12 100 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 This very brief article considers CA and T&C as illustrations of the "code of love." "The lover must know how to speak of love; . . . The lover and his lady most know how to compose poems and letters, to sing, to dance; . . ." etc. In CA, one discovers the requirements of this code by finding the opposites of the vices that Genius condemns. Not only do the two poems share this code, but they both depict an unhappy love, and both also end in a somewhat unexpected fashion: in CA, contrary to the confessor's recommendations of patience and hope, Venus banishes Amans from the domain of courtly love literature by identifying him as the aging John Gower, bringing the poet into the text in flesh and blood as Chaucer does in his "Retraction." Crépin concludes with a note of disagreement with Katherine Heinrich's argument (in The Myths of Love [1990]), that medieval writers drew upon classical story exclusively for tales of amorous folly. There is too much variety in the interpretation of classical heroes and heroines in medieval poems, and Gower himself is able to use these characters as illustrations of Christian truths. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Crépin, André Published Crépin, André. "Le Code Amoureux d'après la Confessio Amantis de Gower et le Troilus de Chaucer." In La 'Fin'Amor' dans la culture féodale. Actes du colloque du Centre d'Etudes Médiévales de l'Université de Picardie Jules Verne; Amiens, mars 1991. Ed. UNSPECIFIED. Greifswald: Reineke, 1994, pp. 67-72. 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 Le Code Amoureux d'après la Confessio Amantis de Gower et le Troilus de Chaucer Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Reineke, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 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 Galloway is interested in the importance of gratitude to late medieval notions of religious faith and particularly of social relations. For contrast, he begins with the early medieval concept of gift-giving as a way for a ruler to earn both loyalty and praise. With the thirteenth century, he detects a shift from the benefit to the giver to the obligation of gratitudo, itself a scholastic coinage which for Aquinas embraces "religious reverence, familial and social loyalty, and more casual obligations" in one continuum (p. 369). Aquinas' "careful ranking of relationships of servility and lordship" implies a "kind of idealization of the system of feudalism." Vincent of Beauvais defines a duty to repay benefits with interest, "a direct use of the ethic in support of a profit economy," and gives a fuller description of the evils of ingratitude. The discussion of Gratitude is especially prominent in 14th-century England. In his Summa praedicantium, Bromyard discusses Ingratitude as a subspecies of Avarice, and describes it as a violation of the natural order. The latter notion finds special resonance in ME, in which both "kynde" and "unkynde" carry a double meaning linking the natural with the moral. "By blending nature with reciprocation, Middle English 'kyndenesse' shifts religious and social bonds away from hierarchy and towards affinity, and the exploitation of these lexical possibilities may easily be aligned with the many distinctive late medieval forms of community or corporate identity in which reciprocation and close affinity or ideas of such affinity cohere" (p. 374). Ricardian writers in particular pass beyond aristocratic emphasis on real kinship and religious writers' emphasis on humans' debt to God to a wider concept of reciprocal social duties. Gower, in MO, treats Ingratitude in the tradition of Bromyard. "Unlike Bromyard, however, Gower is led to a close consideration of the interaction of different social groups or levels rather than any religious obligation" (p. 376). Galloway also notes that Gower's conclusion to the discussion of Ingratitude in MO (6673-85) seems to be "informed by the double meaning of Middle English 'unkynde,' even though the pun cannot directly emerge in the French" (p. 377). In CA, however, "kyndeness" does not provide "a simple key to social unity and morality" (p. 377). The tale of "Adrian and Bardus" "emphasizes the inevitability, the 'naturalness,' of social differences rather than any naturalness in the workings of gratitude. . . . The principal of gratitude finally invoked is the only hope for harmony between the disparate social realms of country, city, and court that Gower contemplates, but this principle is imposed by imperial fiat" (p. 378). Langland makes "perhaps the most ambitious effort to stretch this idea to contain a vast and diverse English community" (p. 379). Galloway emphasizes the neglected implications of Gratitude in Langland's use of "Kynde," and concludes that "in his willingness to pursue the 'natural' or 'given' bases of communities of exchange broadly considered, [Langland] manages to present in 'kyndenesse' a capacious notion of cultural identity that depends neither on authoritarianism (like that of Gower's Emperor) nor even on the unity of the institutional church" (p. 381). Galloway's general conclusion notes the "varying concepts of community" implicit in the different writers' discussions of Gratitude. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew Published Galloway, Andrew. "The Making of a Social Ethic in Late-Medieval England: From Gratitudo to 'Kyndenesse'." Journal of the History of Ideas 55 (1994), pp. 365-83. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies 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 The Making of a Social Ethic in Late-Medieval England: From Gratitudo to 'Kyndenesse' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 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 Calin, William Published Calin, William. "The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England." Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994 Gower Subject Cinkante Balades Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Review Calin includes a chapter on Gower (pp. 371-98) in this lengthy and detailed survey of the relation of late medieval English literature to its continental French and Anglo-Norman predecessors. Most of the chapter has already appeared in nearly identical form as an essay in the special Gower issue of Mediaevalia in 1993. There, Calin surveyed "John Gower's Continuity in the Tradition of French Fin' Amor," using CB and CA to show how the richness and complexity of Gower's work is oversimplified in seeing it simply as a rejection of earlier French ideals of love. The present chapter includes a discussion of MO, also emphasizing both its debt to its French predecessors and its own inherent richness. Calin is anxious to defend the poem from the charge that as a moral work, it is inherently mediocre and dull. He sees it first of all as a satire, and considers two of its principal achievements Gower's creation of a suitable persona and his choice of the style in which the entire poem is conducted: where CA is "a masterpiece of the plain style," MO is "a master¬piece of the flowing, passionately lofty register of the vernacular literature of ideas" (p. 373). The poem is structured not just by its external frame but by the dominant metaphor of combat -- between virtue and vice, reason and passion, light and darkness, God and Satan -- and by patterns of antithetical imagery: evil and Satan are depicted in the demonic and bestial, in rot, corruption, and decomposition, in poison, and in lies and illusion, all of which are countered by the imagery used in the depiction of the virtues. Ethically, Gower counsels the domination of reason over passion and of hard work and liberality over sloth, but the poem ends with the telling of the story of Mary and Jesus, the persona's own act of penance in an effort to gain his own salvation, and the poet's final answer to the problem of evil in the individual and in society. In the drama of salvation, the individual to be saved, the "Omme" of the title, like the implied author, is a male; the adversaries and "adjuvants" are all female: "phenomenologically, the Self is a man and is passively subject to onslaught or to succour, to being dragged down or pulled up, by woman as the Other" (p. 379), until finally turning to the greatest mother of all at the end. The devil is in the details, as we have been reminded so often recently: Calin gets the rhyme scheme of MO wrong (p. 372), he confuses Anthony Farnham with Winthrop Wetherbee (p. 388), and in his survey of Gower's sources for CA (p. 387), he casually overstates the poet's dependance on French rather than Latin sources. The virtual absence of notes, in this paragraph and throughout the entire chapter, makes it difficult to assess whether Calin has achieved some new insight through his own research or is merely carelessly misrepresenting the labors of his predecessors. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 14.1] 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 The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Toronto Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 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 Owen offers his "notes" as extensions of some of the findings of Masayoshi Ito (1976) and R.F. Yeager (1990), who have been among the few to give attention to this neglected aspect of Gower's verse. Within "prosody" Owen embraces Gower's use of rhyme and his use of run-on lines, and also some instances of verbal repetition. In his discussion of rhyme, he focuses on rime riche and on what Ito calls "quasi rime riche" and Owen "identicals," that is, the use of identical syllables at the end of successive lines if not necessarily identical final words. He finds the use of rhyme in MO to be mainly decorative, despite, or perhaps because of, the use of only two rhyme sounds in each twelve-line stanza, a technical feat that recalls the difficult rhyme patterns of some of Gower's French predecessors. He gives several examples to demonstrate that in the couplets of CA, on the other hand, rhyme is frequently used to enhance the sense as well as the liveliness and colloquialism of the dialogue between Genius and Amans. Owen uses the introductory lines in Books 1, 5, and 8 to demonstrate the effectiveness of Gower's use of enjambement. He concludes with a comparison of the two different versions of Gower's final prayer: though the first is marked by a greater number of enhanced rhymes than the second, "I think there can be no question as to the improvement of the passage" (pp. 410-11). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 14.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Owen, Charles A., Jr. Published Owen, Charles A., Jr.. "Notes on Gower's Prosody." Chaucer Review 28 (1994), pp. 405-13. Gower Subject 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 Notes on Gower's Prosody Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 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 Peck, Russell A. Published Peck, Russell A.. "The Phenomenology of Make Believe in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Studies in Philology 91 (1994), pp. 250-69. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Peck examines the dialogue between Genius and Amans in terms of medieval phenomenology -- most generally, the speculation about the relation between the outer world and the images formed thereof in the mind, and about the ways in which the mind understands what it does not see -- as reflected in such authors as Chaucer and Langland as well as Boethius, Hugh of St. Victor, and late medieval English mystics. By this analysis, Genius' tales are images presented for Amans' contemplation, fictions designed to provide access to the truth, while Amans' perceptions and interpretations are shaped by his pre-existing fantasy, another sort of fiction that interferes with the search for truth. At issue also are different kinds of love: for the English mystics, love provided the only means to move beyond phenomena directly to their source, but Amans' naturatus amor merely creates desires that distort all his perceptions. Peck examines the "eyes and ears" passage in Book 1, the discussion of Falssemblant and Supplantation near the end of Book 2, and the discussion of Sorcery in Book 6 in order to show how perception and misperception -- expecially that governed by desire -- and the relation between exterior and interior phenomena are treated as moral issues in Genius' lessons, and how Genius attempts to reorder Amans by providing him with new images, the proper significance of which Amans stubbornly resists. Like the victims of Nectanabus' sorcery, Amans is not the victim of deceit exempt by his own choice. At the end of the poem, the poet sets aside his own Nectanabus-like role -- as creator of images-- at the same time that Amans becomes the supplicant for the welfare of England: "Knowing that he cannot effect change in his audience (only they can do that), he dramatizes instead a change from naturatus amor to caritas within himself, and takes another name -- John Gower" (p. 267). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 14.1] 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 The Phenomenology of Make Believe in Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 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 Bullón-Fernández, María Published Bullón-Fernández, María. "Confining the Daughter: Gower's 'Tale of Canace and Machaire' and the Politics of the Body." Essays in Medieval Studies: Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association 11 (1994), pp. 75-85. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Bullón-Fernández offers not just one but several provocative new ways of reading Gower's already well-read story of Canace and Machaire. Invoking a feminist model of patriarchal society and of the power relations between fathers and daughters, she opposes Eolus' attempts to confine Canace (repeatedly alluded to in the tale) with Canace's two gestures of independence: her choice of her own lover (albeit her brother), which signifies "her father's loss of control over her body" (p. 77); and her composition of her letter, in which she "tries to define her life in her own terms" (p. 77), an attempt that is quickly thwarted. Parallels are drawn in the tale between her two acts of creation, her letter and her child; between her tears and the ink; and thus between writing and her body. The horrific scene of the baby bathing in his mother's blood, Bullón-Fernández observes, paradoxically blends an image of parturition with one of death, echoing the paradoxes of Canace's letter. The multiple parallels in the tale "suggest that Canace's death represents not only Eolus' assertion of his control over Canace's body, but also his desire to terminate a narrative . . . over which he himself had lost authorial control" (p. 79). That Eolus' attempt to control Canace is incestuous in origin is suggested by the attribution of his wrath to Melancholy, the "typical lover's sickness" in the Middle Ages, from which Amans himself suffers because of his unfulfilled desire. Eolus' desire to have control of his daughter's body provides a better explanation of his wrath -- and of Gower's evident sympathy for his victims -- than does the immorality of the children's union. It also refers the issue of patriarchal control to that of kingship, continuing the analogy between home and kingdom that runs throughout CA. In both cases absolute power must necessarily be restrained, and "Canace's tragic death highlights the sterility and self-destructiveness of any type of absolute patriarchal authority that . . . denies the subordinate body a certain degree of independence" (p. 76). Bullón-Fernández' essay appears with nine others in a special issue of Essays in Medieval Studies entitled Figures of Speech: The Body in Medieval Art, History, and Literature, edited by Allen J. Frantzen and David A. Robertson. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 14.2] 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 Confining the Daughter: Gower's 'Tale of Canace and Machaire' and the Politics of the Body Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 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 Scanlon, Larry Published Scanlon, Larry. "Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition." Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature (20). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review For Scanlon authority and power occur in opposition. His subject is the exemplum, which he defines as "a narrative enactment of cultural authority" (p. 34). He traces the inter-related histories of auctoritas and the exemplum from classical times up to Chaucer, who provides the focus of his study. Just as the church had earlier appropriated the exemplum form from its pagan predecessors in order to establish its own auctoritas, Scanlon argues, Chaucer and other contemporary writers appropriated the exemplum anew in order to assert the authority of vernacular poetry in face of that of the church. His reading of Chaucer, emphasizing the poet's engagement with the problem of his own authority, is detailed and complex, and needs to be examined to be appreciated. Scanlon treats Gower in his second to last chapter (pp. 245-97), before turning to his conclusion on "The Chaucerian Tradition in the fifteenth century." He has less to say about Gower's use of the exemplum form precisely than he does about the theoretical issues that the form raises. He describes CA as "a sustained meditation on the contingencies of cultural authority" (p. 267). He attributes to Gower just as much self-consciousness about his role as he does to Chaucer, but describes him as having a very different agenda: more explicitly anticlerical, Gower places lay political authority (rather than the poet's) over that of the church, while also arguing for the interdependence of the prince and poetry. In Scanlon's words, "To the extent moral disorder characterizes the Church, it demonstrates the need for the sort of order provided by the king. But to the extent such disorder also affects kingship, it demonstrates the indispensability of the moral correction that comes from the poet" (p. 249). Scanlon finds a point by point development of this argument in his examination of CA. In the Prologue and Books 1 and 2, "Gower is expecially concerned to demonstrate the necessity of lay authority by means of anti-clerical critique. But he is just as concerned to demonstrate the irreducibly double nature of such authority, the interdependence between poet and prince, and the extent to which the prince's authority is discursively constructed" (pp. 249-50). The Prologue juxtaposes the moral bankruptcy of the Church with Gower's call for a "new Arion," both set within his presentation of his poem to the king. Book 1 introduces Genius, who embodies Gower's "middel weie," hovering "uncertainly between the clerical and the lay" (p. 256). Key tales in Books 1 and 2 explore the discursive nature of all authority. The tale of Boniface sets the pope -- who usurps not only the papacy but also (literally) the voice of God and also temporal authority -- against the virtuous king who restores order to the church. The tale of Constantine with which that tale is paired not only "foregrounds Christianity's dependence on material reality" (p. 266) in its conclusion, but also defines an important aspect of kingship in Constantine's conversion. When Constantine beholds the mothers and their children, "it is as if monarchical power, in its supreme amorality, stimulates from its possessor an irresistable need for moral order," demonstrating "monarchy's inherently self-regulating character, the paradoxical but inevitable logic whereby absolute prerogative produces its own self-generated restraint" (p. 265). In Books 3 through 6, Gower distinguishes this view of monarchy from the chivalric view of lay authority with a critique of the values embodied in romance, focusing particularly on the delusions of fin' amors in tales such as "Canace and Machaire," "Pyramus and Thisbe," and "Orestes," while offering a "demystified" view of the claims of chivalry in his discussion of "Prouesse" in Book 4. In the final tale of Book 6, he offers another version of the self-regulating nature of the monarch's power. Alexander's arbitrary act of shoving Nectanabus off the tower ironically fulfills the prophecy that provokes it; it also corrects the arbitrariness of the act by which Alexander was originally conceived. Divine authority works obliquely through Alexander's action. "By pushing the oblique relation between divine authority and temporal power to the extreme, Gower is able to authorize lay power precisely in its transgressive coerciveness. For it is precisely the self-regulating structure of that transgressiveness that Gower takes as divine authorization. Lay power is by its very nature contingent and incomplete. But for Gower its continual reassertions of it contingency and incompletion produce a self-regulation that is continually able to point beyond that incompletion" (pp. 281-82). This tale opens the way for Book 7, which emphasizes the need for secular rule -- "Monarchy inevitably produces social order, because it is the only form order can take" (p. 291) -- and the unbreakable link between power and self-restraint. One form of that self-restraint, of course, is chastity, the last of the kingly virtues that Gower discusses, which replaces fin' amors with an ideal of behavior that recalls that imposed on the clergy and thus constitutes a sanctification of lay authority. Gower's engagement with political issues, he concludes, was no less important to the poets that followed in the next century than was Chaucer's reappropriation of the clerical tradition. There is more. Scanlon has a great deal to say about many other issues both theoretical and practical that come up along the way (see, for instance, his speculation on Derrida's debt to St. Paul on p. 51). But his discussion is also firmly grounded in some of the most traditional questions of Chaucer and Gower scholarship. In one sense, his reading of Gower puts him in a long line of critics who have emphasized Gower's political views, but he brings an entirely different perspective from earlier commentators. And while he attempts to overcome the antithesis between morality and poetry that lies, as he observes, at the base of most comparisons between Chaucer and Gower, he also sees important differences between these two poets, which he defines in a new and very different light. This is a challenging work, and well worth close study. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN14.2] 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 Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition. 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 1994 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "The penitential fictions that frame Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women" and Gower's "Confessio Amantis" ostensibly measure each poet's fidelity to the amorous ideology codified in courtly literature, but the real object of the poems' critique is the courtly code itself. This critique complicates the operation of the poems' framed narratives as simply moralized exempla; instead, they offer the reader a challenge in independent ethical interpretation. . . . In the Confessio Amantis, allegorical figures borrowed from orthodox scholastic cosmography masquerade as presiding deities of the conventional 'Court of Love' to engage Gower's protagonist is a penitential dialogue, with the covert purpose of challenging his amorous obsession. Gower's exemplary tales often supersede or contradict their stated amorous significations, serving instead as rich aesthetic reworkings of the poem's theological and political themes." [JGN 14.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gould, Cynthia Marie Published Gould, Cynthia Marie. "Penitential Fictions, the Trial of Courtly Love, and the Emancipation of Story in the 'Legend of Good Women' and the 'Confessio Amantis'." PhD thesis, Northwestern University, 1994. 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 Penitential Fictions, the Trial of Courtly Love, and the Emancipation of Story in the 'Legend of Good Women' and the 'Confessio Amantis' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In SumT III.2196, the lord tells the friar, "Ye been the salt of the erthe and the savour." Modern editors have customarily cited Matthew 5:13 as Chaucer's source, but neither "savour" nor the Latin sapor occurs either in the Vulgate or in any of the English translations that Chaucer might have known. The actual source, Hanks suggests, was VC 3.1997-98: "Hii sunt sal terre, quo nos condimur in orbe,/ Absque sapore suo vix salietur homo;" and Chaucer, recollecting Gower, was the first to use the collocation "salt and savour" in English. Hanks goes on to suggest, logically but more intriguingly, that the first use of "savour" in a translation of the gospels, in the Geneva Bible of 1560, was due to a translator's recollection of the earthy passage in SumT. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hanks, D. Thomas, Jr. Published Hanks, D. Thomas, Jr.. "'Savour,' Chaucer's 'Summoner's Tale,' and Matthew 5:13." English Language Notes 31 (1994), pp. 25-29. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'Savour,' Chaucer's 'Summoner's Tale,' and Matthew 5:13 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 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 "Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Gawain-poet's vernacular poetry embodies concerns with interpretation, modification of verse forms and knowledge of register and the associational pull of sound patterns. . . . Used for sense-making and sensuality, sound-patterning is both an interpretive element and a given of end-rhyme and alliterative verse. Sound-echo interactions in poetry influence connotation and, hence, denotation. Comparative and contrastive groupings generated by underlying or site-specific referential sound-patterns create sonotations: sound-cued patterns of denotative interaction and accumulations of connotation. . . . My interpretive, comparative, sound-pattern analyses of rhyme and alliteration are focused upon prominently patterned sound in relation to specific words (chapter two), characters (chapter three), settings (chapter four) or an entire poem [Pearl] (chapter five)." [JGN 15.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bormann, Sally Published Bormann, Sally. "End-rhyme and Alliteration Sonotations in Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the 'Gawain'-poet." PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1994. 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 End-rhyme and Alliteration Sonotations in Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the 'Gawain'-poet Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Scala, Elizabeth Doreen Published Scala, Elizabeth Doreen. "Absent Narratives: Medieval Literature and Textual Repression." PhD thesis, Harvard, 1994. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review "Absent Narratives argues for the structural centrality of missing stories -- those implied, alluded to, or fragmented -- in medieval narrative. Chapters devoted to Chaucer, Gower, Malory, and the Gawain-poet discuss the manifestations and operations of the untold in terms of repression and its attendant parapraxes. By engaging the structure of these works at a level of narrative excess -- that is, precisely where critical commentary breaks down (or is markedly absent itself) -- Absent Narratives formulates a theory of how texts "speak" out of what they "hide." Employing a postructuralist model of repression in order to describe the effect of the untold and unspoken upon narratives, Absent Narratives theorizes a 'textual unconscious' in medieval narrative and manuscript culture." [JGN 15.1] 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 Absent Narratives: Medieval Literature and Textual Repression Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A. Published Peck, Russell A.. "John Gower." In Dictionary of Literary Biography. Ed. Helterman, Jeffrey and Mitchell, Jerome. Detriot: Gale Research, 1994, pp. 178-90. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Biography of Gower Review Peck attempts to provide a one-chapter overview of Gower and his works. It begins with a list of Gower's works (including a selective bibliography of manuscripts and editions); it offers a discussion of Gower's biography and then of each of his works in turn; and it concludes with "References," a bibliography that includes the major book-length studies of Gower and a handful of important articles. About half of the section on Gower's life is concerned with his relation to Chaucer. Separate paragraphs treat Agnes Groundolf, the date of Gower's birth and his ancestry, his property dealings, his relation to the Priory of St. Mary Overey's, and his lost writings, including Fisher's speculation on Gower's participation in the "Pui." The discussion of the major works is given over mostly to their structure and a to summary of their contents. MO is labeled a "complaint against the ills of the world." Like Fisher, Peck gives only a passing reference to the catalog of the virtues, and he describes the poet turning at the end of the poem from the foolish songs of his youth to "a new song of disenchantment," passing over the penitential and redemptive spirit of the life of the Virgin with which the poem concludes. His discussion of VC gives a standard account of the textual history and revisions of the poem, of its contents, including Book 1 and the "Cronica Tripertita," and of its sources. In describing CA, Peck refrains from repeating the arguments of his own published writing on the poem, either his 1978 book on "Kingship and Common Profit" or his most recent essay on "The Phenomenology of Make Believe" (see JGN 14, no. 1), though both are rightfully included in his list of references. He gives a fairly detailed account of Gower's revisions of CA, then treats briefly the frame of the confession, the characters of Genius and Amans (each amusing in his partial understanding), the arrangement of the lessons, and the implications of the Prologue and the epilogue for Gower's penitential purpose. The "strength" of the poem, however, which he repeatedly describes as a delight, "lies in its stories," and he concludes with a list of the dozen tales that he finds most notable (p. 189). The chapter ends with brief accounts of Gower's shorter poems. Consistent with the format and purpose of the volume in which it is found, there is little in Peck's chapter that is new. Most, in fact, can be found in either Macaulay or Fisher, and though he takes a critical view of the notion that Gower's revisions in CA reflect a public change of allegiance (p. 188), Peck repeats some of the more speculative inferences about his relationship with Chaucer (p. 180), and he adopts the idea that Gower had his own scriptorium (pp. 178, 182) which most others who have worked on the text have by now pretty much discarded. There are a few other quibbles one could raise: his account of the revisions of CA suggests that the "third" recension evolved from the "second" when it is more sensible to think of it as a separate revision of the "first;" and Gower didn't receive his first collar of S's from Henry after his accession (Peck, p.189) but in 1393 (see Fisher, p. 68). Otherwise, Peck has presented in brief form a useful summary of what is currently known about the poet and his works, and his chapter could be a good starting point for students who are making their first acquaintance with his writing. [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 18.2.] 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 John Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Gale Research, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 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 Woodring, Carl, and James Shapiro, eds. Published Woodring, Carl, and James Shapiro, eds. "The Columbia History of British Poetry." New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 ISBN 0231078382 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Review One can sometimes get a rough idea of the evolution of an author's critical reputation from the accounts of his or her writing in general works of literary history. Sometimes, moreover, these accounts can be unexpectedly insightful and thought-provoking. Both comments apply to the paragraph on CA provided by E. Ruth Harvey in her chapter on "Middle English Poetry" in this new history of British poetry (p. 41): ". . . Gower's technical expertise in handling his smooth octosyllabic couplets is unobtrusively masterful, and his stories, taken from a wide variety of sources, are woven together with playfulness and wit. The tales are recounted in the course of a long confession made by the lover to Genius, priest of Venus; they are organized as telling examples to illustrate the seven deadly sins, at least insofar as the sins apply to the crimes and follies of lovers. The work displays an extraordinary ingenuity: a fundamentally serious religious ethic is consistently viewed aslant through the monomania of love, and encumbered with enormous and fascinating digressions that serve to delay the inevitable progression to the most interesting sin of all, lechery. Gower teases his audience with surprising turns and twists on the themes of love and virtue, before summoning Venus at the very end to dismiss the lover, disqualified from her service by his impotence and old age. But the poet frames the Confessio with a stern indictment of the contemporary world: the prologue evokes a golden age when men truly knew how to love, and contrasts it with the degeneration of corruption, violence and lust in the world of Richard II. It is hard to hold all the elements of the Confessio together: Gower offers it as a combination of profit and pleasure ("lore" and "lust"); but its analysis of human love in all its manifestations from comic to sublime, its playful wit, fierce denunciations of vice, earnest plea for peace and charity, and splendid portrayal of a mutable and treacherous world in the inevitable and irresistible decline almost pull it apart. If Chaucer offers us a world without comment, Gower offers us something more like an encyclopedia with a moral commentary; not as risqué as The Canterbury Tales, but not in need of apology or retraction either." [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 The Columbia History of British Poetry Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Columbia University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 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 Studies the tradition of Medea "as it is manifested in English and French Literatures [sic] from approximately 1160 to 1477 together with a discussion of Medea's classical background and appearance in a number of important medieval Latin and Italian texts . . . . The focus of my discussion is on the presentation of Medea in late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth century English literature where her story is represented by three histories of Troy . . . as well as Chaucer, in the 'Legend of Good Women,' and Gower, in the 'Confessio Amantis'." Author/Editor Author/Editor McDonald, N. F. Published McDonald, N. F. "'Diverse folk diversely they seyde': A Study of the Figure of Medea in Medieval Literature." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Oxford, 1994. Index to Theses, with Abstracts: Accepted for Higher Degrees by the Universities of Great Britain and Ireland 45.5 (1996), no. 12132. Abstract accessible via Proquest Dissertations & Theses. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Diverse folk diversely they seyde": A Study of the Figure of Medea in Medieval Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Keifer, Lauren. Published Keifer, Lauren, "Gower and Literary Tradition: Jean de Meun, Ovid, and the 'Confessio Amantis.'" Ph.D. Dissertation. Cornell University, 1994. Dissertation Abstracts International 55, no 4 (1995): 1946A. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review "This project attempts to alert the reader to John Gower's literariness. In the 'Confessio Amantis,' Gower deliberately turns away from the straightforward didacticism of his earlier works and of the Middle English penitential tradition, and adopts instead the narrative strategies of poets such as Jean de Meun and Ovid. Gower's literary complexity in the 'Confessio' links with the work's secular concerns, demonstrating Gower's growing awareness of the complex social problems surrounding him and leading him to abandon the didactic stance of his early works. Chapter One outlines Gower's progression from the rigid structures and spiritual emphasis of his earlier major works to the complexity and secular emphasis of the "Confessio Amantis." Gower's revisions of the 'Vox Clamantis' offer evidence of his growing social and political concerns, and show how the first chapter of the 'Confessio' deliberately rejects the medieval penitential manual's paradigm of divine justice, preferring instead a paradigm of personal responsibility. Chapter Two outlines the poetic strategies which Gower borrows from Jean de Meun. In particular, this chapter explores the way Jean and Gower turn the traditional function of the exemplum on its head, by using the form to impugn the credibility of the narrator. While traditional exemplum narrators choose and revise stories for clarity and appropriateness, Jean's and Gower's narrators make choices and revisions which merely reflect their own limitations. While Chapters One and Two examine isolated tales within the 'Confessio,' Chapter Three discusses the way several tales interact with each other. Gower's Ulysses tales--'Ulysses and the Sirens,' 'Ulysses and Penelope,' 'Nauplus and Ulysses,' 'Achilles and Deidamia,' and 'Ulysses and Telegonus'--place him in dialogue with both Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' and the Trojan historiographical tradition. I show how Gower deliberately rejects the didactic tendency of medieval historiography in favor of the more elusive poetic strategies of the epic and romance traditions, just as he rejected the didacticism of the penitential and exemplum traditions in favor of Jean's elusive structures." [eJGN 43.1] 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 and Literary Tradition: Jean de Meun, Ovid, and the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Chapter four explores "connections between four of Shakespeare's plays and the story of Medea as Shakespeare read it in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' "(p. 16): "The Merchant of Venice," "Othello," "King Lear," and "The Tempest." Author/Editor Author/Editor Thomsen, Kerri Lynne. Published Thomsen, Kerri Lynne. Disappearing Daughters: Proserpina and Medea in the Works of Spenser and Shakespeare. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1994. Dissertation Abstracts International A55.08. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. 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 Disappearing Daughters: Proserpina and Medea in the Works of Spenser and Shakespeare. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This study concerns the relationship between signs and phenomena as it is elaborated in selected medieval texts. Part I discusses the basic difficulties of accounting for magical and miraculous phenomena at the level of theory. In Part I.1 I compare the discussions of several modern anthropologists on the topic of magic and cultural translation. Part I.2 is an analysis of the problematics of magic, miracle and sign theory in certain writings of St Augustine. Part II approaches the problems of miracle and magic at the level of practice. The problems which two Anglo-Saxon hagiographers encounter in their attempts to explain and account for individual miracles is discussed in Part II.1. Part II.2 illustrates the function of language in practical magic through analysis of some Old English charms. Part III treats several late medieval attempts to synthesize practice and theory. In Part III.1 I focus on the way natural philosophy is used by Roger Bacon in his attempt to give new legitimacy to the use of words in practical magic. In Part III.2 I look at how another thirteenth-century writer, Henry of Avranches, uses natural philosophy to resolve some of the problems miracles present the hagiographer. Part III.3 discusses the understanding of magic and morality implicit in the fourteenth-century 'Confessio Amantis' of John Gower. My conclusion draws together the main threads of the preceding parts and suggests some alternative ways of looking at the problematics of magic and miracle." Fanger's section on CA (pp. 278-318) addresses how "Gower's coupling of magic with gluttony becomes significant in a cosmological sense: like gluttony, magic seems to represent a type of intemperance with respect to worldly things" (317). She also shows how Gower's views relate to those of Augustine and Roger Bacon, and how, for Gower, magic "is given a place among human properties or powers which are, like speech and language, special, and yet more natural than supernatural; liable to abuse, and yet not wholly diabolic" (318). Author/Editor Author/Editor Fanger, Claire. Published Fanger, Claire. Signs of Power and the Power of Signs: Medieval Modes of Address to the Problem of Magical and Miraculous Signifiers. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Toronto, 1994. ii, 353 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A55.12. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Signs of Power and the Power of Signs: Medieval Modes of Address to the Problem of Magical and Miraculous Signifiers Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 O'Callaghan, Tamara Faith Published O'Callaghan, Tamara Faith. "Love Imagery in Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, John Gower's Confessio Amantis, and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde." PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1995. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review "This thesis examines the imagery of love as it is depicted in three medieval versions of the story of Troy. The result is an attempt to determine to what extent Benoit, Gower, and Chaucer use love motifs and language to distinguish between the gendered experiences of the passion and to what extent love, as it is expressed by the various characters of both sexes, is considered to be the motivational force behind the events at Troy. . . . "In his Confessio Amantis, John Gower restructures the story of Troy around other tales of love and kingship which exemplify the same sin. By presenting the history of Troy out of sequence, by eliminating some of the traditional imagery and language, and by developing his own unique set of images and vocabulary, he effectively disassociates the love episodes from the war narrative. The love stories of Jason and Medea and of Paris and Helen become exempla of the sin of avarice, connected not so much by parallels in plot, but by similarities in the love experience of the main characters. . . . Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Love Imagery in Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, John Gower's Confessio Amantis, and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Kiefer, Lauren Published Kiefer, Lauren. ""My Family First: Draft-Dodging Parents in the Confessio Amantis."." Essays in Medieval Studies: Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association 12 (1995), pp. 55-68. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review For Gower, Kiefer argues, one of the central images of the unravelling of human bonds due to division and loss of love is the disruption of marriage and family. She focuses first on three tales of Ulysses, emphasizing how Gower has depicted in them the threat to family ties posed by mindless militarism. In "Nauplus and Ulysses," Ulysses always thinks of family first: "he dodges the draft out of love for his wife, but succumbs to the draft out of love for his child" (p. 57). By placing Nauplus in the traditional role of his son Palamedes, moreover, Gower has replaced the confrontation of two tricksters with a confrontation between two loving fathers. Gower's audience would have known that Ulysses was later responsible for the death of Palamedes. The tale of "Namplus and the Greeks" demonstrates that Nauplus/Namplus is just as devoted to his son as Ulysses is, but war turns his love to hatred, just as in the former tale it makes "the same loving father willing to jeopardize the life of another man's son" (p. 59). In "Achilles and Deidamia," Ulysses, drafted by a ruse, gets to draft Achilles with a ruse of his own. Gower emphasizes again the toll that war exacts on three different families, Thetis', Lichomede's, and that of Achilles and Deidamia, who is the real victim of Ulysses' guile. These three tales take place within a series of tales in Books 3, 4, and 5 in which families are placed at risk by outside pressures. In Book 3, "Canace and Machaire" places greatest emphasis on the need for parental devotion, and "Orestes" offers another demonstration of the threat to the family posed by war. In Book 4, Genius offers a series of tales in which love is opposed to militarism. Later in the book, when he attempts to link love and war via chivalry, he is successfully opposed by Amans, and the tale he offers, "Nauplus and Ulysses," shows the praise of military valor to be merely meaningless bluster. Book 5 offers several stories of families destroyed or abandoned, notably "Jason and Medea," "Theseus and Ariadne," and "Tereus." "We can trace a rough progression from tales of perverted devotion to family in Confessio Book Three, to discussion of the militarism which perverts it in Confessio Book Four, to an emphasis on the victims of the perversion -- women and children -- in Confessio Book Five. In all three books, however, Gower repeatedly privileges an individual's bonds to spouse and children over any other -- over the demands of heroic destiny, chivalric glory, or societal convention" (p. 65). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.2] 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 "My Family First: Draft-Dodging Parents in the Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Olsson's consideration of issues of "intimacy" and "love" leads not only to a substantial redefinition of what is at stake in Amans' confession but also to some interesting observations on the differences between medieval and modern expectations about privacy and personal relations. He focuses his discussion on the contrast between Amans and the four faithful wives of his concluding vision in Book 8: Penelope, Alceone, Alceste, and Lucrece. The comparison is obviously not favorable to Amans. Amans feels that his singleminded devotion to his lady is sufficient justification for his expectation of a "reward" and for his claims to intimacy with her. The fantasies that he conjures up when deprived of her real company indicate that he understands intimacy only in terms of sexual possession, as a desire to control which denies the woman any decision or choice, and which thus makes real intimacy impossible. His attempts to satisfy his passion have little to do with genuine love. The four wives illustrate a different conception both of self and of marital relations. They are distinguished from not only from Amans, but also from the younger lovers that precede them in Amans' vision, by their faithfulness, of course, but also by the maturity of their relationships and by their stable memory of their experience, the faculty that underlies and enables their strength of character. In MO, Gower reflects a common medieval ambivalence about the desirability of friendship and equality in marriage and the need for a hierarchy. In the ideal marriage, however, the virtues of each partner obviate whatever conflict might be implied in the choice. There is the risk, of course, that the woman's virtue might be defined simply in terms of her acceptance of her subordination, but Gower attributes to his ideal wives virtues that go beyond those required by a hierarchical marriage. That their virtues are associated with their waiting faithfully at home, moreover, places them at the nexus of the values that Gower associates with "home" in CA. Most notably, Amans is depicted as returning "home" with the recovery of his reason and his true sense of self at the very end of the poem, when he comes closest to understanding and practicing the virtues that the wives represent. As he recovers his memory, he becomes conscious of his age, and of the totality of human experience in which he participates. Home becomes for him not the place of forcible and immediate satisfaction but instead the place from which, by true understanding of oneself, one becomes truly qualified for intimacy with others. Where a modern places priority upon privacy, Gower valorizes openness instead, through confession and through the discovery of oneness with other human beings. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Olsson, Kurt Published Olsson, Kurt. "Love, Intimacy, and Gower." Chaucer Review 30 (1995), pp. 71-100. ISSN 0009-2002 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 Love, Intimacy, and Gower 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 1995 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 Anticlaudianus is not the usual point of reference for studies of CA, and vice versa. The originality of the juxtaposition is one measure of the provocativeness and occasional brilliance of Simpson's vigorous and ambitious new study, which offers radically novel readings of both poems at the same time that it draws them together in an intriguing exploration of the nature of the humanist poetics of the Middle Ages. It is not possible here to summarize Simpson's entire argument, particularly on the Anticlaudianus. Readers will find what Simpson himself disarmingly labels a "preposterous solution" to the problems posed by the form of Alain's poem (which involves taking the two major sections into which it falls in reverse order) that renders the poem considerably more subtle, but that needs to be considered and evaluated by those more familiar with Alain's text. With reference to CA, Simpson's main points can be summarized as follows: (1) The entire poem must be conceived as a psychological allegory between two faculties of the same soul, Amans representing the Will (or alternatively Desire), and Genius Imagination. Simpson means this quite seriously: in chapter 8 he even describes the tales that make up the bulk of the dialogue as being summoned forth by Amans' Imagination from his memory of his own previous reading. The way in which Imagination serves the Will and is originally called forth by the Will explains many of Genius' most obvious limitations, particularly his encouragement of Amans' passion. (In support of his argument, Simpson cites particularly egregious examples of Genius' "pedagogy"; and as a source for Genius' voice in the poem, Simpson invokes the Ovidian praeceptor amoris of the Ars and the Remedia.) But though Genius serves Desire, he is not limited by Desire. During the course of the poem he invokes images and "information" that bring about both his and Amans' psychic restoration, and true to his function as Imagination, he finally serves successfully as a bridge between Will and Reason. (2) Like Anticlaudianus, the poem offers a program of instruction in the medieval "sciences" which gives priority to politics as the point of mediation between ethics and cosmology as well as a model for ethical "self-rule." Genius thus becomes increasingly rational as he moves from instruction on love to the citation of examples from the political domain, and as shown in Simpson'a analyses of the second half of Book 3 and of Book 7, politics serves as the vehicle for drawing Amans himself to greater personal knowledge and therefore greater self-control. (3) The form of the poem is thus a mirror of the formation of the soul. Simpson uses the multiple senses of ME "informacioun" as the model for his (and Gower's) conception of poetic form: in the process of transmitting "information" or knowledge (particularly on the proper hierarchy of the sciences), the poet "informs" or gives shape to his poem, and also "informs," both educates and gives "form" to, his reader. (4) Again as in Anticlaudianus, the actual protagonist of the poem is the reader himself. (The male pronouns are used advisedly; neither poet seems to have given much thought to female readers.) Since there is no stable authority figure in CA, the reader must participate in the construction of the meaning, and the process of "formation" with which the poem is concerned is not so much represented in Amans as it is enacted in the reader. Each of these proposals could be, and should be, the subject of considerable serious discussion. To take only the first: it is one thing to say that Anticlaudianus, in which one character is called "Ratio" and another "Fronesis" or "Prudentia," is a psychological allegory, and another to make the same claim of a poem in which the major characters are called "Genius" and "Amans." What is our standard for the validity of such a reading? Simpson's argument relies on his analysis of the multiple senses of "information" in chapter 1 and on his observations on the shortcomings of some of Genius' lessons. But does the opening scene of the poem, in which Amans prays to Venus and Venus then summons Genius to hear Amans' confession, really depict something so simple as the evocation of Imagination by the "concupiscent will" (p. 254)? As justification for the notion that Amans represents Will or Desire, Simpson quotes no less than three separate times the same passage in Book 4 in which Amans asks Genius for instruction in the craft of love (pp. 135, 150-51, 178) as if it were the defining moment in their relation. There are an abundance of other equally significant passages, however, that cannot easily be subsumed under so limited a notion of Amans' role. It is difficult to think of "Will," for instance, as being the site of the conflict between Wit and Will that Amans describes in Book 3 (see Simpson, p. 179-80). It is difficult to see how the faculty of Will can also be characterized as a senex amans who is subject to delusion (see Simpson, p. 160). And it is even harder to conceive of Desire responding to Genius' inquiry whether he has even been guilty of Rapine by saying, in one of the more striking passages of the dialogue, "Certes, fader, no; / For I mi ladi love so" (5.5532-33). If Amans is perhaps alternately the faculty of Will and a more fully constituted human subject engaged in a "confession," why is it necessary to consider him a faculty at all? If Amans is not merely a faculty, moreover, there is no need for believing Genius to be one. Simpson's argument on the deficiencies of Genius' instruction amounts to little more than the observation that his lessons (particularly at the beginning of a book) do not contain everything that he teaches by the end. There is thus a progression to his instruction, as we might expect from any teacher. The reduction of the poem to a psychological allegory may solve some problems, but it certainly introduces a considerable number of others. Simpson's insistence on the pervasiveness of the allegory helps justify his attempt to align CA with the Anticlaudianus, and it also underlies his argument on the reader's participation in the construction of meaning. It is not essential, however, to his argument on the poem's theme. His invocation of the centrality of the "science" of politics (which owes much, as he acknowledges, to Porter's essay in Minnis' Responses and Reassessments [1983]), offers a useful mediation between the Lewis-Bennett-Minnis school on the one hand and the Coffman-Fisher-Peck school on the other. (He rejects entirely the argument that the poem teaches Amans to transcend human love, represented by a large group of critics, most recently by Olsson [1992].) His reading is considerably more nuanced than Porter's is, moreover: it includes a recognition of the need to reserve a place for human desire both in the person and in the polis, and it attributes to Gower at the end a mixture of optimism over the possibility of reconciliation and integration, both in the soul and in the state, and some skepticism about the actual perfectability of real humans. His comparison of Gower's work to Alain de Lille's is particularly instructive in this very regard. The formal similarities go only so far. More interesting are the contrasts Simpson finds, for they do more to help place Gower as a poet of his own time. Where Alain is aligned with Plato and Vergil, Gower's sympathies are with Aristotle and Ovid. Alain is epic, elitist, and absolutist, calling for submission to a higher power; Gower is elegiac, consensual, constitutionalist, calling for reconciliation and mutual restraint, both personally and politically. The Gower that he presents is a more complex and more humane poet than we have become accustomed to in recent criticism. And if Simpson's argument on the reader's role and on the presentation of the "sciences" in the poem carries weight, then Gower is also much more sophisticated a poet than we imagined. His case deserves our close attention. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Simpson, James Published Simpson, James. "Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus and John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 25 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 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 Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus and John Gower's Confessio Amantis 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 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review ["In the three and a half decades since the publication of Ariès's seminal work, Centuries of Childhood, our understanding of Western European medieval notions of right relations between parents and children has changed significantly. . . . In the context of the post-Ariès vision of medieval attitudes toward parents and children, this dissertation examines the works of three English poets of the late fourteenth century, Chaucer, Gower, and the Pearl-poet. . . . All three poets, while presenting relations between parents and children that reflect with some degree of realism contemporary assumptions about familial bonds, also idealize children, often associating them with the miraculous. In Pearl such idealization takes its grandest form, as the poet places the death of a child in the context of Christian Resurrection. In the Confessio Amantis Gower's strongest tales include scenes of anagnorisis, in which children restore parents to new life. In the works of Chaucer, the poet employs the idealized child in the widest variety of contexts; miracles range from a small act of generosity to an instance of Christian transcendance. As the dissertation demonstrates, each of the three poets presents, against a background of real relations between parents and children in this world, a vision of the child, in his or her rejection of such sublunary concerns, triumphant." [JGN 15.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bauer, Kate A. Published Bauer, Kate A.. "The Portrayal of Parents and Children in the Works of Chaucer, Gower, and the Pearl-poet." PhD thesis, New York University, 1995. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Portrayal of Parents and Children in the Works of Chaucer, Gower, and the Pearl-poet Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Bullón-Fernández, María Published Bullón-Fernández, María. "Fathers and Daughters in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis': Authority, Politics, and Gender in late medieval England." EngD thesis, Cornell University, 1995. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review ["This dissertation argues that in the Confessio Amantis John Gower uses the father-daughter relationship as the model on which he explores and raises complex social, political, and gender issues in connection with the definition and uses of paternal, kingly, and artistic authority. "Chapter One, 'Fathers and Daughters: Defining Authority,' discusses the methodological approach. I combine a feminist perspective, employing Judith Butler's theories on gender performativity and on the incest taboo, as well as Lynda Boose on the structure of father-daughter relationships, with a socio-historical perspective, drawing on David Aers' and Lee Patterson's studies on politics and literature in fourteenth-century England. In Chapter Two, 'Daughters and Father Figures: The "Tale of Albinus and Rosemund," "The Tale of the False Bachelor," and "Pygmaleon and the Statue,"' I examine three tales which problematize the structural resemblance underlying husband-wife and father-daughter relationships in the context of politics, in the case of the first two tales, and artistic creation, in the story of Pygmalion. Chapter Three, 'Liminal Daughters: The "Tale of Canace and Machaire," the "Tale of Virginia," and the "Tale of Leucothoe,"' studies three tales in which the daughters are the focal point for Genius' articulation of the father's anxiety over the control of their daughters' sexuality, thus highlighting the limits of the fathers' authority over them. As these fathers are crucial political figures, Gower also examines the limits of political authority. "In Chapter Four, '"Bot what maiden hire esposaile Wol tarie . . .": The "Tale of Rosiphelee" and the "Tale of Jepte,"' I analyze the ways in which social ideology regulates the daughter's sexuality, not so much through the fathers, but by different means -- even through the authority of a narrator/auctor like Genius. Chapter Five, 'Redeeming Daughters: The "Tale of the Three Questions," the "Tale of Constance," and "Apollonius of Tyre,"' centers on three tales in which the father-daughter relationships work in the interests of society and of the political system. Gower's focus on daughters generates an effective metaphor for political relations in fourteenth-century England." [JGN 15.2] 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 Fathers and Daughters in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis': Authority, Politics, and Gender in late medieval England Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Robins, William Randolph Published Robins, William Randolph. "Ancient Romance and Medieval Literary Genres: Apollonius of Tyre." PhD thesis, Princeton University, 1995. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review ["The story of Apollonius of Tyre is the only ancient romance that was known to the medieval West, where it was remarkably popular. Its narrative principle of random contingency served to differentiate it from dominant narrative assumptions in western medieval literature. Without the context of the Greek romances, medieval readers understood the story's provocative randomness in terms of other generic categories, and thus the way various late antique and medieval cultures reponded differently to this same story provides clues about the operations of several distinct literary systems." Chapter 4 treats the OE version; chapter 5 contrasts Antonio Pucci's Apollonio di Tiro with Boccaccio's use of the story in the Filocolo. "Chapter 6 argues that in John Gower's Confessio Amantis the story of Apollonius stages a confrontation between two temporal logics of narrative -- romance and exemplum -- which governs the poem's engagement with its readers." [JGN 15.2] 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 Ancient Romance and Medieval Literary Genres: Apollonius of Tyre Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review ["Human to animal shape-shifting is one of the most universal cultural motifs, appearing in the literature, mythology and sculpture of virtually every people on earth. For all that the theme of metamorphosis denotes the possibility of voluntary fluidity, it also delineates the reality of separation and definition. . . . This thesis examines the nature and use of metamorphosis in four texts. John Gower's Confessio Amantis uses Ovidian stories as a means of discussing the nature and stability of human hierarchies. Social violations bring about physical transformations, which cause humans to lose their place in the Great Chain of Being." Other works considered are Chaucer's KnT, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the Middle Welsh Math vab Mathonwy. "In short, human-to-animal metamorphosis focuses on the limits of humans as social animals, as users of metaphor and as creative beings." [JGN 15.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Schutz, Andrea K. Published Schutz, Andrea K.. "Theriomorphic Shape-Shifting: An experimental reading of identity and metamorphosis in selected medieval British texts." PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1995. 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 Theriomorphic Shape-Shifting: An experimental reading of identity and metamorphosis in selected medieval British texts Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Grady, Frank Published Grady, Frank. "The Lancastrian Gower and the Limits of Exemplarity." Speculum 70 (1995), pp. 552-75. Gower Subject In Praise of Peace Review Gower's longer poems, MO, VC, and CA, have frequently been studied with reference to the political events of the poet's time, especially the turbulent last decade of the reign of Richard II when VC and CA both apparently underwent substantial revision. Grady looks at a different work, the poem that Macaulay entitled "In Praise of Peace," in the context of a different era, the equally turbulent first years of the reign of Henry IV; and he finds that, rather than being an "inert, if elegant, piece of Lancastrian propaganda" as commonly thought, the poem actually betrays the "anxieties of its historical moment": that it reflects, more consciously than has ever been recognized, the incoherencies of the "legitimating discourse" that defended the rights of a conqueror and usurper to the throne, and also, in the subtlety of its strategy, the difficulties inherent in giving advice to a king. Gower opens his poem with a straightfaced echo of the rhetoric of the official Lancastrian justification of the usurpation, but his ostensible project, the advocacy of peace, is obviously difficult to reconcile with the necessity of defending Henry's use force to assert his right to the throne. The problems become evident when Gower resorts to his favorite technique of historical analogy: the exempla that he chooses must be forced to fit the context (as we can see by comparing them to the same stories in CA), and still fail to fully support his point. He begins his argument, for instance, by apparently offering a choice between Solomon's course and Alexander's. Each must be so beset by qualifications, however, that neither offers a clear model for Henry (the implications of the comparison to Alexander, in fact, seem particularly dangerous at this time), nor does either support the complex balancing of wisdom and the need for war that Gower finally advocates in lines 64-70. For the alert reader, the poet raises more questions here about Henry's rule and about the possibility of reconciling wisdom and conquest than he chooses to answer: rather than exploring the contradictions, both in the position he adopts and in his method, Gower merely plunges on. The later example of Constantine (lines 337-57) is even more contrived, for there are conflicting legends of his conversion, and Constantine thus offers no clear distinction between the "law of grace and pity" and "the law of right." But Gower selects what is necessary for his point, just as he selects, and omits a great deal, in the portrait that he chooses to paint of Henry, in order to draw the analogy between his king and Constantine. "We might atttribute this strategy to the triumph of hope over experience or, given the genre, advice over history," Brady writes. "But I would suggest that it is precisely Gower's twenty-five years' hard experience as a poet writing to kings about kingship that makes him simultaneously so conventional in his praises and so subtle in his exasperation. For that is what I take 'In Praise of Peace' to be, in the end -- a poem of exasperation and a valediction to the mirror-for-princes genre, in which Gower's great fidelity to the genre's formal demands and deep grasp of its philosophical premises produce a text that is always on the verge of revealing the intractable paradoxes of that form and the incoherence (or tendentiousness) of that philosophy. 'In Praise of Peace' is a kind of fugitive art, constantly fleeing from the contradictions that it is incessantly uncovering." [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.1] 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 The Lancastrian Gower and the Limits of Exemplarity Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 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 Vasta, Edward Published Vasta, Edward. "Chaucer, Gower, and the Unknown Minstrel: The Literary Liberation of the Loathly Lady." Exemplaria 7 (1995), pp. 395-418. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review Vasta submits the three best-known ME versions of the "loathly lady" story -- Gower's tale of Florent, Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale," and "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell" -- to an analysis in terms of Bakhtin's notions of the confrontational and liberating powers of the grotesque and the "carnivalesque." By the standards that these terms imply, Gower's and to a lesser degree Chaucer's versions both fall short. By the time of the three English romances, the loathly lady had already been severely marginalized from her earlier status as part of the official culture. Unlike her Greek and Celtic counterparts, she bears no sovereignty of her own, but must win a male-bestowed sovereignty in order to regain her place in the culture from which she has been excluded. The renewal she offers, moreover, is merely personal rather than natural or cultural. In this last respect, however, the implications of individual renewal progressively widen in the three ME versions, finally reaching something like the cultural renewal of her earlier manifestations in "Dame Ragnell." The means for both her confrontation with official culture and the renewal that she gives is provided by grotesquerie and laughter, which "turns the usual, officially dominated world upside down and inside out." Gower's tale of Florent would seem to have least patience with the notion of the grotesque, humorlessly employing the loathly lady in service of a straightforward moral on obedience and patience that is endorsed by and sustains the official culture. The "aura of official culture ideology and power" is maintained in the tale by the heavy emphasis on contracts and legal obligation. In the conclusion to the tale, Florent's circumstances are improved, but there is no transformation in his character, much less in the society in which he moves, since all takes place in private. The loathliness of the hag, moreover, itself has no carnivalesque or redemptive function, but is merely the effect of her stepmother's antipathy. Chaucer's ideology is equally conventional and equally supportive of the ruling culture status quo, and it is placed even more obviously in the center of the tale, in the loathly lady's address to her new husband. The husband in Chaucer's version, however, faced with a more complex choice than in Gower's, is enlightened to an "anti-official ideology" in his active recognition of the woman's sovereignty. Assigning the tale to WB gives universality to the loathly lady's claims, but WB's own claim to authority is restricted and contained by the humor with which Chaucer treats her for her deviation from official cultural standards. In neither Gower's nor Chaucer's tale is official culture transformed to incorporate the previously marginalized individual. Such liberation and renewal do occur in "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell." In this poem, which Vasta labels a "carnivalesque romance," the loathly lady much more clearly matches Bakhtin's definition of the "grotesque," both in appearance and in function; and in her cheerful and fearless lack of regard for convention and social restraint, she offers the "perfect example of Bakhtin's carnival spirit." The laughter in the tale, moreover, is equally at the expense of the lady herself and the seriousness with which the official culture of the court attempts to maintain its dignity. With the removal of the mask of her loathliness and Gawain's surrender of authority and freedom, the entire court is transformed: the previously sober Gawain become less respective of convention, Ragnell fills the previously gloomy court with play, and she reconciles Arthur with her brother Gromer. The romance ends with the narrator's prayer for his own release from prison, in which he repeatedly draws upon the language of rebirth, in both respects echoing the redemptive structure of the poem as a whole. "Unlike Chaucer and Gower, who show the power of the official culture confronting wrongdoers, this romancer shows the official culture's power as the wrongdoer, and the victims of the wrongful power as not only correcting the court but as renewing and perpetuating it." [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.1] 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 Chaucer, Gower, and the Unknown Minstrel: The Literary Liberation of the Loathly Lady Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation demonstrates that a number of economic, social, and political elements came together in the late fourteenth century to provide a moment in English literature where London acquired a significant cultural presence in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer and his contemporaries. . . . Using the market values of the city, Langland's Piers Plowman becomes as much an exploration of the value of the soul as it is a quest for the soul's redemption. As a result, Langland's poem critiques more than just the moral aspects of his society but the economic and social elements as well. Gower's Confessio Amantis concerns the role of truth in human society; many of the tales show that characters who seek truth prosper, while those who do not perish." [JGN 15.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bertolet, Craig E Published Bertolet, Craig E. "The Rise of London Literature: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Poetics of the City in Late Medieval English Poetry." Ph.D. dissertation. Pennsylvania State University, 1995. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Rise of London Literature: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Poetics of the City in Late Medieval English Poetry Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "My dissertation . . . examines the literary preoccupation with amorous infidelity that flourished during the 1380's. This decade was, not coincidentally, a period that witnessed a heightened interest in treason law. By contextualizing the literary trope that links treason and love, I demonstrate how the political concerns of Chaucer, Gower and Usk are displaced and restated in another discursive register. . . . Gower's Confessio Amantis urges rulers to avoid tyranny and false counsel by shunning lechery. The Confessio thus offers an art of love as a manual of advice for rulers: by depicting deviant forms of love as treason, the poem links sexual regulation and good governance. In the Confessio, Amans' sexual reform serves as an example for Richard II to emulate. This seemingly innocuous example ultimately aligns Gower's poem with the rhetoric of subversion that alleged the transgressive sexual practices of Richard's court. Given the political environment in which these texts were written, treason in love acquires a referentiality that exceeds its literary locus. By historicizing the literary trope, I show how these writers' treatments of amorous infidelity situate their texts in the unstable and treacherous world of Ricardian politics." [JGN 15.