxically embodies in itself the very inadequacy of language to which it refers.

The likelihood that the poet is using these two types of conventional language—the formula and the topos—self-consciously in the visionary sections is strengthened by his discursive treatment of the limits of language in the debate section of the poem. The maiden, speaking for the poet, makes it clear that language is a much more fundamental issue than the dreamer, with his stock confessions of inexpressibility, perceives, as she touches, implicitly, on the Christian concept of the problematical relation between human words and the Divine Word discussed by Augustine. First, she points out that human language is a medium which encourages error; the dreamer does in fact "speke errour," as he puts it in a conventional apology to her (l. 422). While warning him against depending on the evidence of his eyes, the maiden says,

Þre wordeƷ hatƷ þou spoken at ene:
Vnavysed, for soþe, wern alle þre.
Þou ne woste in worlde quat on dotƷ mene;
Þy worde byfore þy wytte con fle.
(ll. 291-294)

Three words have you spoken at once:
All ill-advised, indeed, were all three.
You don't know what in the world one of
  them means;
Your word has fled before your wit.

She characterizes the dreamer's three misconceptions (that she is in the paradise that he sees, that he can join her there, that he can cross the water) as three illadvised "wordeƷ." And she points out that his "worde" fled before his "wytte"—that is, that he failed to achieve the embodiment of thought in language which Augustine considered a metaphor for the Incarnation.³⁴

But despite the fact that the dreamer's language has failed, the maiden implies that human language may be used to bridge the gap between God and man. The early part of the debate deals with this problem, as can be seen from the prominence given to deme, the link-word in stanza-group 6 (ll. 301-360). In its ten occurrences in the stanza's refrain, the word ranges in meaning from "to judge" to "to speak," and it is applied in turn to God, the dreamer, and the maiden in a way that explicitly contrasts Divine and human speech as well as judgment. The maiden makes it clear, as Augustine had, that whatever the limitations of human language, man is entitled to use it to try to communicate with God ("þy prayer may hys pyté byte" [your prayer may move his pity], 1. 355), and is in fact obligated to do so ("man to God wordeƷ schulde heue" [man should lift words to God], 1. 314). She is recognizing here the Christian paradox that although God is ineffable. He has nevertheless, in Augustine's words, "accepted the tribute of the human voice, and wished us to take joy in prasing Him with our words."³⁵ Human language, furthermore, is valid as a means of communication from God to man, as in His revelation in Scripture, but scriptural words are often misconstrued by fallen human beings. Thus the maiden, in a passage quoted earlier, scolds the dreamer for thinking that Christ would "make a lyƷe" about the resurrection (1. 304), and for taking Christ's words amiss ("Ʒe setten hys wordeƷ ful westernays," 1. 306). The dreamer continues his misunderstanding till near the end of the debate, when he complains that it would contradict Scripture if the maiden had indeed been made a queen in heaven—then "Holy Wryt" would be "bot a fable" (1. 592).

The maiden, then, implies that although man is obligated to try to communicate with God through language, his attempt will be doomed to failure—words are insufficient. More devastating in its consequences for the dreamer, however, is the suggestion that the ability to use language is unnecessary for salvation, since the maiden, who died while an inarticulate child, was saved. The dreamer's main objection to her high position in heaven is that she died too young to have earned that status. The linguistic implications of this point are brought forward when he argues that a child of two would have been unable to pray—to praise God with language:

Þou lyfed not two Ʒer in oure þede;
Þou cowþeƷ neuer God nauþer plese ne pray,
Ne neuer naweþr Pater ne Crede.
(ll. 483-485)

You lived not two years in our land;
You never knew how to please God, nor pray
  to him,
Nor knew either Paternoster or Creed.

