Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England

I HAVE, wherever possible, attempted to quote plague texts in their original languages.Translations of Latin, Castilian, Catalan, as well as simple French and Italian passages are my own unless otherwise noted.For all other languages, I have relied on published translations, which are cited in the notes.There are a few instances where I have not been able to access original language texts; in those cases, I have used modern English alone.Rosemary Horrox's sourcebook, The Black Death, has been an invaluable resource over the course of my exploration of the plague.In particular, I have often used it as a starting point for tracking down treatises, in both print and manuscript form.I want here to acknowledge Professor Horrox's meticulously edited volume, which has done much to open the field of plague studies to a wider range of scholars, and also to acknowledge my debt to her scholarship.1. "A me medesimo incresce andarmi tanto tra tante miserie ravolgendo: per che, volendo omai lasciare star quella parte di quelle che io acconciamente posso schifare." Boccaccio, Decameron, 20 (Waldman, 14).2. Branca, Boccaccio medievale e nuovi studi sul "Decameron, " 34. 3. Benedictow, The Black Death 1346-53, 383.The precise mortality rate for the Black Death in both England and mainland Europe remains a topic of scholarly debate.The rough figure of sixty percent is from Benedictow's exhaustive study of the pandemic and currently stands as the best estimate of the disease's mortality rate.8. The now canonical survey of these sources is Getto, "La peste del Decameron e il problema della fonte Lucreziana."See also Gittes, Boccaccio's Naked Muse.Charles de Paolo, Epidemic Disease and Human Understanding, further reminds us that "no compelling evidence exists that Boccaccio was on the scene" (63) in Florence to witness the event he describes.9. Smith, "Irregular Histories, " 171.10.Scala, Absent Narratives, 1, 5. 11.Ingham, "Chaucer's Haunted Aesthetics, " 228.More recently Lynn Arner has highlighted the "incoherence and fragmentation of the consciousness of the late medieval English nonruling classes, " suggesting how literature might not only absent particular histories but willfully obscure them.See Arner, Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising, 6-7.17.Langland, Piers Plowman, 724 (B.20.98);Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, 199 (CT 6.675-76).Henceforth, all quotations from Langland's and Chaucer's works will be cited parenthetically by line number.18. Wenzel, "Pestilence and Middle English Literature, " 131-32.19.Shrewsbury, A History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles, 42; Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, 105.Such assessments may be dated, but they still hold important critical currency.As recently as 2008, Katherine H. Terrell cites Wenzel's assessment of the plague's impact in order to discount any connection between the disease and Pearl, a reading that my study strenuously resists.See Terrell, "Rethinking the 'Corse in Clot, '" 433-34n9.24.See Lerner, "The Black Death and Western European Eschatological Mentalities, " 533.25.All quotations from the poems of MS Cotton Nero A.x are from The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript.Henceforth, they will be cited parenthetically in the text by line number and, where necessary, by abbreviated title.The quotation above is from Pearl, l. 8. than a decade.29 Eventually, the plague's track seems to have coalesced along the braided commercial networks of the Silk Road, facilitating its westward overland motion.30 It reached Kaffa in late 1346, and the population density within the fortified port, coupled with the ready supply of animal and human hosts lingering on departing Venetian and Genoese trading vessels, rendered the city a pestilential powder keg.31 In a matter of months, the plague would spread over water to most of the major trading ports in the Mediterranean.From those initial nodes-Constantinople, Alexandria, Dubrovnik, Split, Venice, Messina, Tunis, Pisa, Genoa, Marseilles-it would metastasize quickly along established trade arteries, moving inland by river and then fanning out through local and regional patterns of social and economic contact.32 Biologically, plague infection manifests in the human body in four distinct forms, each with a different presentation and each contributing to the pandemic's radial progress outward from the Mediterranean.33 The best known is bubonic plague, which occurs when an infective flea bites