ABSTRACT
The exquisitely beautiful, fourteenth-century, Middle English poem Pearl can be interpreted as a revelation. The poem has been called a dream vision, an elegy, an allegory, and a consolation (as well as a contra-consolatio, a courtly love story, a dialogue, a debate, a hagiographical account, and even a spiritual quest), and the poem certainly participates in multiple genres. However, several literary scholars also have noted its debt to the biblical book of Revelation and likely relationship to illustrated apocalypse manuscripts of the later Middle Ages.1 As Cynthia Kraman has observed so insightfully: “For critics who do not notice the highly literary and personal quality of Pearl, the genre discussion of Pearl is rather overwrought, heightened by expectations that it will conform to a single type of literature, unaware that a new and original literature is being created before their eyes.”2 As Kraman goes on to show, Pearl can be read as a revelation, solidly centered in the tradition of Judeo-Christian apocalyptic literature, even if it also participates in other medieval genres and stylistic conventions.3 Furthermore, it can be so not only partially, at the conclusion of the poem when the Dreamer beholds a vision of the New Jerusalem, but entirely, from the beginning to the end.
