Dr. Arthur Barr (2:55)

Yeah. So it really goes back to my undergraduate days at Amherst College. In Massachusetts. I suppose it goes back a little further than that. I was always a fantasy geek, so I was always interested kind of in the Middle Ages as a fanboy. But it was in college, as an undergraduate, that I first studied Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and later Pearl, with a wonderful medievalist named Howel Chickering, known by everyone as Chick. So Chick Chickering. And I loved the fun and the wit of Sir Gawain. But I was most captivated by Pearl, both for its moving human drama and for its extraordinary literary form, the combination of rhyme, alliteration and concatenation, or stanza linking that it displays across its 101 stanzas. The form is actually unique in English literature. So I focused on Perle in my senior thesis as an undergraduate, but I didn't really work on the. I didn't work with the poems at all, in fact, in graduate school, because I wasn't sure how to. But I knew I wanted to come back to them eventually. So after writing my first book, which was about how, which is what I call the compilation, so I decided to use my second book to bring that codicological or compilational approach to the Perl poems and the only manuscript in which they're preserved, the Pearl manuscript.

Mortaza Hajizadeh (4:30)

You said that you got interested in the medieval history because you were interested in those mythologies or stories in early ages. I was kind of like you, but I had a different background. So I started reading. I'm originally from Iran myself, and I started reading One Thousand and One Nights or Arabian Nights, but I went into different direction, I guess. But anyway, you mentioned Perl Manuscript. Like I told you before we started recording, I kind of feel embarrassed to say that, but I'm a student of English literature, but I'd never heard of Perl manuscript. I've heard of the poems that are in there, but not the Perl manuscript. For the uninitiated, what is Perl manuscript? What are the poems that are covered in that? Can you tell us about that? Why is it called Pero Manuscript?

Dr. Arthur Barr (5:17)

Yeah, so? Well, it's actually formally called British Library, Mississippi for manuscript cotton Nero A10. And that formal designation or shelf mark reflects the library design of the 17th century bibliophile and antiquarian, Sir Robert Cotton, who saved both this manuscript and many other medieval manuscripts, including the only surviving copy of Beowulf. He saved them from the chaos of the 16th century Dissolution of English monasteries and their libraries. And Cotton's bookshelves were arranged down a long room under 14 busts of classical figures, mostly Roman Emperors. So cotton, Nero a 10 meant that you'd find the Pearl manuscript under the Bust of nero, bottom shelf, a 10 books over. And Cotton's library was one of the bases of the modern British Library in London, which is where it's now housed. So it's called the Pearl Man. It's colloquially called the Pearl Manuscript or the Gowing Manuscript for their. For the two most famous and celebrated poems that it contains. And it is the only surviving copy of these poems. There are four of them. They are untitled in the manuscript, but they're now known as Pearl Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. So the first three of these are explicitly religious, explicitly Christian. Pearl is a dream vision about the nature of grace and grief, death and salvation. Cleanness and Patience are alliterative retellings of biblical narratives like Noah and the Flood and Jonah and the Whale. And Sir Gawain is a rollicking, arguably satirical, chivalric romance set in the time of King Arthur. This manuscript is fascinating on many levels, both as the only repository of these poems, but also for a lot of other kinds of uniqueness. It's the only surviving manuscript to consist solely of alliterative Middle English verse. And Pearl and Sir Gawain in particular are the literary equal of any English poem from any period. So one enduring mystery, which my book does not try to solve, is why they should survive only here, in what turns out to be an especially idiosyncratic volume. Then they seem to disappear entirely from literary history between the construction of this manuscript in the late 1300s and their re. Emergence, well, their salvation, really, in the 17th century by cotton.

Mortaza Hajizadeh (8:16)

And the title of your book, which says, in a way, you frame it around some three guiding concepts, Prayer, manuscript speculations, shapes and delight. How do these three ideas work together to shape our approach to understanding the manuscript and the poems there?

