THE anonymous, fourteenth-century English poem, Pearl, is conventionally said to be a dream vision. The nearly literal incorporation of the dreamer’s vision of the New Jerusalem from the Apocalypse of John has been viewed by some scholars as one of its least interesting features. My view is quite different. To say that Pearl is a dream vision, while true according to conventional categories of genre, helps to obscure the poet’s unusual emphasis on its presentation as an artifact: a local frame placed around a vision of the New Jerusalem in an attempt to give that vision renewed force and immediacy. Indeed, this presentation of a literary work as an apocalyptic artifact may be thought to be an unusual ambition in a poem. One might well argue that the great medieval efforts to give the vision of the New Jerusalem a local and dramatic immediacy were not mainly literary; they were architectural, and as we have seen, liturgical. It was the great churches, to begin with, that could become symbols of the New Jerusalem by shaping light and color within a space designed for liturgical celebration. In the later Middle Ages, the private chapel replaced the great church as the preferred setting in which to worship, particularly for people of means; ecclesiastics, kings, and nobility built their own miniature New Jerusalems.