Gawain and the Four Daughters of God
The Testimony of Mathematics in Cotton Nero A.x
Cotton Nero A.x consists of four poems, unusually considered as separate entities. However, when they are examined as a single unity, they point to one of the most common tropes of medieval literature: the kiss of the Four Daughters of God.
An exploration of the mathematical sub-structure of the individual poems as well as the four-as-a-body shows the poet to be a theologian as well as a philosopher-arithmetician-geometer of the highest water.
A mathematical ‘aventure’, exploring an interlocked, layered design within the four poems of Cotton Nero A.x. Key structural elements are identified as mathematical metaphors for theological concepts; e.g. 490 as ‘seventy times seven’ alludes to forgiveness or 101 as a ‘Pythagorean Comma’ alludes to the Music of the Spheres. The author concludes from an analysis of the numerical literary technique and comparison with other medieval poetic mathematics that the four poems – Pearl, Patience, Purity & Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – are meant to form a rhetorical debate with each of the ‘Four Daughters of God’ taking a turn to make her best case.
Available
ISBN (hardcover print): 9780980362060
Author: Anne Hamilton