Dr. Arthur Barr (8:36)

Yeah, I guess I'll take the words in reverse order, because by delight, I mean basically what the word means today. It's a leitmotif word in Perl. So Pearl is organized around concatenating groups of five stanzas that are organized, sorry, around a single leitmotif word. And the penultimate of these words is, in fact, delight. And I make it a leitmotif for my book because I wanted to lean into the delight that these poems afford and that the poet evidently took in their creation and that I believe, that the patron and first readers of this manuscript did as well. It's a passion project. So by shapes, I mean both geometric shapes, like circles and Spheres, points and pentangles, because these are central to the plots of the manuscripts for poems. And I also mean page shapes as they emerge more multiply and abstractly on the page and across the book. So with its geometric and architectural associations, shape is my attempt to offer a concrete subset of form, which in literary discourse has become almost endlessly polyvalent. So speculation is the most complex of these terms, to the extent that it my. I focus on it in my entire first chapter. But briefly, medieval speculation involves looking closely at what remains in order to trace the outlines of something not fully knowable, occluded, but real. So it's a. It's a midpoint between cognition and contemplation in the sense that speculation is operationally intellective, but subtended by feeling. And more than any other medieval poem I know, Pearl inspires devotion even as its complex patterns delight and exercise the mind. So by inviting speculation in this technical, historicized sense, the poem Pearl turns the Pearl manuscript into a locus of speculation today.

Mortaza Hajizadeh (11:04)

That's a very comprehensive response to this. Another thing comes to my mind when we talk about speculation. Part of your argument is that medieval speculation is a mix of intellect and also devotion. I'm curious to know how this sort of sensibility, how can it help us in better understanding the permanent script today and especially the role of visual aims? And I forgot to mention to our listeners that any book I've picked up on medieval manuscript, I would delight it. It's not only an intellectual feast, it's.

Dr. Arthur Barr (11:40)

Also visual feast, let's say.

Mortaza Hajizadeh (11:43)

And similar in this book, there are lots of wonderful pictures of manuscripts there which never cease to amaze me. So let's talk about speculation and how it blends intellect and devotion. How it can better help us understand this manuscript today would be great if we could also talk about the visual elements and the role they play as a devotional object, let's say, in the manuscript.

Dr. Arthur Barr (12:08)

Yeah. So I'll begin by noting just how unusual it is for a book of vernacular poems like this to have full page illustrations. This is actually the earliest collection of Middle English verse that does. And it's also unusual for vernacular poems to be written in this particular script or form of handwriting, which is a really interesting sort of down market version of a very fancy script called textualis or textura that was mostly used for religious books like Bibles and books of hours. Vernacular poems were much likelier to be written in a more cursive, less formal hand. So these two aspects of the manuscript, both its full page illustrations and literally the Letter forms of the, of the words themselves would have suggested a, would have given a devotional feel to the object. So it's also very small, just under 5 by 7 inches. So in its very small size, its textualis script and full page illustrations, the Pro manuscript looks more like a book of hours than it does a book of poems from this period. And Books of Hours were collections of prayers and biblical passages and often, very often illustrations which were designed to be both scripts for devotion and, and contemplative objects in themselves. And unlike books of poems, which were often designed to be read aloud from to an audience, Books of Hours were usually small for private reading. So the religious content of the Pearl manuscript's first three poems further suggests devotional readership, which means that we really need to read for the whole book, the construction, the layout and the decoration. Since devotional manuscripts were often designed as multimedia experiences, not just textual containers. And this is where we get back to speculation. Since late medieval devotion held that the beauty and complexity of the sensory world could lead to higher spiritual understanding by means of a process called speculation. So speculation first emerged in the early Middle Ages as a medieval devotional practice akin to meditation. So St. Augustine is the first major philosopher to theorize speculation as a form of prayerful self reflection. Drawing on a famous metaphor that St. Paul uses in First Corinthians to describe our imperfect understanding of God here on earth. So he for now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. So that's the King James version of 1 Corinthians 13:12. And in the Latin Vulgate, which would have been what most everyone used in this period in the West, St. Jerome writes that we see perspeculum in enigmatae. So by means of a mirror, enigmatically. Now for Augustine, this mirror is the human soul, since we we were formed in God's image, but deformed by sin. And that deformation is why we can have only imperfect indirect knowledge of God as if by a mirror here on earth. But in the later so called high Middle Ages, speculation develops a more outward facing and intellectual dimension that's grounded in sensory perception of the world around us, while still retaining much of its original devotional energy. So the 12th century philosopher known as Pseudo Hugh of St. Victor for his debts to the actual Hugh of St. Victor, he writes that quote, divine majesty can be perceived in the greatness of the universe, wisdom in its beauty, goodness in its utility, from which it is clear that not only in universals, but also in particular things, a certain image and trace of the Trinity is reflected and speculation is really the process of trying to perceive and appreciate this trace of the Trinity in the world around us. And this interest in sensory perception, materiality and beauty increased in the 13th century and beyond with the expansion of the university system and the Western rediscovery of Aristotle thanks to Muslim and Jewish translators. This is one reason why European art and architecture become much more elaborate in the 13th and 14th centuries. So think Gothic cathedrals and jeweled reliquaries. Now the spiritual potential of sensory beauty and complexity extended to books like the Pearl Manuscript. And although it's not very beautiful by traditional standards, it is complex in ways that enhance its poems. So good, so good, so good.

