Decoding a medieval mystery manuscript

Two years ago, MIT professor of literature Arthur Bahr had one of the best days of his life. Sitting in the British Library, he was allowed to page through the Pearl-Manuscript, a singular bound volume from the 1300s containing the earliest versions of the masterly medieval poem “Pearl,” the famous tale “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” and two other poems.Today, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is commonly read in high school English classes. But it probably would have been lost to history without the survival of the Pearl-Manuscript, like the other works in the same volume. As it stands, no one knows who authored these texts. But one thing is clear: the surviving manuscript is a carefully crafted volume, with bespoke illustrations and the skilled use of parchment. This book is its own work of art.“The Pearl-Manuscript is just as extraordinary and unusual and unexpected as the poems it contains,” Bahr says of the document, whose formal name is “British Library MS Cotton Nero A X/2.”Bahr explores these ideas in a new book, “Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight,” published this month by the University of Chicago Press. In it, Bahr combines his deep knowledge of the volume’s texts with detailed examination of its physical qualities — thanks to technologies such as spectroscopy, which has revealed some manuscript secrets, as well as the good, old-fashioned scrutiny Bahr gave the book in person.“My argument is that this physical object adds up to more than the sum of its parts, through its creative interplay of text, image, and materials,” Bahr says. “It is a coherent volume that evokes the concerns of the poems themselves. Most manuscripts are constructed in utilitarian ways, but not this one.”Ode to the most beautiful poemBahr first encountered “Pearl” as an undergraduate at Amherst College, in a course taught by medievalist Howell D. Chickering. The poem is an intricate examination of Christian ethics; a father, whose daughter has died, dreams he is discussing the meaning of life with her.“It is the most beautiful poem I have ever read,” Bahr says. “It blew me away, for its formal complexity, and for the really poignant human drama.” He adds: “It’s in some sense why I’m a medievalist.”And since Bahr’s first book, “Fragments and Assemblages,” studies how medieval bound volumes were often collections of disparate documents, it was natural for him to apply this scholarly lens to the Pearl manuscript as well.Most scholars think the Pearl manuscript has a single author — although we cannot be certain. After beginning with “Pearl,” the manuscript follows with two other poems, “Cleanness” and “Patience.” Closing the volume, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is an eerie, surreal tale of courage and chivalry set in the (possibly fictional) court of King Arthur.In the book, Bahr finds the four texts to be thematically linked, analyzing the “connective tissue” through which the “manuscript starts to cohere into a wrought, imperfect, temporally layered whole,” as he writes. Some of these links are broad, including recurring “challenges to our speculative faculties”; the works are full of seeming paradoxes and dreamscapes that test the reader’s interpretive capacity.There are other ways the text seem aligned. “Pearl” and “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” each have 101 stanzas. The texts have numerically consistent structures, in the case of “Pearl” based around the number 12. All but one of its stanzas has 12 lines (and Bahr suspects this imperfection is intentional, like a fine rug with a deliberate flaw, which may be the case for the “extra” 101st stanza). There are 36 lines per page. And from examining the manuscript in person, Bahr found 48 places with decorated initials, although we do not know whose.“The more you look, the more you find,” Bahr says.Materiality mattersSome of our knowledge about the Pearl-Manuscript is quite new: Spectroscopy has revealed that the volume originally had simple line drawings, which were later filled in with colored ink.But there is no substitute for reading books in person. That took Bahr to London in 2023, where he was permitted an extended look at the Pearl-Manuscript in the flesh. Far from being a formality, that gave Bahr new insights.For instance: The Pearl-Manuscript is written on parchment, which is animal skin. At a key point in the “Patience” poem, a reworking of the tale of Jonah and the whale, the parchment has been reversed, so that the “hair” side of the material faces up, rather than the “flesh” side; it is the only case of this in the manuscript.“When you’re reading about Jonah being swallowed by the whale, you feel the hair follicles when you wouldn’t expect to,” Bahr says. “At precisely the moment when the poem is thematizing an unnatural reversal of inside and outside, you are feeling the other side of another animal.”He adds: “The act of touching the Pearl-Manuscript really changed how I think this poem would have worked for the medieval reader.” In this vein, he says, “Materiality matters. Screens are enabling, and without the digital facsimile I could not have written this book, but they cannot ever replace the original. The ‘Patience’ chapter reinforces that.”Ultimately, Bahr thinks the Pearl-Manuscript buttresses his view in the “Fragments and Assemblages” book, that the medieval reading experience was often bound up with the way volumes were physically constructed.“My argument in ‘Fragments and Assemblages’ was that medieval readers and book constructors thought in a serious and often sophisticated way about how the material construction and the selection of the texts into a physical object made a difference — mattered — and had the potential to change the meanings of the texts,” he says.Good grade on the group project“Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript” has received praise from other scholars. Jessica Brantley, professor and chair of the English Department at Yale University, has said that Bahr “offers an adventurous multilayered reading of both text and book and provides an important reinterpretation of the codex and its poems.”Daniel Wakelin of Oxford University has said that Bahr “sets out an authoritative reading of these poems” and presents “a bold model for studying material texts and literary works together.”For his part, Bahr hopes to appeal to an array of readers, just as his courses on medieval literature appeal to students with an array of intellectual interests. In the making of his book, Bahr also credits two MIT students, Kelsey Glover and Madison Sneve, who helped the project through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), studying the illustrations and distinctive manuscript markings, among other things.“It’s a very MIT kind of poem in the sense that not only is the author, or authors, obsessed with math and geometry and numbers and proportion, they are also obsessed with artifact construction, with architectural details and physical craft,” Bahr says. “There’s a very ‘mens et manus’ quality to the poems that’s reflected in the manuscript,” he says, referring to MIT’s motto, “mind and hand.” “I think helps explain why these extraordinary MIT students helped me so much.”