[In the following essay, Rhodes argues that instead of regarding the dreamer as a mere foil to the Maiden, the dreamer should be viewed as her equal and the poem should be seen as accurately reflecting the theological debate taking place in the fourteenth century.]

One might maintain, not too paradoxically, that every medieval poetic form (on whatever level one may define it) tends toward double meaning: and I don't mean the doubling deciphered by an allegoristic reading but, superimposing or complexifying its effects, a perpetual sic et non, yes and no, obverse/reverse. Every meaning, in the last analysis, would present itself as enigmatic, the enigma being resolved into simultaneous and contradictory propositions, one of which always more or less parodies the other.¹

With the possible exception of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, all of the works of the Pearl poet have been regarded as didactic or imitative of the form and content of a medieval sermon. Of these poems Pearl has been portrayed as the most controlled and sustained example of his homiletic art. Thus for one reader Pearl is about the drama of faith or the "tension of belief which lies at the core of medieval spirituality; for another it is about the fallen soul and its salvation; for most others it is about the education of the Dreamer, his progress under the guidance of the Maiden toward learning to shift his focus from earthly to heavenly love, from the Maiden to the love of Christ.² What these readings share is a confidence in the authority of the Pearl Maiden's discourse, particularly her interpretation of the Vineyard parable as prologue to her formal instruction of the Dreamer in the traditional theology of salvation and penance. At the same time, these readings treat the Dreamer as a sympathetic but somewhat naïve figure who does not understand the full meaning of Christian doctrine.

Recently readers have begun to position the Dreamer more centrally in the narrative and to award him a more active role in the experience of his spiritual education. David Aers, for example, after acknowledging the psychological complexity and theological sophistication of the Dreamer, detects a degree of Lollard individualism and interpretiveness in his response to the vineyard parable.³ Aers argues that the Dreamer's self-absorption has prevented him from gaining self-transcendence and from renewing his bonds with the human community, but that the dream and the encounter with the Maiden give the Dreamer the "time, space, and provocation to change, to redirect his being from identification with the dead person, to redirect his love."⁴ In the symbolic structure of the poem the Dreamer moves from the solitary "I" at the beginning of the poem to the communal "we" at the close.

This approach goes a long way toward redeeming the Dreamer, but it still makes him too dependent on the Maiden for his personal renewal, and it allows the Maiden's theological argument or position to stand uncontested. The aim of this article is to show that the Dreamer's voice counts as much as the Maiden's in the theological and social discourse of the poem and that he shares the theological and moral center of the poem with her. Accordingly, this article proposes that we read Pearl in terms of Bakhtinian dialogic instead of as Boethian dialogue, the traditional approach to the poem. In Boethian dialogue the interlocutor holds unquestioned superiority over the correspondent, whereas in Bakhtinian dialogic no such superiority is apportioned. For Bakhtin, both sides have equal authority, even when the dialogue takes place within only one party, usually as a struggle or interplay between two categories: the authoritative word (religious, political, or moral discourse, the word of the fathers or teachers) and internally persuasive discourse (translating external discourse into one's own words or vocabulary, with one's own accents, gestures, modifications) which, Bakhtin says, is denied all privilege, backed by no authority, and goes unrecognized by scholarly norms or opinions.⁵ Applied to Pearl, this means that the Dreamer is no mere foil who feeds the Maiden easy questions that permit her to expatiate on doctrine to a passive listener. His questions, whether they are practical, personal, or economic, enlarge the scope of the debate and press the discourse of the Maiden to satisfy the very real problems that concern him. His voice gives expression to views on justification and salvation that were current in the fourteenth century and in opposition to her view. Once elevated to the level of the Maiden, the Dreamer brings the poem into line with the tenor and terms of the theological debate that did arise outside the poem.

The dialogical structure also allows the reader to assume a more active role in the reception of the narrative. Inasmuch as the theological issues under examination in the poem—salvation and justification, the claims of this world against those of the other world— are topics that directly concern the reader, the dialogical structure invites the audience to discriminate among the various positions advanced without having to commit itself to any one of them. This will be especially true of the poet's presentation of the vineyard parable. In themselves parables appeal to the interpretive skills of every reader, and the Pearl poet accommodates the interests of his readers in the way that he sustains the tension between the Dreamer and the Maiden through their separate readings and responses to the vineyard parable. The Maiden treats the parable primarily as a metaphor for the kingdom of heaven, or as a lesson in the eternal values, in God's love for the innocent and in the consolation gained by those who resign their will to the supreme will of God. Her vision encompasses the whole scheme of salvation, and her theology centers on the reward of heaven as the free gift of God's grace. The Dreamer responds to the parable more existentially and pragmatically: the vineyard is like the human order in its ordinariness and its workaday familiarity. It represents an area of human activity that is self-contained and autonomous; it pertains to events or conditions in this world, to matters of justice or merit or proper reward for work rendered. His vision settles first on the sense world of immediate experience and does not separate what is theological from what is social, political, or economic.

Normally in a narrative such as this one, as Marie McLean explains it, a narrator gains and holds authority as teller by controlling or co-opting the power of the narratee, or the text of the narrator shapes the audience into its ideal narratee.⁶ In the vineyard parable, however, the Maiden-narrator fails to achieve her desired control over the Dreamer-narratee because he continues to rely on his reason and sense impressions throughout, despite her several attempts to wean him from them, and because his practical intellect persistently interrogates the absolute authority of the explanations and conclusions. By interposing himself between the Maiden and the audience through his seemingly naïve questions, the Dreamer mediates the authority of her discourse so that the reader is neither "recruited" nor "seduced" by the Maiden (to borrow Ross Chambers's vocabulary of narrative persuasion) and thus remains free to be an active reader who can search the text for alternative meanings beneath the stipulated one.⁷

I intend to discuss the dynamic relationship between the Maiden and the Dreamer in more pointed detail below, but first I want to say something about the place of the vineyard parable in the theological debates about salvation, justification, and human freedom in the fourteenth century. In this way we can approach the poem with a clearer understanding of how Pearl unfolds as a debate within the narrator, wherein the earthbound voice of the Dreamer counters the idealizing voice of the Maiden, and a theology of immanence balances against a theology of transcendence.