The maiden answers him with the parable of the vineyard, whose moral is that earthly status is reversed in heaven ("þe laste schal be þe fyrst … /And þe fyrst þe laste," ll. 507-571). She sharpens the moral with the standard medieval gloss that the "laste"—those who entered the vineyard late in the day—are the innocents, those who died in infancy (ll. 625-636). She further blosters her argument by citing Christ's insistence that the Kingdom of Heaven is open to children ("let chylder vnto me tyƷt./To suche is heuenryche arayed," ll. 718-719) and that one can enter it only if he becomes like a child ("hys ryche no wyƷ myƷt wynne/Bot he com þyder ryƷt as a chylde," ll. 722-723). In using these allusions to support her own position in heaven, the maiden is implicitly drawing on the Christian concept that the humility of the child is specifically linguistic. Augustine in particular was intrigued by the idea of the speechless (infans) or barely articulate child. In justifying the sermo humilis of the Bible, he frequently mentions its accessibility to children, saying for instance that Scripture, while it "suits itself to babes," nevertheless lets our understanding rise to the sublime.³⁶ Again in the Confessions he tells of his initial contempt for scriptural Latin because its style was unworthy of Cicero: "as the child grows these books grow with him. But I was too proud to call myself a child. I was inflated with self-esteem, which made me think myself a great man."³⁷ The Pearl-dreamer, as he insists on the efficacy of language, is very like the young Augustine in rhetorical arrogance. The maiden's claim that she was elevated to the rank of queen in heaven is thus especially humiliating: she has shown that adult linguistic facility is insignificant from a Divine perspective.

Language, then, is a far more important theme of the Pearl than has generally been recognized. This theme has both rhetorical and theological implications, since the poet's sense of the inadequacy of his Middle English poetic style is sharpened by his recognition of the inadequacy of man's words vis á vis God's Word. The former he dramatizes by placing conventional and sometimes hackneyed language in the dreamer's mouth; the latter he treats discursively through the maiden's criticisms of the dreamer. By using language which warns against itself, the poet is able to achieve a poetic incarnation on the Augustinian model—to suggest the Divine Word through the limited medium of his own words.