a human host and 29.Schmid et al., 3022-23.30.The story of the Black Death's path(s) from the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau is evolving, and this particular narrative may tell only one portion of it.Robert Hymes has recently posited that the disease also coincided with Mongolian incursions into the territories of Xia (modern Gansu) in North-Central China, perhaps moving from there to population centers in the east (Hymes, "Epilogue: A Hypothesis on the East Asian Beginnings").For the movement and impact of the disease in the Islamicate world, see Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East.Monica Green, moreover, has powerfully argued that we should "broaden our narratives of the Second Pandemic to include sub-Saharan African and, by implication, the Indian Ocean basin" ("Taking Pandemic Seriously, " 38), speculating that the disease may have traveled to Africa via transoceanic trade.In an opinion article released while this book was in its copyediting stage, she has further argued against a straightforward China-to-Crimea trajectory, stating, "Our current understanding of Y. pestis genetics and 14th-century history would make such a transmission scenario impossible" ("On Learning How to Teach the Black Death, " 22).31.Some medieval sources, including Gabriele de' Mussis's influential Historia de Morbo, suggest that the plague's foothold in Kaffa was established when a Mongol military force, which had besieged the port, catapulted diseased bodies into the town in order to infect Genoese and Venetian merchants (de' Mussis, Historia de Morbo, 48-49).While this spurious narrative is repeated in some modern studies (such as Ziegler, The Black Death, 15-16), it has been rightfully questioned by other historians who see Gabriele de' Mussis's blame of "infidels" as motivated by xenophobia and religious self-interest (Benedictow, The Black Death, 52).There is, frankly, little evidence for the account's validity and still less reason to perpetuate it further as historical fact.32.The path of the plague from the Mediterranean outward is well-documented.Again, I follow Benedictow, The Black Death, especially pages 57-122.33.The first of these three modes of transmission, bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic, are those most commonly associated with the medieval plague pandemic.My descriptions of them follow largely from those provided by both the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, though I have also consulted Benedictow, The Black Death, 25-31, and Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, 17-38.From this first point of contact, the disease traveled much as it had through the rest of Europe, journeying quickly from port to port over water and crawl-35.Gabriele de' Mussis, Historia de Morbo, 55. 36.Ziegler, "The Black Death and the Future of the Plague, " 266-67.37. "A Fourteenth-Century Chronicle from the Grey Friars of Lynn, " 274.The brief chronicle covers the years 1340-77.The annals seem to have been written year by year rather than all at once, and they occupy two previously unused folios of a mid-fourteenth-century commonplace book.may have been overstated and the role of other vectors understated.See especially Schmid et al., "Climate-Driven Introduction of the Black Death"; Green, "Editor's Introduction, " Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World, 12; "Taking 'Pandemic' Seriously, " 32-33.45.Schmid et al., "Climate-Driven Introduction of the Black Death, " 3022-23.46.The Anonimalle Chronicle, 50.For the dates of the epidemic and further historical citations for its strong effect on children, see Rawcliffe, Urban Bodies, 362.Shrewsbury, A History of the Bubonic Plague, gives the slightly earlier date range of 1360-61 for the second epidemic but also remarks that it was particularly fatal to the young (127-30).47. Rawcliffe, Urban Bodies, 362-63; Horrox, The Black Death, 88-92.54. Freidl and Kirby, "The Life, Death, and Life of the Pearl-Maiden, " 395.55.Berlant, "Trauma and Ineloquence, " 43.56.McIntosh, "A New Approach to Middle English Dialectology, " 5.In his 1940 edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for instance, Israel Gollancz concludes that the poem's "geographical knowledge of the North-West Midlands and its realistic wintry landscape . . . is 62.See Borroff, "Narrative Artistry in St. Erkenwald and the Gawain-Group." 63.Edwards, "The Manuscript, " 197.64.Chism, Alliterative Revivals, 19-20.65.Bahr, "The Manifold Singularity of Pearl," 729.

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