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Mortaza Hajizadeh (18:18)

I might have mentioned it in this podcast, or maybe before we started recording that I've read the poems in the manuscript, but I haven't, of course, read from the manuscript. I've read the modern version of them.

Dr. Arthur Barr (18:30)

Yeah.

Mortaza Hajizadeh (18:31)

And there's always a, let's say a degree of separation when you read a modern version of a medieval poem, especially if it's completely taken out of those the manuscripts that were in which they were originally written. I'm curious, you know, when we modern readers read these poems in that modern, maybe unillustrated editions, what is it that we lose?

Dr. Arthur Barr (18:56)

Yeah, well, the first and most obvious thing that we lose is of course, the illustrations. And from there the experience of the manuscript as a multimedia experience. And that in turn makes the poems feel less like the kind of devotional objects that I believe they were originally. And more broadly, I think a modern edition is almost inevitably going to make these poems look more or less like other books of poems, when in fact the Pearl Manuscript is an extraordinary outlier in the corpus of surviving medieval manuscripts. So I think one thing we lose is we also would lose the size. I was really shocked at how small and intimate this Manuscript felt when I got to work with it. It's really tiny. And that intimacy suggests a certain kind of relationship with both the book and its texts. That a traditional standard, like the standard scholarly edition of these poems that I used as a. That I still use as a scholar is almost twice as big as the pro manuscript itself.

Mortaza Hajizadeh (20:25)

I think you used the very nice analogies multimedia. Because I used to think of before, you know, I got into the whole manuscript culture, I used to think of a manuscript only as a book, maybe with illustrations, but. But in medieval world, the concept about was completely different. It's truly a multimedia, multisensory, let's say, object. It's not only a book or a text to read. And all those illustrations have that sensory or affective feeling that informs your reading and interpretation of the text. And that's something we definitely miss. If you. If you don't tend to think of a manuscript only as a written text, let's say. But yeah, and I don't think you. Look, maybe I'm biased. I don't know. I'll leave it to you. And there are lots of similar books, let's say illustrated books, comics these days. I generally don't think that even those. It has. That's the same aura, if you know what I mean. If you read a modern book or a modern story with, well, there's illustrations. I personally don't think it has that same aura of a multimedia technology. I even tend to think of it as a technology. There were a lot of people involved in developing a manuscript. Took time, met different artists, some of them placed in different cities.

Dr. Arthur Barr (21:37)

Absolutely. It was a collaborative. One thing that the Perle manuscript really reinforces is the extent to which literary meaning emerges collaboratively as the result of not just the author, but the scribe, the illustrator, the colorist, the patron who had to put their energy and money behind getting this thing produced. The original readers, we know that this manuscript was extensively read partly because of the amount of dirt in the gutter where the pages meet the spine. So all of this and that collective emergence across time of literary meaning, I think really contributes to that aura that you describe, which I think is exactly the right word. This is definitely an object. I think of Walter Benjamin's concept of the aura. This is. This is an object with an aura. Absolutely, yeah.

