Volume 47, No. 17, September 2025 of the London Review of Books features a review of Professor Arthur Bahr‘s newest book Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight. It delves into the history of the works that survived a fire in 1731 as well as the research, speculative readings, and critical analysis of this mysterious work. “Against the pseudo-certainties of historicism, Bahr’s speculative readings are compelling precisely because they admit the essential mystery of the manuscript, rather than trying to explain it away. Bahr’s looser approach brings interpretative rewards, too.” Professor Bahr embraces the mystery and invites us on the chase for the “supereffable”.
At two o’clock in the morning on 23 October 1731, ‘a great smoak’ began to pour from the rafters of Ashburnham House in Westminster. The library was on fire, which meant that English history was on fire. Ashburnham held the many rare manuscripts that had been donated to the nation by the antiquarian Robert Cotton, as well as the treasures of the royal manuscript collections. The flames from a fireplace had caught on the wooden mantelpiece and spread to the wainscoting. Hapless librarians were throwing water on the blaze; the city fire engines were nowhere to be seen. Eventually Mr Casley, the deputy librarian, dashed out of the building cradling the Codex Alexandrinus, a fifth-century Greek Bible. Others remained, throwing books out of the windows as fast as they could. The next day, with Ashburnham in ruins, boys from Westminster School were picking up charred manuscript fragments as souvenirs.
There were almost a thousand manuscripts in the collection, organised into a series of ‘presses’ or shelving units, each one taking its name from the bust of a Roman emperor that stood on top. Vitellius A.xv, the only copy of Beowulf, was scorched and damaged. Otho A.xii, a unique exemplar of the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon, was completely destroyed. Another volume pressed with Otho, an eighth-century Northumbrian Gospel, was mostly gone; the cataloguers remarked hopefully that ‘Some Pieces of the Leaves of this old Book are preserv’d.’ In many cases, the fat from the lambskin vellum had been drawn out by the heat, so that the pages were roasted in their own juices. One unsalvageable codex, in the words of a modern librarian, resembles ‘an irradiated armadillo’. Though conservation efforts succeeded with a good number of the manuscripts, about a fifth of the collection was deemed to have been ‘lost, burned, or entirely spoiled’.
None of the manuscripts in the Nero press was harmed. Among them was the most mysterious volume of medieval English literature. Cotton Nero A.x is a small miracle: a quarto volume, about the size of a paperback, consisting of just 92 leaves. It contains four untitled English poems – 20th-century editors named them Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – written in the alliterative style in a dialect of the West Midlands. The first and last of these poems are among the greatest poetic works written in Middle English. The author is unknown, the patron is unknown, the original owners of the manuscript are unknown. All we do know is that Cotton acquired the volume from another antiquary, Henry Savile, in the late 16th century. It contains twelve bizarre illustrations, added by another anonymous individual some time after the texts were completed. The Pearl Manuscript, as it is usually called, is the only surviving anthology of alliterative poetry, and the sole exemplar of the poems it contains.
There is no getting around the weirdness. We don’t really know what it is or what it was for. In his new study of the manuscript, Arthur Bahr embraces the mystery, spiritedly chasing after a book that will never let us catch up. He suggests that it is ‘a pedagogical compilation’, cleverly designed to provoke readers into reflecting on the limits and possibilities of meaning-making itself. It is not ineffable but ‘supereffable’, proliferating interpretations over the centuries. He has spent years wrestling with the damn thing and is still deeply in love with it: the book is dedicated ‘to the makers of the Pearl Manuscript’.