THE Pearl poet’s conception of the image as a location for spiritual movement and his use of ornament as the screen, or veil, of allegory is the foundation for his presentation of the poem as a literary edifice. As I have argued, the poet’s sophisticated allegorical techniques establish remarkable affinities between Pearl and the symbolic programs of the great churches of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These affinities are established further with a recognition of these edifices as figures of the New Jerusalem. But the Gothic vision of Pearl is, in my view, one that embodies a specifically fourteenth-century religious, artistic, and political environment. It is to fourteenth-century England, therefore, that one must turn in order to understand more precisely the Pearl poet’s Gothic visionary perspective.

In his recent scholarship on Pearl, John M. Bowers attempts to place the poem more firmly within a precise historical and cultural context. Bowers’ evidence consists of an impressive variety of documentary, literary, and artistic components of Ricardian court culture. This “archive,” as he calls it, includes the library of Richard II’s uncle, Thomas, duke of Gloucester (the contents of which form the literary background of the Pearl poet); the fourteenth-century group of Apocalypse wall paintings in the Chapter House at Westminster Abbey; the Wilton Diptych; and Philippe de Mézières’ allegorical Epistre to Richard II, written to secure peace between England and France and to promote a crusade to the Holy Land.