The vineyard parable apparently has always been an enigmatic one, no less so in the fourteenth century, primarily because a literal reading leaves the impression that both sides in the dispute, workers and house-holder, have a just and reasonable claim. Judging from the commentary it attracted, the parable enjoyed widespread popularity in late-medieval discussions of justification, yielding what Paul Zumthor calls a multiplicity of "simultaneous and contradictory propositions." The traditional or orthodox understanding of the parable, articulated by Augustine against the Pelagians, interprets it as a defense of the necessity of God's prevenient grace in the work of salvation. In Augustine's analysis, the workers have no claim to the money in terms of the work done, but they do have a claim on the basis of the promise made to them by the owner of the vineyard. Analogously, human beings have no claim on the grace of God on the basis of their works, only on the basis of the obligation of God to live up to his promise.⁸

Augustine's view remained prominent throughout the late Middle Ages, but its authority was seriously challenged by the nominalist anthropology of the via moderna (those theologians who assign a positive role to human beings in the work of their own salvation)⁹ in the fourteenth century and refined in the fifteenth century by Gabriel Biel.¹⁰ Extrapolating from William of Ockham's and Pierre D'Auriole's "semi-pelagian" treatment of justification, Biel offers an interpretation of the vineyard parable that epitomizes the theological precepts of the via moderna with its characteristic emphasis on human dignity and reward for meritorious deeds. Biel accepts that both God and human beings are teleologically oriented but contends that God's telos and humankind's telos may not coincide. Whereas the employee works for his wages, the employer, Biel says, is motivated not by the wages of the employee but rather by the work performed. Biel's analogy, in Heiko Oberman's view, emphasizes the intrinsic importance of the life of the viator on earth, "the value of which was now less exclusively defined in terms of the eternal Jerusalem (italics added), the final destination of the viator, and more in terms of the journey itself."¹¹

The notion of the viator relates directly to our discussion because it conforms with the Dreamer's disposition to pursue a happiness attainable in this life and to grant greater recognition to work or activity carried out in this world. Without diminishing the importance of salvation theology, the thinkers supporting the notion of the viator stressed hermeneutical over soteriological values, and moral problems over dogmatic theology, priorities of the Dreamer, as we shall see. The notion of the viator also radically changed theological geography by projecting human beings into history horizontally as well as vertically, equipped with their own set of existential objectives and moral determinants. As Oberman observes, the concept of the viator apportioned a realm for human beings established by the potentia ordinata within which they could come into their own, free to realize their own innate endowment of dignity.¹² Finally, the idea of the viator enabled the moderni first to confront then to offset the legacy of "negative progress" inherited from an older Augustinianism (but revived by Thomas Bradwardine in the fourteenth century), whereby the human will has been so weakened by sin that it cannot effect its own regeneration, and human nature itself, without grace, can do little more than contribute to the sum of evil in the world.¹³

To reorient people toward this world, the moderni devised what is called covenantal theology, a partnership or legal pactum with God that broadened the basis of iustitia Dei and brought it into harmony with a theology of merit. Before covenantal theology, Alistair McGrath argues, there was no definitive concept of justification in the late Middle Ages. The twelfth century and scholasticism in general, McGrath says, determined that justification involved an ontological change in human beings, thus requiring an ontological intermediary or intermediate, which was identified with the created habit of grace or charity.¹⁴ Hence ex natura rei such a habit was implicated in the process of human justification. In the fourteenth century, however, both the via moderna and the schola Augustiniana moderna began to conceive of justification in personal or relational terms. In place of the ontological intermediary the via moderna substituted the pactum, wherein God, in his unlimited freedom (de potentia Dei absoluta), wills to limit himself within the chosen order (de potentia Dei ordinata).¹⁵ The pactum or covenant, McGrath says, constitutes the turning point in the doctrine of justification associated with the via moderna, because in it God imposes upon himself the obligation to reward the individual who does quod in se est with the gift of justifying grace.¹⁶

Although formal debate of these issues remained the special domain of the schoolmen, the issues of justification, human and divine agency, freedom and responsibility were made available to the whole of English society. According to Janet Coleman, "Not only were the issues of the schools discussed by those who were not schoolmen, but the language, the jargon of the schools filtered down to a very great extent into literature that was meant for the edification of the nonclerical literate."¹⁷ Similarly, William Courtenay tells us that the themes we can expect to find in Middle English literature are those that were of concern to scholars and poets alike: "These common interests were biblical themes and imagery, and the penitential themes of vices and virtues, grace and justification, moral choice, sin and repentance, predenstination and human liberty, and the conflicts and ambiguities that life presents to the average Christian."¹⁸ In the second half of the fourteenth century, then, in the period when the Pearl poet was composing his biblically oriented poems, vernacular writings of all kinds had begun to reproduce scenes and stories from the Bible, providing greater access to the word of God and personal knowledge of the law of Christ, what Wyclif had declared was the fundamental right of every Christian. Wider distribution and broader understanding of basic doctrine and of biblical materials evidently increased the public appetite for themes and works applicable to everyday life. As Walter Ullmann accurately describes it, a new spiritual ethos took root in art and literature that complemented the anthropological and Christological advances evolving in theology:

The development in the arts might be said to be "From the future life to the present," or "From deity to humanity." Or, as has rightly been said, men now tried to bring God down to earth and to see and touch him.… The type began to give way to the portrayal of real and natural people.… This direct approach—evidenced also by the contemporaneous Bible translations—powerfully stimulated the pictorial representation of gospel stories, with the result that they came to be set in natural surroundings which actually meant the environs with which the artist himself was familiar; their setting was contemporaneous.… As might be expected, every artist perceived a gospel story in a different light, and in this way his product represented the subjective impact which biblical events and situations had made upon him.¹⁹

Instead of a "waning" or "dissolution" of order, then, the second half of the fourteenth century was a period of robust theological activity, when the lay activism encouraged by the Fourth Lateran Council came to fruition, and when the disintegration of some traditional structures signaled not moral decay but a not-to-be-missed opportunity to effect reform of both the church and society.²⁰

By this account the Pearl poet is writing in the midst of a theological and literary renaissance in which a new image of human nature and human society is being forged. Metaphysical problems now are being analyzed from our or the human side of the issue, and the question of greatest importance has become what is expected of human beings, or, as Chaucer's eschatologically disillusioned Monk puts it, "How shal the world be served?" (GP 187).²¹

The Pearl poet is as well equipped as anyone else to answer that question for the fourteenth century. Despite suffering from the reputation that he is too "accepting and unquestioning of the orthodox forms of Christianity and feudalism," the Pearl poet proves, through his artful appropriation of biblical parables, that he is engaged with the social and political issues that beset his church and society.²² Biblical hermeneutics is simply the way he chooses to inscribe crisis into his poetry. While maintaining a readily identifiable link to the order, sequence, and language of the original parable, he enriches his own version with the kinds of contemporary details, nuance, and shifts of emphasis that induce the text to speak afresh to an audience that seeks to comprehend its kerygma in the context of their own experience and historical moment. In all of his poems, however, he does not press upon his audience the sociohistorical or moral concerns built into each of them; instead he leads his audience, through the gradual self-realization of his narrators, to discover for themselves the connection between the moral lesson and contemporary social or theological problems. Rather than mounting a pointed counterargument, he lets style become a manner of seeing things. The realism or language of particularity characteristic of his poems and parables attests to his desire to fix human beings more securely in this world and in a way that allows them to be "reborn as historical beings in their manifest unity of body and spirit."²³ This, I emphasize, is the task that he sets for himself in his depiction of the Dreamer in Pearl.