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hanrahan, Michael Published Hanrahan, Michael. "Traitors and Lovers: The Politics of Love in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, Gower's Confessio Amantis and Usk's Testament of Love." PhD thesis, Indiana University, 1995. 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 Traitors and Lovers: The Politics of Love in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, Gower's Confessio Amantis and Usk's Testament of Love Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio Published Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio. "La traducción portuguesa de la Confessio Amantis de John Gower." Euphrosyne 23 (1995), pp. 457-466. ISSN 0531-2175 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review Announces the discovery of a manuscript of the Portuguese translation of CA, the source of the Castilian translation of the poem. The Castilian translation has long been known. (Macaulay has a few words about it, Works 2.clxvii-clxviii.) Dated (by Santano Moreno) sometime before 1454, it claims to be based on a Portuguese version by one Ruberto Payno, who has been identified with a clergyman who accompanied Philippa of Lancaster to Lisbon. Until now, no trace of this work has been found. The manuscript was discovered in the Biblioteco de Palacio, Madrid, where it had been catalogued simply as "Libro de las moralidades." Professor Cortijo had the good luck of having the existence of the manuscript communicated to him by Professor Angel Gomez Moreno, and then upon obtaining a microfilm, he had the perspicacity to identify it as the long lost translation of Gower. The manuscript is a paper quarto, about 10.25 x 7.5 inches. The main body, containing the translation, consists of 251 leaves written in two columns. It is preceded by 8 leaves containing an index to the poem in Castilian, evidently added later. The text begins with the first line of the English Prologue, with no mention of the title, the author, or the translator; but it is followed by a colophon which identifies the scribe (Joham Barroso, whom Cortijo has not been able to identify), his patron (D. Fernando de Castro the Younger, from Cepta, a small corner of Spanish territory in northwest Africa opposite Gibraltar), and the date of the completion of the copy, 1430. Santano Moreno recently argued that the translation was done after 1433. That date must now be revised and indeed pushed back beyond 1430 to allow enough time for the Portuguese version to become known, and a copy of it acquired, by a minor Spanish nobleman. The index was no doubt added for the convenience of the Spanish readers. It is not identical, however, to the index that is now attached to the Spanish translation, and that is one of several indications that the newly found manuscript is not that upon which the Spanish translation was based, allowing us to infer an even wider diffusion. It appears from Cortijo's account that the Spanish version follows the Portuguese very closely. Cortijo's essay contains the fullest description of the manuscript and it also provides the English, Portuguese and Spanish versions Book 1, lines 2681-2784, the portion of dialogue that precedes the tale of "Nebuchadnezzar's Punishment." [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 La traducción portuguesa de la Confessio Amantis de John Gower Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 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 Fredell offers a subtle and intriguing argument that links the textual tradition of CA, its reception in the early years of the fifteenth century, its illumination, and modern issues of interpretation. The earliest deluxe MSS of the poem all contain what Fredell refers to as the "Henrician" version, with the revised dedication and epilogue. (He groups together here the copies that Macaulay labeled as recensions "two" and "three.") In most of these MSS, the Prologue is headed by the miniature depicting Nebuchadnezzar and the statue that he sees in his dream. The deluxe MSS of the presumably earlier "Ricardian" version of the poem ("recension one") appear somewhat later; in these, the Nebuchadnezzar miniature has been moved to a place later in the Prologue, closer to Gower's reference to the episode in the text. In most of these, moreover, Nebuchadnezzar himself no longer appears, and the miniature depicts only the statue. That the Ricardian version of CA should still be copied after Richard's death is puzzling enough; that three copies of this version should actually have been owned by sons of Henry IV is even more puzzling. But Fredell suggests that the Lancastrians might have had reason for preferring the earlier version of the poem. Where the image of Nebuchadnezzar's dream appears first, he claims, it serves not only as a Biblical model for the type of vision experienced by Amans, but also as an exemplar of kingship. Nebuchadnezzar, here, is "a royal type of tyranny, madness, and desperate penitence after a fall" (p.63); and the miniature directs the reader's attention to the ways in which the entire poem can be read as a "penitential mirror for princes" (p. 63). Such a view of CA, severely moral and intended for the instruction of kings, is also reflected in the revisions that Gower made for the Henrician version of the poem, with its reminders of the failings of King Richard that brought about his fall and that resulted in the rededication to his successor. In the later manuscripts, the miniature, placed later in the Prologue, no longer functions as a frontispiece to the entire work. When Nebuchadnezzar himself is removed, moreover, the emphasis is shifted from the instruction of the king to the content of the dream, in which the statue functions as a morally neutral figure for impersonal Fortune. The poem, as well as the image itself, is freed not only from an instructional frame but also from its association with the historical context of Henry's usurpation. Such a view would have been preferable to the Lancastrians, Fredell argues, because by the early years of the fifteenth century, the "sterner [revised, 'Henrician'] version might be unflatteringly applied to them also, a sword of moral judgment that could cut two ways" (p. 69). The alternative, "humanist" reading, which emphasizes the "'literary' rewards of recreation and wisdom" over "the mirror for princes frame and moral absolutism" (p. 70), is also the one that is more congenial to many, though not all, modern readers of Gower's poem. In support of his argument, Fredell cites other evidence that by the early fifteenth century even Richard himself was seen as an icon of mutable fortune rather than as the deserving victim of his own crimes. Fredell also invokes the history of the same image in the MSS of Machaut's Remède de Fortune; and at the end of his essay, reproduces and describes the principal examples of the miniature in the MSS of CA. Fredell's essay is well documented and thought-provoking, but it argues for more than can be accepted without reservation. His fundamental premise, that the Nebuchadnezzar frontispiece, which illustrates his dream rather than his later madness, invokes an exemplar of kingship that determines a reading context for the entire poem, is not supported by his own account of how diversely the story of Nebuchadnezzar was read in the Middle Ages. It is also undermined by the example of the Remède. In the earliest MS of Machaut's poem, Nebuchadnezzar appears in the illustration with the statue of his dream, but in later copies only the statue appears because, Fredell suggests, the "fall of princes" motif is of no relevance to the poem's central theme. Fine, but that does not explain why Nebuchadnezzar is present in the first place. The example indicates that he could appear even when the "fall of princes" was not a central concern, an analogy that could easily extend to his appearances in CA. There are many other quibbles one might make (readers should make careful use of Fredell's notes, which qualify some of the assertions on which his argument is based), but this essay deserves serious consideration, if only because of the broad range of materials and methods that the author brings to bear in support of his conclusions. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fredell, Joel Published Fredell, Joel. "Reading the Dream Miniature in the Confessio Amantis." Medievalia et Humanistica 22 (1995), pp. 61-93. ISSN 0076-6127 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 Reading the Dream Miniature in the Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 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 Lindahl conducts another examination of the similarities and differences among Gower's tale of Florent, WBT, and "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnall" within his wide-ranging essay on the relations between elite and folk cultures and between oral and written literature in the late middle ages. Gower, "the most secure financially of the three authors, and clearly the most conservative politically, presents an elitist version." Florent is "the most orthodoxly elite of the three leading men." The old woman who gives him the riddle to solve "does so because she realizes that Florent is too nobly connected to be killed by any but treacherous means. In neither of the other tales does there appear a female figure who so clearly symbolizes an attack against basic feudal values." Only in Gower's version is the correct answer that women desire sovereignty in love: Genius suggests both before and after the tale that men must be obedient only in love. Such a reading limits the women's threat to the dominant male, and the loathly lady's revelation that she is a king's daughter "further dispels any hint that she may limit the knight's status." "Florent is a paean to the nobility that Gower served and by whom he was served so well. In its symbolic structure and its glosses, the poem reaffirms that a modicum of deference is all that is required to maintain male dominance." (All on p. 72.) The three versions of the tale demonstrate that the same plot can serve different value systems; they also show the mixing of oral performance and reading in medieval literary culture. It is possible, moreover, that WBT "was intended as a playful inversion of, and as a festive response to the sober clerical cast of Gower's tale" (p. 75). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lindahl, Carl Published Lindahl, Carl. "The Oral Undertones of Late Medieval Romance." In Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages. Ed. Nicolaisen, W.F.H.. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies (112). Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995, pp. 59-75. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Oral Undertones of Late Medieval Romance Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 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 Parkes' new essay constitutes a sequel to the groundbreaking study of the Trinity College MS of CA that he and Ian Doyle (the dedicatee of the festschrift in which the present essay appears) published in the festschrift for another of the century's great palaeographers, Neil Ker, in 1978. In the earlier essay, Doyle and Parkes studied the collaboration of five scribes in the production of a single copy of Gower's poem, and they concluded that while the scribes worked simultaneously, they must have worked independently, and that they could not therefore have been part of the same scriptorium. In his new study, Parkes examines a very different situation, the evident collaboration of ten different scribes whose hands can be detected either copying or revising six of our most important MSS of Gower's works: the four earliest MSS of VC, the "Fairfax" MS of CA (which served as the basis for Macaulay's edition), and the "Trentham" MS, containing shorter French and Latin compositions. All but the last of these contains significant rewriting over erasure and additions to the text that evidently reflect Gower's own revisions and alterations. Based on deductions from the nature of the revisions and from the pattern of the scribes' activity, Parkes drives what ought to be the final nails into the coffin of Macaulay's notion of a scriptorium in which Gower himself supervised the production of copies of his works, and adds some important details to our understanding of the operation of the London booktrade in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. His suggestions also complicate rather than simplify our understanding of the evolution of Gower's text. Parkes begins with a conventional account of Gower's revisions to his text as the poet's responses to contemporary events, an explanation that works better for the changes in VC than it does for those in CA. In the latter case, the allusions are not as direct, and many of the links to specific events that have been proposed are only speculative. For Parkes' purposes, however, sufficient evidence of chronology is provided by the non-controversial allusions to three key events: Henry's accession to the throne in 1399, Gower's blindness in approximately 1400, and his death in 1408. The most detailed and most interesting part of Parkes' essay is his close examination of the work of the ten scribes (illustrated in eight very valuable plates from the MSS that he discusses). His identification of the different hands at work in each MS is evidently identical to Macaulay's, but he gives a more precise account of the different stages of the work of the scribes who entered some of the more extensive revisions, based on changes in their handwriting and in the color of the ink. He also goes much further than Macaulay in identifying the same hand when it appears in other MSS, and he is thus able to compare the contribution that each scribe made in each copy on which he worked. One of his more important observations is that a scribe didn't necessarily work from the same exemplar when he entered revisions in different copies. Parkes is also able to show that there is no evidence of collaboration among the different scribes, or even that they worked simultaneously. He thus concludes that they worked fully independently of one another, as well as outside the poet's supervision. How did such a situation arise? The revised MSS must not have been produced for Gower himself, he deduces, but for different patrons who were likely the original owners of the "unrevised" copies, and who commissioned scribes to provide them with updated revisions. "The owners of these manuscripts must have been persons who knew that Gower had revised his texts, or perhaps that he had revised his views," who independently chose the same scribes since they all probably lived nearby in London. They evidently left to the scribes themselves, however, the procuring of an exemplar. The picture that Parkes offers here explains a great deal about the appearance of the surviving copies, but in other respects it raises more questions than ever. Parkes refers to these manuscripts as "first generation" copies, but it appears from his argument that none of them can be considered a replica of Gower's own exemplar. His discussion of the many layers of revision of the "Fairfax" MS casts doubt on all of the assumptions that Macaulay made in using it for his edition; it remains to some future editor to figure out how it and the other surviving copies, each with its own very complicated history, can be used in reconstructing Gower's text. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Parkes, Malcolm Published Parkes, Malcolm. "Patterns of Scribal Activity and Revisions of the Text in Early Copies of Works by John Gower." In New Science out of Old Books[:] Manuscripts and Early Printed Books: Essays in Honour of A.I. Doyle. Ed. Beadle, Richard and Piper, A.J.. London: Scolar, 1995, pp. 81-121. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Patterns of Scribal Activity and Revisions of the Text in Early Copies of Works by John Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Scolar, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 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 a lively and thought-provoking essay, Guthrie uses Bakhtin's notions of polyglossia as a way of approaching the complex effects of Chaucer's metrical variety and his response to the linguistics diversity of late fourteenth-century England. His foil through most of his discussion is Gower, who is found to be more rigid metrically (as we already knew), but who also feels constrained to keep his French and his English separate from one another rather than to force them into confrontation. Some of Guthrie's empirical observations on Gower's meter in contrast to Chaucer and also to contemporary French poets such as Machaut are useful contributions to our understanding of Gower's verse. Both the real value of his study with regard to Chaucer and also the irritating reductiveness of much of his use of Gower are represented, however, by passages such as this one: "Gower's line is ruled by ergon, the submission of linguistic material to the authority of an abstract metrical system. The presence of French words in either his English or his French line makes it a bilingual ergon, but essentially it is no different from a monolingual one. Its faith is in the ultimate tractability of words. Chaucer's line is ruled by energeia, the animation of linguistic material in tension with a concrete metrical system based in the material itself; 'no ideas but in things.' Its faith is in the ultimate vitality of words. Its metrical complexity is rooted in its linguistic complexity and its capacity for polyglossic perspective and laughter, the two prerequisites of what Bakhtin calls novelistic discourse ('Prehistory' 50" (p. 99). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 17.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Guthrie, Steve Published Guthrie, Steve. "Dialogics and Prosody in Chaucer." In Bakhtin and Medieval Voices. Ed. Farrell, Thomas J.. Gainesville: University of Florda Press, 1995, pp. 94-108. 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 Dialogics and Prosody in Chaucer. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Florda Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 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 A total of 32 of the 118 quotations with which Jonson illustrated his "English Grammar" are drawn from CA, 6 more than from Chaucer and far more than from any other source. That number is itself an indication of Gower's standing in the early seventeenth century. Yeager examines Jonson's work more closely in order to assess some of the reasons for that esteem. Gower appears in Jonson in the company of some illustrious names: Chaucer, Lydgate, Fox, Jewell, Norton, More, Lambert, Ascham, Cheke, Lord Berners, and the King James Bible (pp. 229-30). The quotations, Yeager suggests, are chosen to illustrate and to advance a certain notion of style, privileging a plain vernacular. Thus Chaucer is represented by the "lower range of his poetic voice" (p. 231); and Gower appears even plainer, and seems to have been a better example of Jonson's ideal style than any of the other authors from whom he quotes. Jonson almost certainly knew CA from one of Berthelette's editions rather than from Caxton's, and may have been influenced in his view of Gower by the emphasis on editorial and linguistic correctness in Berthelette's letter to his readers, and by the printer's praise of the poet's "olde englishe wordes and vulgars" in the dedication to Henry VIII (p. 233). Berthelette's praise of CA's "potential to effect moral improvement" (p. 234) also no doubt appealed to the humanist in Jonson, and justified the poet's appearance in the company of Ascham and the Bible. The perception of Gower as a proto-humanist may also have been aided by Berthelette's account of Gower's sources, which resembles the range of writers that Jonson himself drew upon for his Grammar, and by his Latinity, emphasized in Berthelette's printing of the Latin verses and prose glosses in the same column as the English text. Jonson gave considerable attention to the models he drew upon, Yeager argues, because of the circumstances under which the Grammar as we know it was composed, late in his life, after the loss of a considerable body of his work in a fire in 1623, and "when so much of posterity's assessment must have seemed to him to teeter in the balance" (p. 237). For the conception of the Grammar itself, Jonson was heavily indebted to de la Ramée ("Ramus"), whose own work is studded with examples from the most illustrious Latin authors. Jonson's choice of the twelve English authors that he cites indicates that he held them in equivalent esteem. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 17.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Ben Jonson's English Grammar and John Gower's Reception in the Seventeenth Century." In The Endless Knot: Essays on Old and Middle English In Honor of Marie Boroff. Ed. Tavormina, M. Teresa and Yeager, R.F.. Cambridge: Brewer, 1995, pp. 227-239. ISBN 0859914801 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 Ben Jonson's English Grammar and John Gower's Reception in the Seventeenth Century. 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 1995 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 Scanlon offers a fine-grained analysis of sexuality in Alain de Lille's "De planctu Naturae," deconstructing the grammatical figures used to refer to the "unspeakable" (and unnamed) sin of sodomy in the work, examining recurrent phallic metaphors (hammer and pen), aligning Alain's work with developments in canon law, confronting Genius's status as a priest, maintaining that the work is orthodox, and arguing that its orthodoxy is "the product of its transgressive figurations" (222). Ironically, perhaps queerly, Scanlon shows, the work depends upon transgression--grammatical, rhetorical, and figural--while it excommunicates those who transgress; at the same time, it communicates "the pleasure of the power in regulation" (226). Like modern efforts to control homoeroticism, the excommunication of sodomists in Alain, Scanlon concludes, reveals that "sexual regulation is a species of desire" (242). At the beginning of his essay, Scanlon comments briefly on the "Roman de la rose" and Gower's "Confessio Amantis," where, as in Alain, Genius is a priestly figure who "marks a series of moments where a single, specific practice of a single, if central, institution confronts a broad area of sexual behavior"--"taboos" of sodomy, adultery, and incest respectively in the three works. These confrontations "point quite emphatically to the dependence of these taboos on artificially constructed regulatory structures that are historically variable in the extreme" (214-15), although Scanlon does not specify where or how the pointing occurs or which structures he has in mind. The "very textuality," Scanlon continues, "of these metaphorical confrontations between taboo and institutional form suggest [sic] that sexual regulation is itself characteristically discursive," and, as such, counter evidence to the modern "proposition that medieval culture was disinterested in sex." (215), True as far as they go, these claims could be made more clearly, and they are a minor sidelight in Scanlon's larger argument. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Scanlon, Larry. Published Scanlon, Larry. "Speaking the Unspeakable: Alain de Lille, Sexual Regulation and the Priesthood of Genius." Romanic Review 86.2 (1995): 213-42. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Aanlogues, 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 Speaking the Unspeakable: Alain de Lille, Sexual Regulation and the Priesthood of Genius. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Allen characterizes late-medieval Southwark as a noisy, bustling suburb, separate from but affected by many of the social and political restraints and opportunities of the City of London. She credits Martha Carlin's 1983 University of Toronto dissertation for many of her details and emphases, and offers her own interpretive perspective that seeks to align Gower's outlooks with the environs in which he lived for "most of his adult life" (111): "Gower's situation, near but not in the City, and among some of the most wealthy and powerful of the land, seems to have consolidated his moral and political interests" (114). Even though "Gower lived in and for the world of books and wrote with extreme veneration for the past and its writers which screens out direct record," we can nevertheless, Allen tells us, "trace something of Gower's Southwark in his . . . allegories and moral narratives" (115). Enticing as it is, this goal is accomplished in only a very general way. Allen describes noteworthy features of Southwark, identifies Gower's likely affiliations with personages of the area, describes a number of events in Gower's life and times, and offers an engaging survey of his major works, focusing on narrative devices and intended audiences. Mention of Southwark in this survey of the poetry is infrequent, however, so that links between Southwark and Gower's works are neither specific nor clear. As commentary rather than biography or analysis, the essay is well worth reading for its details, perspectives, and energetic prose, but its potential is unfulfilled, perhaps necessarily so. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Allen, Rosamund S. Published In London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Julia Boffey and Pamela M. King (London: Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, 1995), pp. 111-47. ISBN 978-1-870059-07-7. 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 John Gower and Southwark: The Paradox of the Social Self. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Astell views the "Canterbury Tales" within the tradition of the medieval compilation, not just sharing formal qualities with Dante's "Commedia" and Gower's CA but engaging in direct dialogue with them on issues of common concern. She discerns two patterns underlying the structure of CT: the soul's journey through the seven celestial spheres, as described by Macrobius, beginning with the Saturnine KnT and reaching the lowest point in the sublunary realm of Fragment VI; and the commonplace tripartite division of knowledge into the theoretical, the verbal or rhetorical, and the practical. The latter, of course, is also found as the ordering principle of Book 7 of CA, no mere coincidence in Astell's view, as Chaucer borrows from, and argues with, the philosophical scheme of his contemporary. The three divisions of philosophy occur in CT in a chiastic pattern: "Theorique" is represented in fragments I-II and IX, "Rhetorique" in fragments III-IV-V and VII; and "Practic" in fragments VI and X. Astell relies heavily on the ordering of tales in the Ellesmere MS, and also on the formal apparatus of this copy, with its learned apparatus (which she compares to Gower's incorporation of Latin marginalia in CA), suggesting the poem's clerkly origin and its adherence to the conventions of the compilatio. Though she refers frequently to Gower's works (particularly to Book 7 of CA), this is much more a book about Chaucer than it is about Gower. For her discussion of Gower she relies heavily on our standard authorities: Fisher, Coleman, and Strohm on Chaucer's and Gower's common audience; Minnis and Manzalaoui on Gower as a compiler of received knowledge; and Porter, Yeager, and Simpson on the centrality of Book 7 of CA, on its relation to the Prologue, and on Gower's emphasis on ethics and politics. Her conclusions on the relations among Chaucer, Gower, and Dante tend not to be too surprising: Chaucer tends to be "focused on the present rather than on the ancient past [as Gower is] or on the paradisaical afterlife [as is Dante]" (p. 84); Chaucer is more sceptical and more questioning of closed systems of knowledge than Dante is; and where Gower focuses rather narrowly on ethics and politics and the fashioning of a philosopher-king, Chaucer's view is broader, encompassing moral theology too, and directed to the fashioning of a humble Christian penitent. Astell's book finds its place in Gower criticism as the most complete attempt to date to link Gower to Chaucer in such a way as to suggest his importance to his more famous contemporary. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Astell, Ann W Published Astell, Ann W. "Chaucer and the Universe of Learning." Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer and the Universe of Learning Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cornell University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 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 Tinkle, Theresa Lynn Published Tinkle, Theresa Lynn. "Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics, and English Poetry." Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Chapter 7 of this important new study is devoted to CA. Tinkle places herself among those who have discerned in Gower's poem a formal and thematic multiplicity that deliberately juxtaposes a variety of interpretive perspectives without offering a precise resolution among them. By placing the lover's complaint within a penitential frame, Gower emphasizes both the similarities and the differences between amatory and pastoral discourses, and "accentuates the heterogeneity apparent in late medieval discussions of sexuality" (p. 179). On pages 180-83 Tinkle gives a good brief statement of an increasingly common view of Gower's strategy in deploying Amans, a glossator, and the author of the Latin epigrams alongside Genius, who himself adopts different positions according to need and circumstance. Rather than seeing Genius himself as merely inept, she points out that precedent both for his shifting moral standards and for his occasional reductiveness can be found among other medieval mythographers. CA differs from its predecessors in the commentary tradition by its greater valorisation of narrative and by Gower's foregrounding of the disjunction between narrative and Genius' interpretation, which forces a recognition of the limitations of the conventional authoritative tradition of moralizing commentaries. The disparity between tale and lesson offers another instance of the "multiplication of authorities and voices" in the poem, which "forcefully argues against the possibility of any single, unquestionably authoritative model of interpretation" (p. 182). Tinkle's principal interest is in Gower's use of the tradition of mythographic hermeneutics within this frame. She traces two general patterns. In the first, conventional medieval mythography is given a certain limited authority. Amans, the conventional literary lover, has deified his own desires by projecting them onto the figures of Venus and Cupid; guilty of idolatry, he "has fallen into the pseudo-pagan error of divinizing natural forces and humans" (p. 179). "Genius corrects him by means of familiar mythographic explanations that demystify sexuality and its supposedly divine representatives" (pp. 179-80), most explicitly in Book 5, where he offers a conventional historical explanation of Venus and Cupid, and in Book 7, where he turns to astrology to disclose their natural origins. Rational, Christian arguments against ancient pagan religion are used as a way of counteracting the neo-paganism of a medieval lover. But consistent with his refusal to grant final authoritative status to any discourse, Gower also declines to privilege any single mythographic explanation, instead deliberately juxtaposing irreconcilable ways of understanding ancient myths in such a way as to encourage meditation on the relations among them, and to reveal them as the products of separate, interested, individual points of view. His challenge to the authority of the astrological explanation in Book 7 is particularly clear, in the shifting role that Genius attributes to Nectanabus, first of all, and in the conflicts he describes among astrologers, divines, and philosophers over the potency of the will. Genius argues both the irresistibility of the law of nature and the need for reason to govern the flesh, but his statements on the supposed priority of reason turn out to be equivocal and suggest the "predetermined failure of self-governance" (p. 192). His notion of natural law has numerous ambiguities too, represented in the many different manifestation of Venus (p. 190). Gower thus depicts both astrology and natural law as "products of historical human activity," and like Chaucer, Gower "makes visible the culturally invisible ideological bent of science and nature" (p. 189). Even in the final scene, of Amans' "healing," Gower "develops a poetry of figurative ambiguities rather than an argument" (p. 193). "With Venus and Cupid," Tinkle concludes, "Gower exploits the multiplicity of traditions -- literary amatory conventions, historicizing and astrologizing hermeneutics, natural law -- so as to remake their meanings. . . . Within the poem, all the diverse traditions form an integrated whole, within which each convention, each discourse, each perspective enters into endlessly fascinating interplay with the others. The poem does not offer a single meaning but, rather, engaging invitations to reflect on the perspectives that create meaning and on the discourses that construct sexualities. We can of course resist the poem and select a single discourse (penitential, for instance) through which to read it. To the extent that humans tend to be uncomfortable with unresolved ambiguities, the text certainly invites this readerly activity. We might nevertheless choose simply to respect Gower's design, which calls into question the relationships between human wisdom and cosmic orders, between mind and body, between theological and scientific perspectives, without advancing the sure answers of a hegemonic discourse." The value of Tinkle's work for the study of Gower extends far beyond this challenging interpretation of CA. The opening chapters of her book contain a brilliant survey of the medieval mythographic tradition, in which she argues against the pervasive, naively historicist reading of such authors as Augustine, Fulgentius, Isidore, Alberic, and Bersuire in search of "transparent, immediately accessible meanings" (p. 211) that can be used for the explication of other, more "belletristic" texts; and against the corollary and equally common procedure of "torturing all medieval discourses until they confess the same truth" (p. 43). One must read her analyses for the evidence she presents that each of these authors "advances specific ideologies of sexuality" (p. 31), and that "there is no universal value, mythographic or ecclesiastical, to which we can refer for a fixed understanding of all medieval Venuses and Cupids" (p. 43). She disposes forever (one hopes) of the notion that all medieval authors recognized just two Venuses, the concupiscent one and the charitable one; and in dismissing the entire notion of a fixed value for either Venus or Cupid, she forces our attention upon individual texts. One discovers some unexpected sources for some of the ideas that show up in CA (see, for instance, her discussion of Fulgentius on page 56); but more importantly, Tinkle has opened up the study of the poem with her insistence that each author makes his own contribution to the medieval discussion of sexuality. Gower too can be allowed to have his own views on morality and sexuality, even if they are not precisely like Augustine's, and even if they are not quite as indeterminate as Tinkle herself asserts. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.2] 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 Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics, and English Poetry Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Stanford University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 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 "Although most criticism of the Confessio Amantis acknowledges the Latin texts as Gower's work, studies of specific tales in the work, like its treatment in studies of medieval genres like confession, dream vision and exemplum, generally privilege the Middle English narrative. Investigation into the dynamic interaction of text and apparatus, however, reveals in Gower's project a complex exploitation and modification of medieval scholastic and literary traditions. It also illuminates Gower's artful cultivation of ambiguity throughout the work. The reciprocal influence of Latin and Middle English texts permeates the Confessio, and thereby highlights the importance of the issue of auctoritas and its sentence. "This study relies on manuscript research, evidence of scholastic commentary traditions, an investigation of literary genre, and close reading of portions of the work to argue for a re-appraisal of the Confessio Amantis. Based on interpretations that acknowledge the interaction of all of its constituent parts, it demonstrates Gower's keen sensitivity to the relationship between form and content in literature. His sophisticated manipulation of that relationship governs this dissertation's attention to the texts in the authoritative language and the ways in which they affect, and are affected by, the Middle English narrative. Acknowledging the importance of Gower's dependence on medieval literary traditions, this dissertation discovers in the Confessio Amantis evidence of his success in the creation of 'some new thing.'" Directed by Tim William Machan. Abstract provided by the author. [JGN 16.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Batchelor, Patricia Published Batchelor, Patricia. "Unjustified Margins: Vernacular Innovations and Latin Tradition in Gower's Confessio Amantis." PhD thesis, Marquette University, 1996. 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 Unjustified Margins: Vernacular Innovations and Latin Tradition in Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Ferster, Judith Published Ferster, Judith. "Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England." Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Review Ferster's chapter on Gower, in this new study of the Fürstenspiegel tradition in the late Middle Ages, is a lengthened version of the essay entitled "O Political Gower" that appeared in the 1993 special issue of Mediaevalia (reviewed in JGN 13, no. 2, pp. 9-10). Her Mediaevalia piece focussed on the ways in which Gower embedded commentary on contemporary issues in the "Mirror for Princes" in Book 7 of CA. Mixing some subtle rereadings with a sharp alertness to context, she found beneath the poet's obvious deference to the king some pointed advice, particularly on the very subject of advice itself: "The key to [Richard's] success," Gower suggests, according to Ferster, "is not his choice among aristocratic advisors, but his willingness to bend to hear the complaints of the commoners" (Mediaevalia 16 [1993):41). Ferster broadens her analysis in this lengthened version by giving more attention to the language of CA, demonstrating both that Gower's deference is more marked in his English poem than it is in either MO or VC, and also that the language that he uses in describing petitions to kings echoes the idiom of contemporary political discourse. She also comments at greater length on what she sees as Gower's representation of the voice of the gentry in contemporary disputes. Finally, she adds a completely new discussion of a group of tales in Book 7 -- "Diogenes and Aristippus," "Tarquin and Aruns," and "Ahab and Micaiah" -- that, in the paradoxes they raise, seem to bring into question what she calls the "hermeneutics of counsel" and to suggest, before offering an alternative in attention to the vox populi, the futility of a king's dependence upon his own counsellors. The inclusion of her discussion of Gower within the frame of her broader study also allows Ferster to place Book 7 much more persuasively within the tradition of the "advice for princes" from which it derives. The two main themes of Ferster's book are the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in any situation in which a poet or author presumes to advise his king, and the ways in which each of the various works that make up the Fürstenspiegel tradition, beginning with the Secretum Secretorum, can be found to contain a specific contemporary agenda beneath the gestures of deference and the overt endorsement of the monarch's power that are inevitable to the genre. In England in particular, she argues, the principal of the community's right to impose limitations on the king was embodied in Magna Carta, and discussion of the reciprocal relations between monarch and subjects was often phrased in terms of the right to give and the duty to follow advice. By the fourteenth century there was an active community of political discourse, with different groups staking out their rights to advise the king, and several obvious and well known instances in which either the king himself was deposed or his powers limited. The dangers of opposing the king were nonetheless very real, and the trope of the king's need for good advice provided a justification for what might otherwise be taken as a presumption upon the king's power, while the genre of the manual of advice, offered in presumed deference to the king, could be the safest means for offering critical, if necessarily indirect, comment on policies of special importance to the author. Ferster includes chapters on James Yonge's 1422 English translation of the Secretum Secretorum, on Chaucer's Tale of Melibee, and on Hoccleve's Regement of Princes as well as on CA, and she concludes with a brief consideration of Machiavelli's The Prince. She sets the Melibee in the context of the Appellants' crisis, and argues that both the lapses in Prudence's judgment and Melibee's inability to put her advice into practice represent Chaucer's attempt to deconstruct the ideology of advice by which the Appellants justified their impositions upon Richard's authority. Hoccleve, she argues, mixes his endorsement of the legitimacy of the Lancastrian line with pointed criticism of Prince Henry and discussion of some of the most divisive issues of the last years of his father's reign. Each of these readings, like her comments on Book 7 of CA, raises particular problems, both in Ferster's techniques as a reader and in her interpretation of the contemporary political setting; in the former regard, her emphasis upon the apparently deliberate self-contradictions in both CA and the Melibee depends upon an expectation of a formal and thematic consistency in a work of this sort and of this period that is perhaps unreasonably high. The great merit of her book is that by juxtaposing these works and asking the same sorts of questions about them, she has removed the mask of the authors' self-presentation to their patrons and opened up the whole tradition of the advice to the king to a more critical and more revealing view; and in response to the doctrine that there is no possibility of escape from contemporary ideology, she has convincingly demonstrated the presence of a multitude of dissenting voices, however covert some may be, in the political discourse of late medieval England. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.1] 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 Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Pennsylvania Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 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 Fourteen of the surviving MSS of CA contain an illustration of Amans kneeling before his Confessor. In three others, the scribes have left a blank space for the inclusion of a miniature in the same places where this illustration normally appears. In most of the illustrations, Amans is depicted as a young man; in three of them he is noticeably old. J.A. Burrow has already discussed the implications of the figure's apparent age and of the revelation in the illustration of that which is not revealed in the text until the very end. Garbáty is more concerned with the illustrators' and the readers' perception of the identity or distinctness of Amans and the historical author. Conventions of medieval painting make it impossible for us to be certain whether any of these illustrations is intended as portraiture, he observes, but the collar of SS that Amans wears in the miniature in Bodley Fairfax 3 is clearly meant to suggest an identification between the illustrated figure (who is also depicted as old) and the poet Gower. More evidence of such identification is provided, Garbáty argues, in the fact that most of the illustrations show Amans wearing a long gown or robe similar to the one worn by Gower's tomb effigy, and that in twelve of the fourteen he is attired in red or pink, matching the scarlet of the gown in a 1719 description of the tomb. The illustrators' attempts to identify Amans with Gower's appearance in effigy suggest to Garbáty that Gower's earliest readers did not make a critical differentiation between the author and his fictional persona. This argument depends to some extent upon an unusually late date for the Fairfax MS, after Gower's death (see note 13), so that it too may be considered as derivative of the tomb effigy. The only evidence Garbáty presents is the unlikelihood that Gower would have been depicted with a collar of SS while Richard II was still alive. Many, possibly including Gower, did wear such a collar during Richard's lifetime, but even if they did not, the illustration by no means excludes the normal dating of c. 1400. Both paleographers and textual scholars will have trouble with Grabáty's proposal of a later date, and if it is not correct, then there needs to be some explanation other than the tomb effigy alone for the habit of depicting Amans/Gower in red in these illustrations. Garbáty includes in his essay a black and white reproduction and a description of each of the fourteen surviving Confessor illustrations. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Garbáty, Thomas J. Published Garbáty, Thomas J.. "A Description of the Confession Miniatures for Gower's Confessio Amantis with Special Reference to the Illustrator's Role as Reader and Critic." Mediaevalia 19 (1996), pp. 319-43. Gower Subject Biography of Gower 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 A Description of the Confession Miniatures for Gower's Confessio Amantis with Special Reference to the Illustrator's Role as Reader and Critic Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 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 rightness of relations is a major theme in late medieval literature. The criteria for rightness include the identity of wills, the doctrine of submission, and the imitatio Dei. The identity of wills refers to the sharing of goals and desires shared by two persons in a hierarchical relationship (king and subject, master and servant, husband and wife, et cetera). The doctrine of submission establishes obedience as a prerequisite for authority. The imitatio Dei urges likeness to Christ as the foundation for rightness. These three criteria emerged from the junctures of feudal, commercial, and Christian ideologies." Gower is one of the authors Charnley considers to illustrate the appearance of these themes, along with Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, the Pearl-poet, DeGuileville, and Langland." [JGN 16.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Charnley, Susan Christina De Long Published Charnley, Susan Christina De Long. "'I wol nat serve . . .': Authority and Submission in late medieval English literature." Ph.D. dissertation. Michigan State University, 1996. 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 'I wol nat serve . . .': Authority and Submission in late medieval English literature Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review McKinley justifies Gower's frequently criticized departure from the content and structure of the rest of his poem in Book 7 of CA by citing the analogy of the classical ecphrasis, which she defines (rather more broadly than usual) as "a protracted (often book-length) narrative digression which may depend for much of its dramatic power on visual representation, but which is ultimately used by the poet to address a theme or themes (often political) which transcend the 'main story' of the larger poem" (pp. 161-62). She cites three principal examples to support her definition: Homer's description of Achilles' shield in the Iliad, Book 18, known to medieval readers in Baebius Italicus' first-century "Ilias Latina"; Virgil's description of Aeneas' shield in Book 8 of the "Aeneid"; and Orpheus's song in Book 10 of the "Metamorphoses," which McKinley describes as a "self-contained mini-epic" (p. 162). The first two of these interrupt the narratives in which they are contained in order to offer a broadened perspective on the action of the poem, Homer's with a view of the entire cosmos, extending down to a classical version of the "fair field full of folk;" and Virgil's with its summary of Roman history down to the time of the Caesars. Ovid's ecphrasis is rather different in nature, containing eight separate stories within a story, and offering a single coherent view of the "bewildering complexities and joys of human love." McKinley finds both structural and thematic resemblances between Book 7 and each of these. Ovid provides the model for a "fully coherent poem-within-a-poem" (p. 169), for the use of narratives within the ecphrasis, for the framing of tales within a tale (as in "The King, Wine, Woman and Truth"), and for the use of contrasting exempla. Though Virgil is ingratiating and Gower "cautionary" (p. 172), the Roman poet provides a precedent for Gower's address to his ruler; and though their agendas differ, "both poets employ the structural ecphrasis to project a social and political commentary on the ruler" (p. 173). Aeneas' inability to understand the vision of Roman history is recalled, moreover, in Amans' general cluelessness about the applicability of Genius' instruction to his own case. Homer/Baebius, finally, uses the ecphrasis as a way of juxtaposing microcosm and macrocosm: "the vision offered is much like a corrective lens, through which the character (Achilles; Amans) is shown a world whose concerns are much greater than his own and whose harmony depends upon his own active contribution to the social order" (p. 182). McKinley uses her comparison to works so dissimilar to one another as part of a general argument on the importance of Book 7 as the place in which Gower "convey[s] his own artistic, philosophical, and ethical vision" (p. 170). She sees a dual lesson in Gower's ecphrasis, one for Amans, on the foolishness of his love, and one for Richard II, on "importance of self-governance and proper kingship" (p. 170); and she suggests at one point that with Book 7 Gower "complicates the larger enterprise of the Confessio such that we are compelled to ask whether the larger outlying story of Amans isn't fundamentally a 'backdrop' however detailed, for Gower's more central explorations on kingship and polity" (p. 168; her emphasis). In the final part of her essay she examines the exempla in Book 7 for their contribution to Gower's purpose. She sees the tale of "The Jew and the Pagan," quite remarkably, as an allegory of Richard's relations with his subjects and as "the harbinger of the king's downfall" (p. 173); but she gives fullest attention to the tale of Lucrece, in which the two programs of the poem, on the excesses of kingship and of individual desire, most fully merge (p. 175), and in which the specific lessons for both Amans and the king are most explicit. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor McKinley, Kathryn Published McKinley, Kathryn. "Kingship and the Body Politic: Classical Ecphrasis and Confessio Amantis VII." Mediaevalia 21 (1996), pp. 161-187. 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 Kingship and the Body Politic: Classical Ecphrasis and Confessio Amantis VII. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 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 Berthelette's two editions of CA (in 1532 and 1554) have an importance unequalled by any single early edition of Chaucer: not reprinted until 1810, and superseded only by Pauli's edition of 1857, they were the only means of access to Gower's English poem (apart from Caxton's even earlier edition of 1483) for more than 300 years. Machan is less interested in causes than in effects, in the consequences of Berthelette's providing the "preliminary interpretive frame" (p. 145) for most readers during this long period. His description of the book as handsome and carefully produced is confirmed by his reproduction of a single page from the volume (from Book 5); and with its title page, its dedication to Henry 8, the publisher's letter to the reader, and the detailed ten-page table of contents, Berthelette has done everything he can to render Gower's long and complex poem accessible to his readers. Machan identifies several ways in which the book is a typical product of its time. The dedication to Henry invokes a "nobuls and commons" united under the moral and literary authority of the king. The poem itself serves both a moralizing and a nationalistic purpose, edifying its readers "in the way humanist literary paradigms require" (p. 148), and testifying to the greatness of England itself. In his address to his readers, Berthelette recasts Gower as a conservative preserver of the language against the linguistic novelties of his own time, where earlier he had been praised, with Chaucer, for the eloquence of his rhetoric. And Berthelette's claims about restoring an authentic text, while to some extent true, also constitute a typical gesture of sixteenth-century publishers and serve his rhetorical purpose of inscribing both the conservativeness and antiquity of his author and the reliability of his own edition. Machan identifies two major ways in which Berthelette shaped the later reception of the CA, in the judgment of the relative merits of Gower with Chaucer and in the characterization of Gower as primarily a moral poet. Berthelette's own comments implicitly make Gower subservient to Chaucer; and he evidently consciously decided to present him as the author of only a single work, omitting even the colophon to CA in which his other works are described, where Chaucer was already known for the variety of his compositions. What little he says about Gower's life, moreover, cast Gower as "resolutely Roman" (p. 155) during the time when Chaucer was becomingly increasingly Protestant. In his prefatory material he praises Gower for his morality. His presentation of the poem, moreover, with the Latin glosses incorporated directly in to the text, inserts an authoritative moral voice that directs the reader's responses and preempts interpretation, in contrast to the apologetic and self-deprecating Chaucerian persona. The reception of the work was also shaped by Berthelette's own reputation as a serious and conservative moralist. And finally, by remaining for so long the only available edition of Gower's works, Berthelette's established Gower as an increasingly antiquated figure, undeserving of new editorial attention, where Chaucer, regularly revived and re-presented, was forever modern, a trap from which Gower was not freed until he attracted the attention of the philologists of the middle of the nineteenth century. In an appendix, "Printed History of Latin Glosses in the Confessio" (pp. 164-66), Machan argues that "any new scholarly edition" of CA "needs to return the glosses to the status they hold in the manuscripts and early editions" (p. 166), that is, it must present them within the same column as the text rather than placing them in the margins as Pauli and Macaulay did. Echard (in her essay in Studies in Philology) also objects to seeing the relation between text and gloss only as Macaulay presented it, but she gives a fuller consideration of the variety of alternatives in the MSS. In making his own choice of a single format, Machan neglects to point that in all of the earliest copies of the poem, and all that Gower might have had any hand in, including Bodleian Fairfax 3 and Bodley 902, which he cites, but also Cambridge Univ. Mm.2.21 and Huntington Ellesmere 26 A 17, which he doesn't, the glosses are placed in the margin. That the incorporation of the glosses into the text is a later scribal or editorial choice is indicated by the fact that many get placed in different places in different copies, often with no regard at all to the sense of the English text that they interrupt. Machan's advice is defensible, but it forces us to consider what we mean by "edition." If we mean an effort to present the text more or less as the poet left it, then Macaulay got it right; it we mean an effort to represent it as some group of later readers saw it, then one might agree with Machan. Even in Macaulay's text, of course, the relation between Latin and English is still open to interpretation, on which again see Echard above. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 17.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Machan, Tim William Published Machan, Tim William. "Thomas Berthelette and Gower's Confessio." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 18 (1996), pp. 143-166. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Biography of Gower 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 Thomas Berthelette and Gower's Confessio. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 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 Duffell's principal thesis is that Chaucer was the first medieval poet in any language to compose in iambic pentameter. Both to support his claim and to establish its significance, he begins with a brief historical survey of the appearance of the ten-syllable line in French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese in the centuries that preceded Chaucer. This is a tall order for such a brief essay, and difficult for a non-metrist to evaluate. Duffell explains most of his terms well enough (though "proparoxytone" required the reviewer to reach for his dictionary), and makes sufficiently clear how the French décasyllable or vers de dix (which despite the name, might have eleven or twelve syllables) and the Italian endacsillabi (which despite the name, might have only ten) are related to one another and to the English "pentameter" line. His argument does depend, however, on some rather broad claims about the perceptual bases of metrical patterning that one has to suspect might be discussable, and occasionally on Duffell's own choice of one previous scholar's arguments over another's. (It would also be a bit easier to follow if Duffell had marked the stresses in his examples.) Chaucer's innovation, Duffell argues, was to transform Boccaccio's endecasillabos (e.g. in Filostrato) by excluding all "triple time" lines (the reviewer learned these long ago as "dactylic") to create a consistent "duple-time" (i.e. iambic) rhythm for his ten-syllable lines. Such a claim depends upon accepting that final –e is syllabic in Chaucer's verse. Duffell invokes Samuels (1972) and Windeatt (1977) in his support, claiming that their arguments are "overwhelming," and goes on the present some more evidence of his own. This is where Gower comes in, but it is also, I am afraid, where I find the argument hardest to follow. Gower also used décasyllables in his Ballades, but instead of the fixed caesura of his French predecessors, he used a variable caesura in the manner of the Italians. He was able to do so because the words stress in Anglo-Norman, as in Italian, was stronger than in continental French. Humans aren't capable of perceiving rapid counts as high as ten, Duffell argues in the first section of his essay. The French poets, writing in a language in which the differences among levels of stress was not as perceptible, were obliged to base their meter upon the total number of syllables but would inevitably lose count before they got to ten, and therefore wrote décasyllables in lines of 4 and 6 (or less commonly 5 and 5), using the caesura to mark off regular quantities that could be perceived. Gower and the Italians were able to base their metrics on the count of stressed syllables instead and, since there were fewer, would not lose count before the end, allowing them far greater freedom in the internal construction of the line. Gower's lines are also predominantly "duple" (i.e. iambic), in approximately the same proportion as Petrarch's though not in as high a proportion as Chaucer's. "It is likely that the strong-weak alternating structure of the English and Anglo-Norman languages made an entirely duple-time [ten-syllable line] acceptable to English ears long before it became the norm in Italian and Spanish," Duffell writes in conclusion (p. 218). Well, okay, that explains why "duple-time" might be more common in Anglo-Norman and English than in French, but Gower's use of "duple-time," proportionally nearly identical to Petrarch's, hardly explains why Chaucer abandoned "triple-time" so completely and so long before the Italians, whose language, Duffell judges, had a word stress as strong as Anglo-Norman (p. 218). Duffell does attribute to Gower, however, an innovation in the use of the décasyllable that is just about as significant as Chaucer's was in English versification, or that would have been if he had had as many imitators. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 19.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Duffell, Martin J. Published Duffell, Martin J.. "Chaucer, Gower, and the History of the Hendecasyllable." In English Historical Metrics. Ed. McCully, C.B. and Anderson, J.J.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 210-218. ISBN 0521554640 Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer, Gower, and the History of the Hendecasyllable 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 1996 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 "Kant and Goethe distinguish allegory from symbol by associating allegory with rational abstraction and symbol with the attempt to grasp the divine. By applying this understanding of allegory to the allegorical works in the period when Aristotle dominated philosophical thought, we can correlate the development of allegorical literature to the development of Aristotelian thought. The analysis suggests that the allegorists studied were grappling with the problem of how to wrest a description of the divine from philosophical language, a problem which, as Derrida observes, involves moving beyond "the limits of philosophy." The early optimism of the Chartrian philosophers about the ability of universals to assist the mind in understanding the divine is reflected in the 'De planctu naturae.' In 'Floire et Blancheflor' and Guillaume de Lorris' section of the 'Roman de la Rose' we find an increasing skepticism about the divinity of rational processes of abstraction. Jean de Meun's section of the 'Roman de la Rose' anatomizes the absolute failure of philosophical reason to express the divine. In the 'Confessio Amantis,' Gower argues that the teachings of Aristotle provide a rational model for governing the state. In Book II of Spenser's 'Faerie Queene,' Guyon is presented as a reader of allegorical emblems who must learn to ground his interpretations in natural forms. In Book III, Spenser attempts to use imagination to overcome the limits of reason. Ultimately, however, he reformulates the doctrine of the 'golden chain' from a rational cosmological doctrine to an ethical doctrine in which golden chains represent interpersonal relationships, rather than cosmological bonds. In the 'Mutabilitie Cantos,' Spenser explores the manner in which the divine perspective is achieved by understanding the moral limitations of the rational principles governing nature." [eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Heise, William Earnshaw. Published Heise, William Earnshaw. "Aristotle and the Allegorical Aesthetic: Poetry and the Limits of Philosophy from Alan of Lille to Edmund Spenser." Ph.D. Diss. University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana 1996. DAI 57(11): 4725. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Aristotle and the Allegorical Aesthetic: Poetry and the Limits of Philosophy from Alan of Lille to Edmund Spenser. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 the reviewing various kinds of late-medieval scribal copying, Smith emphasizes the commonness of "scribal translation," by which, when confronting an exemplar written in a variety other than their own, scribes translated that exemplar into their customary language. Transmission of the CA differs from this norm, since it evidently had a high number of constrained scribes, that is, scribes who did not translate the language of their exemplar. One such scribe is that of Manchester, Chetham Library MS A.6.11, who reproduces Gower's forms even when they differ from his own preferred ones, as witnessed in his copy of "Gest Hystoriale." [TWM. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Smith, Jeremy J. Published Smith, Jeremy J. "A Note on Constrained Linguistic Variation in a North-west Midlands Middle-English Scribe." Neophilologus 80 (1996): 461-64. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Language 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 A Note on Constrained Linguistic Variation in a North-west Midlands Middle-English Scribe. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 dissertation on the theme of exile in medieval English narratives, Lawler follows Mary Metz Gwin (1987; Auburn dissertation) in treating Amans' trajectory in Gower's "Confessio Amantis" as a form of "spiritual journey" (101)--for Lawler, an essentially "ironic" (102) one that indicates the need to abandon courtly affection as a means to self-recovery. Comparing Amans with Chaucer's Troilus, Lawler argues that each lover jeopardizes his soul through worldly love and must abandon it for "higher matters": "Just as devotional lyrics remind Christians that they should exile themselves from the temptations of the world," Lawler observes, "so too do some love poems reiterate this belief" (103). [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lawler, Jennifer L. Published Lawler, Jennifer L. Representations of Exile in Early English Literature: 1100-1500 A.D. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Kansas, 1996. 241 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A57.07. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Representations of Exile in Early English Literature: 1100-1500 A.D. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Zieman, Katherine Grace Published Zieman, Katherine Grace. "Reading and Singing: Liturgy, Literacy, and Literature in Late Medieval England." PhD thesis, University of California at Berkeley, 1997. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Review "This study shows liturgy's intimate connection with changes in definitions of literate status, the articulation of the components of literate skills, and the production of vernacular literature in late medieval England. The fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries witnessed a considerable growth in liturgical benefactions. This upsurge in liturgical activity affected ecclesiastical institutions, their personnel, patrons and clientele. Both cleric and lay might be motivated to produce or consume liturgy through various desires related to piety, education, charity, or display. The variety of motivations, in fact, combined with the multiplication of contexts for performance, led to the unmooring of literate skills associated with the singing and reading of liturgical texts from the traditional context of the choral community. The resulting fluidity of definitions -- both of the skills required for adequate performance of the liturgy and of the spiritual and ethical value of those skills -- is manifested in the decontextualized collocation 'reading and singing.' "The first chapter charts the development and social implications of the collocation 'reading and singing' in elementary educational practices (generally known as the 'song school'). The second examines the fluidity of the term literatus in relation to liturgical and devotional performance. The third describes lay and clerical strategies for investing in the liturgy and the ethical dilemmas this commodification produced. "The final two chapters show how vernacular literature emerges from the foment of activity surrounding 'reading and singing.' Langland's Piers Plowman depicts a vernacular maker inhabiting the boundary between cleric and lay, justifying his literary activity as a socially useful labor that synthesizes fragmented clerical discourses while foregrounding ethical questions about their appropriate use, questions he increasingly associated with the 'reading and singing' repertoire. In his Vox Clamantis, Gower derives his performative authority from the vernacular concept of the 'voice of prayer' in order to divorce his project from the liturgical pretensions of the participants of 1381 rebellion. Chaucer takes up the issue of voice in House of Fame and The Miller's Tale, turning it into a poetic principle that imputes to the vernacular the authoritative rationality generally restricted to Latin litteras. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading and Singing: Liturgy, Literacy, and Literature in Late Medieval England Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review These are all mere quibbles, however; there is nothing so mysterious about the concordance that it cannot be figured out with the actual text in hand. This is an extremely useful volume, and a major contribution to Gower scholarship. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.2] This new concordance to Gower's writing in French is the seventeenth in the series of "Medieval Texts and Studies" formerly published by Colleagues Press, now identified as "Colleagues Books" in their new home at Michigan State University Press, the same series that brought us Echard and Fanger's invaluable translation of The Latin Verses in the Confessio Amantis and William Burton Wilson's translation of MO (see JGN 12, no. 1). In addition to the verse text of MO, it includes the prose section headings and the table of contents to the poem; the Cinkante Balades along with its prose dedication and its marginalia; and the Traitié with its brief prose preface -- in short, everything but the Latin verse and rubrics in the first volume of Macaulay's edition of Gower's works. All, including a selection of variant readings, is included in a single alphabetical list of 900 pages, without the miscellaneous supplementary indexes that occupy more than a quarter of the pages in Pickles and Dawson's concordance to Gower's English works (JGN 7, no. 1). Every word is indexed except for 226 forms listed on pages viii-ix: mostly pronouns, forms of être and avoir, prepositions, and a few adverbs and conjunctions (including the most common of the omitted forms, et). Unlike Tatlock and Kennedy's Chaucer concordance, which groups all forms of each word and all variant spellings together under a single lemma (the modern English spelling), the present concordance, like Pickles and Dawson's, is arranged strictly by spelling: each form (celeste, celestes) is entered separately, as is each variant spelling (coard, couard). The result poses much less inconvenience that it does in the concordance to the English works, however, because the spelling in Gower's French works is so much more regular. Variants like the coard/couard pair just cited (each appears in Gower's writing twice) are very difficult to find, for the vast majority of words are spelled in only a single way. As a consequence, the different inflected forms of a word are also almost always grouped closely together in the alphabetical list. The only real disadvantage to the strict spelling arrangement is that homonyms are all listed together: thus in the space of a few pages the concordance mingles the forms of three different words beginning with mu- (an adjective meaning "mute," a noun meaning "cage" with its derivatives, and a verb meaning "to move, to change, to moult" with its derivatives); the entry for noun groups together the noun meaning "name" and the negative particle "not;" and the entry for nue contains both the feminine form of the adjective "nude" and the noun meaning "cloud, sky, heaven." In all these respects, wherever any possibility of confusion might exist, the perfect complement to the concordance is provided by Macaulay's glossary, which performs all the tasks that the concordance does not: it scrupulously lists every word in Gower's French vocabulary with all of its variant spellings in a single entry; it provides cross-reference entries for spellings that are separated alphabetically from the main entry for each word; it provides a generous listing of inflected forms; and it distinguishes homonyms. The concordance performs all of the work that the glossary does not, providing, in its listing of every instance of every form, the basis for examining both contexts and frequency. Together, these are the only two tools one needs for a complete study of the vocabulary of the French vocabulary of the poet. Macaulay himself probably wished often that a concordance of precisely this sort had been available to him. But now that Macaulay has done his work so well, why is the concordance so important to the rest of us? For those whose principal interest is linguistic, the question answers itself: not only is it indispensable for the study of Gower's language, but as far as the reviewer is aware, it is the only available concordance for any body of French writing, let alone Anglo-Norman, from the entire fourteenth century. But even for those who leave the language study to others, this volume will have many uses. Only the most obvious convenience is that it provides a thematic index both to Gower's vast moralizing poem and to his lyrics, each with its different connection to CA, and a far more reliable way of locating relevant treatment of important topics than Macaulay's glossary does. All of us are also faced with the difficulties of translating the poem. Even Gower's use of apparently familiar words can sometimes be puzzling, and a list of other examples is often much more helpful than a glossary can be. (For the reviewer, this is the most common reason for turning to Pickles and Dawson.) The interest in semantics extends beyond the French works themselves. How can one do a thorough examination of Gower's multiple and often ambiguous uses of "grace" in CA, for instance, without also considering the different uses of the same word in MO and CB? (When we have a concordance to the Latin works, our tools for the study of his vocabulary will be complete.) Or to take a matter of a completely different sort, how many times does Gower's own name appear in the MSS of his works? The concordance provides three entries, one of which, since it appears in only a single MS of the Traitié, is not referenced in Macaulay's glossary. The usefulness of a work such as this is limited only by the imagination of the user, and its very existence can serve to generate questions that one might not have thought of before. For all these reasons, it is inconceivable that it not be made accessible to everyone with a serious interest in the poet, and if not in our personal collections, it certainly merits a place on the library shelf. When we fill out our purchase recommendations for the librarian, we might also remember the desirability of encouraging the publication of other scholarly reference works of this sort in the future. The volume is very handsomely printed, and is in fact much more readable than Pickles and Dawson, with only 56 lines per column instead of the 78 of the latter. There are no headwords on the page, but the editors have included a lemma at the top of each column, either in the form "prelat (25)," listing the number of occurrences, at the beginning of each entry, or "prelat -- continued" when the entry extends from one column to the next; and one quickly becomes accustomed to fixing one's eye on the top of the right hand column of the recto as one flips through the pages. The lemmata might have been printed in a bolder face than the rest of the text, but again one becomes used to the editor's presentation. The most significant lapse in the book is that the "prose headings" that mark the divisions in the text of MO are cited only by a sequence number that has been assigned by the editors, not by the number of the adjacent line of text. These sequence numbers appear neither in the MS nor in Macaulay's edition, and when there are no other references, the citation can only be found with considerable guessing and searching (e.g. artifice and artifices, which occur only in prose headings "113" and "114"). The verse lines in MO are cited by preceding prose heading plus line number (e.g. "MO 3:210"), in which case the heading number is both unhelpful and unnecessary. The editors might have done better to find a way of relying on verse number alone. The only other criticism to make concerns the "Guide to the Concordance" at the beginning. Only one of the six examples cited for illustration (the last) corresponds to an actual entry in the concordance; two give mistaken forms of the abbreviation used to identify Gower's different works, and one (the second) gives a mistaken explanation of its line number references. The account of what sorts of variant readings are included is incomplete and imprecise, and does not explain such entries as "TRa 1hdG:1" (found under "gower"). Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F West, Mark Hinson, Robin L Hollifield, Adrienne Published Yeager, R.F and West, Mark and Hinson, Robin L and Hollifield, Adrienne (assisting). "A Concordance to the French Poetry and Prose of John Gower." Medieval Texts and Studies, 17 . East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997 Gower Subject Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Concordance to the French Poetry and Prose of John Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Michigan State University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 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 Kiefer, Lauren Kathleen Published Kiefer, Lauren Kathleen. "Gower and Literary Tradition: Jean de Meun, Ovid, and the 'Confessio Amantis'." PhD thesis, Cornell, 1997. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review "This project attempts to alert the reader to John Gower's literariness. I argue that in the Confessio Amantis, Gower deliberatedly turns away from the straightforward didacticism of his earlier works and of the Middle English penitential tradition, and adopts instead the narrative strategies of poets such as Jean de Meun and Ovid. I also link Gower's literary complexity in the Confessio with the work's secular concerns, arguing that Gower's growing awareness of the complex social problems surrounding him led him to abandon the didactic stance of his early works. "Chapter One outlines Gower's progression from the rigid structures and spiritual emphasis of his earlier major works to the complexity and secular emphasis of the Confessio Amantis. In particular, I examine Gower's revisions in the Vox Clamantis as evidence of his growing social and political concerns, and show how the first chapter of the Confessio deliberately rejects the medieval penitential manual's paradign of divine justice, prefer¬ring instead a paradigm of personal responsibility. "Chapter Two outlines the poetic strategies which Gower borrows from Jean de Meun. In particular, this chapter explores the way Jean and Gower turn the traditional function of the exemplum on its head, by using the form to impugn the credibility of the narrator. While traditional exemplum narrators choose and revise stories for clarity and appropriateness, Jean's and Gower's narrators make choices and revisions which merely reflect their own limitations. "While Chapters One and Two examine isolated tales within the Confessio, Chapter Three discusses the way several tales interact with each other. Gower's Ulysses tales -- "Ulysses and the Sirens," "Ulysses and Penelope," "Nauplus and Ulysses," "Achilles and Deidamia," and "Ulysses and Telegonus" -- place him in dialogue with both Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Trojan historiographical tradition. I show how Gower deliberately rejects the didactic tendency of medieval historiography in favor of the more elusive poetic strategies of the epic and romance traditions, just as he rejected the didacticism of the penitential and exemplum traditions in favor of Jean's elusive structures." [JGN 14.2] 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 and Literary Tradition: Jean de Meun, Ovid, and the 'Confessio Amantis' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Explores the literary historical implications of the discovery of the Portuguese translation of "Confessio Amantis," source of the Castilian translation. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio Published Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio. "O Livro do Amante: The Lost Portuguese Translation of John Gower's Confessio Amantis (Madrid, Biblioteca de Palacio, MS II-3088)." Portuguese Studies 13 (1997), pp. 1-6. ISSN 0267-5315 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource O Livro do Amante: The Lost Portuguese Translation of John Gower's Confessio Amantis (Madrid, Biblioteca de Palacio, MS II-3088) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 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 Microform copy of eight leaves of Madrid, Biblioteca de Palacio, MS II-3088, i.e., the Castilian index to the Portuguese translation of Confessio Amantis. 2 microfiches; negative. Includes a printed guide. Author/Editor Author/Editor Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio Published Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio. "Texto y concordancias de Indices castellanos de la traducción portuguesa de la Confessio Amantis de John Gower (Palacio II-3088)." Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, Madison, WI. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations 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 Texto y concordancias de Indices castellanos de la traducción portuguesa de la Confessio Amantis de John Gower (Palacio II-3088). Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Type The nature or genre of the resource Other NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "The aim of this thesis is to offer a reading of the position of women in the tales of the Confessio Amantis and also to contextualise John Gower's portrayal, particularly with reference to his sources and some contemporary analogues. The Introduction undertakes a consideration of theoretical problems, placing particular emphasis on the problematics of the female voice within a male poet's work, the pagan nature of Gower's material, and the exemplum genre. Chapter 1 analyses Gower's presentation of women's speech and places it in the context of medieval social norms and guides to conduct. This is followed by a statistical study of speech in the Confessio and some analogues. The results are examined in the context of the stereotype of the garrulous woman, to question whether Gower evaluated women's speech as negative and to conclude whether their use of words compensates for their restricted access to the world of deeds. Chapter 2 considers the position of women in the family. It is mostly concerned with women as wives since the topic of marriage is particularly important in the Confessio, but the position of mothers and daughters within the power structures of the family is also examined. Chapter 3 begins by discussing Gower's position in the medieval discourse on virginity and goes on to argue that his views on sexuality are part of his more general ideas on Nature. In his poem female desire is not stereotyped and finds many ways of expressing itself. Chapter 4 considers how and in what ways Gower's descriptions of women's bodies and their attire, and also cross-dressing and sex-change, are used to convey particular attitudes to women. In Chapter 5, Gower's use of language in the descriptions of rape in the Mirour de l'Omme, the Latin glosses and the tales of the Confessio is examined. Then Gower's representation of rape is explored, especially in the Tale of Tereus and Philomena and the Tale of Lucrece, comparing them to their sources and analogues. The last chapter investigates male behaviour in the poem in order to shed light on the position of women in the poem. It discusses whether Gower presents masculinity and femininity as opposed to each other, or whether so-called masculine and feminine qualities complement each other in an ideal human being. Although here may be a difference between male and female behaviour, this does not necessarily mean that they are judged differently. A brief conclusion draws the main lines of the argument together in a discussion of pro-feminine role-models in the Confessio." Directed by Helen Cooper. [JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Mast, Isabelle Published Mast, Isabelle. "The Representation of Women in John Gower's Confessio Amantis." PhD thesis, Oxford University, 1997. 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 The Representation of Women in John Gower's Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Debates over translations in medieval Britain occurred at the crossroads of Latin and the insular vernaculars: it was here that writers (ecclesiastic and secular) argued about not only the proper relation of past to present, but of linguistic to national identity, of sacred to secular power. This dissertation looks at medieval writers in whose works we find a conflict between the practice and the representation of translation, seeking to resituate these translations within their social contexts. . . . [Writers considered include Geoffrey of Monmouth, Trevisa, and Chaucer.] This context also yields fresh interpretations of other late medieval writers, including John Gower and Thomas Hoccleve." Directed by Marie Boroff and Lee Patterson. [JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Robertson, Kellie Paige Published Robertson, Kellie Paige. "'Sethe that Babyl was ybuld': Translation and Dissent in Later Medieval England." PhD thesis, Yale University, 1997. 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 'Sethe that Babyl was ybuld': Translation and Dissent in Later Medieval England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Craun's study is concerned with the ethical evaluation of speech and language, and more particularly with the "Sins of the Tongue," as they appear in the "pastoral" literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (that is, in the manuals of instruction for priests that followed the Fourth Lateran Council and in the related handbooks for penitents) and in four major texts of fourteenth-century English literature. In his first chapter he surveys his corpus: it concludes some names that will be familiar to Gowerians, such as Peyraut and Frere Lorens, but also some that are much less well known, such as the long thirteenth-century treatise De Lingua (once attributed to Grosseteste) that Craun has examined in manuscript. In most of these the "Sins of the Tongue" have become a category of their own apart from the Seven Deadly Sins by which treatises of this sort are traditionally organized, but the purpose is the same, to identify, classify, and provide remedies for the various subtypes of the sin for the benefit of both priests and penitents. In his second chapter, Craun takes a closer look at both the form and the content of the treatment of speech in these works. He identifies an "Augustinian" strain in the treatises in the focus on intentionality as the ethical standard by which speech acts are to be judged and on the relation between speech and reason. The writers of the treatises are thus concerned more with "falsehood" than with "falsity" (p. 40): the relation between speakers and the social consequences of truthful or untruthful speech receives more attention than the problematic relation between sign and referent. There is also what Craun calls a "Solomonic" strain, which advises prudence and moderation over hasty or heedless speech. To enforce their lessons and to win their audience away from sin, the writers draw upon a variety of materials, including sententiae (but not usually proverbial or folk wisdom), analogies and comparisons, and narrative exempla, making both rational and emotional appeals; and Craun describes well the fragmentary and disjunctive quality that results from their copiousness (p. 67), in terms which, though he doesn't mention it here, will remind many readers of the experience of reading MO, the work of Gower's that is obviously closest to the tradition in question. In his four remaining chapters, Craun examines how both the contents of these works--their classification of the sins and their hortatory materials--and their rhetorical stance, the address of a moral authority to a penitent, have been adopted and adapted in Patience, Confessio Amantis, Piers Plowman, and fragments IX-X of the Canterbury Tales. Patience he treats as an exemplum on "murmur," a form of deviant speech given prominence in the treatises, which also provide a precedent for using Jonah as an example. The Biblical tale, Craun finds, is everywhere in the poem mediated by traditional pastoral discourse on adequate and inadequate speech; and he emphasizes the creation of the poem's speaking voice, the authoritative catechist who addresses his exemplum to a reading audience and who interprets it for them, and who at the end, portrays himself as affected by the tale and enacts the choice that the tale requires in the telling of the exemplum. In Piers Plowman, the connection is to the pastoral tradition is found in the Langland's discussion of minstrels, which may reflect his unease about the status of poetry, as others have claimed, but which also draws directly, Craun observes, from the treatises' condemnation of entertainers and of the two related sins of scurrilitas and turpiloquium. In establishing this link, Craun is able to draw a closer connection between Langland's references to minstrelsy and both his social and his spiritual concerns: the rebuke of nobles for rewarding sinful speech instead of helping the poor reveals his preoccupation with how wealth is distributed, while the contrasting uses of speech in the poem reflect his concern with the best way to achieve salvation. In the Canterbury Tales, Craun notes that the Manciple's Tale is as heavily marked by traditional pastoral discourse as the Parson's is. As the host seems to recognize, the Manciple's public criticism of the Cook is an example of the sin of Chiding as it is described in the treatises, while the Parson takes unusual care to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate reproof is his discussion of Ire. More important is the way in which each imitates the pastoral discourse from which he draws. The Manciple offers a parody, while the Parson practices the very norms that he advocates. "The Manciple parades jeeringly the inherent contradictions and limits of discourse on deviant speech in general, gutting its claims to provide comprehensive, binding norms for speech . . . [while] the Parson, in response, asserts that pastoral discourse on specific sins is a powerful instrument for moral analysis and religious formation" (p. 189). That Gower should be indebted to the pastoral tradition in a work that is concerned with a confession comes, of course, as no surprise. Formally, Craun points out, the pastoral interrogationes provide a model for Genius' role in the poem, the forma confitendi a model for Amans' replies, though not one that Gower follows slavishly. The interrogatio, for instance, was meant to follow a confession if the priest thought it incomplete, rather than precede it as is Genius' normal practice in the Confessio (pp. 134-35). The Confessio is also marked, Craun argues, by a pervasive concern with the moral dimensions of speech which derives from the same models. Seven of the confessional sequences in the poem are concerned with "Sins of the Tongue;" acts of verbal deception occupy a central position in many of the tales; and the "deviant" speech of the exempla is set in contrast to the honest self-revelation that Amans is encouraged to practice in his confession. One of the three sections of the encyclopedia of human knowledge in Book 7, moreover, is given to Rhetoric, and it is followed by an exposition of "Trouthe" which echoes many of the same ethical concerns. The comparison of Gower's work to his pastoral models reveals both similarities and differences, Craun observes, which can help us understand both Genius' and Amans' strategies. He focuses his examination of the poem on Book 7 and on Amans' lesson on Detraction in Book 2. Genius' treatment of Rhetoric departs from Latini, Gower's source for the structure of Book 7, is its emphasis on the moral use of language. He begins where the pastoral treatises do, with the origin and function of speech, deriving the moral imperative on the uses of speech from its divine creator. Both divine origins and the cognitive function of speech are invoked again in the lesson on "Trouthe." There, however, the pastoral concern is extended into the political, for what is at stake in the lesson for rulers is nothing less than civic concord and discord. The opposite of proper speech is portrayed in the lesson on Flattery. There and elsewhere in the poem, Gower reveals his consciousness of the "fragility" of the spoken word, and offers an alternative to deceit in plain, unselfish counsel. Book 7 thus sets the ethical norms for use of speech for all of the rest of the Confessio. Genius acts as the sage, providing both lessons on and a model of truth-telling speech, and Amans is the "ruler" who must rule both himself and his tongue, and whose experience as a lover "reveals the seductive appeal and destructive consequences of the deceiving word, paralleling the politically deviant speech of the flatterers" (p. 132). In his examination of the lesson on Detraction, Craun points out the many correspondences to the penitential manuals, both in form and in imagery. Along the way, he discovers a combination of logical and emotional appeals that is usually denied Genius but that echoes the multiple discursive strategies of the treatises. He is also alert to a number of differences from these sources, which he interprets in dramatic terms, as Genius' conscious attempts to influence the lover before him, as part of the recognized duty of the priest to adapt his instruction to the particular circumstances of the penitent. On the same basis, he offers a justification for Genius' inclusion of the long tale of Constance as part of the lesson on Detraction. It is, he says, a "rhetorical performance within a confessional sequence" (p. 148), not a self-contained exemplum. Amans has already acknowledged his guilt, and the tale serves less to define the sin than it does to win Amans away from his sin by illustrating the consequences both for the sinner and for his victims, appealing, along the way, to the universality of the moral norms that it teaches rather than illustrating them exclusively in terms of love. There is obviously a great deal of value in Craun's study. He is an alert and persuasive reader of Gower. He has also considered a broader range of earlier works than are usually cited, even by those who have concerned themselves with Gower's indebtedness to the penitential tradition, and his first two chapters thus provide a very useful introduction to this very important group of texts. In focusing on the "Sins of the Tongue," moreover, he has discovered an elegant way of relating the form and language of the works that he examines to their ethical teaching, following a path first laid down for the study of Gower by Schmitz in 1974. If there is any disappointment about his treatment of Gower, it is that it is too brief. His observation that language is a pervasive concern of the Confessio deserves to be demonstrated and analyzed at greater length. At the same time, there are some problems with isolating the lesson on Detraction in the way that Craun does: the tale of Constance might also be seen within a broader argument in Book 2 rather than in terms of an immediate rhetorical purpose deriving from the lesson at hand. It is also not clear how typical this lesson is of the entire poem. Craun is aware of many of the ways in which his argument impinges on current disagreements about CA, and takes time out to allude to some on these. It isn't evident, however, that he is aware of all. He points out how Gower, in contrast to some of his contemporaries, is almost exclusively concerned with the human victims of evil speech, not with the harm to the transcendent (p. 118), but he doesn't pursue the significance of his observation to our struggles over the spiritual dimensions of Genius' (or Gower's) instruction. In his discussion of Gower's debt to the penitentials, he doesn't mention R.F. Yeager's proposal (1984) that the "Sins of the Tongue" provide the explanation for the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated topics in Book 6, the only other instance I know of in which this category of sin has been invoked in the interpretation of the poem. And he equivocates a bit on Genius' role. In emphasizing the importance of Book 7 in supplying moral norms for the rest of CA, he attributes to Genius both a genuine moral authority and a practice that is consistent with it (pp. 130-31), but he takes it back at the very end of his chapter with an allusion to the critics who called into question Genius' reliability as a moral guide (p. 155). But then what are we to make of the parenthetical sentence that immediately follows? "Such ironic readings of individual sequences, however, are only fully convincing when they are grounded in the pastoral tradition of specific vices as well as in the conventions of confessional discourse." Can such readings be grounded in the texts that he has examined or can they not? Genius' moral authority is one of the most important questions that divides us in Gower criticism at this time, and where Craun might have been able to help settle the matter, he backs away. All of this is to say, of course, that he has opened up a very productive line of research, and that he has laid the foundations that others who come after may now build upon. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 17.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Craun, Edwin D. Published Craun, Edwin D.. "Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature: Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker." Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature., 31 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies 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 Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature: Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker. 