This third edition of The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript has been newly revised and updated, taking account of some of the more important textual and interpretative notes and articles published on the poems since the appearance of the first edition in 1978.

"Finch's translations will add much to the pleasure and value of teaching and learning late medieval English history."—Robert Brentano, author of Two Churches "Casey Finch has found an idiom in which these poems can speak Modern English, and in doing so can convey the most elusive and complex effects of the originals. . . . He has conveyed the vitality of these poems in a verse that is as assured, gracious, blunt, urgent, plangent, rich, and perpetually surprising as that of the unknown poet or poets who made them. These brilliant poems have at last found a craftsman who understands the secrets of their intricate luminosity, a faithful steward of a distinctive verbal treasure of the language. In this translation these poems shine as brightly and clearly as they did when newly made, pearls without peer in English."—Anne Middleton, University of California, Berkeley

This edition of the complete Works of Cotton Nero A.x.---Patience, Purity, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight---is the first collected edition since the manuscript itself. Charles Moorman's hope is that this work will facilitate studies of the whole Gawain-Poet, in addition to those of his individual works. In addition, this edition should provide a basis for comparative study and aid in an evaluation of the poet's development. Designed for the professional scholar, the student, and the general reader with no training in Middle English, this edition brings together the tools for both introductory and advances study. Moorman has tried to make the text as readable, the notes as succinct and informative, and the glossary as useful as possible. The new reader will find before him everything necessary for a convenient first reading, and the scholar will see and appreciate the results of generations of scholarship. These four poems---two dramatic biblical narratives, an elegy, and a chivalric romance---are, next to the works of Chaucer, the finest poems of the fourteenth century, an age abounding in great literature. Their variety, their rich imagery, their depth of mood and feeling, and particularly their sensitive responsiveness to the moral dilemmas of human life make these poems an endless, if not wholly translatable, source of both despair and comfort. The Works of the Gawain-Poet presents a number of distictive features: a conservatively edited text; the original manuscript illustrations; apparatus, glosses, and notes on the page with the text; and a full introduction and bibliography. The book should prove useful both as a reading and reference edition and as a graduate text.

Of the five poems contained in this book, two are acknowledged masterpieces. The plot of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an Arthurian romance, brilliantly interweaves elements of suspense and high comedy.

It ends with a discussion of the reception of the Morte Darthur from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, and a select bibliography.

One of the earliest great stories of English literature after ?Beowulf?, ?Sir Gawain? is the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse, who rudely interrupts King Arthur's Round Table festivities one Yuletide, challenging the knights to a wager. Simon Armitrage, one of Britain's leading poets, has produced an inventive and groundbreaking translation that " helps] liberate ?Gawain ?from academia" (?Sunday Telegraph?).