The Prologue or opening movement of Pearl takes place in the erber, a curious mixture of cloister garden and romantic bower, where the Dreamer repairs to commune with his absent pearl. More than a place of contemplation and retreat from this world, the erber stands in for this world as the natural physical environment in which the Dreamer is situated. It is the site where the poet problematizes the figure of the Dreamer before we meet the Maiden and where the Dreamer reveals himself to us as a complex and introspective representative of the human condition. The conversation the Dreamer holds with himself in the erber shows us that he is aware of his loss emotionally and intellectually and that he feels it physically. The appeal of the Dreamer himself, who strikes us as an ordinary layman or bereaved father, draws us into the world of the poem and makes the theological debate that swirls in his mind all the more personal and substantive to our own way of confronting the world.

From the outset it is apparent that the Dreamer refuses to act as a predictable player in a conventional dream vision. In the opening stanza when he tells us that he suffers "fordolked of luf-daungere,"²⁴ we are led to expect one kind of poem only to discover that it is going to be entirely of another sort. The poet's manipulation of a term familiar to love poetry has a calculated effect nevertheless; it acts as a verbal prod that disorients us and sticks in our mind because of its incongruity, both complicating the narrative and individuating the Dreamer. It puts the audience on notice that it has to adjust to his way of articulating and internalizing things. The erotic potentiality in the term "luf-daungere" is not misplaced either if we see it as an expression of the limitations of spiritual consolation and as an admission of the need human love has for the physical or bodily presence of the beloved.

At this point it is helpful if we draw upon the language of modern psychology, especially that of Lacan, if we are to unpack what the poet has wound so tightly in his phrase "luf-daungere." As Lacan describes it, personal grief exists in the frame of a discourse. We the living give the dead over to the symbolic order. That is, we bury them according to the rituals of our society, and we resituate them in a discourse. Only the reference to discourse prevents the grief from becoming chronic.²⁵ Stuart Schneiderman explains this transaction in the Freudian vocabulary of the ego:

When the experience of love is made out to be primary, the dominion of the ego is extended and death is reduced to a loss of love. The ego denies death by idealizing love and life; the dead remain alive in the strong ego, still loving and beloved. Thus the ego may recover from its loss by believing that, through death, love has been made eternal.… It is through the symbolic order and through the rituals it prescribes that the object is truly given up, truly buried. [Italics added.]²⁶

Schneiderman goes on to say that if the deceased is not buried metaphorically, which means forgotten, the subject will have no sense of loss or lack and will be alienated from a desire that can only be seen as a threat to the perfect harmony of the truest love.

In layman's terms, what the Dreamer needs to learn is that burying his daughter does not mean obliterating her from his mind altogether. Burying her, in fact, may lead to the release of an even greater capacity to love, one that could expand the human community to embrace the dead as well as the living. Consolation then will come not only from his vision of the New Jerusalem with the Maiden in it but also from the regeneration of his "luf-longyng" in his encounter in the other world. If his vision teaches him that his pearl is lost forever to this world—living in this world entails the loss of precious things—it also may teach him that such loss need not result in his surrender of the whole earthly enterprise.

The Dreamer's reluctance to let go of his daughter is revealed in the ambivalence he shows toward the erber itself. He is drawn to the spot, even though it fills him with sorrowful reminders, because it also secretly arouses him and energizes him (lines 13-20):

Syþen in þat spote hit fro me sprange,
Ofte haf I wayted, wyschande þat wele
Þat wont watz whyle deuoyde my wrange
And heuen my happe and al my hele—
Þat dotz bot þrych my hert þrange,
My breste in bale bot bolne and bele.
Ʒet þoƷt me neuer so swete a sange
As stylle stounde let to me stele.

The paradoxical state of the Dreamer's mental frame—his sensations oscillate between near-violence and extreme sensitivity—reveals to us the depth of his attachment to earthly things. In contrast to the Maiden's comprehensive vision, the Dreamer is more inductive in his outlook. His mind does not advert immediately to the symbolic signification hidden beneath the concrete reality. Whatever meaning readers may assign to the flowers, the spices, and the pearl itself, the Dreamer sees them first as natural objects of beauty in their own right and not as shadowy reminders of some higher, invisible reality. His attention to the sights, sounds, and odors of the garden indicate his attachment to the physical world and point to his sensitivity to human finitude, change, and the problem of death.²⁷

Memories of the death of his daughter, and his inability to expel the demons of loss that torment him, provoke the Dreamer to speculate about the resurrection of the body and the prospect of an afterlife. His rational faculties and animal soul seem to understand and accept death and regeneration as an integral part of the cycle of nature (lines 29-32):

Flor and fryte may not be fede
Þer hit doun drof in moldez dunne,
For vch gresse mot grow of graynez dede;
No whete were ellez to wonez wonne.²⁸

However much his "special spyce" may enrich the seed, he wonders whether some more perdurable quality is due her, and he cannot fully reconcile himself to the thought that she has dissolved into mere mud or clay. Yet the comfort he might derive from the Resurrection eludes him: "ÞaƷ kynde of Kryst me comfort kenned, / My wreched wylle in wo ay wraƷte" (lines 55-56); it does not master his will and emotions, which incline toward the consolations of the erber. The erber in its colors, odors, and natural beauty thus imposes on our consciousness an acute awareness of the Dreamer's presence in his body and in a familiar human setting that remains embedded in our mind even after we take flight with him to traverse the landscape of the other world.

