SOURCE: "Gazing Toward Jerusalem: Space and Perception in Pearl" in Seeing the Gawain-Poet: Description and the Act of Perception, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991, pp. 12-41.

In the following essay, Stanbury describes the poem as an allegorical fiction and compares it to the pilgrimage-narrative genre of travel literature and to the tradition of medieval illustrated Apocalypses.

Pearl is a story of a journey to Jerusalem. Like popular narrative accounts of actual pilgrimages—526 accounts of journeys to Jerusalem have survived from the period 1100 to 1500—Pearl's itinerary culminates in a sacred city and also takes its pilgrim to that holy city through an exotic land of marvels. The diaries and narratives in which pilgrims logged their impressions are filled with details of exotic experiences; and as Donald Howard has shown in his discussion of pilgrimage narratives, they record graphie visual details of distant places.¹ William von Boldensele, a German Dominican...