1 100 2176 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Wharton "examines how some Middle English writers bring the conventions of estates literature together with an emerging and evolving 'literature of sovereignty' and thereby identify the individual as both a political subject and a target of regulatory authority" (abstract, n.p.). She argues that notions of self-governance found in legal works, especially Henry Bracton's "De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae," reflect English ideas of royal responsibility for social and political order and, in turn, affect understanding and development of political subjectivity for individual members of the traditional three estates. Trained as a lawyer as well as a literary scholar, Wharton reads literary texts alongside legal discourse for ways that they "flatten out the hierarchical or categorical relations among the estates into a series of fungible metonymies for an underlying public obligation that seems to bind everyone equally, and in doing so bring the individual subject to the forefront as a target for regulation and a potential agent of reform" (101-02). She adds nuance to traditional uses of estates material in literary criticism and aligns the estates literature with efforts to define legal responsibilities of king and subject alike, considering Chaucer's "General Prologue" and "Man of Law's Tale," Langland's "Piers Plowman," Wycliffite discourse, "Dives and Pauper," Hoccleve's "Regiment of Princes," and others. In her treatment of "Confessio Amantis," Wharton considers its status as a mirror for princes, its engagement with estates satire, the Tale of Constance, the relation of Book VII to the whole, and the rededication from Richard to Henry--all as evidence of a developing concern with individual sovereignty in civic as well as moral affairs. [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wharton, Robin. Published Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Georgia, 2009. vi, 302 pp. Fully available via https://openscholar.uga.edu/record/7013?ln=en&v=pdf (accessed February 23, 2026). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Literature of Sovereignty in Late Medieval England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Neatly situated among discussions of "translatio studii et imperii" and recent developments in translation studies, Stoll's dissertation "examines the importance of the trope of translation as a means for writers to conceive of their creative process throughout the Middle Ages . . . [exploring how translational] metaphors for textual production have a shaping influence on their narratives" (65). Her focus is medieval French literature that engages the story of Troy and recurrently posits a lost (presumably fictive) Trojan book as a source. Unusually, she includes Gower in this context, setting aspects of his three major works against two by Christine de Pizan ("Epistre Othea" and "Cité des Dames"; see Stoll's chapter three) for the ways they respond to the "tradition of conceiving textual production . . . as a form of translation" (62). Acknowledging that neither Pizan nor Gower wrote a detailed narrative of the Trojan War, nor that either "claims to have translated their texts," Stoll nevertheless includes them because they present a "distinctive concept of fiction" that is "structured" in a way similar to translation "through the concept of the example." Further, both writers "envisage their textual production in relation to Trojan material" and "introduce the figure of Carmentis," mythic inventor of the Latin alphabet, as a provocative figure of transmission (64-65). Gower's multilingualism is central for Stoll insofar as he "frequently puts passages from one of his own texts in one language into another, as well as quoting and translating from other texts" and "blurs the boundaries between translation and multilingual production" (64). Linking Gower's multilingualism, exemplarity, concerns with translation, and allusions and references to Troy (some deeply embedded) with French literary tradition, Stoll explores the poet's ideas about poetic creativity and cultural transmission in "Mirour de l'Omme," "Vox Clamantis," and "Confessio Amantis." [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stoll, Jessica. Published Ph.D. Dissertation. King's College London, 2014. 312 pp. Fully accessible via https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/studentTheses/imagining-troy/ (accessed February 23, 2026). Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Mirour de l'Omme Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Imagining Troy: Fictions of Translation in Medieval French Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yee's study draws on modern approaches to dealing with traumatic grief, particularly those of Judith Lewis Herman (1992) and Rita Charon (2006), using them to reconsider "the genre of three fourteenth-century Middle English dream visions, reframing them as illness narrative. Examining John Gower's "Confessio Amantis," "Pearl," and Chaucer's "Book of Duchess," it asks: What is at stake when we rethink these canonical poems as stories about health and illness?" (ix). "At stake" here is not the dream vision genre at large--where the staging of grief is neither a necessary nor intrinsic concern--but what can be learned from and about the three poems when the analytical discourse is psychological grief therapy rather than philosophical consolation or confessional absolution. Yee's approach is fruitful, yielding some broad generalizations as well as particular observations about the poems. She analyzes the protagonists of the works as patients and their interlocutors as doctors, assessing the role of narrative in treating traumatic grief, "imaginative sympathy" (ix) as a therapeutic device, and the "success or failure" (x) of the therapy depicted. A general concern is "Christian confession as a medieval model that reflects key tenets of illness narratives and modern therapy" (26), evidence for Yee that confession is "a premodern basis for talk therapy" (30), despite significant differences between the etiologies of forgiving sin and curing illness, differences which Yee attributes to underlying differences between medieval and modern understandings of cognition. More particularly, Yee's readings of the individual poems find or reveal some surprising, provocative emphases. Reading the frame of CA as Amans' "pathography" (passim), she finds Genius to be an "inattentive physician, one who is too set upon a standard course of treatment to listen to the needs of his patient," while Amans, in his responses to Genius, "shows more awareness and initiative than previous scholarship has allowed" (50). The revelation late in the CA that Amans is the elderly John Gower, Yee argues, also reveals the deeper truth that the protagonist suffers, not only from lovesickness (here a form of grief), but also from memory disruption and dissociation. At the end of the CA, Venus leads Amans to enact "an experiential pedagogy, one that is more interactive than Genius' more traditional, sermonizing didacticism" (111), allowing Amans to "face the truth of his forgotten identity" (115), experience an "inverted rebirth" (124), and ultimately, produce the pathography that Yee finds in the CA itself. The confessional/therapeutic frame of CA is Yee's primary focus, rather than individual tales, but she integrates her discussion of the Tale of Constantine and Sylvester, an examination previously published in South Atlantic Review (2015). In Yee's readings, the "Pearl"-maiden is even less successful than is Genius as a therapist; Chaucer's dreamer in BD, more successful than either. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yee, Pamela M. Published Yee, Pamela M. "Words of the Wounded: Traumatic Grief and Narrative Therapy in Middle English Dream Visions." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Rochester, 2022. Dissertation Abstracts International 84.04(E). Fully available online via https://urresearch.rochester.edu/. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Words of the Wounded: Traumatic Grief and Narrative Therapy in Middle English Dream Visions. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Stern explores how literary depictions of sound "animate marginalized characters when their voices fail," treating silence in Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde," laughter in "Le Roman de Silence," crying in the "Book of Margery Kempe," and music in both Gower's "Tale of Apollonius of Tyre" ("Confessio Amantis," Book 8) and the "Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri" (HA). She tells us that "[e]ven when voice proves to be impossible for myriad reasons, these early literary works showcase marginalized characters that can temporarily rebel, refute, and resist through their authors' orchestration of what I refer to as 'sonic expressions' or the ability to express through sound" (xiv). In Stern's discussion of Gower's tale and its antecedent (Chapter 4), notions of music, literary voice, prosodic patterning, and the auditory imagination of reading and listening audiences complicate and perhaps muddy her concept of "sonic expressions," hazarding confusion, even dissonance. For example, the HA and Gower's Tale "are textual objects that are not sounded objects in a traditional sense. Still, they feature abundant music, performance, and song representations that beg us to consider how these textual features differ from conventional modes of communication, such as voice. In this sense, the text can be both unsounded and musical in its representations of what we might redefine as 'music'" (167). A "reader's engagement," Stern tells us, can "bring to life" the "musical engagements" of the Apollonius accounts because their "vibrational affect takes effect, pulsating from text to reader and back to text again," and "offer[s] ethics to counteract the inherent limitations of the story," especially when readers "attun[e] their thinking ears to the sonic features of the text" (170). Specifically, if we attend "to the sounds that derive from Thaise's/Tarsia's character's musical abilities, we, as readers, can begin to hear not the interpretation of the female voice but a form of musical expression that pulsates from the descriptions of her performances" and helps to "generate a more ethical approach" to these accounts (171). I'm not sure how it is generated by these concerns with sound, but Stern's ethical approach is briskly feminist so that, for example, "Gower's version eclipses the HA's in terms of its delivery of female agency . . . . Gower's rendition is a win for all women" (188). A bit later, Stern tells us that the ending of the HA "resonates with my feminist wishes" (193), while "Gower elects to spend the final pages of his 'Apollonius' story silencing, erasing, and 'fixing' the canonical tradition brought forth by musicality: female agency" (195). At the close of her discussion, Stern states: "Thus, I conclude that these two versions of the Apollonius story should be read thematically for their musical presentations, for to do so is to read Thaise's/Tarsia's character anew. No longer an empty signifier of the female voice, Thaise's/Tarsia's musical performances can be read as detectable and persistent. In imagining Thaise's/Tarsia's melodies, the song's sound can be heard, even in the face of oppressive editing practices. This is the most feminist reading one can make of a textual tradition that offers so little room for women to express themselves" (200-01). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stern, Kortney, Published Stern, Kortney, "Sonic Interventions: Silence, Sound, and Melody in Medieval Literature." Ph.D. Dissertation. Indiana University, 2024. Dissertation Abstracts International A86.02(E). xi, 227 pp. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sonic Interventions: Silence, Sound, and Melody in Medieval Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Prasad discusses the "nature of complaint" in late-medieval rhetoric, and maintains that "in medieval English poetry . . . complaint is used in two ways: first, it is inserted within a poem as a little oration[;] second, it is also used as a self-sufficient theme for composing a poem." The study identifies "three distinct lines of medieval English verse complaints": "social complaints" (distinct from verse satires), love complaints, and complaints which "mingl[e] . . . various forms of complaint," assessing the "Confessio Amantis" as an example of the latter, with a "point of view [that] is uncertain." When we view CA in light of "medieval English poetry" rather than the "French tradition," we can see that "Gower is the pioneer of the type of the mixed-form of the art, which, later developed as tragi-comedy." Author/Editor Author/Editor Prasad, Prajapati. Published Prasad, Prajapati. "The Order of Complaint: A Study in Medieval Tradition." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Wisconsin, Madison. Dissertation Abstracts 26.7 (1966): 3930. [eJGN 44.1] Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Order of Complaint: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1966 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Harder explores "Gower's treatment of the tales he took from Ovid . . . [to reveal] how Gower used his source in establishing the sentence of his tales." Treats Gower's Ovidian tales in the 'Confessio Amantis' sequentially, arguing that Gower "generally used" the ones "easily adaptable to his purpose . . . . But he made changes wherever necessary to establish his moral," recurrently "reduc[ing] the number of characters and events . . . us[ing] editorial narration to stress doctrine . . . and respond[ing] to certain elements of Ovid in a predictable pattern." Gower "is a capable story-teller." [eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Harder, Henry Louis. Published Harder, Henry Louis. "Ovid and the Sentence of the 'Confessio Amantis.'" Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Maryland, 1970. Dissertation Abstracts International 31.11 (1971): 6057A. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ovid and the Sentence of the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1970 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review From Dwyer's abstract: "I argue in this dissertation that scripts are media that serve literary interpretation. . . . Chapter 1 finds that scribes heavily relied on artful, creative, and often rhetorically powerful language to communicate about scripts to the broader world. . . . Chapter 2 focuses on one example of the figurative language scribes use to label and think about script: the term 'bastard,' . . . find[ing] that 'bastard scripts' are those which exhibit the careful combination of 'high' calligraphic features with 'low' cursive ones that can be read for particular literary effects. Analyzing the variously rendered 'bastard scripts' of the early manuscripts of John Gower's "Confessio Amantis," Chapter 2 ultimately finds that the different ways scribes 'bastardized' scripts uncover a medieval 'bastard poetics,' aided by the poem's own 'bastard' combination of 'high' Latin verse with 'low' English couplets. . . . Chapter 3 investigates how scripts can portray the affective stances their literary texts assume, more specifically intimacy. Focusing on secretary, a script imported to England from French-speaking territories of Europe, I examine its uses in three case studies: a manuscript of Guillaume de Machaut's multi-form poem "Le livre dou Voir Dit," John Gower's ballade sequence the "Traitié," and several early manuscripts of Christine de Pizan. Chapter 3 finds that secretary, in both French and Anglo-French contexts, when it triangulates with language (French) and form (epistolary lyrics or prose), facilitates what I call 'secretarial reading,' wherein the reader is encouraged by the apparent simplicity of secretary's cursive aspects to recognize and engage with intimacy in the texts at the level of content, genre, or the author's literary persona. . . . Chapter 4 argues for the possibilities of script as a facilitator for reading in a continuous process. It focuses on a single case study, an early fifteenth-century manuscript of "Piers Plowman," copied by an apparently 'amateur' scribe, Thomas Tilot. Tilot's script starts out as a highly formal textualis, but slowly decreases in calligraphic effort until it fully becomes a rapid cursive. This calligraphic diminuendo epitomizes scribal 'amateurishness' through its disinterest in absolute uniformity and consistency, which I argue offers a visual reading of the many moments of upheaval, destabilization, and narrative unraveling in "Piers Plowman" itself. Chapter 4 ultimately offers a method of close reading medieval texts that takes script more fully into account alongside lexis, diction, and meter, concretizing this dissertation's arguments about the interpretive power scripts hold for literature." Chapter 2 is evidently a version of Dwyer's "Bastard Hands: Fifteenth-Century Scripts and the Processes of Medieval Making." Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 118, no. 3 (2024): 315–47. [eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dwyer, Seamus Published Dwyer, Seamus. "Scripts and Literature in the Manuscripts of England and France, 1370-1425." Ph.D. Dissertation. Yale University, 2024. Dissertation Abstracts International A86.01(E). Abstract accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Scripts and Literature in the Manuscripts of England and France, 1370-1425. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This study . . . [seeks to] demonstrate the importance of an understanding of the moral connotations of madness--specifically the connection between madness and sin--for the interpretation of many medieval works; to provide an introduction to concepts of disease and madness prevalent in the Middle Ages; to define three conventions of madness [the Mad Sinner, the Unholy Wild Man, the Holy Wild Man]; and to offer new perspectives on some important works which include mad or wild men." Chapter 3 treats Nebuchadnezzar as the "prototype of literary medieval madness" and includes discussion of him in Gower's "Confessio Amantis." [eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Doob, Penelope Billings Reed. Published Doob, Penelope Billings Reed. "Ego Nabugodonosor: A Study of Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature." Ph.D. Dissertation. Stanford University, 1970. Dissertation Abstracts International 31.04 (1970): 1755A. Full text accessible via ProQuest Theses & Dissertations Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ego Nabugodonosor: A Study of Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1970 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In his dissertation Brent offers a "sustained reading" of Trevet's 'Cronicles' "as a text in its own right, with its own strategies of language and form, and its own historical context," locating the 'Cronicles' among early fourteenth-century "Plantagenet efforts" to respond to "contemporary political uncertainty" and reflecting "methods of conceptualizing and articulating the nation in religious terms" (iii). In chapter three, Brent assesses Trevet's narrative of Constance as central to the formal and thematic unity of the 'Cronicles.' He argues sensibly that the Constance narrative should be read within the entirety of the 'Cronicles,' not isolated or synopsized for the sake of comparison with Gower's and Chaucer's stories of Constance. The length, placement, and resonances of Trevet's Constance account in the context of the larger work, Brent argues, compel us to understand it as a rich expression of "the idea that [Constance's] motherhood allows England, through its royal blood, to bring about its own salvation" (163), an idea, he shows then at some length, that was useful in Plantagenet "crusading politics," (245) and valuable as an example of more pervasive late-medieval thinking about history. Chaucer is mentioned much more often than Gower in Brent's treatment of Constance, largely because critical tradition has, he shows, skewed attention to concerns that privilege the "Man of Law's Tale." In at least one instance, however, Brent suggests that study of Trevet might usefully prompt attention to an "underexplored aspect of source study among Chaucerians and critics of Gower, i.e., Trevet's "legal diction" (174).] [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Brent, Jonathan Lawrence. Published Brent, Jonathan Lawrence. "World History in the Tumultuous 1330s: A Study of Nicholas Trevet's Anglo-Norman 'Cronicles.'" Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Toronto, 2021. Dissertation Abstracts International A83.01(E). Full text accessible at https://utoronto.scholaris.ca/home. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource World History in the Tumultuous 1330s: A Study of Nicholas Trevet's Anglo-Norman "Cronicles." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Helena Znojemská deftly unravels the complex interplay of gender dynamics, transforming the 'loathly lady' motif from a mere narrative device into a profound commentary on power, transformation, and identity. Znojemská argues that the motif functions to interrogate and destabilize traditional gender roles and power dynamics before re-instating the status quo, even if this is not sustainable. In medieval literature, gender structures are often portrayed as rigid and hierarchical, with women typically positioned within a framework of submission, subservience, or objectification. However, texts like "The Tale of Florent," "The Wife of Bath's Tale," and "The Wedding of Dame Ragnelle" complicate these binaries by featuring women who challenge traditional gender roles through transformative encounters. These stories offer a nuanced exploration of how gender and power are intertwined, reflecting both societal expectations and the potential for female autonomy within the constraints of medieval norms. Znojemská's interpretation of gender structures highlights the ways in which the 'loathly lady' figure in medieval literature serves as both a challenge to and a negotiation of traditional gender norms. Her ability to draw connections between the texts offers a cohesive analysis that reveals recurring themes of transformation, agency, and subversion of gender norms. Additionally, Znojemská's interdisciplinary approach, blending literary analysis with gender theory, enriches academic discussion by providing fresh insights into how these texts interrogate medieval social structures. As academic discourse surrounding the 'loathly lady' figure remains limited, this analysis of the complex implications of gender roles within the text is a valuable contribution to existing scholarship while offering the potential for further discussion. [CM. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Znojemská, Helena. Published Znojemská, Helena. "Loathly Ladies' Lessons: Negotiating Structures of Gender in 'The Tale of Florent,' 'The Wife of Bath's Tale,' and 'The Wedding of Dame Ragnelle.'"Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philologica (2022): 21-37. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Loathly Ladies' Lessons: Negotiating Structures of Gender in "The Tale of Florent," "The Wife of Bath's Tale," and "The Wedding of Dame Ragnelle." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yeager's contribution to the "Oxford History of Poetry in English" bids to establish a new status for Gower in English literary history: that of a ground-breaker; a metrical, formal, and stylistic innovator. Covering a wide range of information about Gower's works and traditional topics in Gower criticism--Gower's trilingualism, his poetic ambitions, his sources, and the relative chronology of his works--Yeager weaves them together with particular emphasis on what he calls "a broad strain of experimentalism that runs throughout" Gower's works in all three languages (441), most evident in cross-fertilizations across language boundaries. Early on, Yeager cites "'Eneidos bucolis'" and the three-volume, three-language head-rest of Gower's tomb effigy as evidence that his "sense of a poetic self took Virgil's example as an inspiration" and "his decision to write extensively--and continually--in French, Latin, and Middle English" (440-41). "[D]iscoveries made writing verse in one language," Yeager maintains, "at times carried over influentially into his work in others," and this essay is--to put it over-simply--a description of those carry-overs from Gower's French and Latin poetry into his "Confessio Amantis." After a brief acknowledgement of the uncertainties of dating Gower's works and manuscripts (recurrent sub-topics), Yeager launches his assessment of "Mirour de l'Omme" (in French, "written in the 1370s or somewhat earlier") as "an ambitious enterprise, particularly if it was indeed Gower's initial poetic project" (441). The length of the MO, its intricate, twelve-line stanzas, and the regularity of its meter are Yeager's concerns here as they anticipate "Gower's future poetics" in the "Vox Clamantis" and the "Confessio Amantis," particularly his habitually "smooth flowing verse" (442), achieved via willingness "to subordinate both syntax and grammar" in the French prosody of the MO and similar manipulations of English in CA. Yeager adds that the "inward turn" (442) of the MO, "moving from allegory to social criticism to intense self-scrutiny"--"altogether unprecedented in late medieval literature"--anticipates Gower's unusual combinations of genres elsewhere, his "formal iconoclasm" (443). Formal concerns are also Yeager's targets in his discussion of Gower's two other French works, "Traitié" and "Cinkante Balades." Yeager argues for dating "Traité" rather earlier than usual (see n12), and suggests persuasively that, as in the CA (which may have been composed or revised at or about the same time), marginal Latin glosses enact "dialogic argument as a means to examine ideas" (444). In the "Traitié," the argument is "unfolded one balade at a time"--an "entirely original conception apparently unique to Gower" (443). The early dating of the "Traitié" also enables Yeager to extend Martin Duffell's argument (1996) about Gower's hendecasyllables and to suggest that "Gower, rather than Chaucer, may have invented iambic pentameter--albeit in French" (444). In turn, the CB is, for Yeager, a "true sequence, each poem building upon the next to supply information about events, and particularly character, both of the male lover and the lady he addresses," anticipating Philip Sidney's "Astrophil and Stella" by two hundred years and prompting Yeager to speculation: "Had Gower elected to write the 'Cinkante Balades' in English, his subsequent reputation would have been very different" (445). The CB influenced the characterization of Amans in CA, Yeager tells us, the vocabularies of the poems are similar at points, and, as with the "Traitié," "resonances" of the CB "are detectable in Gower's English prosody" (446). Turning to Gower's Latin works, Yeager sidesteps "Cronica Tripertita" because it is too late to influence CA (although it may have affected "In Praise of Peace"), and goes on to treat the "Vox Clamantis" as innovative in two respects: the dream vision of the "Visio Anglie" and the plain style of the VC at large. For Yeager, the "Visio" opens as a traditional dream vision, but "quickly transforms into a harrowing nightmare unmatched in English literature, save only, perhaps, by the 'Nighttown' section of James Joyce's 'Ulysses." (446). The plain style of VC---its "unrhymed elegiac distichs" (Yeager here following A. G. Rigg, 1992)--"had little contemporary precedent in England," even though Langland was trying something similar in English when seeking to reach a "discernable audience" through a middle style. Moreover, the plain style of VC contrasts sharply with the "highly artificial scholastic verse" of medieval Latin poetry and, "probably of greater importance" to Gower, it was a means whereby he "positioned himself with Virgil and Ovid" (447). The "thoughtful, innovative poetics" of Gower's "remoulding" of classical poetry occupies Yeager briefly while he revisits his earlier (1989) assessment of classical "cento" in VC, where Gower borrowed lines from classical sources and recontextualized them to produce new meanings in his own poems--techniques that are, like the others mentioned above, "replicated in Gower's Middle English work, if in somewhat different garb" (448). The CA is not, of course, a wholly Middle English text at all: "Gower envisioned it as a work in two languages, English and Latin" (449). Its Latin prose glosses produce, as they do in the "Traitié," a "bilingual polyvocality" which provides Gower with an "alternative 'voice', unidentifiably sourced in the text but specifically non-authorial with which to usher the reader into, and engage with, the vernacular poetry" (449). Moreover, the CA includes poetic passages in Latin (the Latin in "Traitié" is prose), and the labor Gower expends on them, for Yeager, "suggests additional aesthetic ambition." Structurally, "most of the Latin verses" included in CA, Yeager tells us, "mark stages" in Amans' confession, but they also "introduce ideas, and . . . images that will arise in the English many lines later" (450) and at greater length, producing poetic effects that Yeager exemplifies: characterization, "deliberated irony," and punning--"enriching and thickening the English, albeit in riddling--even Donnean--fashion." Explicating interactions between several passages of English verse in CA and Latin ones, Yeager demonstrates that Latin recurrently introduces or interjects "playfulness" into his poem without diminishing its seriousness of purpose, i.e., the "socio-political concerns" that run throughout MO, VC, and CA; the "basic strategy and socially ameliorative purpose that remain the same in all three poems" (452); and the differing, though purposive, targeting of their audiences. The final movement of Yeager's essay is a detailed survey of the resonances of Gower's French prosody in his CA: the use of exemplary tales as in MO, albeit with "greater sophistication" in CA; the "mutual crossover" in his "handling of rhyme" in CA and CB, essentially "monosyllabic, or simple bi-syllables" (453); the "near-absolute regularity of metre" in CA that has "no English counterpart" but does in French poetry by Machaut, Deschamps, and Gower himself; and--Latin here as well as French--the virtuosity with which Gower sustains congruency of "grammar, syntax, [and] precise word selection" over long stretches to carry "extended thoughts smoothly over many lines, notwithstanding the shortness of the four-beat couplet that renders this task demanding." In short, Gower's "mastery of the verse-paragraph is nonpareil" (454), a claim that Yeager substantiates through explication of several passages in which he identifies Gower's "mellifluousness," "aural imagery" and "arresting vividness" (455). Maintaining that "the accentual pattern of conventional English speech over thousands of lines is a control Gower alone achieves," Yeager exclaims that "Chaucer seldom matches it; Hoccleve and Lydgate, never" (454). Yeager's enthusiasm for Gower's cross-fertilizing innovations and poetic style may well put to rest the generations-old canard that Gower is a pedestrian poet (search "dull" in the John Gower Bibliography Online for too many examples). Whether or not Yeager's essay cements a new, more positive orthodoxy of Gower as an experimentalist remains to be seen, but its evidence, arguments, authority, and placement in the Oxford History give it a good chance to do so. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R. F. "John Gower." In Helen Cooper and Robert R. Edwards, eds. The Oxford History of Poetry in English. Volume 2. Medieval Poetry: 1100-1400 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 440-56. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Mirour de l'Omme Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Cinkante Balades In Praise of Peace Cronica Tripertita Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Minor Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yeager neatly expresses the broad outlines of his perspective on Gower's "discontent" with Ovid in the final paragraph of this essay: "the disquieting problem I believe Gower discovered in his last years with Ovid as an aesthetic model was posterity . . . . [A]s a poet of continuing transformation, and earth-bound love, Ovid fell short of that Petrarchan high seriousness that promised permanence. Virgil, alone, possessed that" (107). However, like Ovid, Yeager explains earlier, Gower "had problems with" Virgil, in Gower's case with both the "tyrannical imperialism" (103) of the "Aeneid" and the "military adventurism" (106) of Aeneas, helping Yeager to explain why Virgils' direct influence on Gower was slight, and why the Virgil we find in the "Confessio Amantis" is a magician and a failed lover, not a poet; Aeneas, a betrayer rather than a hero--both based in romance rather than epic, and both, perhaps, influenced by Augustine's critique of Virgil in his "Confessions" and "De civitate Dei." Gower well knew of Virgil's enduring status and wanted such "posterity" (95) for himself, a goal he was, perhaps, introduced to by Chaucer, Yeager suggests, and a topic likely to have been discussed among those in "Gower's circle"--Chaucer, Ralph Strode, and others (102n47)--especially as purveyed by Petrarch. Previously, Ovid had provided Gower with a wide range of narratives of transformation and love--topics Gower took up early in his "Visio Anglie" and in CA (c. 1381-82)--especially those that posed "hopeful aspiration" implicit in "continual . . . potentially ameliorative change." Over time, however (both Gower's age and "Richard's darkening rule" played roles here, Yeager observes) Gower's "outlook changed" (94) and a "new ambition" developed: he grew concerned to establish a poetic legacy of the sort articulated by Petrarch. Yeager is careful to make clear that "no evidence has surfaced yet of Gower's reading of any work of Petrarch's," but he makes it equally clear that a new idea of authorship was coalescing in England at the very late fourteenth century--a preoccupation with "posterity, a concept concerned with the life of letters that Petrarch re-invented, framing poetic immortality solidly around Virgil" (95). Yeager shows that Gower "moves away from Ovid" (98) in his late works (1390s and after), examining closely the nuances (and authorship questions) of "Quam quincere," "Eneidos bucolis," and "Quia unusquisque" as "fruits of conversation within Gower's circle" (102) and the result of a "Petrarchan gaze" (99), tinged with "clear distrust, even a detestation, of the worldly pretensions of imperium" (103) that Gower associated with Virgil. Throughout this essay, Yeager's own gaze is on Ovid but it widens out to include significant engagement with Virgil and Petrarch, along with Chaucer, Strode, and even Langland and Lydgate, offering a wide-ranging exploration of changes in Gower's poetic outlook, a rumination rich in details, nuances, sidelights, implications for chronology, and provocative questions, many of the latter left hanging, tantalizingly, for future consideration, even though some of them already have been addressed in studies not mentioned by Yeager. See, for example, T. Matthew N. McCabe's "Vernacular Authorship and Public Poetry: John Gower" (2020). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R. F. "Gower's Ovidian Aesthetics and Its Discontents." In William Green, Daniel Herbert, and Noelle Phillips, eds. Textual Traditions and Medieval Literary Culture: Essays in Honour of Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2025), pp. 89-107. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Later Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Ovidian Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2025 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This concise essay argues that Gower's version of the Constance story (CA 2.587–1598) "contains a covert progression of the controversies concerning Constance's marital relationship with King Allee" (510). The first controversy identified is Constance's legitimacy to be Allee's queen. Wu suggests that in Gower's version of the tale--more so than in Chaucer's or Trevet's--Allee's support of Constance as an appropriate choice for the monarchy "portrays Britain as a tolerant and inclusive nation by creating a resolute, far-sighted, and fortunate king" (512). The second controversy focuses upon Constance's loyalty to Allee, or the narrative ambiguity surrounding her loyalty. Constance's journeys become replete with opportunity for infidelity, and, as Wu suggests, not all of these moments are explicitly refuted, such as the years Constance spends with Arcennus. Again, Wu proposes, the focus turns to Allee's morality as he recognizes his own role in propelling Constance towards those possible infidelities. And finally, the third controversy is characterized by Constance's "political impact" (514), the possible renegotiation of political alliances and alteration of national sovereignty. This controversy is assuaged by Allee's deft political maneuverings and the results in the production of an heir, Maurice, suggesting "an optimistic view of the political marriage as a lucrative political scheme planned by King Allee himself" (515). Ultimately, for Wu, "Gower's poetics in this tale features a romantic and empathetic image of the king, which is associated with the contemporary discourses around King Richard II" (515). [BWG. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wu, Xiaoling. Published Wu, Xiaoling. "'Worldes Faierie': The Narrative Controversies over Constance in 'Confessio Amantis.'" ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 37.4 (2024): 510–18. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Worldes Faierie": The Narrative Controversies over Constance in "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Watt describes the making of Earl Gower's Roxburghe Club edition of London, British Library MS 59495, olim Trentham, "one of nine books printed by club members in 1818" (162), a manuscript on the library shelves of his father, the Marquis of Stafford, at Trentham Hall. The Earl used a transcription made by Henry Stachey in 1764 for the printer's copy (152), but corrected the proofs from the manuscript itself (156). The Roxburghe Club edition prints the Latin and French poetry, but deliberately leaves out the one Middle English poem in the manuscript, "In Praise of Peace," an omission explained by Earl Gower that this had been previously edited "in Urry's edition of Chaucer's works" (154). Oddly, Watt suggests that the Club members would have thought the character Gower in Shakespeare's "Henry IV, Part 2" was the poet: "Roxburghe Club members might nonetheless have enjoyed making the more subtle connection between the Trentham Manuscript's (now London, British Library MS ADD.59495) ostensible dedication to Henry IV and Gower's cameo appearance in "Henry IV, Part 2" (though it is not entirely clear what they might have thought of Gower's refusal to dine with Falstaff in Act 2, Scene 1" (163-64). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Published Watt, David. "A Knight at the Roxburghe (Club): George Granville Sutherland-Leveson-Gower and the Textual Transmission of 'Balades and Other Poems by John Gower.'" In William Green, Daniel Helbert, and Noëlle Phillips, eds. Textual Traditions and Medieval Literary Culture: Essays in Honour of Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2025), pp. 152-65. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Knight at the Roxburghe (Club): George Granville Sutherland-Leveson-Gower and the Textual Transmission of "Balades and Other Poems by John Gower." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2025 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Warwick opens with a brief biography, correcting then-current errors with surprising accuracy, e.g., Gower's lineage was not Yorkshire, but Kent and by way of proof prints line drawings of the effigy and arms of Sir Robert Gower, and of Gower's seal (85-86). His assessment of Gower's character makes use of documents related to Gower's land transactions (87-90). Warwick seems to have been the first to propose "three editions of the 'Confessio Amantis'"--what apparently became Macaulay's recensions: "the first, containing the compliments to Chaucer and the king; the second, omitting the praise of Chaucer when he had lost his place [i.e., in the wool staple]; and the third, expunging the praises of the king when he had lost his crown, and substituting for them a dedication to his successor" (94)--and perhaps first again to suggest that the character of Chaucer's January was based on Gower (105). The bulk of the article is an assessment, comparatively well balanced for a mid-Victorian, post-Romantic reader, of Gower's trilingual poetry ("he wrote a leash of languages," [97]), e.g., "And beyond all question, Gower contributed much to the moral philosophy of his country. But he was deficient in that living genius which brings man and nature before us as if alive again, and in that dramatic faculty which represents men, their feelings and their passions, in storied action" (106). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Warwick, W[illiam]. Published Warwick, W[illiam]. "On Gower, the Kentish Poet, His Character and Works." Archaeologia Cantiana, 6 (1866): 83-107. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource On Gower, the Kentish Poet, His Character and Works. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1866 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The name is Norman French, meaning "seven winnowing fans," three of which surmount the family arms (azure, three fans or). The first Septvans documented in England held the manor of Aldington in Kent, in 1180. The article names wives and children (with a detailed family tree between pp. 112-13), and provides dates of births and deaths into the 17th century. There is a very brief mention of the "Septvans case," involving the fleecing of the under-age William de Septvans, and some account of his later life, including his capture, while serving as Sheriff of Kent, by the rebel mob in 1381 (112-13). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Tower, Sir Reginald. Published Tower, Sir Reginald. "The Family of Septvans." Archaeologia Cantiana 40 (1928): 105-30. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Family of Septvans. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1928 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Ronan's book is remarkable in several ways, not least because it begins by explaining his interest in "addiction literature" as having grown from his own decade-long experience as a drug addict, now recovered. Following a substantial introduction, "Premodern Addiction and Addiction," the book has six chapters: 2, "Modern Addiction Discourse," 3, "Modern Addiction Literature," 4, "Premodern Discursive and Didactic Texts," 5, "Addicted to Love in Premodern Literature," 6, "Anthropomorphised Beasts and Bestial Men." In chapter 4 (133-84), Ronan traces the idea of addiction as considered by Plato, Aristotle, Prudentius, Boethius, and Thomas Aquinas. In chapter 5 (185-244)--following an unexpected opening referencing Robert Palmer, the Chambers Brothers, and Smokey Robinson--he takes up love (quoting Jacalyn Duffin) as "burning desire, lust, and rest-of-your-life, self-obliterating adoration" (186), the kind of love, in other words, found in Ovid's "Remedia Amoris" (Ronan compares Ovid's advice to "modern addiction recovery discourses" [191]), Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" (a "diseased" Troilus presents "the common narrative traits of modern Addiction Literature: initial hubris, a progressive and chronic loss of agency, ignored negatives, and the need for intervention" [195]), and Gower's Confessio Amantis," where "the frame narrative . . . represents one of the most significant, sustained and wide-ranging examples of Middle English poetic engagements with the issues of impaired personal behavioural agency" (210). Ronan thus pays particular attention to the frame, something that he asserts "Macauly" [sic, throughout] got wrong (215-17), because it is in the frame that readers encounter Amans, whose "addiction to love" justifies the process of the poem. Ronan concurs with C. S. Lewis that the CA "tells the story of the death of love" (215) and this for Ronan amounts to a glad--if complicated--ending, since "love" in Amans' terms amounts to addiction, its death in Ronan's parlance recovery and "renovation" (217). Yet what Amans relinquishes at the poem's conclusion is only a kind of love, not love itself, which has many positive aspects: love of family, of community, of God. Thus, "love in the 'Confessio' is never depicted in a wholly negative light, but it is depicted as possessing a capacity for being misused. The behaviour of Amans is not in need of intervention and correction because he is a lover, but because he loves futilely and out of measure of reason" (221). For Ronan, recovery narrative unlocks the secret of the CA's structure, which seen from this viewpoint, he asserts, is fully coherent. Even the many tales told by Genius, some of them seemingly conflicting, fit, because Genius recognizes the need to be "slyh / To hem which hath the need on honed" (8.2064-65), that is, to distract while the cure settles in. (In this Genius channels Ovid's advice in the "Remedia" [236-40]). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ronan, Mark. Published Ronan, Mark. Addiction Literature's Past and Present. Cham, Switz.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Addiction Literature's Past and Present. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Perry seeks to establish "a new way of understanding the English literary tradition by focusing on the essential role that coteries played in the tradition's beginning and maintenance" (4). By the "tradition" he means Chaucer, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Dunbar, Roos, Skelton, Surrey and Wyatt. It's a big-name list, especially when each move chronologically forward also mandates discussion of those left out, like Gower (in Perry's view, due to Lydgate [152]), and attendant "coteries"--"a sociological term denoting a gathering of like-minded individuals of the same class, actual historical persons in relation with one another . . .that also depend upon a rhetorical pose involving distinct literary features" (8). How can one recognize a coterie? "There are two general means by which a literary work may signal its involvement in a coterie: specific forms of allusion and a particular way of using proper names" (9). Gower, unsurprisingly, thus figures early as a prominent--perhaps the most prominent--member of "Chaucer's London coterie" which included Thomas Usk until his execution, and possibly the Oxford philosopher-turned-lawyer, Ralph Strode. Gower is the one Chaucer names (in "Troilus and Criseyde") who also names Chaucer in return (Venus' request to Gower to greet Chaucer when they meet, in CA 8 (38-49), establishing coterie connection, and (incidentally) dismissing the idea of a quarrel between the two. Identifying allusions, Perry concedes, is "a necessarily more speculative enterprise" than name-checking (49). By way of examples he cites the Man of Law's "humorous" criticism of Gower's "incest tales" (42-43, 49-52), (which he reads as indicative of the two poets' "jovial competitiveness" [51]). Thereafter, in chapter 2, Gower appears to have been of small importance for Hoccleve and is mentioned sporadically, e.g., when Hoccleve is "didactic," he's "Gowerian" (113). In chapter 4, however, Perry presents Lydgate as "indebted to John Gower, especially the latter's form of political poetry and its pacifism" (126), and "a model of the poet as political commentator and advisor to princes, an exemplary poetic voice aimed at enhancing the common good" (127). Part of this admiration devolved from Gower's pacifism: "Lydgate tries to ensure that Gower's pacifism gets a fair hearing, even if Gower the man is silenced" (127); and "one finds Lydgate appropriating French culture to speak back to his English patrons, including Chaucer's family, in the form of Gowerian critique" (127). Perry sees Lydgate identifying with Gower as a poet writing for a Lancastrian king, just as did Lydgate (142-43), who borrowed techniques of address from "In Praise of Peace" that allowed him to envision a "double mode of address" (148), "a means to praise the Lancastrian nobility while simultaneously critiquing their actions" (144). Nonetheless, Lydgate's "double mode" differs from Gower's, "inverting" it: "Gower's dual address speaks for a class" of which he was a member, while "Lydgate's [speaks] for a coterie" (149). Yet while he borrows so extensively from Gower, Lydgate never mentions him, thereby bolstering "Chaucer's position in literary history while diminishing Gower's" (152). In chapter 5, discussing Dunbar's "Lament for the Makars," Perry notes that Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate are named together, distributing "the praise afforded to one of the three to the other two as well" (183). Skelton connects the three again in "The Garlande of Laurell," speaking with each in turn, beginning with Gower, whom he praises for "garnishing" the English language (188-89). With the poets of "Tottel's Miscellany"--Surrey and Wyatt--in chapter 6, "the need to bolster Chaucer's reputation by providing him with the attendant figures of Gower and Lydgate is no longer acute, and Chaucer begins to stand for the foundation of the English literary tradition as such. It is at this moment . . . that the Chaucerian tradition has become the English literary tradition" (198). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Perry, R. D. Published Perry. R. D. Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition: From Chaucer to Spenser. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition: From Chaucer to Spenser. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This John Gower is not the poet, but a little-known 17th-century schoolmaster of Latin and Greek who "graduated from Cambridge University with a BA in 1632 and an MA in 1636 . . . . " In 1635 "he published a comic poem entitled 'Pyrgomachia,' or the Cowrageious Castle Combat'" (255) and in 1640, under the title "Roman Festivalls," his translation of Ovid's "Fasti." [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Newlands, Carole E. Published Newlands, Carole E. "The Other John Gower and the First English Translation of Ovid's 'Fasti.'" Hermathena 177/78 (2004, 2005): 251-65. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Other John Gower and the First English Translation of Ovid's "Fasti." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004, 2005 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review McGregor approaches Gower's "Tale of Rosiphelee" by contextualizing and rethinking its most striking visual image: the figure of the abject revenant "horse knave" ("Confessio Amantis" 4.1399), sporting an array of halters around her waist, as she and her lean, ill-kept, hobbling black horse, trail a group of elegant women mounted on "amblende hors . . . / That were al whyte, fatte and grete" (4.1309-10). The woman explains her reduced state to Rosiphelee as punishment for resisting before turning late to love, a partial redemption marked by the horse's bridle of gold and precious stones. The overt lesson of this encounter is to submit to Venus's "betre reule" (4.1264) in good time and thereby outwit contingency and misfortune. McGregor finds in the image a social dimension that extends beyond the injunction for women to love, with the promise of marriage and maternity. The key to it is the identification of the horse and rider as effectively one body under the control represented by the bridle. McGregor turns to contemporary manuals for keeping horses to establish that the composite rider and horse suffer from "myskeping"--a term that denotes inadequate care or mistreatment, apart from the ordinary dangers and injury that animals face. Such neglect, she observes, is roundly condemned in the literature and the culture at large. In this way, she suggests that the corollary to subjection, obedience, and domestication (symbolized by the bridle) is an ethic of care and nurture (symbolized by the halter). McGregor notes earlier that Gower diverges from his likely source, the thirteenth-century "Lai du Trot," by creating a story populated only by women. The "horse knave" inhabits the lower rung of this mysterious, uncanny female world, oppressed by the labor signified by the "twenty score / Of horse haltres and mo" (4.1356-57). In positing an alternative space of care and nurture, Gower's poem does not, therefore, eliminate the prospect of neglect. McGregor argues, "The maiden and her horse have submitted to the strictures of haltering, yet the domestic agreement is violated and both reap abuse rather than nurture (128). [RRE. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor McGregor, Francine. Published McGregor, Francine. "Bridling at Halters: Equine Bodies and Double Binds in John Gower's 'Tale of Rosiphelee.'" The Chaucer Review 60.1 (2025): 108-29. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bridling at Halters: Equine Bodies and Double Binds in John Gower's "Tale of Rosiphelee." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2025 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The Northwood family, prominent landholders in east Kent, may have been related to Gower through the female line. The article as its title suggests lays out the generational family, as presented in London, British Library MS Additional 75889, a chronicle roll related to the manor of Thurnham, in Kent. The roll covers the period early to late 1380s, when it was transcribed. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor L. B. L. [Lambert B. Larking]. Published L. B. L. [Lambert B. Larking]. "Genealogical Notices of the Northwoods." Archaeologia Cantiana 2 (1859): 9-42. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Genealogical Notices of the Northwoods. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1859 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Larking translates from Latin and Anglo-Norman French the legal documents related to the case of the underage heir William de Septvans the younger, "evidently a youth of weak mind and reckless habits" (125), whose father's lands in Kent (including the manor of Aldington) were held of Edward III "in capite," and "alienated" into "the hands of most unscrupulous and crafty plunderers," one of whom was John Gower. Also translated is an excerpt from Froissart, describing the capture of the Count d'Eu and Guisnes, Constable of France, and the Count de Tancarville in 1346. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor L. B. L. [Lambert B. Larking]. Published L. B. L. [Lambert B. Larking]. "'Probatio Aetatis' of William de Septvans, from the Surrenden Collection." Archaeologia Cantiana 1 (1858): 124-36. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Probatio Aetatis" of William de Septvans, from the Surrenden Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1858 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Sobecki's essay is "a response" to the others in this cluster of Speculum essays--hence its concerns on arguments. pro and con, with Adam Pinkhurst as Chaucer's "Adam scriveyn" (Sobecki is not convinced), and so are largely extraneous to Gower. He does reprint Linne Mooney's Fig. 2, the portion of Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.2 fol. 9ra (791), and comments interestingly that this manuscript "has clear Westminster connections" and may point to a circle of Westminster scribes, with scribes A, B (if not Pinkhurst), and D perhaps belonging to Anglicana-specialized clerks working in Westminster Hall, that is, Chancery, Exchequer, the central law courts" (804). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sobecki, Sebastian. Published Sobecki, Sebastian. "Quo vadis, Adam Pinkhurst? Scripts, Scribes, and the Limits of Paleography: A Response Essay." Speculum 99.3 (2024): 780-804. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Quo vadis, Adam Pinkhurst? Scripts, Scribes, and the Limits of Paleography: A Response Essay. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Smith's essay, while arguably the most technical in this cluster of "Speculum" essays, is also of foremost importance. Citing conclusions drawn in his many earlier publications addressing the language of "Confessio" manuscripts, Smith points out the continuity of distinctively "Gowerian" spelling and its close association with scribes "B," "D," and "Delta" (Doyle and Parkes' terminology), close enough to posit a unique "scripta"--"a prototypical usage 'characteristic of particular discourses and transmitted through the activities of particular communities of practice'" (778). Special attention is paid to MSS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Fairfax 3, San Marino CA, Huntington Library EL 26 A.17 (olim Stafford). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Smith, Jeremy J. Published Smith, Jeremy J. "On 'Standard' Written English in the Later Middle Ages." Speculum 99.3 (2024): 762-79. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource On "Standard" Written English in the Later Middle Ages. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review O'Byrne's study is of the Anglo-Irish scribe Nicholas Bellewe (1423-74), who signed his work, irrefutably establishing identity. Bellewe isn't known to have copied MSS of Gower (whom O'Byrne does not mention) but he did produce both legal and literary documents using the different hands appropriate to each type. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor O'Byrne, Theresa. Published O'Byrne, Theresa. "Bilingual, Bitextual Bellewe: A Case Study of Paleographical Code-Switching in Late Medieval English-Controlled Ireland. Speculum 99.3 (2024): 744-61. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bilingual, Bitextual Bellewe: A Case Study of Paleographical Code-Switching in Late Medieval English-Controlled Ireland. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Da Rold's concern is to describe the training culture that produced scribal techniques, and to make a case for the use of scribal idiosyncrasies, or "quirks," as helpful in identifying hands, manuscript to manuscript. Her brief mention of Trinity College MS R.3.2, "Confessio Amantis," focuses on Hoccleve's slight contribution "in mixed script" (728). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Da Rold, Orietta. Published Da Rold, Orietta. "Medieval Clerical Culture: The Sociology of Scripts and the Significance of Scribal Quirks." Speculum 99.3 (2024): 713-43. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Medieval Clerical Culture: The Sociology of Scripts and the Significance of Scribal Quirks. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Mooney discusses comparatively some distinctive letter forms in MSS Hengwrt and Ellesmere of the "Canterbury Tales," and in Trinity College R.3.2, the "Confessio Amantis," choosing for illustration a section of fol. 9ra of the latter to support an observation that "the spaces between lines in the Gower are more similar to the oath [of Adam Pinkhurst in the London Common Paper] than in the other two (702). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Mooney, Linne R. Published Mooney, Linne R. "Reexamining the Evidence Regarding Adam Pinkhurst, Scrivener." Speculum 99.3 (2024): 697-712. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reexamining the Evidence Regarding Adam Pinkhurst, Scrivener. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review As his title suggests, Horobin's essay concerns methodology; no mention of Gower. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Horobin, Simon. Published Horobin, Simon. "Identifying Scribal Hands: Principles and Problems." Speculum 99.3 (2024): 688-96. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Identifying Scribal Hands: Principles and Problems. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Kerby-Fulton's essay serves as an introduction to a cluster of essays, commenting on each of the essays to come. Thus she mentions, rather than discusses, Scribe B's "brief stint" in Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.2, and Doyle and Parkes' Scribe D (the "warhorse of Gower copying") and Scribe E, whom Doyle and Parkes concluded was Thomas Hoccleve. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. Published Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. "Adam Pinkhurst and the Baffled Jury: Assessing Scribal Identifications within the Margin of Error." Speculum 99.3 (2024): 664-87. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Adam Pinkhurst and the Baffled Jury: Assessing Scribal Identifications within the Margin of Error. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The title refers to a cluster of essays in this issue of "Speculum," devoted to re-assessing the identification of Adam Pinkhurst as "Adam Scriveyn," by Linne Mooney in 2004. Kerby-Fulton provides a brief introduction, and hers is the first essay in the cluster. Because Mooney's still-controversial essay began with an earlier study by A. I. Doyle and Malcolm Parkes of multiple scribal hands in a manuscript of the "Confessio Amantis," one of whom (Doyle and Parkes' "Scribe B") Mooney judged to be Pinkhurst, all of the essays in the cluster touch upon scribes copying Gower's work to one degree or another, although the Gower portion of these essays receives very little attention. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1. For brief treatment of each essay in the cluster, search for Speculum 99.3 in the Search by Character-String box] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. Published Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. "Communities of Practice: New Methodological Approaches to Adam Pinkhurst and Chaucer's Earliest Scribes." Speculum 99.3 (2024): 664-804. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Communities of Practice: New Methodological Approaches to Adam Pinkhurst and Chaucer's Earliest Scribes. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Rather surprisingly, given the number of manuscripts of Gower's work, he receives scant mention here--perhaps because those who copied his poems were fully employed? It is interesting to read that "Scribe D" (Doyle and Parkes' identification and terminology), named John Marchaunt by Linne Mooney and Estelle Stubbs, "worked alongside Hoccleve himself on the Trinity Gower," i.e., Cambridge, Trinity College R.3.2 (101, and see also 132), an unexpected emphasis given how small Hoccleve's stint was in that manuscript. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. Published Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021 Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Green takes up the problem of the purpose of Book VII often raised by readers of the 'Confessio' (including Tamara O'Callaghan, M.A. Manzalaoui, Elizabeth Porter, Seb Falk, and--obliquely--Siân Echard), and argues vigorously that we are in fact the problem, not Gower's text: "It is precisely in the alienness of the material that we perceive of as dull in which me might attempt instead to see medieval textual productions of the once-live objects that informed medieval subjectivities; it is in the boring that we might gain insight into the fundamental differences between our own modes of being and theirs" (138). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Green, William. Published Green, William. "Gower and the Heavens: the 'Dull' and the Divine in 'Confessio Amantis'." In William Green, Daniel Helbert, and Noëlle Phillips, eds. Textual Traditions and Medieval Literary Culture: Essays in Honour of Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2025), pp. 133-51. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and the Heavens: the "Dull" and the Divine in "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2025 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Giancarlo claims a close connection between the developing nature of parliament as a body at once "of the people" but with a distinct Pentecostal element (esp. 52), thus offering a functional re-interpretation of "Vox populi, vox dei" that becomes a major motif throughout the book. He variously expands and contracts this construct of parliament to characterize the development of poetry from the thirteenth century, although poets of the fourteenth occupy him primarily. He treats Gower in his third chapter (90-128), focusing largely on the second part of the "Mirour de l'Omme" and the "Cronica Tripertita," with a brief coda on several parliaments' appearances in the "Confessio Amantis." The "Septvauns Affair" becomes the lens through which Giancarlo characterizes the MO Part II--the "Devil's parliament"--and the CrT (the three sections are described as parliaments of different sorts); going further, he finds evidence of an overriding "tension" in Gower's writing, an insecurity about place (social, national, moral) and voice that mirrors parliamentary anxiety in the years between the depositions of Edward II and Richard II. "As the 'Mirour' and the 'Cronica' demonstrate, from the start of his career to the end of it, Gower represented a collective voice in his poetry that bore a complicated relation to the specifically parliamentary tropes of his contemporary social environment. It was not just the problems of 'kingship,' but the conflicted role of parliament and 'parlement,' which stand at the formal base of the poet's efforts to speak" (125). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Giancarlo, Matthew. Published Giancarlo, Matthew. Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme Cronica Tripertita Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower features in chapter 4, "Monsters and Shapeshifters: The Hybrid Body in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'" (123-153). Gasse's interest in the CA is subordinate to her larger set of claims regarding the essential "hybridity" of the human body, an entity ever capable of transformation, especially via age and/or disability. She considers the tales of "Florent," focusing on the "loathly lady" figure (125-26), "Cambises" in Book VII, who flays a judge, covers a chair with his skin, and makes his son succeed him in office, and sit upon the chair (127), "Albinus and Rosemund" (127-28), which reveals "the monstrous presence of Gurmond" (128), and "the most disturbing alteration of the human form," the "murder of Itys by his mother Procne" (129), in the "Tale of Tereus," "a horror story on multiple levels" (129). Gasse touches briefly upon the tales of Pygmalion, Medusa, the Minotaur, Sirens, centaurs ("the male counterpart to the hybrid female body of the Siren" [133]), leading to very brief commentary on the "Wedding of Pirithous" and "Education of Achilles" (134-35). There follows a sketch of "the Hybrid Masculine Body," covering tales that lead to the conclusion that: "Characters such as Hercules, Nessus, Achelons, and Nectanabus suggest the strengths and the limits of the sexualized and aggressive male body. Unlike the neutered Nebuchadnezzar the ox who is deprived of this aspect of his manhood, these four are all powerful men driven by animalistic heterosexual desire to compete with other males even to the point of violence over the right to mate with a female" (139). Sections on "the Hybrid Gendered Body," the "Hybrid Feminine Body," and the "Hybrid Disabled Body: Tiresias" follow, leading to the conclusion that "Much of Gower's treatment of the malleable human form is to be expected for a late fourteenth-century English text . . . variations on the human body--the aged body, the female body, the prepubescent body, the peasant body, the clerical body, the body missing some of its functioning parts, the body in which the animal is too prominent, the heterosexually impotent body, the body reduced to a small pile of ash and bone, the body made inanimate object, made food, made excrement--are all indicators of cultural anxiety and disability of one sort or another as hybrid examples of the reduced human form" (152). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gasse, Rosanne P. Published Gasse, Rosanne P. Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England. Cham, Switz.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Echard's book is an extended answer to a question she asks on page 17: "what does it mean to reproduce a medieval author (or text) in 'his own shape and likeness'?" Gower figures in chapter 3, "Autocratic Antiquaries: Gower on Gower"--in this case, George Granville Leveson-Gower, (1786-1861), who produced the Roxburghe Club edition of British Library MS 59495 (olim Trentham), on John Gower the poet (97-98). Echard uses the Roxburghe edition, and to a lesser degree that of G. C. Macaulay, to center a thorough history of Gower's translation from manuscript to print--a history that covers editions by Caxton, Berthelette, and the most modern (e.g., Russell Peck's student edition based on Macaulay). In the process she makes a number of vital points directly responsible for how Gower has been understood for five centuries. She notes that "as soon as he enters the age of print, Gower's status as a multilingual poet disappears" (99), and illustrates how the process begins with Caxton and Berthelette (100-102), although Gower's tomb, with its three volumes, kept the multilingualism prominent into the nineteenth century, lending him "a monumentalism as much literal as literary" (102). Proceeding chronologically, Echard discusses Elizabeth Cooper, John Henry Todd (whose 1810 selective edition included an engraving of the tomb), and--especially--the Roxburghe edition in important detail, clarifying that Leveson-Gower had a handwritten copy made of the manuscript, and this--not the manuscript--was the copy-text for his 1818 edition (117). A major concern of Echard's throughout is "the facsimile impulse," linked "to the emphasis on the physical object over its textual content" (118). Leveson-Gower, Echard makes clear, saw the manuscript as a totem of the family and social class the Roxburghe Club members represented--and in that sense the poet, too (122). The chapter concludes with the four-volume edition of Macaulay who, by dividing Gower's work into separate volumes by language, reflects "the same tendency to concentrate on Gower's English . . . traced in this chapter from the fifteenth century onward" (123). Macaulay's decisions impacted how Gower has been seen in modern times in another way, perhaps more important: "It was Macaulay who divided the manuscripts of the 'Confessio' into three recensions, based on the degree to which they had shifted from Ricardian to Henrician sympathies, and it was Macaulay who decided that the Henrician version should be considered Gower's last word" (124). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân, Published Echard, Siân, "Aristocratic Antiquaries: Gower on Gower." In Siân Echard, ed. Printing the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 97-205. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translation Manuscripts and Textual Studies Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Aristocratic Antiquaries: Gower on Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Dwyer, Seamus. Published Dwyer, Seamus. "Bastard Hands: Fifteenth-Century Scripts and the Processes of Medieval Making." Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 118.3 (2024): 315–47. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Review Dwyer investigates scribal use of "bastard" as a descriptor for, among other things, script types (e.g., "bastard anglicana"), examining for comparison other "made/crafted" objects--"swords, saddles, wine, food recipes" (315) to which "bastard" was applied, objects made from "intermingled parts that achieve specific utilitarian ends" (325). He concludes that like these, script was considered a commodity, and that "bastard" as applied to script meant an adjudication of high and low styles, mixing "calligraphic features" with less formal script, suited to individual customers--"a process of making that purposefully intermingles elements of efficiency and restraint with elements of care and refinement that yield an elevated yet accessible commodity" (328). Dwyer uses manuscripts of the "Confessio Amantis" ("a manifestly bastard thing," 329), focusing first on the "anglicana formata" of "Scribe D" (Doyle and Parkes' identification and terminology) in Oxford, Christ College 148 [sic] (337, typo for Christ Church) to illustrate and support his argument that "combining lofty matters with 'lusty' ones, and Latin with vernacular, produces a bastard textual object: one that is plainly accessible yet elevated" (333.) He thus connects Gower's "middel weie" with scribal practice: "poetry more solidly with bookmaking" (334). He next examines the hand of Cambridge, St. John's College B.12, "a rare example of an early fifteenth-century 'Confessio' potentially produced outside of London" (341), finding there a "bastard" script that "participates dynamically in the bastard project of Gower's poetry" (344)--i.e., because Gower's subject is Love, at once divine and corporeal. Ultimately, Dwyer draws the conclusion that "literary readings are enhanced by analyzing script. Likewise, commonly used scripts can be shown to have surprising literary qualities that are illuminated in certain poetic milieux" (346). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bastard Hands: Fifteenth-Century Scripts and the Processes of Medieval Making. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Cowdery is aware that the six writers he chooses to study here--Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Skelton, Wyatt--"have been received as the early foundation of a high-prestige English literary tradition" (13), and he seeks an original approach to them via the twin elements of his title, "matter" and "making." While the latter is clear enough--it's the writing--the former takes several shapes, i.e., "this book will follow Aristotle in arguing that 'literary matter' is . . . a relative term . . .that designates whatever a given text was understood to be made of" (6), i.e., its "source," one might say. Cowdery argues that "late medieval and early modern court poets followed the same basic procedure" when composing: "(1) the use of pre-existing matter and (2) the remaking of that matter into some new form" (10-11). He applies these definitions to Gower in chapter 2, "Gower and the Crying Voice" (52-82). Gower's habit was to work from the rhetorical figures "figura," "distinction" ("figura" expanded), and "exemplum," all of which are described and illustrated (61-64); Gower's purpose is to "draw out of these materials a set of structural principles, which then serve as the framework for an allegorical and exegetical elaboration upon some moral truth" (64). As many have noted, Gower's exegeses don't always cohere rationally, locus to locus, and so, Cowdery argues, Gower "pursues feeling alongside thought," seeking "to foster an affective connection between the reader and the text": "the voice of a literary character who cries out for mercy" (67). This voice has a special claim on the power of God (69) and is well exemplified in the "Tale of Constantine and Sylvester"--but although "the crying voice" is "a very powerful ethical tool," it too doesn't always seem to work (70-72). Such inconsistencies can be read as allegories, Cowdery asserts, reading the "Tale of Tereus" as just such an allegory critical of Richard II: a superimposition of a "microcosm of erotic greed onto the macrocosm of economic and social greed" (73). For Cowdery, the tale (which he discusses at length) is akin to political protest: "Philomela's woven cry for pity becomes an act of protest speech, and Procne's plot for personal revenge is reimagined as the lead-up to a putsch" (75). But "Tereus" also makes his point, that the matter of the tale can be remade to "allow us to hear the voices of those we cannot hear in our day-to-day lives" (76), as exemplified by Philomela's weaving; and its making "around those voices" (77) is evident throughout his work. Gower's position as himself/as poet at the conclusion of the CA presents the same crying, petitioning stance to Henry (78), Cowdery says--though perhaps here mixing up monarchs and poems, Richard with Henry, the CA with "In Praise of Peace"? Gower did not attempt to "reinvent his materials," Cowdery concludes, "but to draw out what is notable from within them" (82), thereby making something new. Despite several slips of fact (i.e., Gower was not "granted a right to live within the priory precincts of St. Mary Overie"--rather, he sub-let a house there; the priory had no "active scriptorium"; there is no evidence that Gower "once had been a lawyer" [57-58]; the confusion of monarchs, as noted above), and the difficulty of stretching a single thesis to fit six disparate poets across two centuries, Cowdery on Gower provokes thought. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cowdery, Taylor. Published Cowdery, Taylor. Matter and Making in Early English Poetry: Literary Production from Chaucer to Sidney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis In Praise of Peace Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Matter and Making in Early English Poetry: Literary Production from Chaucer to Sidney. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Constituting chapter 17 in the volume, this addresses the question "how do women 'mean' in these literary contexts [Chaucer and Gower as "pan-European" poets engaged with multi-lingual sources]" (342). The plan of the article indicates its extremely ambitious range: "[it] reviews Chaucer's key poetic works and genres ("The Canterbury Tales," "Troilus and Criseyde," and the three major dream visions) and Gower's major works (the "Confessio Amantis," "Vox Clamantis," "Mirour de l'Omme," and "Cinkante Balades"), and concludes with a comparative analysis of major female figures that both Chaucer and Gower portray (Dido, Medea, Constance, the 'loathly lady,' and Alcyone)" (342). Common to both poets is a "discourse [that] depicts women and femininity as subordinated to masculine hermeneutic needs" through a focus on "women's meaning in ethical terms," a meaning that is generally reductive, seeing femininity . . . in binary terms as 'good'/'bad'" (343). While Gower is famously known as "moral," Chaucer is equally concerned with morals and ethics (354), albeit more "play[fully]" than Gower (369). In VC and MO Gower adhered to the simplistic archetype of women as temptresses (VC) (356-57), or framed them as Eve or Mary (MO) (358-59). In the CA, where almost every story exemplifies a Deadly Sin, he tends to erase "the voices and agency" of women characters, compared to their sources (356). In CB, women speakers are reduced to already-established "signifiers" such as the woman betrayed (357-58). Per Bridges, only Gower's Medea is a "more complex construction" than her counterpart in Chaucer, as her varied life choices can't always be explained in terms of "conventional femininity and its morals" (363). By contrast, Chaucer truncated the story of Medea in his "Legend of Good Women," reducing her life journey to exemplify the innocent woman abandoned (362). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bridges, Venetia. Published Bridges, Venetia. "Chaucer and Gower." In Corinne Saunders and Diane Watt, eds. Women and Medieval Literary Culture from the Early Middle Ages to the Fifteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. 342-376. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Vox Clamantis Mirour de l'Omme Cinkante Balades Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer and Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article concerns the bedchamber scene in Shakespeare's "Cymbeline" 2.2, specifically Innogen's reading the "Tale of Tereus" (2.2.45) just before she falls asleep and Giacomo emerges from a trunk to spy on her. The Ovidian story describes a rape, and Giacomo's action is a kind of rape although physical touching does not occur. Boecker addresses two previous deficiencies in scholarship on Innogen's reading: the exclusive focus on the rapist mind of Giacomo, at the expense of Innogen's mind in the act of reading, reducing her to a passive victim (416); and the assumption that Innogen's book must be Ovid's "Metamorphoses" (418). For Shakespeare and his audience, Boecker argues, the "Tale of Tereus" included a tradition of English Ovidiana where Procne and Philomela also figure prominently, and which offer insight into the consciousness of Innogen, her active "non-conformism" (417), and the early modern women poets who embraced the tale (418-19). Thus, Innogen's book is better understood as an "amalgam" of Ovid and four English intertexts: Chaucer, Gower, George Gascoigne, and George Pettie (419). Gower's "Tale of Tereus" is told as an exemplum against "ravine," a violent branch of avarice including rape (422). In its equal focus on Procne and Philomela, Gower's version provided Innogen with a model of female "agency" against oppression by the male (422). Tereus mutilates Philomela only after she has threatened to tell the world of his crime (423). Not only does Procne carry out a gruesome revenge on Tereus, but even as a bird she continues to broadcast his perfidy (423). Gower's version also invokes the political theory of Giles of Rome whereby a virtuous monarch is like a faithful husband. This resonates with Innogen's insight that if Posthumus is unfaithful to her, which as a faithful wife she does not believe, he has also "forgot Britain" (424). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Boecker, Bettina. Published Boecker, Bettina. "'The Tale of Tereus' and the Story of Procne: Innogen's Bedside Reading." Shakespeare 20.3 (2024): 415-32. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "The Tale of Tereus" and the Story of Procne: Innogen's Bedside Reading. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Blatt uses "data" to study "hundreds of English wills written between 1400 and 1499 to evaluate descriptive trends employed by book owners of the late Middle Ages that clarify how they conceptualized miscellanies" (683). One will, that of Elizabeth Childrey Kyngeston Findern (d. 1463), records the potential passing of her "boke called Gower" to her son Thomas, an ardent Lancastrian supporter who lost his head after the battle of Hexham in 1464 (685). Blatt considers, without entirely resolving, whether the "boke called Gower" might be the miscellany now known as the Findern manuscript, which contains "excerpts from John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' alongside some of Chaucer's short poems and works by Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, and others" (683). Blatt suggests as possibilities for the description in the will (which she prints in full, as Appendix A, 696-97) that the "boke called Gower" could indeed be a multitext manuscript and mark the first documentary appearance of the Findern manuscript. It is also possible that the "boke called Gower" represents only a fascicle that was, after its distribution following Kyngeston's death, added to and bound with others to fashion the multitext Findern manuscript" (694). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Blatt, Heather. Published Blatt, Heather. "Describing Miscellanies in Late Medieval English Wills." The Huntington Library Quarterly 85 (2022): 683-704. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Describing Miscellanies in Late Medieval English Wills. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Batkie is concerned to identify Gower as a unique kind of history-writer, in whose work the structuring and affect ('ordinatio' and 'ductus,' in her terms here) "of the poetic line become entangled with resistance to political desire, and they generate a field in which an obverse aesthetic takes over from chronological distance or propagandistic control--the two other modes we often find structuring narrative histories" (113). For examples of these latter approaches she discusses, respectively, Thomas Walsingham's "Monasterii St. Albani" --at length--Richard Maidstone's "Concordia." Leveraging the affective power of anaphora particularly (with all its Ovidian overtones), Gower, Batkie argues, draws attention to real events while also underscoring the uncertainty inherent in living through them: "In the 'Visio,' Gower's vision is intentionally fragmented, illuminating not a stable political landscape but one that is--and always has been--unreliable" (132). For Batkie, uncertainty (unreliability) of this kind should be invoked more often in regard to Gower, "particularly as we consider the ways in which he imagines his historical narrative of the past contributing to and shaping the political present" (132). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Batkie, Stephanie L. Published Batkie, Stephanie L. "Gower's Allusive Forms: Anaphora and Political Desire in the 'Visio Anglie'." In William Green, Daniel Helbert, and Noëlle Phillips, ed. Textual Traditions and Medieval Literary Culture: Essays in Honour of Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2025). Pp. 108-32. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Allusive Forms: Anaphora and Political Desire in the "Visio Anglie." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2025 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Archibald, Elizabeth. Published Archibald, Elizabeth. Incest and the Medieval Imagination. Oxford: Clarendon, 2001. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review Essentially, Archibald's study is a taxonomy of variations on the motif of incest in medieval literature, with attention to mother-son, father-daughter, and sibling sexual relations, contextualized with classical and biblical backgrounds, and complex cultural understandings (note the plural) of incest that broaden beyond the fundamental notion of "intercourse between blood relatives" (6) to include in-laws, god-parents, and other social and religious relations in medieval Christian communities. Gower has a minor but sustained presence throughout, including a possibly surprising appearance in Archibald's conclusion. Archibald comments that Gower's "mixed views on incest laws" (25), found at the opening of Book 8 of the "Confessio Amantis," reflect--but notably modify--Augustine's idea that consanguinity in marriage was necessary to populate the earth soon after it was created and that instinctive revulsion successfully curbed it over time; Gower, Archibald tells us, accepts the initial necessity of familial incest, but papal prohibition is the curb for him. Archibald also observes that Gower's Dame Incest in "Mirour de l'Omme" entails a concept broader than "what we would expect" (39), emphasizing sex between monks and nuns as incestuous, along with sex within nuclear families. In a portion of her chapter on "The Classical Legacy," Archibald focuses on medieval adaptations of Ovidian narratives, mentioning Chaucer's possible "gibe" (80) at Gower in the "Man of Law's Prologue" and assessing Gower's "Tale of Canace and Machaire." She follows A. C. Spearing (1993) in finding the love between these siblings to be sympathetic but paradoxical--both natural and unnatural, and an example of the "dangerous power of love" (83). Modern readers, Archibald surmises, may see it as "a rare instance of sibling love presented in a fairly positive light, as a mutual and genuine passion, though also a fatal one" (83-84). For Archibald, Gower's account of Philomena "seems to be interested not so much in incest [even though Tereus is Philomena's brother-in-law] as in the fact that Tereus is already married, and that Philomena is a virgin" (90), emphases also evident in the "Ovide moralisé," Chaucer, and Lydgate. Following her own 1991 study of the story of Apollonius of Tyre, Archibald recounts that Gower's version of the story is "an exception" to the tradition in that he "emphasizes the strong attraction" between Apollonius and Thaise in their recognition scene, and that Gower "suggests that it would be quite natural for an unrecognized father and daughter to feel drawn to each other" (98-99), repeating this claim verbatim later in her study (186). Here, as in his account of Canace and Machaire, "Gower uses incest to represent love out of control" (80), detrimental to the common good but not unnatural or especially perverse, as it is often represented elsewhere. Indeed, at the close of her study, Archibald loosely aligns Gower's view of Apollonius's attraction to Thaise with the "immaculate 'incest' of Mary and her Father/Brother/Son in the salvation of mankind" (244). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Incest and the Medieval Imagination. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Alder and Strohm explore the complexities of medieval understandings and experiences of time, clearly and succinctly addressing various notions of time and related topics (e.g., aging, time-keeping, planetary motion, eternity, the end of time) as reflected in medieval material objects as well as philosophy and literature. In a section on "Timescapes" the authors examine time as a theme and device in works by Julian of Norwich, Margery of Kempe, and Thomas Usk. Gower and his works are considered, more briefly, in three separate sections. One on "Allegorical Time" addresses Lachesis in "Confessio Amantis," Book 4, and the "erroneous sense of time as recoverable" (138) entailed in "borwe" at 4.8-10. The second, on "The Ages of Humankind," includes remarks on the "incompatibility" of old age and idealized love in CA and observes where Gower uses "nature-based analogies" (179) to distinguish between youth and age in the Latin opening of CA, Book 8, and, in "Henrici Quarti primus," to keep a "degree of philosophical distance from the malady [blindness] caused by old age" (181). In their closing section, "The End of Time," Adler and Strohm observe Gower's eschatological concern with time in Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the Prologue of CA, with its emphasis on decline and destruction derived from the Book of Daniel and exegetical tradition. Notably, this last concern is accompanied by a full-page, full-color reproduction of Nebuchadnezzar dreaming of the statue mentioned in Daniel and presented here as similar to Dante's "Old Man of Crete" (198). The illustration reproduces London, British Library, MS 3869, fol. 51. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Adler, Gillian. Strohm, Paul. Published Adler, Gillian, and Paul Strohm. Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life. Medieval Lives. London: Reaktion, 2023. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life. Medieval Lives. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Arguing that the "study of the apocalyptic in the English literature of the late fourteenth cannot boil down simply to the tracing of sources or to historicist (New and otherwise) readings of contemporary texts and artifacts," Hackbarth instead explores "the ways in which apocalyptic comes to be known" (6). He assesses several broad, perhaps incommensurate "centers of meaning--mortality, authority, confession, and textual permanence" (1)--and dedicates a chapter to each. Late-fourteenth-century English literary works--Gower's "Confessio Amantis," Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," Langland's "Piers Plowman," "Pearl," and "Cleannesse"--are among the many works Hackbarth considers, but he addresses them impressionistically, providing insights but little sustained analysis or convincing evidence about the works themselves. Remarking on the evils of Division in Gower's Prologue to his "Confessio Amantis," 957-1062, for example, Hackbarth claims generally, that "terms laid out by Gower are as apocalyptic as it gets" (62), but he establishes no clear connections when he associates Gower's discussion with Papal Schism (60) and Lollardy (63). Gower introduces his concern for a stylistic "middle weie" (Prologue, 17), Hackbarth tells us, "to make sure that readers stay interested enough to continue the chain of information into the future" (191), a strategy that Hackbarth associates, rather loosely, with apocalyptic authors. Hackbarth acknowledges that Gower's "middel weie" recalls both Horace and Augustine, but only after asserting, tendentiously, that "The very incorporation of multiple sources within a text promotes apocalypticism" (184). Moreover, "Meaning is fragile in an apocalyptic environment" (195), Hackbarth tells us, and "Apocalypticism demands that readers be vigilant and discerning," both offered as evidence of a "climate of apocalyptic concern with texts" (196) in late-medieval (and somewhat earlier) England. Further, "The apocalyptic sense prevalent in the period proves to be connected to literacy itself" (202), so that in Gower's Prologue "Writing . . . is something done out of a sense of duty, something that is done quite purposefully, yet something that requires experimentation, trying-out." This "contradiction," as Hackbarth labels it, is embodied in "Any Christian apocalypticism (particularly as it must be defined by a certainty in an end of daily life and aware that 'time shall be no more')" (213). Stringing together--and recurrently leaping among--literary experimentation, literacy, readerly engagement, multiple sources, lust and lore, vernacular writing, meaning itself, and a sense of an ending, Hackbarth seems to find the apocalyptic everywhere. Surprisingly, he does not mention Frank Kermode's landmark study of Christian apocalypticism and literature, "The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction" (1967). [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hackbarth, Steven A Published Hackbarth, Steven A. Apocalyptic Mentalities in Late-Medieval England. Ph.D. Dissertation. Marquette University, 2014. ii, 245 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International 76.04(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/411/. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Background and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Apocalyptic Mentalities in Late-Medieval England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In his dissertation, Stadolnik shows how "Middle English writers tested the capabilities of their vernacular, experimenting with new genres and styles of literary composition, as well as with discursive conventions and practices borrowed from nonliterary fields" (i), particularly the scientific discourses of medicine, alchemy, and astronomy. In his second chapter, "Gower's Bedside Manner" (pp. 78-117), Stadolnik assesses the frame of Gower's "Confessio Amantis" as a "confabulation" between Amans and Genius, a unique genre than draws from medical and confessional discourse, along with encyclopedic concerns. For a published version of this chapter, see Stadolnik's essay of the same title in New Medieval Literatures 17 (2017): 150-74. Author/Editor Author/Editor Stadolnik, Joseph. Published Stadolnik, Joseph. Subtle Arts: Practical Science and Middle English Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation. Yale University, 2017. vii, 294 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A78.11(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Subtle Arts: Practical Science and Middle English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor McMillan, Samuel F. Published McMillan, Samuel F. Medieval Authorship at Reason's End: The "Roman de la Rose"'s Legacy of Misrule. Ph.D. Dissertation. Pennsylvania State University, 2016. v, 324 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A80.05(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/rr171x20k. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Review McMillan argues "that Guillaume de Lorris's and Jean de Meun's 'Roman de la Rose' initiates a literary tradition that understands reason to be in tension with and even antithetical to imaginative writing" and serves as a "speculative domain" for writers such as Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Hoccleve. In differing ways, these writers "imitate, correct, and reimagine the narrative conditions and implications of Raison's repudiation," enabling them "to recognize, accept, document, and value the morally questionable, the ephemeral, the earthly" (iii). Tracing this development through later fifteenth-century poets (Hawes and Skelton), McMillan argues that this poetics of "counter-rationality" (285) leads eventually to the "passionate sublime" (286) of early modern English writing. Treating Gower, but only the "Confessio Amantis" (pp. 114-70), MacMillan structures his discussion in four parts. First, he establishes that Gower posits "two different presentations of authorship . . . at the beginning of Book I for his fictional self and for Amans," casting the "frame" of CA "as the story of a poet coming to appreciate and employ the imaginative capacities of a love that cannot be known by rule." Next, MacMillan "analyzes the mode of authorship embodied by Genius" and Genius's "poetic shortcomings" to offer imagination as an alternative to the futility of trying to unite passion and rationality." In his third section, McMillan addresses how Gower, in Book VII, presents "rhetoric as a rational aesthetic," an ideal, however, that he is himself either unable or unwanting to attain." In his fourth section, McMillan reads "the closing of Book VIII" as a "dramatic reimagination" of RR and a depiction of "poetry as incapable of effecting the regeneration of an audience's reason." Here, "[i]maginative composition functions as misruled desire, a sensual longing for a reason that can resurface only in the wake of the literary" (116-17). Gower, McMillan tells us, "may be above all a moral poet hoping to return rational order to a world turned upside down, but to accomplish this feat, to bring a measure of harmony to man and beast alike, he must invest readers with an intense love of the mundane by relying on a poetry founded in reason's other" (170). [MA] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Medieval Authorship at Reason's End: The "Roman de la Rose"'s Legacy of Misrule. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Knox, Philip. Published Knox, Philip.  The "Romance of the Rose" in Fourteenth-Century England. D.Phil. Dissertation. University of Oxford, 2015. v, 281 pp.; 10 illus. Dissertation Abstracts International C75.01. A redacted version (without illus.) is fully accessible via https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d55e2158-a9ee-4bf2-b8e4-98d7e0c6a598. Abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses International. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues and Literary Relations Confession Amantis Mirour de l'Omme Vox Clamantis Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz Minor Latin Poetry Review "This thesis traces the afterlife of the 'Romance of the Rose' in fourteenth-century England. Whether it was closely imitated or only faintly recalled, I argue that the 'Rose' exercised its influence on fourteenth-century English literature in two principal ways. Firstly, in the development of a self-reflexive focus on how meaning is produced and transmitted. Secondly, in a concern with how far the author's intentions can be recovered from a work, and to what extent the author must claim some responsibility for the meaning of a text after its release into the world of readers. In the 'Rose,' many of these issues are presented through the lens of a disordered erotic desire, and questions of licit and illicit textual and sexual pleasures loom large in the later responses. My investigation focuses on four English writers: William Langland, John Gower, the 'Gawain'-Poet, and Geoffrey Chaucer. In my final chapter I suggest that the Rose ceased to be a generative force in English literature in the fifteenth century, and I try to offer some explanations as to why" (i). Knox's assessment of the influence of the RR on Gower includes attention to the archer "portrait" and Latin texts that accompany it and to aspects of "Mirour de l'Omme," "Vox Clamantis," "Traitié pour les Amantz Marietz," and relations between Gower's late-life marriage and his "Est amor." Generally, however, Knox focuses on "Confessio Amantis" and ways that the "Rose" was Gower's "model" for treating Ovidian myth as "unallegorised narrative with an exemplary moral" while also investigating "the proliferation of plural--perhaps unwelcome--meanings" (118). In treating these concerns, Knox addresses various tales (e.g., Narcissus and Pygmalion, Arion and Orpheus, Iphis and Iante) and the disclosure of Amans as Gower at the end of the poem. For a broadly revised version of Knox's thesis, see his monograph, "The Romance of the Rose" and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature (2022). [MA] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The "Romance of the Rose" in Fourteenth-Century England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Stoyanoff, Jeffery G. Published Stoyanoff, Jeffery G. Bringing Frames into Focus: Reading Middle English Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation. Duquesne University, 2015. viii, 163 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A77/01(E). Fully accessible via https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/ and via ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Review In his dissertation, Stoyanoff exemplifies how Middle English writers use "generically-situated framing devices to play with readers' expectations and to open up their texts for a number of possible interpretations" (iv). He focuses on three types of framing device to show how they "control the presentation of the text while implicitly recognizing that such ornamentation cannot, ultimately, control interpretation": "the circular frame in John Gower's compilation, 'Confessio Amantis'; the episodic, memory-based frame of contemplative writing in Margery Kempe's 'Book'; and the narratorial frame accomplished through narratorial tags in 'The Romaunce of Sir Beves of Hamtoun" (v). For a published a version of Stoyanoff's discussion of Gower's "frame," see his "Beginnings and Endings: Narrative Framing in 'Confessio Amantis'." South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015), pp. 52-64. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bringing Frames into Focus: Reading Middle English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Orton, Daniel. Published Orton, Daniel.  Theories of Poetry, 1256-1400. D.Phil. Dissertation. University of Oxford, 2019. v, 282 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International C83.06(E). Freely accessible at https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:dfc9eb17-71d5-425f-a7b1-2e835310e322; abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Review "This thesis explores some submerged aspects of the history of the theory of poetry in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, examining the circumstantial factors motivating its intellectual, religious, and moral developments. Starting with the early university men, it argues that the important poetic initiatives of scholastic writers, specifically, Roger Bacon, anticipated the literary advancements and innovative claims conventionally ascribed to the poetic theories of the Italian humanists at the turn of the century. It tracks these theoretical developments and ideas as they move through the exuberant affirmations of poetry made by Albertino Mussato and into the vernacular works of the English writers, John Gower [in the "Confessio Amantis"] and Geoffrey Chaucer [in "The House of Fame"], who ruthlessly interrogate the instability of their own art and explore the uncertainties of literary reception and transmission. Here, the progressive expansion of the status and power of poetic discourse, which had been fought for and won by previous generations of theorists, is conclusively and soundly rejected" (ii). In his chapter on Gower (pp. 109-66), Orton argues that the poet questions poetry's ability to convey meaning reliably: "Gower abandons the radical confidence of the earlier humanist writers . . . in order to adopt a distinctly sceptical view of the power of poetic discourse. Although he demonstrates a strong belief in the transformative potential and moral benefit of his art, he appears equally suspicious of its ability to achieve anything with any certainty. That poetry could be both paralytically futile and morally valuable represents an important self-ironizing tension that drives the 'Confessio' forward . . . , typical of Gower's desire to thoroughly excise all interpretative stability from his poem. Because the poetic experience represented a crisis of certainty for the reader, there was the very real--and necessary--danger that the dark matter of poetry might remain entirely impenetrable" (116). Orton explores and exemplifies how this "self-ironizing tension" operates in a complex network of ways in CA, large and small, formal and stylistic, overt and submerged. As a "compilatio," CA poses Ovidian hermeneutical variety without resolution, Orton tells us; its "Latin apparatus serves to further impede the efforts of readers to wrest singular meaning from the poem" (123), and its recurrent instances of rhyme riche produce a "dominant effect of disorientation" (127). For Orton, multiple prologues in the poem--especially the main Prologue and the prologue to Book I--pose differing views of what poetry can and should do, while the exchanges between Amans and Genius anatomize "complex range of psychological responses to narrative poetry." Their exchanges constitute a "psychomachia" that "explores the tangled interactions of the internal faculties of the soul, observing both the beneficial and potentially detrimental impact of literary material" (136), focusing attention on how "the evidential status of narrative poetry" is beyond the understanding of individual readers/listeners embodied in Amans (147). Individual narratives in CA, for Orton, contribute to or evince the destabilization of single or simple outlooks on meaning: the paired tales that open Book IV (Aeneas and Dido; Ulysses and Penelope), for example, pose alternative kinds of readers or reading, leading Orton to suggest that, in this light, "there were no texts and no authors, and instead only readers" (147). Similarly, Genius's description of the trial of Cataline in Book VII expresses general wariness about the dangerous power of "affective discourse" (152), prompting Orton to connect this wariness with the overall "blandness" of Gower's style (154); the lack of a narrated resolution to Cataline's trial, Orton tells us, leaves readers to formulate their own conclusions. Orton weaves these and other arguments and evidence in ways that are hard to capture here fully, and he situates them in various rhetorical, exegetical, and psychological contexts, often aligned with the Aristotelian moral philosophy of Giles of Rome and John Trevisa, also difficult to summarize briefly. Notably, Orton punctuates this intricate discussion with resounding, provocative assertions about Gower and his work: the CA "is, in the end, a bleak assessment of the moral utility of poetry" (159); Gower was, for Chaucer, a "moral" poet because "moral poetry was not moralizing poetry, it was darkly uncertain, rich in diversity, and laden with a satirical force that enacted itself on the reader" (163); for Gower, "Arion was a humanist fantasy, a parody of the authoritative and divinely inspired 'poeta theologus,' at least as he perceived it" (164). [MA] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Theories of Poetry, 1256-1400. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Schreiber's dissertation comprises four studies on the place and function of Venus in individual Middle English narratives--one each on Gower's "Confessio Amantis," Lydgate's "Temple of Glas," Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid," and the "Kingis Quair"--prefaced by a survey of the goddess in medieval mythographic tradition. Each of these stands on its own but Schreiber throws up his hands when he thinks about pulling them together in his conclusion: "the poetic values of the goddess are most difficult to delineate, and thus, I suggest, a summary of the 'figurae' of Venus would entail restatement of the analyses which I have already given" (140). The plural "figurae"/"figures" mentioned here might well have appeared in the title of Schreiber's dissertation, as he states and reiterates Venus's variety and ambiguities throughout--description and source study rather than synthesis. In his discussion of the CA Schreiber grounds an argument for the unity of Gower's work--which he considers "well unified"; its "vision consistent" (35)--upon the idea that Amans undergoes "self-discovery through the process of confession," with Venus playing a role "much like Lady Philosophy who told Boethius that he had forgotten his true identity" (48), even while she is "highly ambiguous" (49). As with Venus, Schrieber says, "we are also unsure of the true character of her priest Genius" (50). Surveying the double (or triple) nature of Venus and similar background to Genius in medieval philosophy and "philosophical poetry" (John Scotus Erigena, Alain de Lille, Bernardus Silvestris, the "Roman de la Rose," and more), Schreiber suggests that Amans' eventual self-recognition and progress from lower to higher love are signified in Book VIII, when Venus re-appears with her mirror, with its multiple "traditional functions"; she then disappears again because she does not "participate in the new dispensation, wherein understanding becomes wisdom only by the infusion of divine charity. Instead, she is . . . Scotus' 'bonae ac naturales virtues' and Bernardus' 'musica mundana,' the good Venus of Alan's 'De planctu' who represents the proper exercise of man's natural virtues in the economy of Creation" (60-61). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Schreiber, Earl George. Published Schreiber, Earl George. "The Figure of Venus in Late Middle English Poetry." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Illinois, 1969. Dissertation Abstracts International 31 (1970): 767A. Full-text available at ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Figure of Venus in Late Middle English Poetry. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1969 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Owen surveys the presence of Caesar in English literature from the early fourteenth century through Shakespeare, with particular attention to drama, including some continental works. His opening survey of medieval materials is largely taxonomic and descriptive, background material for analysis of early modern references and depictions in plays, locating references and allusions to Caesar in romances, chronicles, lists of the Nine Worthies, and moral anecdotes. His brief treatment of Gower's works (pp. 31-36) falls appropriately into the latter grouping, nested with discussions of Chaucer's, Hoccleve's, and (most extensively) Lydgate's works. For Gower, Owen tells us, Caesar "is an ideal representing various positive moral qualities worthy of emulation. No blemishes or faults are mentioned. Caesar is symbolic of the great world leader, and Gower uses him as a pattern for others . . . rather than presenting him as a complete human being" (31-2): he is idealized as a "noble ruler" of Rome in the Prologue to the "Confessio Amantis," a skillful orator in Book VII.1597 and 1615, generous and of subtle discernment in the CA accounts of "Julius and the Poor Knight" and "Cesar and the Flatterers," Book VII.2061ff. and 2449ff., respectively. Owen closes this tally by observing where Gower includes Caesar with other ancient rulers as reminders of the passing of worldly kings and kingdoms in advice given to Richard (twice in "Vox Clamantis") and to Henry ("In Praise of Peace"). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Owen, Trevor Allen. Published Owen, Trevor Allen. "Julius Caesar in English Literature from Chaucer through the Renaissance." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Minnesota, 1966. Dissertation Abstracts International 27 (1967): 3847A. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Julius Caesar in English Literature from Chaucer through the Renaissance. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1966 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yeager begins by observing several scholarly comments on composition, style and the place of marriage in thought, philosophy and poetry--all written about Spenser but which equally could apply to Gower. Yeager's argument throughout this essay is that there are parallels between Gower and Spenser's work which have hitherto been neglected, perhaps unsurprisingly given that Spenser only refers to Gower once, and Gower has only relatively recently been studied in earnest in modern scholarship. Nevertheless, Gower's CA would have been readily available to Spenser, whether in manuscript form--"manuscripts in general were ordinary and available to the Elizabethans" (76), Yeager notes, and there were likely more manuscripts of the CA in the sixteenth century than the forty-nine whole witnesses extant today--or in print, in the three printed editions by Caxton and Berthelette. Given Spenser's reputation for being widely read, it is unlikely that he would not have encountered Gower, and indeed Rosemond Tuve established that Spenser may have had access to the CA based on the signature "Spenserus" next to lines from Ovid in a fifteenth-century CA manuscript. Yeager then traces possible references and allusions in "The Faerie Queene" to the CA, while acknowledging that Spenser could have drawn on other similar texts and traditions. The hypocritical priest Archimago in FQ, Book I, has traditionally been linked with Faus Semblant in the "Roman de la Rose," but could also be connected with Falssemblant in Book II of the CA and throughout the "Mirour de l'Omme." This Gowerian link is strengthened by figures (Archimago and Falssemblant) that Spenser and Gower both present as emblems of Envy. Yeager further suggests that the story of Paridell and Hellenore in Book III of FQ parallels Gower's version in Book V of the CA. Yeager concludes by considering why Spenser, typically an avid name-dropper, may have consciously avoided referring to Gower. Spenser was keenly aware of his literary reputation and afterlife, and may not have wished to associate his name with Gower's Catholicism. Gower was also not as authoritative a name for Spenser to invoke as Chaucer, who had emerged as the "Father" of English poetry. [RM. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R. F. "Absence Is Presence: The Confessio Amantis and The Faerie Queene." Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual 38 (2024): 73-87. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Absence Is Presence: "The Confessio Amantis" and "The Faerie Queene." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yeager's essay--part of a two-number special issue of "The Chaucer Review" that commemorates Derek Pearsall's many achievements in Middle English studies--fittingly describes Pearsall's most significant contributions to Gower scholarship. As Yeager makes clear, Pearsall twice received the John Gower Society's prestigious John Hurt Fisher Prize for these contributions--the first ever awarded in 1991 and then, most recently (with Linne Mooney), in 2023, the year after Pearsall's death at age 90. Yeager's survey covers more than fifty years, starting with Pearsall's landmark article in PMLA (1966), "Gower's Narrative Art," and running through his definitive "A Descriptive Catalogue of the English Manuscripts of John Gower's Confessio Amantis" (with Mooney; 2022). Along the way, Yeager rightly (and courteously) acknowledges Pearsall's general lack of attention to Gower's work other than the CA and his interest in the frame and narrative techniques of CA rather than its poetic style. Yeager identifies and exemplifies Pearsall's early appreciation of Gower's humor and humane sensibility and appreciates Pearsall's "great gift as a literary critic" in finding in CA the "large truth in the particular," thereby pointing "the path forward for a generation of modern scholarly readers" (488-89). Comparative analysis, Yeager shows, is fundamental to Pearsall's critical sensibility: "striking off Gower, Langland, Lydgate, and Chaucer, one or another against the other" (483), with similar "illustrative comparison" deployed when Pearsall discloses Gower's "purposive, rhetorical forays" (488) by juxtaposing Gower's tales and Ovidian sources. Yeager's comments on Pearsall's work with Gower manuscripts are equally complimentary and just. Several examples: he characterizes Pearsall's "Manuscripts and Illustrations of Gower's Works" (2004) as still the "handiest go-to resource for short questions of location, dating, or shelfmark," and tells us that Pearsall's essay on the Wollaton Hall Gower manuscript (2010) contains "perhaps the most instructive exposition extant of the creative and technical processes underlying the production of late medieval literary manuscripts" (491). More than forty years in the making, the "Descriptive Catalogue" "provides information in unprecedented quantity, quality, and variety, in a format readily accessible and uniform" (492). These and many other words of praise--appropriate and expected in a commemorative essay--distill Pearsall's sensitive, sensible, and above all, useful Gowerian work, crucial in the development of Gower studies. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R. F. "Derek Pearsall and John Gower." Chaucer Review 58, nos. 3-4 (2023): 481-93. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Derek Pearsall and John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review It is no news to Gowerians that R. F. Yeager values Gower's poetry, but this essay articulates why he thinks everyone should do so, summarized in his closing comment: "what ought to distinguish Gower the Poet, with his fluency in three languages, Italianate ambition and, as his output suggests, indefatigable energy, is his repeated insistence in work after work that poetry should serve society. Poetry should make things better. If a poet fulfilled his role well--and readers read with care--then poetry probably did" (492). Yeager neither ignores nor shrugs off comparison with Chaucer--that recurrent motif of much Gower criticism and commentary--but opens it out at points to comparisons with Dante, with Langland, and with Milton, and uses these comparisons to establish the depth of Gower's desire for lasting poetic fame ("Italianate ambition"), his audience awareness, his social politics, and his multiple voices (trilingualism, "vox populi," "vox clamantis," open "speak[ing] to power" [487], "English vocal range" [491], etc.). Yeager considers form as meaning in Gower's three major works and in a range of less frequently considered ones: "In Praise of Peace," "Cinkante Balades" XLIII, and, from among the shorter Latin poems, "Quicquid homo scribat," "Est amor," "Ecce, patet tensus," and the possibly spurious "Eneidos bucolis." In these readings, Yeager attends to Gower's biography, linguistic subtleties, narrative and prosodic techniques, sources, historical contexts, critical traditions, and more. Notable, too, are Yeager's recurrent enlivening glimpses of Gower as a person when, for example, "[i]magining Gower imagining" his audience before taking "quill or stylus in hand" (481), when observing moments of personal sorrow and "grace" (486) in Gower's Latin lyrics, or when showing that "even when harnessed for service most public poetry was, for Gower, a living means of self-expression as well" (487). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. " Published Yeager, R. F. "The Poetry of John Gower." In Corinne Saunders, ed. A Companion to Medieval Poetry. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell; 2010. Pp. 476-95. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Biography of Gower Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Poetry of John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Willes' is a spirited account of the rich and often revolutionary history of Southwark, from its Roman antecedents up to modernity. Rather than approach such a complicated history chronologically, Willes organizes the book thematically, with chapters on such topics as London Bridge (Chapter 2: London Bridge is Falling Down) to the demographic breadth of residents over the years (Ch 7: A Mixed Community) to its importance in England's history as a center for health care and medicine (Chapter 10: Medical Matters) to its contribution to London's, and England's, financial security (Chapter 12: A Center for Commerce). But for all of its sprawling breadth, "Liberty over London Bridge" is grounded by two complementary areas of focus: the stories of individual people and families of Southwark (which greatly contributes to the book's liveliness) and the central role the Cathedral (from its establishment as St. Mary Overies, then as St. Saviour, and now Southwark Cathedral) played in the borough's history. It is mainly in the context of the Cathedral that Willes evokes Gower, primarily in Chapter 4: On the Road to Canterbury, which begins with a description of Gower's Tomb. The chapter spends little time on the Cathedral, or Southwark generally, in the context of pilgrimage, instead focusing on the borough's significance as reflected in its two most important medieval authors: Gower and Chaucer. "Liberty over London Bridge" appears to be targeting a more popular audience, and Willes focuses on summarizing Gower's life (including his will and his marriage to Groundolf) and the content of Gower's three major works, since they are represented in the tomb, and then similarly summarizes Gower's life and works, with special attention to Southwark's Tabard Inn in the "Canterbury Tales." [BWG. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Willes, Margaret. Published Willes, Margaret. Liberty over London Bridge: A History of the People of Southwark. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2024. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Liberty over London Bridge: A History of the People of Southwark. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The essay constitutes a reply to Ad Putter's "Linguistic Change and Metre: The Demise of Adjectival Inflections and the Scansion of 'high' and 'sly' in Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve" (English Language and Linguistics 26 (2022): 471–85), which argued that while Gower and Chaucer typically did not often deviate from the grammatical principles of final -e as an adjectival inflection, the examples of "high" and "sly" in their poetry demonstrate the vulnerability of final -e when following vowels. In Putter's view, these words therefore provide examples of the gradual loss of adjectival inflections in English. Weiskott counters Putter's linguistic analysis by noting a long-acknowledged metrical subrule specifying that "the inflectional -e of weak adjectives regularly drops out of metre before a word with aft stress" (54). Putter draws on thirty-one uses of "high" and "sly" in Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve's works: twenty-eight of these, Weiskott argues, are accounted for according to this subrule. He identifies a metrical rather than grammatical reason for the alternating use or omission of final -e, which is that its usage is determined by the metrical shape of the next word in the line. Weiskott concludes, contra Putter, that "Chaucer and Gower, in their high-minded and traditionalist way, treat 'high' and 'sly' as metrically equivalent to any other monosyllabic adjective" (55). [RM. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Weiskott, Eric. "Linguistic Change and Metre: A Reply." Notes and Queries 268 (2023): 54-55. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Linguistic Change and Metre: A Reply. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Weiskott identifies a dual-purposed pun on "Aquilonica" as referencing both "aquilo" (Henry IV's nickname) and "aquila" ("north," i.e., Ravenspur where he landed to begin his conquest of England) in the couplet (Cronica Tripertita 3. 142-43): "Vela petunt portum quem sors prope contulit ortum; Vt dux concepit, Aquilonica littora cepit." ["To fated eastern port by sail they hasten forth; The duke, as he had planned, made landfall in the North."] (319). "The allusive, compressed effect of the double hidden reference in 'aquilonica' argued for in the present note was entirely in keeping with the allusive, compressed style of Gower's composition" (320). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Weiskott, Eric. "The Eagle Has Landed: A Prophetic Pun in John Gower's 'Cronica tripertita'." ANQ: American Notes and Queries 36 (2023): 319-20. Gower Subject Cronica Tripertita Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Eagle Has Landed: A Prophetic Pun in John Gower's "Cronica tripertita." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Weiskott's article isn't easily summarized, as it represents a kind of "magnum opus" on Gower's shortish (104 lines) Latin poem, "O deus immense," in order to argue strongly for a reassessment of its importance in the canon of Gower's works. In the process he covers the difficulties of dating its composition (sometime between 1398 and 1400); whether or not its subject was kings in general or Richard II exclusively (he goes back and forth, but more or less favors Richard: see pp. 221, 227, 246); Gower's quarrying of it (very sharply observed) to insert variously elsewhere (226-27); and its (justified) claim to belonging among the "public, monitory, prophetic, and enigmatic" (244) poems of the early years of the Lancastrian usurpation--"Richard the Redeless," and "Bede's Prophecy" in particular, the latter introduced here by Weiskott. He concludes: "Gower supposed that writing enigmatic, prophetic, monitory verses 'ad regem' on behalf of a recalcitrant, inarticulate public was a difficult, noble, and urgent political task, and he was not alone in so supposing. Gower had long harbored those views individually, dispersed throughout metaliterary and purple passages in his trilingual trilogy. In "O deus immense" Gower encapsulates the poet's task with unwonted concision and self-reflexive panache." [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Weiskott, Eric. "'Loquela gravis iuvat': Gower's "O deus immense" and the Place of Poetry, 1398-1400," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 45 (2023): 205-46 Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Loquela gravis iuvat": Gower's "O deus immense" and the Place of Poetry, 1398-1400." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Likely composed contemporaneously with Gower's making of his will in 1408, "Dicunt Scripture" "exhorts its reader, but in effect the poet himself, to make premortem preparations for worldly goods and for [sic] soul" (196). Weiskott determines a two-part, balanced structure, in which "the moment of death arrives precisely at the line-break between the two stanzaic quatrains" (196). Manuscript marginal notes cited by Macaulay in his edition identify the target of the poem as unscrupulous executors. Weiskott argues instead that, while Gower's larger purpose near the end of his life is always self-memorializing, here it means not merely "not to entrust one's memory wholly to friends who live on" (197), but rather more seriously, represents Gower's genuine struggle to reconcile being "both wealthy and devout" (198). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Weiskott, Eric. "The Subject of John Gower's 'Dicunt Scripture'." Notes and Queries, 69 [267], no. 3 (2022): 196–98. Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Subject of John Gower's "Dicunt Scripture." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Weiskott, Eric. "The Occasion of John Gower's 'Unanimes Esse.'" Notes and Queries, 69 [267], no. 3 (2022): 192–96. Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry Biography of Gower Review "Of John Gower's very last writings, almost all of them in Latin verse and politically inflected," Weiskott writes, "the ten-line 'Unanimes esse' is least immediately explicable" (192)--by biographical or political elements, he means. He finds an "unique" tripartite structure to the poem (194), which he believes (following Sebastian Sobecki's claimed identification of the poet's hand in London, British Library Cotton Tiberius A. iv) "Gower himself copied" (194), establishing a date no later than the "mid-1400s" (194, sic), and--obviously--before Gower went fully blind. Weiskott argues that "Unanimes esse" "plausibly reflects the fearful atmosphere surrounding 'De heretico comburendo' and the burning of William Sawtrey in 1401" (195). Lollardy, in short, coupled with fear of another uprising of the commons, motivated "Unanimes esse," making it "a post-script to the 'Carmen super multiplici victorum pestilencia'" (195). Weiskott supports this claim with careful identification of "self-borrowing" between the two poems, although he carefully notes that "the words are not distinctive" and Gower was unlikely to have had them in mind, or a manuscript copy of the "Carmen super" to hand, when writing "Unanimes esse" (196). But reading the two together allows recognition of a "subtle note of disapprobation or at least apprehension directed toward Arundel" in both poems, which possibly explains "why 'Unanimes esse' stays so uncharacteristically coy about its real-world references" (196). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Occasion of John Gower's "Unanimes Esse." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Walling investigates the "paradox" that, "while Gower was clearly intrigued by the possibilities of Aristotelian pedagogy, very little of the 'Confessio Amantis' is based directly on the 'Secretum secretorum'" (343). Gower "specifically avoids dramatizing or voicing Aristotle as a character," using instead Nectanabus as a "darker alternative" to Aristotle (358) "to emphasize the distancing effect in his handling of Aristotle"--a strategy which shows "the complexity of his literary personae and his understanding of the pedagogical and psychological workings of literary fictions" (344), as well as, Walling suggests, "his misgivings about the risks and the efficacy of offering counsel to [Richard II]" (353). She briefly traces the origins and spread of the "Secretum secretorum" from the Orient through Roger Bacon and thence into the mainstream of Western European literature (345-46). Walling is reluctant to see Gower using the "Secretum" to forge a "speculum principis," as has been suggested by many; instead, he diffuses his own voice through several characters (rather than adopting an Aristotelian one), and provides Nectanabus as an alternative. In the conflicting pairing of Alexander's two counselors, Walling finds important evidence of Gower's strategy: "Gower's negotiation of the opposing literary poles of Aristotle and Nectanabus in the final books of the 'Confessio Amantis' helps us to see the drama of pedagogy at the poem's core, and the struggle to establish a way of relating to received textual authority that can plausibly lead to moral and psychological transformations" (364). What the CA ultimately offers readers, whether king or commoner, is "mediated access to Aristotelian knowledge for readers or students who wish to seek it, the poem's most effective lesson is its dramatization of self-transformation in the pursuit of knowledge . . . not an encyclopedic treatise of readily digested political wisdom, but a meditation on how to seek out wisdom and self-realization" (367). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Walling, Amanda. Published Walling, Amanda. "The Authority of Impersonation: Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and the 'Secretum Secretorum'." Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 47.3 (2016): 343-64. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Authority of Impersonation: Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and the "Secretum Secretorum." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Vising, Johan. Published Vising, Johan. Anglo-Norman Language and Literature. London: Oxford University Press, 1923. 111 pp. Gower Subject Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Mirour de l'Omme Cinkante Balades Traité pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Review Vising describes the "External History" and "Character" of the Anglo-Norman language, and outlines the history of its literature, with an extensive catalog of works written in Anglo-Norman. Along the way he cites examples from "Mirour de l'Omme" of Gower's awareness of the "internal decay" of the language (27), refers to morphological confusion of "u" and "o" and of "u" and "ui" in Gower's works as identified by Alfred Tanneberger in 1910 (29), and describes MO as the "last considerable representative" of AN literature (39). In his catalog of fourteenth-century AN literature, Vising includes brief descriptions of "Cinkante Balades," MO, and "Traité pour Essampler les Amants Marietz" (72-73; items 360, 369-70) and, in a general discussion of AN versification, attributes Gower's "exceptional" combination of "adherence to English rhythm with the French syllabic system" to him being a "learned man," who "had spent considerable time in Paris" (82)--the latter, an incorrect assertion. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Anglo-Norman Language and Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1923 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower's "Tale of Apollonius" is central to Vincent's analysis of baroque "excess" in Shakespeare's "Pericles." (FYI: To understand Vincent's argument on "baroco," a syllogism, you will need to consult his article "Baroco: The Logic of English Baroque Poetics," MLQ 80.3 [Sept. 2019]: 233-59, and any academic background you may have in formal logic, as the author never provides an example of a baroco syllogism.) Vincent begins by noting the recent deficiency of studies on Shakespeare and the early modern artistic movement known as the "baroque." He locates the origin of the term in the "Scholastic syllogism called Baroco" (33) that was decried by early moderns, e.g. Montaigne, as linked to "excessive complexity and artificiality." Likewise, early modern authors disparaged the typical plot of a medieval romance as absurdly convoluted, piling "adventures upon adventures" (34). Nonetheless, paradoxically, these "baroque" effects were attractive to seventeenth-century poets, including Shakespeare, who based his "Pericles" on (in Vincent's view) Gower's notably "excess[ive]" (36) "Tale of Apollonius" in the "Confessio Amantis," Book VIII. While lacking in organic symmetry and unity, "baroque" literary works were unified by theme (37), a unity supplied by Shakespeare's choric Gower, as he navigates the audience through examples of sinful excess in love, to the equally extreme, but morally pure love ultimately achieved by Pericles and his wife and daughter (40). The paradigm for Shakespeare's "allegory of excess," per Vincent, is found in Gower's epigraph to the "Tale of Apollonius": "Omnibus est communis amor, set et immoderatos/Qui facit excessus, non reputatur amans." The alternative to such "immoderate excesses" in love is the rightly directed, "moderate excess" exemplified by Apollonius, Pericles, and Southwell's "Mary Magdalene" (38-40). Other baroque effects anticipated in "Apollonius," and recurring in "Pericles," are the hero's melancholy (related to Christian patience), and an over-the-top, miraculous conclusion to the story (41-44). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Vincent, Robert Hudson. Published Vincent, Robert Hudson. "The Excesses of Romance: Shakespeare's Pericles and the Baroque." The Shakespearean International Yearbook, 20: Special Section, "Pericles, Prince of Tyre," ed. Tom Bishop et al. New York: Routledge, 2024: 32-49. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Excesses of Romance: Shakespeare's "Pericles" and the Baroque. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Stone provides a brief history and chronology of the process of medieval manuscript acquisitions at Wadham College and an overview of the current catalogues of the College's collection. Of the eight medieval manuscripts catalogued here, one--MS 13--contains Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and "Traitié" (catalogued at 472–476). The manuscript is from England, perhaps Chester, and dates to c. 1470. The manuscript is paper, and its foliation is ii + 446 + ii, where fol. ii is a vellum flyleaf; fols 447–448 are post-medieval endleaves. Stone notes two scribes, both writing in a late mixed cursive hand: Scribe A can be localised to Derbyshire and Scribe B to the Staffordshire-Derbyshire border (475). They originally wrote consecutively but a later misbinding led to Scribe A's hand at 1-169v, 273-288v, and Scribe B's hand at 170-272v, 289-446v. Gower's CA runs from fols. 1–442r. Macaulay places MS 13 in his third recension of the text, stating that it derived from Bodleian, MS Fairfax 3. Stone notes "significant confusion in the prologue regardless of binding errors" (473). The Traitié follows on fols. 442v-446v. Stone then describes the manuscript's collation, textual decoration and presentation, additions, binding, and provenance. It contains authorial marginalia in Latin. Additions are in both English and Latin, including chronicle entries, a list of Chester sheriffs and mayors, "a long note regarding the composition of Gower's 'Confessio' . . . copied in a s. xv/xvi hand" (474) which references Richard II's reign and the work's dedication to Henry, musical notation, and individual alphabet letters and doodles. [RM. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stone, Zachary E. Published Stone, Zachary E. "Descriptive Catalogue of Eight Medieval Manuscripts from Wadham College, Oxford." The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 21 (2020): 445-76. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Descriptive Catalogue of Eight Medieval Manuscripts from Wadham College, Oxford. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Sharma refers sparingly to Gower in this study, although he does cite the "Tale of Apollonius" several times in his reading of "The Man of Law's Prologue and Tale." Differences among Gower's, Trevet's and Chaucer's versions of the Constance narrative help Sharma to show how the entanglement of the Man of Law in the motif of incest even as he seeks to detach his narrative from it exemplifies "the Chaucerian principle of unintended consequences" (110) which rebound on the narrator, who "actually seems to enjoy the oppressions" Custance endures (113). More generally, Sharma gives something of a new twist to the dismissiveness of the traditional label of Gower as "moral." Asserting that he has "no desire to insist on any stark opposition between Chaucer as ludic ironist and Gower as didactic moralist," Sharma makes clear that Chaucer is no less moral than Gower, although he finds the latter to be more pessimistic than his fellow poet. When setting out to clarify Chaucer's use of paradox, Sharma briefly contrasts it with Langland's use of enigma and then explores "some significant points of diffraction" between the CT and the "Confessio Amantis," regarding both "as sustained meditations on the nature of love" (24). In a swift description of hierarchical, analogical love in the CA, Sharma tells us the poem "supplies us with a double perspective on love: On the one hand, 'sub specie aeternitatis' love is an element subordinated within God's providential regulation of the cosmos; on the other hand, ' for mortals, love is a force that can never be internally regulated. Love may submit to the authority of divine reason, but it rebels against the authority of human reason. Human existence in the 'Confessio,' at least after a fantasmatic golden age, is thus inherently disordered" (27). Chaucer, Sharma tells us in the following paragraph, "finds a radically different way to articulate order, disorder, and love" in the CT, where "reality . . . is hierarchical and anti-hierarchical at the same time." Gower sees only a "metaphysical abyss" between "divine necessity" and "human contingency," while, in Chaucer, "God strictly determines us to be absolutely free" (28) and the poet's "charitable hermeneutic" (30) serves as a bridge across the abyss Sharma sees in Gower. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sharma, Manish. Published Sharma, Manish. The Logic of Love in "The Canterbury Tales." Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2022. x, 395 pp. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Logic of Love in "The Canterbury Tales." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This wide-ranging article discusses how medical lore on the pneuma/spiritus (the bodily spirit or spirits) became an established theme and plot device, both in medieval European romance, and in personal accounts of profound religious experience. Among the many examples is a paragraph on Gower's "Tale of Apollonius" (99). Saunders begins with a highly complex discussion of the spirits according to Galen, Avicenna's "Canon of Medicine," and European translations of these authorities. Within the heart, in synchrony with the breath, the spirits were formed of mingled air and blood to animate the three-part soul, including the emotions, which were "dramatically written on the body through the flight of breath" (88). In grief or sorrow, the vital spirits withdrew into the heart, bringing cold to the body, as "reflected in pallor or swooning . . . unconsciousness or even death" (91-92). Saunders proceeds to discuss the medically accurate depictions of lovesickness evidenced by death-like swoons in the "Roman de la Rose," the "Parliament of Fouls," several Middle English romances, and especially "Troilus and Criseyde" (93-96). Most relevant to the discussion on Gower, the retreat of spirits might result in a death-like state from which the patient could be revived by a skilled physician. As examples, Saunders discusses the restoration of a seemingly dead lady in Marie de France's "Eliduc," the ancient novel "Apollonius," and Gower's "Tale of Apollonius." In educated medical detail, Gower describes how the physician Cerymon restored the latent spark of life by remedies including the warming of the lady's breast, causing her heart to "flacke and bete" (VIII.1195; qtd. p. 99). To conclude her study, Saunders discusses how the bodily spirits mediated intense religious or visionary experience, e.g., in Richard Rolle's "Incendium Amoris," the Middle English "Pearl," and the "Book of Margery Kempe," with bodily expression that included the swoon (100-05). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Saunders, Corinne. Published Saunders, Corinne. "From Romance to Vision: The Life of Breath in Medieval Literary Texts." In David Fuller, Corinne Saunders, and Jane McNaughton, eds. The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture and Medicine: Classical to Contemporary (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 87-109. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource From Romance to Vision: The Life of Breath in Medieval Literary Texts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Rogers offers first an introduction to John Gower's "Tale of Constance" (Confessio Amantis Book II) from the perspective of Disability Studies before then presenting an edition of the tale, footnoted with special attention toward moments of impairment and/or disability. After providing a brief synopsis of both CA as a whole and then the tale itself, Rogers makes the claim that the tale "is ultimately about sight and perception" (304). Rogers calls our attention to Gower's emphasis on listening and hearing in the tale, reminding us that Envy--the section of the CA from which this tale is taken--is a sin that stems from sight. As Rogers nicely puts it, "no one truly sees Constance, besides those who attempt to destroy her, those who are physically blind, or those who die or are separated from her as a result of her friendship and love" (304). It is this emphasis on sight, then, and those moments in the tale to which Rogers directs readers who may be interested in disability and impairment. He reminds us, however, that blindness in the tale is a condition that requires intervention--whether medical or spiritual. Rogers concludes, "For Gower's text, as for Chaucer's, the fiction of the normal body is just that" (305). [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rogers, Will, ed. and intro. Published Rogers, Will, ed. and intro. "Tale of Constance," In Medieval Disability Sourcebook: Western Europe, ed. Cameron Hunt McNabb (New York: Punctum, 2020), pp. 304-12. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Tale of Constance. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Art historians pay less attention to illustrations in literary manuscripts than they do to those in religious texts--psalters, books of hours, bibles, etc. Literary scholars, on the other hand, pay significant attention, but generally focus on connecting the illustration to the text, as an aid to interpretation. Pearsall argues "for more consideration to be given to . . . the importance of the idea of the book (rather than the text) in the choice and disposition of illustrations; and the possibility that pictures may have their own significance deriving from their own historical apparatus of visual convention, that may go beyond or against the grain of or contradict or have nothing to do with the texts they illustrate" (197). Illustrators' instructions, sometimes verbal, sometimes sketched out or written in margins (as in the case of "Confessio Amantis" MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902), and often copying generic models, need to be considered (198). The supervisor, the scribe, nor the illustrator may have read the text; illustrations may have been included "to heighten the value of the book as a salable product and an object of prestige to the owner" (198). Various illustrated manuscripts of Chaucerian texts provide most of Pearsall's examples. Pearsall devotes pp. 205-07 primarily to two "pictures that Gower himself seems to have stipulated as the pictorial program for the poem": Amans confessing his sins against Love to Genius, and the Dream of Nebuchadnezzar. "So what we have in the 'Confessio' is an authorial program of illustration designed to articulate the moral and formal design of the poem" (206). His examples are taken from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 294 and various versions of Nebuchadnezzar noted by Gareth Spriggs (q.v.). MS Bodley 902, with its white-bearded Amans, is exceptional, in that it "gives the game away" (206). Pearsall notes that the same picture appears in Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 307, though this "is a reversed copy of the Bodley picture, and therefore not an independently idiosyncratic choice but a mere production economy" (206). In his closing remarks, Pearsall comments without elaborating that "pictures may, as in certain manuscripts of the 'Confessio Amantis,' insist on a programmatic reading of a text which the text itself may not seem to carry through" (208). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek. Published Pearsall, Derek. "Beyond Fidelity: The Illustration of Late Medieval Literary Texts." In Tributes to Kathleen L. Scott: English Medieval Manuscripts: Readers, Makers, Illuminators (London: Harvey Miller, 2009), pp. 197-208. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Beyond Fidelity: The Illustration of Late Medieval Literary Texts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The nominal question asked by Ndiaye springs from the character Gower's lines "Lords and ladies in their lives / Have read it for restoratives" ("Pericles" 1.0.7–8), the "it" being John Gower's own narrative of Apollonius in CA VIII. This "leads [her] to wonder: what 'restoratives' exactly does 'Pericles' have in store for us, when 'us' is (as it always was and will be) diverse, Black, and Brown?" (12). Appropriately, Ndiaye's focus is on the play (which, it is fair to say, she finds blindly racist), not on the poet who inspired it; hence Gower the poet figures only briefly, by way of establishing how colors--red, white, and black--appear in the "Confessio," and hence are transferred into the "Pericles" text. Ndiaye notes that when Apollonius "is stranded, naked and destitute, on the shores of Pentapolis, 'His colour, which whilom was whyt, / Was thanne of water fade and pale'" (CA VIII. 636-37; at p.13). Citing "critical whiteness studies" (13) scholarship, Ndiaye argues that "Gower depicts Apollonius as particularly white (with all the privileges attendant to whiteness in potentia) at the peak of dispossession, and whiteness might read here as a promise of compensation. While such a reading may not have been the one Gower had in mind, it may very well have informed Shakespeare and Wilkins's early modern reception of those lines" (13). She also identifies Gower's use of red and white to suggest emotional states (love, e.g.), quoting CA VIII. 845-50 and 1908-11, and black to flag negatives, e.g., Apollonius' depression in his ship's "derke" hold--though the attempt to extend the pejorative color language to mourning clothes and widows' weeds (14) is anachronistic, at the very least. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Ndiaye concludes that: "The question is not whether 'Pericles' has anything restorative in store for Black, Brown, and diverse twenty-first century audiences, but, rather, how scholarship that unearths all the toxic layers of plays like 'Pericles'-- such as early modern critical race and critical whiteness scholarship--might constitute a resource for theatre-makers who want to produce that play in an informed restorative manner" (23). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ndiaye, Noémie. Published Ndiaye, Noémie. "'Read it for restoratives': "Pericles" and the Romance of Whiteness." Early Theatre: A Journal Associated with the Records of Early English Drama 26 (2023): 11-27. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Read it for restoratives": "Pericles" and the Romance of Whiteness. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Images of "Gower" as an archer taking aim on a round target, probably representing the world, as the accompanying verses ("Ad mundum mitto mea iacula") imply, appear in three manuscripts: San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS HM 150; London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A. iv; and Glasgow, University of Glasgow Library, MS Hunter 59. Usually the images are interpreted as representing jointly Gower's moral stance and his desire for (in David Carlson's words, as quoted by Mitchell [291] "auto-epitaphery"). Mitchell, however, argues that "the portrait can be seen as forming a striking silhouette of an elementary trigonometric diagram associated with the venerable practice of Ptolemaic astronomical computation, depicting bow (arcus), string (corda), and arrow (sagitta), all of them foundational mathematical terms" (291). That Gower directed the design Mitchell has no doubt: "Gower likely commissioned them during his long retirement at St. Mary Overeys in Southwark, coordinating image production by scribes and limners there or nearby in the city" (293). This certainty allows Mitchell grounds to see the Archer figure as "in outer space," as if Gower were presenting himself as a "new and as-yet unidentified constellation" (295). Gower's "affectionate account of 'Geometrie' and 'Astronomie' in the seventh book of 'Confessio Amantis'" (296) show that he "comprehends the special importance of geometrical figures to astronomy" (297)--and probably his solid knowledge of Ptolemy's "Almagest" and "chord theory" as presented by, among others, Gerbert of Aurillac (298-304). Gower, Mitchell concludes, would have intended two things by his portraits: 1) to reflect "on the wider intellectual cultures of his day" while simultaneously "tending to his image as a poet" in an act of "visual self-fashioning" and 2) to utilize the "formal and rhetorical significance of arc, chord, and sagitta" to triangulate "ethics, rhetoric, and mathematics"--what Mitchell deems the confluence of "scientia" and "conscientia" (312). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Mitchell, J. Allan. Published Mitchell, J. Allan. "John Gower Illustrated: The Archer Images, Astronomical Science, and Poetic Identity." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 53 (2023): 287-321. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower Illustrated: The Archer Images, Astronomical Science, and Poetic Identity. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Matthews here surveys "autobiographical fragments or moments . . . [that] appear to be performances of self" (27) in works of select fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English poets, gauging their "truth value" to be generally unreliable (39) but asking more broadly "what can be said about the ways in which such writers might have entwined life-writing into their larger literary projects?" (29). Before turning very briefly to Gower, Matthews usefully observes A. C. Spearing's distinction (2012) between "autography" and autobiography, glances at conventionalized uses of first-person pronouns in works of the early fourteenth-century writers, and explains why Chaucer's performances of self in "Book of the Duchess," "House of Fame," "Legend of Good Women," and "Canterbury Tales"--with the possible exception of his Retractions--are "difficult to label" as autobiographical because of the poet's playful ironic self-deprecation: the "Chaucerian self is clearly embodied in his work, but his self-presentations can rarely be taken at face value" (32). Matthews then turns to Gower (for two paragraphs only) for evidence that "inserting a version of oneself into literary works was by this time a viable poetic strategy." He mentions Gower's use of his own name in "Confessis Amantis," observes that Amans/Gower's "abjecting himself" to Venus is similar to Chaucer's self-abjection to the god of Love in the Prologue to "The Legend of Good Women," and points out that "There is little to be gleaned about the real Gower's autobiography from these passages." Matthews then sidesteps a more complex engagement with Gower and autobiography: "So far as autobiography is concerned, [Gower] critics have been more interested in what goes on at the beginning of the 'Confessio,' and the claim made there that the work was commissioned by King Richard himself" (33). Moving on immediately from this statement to discuss fifteenth-century poetry, Matthews neither cites the interested critics he mentions nor assesses the truth value of Gower's account of meeting Richard on the Thames in the first recension of the poem--perhaps because there is no easy or obvious way of establishing that the scene is historical or fictional, apart from the discovery of at-present-unknown documentary evidence. Is this an instance of genuine autobiography, maybe the first in English? Does it make any difference? How does Gower's revision/elimination of the scene affect his presentation of self elsewhere in the poem? As he proceeds, Matthews effectively shows that Hoccleve and Lydgate--like Chaucer (along with W. G. Sebald, Marcel Proust, and Karl Ove Knausgaard)--combine fact and fiction for rich thematic and stylistic effects in their various presentations of self. Gower's scene on the Thames might well be investigated in this light too. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Matthews, David. Published Matthews, David. "Autobiographical Selves in the Poetry of Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate." In Adam Smyth, ed. A History of English Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 27–40. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Autobiographical Selves in the Poetry of Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Mitchell, J. Allan. Published Mitchell, J. Allan. Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 249 pp.; 11 color illus. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Mirour de l'Omme Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Language and Word Studies Review Mitchell's volume is a study of the physical, social, and ethical issues of parturition and early development in medieval England, showing how these issues can be seen to underlie and inform modern concerns. Attentive to philosophical, psychological, and sociological formulations, with recurrent attention to differences between "ontogenesis" and "ontology" (and cosmogony and cosmology; see below), Mitchell contemplates the messiness involved in the culturally complex, never-quite-completed processes that produce what he calls "emergent creatureliness" (xxvi)--becoming human--as they are evident in, contiguous with, analogous to, or complicated by cross-species coexistence, environmental interactions, and cosmological speculations. The goal of his book, he tells us, is "to identify residual and emergent ideas of becoming where humanity is and remains at risk" (xxx). This is heady stuff. Mitchell connects modern theorizing about materialism, ethics, subject-object relations, tool-using, actor networks, and speculative realism with discussion of medieval philosophical texts, comportment books, and material objects, along with analyses of various literary works--Usk's "Testament of Love" and Chaucer's "Treatise on the Astrolabe," "Sir Thopas," and the Franklin's table "dormant"; portions of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and "Piers Plowman"; selections from Lydgate, John Russell's "Boke of Nurture," and more. Generally, Mitchell cites Gower to clarify medieval ideas, quoting, for example, the "Confessio Amantis" IV.2487-90 for its connection of alchemy and embryology (77), and briefly commenting on "Mirour de l'Omme" 107-19 in passing (140 and 145) when discussing gluttony and culinary transformation as concerns underlying medieval dining practice and etiquette, and as factors--even actors--in human acculturation. More expansively--and more crucial to Mitchell's entire enterprise--when explaining medieval human-as-micro, universe-as-macro analogies, Mitchell reads portions of CA as adumbration of modern ecological and cosmogenic concerns. In his section called "Little Worlds," Mitchell disrupts oversimplified notions of medieval analogical thinking, and uses portions of the Prologue to CA (913-44, 954-58, 970-90) to argue that, for Gower, universal disorder is a "postlapsarian one of human becoming" (41) but less anthropocentric than "egocentric and epigenetic, where creatures of all kinds are deeply enmeshed." This is an example, Mitchell tells us, of what "Timothy Morton calls ecological thought" (42), "owing to the strength of the contingent bonds between upper and lower elements" that Gower describes. Indeed, Gower "highlights the ligatures, joints, and connective tissues of the organized whole" and thereby exposes a "transhuman 'condicioun'" (43) that both echoes Macrobius and (mentioning Bruno Latour) anticipates modern philosophical analyses that seek "to compose commonalities without a pregiven harmony." The "embryological" cosmogony of Book VII of the CA is even more clearly "prescient" than the cosmology of the Prologue, Mitchell argues, insofar as it emphasizes elemental germination as "the world comes into being" (44). Mitchell surveys the world as egg in the classical and medieval imaginary from Aristotle and Lucretius to Bernardus Silvestris (with a nifty sidelight on Ovid as, etymologically, a cracker of eggs, "ova"), emphasizing ways in which the image depicts a "total picture of the universe that is never a finished totality but is rather composed of fluctuating intensities and heterogeneous extensities" (52). He follows this survey with close explication of Gower's brief, powerful discussion of "Ylem" (7.214-22)--the poet's English neologism for Greek "hyle"--as a "significant sequence of thought" insofar as it "posits a [kind of] matter that antecedes and exceeds formal causation" and is "tantamount to assuming something like a two-seed theory" of the universe coming into being "against Aristotle's single seed." Playing on "form" and "enform," Mitchell explains, Gower is "at once informed by his studies and formed from the same material substrate he is studying," and aided by Kellie Robertson's exploration of form/matter distinctions in medieval poetic metaphors ("Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto," 2010), Mitchell concludes that "All of this is surely meant to suggest that poetic matter, like the primordial matter of which [Gower] is speaking, is as polysemous as it is pluripotent" (53). As if this weren't enough, Mitchell goes on to explain that mid-twentieth century physicists, George Gamow and Ralph Alpher, "poached" Gower's term"--'ylem'--"to describe the volatile nucleogenesis immediately following the big bang," and, in commemoration, used it to relabel a celebratory bottle of Cointreau as Ylem, "Now on display in the Smithsonian National and Space Museum" (54; and see full-color plate 4 and its caption). For Mitchell, Gower's cosmogony, primordial causation, cosmic eggs, poaching, a bottle of spirits, and modern theoretical physics come together in rich ways to encourage us to wonder "is it not worth putting the medieval sciences in dialogue with modern physics and philosophy more generally?" (54). His implied answer is, of course, yes--in many ways a powerful justification for reading his provocative volume. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Martin reads the "Kingis Quair" against Gower's "Confessio" and Hoccleve's "Regiment of Princes," "La Mal Regle," and the "Series." "The concerns of Gower and Hoccleve with exemplarity, self-reformation, and good governance," she argues, "were important for James's composition of the 'Quair,' offering sophisticated instances in which personal history is used to examine broader institutional conditions" (44). Both poets' work influenced the shifting position of the "Quair"'s narrator, helped James "negotiate the Lancastrian influences on his early life, finally proposing an alternative to the dangerous unpredictability of contemporary English politics" (44). Those influences stemmed from his treatment over eighteen years of captivity by Henry IV and V, of which there are conflicting accounts, and insights gained with the coronation of the child Henry VI (45). In Martin's view, the CA "cannot have made wholly comfortable reading for the Lancastrian dynasty" (46), as Hoccleve and Gower "envisage solutions to misrule as elusive" (50). James finds means to differentiate himself from Amans and Hoccleve's several narrators, "who cannot bring their reason to their predicaments, control their desires, or envision remedies for contemporary problems" (51). Martin sees parallels with the character of Apollonius in CA VIII: "A captive in another 'countree,' James's directionless 'planctus' is reminiscent of that of Gower's tormented and exiled prince" (52). Yet James, via love for his lady, grasps Gower's lesson, that "while escaping treachery in the political macrocosm may not be possible . . . one can better equip one's self for its challenges through inward virtue" (53). This wisdom is apparent in the "Quair" narrator's encounter with Fortune, in which he like Apollonius demonstrates "fortitude and true and patient service in love" that can be applied as well to "political treachery" (57). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Martin, Joanna. Published Martin, Joanna. "The Translations of Fortune: James I's 'Kingis Quair' and the Rereading of Lancastrian Poetry." In Nicola Royan and Sally Mapstone, eds. Langage Cleir Illumynate: Scottish Poetry from Barbour to Drummond, 1375-1630 (Amsterdam: Brill Academic Publishers; 2007), pp. 43-60. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Translations of Fortune: James I's 'Kingis Quair' and the Rereading of Lancastrian Poetry. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Hurley's Chapter 4, entitled "Becoming England: The Northumbrian Conversion in Trevet, Gower, and Chaucer," centers around the "Man of Law's Tale" and Chaucer; Trevet and Gower present "versions" that demonstrate "an emerging engagement--beyond Chaucer himself--with the Pre-Conquest past during the fourteenth century" (125), thereby helping Hurley find answers to her question driving the chapter: "By examining the translation effects that appear in the 'Man of Law's Tale,' we can begin to see how imagined textual communities are affected by post-Conquest translation. How does a new English vernacular change the composition of such textual communities?" (127) Her answer, found by juxtaposing Trevet's, Gower's, and Chaucer's narratives, is a unifying idea of "an emerging sense of Engelond" (128) discernible through their differences. Per her book's title, Hurley's discussion of Trevet's Constance and Chaucer's Custance highlights the ability to speak languages other than her native (Roman) Latin, pointing out the cultural "homogenization" implicit in giving her speech in vernaculars--in contrast to Hermengyld who, in both Trevet's and Gower's tales, is allowed to register herself as Saxon via linguistic code-switching (139). Gower, Hurley notes, eludes the complexities involved in moving a heroine through several linguistic environments by keeping Constance "profoundly silent" (137): indeed, because "language (like translation) is . . . a means to an end" for Gower, readers are given only the results of Constance's speaking, both to the Saxons and to the Syrian merchants, not her words themselves (138). It is a technique which--in a way--brings Gower closer to Trevet than to Chaucer (139). It is perhaps worth noting that (131, n. 25) Hurley takes her texts of both Trevet and Gower from Correale and Hamel, "Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales." [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hurley, Mary Kate. Published Hurley, Mary Kate. Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2021. Pp. 125-50. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In the Acknowledgements that accompany his essay (p. 59), Hsy points out that "This chapter also appears in a modified and expanded form in Jonathan Hsy, "Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature" (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 27–57," a volume reviewed in JGN 32.2. The "modifications," if any, are imperceptible. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hsy, Jonathan. Published Hsy, Jonathan. "At Home and in the 'Countour-Hous': Chaucer's Polyglot Dwellings." In Suzanna Conklin Akbari and James Simpson, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 43–62. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource At Home and in the "Countour-Hous": Chaucer's Polyglot Dwellings. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The brief entry on Gower in Hicks's compilation synopsizes Gower's life and works, emphasizing his conventionality and social criticism. Hicks cites John H. Fisher's "John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer" (1965) for further information, and quotes briefly from G. L. Harriss's Introduction to "Henry V: The Practice of Kingship" (1985) where Gower is referred to as being, among Ricardian poets, the "most representative" of the middle stratum of society. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hicks, Michael A. Published Hicks, Michael A. Who's Who in Late Medieval England, 1272–1485. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 1991. Pp. 178–80. Gower Subject Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Who's Who in Late Medieval England, 1272–1485. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In Chapter 2, Hadfield considers the "Visio Anglie" ("Vox Clamantis" Book I) together with "Piers Plowman" (essentially A-Text) and Chaucer's tales of the Knight, Miller, and Reeve, concentrating on the latter two. Not surprisingly, he concludes a discussion--which he recognizes is "designed for readers who are not specialists in medieval language" (109, n. 1)--this way: "While Langland opted for the peasants, Gower sided with the nobility. The urban-dwelling Chaucer would seem to have situated himself somewhere in between" (109). An historian, Hadfield is consequently concerned to present the social environments described in each selection. Gower, here, comes across as one who knows agriculture, as a Kentish landowner (106), and hence the nature of peasant labor. Indeed, his description of medieval three-estate structure, is somewhat nuanced. He represents Gower's anger at the revolting peasants as derived from a concern for social stability ("Throughout the poem Gower reminds his readers that one of the worst aspects of the rebellion is its attempt to subvert the proper social order" [106]), yet also calling attention to rather mournful lines (in Rigg's translation) on the appearance of abandoned, and hence unproductive, fields (106). On the other hand, "in making the case Gower was surely being conspicuously reactionary and deliberately eliding the distinction made in English law that separated the free and the unfree, asserting the need for a noble class to control society as in other European countries. Like Chaucer and Langland his class-based politics were not founded on an obvious external reality--at least, not one that currently existed--but an ideologically-driven ideal" (109). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hadfield, Andrew. Published Hadfield, Andrew. Literature and Class: From the Peasants' Revolt to the French Revolution. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Biography of Gower Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Literature and Class: From the Peasants' Revolt to the French Revolution. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Guy-Bray examines three plays--Marlowe's "Dido, Queen of Carthage," Jonson's "Poetaster," and Shakespeare/Wilkins' "Pericles"--finding in them a "strong if usually implicit tension between the earlier and newer versions" (133). "This tension was greater," he goes on to say, "in the case of plays based on well-known texts or events, and greater still if playwrights chose to make this tension part of the subject of their plays--to confront, more or less explicitly, the question of the secondary status of their own texts, and, by extension, the secondary status of theatre itself as a form that was new in an English context and of lower status than poetry" (133). This thesis guides Guy-Bray's analysis of "Pericles," which focuses on the character Gower, whose "Confessio Amantis" would have been only one of the sources of the play (he claims without offering evidence) known to the audience--the others being Godfrey of Viterbo's "Pantheon" and the "Gesta Romanorum" (146). Gower the character, he notes, could be identified not as the author of the source per se, but as a "presenter," one who "embodies the author function" (146). By this means, Shakespeare/Wilkins "may be seeking to give 'Pericles' a higher status than if the source were a folktale or a relatively recent English prose work" (146--but see also n. 19 on that page, in which it is suggested that the name Apollonius was changed to Pericles in order to invoke Pyrocles from Sidney's "Arcadia"). Pointing out that by underlining the visual--the watched drama with its potential to show rather than "merely" narrate--Shakespeare/Wilkins register some credit for their new form (148); yet, as the necessity of Gower's narration is made clear in the otherwise-unintelligible dumb-show, "Gower reminds us that we can still rely on him to tell the truth of the visual representation" (149). Thus, "'Pericles' suggests that however different a play may be from its source, the source is still necessary" (149). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Guy-Bray, Stephen. Published Guy-Bray, Stephen. "Sources." In Henry S. Turner, ed. Early Modern Theatricality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 133-63. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sources. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In the "Confessio Amantis," Grinnell argues, "violence against children, specifically male children, . . . turns in upon itself, circling back to damage the murderous parents," yielding "a self-annihilation that consistently destroys attempts to build an ordered, fertile familial structure in imitation of the ordered kingdom of God." Per Nicholas Orme's assertion that in the Middle Ages the relationship of parent to child reflected "that of king to subject and God to humanity" (5), this has consequences: "familial violence produces political violence as an unstable kingdom is disrupted by the blood of dead children" (1). Grinnell draws evidence from three tales primarily: "Canace and Machaire," "Jason and Medea," and "Tereus" (with a brief, important analysis of "Phrixus and Helle," [6]). All three build out from representation of child-birth in some--sometimes metaphoric, always horrific--form, in which the female protagonists, despite their responsibility for their children's death, are not condemned by Gower--rather, "Gower . . . concentrates on the male character's responsibility for provoking the violence" (5)--a failure of importance, as Grinnell sees it, since males govern in Gower's society, and the "young" lover Amans will become the aged "John Gower," incapable of "procreation" except through poetic tale-telling (or retelling). Such linkages, which Grinnell renders with dizzying, albeit convincing, evidence from sources including Ovid and the "Roman de la Rose," lead to her conclusion: "Nature, as Gower points out in the Prologue to the 'Confessio,' is unnatural, fallen, subject to time and death. [It is a "world turned upsidedown" (6).] Therefore, in the 'Confessio Amantis,' all births are deaths, and all children are murdered by their parents when they pass on original sin, until the work culminates in the death of the narrator and the birth of the author, both his father and his son" (9). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Grinnell, Natalie. Published Grinnell, Natalie. "[H]e which can no pite know": Murdered Children in the "Confessio Amantis." Investigo 1 (2023): 1-13. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "[H]e which can no pite know": Murdered Children in the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Green's essay covers an extraordinary range of literary chronology, from Alanus Capellanus to earl Rivers, tutor to the young Edward IV, and almost everyone in between, on both sides of the Channel. His ostensible purpose is to determine the reality of the "cour amoureuse." Were there any such, and if so, in what style or sense? Ultimately he concludes that "If the courts of love in the late middle ages were indeed little more than a literary embellishment of one side of life in the real court (their plaintiffs court poets, their lawsuits literary debates, their 'billes' actual poems) then it is in the literature itself that we might hope to come closest to the reality" (108). Gower is not one of the "four examples" that constitute his focus, but in the process he cites Gower's treatment of the love court in the "Confessio," connecting it with that of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia (91-92), while noting of the court's appearance in Book VIII that "Gower's view is far from uncritical, of course, and to appreciate the full irony of Venus' rejection of Amans at the end we should recall that it was the accepted duty of the head of a real household to look after old servants" (92). Gower figures one further time, as Green notes that for Gower the "familia Cupidinis" ("family of Cupid") was "not . . . a formal assembly however playfully realized, but as the metaphorical expression of an aspect of courtly society--in this case, its jurisdiction over all forms of polite behaviour" (100). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Green, Richard Firth. Published Green, Richard Firth. "The Familia Regis and the Familia Cupidinis." In V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne, eds. English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983), pp. 87-108. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Familia Regis and the Familia Cupidinis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1983 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review One of his nineteen contributions to the ODNB, Gray's biography of Gower opens with mention of Gower's tomb and date of death in 1408, estimating his birth as '"in the 1330s or 1340s," then proceeds to describe Gower's '"Family origins," correcting errors in Caxton's 1483 edition and other early biographies and clarifying the poet's origins in Kent and his connections with Yorkshire. Gray comments on Gower's role in the '"messy affair" of the purchase of the manor of Aldington Septvauns in Kent, and thinks it probable that Gower held '"some legal or civil office," citing evidence from the "Mirour de l'Omme" of his '"good knowledge of legal privileges and terminology." He then moves on to evidence that Gower lived in Southwark, his financial transactions, Lancastrian SS-collar, and late-in-life marriage to Agnes Groundolf (refraining from guessing why). Gray observes that, of Gower's life in the priory of St. Mary Overie, '"virtually nothing is known," and that the '"mysterious incident" involving Thomas Caudre, for whom three Londoners were mainprisors "that he would do or procure no harm to John Gower, remains unexplained: it may refer to a private quarrel, or to some financial dealings, or to some political disagreement." Beginning his description of Gower's "Literary career" Gray explains the difficulty in dating any early lyrical poetry that may reside in the late manuscript of "Cinkante Balades." Summary descriptions of "Mirour de l'Omme," "Vox Clamantis," and "Confessio Amantis ensue, accompanied by appreciative comments, and followed by similar treatments of Gower's short Latin poems, "In Praise of Peace," and "Cronica Tripertita." Throughout, Gray comments on political backgrounds to Gower's works and on relations between his works and Chaucer's. In his final sub-section--'"Last years, death, and reputation"--Gray returns to Gower at St. Mary Overie and Gower's tomb, along with other portraiture of the poet. Gray comments on the central place the CA holds in Gower's reputation, its Iberian translations ('"unusual" for a Middle English poem), and the negative treatment Gower received among nineteenth-century critics, replaced by '"serious study" undertaken after the publication of Macaulay's edition. A brief but useful list of sources closes Gray's account. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gray, Douglas. Published Gray, Douglas. '"Gower, John." In H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 61 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Vol. 23, pp. 125-30. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, John. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gillen seeks to '"illuminiate continuities and disjunctions between early Protestant drama and the commercial drama of William Shakespeare's stage" (172), in order to show that early modern drama is both '"reformed" and '"reforming." Her example of Protestant drama are the biblical plays of John Bale, whose 1544 "Epistle Exhortatory of an English Christian" vigorously condemned public theater; "Pericles" (crediting acts 1 and 2 to George Wilkins and 3-5 to Shakespeare) provides the commercial theatre test case. In each she focuses on the narrator figure: Baleus Prolocutor, and Gower. '"Gower's shifting role and his changing relation to dramatic action . . . are not merely indications of Shakespeare's stylistic preferences but are also reflective of Shakespeare's attempt to articulate the mimetic power and social role of public theater in light of antitheatrical objections" (174). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gillen, Katherine A. Published Gillen, Katherine A. "Authorial Anxieties and Theatrical Instability: John Bale's Biblical Plays and Shakespeare and Wilkins's Pericles." In James D. Maddock and Kathryn R. McPherson, eds. Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2014), pp. 171-93. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Authorial Anxieties and Theatrical Instability: John Bale's Biblical Plays and Shakespeare and Wilkins's "Pericles." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In this carefully argued essay, Sarah Friedman takes on the question of sexual violence against women in which she juxtaposes Chaucer's Physician's telling of the tale of Virginia with Gower's Confessor's telling of the Tale of Lucretia to unveil the "intersubjective nature of suffering" (65). In a more broadly cast reading than is typical of those who address the raping of women in medieval literature, Friedman focuses on the decentering of "the psychological effects of violence brought to the female body" (65) and the use of the violated female body "to facilitate communal healing and positive political change" (65). While at first glance it is difficult to see any connection between the violence done to Virginia and that done to Lucretia OR even the shame/blame that drives each woman to her death (the former by beheading, the latter by suicide), there are points of convergence that illuminate each tale, nonetheless. Especially jarring at first is a seemingly sympathetic take on an illness medieval physicians took very seriously, i.e. lovesickness or "amor heroes" and its effects on the two lascivious and rapacious men in these tales, Appius [sic] and Tarquin. The "inborn suffering" thought to be "love" (at least in Andreas Capellanus's "De Amore") changes Appius's "herte and mood" (l. 126), making him a "victim of Virginia's beauty even though he is the one plotting to capture her" (67). In Gower's tale, Cupid's "fyri dart" robs "Tarquin" [i.e., Aruns, his son, in the CA] of his reason, and he suffers a "blinde maladie to which no cure of surgerie can helpe" (VII, 4852-57). This is a component of intersubjective suffering that infects these male bodies with an illness that is both physical and moral, not theirs alone, but rather a malady of the community at large. Friedman's use of "contagion" in her title is a reference to the bubonic plague raging in the historical background, acknowledged by Chaucer when he uses the term "sovereyn pestilence" (l. 91) as a metaphor for the "diseased" (emphasis mine) betrayal of Virginia's innocence. For Gower, this is a contagion in need of purgation afforded by confession, which like bloodletting, brings the body/soul back into a state of homeostasis. While much attention appears to be focused on the suffering of these two men in Friedman's discussion, the women do come back into the conversation, especially in relation to the impact their dead bodies have on their respective communities. As in the theological discourses underpinning medieval notions of sexual violence against women, which the author builds into her argument along with selected medical authorities, "Chaucer and Gower set up links between sexual violence and illness to forge a connection between the tragedy of rape and positive forms of community formation and healing" (70). That said, the dead bodies of two women still lurk in the background. [ES. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Friedman, Sarah. Published Friedman, Sarah. "Contagion, Sexual Violence, and Communal Healing in Chaucer's 'The Physician's Tale' and Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." Essays in Medieval Studies 37 (2022): 65-80. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Contagion, Sexual Violence, and Communal Healing in Chaucer's "The Physician's Tale" and Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Edwards maps out how "medieval discourses of survival" have something in common with modern-day understandings of what it means to "outlive" sexual violence, that is, to be a "survivor" rather than a "victim." Beginning with Augustine's response to the Lucretia story in the "City of God," she reminds us that he rebutted Livy's celebration of Lucretia's suicide as "a courageous act of devotion to spouse and city" (4). For Augustine, rape was a violation of a woman's body but not her mind, and he struggles to understand Lucretia's actions "so that he can more effectively dissuade rape victims in his own historical moment from doing likewise." Augustine concludes, according to Edwards, that "Lucretia's suicide was not a failure of her chastity, but rather evidence of her inability to live with shame" (7). This sets up the author's reading of Gower's version of the tale in Book VII of the "Confessio Amantis" (and her final chapter) in which "Lucrece's chaste fidelity is an exemplary model for the will's sovereignty over the body and for the ruler's sovereignty over the body politic" (113). The body of the suicidal woman, the incomparable spouse, and paragon of virtue thus becomes an exemplum of political violence; her dead body is displayed publicly to incite anger among the populace and provide a motive for rejecting the tyranny that rape and the rapist represent. The scene that Gower re-presents is sensitive to Lucrece's state of mind when Aruns plots his attack. Described as a "tigre his time awaiteth / In hope for to cacche his preie" (ll. 4945-46), he "tok thane what him liste,/ And goth his wey, that non it wiste" (ll. 4989-90) . When the terrorized woman faints during the assault, enacting the sense of dissemblance described by Edwards as a rape survivor's not knowing "how she thinks she knows herself" (9), we see the relevance of the scene to present-day rape survivors. Yet Lucrece lives in ancient Rome where the shame of rape for a married woman is unbearable; she is not a rape survivor in the modern sense, nor a martyr in the ancient sense. Rather, her violated body becomes an emblem of political turmoil and tyrannous rulership. And while this is clearly one of the points of Gower's tale, Edwards' tendency to look away from Lucrece's corpse to the men who find her body seems an abrupt swerve. Gower's representation of Lucrece's rape illustrates the mind/body separation that Augustine claims for her, but it also indicts the underlying rivalries among men that fuel violence both public and personal; the poet's sensitive rewriting of Lucrece's response to the violation of her "wommanhiede" is deserving of greater explication than is afforded in Edwards' concluding chapter. [ES. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, Suzanne M. Published Edwards, Suzanne M. The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This informative chapter discusses scholars' access to medieval British manuscripts from the time of their production to the present (2020), taking one manuscript, British Library, Cotton MS. Tiberius A. IV, a collection of John Gower's Latin poems, as a focal point for current access but at times extending further to discuss access in more general terms. For experienced scholars, the description of how one gains access to manuscripts in the British Library won't have added much to their knowledge. The interesting part comes as Prescott and Echard discuss how collections came into the British Library, why the Library changed the shelfmarks, for some while they retained the previous collectors' shelfmarks for others like the Royal and Cotton collections, and how the holdings of medieval charters, printed books, etc. cause some confusion in the shelfmarks seemingly duplicated when we use contracted forms. Prescott's insider knowledge of the workings behind the circulation desk at the British Library both before and after its move to St. Pancras enables them to explain how and why the Library came to classify some manuscripts as "Select" while others seemingly just as important remain ordinary. They also describe how decisions about the handling, display and conservation of manuscripts were made by different Keepers of Manuscripts. Prescott's insider glimpses into how and where the manuscripts are kept in storage and fetched when we request them, and explanations for the historical classifications by which the Library decided which to protect during the two world wars and which could be kept at the Library are also interesting. Echard then picks up the story to describe how modern scholars access manuscripts other than "in person," through photographs, facsimiles, microfilm and (now) digital imagery on line. Her frustrations as a North American scholar, on the west coast at that, pinpoint the difficulties of access for those not based close to the collections. Branching out to look more widely at the manuscripts of Gower's works held in libraries other than the British Library, she reviews which sorts of libraries have had the resources to digitize their manuscripts, and points out the pressures on libraries and archives to digitize not only English medieval manuscripts with which we are interested but also modern collections, which are much more numerous. This last year (2023-4), the ransomware attack on the British Library's IT system has only exacerbated these frustrations, even for scholars closer to the British Library than Echard. All in all, this is a wonderfully informative article focussed on a manuscript of Gower's non-English works but teaching us much more about the issues of access, both historically and at present, that we all face when studying medieval manuscripts. [LM. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân. Prescott, Andrew. Published Echard, Siân and Andrew Prescott. "Charming the Snake: Accessing and Disciplining the Medieval Manuscript," in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval British Manuscripts, ed. Orieta Da Rold and Elaine Treharne (Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 237-66. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charming the Snake: Accessing and Disciplining the Medieval Manuscript. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain" (EMLB) is a comprehensive reference work with over 600 substantial entries, in four volumes, totaling over 2000 pages, covering the years 449-1541. As the introduction states, the EMLB "seeks to redefine the study of medieval British literature as the study of the literature of medieval Britain" (lxxxviii), thus one of its great strengths is its focus on the multilingual and multicultural aspects of the literature of medieval Britain, including Latin, French, Celtic, and continental as well as English literatures and issues. Gower appears in a number of entries in the EMLB, including those on Estates Satire (Roger Ladd), Exemplum (Larry Scanlon), Legal Writing (Candace Barrington), the Loathly Lady (S. Elizabeth Passmore), Mirrors for Princes (Misty Schieberle), and Apollonius of Tyre (Elizabeth Archibald), among others. The EMLB also contains entries devoted exclusively to Gower: a substantial (approx. 7000 word) main entry for John Gower (R. F. Yeager) and one shorter (approx. 3500 word) entry each on his English Poetry (Matthew W. Irvin), French Poetry (Siân Echard), and Latin Poetry (Siân Echard). Yeager's entry covers what we know of Gower's life, as well as his critical reputation and influence during and after his life. This is followed by an overview of Gower's works, with a section each devoted to the French, Latin, and English works, which all include discussion of the content, form, and manuscripts of the works. Yeager's overarching approach is to highlight just how revolutionary and significant Gower's works are. The three entries that follow focus upon Gower's poetry in each of those three languages. While there is some overlap in each section with Yeager's primary entry on Gower, the entries by Irvin (on the English works) and Echard (on the French and Latin works) provide more detail concerning the content, forms, and manuscript issues, as well as sources and analogues. Each of the Gower entries concludes with references and useful lists of further readings. While the entries as a whole will provide students a substantive foundation for further study of Gower, even the most experienced Gowerian will undoubtably find (or be reminded of) useful information in them as well. [BWG. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân, ed. Rouse, Robert Allen, ed. Yeager, R. F. Irvin, Matthew W. Echard, Siân Ladd, Roger Scanlon, Larry Barrington, Candace Passmore S. Elizabeth Schieberle, Misty Archibald, Elizabeth Published Echard, Siân, and Robert Allen Rouse, eds. The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain. 4 vols. (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2017). Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Downes' subject is the "relationship between bilingualism--whether individual or cultural--and the expression of emotion in literature" (51). She proposes to approach this problem psycho-sociologically, along lines suggested by Anna Wierzbicka: "Different languages are linked with different ways of thinking as well as different ways of feeling; they are linked with different attitudes, different ways of relating to people, different ways of expressing one's feelings" [quoting Wierzbicka] (52). Downes asks "How true might these observations be for those who read, thought, wrote, and spoke in more than one language in fourteenth- and fifteenth- century England?" (52). She takes for her case-study Gower's "Cinkante Balades" and "Traitié pour les amantz marietz" and Charles d'Orleans' "Fortunes Stabilnes," seeing them as works written in "L2" languages--i.e., acquired tongues--by speakers fluent in both French and English. She selects balade sequences as her material, since in general these are written from a first-person perspective ("je/jeo/I"), more easily quarried for emotional connection. Downes' working hypothesis is that writing about feeling in French is different from writing about it in English ("Psycholinguists tend to describe an emotional detachment from additional languages as related to an individual's sense of their own inadequacy in that language" [54]). Ultimately, however, she suggests that, for Gower at least, it is the nature of the love described that matters, not the language used to describe it (58-59). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Downes, Stephanie. Published Downes, Stephanie. How to Be "Both": Bilingual and Gendered Emotions in Late Medieval English Balade Sequences. In Susan Broomhall, ed. Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. 51-65. Gower Subject Cinkante Balades Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource How to Be "Both": Bilingual and Gendered Emotions in Late Medieval English Balade Sequences. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Attending little to Gower and his works, Davis's book explores interwoven complexities of inheritance, succession, moral legacy, and literary patrimony in the late medieval and early modern imaginary. It covers a wide range of poetry, prose, and drama by Chaucer, Lydgate, Hoccleve, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Bunyan, along with less-studied works such as the Latin "Ordo de Ysaac et Rebecca," the "Tale of Gamelyn," and the genealogies and Great Picture of Anne Clifford. Tension between inheritance and emergent commercialism is Davis's focus in chapter six where he addresses, primarily, Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale" (with brief mention of Gower's Constance narrative) and Shakespeare's 'Merchant of Venice.' In this context, Davis discusses Gower's depiction of fraud ("Triche") in the international wool trade ("Mirour de l'Omme," 25237-55 and 25369-80) as straightforward "conservative estates satire" and "flat condemnation" (237-38), contrasting it with the "much more innovative" (235) and complicated "Libelle of Englyshe Polycye" and the "[v]ery nearly trenchantly paradoxical" (239) "Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep" by Lydgate. For Davis, MO stands as representative of the "complaints . . . found in innumerable sermons and homilies produced throughout the Middle Ages" (234), a depiction of trade as "alien entity within traditional medieval culture" (247), and, lacking paradox or tension, it seems, not quite premodern. Elsewhere in the book, Gower is mentioned only twice in passing: the poet presents Henry as conqueror by force in "Cronica Tripertita" (103n17) and, at a moment in "H. aquile," the poet offers a "paradoxical formulation [that] balances competing intuitions of change and continuity" (109), perhaps a bit premodern after all. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Davis, Alex. Published Davis, Alex. Imagining Inheritance from Chaucer to Shakespeare. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. [xiii], 297 pp.; 11 b&w illus. Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme Cronica Tripertita Minor Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Imagining Inheritance from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article is the earlier and longer version of what became the chapter, "English Poetry in Late Summer 1399," in Carlson's book, John Gower: Poetry and Propaganda in Fourteenth-Century England (2012). Its subject is the extension to poetry of the Lancastrian "effort to manage information" (375) concerning the 1399 invasion and deposition. Carlson suggests, albeit through "indirect" evidence, that the Lancastrian regime not only managed information through official records and chronicles, but engaged in "public self-fashioning" (410) through a group of poems with certain key shared characteristics. While he admits that "[t]here is no evidence of writs going out to the English poets in late summer 1399 . . . nor are there receipts for payment and the like" (409), as there is for chronicle writers, Carlson finds in the poetry relating to the summer of 1399 consistencies which point to official pressure or encouragement. He analyzes five poems: two in Latin, "O deus in celis, cuncta disponens fidelis," and Gower's "Cronica tripertita," and three in English, "On King Richard's Ministers," and "Richard the Redeless", and the poem written as marginalia in a manuscript of Walsingham's "Chronicle," "Up on a hylle is a greene." At the end of the article (410-18), Carlson supplies an edition and translation of "O deus in celis," with extensive textual and explanatory notes. The four elements which suggest for "conspiracy" or "collaboration" are 1) how the poems discuss their own chronology with an implication of "predeposition composition" (381); 2) the poems "generic distribution and peculiar style," specifically, prophetic, recondite allegory; 3) their concern over the politics of the ruling elite; 4) their inclusion in a larger effort "to represent as righteous and lawful the lawlessness and crime used to put the Lancastrian regime in place" (377). He also argues that "the poetry was too particularly useful to the Lancastrian regime then in process of installing itself to pass now for spontaneous" (410). Specifically in terms of Carlson's treatment of Gower, he suggests that Gower does invoke contemporaneous composition ("journalism," in Carlson's words) "even though the 'Cronica's putatively current reportage often supersedes itself" (382). The section on "Genres and Allegorical Style" situates Gower's allegory in the CrT in a context of political writing, and provides a different explication for its political prophecy. Gower is also central in the construction of an image of "Henricus 'pius'," specifically, a Henry whose revolution was not bloody (403). [MWI. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R. Published Carlson, David R. "English Poetry, July--October 1399, and Lancastrian Crime." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007): 375-418. Gower Subject Cronica Tripertita Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource English Poetry, July--October 1399, and Lancastrian Crime. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article, published posthumously, primarily presents a reading of the overall structure and approach of "Fortunes Stabilnes," Charles d'Orléans' framed poetic collection in English, which Burrow generally refers to as the "English Book of Love." Burrow compares Charles' framing dream of Age to the 'Confessio Amantis,' and contrasts Amans' ultimate abandonment of love to Charles' abandonment of it, which in "Fortunes Stabilnes" he later reverses. The focus is largely on the collection's movement through its framing dreams, with some discussion of those dreams' possible use of English models. This is where Gower comes in--Burrow presents a detailed comparison of Venus' healing of Amans' love wound to Charles' presentation of himself retreating to the castle of "No Care" ("Nonchaloir") with his heart wrapped in black (25). The comparison continues with Burrow's discussion of Charles' second dream, which "like the first (and like Gower's), mysteriously heralds a change of life" (26), though unlike Gower's it involves returning to a poetic persona as a lover. Burrow notes that this dream is not paralleled in the French version of the collection, and calls it "so much wilder than the first" (26), suggesting some differences in the poet's approach when composing in English vs. French. Burrow suggests that "Charles may have conceived the first and last parts of his book as forming a kind of diptych, representing two of the main sorrows that a lover might suffer: separation from a mistress who is kind, or proximity to one who is not" (32). He concludes by speculating that Charles walked away from the English version of the collection without a strong conclusion, upon being freed from captivity (33). Overall, this article presents an interesting overview of the structure of "Fortunes Stabilnes," suggesting ways in which English models might be tied to the dream structure. While its primary focus is (and should be) Charles d'Orléans, it does provide a valuable perspective on Gower's fifteenth-century influence. [RAL. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burrow, John. Published Burrow, John. "The Two Dreams of Charles d'Orleans and of His English Book.' In R. D. Perry and Mary-Jo Arn, eds. Charles d'Orleans' English Aesthetic: The Form, Poetics, and Style of Fortunes Stabilnes (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 2020), pp. 22–33. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Two Dreams of Charles d'Orleans and of His English Book. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bower's examination of the discourse of medical recipes in Middle English focuses on the aesthetic features of the texts along with their practical value and placebo effects. Her clarifications of the aesthetics of these texts--their "poetic" and "playful" features rather than their "practical" ones (p. 22 and throughout)--depend upon comparison with better-known texts, including a portion of Gower's "Tale of Medea" (Confessio Amantis, Book V, 3957ff.) where Medea labors to renew the youth of Eson, Jason's aged father. Bowers' close reading of the episode acknowledges Gower's dependence on Ovid's "Metamorphoses" 7 as source, neatly summarizes the passage, and emphasizes how "Gower's lexical choices . . . seem designed to soften (or at least nuance) Medea's associations in classical and medieval writing with witchcraft and sorcery" (155) and how through protraction and repetition he "edges his representation towards parody, teasing readers with the possibility that Medea's impressive and protracted performance might not have any healing effects at all" (157). Bower suggests that Gower may have been echoing contemporaneous medical "recipes" (157) and that modern response to the labored efforts of Gower's Medea may reflect Pierre Bourdieu's notion that "the timing and duration of an action is [integral] to our interpretation of it" (160). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bower, Hannah. Published Bower, Hannah. Middle English Recipes and Literary Play, 1375–1500. Oxford English Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Middle English Recipes and Literary Play, 1375–1500. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Ascari intends "monumental" to be taken in two ways: both as the placement of Chaucer at the head of an incipient vernacular literary canon, and as the subject of "his" (since Chaucer's body was never in it) tomb, placed in Westminster Abbey by the Catholic Nicholas Brigham in 1556. The first of these, Ascari argues, results from the development of printing, and the second--motivated and facilitated by the first--from the erection of the "tomb" itself. Gower figures briefly but importantly in Ascari's narrative, which focuses on Thomas Berthelette's two editions of the Confessio Amantis (1532 and 1554) and Gower's tomb (which did contain his body) in what is now Southwark Cathedral. (Rather strangely, Ascari neglects Caxton's prior printing of the CA in 1483, and whatever contribution it might have made to his argument.) Ascari quotes at length Berthelette's introductory "To the Reder" in which the printer connects Gower's tomb with Chaucer's original, humbler burial-site in the floor of Westminster Abbey, in order to argue that Brigham was motivated to provide the monumental "tomb" for Chaucer by Berthelette's editions and by the clearly Catholic tomb of Gower, in the hope that Chaucer could thus be claimed as a Catholic poet (416-20). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ascari, Maurizio. Published Ascari, Maurizio. "Monumental Chaucer: Print Culture, and Conflict, and Canonical Resilience." Chaucer Review 53 (2018): 402-27. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Monumental Chaucer: Print Culture, and Conflict, and Canonical Resilience. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This study develops a critical method for reading the vernacular frame narratives of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate based on the grammar-school commentaries that taught them classical rhetoric, philology, and history. In the course of developing this method, I answer the following questions: why do the school texts and vernacular works exist in the same format? Why is it that Christian writers appropriate the structuring principles of Ovid's pagan 'Metamorphoses' for their works? Furthermore, what inspired England's obsession with Ovidian narrative structure during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, to name just a few, participated in this Ovidian vogue--attempting to capture the Roman's sinister and playful voice and, more specifically, to master the frame-narrative device that gave it critical direction. Seeing Ovid's collection of pagan myths as a cohesive and continuous poem, medieval commentators uncovered an argument about abuses of power. Vernacular writers adopted this approach to Ovid, interpreting his work as a model for literary navigation in a historically turbulent period. I hereby alter the assumption that medieval writers mined classical literature merely as sources for their compilations of exempla with which to practice moralizing strategies. Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and their literate contemporaries would have learned in school that the 'Metamorphoses' was a text replete with masterful grammar, syntax, and rhetoric--but also with drama, subversion, and political intrigue" (ii-iii). Focusing in her second chapter on Book 4 of "Confessio Amantis, particularly the tales of Aeneas and Ulysses, Gerber argues that Gower's poem "contains two competing texts: Genius' moral expositions and Gower's literary frame narrative. The former text follows the [moral] allegorical tradition recorded by early medieval Ovidian commentators; the latter text follows the [political] commentary tradition from Orléans and the English prose paraphrases emerging at the end of the Middle Ages, which elucidate and mimic his rhetorical craft. The second text implicitly allows Gower to extend political criticisms from a safe distance." In this way, the CA "provides an early imitation" of the "Metamorphoses": "By removing the motivations for the actions of gods and the ruling class in general, Gower and Ovid similarly criticize those in positions of power for their seemingly arbitrary decisions that are based on selfish purposes" (133-34). [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gerber, Amanda J. Published Gerber, Amanda J.  Reframing the "Metamorphoses": The Enabling of Political Allegory in Late Medieval Ovidian Narrative. Ph.D. Dissertation. The Ohio State University, 2011. viii, 298 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A73.06. Freely accessible at http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1323788507. Abstract accessible at ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reframing the "Metamorphoses": The Enabling of Political Allegory in Late Medieval Ovidian Narrative. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Holchak, Paul. Published Holchak, Paul.  Intelligent Bodies and Embodied Minds: Reading Religious Performance in Middle English Writing from Syon Abbey, Nicholas Love, William Langland, and John Gower. Ph.D. Dissertation. City University of New York, 2017. x, 239 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A78.07(E). Freely accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1915/. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review In his dissertation Holchak uses current ideas from cognitive scientists and philosophers of the mind (e.g., Andy Clark, Alva Nöe, Antonio Damasio, Martha Nussbaum, and Daniel Kahneman) to argue for "a new reading of the relationship that texts have to performance, bodies have to agency, and that social construction has to literary criticism as these matters relate to the study of religious practice in late medieval England" (iv). It emphasizes the interrelation of embodiment, cognition, environment, and action in religious practice as evident in "The Myroure of Oure Ladye" and "The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ" from Syon Abbey, Nicholas Love's "Meditationes Vitae Christi" and "Treatise on the Sacrament," and fictive representation of pilgrimage in "Piers Plowman" and of confession in "Confessio Amantis," treating the latter two as similar in several ways: "the interest, energy, and narrative focus shift in both poems to zones of interactive participation in which the activity of bodies matters. In navigating those zones, an ability to use implicit, partially unstated information proves crucial to the protagonists' projects. As a consequence, Will and Amans learn that when they no longer expect their actions to be controlled discursively, the process of participating in devotion changes, and how one participates appears more significant than how far along one is in completing the performance" (220). For CA, Holchak focuses all but exclusively on the end of Book 8. After Amans resists confession throughout earlier portions of the poem, Holchak tells us, and tracing various shifts near the end of the poem--discourse to recognition, stasis to motion, Genius to Venus, Amans to Gower--Holchak argues that Gower "accepts and affirms that he does not really know what love is" (214), relaxing his "reliance on discursivity" and enabling him "to leave a narrative in which Amans had been trapped, (218), heading ambiguously but significantly "Homward" (8.2967). [MA] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Intelligent Bodies and Embodied Minds: Reading Religious Performance in Middle English Writing from Syon Abbey, Nicholas Love, William Langland, and John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Hastings' abstract: "This dissertation explores the ways in which Old and Middle English poets made use of the poetic corpus of the Roman Augustan Age poet Horace (Quintus Flaccus Horatius) and the medieval commentary tradition that accrued around it. It considers especially the Late Antique commentaries of Porphyry and PseudoAcro as well as the scholia transmitted in Bern MS Bernensis 363 and Paris, BnF MS Latin 17897. The Old English elegies in the Exeter Book (Exeter Cathedral MS 3501) are the subject of the second chapter. Subsequent chapters focus on William Langland's 'Piers Plowman,' John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,' and Geoffrey Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' (with especial emphasis on Fragments VIII and IX)." In chapter four, Hastings assesses "what role the Horatian tradition may have played in the moral counsel Gower sought to provide to his king through the 'Confessio Amantis'." He comments on two spurious attributions to Horace of material in Gower's Latin commentary, followed by close analysis of four passages in CA where, Hastings argues, Gower "uses the Horatian tradition to inflect the tone and timbre of his other source material to admonish Richard II on the proper exercise of virtue. Specifically, "These subtle criticisms on ethical conduct and procreative sexuality provide counterweights to two of the criticisms most commonly laid against the Ricardian court: a culture whose excesses bordered upon the effete and a king whose relationship with Robert de Vere caused anxiety 'vis-à-vis' dynastic succession" (196). [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hastings, Justin A. Published Hastings, Justin A. "Englishing" Horace: The Influence of the Horatian Tradition on Old and Middle English Poetry. Ph.D. Dissertation. Loyola University, 2016. vi, 287 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A78.07(E). Fully accessible ProQuest Theses & Dissertations Global and at https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2283/. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Englishing" Horace: The Influence of the Horatian Tradition on Old and Middle English Poetry. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Nafde, Aditi. Published Nafde, Aditi. Deciphering the Manuscript Page: The "Mise-en-Page" of Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve Manuscripts. D.Phil Dissertation. University of Oxford, 2012. viii, 268 pp.; 11 illus. Dissertation Abstracts International C73.08 and C81.07(E). Fully accessible at https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b2c67783-b797-494a-b792-368c14d1fe49. Abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Review From Nafde's abstract: This thesis "offers close analysis of the 'mise-en-page' of the manuscripts of three central authors: Chaucer's, Gower's, and Hoccleve's manuscripts [which] were . . . produced when scribal methods for creating the literary page were still unformed. Previous studies have focused on the localised readings produced by single scribes, manuscripts, or authors, offering a limited examination of broader trends. This study offers a wider comparison . . . , analysing the layout of seventy-six manuscripts [twenty-six of Gower's Confessio Amantis], including borders, initials, paraphs, rubrics, running titles, speaker markers, glosses and notes, [and arguing] that scribes were deeply concerned with creating a manuscript page specifically to showcase texts of poetry. The introduction outlines current scholarship on 'mise-en-page' and defines the scribe as one who offers an individual response to the text on the page within the context of the inherited, commercial, and practical practices of layout. The three analytical chapters address the placement of the features of 'mise-en-page' in each of the seventy-six manuscripts, each chapter offering [one of three] contrasting manuscript situations. Chapter 1 analyses the manuscripts of Chaucer, who left no plan for the look of his page, causing scribes to make decisions on layout that illuminate fifteenth-century scribal responses to literature. These are then compared to the manuscripts of Gower in Chapter 2, directly or indirectly supervised by the poet, which display rigorous uniformity in their layout. This chapter argues that scribes responded in much the same way, despite the strict control over meaning. Chapter 3 focuses on Hoccleve's autograph manuscripts which are unique in demonstrating authorial control over layout. This chapter compares the autograph to the non-autograph manuscripts to argue that scribal responses differed from authorial intentions. . . . Focussing on the 'mise-en-page,' this thesis . . . mount[s] a substantial challenge to current perceptions that poetic manuscripts were laid out in order to assist readers' understanding of the meaning of the texts they contain. Instead, it argues that though there was a concern with representing the nuances of poetic meaning, often scribal responses to poetry were bound up with presenting poetic form." Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Deciphering the Manuscript Page: The "Mise-en-Page" of Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve Manuscripts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Rajendran, Shyama. Published Rajendran, Shyama. Modes of Multilingualism: Contemporary Language Theory and the Works of John Gower. Ph.D. Dissertation. George Washington University, 2017. viii, 163 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A79.01(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Vox Clamantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusioin Review In her dissertation, Rajendran applies modern theories of language and translation to selected potions of Gower's corpus in order "to provoke a reconceptualization of how we think about multilingualism, recognize when and where contemporary language ideology is structuring our expectations of the operations of language, and revisit our unmarked assumptions about language and cultural identity." Further, her "project aims to show that focusing in on textual moments of Gower's work serves to build a picture of his multilingualism that is more true to the operations of language, rather than the operations of language ideology. By distinguishing between his ideological investments and the operations of language at each of these textual moments, this project seeks to attend to the operations of language without succumbing to contemporary language ideologies" (vi). In chapter one, Rajendran draws "on contemporary sociolinguistic theorist Yasemin Yildiz's formulation of the postmonolingual condition [to] consider how Gower's divergent interpretations of the Babel story in Middle English verse and Latin prose annotations [in "Confessio Amantis'] speaks to modern multilingual resistance to monolingual frames of analysis and interpretation" (21-22). Chapter two assesses the notion of cultural identity in Gower's Tale of Constance in CA by viewing it in light of Gloria Anzaldúa's border theory and the practices of rap-artist M.I.A. (Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam), revealing "the unmarked and marked structures of cultural intelligibility in medieval literature as well as in the present" (23). Chapter three uses "cognitive linguist Mel Y. Chen's concept of feral methodology" to argue that Gower's "Visio Anglie" (Book 1 of "Vox Clamantis") helps us to think "critically about our modern tendency to categorize languages as living or dead" and to generate "a more nuanced understanding of allegory's ability to control or 'domesticate' language" (24). In chapter four Derrida's "idea of the specter" helps Rajendran to show how in Shakespeare's "Pericles" Gower's "resurrection" as chorus "functions as a textual haunting, complicating our understanding of a linear progression from one linguistic iteration to the next" (24)--in this case from Godfrey of Verbo's Latin "Pantheon" to Gower's Tale of Apollonius to Shakespeare's play. [MA] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Modes of Multilingualism: Contemporary Language Theory and the Works of John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Herrold, Megan. Published Herrold, Megan. Productive Misogyny in Medieval and Early Modern Literature: Women, Justice, and Social Order. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Southern California, 2018. 267 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A84.12(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review In her dissertation, Herrold shows how in medieval and early modern literature "misogyny offers surprising ethical and political philosophical opportunities to explore gendered constructions of personhood." She considers "how authors ranging from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, including Chaucer, Gower, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Aemilia Lanyer, appropriate conventionally misogynistic figures to rethink radically the ethical and political capacities of personhood, and therefore justice, in society" (7-8). Literature of "productive" misogyny, Herrold tells us, contemplates "the place and/or the idea of women in a system of social order . . . ethically and seriously," and, in this literature, either society changes "to more justly accommodate the troubling woman within it" or, more conservatively, the troubling woman is herself transformed "to render the systemic injustice she elucidates moot in her particular case" (8). She reads Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, Gower's Tale of Florent, and "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle" as examples of her more conservative category, together comprising "a commentary on the limitations of individual autonomy in society-building: the just social order is forged by shunting the notion of compromised subjectivity onto women in general and the loathly lady in particular" (21). Each of the individual versions "stages and restages the fiction of men's autonomous subjectivity; [while] the recursive nature of the tales reveals the toll patriarchy takes on women." When considered together as a "genre"--arguably, not a very precise use of the term here--the loathly-lady stories come "very close to an exploration of a radical, post-patriarchal order" (27). In each poem, the presiding social order is tested by a "loathly" woman, but that social order--unjust though it is--is neither corrected nor replaced. Nevertheless, the reiterated challenges--and ongoing feminist readings of them--prompt questions for Herrold about how such corrections or replacements might be imagined when individual women are no longer subsumed allegorically into a single, universalized, compromised subjectivity. Extending her arguments into early modern England, Herrold incorporates queer attention to Spenser's Britomart as a "gender-bending loathly lady" (22). She moves to analysis of Shakespeare's uses of troubling women in several of his plays, including those where the traditional bed-trick plot engages questions of justice and those where Lady Fortune is involved in depictions of gambling with justice. In her final two chapters, Herrold addresses Lanyer's fusion of Petrarchanism and Marian compassion in her "Salve Dues Rex Judaeorum" and closes with exploration of "the ways in which the tradition of representing justice as female--as Lady Justice--allegorically justifies the exclusion of women from the political order even while acknowledging its dependence on them" (23). [MA] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Productive Misogyny in Medieval and Early Modern Literature: Women, Justice, and Social Order. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Gillhammer, Cosima Clara Published Gillhammer, Cosima Clara. An Edition of Oxford, Trinity College, MS 29. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Oxford, 2020. 2 vols.: xi, 335; i, 329; 51 illus. Dissertation Abstracts International C82.02(E). Abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Fully accessible via https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c3244a71-a6fa-4646-aeb3-9902e055a290. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Review Gillhammer opens her two-volume dissertation with clear claims and an ambitious goal: "Oxford, Trinity College, MS 29 (T) contains a unique Old Testament history which has so far only been known to a very small number of experts. T is an unusual and eccentric text; it is a compilation of reworked extracts from a wide range of sources, forming a history of the world beginning with the creation of man and breaking off incompletely at the time of Hannibal . . . . [T]here "has never been a complete description or a comprehensive analysis of this text--a lack which the present thesis and edition seek to remedy" (1). She succeeds in remedying this lack, editing the text itself (without notes) in her second volume (although she calls it an "appendix"). Volume 1 is a comprehensive Introduction, with paleographical and codicological descriptions of the manuscript and analysis of its sources (including Gower's "Confessio Amantis"); discussion of "broader contextual questions such as authorship and authority, intended audience and use, as well as the evidence for a compiler-scribe"; assessment of "T in the context of related medieval genres, such as universal histories, encyclopedias, and florilegia"; and investigation of "the linguistic evidence, and traces the manuscript's origin based on a dialectal analysis" (3). Gowerians will be particularly interested in Gillhammer's discussion of the use of Gower's "Nebuchadnezzar's Dream" in the manuscript--the only section of CA excerpted in in the manuscript in verse--and more than twenty briefer excerpts from CA given in prose (see especially pp. 43-49 and 154-59 of volume 1). [MA] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource An Edition of Oxford, Trinity College, MS 29. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Strakhov, Yelizaveta. Strakhov, Elizaveta. Published Strakhov, Yelizaveta. Politics in Translation: Language, War, and Lyric Form in Francophone Europe, 1337-1400. University of Pennsylvania, 2014. ix, 339 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A76.01(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Background and General Criticism Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Language and Word Studies Review From Strakhov's abstract: "The dissertation examines the so-called 'formes fixes,' an important lyric genre widely used across Francophone Europe in the late Middle Ages. It argues for this genre's emergence as a privileged medium for Francophone poets to explore the difficulty of retaining trans-European cultural affinity during the rise of protonationalist and regionalist faction in the Hundred Years War . . . . The dissertation organizes itself around a large, but little studied, late medieval manuscript anthology of 'formes fixes' lyric, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, MS Codex 902 (formerly French 15). . . , the largest, oldest, and most formally and geographically diverse 'formes fixes' collection extant today. Chapter One argues that, unlike other, later, 'formes fixes' anthologies, the Pennsylvania manuscript is not structured by author or sub-genre, but rather by form, chronology, geographic diversity, and dialectal difference . . . , reveal[ing] not only its compiler's awareness of the diffusion of 'formes fixes' lyric, but a desire to memorialize this genre's transmission across regional divides. Chapter Two explores the political effects of the diffusion of 'formes fixes' lyric by mapping literary borrowings between a corpus of anti-war texts in this anthology and other lyric corpora written in France, England, and the Low Countries. Chapter Three focuses on Francophone responses, both positive and negative, to the transmission of 'formes fixes' lyric into England, centering on the implications of Eustache Deschamps' praise of his English Francophone contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer, as a 'great translator' of 'formes fixes' lyric. Chapter Four examines the adoption of 'formes fixes' lyric in the work of Chaucer and . . . John Gower. It demonstrates that, like their Continental counterparts, Chaucer and Gower also view the appropriation of 'formes fixes' lyric as a means of carving a geopolitically specific identity out of Francophone cultural belonging" (vi-vii), focusing on Chaucer's Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women" and Gower's "Traitié selonc les auctours pour essampler les amantz marietz," with commentary on Gower's multi-lingualism elsewhere in his corpus. [MA] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Politics in Translation: Language, War, and Lyric Form in Francophone Europe, 1337-1400. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014