Near the beginning of the ‘Tale of Sir Gareth’, on Whit Sunday, an unnamed damsel arrives at Arthur's court, helpfully fulfilling Arthur's desire to hear some strange adventures before he dines. But she unhelpfully withholds much of the relevant information:

I have chosen this example because Malory directs our attention to what we do not know. We readers, like Arthur's court, do not know the lady's name or location; neither do we know why the damsel is choosing to withhold this information, though Arthur tells her that her refusal to say more is preventing her from getting the help she seeks.

But this is just one example of the kind of gap that is everywhere in the Morte: explanations are withheld, motivations are unclear, actions and words are inscrutable, and the causes of events mysterious. Jill Mann has observed that this obfuscation is deliberate: Malory often removes explanations and clarifications that are there in his sources.

Cleanness is the most complex poem discussed in this book. In some ways it follows the same approach as the poems we have already encountered: it takes a historical rather than allegorical approach to biblical stories, and silently combines its biblical source with historical material and romance influences. It appears after Pearl and before Patience in MS Cotton Nero A X, and as with Patience, the poem’s opening word, ‘Clannes’, announces its theme – something that again sets it apart from most other biblical literature. But here that theme is explored through multiple biblical episodes. The poet’s contention is that God loves cleanness, and is angered by ‘fylthe’ (6), and he initially demonstrates this through a retelling of the parable of the wedding guest in foul clothes, found in Luke 14 and Matthew 22. A short discussion of the Fall of Lucifer and that of Adam and Eve functions as a bridge before a full account of Noah’s Ark from Genesis 6–9, beginning with a discussion of the sins of the people who lived before the Flood. The middle section of the poem tells the story of Abraham receiving a celestial visit, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and God turning Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, from Genesis 18–19. After another bridging section, the final episode follows: Belshazzar’s Feast, from Daniel 5. This tells how Belshazzar, the proud and decadent king of Babylon, misused the vessels from the Temple in Jerusalem and was first terrified by the apparition of a hand writing mysterious characters and then punished with a horrific death. That episode is preceded by an explanation of how the vessels were created, how God caused Nebuchadnezzar to defeat the Jews and conquer Jerusalem, and how Nebuchadnezzar treated the vessels with respect, all pieced together from Kings, Chronicles and Daniel 1. As the poem proceeds, the meanings of ‘clean’ and its opposites are expanded and explored.

The combination of episodes in Cleanness makes it unique among Middle English biblical poems. As discussed in the Introduction, most of these present either a single episode – as with the other poems in this book – or, at the other extreme, the whole of creation history (as with Cursor Mundi).

Once, Middle English popular romances were derided as trite mediocrities. They were written by hacks or minstrels, aimed at an unsophisticated audience who would have been unable to appreciate anything of higher literary value. They were unworthy of serious critical attention. But since the late 1980s, they have come back into fashion. The 1988 Gregynog conference on Medieval Romance in England has been repeated every other year, and studies by Susan Crane and Helen Cooper, and collections edited by Nicola McDonald, Jane Gilbert and Ad Putter, to name just a few, bear witness to what is now a thriving academic field. The artistry of many of these romances has been demonstrated, and they have been recognised as political texts, responding to the issues of the day and challenging and reinforcing medieval ideologies and social relations. This book proposes that Middle English biblical poetry has been similarly unfairly derided and overlooked, and is due its turn in the spotlight. Because they adapt biblical material, the poems have been thought of as nothing more than ‘paraphrases’, a term that suggests little creativity and even less interest, and editorial titles such as A Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament have not helped these unfortunate texts. But many are as rich, lively, interesting and creative as any of their romance contemporaries. They also have just as much to say as do the romances about their own historical moment: lineage, family, marriage and reputation are prominent concerns.

This book will explore six biblical poems from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: the Auchinleck Life of Adam and Eve; another Adam poem, the Canticum de Creatione; Iacob and Iosep; A Pistel of Susan; and the Gawain-poet’s Patience and Cleanness. Together with two fifteenth-century poems, The Storie of Asneth and The Life of Job, which I have discussed elsewhere, these constitute all the extant Middle English poems that retell individual narrative episodes from the Old Testament. The six poems in this book were all written between the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which mandated the vernacular instruction of the laity, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1407–09, which sought to control and limit biblical translation into English. So, although in most cases their exact dates are unknown, and their immediate writing contexts seem to have differed, they share a certain cultural moment.

