"Al Songe to Loue Þat Gay Juelle:  Telling the Tale of Virtue in Pearl"

In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre shows that man is essentially a story-telling animal and that the telling of stories plays a key role in educating us into the virtues. This model of education provides a rich entry point into an exploration of knowledge in the late fourteenth century poem Pearl.  In Pearl, a jeweler losing his pearl is an allegory for a father who mourns the death of his infant daughter.  The jeweler becomes apprenticed to his redeemed daughter, the Pearl Maiden, when she appears to him in a dream vision as a member of the communion of saints.  This paper explores the dreamer’s life as one subject of narrative selfhood, running from birth to death, and the Pearl Maiden’s as another.  The Pearl Maiden guides the dreamer through the process of recognizing their interlocking narratives as stemming from the same Christian tradition while also differentiating between her narrative of grace and his of penitential practice.  The dreamer does not and cannot have knowledge of the unity of life as the Pearl Maiden does because she inhabits the product of grace -- she lives within their shared understanding of the good as a member of the communion of saints in the City of New Jerusalem.  The dreamer’s learning process is a quest for the good life, one sustained by the Christian virtues of faith, hope and love.