Mary, «Pearl», and Sir John Stanley (d. 1414)

Pearl is a Middle English dream-poem in London, British Library, ms Cotton Nero A.x, of about 1400. It is attributed to the same author as the scriptural poems Patience and Cleanness and the romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight also found in this manuscript. The four texts provide abundant information on fourteenth-century social life, including religion, particularly for devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Analysis of Marian imagery in Pearl and its related poems thus tells us much on the attitudes to Christ's mother of a high-ranking provincial layman of about 1390, especially for her as ‘Queen of Heaven’ and ‘Queen of Courtesy’, the latter term denoting the values of court society. Such analysis also tends to confirm attribution on other grounds of the four poems to Sir John Stanley (d. 1414), a magnate and courtier who in the last thirty years of his life dominated the politics of the Lancashire-Cheshire region of north-west England.