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 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 Byrd explains the proverb in CA 3.585: "But Oule on Stock [perch or branch] and Stock on Oule." Similar language from "The Owl and the Nightingale" shows that the proverb means that the owl defiles her nest and is then defiled as she sits on the nest. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Byrd, David G Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Published Byrd, David G. "Gower's Confessio Amantis, III, 585." Explicator 29.1 (1970), Item 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/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1970 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Gower's Confessio Amantis, III, 585 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Recognizing that glossing establishes a form of "multi-voicing" in poetry, Galloway remarks that "such glossing of Middle English manuscripts is relatively rare, and generally thin when it appears" (40). The CA, however, offers "the great exception to this faint tradition of Latin glosses on English poetry" and because of the nonpareil nature of Gower's practice there, "this suggests that we need a fuller history of Latin glosses of English verse to appreciate its dynamic if ghostly functions, certainly to appreciate the unusual role that Gower has cast it in" (40). While not purporting to offer a complete version of that "fuller history," Galloway suggests the case of "The Prick of Conscience" as "an alternate tradition of Latin glossing of English poetry that points toward possibilities not otherwise exploited in the English literary tradition, not even by Gower" (41) and notes that "the case presents a particularly useful way to ponder the meaning of the relation between text and gloss in the Confessio Amantis as well" (43). The glosses in the "Prick of Conscience," Galloway argues convincingly via examples and illustrations of full pages (45-64), "are vital intellectual materials because the English text of that poem touches on matters where the Latin and English doctrinal materials have a living context and tradition, the confessional world" and it is a world in which "the glosses [are] productive of other glosses for the same reason: an audience that energetically uses it and needs it, with all the complexity they can find in it and explicate from it for themselves and others. 'The Prick of Conscience' glosses are extensions of the cultural energy that the poem itself was part of, in sifting sin, punishment, and penance" (65) This multi-vocal glossing tradition helps clarify Gower's practice, by contrast: his glosses have a "deadening and timeless quality . . . . Their point is clear only in its further highlighting of the vividness and action of the English poetry, and in terms of a subtle rejection of the clerically controlled confessional world. He addressed, at least potentially, a readership able to appreciate the irony of dull Latin glosses to rich English stories, just at the copyists and readers of the 'Prick of Conscience' addressed an audience possibly able to appreciate the enrichment of vital Latin glosses on moral theology. Gower's glosses at best emphasize by contrast the English poetry's display of individual and civic self-determination, and its psychological complexities of sin that no priest can take up and absolve, for which a secular writer is needed to impose the terms of civic and secular soul-searching and ethical ideals" (65). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew Published Galloway, Andrew. "Gower's Confessio Amantis, the Prick of Conscience, and the History of the Latin Gloss in Early English Literature." In John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts. Ed. Urban, Malte. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009, pp. 39-70. 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 Gower's Confessio Amantis, the Prick of Conscience, and the History of the Latin Gloss in Early English Literature Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brepols, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 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 Book 6 of the CA, Amans mentions a number of courtly dances and uses the phrase "forto go the newefot." Macaulay interprets the word "newefot" as probably the name of some kind of dance. Byrd suggests that "it is a nonce word, meaning not a specific dance, but a 'new dance,' the latest dance craze of the court." [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Byrd, David Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Published Byrd, David. "Gower's Confessio Amantis, VI. 145." Explicator 33.5 (1975), Item 35. Dublin Core The Dublin 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 1975 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Gower's Confessio Amantis, VI. 145 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Griffiths presents a detailed description of a previously unknown manuscript of selections from CA, for which she is not able to provide the present location because the owner wishes to remain anonymous. (Shall it therefore be known as the "Griffiths MS"?) It consists of 17 folios in double columns of 34 lines. Griffiths describes the hand as "an early form of Bastard Secretary with anglicana influence" (245). She dates it to the first quarter of the fifteenth century (244) and localizes it in the area "around London, Kent, and Sussex" (246). Textually it is most like Royal MS 18.C.xxii (Macaulay's R), a manuscript of Macaulay's first recension, group c. It is unique among manuscripts of extracts from the poem in presenting only a single tale, that of Codrus, on the final folio, and of eliminating all references to the dialogue between Genius and Amans except an occasional reference to "mi sone." It consists entirely of edited passages of moral instruction in both Latin and English, chosen from the Prologue and each book but the last. The compiler's choices suggest both a very personal response to CA and an engagement with the entire poem, and the framing of the collection with a passage from the Prologue on the decline of the world at the beginning and a "discussion of the nature of good kingship" (250) at the end suggests a deliberate intention to create "regiminal work . . . pertaining to ethical government" rather than offering merely "personal improvement" (250). Griffiths provides six pages of excerpts. There is one small slip. In discussing the relation of this MS to other copies, she notes that it includes 1.579-84, "hitherto known only from the Fairfax manuscript" (247). The passage in question appears in all copies that contain that portion of the poem; it is Prol.579-84 that occurs only in Fairfax and its successors. Based on Griffiths account, it appears that this manuscript contains none of the passages that appear in "recension 3" MSS alone. [PN. Copyright. JGN 33.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Griffiths, Jane Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Published Griffiths, Jane. "Gower's Confessio Amantis: A 'New' Manuscript." Medium Aevum 82 (2013), pp. 244-59. ISSN 0025-8385 Dublin Core The Dublin 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 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Gower's Confessio Amantis: A 'New' Manuscript Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 collection of some of the landmarks of Gower criticism is meant to gather in one place representative examples of some major approaches to the Confessio Amantis, and to illustrate, by the choice of some of the landmarks of Gower criticism, how the study of the poem has evolved. It includes English translations of two essential essays available hitherto only in German. The contents are: G.C. Macaulay, `The Confessio Amantis' (from The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1908); C.S. Lewis, `Gower' (from The Allegory of Love, 1936); George R. Coffman, `John Gower in His Most Significant Role' (1945); J.A.W. Bennett, `Gower's ``Honeste Love''' (1966); Derek Pearsall, `Gower's Narrative Art' (1966); Arno Esch, `John Gower's Narrative Art,' translated by Linda Barney Burke (1968); George D. Economou, `The Character Genius in Alan de Lille, Jean de Meun, and John Gower' (1970); Götz Schmitz, `Rhetoric and Fiction: Gower's Comments on Eloquence and Courtly Poetry' (translated by the author from chapter three of The Middel Weie: Stil- und Aufbauformen in John Gowers `Confessio Amantis', 1974); Denise N. Baker, `The Priesthood of Genius: A Study of the Medieval Tradition' (1976); A.J. Minnis, `John Gower: Sapiens in Ethics and Politics' (1980); and Kurt Olsson, `Natural Law and John Gower's Confessio Amantis' (1982). The volume concludes with a list of `Suggestions for Further Reading. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter, ed. Published Nicholson, Peter, ed. "Gower's Confessio Amantis: A Critical Anthology." Publications of the John Gower Society, 3 . Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991 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: A Critical Anthology. 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 1991 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 Yonekura has systematically checked every word in Pickles and Dawson's Concordance to Gower's CA against both MED and OED, and he offers several long lists presenting his results. He finds 265 words for which Gower appears as the first citation in the OED, of which 141 are still in current use, plus 26 other words "which only Gower first used in English," which evidently means "for which Gower's is the only recorded use." He finds an additional 459 words for which Gower provides the first use under a particular definition in the OED; 263 of these senses are still in current use. He evidently made rather less use of the MED: he cites eight words listed in the MED that OED omits (all beginning with A, C or D), and four words for which OED gives a citation earlier than the MED's (all beginning with A). A bit of bibliographical history might have been appropriate here: the anomalies he finds early in the alphabet (many of which involve collocations that may or may not be compounds, according to an editor's choice) are no doubt due to the appearance of Macaulay's edition of CA while the OED was already in progress. Yonekura also fails to note anywhere that the MED itself is still incomplete. There are a few other quibbles that one could make: the first that comes to mind is that Gower's "basketh" (CA 3.315) is not neglected by both OED and MED as Yonekura claims, but appears is OED s.v. "bask" (Yonekura evidently looked for a non-existent "baskle"). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yonekura, Hiroshi Published Yonekura, Hiroshi. "Gower's Contribution to the English Vocabulary." In Kotoba no kozo to rekishi. Structural and Historical Studies on Languages: Essays Presented to Dr. Kazuo Araki on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday. Ed. Nakano, Hirozo and Araki, Kazuo. Tokyo: Eichosa, 1991, pp. 503-24. 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 Gower's Contribution to the English Vocabulary Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Eichosa, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 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 Gower "was a 'court man' for life" in both meanings of the term, the noble household and court of justice (150). Gower's sophisticated trilingual corpus "could have found a comfortable home" in any courtly context (151). Despite his insider status, however, Gower was prone to role-playing the prophet in the wilderness boldly calling out abuses (151-52). Through the characters of Amans and Genius, both projections of the author, he channels both the courtly "subject of rule" and "voice of authority" (152). The poet's view of kingship, especially the usurpation of 1399, has evoked a range of interpretations, with some critics claiming sycophancy, and others a nuanced constitutionalism requiring even kings to obey the law (153-54). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Giancarlo, Matthew. Published Giancarlo, Matthew. "Gower's Courts." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 150-57. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Courts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Moll, Richard J. Published Moll, Richard J.. "Gower's Cronica Tripertita and the Latin Glosses to Hardyng's Chronicle." Journal of the Early Book Society 7 (2004), pp. 153-158. ISSN 1525-6790 Gower Subject Cronica Tripertita Influence and Later Allusion Review Three rubrics in the unpublished MS of the first version of the English metrical Chronicle of John Hardyng, completed sometime in the 1450's, cite Gower's Cronica Tripertita as a source, and two of these include 7- and 8-line passages of verse based directly upon Gower's poem. Moll notes the changes in the text due both to scribal confusion and to Hardyng's somewhat greater sympathy for Richard. He points out the importance of these passages as evidence that Cronica Tripertita was known well outside of the small circle of Gower's original readers in the decades after his death, and that it evidently circulated alone, detached from Vox Clamantis. He also notes that "In several places, Macaulay quotes the second version of Hardyng's Chronicle [which had appeared in print, but which lacks these three glosses], apparently as an independent witness to corroborate details in the Cronica. Given his knowledge of the text, however, it is more likely that Hardyng derives these details from 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 Gower's Cronica Tripertita and the Latin Glosses to Hardyng's Chronicle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 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 It is generally known that the "Visio" of the "Vox Clamantis" and the "Cronica Tripertita" were combined with an earlier shorter version of VC, and Carlson makes the case in this essay that an early, independent version of the "Epistola ad Regem" was also added and currently comprises "the imposed chapters 8-18 of the received book 6" of VC (VI.581-1200), described by Carlson as "some remnant (at least) of a once separate piece of writing--a coherent 'speculum principis' cast in epistolary form." The suggestion that an early "Epistola" was added to an early VC is not a new one; it was broached, though inconclusively, by John Fisher, for example, as Carlson reports. Yet, Carlson offers strong supporting arguments for the case while reviewing the structure and rhetoric of the passage as internal evidence for the claim, exploring the "quasi-internal evidence of the transmitted prose headings" (295) that clarify a self-standing structure (295). He also offers as a kind of external evidence John Bale's lists of Gowerian works found in his manuscript notebook "Index Britanniae Scriptorum" and his "Scriptorum Illustrium Catalogus," where, as Carlson puts it, "Bale sometimes reports having seen writings and kinds of manuscripts of Gower that do not now survive" (298). Bale reports in his "Catalogus," for example, the incipit line from a work he lists as "De eodem de Herico," a line which Carlson locates both in the "Epistola" of VC and in an independent 56-line poem by Gower, leading Carlson to compare closely the two versions and show, among other things, that the "Epistola" "embedded" in the VC "underwent revision, at some point or some several points, to better fit" into the larger poem (304). A second example, Bale's quotation of the incipit to what he labels Gower's "De regimine principum"--"O deus immense, sub quo dominator"--is a near match with that of an independent Gowerian poem of 104 lines. No version of this incipit, Carlson makes clear, is found in either the "Epistola" or the VC at large, but he also makes clear that there is a relation between a prose heading that accompanies the independent poem in one manuscript and several features of VC, raising the possibility that an early version of the "Epistola" can be "supposed to have begun with a prayer--something like the surviving 'O deus immense'" (306). Tracing another of Bale's incipit lines from Gower to its source in Peter Riga's "Aurora," Carlson locates the line in the "Epistola" section of VC and, again through close comparison, shows that Gower reworked Riga's original to a new purpose, for which "Bale's evidence" indicates circulation "as a separate poem" (309). Carlson characterizes the reworking he describes as a "standard, school-boyish exercise in Latin verse composition" (308), evidence in support of a general hypothesis that when such "scholastic exercises" are found in the VC they may be regarded as "the remains of originally independent shorter poems" (309). Carlson considers it a "plausible supposition" that Gower produced such "adaptations earlier rather than later in his career as a Latin poet" and proceeds to offer further plausible "supporting evidence" (310) by comparing Bale's listings, Riga's "Aurora," and related material--again from the "Epistola" section of VC. The material in this section eulogizes Edward, the Black Prince, in ways that Carlson finds similar to a eulogy for Edward III ("Epitaphium Edwardi tertii," 1377) and that, he claims carefully, "may be an embedded fragment of a once independent eulogy of the Black Prince, written at the time of his death" (312) in 1376. He offers a version of what this independent eulogy might have looked like, reconstructed from lines in the "Epistola" that praise the Black Prince and that echo the language and imagery of praise in the "Aurora," albeit largely reordered. We are not encouraged to accept Carlson's reconstruction as a new piece of Gower's Latin verse, but to accept it as a model of how Gower may have adapted an early Latin poem in the making of the "Epistola," itself revised when incorporated into the VC. And this is what Carlson ultimately offers: an approximate chronology and sequenced reconstruction of Gower's habits as a Latin poet--first, school-boyish exercises that adapt traditional material; next, modification of these exercises into what (following Fisher) Carlson calls "laureate" (317), occasional poems; and finally, further adaptation of these poems for incorporation into the capacious project of the VC. In the final section of this intricate argument (314-17), Carlson sets his hypotheses against social practices and political events of Gower's lifetime to offer a provisional history of Gower's habits with his Latin poetry. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R. Published Carlson, David R. "Gower's Early Latin Poetry: Text-Genetic Hypotheses of an Epistola ad Regem (ca. 1377-1380) from the Evidence of John Bale." Mediaeval Studies 65 (2003): 293-317. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Minor Latin Poetry Influence and Later Allusion 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 Gower's Early Latin Poetry: Text-Genetic Hypotheses of an "Epistola ad Regem "(ca. 1377-1380) from the Evidence of John Bale. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review As Nicholson points out in a prefatory note (185), his essay responds to Derek Pearsall, "Early Revision in the Text of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,'" JEBS 24, continuing a conversation interrupted by Pearsall's death. "The question before us," Nicholson notes, "is whether the passages in Books 5, 6, and 7 that distinguish MSS S [San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS EL 26.A.17] and P [Princeton University, Firestone Library, Robert H. Taylor Collection, Medieval MS 5] were in Gower's earliest manuscript and later deleted, as Derek Pearsall has proposed, or later additions to as text more like that of A [Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902], as Macaulay presumed" (187). Nicholson comes down on the Macaulay side: ". . . every indication that we find either in the text or in the manuscripts does point to the same conclusion: that Gower revised his poem by making short, selective additions to what was still a fluid portion of the text, and that as Macaulay believed, the shortest of the surviving versions is thus the earliest" (196). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter. Published Nicholson, Peter. "Gower's Early Revisions Revisited." Journal of the Early Book Society 25 (2022): 185-99. 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 Gower's Early Revisions Revisited. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Shows that Gower makes use of a vocabulary applicable at once to the ethical health of Amans and to the political well-being of the state, thus making the Confessio Amantis a true 'speculum regis.' [PN. Cpyright the John Gower Society. JGN 3.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Porter, Elizabeth Published Porter, Elizabeth. "Gower's Ethical Microcosm and Political Macrocosm." In Gower's Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments. Ed. Minnis, A. J. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1983. Pp.135-62. 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 Ethical Microcosm and Political Macrocosm. 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 1983 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 an earlier essay, "Politics and the French Language in England during the Hundred Years' War" (see JGN 20, no 1 (March 2001): 23-26), Yeager focused on the origin of MO, arguing that its opening and its choice of language indicated that it was intended to be read by a chivalric audience, more specifically by King Edward III and his French-speaking inner circle. In the present essay, Yeager focuses on the completion of the poem, which he believes occurred many years later, when Gower had become installed at St. Mary Overes priory in Southwark. Both the penitential tone of the final section of the poem – so different from everything that precedes – and the appeal to the intercession of the Virgin can be explained, Yeager suggests, by a shift in Gower's intended audience to the Austin canons of the priory, and Gower's residence there also explains his access to the sources, which he is not known to have used otherwise, for this section. There is obviously much that is speculative about this argument, of course, but Yeager has anticipated virtually every objection, and in doing so, he has added to the discussion of the relative status of the three languages current in England at the time by pointing out that French would have been in common use by the priory's residents. Also along the way, he adds some new material on the origins of MO, suggesting Henry of Lancaster's "Livre de Seyntz Medicines" as one of Gower's models, both for the form of his poem and for the idea that a moral work of this sort would appeal to a royal and aristocratic audience. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 26.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Gower's French Audience: The Mirour de l'Omme." Chaucer Review 41 (2006), pp. 111-37. ISSN 0009-2002 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Biography of Gower 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 Gower's French Audience: The Mirour de l'Omme 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 2006 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 MO is preserved only in Cambridge University Library Additional MS 3035 [no date proposed], which must have been copied from a witness now lost as it is not a holograph (97-98). Likewise, the CB survives in a sole MS, the trilingual BL Add. 59495, dated 1399 (98). Gower may have personally worked on this MS; if so, he must have had a special purpose for assembling poems in three languages (99). The ballade sequence "Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz" appears in thirteen MSS, including Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 3, the oldest to preserve the CA (99). The intended audience for the "Traitié" remains a subject of debate (99-100). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bertolet, Craig E. Published Bertolet, Craig E. "Gower's French Manuscripts." ." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 97-101. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Cinkante Balades Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's French Manuscripts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review 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 Ladd uses gift exchange to analyze a range of exempla in the "Confessio Amantis." Some of the gifts in Gower's tales are "incidental" while others "cluster . . . around the concept of magnificence" (230). Societies have gradually moved, according to gift theorists, from a gift-based to a profit economy. In the CA, gifts can be monetary or not and are exchanged within and across classes: "Aristocratic gifts could be expressions of authority over their recipients" (232). In the "Tale of Antigonus and Cinichus" (Book VII), King Antigonus denies Cinichus either a small or a large gift, demonstrating his honor and the honor due to him outside a material context. Gifts also establish commercial relationships: how "creditworthy" (238) a person is can depend on withholding or giving gifts. In the "Tale of Apollonius of Tyre" (Book VIII), Apollonius generously prevents a famine by a gift of wheat, acquiring honor thereby. The essay concludes with a chart of Gower's use of the words "gift" and "give" across the CA. [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ladd, Roger A. Published Ladd, Roger A. "Gower's Gifts." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. 229-41. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis 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 Gower's Gifts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Giancarlo's argument begins by examining Gower's admonitory "regimen" for kings in general, including the mirror for princes in Book VII of the CA, and how the poet creatively reworked his sources, especially the "Secretum Secretorum" and the regiminal material in Brunetto Latini's "Livres dou Tresor." In so doing, the poet addressed "the pragmatics of governmentality," a term derived from the political theory of Foucault (228). The regiminal tradition was "constitutional" in that it theorized the king's power not as absolute, but always predicated on justice and the just rule of law (230-45). Following the English tradition enshrined by Bracton, Gower "made the relation of the king and the law one of mutual conditioning" (234). In an exemplum from the CA's mirror for princes, the wise sovereign Lycurgus gave his people a just law, then disappeared, never to return; the moral is that good law is necessary for good government, while the person of a king is not (242, citing CA VII.3002-07). Next, Giancarlo discusses Gower's regiminal theory as he expressed it in his writings addressed to the new king Henry IV, both the Latin encomia and the English "In Praise of Peace." All are "constitutional" (250) in specifying limits on the king's power, not through institutional checks and balances as in a modern democracy (246), but grounded in the voice of the people, justice, and law; if Henry violates the principle of "ius," he will incur both evil fame and the destruction of his rule (245-54). In "In Praise of Peace," Gower praised Henry, advised him, and expressed hope for his reign, while (constitutionally) affirming his loyalty to Henry's regal estate, not to his person (258, citing IPP 372-78). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Giancarlo, Matthew. Published Giancarlo, Matthew. "Gower's Governmentality: Revisiting John Gower as a Constitutional Thinker and Regiminal Writer." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 225-59. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Minor Latin Poetry In Praise of Peace Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Governmentality: Revisiting John Gower as a Constitutional Thinker and Regiminal Writer. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review 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 Review Cowling traces the development of Amans's character in the CA from a general personification of "loving" to a complex psychological persona for Gower the poet. At the outset Amans is confused about love, and has trouble identifying his role in Venus's court. Gradually he "acquires a genius of his own" (66), and starts to think more critically. When he writes his verse complaint to Venus and Cupid in Book 8 he has become a poet, and so where he once was mostly a type of the lover, he has now been individualized as Gower specifically. To highlight the resulting complexity of representation, Cowling points out the ways in which the narrative becomes increasingly a parody of the Bible (e.g., Venus acts as Mary). In addition, Cowling highlights a number of ironies resulting from Gower's creation of a persona. Most importantly, Amans ends up denying the very religion of love that Gower the poet has created. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cowling, Samuel T Published Cowling, Samuel T. "Gower's Ironic Self-Portrait in the Confessio Amantis." Annuale Mediaevale 16 (1975), pp. 63-70. 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 Ironic Self-Portrait in the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1975 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 was not preoccupied with the Jews. In all his vast trilingual corpus, fewer than 300 lines refer to Jewish people per se, "of which 122 make up the 'Tale of the Jew and the Pagan'," the primary focus of Yeager's analysis (184, referring to CA VII.3207*-3329*). The tale is anti-Semitic by any standard. Although unschooled by true religion, the pagan follows the law of nature by helping his fellow human, while the Jew observes Jewish law by helping only himself and his fellow Jew. The story presents an analogue to the parable of the Good Samaritan, where the Samaritan (a religious outcast, a sort of pagan) shows himself superior in compassion to the (obviously Jewish) priest and Levite (188-90). In both stories, however, it is only the wrongful exercise of free will "[that] makes a Jew, not ethnicity or genealogy" (190). Gower's work is notably devoid of the usual medieval tropes on Jewish people as condemned by mere fact of birth to "societal detrimentality, physical deformity, monstrosity or bodily filth" (191). Intriguingly, the story appears only in a group of manuscripts evidently designed for Henry IV (193-94). According to St. Augustine, the Jewish people were kept alive for a reason, and a few would be converted, so all must be treated fairly (195-96). The "Jew and the Pagan" appears in a discussion of "pity," a virtue the poet was especially concerned to promote in Henry (199). Also, Gower may have wished to encourage the new king in supporting London's "domus conversorum," a refuge for converted Jews that must have been familiar to Gower (197, 202). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R.F. "Gower's Jews." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 185-203. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations 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's Jews. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Galloway begins with a discussion of the circumstances surrounding Gower's acquisition of a foreign "chest" ("kiste") and documents associated with the acquisition. These suggest the importance of mercantilism to Gower's life and poetry and may be applied to the puzzle of how "Confessio Amantis" traveled to Iberia, physically and by translation. The prevailing view cites the role of John of Gaunt's daughters in the travels of the CA, through their marriages to the princes of Portugal and Castile. The intersection of 14th-c. mercantile and "noble culture" (197), however, provides an alternative avenue. In the CA, chests have their traditional iconographic association with covetousness. They also signify, however, "the creation and circulation of . . . human political commodities," such as "the voice and words of people of high value" (204), and a poet's "political self-commodification" (210). Gower develops this theme in Book V of the CA, on avarice, where the "Tale of Two Coffers" functions as an exemplum of the allure and risk of venture mercantilism. [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew. Published Galloway, Andrew. "Gower's Kiste." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. 193-214. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Kiste. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Ito argues against James J. Murphy's controversial thesis that Chaucer and Gower did not know Geoffrey of Vinsauf's "Poetria Nova" directly. Ito points out that in addition to the well-known play on the acephalous name in VC 3.955-56, there is a further passage in Gower that is clearly indebted to Vinsauf. In VC 6.979-84, Gower's advice to Richard to avoid timidity is a detailed and skilful borrowing from Vinsauf's third example of apostrophe or "exclamatio." Ito also provides a number of other possible echoes, particularly in the description of a beautiful woman in VC 5.79-128) and in Gower's frequent use of the wordplay on "onus"/"honos" (labour/honour). While not many manuscripts of the "Poetria Nova" are known to have circulated in England, it is suggestive that a manuscript of the "Aurora" (a major source for Gower) also contained Vinsauf's work on rhetoric. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ito, Masayoshi Published Ito, Masayoshi. "Gower's Knowledge of Poetria Nova." Studies in English Literature 162 (1975), pp. 3-20. Reprinted in Ito's John Gower, The Medieval Poet (Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1976), pp. 272-90. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification 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 Gower's Knowledge of Poetria Nova Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1975 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 Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Gower's Lancastrian Affinity: The Iberian Connection." Viator 35 (2004), pp. 483-515. ISSN 0083-5897 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review If the place of "Confessio Amantis" in literary history were not already secure, the poem would still be notable as the first work of English literature to be translated into a contemporary vernacular. Both Portuguese and Castilian translations survive (the latter based on the former). Yeager surveys what is known about the origin and circulation of these, based on the evidence contained in the two MSS and on what is known and can be deduced from the historical record about the two named translators, the one named scribe, their patrons, and the circles in which the latter moved; and nowhere else is this information presented in so complete or so engaging a form as in this essay. Yeager gives central importance to Queen Philippa of Portugal (daughter of John of Gaunt), both for the origin of the Portuguese translation and for a likely role in the production of the Castilian translation for her sister, Queen Catherine of Castile; and he cites the long tradition of learning among the members of the House of Lancaster in support of the inferred literary interests of the two women. He also argues that they may have known of CA and even have had copies of the completed portions of the unfinished poem when they left England for Iberia in 1386. He also considers other possible routes by which CA might have reached the peninsula, however, including others in the 1386 entourage and the connections – social, political, and commercial – that resulted from John of Gaunt's marriage to Costanza of Castile in 1371. One effect of this union was the strengthening of ties between England and Portugal, including a treaty in 1372 that recognized John and Costanza's claim to the Castilian throne. The community of English merchants in Lisbon and Porto grew considerably, and Robert Payn, the Portuguese translator, may have had his origin there. The two surviving MSS suggest that Gower's readership on the peninsula, as in England, extended well beyond the royal family. Gower's anti-authoritarian stance and his advocacy of "comun profit? would have been quite congenial in the political climate of both countries during the first half of the fifteenth century. The production of the two translations is also consistent with other contemporary literary activity, including a multitude of other translations and the composition of such works as the Libro de buen amor. The royal connection remains of central importance in the explanation of the circulation of CA in Iberia, Yeager concludes, but there is also much more to say about the many others who may have played a role, about the tastes to which the work appealed, and about the needs that it supplied, as Yeager so admirably reveals. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 24.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Lancastrian Affinity: The Iberian Connection Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 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 its vast extent and high quality, Gower's trilingual output is unrivalled for an English poet (225). In contrast to earlier approaches, which separated languages and considered Gower's English poetry to be a stage in "the triumph of English" (226, 232-34), recent criticism sees his three languages as coequal and often engaged in "interplay" (227, 228), as in the CA, where English and Latin lines coexist in creative tension (227). Gower was a stylistic innovator both in Latin and French (227, 230), suggesting he saw an English future for both. Different languages often acted as "symbols" or "metonymies" for Gower, French for reconciliation (228), Latin for political "vitriol" (229), and English for a kind of "social resistance" (231), given its still-marginal status within his lifetime (232-34). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Machan, Tim William. Published Machan, Tim William. "Gower's Languages." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 225-36. 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 Gower's Languages. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review 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 The Latin works--VC, CrT, and short poems--all survive in fairly numerous witnesses. Reviewing the manuscript catalogues, Batkie notes the evidence for a scriptorium overseen by Gower, as well as authorial revisions as late as the Henry Percy rebellion of 1402-05 (103-04). Under "Manuscript production and conditions," she notes the probability of "redactions" showing the poet's increasing disillusionment with Richard II, as well as a network of scribes if not a scriptorium (105-06). Moving on to discuss "how those [material] conditions generate new readings of the texts themselves" (106), she notes, for example, how the famous trilingual MS BL Add. 59495 may really express an evolving critique of Henry IV's bellicosity (107). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Batkie, Stephanie L. Published Batkie, Stephanie L. "Gower's Latin Manuscripts." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 102-09. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Vox Clamantis Cronica Tripertita Minor Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Latin Manuscripts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Carlin's discursive biography of Gower follows her list of life records which document the poet's legal and economic activities, enabling her to deduce his income as it varied over his lifetime, locate his residences and when he might have lived in them, and describe in "brief profiles" (pp. 62-79) his various associates and friends. She also explores at some length what can be deduced from Gower's tomb, his marriage to Agnes Groundolf, and his final "Testament." Notably, Carlin disagrees with previous biographers who consider Gower's marriage to be one of chaste convenience--old-age care, if you will--arguing that Gower's poem "Est Amor," his "Testament," Agnes's surname, and archival records of her activities after Gower's death indicate something more personal. Carlin also corrects discussions of Gower's tomb, describing accounts and errors of its reconstruction and placement in Southwark Cathedral (then St, Mary Ovary) and correcting earlier descriptions of his effigy. At the heart of Carlin's discussion, however, are the records themselves; she notes recurrently what they can tell us and what they cannot, punctuating her discussion with "perhaps," "probably," and "may be." Gower, she deduces generally, was a money lender as well as an investor in property, uninvolved as an agent for others, while he enlisted them in his own activities. The "archival record," she concludes, is "curiously lacking in evidence of conventional obligations and service, personal friendships [Chaucer excepted], family relationships [Agnes excepted], collegial ties, and confraternal or parochial affiliations" (109). A closing Appendix includes Carlin's transcriptions of two Latin Hustings deeds of 1366, and English translations of the lawsuit "Feriby v. Gower et al" (Guildford, 1394), and Gower's final "Testament." [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlin, Martha. Published Carlin, Martha. "Gower's Life." In Historians on John Gower. Ed. Stephen H. Rigby, with Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 22-120. 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 Gower's Life. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Grinnell uses this little studied poem, written towards the end of Gower's career, to argue that "Gower's light is penetrative, both physically and morally, highlighting the nature of medieval optical theory and evoking an ecology of light somewhat in concord with contemporary radiation theory" (161). Grinnell begins by evoking the contradictory nature of light in medieval thought, characterized physically at times as extra-transmissional and at times as intra-missional, and riven also in ethical thought between an association with the dangerous carnality of the senses and a contradictory association with the scriptural identification of light and God himself. Similarly, Grinnell reads Gower's poem as one far removed from his earlier stance of visionary revelation in the "Vox Clamantis." In this short lyric, Gower is no prophet, but an individual contemplating the interplay of shadow and light both in the fallen world and in his own existence, ending the poem with a prayer for a single candle to light his way. [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Grinnell, Natalie. Published Grinnell, Natalie. "Gower's Light: The Ecology of 'De Lucis Scrutinio'." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 161-71. Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry 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 Gower's Light: The Ecology of "De Lucis Scrutinio." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Ovid, Livy, and Chaucer are the most frequently mentioned sources for Shakespeare's "Rape of Lucrece," and only two details in his poem have been traced to Gower's version in CA. Hillman finds a number of other detailed recollections of Gower's text, but finds even more compelling similarities in the general handling of two key scenes, the rape itself and Lucrece's suicide, and in the treatment of the two main characters. Both Shakespeare and Gower develop the contrast between Lucrece's innocence and the villain's guile on the evening of the rape, a scene neglected in the other sources, and give more than usual attention to the villain's motivation and state of mind. Both also treat Lucrece with greater sympathy and dignity than the other authors, and raise her to a genuinely tragic stature. Gower's version is "more engagingly human, more complex, and more powerful" than the other versions Shakespeare knew, and contributes more to our understanding of both the moral and the dramatic emphases of Shakespeare's poem. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 10.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hillman, Richard Published Hillman, Richard. "Gower's Lucrece: A New Old Source for The Rape of Lucrece." Chaucer Review 24 (1990), pp. 263-70. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Lucrece: A New Old Source for The Rape of Lucrece Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 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 Nicholson, Peter Published Nicholson, Peter. "Gower's Manuscript of the 'Confessio Amantis'." In The Medieval Python: The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones. Ed. Yeager, R. F and Takamiya, Toshiyuki. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 75-86. ISBN 9780230112674 Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Review Nicholson challenges what he himself had argued in an important 1987 essay, that Gower played a minimal role in the production of manuscript copies of the CA. Here basing his argument on a new comparison of two early manuscripts--Oxford, Bodleian Library, Fairfax 3 (F) and Bodley 902 (A)--Nicholson seeks to provide "a closer and more precise idea of what Gower's prototype manuscript looked like and of the ways in which the poet prepared his manuscript for copying" (76). Each of these manuscripts was copied by three separate scribes. The copies of the middle section, virtually in its entirety (fols. 22- 81 in F, and fols. 21-80 in A), are remarkably similar, lining up "precisely column for column" (p. 76) in two 46-line columns per page. Neither manuscript is taken from the other, however, but "copied from a common exemplar" (77). The visual presentation in this section, ordered to reflect Gower's conceptual organization of his material, suggests his involvement: major new divisions are moved to the top of columns, for example, and major and minor divisions are distinguished and announced by initials of appropriately varying size. The third section is different. This portion of the poem, which Gower continued to revise, is less finished, and in the copies, there is "less correspondence of arrangement to structure" (79). The first section is different again. Nicholson suggests that it was originally in as finished a state as section two, but later "disturbances . . . made the scribes' intervention necessary" (82). The decision to include illustrations, for example, was not part of the original plan, and their eventual inclusion in different number, size, and location in the copies affected the 46-line arrangement in each. Thus, though the texts in this portion of the poem are, for the most part, aligned, occasional differences are telling. Whereas A sometimes moved marginalia into the text and left blank lines at the bottom of some pages, F did neither. This scribe "not only fills up every line of the available space . . . but works to align new sections of the poem with the first line of the column whenever possible, and he does so by supplying new lines of English text" (83). The precise number of needed lines could only have been ascertained during the process of copying, and Nicholson persuasively argues that these passages were most likely composed by Gower. Ultimately, then, it appears that the poet worked "collaboratively" with his early scribe(s) to effect a presentation that matches nuances of his conceptual design. This is a closely argued paper, and Nicholson is to be applauded for venturing to re-examine the evidence, and on that basis to question and ultimately revise his earlier findings. [Kurt Olsson. Copyright JGN 31.2] 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 Gower's Manuscript of the 'Confessio Amantis'. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Palgrave Macmillan, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 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 Kruger observes that the growth of the merchant class in the late Middle Ages offered challenges to traditional Christian conceptions both of Christianity itself and of the three estates, and that "the changes and anxieties associated with mercantilism are intimately, indeed indissolubly, connected to questions of religious identity and difference: can the Christian remain a Christian if he is a merchant?" (3). In the texts that he uses as examples, the Mediterranean provides the ideal site for acting out questions both of religious and of mercantile identity. Gower's Mediterranean is most often the pre-medieval and pre-Christian setting of the tales he borrowed from his classical sources, but he too uses the contemporary Mediterranean as a site to "think through" the relation between Christianity and mercantilism (8). Kruger's principal example from Gower's work is the tale of Constance, in which the Barbar merchants of the opening initiate a "spiritual exchange" and a series of conversions, and in which Constance herself, in her several voyages, "takes on and spiritually transforms the merchants' role" (14). Many of the exchanges that she is involved in, however, result in violence. The merchants in the tale "may . . . be part of an attempt to rethink and assert the value of the mercantile for Christian purposes, but the Mediterranean stage of their actions remains riven by religious difference, a scene of conflict and disruption as much as of Christian self-promulgation" (14). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kruger, Stephen F Published Kruger, Stephen F. "Gower's Mediterranean." In On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium. Ed. Yeager, R.F. Studies in Medieval Culture (46). Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2007, pp. 3-19. 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 Mediterranean Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 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 Dwyer agrees with Elfreda Fowler that no single manual on the vices and virtues can account for all the contents of Gower's MO. However, he rejects "her judgment on the relative closeness of the Somme des Vices et Vertus and the Miroir du Monde to Gower's Mirour" (483). The existence of two passages in the MO that are borrowed from the Somme shows that the latter work is a closer analogue to Gower than the Miroir du Monde. The first passage is an extended treatment of fear ("Paour"), a subdivision of Humility (lines 11293-472 of the MO). The inclusion of certain verses from Helinand's Vers de la Mort in both texts proves the indebtedness to the Somme. The second shared characteristic is "the allegory involving the Beast of the Apocalypse" (497). Both the MO and the Somme offer a unique interpretation of the Beast's seven heads as the Seven Deadly Sins, a configuration that is unusual in the patristic and medieval tradition. On the other hand, while Gower preferred the Somme over the Miroir, he did generally employ an eclectic manner of composition. As proof of this tendency, Dwyer points to the VC, written in Cento, and to the tale of "Pyramus and Thisbe" in the CA, where Gower likely borrowed from, and adapted, multiple sources. There is therefore no need to posit a single parent source to explain Gower's eclectic borrowings in the MO, as Fowler does. Moreover, an eye must also be had for Gower's originality. He is both more rigid in his subdivisions of the virtues and vices, and more lax in his treatment of some of them (his narrow understanding of Temperance being but one example). Dwyer therefore concludes that one "should more reasonably suspect a rather free use of collections and florilegia on Gower's part than a plundering of a single source" (488). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dwyer, J. B Published Dwyer, J. B. "Gower's Mirour and its French Sources: A Re-examination of Evidence." Studies in Philology 48 (1951), pp. 482-505. 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 Gower's Mirour and its French Sources: A Re-examination of Evidence Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1951 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 valuable appreciation of MO within the context of the tradition from which it stems. Gower's colophon suggests that the work is best viewed as an example of devotional literature. Gower's choice of language may reflect an attempt to place his work in that tradition, since Anglo-Norman treatises on devotion evidently remained popular until the very end of the century. Within this tradition, MO is also not unusual for its bulk. The composition of vast formal treatises that were devotional rather than didactic in motivation seems to have been a fourteenth-century phenomenon, but there is no exact parallel for the choice of elements one finds in MO. One of the sources that Gower cites in the first part of the poem, the highly popular Meditationes wrongly attributed to St. Bernard, though very different in form, suggests the sense of "meditation" reflected in Speculum Meditantis, one of the Latin titles of Gower's poem, and it provides the rationale for self-exploration and a turning inward as a means of approaching God that provides the basis for the structure of MO. That turning inward occurs most clearly in the last part of the poem, recounting the life of the Virgin and of Christ, many details of which appear to have been borrowed from works in the devotional tradition. This inward shift, Bestul concludes, has parallels in Chaucer's work and elsewhere; and it "seems to articulate what appears to be a growing conviction in the fourteenth century that what was most needful was a private moral reform based upon individual self-examination, a reform which would hinge upon reflection and contemplation both as necessary activities and as sources of contemplation" (p. 323). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bestul, Thomas H. Published Bestul, Thomas H.. "Gower's Mirour de l'Omme and the Meditative Tradition." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 307-328. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations 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 Gower's Mirour de l'Omme and the Meditative Tradition Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 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 Flügel, Ewald Published Flügel, Ewald. "Gower's Mirour de l'Omme und Chaucer's Prolog." Anglia 24 (1901), pp. 437-508. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Review The epigraph to Flügel's article reads "Glosynge is a glorious thyng certeyn" (437), and Fluegel's critical method is to give extended glosses to various lines from the Prologue to Chaucer's CT. The primary purpose of these glosses is to provide analogues from quite a range of contemporary sources, Gower's MO and the VC being the foremost among them. Fluegel's discussion centers around a number of characters, namely the Knight (440-48), the Monk (448-60), the Friar (460-72), the Merchant (472-76), the Clerk (476-84), the Man of Law (484-96), the Physician (496-98), the Parson (498-503), the Plowman (503-04), the Summoner (505-07), and the Host (507-08). In general, Gower's satire is sharper and less sympathetic. For instance, Fluegel suggests that the MO's section on "chivalers," with its "scharfe kritik der gegenwärtigen zeit" (strong criticism of the present time) bears little resemblance to "dem freundlichen, lebensfrischen und sonnigen in Chaucer's prolog" (the pleasant, lively, and sunny [aspects] of Chaucer's Prologue; 440). Indeed, Fluegel generally describes the MO's style as similar to "die ölige, glatte monotonie der Confessio Amantis" (the slick and polished monotony of the CA; 427). The MO has a certain "farblosigkeit" (colourlessness; 437)and is characterized by a "melancholisch-pessimistischen tadelsfreude" (melancholy and pessimistic enjoyment of censure; 437). Simply put, Chaucer's Prologue is shorter, but its satire is better. Nevertheless, some of the descriptions of the estates are surprisingly similar in the MO and the CT. For instance, Augustine's comparison of clergy that dabble in secular matters to fish out of water is found both in Chaucer's description of the Monk and in Gower's discussion of "possessioners." In these sections, both authors also make reference to the Rule of St. Augustine (450). In places, Fluegel further notes the importance of the VC in relation to the CT. For instance, in the section on the Man of Law, Fluegel directs the reader to the first six chapters of book 6 of the VC (on the greed of judicial officials), which "womöglich den Mirrour noch an bitterkeit und zorn übertreffen" (possibly exceed the MO in bitterness and fury; 484). Yet it is still the MO that receives most attention, and Fluegel suggests that the MO's section on the law contains a new legal expression about "packing a jury"; the leader who corrupts the jury is called a "Tracier" (489). Fluegel provides little commentary on whether any direct lines of influence are discernable between Gower and Chaucer. In fact, at times he notes their stark difference. One of the last characters Fluegel discusses, the Plowman, presents a stark contrast to Gower's complaints about contemporary laborers, and shows much more similarity with the depiction of the Plowman in Wyclif and Langland (503-04). [CvD] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Mirour de l'Omme und Chaucer's Prolog. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1901 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 Williams, Deanne Published Williams, Deanne. "Gower's Monster." In Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures. Ed. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 127-150. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review "As a spiteful despot cum humble penitent, as a prophetic dreamer, gifted with foreknowledge of the apocalypse, and as a lamenting beast in the wilderness, Nebuchadnezzar is a figure for juxtaposition and the swift shifting of gears,," Williams writes (144). She surveys the use of Nebuchadnezzar in other fourteenth-century texts, including "Cleanness," Chaucer's "House of Fame" and "Monk's Tale," and "Piers Plowman," but she focuses on his appearance at the end of the Prologue and Book I of CA, seeing the Biblical figure as an image of the cultural and linguistic hybridity both of Gower's England and of his poem; of the multiple "divisions" of CA as a whole, including the tension between the orderliness of the frame and "the fascination with narratives of chaos, metamorphosis and monstrosity that make this ostensible orderliness spin out of control" (128); and of its form: "When Gower segues from the apocalyptic discourse and political analysis of the Prologue into the personal, amatory woes of Amans in the 'Confessio Amantis' he makes a generic move from prophecy, political treatise, and estates satire to dream vision and ars amatoria. With this shift of gears, . . . the 'Confessio Amantis' reveals itself to be as hybrid, generically, as Nebuchadnezzar is physically" (142). "The story of Nebuchdnezzar," she concludes, "suggests how we can be, simultaneously, one thing and the other: a paradigm that defeats the kind of binaries that distinguish East from West, civilized from barbarian, self from Other. Nebuchadnezzar is both/and as opposed to either/or: a tasteless barbarian and an expansionist conqueror; an ignoramus and a visionary; a king and a monster; a human and a beast. He at once embodies the binaries, and transcends the conflict between them. . . . [The] dichotomy between the self/Other binary and the hybrid continues to motivate postcolonial theory: the true choice, it seems, is not between East and West, colonizer and colonized, and self and Other, but instead between a mentality of unassimilable cultural difference and multicultural diversity and cosmopolitanism. Gower's alienated, ambivalent, yet compelling Nebuchadnezzar offers an alternative to these binaries that is monstrously resistant to classification: both" (144-45)]. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 25.2/] 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 Gower's Monster 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 2005 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 relation to criticism that views Gower as primarily a stern moralist and political commentator, Pearsall writes: "The current reappraisal of Gower is doing loyal service to Gower the man, but may be doing less service to Gower the English poet" (475). In describing Gower's narrative art, Pearsall focuses on the frame narrative and exempla of the CA, the excellence of Gower's verse having been observed sufficiently by C. S. Lewis. Pearsall views the CA Prologue as a recapitulation of the themes from the MO and the VC and as a transition to the subject of love, "which is, for all its blind instinctual nature, a unitive and not a divisive principle and in which therefore the reconciliation of division may be found" (476). Indeed, "Gower, despite the fiction of the lover's confession, is not providing instruction in the art of love, but using love as the bait for instruction in the art of living" (476). Part of Gower's artistic achievement lies in his humorous and sympathetic depiction of Amans. In Pearsall's assessment, the dramatic frame in which Amans plays an important part is less organic than that of Chaucer's CT, but less flawed than that of the LGW. The only count against the frame of the CA is the presence of some long digressive passages like the discourse on false and true religion and Book 7's excursion into politics, although Pearsall is ready to admit that these sections have "external validity" (477n8). As for Gower's stories, they depend on "the initial response of imaginative sympathy to the human condition" (478). Thus, Pearsall uses the story of "Constantine and Sylvester" to show how Gower's special achievement is to embody, in Constantine's soliloquy and in the description of his thoughts and feelings, the very substance (and not just the abstract truth) of human charity and pity. Gower's constant promotion of "humane Christian values" (478) is especially visible in his adaptation of Ovidian narratives, such as the tale of "Tereus, Procne, and Philomela." Gower mutes the horrors of Ovid's version in the interest of preserving "a plausible pattern of human behavior which will be susceptible of humane moral interpretation" (478). Gower treats Procne and Philomela with sympathy and develops their metarmorphoses "with great charm and tenderness" (479). The same is true for the transformation in the tale of "Ceix and Alceone," although in the story of "Pyramus and Thisbe" Gower omits the metamorphosis, likely because he could not stomach "the image of Pyramus' blood spouting high to stain the mulberry" (480). In every story, then, Gower aims to describe a meaningful pattern of human action. He develops Thisbe's speech over Pyramus' body where she questions justice and divine providence. His Iphis takes time to explain his decision to commit suicide and Gower turns Ovid's emotionless Araxarathen into a woman who is stricken with remorse and behaves "like a lady" (481). Similarly, the story of "Canace and Machaire" produces "a sober and compassionate meditation" (481) on love and law. Gower skillfully postpones the exposure of Canace's child, so that she can have the baby with her as she writes her final letter. In fact, it is "women who draw forth Gower's largest humanity, and his most deeply effective expressions of that humanity" (481). The story of Lucrece, for example, is "perhaps his most perfect realization of womanliness" (481), and the tale of "Jason and Medea" explores Medea's love with great pathos. Gower's "success with these classical stories is due in part to his ruthlessness. He has no respect for antiquity nor for the rich resonance of its allusiveness, and no hesitation at all in re-embodying its narratives in the social and moral contexts he understands" (482-83). Only a few stories – such as those of "Orestes" and "Deianira" – refuse this recontextualization and sometimes Gower's moral betrays his own best understanding of the meaning of a particular narrative. Pearsall concludes his argument with some comparisons with Chaucer's CT that demonstrate that "Gower, by any but these, the very highest standards, is an uncommonly fine narrative poet" (484). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Published Pearsall, Derek. "Gower's Narrative Art." PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 81 (1966), pp. 475-484. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Narrative Art Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1966 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 Unexamined. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Speed, D. F. Published Speed, D. F. Gower's Narrative Technique as Revealed by His Adaptations of Source Material in the Tales of "Confessio Amantis." Ph. D. Dissertation. University of London, 1970. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Narrative Technique as Revealed by His Adaptations of Source Material in the Tales of "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1970 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yeager neatly expresses the broad outlines of his perspective on Gower's "discontent" with Ovid in the final paragraph of this essay: "the disquieting problem I believe Gower discovered in his last years with Ovid as an aesthetic model was posterity . . . . [A]s a poet of continuing transformation, and earth-bound love, Ovid fell short of that Petrarchan high seriousness that promised permanence. Virgil, alone, possessed that" (107). However, like Ovid, Yeager explains earlier, Gower "had problems with" Virgil, in Gower's case with both the "tyrannical imperialism" (103) of the "Aeneid" and the "military adventurism" (106) of Aeneas, helping Yeager to explain why Virgils' direct influence on Gower was slight, and why the Virgil we find in the "Confessio Amantis" is a magician and a failed lover, not a poet; Aeneas, a betrayer rather than a hero--both based in romance rather than epic, and both, perhaps, influenced by Augustine's critique of Virgil in his "Confessions" and "De civitate Dei." Gower well knew of Virgil's enduring status and wanted such "posterity" (95) for himself, a goal he was, perhaps, introduced to by Chaucer, Yeager suggests, and a topic likely to have been discussed among those in "Gower's circle"--Chaucer, Ralph Strode, and others (102n47)--especially as purveyed by Petrarch. Previously, Ovid had provided Gower with a wide range of narratives of transformation and love--topics Gower took up early in his "Visio Anglie" and in CA (c. 1381-82)--especially those that posed "hopeful aspiration" implicit in "continual . . . potentially ameliorative change." Over time, however (both Gower's age and "Richard's darkening rule" played roles here, Yeager observes) Gower's "outlook changed" (94) and a "new ambition" developed: he grew concerned to establish a poetic legacy of the sort articulated by Petrarch. Yeager is careful to make clear that "no evidence has surfaced yet of Gower's reading of any work of Petrarch's," but he makes it equally clear that a new idea of authorship was coalescing in England at the very late fourteenth century--a preoccupation with "posterity, a concept concerned with the life of letters that Petrarch re-invented, framing poetic immortality solidly around Virgil" (95). Yeager shows that Gower "moves away from Ovid" (98) in his late works (1390s and after), examining closely the nuances (and authorship questions) of "Quam quincere," "Eneidos bucolis," and "Quia unusquisque" as "fruits of conversation within Gower's circle" (102) and the result of a "Petrarchan gaze" (99), tinged with "clear distrust, even a detestation, of the worldly pretensions of imperium" (103) that Gower associated with Virgil. Throughout this essay, Yeager's own gaze is on Ovid but it widens out to include significant engagement with Virgil and Petrarch, along with Chaucer, Strode, and even Langland and Lydgate, offering a wide-ranging exploration of changes in Gower's poetic outlook, a rumination rich in details, nuances, sidelights, implications for chronology, and provocative questions, many of the latter left hanging, tantalizingly, for future consideration, even though some of them already have been addressed in studies not mentioned by Yeager. See, for example, T. Matthew N. McCabe's "Vernacular Authorship and Public Poetry: John Gower" (2020). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R. F. "Gower's Ovidian Aesthetics and Its Discontents." In William Green, Daniel Herbert, and Noelle Phillips, eds. Textual Traditions and Medieval Literary Culture: Essays in Honour of Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2025), pp. 89-107. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Later Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Ovidian Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2025 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Galloway connects Gower to the English proto-humanists of the fifteenth century, albeit with qualifications, noting that "in many elements of substance he missed this take-off of the 'studia humanitatis' almost entirely" (436). Gower didn't know Plato, very little Statius or Virgil, and more--but not much--of Cicero. Ovid, however, is a different story: "Gower appropriated Ovid with unusual fidelity yet extraordinary freedom. At his most productive, he shows himself steeped in Ovid and up-to-date Ovidian commentators [i.e., the "Ovide Moralisé" and Bersuire's "Ovidius Moralizatus"] to a degree hard to parallel before the Renaissance, and rare thereafter" (438). Galloway tracks the trajectory of Gower's recourses to Ovid from the Ovidless MO to heavy reliance in the VC and a few of the balades to "a flowering of Ovidiana in the 'Confessio'," followed by "almost no mention in his final political poetry" (439). He sees this interest in Ovid driven by Gower's "legendary interest in ethics and 'morality'," although he came to it via "Ovidian materials"--i.e., "there is clear textual evidence that Gower's elaborations and framing were stimulated by the moralized, redacted, and summarized medieval Ovids he consulted" (439). The remainder of Galloway's essay specifically addresses, work by work, examples of Ovidian presence. He is particularly informative about Gower's uses of Bersuire (448-53). As Galloway sums it up, "The results show Gower responsible for a major transition in the intellectual as well as poetic uses of Ovid, a departure from using Ovid simply as a matrix for Christian allegory. Along with Ovid himself, the Ovidian commentators lead Gower not only into his best poetry, but also into his fullest participation in moral, social, literary, and political dialogue, though not always with the interlocutors and topics we might expect" (439). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew. Published Galloway, Andrew. "Gower's Ovids." In The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. I: 800-1558, ed. Rita Copeland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 435-64. ISBN: 9780199587230; 9780199587230. 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 Gower's Ovids. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Considers the implications of Gower's "correctness," his "purity of diction" and his "plain style," the three terms that occur most commonly in the descriptions and assessments of Gower's style. The first is at least to some extent anachronistic, since there were no fixed standards of correctness in such matters as spelling, one of the features of language in which Gower's MSS are most consistent, in Gower's time. It does apply, however, Burrow observes, to the poet's handling of both meter and rhyme--both for their regularity and for the way in which they conform to spoken language--and to grammar and syntax, where Gower displays an impressive command of periodic syntax, perhaps because of his experience of writing in Latin. Gower's diction is notable for its virtual exclusion of "commonplace English poeticisms" (244) from contemporary popular poetry or from the alliterative tradition, both found in far greater numbers in Chaucer. The "plain style," finally, is best understood with reference to Gower's own comments on "plainness": it is a style unadorned by rhetorical display consisting of "simple words used in straightforward literal senses" (246). The resulting tendency towards the typical and the general is appropriate to a poem of exemplary wisdom. CA is not noted for its "richly poetic strokes" (248), Burrow concludes, which is one reason why it may fail to appeal. "In its limitations as well as its strengths, Gower's is essentially a long-poem style" (249), and while long poems themselves have gone out of style, the result can nonetheless be considered true poetry. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burrow, John Published Burrow, John. "Gower's Poetic Styles." In A Companion to Gower. Ed. Echard, Siân. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004, pp. 239-50. 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 Gower's Poetic Styles Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 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 Edwards discusses the theoretical dimensions of the "literal" within medieval exegesis and then explores Gower's use of the literal in his narratives, in two aspects. In the first, ("Word and Conceit"), he demonstrates how Gower employs enigmas (in "Florent," "Apollonius of Tyre," and others) and significant material objects (in "Rosiphelee," "The Trump of Death," et al.) in pursuit of his goal, announced in the Prologue, "to recover signification so that words align with ideas and ideas with things in order to advance the project of reform" (63). In the second ("Prophetic Literalism"), he explores how the "literal" operates within the prophetic strain of MO, VC, and especially CA. In tales such as "The Three Questions," "Alexander and the Pirate," and "Lucrece," the literal narrative can be seen demystifying some of the most arbitrary assumptions underlying contemporary social hierarchy. "From the standpoint of poetics, perhaps the most interesting work of prophecy in the Confessio Amantis can be seen in the pressure of history as it bears on structures of cultural belief which are seemingly positioned outside time and contingency, beyond deliberation and debate. Prophecy in this sense operates poetically through a literalism that makes visible the systems of power that organize life and experience in a social world of division, reversal, and mutability" (70). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, Robert R Published Edwards, Robert R. "Gower's Poetics of the Literal." In John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition. Ed. Dutton, Elisabeth, and Hines, John, and Yeager, R.F. Cambridge: Brewer, 2010, pp. 59-73. Gower Subject 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 Gower's Poetics of the Literal Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 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 Longo offers a study of the complex layers of "voicing" in VC, with special attention to the way in which the addition of the Visio (the present Book 1)--with the addition of the new voice of the reluctant prophet--reinforces the lessons on the need for personal reform in the present Books 2-7, which were written before the events of 1381. The appeals to the authority of the "vox populi" and its association with the "vox dei" occur, she notes, only in Books 2-7. In Book 1, the voice of the "people" is animal-like and cacophonous, and it is contrasted with the "vox celica" that summons Gower to his role as poet in 1.2019. In Books 2-7 he submerges his own voice beneath the authority of his Latinate sources and the appeals to "vox populi." But Longo notes that "the unanimity of this voice is undercut by the very social strains that the poem attempts to overcome" (360). Other references in 2-7 to the plebs and vulgus throw into question whose authority is being invoked and also who is responsible for reform, and force the reader to examine his or her own role and responsibility. Book 1 puts the poet in the position of enacting that self-examination himself, in anticipation of the duty he expects of his readers. Longo pulls together the complex threads in her argument in her conclusion: "The addition of "Vox" 1 to Gower's public outcry enhances the poems call for self-reflection, a personal reform that leads to communal reform. Indeed, the prefatory "Vox" 1 makes the poem's critique even more powerful after the Rising. All the more so after observing the irrationality of rebellious voices, Gower's readers must weigh the voice of the people to whom he credits his criticism of clerical and lay elites. "Any uncertainties over this voice have been matched by uncertainties over the voices of the Rising. With the addition of "Vox" 1 it seems that the poem's "vox dei" contrasts sharply with the animalistic voices of the rebels; but these voices are no less powerful. To evaluate them is to prepare to evaluate the voice of the people Gower cites in the other books. The added "Vox" 1, with its naming of Gower and depiction of the turmoil in "New Troy," hints at the void Gower takes upon himself to fill through "Vox" 2-7's layered voicing. The "vox celica" at the end of "Vox" 1 indeed comes with divine authority and stresses the lack of moral coherence among those Gower believes should preserve order. In the context of the seven-book poem, tensions surrounding the people persist in "Vox" 2-7 and demand careful readers to decide if they will allow rebel voices to dictate the social order or if they will take up the call to reform themselves. "The complete poem leaves the future of civil society up to its reading public; indeed, it calls this public into being through its fraught outcry. If Gower's 'Vox' speaks with the voice of God, it only does so because those who ought to lead by example lack the moral coherence to maintain that civic enterprise, as 1381 would show with devastating consequences. Gower indicates that readers may take up the cause of reform if they learn from history and from the poem's contemporary voice: that is, if they carefully examine the signs of the times and their own culpability. Tensions between the portrayal of the rebels in 'Vox' 1 and the claim to the voice of the people in 'Vox' 2-7 ensure that voicing always points back to the people. For readers to ponder who has the right to reform society is to begin to look to themselves to heal divisions within the body politic" (378-79). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 34.1]. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 285-303. Author/Editor Author/Editor Longo, Pamela L Published Longo, Pamela L. "Gower's Public Outcry." Philological Quarterly 92 (2013), pp. 357-87. ISSN 0031-7977 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 Gower's Public Outcry Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 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 Galloway, Andrew Published Galloway, Andrew. "Gower's Quarrel with Chaucer, and the Origins of Bourgeois Didacticism in Fourteenth-Century London Poetry." In Calliope's Classroom: Studies in Didactic Poetry from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Ed. Harder, Annette and MacDonald, Alasdair A and Reinink, Gerrit J. Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2007 ISBN 904291808X Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Review Galloway here positions the CA as significantly more important for what it "yields…to political and social theory than [what] it does either to clerical didacticism or love poetry" (p. 246). In a direct challenge to contemporary views, he reads the long-discredited "quarrel" between Gower and Chaucer as legitimate, but only if properly understood as reflective of a debate within a self-consciously mercantilized polity, not about issues of amour courtois and/or moral stricture, but rather about the nature and limits of power between what he argues is Gower's Lockian optimism and Chaucer's Hobbesian pessimism with regard to self-interest both public and private. It is a debate that reveals itself in Chaucer's failure to complete the "Legend of Good Women," which Galloway claims was abandoned not because Chaucer "became bored with its repetitive form and moralising requirements" (p. 259) but rather because he found the "task of showing an ideal union of political and moral absolutism" quite "impossible" (p. 259). "The unfinished Legend of Good Women, with its chillingly 'realist' view of atomized absolutist self-interest, and its demands for an encompassing absolutism that would merge moral authority with secular power," Galloway asserts, "was a major instigation for Gower to write the Confessio Amantis--at least as important as any commission by King Richard II" (p. 259); indeed, for Galloway, "the entire Confessio is a long and pre-emptive answer to the absolutist social didacticism of the "Legend of Good Women," one showing how governance of self-sufficient entities and self-interested society should be imagined in another way" (p. 260). Like Locke (whom Galloway likens to Gower among other ways by taking "Two Treatises on Government" to be an answer to Hobbes' "Leviathan," which he compares to Chaucer's LGW), Gower for Galloway is a kind of "constitutionalist" (p. 256), who continually creates narratives supporting the potential of "a consensual urban community to establish a principle of justice and freedom to pursue secular self-interest" (p. 262). Chaucer's trajectory after turning his back on the incomplete LGW is to the Canterbury Tales, which Galloway assesses from the perspective of the Manciple in the work's final tale as expressing its author's ultimately "bitter disenchantment about the possibilities of any governance over self-interest" (p. 264). This is a vision so dark as to move outside either a Lockian or a Hobbesian position, one that "anticipates later and more sweeping critiques of 'bourgeois philosophy'" such as those offered by Horkheimer and Adorno (p. 265), and Galloway contrasts it staunchly with "Gower's overarching optimism…that, with enough self-sacrifice (by himself or others) he and his poetry might offer [a] socially harmonising" alternative to "the Manciple's black concluding pessimism for any harmonious framework, poetic or social, containing a world of absolutism inherent in natural existence" (p. 266). In the end, while Galloway deems Chaucer the more "penetrating" ironist and--in a carefully turned phrase significantly pointed by his italics--"less 'intellectually' absolutist," he concludes that it is "Gower's Lockian genius, with his distinctive literary brilliance in conveying it [that] deserves far fuller credit than it has received" (p. 266). [RFY. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.2] 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 Gower's Quarrel with Chaucer, and the Origins of Bourgeois Didacticism in Fourteenth-Century London Poetry Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Peeters, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 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 Weiskott argues that six late, quatrain-length Latin poems--"Ad mundum mitto" (the "Archer poem"), "Quam cinxere freta" (linked to "Eneados, bucolis," about which he asks "Can this poem . . . possibly be serious?" [780]), "Explicit iste liber," "H. aquile pullus," "Armigeri scutum" (for his tomb), "Quam bonitas, pietas" (for his wife's tomb, recorded as Gower's by Bale, but not found elsewhere)--are all definitely Gower's and should be read as a group: "They all form a set. They are in Latin, either hexameters or hexameters + pentameter ('elegiac couplets') or two hexameters followed by an elegiac couplet. All employ internal rhyme ('leonine' lines)" (777) and they are all "jingly poems" (777). They show Gower mastering the craft of the quatrain, and "comment on the vastness of his life in poetry" (778). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Weiskott, Eric. "Gower's Quatrains: Language, Rhyme, Occasion." English Studies 103 (2022): 777-86. Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Quatrains: Language, Rhyme, Occasion. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bullón-Fernández asserts that the MO explores gender, sex, and language leading to deeper implications than critics have thus far realized. She argues, "Gower develops an authorial voice and a poetics that in its embrace of male and female can be identified as queer." Bullón-Fernández first points us to an early passage in the poem (lines 1021-32) to show us Gower's invocation of the figure of the hermaphrodite, making "intersexuality more than a trope." The intersexual nature of the sins, Bullón-Fernández adds, presents a category crisis that further reflects on Gower's authorial persona, his poem, and his poetics. Gower uses queer language in his confession, acknowledging previous poetry that was "gender ambiguous or queer." Bullón-Fernández calls this an "authorial self-disciplining process," but she is careful to distinguish this as distancing rather than rejection. That is, when Gower "re-invents" himself, he still relies on "queer associations and queer ambiguities." To demonstrate this argument, Bullón-Fernández focuses on queer "indeterminaciones" in the poem--both language and gender--through a close reading of the depiction of Satan and the temptation of Eve, which illuminates the intersexual sins. These queer indeterminacies then provoke queer desires, claims Bullón-Fernández, specifically in the figure of Wantonness. She adds that the sins' associations with gender ambiguity are in addition to language and deception, which in turn links all three. Bullón-Fernández then suggests that the figure of Wantoness "introduces the specter of sodomy." Finally, Bullón-Fernández addresses Gower's confession at the end of MO and how his poetic approach to the Life of the Virgin Mary "suggests that he does not ultimately renounce [queer courtly language and practices associated with it] but reorients them, developing a different kind of queer poetics." She sees two types of fear expressed in his confession: gender anxiety and sodomy anxiety. Then, in the "Life of the Virgin Mary," Bullón-Fernández demonstrates how Gower queers divine figures, concluding that he strives to unify male and female. [JGS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bullón-Fernández, María. Published Bullón-Fernández, María. Gower's Queer Poetics in the "Mirour de l'Omme." Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media 6 (2020): n.p. Gower Subject 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 Gower's Queer Poetics in the "Mirour de l'Omme." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Through various tactics of authorial self-presentation, Gower largely controlled his own reception, even promoting his own work by the term "moral" also attached to him by Chaucer (197). In many testimonials following his death, Gower is cited as a canonical author generally linked with Chaucer, for example, in Bokenham's "Legendys of Hooly Wummen" (200). Manuscript culture gives evidence for an engaged readership, as shown by the creation of tables of contents, more illuminations, and excerpted versions, some possibly reflecting the interests of women (202-04). Early print editions are reviewed, several containing a dedication to Henry VIII (203-05). Early modern authors, including Shakespeare, found source material in Gower (205-06). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, Robert R. Published Edwards, Robert R. "Gower's Reception, 1400-1700." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 197-209. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Manuscripts and Textual Studies 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 Gower's Reception, 1400-1700. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review While staunchly orthodox, Gower's Christian faith is complex, like its counterpart today. Despite a generally Augustinian mindset, he never mentioned predestination (57). With few exceptions, he "privilege[es] the rational over the non-rational" (57), agreeing with Holcot that salvation is based on faith and good works (60). His sole foray into affective piety, the life of Mary in the MO, has the rational purpose of underscoring his "bedrock belief in the broad availability of human redemption" (61). He generally appealed to reason in refuting non-Christian faiths (61-66), allowing that misbelievers may repent and be saved (63), while more fanatically excoriating Lollardy as the devil's own work (68). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R .F. "Gower's Religions." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 56-74. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism 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 Gower's Religions. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Echard identifies five recurring themes in the critical response to the poet: his identity as "moral Gower," his political views, his choice of language, his relation to his sources, and both his personal and his literary relation to Chaucer. She traces these in large part to the poet's own deliberate self-fashioning, to "the qualities that he made central to his own poetic ethos" (17), and she points out how Gower's reputation has shifted over the centuries as each of these has provided either a stick with which to beat the poet (primarily during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) or as an opening to a greater understanding of his work (more recently), as, for instance, critics have taken a broader interest in the implications of "moral," in the complex issues of a poet's self-presentation, and in the political and ideological implications of the choice between Latin and the vernacular. That broadening of understanding is admirably illustrated by the writers that follow in this volume, and Echard's essay serves both to situate their contributions and to tie together the diverse approaches. [PN. Copyright John Gower Society. JGN 24.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân Published Echard, Siân. "Gower's Reputation." In A Companion to Gower. Ed. Echard, Siân. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004, pp. 1-22. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Influence and Later Allusion 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 Gower's Reputation Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 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 three groups into which Macauley divided the manuscripts of the first recension do not represent three stages of the author's revision but scribal corruption instead, and the version that Mcauley considered fully revised was actually Gower's original. This conclusion has a number of consequences for the study of the poem. Since MS B, which contains the Ricardian dedication but the revised conclusion, draws its opening from a late and corrupt (rather than an early, "unrevised") manuscript of recension one, B is not derived from an author's working copy in the midst of revision, as Macauley believed, but is instead an editorial composite, combining separate manuscript traditions into a single continuous text. Macauley's beliefs about the order of composition of "recension two" an "recension three" are therefore brought into question. [PN. Copyright the John Gower Society. JGN 4.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter Published Nicholson, Peter. "Gower's Revisions in the Confessio Amantis." Chaucer Review 19 (1984), pp. 123-143. ISSN 0009-2002 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 Gower's Revisions in the Confessio Amantis. 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 1984 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 volume in which this essay appears is devoted to medieval and Early Modern authors' engagement with Ovid's version of Iphis and Ianthe, and Lochrie's is the only essay that treats Gower's use of the tale. Lochrie argues that Gower's version is "a tale that, in refusing to solve its riddles or provide the interpretive wherewithal of its gloss, creates the possibility for another kind of change--a metamorphosis, if you will, in the very moral and epistemological rubrics with which we read gender, sex and bodies" (93-94). Lochrie begins by exploring the "riddles" in Ovid's version, primarily that Iphis's embodiment as a man solves the "monstrous" riddle of love reflected in the same-sex relationship of Iphis and Ianthe. Turning to Gower's retelling of the tale, Lochrie suggests Ovid's riddles are replaced with a set of riddles defined by ambiguity and which frustrate the reader's attempts at certainty and resolution, which itself embodies the queer politics of the story. For example, when Gower's couple "use / Thing which to hem was al unknowe) (4.486-7), Lochrie considers the linguistic ambiguity of what that "thing" may be (from a reference to practice--to do things or engage in an activity--to a physical object or prosthetic phallus). Gower, Lochrie posits, "opens up a space of opaqueness courtesy of Nature and the desires of Iphis and Iante--a space that seems deliberately resistant to sexual epistemology" (86). Lochrie then turns to an exploration of the Latin gloss located at the beginning of the tale, and its "deliberate misprision of the Middle English story" (88). For Lochrie, Ovid's conundrum about how two women can physically love each other is replaced, in Gower, with a "more shadowy riddle about the position this physical love between women occupies with respect to nature" (90). This essay analyses the complicated and conflicting nonheteronormative aspects of Gower's tale. The collection in which this appears also includes, in Appendix B (286-8), Lochrie's translation of Gower's tale, which will undoubtedly contribute to greater inclusion of Gower's version in courses in which ME is not required and in courses more widely devoted to gender and sexuality. [BWG. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lochrie, Karma. Published In Ovidian Transversions: 'Iphis and Ianthe', 1300-1650, ed. Valerie Traub, Patricia Badir, and Peggy McCracken. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. 80-98. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis 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 Gower's Riddles in "Iphis and Iante." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The essay discusses Gower's poetic career in the context of the Vergilian "cursus honorum"--"the sequence of works progressing from lower to higher genres" (144). Venus's dismissal of Gower at the end of the CA concludes his career as lover and poet and might echo the retreat into "philosophical contemplation" (145) that Suetonius describes in his biography of Vergil. Gower, unlike Vergil, continued writing poems, such as "In Praise of Peace," the "Traitié," and the "Cinkante Balades": a second cursus. This second canon, in one sense, is minor when compared with the magisterial achievement of Gower's three major works: the "Mirour de l'Omme," "Vox Clamantis," and "Confessio Amantis." At the same time, it is reflexive. For instance, "In Praise of Peace" reconsiders themes of anger and good government already taken up in the CA. Likewise, the CB "renegotiate and reimagine aspects of his major works" (150), such as his "dual roles as moralist and public poet" (151). [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, Robert R. Published Edwards, Robert R. "Gower's Second Cursus." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. 141-52. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism In Praise of Peace Cinkante Balades Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Second Cursus. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Neville responds to Leo Henkin's suggestion in "The Carbuncle in the Adder's Head," that the story of "Aspidis the Serpent" from Book 1 of the CA is based on two separate legends from folklore. Neville demonstrates that the combination of these stories did not originate with Gower, but with Brunetto Latini's "Li Livres dou Tresor," Gower's immediate source. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Neville, Marie Published Neville, Marie. "Gower's Serpent and the Carbuncle." Notes and Queries 197 (1952), pp. 225-226. 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 Serpent and the Carbuncle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1952 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 No, not that Batman. Stephan Batman was in the service of Matthew Parker, possibly as his household chaplain, and he aided him in the acquisition of his vast library as well as acquiring a collection of books of his own. His "Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation" was published in 1569. It includes a discussion of the Seven Deadly Sins, and under Sloth, a brief version of the story of Dido and Aeneas that Reid argues is modeled on CA rather than any classical source: in it, Aeneas does not abandon Dido when he departs from Carthage but is merely "long tyme absent," and his sloth lies in the slowness of his return, with its ultimate tragic consequence, not in his delaying the founding of Rome. The episode still poses two puzzles, Reid notes: this account of Aeneas' sloth does not fit well with either of the two ways in which Batman defines the sin, and it is "somewhat surprising" that Batman should turn to Gower, given his "rather ambiguous status among sixteenth-century Protestant reformers," in an anti-papist tract (350). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Reid, Lindsay Ann Published Reid, Lindsay Ann. "Gower's Slothful Aeneas in Batman's 'Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation'." Notes and Queries 61 (2014), pp. 349-54. ISSN 0029-3970 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 Gower's Slothful Aeneas in Batman's 'Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 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 Batman, a fiercely partisan Protestant, published his "Christall Glasse" in 1569. Like the "Confessio Amantis," it is organized around the Seven Deadly Sins. Reid argues that "it is clear that [Batman] follows Gower's earlier tale [i.e., "Aeneas and Dido" in Book IV] by likewise positing Dido's unhappy end as the tragic consequence of Aeneas' 'sloth and forgetfulness' in love" (353). But Batman's choice is "peculiar," given that "the exemplum of slothful Aeneas, guilty essentially of violating courtly love conventions, does not comfortably fit" either of Batman's two expressed categories for Sloth--physical and moral; thus, we are left with the questions why would Batman have turned to (Catholic) Gower, and "what does it mean to press a recognizable Middle English 'exemplum in amoris causa' into the service of a new Protestant message?" (354). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Reid, Linday Ann. Published Reid, Linday Ann. "Gower's Slothful Aeneas in Batman's 'Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation.'" Notes and Queries 61 (2014): 349-54. 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 Gower's Slothful Aeneas in Batman's "Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review 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 The poet's "only documented residence is the house in the precinct of the Augustinian priory of St Mary Overey in Southwark" where he lived until his death (132). Carlin describes the rather working-class (137-38), noisy, and odoriferous district just south of the Thames (137-38). The bridge leading to London proper held a Great Gate adorned with the arms of King Richard II, Queen Anne, and Edward the Confessor (139). Gower may have moved into his residence as early as June 1385 (141). According to the lawsuit of 1394-95, he displaced the rightful tenant, one Feriby, and was forced to pay a fine, a case "not reflect[ing] well on his legal expertise" (142). Evidence is reviewed on the exact location of the house (142-44). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlin, Martha. Published Carlin, Martha. "Gower's Southwark." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 132-149. 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 Gower's Southwark. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review 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 Echard argues that "Gower's trilingualism . . . can in fact frame a survey course, becoming a touchstone and recurrent point of reference" (91). She presents that frame in four modules--of material culture, manuscripts, multilingualism itself, and authority--to be spread across a syllabus, with each to be offered in a class or part of a class session. The first unit, on material culture, begins with a discussion of Gower's tomb. Whereas "Lydgate lacks both a monument and a tradition" and "Chaucer's monument is of a piece with the desire of later tradition to canonize him . . . Gower's tomb is clearly the poet's own statement, his summary of his poetic career, his staking of his own posterity" (92). This discussion leads to a brief account of recent archaeological studies of the tomb, Southwark, and Saint Mary Overeys, and Gower's positioning as, for example, a city poet. From the three books serving as the pillow for poet's head in the effigy, Echard advances to a discussion of Gower's mastery of three languages, the books in which they are employed, and the manuscripts in which they appear: of particular note are the surviving Gower manuscripts that "combine more than one language," and especially "the Trentham manuscript, a collection of pieces in Latin, French, and English" (94). Echard then treats the changing status of each of these languages in the culture of fourteenth-century England and concludes by exploring Gower's quest of his "poetic authority" or "right and obligation to speak" (96) by means of his very choice of language. [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân Published Echard, Siân. "Gower's Triple Tongue (1): Teaching Across Gower's Languages." In Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Ed. Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011, pp. 91-99. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Biography of Gower 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's Triple Tongue (1): Teaching Across Gower's Languages Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 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 Of Gower's two French "balade" collections, the "Cinkante balades" represent "the sole examples known of sequentially linked poems written by an Englishman, in English or French, before Philip Sidney's sonnet sequence 'Astrophil and Stella'" (100); the eighteen "balades" of "Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz," on the other hand, "are topically, not narratively, connected: all are concerned to establish the nature and role of sanctified marriage, most particularly by warding off adultery" (100). These collections together "furnish a solid keystone for fruitful discussions of late medieval multilingualism and an across-the-channel aesthetic and intellectual influence and exchange," particularly with poets of the stature of Guillaume de Machaut and Eustache Deschamps. The "Cinkante balades" can enrich discussions of medieval love poetry and its legacy; they are well-crafted poems and many "can be amusing, even moving, in their depiction of affairs of the heart" (100). As with the poems of the "Traitié," their short length makes them particularly adaptable to the syllabi of surveys. The "Traitié" in several of its aspects invites comparison with the "Confessio Amantis," which it follows in many manuscripts: it contains, in capsule form, a number of exempla also appearing in the "Confessio," including, for instance, the stories of Hercules and Deineira and of Tereus and Progne, and like the "Confessio," it is presented with Latin prose commentaries in the margins. It should be noted finally that the "Traitié" and the "Cinkante balades" are available, with translations, in an inexpensive TEAMS edition. [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F Published Yeager, R. F. "Gower's Triple Tongue (2): Teaching the 'Balades'." In Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Ed. Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011, pp. 100-03. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Cinkante Balades Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Triple Tongue (2): Teaching the 'Balades' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 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 Mahoney examines the passages at the beginning and ending of CA that exist in two versions, one written for Richard II (Macaulay's recension "one") and the other for his successor Henry of Lancaster (Macaulay's recensions "two" and "three"). Each creates a different "liminal frame" that shapes the reader's view of the entire poem. The Ricardian frame begins with the charming account of the poem's commissioning (which Dahoney discusses with reference to its analogues as an example of an Auftragstopos). Gower expresses hope both in his young king and in the "newe thing" that he offers him; and as he offers to follow a middle way, "somwhat of lust, somwhat of lore," he presents a self-confident and trustworthy persona. The epilogue contains Venus' compliment to Chaucer and a prayer for the king that emphasizes loyalty and obedience; and it attributes the poet's renunciation of love poetry to his realization of his age and the restoration of wholeness that occurs with his "healing." The Lancastrian prologue is less personal and more monitory; the emphasis shifts from promise to degeneration; and the poet's devotion to Richard is replaced by an extended moral and social critique. The renunciation of love at the end of this version is not founded on the contrast of youth to age but on "a more general, one-note, condemnation of secular love, which is blind, opposed to reason, a cause of division in the self" (p. 32), culminating in a contrast between secular and heavenly love. There is less sense of the presence of the court, and Gower himself "becomes less an observer, less a poet, and more a prophet" (p. 33). The later revision has been privileged by modern editors, and thus "it is not surprising that the official version of Gower is the 'moral' Gower" (p. 34). Dahoney presents the alternative versions as equally authoritative, but it is clear that she has strong reasons for preferring the former and for urging it upon our attention. She points out that it was still widely circulated, even after Richard's death. She argues that it was probably not as offensive as modern readers, influenced by Lancastrian propaganda, have believed, and that its dedicatory passage had an "authorizing value" that extended beyond political considerations and even beyond considerations of historical fact. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Mahoney, Dhira B. Published Mahoney, Dhira B.. "Gower's Two Prologues to Confessio Amantis." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Ashville, NC: Pegasus, 1998, pp. 17-37. 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 Two Prologues to Confessio Amantis. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pegasus, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 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 Gower's CA borrows from the "Vita Barlaam et Josaphat" in two places. First of all, the Trump of Death story is based on the first of the Vita's ten apologues. Analogues are further found in the Legenda Aurea, the Gesta Romanorum, and in the 16th century Japanese Christian text "Sanctos no gosagveo." Examples of Gower's changes include the greater contrast between the May setting and the age of the pilgrims, the sharp contrast in character between the king and his proud brother, and Gower's final emphasis on "the necessity of humble obedience to the law of nature established by God" (10). Gower's exposition on the gods in Book 6 is also based on the Vita, but Gower expands the section on the Greek deities by using Berchorius' "De formis figurisque deorum" (the first chapter of his Ovidius moralizatus). Comparison of the source texts reveals, for example, that "gentils" (in 5.1271) should be translated as "gentiles" (not "gentle people") and that naming Philyra as mother of Jupiter is not peculiar to Gower. Gower especially follows the Vita in "rejecting Berchorius' allegorical and favorable interpretations of pagan divinities" (15). Ito concludes with some comments on the Japanese text Sanctos no gosagveo." [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ito, Masayoshi Published Ito, Masayoshi. "Gower's Use of 'Vita Barlaam et Josaphat' in Confessio Amantis." Studies in English Literature 56 (1979), pp. 3-18. 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 Use of 'Vita Barlaam et Josaphat' in Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1979 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 Beichner quotes Macaulay's opinion that Gower's practice of writing "cento" in the VC amounts to "schoolboy plagiarism" (quoted on 582). Beichner proposes to analyze the borrowings from one of the texts that Gower employs, the Aurora or Biblia versificata of Peter Riga, and he interprets them from a more positive perspective than Macaulay. According to Beichner, Gower must have used a manuscript of the first or unexpanded edition of the Aurora, because later additions to Riga's text do not figure at all in the VC. In terms of the content of his borrowings, Gower does not seem to have been particularly interested in the narrative sections of Riga's verse Bible, although he does borrow one such passage (VC 6.12), an excerpt of 28 lines that describes Balaam's plan for the defeat of the Israelites. Gower is mostly interested in Riga's moralizing passages, and Gower's originality lies in the new context that his own work provides. In fact, when one considers the VC as a whole then "one is overwhelmed by Gower's industry" (592). Gower carefully memorized passages as models of elegant writing from a variety of classical and medieval authors, of whom Riga is only one example. Beichner thus counters the accusation of plagiarism with the following conclusion: "I believe that he [Gower] felt he was honestly presenting his views on his own day even though he often expressed himself in words and criticisms borrowed from his predecessors" (593). An appendix to Beichner's essay provides a detailed catalogue of Gower's borrowings. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Beichner, Paul E Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Published Beichner, Paul E. "Gower's Use of Aurora in Vox Clamantis." Speculum 30.4 (1955), pp. 582-595. Dublin Core The Dublin 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 1955 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Gower's Use of Aurora in 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 Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Ito compares the frequency and usage of rime riche in Gower's CA and MO as well as Chaucer's works. Gower uses 383 rime riches in the CA or about one for every hundred lines, whereas Chaucer uses about a third of that. Ito points out that modern translators avoid this device, "regarding it [as] too artificial, or even comical, whereas to ME poets … such sonorous, euphonic repetition of verbal sound as rime riche was far more 'poetical' than we suppose" (31). Of the CA's rime riches, three quarters are made of native words and the rest are French loan words. High frequency pairings tend to be of Old English origin and are generally used for colloquial speech or as poetic filler to complete the line. Most of Gower's rime riches play on semantic contrast, but a small number consist of words that are different only on a grammatical level. Gower's rime riches aim for "logical clarity" (36), whereas Chaucer's can also convey a sense of humour. Ito points out two passages (CA Book 5.79-90 and 8.3151-56) where multiple rime riches occur together and he notes that at times Gower uses rime riche to bridge two sentences (this is called "rime-breaking" or "a broken couplet"). Ito's conclusion summarizes the reasons for Gower's frequent recourse to rime riche wordplay and provides some final comparisons between Gower and Chaucer. [CvD; rev. MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ito, Masayoshi Published Ito, Masayoshi. "Gower's Use of Rime Riche in Confessio Amantis: As Compared with His Practice in Mirour de L'Omme and with the Case of Chaucer." Studies in English Literature 46 (1969), pp. 29-44. Reprinted version in Ito's John Gower, The Medieval Poet (Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1976), pp. 214-31. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification 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 Gower's Use of Rime Riche in Confessio Amantis: As Compared with His Practice in Mirour de L'Omme and with the Case of Chaucer Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1969 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 Hamilton agrees with the work of E. T. Granz and C. H. Wager, which suggests that there exists an intermediary text between Benoît de Saint-Maure's Roman de Troie and two later translations: Konrad von Würzburg's Trojanerkrieg and the Middle English Seege of Troye. The later redactions include five episodes that differ substantially from Benoît in arrangement and wording. Of these five, the story of the youth of Achilles is also recounted by Gower, and Hamilton's purpose is to show that Gower, like Konrad von Würzburg (Hamilton's primary model for comparison), also used an "enlarged Roman" (180). In particular, Hamilton argues that Gower's tales of "Achilles's youthful training under Chiron, his life at the court of Lycomedes, and his discovery by Ulysses, are told in enough detail to show a common source more extensive than the Achilleis [Achilliad] of Statius" (181-82). In the process of enumerating the similarities between Konrad and Gower's accounts, Hamilton also points out some differences. For instance, when Gower's Achilles is advised by his mother Thetis (the same name is used by Konrad) that he should disguise himself as a woman, he does so "without protest, and without knowing the occasion" (188). Hamilton concludes by arguing that it is unlikely that Gower ever had "a first hand acquaintance" (196) with the Achilliad. Since it was a rare volume in medieval libraries, and since Gower show little or no acquaintance with the Thebaid (196), it is unlikely that he read Statius directly. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hamilton, George L Published Hamilton, George L. "Gower's Use of the Enlarged Roman de Troie." PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 20.1 (1905), pp. 179-196. 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 Use of the Enlarged Roman de Troie. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1905 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 Though Virgil does not function as a direct source for Gower in anything like the way that Ovid does, he still serves as one of Gower's most important models, and Gower may be the most "Vergilian" of contemporary English poets, especially considered in contrast to Chaucer. The most important direct reference to Virgil is found in the verses "Eneidos Bucolis" which appear at the end of some MSS of CA and VC. If Gower himself did not write these lines, he at least must be responsible for attaching them to his work, and they affirm Virgil both as the model that he seeks to emulate and as the one that he seeks to surpass. Virgil was renowned in the late Middle Ages for his moral seriousness, for his wisdom, for his rhetorical achievement, and also for broad historical scope of his best-known poem, honoring both a heroic individual and the nation that he helped to found. Kuczynski cites evidence that Gower conceived of his own tripartite project in the same epic terms. But as the final lines of "Eneidos Bucolis" indicate, Gower also felt that his Christian ethical scheme conferred an inherent superiority over the pagan poet. A similar double view of Virgil is displayed in his three appearances in CA. In "Virgil's Mirror," it is his wisdom, extending to both moral and national self-knowledge, that is evoked, but in his other two appearances, in the discussion of Gluttony in Book 6 and in the procession of lovers in Book 8, he is the senex amans, "a type of the very lack of self-knowledge, enslavement to passion, that Amans escapes at the poem's close by gazing into Venus's marvelous glass" (178-79). Gower may have seen in Virgil a figure for his own self-subjection to the burdens of to the theme of fin'amor that he chose for CA, but at the end of the poem, "in the figure of the liberated Amans, he is released from its obsessive claims on his attention. That Virgil, Rome's greatest poet, is among the number who plead for his release is noteworthy and more significant if we understand Gower as having aspired to emulate and even to exceed Virgil's preeminent literary achievement" (180). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kuczynski, Michael P Published Kuczynski, Michael P. "Gower's Virgil." In On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium. Ed. Yeager, R.F. Studies in Medieval Culture (46). Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2007, pp. 163-87. 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's Virgil Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 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 Kaplan bases his analysis of Gower's English vocabulary on Macaulay's word list to the CA. The total number of words is 6006, of which 882 are proper names and 476 are variants of other words. The net number – 4648 words – seems much lower than the tally for Shakespeare, Milton, or even Chaucer. However, Kaplan ridicules the idea that "the greater the genius the greater the vocabulary" (396), and he finds the real interest in the percentage of loan words in Gower's vocabulary. Gower's diction is 54.9% Anglo-Saxon, 4.2% Latin, and 37.9% French, and a small percentage Other. However, when we take into account frequency of occurrence, then Gower's use of Anglo-Saxon words is likely around 90%. Kaplan further lists words from J to Z (Macaulay covered A to I) where Gower is the first citation in the NED (i.e., the OED). However, he concludes by casting some doubt on the value of first citations. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kaplan, Theodore H Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Published Kaplan, Theodore H. "Gower's Vocabulary." Journal of English and Germanic Philology 31 (1932), pp. 395-402. Dublin Core The Dublin 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 1932 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Gower's Vocabulary. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Raymo provides a lengthy list of citations where Gower's VC borrows directly from Nigel de Longchamps' Speculum Stultorum (the story of an ass called Burnell who desires a longer tail). In the VC, Gower twice alludes expressly to the Speculum Stultorum. He also uses it as the source for the story of Adrian and Bardus in the CA. Gower seems to have been particularly interested in the exempla of the revengeful cock and of the unfortunate cows who were attacked by flies. However, most of Gower's borrowings have lost all relation to their original context. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Raymo, Robert R Published Raymo, Robert R. "Gower's Vox Clamantis and the Speculum Stultorum." Modern Language Notes 70.5 (1955), pp. 315-320. 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 Gower's Vox Clamantis and the Speculum Stultorum Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1955 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 Summers, Joanna Published Summers, Joanna. "Gower's Vox Clamantis and Usk's Testament of Love." Medium AEvum 68 (1999), pp. 55-62. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Influence and Later Allusion Review Summers' essay begins a bit oddly, with the claim that the usual view among those who have commented is that Gower's call for Chaucer to write his own "testament of love" (CA 8.2955*) reflects his "amusement or disdain" for the poem of Thomas Usk of the same name. At least three of the four sources that she cites make no such claim. (I have not seen the fourth, an essay by David Carlson in the Leyerle festschrift of 1993.) The bulk of this short piece, however, is not about Gower's attitude towards Usk but about Usk's towards Gower. Skeat and others have suggested that the "Shippe of Traveyle" episode in Book 1 of the "Testament" reflects Usk's hearing or reading of the C-text of Piers Plowman. Summers proposes that there is greater similarity to the allegory in Book 1 of the Vox Clamantis, both in the structure of the episode and in some interesting if not exact verbal parallels. In her summary, "both texts present a narrator who foolishly leaves home to become lost in a forest; witnesses the rampages of domestic animals, like swine, who have turned wild; is rescued by a ship, but then is subject to a treacherous storm; and is finally driven to an island" (p. 57). In the Testament, the allegory refers to Usk's experiences in the trial of Northampton, and Usk may have been inspired by Gower's later comparison of a lawsuit to a voyage in rough seas (VC 6.474-80). Summers wishes to suggest that these allusions might have been recognized and that Usk might thus deliberately have cloaked himself in the conservative and royalist sympathies of poet of the earliest versions of VC. She also suggests that the "Margarete" that Usk discovers on the island at the end of his voyage and that he pledges to serve faithfully represents King Richard, an identification that she supports by pointing out that the island in Gower's vision is very clearly Britain. In the immediately following essay in the same issue of Medium AEvum, Lucy Lewis argues that Usk's "Margarete" is to be identified instead as Margaret Berkeley, wife of Sir Thomas Berkeley, well-known as a patron of Trevisa. [PN. Copyright John Gower Society. JGN 18.2]. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 195-200. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Vox Clamantis and Usk's Testament of Love Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 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's choice to write in English, McCabe argues, is reflective of the poem's ambitious new moral project, to define a lay spirituality, accessible to a vernacular audience, free of clergial mediation, and focused on the immanence and accessibility of grace. McCabe's thesis touches on virtually every important issue in the recent criticism of the CA, and he can be found both drawing from and also drawing careful distinction from such scholars as Middleton, Simpson, Scanlon, Copeland, Wetherbee, and Mitchell, among several others. His argument is both wide-ranging and very closely grounded in the text, and it offers a novel view of what might be considered some of the most familiar aspects of the poem. Chapter one, on "Gower's Ovidian Voice in English," makes two main claims. First, the separate but parallel ways in which both the Prologue and the main body of the poem engage with the "Metamorphoses" helps establish the link between the larger concerns for moral and social reform of the former and the more personal amatory themes of the latter; and second (here following Wetherbee), Ovid provided an authoritative source that could be confronted directly, without mediation. In defense of the first claim, he points to the common emphasis on mutability and change (e.g. in the example of Nebuchadnezzar) and with political and psychological "division." To support its link to the "Metamorphoses," he traces the Prologue's depiction of the fallen world to the description of primal chaos with which Ovid's poem begins. He also draws an interesting link between the discontinuous argument in the Prologue and the "discontinuities and ruptures" that mark Genius' description of love. In support of his second claim, he draws a persuasive contrast between the CA and earlier medieval moralized retellings of Ovid, which substitute the glossator's authority for the poet's. Ovid speaks to us directly in the CA, McCabe asserts, and especially in the tales of metamorphosis, leaves the reader with implications that cannot be constrained even by Genius' moralization. Chapters two and three look more closely at the implications of Gower's choice to write in English. In chapter two, "English Writing and Lay Theology," McCabe detects no attempt on Gower's part to elevate the vernacular or to displace the authority of Latin. The form of the poem, he points out, preserves the hierarchy of languages, with Latin maintaining its position at the top. Gower chooses English as "an alternative medium," not only appropriate to the subject matter but also, both because of its marginal status and because of the much broader implicit audience, "likely to achieve quite different results" (89). One difference can be seen in the more reserved claims Gower makes in the opening of the CA about the reliability of the medium and the effectiveness of books, compared, for instance, to passages in VC. A more revealing difference lies in his treatment of theological subjects in the CA, which in contrast to both of Gower's earlier long poems are less abstract, less concerned with the subtleties of doctrine, and more indebted to the liturgy than to academic or clerical discourse, emphasizing "good works and due observance of traditional church practices, . . . the core of lay religious experience" (95). In chapter three, "At the Limits of Clerical Discourse," he extends the argument to embrace the other expository sections of the poem, notably Book VII and the discussion of the history of the sciences in Book IV, in both of which he finds a similar tentativeness, an awareness of their "belatedness" with regard to Latin, a similar refusal to draw upon clerical discourse, either to replace it or to claim its authority, and a similar accommodation to his vernacular audience. But far from being forced by circumstance, McCabe insists, Gower embraces his role as "burel clerk" (which he glosses as "lay," 68) and betrays his "enthusiasm for the intimate power available in the mother tongue" (101). In all three long poems, Gower appeals to the "vox populi" and he criticizes the clergy, and he "shows himself equally eager in all three poems to revitalize Christian doctrine of self and society" (116) by "finding out alternatives to clerical learning" (121). McCabe finds the key to Gower's method in the CA in the two most explicitly theological tales in Books I and II (which also provide their conclusions), "The Three Questions" and "Constantine and Sylvester." The first is marked by the inversion of weak and strong and by the exaltation of Humility, following the example of Christ, the paradox of whose incarnation (the doctrine of "kenosis") was an important theme in other fourteenth-century vernacular religious texts (121). "Constantine and Sylvester" privileges "bodies and actions" over "ideas and doctrines" (138). Together, the two tales provide a model for both the elevation of the vernacular and for the constitution of an accessible vernacular theology. Chapters four and five seek to define more precisely the nature of the poem's vernacular spirituality by examining key sections in which theological issues are not presented as explicitly. In chapter four, "Kinde Grace," McCabe returns to Ovid, particularly to the tales of metamorphosis, first as punishment, then as reward. These tales are significant first because in the very mystery of the transformations they invite a readerly response that is primarily affective and that cannot be contained by Genius' attempt to moralize, and second, because of the vagueness of agency yet the essential rightness of the outcome, they seem to display the immanence of grace in Nature, which is also to say that it is constantly present and accessible without the mediation of clergy. Love, implicated in Nature, is also shown to be linked to grace, but by way neither of allegory nor of moral prescription. "Rather, by emphasizing the provisional character of earthly love, these particular stories keep earthly love as their primary concern, but they additionally sacralize this love, thus encouraging readers to see spiritual realities that lie less beyond any textual sensus literalis than beyond earthly love itself" (190). In chapter five, "Ethics, Art, and Grace," McCabe turns to the conclusion to the poem, and he offers a reading of Amans' "beau retret" that reconciles his failure to achieve his love with the essentially optimistic theology of the rest of the poem. Amans' confession is marked in part by his effort to learn the "art" of love that will enable him to find success. The final and longest tale of the poem, "Apollonius of Tyre," is also concerned with "art," the "how to" not just of achieving love but also of ruling a kingdom; and it demonstrates how humans grow wiser through experience. The tale is also dominated by chance and unpredictability beyond the control of the best efforts of any human. The happy ending is brought about by Providence, acting, finally, in cooperation with the virtuous efforts of the characters. "On its own, art is inefficacious because good fortune does not depend finally on learning. However, in its penultimate movement through the wanderings of Apollonius, the poems affirms as a necessary coadjutor with providence a kind of learning that is reduced to the status of an improvisatory, inherently fallible art" (214-15). Such a trajectory provides a model for the final experience of Amans, whose lack of success with his lady is a reminder that failure is part of learning, and that no art can guarantee success. Amans' impotence is his final disqualification for love, and as such, it stands as a figure for all earthly love. But the ending is also a demonstration of the mysteriousness of grace, as Amans' rejection by Venus opens the way to a love that "mai noght faile" (CA VIII.2086). McCabe's conclusion emphasizes the "oblique didacticism" (227) yet strong moral commitment of Gower's "middel weie." "Gower's love ethic, like Ovid's, celebrates its evasion of textual capture, but ends not in despair but in grace" (230). McCabe's argument attributes both a greater subtlety and a greater complexity to the CA than we are accustomed to as it stakes out its own "middel weie" among recent readings of Gower's moral project. It is going to help shape our discussion of the poem for many years to come. [PN. Copyright JGN 31.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor McCabe, T. Matthew N Published McCabe, T. Matthew N. "Gower's Vulgar Tongue: Ovid, Lay Religion, and English Poetry in the "Confessio Amantis"." Publications of the John Gower Society, 6 . Cambridge: Brewer, 2011 ISBN 9781843842835 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Vulgar Tongue: Ovid, Lay Religion, and English Poetry in the "Confessio Amantis" Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 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 Edwards, A. S. G. Published Edwards, A. S. G.. "Gower's Women in the Confessio." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 223-237. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Takes issue with the prevailing critical orthodoxy that Gower showed particular compassion for his female characters. Beginning with the four virtuous women of Amans' final vision, and proceeding with a comparison between Gower's and Chaucer's treatment of some of the same figures -- Thisbe, Constance, Lucrece, Virginia, Phyllis, Medea -- he demonstrates that Gower's male characters receive greater attention to their feelings and greater sympathy for their suffering, that the women's feelings tend to be deflected or marginalized, that the women's situation is subordinated to that of the men around them, and that Gower's women in general tend to be defined by the way in which they affect the lives of men. Rather than being hostile to women, Edwards concludes, Gower simply appears to have felt that they were less significant than men. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Women in the Confessio Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 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 Rigby describes each of Gower's major works and dates them and their revisions in light of references (overt and covert) to historical and political events, manuscript evidence, and scholarly discussion. "Mirour de l'Omme" is "difficult to date precisely" (124), although likely completed in whole or in part before the death of Edward III in 1377. "Vox Clamantis," particularly the "Visio" and Book 6, went through a "number of stages of composition" (126), largely in response to the 1381 Uprising and fluctuations in the reign of Richard II. "Confessio Amantis" was similarly revised over a lengthy period, and various revisions reflect the complications of Gower's Lancastrian associations and his relationship with Chaucer. G. C. Macaulay's theory of three recensions of CA has "remained extremely influential" (130), but "it may be best to conclude that we are actually confronted with one basic version . . . with two different dedications" (133). In any case, the CA manuscripts have been "central to debates about how the texts of Gower's works were produced" (135), and, although Gower's political affiliations before 1399 are not absolutely clear-cut, Rigby tells us, a number of poems were likely written after the deposition of Richard: "Rex Celi Deus," "O Recolende," "H. Aquile Pullus," "In Praise of Peace," and "Cronica Tripertita." Even in these, however, questions remain about relations between Gower's "moral and social outlook" and the impact of the deposition (138). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rigby. Stephen H. Published Rigby, Stephen H. "Gower's Works." In Historians on John Gower. Ed. Stephen H. Rigby, with Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp.121-38. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism 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's Works. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yeager examines not the humor that might provoke the reader's laughter in Gower's poems but rather the instances in which the poet refers directly to laughter, in CA and MO. Many of these are merely hypothetical, and these often occur in formulaic expressions (e.g. "lawhe and pleie") or in patterns of conventional rhyme. In the instances in which characters are actually depicted laughing (Nectanabus in CA 6.2026-34, Zoroaster at his birth in 6.2370-76, and the majority of instances in which allegorical figures are described as laughing in MO), the laughter is either malicious, hollow (in that someone else gets to laugh last), or both. There are no examples of the laughter of pure joy as there are in Chaucer. All of the best examples of humorous laughter in Chaucer are attributed to women, and among the more hypothetical examples in Gower, there are two (in 5.2473-75 and 8.848-55) in which Gower too imagines a laughter "devoid of irony" (152), also only with reference to women. And though there is nothing in Gower precisely like Troilus's laugh at the world at the end of T&C, Troilus reflects Gower's, not Chaucer's, "deeper sense of the nature and value of laughter in narrative and points us to Gower's probably source," in Psalms 2:1-4 (153).[PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Gowerian Laughter." In ." Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Medieval English Literature: The Influence of Derek Brewer. Ed. Brewer, Charlotte and Windeatt, Barry. