10 100 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 Burnley considers Gower along with Chaucer and Usk in his discussion of the knowledge of traditional Latin rhetoric by London poets of the end of the 14th century. Murphy (1962) drew heavily on Gower for his argument that there was no viable rhetorical tradition during Chaucer's and Gower's time. He was most vigorously opposed by Schmitz (1974), who insisted that Gower was not as ignorant as Murphy claimed, but that he deliberately rejected the rhetoric of ornament, which he associated with falsehood and deception, in favor of a "plain" rhetoric rooted in "trouthe" and "honestete" that directly reflected the moral concerns of his poem. Burnley takes a middle-of-the-road view. He decides that the three London poets "may have known something of the teaching of the rhetorics and the artes poeticae" (p. 291), but that they had not studied them systematically and their concepts of rhetoric and style were less technical and influenced by more general sources. Like Schmitz (whom he does not cite), he finds that there is "an implied moral significance" in the contrast that Gower (like Chaucer) draws between rhetorical ornament and plainness and honesty, but he attributes his use of "colour" and "peynte" in this context not to a conscious choice of a different rhetorical ideal but to "habitual expression which has been part of the common core of vocabulary for long enough to have shifted its sense" (p. 285). He concludes that Gower was less well-informed about traditional rhetoric than Chaucer was. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burnley, J.D. Published Burnley, J.D.. "Chaucer, Usk, and Geoffrey of Vinsauf." Neophilologus 69 (1985), pp. 284-93. Gower Subject 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 Chaucer, Usk, and Geoffrey of Vinsauf Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 A comparison between Chaucer's "Physician's Tale" and Gower's "Virginia," in Japanese; not seen by JGN. The reference is taken from "An Annotated Chaucer Bibliography: 1985" by Lorraine Y. Baird-Lange and Bege K. Bowers, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 9 (1987), item 184. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kanno, Masahiko Published Kanno, Masahiko. "Chaucer no The Physician's Tale - Ruiwa tono Hikaku" ("The Physician's Tale - Comparison with its Analogue")." Studies in Foreign Languages and Literatures (Aichi University of Education) 21 (1985), pp. 47-58. Gower Subject 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 Chaucer no The Physician's Tale - Ruiwa tono Hikaku" ("The Physician's Tale - Comparison with its Analogue") Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 Smallwood cites some dozen examples of brief digressions in the tales in CA in contrast to the longer, more substantial digressions that occur near the beginnings of several tales by Chaucer (pp. 440- 41). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Smallwood, T.M. Published Smallwood, T.M.. ""Chaucer's Distinctive Digressions."." Studies in Philology 82 (1985), pp. 437-49. Gower Subject 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 "Chaucer's Distinctive Digressions." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 Fischer offers one of the most detailed comparisons of the two most frequently compared passages in Chaucer's and Gower's poems. She draws a general distinction between what she labels the "baroque" style of WB and the "classical style" of Gower's Confessor, borrowing her terms from H.H. Meier. The former she describes as "emotive, committed, excited" and the latter as "calm, detached, orderly;" and she analyzes the specific stylistic features in which this general difference is manifested. Gower uses longer and more complex sentences, he uses more parataxis and makes more use of the passive voice, his vocabulary is less familiar and more specialized, and he uses fewer exclamations, fewer intensifying words and expressions, less anacoluthon, and less alliteration, in general reflecting rationality and design rather than emotion and impulsiveness. He also uses less direct speech, and his version is less dramatic, less suspenseful, and more prosaic and matter-of-fact. The WB's style reflects her direct involvement in her story, while the Confessor is less interested in the characters than in the moral of the tale. Fischer acknowledges that WBT represents the differences between Chaucer and Gower at their greatest extreme. Her examination of the Clerk's Tale reveals a style closer to the Confessor's than to WB's, and thus range and variety themselves must be considered a characteristic of Chaucer's style. The Confessor's style, however, is identical to Gower's, for their purposes in telling their tales are the same; and echoing Schmitz (1974), though she does not cite him, Fischer concludes that Gower's style is a consciously chosen attempt to match "form" and "content" and to reflect the reason and harmony that he teaches in the orderliness and harmoniousness of his poem. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fischer, Olga C.M. Published Fischer, Olga C.M.. "Gower's Tale of Florent and Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale: A Stylistic Comparison." English Studies 66 (1985), pp. 205-225. ISSN 0013-838X 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 Gower's Tale of Florent and Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale: A Stylistic Comparison Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 Chapter 1 summarises the present state of knowledge of the history of Middle English and sets forth current theories for analysing scribal practice. Chapter 2 reconstructs the language of the poet through an examination of the manuscript evidence, and presents a study of Gower's rhyming practice. Chapter 3 is a preliminary linguistic survey of all accessible manuscripts and early prints of the Confession Amantis, with the exception of those studies in detail in chapters 2 and 4. Chapter 4 is a study of the manuscripts copied by "Scribe D." Chapter 5 presents conclusions, important among which are that (a) MSS Fairfax and Stafford "are, in all respects except their actual handwriting, as good as autograph copies;" (b) Gower's own language "was transmitted through layers of scribal copying throughout the fifteenth century in a very remarkable way;" (c) a corpus of spellings for the entire available manuscript tradition of the Confessio is presented; (d) new evidence about the career of Scribe D is offered. There are a bibliography and two appendices, one in which data used in the text are presented, and one of maps, showing dialectical regions. [JGN 5.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Smith, Jeremy J Published Smith, Jeremy J. "Studies in the Language of Some Manuscripts of Gower's Confessio Amantis." PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 1985. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis 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 Studies in the Language of Some Manuscripts of Gower's Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed 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 Like Ovid in his "Metamorphoses," Gower creates comedy in CA by manipulating traditional stories and their presentation. Hiscoe examines the authors' versions of the Ceyx and Alcyone story as examples of their comic, ironic techniques, and argues that Gower was aware of his place in a literary "chain of wisdom," modifying and adapting Ovid methods to the late-medieval context. Where Ovid's alterations of traditional details, tone, and perspective deflate love and thereby encourage readers to "evade rhetorical manipulation," Gower presents Genius as ignorant of the moral and spiritual allegorizations that were part of the medieval interpretive tradition of the "Ovide Moralisé" and, as a result, he depicts his "priest of love" as humorously insensitive to the Christian messages that inform his stories. Indeed, in his version of Ceyx and Alcyone, Genius is guilty of spiritual sloth when he tells the tale merely as an exemplum against Sloth and obscures its message of redemption. [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hiscoe, David W Published Hiscoe, David W. "The Ovidian Comic Strategy of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." Philological Quarterly 64 (1985), pp. 367-85. ISSN 0031-7977 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 Ovidian Comic Strategy of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 Harriss considers Gower with reference to Henry V and discusses Gower's relation to the politics and society of his time. Harriss uses the works of Gower, Hoccleve, Lydgate, and a number of anonymous poets to illustrate prevailing concerns with government and kingship among the educated urban class of late medieval England. The repeated calls for "good governance" among the commons following the many disturbances of the end of the fourteenth century "only thinly concealed their own bewilderment and lack of effective remedies." It is in this context that Gower's political writings are to be seen. "Of all the Ricardian poets Gower is most representative of the middle and 'professional' stratum of free society which in the late fourteenth century had become alienated from royal government, and impotently voiced its grievances and remedies in a wide range of the surviving literature" (p. 2). The "strictly defined role" of this class "in the political hierarchy restricted their own capacity to effect reform" (p. 4). Hence they looked to the king, both as a model and as a leader. The bulk of Harriss' essay is taken up with a survey of the prevalent ideals of kingship, divided among the following topics: the role of the king, justice, counsel, finance, political harmony, chivalry, war and peace, and religion. Henry shared the same ideals, Harriss asserts, and made them the program of his reign; and his ability to win the confidence of his subjects was due not to his innovations but to his fulfilling the expectations of kingship as they had already been defined. All these topics are familiar, of course, from Gower's writing, and Gower is frequently quoted as Harriss defines the ideals that Henry attempted to put into practice. Harriss' survey also does much to set Gower's poetry in the context of other contemporary writing on political themes.[PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Harriss, G. L. Published Harriss, G. L. "Introduction: The Exemplar of Kingship." In Henry V: The Practice of Kingship. Ed. Harriss, G.L.. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 1-29. 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 Introduction: The Exemplar of Kingship Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Oxford University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Wyclif, Langland, and Gower have all been cited by historians attempting to demonstrate that enthusiasm for crusading had completely died out by the end of the fourteenth century. By setting their remarks in context, Siberry attempts to show that support for the crusades remained undiminished. Wyclif's criticism was restricted to the Norwich Crusade of 1383, and Langland's advocacy of missions to convert Muslims was not inconsistent with military crusading. Gower's remarks on the crusades, actually spoken by Amans, in CA 3.1620-33, 1656-82, 2241-44, and 2484-2515 "should not be taken at . . . face value" (p. 130): they were dictated to some extent by the demands of courtly love, and "may also have been intended to be ironical, highlighting the absence of chivalric values amongst the knightly class" (p. 130). They would not have pleased Gower's patron, Henry earl of Derby, moreover, and are inconsistent with the sentiments expressed in VC Book 3, in "In Praise of Peace," and in "De lucis scrutinio," in which Gower asserts the Christian's right to the Holy Land, laments the decline of chivalry and crusading zeal, and urges his fellow Christians to turn their attention from fighting among themselves to defeating the Muslims. Siberry concludes by citing the large number of Gower's contemporaries who took part in crusades, including of course Henry. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Siberry, Elizabeth Published Siberry, Elizabeth. "Criticism of Crusading in Fourteenth-Century England." In Crusade and Settlement: Papers read at the First Conference of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East and presented to R.C. Smail. Ed. Edbury, Peter W.. Cardiff: University College Press, 1985, pp. 127-34. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Minor Latin Poetry 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 Criticism of Crusading in Fourteenth-Century England Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University College Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Hillman argues that Shakespeare's "Pericles" was more widely influenced by the CA than is previously recognized. He acknowledges Gower's role as "an unusually sophisticated choric function" in the play and accepts the importance of Gower's story of Apollonius (CA book 8) as Shakespeare's primary source. Going further, he explores how and in what ways CA "[t]aken as a whole . . . strikingly furnishes" a precedent for Shakespeare's "use of love themes as a means of exploring larger issues of human spirituality and self-realization" (428). The "tortuous psychic voyage of Amans toward self-discovery" in CA, and the poem's affirmation that "proper behavior at least offers a chance of happiness, while nothing good can come of wickedness," Hillman agues, are echoed in the "pattern of suffering and redemption" (430) in Pericles. Both poem and play indicate the arbitrariness of fortune in human affairs, and Gower's presence in the play serves as a "safety net" (431) for Shakespeare's hero, reminding the audience of the drama that, like Gower's Amans, Shakespeare's Pericles transcends fortune through the gaining and proclamation of his fundamental identity. In each case, "selflessness is explicitly a condition of the renewal of self" (434) and a major step toward acceptance of morality and "reconciliation to the human condition" (435). In a nice turn of phrase, Hillman claims that Shakespeare summons Gower "not only as mouthpiece but also as muse" (437), and he aligns Gower's role in "Pericles" with that of Arion in CA. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hillman, Richard. Published Hillman, Richard. "Shakespeare's Gower and Gower' s Shakespeare: The Larger Debt of 'Pericles'." Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985): 427-37. 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 Shakespeare's Gower and Gower' s Shakespeare: The Larger Debt of "Pericles." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 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 Tarvers, Josephine Koster. Published Tarvers, Josephine Koster. The Language of Prayer in Middle English,1200-1400 (Medieval, Religious, Katherine Group, Chaucer). Ph.D. Dissertation. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1985. DAI-A 46.11. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review Tarvers studies prayer in Middle English literature, analyzing "about 200 published Middle English prayers" and "21 hitherto-unpublished prayers from Bodleian manuscripts (which are presented in appendices). The analysis identified nine components commonly found in prayers (formulae of address, two kinds of honorifics, professions of faith, petitions, grounds for petitions, interpolated amplification, homiletic elements, and closing formulae) and the various forms each component takes." Then Tarvers "goes on to examine historically the treatment of these components in Middle English pious and didactic collections, such as "The South English Legendary," "The Lay Folks' Mass Book," "The Pricke of Conscience," and the Vernon MS. The examination brought to light three generally identifiable styles: a plain one; a second strikingly characterized by repetition, which I call "iterative," and a third which I call "elaborate," because the writer appears to be conscious of style and the result is mannered. The examination revealed that prayers tend to become more iterative and elaborate as the fourteenth century progresses. But the progression is not a steady one: there is a peak of stylistic elaboration in the prayers embodied in the "Katherine group" to which subsequent prayers rarely attain. The last part of my study, which is of prayers in literary works, including the romances and the works of the "Pearl-poet," Langland, Gower, and Chaucer, produced two unexpected results. The prayers in these works proved to have the same components [as] those composed primarily for devotion and differed only in one structural particular, the occasional interruption of the prayer by the narrator to relate it to the narrative situation. Otherwise, what distinguished the prayers in the literary works was, effectively, a superior command of style in those writers" (n.p.). Tarvers (pp. 177-82) comments on stylistic features of eight prayers in Gower's Confessio Amantis: the narrator's early address to Venus, Amans' prayer to Genius, Nabuchadnezzer's prayer to God, a prayer at the end of Iphis and Araxarathen, two prayers in Jason and Medea, one in Philomena, and the narrators' rhyme-royal prayer to Cupid and Venus near the end of the poem. 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 Language of Prayer in Middle English,1200-1400 (Medieval, Religious, Katherine Group, Chaucer). Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 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 Shaw proposes that "coise" (CA 1.1734) = "thing;" and that it is a feminine form of OF coi, quoi, "what," which is used as a substantive to mean "thing" in MO 1781. She also cites Gower's use of "what" to mean "thing" or "person" in CA 1.1676; and concludes that "the unusual diction of this passage argues forcefully for a French source for the 'Tale of Florent'." Shaw provides no other examples, however, of the creation of a feminine noun by the addition of non-etymological -se to a masculine noun, much less to a pronoun (the very lack of gender of which is implied in her own translation), and the pages she cites from Einhorn's Old French: A Concise Handbook do not offer any help. Previewed in JGN 3, no. 2. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Shaw, Judith Davis Published Shaw, Judith Davis. "Etymology of the Middle English 'Coise'." ELN 22.4 (1985), pp. 11-13. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Language and Word 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 Etymology of the Middle English 'Coise' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985-06. Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 Burrow does not give a detailed account of CA in this book, referring instead to his own earlier essay in Minnis' Responses and Reassessments (1983), but his remarks on Gower's debt to earlier writers, on the uniqueness of his treatment of Amans' old age, and on his later influence are worth reading again in the context of his general treatment of the "ages of man" in medieval literature. "More than any other medieval poem known to me," he writes, "Confessio Amantis conveys what it must feel like to be 'senex amans' which is much the same as what it feels like to be any other sort of lover" (pp. 160-61). Burrow also adds another text to the list of Gower's sources, the fourteenth-century French poem Les Douze Mois figurez, to which he attributes Amans' comparison of the stages of his life to the twelve months of the year, CA 8.2837- 41. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burrow, J.A. Published Burrow, J.A.. "Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought." Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986 ISBN 0198117558 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 Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Clarendon Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book NonPeerReviewed 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 Chaucer's poetry is pervaded by his deep concerns for contemporary political and social issues; he is dismayed by the materialism and loss of spiritual values of his contemporaries; and he hopes through his writing to bring about a transformation in the commonwealth. The themes are familiar, but Olson is writing about Chaucer, not about Gower; and though Gower is cited only peripherally, the subtlety and clarity of Olson's argument may prompt a renewed look at what has become one of the chestnuts of Gower criticism. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Olson, Paul A. Published Olson, Paul A.. "Canterbury Tales and the Good Society." Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986 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 Canterbury Tales and the Good Society Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Princeton University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book NonPeerReviewed 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 Unlike Gower's other poems, the moralizing in CA is presented not as a direct address to the reader but dramatically, in the dialogue between Genius and Amans. This fictional dialogue is as important to the moral and imaginative dimensions of the poem as the pilgrimage that serves as the setting for CT. Amans' presence allowed Gower to shift the emphasis from purely abstract moralizing to the difficulties of an individual sinner's real experience. The poem thus presents a genuine exploration of the relationship between general moral truth and the realities of human endeavor. An examination of Book 1 provides a demonstration of Gower's method, in particular of Amans' importance as the object of Genius' lessons. As the first book of the poem it also provides a summary of the essential points in Gower's complex and sympathetic doctrine of human love.[PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter Published Nicholson, Peter. "'Confession' in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Studia Neophilologica 58 (1986), pp. 193-204. ISSN 0039-3274 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 'Confession' in Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Routledge, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 1982, M.L. Samuels and Jeremy Smith published an essay on "The Language of Gower" (NM 82:295-304) in which they demonstrated that the orthography of the two principal manuscripts of CA contain features that can be localized in NW Kent and SW Suffolk, precisely the areas in which the poet and his family were known to have owned property. Their article was not only an important contribution to Gower studies, but also an impressive confirmation of the dialectological methods that had been pioneered by the editors of the new Linguistic Atlas of Late Middle English. Much had already been written about the new methodology, which is based on scribal orthography rather than on underlying phonological forms or the language of the author, but at the time, the body of data on which Samuels and Smith depended was available only to the small circle of scholars working in Glasgow and Edinburgh. That data has now been published in impressive form, and though the new atlas makes no specific reference to Gower, it would be inappropriate to leave unacknowledged here one of the great monuments of Middle English scholarship of our time, and a work that will no doubt have profound impact on Gower studies in the years to come. The atlas is a daunting production. The first of the four large volumes includes a general introduction, providing the most complete statement of the assumptions under which the editors worked, an index of sources, and a series of "dot maps" showing the distribution of specific forms; volume two contains enlarged "item maps," plotting the different forms of the same item; volume three contains linguistic profiles of each county; and volume four is a "county dictionary," indexing the distribution of localizable forms. This is not a tool for a novice, and some of us will need considerable help before we understand all of the implications of this material. A new essay on the language of CA by Jeremy Smith is promised in the forthcoming "Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts of the Works of John Gower" (see JGN 2, no. 1), which will no doubt tell us more about how all this data may be used. It may also resolve one question that troubles the reviewer: since the working assumption of the atlas researchers is that scribes copied by "translating" texts into their own orthography, what is the implication of the fact that the language of the two earliest Gower manuscripts is evidently the poet's, and that these manuscripts, by different scribe, are "in all respects except their actual handwriting, as good as autograph copies" (Samuels and Smith, 1982:304)? [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor McIntosh, Angus Samuels, M.L. Benskin, Michael Published McIntosh, Angus and Samuels, M.L. and Benskin, Michael. "A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English." Aberdeen: University Press, 1986 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 A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed 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 After a number of tales in Book 4 concerned with the passage into adulthood, one of the major themes of CA, Amans makes his single attempt at self-assertion in his declaration of his refusal to kill for love (4.1648 ff.), citing the example of Achilles laying down his arms for Polixena based on Benoit de Sainte- Maure (4.1693-1701). Genius responds with three tales rebuking Amans' budding independence, and concludes with the tale of "Achilles' Education" drawn from Statius (4.1963 ff.), presenting Genius' somewhat different idea of the mature life. In Book 5 Genius makes two further mentions of Achilles, presenting the story of Deidamia from Statius (5.2961 ff.), and completing the story of Polixena begun by Amans (5.7591-96), expressing his own disapproval of Achilles in correction of his pupil. Genius' ideal is the heroic warrior-lover described by Statius, and using Achilles as his example he "urges Amans to grow up perfectly in an imperfect world" (pp. 135-36). Amans is more aware of the impossibility of such an ideal, and he turns to Benoit and to romance as an expression of accommodation to the realities of the world and of human behavior. Genius' attempt to educate Amans becomes increasingly irrelevant: the self-contradictions in his ideal become more evident in the two stories of Achilles in Book 5, and Aristotle's education of Alexander in reason and logic in Book 7 turns out even less successfully. Books 4 and 5 thus mark an important turning point in the poem; and in Book 8, once Genius has faded into the background, Amans' real education is completed in his vision of the Company of Lovers, with its examples of "those who try to live as best they can in this flawed world" (pp. 143-44). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Zambreno, Mary Frances Published Zambreno, Mary Frances. "Gower's Confessio Amantis IV, 1963-2013: The Education of Achilles." Essays in Medieval Studies: Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association 3 (1986), pp. 131-48. 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's Confessio Amantis IV, 1963-2013: The Education of Achilles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 Book 4, Levin notes, devotes an unusually large number of lines to Amans' discourse on his love and his notions of "gentilesse." What his speeches reveal, she argues, is a condition of "suspended imaginative desire" based on his direct appropriation of the forms and vocabulary of the courtly lyric, a state that protects him from "aggressive sexuality" but that also insulates him from any fruitful communion with his lady. "Amans lives a lyric, condemning himself to desire without plot or ending. Yet throughout Book 4 he attempts a paradox: he seeks a text which would both eliminate narrative action and enable him to find himself miraculously gratified by his lady's favor, a lyric of love granted" (p. 117). His condition is manifested in several different ways. His attempt to create a narrative, in his reference to the story of Moses and the magic ring, reveals instead his "ambivalence toward his own desire and his underlying wish to forget aggressive sexuality" (p. 118). The series of vignettes with which he describes his courting, all in the present tense, contains no "advancing narrative" but shows "his dislocation from any real attempt to gain gratification from his lady" (p. 119). It also reveals his idea of "gentilesse," which is based more on courtly decorum and correct behavior than on virtuous character. And his borrowing from Ovid in 4.1210-17 "celebrates the condition of desire rather than his lady as the object of desire" (p. 119). The two principal works that he turns to for models for his behavior are RR and T&C, which "offer to Amans the notion that he may in some unspecified way conflate his imaginative experience as lyric persona with the narrative romance to attain the static lyric situation of love fulfilled for which he claims to long" (p. 122). In adopting imagery from RR, however, he "adapts its text to avoid its narrative" (p. 122), and in imitating Troilus, he "adopts a literary antecedant which does not inspire assertive love but instead gives him a precedent for his passivity" (p. 125). "Thus Gower shows how the forms of courtly poetry, however beautiful, betray Amans" (p. 126), and only gradually throughout the remainder of CA does Genius help Amans escape his trap by teaching him the broader and more important connotations of "gentilesse." [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Levin, Rozalyn Published Levin, Rozalyn. "The Passive Poet: Amans as Narrator in Book 4 of the Confessio Amantis." Essays in Medieval Studies: Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association 3 (1986), pp. 114-30. 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 Passive Poet: Amans as Narrator in Book 4 of the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 Zaerr traces the shifting meanings of sloth and fine amour and the shifting relationship between Genius and Amans throughout Book 4. "Amans is led, though he has not requested it or realized he needed it, along a very complex and at times paradoxical path to an understanding of a love completely different from that he had sought." Directed by Miceal Vaughan. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Zaerr, Linda Marie Published Zaerr, Linda Marie. "The Dynamics of Sloth: Fin Amour and Divine Mercy in John Gower's Confessio Amantis." PhD thesis, University of Washington, 1986. 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 Dynamics of Sloth: Fin Amour and Divine Mercy in John Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed 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 five scattered episodes in which Ulysses' story appears do not follow the usual chronology of his legend, but their arrangement is coherent, and taken together, they represent a pilgrimage of the soul struggling between reason and passion that parallels in some ways the journey of Amans. Despite Ulysses' reputation as a rhetorician (cf. CA 7.1560) Gower suppresses all of his direct speech until the final episode in which he appears, when he forgives Telegonus after being mortally wounded (6.1747-48). His first use of speech completes the pattern of similarity to the story of Nebuchadnezzar in this tale, and suggests that in forgiving his son he undergoes a transformation from a lower state to a higher one, repudiating his previous disobedience and preparing himself for grace. "Gower has transformed the ancient pagan hero into a medieval Christian one." [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gittes, Katherine S. Published Gittes, Katherine S.. "Ulysses in Gower's Confessio Amantis: The Christian Soul as Silent Rhetorician." ELN 24 (1986), pp. 7-14. 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 Ulysses in Gower's Confessio Amantis: The Christian Soul as Silent Rhetorician Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 Dingley examines the survival of the story of Philomel in medieval and Renaissance English literature, particularly the attempts to reconcile the Ovidian tradition of Philomel's rape and transformation with another tradition, deriving from Provençal verse, in which the nightingale is the harbinger of spring and the wakening of love. Chaucer, in "Legend of Good Women," omits the transformations of Ovid's version, and thus eliminates the association between Philomel and the nightingale, which elsewhere in his work is linked to love and springtime. Gower is the first author that Dingley has found who faces the inconsistency directly and tries to achieve some sort of reconciliation. Gower downplays the vindictive roles of both Philomel and Procne in order to shift all of the blame onto Tereus; and in portraying Philomel as a virtuous victim, he invents an entirely original reason for her silence in winter and her joyful song in spring (CA 5.5985-88): ashamed and unable to hide while the trees are bare, she is joyful that her sorrow is hidden when the leaves return--a paradox that according to the poet recalls the mixed joy and pain of love. Gower ``seems here to be infiltrating elements of the courtly tradition of the nightingale as harbinger of love in order to counterbalance and temper the morally bare conclusion of the Ovidian narrative'' (p. 80). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dingley, R. J. Published Dingley, R. J.. "The Misfortunes of Philomel." Parergon 4 (1986), pp. 73-86. 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 Misfortunes of Philomel Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 derived his tale of "Geta and Amphitrion" (CA 2.2459-95) from the "Geta" of Vitalis of Blois, a widely circulated twelfth-century Latin comedy roughly contemporary with the "Comedia Babionis," from which Gower drew his tale of "Babio and Croceus" (5.4808-62), and the "Pamphilus," borrowings from which have been detected in both MO and VC. The roles of the male characters have been altered in Gower's version, however. Either he knew the source only indirectly or, more likely, he indulged in a playful misreading in which Amphitrion usurps the role of Jupiter, Geta usurps the role of his former master, and the priestly narrator himself supplants his esteemed auctor in this intentionally garbled imitation, all illustrating the sin with which Gower's exemplum is ostensibly concerned. Both Paul Olson (1986) and Roy J. Pearcy, "The Genre of Chaucer's Fabliau-Tales," in Leigh A. Arrathoon, ed., Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction (Rochester, Michigan: Solaris Press, 1986), p. 372, cite Gower's use of the "Comedia Babionis" in a discussion of the influence of the Latin comediae on Chaucer's fabliaux. Pearcy identifies a fourteenth-century English MS in which "Pamphilus," "Babio," and "Geta" all appear together, and notes that Chaucer too refers to the "Pamphilus" in his "Tale of Melibee," 1555 ff. See also Macaulay's note, "Complete Works," I: 429. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wright, Stephen K. Published Wright, Stephen K.. "Gower's Geta and the Sin of Supplantation." Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 87 (1986), pp. 211-217. ISSN 0028-3754 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 Gower's Geta and the Sin of Supplantation Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 Virtually all of Bennett's chapter on Gower (pp. 407-29) is devoted to "Confessio Amantis," and it is for the most part an expanded version of the introduction to his "Selections from John Gower" (1968): one will find very much the same characterizations of Gower's relationship with Chaucer, of his narrative style, of his poetic achievement, of his general themes, and of the roles of the various characters in his poem, fleshed out with considerably more explanation and illustration. Bennett's Gower is a skilled poet and storyteller who is underestimated because of the unobtrusiveness of his art and a man of broad sympathy and insight, characteristics that Bennett illustrates with discussions of "Ceix and Alcione" and "Florent" and with brief quotations from other tales. Gower's most important model and predecessor is Ovid, not only for the tales that he borrowed but also for the topical references and philosophical statements with which his poem begins and ends. His confession frame derives from "Roman de la Rose" and "De Planctu Naturae" but it would also have been seen as a literary adaptation of sacramental penance, and the "therapeutic" function of the sacrament provided the "point of contact" to the treatment of love as a sickness in contemporary love-literature. The general theme of the poem is love: Bennett is not persuaded by attempts to see it as an expression of political or social doctrine, nor is he moved by the efforts to construct a precise moral underpinning for all of the various elements that it contains. Gower's "honeste love" links courtesy, charity, and the practical aims of marriage and the begetting of children. Genius does not represent a single point of view or value but carries out a composite and in some ways ambivalent role. And the unity of the poem is provided loosely by a group of five "distinctly Gowerian" concepts or themes: "Love and Charite as opposed to Lust and Will . . . ; Peace and Rest as opposed to War and Discord; Reason and Wit as against 'unreason'--folly and passion; Nature or Kind, and Mortality; Fortune and Necessity (but with Providence guiding them)" (p. 425). Bennett's view of CA is firmly rooted in a literal reading of Gower's "lessons" but it is also broad and generous and sensitive to the expressive qualities of Gower's verse. Review by A.J. Minnis in TLS, 6 February 1987, p. 140. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bennett, J.A.W. Gray, Douglas Published Bennett, J.A.W. and Gray, Douglas. "Middle English Literature." Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986 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 Middle English Literature. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Clarendon Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed 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 "perfect age," according to Dove, is that vaguely defined period of middle age, which for medieval writers was a time of neither uncertainty nor mere transition but the prime of life, the period of gravitas as opposed to both iuventus and senectus. The first two parts of this book offer a survey of the imagery of the "perfect age" in medieval literature, drawing examples from earlier and later texts as well. In the last part, Dove discusses how the major poets of the Ricardian period invoke the conventional motif only to question it, and explore the individual's experience of living through the stages of his life rather than imposing an inherited pre?existing pattern. "The ageing process itself," she writes, "is one of Ricardian poetry's most characteristic matieres. For Gower, in Confessio Amantis, it is the most exciting avanture of all" (p. 126). In her short chapter on Gower (pp. 125?33) Dove analyzes the stages of Amans' growth into realization and Gower's use of first? and third?person narration in his account. Along the way, she takes issue with both Burrow's and Lewis' emphasis on Amans' discovery of the limitations of his old age. Like Langland's Dreamer, Amans crosses directly from iuventus to senectus, but unlike Langland, "Gower represents the threshold between the two ages as a place where consciousness of self begins" (p. 130). With "consciousness of self" comes reincorporation into the "created world" and a release from the bonds of age?decorum. At the same time, Gower "re?defines the series of the ages. Senectus as grief and loss and nakedness is experienced only during the time of transition from one age to the next, in a swoon. The age which comes after myhty youthe is an age of rest and ease and peace, an age which anticipates a calm, unadventurous transition to the eighth age of the world, the age which is, as Ambrose says, 'una et perpetua'--not a stage but a lasting state" (p. 132)--in other words, the "perfect age."] [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dove, Mary Published Dove, Mary. "The Perfect Age of Man's Life." Cambridge: Cambridge Uuiversity Press, 1986 ISBN 0521325714 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 Perfect Age of Man's Life. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cambridge Uuiversity Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed 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 Chapter 1 surveys some approaches used to analyse the effect of illustrations on a reader, among them Alain-Marie Bassy's distinction between textual "relay" and textual "anchorage." Chapter 2 analyses certain Middle English prefatory pictures which operate like Bassy's "relay;" these pictures bring familar iconographic motifs to bear upon the authorial persona the literary work presents. Depicting either the Lover's Confession or Nebuchadnezzar's Statue, the prefatory miniatures in manuscripts of Gower's Confessio Amantis help characterize the works protagonists and help confirm the poet's own role as a prophet who warns the king that the final age of history has come. Chapter 3 shows that the illustrations in MS New College 266 typically highlight moments of moral conversion and self-recognition from the exempla. Chapter 4 shows that the illustrations in MS Morgan M.126 typically emphasize scenes from the exempla that reflect the political and moral discord of the present age described by Gower in the Prologue. An appendix contains iconographic descripions and reproductions of the miniatures used in the study. [JGN 5.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Braeger, Peter C. Published Braeger, Peter C.. "The Interrelationships of Text and Illustration in Some Middle English Literary Manuscripts." PhD thesis, Purdue University, 1986. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis 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 Interrelationships of Text and Illustration in Some Middle English Literary Manuscripts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed 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 volume, containing descriptions of "manuscripts and early printed books from libraries in and near Philadelphia illustrating Chaucer's sources, his works and their influence," is the catalog of the exhibition held as the Arthur Ross Gallery and the Rosenbach Museum and Library concurrently with the fifth International Congress of the New Chaucer Society. Pages 99-103 describe two parchment manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis, Rosenbach MS. f 1083/29 (ca. 1450) and the Taylor MS (no number) owned by Princeton Universiy Library (ca. 1400-1450). A portrait of Gower from the Rosenbach MS and an example of the hand of the so-called "Scribe D" from the Taylor MS are reproduced as well. [PN. Copyright the John Gower Society. JGN 5.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Anderson, David, ed. Published Anderson, David, ed. "Sixty Bokes Olde and Newe." Knoxville, TN: New Chaucer Society, 1986 ISBN 0933784082 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis 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 Sixty Bokes Olde and Newe Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available New Chaucer Society, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed 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 CA "is a highly complex poem," Wetherbee asserts, "though it employs a minimum of overt artistry." The spareness of its style, of its treatment of narrative, and of its diction has made critics "take for granted the impeccable orthodoxy of Gower's artistic intentions"; and the hierarchical orderliness implied by its structure has been taken as expressive of the "essential character" of the poem. The bulk of CA, however, consists of tales, "complex in themselves, and made still more so by the complexity of their interrelation. All are ostensibly illustrations of the poem's moral argument, but . . . few make their points in a straightforward way" (pp. 241-42). Some of their complexity derives from the "dual perspective" that characterizes Genius: servant to Venus, he also bears traces of the priest of Nature of Alain de Lille, and he is able to "see his subservience to Venus in relation to a prelapsarian model of human behavior." Thus the morals of the tales often serve only as a foil to "Genius' intuitively more sympathetic reponse the the story he is telling," yet Genius is also "intuitively aware that the failings for which he shows such tolerance reflect an underlying failure of reason, will, and vision; and this, though he does not recognize it as such, is a result of the Fall, a measure of man's alienation from a once harmonious relationship with nature and with his fellow humans" (pp. 243-44). Wetherbee illustrates the complexity of the moral argument of the poem with a detailed analysis of the tales in Book 1. He provides several examples in which the circumstances of the tale either subvert, or nullify, or broaden, the intended moral, often because of the changes that Gower has introduced in retelling it. In other cases, it is the details that Gower omits that provide the best evidence of the inadequacy of Genius' moralization. Many of these tales, he observes, are concerned with a man's encounter with a woman, and in many of these, Genius' sympathy for the male character governs his morality and results in the obliteration or obscuring of the moral situation of the woman. Wetherbee goes on to suggest that "male misperceptions of the feminine, and the moral and psychological problems they dramatize, are the unifying element in Book I of the Confessio, Gower's way of focusing his treatment of the sin of pride" (p. 255). Only in the final tale of the "Three Questions" is the woman given an "unambiguously positive role," and while "the story and its explicit moralitas are still imperfectly united, as in the earlier tales, . . . here at last they are in sympathy" (p. 260). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wetherbee, Winthrop Published Wetherbee, Winthrop. "Genius and Interpretation in the 'Confessio Amantis'." In Magister Regis: Studies in Honor of Robert Earl Kaske. Ed. Groos, Arthur. New York: Fordham University Press, 1986, pp. 241-260. ISBN 0823211614 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 Genius and Interpretation in the 'Confessio Amantis'. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Fordham University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Commentary and bibliography through 1985. Continues on pages 2399-2418, updating and replacing the section in J. E. Wells, A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1916) and its supplements through 1951. Author/Editor Author/Editor Fisher, John H. Hamm, R. Wayne Beidler, Peter G. Yeager, R.F Published Fisher, John H. and R. Wayne Hamm, Peter G. Beidler, and R. F. Yeager. "John Gower." In A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1500, Volume VII. Ed. Severs, J. Burke. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1986. Pp. 2195-2210. 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 John Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Archon Books. Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 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 Peck examines major and minor poets of late 14th-century England for their attitudes toward the pervasive problems of the time: proper kingship, religious egalitarianism or its absence, attitudes toward the agrarian estate. Chaucer, Langland, and Gower receive prominent treatment within the larger contaxt including Wycliff, John Ball, Clanvowe, the author of "Richard the Redeles." Peck stresses Gower's concern for the law, and his placing it above the power of kings--a position Gower derived from Bracton. "Only insofar as 'king' is a metaphor for the governance of the soul does Gower allow for an absolute sovereignty. And even here the 'king' is more an administrator under divine, natural, and positive laws than an absolutist" (p. 129). [PN. Copyright the John Gower Newsleller. JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A. Published Peck, Russell A.. "Social Conscience and the Poets." In Social Unrest in the Late Middle Ages: Papers of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies. Ed. Newman, Francis X. Binghamton, NY: CEMERS, 1986, pp. 113-148. 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 Social Conscience and the Poets. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available CEMERS, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Olsen, Alexandra Hennessey. Published Olsen, Alexandra Hennessey. "The Literary Impact of the Pun in Middle English Literature." In Geardagum: Essays on Old and Middle English 7 (1986): 17-36. