2 My documentation also can only be suggestive, not exhaustive. A very useful bibliography on the Gawain-poet is now available: Robert J. Blanch, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight": A Reference Guide (Troy, N. Y.: The Whitston Publishing Co., 1983). Parts of the second half of this paper were read at the Fifth Annual Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Literature at The Citadel, 15 March, 1985; I would like to take this opportunity to thank Professors David G. Allen, Robert J. Blanch, and Julian N. Wasserman for inviting me to participate in the Conference.

3 On the terms "cowarddyse and couetyse," see R. E. Kaske, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Proceedings of the Southeastern Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Summer 1979, ed. George M. Masters (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984), pp. 24-44, esp. pp. 27-28.

4 Among the many studies, of special interest are Robert W. Ackerman, "Gawain's Shield: Penitential Doctrine in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Anglia 76 (1958), 254-65; George Engelhardt, "The Predicament of Gawain," MLQ 16 (1955), 218-25; Richard H. Green, "Gawain's Shield and the Quest for Perfection," Journal of English Literary History (1962), 121-39; D. R. Howard, "Structure and Symmetry in Sir Gawain," Speculum 39 (1964), 425-33.

5 The pentangle, also a kind of text, signifies "bi tytle þat it habbez" (626; emphasis added); and the "teuelyng of þis trwe kny3tez" (1514) is "`þe tytelet token and tyxt of her werkkez'" (1515; emphasis added).

6 For a discussion of cutting, severing and severity in the signifying process, see R. A. Shoaf, Milton, Poet of Duality: A Study of Semiosis in the Poetry and the Prose (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 10-11, 60, 64.

7 I have studied this passage and these words elsewhere, in The Poem as Green Girdle: "Commercium" in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", Humanities Monograph 55 (Gainesville, Fla.: University Presses of Florida, 1984), pp. 72-74.

8 See, on this matter, the substantial and informative The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages: A Decorum of Convenient Distinction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), esp. pp. 3-67.

9 Robert J. Blanch and Julian N. Wasserman observe, in a paper they delivered together at the Fifth Annual Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Literature at The Citadel (15 March 1985), that Gawain could have chosen the "holyn bobbe" rather than the ax as his weapon. My own interpretation of this moment derives from numerous conversations with the late Judson Boyce Allen who, developing remarks he had published on doubling in the poem (in The Friar as Critic: Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages [Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971], pp. 144-48), was moving toward an understanding of the "holyn bobbe" as a gloss on the ax (Morgan le Faye, similarly, a gloss on Bertilak's Lady; Hautdesert, a gloss on Camelot, etc.). I hope to continue Judson Allen's investigations in my own study of the knot in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, paying particular attention to the Gawain-poet's place in the ancient epistemological tradition of knowledge by contraries--for preliminary bibliography on this tradition, see Milton: Poet of Duality, p. 192n9.

10 See, further, The Poem as Green Girdle (n. 7 above), pp. 74-75.

11 The text and translation of Dante's Commedia cited here and elsewhere is that of Allen Mandelbaum, in the Bantam Classic edition, Inferno (New York, 1982), Purgatorio (New York, 1984), Paradiso (New York, 1986); the present passage is found in Purgatorio, pp. 222-23.

12 Lines 189-92, ed. and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, in the Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 466-67.

13 De Doctrina Christiana 2.16.25, ed. J. Martin, Corpus Christianorum series latina 32, pp. 1-167, p. 50; trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr., On Christian Doctrine (Indianopolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1958), p. 51.

14 Canterbury Tales V (F) 401-08, cited from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, based on The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. by F. N., Robinson (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1987); all citations of Chaucer in this paper are from this edition.

15 See R. A. Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word: Money, Images, and Reference in Late Medieval Poetry (Norman, Oklahoma: Pilgrim Books, 1983), pp. 111-22.

16 The Praise of Folie (London, 1549), Tiij (my emphasis); cited in Rosalie Colie, Paradoxa Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 20.

17 See "The Extasie," line 64, in The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), p. 132; and Paradise Lost 4. 348-9, ed. ed. Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1971), p. 216; and consult also Fowler's note to 4. 348: "St Augustine says that Satan chose the serpent for his instrument because it was `a creature slippery, pliable, wreathed in knots, and fit for his work' (my emphasis)."

18 For more on this issue, see R. A. Shoaf, "Chaucer and Medusa: The Franklin's Tale," Chaucer Review 21, 2 (1986), 274-90.

19 See, further, The Poem as Green Girdle, pp. 69-70.

20 All the instances, e. g., of "token" and "tokenyng" occur in the second half of the poem, suggesting, especially in Gawain, a greater awareness of signs and signification after the experience of the Green Knight and his challenge.