These two currents converge in the Dreamer's mind when he identifies the occasion as both a religious holiday and the height of the harvest season. Aers has shown that the holiday and the suggestion of human activity unfolding outside or beyond the erber bring out the poignancy of the Dreamer's isolation and distance from the community.²⁹ The Dreamer's words "In Augoste in a hyƷ seysoun, / Quen corne is coruen wyth crokez kene" (lines 39-40) pit the imagery of the coming of winter and impending death against the celebration of life in its plenitude. The particularity of the Dreamer's language allows us to visualize this particular August, this field of corn, these workers with their sharp sickles. His consciousness of the organic growth from seed to flower and of the interpenetration of nature and human beings offsets the earlier images of disintegration and decay and serves as a buffer for his loss. The continuity and self-renewal of nature in its annual cycles thus vies in his mind with the linear plane of eschatological time or salvation history.³⁰

Suffused with the scent of the flowers that surround him, he drifts into sleep. He dreams of a vineyard, not only because the parable centers on a harvest but also because it contains all the conflicting tensions he has been turning over in his mind. For when he departs from the erber, he explicitly leaves his body behind: "My body on balke þer bod. In sweuen" (line 62). The separation of the soul from the body as prerequisite for entry into the other world illuminates the source of much of his anguish. His eventual return to his body could imply a plea for the resurrection of the body, an appeal to heal the body-spirit schism and thus restore human nature to its original dignity. The Dreamer's return to the erber also posits a theology open to the world, and thus a counter to the contemptus mundi motif inherent in the Maiden's discourse.

The lines of the dialectic are sharply drawn once the Dreamer meets the Maiden in his dream. What disrupts the joy of their reconciliation is his dismay over her disclosure that she has been made a queen of heaven, when Christians here on earth accept only Mary as queen. The Maiden patiently explains to the Dreamer that many strive for heaven and many achieve it but that there are no "supplanters" within the place and all who arrive are made kings or queens. Then, drawing on Paul's analogy to the body in 1 Cor. 12:12-31, the Maiden explains to him that the heavenly order differs from the earthly norm. In heaven, she says, everyone cares for and belongs to the other (lines 457-68):

Of courtaysye, as saytz Saynt Poule,
Al arn we membrez of Jesu Kryst:
As heued and arme and legg and naule
Temen to hys body ful trwe and tryste,
RyƷt so is vch a Krysten sawle
A longande lym to þe Mayster of myste.
Þenne loke: what hate oþer any gawle
Is tached oþer tyƷed þy lymmez bytwyste?
Þy heued hatz nauþer greme ne gryste
On arme oþer fynger þaƷ þou ber byƿe.
So fare we alle wyth luf and lyste
To kyng and quene by cortaysye.

Although the Maiden's aim is to attend to the invisible or heavenly application of the analogy, her language exceeds her announced intention. Christ's body in its physical dimensions obtrudes and takes on a significance of its own. As David Jeffrey has shown in respect to medieval painting, when the natural world is made fully natural, it may no longer signify the spiritual. That is, when the vividness or realism of the visible, physical object that refers is more pronounced than the spiritual or invisible thing to which it refers, the signs cease to function with the same directness.³¹ Accordingly, in this passage, we are more likely to register an impression of the physical or material body of Christ, than the mystical concept—more so if we have been an audience that had become increasingly exposed to what Ullmann identified as the growing pervasiveness of incarnational images.

Christ's navel, the most unusual and arresting item in the catalogue of Christ's physical properties, does the most work to capture our attention and prevents us from responding passively to an otherwise metaphoric commonplace. Making navel a rhyme word with sawle and with Poule draws added attention to it and suggests the inseparable link of the body with the soul. More suggestively, the navel is what connects the audience to and reminds it of their common origins in Adam and redemption in Christ, whose birth from a human mother and acceptance of a complete human nature characterized incarnational devotion at that time.

The incarnational strain in fourteenth-century theology, in concert with the via moderna and Franciscan spirituality in general, called attention to Christ's body as a further indication that human nature was created in the image and likeness of Christ. Here again the aim was to stress the positive aspect of human nature, its inherent nobility and its capacity to act ethically. This theology was also secular in its outlook, insofar as it sought the political as well as moral improvement of human society. Graeco-Roman body-politic ideology had been revived for the later Middle Ages by John of Salisbury, and, Peter Travis tells us, Paul's exaltation of Christ's body stimulated the imagination of the poets and artists, as well as the theologians, to use it as a metaphor for social unity and social harmony:

Recognizing the tendency of social bodies to break up into misaligned fragments, yet appreciating the special importance of the most lowly organs [Christ's navel?], Paul's version of Christ's body and the unifying and disunifying function of its discrete parts is a version that ramifies throughout the Middle Ages. Not only was this living metaphor sacralized in peculiarly complicated ways in the idea of the king's two bodies, but it blended with various late medieval ways of conceiving the polis, the city on earth perceived as a sacred human organism of interdependent economic, social, political, and geographic units. [Italics added.]³²

One effect of the incarnational emphasis, then, was to transpose to the human plane, as a this-worldly possibility and as a specifically human goal, the social harmony and spirit of mutuality that the Maiden presents as an (exclusively) other-worldly ideal.

What the Dreamer does not yet grasp, and will not until after he has his vision and beholds the Eucharist in the Mass, is an incarnational understanding of the world. Nor does he as yet see the body of Christ as the sign of a continuity between this world and the other world, life and death, human and divine, that eluded him in the erber.³³ But his receptivity of the incarnational is implicit in his language, even if it is not articulated in a theological vocabulary, first in his impression of a redeemed nature in the erber and here in the confidence he shows toward the moral responsibility of the human community. Those who have endured the trials of this world and have lived their penance in it, he proclaims, are the ones most deserving to wear the crown and be at one with Christ's body (lines 475-80):

What more honour moƷte he acheue
Þat hade endured in worlde stronge,
And lyued in penaunce hys lyuez longe
With bodyly bale hym blysse to byye?
What more worschyp moƷt he fonge
Þen corounde be kyng by cortaysé?

