The Gawain-Poet

3 credits · Graduate

The Cotton Nero A.x. manuscript contains the single extant version of four of the greatest poems in Middle English: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Patience and Cleanness. This course will study these four works by one anonymous author, known to scholars as the Gawain-poet or the Pearl-poet. Written in a more difficult dialect of Middle English than Chaucer or Malory, the poems are in alliterative long-line as well as occasional rhyme, and may provide the only evidence of a sophisticated 14th-century court located in the North-West Midlands area of England. FORMATS: Seminar