Gaming the Medieval English Text

This book innovatively combines medieval manuscript study with contemporary cultural game theory to show how the Middle English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight launches a multidimensional game with its late-fourteenth-century elite reader.

The reading games within Sir Gawain and the Green Knight extend to the layout of the poem as found in its one extant manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero A X/2. This study offers a more comprehensive examination of games and gaming in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the manuscript as a whole, its four poems and its illustrations, than has been published to date.

Reading, before printed editions, was an activity that involved interacting with the visual layout of the text on the page. The authors find that a medieval reader’s ludic interaction with this singular medieval codex could amuse but also serve as a means to serious ends, specifically redemptive knowledge. Couch and Bell conclude that the textual and visual games of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Cotton Nero manuscript allow a fourteenth-century English Christian aristocracy to align courtly gaming with heavenly goals, thereby justifying elite amusements.

Julie Nelson Couch is Professor of English at Texas Tech University and has published on Middle English poetry, including romances, apocryphal verse, and miracle poems, on Middle English manuscript contexts, as well as on children as characters and readers.

Kimberly K. Bell, Professor of English at Sam Houston State University, has published on Middle English manuscripts, examining their contents—including romances, saints’ lives, and chansons de geste—while paying special attention to genre, narrative structure, and gaming features.

Couch and Bell have collaborated on studies of Havelok the Dane, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108, as well as on the gaming context of other Middle English romances.