His reluctance to celebrate the Maiden's heavenly status is not intended to deny her a place in heaven, only that it seems to him that human beings purchase their salvation with "bodyly bale." Indirectly the Dreamer's argument summarizes the view of the moderni on justification. His emphasis on work in the world assumes the essential goodness of human nature and accepts the obligation to work in the vineyard as the human side of the pactum.³⁴

In response to the Dreamer's contention that God's "courtesy" is too generous if it allows someone to be queen who has scarcely lived two years in the world and who, he says, "cowþez neuer God nauþer plese ne pray, / Ne neuer nawþer Pater ne Crede" (lines 484-85),³⁵ the Maiden recites the vineyard parable as an object lesson (it is she who is didactic, not the poet) that will teach him that there is no "date" or limit to God's mercy and goodness (lines 495-500):

For al is trawþe þat He con dresse,
And He may do noþynk bot ryƷt.
As Mathew melez in your messe
In sothfol Gospel of God almyƷt:
In sample He can ful grayþely gesse
And lyknez hit to heuen lyƷte.

Her interpretation of the parable conforms to the Augustinian theme of salvation in the other world, but her homely, familiar recitation of the parable itself pulls against the soteriological meaning she tries to extract from it. As with her allusion to Christ's body, the physical object that refers is more pronounced than the invisible thing to which it refers, and we see more than just the heavenly application when we become absorbed in the vivid details of a contemporary harvest scene Brueghelian in its realism.³⁶

First the householder is given a ring of authenticity by the skill he displays in knowing the most propitious time to secure the vines: "Of tyme of Ʒere þe terme watz tyƷt, / To labor vyne watz dere þe date. / Þat date of Ʒere wel knawe þys hyne" (lines 503-505). Chaucer employs similar language to characterize the acumen of his Reeve: "Wel wiste he by the droghte and by the reyn / The yeldynge of his seed and of his greyn" (GP 595-96) (the Pearl poet's "reve" also controls the purse strings of his master; lines 541-48). The emphasis in both of these passages falls on experience and the knowledge that accrues to human beings who are in harmony with nature and nature's time.

The Pearl poet's feel for human beings in rhythm with their surroundings and in tune with their work, such as the sailors in Patience and the armorers in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (or the masons in Saint Erkenwald with their "eggit toles"—a scene worthy if not imitative of the Pearl poet), not only heightens the realism of his poems but also helps reorient his audience toward the purposefulness of the ordinary in this world. Most of these scenes and the workers themselves are evidently peripheral to the main focus of the poem, yet it is precisely through them that the poet is able to articulate an important theme of his poem: humble, routine labor and those in the margins of society are vitally connected to the concerns of the community. And, since the work activity occurs in poems that revolve around a moral or theological crisis, he appears to be imputing a sacramental purpose to work no matter how remote it may stand from official spiritual activity.

In the parable the poet synchronizes the labor of the vine workers with the rise and fall of the sun and with the canonical hours. Time is measured by the change in the color of the sky and by the pleasure or pain the workers feel as they "Wryþen and worchen and don gret pyne, / Keruen and caggen and man hit clos" (lines 511-12). The Maiden's narrative respects, perhaps privileges, the generosity of the householder, but the heat of the day, its length, and its exhausting toll on the workers, suretched out by the effective use of polysyndeton in the lines just cited, generates sympathy for the disgruntled day laborers, who feel unfairly compensated for their efforts (lines 549-56):

And þenne þe fyrst bygonne to pleny
And sayden þat þay hade trauayled sore:

"Þese bot on oure hem con streny;
Vus þynk vus oƷe to take more.
More haf we serued, vus þynk so,
Þat suffred han þe dayez hete,
Þenn þyse þat wroƷt not hourez two,
And þou dotz hem vus to counterfete."

The workers evidently believe in a merit system wherein reward is proportionate to performance. To them the householder's generosity appears arbitrary and unjust. The real day laborers in the fourteenth century often worked exceedingly long hours for deplorably low wages and were systematically exploited by householders or the seigneurial class lends credence to the protests uttered by the vineyard workers.³⁷ In the poet's version of Matthew's parable, moreover, the workers are granted a greater recognition scene than they get in the biblical passage, rooting the poem, and the parable, more firmly in the social and economic milieu of the fourteenth century and making the question of justice in this world a more pointed one.

The householder defends his actions on the grounds of the covenant, the agreement he struck with the individual groups of workers before they entered the vineyard—although no mention is made of wages in the employment of the one-hour workers (lines 558-68):

Frende, no waning I wyl þe Ʒete;
Take þat is þyn owne, and go.
And I hyred þe for a peny agrete,
Quy bygynneƷ þou now to þrete?
Watz not a pené þy couenaunt þore?
Fyrre þen couenaunde is noƷt to plete;
Wy schalte þou þenne ask more?
More, weþer louyly is me my gyfte—
To do wyth myn quatso me lykez?
Oþer ellez þyn yƷe to lyþer is lyfte
For I am goude and non byswykez?

The householder speaks placatingly to the day laborers here (he calls their leader "frende"), but he stands firm in his conviction that he has the right to reward as he pleases, as long as he does not violate his promise to the first in his generosity to the last. Legally or technically, the householder is correct in his stance, but the strength of any covenant lies in its mutuality, and any sense of injustice or unfairness could result in discontent or loss of respect, as expressed by the day laborers.

The concept of the covenant itself (no equivalent of which is in Matthew's version), however, does leave room for some reconciliation of grievances to be negotiated, which the poet underscores by its repetition in lines 562 and 563. For, in addition to its theological signification as the bond or working arrangement between God and humankind outlined by the moderni, the concept of the convenant had a rich heritage in English law, dating to the feudal period during which the lord and his vassals were united by reciprocal rights and duties.³⁸ Feudal law had or presupposed the cooperation of both lord and vassal toward a common goal, a cooperation that emanated from a concept of mutual fidelity.³⁹

In the vineyard parable the vineyard itself, this earth, is the mutual ground that unites the workers and house-holder together, and on its growth and development depends the economic salvation of both laborers and landowner. Throughout the parable the householder's repeated injunctions against idleness and his several forays into the marketplace to recruit eager workers whose "hyre watz nawhere boun," that is, not fixed by covenant, and who are asked to do whatever they can (lines 531-36), open the vineyard to the entire community, giving the parable a Dantean turn. It is Dante who contends that only through the effort of all human beings working collectively toward peace and justice will humanity and human history actuate the totality of its humanitas.⁴⁰ For this enterprise all are called and all are chosen.

The Pearl poet does not seek to resolve the conflict between the laborers and the householder openly. He neither privileges the view of the householder nor discredits the complaints of the workers. Rather, he prefers to sustain the paradox built into the parable and its several levels of meaning so that the impasse between the parties serves as a provocation that both frustrates closure and allows questions of social justice and divine justice to arise naturally from the situation he depicts. Similarly, the narration of the parable itself does not settle the differences between the Dreamer and the Maiden, each of whom seems strengthened in his or her position by its recitation. At the close of the parable the Maiden likens the householder to Christ, who sheds his mercy graciously on the innocent "ÞaƷ þay com late and lyttel wore, / And þaƷ her sweng wyth lyttel atslykez" (lines 574-75). She supports her argument by drawing on the moral force contained in the double epigram that concludes the parable: "Þe laste schal be þe fyrst þat strykez" (line 570), and "For mony ben called, þaz fewe be rnykez" (line 572). In her gloss the Maiden alludes to paradigms of universal and timeless significance, preeminently to the ideal of innocence and to the figure of the child as the highest beatitude. Because Christ beckons us to come to him as little children, she says, the innocent receive a greater portion of glory and bliss than all the people of the world might claim by seeking judgment on the grounds of their righteousness. The tag lines that echo throughout sections 11 and 12 respectively carry the burden of her argument: "Þe grace of God is gret innoƷe" and "Þe innosent is ay saf by ryƷt."

The Dreamer reacts boldly to her gloss ("Then more I meled and sayde apert"; line 589), telling her that her explication of hte text is unreasonable. Confidently expressing his own understanding of Scripture, he cites David's psalm as a more accurate reflection of the meaning of the parable (lines 595-600):

"Þou quytez vchon as hys desserte,
Þou hyƷe Kyng ay pertermynable."
Now he þat stod þe long day stable,
And þou to payment com hym byfore,
Þenne þe lasse in werke to take more able,
And euer þe lenger þe lasse þe more.

It is apparent that the Dreamer identifies with the point of view of the workers; he refuses to regard them abstractly, and his enthusiasm for those who "stand the long day stable," the many who are called, matches her zeal for the few who are chosen. In his persistence the Dreamer should not be dismissed as recalcitrant or simpleminded, as some have concluded, when his words show that he is as committed to his own theological convictions and moral values as the Maiden is to hers. What the Maiden attributes to the transcendent, the Dreamer continues to show is also part of the immanent, the personal, and the human.

The Maiden goes on to expound on the power of God's grace and the redemption of the innocent, at the end of which the Dreamer still expresses his wonderment—and doubt—that she should be exalted above those who have suffered for Christ "onvunder cambe" (line 775). The Dreamer's hesitancy sets the Maiden off on another lengthy disquisition, this time on salvation history. In her lesson the Maiden schools the Dreamer in the sinfulness of human life, Christ's suffering in the world at the hands of "boyez bolde" (line 806), his transformation into the Lamb, and the evolution of the New Jerusalem out of the earthly one. More and less, she tells him, are not relevant in God's kingdom; what does count is the salvation of one's soul. For her, recovery of the pearl in the other world is compensation enough for loss or death in this world. Hence she urges him (lines 743-44) to forsake this world if he wants to purchase his spotless pearl. She warns him that no one is righteous enough to warrant heaven (lines 697-700) on his or her own merits: "Forþy to corte quen þou schal com / Þer alle oure causez schal be cryed, / Alegge þe ryƷt, þou may be innome" (lines 701-703). She completes her lesson and brings the poem to its climax with an allusion to death and salvation that goes to the heart of the distress suffered by the Dreamer in the erber—his fear of death and bodily decay set against the promise of permanence and the release from all tension in the New Jerusalem. She assures him (lines 857-61):

AlþaƷ oure corses in clottez clynge,
And Ʒe remen for rauþe wythouten reste,
We þurƷoutly hauen cnawyng;
Of on dethe ful oure hope is drest.
Þe Lombe vus gladez, oure care is kest.

The Maiden's appeal situates intimacy—the lost intimacy the Dreamer had mourned for in the erber—in the New Jerusalem and in the Lamb who relieves all cares. Aware that she is a "reken rose" and he "bot mokke and mul among" (lines 905-906), he asks to be taken to that "blysful bor" (line 964) where peace reigns "withouten reles" (line 956).

Some readers have been disappointed with the Dreamer's description of the New Jerusalem; they find it flat and insipid, or a lapse of attention on the poet's part. More likely it is another instance of style creating meaning. Throughout the sequence the Dreamer defers his own responses to those he has read in John's Apocalypse. John's description, like the Maiden's lengthy speech, appeals to him intellectually but also shows the limitations of theological formulations to personal crises. The repetition in every stanza of some phrase that acknowledges John's description, "as Johan deuysed" or "as Johan hym wrytez," points up the Dreamer's role as reader and interpreter, but also his independence as a seer. He is no mere conduit for John's vision, and his own vision does not result in the renunciation of this world that the Maiden had urged on him. As impressed as he is with the vision, the Dreamer, like Dante, shows that one's ascent to the pinnacle of the other world need not obliterate the mutable world. Rather, the vision encourages the viewer, including John, another poet, to return to this world to work or to write in order to make this world approximate the heavenly ideal they had the privilege of seeing. So it is with the Dreamer.

His personal response does enter the moment he sees Christ's body, the wound in his side still spurting blood (lines 1135-37). Redemption of a personal kind is made real to him when he spies his daughter in the procession frolicking joyfully with her companions. What moves him is his irrepressible desire to join his daughter, to be part of the Body of Christ. Equally strong is the attraction of the "meyny schene," and how "þay wyth lyf wern laste and lade" (lines 1145-46). His sudden impulse to cross the river, "For luf-longyng in gret delyt" (line 1152), is his act of self-transcendence, his determination to be reunited to society, to be part of the human community again. His "luf-longyng" recalls the "luf-daungere" he felt in the opening passage of the poem, which no longer seems mysterious but identifies itself as that love of the earth which calls him back to his "erber grene" and to the fundamental human desire for the life of the body: back to the harvest, and back to the work that remains in the fields and in the vineyard.⁴¹

His self-assertion wakes him up, the vision dissipated, and we are constrained to ask, Is this the fall of man?⁴² Does the Dreamer awaken in a "doel-doungoun" (line 1187) or in an "erber wlonk" (line 1187)? Viewed from one perspective, with one eye on his "lyttel quene" (line 1147) set in a "garlande gay" (line 1186) in the New Jerusalem, and the other eye on the Dreamer prostrate on her grave mound, this world (the "old muck ball," Beckett calls it) may seem indeed a place of exile. Yet the heavenly view need not invalidate the earthly one. At the end the narrator, who is at once the Dreamer and the one who has had the dream, can accept the vision of the eternal world, God's world, and its fulfillment. But he also accepts the fact that there is, contrary to Augustine, a real world here and a need to enjoy its pleasures and pains, to understand his purpose in the present life, and to comprehend still further his work here. To love the things of this world, the Dreamer has learned, is not to be attached overly to the material world or to be resistant to God's love and will. It is to understand and love better by seeing how such love brings about the full realization of one's humanness. The immanent world is not a rejection of the transcendent world; the Dreamer has buried his daughter. Rather, the presence of the transcendent—the knowledge of her continuity—compensates for the awareness at the root of Western consciousness of a profound sadness, or inescapable lack, to human existence.

