This study of the four poems of MS. Cotton Nero A, X does what it says: it examines the relationship between theology and genre. As such, it presents an important argument concerning the relationship between the deeply religious focus of each of these fourteenth‐century poems and the secular literary genres that each poem brilliantly exploits. The four poems, while anonymous, are usually ascribed to a single author, variously known as ‘the Pearl‐Poet'or ‘the Gawain‐Poet’, after the two most famous poems in the collection. Cecilia Hatt explores what the theological furnishings of this poet's mind are likely to have been, before examining how this theology finds an appropriate embodiment in his chosen genres.
In this, Hatt is taking issue with previous scholars, notably David Aers, whose 2000 study Faith, Ethics and Church finds assimilation of Christian values into courtly genres and lifestyles somewhat suspect. Modern scholars have tended to posit a dualistic relationship between religious and worldly concerns, spirit and matter, which sees as problematic the poet's obvious revelling in the ceremonious, luxurious, glamorous lifestyle of the court. Hatt relates this unease to a theology derived predominantly from Augustine, infused by Platonist distinctions between ideal form and imperfect matter. She points out, however, that many other influences were at play in the late medieval theology that would have shaped the poet's mind. In particular, she draws attention to the very different relationship between spirit and matter presented in the theology of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas, drawing on Aristotle, sees matter as the body of the soul; he emphasises connection rather than separation. Thus the body, for him, is created in grace and has a sacramental value. This explains, argues Hatt, the poet's interest in ‘embodied human life’, which she sees as central to the poems. While Aers seems to disapprove of ‘the poet's evident and unashamed enjoyment of materiality’, Hatt sees this as key. She argues that the poet's incarnational theology inevitably seeks expression in the kinds of poetry he writes: courtly dream‐vision, university‐style sermon, comic fable, courtly romance.
Hatt adds a particularly interesting nuance to her discussion of the poet's theology. She points out the importance of the concept of Creator and creation in the poems, but then draws a distinction between a post‐Reformation emphasis, in all traditions, on a Creation‐Fall‐Redemption narrative of salvation, and a pre‐Reformation narrative of Creation‐Consummation. In Aquinas's theology, human beings and all creation are destined for an eschatological union/reunion with God. This gives Creation an inbuilt dynamic shape, a drive towards consummation. She comments, ‘Hence it is in that context that we are to understand the role of our bodiliness in our engagement by redemptive grace.’
Readers who know the poems will be aware of how central seeking understanding of puzzling situations on earth is to each of the poems. This puzzlement could be said to be a by‐product of the poet's understanding of creation. Hatt comments that ‘being created by God gives legitimacy to the world but also gives it its own integrity, into which God does not intrude in order to justify or explain.’
This lack of obvious explanation is then explored in each of the poems. The bulk of the book consists of four chapters, one on each poem, in the order in which they occur in the manuscript. These chapters can function as stand‐alone studies of each poem, and therefore will form a useful addition to undergraduate reading‐lists. The main interest of the study, however, lies in the application of this ‘embodied theology’ perspective to each chapter. Hatt is at pains to point out that there is nothing startlingly original in this theology or in what it reveals in the poems. For example, in the chapter on Pearl, she emphasizes that the poet is describing a dream, not a vision, and that what he comes to understand are aspects of the stock teaching of the Church of his time, which would already have been somewhere inside his mind: what the dream does is to move some elements into the foreground. What each chapter seems to me to achieve is to make it possible to read each poem as having a more natural, unforced, obvious coherence than much modern scholarship might lead us to expect. Even Cleanness, universally regarded as the most uncomfortable of the four poems and the least accessible to a modern audience, benefits from Hatt's careful situating of it within secular, ironic uses of the sermon‐genre, as in Chaucer or in French courtly love literature. This helps to draw together its challenging meditation on the purity that allows us to see God, and the earthy vividness of the retelling of the Old Testament scenes of destruction that forms its main content. Hatt's approach removes some of the dissonances that have perhaps been read into the pomes by modern assumptions about Christian theology.
This reader, notwithstanding a lifetime of reading and teaching the poems, found the theological exposition contained in this study lucid, useful and illuminating. As such, I hope it will be of use to many other scholars of the Gawain‐Poet, as well as to students and general readers.
