Pearl, while connected through manuscript location and possible authorship with the popular Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, is undeniably less frequently taught. The editors and contributors of this volume acknowledge this reality and note Pearl is less appealing to modern, often secular, students, not merely because it does not include figures known to them in their post-medieval incarnations such as King Arthur, but also because the Midlands dialect of the poem presents an overt language challenge alongside a less palatable, less plot-driven narrative. The poem is steeped in Christian theology and iconography with no hint of an adventure. For these reasons the MLA volume dedicated to Pearl pedagogy is a welcome addition to the Approaches to Teaching World Literature series. The introductory chapter to Jane Beal and Mark Busbee'sApproaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl is a thorough examination of the information one needs to make informed decisions about teaching the poem. The introduction provides a precise summary of the poem followed by detailed discussion of historical and manuscript contexts, genre, poetics, authorship, and symbolism. These discussions are accessible to non-specialists because they define key terms such as affective piety and manuscript terminology. Following this introduction, the collection is separated into "Materials" and "Approaches," the second of which comprises the bulk of the volume. Additionally, there are useful appendices including study questions for the poem and the illustrations from the manuscript; several methods to locate these images electronically are also provided, an important asset for the contemporary classroom.
The "Materials" section of the volume is divided into "Classroom Texts" and "Instructor's Library," distinguishing between items one teaches directly and items that inform one's teaching. In "Classroom Texts" there is a thorough listing of the facsimile editions of Pearl, followed by dual and modern language translations of the poem. The differences are expressed clearly and succinctly with a clear audience or use suggested for many items. Beal also notes when some of these translations and editions are available freely online, helpful knowledge to prevent both plagiarism in translation exercises and to broaden one's sense of the variations in translation. Less attention is given to non-English translations, commentaries on the poem, and appearances in anthologies. Overall the "Classroom Texts" section provides evaluative and descriptive commentary that allows Pearl teachers, whether medievalists or non-specialists, to make informed decisions about textual choices for their students.
In "Instructor's Library," there is a bibliographical survey of the available background resources a teacher of the poem might find useful. Introductions and critical collections appear, but for specialists there are specific discussions of scholarship trends as well as accounts of academic books and dissertations, organized into two categories: critical contexts and critical theories. The critical contexts works are discussed in detail and arranged to cover a variety of topics, giving the teacher of Pearl a handy short-list of evaluated titles to begin with on the following topics: dream vision theory, dialogue or debate poetry, Biblical and medieval cultural literacy, preaching, the role of the Pearl-maiden, Pearl's relationship to the Mass and liturgy, the vernacular and alliterative revivals, historical contexts, and finally iconographical and medieval visual culture. The "Instructor's Library" talks broadly about the trends in application of literary theory to Pearl by surveying major works, finding feminist and psychoanalytical studies are most prominent, and noting recent productive scholarship on Pearl, Levinas, and ineffability studies.
Most important in the "Instructor's Library" is a list of major bibliographies that includes a section of multimedia resources, including Jane Beal's site that contains a free, downloadable PowerPoint presentation with full color, high resolution images of the manuscript illuminations. This type of resource is invaluable, especially for faculty who would like to see the increased teaching of works from the medieval period in K-12 education and more broadly in colleges. The multimedia list also directs readers to the MED and METRO, additional valuable resources for the teacher of Pearl.
The "Approaches" section has its own introduction that initially describes the articles according to the four-part organization of the section: "Historical Approaches and Contexts," "Literary and Theoretical Approaches," "Comparative Approaches," and "Specific Classroom Contexts." Then the introduction re-categorizes articles based along lines that teachers of Pearl may understand their own pedagogical interests and needs to be: "The Text of Pearl and Its Contexts," "Pearl in the Company of Other Works," "Literary and Rhetorical Aspects of Pearl," "Relationships between Form and Content in Pearl," and "The Religious Message of Pearl." Under these headings Busbee discusses the articles again, threading through their similarities and drawing connections across the other sections that structure "Approaches," which allows for a user-friendly introduction that enables readers to see which articles are of most immediate interest.
