Publisher's Synopsis
This book innovatively combines traditional manuscript study with contemporary cultural game theory to show how the enigmatic fourteenth-century Middle English romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, launches a multidimensional game with the reader in its unique manuscript context, Cotton Nero A.x. The authors argue that the poem positions the reader as a player who constructs meaning through the poem's multivalent games within games: the exchange-of-winnings game nested within the exchange-of-blows game, nested within the Christmas games of Arthur's court.