Reawakened to the world around him, the Dreamer finds that he is not alone in the world. He discovers in the Eucharist, in the Body of Christ, "a frende ful fyin" (line 1204). Calling the Eucharist a "frende" echoes the householder's conciliatory gesture toward the day laborers in the vineyard parable (line 558), making the Eucharist a sign of the covenant or bond of mutual fidelity that joins the human with the divine. As Caroline Bynum remarks about eucharistic devotion in the late Middle Ages: "it stood for Christ's humanness and therefore for ours. Eating it and, in that eating, fusing with Christ's hideous physical suffering, the Christian not so much escaped as became the human."⁴³ The Eucharist thus becomes for the Dreamer a daily reminder of the dream, of the vineyard, of the vision of his daughter, and, finally, of a fully human redemption.

Like Dante, then, the Dreamer sees to see better. It is his vision, after all, not the Maiden's, and the writing or retelling of it affords him the retrospective view that yields meaning. He has lost one vision only to discern by his human sight a vision right in front of him. It is the Dreamer himself who draws the link between seed, penny, pearl, and Eucharist, the harvests of grain and grape, bread and wine. He knows he cannot lose himself in the seasons or the cycles of nature, nor can he withdraw to the heavenly Jerusalem. But he now knows who he is and to what kingdom he belongs. That he returns to the erber and reinhabits his body without any sense that he has fallen back into a sinful world assures us that he is not in exile here. Like Jonah in his woodbine, the Dreamer is at home in his "erber wlonk."

