Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent unused condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Biblical exegesis has left the Gest strictly alone probably because the exe- getes have more pressing things to do. Still the religious or ecclesiastical ele- ments in the poem are noteworthy at various levels. A devout rebel the king of the forest at war with the establishments of church and state plays Good Samaritan to a member of the other side. Robin Hood and Little John are another David and Jonathan. (It is true that they are equally another Gil- pamesh and Enkidu and so on through a list of heroic bonded males not all of them with Christian associations.) The Knight confronts a good prior and a bad abbot in another structural balance Robin (like outlaws in the Legenda Aurea and similar collections”) worships Mary but is murdered by a prioress who loves another knight. The legend of Eustace the Monk (forest renegade. cutlawed nobleman and trickster one of his disguises is that of a potter cf. Child 121) is sometimes cited as an analogue to the Robin Hood ballads and a number of motif-analogues in early exempla and miracles of Mary link his story to Robin Hood’s. The miraculous return of a loan (Gest 248) reflects Proverbs 19:17 (“He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the Lord and that which he hath given will he pay him again’) as paraphrased in Piers Plowman B VIII 82-83 and elsewhere. It would seem that as a Christian poem the Gest is a more crowded hunting-ground than some other late- medieval pieces that have been more diligently searched for game. We are not complaining of the neglect but noticing an emptiness that might some day be filled. (MP)