Of the nineteen contributions in "Approaches," four appear under the heading "Historical Approaches and Contexts." Each article provides something for specialists and non-specialists. A. S. G. Edwards' work on authorship expediently recapitulates the history of the debates that many specialists may be familiar with, but that non-specialists may not know. Edwards offers literary scholars a reminder of the self-interest of accepting common authorship of the Cotton Nero A. x manuscript because doing so allows for the invention of "a single poetic presence whose multiplicity of individual achievements commands admiration" that would outstrip that directed at four different poets (64). Likewise, Laura Howes' linguistic perspective on Pearl has something available for people comfortable with Middle English as well as novices. Her discussion of repeated words and their subtle shifts in meaning offers the basis for one class or several classes of activities, depending upon how deeply one investigates the words. Her article includes suggestions that can be scaled in difficulty for graduate or undergraduate students. Murray McGillivray and Kenna Olsen's article probably provides the best and most practical information in this section for teachers; it highlights the useful tools available at the Cotton Nero A. x Project located at Gawain-ms.ca. This project offers access to high resolution images that provide students with direct, though electronic, access to the original, unedited text of the poem. For those without training or interest in manuscript studies, however, this article also offers a useful mode for discussion aboutPearl based on the poem's illuminations. Finally, this article offers a sample assignment appendix that spells out how one could use both the project and the text of Pearl to promote student understanding of scholarly editing while also teaching them marketable skills such as editing and web publication. David Coley's "PublicPearl" is the final article in this section and approaches the poem as public in order to reveal the complexity and polysemy in Pearl as well as to bring it into conversation with its literary cohort, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman. Coley's essay requires the least technical knowledge in this section, and while not overtly practical, it offers a discussion points that non-specialists can fold into lecture-discussion.
"Literary and Theoretical Approaches" includes five articles that take a formalist or theory-driven approach to teaching Pearl. Among the latter, Meyer and Beal's article organizes itself into three sections that address major questions teachers of the poem may have: genres and medieval exegetical practice, the activity of medieval allegoresis, and key images and symbols from the poem. This article is an essential guide for the non-specialist who may not have a firm grasp on medieval intellectual and literary terminology. There are practical exercises included and a helpful sentiment that reading Pearl positions readers as "allegorical interpreter[s]" that stand in for "the soul always in motion on spiritual pilgrimage," which allows one to connectPearl with literature of pilgrimage and conversion (94). John Fleming's article emphasizes the significance of mathematical pattern in verse structure. Fleming acknowledges the intellectual alterity of the poem for modern undergraduate students as "forbidding," but rather than providing the literary and interpretive methods at work in the medieval past as the Meyer-and-Beal approach takes, Fleming suggests that some students might be able to access Pearl simply by having the patterns and structures pointed out to them (96). Fleming also qualifies this emphasis on pattern by noting medieval attitudes toward pattern: "the numerological poet was not, from his own point of view, dealing in an extrinsic and artificially imposed device," but engaged in an ideological discovery of God's creation (100). Taken together, the Fleming and Meyer-and-Beal articles offer an excellent foundational overview of teaching Pearl.
Beal also offers an individually authored article that addresses the question of teaching Pearl and maintaining the poetic ambiguity of the maiden's relationship with the jeweler, an ambiguity she points out is eclipsed in almost all editions and translations. Beal offers a clear model of how to engage students with the illuminations that open Pearl with clear descriptions of the illuminations, as well as specific observations teachers can prompt from students. Finally Beal provides a chart of scholarly opinions on the relationship between the maiden and jeweler that can be adapted for various small group activities, including one suitable for the graduate classroom.
Seeta Chaganti's approach mirrors Fleming's interest in structure, but Chaganti examines Pearl comparatively with the other Cotton Nero A. x poems and St. Erkenwald. Chaganti's most interesting pedagogical tool is to have students read excerpts of the openings of all five poems to allow an intertextual examination that can be revised as the semester continues. The final article in "Literary and Theoretical Approaches," also comparesPearl with the other Cotton Nero A. x poems but leaves aside St. Erkenwald. J. A. Jackson's article takes a fairly theological perspective, deploying theology in a cross-textual examination of Christological imagery, but this article may be difficult to access for non-specialists and may not offer approaches that work for more secular student populations.
