The Pearl Manuscript, as it is usually called, is the only surviving anthology of alliterative poetry, and the sole exemplar of the poems it contains. He has spent years wrestling with the damn thing and is still deeply in love with it: the book is dedicated ‘to the makers of the Pearl Manuscript’. Amid all this busy copying, the Pearl Manuscript remained unknown – perhaps even hidden. Given the changeable nature of so much other 14th-century literature, the poems in the Pearl Manuscript are curiously perfect. But no amount of knowledge about medieval literary culture can make the Pearl Manuscript tell us what it means.