In around 1330, about fifty years after Iacob and Iosep’s manuscript, Bodley 652, the Auchinleck manuscript was created. Perhaps the most significant manuscript witness to Middle English literature, it is often thought of as an anthology of romances. Whereas Iacob and Iosep is the only English item in its manuscript, the Auchinleck Life of Adam and Eve is surrounded by English literature; and whereas Bodley 652 is deeply obscure, the Auchinleck manuscript has been celebrated, reproduced in facsimile, digitised and generally subjected to all forms of scholarly attention. The Auchinleck Life is one of two verse lives of Adam and Eve that I will be discussing in this chapter. They retell another episode from Genesis, but one that was (and still is) more culturally central in England and the Christian world. However, the primary source for both poems is not Genesis, but an apocryphal text that narrates the adventures of Adam and Eve after they were expelled from Paradise. Whereas the poet of Iacob and Iosep gave no indication of where he was getting his material, seeming cheerfully indifferent to the ways in which his story departed from the biblical text, the authors of these two poems make several – sometimes confusing – references to their sources. The two Lives share some features with Iacob and Iosep: they are short, clear narratives with an ear for dialogue and a taste for drama and the exotic. But they are more morally oriented than the earlier poem, presenting their protagonists as exemplary figures, and using their stories to deliver nuggets of theological and pastoral instruction.

The Auchinleck Life of Adam and Eve and the Canticum de Creatione appear uniquely in their respective manuscripts, and were edited together in 2002. The Auchinleck Life appears in the first booklet of the manuscript, which is dominated by religious texts: it comes after The King of Tars and before the stanzaic lives of St Margaret and St Katherine. It is now the third item in Auchinleck, but was originally numbered eighth. The poem as we have it is incomplete: the title and the opening section of the poem are lost; then there are 352 lines in the fragment of Auchinleck that is now Edinburgh University MS 218, after which there is a further missing section; the poem begins again on folio 14 of Auchinleck and continues for a further 427 lines.

Iacob and Iosep is one of the earliest surviving Middle English poems, probably dating from the second half of the thirteenth century and thus roughly contemporary with early romances such as King Horn, Kyng Alisaunder and Floris and Blauncheflur. The poem has not been completely ignored since Napier’s 1916 edition: David C. Fowler enthused about the originality of its narrative construction and its overall effect; in 1945 Oscar Sherwin used it to argue for the existence of a lost ‘tradition of religious ballads composed and sung by the friars’; and it has had some attention in studies of thirteenth-century manuscripts. Most recently, in 2017, Murdoch published an article dedicated to the poem and its relationship with earlier receptions of the Bible. But it has fallen outside the scope of two of the most influential assessments of the vernacular literature of thirteenth-century England: Susan Crane’s Insular Romance and Christopher Cannon’s The Grounds of English Literature. In this chapter I will analyse the poem’s unusual mixture of English colouring and interest in a foreign landscape and linguistic context, the tight fall and rise plot it combines with a free rewriting of the Genesis story, and the high emotion it maintains alongside its articulation of male upper class interests. I will attempt to reconstruct the poem’s original vernacular literary context, including biblical poetry, ballads, saints’ lives and romances, and show how its deceptively simple style belies its participation in a lively literary culture. I will argue that the poem was written for a knightly audience, probably by a household chaplain, rejecting both Murdoch’s view that it was written for a baron, and characterisations of its manuscript as a friars’ miscellany.

Iacob and Iosep runs to only 538 lines in its current state – halfway through the poem a leaf of its unique manuscript, MS Bodley 652, is missing. Its lines are arranged in rhyming couplets, a mixture of alexandrines, septenaries and four-stress lines, giving an overall effect that Derek Pearsall has described as ‘vigorous and fast paced’. This rather irregular form connects the poem with contemporaries such as the South English Legendary and the ballad of Judas, which I will discuss in more detail below, as well as the later romance of Gamelyn.

The audience for Patience must have been similar to the audience of the Pistel and other poems in this book: high-class, lay, steeped in romance literature. Since Patience appears alongside Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in British Library MS Cotton Nero A X, it is the best known of the poems I have discussed so far, and more scholarly attention has been given to its author and original reading context, despite the frustrating absence of evidence. We know that the manuscript, which also includes Pearl and Cleanness, was copied around 1400, and that since Cleanness is indebted to Mandeville’s Travels, it cannot have been composed before c. 1360. The language of the poems is that of the north-west Midlands, probably Cheshire. Most scholars have assumed that the same poet wrote all four poems in the manuscript, which share a common alliterative metre, dialect and stylistic similarities, and an apparently similar controlling intelligence, and I share this assumption. The fact that the poems appear together in Cotton Nero, copied together by a single scribe, implies that the manuscript was made for a single audience. Of course, this scribe’s intended audience was not necessarily the same as the poet’s. Indeed, it has sometimes been argued that Patience was written for clerics. But I will assume that the four poems were also composed for a single, lay audience. There seems to me to be a significant continuity between the way the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight depends on his audience’s deep knowledge of romance, making witty in-jokes about Gawain’s literary reputation and knightly convention before wrong-footing them at the poem’s climax, and what he does in Patience. I will argue that for Patience, too, an audience steeped in romance is necessary for the poet to achieve his desired effects.