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Review Despite the more general import of its title, this article is almost entirely concerned with puns in the "Confessio Amantis," both in their own right, and as a "framework for the discussion of puns in medieval texts in general" (21), and Ricardian poetry in particular (18). Olsen begins by noting the deficiencies in previous scholarship that her study is meant to address: the mere presence of puns has been under-recognized in Ricardian poetry, as well as the potential "literary artistry" of the pun (17), as well as the sophisticated literary artistry of Gower (18). The skillful play on "foal/fool" at CA VIII.2407--"Olde grisel is no fole"--is her first example to the contrary. As a "grisel/gray horse," Amans is no longer a "foal," and thus, as echoed by the pun, he is no longer eligible to play the "fool" (18-19). The pun on "beste/beste" ("best" and "beast") was well established in Middle English, as witnessed by its appearance in the anonymous lyric "Foweles in the Frith" (19). Per Olsen, Gower uses it to resonate with his theme in "The Tale of Florent" (CA I.1740-41), where the hideous crone has the semblance of a "beast" (23), but in a triumph of "truth/troth" over mere "perception," she turns out to be the "beste" of women and speaker of the "truth" that Florent most needs to hear (23). Olsen proceeds to review the "pun theory" of earlier critics, allowing her to distinguish between the "simple pun" (22), a homonym with two or more meanings, both of which fit the syntax and significance of the context, and more complex types of puns, some aimed at more subliminal appreciation by the reader (19-23). All of these types she finds to be skillfully deployed in the CA, as they enhance the larger themes of their context within the single tale, the book, and the poem as a whole (22). In "The Tale of Acteon," using a common English pun also prominent in Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess," Acteon's willful "mislok"--a misdeed of the "Herte/heart"--has him changed into a "herte/hart," with fatal consequences (23-24). In a more complex play on words, Genius describes the sin of sacrilegious lovers with the warning "so nyh the weder thei wol love" (CA V.7048). As explained by G. C. Macaulay, this is a nautical metaphor meaning "so near the wind [so out of bounds] will they luff [steer the boat]," with the meaning "love" ruled out in Middle English by the rhyme with "glove." However, per Olsen, the near-homonym does awaken the moral association with misplaced "love," as well as the "voyage of life" as a topos connecting the poem as a whole (25), perhaps without the reader's full awareness of the double meaning. Olsen proceeds to analyze the subtle artistry of puns and near-puns in the CA, including "bote/bot/remedy/boat" in "Appollonius" (VIII.639), "salve/salve/salve/ greeting" (26), "povere/pouer" (in Langland as well as Gower, 27), more puns in "Florent" ( on "clepeth," "Mone," and "bridel," 27-28), wordplay throughout Book IV (especially on Slowthe and "spiede/speed, success," 28-30), and "wise/wise" throughout the poem (30-31). These help to make the CA "a complex network of themes and associations" that is "more than the sum of its parts on both narrative and linguistic levels" (31). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] 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 Literary Impact of the Pun in Middle English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 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 examines the role played by the exemplum in the emergence of the English literary tradition in the later Middle Ages, arguing that the mode provided a crucial vehicle for the assertion of secular moral authority. Part I traces the Christian expropriation of the exemplum from classical tradition, its development from an incidental rhetorical device to a discrete narrative genre . . . . [It} concludes with an examination of the exemplum's efflorescence in the great preaching campaigns of the later Middle Ages. Part II examines Gower's attempt in the Confessio Amantis to ground the secular exemplum's moral authority in the ideal of kingship, which, in a revision of his principal antecedent, the Romance of the Rose, he proposed as a replacement for courtoisie as the central value of aristocratic life. Part III argues that Chaucer's use of the exemplum is structurally identical to Gower's, though he doesn't tie it to any specific political value. In the incompletion of the Monk's Tale and fabular resolution of the Nun's Priest's Tale he uses the mode to dramatize both the moral inadequacy of history and the inability of secular life to escape it. Part IV traces the attempts of Hoccleve and Lydgate to generate a positive affirmation of kingship without violating Chaucer's disjunction between morality and history." [from the abstract shortened in ProQuest with permission of author]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Scanlon, Larry. Published Scanlon, Larry. Literal Authority: The Exemplum and Its Traditions in Middle English Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation. The Johns Hopkins University, 1986. Dissertation Abstracts International A48.02. Abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis 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 Literal Authority: The Exemplum and Its Traditions in Middle English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 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 Another item for the State-of-Gower's-Reputation department: Burrow gives a sympathetic two pages to Gower (compared to nine and a half for Chaucer, including illustrations) in this popular account of English literary history (pp. 49-50). After a brief biographical summary, he compares CA to LGW as a collection of tales and uses "Acteon" as an example of Gower's adaptations from Ovid. "The finest moments in the poem," however, "come in its closing pages," when Amans discovers that "the renunciation of love can be for him no more--and no less--than an acceptance of the natural course of things." Review by Tony Tanner in TLS, 17 July 1987, p. 763. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burrow, J. A. Published Burrow, J. A. "Old and Middle English." In Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature. Ed. Pat Rogers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 1-87. Reprinted without illustrations in Pat Rogers, ed. An Outline of English Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 1-57. 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 Old and Middle English Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Oxford University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Cherniss' chapter on CA (pp. 99-118) is for the most part a reprint of his essay on "The Allegorical Figures in Gower's Confessio Amantis," Res Publica Litterarum, 1 (1978), 7-20. In the earlier essay Cherniss outlined the roles of Venus, Nature, and Reason in the poem and gave particular attention to the difficulties posed by Genius, especially to what he saw as his shifting relationship to Venus in Books 7 and 8. He also presented his view of the ending of the poem as "arbitrary and unsatisfactory," creating an ad hoc resolution for a particular old man rather than a final reconciliation of the forces the various allegorical figures represent, and requiring the acquiescence of Nature and Venus, thus contradicting the doctrine of individual responsibility expressed in the Prologue. The expanded version adds a discussion of the poem as a "Boethian Apocalypse," emphasizing the elements that link it to and make it different from the other medieval poems that make up a single tradition deriving from the De Consolatione Philosophiae. Cherniss points out how Venus and Genius share the role of Boethian authority figure and he describes Amans as a "prototypical Boethian narrator" whose consciousness is the focus of the poem. Gower's innovation (as noted by Lewis) was the transfer of the confession from the goddess of the vision to the visionary narrator himself. Gower's poem is more static than most works in the genre, however, because of the difficulty of marking the progress of the argument and the development of the narrator's consciousness within the confession frame, which is weakened by the many long tales and by the long expository sections. A problem of a different sort is created by the Prologue. "The decorum of the Boethian Apocalypse demands that the reader experience the visionary process of enlightenment along with the narrator," but the Prologue reveals not only the problem but also the solution before the poem has even begun, and Gower's attempt to start again at the opening of Book 1 is at best clumsy. Readers of CA will also want to look at Cherniss' chapters on DCP, De Planctu Naturae, RR, PF, Pearl, BD, The Kingis Quair, and The Testament of Cresseid. Previewed in JGN, 5, no. 2. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cherniss, Michael D. Published Cherniss, Michael D.. "Boethian Apocalypse: Studies in Middle English Vision Poetry." Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1987 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 Boethian Apocalypse: Studies in Middle English Vision Poetry Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pilgrim Books, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed 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 a manuscript note on a late draft of "Sailing to Byzantium," Yeats wrote that he "had just finished a poem in which a poet of the Middle Ages besought the saints 'in the holy fire' to send their ecstasy" (Davies, p. 34). Davies deduces that the poet Yeats had in mind was John Gower, not exactly as he is best known to readers of JGN, but the figure that Shakespeare created as the choric "presenter" of Pericles. Davies advances similarities in situation between Yeats' narrator and Shakespeare's poet -- both are old men, transmitting an ancient tradition to a younger audience -- and cites verbal parallels that suggest even more strongly that Yeats recalled the prologue to Shakespeare's play at some point during the composition of his poem. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 10.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Davies, Neville Published Davies, Neville. "Old Gower's Voyage to Byzantium." In KM 80: A Birthday Album for Kenneth Muir, Tuesday, 5 May, 1987. Ed. UNSPECIFIED. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1987, pp. 34-35. 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 Old Gower's Voyage to Byzantium Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Liverpool University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Gwin assembles the evidence that Gower knew and made use of De Consolatione Philosophiae, and then traces its influence on the themes and structure of CA. Boethius provides the model for the dialogue between Amans and his confessor, and Amans' rejection of courtly love for "the soul's union with the mind of God" is a version of the Neoplatonic journey in DCP. Directed by Thomas L. Wright. [JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gwin, Mary Metz Published Gwin, Mary Metz. "'Homward a softe pas': The Boethian model in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." PhD thesis, Auburn, 1987. 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 'Homward a softe pas': The Boethian model in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed 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 Wurtele summarizes Gower's tale of Florent along with "The Marriage of Sir Gawaine" and "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell" in his discussion of the background to WB's alterations of the traditional tale. While Gower has evidently deliberately removed the tale from its Arthurian setting, and his version is more restrained, more skillful, and of greater psychological insight than its "cruder" predecessors, he preserves the notion of "charity as an antidote to an act of malice" by "sharpen[ing] the importance of love and fair-dealing" in the conclusion to the tale (p.53). WB, on the other hand, willfully distorts both the motifs and the emphasis of the earlier tales, and in the final scene, corrupts the "relatively benign dilemma" of the traditional versions "into something little short of vicious" (pp. 56-57). In one way, the result is to heighten the irrationality of the tale, but in another, to create a different sort of realism. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wurtele, Douglas J. Published Wurtele, Douglas J.. "Chaucer's Wife of Bath and Her Distorted Arthurian Motifs." Arthurian Interpretations 2 (1987), pp. 47-61. 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 Chaucer's Wife of Bath and Her Distorted Arthurian Motifs Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 Holloway surveys the knowledge and circulation of Latini's work in England during the late Middle Ages. She notes the existence of an Italian MS of c. 1425 (now B.L. Add. 39844) containing the Secretum Secretorum with interpolations from Il Tesoro, following closely the pattern of Gower's adaptation of both works in Book 7 of CA and suggesting that Gower had access to an earlier MS with the same arrangement, contrary to the usual assumption that Gower himself was responsible for the juxtaposition (though we might also expect that Gower's MS would have presented the French version of Latini's work rather than the Italian). The reference to Holloway's essay was provided by John M. Crafton, "Chaucer's Treasure Text: The Influence of Brunetto Latini on Chaucer's Developing Narrative Technique," Medieval Perspectives 4-5 (1989-90): 25-41. Crafton refers to Gower's use of Latini's Livres du Tresor as evidence for the availability of the work to Chaucer, citing Holloway and James J. Murphy's 1961 essay on Gower's discussion of rhetoric. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Holloway, Julia Bolton Published Holloway, Julia Bolton. "Brunetto Latini and England." Manuscripta 31 (1987), pp. 11-21. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis 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 Brunetto Latini and England Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 expressing his distaste for "unkynde abhomynaciouns" in his introduction, ML distinguishes his tale from stories like "Apollonius of Tyre." The distinction results in a peculiar distortion of the Apollonius story, in which the brief episode of incest at the beginning is overshadowed by the lengthy account of the power of "kynde" in the adventures of the hero. It also draws attention to a feature of the traditional Constance story that ML suppresses, the father's incestuous desire for his daughter which both motivates the ensuing action and gives sense to the many variations of parent-child relations throughout the tale. MLT is marked by this attempt to suppress that which ML finds repugnant but also by the repeated reassertion of the incest theme in subtle but ironic ways. Gower's version exhibits no such preoccupation. Unlike ML, Gower directly links his "Constance" to his "Apollonius": in addition to the remarkable similarities in plot, he emphasizes in both the power of "kinde love" that draws father to daughter at the end, and he uses almost the same words to describe the two reunions (CA 2.1381-82; 8.1707-8). Like Chaucer, Gower was probably aware of the incest motive in the traditional Constance story, but he kept Trivet's version of the opening since incest was to be a central theme in both "Apollonius" and Book 8 of CA. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Goodall, Peter Published Goodall, Peter. "'Unkynde abhomynaciouns' in Chaucer and Gower." Parergon 5 (1987), pp. 94-102. 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 'Unkynde abhomynaciouns' in Chaucer and Gower Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 is not given a major part in Howard's new biography of Chaucer, but the scattered references touch on a number of details in both the personal and literary relationship between the two poets. Partly because of the lack of any other more suitable candidate, Howard suggests that the older Gower was Chaucer's most likely "mentor" during Chaucer's twenties (pp. 162-63). Chaucer's earliest ballades in particular may have been written under Gower's influence, and like Gower's, may have been intended for oral delivery before the merchant "Puy" (pp. 267-68). Gower was well behind his pupil, however, in not yet having begun to write in English (pp. 162- 63, 225). And with HF, "Chaucer's way of writing turns away from Gower's," in part because of his encounter with Italian literature and in part because a poet in his thirties will leave behind the mentors of his youth (p. 255). Their acquaintance continued, but by the time of the dedication of T&C they had "parted company artistically: Gower was still writing medieval complaint with its explicit moralizing, and he disapproved of Chaucer's satire, with its ironic stance" (p. 373), and there is "some irony, surely" in Chaucer's reference to his "sententious and avuncular" friend as "moral Gower" (p. 420). "There is not a question that the two poets were sharing ideas and tales" as Gower began his work on CA and Chaucer commenced LGW and CT (p. 418). MLT was influenced by Gower's "Constance," which Chaucer had seen in draft (p. 419). But in ML Intro Chaucer continues the teasing of his friend: Gower had apparently admonished Chaucer for his inclusion of MilT and RvT, and ML thus condemns Gower for telling dirty stories of his own (p. 420; also p. 438). And though there is no evidence that they quarreled (p. 420), their friendship seems "not to have been resumed with intensity after 1388" (p. 497). Howard artfully weaves together the documentary evidence for Chaucer's life with what is known about the historical backdrop, particularly about the events in which Chaucer is known to have been involved, and the attitudes and interests that he infers from Chaucer's works; and the portrait that emerges of Chaucer's life and times is rich and detailed. Howard will no doubt be criticized for the lack of evidence for some of his speculations (including some of what he has to say about Chaucer's relationship with Gower) and for the excessively biographical interpretation of some of Chaucer's works: is it necessary to believe, for instance, that the Merchant's views of marriage somehow echo Chaucer's? Much of Howard's view of Chaucer's "times," of course, is seen as through Chaucer's eyes; and since Chaucer was close to several members of the royal family, much of the story is concerned with their public and private lives and with the warfare, diplomacy and marriage negotiations in which Chaucer had some part. But Chaucer had little to say about a great many broader social and political movements during his century. It is interesting to speculate how different a backdrop would be drawn, and how different a view of the "times" would emerge, in a similar biography of Gower. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Howard, Donald R. Published Howard, Donald R.. "Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World." New York: Dutton, 1987 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations 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 Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Dutton, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed 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 attempts the difficult task of discerning Gower's and Chaucer's attitudes towards peace and warfare on the basis of their writings. In Gower he finds a change in attitude between the poet's earliest and his final works, which he attributes in part to a reaction to the changing English fortunes in the war with France. In MO Gower argues the justness of Edward III's prosecution of the war. The very nature of his argument betrays Gower's legal training and reflects the influence of Isidore and Gratian, who emphasized in their justification of war the nature of the provocation. In VC and CA one detects the growing feeling that all wars "are more about money than about justice' (p. 104), placing greater emphasis on the motives of the warrior than on the wickedness of the enemy, and Gower's criticism of war in his later poems is accompanied by a greater emphasis on peace, in both cases reflecting the influence of Augustine. Augustine's influence is particularly evident in Gower's last English poem, "In Praise of Peace." In CA, while the dialogue between Amans and Genius in Book 3 reflects "a profound division in Gower's own heart" (p. 105), greater weight is given to the Confessor's advocacy of mercy and charity, and indeed CA as a whole seems to treat "not courtly love but love of order, and the peace which comes when discord is halted and right relations restored" (p. 107). Discerning Chaucer's attitude is more difficult: Yeager assembles what we know of the poet's biography, the opinions of those closest to him, the attitudes expressed in "Melibee" and "Sir Thopas," the effect of the juxtaposition of these two tales, and verbal similarities between passages that Chaucer added to "Melibee" emphasizing mercy and forgiveness and the words in his own Retraction, to conclude that Chaucer too was a man of peace, more instinctually than Gower but perhaps also more deeply and more thoroughly. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1]. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 163-77. Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. ""Pax Poetica: On the Pacifism of Chaucer and Gower."." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 (1987), pp. 97-121. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) 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 "Pax Poetica: On the Pacifism of Chaucer and Gower." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 Lawton compares Gower's confession frame, in which the "lust" of storytelling is harmoniously integrated into the penitential design, with Chaucer's opposition of the "demands of penance and play" (p. 17) as part of his discussion of the function of Parson's Tale. He also contrasts Gower's and Chaucer's use of their respective narrators (pp. 20-21). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lawton, David Published Lawton, David. "Chaucer's Two Ways: The Pilgrimage Frame of The Canterbury Tales." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 (1987), pp. 3-40. 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 Chaucer's Two Ways: The Pilgrimage Frame of The Canterbury Tales Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 Cubie distinguishes three different motifs that contribute historically to the medieval understanding of caritas, and finds the predominant motif in CA is neither agape nor eros but the fulfillment of God's law. Directed by Christian P. Zacher. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor McMackin Cubie, Genevieve Published McMackin Cubie, Genevieve. "The Meaning of Caritas in John Gower's Confessio Amantis." PhD thesis, Ohio State University, 1987. 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 Meaning of Caritas in John Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed 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 Fowler announces that his purpose is to treat the history of literary forms rather than contents; and with regard to specific works, he writes, "I have tried to explain how best to approach each writer: what obstacles to avoid, what allowances to make, what pleasures to expect" (p. vii). His two terse paragraphs on Gower demonstrate the clarity and freshness of observation of the book as a whole, and also some of the limitations of treating so many works in a single short volume: In CA, he writes, "a lover's confession to love's priest Genius, the natural self, constitutes a minutely developed allegorical frame, in which relatively undetailed, beautifully shaped tales are inserted as examples clarifying the deadly sins of love. In effect the tales survey a broad range of human experience in a rational, systematizing way, such that they almost anticipate the method of the Renaissance. Gower was a great intellectual, and his masterpiece communicates an impressive vision. It is a moving, terrible vision, of life as threatened by irresistible and irrational impulses. By the end of his life-long confession Gower's lover has become too old: 'the thing is torned into "was" . . .' (viii.2435). The individual tales, drawn from Ovid or the romances, are triumphs of refacimento, the art of stylish re-presentation. "Gower had the gift of selecting just what formed a spare, classic unity, logical rather than allegorical in coherence. Even his neat tetrameters (four-stressed lines) are balanced, divided into equal halves. . . . Although he wrote with moral fervour, 'moral Gower' was our first major poet of formal elegance in narrative-- superior, in this regard, even to Chaucer." (P. 12.) Review by Martin Dodsworth in TLS, April 8-14 l988, p. 382. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fowler, Alastair Published Fowler, Alastair. "A History of English Literature: Forms and Kinds from the Middle Ages to the Present." Oxford: Blackwell, 1987 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 A History of English Literature: Forms and Kinds from the Middle Ages to the Present. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Blackwell, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed 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 White takes issue with a long list of earlier critics who have maintained that Amans' love is "unnatural," either because of his age or because of his implicit impotence. The questions White raises are important for the understanding of Gower's view of Nature as well as for our judgment of Amans. White points to Solomon's presence in the Court of Love (8.2691-96) as evidence that elderly love may be in accord with Nature, even when potency is in doubt. Several other passages indicate that Nature is not to be equated with physical powers, as many have implied, but is instead the susceptibility to love, the urge to sexual activity that operates at all ages and may be irresistible even in those whose powers have declined. Rather than a beneficent and orderly force to which man should properly submit, therefore, Nature may prevent man from conforming to the "natural" requirements of his age, and in other contexts can even be conducive to evil. Amans' love is all too "natural," White concludes, but Amans himself is perhaps not to be blamed. For "Gower does not seem to see the universe as a place considerately arranged so that the man of goodwill shall move reasonably smoothly towards salvation; rather he sees it as a battleground on which man in his weakness must face adversaries immensely superior to him and by no means wholeheartedly committed to his spiritual good" (p. 321). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor White, Hugh Published White, Hugh. "The Naturalness of Amans' Love in Confessio Amantis." Medium AEvum 56 (1987), pp. 316-22. 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 Naturalness of Amans' Love in Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 mixture of English and Latin on the MS pages of CA results, according to Yeager, in the creation of three different "voices" requiring our attention in the poem: that of the fiction, the story of Amans and Genius and the exempla, in English; that of the Latin verses that divide up the text; and that of the Latin prose marginalia. The second voice, Yeager argues, serves some of the same functions as the links in CT, but is peculiarly without a speaker: "no character, no fictive or even omniscient narrator, speaks these Latin lines; they appear as devices only, looking ahead for us to the unfolding of the larger narrative in English, providing a glimpse of what will be said and done" (p. 259). In their relation to the English text, "they insist upon reminding us of the textuality of the experience, of its unreality, of its craftedness" (p. 259); thus the engagement between "self" and "other" in reading CA becomes an engagement with the text itself. At the same time, the verses allow "entry in to the fictional world of the frame and exempla an authoritative, directing presence which is also authorial. By reminding us continually that the fiction is text, neither self-productive nor uncrafted, the Latin verses bring us back to the source of such crafting" (p. 260). The third voice, of the marginalia, provide a gloss to the poem, "referring to the events from a third-person point of view" (p. 261) and "directing the act of comprehension" (p. 262). Such glosses are presented as the work of an "unnamed 'other' reader" (p. 262), and there is no good precedent for Gower's decision to compose such glosses for his own text. The device recalls Derrida's discussion of the "doubled" text, and suggests Gower's consciousness of the page itself as "sign." As illustrations of the layout of a typical MS page, Yeager includes reproductions of three pages from Yale University MS Osborn fa. 1, a "third recension" copy of the early 15th century unknown to both Macaulay and Fisher. Though differing in orthography and layout, the text appears to be quite close to Fairfax. We should hope to learn more about it from the forthcoming Catalog of the Manuscripts of the Works of John Gower. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "English, Latin, and the Text as 'Other': the Page as Sign in the Work of John Gower." Text 3 (1987), pp. 251-67. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis 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 English, Latin, and the Text as 'Other': the Page as Sign in the Work of John Gower Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 Olsson begins his essay by distinguishing three different perspectives on "place" in Vox Clamantis, each with a corresponding sense of justice, of time, and, we later learn, of fear, referring to geographical location in Book 1, social position in Books 3-6, and spiritual location in Book 7. The rest of his essay explores the implications of these distinctions and of the "expanding sense of place" in the poem in a detailed analysis of the separate sections, and it offers one of the most important attempts to treat VC as a work with an inner coherence of its own rather than as a mere collection of statements of Gower's political and social views. Olsson draws upon both classical and medieval rhetorical models to explain the relations among the three parts and how they constitute a single argument, leading readers from the "comun drede" pervading the England of his time to a reappreciation of their own responsibility, to a turning inward to repentance and a reexamination of their own inner life. His argument is sophisticated and complex and it defies brief summary. Among his most important contributions, however, is his redefinition of the function of the vision that constitutes Book 1 of the poem. As an exordium, the book is intended to win the readers' attention and good will for the argument that follows by implying that they too are the injured parties in the rebellion. The narrator too is clearly "vexed by injustices," but his bewilderment and fear are not a reflection of Gower's own attitude towards the peasantry but an indication that the narrator suffers from the same misperception and lack of sense of his proper "place" that the readers too must overcome. Book 2 begins the process of reordering his, and the readers', perception, and Gower shifts his narrative stance, adopting the vox populi to describe the proper duties and functions of each estate as part of his general argument that those who suffered from the peasants' attacks are themselves culpable. Book 7 juxtaposes Nebuchadnezzar's dream to the vision in Book 1: it depicts the recovery of proper place spiritually, but it also suggests a return to the world of Book 1 as a place of penance with new hope for the restoration of what has been lost. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Olsson, Kurt Published Olsson, Kurt. "John Gower's Vox Clamantis and the Medieval Idea of Place." Studies in Philology 84 (1987), pp. 134-158. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis 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's Vox Clamantis and the Medieval Idea of Place Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 Lee makes a multi-pronged attempt to redeem Chaucer's Physician's Tale from the unfavorable judgment of earlier criticism, and uses the comparison to Gower's tale of Virginia to bolster his case (pp. 144-46). Gower reveals by contrast some of the most outstanding qualities of Chaucer's version. Gower maintains the "overtly political purpose" of the tale, while Chaucer transforms "a pagan political anecdote into a Christian moral exemplum." Chaucer emphasizes the pathos of the situation; Gower eschews pathos and any attention to character, "and so does not rise above the anecdotal level." The comparison also reveals some of the strengths of Chaucer's retelling: he provides a more credible motivation to the villainous judge and demonstrates his contempt for justice more vividly; he portrays Virginia's virtue singlemindedly, and strengthens the narrative by omitting reference to her betrothal; and he effectively invokes pity in the conclusion, a quality explicitly excluded by Gower, who attributes Virginius' action to his irrational despair. Lee's essay also contains an interesting discussion of the "moral logic" of Chaucer's version and ts relation to FrankT and PardT, which precede and follow. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lee, Brian S. Published Lee, Brian S.. "The Position and Purpose of the Physician's Tale." Chaucer Review 22 (1987), pp. 141-160. ISSN 0009-2002 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 Position and Purpose of the Physician's Tale. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Penn State University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 According to Mitchell, Confessio Amantis is one of the many works of medieval literature with which Scott was familiar, but Scott's attitude towards the poem was evidently typical of his time. "He read it, certainly, but except for the Tale of Florent and some lines from Book VI referring to the Tristan-story [6.467-75?] (which he quotes in the note to II.1 of Sir Tristrem [the ME version, which he edited in 1804]), it made little impression on him; on the whole he found in 'dull'" (p. 37; the source for the last quotation is not specified). Scott edited the works of Dryden in 1808; and in his headnote to Dryden's translation of the "Wife of Bath's Tale" he cited both "Florent" and The Marriage of Sir Gawaine: "What was a mere legendary tale of wonder in the rhyme of the minstrel, and a vehicle for trite morality in that of Gower, in the verse of Chaucer reminds us of the resurrection of a skeleton, reinvested by miracle with flesh, complexion, and powers of life and motion" (p. 36). Interestingly enough, Scott does not appear on any of the available lists of Gower allusions and commentary. The bibliography is not large, and the example of Scott suggests that there are still other references to be identified. See Macaulay, Complete Works, II, viii-ix; Heinrich Spies, "Bisherige Ergebnisse und weitere Aufgaben der Gower-Forschung," Englische Studien, 28 (1900): 163-74, 207?8; Spies, "Goweriana, 1. Weitere Hinweise auf John Gower in der englischen Literatur," Englische Studien, 34 (1904): 169-75; Spies, rev. of Macaulay, Complete Works, IV, Englische Studien, 35 (1905): 105-06 and n.; Fisher, John Gower (1964), pp. 1-36; N.W. Gilroy-Scott, "John Gower's Reputation: Literary Allusions from the early fifteenth century to the time of 'Pericles'," YES, 1 (1971): 30-47; and Derek Pearsall, "The Gower Tradition," in Gower's Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments (1983), pp. 184-94.] [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Mitchell, Jerome Published Mitchell, Jerome. "Scott, Chaucer, and Medieval Romance: A Study in Sir Walter Scott's Indebtedness to the Literature of the Middle Ages." Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987 ISBN 0813116090 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 Scott, Chaucer, and Medieval Romance: A Study in Sir Walter Scott's Indebtedness to the Literature of the Middle Ages. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of Kentucky, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed 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 Corsa summarizes earlier views of the relationship between PhysT and Gower's "Virginia" in her account of the analogues of Chaucer's tale (pp. 4- 8). She describes Gower's version as a "more or less faithful paraphrase of Livy" (p. 7) and emphasizes the "political moral" of the tale and the lesson on the king's need for self-control, citing Fisher (1964) and Peck (1978). "Scholars generally agree," she writes, that Gower's "can be neither source nor scion" of PhysT (p. 7), and she suggests that the two poets wrote their separate versions "perhaps almost simultaneously" (p. 3). Her "Survey of Criticism" (pp. 28-41) includes references to several earlier comparisons of the two tales (pp. 29-30, 32 and 38), and Gower is mentioned in the notes to lines 5, 35, 122, 139-64, and 240. Judging on the basis of the references to Gower, the index to this volume is not complete, and though Carol Weiher's article on "Chaucer's and Gower's Stories of Lucretia and Virginia" (ELN, 14 [1976], 7-9) is mentioned on p. 5, it is not included in either the index or the bibliography. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Corsa, Helen Storm, ed. Published Corsa, Helen Storm, ed. "The Physician's Tale." A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer., 2, part 17 . Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987 Gower Subject 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 Physician's Tale. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Oklahoma Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed 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 notes to the long-awaited revision of Robinson's Chaucer have been completely redone by a large team of well-known Middle English scholars, and if they do not provide a precise guide to current views of Chaucer's relationship with Gower, they do offer some idea of what students will be learning about Gower in their Chaucer classes for the next few years. Many will be pleased that the theory of a quarrel between the poets is given short shrift in this edition, both by Martin Crow and Virginia Leland in their biographical introduction (p. xxiii), who refer to "structural reasons" for Gower's removal of his compliment to Chaucer (CA 8.2941 ff.), and by Patricia Eberle in her notes to the Introduction to the Man of Law's Tale (p. 854), who points out the present uncertainty about the dating of Gower's revisions. (Robinson also dismissed the likelihood of a quarrel in his note to LGW G 315). Gower is given extensive coverage, however, either as a source or as an analogue for a great many passages in Chaucer's work, particularly in CT. CA is included in the discussion of contemporary tale collections in the General Editor's introduction (p. 3), but is omitted from the list in the notes on pp. 795-96. In the discussion of the General Prologue Gower is cited only once as a possible source, for GP 435-37 (from MO 8338-43), but illustrative passages are cited from all three of his major works in the notes to the portraits of the Monk, the Clerk, the Sergeant of the Law (as he is called), the Doctor of Physik, the Parson, the Plowman, and the Summoner. Gower is also cited in the notes to a number of the tales; e.g. KnT 2129, MLT 161, 302-8, 1183, WBT 1109, et al.: without a precise count, the number of such references seems much larger than in Robinson's edition. Of the four tales that have close analogues in CA: Both Benson and Patricia Eberle come down in favor of Gower's priority for the tale of Constance (pp. 9, 856-57), and to Block's list of nine passages that Chaucer borrowed from Gower Eberle adds the entire scene of Constance's departure from Northumberland, MLT 834-68. In his comments on the Introduction to the Man of Law's Tale Benson suggests that "perhaps Chaucer is teasingly challenging his friend to a storytelling contest parallel to that in which the pilgrims are engaged" (p. 9); while Eberle (p. 856) provides an excellent note on the complexities involved in inferring a reference to Gower. Christine Ryan Hilary declares, a bit surprisingly, that "Chaucer knew and probably echoes" Gower's tale of Florent in WBT, citing Chaucer's line 1081 and CA 1.1727-31 (pp. 872-73). She also compares WBT 1073 to CA 1.1587. She doesn't cite Fisher, however, the one scholar who would most certainly agree on Chaucer's borrowing. (Benson lists Gower's tale only as an analogue, p. 11.) Larry Benson asserts that Chaucer knew Gower's tale of Virginia before writing his PhysT (p. 14), but David Benson lists Gower's tale only as an analogue and concludes that "there is no convincing evidence that Chaucer drew on any earlier version except RR" (p. 902). Larry Benson includes Gower's "Phebus and Cornide" as one of the possible sources for Chaucer's MancT (p. 20), and V.J. Scattergood cites in a favorable context Hazelton's suggestion that Chaucer's tale is a parody of Gower's (p. 952). Colin Wilcockson cites Gower's "Ceix and Alceone" only once in his notes to BD (p. 968), not as an analogue but as containing the metamorphoses that Chaucer omits. Benson's introduction to The Parliament of Fowls (p. 383) cites Gower's 34th and 35th balades in a list of contempary Valentine's Day poems. John M. Fyler's notes to HF include a reference to Tatlock's belief (1907) that MO 22129-52 might be based on HF 1573-82 (p. 988). The notes to LGW by M.C.E. Shaner and A.S.G. Edwards (pp. 1059-75) reflect some of the complexity of the relationship between this poem and CA. They note that the "Flower and the Leaf" passage in CA 8.2468 "may be an imitation" of LGW F 72, while LGW G 315 "may be a friendly jab at Gower." Among the tales, Gower's Cleopatra "is probably based" on Chaucer's (p. 1066), particularly for the details of her death (LGW 678-80, 696-702); and Chaucer's and Gower's stories of Thisbe "seem related, but it is hard to say which came first" (p. 1067), in both cases echoing Robinson. Gower is cited only as an analogue for Chaucer's tales of Medea, Lucrece, Ariadne, Philomela, and Phyllis. No note is made of Root's suggestion (1909) that Chaucer's Lucrece may have been based on Gower's, and though other parallels are noted in this legend, no reference is made to one of the most interesting similarities between the two poems, Lucrece's swoon before she is violated by Tarquin (LGW 1815-17; CA 7.4986-87). Several other parallel passages from MO, VC, and CA are cited in the notes to LGW, many of them drawn from Fisher. Laila Z. Gross takes note of Fisher's account of the many parallels between Chaucer's "Lak of Stedfastnesse" and Gower's CA Prol. (p. 1086), and Stephen Barney lists Fisher as a general source on Gower's relation with Chaucer in his note to T&C 5.1856-59 (p. 1058). Otherwise Fisher is quite remarkably neglected in this edition: there is no reference, for instance, to his belief in Gower's influence on the conception of GP and the Marriage Group or to his identification of the Eagle in HF, and while he is cited (p. 1059) for his belief that LGW was written at the request of the queen, the rest of his proposal, that LGW and CA were written for the same commission in 1385, passes without notice. Despite the inevitable unevenness and inconsistency in a work involving so many different hands, the editors on the whole have done a commendable job of presenting the most useful scholarship on Chaucer in a clear and compact form. One small but revealing example of their care will cause some pleasure for those of us who decide to cite from this volume: except in the case of "Boece," which has been freshly edited by Ralph Hanna and Traugott Lawler, the editors have arranged the prose texts on the page so that the line numbers are the sa as in the edition that they are replacing. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Benson, Larry D., ed. Published Benson, Larry D., ed. "Riverside Chaucer 3rd ed." Boston, MA.: Houghton Mifflin, 1987 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations 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 Riverside Chaucer 3rd ed. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Houghton Mifflin, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed 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 Olsen maintains that Gower's descriptions of the hero's eleven sea-voyages in "Apollonius of Tyre" are modeled on a "type-scene" that the poet inherited from English oral poetic tradition. She borrows her description of the "type-scene" from Lee C. Ramsay's essay on "The Sea-Voyages in Beowulf" (NM 72 [1971]): "Beowulf gives an order to his men . . . and explains the purpose of his voyage. . . . He leads the way to the ship, . . . which waits at the shore laden with treasures. . . . The men depart in the ship and sail until they can observe the opposite shore. . . . They moor the ship . . . and are greeted by a coastal guardian. . . . They leave the ship and proceed to the hall." The skeptical reader, perhaps already too familiar with such passages from other works, may ask how else a sea-journey is to be described: one important point seems to be that it is described at all, for Olsen shows that nearly all of the passages she examines in "Apollonius of Tyre" are Gower's additions to a source that gives far less attention to actual journeying. As in Beowulf, she observes, these scenes provide an important transition between episodes, and they also contribute to the characterization of Apollonius as "a hero who matures into a good king" (p. 507). Olsen also claims that Gower "deliberately plays with the expectations of his audience" (p. 500) in departing from the "type-scene" she has defined in his accounts of the voyages of Thaise, the female hero, and of Taliart, the villain. The sea-voyages also function symbolically, suggesting both the overcoming of adversity in life and the journey towards death, both of which Olsen finds significant to the structure of CA as a whole. She concludes that Gower adopted the traditional "type-scene" for deliberate effect, and that we can better appreciate his literary artistry by being aware of his debt to oral-formulaic tradition. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Olsen, Alexandra Hennessey Published Olsen, Alexandra Hennessey. "Literary Artistry and Oral-Formulaic Tradition: The Case of Gower's Appolinus of Tyre." In Comparative Research on Oral Traditions: A Memorial for Milman Parry. Ed. Foley, John Miles. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1987, pp. 493-509. 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 Literary Artistry and Oral-Formulaic Tradition: The Case of Gower's Apollinus of Tyre Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Slavica, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Summary provided by the author: "Macaulay's account of the textual history of CA, particularly of the evolution of its three "recensions," depends on his assumption that Gower himself supervised the copying of the early MSS of his work. A close examination of the Fairfax and Stafford MSS, the earliest copies of "recension three" and "recension two," reveals that each is the complex product of several different layers of textual history, in none of which is Gower's own hand absolutely clear. Gower's revision of the poem, therefore, did not necessarily take place in the stages that are embodied in the surviving copies, and though it will make the job of Gower's next editor immensely more complicated, we must distinguish between the history of these MSS and the history of the text." [JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter Published Nicholson, Peter. "Poet and Scribe in the Manuscripts of Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Manuscripts and Texts: Editorial Problems in Later Middle English Literature. Ed. Pearsall, Derek. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1987, pp. 130-142. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis 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 Poet and Scribe in the Manuscripts of Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D.S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 publication of this much needed concordance to the Confessio Amantis is perhaps the most important single event in Gower scholarship since the appearance of Macaulay's edition in 1900-1901, and certainly no better beginning could have been chosen for the John Gower Society Publications. The largest part of this book is a 764-page concordance to what Pickles and Dawson call the "main text" of the poem, Macaulay's edited "recension three" (the English portion alone). The editors have also provided a separate alphabetical listing of the vocabulary of this text; a reverse spelling list of the same vocabulary; a listing by frequency of all words that appear more than 12 times, with statistical analysis; a separate concordance, vocabulary list, and reverse spelling list for the "variant text" (the passages from the "first" and "second" recensions in the Prologue and Books 5, 7, and 8 that are printed at the foot of the page in Macaulay's edition); and in four appendices, a complete concordance to four of the 45 most frequent words omitted from the main concordance ("al," "alle," "love" [which appears in the main text a total of 855 times], and "man"), sample citations of the remaining most frequent words, a rhyme index (combining the "main" and "variant" texts), and a combined index of capitalized words. All is contained in a handsome volume of 1124 closely printed but easily legible pages, only slightly larger than a single volume of Gower's works. The editors report (p. ix) that they relied heavily on a computer for their work, and the volume that they have produced reveals both the advantages and disadvantages of the computer-aided analysis of a literary text. The broad array of material presented here would have been difficult and time-consuming to compile by hand, to be sure. The limitation of the computer, however, is that it works strictly on the basis of spelling. Thus with the single exception of "the," article, and "the," pronoun, the editors have made no attempt to distinguish homonyms or even different parts of speech. Under an entry such as "hold," for instance, one finds both "Demetrius was put in hold" and "Forthi, mi Sone, hold up thin hed." At the same time, both variant spellings and different inflectional forms of the same word receive separate entries: thus "thyng" is listed separately from "thing," and there are also entries for "thinge" and "thinges." Some adjustment will be necessary for those already familiar with either Tatlock and Kennedy's Chaucer Concordance or Kottler and Markman's Concordance to Five Middle English Poems, in which homonyms are distinguished and the problem of variants is eliminated by listing all words under a modern spelling. The editors' scrupulosity over what may well be merely scribal variation does not extend to other details of the text, for they accept Macaulay's practice of modernizing i/j and u/v and replacing thorn and yogh where they occur. Their arrangement also calls into question the value of their elaborate word-frequency analysis. It is difficult to know what significance to attach to the 855 appearances of "love" since the figure includes both the noun and the verb. To find the frequency of the verb alone one must do one's own sorting of the list of examples, and then add in the separate entries for "loved," "lovede," "loveden," "loven," and "loveth." The total, however, would presumably be meaningful only if one has done the same sort of recalculation for every other verb. One cannot expect the editors to have anticipated every need of their future users, but somewhat more intervention in the work of the machine might have been called for. And if the concordance itself had necessarily to be based strictly on the spelling of the text, the separate alphabetical list of the vocabulary of this text, entirely redundant to the concordance, might have been replaced with a glossary list distinguishing the different parts of speech, giving total frequency for each glossary entry, and cross-listing the forms under which each item is concorded. Some objection might also be raised to the editors' treatment of the "main" and "variant" texts. It is not clear why the two concordances could not have been combined, especially since no distinction is made in the rhyme index and the list of capitalized words at the end, and the present arrangement makes it necessary to check in two places for each item. The editors have gone much further than Macaulay, moreover, in enshrining the Fairfax MS as the study text of the poem. They are correct in stating in their introduction (p. vii) that Macaulay's choice of this MS as the basis for his edition is unlikely to be bettered, but it is doubtful that any contemporary editor would treat this MS as uncritically as he. And no doubt under the influence of Macaulay's edition, they have chosen only the longest of the passages in the "variant" text for their concordance: no notice is made of the many shorter passages scattered throughout the poem in which recensions "one" and "two" differ from "recension three," some of which, the present reviewer has argued elsewhere, might perhaps represent scribal alteration in the Fairfax copy. Whatever reservations one might have about the editors' procedure, they have nonetheless produced a valuable, indeed indispensable tool for all future study of Gower's poem, and we will all be grateful to Pickles and Dawson for finally having filled so plain a need. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pickles, J. D. and J. L. Dawson, eds. Published Pickles, J. D. and J. L. Dawson, eds. "A Concordance to John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Publications of the John Gower Society, 1 . Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1987 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies 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 A Concordance to John Gower's Confessio Amantis. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D.S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed 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 Lawton here challenges the apparent critical consensus that fifteenth-century poets were not as good as their fourteenth-century forbears, or were, in a word, "dull" (761). In contrast, he argues that "the fifteenth century authoritatively consolidates the public voice and role of English poetry" (762), and that the "dullness" of his title is not that attributed to the period by critics, but rather the consistent use of a humility topos by poets presenting themselves as dull or otherwise lacking. This move Lawton traces to Boethius, but in the period attributes it first to Chaucer, where it has a playfulness mostly lost when handled by his successors. Briefly exploring, as a first example, Hoccleve's "dull" self-presentation in "Regement of Princes," Lawton finds him a student of Chaucer, although a passage in which Hoccleve addresses the burning of Lollards comes across to him as an "an unprompted Gowerian intervention by a poet into current affairs and public policy" (764). Learned Chaucerian technique of professing authorial incapacity nevertheless insulates Hoccleve from direct social critique. Lawton then presents an example from Lydgate's "Fall of Princes" using age as a similar protection, then moving on to the common trope of poets declaring themselves lesser than, first, Gower and Chaucer, and by century's end also including Lydgate. Examples considered include Osbern Bokenham, George Ashby, and John Shirley, all of whom Lawton sees as in large part following Lydgate's model. Lawton characterizes a "strong, non-Chaucerian, moral undertow" (768) in many of these poets' works, and presents in some depth Alexander Barclay's translation of the "Ship of Fools" as an example. All of these poets following Lydgate Lawton characterizes as "a culture" (771). To characterize that culture, he examines work of George Ashby, which he considers "an anthology of fifteenth-century public discourse" (772). Lawton resists writing off Ashby as "conventional or commonplace" (773), but instead suggests focusing on these works in their broader cultural context "devoted to the search for Wisdom in the Biblical sense" (775). The tone he uncovers is evident in what he takes to be fifteenth-century taste in Chaucer: rather different from our own, foregrounding works that are less popular now, including "'Troilus,' 'Melibeus,' the Clerk's Tale, The Monk's Tale, 'Boece,' The Knight's Tale and the Parson's Tale," so that "the Chaucer of the fifteenth century is unusually austere" (780). Lawton observes that "fifteenth-century writing is to a great extent the literature of public servants" (788), which managed to be "courageous and hard-hitting" but also "socially acceptable" (789). The humility topos of dullness allows for that duality by insulating the poet from censure, a maneuver which Lawton sees ultimately as "the social mask of a Renaissance poet" (791). He then concludes with reference to Jürgen Habermas and Terry Eagleton, allowing him to theorize this body of work in terms more familiar to a 1987 audience. Overall this essay covers significant ground, and while subsequent readings of this period and these poets may not always share Lawton's overarching sense of a commonality between fifteenth-century poets, this essay has supported a significant amount of further work on the period. [RAL. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lawton, David. Published Lawton, David. "Dullness and the Fifteenth Century." ELH 54.4 (1987): 761-99. 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 Dullness and the Fifteenth Century. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 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 Per Olsen's argument, most of the critical response to Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" has been overly sympathetic to Troilus, forgiving his faults, while anachronistically hostile to Criseyde and Diomede. To recapture a more authentic, fourteenth-century view of the three characters, Olsen maintains, we can turn to their portrayal in the works of John Gower, where Troilus erred from his first sight of Criseyde (4), and Diomede was not without honor. The works of Gower provide us with a more nuanced view of the famous love triangle. Troilus, while given credit in the Vox Clamantis as faithful unto death, according to the Confessio Amantis was guilty of "sacrilege" due to the setting of his first attraction to Criseyde--a religious service (4). Never does Gower refer to Criseyde as a prostitute, as does Robert Henryson in "Testament of Cresseid," Olsen notes; rather, by leaving her "lief" (Troilus) to love Diomede, a "levere," she "changed lovers out of a genuine preference for the second man" (5). In the VC, Gower cites the serial seducer Jason, never Diomede, as archetype of the unfaithful male (5). In fact, Olsen asserts, there is no textual proof in any version of the story that Diomede had a lover before Criseyde, or that he ended his relationship with her (8). Crucial to Olsen's argument is the appearance of all three characters, more or less together, in the "Lovers' Paradise" of CA Book VIII (6). All of the company, including Diomede, are classed as "gentil folk" (6). By this evidence, "both men would still lay claim to Criseyde after death and . . . Criseyde would still find it difficult to choose between them" (7). According to Olsen, Diomede's life course should be understood by the French expression "il s'est range / he has put himself in order," which refers to a man who has settled down to a stable domestic life after sowing his youthful oats (8-9). Gower's portrayal of Diomede is thus "less puritanically English" than the later tradition, as exemplified by Henryson, and thus more in harmony with the bilingual court culture of Richard II (9). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Olsen, Alexandra Hennessey. Published Olsen, Alexandra Hennessey. "In Defense of Diomede: 'Moral Gower' and Troilus and Criseyde." In Geardagum: Essays on Old and Middle English 8 (1987): 1-12. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis 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 In Defense of Diomede: "Moral Gower" and "Troilus and Criseyde." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 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 is primarily a codicological argument about Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff.I.6. Some "Confessio Amantis" extracts are part of the larger argument about whether the "Findern Miscellany" was designed to be a coherent whole or to circulate as separate fascicles or pamphlets; hence Hanna's views have some relevance for Gower research. In large part Hanna is responding to Kate Harris' 1983 analysis of the manuscript, "an elaborate discussion which lays out in full the evidence of quiring, of the watermarks of the papers used, and of scribal stints" (62). He notes that while many earlier studies interpreted this manuscript as largely fascicular, Harris concluded that it was a single (albeit group) production. Hanna accepts nearly all of her evidence, but he argues that it instead supports the fascicular theory. Taking this approach requires Hanna to rehearse most of her evidence, and then to lay out his own logic of how that evidence fits the fascicular model. Gower comes into the discussion in Hanna's detailed explanation of the CA extracts (64)--the stints of the five copyists are highly variable in length and placement, so that he notes that "one is forced to assume highly unstructured procedures--either copying as a sort of social game, where the archetype and in-production codex were passed about in a gathering for successive additions; or copying by leaving archetype and in-production codex out (on a table, say) for chance additions by any interested members of the household" (64). Hanna thus raises some intriguing questions about Gowerian reception and the production or consumption of household miscellanies. [RAL. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hanna, Ralph. Published Hanna, Ralph. "The Production of Cambridge University Library MS Ff.I.6." Studies in Bibliography 40 (1987): 62-70. 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 The Production of Cambridge University Library MS Ff.I.6. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 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, Fanale studies the functions of confessors and confessor figures in late medieval English literature: Gower's "Confessio Amantis," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and Chaucer's "Parson's Tale," "Book of the Duchess," and Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women," with attention to aesthetic backgrounds in the "Roman de la Rose" and late-medieval art, and theological backgrounds in penitential legislation, handbooks, sermons, and liturgies. His treatment of Gower (pp. 211-27) attends to background to the figures of Genius and Venus, structural similarities between the CA and "the post-Lateran IV style of confessing" (216), Venus and Genius as "co-confessors for Amans" (220), and Amans' "imperfect contrition" (226). [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fanale, James Francis. Published Fanale, James Francis. God's Ear: The Confessor in the Theology, Art, and Literature of the Late Middle Ages. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 1987. iii, 300 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A48.02 (1987): 387. 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 God's Ear: The Confessor in the Theology, Art, and Literature of the Late Middle Ages. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 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 On pp. 88-100, Koff cites Gower a number of times in his desciption of Chaucer's relation with his audience as part of his general argument on the way in which Chaucer's poetry creates its own community of understanding. Chaucer's choice of English, like Gower's, may be part of an attempt to incorporate his English readers into a broader international community of letters. Gower's account of the commissioning of CA may reveal the impetus behind LGW as well; and Chaucer's only political commentary, in the F Prologue of LGW, reflects similar concerns revealed in all of Gower's works. Chaucer's interest in edification may be more oblique than Gower's but is just as real: both share a sense of the importance of books, and the well-known T&C frontispiece showing Chaucer reading his work to the court suggests an attempt to give instruction to young King Richard that echoes Gower's in CA. All of Koff's citations of CA are taken from the Prologue and epilogue; consequently he has little directly to say about Gower and the art of storytelling. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Koff, Leonard Michael Published Koff, Leonard Michael. "Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling." Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988 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 Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of California Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed 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 CA is one of four works Lynch considers (along with Alain de Lille's "De Planctu Naturae," the "Roman de la Rose," and Danet's "Purgatorio") as examples of the "philosophical vision" of the late MiddleAges, a sub-genre of the dream vision deriving from Boethius' DCP. Her introduction and her first two chapters supply the historical and theoretical background: "The paradigmatic structure of the literary vision," she argues, "echoed central epistemological structures in scholastic philosophy." This epistemology was rooted in the problem of reconciling scriptural and scientific authority, and in the neces sity of accounting for man's ability to apprehend divine truth from earthly experience. It gave rise to a faculty psychology according to which man was led from perception by way of Imagination and Reason to the understanding of spiritual truths. The vision poem had as one its its purposes the defense of this epistemology. The plot of these poems is typically the visionary's spiritual journey towards truth, passing from literal image to figural and absolute meanings; the characters that accompany and instruct him typically stand for the facul ties by which higher levels of understanding are achieved; and one of the insights that he typically receives concerns the relation between his corporeal and spiritual natures. Like the other poems that Lynch discusses, CA is concerned with the narrator's spiritual growth; and following the model of Gower's predecessors, Amans' principal guide, his confessor Genius, is an embodiment of one of his faculties, his Imagination or ingenium. One of Genius' principal functions is to provide tales and images for Amans' consideration, but since he is not capable of performing the functions reserved to Reason, he is frequently unable to draw the proper moral lesson from his tales. His incompetency is thus a meaningful part of the epistemological design, and is emphasized by his comic misinterpretations and the many discrepancies between the tales and the moral truth they contain. Genius himself is capable of growth, particularly after his confrontation with the contradictions between classical and divine teaching in Book 5, and in Book 7 he instructs Amans on how the world can be a speculum in which he may finally come to understand divine love. The dialogue with Genius, however, is necessarily inconclusive; the real conclusion comes with another vision (8.2440 ff.) which ends with the ascendancy of Reason that the genre demands and with Amans' abandonment of his earthly love for that other love "that stant of charite confermed" (8.3165). Lynch's work is outstanding in many respects: in the connections she draws between medieval poetry and philosophy; in her account of the relation between form and meaning in the vision; in her explanation for the endurance of the vision form; and in her ability to provide an explanation of dream psychology that is consistent with the prevailing epistemology of the time. She writes lucidly and convincingly, and while carefully maintaining the thread of her argument she is sensitive to the many differences in the works that she examines. Her description of CA is a significant attempt to account for the form of the poem and offers a number of important insights: her discussion of the use of images and "pointing" in the poem seems especially promising. Her chapter is too brief, however, to consider all of the problems that her interpretation raises. She will give comfort to those who believe that Amans' love is portrayed as sinful at the beginning of the poem, and that he is brought to a virtuous renunciation at the end. These, however, are the presuppositions, rather than the conclusions, of her attempt to place CA within the genre she has defined. And for a key part of her analysis -- her assertion that Genius' lessons become more complete and more adequate as the poem proceeds -- she depends entirely on James Foster's unpublished dissertation on "The Influence of Medieval Mythography on John Gower's Confessio Amantis." There are other ways of viewing Amans' condition, of understanding Genius' role, and of interpreting his lessons, all of which are at the center of current critical discussion of the poem. If Lynch's assumptions about CA are correct, then she provides the clearest account so far of the ancestry of Gower's design and of the implications of his form; if they are not, then Gower's debt to the tradition that she describes so persuasively is rather more complex and more problematic than she allows. [PN. Copyright the John Gower Society. JGN 8.1] N.B. This study is based on Lynch's dissertation, "The Medieval Dream-Vision: A Study in Genre Structure and Meaning." University of Virginia, 1982; Dissertation Abstracts International 43 (1983): 3314A. Author/Editor Author/Editor Lynch, Kathryn L. Published Lynch, Kathryn L.. "The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form." Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988 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 High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Stanford University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed 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 Hudson considers Gower alongside of Chaucer, Trevisa, and Langland in her chapter on "The Context of Vernacular Wycliffism," in this detailed and in many respects eye-opening new survey of the growth and influence of the Lollard movement (pp. 408-11). Gower seems to have had little knowledge of the details of Wycliffe's doctrine, she concludes, though he criticizes Lollardy in CA (Prol. and Book 5) and in the later Carmen super Multiplici Viciorum Pestilencia for the threat it poses to the unity of the faith. She also perceives a modification of Gower's own criticism of the church between Book 3 of VC and the composition of CA. The former contains some substantial anticlerical satire; in CA, however, Gower has evidently become more circumspect, and the passages on the failings of the church are "muted" and relatively short. ronically, Gower later dedicated a copy of VC to Archbishop Arundel, who as the scourge of the Lollards came to take even such criticism of the church as Gower offers as exceptionable; and as Macaulay noted, despite his own defense of orthodoxy, Gower seems to come very close to advocating the Wycliffite doctrine of dominion. Hudson's entire book is of interest as background to Gower, if only because the richness of her survey makes clear how far removed the poet was from the actual theological issues of the time. See also the detailed review by David C. Fowler, SAC 12 (1990): 296-305. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 10.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hudson, Anne Published Hudson, Anne. "The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History." Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Vox Clamantis Minor Latin Poetry 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 Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Clarendon Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed 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 Japanese. The summary of this item has been provided by Professor Ito: "A comparative analysis of 'Virgil's Mirror' and 'The King and the Steward's Wife' with their French originals (the SATF text of Les Sept Sages de Rome). Remarkable is Gower's skill of adaptation. In either case, he metamorphoses the mortally neutral tale into an exemplum against 'coveitise' by a black-and-white characterization, a vivid representation of the mind and acts of evil-doers, and an emphasis on the retributive justice shown to them." [JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ito, Masayoshi Published Ito, Masayoshi. "The Use of The Seven Sages of Rome in the Confessio Amantis." Studies in Medieval English Language and Literature (Japan Society for Medieval English Studies) 3 (1988), pp. 101-12. 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 Use of The Seven Sages of Rome in the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 Japanese. The summary of this item has been provided by Professor Ito: "A translation of the Latin text edited by H. Oesterley (Berlin, 1872); supposedly, this work originated in thirteenth-century England, and was used by Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve; it also contains old versions of Guy of Warrick and Roberd of Cisyle. The translation comprises 200 tales -- the canonical 181 and 19 supplementary tales -- together with commentary and motif-index." [JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ito, Masayoshi Published Ito, Masayoshi. "A Japanese Translation of the Gesta Romanorum." Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin Press, 1988 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations 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 Japanese Translation of the Gesta Romanorum. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Shinozaki Shorin Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed 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 summary of this item has been provided by Professor Ito: "The second edition of the book (1980), revised and supplemented." [JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ito, Masayoshi Published Ito, Masayoshi. "A Japanese Translation of the "Confessio Amantis"." Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin Press, 1988 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations 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 A Japanese Translation of the "Confessio Amantis". Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Shinozaki Shorin Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed 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 Krochalis surveys what can be determined about book ownership and reading among the members of the royal family at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries, then gives closer attention to the books owned and borrowed by Henry V, concluding that "in a circle of collectors, Henry V stands out as a reader of books" (p. 70). Henry is not known to have owned or read any of Gower's works, alas, and there is no known connection between Henry and any Gower MSS. Gower does figure, however, in Krochalis' account of the other members of Henry's family. She notes that two surviving MSS of CA are thought to have been owned by Henry's brothers Humphrey and Thomas (pp. 55, 57). She recounts the story of the commissioning of CA in her discussion of Richard II (p. 59), and of the change of dedication in her comments on Henry's father (p. 55). She also lists several of Gower's other works with reference to Henry IV. She mistakenly states that VC was dedicated to Henry IV to the same year as the rededication of CA. But she suggests that the Cinkante Balades, which are also dedicated to Henry IV, might date from the period of the negotiations for Henry's remarriage in 1401 or later, and that the choice of French might thus be due to his prospective marriage to Joan of Navarre (p. 55 and note 31). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Krochalis, Jeanne E. Published Krochalis, Jeanne E.. "The Books and Reading of Henry V and His Circle." Chaucer Review 23 (1988), pp. 50-77. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Vox Clamantis Cinkante Balades 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 Books and Reading of Henry V and His Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 Sanderlin summarizes what can be inferred about the relation between Chaucer's documented life and the political events of the last decade and a half of the fourteenth century, and refers to Gower in the context of a discussion of the change of dynasty in 1399: "John Gower, of course, had some years earlier cut his ties with Richard and was dedicating his works to Henry. Whether this was from his dislike of Lollards (who were tolerated in Richard's court and who had nailed their 'Twelve Conclusions' to the door of Westminster Hall in 1395) or from some other reason apparently is a subject for dispute but little information" (p. 181). The only support cited is Fisher (1964:121-24), who is rather more cautious about Gower "cutting his ties" with the king, and who makes no mention of the Lollards; there is evidently some chronological uncertainty here, moreover, since the change of dedication on which Gower's putative change in sentiment is based is usually dated to 1393. The real value of Sanderlin's essay lies elsewhere, in its account of how circumspectly Chaucer acted during the political crises of the time, with its implication of how imprudent and unlikely it would have been for a commoner to meddle directly in the friction between Richard and his lords. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sanderlin, S. Published Sanderlin, S.. "Chaucer and Ricardian Politics." Chaucer Review 22 (1988), pp. 171-84. ISSN 0009-2002 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 Chaucer and Ricardian Politics Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 Hanna makes a contribution to the discussion of the literary relation between Gower and Chaucer during the course of his essay on the text of Chaucer's "Truth." Brusendorff (1925:204) first pointed out the resemblance between line 2 and the refrain of one version of Chaucer's poem and CA 5.7739-41, and concluded that Chaucer had probably borrowed from Gower. Pace and David, in their edition of The Minor Poems for the Variorum Chaucer (1982:60), suggested that Gower was alluding to Chaucer's poem instead, indicating that the version in question was thus already well known. Hanna points out that Brusendorff evidently supposed Gower to use "fre" in 5.7741 in the modern sense of "free, independent," and that since he uses it to mean "generous, liberal" instead, the purported resemblance to Chaucer's refrain ("And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede" in the new Riverside Chaucer) disappears. The remaining similarity between the two passages can be attributed to independent allusion to the same Latin proverb, and Hanna concludes that there is no evidence that either poet influenced the other. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hanna, Ralph III Published Hanna, Ralph III. "Authorial Versions, Rolling Revision, Scribal Error? Or, the Truth about Truth." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 10 (1988), pp. 23-40. 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 Authorial Versions, Rolling Revision, Scribal Error? Or, the Truth about Truth Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 CA 4.234-43, under the rubric "Lachesse," Gower tells the story of how Robert Grosseteste lost seven years' worth of work on a magical head of brass because of a single moment of neglect. Macaulay's note to the tale mentions just one analogue (for which he does not provide the date), and notes that similar magical powers were attributed to Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus. Breeze provides a great deal more information about the appearance of tales of talking heads, made of brass and other materials, during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The earliest version he cites is from William of Malmesbury, who attributes the magical head to Pope Sylvester II. Other analogues are found in French, Italian, and Spanish, and Breeze collects a number of interesting allusions from Welsh authors. The head is attributed in these stories to Virgil, to Albertus Magnus, and to Stephen of Tours, among several others; the tradition linking it to Roger Bacon seems to have been particularly viable, but only from the mid-sixteenth century on. Among the versions that Breeze describes, Gower's seems to be the earliest to attribute the head to Grosseteste (the analogue Macaulay cites was written c. 1502), and also the first in which the head is destroyed because of the owner's own neglect. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 10.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Breeze, Andrew Published Breeze, Andrew. "Roger Bacon's Head of Brass." Trivium 23 (1988), pp. 35-50. 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 Roger Bacon's Head of Brass Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 Zaerr, Linda Marie Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Published Zaerr, Linda Marie. "Duke or Duck: Reading the Stories in John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Willamette Journal of the Liberal Arts 4 (1988), pp. 1-9. ISSN 0740-6789 Review Zaerr uses her own youthful misreading of the first line of the tale of "Mundus and Paulina" as an exemplum on the possibilities of misreading the entire poem: believing from the reference to the villain as a "duck" that she was reading a beast fable, only on consideration of the entire context did she realize that he was a duke. The "duck" in the interpretation of the entire poem is the superficial acceptance of Genius' claim to present a coherent morality of fin amour. This is a reading that quacks and waddles because of the tediousness of many of the stories viewed in this light and because of the persistent contradictions between the tales and the frame. A closer examination of how Gower's purposes build upon Genius' stumbling reveals the "duke." The examples that Zaerr uses are the two pairs of tales about Aeneas and Ulysses in Book 4. The first pair, which Genius evidently thinks offer parallel lessons, actually set up two contradictory situations. Aeneas never professes a love for Dido, and her protests against his "slowthe," cast within the vocabulary of "fin amour," reveal her own sensuality. Ulysses is genuinely guilty of slowthe and knows it; Penelope, however, forgives rather than blames him. Unknown to Genius, they illustrate both a more solidly based "honeste" love and also a spirit of forgiveness that is modeled on God's mercy. In the two later tales, Genius blames Ulysses for sloth because of his initial unwillingness to leave Penelope rather than for the tardiness of his return, and he credits Aeneas for his accomplishments after he abandons Dido. "Sloth, defined in terms of fin amour, is revealed to be a contradictory concept" (p. 7), and the scaffolding of Genius' moral system disintegrates. In its place, however, we are able to see the true moral system of the poem. "These shifts in meaning work together to exemplify a flexible alternative, provided by divine mercy, to the conflicting rules and simplistic contradictory proofs provided by the moral system of 'fin amour'. . . . Gower uses the complexity and contradiction in his 'Confessio Amantis' to convey an idea of the complexity and comprehensiveness of the working of God's redemptive love" (p. 9). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 19.1.] 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/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Duke or Duck: Reading the Stories in John Gower's 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 Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower gets a brief discussion (pp. 89-90) in this survey of nearly 200 examples (short and long) of "framing fictions" in Middle English. CA is listed with other "dream-vision analogues," poems which contain the structural features of dream visions but in which no "break in consciousness" occurs. The preliminaries in Book 1 of CA constitute an "adventure motif" that is conventional in such poems, but unlike the shorter examples, the "framing fiction" is not clearly marked off from the "core" of Amans' dialogue with Genius. Gower's manipulation of convention is also evident in his use of the "framing fiction" in the third-person tale of Rosiphelee. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Davidoff, Judith M. Published Davidoff, Judith M.. "Beginning Well: Framing Fictions in Late Middle English Poetry." Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988 ISBN 0838632084 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 Beginning Well: Framing Fictions in Late Middle English Poetry. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed 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 verbal parallel between Legend of Good Women Prologue F464-65, "For-why a trewe man, withouten drede, / Hath nat to parten with a theves dede," and VC 5.314, "Improba nec iustos scandala furis habent," and the similarity in general context suggest that Chaucer borrowed the phrase from Gower. The borrowing provides confirmation of Chaucer's knowledge of VC, and strengthens the case that the discussion of love and chivalry in VC 5 influenced the moral bearing of Troilus and Criseyde.] [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Juby, W.H. Published Juby, W.H.. "A Theves Dede: A Case of Chaucer's Borrowing from Gower." ANQ: American Notes and Queries 1 (1988), pp. 123-125. ISSN 0003-0171 Gower Subject Vox Clamantis 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 A Theves Dede: A Case of Chaucer's Borrowing from Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 Simpson explores the discrepancies and contradictions created by the juxtaposition of differing traditions in the Prologue and Book 1 of CA, partly in answer to those who see the unity of the poem in Gower's subordination of his presentation of love to the ethical scheme within which it is framed. The opening of Book 1 presents love as an irresistible force and denies the possibility of its control by reason, directly contrary to the sentiments of the Prologue, which denounces men who blame external influences for their own suffering. Such an attitude towards love cannot be a sub-branch of the ethical wisdom of the Prologue, as A.J. Minnis claims: indeed one of the works that Minnis cites for his notion of the "extrinsic" and "intrinsic" prologues helps clarify the distinction between philosophical wisdom and the blind appetites that are the subject of Book 1. Gower's reference to his change of "Stile" (1.8) is also significant, for it alludes to the distinction between the satiric mode of the Prologue (in the manner of Juvenal) and the poetry of delight alone (the manner of Ovid) to which satiric verse was traditionally hostile. Genius himself partakes of a similar "juxtaposition of traditions," and is too ambivalent in nature to resume the moral authority of the Prologue. The tales he tells (Simpson limits himself to Book 1) leave doubt concerning his moral authority on the central question of reason's control of love. A different kind of instability is created by the tendency of the tales to break the bounds set by the opening of Book 1 and to repeatedly invoke the political concerns of the Prologue. The effect is to remind the reader that, despite Genius' fumbling and despite the artificial separation created by the narrator, one cannot treat either politics or sexual control without reference to the other. Gower is very much a poet rather than a philosopher; his wish for a new Arion is closely related to his purpose with CA, but he works within the ironic traditions of Jean de Meun and Chaucer rather than as a compiler of philosophical lore. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Simpson, James Published Simpson, James. "Ironic Incongruence in the Prologue and Book I of Gower's Confessio Amantis." Neophilologus 72 (1988), pp. 617-632. ISSN 0028-2677 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 Ironic Incongruence in the Prologue and Book I of Gower's Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 According to the traditional view, Gower's attempt to link "lust" and "lore" in CA was misguided, and his work is essentially disunified as a result. According to more recent views, the treatment of love is of a piece with the ethical concerns of the poem; in Minnis' words (1983:1), "For Gower, the virtues of the good lover were indistinguishable from those of the good man." White rejects both positions, and argues that the apparent disunity of the poem reflects the poet's own concern with "division." The theme of division occurs repeatedly in CA, both as a social and as a psychological phenomenon. In both the Prologue and Book 7 man himself is described as divided between conflicting powers. The conflict "is not presented as irresolvable, but . . . a final resolution can only be achieved through the complete removal of one of the warring parties. And there is a clear awareness that such a resolution is not often achieved. . . . It is a pattern which concedes the dominance of failure" (p. 603). One of the recurring oppositions in the poem is that between Nature and Reason, which Gower depicts as "a reflex of the fundamental division between the body and the soul" (p. 604). Despite instances in which nature and reason are apparently reconciled, Gower is not optimistic about the likelihood, especially in matters of love. Genius too is "a figure divided against himself" (p. 607), attempting to serve incompatible aims: thus his own statement on the difficulty of treating love and morality together. The awkwardness is confronted repeatedly during his discourses, especially when his service to Venus leads him to contradict orthodox morality, and at the end of the poem, he abandons the attempt to reconcile love and reason and chooses reason alone. Even Venus and Nature, in Gower's portrayal, partake of the same division; and the attempt to accommodate "kinde" to Reason only leads to conflicting statements on "kinde" itself. Having abandoned the style of his earlier works at the beginning of Book 1, Gower is sent back to these works at the conclusion of Book 8 as he turns from human love to charity. CA is thus "permeated with a sense of failure" (p. 615), reflecting Gower's pessimism about the insuperability of fundamental divisions in our nature and about the impossibility of both enjoying the world and also keeping an eye focused on heaven. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor White, Hugh Published White, Hugh. "Division and Failure in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Neophilologus 72 (1988), pp. 600-616. ISSN 0028-2677 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 Division and Failure in Gower's Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 According to the editor of this volume, in his splendid essay on the many faces that Ovid has presented to poets and readers down through time, Harbert shows that Gower is "in some ways the leading Ovidian of the Middle Ages" (p. 1). Harbert does not actually do quite so much, but he does give a useful survey of Gower's use of Ovid in VC and CA. He finds that the degree and nature of Ovid's influence vary greatly in the two works. In VC, according to statistics borrowed from Stockton, Gower's borrowings range from about 2% of his lines (in Book 3) to about 12% (in Book 1, in the vision of the mob and the destruction of the city). In the passages most marked by Ovid, Gower has taken not just lines but also themes, and "as he borrows more and more from Ovid we find his work, even the original passages, becomes better not worse. Ovid is now not merely a quarry for Gower, but an inspiration" (p. 86). In CA, on the other hand, though the borrowings are more extensive (some 40 tales, in whole or in part), the framework of the confession is entirely unlike Ovid's, and Gower's octosyllabic couplets are not as well suited for translation as Chaucer's five-stressed line. Consequently he remolds rather than merely translates. His many alterations betray the influence of the common use of Ovid for exercises in both embellishment and condensation in medieval rhetorical training; of his use of Old French sources, which suggested "a tendency to concentrate more on the state of mind of the characters and less on the external world than Ovid" (p. 88); of native English romances (cf. Gower's "Acteon"); and of the Bible (cf. his "Arion"). He remains equally free of all his sources, however, and a consideration of his handling of scenes of transformation and of his "Pyramus and Thisbe" and "Jason and Medea" reveals both his independence and his ability to blend details from different texts. In contrast to VC, "the mode of narration of the Confessio is so different from Ovid's that Gower seems by this stage to regard Ovid's poetry as little more than raw material, to be manipulated and transformed without regard to its origin" (p. 96). The one place in CA that might have been inspired by Ovid comes in a surprising place, in the "palinode" and the revelation of Amans' old age: the germ for the persona that Gower adopts here is perhaps to be found in passages in the Tristia that he also drew from in his meditations on his solitude after he flees London in Book 1 of VC. Harbert has also written on the story of Tereus in Ovid and Gower in Medium AEvum, 41 (1972), 208-19. Other essays in the present volume take up single Ovidian themes in later writers and treat the influence of Ovid on Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dryden, T.S. Eliot, the Elizabethans, and the Augustans. Review by C.H. Sisson, TLS, July 15-21, 1988, p. 772.] [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Harbert, Bruce Published Harbert, Bruce. "Lessons from the Great Clerk: Ovid and John Gower." In Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art From the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. Ed. Martindale, Charles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 83-97. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification 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 Lessons from the Great Clerk: Ovid and John Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cambridge University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Alvar studies de Cuenca's rendering of Gower's "clerc" in his Spanish translation of CA of c. 1400. The translations de Cuenca chose for different contexts -- clérigo, desperta en toda sabiduría, filósofo, letrado, maestro, poeta, sabidor, sabio, valientes teólogos, each of which Alvar examines in some detail -- indicate both how far the English word had developed from its original meaning of "ecclesiastic" and also the care with which de Cuenca worked with his text. When Alvar concludes that Gower's "clerc" is "un intelectual laico" (p. 12), it is difficult to tell whether he means from Gower's or from de Cuenca's point of view. Perhaps both: he makes much of CA 3.1782 ("Ne prest, ne clerc, ne lord, ne knave"), in which Gower makes some sort of distinction between "prest" and "clerc," and in which de Cuenca rendered "clerc" as lego, "layman" (pp. 4-5). But he doesn't give a full consideration of Gower's use in context, nor does he tell us how de Cuenca handled the role of Genius, who is both "Clerk" and "prest" in 1.196 and 203. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Alvar, Manuel Published Alvar, Manuel. "El Clerc de John Gower y su polivalencia en Juan de Cuenca." In Hispanic Studies in Honor of Joseph H. Silverman. Ed. Ricapito, Joseph V.. Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, Series Homenajes (5). Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 1988, pp. 1-13. Gower Subject Language and Word 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 El Clerc de John Gower y su polivalencia en Juan de Cuenca Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Juan de la Cuesta, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Bunt begins with a general overview of the frame story, the structure, and the sources of CA as a prelude to his discussion of Gower's use of exempla. Using some of the most familiar tales from the poem, he points to the problems created by Genius' uncertain moral authority, especially in tales concerned with love (e.g. "Dido and Aeneas" and "Ulysses and Penelope"), and by the frequent conflict between the moral lesson and the particulars of the narrative in the longer and better developed tales (e.g. "Ceix and Alcyone," "Apollonius of Tyre," and "Canace and Machaire"). These discrepancies, he concludes, "seem to be inherent in [Gower's] method of exemplification," by which the poet concentrates upon a single lesson for each tale, even when this is not necessarily its dominant theme. A different sort of discrepancy arises in the many tales concerned with Alexander, who is referred to more often than any other hero in CA, and who provides the pretext for the long excursus in Book 7. One finds the same habit of concentrating upon a single lesson at the expense of the other moral issues each story might raise. In this case, moreover, Gower makes no effort to provide a consistent view of Alexander's character, and was clearly less interested in Alexander as a historical figure than as a source of a large number of well known, though sometimes conflicting, exemplary tales. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bunt, G. H. V. Published Bunt, G. H. V.. "Exemplum and Tale in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." In Exemplum et Similitudo: Alexander the Great and Other Heroes as Points of Reference in Medieval l]Literature. Ed. Aerts, W. J. and Gosman, M.. Mediaevalia Groningana (8). Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1988, pp. 145-155. 