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Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knightare 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. Cecilia Hatt gained her D.Phil from Oxford University.

Christian poetry, English (Middle) --- Arthurian romances --- Christianity and literature. --- Manuscripts, English (Middle) --- Poésie chrétienne anglaise (moyen anglais) --- Cycle d'Arthur --- Christianisme et littérature --- Manuscrits anglais (moyen anglais) --- History and criticism. --- Histoire et critique --- Literature and Christianity --- Literature --- Christian literature --- English manuscripts (Middle) --- Manuscripts, Middle English --- Middle English manuscripts --- Arthurian Literature. --- Cleanness. --- Gawain-Poet. --- Genre. --- Literary Analysis. --- Literary Genres. --- Literary Scholarship. --- Medieval Literature. --- Middle English. --- Patience. --- Pearl. --- Sir Gawain. --- Theological Themes. --- Theology.