Literary historians have been working productively in recent years to reclaim the texture of early-fifteenth-century English poetry in contexts of politics and religion. To the list of major authors we should add John Audelay, chaplain of Knockin , setting him equally beside his contemporaries Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, and Margery Kempe. As a vernacular poet with a name, a provenance, and a rich body of work, Audelay warrants serious regard. His oeuvre displays an artistry that is different from, but as (...) innovative and revelatory of his times as, those of his celebrated contemporaries. (shrink)

The linked stanza form of Pearl is widely known and admired. Yet there exists no complete account of how this aspect of Pearl compares with other Middle English poems written in twelve-line units. The omission is surprising, not least because this information may offer a background for dating Pearl. Four editors—of Pearl or of other verse—have compiled lists of verse specimens with a cognate stanza, but none of these tentative lists is complete or entirely accurate. The best resource for tracking (...) such information, Carleton Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins's Index of Middle English Verse, has become increasingly outdated and therefore unreliable: new poems have been discovered; verses listed as unpublished have now been printed; some single listings have turned out to comprise two or more different pieces; and separate listings have been recognized as variants of the same poem. Consequently, when scholars attempt to compare Pearl with other poems in this or related stanza forms, confusions arise because we still lack the context that a comparative history would supply. In this article I hope to provide such a context by examining the lyrics that survive in the three main types of twelve-line stanzas and, with this evidence, to reconsider the question of the date of Pearl. (shrink)