What the Poet of Patience Really Did to the Book of Jonah

"What the Poet of Patience Really Did to the Book of Jonah." A good deal of accumulated scholarship postulates a wide variety of patristic sources for the Middle English Patience, and more recent studies have explored its participation in various rhetorical traditions. These findings, not compelling in themselves, can be applied to an examination of certain particular transformations the poet performs on his primary source, the Vulgate Jonah. Further comparison to tendencies in Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, beyond advancing the theory of common authorship for the poems of Cotton Nero A.x, suggests what the poet has contributed to his material, and what that tells of his inclination and outlook: he was very likely a pedagogue, certainly deeply interested in human intellectual processes, and a committed Christian figuralist, understanding learning as a moral process rather than an intellectual act, and insistent on the teleological significance of even the trivial choices of the individual.