A Debated Poet. The Matter of Common Authorship in the Cotton Nero Manuscript's Poems and Saint Erkenwald

Abstract

With the discovery of Cotton Nero A.x manuscript and the growing notoriety of the poems contained in it, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, scholars have tried to understand if these compositions were elaborated by the same unknown author, or if they were collected together by the scribe who copied the texts into the codex. To solve this question and to develop the debate on common authorship, scholars take into account some points (language, meter, structure, style, and topics). Although identifying a precise person as the author of the texts is impracticable for the lack of evidence, studying the poems through their contents and their formal aspects can help us to determine at least whether they are the product of the same poet or not. That is the basis for the second part of this investigation: the common authorship between the Cotton Nero A.x manuscript’s poems and another external text located in another codex: Saint Erkenwald. In fact, this composition presents a set of features that led some scholars to consider it the fifth known work of that unidentified poet. By a further comparison of all the five poems, this study intends to establish the authorship of Saint Erkenwald, confirming or denying it through the analysis of those supposed common features linkable to the Cotton Nero’s poems. The detailed examination of the first four poems and of their manuscript will take place in the first two chapters. Instead, in the last two chapters, firstly, shall be analysed the poem of Saint Erkenwald, and, finally, the possible common authorship of the five poems. As reference editions, I have chosen that of Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron for the poems of the Cotton Nero A.x, while for Saint Erkenwald that of Clifford Peterson.