Mortaza Hajizadeh (22:41)

Let's move on to the next question I have. It's in one of the chapters, you talk about this concept of midpoints in the poems in the manuscript. What do you mean by that? And you talk about the role of These midpoints that they're not simply structural asymmetries, but they help us in interpretation of the poem. Would be good if you would tell us what you mean by midpoints and how they help us within interpretation of poems. And an example would be good if you could come up with one.

Dr. Arthur Barr (23:14)

Yeah, for sure. So Pearl is. So the opening poem. Pearl is one of the most elaborately wrought objects in all of literature. Certainly it's the most elaborately wrought poem I'm aware of in English. And that wroughtness, that the intensity of its formal symmetries makes the few exceptions to those rules, the few asymmetries, especially interesting. So it's written in 12 line stanzas. All but one of them have 12 lines. There's a single stanza with 11 lines. It's concatenating sections of five stanzas. All 20 of them have five stanzas. One has six, which gives it this protruding quote, unquote imperfect 101st stanza. And there are scribal manicules, or little pointing hands that draw the reader's attention to some of these irregularities. So that suggests that somebody, and it looks like the scribe to me, at least somebody wanted us to focus on these asymmetries as meaningful, or at least as potentially meaningful. So that means that Perl has, in a sense, two different midpoints, because. Because of this extra protruding stanza, the poem itself has 12, 11 lines. But if you count by the sections of. Which means that the midpoint is. What would that be? Line 605 or something. But if you count by the sections of the poems, then the midpoint would be at line 600, 601, because the. The irregular section is in the second half of the poem. And initially we might not think that this means very much at all, because any of these singular exceptions or asymmetries can be ignored or explained away, or it's the product of scribal error, et cetera. But as they begin to multiply, first within Perl itself and then over the course of the Pearl manuscript as a whole, that multiplication of these asymmetries is part of what I argue makes turns the manuscript into an object of contemplation, because it encourages the reader to contemplate and think for themselves whether it matters to have one line more or less, one stanza more or less, one letter more or less than all of these kind of architectonic symmetries would suggest. And in later poems like Cleanness and Patience, these asymmetries and multiple midpoints start to get inscribed into the physical construction of the manuscript itself. So they become not just literary, but, but also material.

Mortaza Hajizadeh (26:47)

Let's talk about one of the poems there, the Patience. And in that one you talk about the shifts of focus, of touch and texture. And again, I guess that goes back to that idea of that affective, sensory or multimedia feeling aura that we discussed. How does the physical feel of the manuscript deepen again its theological themes? And again goes back, I guess to the title of the book. It's about how speculation, shapes and delight. They all inform how we interpret this. But here specifically I'm interested in the idea of that physicality or physical feel of the manuscript and the theological themes.

Dr. Arthur Barr (27:29)

Yeah. So the first thing to point out is that the Perl manuscript is a very. Despite the intensely wrought and formally beautiful nature of the poems, the physical object itself is in many ways pretty ratty. The parchment quality is very poor in a lot of places. And so we feel for example, the difference between flesh and hair side of the page. And I'll explain what I mean by that. So paper was not yet common in 14th century England. So most books were made of animal skin called parchment or vellum, whose outer surface would bear traces of hair follicles from the animal. Hence the so called hair side of the page, unlike the inner flesh side. And one of the manuscripts exceptions to the rule, this time material rather than literary, as they mostly were in Perl. One of these exceptions to the rule has to do with how these flesh and hair sides are arranged. So in making the booklets or choirs that would be stitched together to build the manuscript, the smoother flesh side of each booklet traditionally faced outward, so that whenever the book was opened, like sides would face one another and folios would alternate throughout the manuscript. So if one recto was flesh side, the next would be hair side, and so on and so forth. Now in the Perl manuscript you can both see and really feel the difference between flesh and hair sides more than you can with high end manuscripts like the Ellesmere Chaucer, for example. So when one of the Pearl manuscript's nine booklets violates the so called rule of Gregory, by which you should have flesh side outermost, you can literally feel it even more than you can see it. And I was surprised at how obtrusive this exception to the rule felt when I got to turn the pages myself. And that made me think harder about the text. But that gets highlighted by this inversion of flesh and hair inside and outside. And the place where this happens is during Jonah's the prophet Jonah's prayer from within the Whale, which also draws on Psalm 68. And the text of this passage is full of the language of inside and outside. So as you read about Jonah being swallowed by the whale, then praying from inside it, you feel hair follicles when you would not expect to. So these anomalous pages reinforce the manuscript's status as animal, just as they narrate Jonah's own anomalous envelopment by another animal. And I think more broadly, this use of very humble material, this poor parchment quality, there are actually quite a lot of holes in the manuscript that the scribe has simply just jumped over in writing the words. This use of humble material, I think suggests the need, subtly suggests the need for humility before God and Jonah's abasement inside the whale when he pridefully refuses to do as God commands and. And preached to the city of Nineveh.