"Comparative Approaches" features four articles that investigate relationships with Pearl and other texts beyond the commonly authored texts. The articles by Arthur Bahr, Busbee, and Elizabeth Harper in this section are the most practical and easily implemented in this collection; they all include clear, step-by-step pedagogical procedures for various activities. Bahr compares Pearl with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and gives an excellent set of expectations for students working in a translation course. For faculty who may be teaching a new translation seminar, this offers a clarity of direction that can safeguard against uneven student output by providing precise translation methodology. If sources and analogues are key to one's approach, Busbee offers a clear guide to Pearl's, but also offers an important method of gaining student interest. He starts, not with medieval analogues and sources, but by looking at more recently penned "cross-over analogues" wherein "unsettled or unhappy characters journey into parallel worlds and experience healing, growth, or consolation" (139). This method asks students to engage with Pearl through prior reading or viewing, thereby achieving a similar personal access to Pearl that Harper also employs. Harper situates the poem as one of grief, and she asks them to reflect on their own experiences of grief to make sense of it. Pearlis alien in many ways, but Harper reminds us it is also an ultimately human poem. Everyone must experience grief; Pearl is a medieval meditation on such. Laudably, Harper's article spends the most time articulating information about a variety of student attitudes and how her methods offer each student a different benefit or avenue of learning. A final benefit of Harper's contribution is that it hints at art-historical interdisciplinarity in its suggestion that the Pearl maiden's appearance be compared with that of St. Katherine, a comparative text that Harper suggests reads well alongside Pearl. The final article by John Bowers adopts the connection of Pearlto students' other reading interests, specifically with the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien. Bowers gives a clear pathway and list of resources for faculty interested in Tolkien connections, but there are fewer practical tools than in other "Comparative Approaches" articles.
The final section of essays is a miscellany of six articles addressing "Specific Classroom Contexts." William Quinn's article focuses on translation, both literally and figuratively, though his article offers more of an interpretive stance rather than practical activities. His article is also probably better suited to those with experience with Middle English. Heather Maring's article takes up performance as the main teaching circumstance to emphasize and divides her article into a justification for performance as a pedagogical method (includes helpful reading suggestions on orality) and a section that presents more practical performance concerns, including a sample assignment of a reflective post-performance paper. Maring's article pairs well with Eugene Green's article, which makes debate the instructional emphasis, but, like Maring, Green emphasizes oral performance. Additionally, Green suggests the concept of debate poetry can be accessed by modern readers by juxtaposing the debate scenes from Pearl with modern film arguments. This strategy prompts students to visualize the dreamer-maiden debate as well as think about the oral performativity of their speech exchanges in a way that silent reading cannot.
The last three articles focus less on pedagogical approach than they do on topic of discussion. Elizabeth Allen's article pairs well with Beal's article as they both highlight the use of manuscript illumination to generate class discussions, but Allen emphasizes landscape within the images and poem in order to unlock the poem's meaning, and specifically directs students to examine three areas: garden, dreamscape, and the New Jerusalem. Jane Chance's article asks students to consider Pearl within the larger context of medieval dream vision and visionary literature; it is also the only essay to specifically consider the needs of a graduate seminar in detail. Chance's essay offers a clear introduction to the genre of dream vision and provides a walk-through of the reading lists that she provides at the end of the article; this essay situates Pearl within the field of dream vision and visionary literature, but does not offer practical, pedagogical advice. Nancy Ciccone's article takes as its focus imagery of Christ's wound and the lamb. This article is a move back toward a more practical approach, providing discussion topics and small group activities.
Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl offers a welcome step forward in medieval studies pedagogy, and it draws a variety of voices together that are occasionally, but not always in conflict, so that the twenty contributors reflect a broad cross-section of Pearl pedagogy, generating for teachers new ideas about how to teach the poem. While clearly a valuable volume, there is still much work to be done in the production of clear, directly applicable teaching tools. While there is guidance here, there is not an overwhelming material support for the teaching of Pearl that will not have to be converted and processed for the modern classroom. Clearly scholars such as Beal and other contributors see the urgency in producing multimedia pedagogical resources, but this volume remains one that will still be more useful and navigable to the specialist teaching in a graduate or upper-division undergraduate context. Finally, there are also no overt considerations of online pedagogical concerns in this volume.