The Pearl poems froth with luxury items, from golden shields to pearl-encrusted crowns. These poems, however, also brim with mistakes and miscalculations: games are rigged, God is invisible, and common sense is trumped by the improbable and divine. In this paper, I argue that there is a link between these two: that luxury both informs and complicates how the Pearl poems construct knowledge. In doing so, the Pearl poems scramble meanings of material luxury and epistemological inquiry in fourteenth century England — and in turn, create layers of (mis)interpretation for the Pearl protagonists and medieval and modern audiences alike.