Three Purgatory Poems

Three Purgatory Poems: The Gast of Gy, Sir Owain, The Vision of Tundale, edited by Edward E Foster, 254 pages

This book collects three fourteenth century poems involving Purgatory and the bonds of love which connect the living and the dead.  In "The Gast of Gy" the titular gast (ghost) haunts his wife until she seeks help from the local Dominicans, who interrogate the spirit about his place in the afterlife and provide him with their prayers of assistance.  "Sir Owain" is a romance about a 12th century English knight who travels through a mystical Irish cave to Purgatory.  "The Vision of Tundale" tells the story of a crooked merchant who has what moderns would call a near-death experience in which his guardian angel gives him a tour of the afterlife, a tale the Latin original of which may have helped inspire Dante.

The texts are presented in Middle English (although some are themselves translations of older poems), with marginal notes when the language is sufficiently different from Modern English that such help is likely to be necessary and longer notes at the end of each work to more fully explain difficult passages.  The result is a text which maximizes both readability and clarity, making the original works accessible without burying them in commentary or rewriting them entirely.