I recently read the Tolkien translation of Pearl, and was so struck by it that I went in search of explanation because I knew I was missing a lot of what was going on. Kean's explanation is painfully thorough and she is in love with footnotes, but I can safely say that I now grasp the basics. I do wish, however, that she'd included translations of the Pearl quotes. Her Italian and Latin quotes (from the poet's literary influences) are all carefully translated under the original, but she seems to assume that if one is reading a lengthy study of the Pearl poem then one is fluent in Middle English. Which is a fair enough assumption on one hand, but the jacket cover trumpets this study as helping to make the poem approachable to the modern reader. I had to keep flipping between this and the Tolkien when I couldn't puzzle out word meanings on my own, so approachable it is not.