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013, pp. 144-53. ISBN 9781843843542 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations 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 Gowerian Laughter 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 2013 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 piece is a kind of appendix to Spies' article from 1900 ("Bisherige Ergebnisse") and consists of two parts: a further listing of allusions to Gower in later authors, and a fleshing out of Macaulay's descriptive catalogue of CA manuscripts. In the first part Spies makes only an occasional comment on the various references he lists. For example, he wonders whether George Puttenham had not seen the first recension of the CA since he only mentions Gower in relation to Henry IV. In the second part Spies describes a number of MSS in some detail (including one come to light after Macaulay's edition), and seems fascinated by some of the marginal notations and added verses, but makes no larger observations. Spies finishes with an initial tally of the number of extant copies of Caxton's and Berthelette's editions. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Spies, Heinrich Published Spies, Heinrich. "Goweriana." Englische Studien 34 (1904), pp. 169-175. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies 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 Goweriana Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1904 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 Argues that Gower's CB was a driect influence on Chaucer." [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Koeppel, E. Published Koeppel, E. "Gowers französische Ballenden und Chaucer." Englischen Studien 20 (1895): 154-56 Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion 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 Gowers französische Ballenden und Chaucer. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1895 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Brief mention of dates and works. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Schroer, M. M. A[rnold] Published Schroer, M. M. A. Grundzüge und Haupttyopen der englischen Literaturgeschichte. Berlin and Leipzig, De Gruyter, 1927, pp. 142-44. 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 Grundzüge und Haupttyopen der englischen Literaturgeschichte. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1927 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Chinese, with English summary.) Su takes on the "idea that Middle English vernacular literature capitalizes on a form of nationhood and identity" by examining "the prefaces of . . . collected texts": Layamon's "Brut," Wace's "Roman de Brut," Lydgate's "Troy Book," Manning's "Chronicle," "Cursor Mundi," and Gower's "Confessio Amantis." The study determines that "the two hundred years of vernacular English literature is found to have a prominent authorial ego which played a significant social role." [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Su, Qikang [So, Francis K. H.] Published Su, Qikang [So, Francis K. H.] "Gu zao di fang hua Ying wen wen xue de zi wo yi shi." Review of English and American Literature 10 (Spring 2007): 1-50. Gower Subject Background 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 Gu zao di fang hua Ying wen wen xue de zi wo yi shi. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Reprints from Reinhold Pauli (1857), CA "Rosiphelee," Book IV, 1245-1453; "Ceix and Alceone," IV, 2972-3114. Brief biography; glossary. [RFY1891]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Corson, Hiram, ed. Published Corson, Hiram, ed. Handbook of Anglo-Saxon and Early English. New York: Holt and Williams, 1871, pp. 316-27. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis 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 Handbook of Anglo-Saxon and Early English. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1871 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 McShane opens with a discussion of the role of storytelling as narrative medicine, expanding this idea to include narrating as a way of making sense of events. Then, beginning her discussion of Gower in particular, McShane argues, "Gower gives us models in which interpersonal violence is a community concern and accountability requires community intervention." McShane focuses her study on the "Tale of Mundus and Paulina" and "Tale of Lucrece": "Social healing in both tales begins with believing women and ends with the community's demand for accountability--a model that is still aspirational, not realized, in our own moment." McShane succinctly points to the first connection between these two tales--that "women are believed and trusted"--before delving into the text. She provides thorough close readings of both tales to show how the community surrounding these women trust and believe what they are saying about the sexual assault they have faced. McShane notes a crucial difference between the tales, however, in that Paulina controls her narrative whereas Lucrece, by and large, does not, which could leave us to conclude, as McShane writes, "Lucrece's own resolution is, at best, only partial." Continuing her analysis, McShane demonstrates how personal harm becomes social and political harm. From this harm, then, and the accountability that the community seeks, we see structural change. As McShane nicely puts, speaking to "The Tale of Lucrece," "When those in authority are themselves responsible for social rupture, Gower suggests, structural change is necessary." For the "Tale of Mundus and Paulina," we instead see good leadership initiating change. McShane concludes by returning to her assertion that Gower's tales can still tell us a lot about our own society's issues--that he "offers flashes of healing possibility in narrative and other potential ways of being in community." [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor McShane, Kara. Published McShane, Kara. "Healing, Accountability, and Community in Gower's Confessio Amantis" Accessus 7, no. 1 (2022): n.p. 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 Healing, Accountability, and Community in Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Donavin in teaching Gower seeks to evaluate his "voice" in the "Confessio Amantis" by means of medieval composition theory. In particular, she approaches the poem by studying Gower's invention ("the power of suggestion in Richard's II's commission of the poem and the formation of content through resources" [79]), arrangement (particularly "the context for each tale provided by the confessional frame" [80]), and style (specifically the commitment to "the superiority of plain speech" [81]). Gower's narrative voice in speaking directly to the reader in the prologue to the CA "shatters into a variety of speakers who utter their lines in a variety of tones and languages," and "students are eager to sort out some reasons for these vacillations in narrative voice. Review of the Rethorique section in CA, book 7, and of some basic principles of Ciceronian orations promote the understanding that invention, arrangement, and style are rhetorical offices that solicit, confine, and characterize the poet's voice" (81-82). [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Donavin, Georgiana Published Donavin, Georgiana. "Hearing Gower's Rhetoric." In Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Ed. Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011, pp. 77-82. ISBN 9781603290999 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 Hearing Gower's Rhetoric Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 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 Irvin's explication of Gower's Latin verse that opens "Confessio Amantis" (Prologue i, 1-6) discloses a great deal about the poet's attitude toward English (versus Latin in particular) and his use of the language in the poem at large. Irvin opens by clarifying that "Gower was a man interested in memory" (251), citing his gifts to St. Mary Overie and discussing in some detail his memorial tomb which, Irvin argues, Gower "expected to be 'read' by multilingual readers, both the 'public' and the canons [of St. Mary], the coterie of remembrancers" (253). But the Latin verse that opens CA is Irvin's real target here, and it is perhaps best to quote his thesis in full: "By examining one of Gower's Latin verses from the "Confessio Amantis," a verse that deals, through a riddle, with the relationship between English and Latin, I shall argue that the difference in tongues articulates differences between memory and history and stands in a central place in Gower's understanding of poetic form and intention. Moreover, I suggest that Gower's use of English in the 'CA' is itself a linguistic riddle to be solved, one hidden by how we remember Gower in the history of specifically 'English' letters" (254). The Latin verse includes references to Hengist, Brutus, and Carmentis before echoing one of the apocryphal Proverbs of Alfred (concerning the boneless tongue), all of which Irvin examines carefully in the process of answering a question that he poses: "How does one remember (in) English?" (254). Negotiating a rich congeries of contexts and critical and theoretical perspectives--most extensively Ovid's "Fasti" 1 as the source of Gower's reference to Carmentis; Aristotelian and nominalist understandings of interpretation; the perceived stability of Latin grammar versus English variability; Walter Benjamin on translation; Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace on Hengist's English language and treachery; differences between "translatio studii" and "causal" history; and proverbs as "translatable knowledge" (265)--Irvin concludes that, for Gower, "the English of the 'Confessio' always exists between Latin and French: it tears the French music from love poetry, and it deprives Latin of its grammar. It is not a language to be remembered but a language in which the memory of the 'original' languages always lurk[s], a literary language that 'comes after' in history. While English is a language in which 'fewe men endite' [few men write] (CA Prol.22), that is, few use English for 'literary' purposes, it is for that reason a perfect language for a critical approach to law and love: it involves the game of remembering source texts, the strenuous lexical exercise of considering what Latin and French terms certain English words represent--and it is for a coterie: not Latinate monks, like those at St. Mary's, but a specifically English readership, the 'fewe' who can use the craft of English to interpret the discourses of erotics and politics" (275). N.B.: Irvin emphasizes via italics that, in Gower's Latin verse, Hengist's tongue sings ("canit") "in the present tense" (265), a notable correction to translations that use the past tense in this instance. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Irvin, Matthew W. Published Irvin, Matthew W. "Hengist's Tongue: Remembering (Old) English in John Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Sharon M. Rowley, ed. Writers, Editors and Exemplars in Medieval English Texts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Pp. 251-79. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Minor Latin Poetry Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Hengist's Tongue: Remembering (Old) English in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gail Ashton examines in this article three tales that share the motif of the exiled daughter, Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale," Gower's Tale of Constance, and "Emaré," in order "to explore the centrality of the family within society and the problematical role of 'daughter' itself" (416). On the surface, Ashton argues, these daughters are presented as passive "unsignified" (418) figures to be traded among men. Their role in their father's house is only temporary, as they wait to be married off. Ashton identifies a patriarchal ambivalence toward this temporary role. In trading his daughter, the father exerts power and, simultaneously, experiences the loss of power over his daughter, a loss that is also an emotional loss. Looking under this surface we can also see that the daughters are not merely passive but manage to have some control over their own identity and fate after leaving the father's house. Ashton notes that all three daughters choose the men they finally marry (Chaucer's and Gower's Constance do not marry the sultan, the man chosen by their father, but a king they meet on their own after they are set adrift following the sultan's murder; Emaré meets the man she marries after fleeing from her father). In addition, in all three stories, the daughters use silence in strategic moments to hide their identity and, in the cases of Gower's Constance and Emaré, they even change their names slightly at one point in their story. Constance, Custance, and Emaré also carefully stage their stories' final encounter scene, a reencounter of the daughters with both their fathers and husbands through the mediation of their sons. Ashton argues that through their sons the daughters return to their fathers, thus healing the breach signified by marriage and restoring the patriarchal structures, but they do so on their own terms, in effect critiquing marriage and patriarchal laws through a "re-positioning and rearticulation of 'daughter'"(420). [MB-F. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ashton, Gail. Published Ashton, Gail. "Her Father's Daughter: The Re-Alignment of Father-Daughter Kinship in Three Romance Tales." Chaucer Review 34.4 (2000): 416-27. Gower Subject Confessio Amantic 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 Her Father's Daughter: The Re-Alignment of Father-Daughter Kinship in Three Romance Tales. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 essay considers the material world in Gower's CA, with particular focus on "crafted things," a cause of particular "anxiety about the ways in which such goods are produced and used" (295) in a corrupt and declining world. Both Aristotle and Thomas taught that all things are "hylomorphic," inseparable in form and matter, while medieval poets believed the same of their craft. As her chief example, Parkin discusses the jewel-encrusted goblet in the "Tale of Albinus and Rosemund," which despite its polished surface and innocent appearance is really constructed around the skull of Rosemund's father, who was killed in battle by her husband Albinus. The ambiguous status of the cup can best be understood in the context of Aquinas and Ockham on form and matter. Following Aristotle, Aquinas taught that "the body of any animal is a substance, while manufactured things . . . are artifacts" (300). For Aquinas, the skull cup is now an artifact, as the body ceases to be a substance when it is no longer alive, but for Ockham, even a dead body retains some properties of a substance--else why do we venerate the bodies of the saints (302)? For Gower, along the lines of Ockham, the skull retains "a kind of vitality" (302), but it is the craftsman who transforms it into a deceptive artifact with the power to do harm. Despite his anxiety over crafted objects, Gower believed in the possibility of honest craft; his own poetry, including the plain morality of "Albinus and Rosemund," is evidence of that (304-05). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Parkin, Gabrielle. Published Parkin, Gabrielle. "Hidden Matter in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 295-305. 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 Hidden Matter in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower's French is too Anglicized to be seriously considered as French; Gower described as a strong moralist. [RGY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Taine, Hippolyte. Van Laun, Henry, trans. Published Taine, Hippolyte. Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise. 2 vols. Paris: Hachette, 1863, I, 203ff. Translated by Henry Van Laun. History of English Literature. New York: Holt and Williams, 1871, I, 74, 136. 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 Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1863 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Biography; assessment of works through comparisons with Chaucer, Lydgate, and Langland. Gower a good tale-teller, but not an inventive poet. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Jusserand, J. J. Published Jusserand, J. J. Histoire Littéraire du Peuple Anglaises. Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1894. 2d ed. rev., 1896. English version: A Literary History of the English People. New York: Putnam, 1895. 3 vols. Vol. I, From the Origins to the Renaissance (Des Origines à la Renaissance), pp. (French edition) 124, 258, 281, 284, 302, 328, 329, 347, 373, 375, 376, 379, 520, 522, 520; (English edition) 119, 242, 257, 279, 285, 299, 325, 341, 352, 364-72, 373, 502ff., 510. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Histoire Littéraire du Peuple Anglaises. A Literary History of the English People. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1894 1896 1895 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Rigby, Echard, and a team of twelve contributors explore Gower's "artistic refraction of contemporary affairs" (xxii), reading his poetry "in the context of his life [and] . . . the intellectual culture of the social, religious, and political controversies of his day" (xxiii), particularly the upheavals that hit England most directly: plague, the Uprising of 1381, Lollardy, the challenges of the Lords Appellant, and the deposition of Richard II. The tradition of estates satire and the framework of political ideology are recurrent concerns, as are relations with contemporary poets, especially Chaucer and Langland, and the relative chronology of Gower's works, his revisions of them, and contemporary events. The fourteen essays (plus a calendar of life records) are informed by consistent awareness of parallels between Gower's works, on the one hand, and chronicles and documentary records on the other, accompanied by careful attention to previous scholarship, judicious cross-referencing between the essays, a comprehensive index, and illustrative figures in color and black and white. The John Gower that emerges from the essays is not an unfamiliar one--a traditionalist moral poet--but one that is more nuanced and more ambivalent in his outlooks, perhaps, than is usually observed. His trilingualism is more taken for granted than directly explored, with sustained attention to "Mirour de l'Omme," "Vox Clamantis," "Cronica Tripertia," and the "minor" poems as well as "Confessio Amantis," the long-time favorite of critics. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rigby, Stephen H., ed., with Siân Echard. Published Rigby, Stephen H., ed., with Siân Echard. Historians on John Gower. Publications of the John Gower Society. Volume XII. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019. ISBN 97818433845379. 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 Historians on John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Brief biography of Gower, with assessment of works and comparisons with Chaucer, including comments on the "lilting, rippling cadence" of Gower's octosyllables and notice of his extensive use of French and Latin words and derivations. [RFY1981; rev. MA]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Fernald, James. Published Fernald, James. Historic English. New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1921, pp. 151-57, 164. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Historic English. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1921 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Unexamined. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Kanno, Masahiko. Published Kanno, Masahiko. "Historical Present in Gower." Bulletin of Aichi University of Education 25 (1976): 45-49. 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 Historical Present in Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1976 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Nolan's argument is complicated, nuanced, and consequently quite difficult to do it justice in a brief summary. Her focus is "on the relationship of historical thought to literary form as a way of assessing what aspects of historicist discourse and practice remain critically energetic and analytically central to medieval literary study" (63). Working with three examples--Augustine's discovery of a "giant's tooth" in the "City of God," passages from Ovid's "Ars Amatoria," and Gower's image, at the beginning of Book II of the "Vox Clamantis," of his creative process as honey gathered from many flowers, or shells found on the beach, an image taken verbatim from Ovid (70)--she lays out as necessary an understanding of the past observed not merely backwards from the present, nor as if past and present were the same, but as an object of study both itself and in relation to the present as well as part of it. Her description of how this relates to Gower also captures much of her larger argument: "When Gower . . . appropriates Ovid's art, he does so as a way of reflecting on his own poetic practice. Like the Romans who gather shells, extract what's beautiful in them, and transform that extraction into a symbol of power, Gower gathers words from his predecessors, detaches them from their contexts, and forces them to make meaning in a new way. This account of Gower's poetics, as a form of imperialism, wrought under the sign of deference to the very classical "auctores" whose words he has gathered and reused, fundamentally rewrites the standard narrative of Gower's history-writing in the "Vox Clamantis." It has long been thought that the version of the fourteenth century found in the "Vox" is so ideologically driven, so wedded to a conservative vision of medieval society (the hierarchy of the three estates), that it utterly lacks nuance, self-reflection, and the capacity to accept social change . . . . The example of the gathered shells thus illustrates the way in which Gower determinedly sustains a tension between deference to Latin authority (here, Ovid) and the display of poetic skill embodied in the fearless abandon with which he redeploys classical words and images while ruthlessly exploiting both their past and present meanings. The brilliance of this particular display lies in the fact that Gower has chosen a passage from the "Ars Amatoria" whose Ovidian meaning constitutes a critique of its Gowerian use: Ovid deploys the gathering of shells to illustrate the triviality of modern forms of imperial expression, from the color purple to well-groomed ladies. If Gower aligns himself and his own gathering of words with these Roman practices, he must also accept the critique sedimented in the line he has adopted. By doing so, Gower forges a poetic 'middle way'--a practice of engaging the past that treats it with care, but without kid gloves. This middle way is a mode of using the past while allowing it to speak freely: Gower may manipulate Ovid's poetry for his own ends, but he retains the exact wording of Ovid's verse about shells" (81-82). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nolan, Maura. Published Nolan, Maura. "Historicism after Historicism." In The Post-Historical Middle Ages. Eds. Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. Pp. 63-85. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis 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 Historicism after Historicism. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Arner offers a detailed explication of the image of Nebuchadnezzar's statue in the CA Prologue, which she sees functioning as part of Gower's address to those readers in "the upper strata of urban non-ruling groups"--the more prosperous shopkeepers, artisans, and craftsmen--who "had participated in or who had sympathized with the English Rising of 1381" in order to win them over to the ideology of the ruling class and to break their identification with the lower ranks of society (239). The statue represents history as predetermined. "The inevitability of this development ratifies the social order and social relations" of Gower's time and "positions medieval men and women as helpless object of great forces" (243) which have also operated over a vast expanse of time, implying that "political action is futile" and encouraging "resignation and accommodation" (244). CA nonetheless "addresses readers as having agency," but it "works to direct this agency to-ward specific ends" (245). The statue also suggests that Gower's England stands at the end of time. "Therefore, movement into the future holds little in store but further decline," and "the only hope for the continuation of Gower's society lies in the stabilizing measures offered by conservative groups" (246). The statue offers an image of society itself, with each component representing a different rank. The lowest order - the statue's feet - is the most unstable and threatens the survival of society as a whole. The statue thus suggests the need for control and repression of the lowest ranks. By placing late medieval England at the end of time, it also positions it outside of time, and paradoxically, while affirming that current social conditions are the result of an inevitable process, it also affirms the irrelevance of history to the present in order to delegitimate claims for relief based upon a history of oppression. "The erasure of the history of subordinate groups" (249) is also evident in the summary of history that accompanies the statue, which is all about the rulers rather than the ruled, suggesting that "subordinate groups . . . were irrelevant" (250). The identification of each class with a particular material "argues for an essentialist understanding of the social order" which therefore "cannot be changed" (251). Finally, "by conceptualizing rank and, by extension, interest apart from ongoing political struggles, the poem discourages readers from rearticulating their wants and needs in relation to a shifting ideological climate" (252). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 22.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Arner, Lynn Published Arner, Lynn. "History Lessons from the End of Time: Gower and the English Rising of 1381." Clio 31 (2002), pp. 237-255. ISSN 0884-2043 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 History Lessons from the End of Time: Gower and the English Rising of 1381 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 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 Argues for chronological order of Gower's poems as French poems, Latin poems, English poems. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Ten Brink, Bernhard. Robinson, William C., trans. Published Ten Brink, Bernhard. History of English Literature. Translated by William C. Robinson. New York: Holt, 1893, II, 39ff. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism 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 History of English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1893 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 was a friend of Chaucer; "Florent" is his best tale, although "not more than three" of the "one hundred twelve short tales" in CA are "interesting"; portrait (artist's conception). [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Halleck, Rueben Post. Published Halleck, Rueben Post. History of English Literature. New York: Barnes, 1900, pp. 69-70. 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 History of English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1900 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 was a moral poet; names only the CA as his work. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Chambers, Robert. Published Chambers, Robert. History of the English Language and Literature. Hartford, CT: Edward Hopkins, 1837, p. 13. 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 History of the English Language and Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1837 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Discovers an interpretive nexus in the allusions to "timor dei" in Book 1 of CA. Traditionally associated with Humility, "timor dei" is portrayed in its most conventional form in "Capaneus" and "The Trump of Death," though the more serious part of the lesson appears to be lost upon Amans. Another traditional locus for "holy fear" was the Annunciation, which is echoed in both "Mundus and Paulina" and "The Three Questions," and which provides a model for the association of fear, the "conception" of the Word and, by extension, poetic creation as well, and amorous seduction. Gower plays upon these associations throughout Book 1 without fully resolving them. The tale of "Ulysses and the Sirens" suggests that a fear like Mary's at the Annunciation is an appropriate response to the seductions of poetry, particularly poetry of love, that ironically embraces CA itself. In the conversation that precedes the final lesson, on Vainglory, Amans describes his own futile efforts to seduce his lady with his poems and his fear of failure and rejection. In the lesson that Genius offers in reply, Nebuchadnezzar expresses his proper fear of God in his distinctly unpoetic braying. But Genius' second tale, of "The Three Questions," is not at all so straightforward. While echoing earlier references to "holy fear" and to the Annunciation, Peronelle herself exhibits no fear and uses her "eloquent plainness" (206) both to advance her social position and to achieve her own erotic ends. "Present and absent in this riddling culmination is an ever-shifting register of "timor domini," a theme Gower modulates in earnest and in game (and without resolution) throughout Book I and a motif that suggests an ironic sense of self and poetics as subtle and elusive as that of his literary friend and colleague Chaucer" (207). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Banchich, Claire Published Banchich, Claire. "Holy Fear and Poetics in John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Book I." In On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium. Ed. Yeager, R.F. Studies in Medieval Culture (46). Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2007, pp. 188-215. 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 Holy Fear and Poetics in John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Book I Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 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 Echard, Siân Published Echard, Siân. "House Arrest: Modern Archives, Medieval Manuscripts." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000), pp. 185-210. ISSN 1082-9636 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review Echard's essay is not concerned with Gower directly nor even with the scribes who produced the manuscripts of his works, but instead with our own engagement with and response to Gower and how these are mediated by the conditions in which his manuscripts are now housed and preserved. Drawing upon her own experiences with a wide range of libraries but focusing in particular on two copies of "Confessio Amantis" (Columbia University, MS Plimpton 265 and Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M690), she offers a number of loosely connected observations on "how archival practices and archival encounters structure and control our reading of medieval books and the texts that they contain" (p. 186). Gower is an ideal object for exploring the paradoxes of preservation, for as Echard points out, his manuscripts are often valued either for their ornate production or for the author's association with Chaucer by those who have little interest in reading his text. She places the present conditions of preservation of medieval books in contrast both to the use to which these manuscripts were put by their original owners and also to the habits and interests of the antiquarians and collectors who acquired many of the most important of the manuscripts that are now found on the west side of the Atlantic. Were it not for the collectors and their archivist descendants, she acknowledges, many fewer copies would be available to us now, yet the conditions imposed by the necessity of preservation make our modern encounter with medieval books entirely different in nature from that of their owners, who both used them in the best sense of the word and also often abused them. Nowadays "one worships at the altar of the manuscript; one does not doodle on it" (p. 189). In a historical aside, Echard traces the mixed motives of the antiquarians who replaced the owner-readers, including "nostalgia, competition, and the commodification of culture" (p. 194) as well as, in some instances, a genuine interest in history and in preserving the past. Even the efforts of the collectors are now effaced, however, as manuscripts are kept apart from the rooms in which they are read and are offered to readers individually, in isolation from the collection of which they were made a part. Each of us who has experienced a frisson in the presence of one of these ancient books will understand Echard's remarks on how our reverence amounts to a kind of fetishization, complete with the creation of a priesthood (ourselves) with unique rights of access to the sacred objects. She gives some consideration to the ways in which librarians can impose their own assumptions about the value of a book: in foliation, for instance, privileging either the text itself, the original material form, or the present material form (the prevalent modern practice); or giving greater attention to the illustration than to the text. And in looking to the future, she contemplates a final paradox: that the digitization of an increasing number of manuscripts may make them more widely available in one sense while perhaps also resulting in greater restriction of access to the actual physical book. Echard has no single conclusion to offer but instead simply requires us to think about our own assumptions and practices in a way that we might not have before. Her essay is provocative and often entertaining. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource House Arrest: Modern Archives, Medieval Manuscripts Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 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 her first paragraph, Echard sets out the subsequent course of her argument with characteristic clarity: "This essay considers the development and significance of [Gower's] Latin voice. It focusses first on two short Latin poems, "Est amor in glosa" and "De lucis scrutinio," arguing that in these Gower explores the limits of poetic language in an explicitly Latinate tradition. It next turns to his Latin "Vox Clamantis" and his Middle English "Confessio Amantis," showing that the Latin poem is more likely to turn to the vocative to admonish, condemn, or express outrage, while the English poem is more likely to employ the vocative in moments of pathos. It concludes by considering "Rex celi deus," "O recolende bone," and "In Praise of Peace," poems addressed to King Henry IV, and argues that in them the resources of Latin and English come together to craft a uniquely multilingual, multipositioned speaker who is at once intimate and detached, warm advisor and stern critic, truly suited to function as the voice of England" (291). Among the many insightful observations in this article are these: "Gower's Latin is best understood as acting in constant relation to his vernaculars, because he is, fundamentally, a trilingual poet. His trilingualism makes him all the more aware of the failures of every language, including Latin" (292). Both "Est amor" and "De lucis scrutinio" are "self-consciously concerned with poetic technique . . . deploying repetition and variation with considerable deliberation and flare" (299); but "As in 'Est amor,' it is possible to see ['De lucis''] stance as simultaneously invested in, and uncertain about, the display of poetic skill; in each case, it brings the speaker near to the desired goal but must finally, it seems, be laid aside" (300). Placing "Gower's Latin alongside his English, to show the development of what [she] calls the Gowerian 'voxative,' the voice that, despite Gower's concerns about the limits of poetry, nevertheless seeks to speak in the public arena" (300). "Gower presents himself in Latin as the voice of one crying, and in English as the voice of England" (302), "Address to a king is clearly a particular focal point of vocative structures in the Latin work" (308). While "the sequence in some . . . manuscripts suggests a kind of deliberate, progressive structure of admonition, record, and advice . . . the unpredictability of manuscript culture can undermine even a carefully orchestrated organizational plan" (308). "If 'O' can signal, particularly in Latin, the admonitory voice, then we might wonder if under these 'O's' of praise [in "Rex celi deus"] there is also some warning; that is, Gower also plays with the multiple meanings of words . . . . I am suggesting he is also playing with the multiple meanings/effects/affects of structures" (310). The Trentham manuscript [London, BL MS Additional 59495], while appearing free from Gower's "admonitory voice," does in fact "channel that voice even in a collection that must be understood in the context of patronage and precarious politics, . . . by merging the resources of English and Latin" (311). The evidence for this last statement is to be found in "In Praise of Peace": "Where once Latin tilted towards admonition and outrage, and English towards lament and carefully suggestive exemplarity, the linguistic and formal layering here offers a new voice, a uniquely multilingual, multipositioned speaker who is at once intimate and detached, warm advisor and stern critic" (314). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân. Published Echard, Siân. "How Gower Found His "Vox": Latin and John Gower's Poetics." Journal of Medieval Latin 26 (2016): 291-314. Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis In Praise of Peace Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource How Gower Found His "Vox": Latin and John Gower's Poetics. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Downes' subject is the "relationship between bilingualism--whether individual or cultural--and the expression of emotion in literature" (51). She proposes to approach this problem psycho-sociologically, along lines suggested by Anna Wierzbicka: "Different languages are linked with different ways of thinking as well as different ways of feeling; they are linked with different attitudes, different ways of relating to people, different ways of expressing one's feelings" [quoting Wierzbicka] (52). Downes asks "How true might these observations be for those who read, thought, wrote, and spoke in more than one language in fourteenth- and fifteenth- century England?" (52). She takes for her case-study Gower's "Cinkante Balades" and "Traitié pour les amantz marietz" and Charles d'Orleans' "Fortunes Stabilnes," seeing them as works written in "L2" languages--i.e., acquired tongues--by speakers fluent in both French and English. She selects balade sequences as her material, since in general these are written from a first-person perspective ("je/jeo/I"), more easily quarried for emotional connection. Downes' working hypothesis is that writing about feeling in French is different from writing about it in English ("Psycholinguists tend to describe an emotional detachment from additional languages as related to an individual's sense of their own inadequacy in that language" [54]). Ultimately, however, she suggests that, for Gower at least, it is the nature of the love described that matters, not the language used to describe it (58-59). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Downes, Stephanie. Published Downes, Stephanie. How to Be "Both": Bilingual and Gendered Emotions in Late Medieval English Balade Sequences. In Susan Broomhall, ed. Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. 51-65. Gower Subject Cinkante Balades Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource How to Be "Both": Bilingual and Gendered Emotions in Late Medieval English Balade Sequences. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In the final stanzas of T&C Chaucer brutally shatters the reconciliation between love of God and the love inspired by Nature that had evidently been achieved at the highest moment of the poem in Book 3. Crépin compares Chaucer's "palinode" to CA *8.3088-114, in which Gower too describes a movement from earthly to heavenly love, and he argues that Chaucer is responding to Gower here: that Chaucer "took up the challenge" of Gower's suggestion that Chaucer say farewell to love poetry in CA *8.2941-57 by going further than Gower himself in his radical condemnation of human love. In doing so, he "out-Gowers Gower"; and in his condemnation of "the forme of olde clerkes speche / In poetrie" (T&C 5.1854-55), he also attacks the entire structure of CA as well as material of his own poem. Gower responded in turn in the revised version of CA: he dropped the allusion to Chaucer, and the anaphora of one passage of the rewritten epilogue (CA 8.3165-67) appears to be in imitation of Chaucer's use of the same device in T&C 5.1828ff and 5.1849ff. The comparison of these two works brings out some of the differences between the poets: "Gower contrasts the two kinds of love but does not set them in opposition to one another or suggest that once excludes the other," while Chaucer "makes the opposition complete and allows room for compromise." His more radical position may reflect actual belief, but is also calculated to "tease his readers/listeners, and himself, into thought." Crépin does not suggest dates for the composition of T&C or either of the versions of CA, but his argument requires acceptance of a chronology very different from that which is ordinarily assumed. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Crépin, André Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Published Crépin, André. "Human and Divine Love in Chaucer and Gower." In A Wyf Ther Was: Essays in Honour of Paule Mertens-Fonck. Ed. Dor, Juliette. Liége: L3 – Liége Language and Literature, Département d'anglais, Université de Liége, 1992, pp. 71-79. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Human and Divine Love in Chaucer and Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available L3 – Liége Language and Literature, Département d'anglais, Université de Liége, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 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 Gower features in chapter 4, "Monsters and Shapeshifters: The Hybrid Body in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'" (123-153). Gasse's interest in the CA is subordinate to her larger set of claims regarding the essential "hybridity" of the human body, an entity ever capable of transformation, especially via age and/or disability. She considers the tales of "Florent," focusing on the "loathly lady" figure (125-26), "Cambises" in Book VII, who flays a judge, covers a chair with his skin, and makes his son succeed him in office, and sit upon the chair (127), "Albinus and Rosemund" (127-28), which reveals "the monstrous presence of Gurmond" (128), and "the most disturbing alteration of the human form," the "murder of Itys by his mother Procne" (129), in the "Tale of Tereus," "a horror story on multiple levels" (129). Gasse touches briefly upon the tales of Pygmalion, Medusa, the Minotaur, Sirens, centaurs ("the male counterpart to the hybrid female body of the Siren" [133]), leading to very brief commentary on the "Wedding of Pirithous" and "Education of Achilles" (134-35). There follows a sketch of "the Hybrid Masculine Body," covering tales that lead to the conclusion that: "Characters such as Hercules, Nessus, Achelons, and Nectanabus suggest the strengths and the limits of the sexualized and aggressive male body. Unlike the neutered Nebuchadnezzar the ox who is deprived of this aspect of his manhood, these four are all powerful men driven by animalistic heterosexual desire to compete with other males even to the point of violence over the right to mate with a female" (139). Sections on "the Hybrid Gendered Body," the "Hybrid Feminine Body," and the "Hybrid Disabled Body: Tiresias" follow, leading to the conclusion that "Much of Gower's treatment of the malleable human form is to be expected for a late fourteenth-century English text . . . variations on the human body--the aged body, the female body, the prepubescent body, the peasant body, the clerical body, the body missing some of its functioning parts, the body in which the animal is too prominent, the heterosexually impotent body, the body reduced to a small pile of ash and bone, the body made inanimate object, made food, made excrement--are all indicators of cultural anxiety and disability of one sort or another as hybrid examples of the reduced human form" (152). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gasse, Rosanne P. Published Gasse, Rosanne P. Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England. Cham, Switz.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023