God and the Gawain Poet

Pearl Cleanness Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are accomplished examples of four different literary genres and represent some of the finest poetry in Middle English. They are by turns fast and funny powerfully dramatic gentle and ironic telling of painful bereavement and the terror of victims of disaster and violence as well as the comic bewilderment of people entangled in alarmingly mysterious situations.The anonymous poet's evident delight in the pleasures and artistry of courtly life has led some readers to suggest that he was a gifted but complacent frequenter of courts his attention dedicated to the wealthy and his sympathies to the powerful and moreover that his poems pay the merest lipservice to religious observance. God and the Gawain-poet argues that on the contrary the poet's wide-ranging engagement with all human life explicitly acknowledges all material creation as God's gift revelling in its physicality in bodily senses and movement and the ways a community celebrates itself. Dr Hatt shows how in exhorting readers to recognize and respond to the narrative of divine gift he appears as an energetic Christian poet and a humane and compassionate observer.