Pearl Text and Translation

The fourteenth-century Middle English poem Pearl is one of the best dream vision poems ever written, yet its language (the Northwest Midlands dialect of late-medieval England) and literary allusions (to biblical, mythological, and medieval works) make it difficult for modern readers to understand. This new dual-language edition of Pearl provides the original Middle English with a facing-page modern English translation. It includes a comprehensive introduction, annotations of key words and ideas, reproduction of the four manuscript illustrations, a literary sourcebook, and lists of biblical sources, significant liturgical dates, and the concatenation words. Literary and biblical sources for the poem are provided as appendices.