Mediaeval Glass-Making Techniques and the Imagery of Glass in Pearl

The last decades of the fourteenth century in England witnessed an upsurge of creative writing of exceptional quality. The works of the poets, among them Chaucer, Langland, and the unknown author of Pearl, and the writings of the mystics, Julian of Norwich, Walter Hilton, and the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing, were all brought to life in those years. The world out of which they sprang was one of ordinary things, of the commonplace and the cruelly unexpected, of boiled peas and Perpendicular churches, of plague and Peasants' Revolt. Yet these things were to become woven into the very fabric of their visionary experience. For the poet, especially the mediaeval one, and the mystic, the very smallest things were fraught with significance, were metaphor. The poet, the maker of metaphor, stood as one endowed with the rare gift of accomplishing the transformation of the ordinary into new and poignantshapes and forms. His task was the articulation of the hidden significances of things, the joining of two worlds: of tangible and intangible, of sense and spirit.