Medieval Women's Voices

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, composed anonymously in the late fourteenth century, survives uniquely in the Cotton Nero A.x manuscript alongside three other poems — Pearl, Patience, and Cleanness — usually attributed to the same unknown "Pearl poet." Written in a West Midlands dialect as part of what scholars call the Alliterative Revival, it combines long alliterative lines with tightly rhymed "bob and wheel" stanzas to tell of Gawain's acceptance of a beheading challenge from a mysterious Green Knight, and his subsequent testing of courage, courtesy, and chastity at the castle of Bertilak, where Bertilak's wife plays an unusually active and articulate role in probing the limits of Gawain's chivalric and Christian ideals.