Abstract
Thorlac Turville-Petre (Professor Emeritus, University of Nottingham) has edited, translated, and commented on the fourteenth-century, Middle English dream vision poem, Pearl. As an expert in Middle English philology, he produced, with J. A. Burrows, A Book of Middle English
(1992, 4th ed. 2020), which has been widely used to teach Middle English in colleges and universities. This new book is an impressive accomplishment and a worthwhile contribution to Pearl scholarship. The book is well-organized. It begins with Acknowledgements and
Abbreviations. In his acknowledgements, Turville-Petre discloses that his "principal debt" (vii) is to previous editors of the poem: E. V. Gordon (1953), Charles G. Osgood (1906), and Sir Israel Gollancz (1921). He mentions that Gordon's widow, Ida, revised the 1953 edition
for publication, but oddly does not mention here that J. R. R. Tolkien was Gordon's original co-editor. (Tolkien and Gordon produced an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in 1925 and subsequently worked on Pearl together, but the Pearl edition was
completed by Ida Gordon after her husband's untimely death.) Turville-Petre states that he also consulted the editions of Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (1978; 5th ed. 2007) and of Ad Putter and Myra Stokes (2014) as well as the "impressive verse translation"
(vii) of Simon Armitage. In other words, he has primarily relied upon the earliest editions of the poem, excepting the very first by Richard Morris, which was edited for the Early English Text Society in 1864 (rev. and rprt. 1869): an odd omission. Neither is Morris' edition cited later
in the bibliography, despite its seminal importance.