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 Exemplum and Tale in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Egbert Forsten, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Iwasaki lists a number of different constructions involving as from CA, e.g. "as forto," "as for," "as in," "as of," "as be weie of," "as touchende," "as tho," and "as thanne." In almost all cases the as is evidently pleonastic, and included for sake of meter alone, and to prove the point Iwasaki lists other passages that seem in every way similar in both meaning and construction but that omit the as. He also points to a small number of passages in which as cannot be omitted (e.g. "as for" in the sense of "concerning"), and in which as has some restrictive force [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Iwasaki, Haruo Published Iwasaki, Haruo. "Pleonastic 'as' in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Philologia Anglica: Essays Presented to Professor Yoshio Terasawa on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday. Ed. Oshitari, Kinshiro, and others. Tokyo: Kenkyushi, 1988, pp. 176-183. 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 Pleonastic 'as' in Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Kenkyushi, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Brown endorses the traditional view that Gower's tale of Virginia is based on Livy (p. 40), but he believes that the case for Chaucer's use of Livy remains unproven, and that the details that Chaucer could not have taken from RR, which served as his principal source, more likely came from another medieval text. Gower's version provides many of the necessary details and could well have been available to Chaucer when he wrote his tale; but a more likely source is provided by Pierre Bersuire's translation of Livy (completed in 1355), which supplied not only the details that RR lacks but also the emphasis on virginity that Chaucer shares with Livy, a concern that is diluted in Gower's version as he draws instead a lesson for the king on pursuing virtue and common profit. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Brown, William H., Jr. Published Brown, William H., Jr.. "Chaucer, Livy, and Bersuire: The Roman Materials in The Physician's Tale." In On Language: Rhetorica, Phonologica, Syntactica; A Festschrift for Robert P. Stockwell from his Friends and Colleagues. Ed. Duncan-Rose, Caroline and Vennemann, Theo. London: Routledge, 1988, pp. 39-51. ISBN 0415003121 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 Chaucer, Livy, and Bersuire: The Roman Materials in The Physician's Tale. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Routledge, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 slim volume consists of an brief introduction by the editor, and eight essays on scribal practices and the reconstruction of authorial language in late Middle English, five by Samuels, two by Smith, and one coauthored. Six were previously published between 1972 and 1985, and another was given as a paper at the New Chaucer Society Congress in 1988. They are reprinted exactly as they first appeared. There is some degree of disjointedness and repetition as a result, but also an opportunity to trace the steps in the process of detection by which the authors have separated out scribal and authorial strata of language in the MSS they examine. One of the key elements in their work was provided by Doyle and Parkes' identification of other MSS copied by scribes "B" and "D" in the Trinity Gower, in their 1978 essay in the Neil Ker Festschrift. Another was Samuels and Smith's own study of "The Language of Gower," reprinted in this volume (pp. 13-22) from Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 92 (1981), in which they demonstrate that the orthography of the Huntington and Fairfax MSS of CA must be virtually identical to Gower's own. In his 1983 essay on "Chaucer's Spelling" (in the present volume, pp. 23-37), Samuels compares the orthography of scribes "B" and "D" in the Trinity MS to the authentic Gowerian spellings in Fairfax in order to discover each scribe's own characteristic habits, and then proceeds to separate the scribe's forms from Chaucer's in the copies that they made of CT. In the two essays that follow (pp. 38-69), Samuels studies the work of scribe "B" (in an essay that first appeared in 1983) and Smith studies that of scribe "D" (in his 1988 New Chaucer Society paper), again with the knowledge of Gower's authentic spellings as a base, in order to sustain Doyle and Parkes' conclusions on the identity of the hand in the manuscripts they attributed to these scribes in face of the attacks on their methodology made by Vance Ramsey. The volume also contains Samuels' essays on "Chaucerian Final '-E'," "Langland's Dialect," and "Spelling and Dialect in the Late and Post-Middle English Periods." The only other essay to refer to Gower is also the only one that has not appeared before, Smith's study of "Spelling and Tradition in Fifteenth-century Copies of Gower's Confessio Amantis" (pp. 96-113). Smith makes two important observations about the orthographical tradition of CA MSS: first, that the distinctive language of the archetype was preserved far more strongly than one would expect or that happened in contemporary copies of CT, a fact he attributes to the status as auctoritas that Gower seems to have enjoyed; and second, that there was only slight influence from the "Chancery" forms that were to become the basis of the written standard. In the last part of his essay he takes up the question of the textual transmission of CA, and observes that the MSS of the groups that Macaulay labelled "first recension, unrevised," "first recension, intermediate," and "second recension (b)" seem to derive from an exemplar with a number of North-West Midlands features. His suggestions on how this situation arose appear to accept Macaulay's explanation of the order of appearance of these groups. In fact, his observations are consistent with other evidence that Macaulay got the order wrong, and that the groups he thought were first in origin were actually those furthest removed both in time and place from the poet himself. The Appendix to this essay contains a valuable list of the MSS of CA with notes on the language forms of each. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Samuels, M.L. Smith, J.J Published Samuels, M.L. and Smith, J.J. "The English of Chaucer and His Contemporaries." Aberdeen: The University Press, 1988 ISBN 0080364039 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 English of Chaucer and His Contemporaries. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed 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 makes two important observations about the orthographical tradition of CA MSS: first, that the distinctive language of the archetype was preserved far more strongly than one would expect or that happened in contemporary copies of CT, a fact he attributes to the status as "auctoritas" that Gower seems to have enjoyed; and second, that there was only slight influence from the "Chancery" forms that were to become the basis of the written standard. In the last part of his essay he takes up the question of the textual transmission of CA, and observes that the MSS of the groups that Macaulay labelled "first recension, unrevised," "first recension, intermediate," and "second recension (b)" seem to derive from an exemplar with a number of North-West Midlands features. His suggestions on how this situation arose appear to accept Macaulay's explanation of the order of appearance of these groups. In fact, his observations are consistent with other evidence that Macaulay got the order wrong, and that the groups he thought were first in origin were actually those furthest removed both in time and place from the poet himself. The Appendix to this essay contains a valuable list of the MSS of CA with notes on the language forms of each. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Smith, Jeremy J. Published Smith, Jeremy J. "Spelling and Tradition in Fifteenth-century Copies of Gower's Confessio Amantis" In M. L. Samuels, and J. J. Smith, The English of Chaucer and His Contemporaries." Aberdeen: The University Press,1988. Pp. 96-113. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Language and Word 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 Spelling and Tradition in Fifteenth-century Copies of Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 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 For Gower, the Subject Index lists thirty-five items, cited by number; on Gower-Chaucer connections and mutual influences, with some brief annotations and book reviews. Author/Editor Author/Editor Baird-Lange, Lorrayne Y. Schnüttgen. Hildegard. Published Baird-Lange, Lorrayne Y., and Hildegard Schnüttgen. A Bibliography of Chaucer, 1974-1985. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1988. Gower Subject Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference 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 A Bibliography of Chaucer, 1974-1985. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 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 argues that the late medieval English poets consistently distinguish Venus and Cupid from each other: Venus represents nonverbal sexual desire and activity, while Cupid is in charge of the "refined" language in which noble lovers express their desire. . . . Chapter 4 posits that John Gower in the Confessio Amantis offers a corrective, demystifying account of the gods' pagan origins." Directed by Henry Ansgar Kelly. [JGN 10.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Tinkle, Theresa Lynn Published Tinkle, Theresa Lynn. "Cupid and Venus, Chaucer and Company." PhD thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1989. 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 Cupid and Venus, Chaucer and Company Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed 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 Annotated Index is in the form of notes and annotations to the text of Gower's poem, arranged in order by book and line number. Every significant reference to a particular passage or tale in the modern commentary on the poem is given an entry, and when there is more than a single comment on any passage, the entries are arranged chronologically. Each entry includes a brief summary. Thus it is possible to locate quickly all of the important commentary on a particular passage, and also to see how the commentary has developed over time; and though the summaries are necessarily brief, the Index will have many of the same uses as a variorum commentary or the notes to a fully annotated edition of the poem. Approximately 330 books and articles that have appeared since the publication of Macaulay's edition in 1900-1901 are indexed, plus 27 editions of excerpts or selections from the poem. Of these, more than 100 are listed in no other Gower bibliography, and thus the 'List of Works Cited' is the most complete available listing of the published criticism of the Confessio Amantis. The index is preceded by an introduction surveying general issues in the commentary on the poem during the twentieth century. The work is intended for the use of scholars who wish to have quick access to the most important and relevant criticism, but also for all readers of the Confessio, who must otherwise rely on the notes in Macaulay's by now antiquated edition. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter Published Nicholson, Peter. "An Annotated Index to the Commentary on John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies. (62). Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, 1989 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis 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 An Annotated Index to the Commentary on John Gower's Confessio Amantis. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed 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 "Canace and Machaire" includes a passage describing their sharing a bedchamber (CA 3.148-53) that was added by the poet. Commentators on the tale have implied that the proximity of the children somehow excused them from their sin. But Gower has added a similar passage to his tale of "Apollonius of Tyre" (8.291) which hardly constitutes a justification for Antiochus' rape of his daughter. Tales in several other exemplum collections illustrate the potentially harmful results of family members having a common bed. Most are concerned with parents and their children, but John Mirk contains a specific warning against children above the age of seven lying together. Shaw concludes that the shared bed in "Canace and Machaire" is an "admonitory device," offering a warning for parents, rather than "a means of eliciting sympathy" for the children. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Shaw, Judith Davis Published Shaw, Judith Davis. "The Role of the Shared Bed in John Gower's Tales of Incest [sic]." ELN 26 (1989), pp. 4-7. 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 Role of the Shared Bed in John Gower's Tales of Incest [sic] Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 is part two of a longer essay comparing Chaucer's and Gower's versions of the same tales; the citation was taken fron the International Medieval Bibllography, which does not give the location of part 1, however, or any indication whether there is a part 3. The portion cited here discusses the tales of Virginia, Phebus, Nebuchadnezzar, Thisbe, and Medea in Canterbury Tales and Legend of Good Women and in Confessio Amantis, with some reference to Chaucer's and Gower's sources. The emphasis in on Chaucer's version; the comparison is limited to isolated observations on language and imagery leading to no general conclusion; and the essay as a whole is a lesson for all of us on the risks one takes when writing in a language that is not one's own. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Tanaka, Minoru Published Tanaka, Minoru. "A Comparison of Chaucer's and Gower's English Expressions (2)." Bulletin of the Daito Bunka University 27 (1989), pp. 143-160. 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 A Comparison of Chaucer's and Gower's English Expressions (2) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 Hatton's examination of Gower's alterations of the tales he borrowed from Ovid in Book 3 provides a succinct demonstration of the ironic mode of reading and interpreting CA. Three premises are evident in his study. Genius, "a personification of man's natural urge to reproduce his species, . . . represents a carnal force" (p. 257), and is thus neither a proper confessor nor a reliable guide to the meaning of his own tales. Amans himself is deeply in need of spiritual correction, guilty of "lecherous designs" (p. 262) and "inordinate concupiscence" (p. 263). The tales offer the needed correction, but in a way unperceived by both Genius and Amans: some of the tales Genius manages to get right, but in most, he either twists the story to support an invalid lesson, or ignores the traditional moralization. In both cases, the readers can supply the true meaning from their own previous familiarity with the tales. Applying these premises to Book 3, Hatton comes up with some rather new readings for a number of tales, and discovers a previously undetected pattern to Gower's, if not Genius', instruction. To summarize only the high points of his argument: In "Canace and Machaire," Genius alters Ovid in his attempt to excuse the children's incest. In fact, they and their father are equally to be blamed: the tale illustrates the two components of the "sensate" part of the human personality, concupiscence and irascibility, and shows how the indulgence in lechery leads to a surrender to wrath, exactly as has happened in Amans. The baby adds an allegorical dimension: born of a surrender to concupiscence that parallels that of Adam and Eve, the baby is "expelled into a wilderness by the anger of the father" (p. 264), and becomes subject to the natural law that leads to death. In "Tiresias and the Snakes," Genius tells only half of the tale found in Ovid: juxtaposed to "Canace and Machaire," the parting of the snakes suggests a disturbance of the balance between irascibility and concupiscence, with its tragic consequences. In being transformed from a man into a woman, moreover, Tiresias is changed from a spiritual to a sensual being. "Jupiter, Juno, and Tiresias" is also allegorical. Jupiter equals human reason, and Juno sensuality. In deciding against Juno, Tiresias aligns himself with reason. "In revenge sensuality may blind him physically, but his spiritual nature gives him a higher kind of sight" (p. 266). (Hatton actually misrepresents Gower's version here, and overlooks some significant departures from Ovid.) The following tales illustrate the disastrous consequences of surrender to the passions, while Diogenes, like Socrates earlier, provides an example of control of the passions for Amans to follow. "Pyramus and Thisbe" illustrates the dangers of self-destructiveness that attend a surrender to the passions. Genius' alterations emphasize the irrationality of the lovers and their service to Venus and Cupid, and thus their similarity to Amans. And in "Phoebus and Daphne," the alterations support the traditional moralization of the tale as a confrontation between concupiscence and virtue in which virtue is both preserved and rewarded, but Genius misses the point, attributing Phoebus' lack of success to Fortune. In sum, Genius' lessons on wrath are sound enough, but the principal lesson that emerges from these tales, undetected by the confessor, is that as long as Amans remains a servant of concupiscence and of Venus, he cannot hope to escape wrath or to act in a reasonable way. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 10.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hatton, Thomas J. Published Hatton, Thomas J.. "John Gower's Use of Ovid in Book III of the Confessio Amantis." Mediaevalia 13 (1989), pp. 257-274. 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 John Gower's Use of Ovid in Book III of the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 retelling the story of Paris' judgment, Gower may have adopted the common medieval allegorization in which Juno represents the Active Life, Venus the Passionate Life, and Minerva the Contemplative Life. In siezing Helen in the temple, Paris is both an unwise political leader, victimizing the innocent, and also an erring human who has chosen the passionate way over the contemplative. Gower redefines Helen's role in their relationship in order to shift all blame to Paris. Though she falls in love with Paris at their first encounter, her part in their dialogue together is reduced, and she has evidently overcome her passion and has turned from Paris to God before she is abducted. Thus unlike the "symbol of destructive sexuality" in Homer, Gower's Helen is "a model of morality and of proper Christian behavior," and as she prays in the temple she may be intended as an image of the contemplative way of life that Paris rejects.] [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gittes, Katherine S. Published Gittes, Katherine S.. "Gower's Helen of Troy and the Contemplative Way of Life." ELH 27 (1989), pp. 19-24. ISSN 0013-8304 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 Gower's Helen of Troy and the Contemplative Way of Life. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 Santano Moreno, Bernardo Published Santano Moreno, Bernardo. "La traducción de "Confessio amantis" de John Gower." Anuario de estudios filológicos 12 (1989), pp. 253-65. ISSN 0071-1713 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Review After a review of the main studies of the Spanish translation of the CA and the main issues related to it--like the alleged existence of the Portuguese intermediate version--,Santano attempts to date both the only extant Spanish manuscript of the "Confisyon" and translation itself. The manuscript is written, he claims, in a hand similar to the script found in some late-fifteenth documentary records of the city of Huete, the birthplace of Juan de Cuenca, who translated the poem. For the date of the translation, he uses internal evidence. Thus, the reference to Huete as city in the Spanish text provides a post quem dating point,1428, when the town received this new designation. Similarly, the term "corona"--considered a calque from Portuguese--translates the English currency "pound;" Santano points out that this currency was used in Portugal in times of Dom Duarte (1433-38). An English version of this article (slightly modified) was published as: Santano Moreno, Bernardo. "Some Observations on the Dates and Circumstances of the Fifteenth-Century Portuguese and Castilian Translations of John Gower's Confessio Amantis." SELIM 1 (1991), pp. 106-122. 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 La traducción de "Confessio amantis" de John Gower Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed 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 publication of this volume is certainly one of the major events in Gower criticism of the last few years. Its thirteen essays were originally read at the annual Gower sessions at Kalamazoo. Other papers from Kalamazoo have already appeared in print (e.g. Benson's study of "Canace and Machaire," in Chaucer Review, 19 [1984]). Those who have not been able to make it to Kalamazoo each year -- and those who have as well -- will be grateful that the best of the remaining papers have been gathered here. All have been revised and expanded, some substantially, for publication. Twelve of the thirteen essays are concerned all but exclusively with CA, but unlike those collected by Minnis in Responses and Reassessments, which offered new ways of looking at the structure of the poem as a whole, most are focused rather more narrowly on problems of Gower's sources, investigations of particular subjects in his poem, studies of particular passages, and examinations of particular MSS of CA. All are competently and professionally done, and several have implications that range well beyond the topic immediately at hand. Together, the volume presents a good cross-section of recent and current scholarship on Gower, and because of its very diversity, there is certain to be something of interest for every reader of Gower here. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F., ed. Published Yeager, R. F., ed. "John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88." Studies in Medieval Culture, 26 . Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1989 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 John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed 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 Pearsall, Derek Published Pearsall, Derek. "Interpretive Models for the Peasants' Revolt." In Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture. Ed. Gallacher, Patrick J. and Damico, Helen. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989, pp. 63-70. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Vox Clamantis Review Pearsall considers various interpretations of the Peasants' Revolt in late-medieval literary and historical accounts, including the "Visio" of "Vox Clamantis." His general point is that it is necessary to recognize "the shaping power of interpretive models" in the study of history as well as in the study of literature, but without reducing objective knowledge to thorough-going illusion (an idea Pearsall attributes to the relativism of Karl Popper) because "the possibility of falsifiability implies the existence of truth, however difficult of access" (69). Pearsall treats Gower's depiction of the 1381 Uprising in Book 1 of "Vox Clamantis" in a brief paragraph, associating it with "the prevalent image or model of the well-being of the commonwealth" found in petitions against laborers that depict them as "mindless." For Pearsall, Gower's is "the most powerful and sustained account of the Peasants' Revolt in terms of the image of reason and nature overturned" but "Gower is not, to be frank, much interested in the actuality of the event, rather in the image of primal chaos and reversion to bestiality which follows on the challenge to the established political order" (65). Elsewhere, actuality is suggested--and a greater sense of historicity achieved--Pearsall shows, in several other versions of the Uprising (the "Anonimalle Chronicle," "Tax has tenet us alle," Froissart's account), distinguishing them from Gower's (and Walsingham's) by their degrees of "authenticating realism," a notion Pearsall draws from Morton Bloomfield's 1964 study of realism in Chaucer. [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 Interpretive Models for the Peasants' Revolt Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 earlier essay in PQ, 64 (1985), 367-85, Hiscoe argued that Genius' storytelling in CA was actually an inducement to sin in the guise of moral preaching, in an elaborate display of rhetorical trickery modeled on Ovid, and that the reader's role was to signal his or her own superior moral sense through laughter. He makes a similar case in the present essay, but couches it in terms of a medieval theory of "signs." "The comic strategy of Confessio Amantis," he writes, "is built on the medieval assumption that the process of assigning meaning mirrors the spiritual condition of the humans who engage in the process" (p. 229). Citing Augustine and Ockham, he describes how, as a consequence of the fall, "words themselves remain empty of any significant content unless transformed by a speaker's awareness of how verbal signs gain ultimate authority solely from their capacity to call up Christian truths to their speakers and to their audiences" (p. 230). The same demand is placed upon secular literature; and the readers have the same role in constructing the meaning from their own experience with the power of language to refer to spiritual truths. In the Confessio Amantis, Genius is a spokesman for fallen mankind who cannot see the spiritual content of his own discourse, and he repeatedly either befuddles or distorts the meanings that the readers, from their position of superior understanding, are able to supply. In his earlier essay Hiscoe used "Ceix and Alceone" (CA 4.2927-3123) as his primary example, and drew upon Ovide Moralise as a guide to the moral that Genius misunderstands. In this essay he uses "Adrian and Bardus" ((5.4937-5162) to show how Gower handles tales without background in the mythographical tradition. Such tales are given "evocative details" that "urge readers to expect heavy spiritual weight; instead they are entertained with the spectacle of a storyteller comically unable to understand or control the inherent significances of the tales he himself chooses to tell" (pp. 232-33). "Adrian and Bardus," in Genius' telling, is laden with language that alludes to Christian redemption, but Genius fails to pursue any of the spiritual implications that are offered. Adrian is another, more literal, representative of mankind after the fall; Bardus comes in the role of savior; but neither fulfills his role according to expectation as the "fictional details spin madly toward no apparent end" and "Genius' story confounds itself at all possible planes of interpretation" (p. 238). In applying the tale to Amans' situation, finally, both Genius and Amans overlook the fact that his cupidinous love is a symptom of the attachment to worldly things that the tale should warn against, and in his defense of his fidelity, Amans quickly becomes tangled in the same sorts of equivocation that mark Genius' tale. One may subscribe to all of the theory in this essay without accepting any of what Hiscoe deduces in applying it to the reading of CA. In drawing us outside the text, Hiscoe may have paid too little attention to it: as only one instance, Bardus does not come "riding into the scene on an ass" (p. 236), but "walkende with his asse" (CA 5.4957); it makes a difference if one insists that we are supposed to make an identification with Christ. Like most "ironic" readings of the poem, moreover, Hiscoe gives us only two choices: either the poem is a dry moral treatise, a "compulsively scholastic gathering of ethical lore" (p. 228), or it is a "tour de force of comic skill and audience engagement" (same page). Most recent criticism has been concerned with carving out a large middle ground in which, for instance, Amans' love might not be purely cupidinous, and his fidelity to his lady might in some lights be held to be commendable. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hiscoe, David W. Published Hiscoe, David W.. "Heavenly Sign and Comic Design in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature. Ed. Wasserman, Julian N. and Roney, Lois. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1989, pp. 228-44. 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 Heavenly Sign and Comic Design in Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Syracuse University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Pearsall divides the Latin apparatus of CA into four different categories: the elegiac verses; the prose commentaries that Macaulay prints in the margins; the speech prefixes and citations of authority; and the colophon and other additions at the end. The systematic nature of this apparatus and its careful integration with the English text are exceptional in a vernacular work: the closest model he can find is Boccaccio's Chiosi to his Teseide; and the consistency with which it is preserved in the MSS indicates strongly that it is Gower's own. The general purpose seems to have been to lend the poem some of the authority of a classical text. Nonetheless, Pearsall argues, the Latin should not be taken as the poet's last word on the poem's meaning, but instead as another "voice" that is meant to be heard alongside that of the very different English text (pp. 15-16). The verse epigrams are characterized by an ostentation of style that strongly differentiates them from the simpler and more straightforward English; where "the English bids for a kind of literalness, . . . the Latin insists always on its own literariness" (p. 19), reflecting some of the differences between an oral culture and a written. The prose passages set themselves off from the English in a different way: when referring to the frame, they sharply diminish the dramatic illusion, and when referring to the tales, they "formalise the exemplary function of the stories in a manner that could be said deliberately to miss their point" (p. 22), denying the mimetic value of the tales and ignoring virtually everything that makes a story a fiction. They must be seen, Pearsall insists, not as summaries, but as "commentaries," "instructions on how to read it according to the conventions of a specific code of reading" (p. 24). The revised colophon, finally, he describes an even greater act of misappropriation. "As a whole," he concludes, "the Latin apparatus of the Confessio has considerable interest in relation to the English poem, and is relevant to it, but its interest and relevance is in its differentness: it cannot be used, in interpretation, without that qualification." [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek Published Pearsall, Derek. "Gower's Latin in the Confessio Amantis." In Latin and Vernacular: Studies in Late-Medieval Texts and Manuscripts. Ed. Minnis, A. J.. York Manuscripts Conferences: Proceedings Series., 1 . Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989, pp. 13-25. Gower Subject Language and Word 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 Gower's Latin in the Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D.S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Here he offers an unusually clear and well illustrated summary of Gower's doctrine. Earlier sources had provided two different views of Nature, one the "law of (non-rational) instinct," the "nature" that man shares with the animals, the other the "law of (natural) reason," man's "nature" as a rational being (p. 2). These two views could be harmonized, yet they could also be set in opposition. In RR, one of Gower's most important sources, Nature is clearly opposed to Reason, though she is not for that reason completely amoral. In CA, "nature," or more normally "kinde," can be used with moral force, for instance in the discussions of ingratitude and murder. "Kinde" is distinguished, however, from "reason," opening up the possibility of conflict, a possibility that is realized for Gower in the sphere of human sexual love (p. 7). "Kinde" may refer broadly to man's "nature," including reason; and even with reference to the sexual impulse it may carry moral authority, though the most obvious examples, the prohibitions of incest and homosexuality, raise unresolvable problems in Nature's role. In other examples (e.g. "Canace and Machaire"), Nature can quite clearly operate against reason, and thus be conducive to vice. There are several key passages in CA on the need to keep natural impulse under the control of reason. But White observes that Gower evidently believes that such control is not always possible. Gower portrays man as trapped between two irreconcilable forces, and the ending of the poem illustrates that "the only truly safe condition is one in which man is no longer subject to the influences of love and nature" (p. 14). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor White, Hugh Published White, Hugh. "Nature and the Good in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the John Gower Society at the International Congress 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 1-20. 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 Nature and the Good in Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Argues that the conclusion of CA, in which Amans discovers that he is too old for Venus' service, derives much of its force from the contrast to the energetic allegorical consummation at the conclusion of RR, and thus should be seen at least in part as Gower's answer to Jean de Meun. Where Genius, in RR, urges Love's barons on by crying "Plow, for God's sake, my barons, plow," Gower's Venus reminds Amans that "mor behoveth to the plowh" than just his will alone; and instead of plucking the rose, as in RR, Amans discovers that Cupid plucks the arrow from his heart. Dean also examines Gower's use of the conventions and language of French courtly poetry, and shows how they are consistently subverted, sometimes ludicrously, by more colloquial Anglicisms and by the reality of Amans' condition. Gower has "modernized" Jean de Meun's conclusion in his poem. The result of his mixture of humor and pathos in these scenes is a "comedy more fitting for reflection than for unqualified mirth" (p. 34), and suggests an important statement on the human condition in both its comic and its tragic aspects. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dean, James Published Dean, James. "Gather Ye Rosebuds: Gower's Comic Reply to Jean de Meun." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medfieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 21-37. 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 Gather Ye Rosebuds: Gower's Comic Reply to Jean de Meun Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Addresses the question of humor in CA in a rather different fashion by examining Gower's references to smiling and to laughter. She discerns three different attitudes towards laugher in medieval writing: the first two, which she labels "ascetic hostility" and "reluctant tolerance" (p. 42), are those discussed by Curtius and Kolve. But the third attitude, "which unreservedly affirms the inherent dignity of laughter" (p. 43), has equally venerable roots, she claims, and is the one that is more characteristic of Gower. She finds evidence for this attitude in the condemnation of joylessness that frequently occurs in medieval descriptions of Envy, and more positively, in the inclusion of laughter among man's natural endowments, for which she quotes Vincent of Beauvais. Both the negative and positive aspects of "natural" laughter are reflected in CA. She also finds examples in which laughter is ironic in effect, and examples in which laughter represents a rational corrective of sinful behavior. The latter are marked by a compassion and empathy that mark CA as a whole, and Burke's account of Gower's view of laughter generally supports her characterization of him as a man who could share a joke with his friend Chaucer. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. PGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burke, Linda Barney Published Burke, Linda Barney. "Genial Gower: Laughter in the Confessio Amantis." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 39-63. 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 Genial Gower: Laughter in the Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Concerned with Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale," but argues that the examples of Gower's version of the story and of the CA as a whole, as invoked in MLIntro, provide a standard of moral responsibility that helps reveal the moral void at the heart of ML's performance. ML's allusions to "Canace" and to "Apollonius of Tyre" reveal both a preoccupation with incest and an inability to appreciate the positive lesson of Gower's tales, the importance of cultural institutions in "guiding and giving value to fallible natural impulse" (p. 67). Both attitudes also characterize ML's handling of his tale. The latter is revealed in the contrast between his Constance -- solitary, helpless, and consistently detached from any meaningful social reality -- and Gower's -- active, engaged with those around her, and fully portrayed in her roles as both wife and mother. ML's "stiflingly possessive attitude" towards his heroine (p. 69), his "desperate anxiety" (p. 96) about normal social relations and human feelings, moreover, amount to a type of incest that unwittingly recalls the tale's most traditional themes. The ostensible "moral" of the tale thus coexists uneasily with the private preoccupations of the teller. The combination reflects an ambivalence towards authority that stems from the teller's social status, Wetherbee suggests. It also points to the broader difference between the compassionate but morally normative CA and Chaucer's willingness to dramatize the tensions of his society more radically in CT. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wetherbee, Winthrop Published Wetherbee, Winthrop. "Constance in the World in Chaucer and Gower." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 65-93. 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 Constance in the World in Chaucer and Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Considers both the textual and the manuscript evidence for Chaucer's and Gower's knowledge of the works of Virgil, who is often mentioned alongside Ovid as one of the most important classical influences in the late Middle Ages. In their retellings of the story of Dido and Aeneas, which Schmitz uses as his primary example, both poets adopt Ovid's view of Dido's misfortune, rather than Virgil's view of Aeneas' heroic calling. Gower shows no familiarity at all with Virgil's version, a lack of knowledge confirmed by his references to Virgil elsewhere in CA. Chaucer mentions Virgil more knowledgeably but remains equally bound to Ovid's version of the story, and may even have drawn his Virgilian material from a later French historical romance rather than from the original. The absence of direct knowledge of Virgil is consistent, Schmitz notes, with what others have observed about the lack of books in late medieval England, and suggests the need for care in our references to "classical influences" in fourteenth-century poetry. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Schmitz, Gotz Published Schmitz, Gotz. "Gower, Chaucer, and the Classics: Back to the Textual Evidence." In Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 95-111. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis 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 Gower, Chaucer, and the Classics: Back to the Textual Evidence Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Finds that the model for Gower's process of composition in VC was provided by the classical and post-classical cento, the tradition of composing new poems by selecting lines and parts of lines from the works of earlier poets. As practiced by Greek and Roman poets, the art of the cento involved not just borrowing but adapting borrowed phrases to a new context and harmonizing borrowings from different sources. Except for the 10th-century "Ecbasis Captivi," the practice was not otherwise known to have been revived before the Renaissance. It is unlikely that this work circulated in England, nor is Gower likely to have been familiar with most classical examples. The most likely model, Yeager concludes, is the 4th-century Christian poet A. Faltonia Proba. Though Gower does not name her or quote her directly, her works were available in England, sometimes grouped with other works that Gower is known to have used. He may also have known of her second-hand: she is discussed by both Isidore and Boccaccio, ands the account in "De Claris Mulieribus" provides a strikingly apt description of Gower's practice in VC. Yeager says "we can be certain" that Gower had read Boccaccio's work (p. 122), but no one else has ever presented any real evidence that he had. Even if Proba does not provide Gower's actual model, however, the very knowledge that other poets composed such works is interesting in itself, and by providing a point of comparison, suggests that Gower's technique might be examined more closely for what it is rather than being dismissed as mere plagiarism. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Did Gower Write Cento?" In Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Micigan University, 1989, pp. 113-32. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis 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 Did Gower Write Cento? Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Micigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Correale is preparing a long-awaited edition of the entire Cronicles for the Chaucer Library. The editorial policy of the series requires him to choose as his base the MS that is closest to the one that Chaucer evidently used, and to try to reconstruct the text as Chaucer saw it. In this essay he applies the same method to determine which of the surviving MSS is closest to the one that Gower used in his version of the tale of Constance. Though the forms of the characters' names that Gower used pose a special problem, the variants that Correale considers indicate persuasively that Gower's source MS belonged to the same branch in the stemma as the MS that Chaucer used and "was probably not very different from Chaucer's" (p. 152). One of the consequences, as Correale points out, is that we will be able to consult the Chaucer Library edition for the study of Gower's use of his source as well as Chaucer's. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Correale, Robert M. Published Correale, Robert M.. "Gower's Source Manuscript of Nicholas Trevet's Les Cronicles." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 133-57. 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 Gower's Source Manuscript of Nicholas Trevet's Les Cronicles Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Discerns two views of history in Gower's writing: the apocalyptic -- emphasizing decline and punishment -- and the redemptive and penitential -- emphasizing the individual's ability to correct and improve himself. Gower found the models for both these views in the two dreams of Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel. Peck surveys other borrowings from Daniel in medieval literature to demonstrate that Gower's use of this source was exceptional, at least for secular writers. He then discusses how Gower used his model in VC and CA. VC is the more apocalyptic work: Gower draws on a number of eschatological sources in his Prologue, in preparation for Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the composite statue, representing the degeneration of mankind, in Book 7. In CA, Gower's two different views of history are juxtaposed. Even the dream of the statue in the Prologue is surrounded by imagery that is more penitential in nature and by repeated references to mankind's responsibility, and the Prologue ends with expressed hope for a new Arion (from the Book of Isaiah) who will bring about a new Golden Age. The penitential mode becomes dominant in Book I, in which Gower shifts from Nebuchadnezzar's first dream to his second, moving the apocalyptic rhetoric to the background and setting the tone for the remainder of CA. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2]. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 177-88. Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A. Published Peck, Russell A.. "John Gower and the Book of Daniel." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 159-87. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations 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 John Gower and the Book of Daniel Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Links CA to the tradition of medieval "metaethics," which treats the meaning of the terms of our moral discourse rather than the rules that govern moral behavior ("normative ethics"). As his basic metaethical text he uses Abelard's "Scito Teipsum," the main concern of which is "intentionality and the extent to which ignorance of the nature of one's acts reduces moral culpability" (p. 190). Both Abelard and Gower share the use of dialogue as a way of exploring moral questions; both also use exempla not for simple moralitates on human conduct but as ways of exploring the nature of moral terms. Gower is more likely to have been familiar with the many anonymous vernacular moral treatises that imitated Abelard's method than with Abelard himself. From one such text, Kuczynski draws a discussion of bisinesse for comparison to Gower's portrayal of Amans in Book 4 of CA. The text he quotes distinguishes between two antithetical types of bisinesse, one the avid pursuit of things of this world, the other the avid pursuit of spiritual goods. Both Langland and Chaucer demonstrate familiarity with the distinction. Gower dramatizes it in the condition of Amans, who is caught in both a verbal and a moral paradox: his complaints about the unprofitability of his bisinesse in love betray a deeper misunderstanding of the difference between proper and improper bisinesse and the need to reconsider his definition of bisinesse itself. The exampla in Book 4 are meant to make Amans and the reader more conscious of the various possible meanings of the term. Because of his role, serving both Venus and God, Genius must proceed indirectly, but he thus forces both Amans and the reader to interpret his stories carefully and to become "more conscious of the nature of moral language itself" (p. 201). The tale of Pygmaleon, for instance, far from encouraging Amans' conduct, portrays a character who, like Amans, is merely a slave to fantasy; and despite the expressed lesson on the rewards for persistence in love, it offers not hope but the example of another man who is subject to the whims of Fortune, in both respects exposing the true nature of Amans' bisinesse. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kuczynski, Michael P Published Kuczynski, Michael P. "Gower's Metaethics." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 159-207. 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's Metaethics Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed 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 Discusses the difference between earthly and spiritual goods in Book 4 of CA, focusing on an episode near the end of Book 4, when Amans, despairing over his lack of rewards in love, points out that a sinner who had prayed to God with half as much bisinesse as he had prayed to his lady "scholde nevere come in Helle" (CA 4.3495). Amans unwittingly alludes to the proper goal of prayer; he also raises a question about the nature of God that was a subject of considerable late medieval theological speculation. The tale of "Iphis and Araxarathen" which follows is enigmatic at best as a counsel on avoiding despair. Allen suggests however that by making Iphis a "kinges Sone" (4.3579), Gower uses Iphis' suicide to recall Christ's sacrifice, echoing a common medieval moralization of Ovid's tale. But where Christ offers hope, Iphis dies in despair. The reminder of Christ's promise of redemption creates a contrast between Christ and Araxarathen, who is unmoved by prayer, that echoes Amans' comment on the difference between God and his lady and that offers a true remedy for despair. "God's favor is predictably attainable while an adored and idealized human's may or may nor be," Allen concludes (p. 214). Amans treats his lady as if she were God, and clearly needs a reorientation. The contrast to the earlier tale of Iphis, in which a lover's prayer does earn a reward, only reinforces the arbitrariness and unreliability of earthly love. The reliability of God, by contrast, as the object of bisinesse and prayer prepares the ending of the poem, when "an old, worn Amans will turn to God for the certainty that he could never find in his lady" (p. 220). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Allen, David G. Published Allen, David G.. "God's Faithfulness and the Lover's Despair: The Theological Framework of the Iphis and Araxarathen Story." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 209-23. 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 God's Faithfulness and the Lover's Despair: The Theological Framework of the Iphis and Araxarathen Story Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed