Following his 2021 critical edition of the Middle English Pearl, Thorlac Turville-Petre continues his work with the poems attributed to the anonymous Pearl-poet, this time with a new critical edition of St. Erkenwald. This most recent critical edition of the poem in forty-eight years (following Clifford Peterson’s 1977 University of Pennsylvania edition) makes full use of the resources now available to textual editors, and of the editor’s own long, distinguished career. The edition includes a fifty-page introduction; a bibliography of primary and secondary sources relevant to the poem; a facing-page text of the Middle English poem (with textual emendations listed at the foot of the page) and a modern English prose translation; twenty-three pages of annotations; an appendix listing marginal glosses added in the sixteenth-century to the single extant manuscript of St. Erkenwald (British Library MS Harley 2250); a glossary of twenty-six pages; and an index of proper names.
The Introduction builds on the established Cheshire connections for the poem’s authorship, provenance, and date most recently articulated by John M. Bowers (2012). [1] Turville-Petre challenges the common designation of Erkenwald as a “London poem” (13), a tag based on its setting at London’s St. Paul’s cathedral, and on the proposed commissioner of the poem as London Bishop Robert Braybrook. Given the poem’s high alliterative style, characteristic of the northern poets, and its outsider’s perspective to events “At London in Englond” (line 1), the editor argues for a Cheshire audience, and a patron “with strong Cheshire affiliations, who may of course also have been active in the affairs of St. Paul’s” (14). Turville-Petre proposes a patron not unlike the family with known connections to MS Harley 2250--that of John Booth of Barton (d. 1422), a Member of Parliament, and his sons William and Lawrence, who became Archbishop of York and Bishop of Durham, respectively. The sons, in particular, both had active ties to St. Paul’s. The edition’s list and discussion of the manuscript’s contents support the Cheshire provenance. Likewise, the editor proposes an individual sharing the regional and professional identity of the Booths as a likely candidate for authorship. Turville-Petre also re-opens the “common authorship” question of Erkenwald and the four poems attributed to the Pearl-poet in MS Cotton Nero A.x; he details the poem’s stylistic affinities with Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, alongside its metrical kinship with works such as The Siege of Jerusalem and the Wars of Alexander, suggesting “a school of poets” of the north whose work is now lost (15). He also notes Erkenwald’s dissimilarities of characterization and descriptive technique to the poems of the Pearl-poet.
The sections on “Sources” and “The Discovery of the Tomb” revisit and expand on previous coverage of Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth as sources for the historical proem of Erkenwald. In particular, Turville-Petre updates our understanding of the pagan temples (and their gods) of London ostensibly converted during Augustine’s late sixth-century conversion of England to Christianity. Similarly, he widens the context of the inventio scene--the discovery of the incorrupt corpse forming the poem’s central mystery--with comparable accounts from Bede and Matthew Paris of the similar discoveries of the pre-Conquest saints Cuthbert, Etheldreda, and Alban. Interpretive insights throughout the edition revolve mostly around the poem’s theological complexities, including its formulations of Heaven and Hell (deemed “notably conservative” at 27), and the process of pagan salvation. To this effect, Turville-Petre includes two “Case Studies,” close readings of “Bishop Erkenwald’s Speech” upon first approaching the tomb (ll. 159-76), and the culminating “Baptism” of the pagan corpse by the bishop’s tears.
The strength of the annotations lies in additional and precise examples of analogous scenes, texts, and usage. For example, Turville-Petre expands the account for the non-Christian temples allegedly converted to Christian houses of worship in the opening lines, including the enigmatic reference to a “synagoge of þe Sonne” (l. 21); whereas earlier editors avoid the Hebraic word, Turville-Petre identifies a parallel synagoge in the Wars of Alexander as a temple to Ammon (an Egyptian deity), suggesting a culturally flexible understanding of the word. Certain other interpretive “hot spots” of the poem benefit from greater clarity, including: the bishop’s celebration of the Mass of the Holy Spirit as tied to the bishop’s earlier prayer for guidance, and to his subsequent reanimation of the corpse, where language of the Holy Spirit prevails; the pagan judge’s uncanny knowledge and articulation of the doctrine of atonement (ll. 295-9), and his allusion to a “depe lake” (l. 302), traced to the offertory of the mass for the dead; the dead judge’s phrasing of his legal practice (ll. 233-44), which are corroborated against established ecclesiastic and royal oaths taken by judges and other officials; the puzzling “lewid date” (l. 205) and convoluted chronology the dead judge provides for his lifetime, which while not “solved,” are nonetheless aligned with similar medieval schemes to reconcile biblical with ancient Roman chronology; the final, spontaneous ringing of all the city bells following the baptism of the incorrupt body (l. 352) finds parallel in the spontaneous bell-ringing at the uncovering of the incorrupt corpse of St. Etheldreda, with references to further hagiographic examples, suggesting the pagan judge as “the saint” of the story. Especially helpful are notes that trace specific vocabulary to similar occurrences in the work of the Pearl-poet.