Notes

1. Paul Zumthor, Speaking of the Middle Ages, trans. Sarah White (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 63.
2. See Theodore Bogdanos, Pearl: Image of the Ineffable: A Study in Medieval Poetic Symbolism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1970); Ian Bishop, pearl in Its Setting: A Critical Study of the Structure and Meaning of the Middle English Poem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968); Lynn Staley Johnson, The Voice of the Gawain-Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). Other texts that influenced my reacing of the poem are W. A. Davenport, The Art of the Gawain-Poet (London: Athlone, 1978); and, most recently, the excellent study by Sarah Stanbury, Seeing the Gawain Poet: Description and the Act of Perception (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).
3. See David Aers, "The Self Mourning: Reflections on Pearl," Speculum 68 (1993): 54-73, esp. pp. 65-66.
4. Ibid., p. 59.
5. See M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 342-46.
6. See Marie McLean, Narrative as Performance: The Baudelairean Experiment (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 20.
7. Cited in ibid., pp. 20-21.
8. For a detailed discussion of Augustine's argument and its influence in the later Middle Ages, see Alistair McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, vol. 1, The Beginnings to the Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 53-70.
9. For a clear statement of the nominalist anthropology of the via moderna, see Heiko Oberman, "Some Notes on the Theology of Nominalism," HTR 53 (1960): 47-76.
10. I do not wish to give the impression that Biel was an opponent of Augustinianism, and I follow Francis Oakley in this regard (The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979], esp. pp. 131-74). Oakely shows that, while Augustinian terms did govern the theological discourse of the later Middle Ages, there were as many Augustinians in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as there were Platonists in the twelfth. Much of the intensification of the Augustinian language in the era, he says, was as a response to the rise of a humanist sensibility in distinction to it (p. 136), and by the fourteenth century Augustine's views on justification were not the dominant ones.
11. See Heiko Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William E. Eerdmans, 1967), p. 214.
12. Ibid., pp. 214-15.
13. For a discussion of this point, see Gordon Leff, Bradwardine and the Pelagians: A Study of His De Causa Dei and Its Opponents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), pp. 140-59. See also Oberman, "Some Notes," p. 53.
14. McGrath provides a detailed and extensive analysis of this entire subject in Iustitia Dei, pp. 109-55, 166-80. He also provides a more abbreviated discussion, which I rely on here, that superbly conveys the gist of the matter as it applies to the social and political issues involved. See Alistair McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 69-93.
15. See McGrath, Intellectual Origins, pp. 80-82. In general, covenantalism characterizes the theology of Ockham and Duns Scotus, particularly in the areas of merit, the two powers of God, and the contingency of the world. In Oberman's words, covenantal theology sought to replace the hierarchy with a partnership or legal pactum, by designating human beings as "the appointed representatives of God, responsible for their own life, society, and world, within the limits of the covenant stipulated by God"; Heiko Oberman, "The Shape of Late Medieval Thought: The Birth Pangs of the Modern Era," in Heiko Oberman and Charles Trinkaus, eds., The Pursuit of Holiness in the Later Middle Ages (Leiden: Bril, 1974), p. 15. For additional discussion, see William Courtenay, Covenant and Causality in Medieval Thought (London: Variorum Reprints, 1984), esp. pp. 94-115; and William Courtenay, Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth Century England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 250-307. See also Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250-1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 15-72.
16. McGrath, Intellectual Origins, p. 81. For Ockham's view on God's freedom and the pactum, see William of Ockham, Oxoniensis, 4 Sent. q. 3 Q: "God freely institutes the conditions of beatitude and creates every creature from His will. He can, therefore, will anything with respect to creatures. If someone should love God and perform all the works approved by God, still God could annihilate him without offence, or he could 'reward' him with eternal punishment, for God is debtor to no one." See also ibid., 1 Sent. d, 17 q. 2 C: "God of his own free will can accept as meritorious an act arising ex puris naturalibus without the habitus of caritas";, cited in Janet Coleman, Piers Plowman and the Moderni (Rome: Edizioni Di Storia E Letteratura, 1981), pp. 201-202 n.30.
17. See Coleman, Piers Plowman and the Moderni, p. 15. See also Margaret Aston's comment: "Interest in scholastic theology radiated beyond the schools. In the 1330's William of Ockham remarked that the topic of free will attracted lay disputants, so that 'laymen and old women' were ready to take on 'even learned men and those skilled in theology'"; Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon, 1984), p. 130.
18. Courtenay, Schools and Scholars, p. 380.
19. Walter Ullmann, The Medieval Foundations of Renaissance Humanism (Ichaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 84. See also Maurice Keen's observation that the widespread use of vernacular manuals with their emphasis on the humanity of Christ and attention to contemporary moral issues, "a strand in late medieval English religion very different from its preoccupation with the fate of the soul after death," may have had an influence on what he sees as a pronounced growth in charitable and socially directed activity in the fourteenth century; Maurice Keen, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, 1348-1500 (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 284.
20. See Heiko Oberman, The Dawn of the Reformation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986), pp. 15-16; Oberman, "The Shape of Late Medieval Thought," pp. 10-15.
21. All citations of Chaucer's works are taken from Robert A. Pratt, ed., The Tales of Canterbury, Complete, by Geoffrey Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966).
22. See Charles Muscatine, Poetry and Crisis in the Age of Chaucer (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1972), p. 37.
23. Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 178.
24. All citations of Pearl are taken from Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, eds., The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978).
25. For a general and informative introduction to Lacan's ideas as they relate to this discussion, see Stuart Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 150-55; see also Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust, and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 99-135.
26. Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan, pp. 151-52.
27. Stanbury, Seeing the Gawain Poet, pp. 16-17, makes a perceptive comment on the poet's strategy: "In the Maiden's analysis, the dreamer's perceptual problem is one of relying on experience rather than authority. Authority here is not, of course, the validation given by books, but the authority of Scripture, the one book, or the validation of faith. Nevertheless, by centering perception on the dreamer, together with the primary interpretation of what is seen or heard, the poet exploits a technique of narrative engagement that subverts the Maiden's text on ocular skepticism without offering an alternative epistemological model, dramatizing rather a crisis of interpretation."
28. For a discussion of flower and fruit imagery, or vegetation imagery in general, and its relation to personal renewal, see Gerhart B. Ladner, "Vegetation Symbolism and the Concept of Renaissance," in Millard Meiss, ed., Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, De Artibus Opuscula XL (New York: New York University Press, 1961), pp. 303-22.
29. Aers, "Self Mourning," pp. 57-58.
30. For further discussion of this point see Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, trans. Janos M. Bak and Paul A. Hollingsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 99-103.
31. David Jeffrey, "Postscript," in David Jeffrey, ed., By Things Seen: Reference and Recognition in Medieval Thought (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1979), p. 251. See also Jeffrey's suggestion, p. 240, that with the appearance of Aristotelean thought the current from Being to becoming reverses and it is the rich experience of the created order which leads men to an apprehension of its eternal model. Immanence itself, he says, does not prevail until vertical organization—the principle of reference—gives way to horizontal order.
32. Peter W. Travis, "The Semiotics of Christ's Body in the English Cycles," in Richard Emmerson, ed., Approaches to Teaching Medieval English Drama (New York: MLA Publications, 1990), pp. 72-73. See also Peter W. Travis, "The Social Body of the Dramatic Christ in Medieval England," Acta 13 (1985): 17-36.
33. For a general discussion of the poet's reliance on incarnational images and its theology in Pearl, see Bogdanos, Pearl, pp. 10-12.
34. See Anonymous, "Our Daily Work: A Mirror of Discipline," in David Jeffrey, The Law of Love: English Spirituality in the Age of Wyclif (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1988), pp. 236-64. The anonymous author emphasizes the importance of work to salvation and likens Christians to servants in God's vineyard who are called upon to work. He goes on to say that "that person prays without ceasing who is always doing good"; p. 246:
35. The Dreamer's references to the "Pater" and the "Creed" indicate how seriously he took the responsibility to learn the minimum that was required of the laity in one's understanding of the faith. In addition to the Creed and Paternoster, the laity were expected to know the Ave Maria, the sacraments, the seven deadly sins, works of charity, the acts of mercy, and the seven virtues, all of which attested to a concerted desire to have a more active as well as more informed laity. See also R. N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (London: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 275-99.
36. Those critics who have linked the vineyard parable to the harvest or have recognized its special appeal to the agricultural society of the fourteenth century are Paul Piehler, The Visionary Landscape: A Study of Medieval Allegory (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1971), pp. 150-52; Spearing, The Gawain Poet, p. 101; and Bogdanos, Pearl, p. 91.
37. In fourteenth-century France the vineyard day laborers had a widespread reputation for standing up for wage and work reform against strong opposition from their noble and ecclesiastical employers. See Jacques LeGoff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 47 and n. 25. For a discussion of labor conditions, clocks, and the social effects of both the Ordinance of Labourers and the Statute of Labourers, see Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, c. 1200-1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 27-86, 219-32; see also Keen, English Society, pp. 27-47.
38. In this regard see the arrangement between the Reeve and his master in Chaucer's General Prologue: "His swyn, his hors, his stoor, and his pultrye / Was hoolly in this Reves governynge, / And by his covenant yaf the rekenynge" (lines 598-600).
39. Ullmann, Medieval Foundations.
40. For Dante's view of history and human development, see Gerald Groveland Walsh, "Dante's Philosophy of History," Catholic Historical Review 20 (1934): 117-34; Ullmann, Medieval Foundations, pp. 128-38. For the connection between Dante and the Pearl poet, see R. A. Shoaf, "Purgatorio and Pearl: Transgression and Transcendence," TSLL 32 (1990): 152-68.
41. Lee Patterson's comment about Chaucer's poetry seems equally suitable to apply to the Dreamer and the Pearl poet himself: "the characteristic location of Chaucerian poetry is precisely the middle ground, the space between an atemporal beginning and a transcendent end. … Man is a creature of the middle, a historical being who dreams of a moment before and after history that he can never finally attain"; Lee Patterson, "'What man artow?': Authorial Self-Definition in The Tale of Sir Thopas and The Tale of Melibee" SAC 11 (1989): 174.
42. Bogdanos, Pearl, p. 114, among others, answers this question affirmatively.
43. Caroline Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 44. See also Miri Rubin's masterful study of the Eucharist in the late Middle Ages, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Rubin says that the Eucharist as symbol bound together the essential narratives of the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Redemption: "It was this-worldly in emphasizing that channels of regeneration and salvation were available and attainable, renewable and never exhaustible. It possessed little of the eschatological pull which informed the cultural worlds of late antiqu ty, or of the early modern era, but was geared toward the present, was fulfilled here and now, offering powerful and tangible rewards to the living in the present, as well as to their relatives the dead"; p. 348.