As Putter and Stokes show, Patience was written for reading aloud to a group of listeners. This is the context conjured up by the poet’s invitation ‘Wil ye tary a little tyne and tent [pay attention to] me a while?’ (59), but more persuasive evidence is offered by the poem’s division into two instalments, which indicates a stable audience who would hear it as entertainment over a couple of days: most plausibly, a household group. The first instalment ends with a quatrain of summary and anticipation:

The image on the cover of this book does not come from one of the manuscripts of Middle English biblical poetry – which are sadly short on illustrations – but from the Jonah section of a fourteenth-century Bible Historiale. Nevertheless, it is so delightfully characteristic of medieval vernacular biblical culture that it encapsulates, in miniature form, the central arguments I have been making. First, there is the whale. Shaped like a cylinder, with a few large, widely spaced teeth and an enormous hollow stump for a blowhole, it does not appear to have been painted from personal observation. Rather, it is designed to emphasise strangeness and evoke wonder at its black monstrosity. The image perfectly expresses the taste for the marvellous and the extraordinary that it shares with the poems discussed in this book – a taste more normally associated with romance.

This is what A Pistel of Susan seems to mean when it promises its audience ‘ferlys’. Perhaps the poet is referring specifically to God’s inspiration of his prophet Daniel, the only strictly supernatural moment of the story – but more probably, it is a loose gesture towards the exotic story it tells, set in a superlative Babylonian garden where rhubarb grows and parrots fly, peopled with characters of either extraordinary virtue and beauty or extraordinary villainy. This taste for the marvellous affects different poems in different ways. In the Auchinleck Life of Adam and Eve, the mysterious movements of the angel are presented as an enjoyable source of wonder. In Iacob and Iosep, the hero is – like Susanna – astonishingly beautiful, and placed in a context that is doubly exotic, longing for the Hebrew songs of his childhood while displaced in an Egypt described using romance vocabulary. The Canticum de Creatione also evokes exotic tradition with its reference to an imaginary Hebrew source. The Gawain-poet embraces this tendency and takes it to new heights. His extended descriptions of the inside of the whale and the marvellous woodbine in Patience are glorious poetic set-pieces, while Cleanness revels – sometimes with dubious taste – in the environmental catastrophe of the Flood, the post-apocalyptic landscape of the Dead Sea and the terrifying apparition of the disembodied hand at Belshazzar’s Feast.

A Pistel of Susan seems to have been a popular text in medieval England. Alone among the poems in this book, it appears in multiple well-thumbed manuscripts from across the country. The Pistel, an alliterative poem written in thirteen-line bob and wheel stanzas, was probably written in the second half of the fourteenth century in southern Yorkshire, perhaps by the mysterious ‘Huchon’. It is included in the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts, celebrated and enormous religious compendia from c. 1400, perhaps commissioned by a wealthy aristocrat and copied in Worcestershire. But it was also copied into manuscripts that combine religious content with more secular reading: romances and travel narratives. The Pistel is the first item in British Library Cotton Caligula A ii, copied c. 1450. This important manuscript, possibly copied in the central Midlands, anthologises many Middle English romances as well as religious and didactic pieces. In the more modest Huntington Library MS HM 114, copied in London between 1421 and 1437, the Pistel appears alongside Mandeville’s Travels, Troilus and Criseyde and Piers Plowman. Pierpont Morgan MS M 818 (also known as the Ingilby manuscript) is another unshowy manuscript, this time copied probably in Lincolnshire in the middle of the fifteenth century. There, the Pistel is followed by Richard Rolle’s Form of Living and the earliest known A-text of Piers Plowman. It has even been claimed that Chaucer knew the poem, though, as I will show, the evidence for this is not persuasive. The manuscripts suggest a cultural world that brings together English vernacular romance and mainstream religious practice, and an audience that extended beyond the aristocratic world to people further down the social scale. As we will see, the poem’s content bears this out.

The Pistel retells the story of Susanna from chapter 13 of the Book of Daniel. The events narrated take place during the exile of the Jews in Babylon. Two Jewish elders develop a lecherous desire for Susanna, the beautiful wife of the rich Joachim, whom they have seen walking in the garden of her marital home, and entrap her there. When they catch her alone, preparing for a bath, they proposition her and tell her that, if she refuses to consent to adulterous sex with them, they will say that they have caught her with another man.