: <i>Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight</i>

How might we advance the study of an exquisitely mystifying literary object without reducing its endless potential?Arthur Bahr proposes visionary answers to this question in Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript.This volume, heralded by significant essays in ELH and Studies in Philology, examines the famous quartet of Middle English poems-Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight-as literarily and cerebrally embedded in the visual and codicological environment of their commonly shared "small, cropped, somewhat ragged but brightly illustrated" single manuscript (1).Bahr signals that his study aims to renew ways of garnering "fresh appreciation" for the poems' literary art by reading them through the complex, multimedia lens of their manuscript, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x/2, or the Pearl-Manuscript.This book does not center its argument around finding definitive answers to historical questions of authorship, ownership, or production.Instead, Bahr engages in a probing yet celebratory chase of delight in the unknowables of literary and book history.Bahr reveals how interpretation of the forms and contents (or as he more inclusively terms these, shapes) of the Pearl-Manuscript's texts is bolstered by investigations of such phenomena as the visual shapes created by its text blocks, its blank spaces, the blemishes on its parchment, or the directions of its painted gazes.Bahr's method in this chase is a novel approach to speculation, outlined in chapter 1. Acknowledging the term's largely postmedieval negative connotations, Bahr reorients speculative thinking by initially delving into its Latinate etymology, principally its derivation from speculum, or "mirror," a leitmotif of Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript.He traces speculation's role in medieval