A scholarly question-and-answer tool for the four poems of the Pearl-poet: Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, and Cleanness. All four survive in a single fourteenth-century manuscript — British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x — and are almost certainly the work of one anonymous author writing in the North West Midlands dialect of Middle English.
This tool lets you ask questions about any of the poems and receive answers grounded in the original texts, with Middle English quotations, modern translations, line references, and scholarly citations.
Pearl is a dream-vision elegy of 1,212 lines, composed in a demanding twelve-line stanza with concatenation and a recurring refrain. A grieving narrator falls asleep over a grave and encounters a radiant maiden — his lost pearl — who leads him to a vision of the New Jerusalem.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the masterpiece of Middle English Arthurian romance, 2,530 lines in alliterative verse with a distinctive four-line bob-and-wheel stanza. It follows Gawain's acceptance of a beheading game and his journey to the Green Chapel, testing his courage, loyalty, and chastity.
Patience retells the Book of Jonah in 531 lines of unrhymed alliterative verse, using Jonah's reluctant obedience as a meditation on the virtue of patience and the inexhaustible mercy of God.
Cleanness (also called Purity) is a 1,812-line alliterative homily drawing on the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Belshazzar's feast to argue that moral and spiritual purity is the one quality God most demands — and its violation the one he most severely punishes.
Select a scope using the tabs at the top to focus on one poem, or leave it on All poems to draw on the whole manuscript.
Ask a question in the text box — about themes, characters, structure, language, sources, or scholarship. The tool will respond with substantive answers, quoting the Middle English where relevant and providing modern translations in parentheses.
Use the suggestion chips for a quick start. Each chip is mapped to one of the four poems.
Generate citations using the cite bar at the bottom. Select a poem tab first, then click MLA, Chicago, APA, or MHRA to populate the question box with a prompt that produces a properly formatted bibliography entry and in-text citation guide.
Generate footnotes from any answer by hovering over it and clicking ¶ Footnote. This opens a panel with the answer's key claims reformatted as ready-to-use footnotes in all four citation styles, each with its own copy button.
Save answers by clicking ☆ Save on any response. Saved answers are stored in your browser and accessible from the ★ Saved button in the toolbar.
Export the full conversation as a Markdown file using the ↓ Export button.
All citations follow the standard scholarly edition:
Andrew, Malcolm, and Ronald Waldron, eds. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 5th ed. University of Exeter Press, 2007.