The Cathedral of All Saints welcomes Arthur Bahr, PhD, associate professor of literature at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Sunday afternoon, June 26 at 2:30 PM for a talk on "Biblical Catastrophe and Courtly Romance,” followed by a conversation and afternoon tea.

Tickets which include the tea are no longer available. A $10 donation is suggested for just attending the talk.

Dr. Bahr will speak on two of the four poems in the Pearl-Manuscript, the rare 14th-century document that includes Pearl, and three other works: Patience, Cleanness, and the famous chivalric romance story, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, recently adapted into a movie, The Green Knight. The focus of his presentation will be the homiletic poem Cleanness which references the biblical stories of Noah and the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Belshazzar's Feast, as well as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 

“Part of my job,” Dr. Bahr says, “is to help these texts be audible and resonant in a very different cultural, social, and religious context than the one in which they were created."

Dr. Bahr is the author of Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and co-editor of Medieval English Manuscripts: Form, Aesthetics, and the Literary Text, a special volume of The Chaucer Review (47.4, April 2013). His essays have appeared in ELH, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Studies in Philology, and The Chaucer Review, as well as a range of edited volumes.

You can learn more about Arthur Bahr at https://lit.mit.edu/people/abahr/ and about his work with the Pearl-Manuscript at: https://shass.mit.edu/news/news-2022-arthur-bahr-and-pearl-manuscript