Manuscript Cotton Nero A.x takes its designation from the unique cataloging system of seventeenth-century British antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton's library: busts of historical figures atop shelves provided the organizing principle, such that one found this particular codex under the bust of Roman Emperor Nero, on the top shelf, ten volumes over. (Another famous manuscript, containing Beowulf, is called Cotton Vitellius A.xv.) Cotton Nero A.x contains the only versions of the poems we now know as Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, generally agreed to have been composed sometime in the latter half of the fourteenth century--the time of Piers Plowman and Geoffrey Chaucer, though radically different from either. No one knows who the poet was. No one knows if more than one poet wrote some or all of the poems. Together, they present a stunning array of themes, allegories, and images that critics continue to puzzle over: Patience offers a psychologically complex rendering of the Old Testament story of Jonah and the whale; Cleanness explores its homiletic theme in carnal and spiritual terms with complexity, irony, and even humor; Pearl provides a dream allegory that pushes at the distinction between its earthly and heavenly meanings, challenging the very notion of metaphysical transcendence its form seems to point towards. Finally, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the most secular of the poems, is a sophisticated take on Arthurian legend that unfolds like a psychosexual mystery novel, with no easy solution in sight. All the poems are rendered in a difficult Middle English dialect and intricate alliterative form, which sometimes involves a complex rhyme scheme as well. As poet-medievalists, we bow before the poetic achievement of the works in Cotton Nero A.x in all their multi-faceted richness. This is not a translation, nor an interpretation. It is what might be called a trace. A response. A homework assignment from beyond the grave, for four students who should have known better. A dream we hope to dream.

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?).

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.

Shows how English responses to the Black Death were hidden in plain sight--as seen in the Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight poems.

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

Chrysanthemum loves her name, until she starts going to school and the other children make fun of it.