| This project analyzes costume rhetoric as visual communication in the Middle English poems attributed to the Pearl-poet. I show how the poet's descriptions of textiles, clothing and personal adornment communicate significant social data, including age, gender, status, affiliation and family ties. I examine sources as diverse as romances, sumptuary laws, lapidaries, conduct manuals, wills and sermons to identify the contemporary meanings assigned to the material culture depicted in Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.;Following an established medieval tradition, I also examine the body itself as a costume---a garment that manifests the state of the soul within it. I analyze the ways in which physique or physical features---especially deformities or the violation of the flesh---function as visible garb for the inner nature of the incarnate Christ, angelic visitors, or the immortal souls of human beings. These four poems represent the human body as transitory and malleable clothing for the soul, manifesting the deformities and diseases corresponding to the staining filth of sin, the bright loveliness of a soul-garment cleansed through the sacraments of baptism and penance, or the cosmetically artificial beauty that conceals a sullied interior. I argue that the poems of the Pearl-poet corpus challenge simple statements articulating a direct correspondence between inner nature and outer form, and they establish the ability to conform one's own outer form to one's inner nature as the criterion for one's ability to perceive this correspondence---or its absence---in others. |