Mortaza Hajizadeh (31:19)

Another famous poem in this manner heap is Sir Gawaine and the Openings especially, which is unbelievably rich with symbolism, geometric symbolism. And then again, that highlights that visual element of manuscripts. There is also this idea of visual strangeness there in the manuscript that prepares the readers for the poems. It's not an easy ride to read that poem. Poems, let's say, interpretive challenges. How does that. Visual elements prepare us for this, to get into this poem, let's say, or prepare us for what's to come in the poem?

Dr. Arthur Barr (31:58)

Yeah. So for one thing, the opening illustration of Sir Gawain, which appears opposite its opening lines strongly so it depicts the very climactic moment when the Green Knight rides into Camelot. He challenges King Arthur's court to nominate a knight to give him a whack with the big axe that he brought on the condition that he, the Green Knight, will get to give the other guy, who of course turns out to be Sir Gawain, a whack a year later. And the depiction is of sort of a before and after scene. In the upper left, we see Sir Gawain holding the axe with one hand. It looks like he's taken up the. He's just taken up the challenge. And then you see the Green Knight with severed head. The head is actually sort of along. Depicted in this. Along this long feasting table, as if part of the dinner service. And then in the lower right, you see Sir Gawain a second time, this time holding the axe with two hands, as if sort of steadying himself from the shock of what's just transpired. And this opening illustration is complex in the sense that we have to read it temporally from Left to right. It also strongly evokes an earlier illustration of Cleanness, the second poem, which depicts Belshazzar and his court being judged by the prophet Daniel, who is dressed in green and occupies the same lower left part of the page as the Green Knight. So that visual similarity between these two illustrations of two different poems, I think, would suggest that we should bring a spiritual or theological lens to what is outwardly quite a secular, rollicking, fun poem. Also, these weapons, the axes that the two Gawains are holding. These weapons suggest a set of sight lines and angles that my book goes into in more detail. And their geometric complexity in turn anticipates the. The intricate pentangle that will define Sir Gawain in the poem itself.

Mortaza Hajizadeh (34:24)

That's amazing. And like I told, I read this one long time ago, but I guess I haven't really gone back to them recently. But I'm really keen to do that, especially after reading a few books on manuscripts. And I'm absolutely sure this will be a completely different experience because I'll be definitely guided by the. The visual elements of the manuscripts. I can't read the original ones of it, like I said, but I'm trying to find a version that has those visual elements and a half modernized version, let's say that I can easily go through. More easily go through, let's say. Yeah, yeah. Let me ask you about. Sorry, do you want to say something? I felt like I interrupted you.

Dr. Arthur Barr (35:06)

Oh, no, not at all. Well, I was just going to say on the. I think the translations by Simon Armitage of Pearl and Sir Gawain are great. And they have the. They have the facing page of the Middle English on the left, so that you can. You can see. You can at least see the, I think, beautiful strangeness of the language of the original, even if you're mostly or entirely reading the Modern English on the right. And Armitage is himself a poet, and so I think he gets the poems at a deep level. I hope that he's going to do translations of Cleanness and Patience as well. They are unillustrated, however. But my book has most of the illustrations of the manuscript, so you could have a twofer.

Mortaza Hajizadeh (35:59)

Right. Let's talk about the Magist group's ending. You describe it as paradoxically generative. Talk about the final pages. How do they invite readers to kind of. What do you mean by paradoxical generative? How do they invite the readers to start over again?