The facing-page prose translation of the poem greatly serves students of the poem, as it adheres more closely to the original than, for example, the popular translation by Casey Finch accompanying the Andrew, Waldron, and Peterson edition, [2] which tends to insert words into, and omit words from, the original. For example, in the opening scene where the workmen at St. Paul’s uncover the tomb, Turville-Petre better captures the workmen, and their actual tasks, tools, materials, and aims. For lines 39-42, “Mony a mery mason was made þer to wyrke, | Harde stones for to hewe with eggite toles, | Mony grubber in grete þe grounde for to seche| Ƿat þe fundement on fyrst shulde þe fote halde,” Finch translates as “On that minster were many masons employed. | Many hacked and hewed at the hardest of stones; | Many gripped at the gravel on the ground with their picks; | All to dig a foundation of depth for the church” (325), whereas Turville Petre translates the passage as “Many a lively mason was set to work there, to hew hard stones with sharp-edged tools, many a digger in the earth to search for solid ground, so that the foundations should support the footings first of all” (64). Whereas Finch somewhat effaces the workmen, Turville-Petre captures the spirit, intent, specialties, and skill of those who first encounter the marvel. In the same vein, Turville-Petre better captures the tomb-wonder and its craft. For example, lines 45-6, “For as þai dyʒt and dalfe so depe into þe erthe | Ƿai founden fourmyt on a flore a ferly faire toumbe,” Finch translates as “When they’d dug to the depths of the dark, hardened earth, | The men found on a floor at their feet a great tomb” (325), whereas Turville-Petre translates this as “as they worked and dug so deeply into the earth, they found a very beautiful tomb constructed on a floor” (64), which conveys not only the efforts of the present-day workmen who “worked and dug,” but also the care and skill of the earlier craftsmen who made the tomb. His more faithful translation of such passages corroborates scholarship on the poem that emphasizes the importance of the third estate crowd who abide by the tomb throughout the story, and across the ages.
Turville-Petre’s translation not only better captures the citizenry around the tomb, but also respects the poem’s interpretive invitations. For example, whereas Finch assigns late-medieval design features to the “gargeles” (l. 48) who supposedly “grimaced and crouched” (327) on the tomb, wording not in the original, Turville-Petre captures the original imagery of a tomb “decorated around with gargoyles,” allowing for broader interpretive possibilities for this inaugural instance of “gargoyle” in the English language. Likewise, whereas the Finch translation tends to insert the word “saint” to refer to Bishop Erkenwald where the original does not (ll. 33, 129, 159, 189, 273, 311), Turville-Petre respects the non-hagiographic Middle English vocabulary so often used for Erkenwald as simply “segge” (man) or “bishop,” allowing for the poem’s ambiguity concerning “the saint” of the story, which could be either the bishop (a historical saint) or the incorrupt body of the pagan judge, who forms the central miracle of the inventio scene. To this same effect, Turville-Petre also preserves an important line of the poem which earlier editors modified, thus changing the meaning. When the body speaks, and relates his story, he says “I was an heire of anoye in þe New Troie” (l. 211), which earlier editors changed to “I was (o)n heire of an oye(r) in þe New Troie” (Savage, 1926); “I was of heire and of oyer in þe New Troie” (Andrew, Waldron, Peterson, 1993), translated by Finch as “In the oyer and eyre courts I everywhere judged” (333); Adhering to the original wording in the manuscript, Turville-Petre translates the line as “I was inheritor of affliction in New Troy” (72), which he contrasts, in the note to this line, with the “eyres of hevuene” in Piers Plowman C.5-59 (96), better conveying the irony of the judge’s words, and the pattern of tribulation over his lifetime he recounts. Having said that, in one instance, Turville-Petre departs from the original, missing a small but meaningful tool of characterization: at line 230, the dead judge reports that he served the people “more þen fourty wynter,” which Turville-Petre translates as “more than forty years” (74). The dead judge uses the earlier, Old English form “winter” rather than the later word “year” to measure annual time. This is one of only two instances in the works of the Pearl-poet (SGGK, l. 613), and the singular instance in St. Erkenwald, of the older term “winter” used synonymously with “year,” suggesting a degree of poetic intent to authenticate this early citizen by how he calculates the passage of time.
Turville-Petre has completely and thoughtfully revisited the text of St. Erkenwald--from transcription, to translation, to annotation--producing a welcome new edition of the poem that will serve students and scholars of the poem for years to come.
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Notes:
1. John M. Bowers, An Introduction to the “Gawain” Poet (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012).
2. Casey Finch, trans.; Malcolm Andrew, Ronald Waldron, and Clifford Peterson, eds., The Complete Works of the “Pearl” Poet (Oakland: University of California Press, 1993).