The architecture of light: Color and cathedral as rhetorical ductus in the Middle English 'Pearl

Much scholarship on the Middle English Pearl has appropriated architectural terminology to describe the atmosphere of earthly paradise as conceived by the Pearl-poet. The poem, however, unfolds in three distinctly nonarchitectural loci---the "terrestrial-natural," the "terrestrial-supernatural," and the "celestial-supernatural" worlds. The poem's lack of architecture is keenly felt in its most architectural passages---those depicting the celestial city---yet feels most keenly constructed in its least architectural passages. The terrestrial-supernatural world projects a sense narrative plasticity. Here the reader discerns Pearl's pathways, rooms, its complex interiority.;I argue that Pearl's architectural utterance may best be understood in an analogical reading of the text, which has its corollary in the figure of a fictive Gothic cathedral. This analysis depends upon a consideration of medieval optics (focusing on the method by which light acts as a metaphor for cognition) and an examination of how the Pearl poet uses the Dreamer's "sight" of light (and color in as much as it is a physical property of light) as a rhetorical device.;Concurrently reflecting on the evidence of tonality in the other poems of the Pearl corpus, I demonstrate color's function as rhetorical strategy in Pearl. Taking into account mnemonic techniques of late-antiquity and a history of the Gothic movement from the twelfth-fourteenth centuries, I effectively chart Pearl's hues as they prescribe, design and signpost the Dreamer's "way through" the poet's composition. Finally, I map the Dreamer's journey in a color-trail that moves the poem's content from one mode of discourse to another---from verbal text to the visual---and visionary---"archi-text" of the Gothic cathedral.;I propose the fictive cathedral is grounded as much in an understanding of medieval optics as it is in Gothic architecture. Thus, the verbal-visual transfer depends on color's success as a guiding force of rhetoric: persuasive, locative, and affective. In conclusion, I turn to four instances of visionary architecture demonstrated to have been popular in the imagination of the late fourteenth-century medieval west---from the Temple of Jerusalem to the Plan of St. Gall---and show how Pearl typifies their ideal, visionary expression.