Jewels and Jewellers in Pearl

Abstract

No one would deny that the symbolism of jewels is central to Pearl, but in recent years a number of critics have based historical, political, economic readings of the poem on literal interpretation of the dreamer as a professional jeweller, a craftsman or merchant. This essay takes a sceptical view of such readings on the basis of the poem's lack of technical vocabulary, the description of jewels here and elsewhere in alliterative poetry in terms of architectural structure and aesthetic effect rather than the process of making and uncertainty that the word ‘jeweller’ was used in the fourteenth-century with quite that sense (‘perrier’ being the preferred term in lapidary texts). The various vernacular versions of the fable of the Cock and the Jewel provide a gloss on the terms and attitudes in Pearl, as do lapidaries on the poem's conclusion.

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