Dr. Arthur Barr (36:20)

Yeah. So one way is that the manuscript concludes with three illustrations of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight. And it's the only poem in the manuscript that has illustrations after the poem in question. All the others, they all appear before. And these three illustrations depict First Lady Bertilac attempting to seduce Gawain, then Gawain approaching the Green Knight to receive his blow at the Green Chapel, and then Gowing again, finally reintegrated into Camelot with Arthur and Guinevere. So the fact that these poem and the final illustration is in some ways the strangest because it includes two Sir Gawains, just like the first illustration that preceded the poem. But whereas the two Gawains in the first illustration pretty clearly represent two different moments in time just before and just after the climactic blow that he strikes, these two galleons are harder to interpret in the last illustration. And that also, I think, prompts us to keep thinking, to reflect on what we've read, rather than necessarily just put the book down. There are also textual echoes of earlier poems in the manuscript at the very end of Sir Gawain that I think also would subtly loop us back around to the beginning of the manuscript. And in that sense, the manuscript as a whole suggests a kind of circularity that Pearl, the opening poem, very much leans into and gives. And so the. So the. So the poem ends on the one hand with the image of the crown of thorns, which is a spiky thing. Right. And in that sense, sort of like Gawain's pentangle, but it's also round. And so that final image loops us back around to Perl at the very beginning.

Mortaza Hajizadeh (38:47)

It's really a difficult art to be able to create that kind of circularity in any kind of book, I guess. And it's also very modern as well. It's a modern concept. I mean, you use a metaphor at the end in your conclusion. I think it's in the conclusion of the book. And that's Kai Daskop. Why do you think that the idea of a kaleidoscope is the right image, a more apt image than a mirror? In literature, we usually use a concept of mirror to understand, for example, poems, let's say, or in this manuscript, in reference to this manuscript, you have the idea of a kaleidoscope. What do you mean by that? Why do you think that's the right metaphor to discuss this particular manuscript?

Dr. Arthur Barr (39:35)

Yeah, for a few reasons. So one is that compared to a modern mirror, which offers a single passively reflective surface, the kaleidoscope uses multiple mirrors along a long tube to create the beautiful shifting shapes that we see at the end of the tube when we turn the little dial. So as such, I thought that the kaleidoscope offered a useful way of estranging our perspective on the mirror, for as Michael Camille has shown. So Michael Camille is an art historian who wrote a beautiful book about the Littrell Psalter called Mirror and Parchment. But he kind of, I think kind of means that term ironically or not ironically, but it's complicated because mirror in modern English simply cannot convey in our post photographic and often disenchanted world what speculum, which is the Latin word for mirror and where we get speculation. Mirror in modern English simply cannot convey what speculum signified in the Middle Ages, which is a mirror. Yes, but also more so. The kaleidoscope is also interactive, unlike the passively reflective mirror, but like the medieval speculum and like speculation itself, and by prompting us to do something in order to see its beautiful shapes, right, we have to turn the. Turn the little dial. The kaleidoscope reinforces the interactive nature of our relationship with the world and that extends to our objects of study. As my own encounter with the anomalous booklet of patience vividly reinforced hair side rather than flesh side. We are changed by what we handle. And that co implication of reader with book, student with object recalls the interactive dimension of medieval speculation, which is another reason I find that interpretive Mode so powerful.

Mortaza Hajizadeh (41:50)

Dr. Arthur Barr, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us on New Books Network. I wish we had time to talk about more parts of this book. As I said at the beginning, any book on dual manuscript, it's not only a wonderful story to read about, but also it's a visual delight to look at, particularly in this one. Like I said, you have a lot of wonderful pictures of different manuscripts or images that have been used in the manuscript that you're discussing. So I do strongly recommend the book to our listeners. The book we just discussed was Chasing the Peril Manuscript Speculation, Shapes, Delights, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025. Afu, thank you very much for your time.

Dr. Arthur Barr (42:30)

Thank you so much.

Mortaza Hajizadeh (42:31)

It's been a real pleasure.

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