Dr. Ethan Campbell Publishes Book on Middle English Poet and Medieval Priesthood

In March 2018, Dr. Ethan Campbell, associate professor of English and literature and coordinator of the English major, published The Gawain–Poet and the Fourteenth-Century English Anticlerical Tradition. The book offers a close reading of four Middle English works penned by the same unknown poet—Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience—to examine the author’s critique of the English priesthood.

Within the book, Campbell situates the Gawain-poet’s works alongside those of other fourteenth-century writers, including The Canterbury Tales author Geoffrey Chaucer, the satirical poet William Langland, and reformer and Bible translator John Wyclif. Like the Gawain-poet, these authors were keenly concerned with clerical corruption. For example, “In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer depicts a rogues’ gallery of various criminals who are running the church,” Campbell says.

“The anticlerical critique may not seem to be central at first glance, but if you read Patience, the Gawain-poet’s story of Jonah, you find the author taking every opportunity to compare Jonah’s failings as a prophet to the failings of modern priests, and to describe what steps the church needs to take to reform itself,” says Campbell.

Anticlerical Tradition is an outworking of Campbell’s Ph.D. dissertation and intersects with Campbell’s long-term interests in Middle English literature. At King’s, Campbell teaches “History of the English Language,” in which the work of the Gawain-poet is part of the syllabus. He also teaches “Tolkien’s Medieval English Sources,” which introduces students to the Old English and Middle English writings that influenced J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic The Lord of the Rings.

Beyond the Gawain-poet’s literary value, the theme of anticlericalism is also relevant in light of contemporary sexual abuse scandals within the church. For Campbell, the topic of priestly corruption has even more personal significance: his father was baptized by a pastor who was later imprisoned for sexual assault. His father worried in a journal, “I’m not sure—maybe my baptism doesn’t count!”

In the preface to Anticlerical Tradition, Campbell connects his father’s story to the larger questions that the Gawain-poet and his contemporaries pursued. “Can a pastor or priest who performs religious rituals as part of his office commit a sin so grave that those rituals become invalid? To phrase the question more broadly, does the effectiveness of a sacrament rely upon the virtues of the man performing it, or can the power of the office or the institution overcome the failures of the man?”

The Gawain–Poet and the Fourteenth-Century English Anticlerical Tradition is available for purchase through Medieval Institute Publications, an academic press at Western Michigan University.