Notes

1. For a succinct discussion, see John MacQuarrie, God-Talk: An Examination of the Language and Logic of Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), pp. 25, 28-29.
2. E.g., A. C. Spearing, The Gawain-Poet: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 155-56, 165, and Pamela Gradon, Form and Style in Early English Literature (London: Methuen, 1971), pp. 207-211.
3. Two articles deal with the theme of language in Pearl in ways that differ from mine. James Milroy's "Pearl: The Verbal Texture and the Linguistic Theme" (Neophilologus, 55 [1971], 195-208) discusses the dreamer's earthbound understanding of words, but in a context which is only implicitly theological; John M. Hill's "Middle English Poets and the Word: Notes toward an Appraisal of Linguistic Consciousness" (Criticism, 16 [1974], 153-169) is much closer to my work in treating the inadequacy of language in Augustinian terms, but, like Milroy's article, does not relate this inadequacy to the limitations of Middle English verse.
4. Trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr., On Christian Doctrine (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), I.vi.6; PL XXXIV, 21.
5. See, e.g., Confessions I.iv.4; PL XXXII, 622-623.
6. Augustine's statements about language are part of his larger concern that anything intended to move men toward blessedness not be enjoyed for its own sake. For Augustinian sign theory, see Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (1972; rpt. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974), pp. 21-43, and Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, "St. Augustine's Rhetoric of Silence: Truth vs. Eloquence and Things vs. Signs," Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 1-28.
7. See Marcia L. Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 22, 33-35, and more generally, the chapter "St. Augustine: the Experience of the Word," pp. 8-81.
8. "Sermo humilis," in Literary Language and its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 27-52.
9. Especially in De Vulgari Eloquentia; on this point and on the general continuity of the theory, see Colish, pp. 264-265, 315-316. The case for the influence of Augustinian sign theory on two Middle English poems contemporary with Pearl is made by Mary Carruthers (The Search for St. Truth: A Study of Meaning in Piers Plowman [Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973], esp. pp. 10-19), and Eugene Vance ("Mervelous Signals: Poetics, Sign Theory, and Politics in Chaucer's Troilus," NLH, 10 [1979], 296). Robert O. Payne points out that the Augustinian concern that rhetoric would encourage idolatry continued through the fourteenth century ("Chaucer's Realization of Himself as Rhetor," in Medieval Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Medieval Rhetoric, ed. James J. Murphy [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978], pp. 280-282).
10. See Albert C. Baugh, A History of the English Language, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957), pp. 150-187, 227-237, and Basil Cottle, The Triumph of English, 1350-1400 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969), pp. 15-50.
11. On the debasement of Middle English style, see J. A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the Gawain-Poet (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 25-28. On oral performance in medieval literature, see Robert Kellogg, "Oral Literature," NLH, 5 (1973), 55-66.
12. For a brief account of the nature of the alliterative line, see Thorlac Turville-Petre, The Alliterative Revival (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), pp. 51-56.
13. Burrow, p. 26. See also J. P. Oakden, Alliterative Poetry in Middle English: A Survey of the Traditions, II (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1935), 381-401.
14. Elizabeth Salter, Piers Plowman: An Introduction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961), p. 17. She refers to the "high rhetoric" and "formality" of many of the poets (pp. 15-17).
15. See especially Marie Borroff, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Stylistic and Metrical Study (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 52-90, and Larry D. Benson, Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 126-143.
16. Burrow, pp. 39-40.
17. Burrow, p. 27.
18. Borroff, pp. 71-72; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2nd ed. rev. Norman Davis (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), ll. 197-98. My translation.
19. Wynnere and Wastoure, ed. Sir Israel Gollancz (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1930), l. 89, and "Summer Sunday," in Historical Poems of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Rossell Hope Robbins (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959), p. 100,l. 64. Similarly, the dreamer in "The Crowned King" tells of the marvelous crowd of people which he "sawe in [his] sight" (in Robbins, p. 228, l. 33).
20. Pearl, ed. E. V. Gordon (1953; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), ll. 197, 204, 200. This and subsequent translations of the poem are my own.
21. See George Henderson, Gothic (1967; rpt. Baltimore: Penguin, 1972), p. 149.
22. Edward Wilson, "'Gostly Drem' in 'Pearl'," NM, 69 (1968), 90-101.
23. See C. G. Osgood, ed. Pearl (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1906), n. to l. 675, and Robert J. Menner, ed. Purity (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1920), n. to l. 25.
24. So named by Ernst Robert Curtius, in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (1953; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 159.
25. Burrow, pp. 39-42.
26. See Lowry Nelson, "The Rhetoric of Ineffability: Toward a Definition of Mystical Poetry," CL, 8 (1956), 323-336, Luigi Tonelli, Dante e la poesia dell'ineffabile (Florence: G. Barbèra, 1934), pp. 45-77, and Robin Kirkpatrick, Dante's Paradiso and the Limitations of Modern Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 36-50.
27. Peter S. Hawkins, "Saint Augustine and the Language of Ineffability," unpub. ms., pp. 8-11.
28. For the former point, see P. M. Kean, Pearl: An Interpretation (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), pp.120-132; for the latter, The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counselling, ed. Phyllis Hodgson (London: EETS, 1944), p. 62.
29. See Nelson, p. 327, and Tonelli, pp. 70-75.
30. Curtius' examples are limited to secular ones (pp. 159-162). In Dante the secular topos coalesces with the Christian, and Tonelli has shown that the poet drew on its use by Provencal love poets as well as by the mystics (pp. 80, ff.).
31. He says that it is "to tor for to telle" of all the ornamental figures embroidered on the Green Knight's clothing (l. 165). See OED, Tor, a., for further examples in alliterative poetry. My interpretation of the formula as a use of the inexpressibility topos depends on a translation of tor as "difficult"; the more common translation, "tiresome, tedious," would make it an instance of occupattio—the announcement that the poet will curtail his description (see Benson, p. 172).
32. E.g., the landscapes in Wynnere and Wastoure (ll.33-44) and the Parlement of the Thre Ages (ed. M.Y. Offord [London: EETS, 1959], ll. 1-20). On the conventionality of such landscapes, see Ralph W. V. Elliott, "Landscape and Rhetoric in Middle English Alliterative Poetry," Melbourne Critical Review, 4 (1961), 65-76.
33. La Commedia seconda antica vulgata, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi, IV (Rome: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1967), XXX. 16-33.
34. De Trinitate XV.x. 19; PL XLII, 1071, and De Doctrina Christiana I. xiii; PL XXXIV, 24.
35. On Christian Doctrine I. vi. 6; PL XXXIV, 21.
36. De Trinitate 1.2 (trans. Arthur West Haddan in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaff [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1956], III, 18; PL XLII, 820).
37. Confessions III.v(trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961], p. 60); PL XXXII, 686.