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 1997 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The presentation of a text is also a response to it and an interpretation of it, Echard asserts, echoing Doyle and Parkes (1978) among many others. Because of its length and the complexity of its structure, CA presented a number of challenges to both scribes and editors which resulted in very different presentations despite the high level of consistency in the text. In this essay Echard is concerned with a single editorial device, the prefatory tables of contents by which CA was introduced, and she chooses four examples for contrast. Each shapes the reader's experience of the poem in a different way; and though all are in English, each draws in different proportions from the Latin and English texts. In Princeton Univ. Lib. MS Taylor 5, the table consists only of a list of stories, ignoring both the dramatic and the conceptual frames and thus neglecting the exemplary function of the tales; and it also passes over the contents of the Prologue. The tabulator evidently relies exclusively on the English text, and examining only the first few lines, often gives a misleading view of the contents of the stories. The table in Magdalen Coll. MS 213 is more careful and more detailed; it makes use of both the Latin and the English; it sometimes makes reference to the framework of the sins within which the tales are contained, but not in any consistent manner; and it includes references to Nebuchadnezzar's dream and to Daniel's prophecy in the Prologue. Caxton, in his edition of 1483, is even more thorough. In his introduction, he describes both the dramatic frame and the framework of the sins, and in his table he includes a detailed account of the subcategories of sin. He nonetheless portrays the poem primarily as a collection of tales. Berthelette, in his edition of 1532, enlarges Caxton's table. He gives fuller treatment to the long and multi-episodic tales. He includes headings for the different topics in the Prologue and for the mythographic and scientific topics in Books 5 and 7, and the reader thus perceives the work as encyclopedic in nature as well as as a collection of stories. At the same time, Berthelette is more sensitive than Caxton to the actual moral import of many of the tales. In including so complete a description of the poem, Berthelette's table is the most useful, but it is also the one that imposes its own vision of the poem most fully upon the reader. While they may or may not be based upon classical models, Echard concludes, these various efforts to provide an epitome to the poem represent the beginnings of Gower criticism. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 17.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân Published Echard, Siân. "Pre-Texts: Tables of Contents and the Reading of John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Medium AEvum 66 (1997), pp. 270-287. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations 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 Pre-Texts: Tables of Contents and the Reading of John Gower's Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 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 "Chaucer's Ghoast" is an anonymous collection of twelve short poems (one set within a short story in prose) published in London in 1672, and evidently never reprinted since. It has been described as a loose translation of selections from Ovid, and sometimes (e.g. by the NUC) attributed to Charles Cotton (1630-87). Joshua has identified it as a modernization of selections from CA, and reprints ten lines from the two works (from the story of Pygmaleon) to demonstrate the closeness of the seventeenth-century author's borrowing. The non-Ovidian tales of Socrates and Arion are referred to in a note, but the other nine tales are not identified. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 17.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Joshua, Essaka. Published Joshua, Essaka. "Chaucer's Ghoast and Gower's Confessio Amantis." Notes and Queries 44 (1997), pp. 458-459. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations 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 Chaucer's Ghoast and Gower's Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 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 Expanded abstract supplied by the author: "Exemplary literature perpetuates the absolutist notion that a past event, the narration and reception of that event, and the reader;s social behavior exist in absolute causal alignment. But Middle English texts in the exemplary mode, from conduct-books to ambitious poetry, rarely carry out their own claims of integrity. This study explores how several writers--including Gower, Chaucer, Caxton, and Henryson--anticipate a wide range of new secular audiences, attempting to both constrain interpretation and open readers to the transformative powers of literature. Drawing on recent theories of translation, imitation, and intertextuality, the study investigates how textual imitation both enables and complicates exemplary imitation: how, that is, the relations between 'olde bokes' and new suggests relations between new books and new readers. Chapter 2 and 3 argue that, in the last two books of the CA, Gower increasingly advocates the fictive register as educational method. Chapter 2, "Recognition and Reflection: Reading Women in Two exemplary Compilations," paries his "Apollonius of Tyre" with Le Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry in order to examine the connections between moral injunction and imaginative fiction. Unlike the violent injunctive discourse of the Chevalier de la Tour Landry, "Apollonius of Tyre" represents moral choice as an interpretative process demanding readerly acts of discrimination, exemplified by Thaise's reinterpretation of her silent father. Genius's moralizing and Amans's resistance to the tale encourage us to read the tale better than they do. In concluding the CA with "Apollonius of Tyre," Gower makes his broadest demands upon his readers and his most ambitious claim for the educational value of imaginative fiction. Chapter 3, "From Endorsement to Disavowal: The Politics of Exemplarity in the Tale of Virginia," examines Gower's version of the tale of Virginia (at the end of Book 7) along with Livy's and Chaucer's versions. In Livy's Ab Urbe Condita, Virginia's father saves her virginity by stabbing her in the public forum, and the act constitutes a successful call to revolutionary action. Gower renders the father tyrannical and suppresses the efficacy of the revolution. Livy's apparent endorsement of Virginia's death emerges in Gower as a rigid form of historical truth-telling in which the exemplum must be destroyed in order to remain exemplary. Gower translates Livy's exemplary efficacy into an argument for the political importance of metaphor--and of fiction itself. Chapter 1, '"Grisilde is deed": Reflecting Audience in Late Medieval England,' lays out the study's methods. Chapter 4, 'Alienation and Lectio Facilior: The Pardoner and His Audiences,' examines Chaucer's 'Pardoner's Tale' through the lends of its reception in fifteenth-century manuscripts and in the Tale of Beryn; and Chapter 5, 'Chaucer's Criseyde in Henryson's "poleist glas,"' examines the Testament of Cresseid as an exemplary response to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde." Directed by Karla Taylor. [JGN 17.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Allen, Elizabeth Gage Published Allen, Elizabeth Gage. "'Lat the chaf be stille': Exemplary Fictions is Late Medieval England." PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1997. Open access at http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqm&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:9732034 (accessed January 23, 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 'Lat the chaf be stille': Exemplary Fictions is Late Medieval England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation employs the methodology of feminist thematics to examine the motif of the reflecting pool in signalling and shaping gender relationships in medieval romances by Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Gower. It has long been recognized that later medieval romances create and perpetuate masculine and feminine stereotypes, hierarchies of reason and love, spirit and flesh, strength and weakness. My work identifies a steady movement toward thickening the boundaries of these stereotypes and rejecting earlier, semi-mythological representations of female power. By examining a series of traditional canonical texts through a common motif invested with the cultural and poetic ideals of medieval love poetry, my study illuminates the means by which the definitions of gender which permeate our culture today were absorbed into western literary tradition." Directed by F. Anne Payne. [JGN 17.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Grinnell, Natalie Published Grinnell, Natalie. "Reflecting Pools: The Thematic Construction of Gender in Medieval Romance." PhD thesis, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1997. 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 Reflecting Pools: The Thematic Construction of Gender in Medieval Romance. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Allen attempts to overthrow the prevalent view of Gower as a rigid and doctrinaire moralist, arguing that the poet is fully aware of the complexity and contingency of moral choice and that his purpose is not simply to correct but to engage the reader in the process of moral decision. She cites Chaucer's dedication of T&C in support of her argument: Gower is invoked, she claims, not as the corrector of the moral ambiguities in that "insistently ambiguous poem," but rather as "a fellow muddier of moral waters" (pp. 628-29). Chaucer's appreciation of his contemporary is also reflected in MLIntro, and the bulk of Allen's long essay consists of a subtle and challenging rereading of the ML's comments and of the three tales in CA that he refers to, in which incest either figures or (in the case of "Constance") is suppressed. Her argument depends, of course, on driving a wedge between Chaucer and ML, whose comments both on Gower and on Chaucer reveal the limitations of his own prudishness. For ML, the only moral choice involved in storytelling lies in the choice of subject; he remains blind to the way in which his treatment of Custance itself amounts to "something like incest" (p. 630, citing Wetherbee). Through ML, Chaucer invokes Gower as an alternative to the conventional morality that ML represents. The real threat that Gower offers to ML lies in his effort to provoke the reader's participation in moral choice. In both "Canace and Machaire" and "Apollonius of Tyre," Gower depicts incest as both natural and unnatural; he also exhibits a compassion for Canace that is neither exculpatory nor possessive. He shifts attention from the horror of the act to the moral responsibility of the human will, and to both the necessity and the complexity of moral choice. Amans' reaction to the tale, distancing himself from its overt lesson, also raises questions of moral responsibility and of the process of interpretation that are more relevant to us as readers than are the actions of the characters in the tale. To the extent that we accept or reject his reading, Gower forces us to examine the basis of our own interpretive choices in a way that is destabilizing of ML's assertion of a single socially acceptable morality. ML also misreads "Apollonius of Tyre," seeing it only as an "endorsement of violence" (p. 636). While Gower's tale obviously condemns Antiochus' incest, it also offers an exemplary lesson in growth and self-exploration in the adventures of Apollonius. The climactic moment, his reunion with Thaise, verges on a re-enactment of Antiochus' forcing of his daughter, but reverses it through "a series of subtle acts of reading, both within the tale and outside it at the level of the Confessio readers" (p. 639). While we may be invited to read like Thaise, we are also shown the possibility of reading like Amans, who again expresses his frustration at the lack of any precise applicability to his own situation, a frustration that perhaps mirrors our own. But the only way out for Amans that the poem offers is through reading. "Reading itself becomes a paradigmatic moral activity because it has the capacity to apply to different readers' individual development. . . . The kind of morality that Gower has to offer, finally, is the circuitous process of Amans's internal development, and the hope that reading about Amans's reading can generate a complementary moral process in us" (p. 640). All of this subtlety in Gower's purpose is lost, of course, on ML, "who refuses to see the ethical implications of Gower's incest stories because he has an inkling that Gower's ethics might challenge his moral stance. Specifically, Gower's ethical complexity might discourage the Man of Law's use of a sanctimonious tale to claim social status--and might reveal the ways in which the Man of Law's reception reduces human social activity to a system of violation and victimization" (p. 641). As her final example, Allen turns to Gower's "Constance." Where many have read Gower as if he were Trivet, she argues instead that "he lodges a critique of Trivet, destabilizes Constance's morality, and thus presents a subtle argument for the moral value of narrative instability" (p. 641). She sees the suppression of the incest motive of the original version of the story as an example of the silence that Genius advocates in face of detraction, but argues that such restraint and silence--as represented in Constance's own passivity and in her refusal to reveal her identity--ultimately victimize the heroine by making her an accomplice in the violence that besets her and by helping preserve the institutions that perpetuate it. Such a reading borders on the perverse, Allen acknowledges, and is sustained only by the closest examination of the imagery. But that is the poet's purpose, she argues. "Gower's narratives include readers in conventional or comfortable assumptions which he subtly destabilizes. This process implicates his readers in his plot choices: if at first the plot seems transparent and predictable, as so many readers have found Gower to be, then disjunctive or troubling moments turn the focus onto the readerly desire for predictability and transparency" (p. 646). Our own desire for the more comfortable reading can make us too complicit in the violence that Constance suffers. Gower's very style may encourage such a passivity, and Chaucer's response may thus constitute a critique: "Gower sets up his readers to read passively, and then proceeds to make us ask in retrospect why we read as we did. Chaucer's Man of Law embodies the risk of such a style: he fails to ask questions about his own reception" (p. 647). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 17.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Allen, Elizabeth Published Allen, Elizabeth. "Chaucer Answers Gower: Constance and the Trouble with Reading." ELH 63 (1997), pp. 627-655. 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 Chaucer Answers Gower: Constance and the Trouble with Reading. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This is a scholarly book of a sort that we don't see very often anymore: broadly researched, thoroughly documented, nearly encyclopedic in its coverage, and without any particular theoretical disposition. Dean offers his work as a contribution to the history of ideas, and as a token of his thoroughness, in his introductory chapter, in addition to summarizing and commenting on earlier studies of the "world grown old" in medieval literature, he also offers a discussion of the difference between "idea" and a trope or topos (citing both Boas and Curtius); and indeed it is part of his argument that the "world grown old" is an "idea" rather than merely a rhetorical commonplace: that it encompassed a variety of different but related subtopics, and that in its breadth it provided the "organizing principle" for major works of later medieval literature. Dean's interest is in these works rather than simply in the growth and development of the "idea," and in that respect he distinguishes his own study from more traditional scholarship in the "history of ideas." While acknowledging the importance of recognizing conventions for what they are, he focuses on the ways in which individual authors apply and respond to the "ideas" that they use, including the ways in which different ideas co-existing in the same work are brought into relation with one another. Thus, after a very useful "Morphology of Subtopics," including the "ages of the world," the "world upside-down," "the ancient-versus-modern controversy (giants and dwarves)," and a number of others in his second chapter, the bulk of his book is given over to close study of five major medieval authors: Jean de Meun, Dante, Langland, Gower, and Chaucer. The Gower chapter is entitled "Social Deterioration and the Decline of Love in John Gower's Narratives," by which he means Gower's three major poems, MO, VC, and CA. In each, the poet "chronicles the sorry state of things and laments the world's decline from former, better eras" (p. 233), using the de senectute mundi theme as his structuring principle. In his separate consideration of each of these three works, Dean naturally focuses on those portions in which the de senectute mundi theme occurs. In MO, that would be the social anatomy in lines 18421-27360 in which each estate is criticized in turn for failing to live up to the model of virtue of their predecessors, often by means of the rhetorical construction "jadis . . . mais ore." In VC as well, "Gower portrays a deteriorating society and a world turned upside down" (p. 243). Book 1--the visio of the Peasants' Revolt--repeats the characterization of the peasantry in contemporary chronicles, and is a virtually unique instance in Ricardian poetry of an extended response to a particular contemporary historical event. Gower's treatment contains echoes of Langland, of Ovid, and of scripture. In the remaining books, he "anatomizes society as in decay" (p. 247), using familiar "world grown old" motifs. "These and other laments de senectute mundi are thoroughly conventional and yet given a new context by the account of the Peasants' Revolt and Gower's insistence throughout the Vox that there are modern applications to the ancient tropes. Throughout his narrative writings Gower implies that modern men and women live their lives according to archetypal scripts, ways of behaving and speaking instanced in ancient scriptural and classical texts and reenacted in modern conduct" (p. 248). The most pronounced image of the "world grown old" is the statue from Nebuchadnezzar's dream in the Book of Daniel, another instance of applying an old symbol to modern times, anticipating the appearance of the same image in CA. Also anticipatory of CA in the Cronica Tripertita, in which Richard is blamed for a lack of love. As in MO and VC, Gower finds the "chief example and root cause" of the declining world in "individual malfeasance" (p. 250). In CA, the individual's responsibility for the decline of the world in embodied in the poet/Amans, who is also old. As in Gower's earlier works, the central idea of CA is the "world grown old," particularly the decline of love; in this work, however, both the macrocosm and the microcosm have decayed. The Prologue to CA, repeating themes from MO and VC, reflects "Gower's persistent, strong concern for moral and terrestrial decline and particularly for the individual's responsibility in the decay" (p. 252). Gower repeatedly echoes the "jadis . . . mais ore" formula from MO, and also introduces again the statue from Nebuchadnezzar's dream. Dean emphasizes Gower's departures from the Biblical version of the dream, particularly in Gower's hope, represented in the overthrow of the statue, for an apocalyptic renewal of the world rather than merely a messianic kingdom. The statue is effective because it portrays the decline of the world in a specifically human image, which is emblematic for Gower of mankind's "original and continuing culpability for the world's 'health'" (p. 261). The focus on human sin prepares the way for the story of Amans, who, as an "example of improper loving" (p. 264), discovers his own responsibility for the decline of love in the world. While his age is not explicit at the beginning of the poem, he is described as having suffered his love-sickness for a long time, so that the discovery of his age at the end is not a shock but a recognition. The poet's incorporation of his own literal infirmities into the conclusion has an element of wit, but his age and his sickness both have "metaphoric overtones" (p. 267). "If the great world has grown old through division, improper loving, and a cooling of charity, so has Gower" (p. 268). He is both St. Paul's vetus homo and an image of the world at large, and as he shuffles off to seek dignity in penance, "he makes himself the butt of the joke and humbly acknowledges his complicity in the decay of society" (p. 270). This summary reveals both the strengths and the limitations of Dean's study. It is certainly useful to see the ways in which Gower draws upon and alters motifs and ideas that were current in his time, and to examine the connections among his three works. But the effort to do so can itself result in a very partial view, especially for a poem like CA. While such a study may indeed be adequate for MO and VC, fully half of Dean's discussion of CA is concerned with the Prologue, and most of the rest treats the final scene in which Amans is compelled to acknowledge his old age. Virtually everything else that occurs in between is summarized with the observation that "The exemplary stories themselves may owe more to 'lust' than 'lore," more to mirth than morality; but often Genius finds ways to link the stories and their applications with moral pronouncements de senectute mundi" (p. 266). He actually does so fairly rarely, and only in the "digressions," not in the tales. It would in fact be quite hard to demonstrate from the stories in CA that Gower saw the ancient past as in any way more virtuous than the present. Earlier, Dean declares "Although Gower scholars have questioned the appropriateness of individual tales within the books as illustrations of particular sins, Gower's moral, didactic intentions are clear enough" (p. 252). Elided here is virtually all of the recent discussions of the poem that would make of it something much more complicated and more sophisticated than the straightforward didactic work that Dean describes. And viewing the ending simply in terms of Amans' age allows no consideration of any of his specific lessons during the course of the confession or of the multiple inflections that have been given to both "Nature" and "Reason." Dean would take us back to Fisher's view of Gower's three major works as coherent in purpose if not indeed as three parts of the same composition. His method of argument also often resembles Fisher's, picking out only the passages in the poem that conform to his thesis with the implication that they constitute the whole. What Dean has provided is a valuable index to a central idea and to its associated motifs, which deserves to be incorporated into a more complete understanding of the complexities of a very complex poem. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 17.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dean, James M. Published Dean, James M.. "The World Grown Old in Later Medieval Literature." Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1997 ISBN 0915651041 Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Cronica Tripertita 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 The World Grown Old in Later Medieval Literature. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Academy of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 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 Robins offers an ambitious argument grounded in contemporary theoretical models to account for the nature and purpose of the frequently remarked diversity of voices and of types of narrative in CA. He works from the inside out, starting with "Apollonius of Tyre." Gower's setting of the romance within a moralized frame invokes "dramatically opposed strategies of reading" (p. 158), one represented throughout the poem by Amans and the other by Genius. Romance, he claims (citing Bakhtin) is the mode of random narrative contingency, and of unseen external forces as opposed to individual agency; but Genius, in his focus on the conclusion of the tale, invokes an opposing "temporality of moral necessity" (here Robins cites Ricoeur) according to which "internal moral disposition will determine the outcome of external events" (p. 161). Amans believes he lives in the first mode, subject to the arbitrary whims of his lady, while Genius unsuccessfully attempts to resee his life in exemplary and moral terms. Genius' very attempt is paradoxical, for exemplary instruction is itself an "external force," the efficacy of which depends upon a pre-existing internal disposition. This "paradox of exemplarity" is illustrated in Amans' assertion that the lesson of "Apollonius" does not apply to him. Throughout the poem he repeatedly rejects the analogical reasoning of the exempla, and Genius is unable to overcome his objection. This "interrogation of the grounds of exemplarity" is the "theorem" of the poem (p. 165), and Gower pursues his exploration by opposing different kinds of tales and different ways of reading. A precedent for his procedure can be found in the Nicomachean Ethics, which invokes "competing patterns of how behavior might be understood," by "internal ordering of the soul" or by the "external gifts of Fortune" (p. 167). Gower deals with this philosophical issue in literary terms, by experimenting with different kinds of narrative, culminating in "Apollonius of Tyre." This tale also contains in its recognition scene a model for the conclusion of CA. As Thaise attempts to reason with her father, external promptings fail, but the internal predisposition that stems from their natural blood relationship works to bring about Apollonius' transformation. The scene keeps the dynamic between external and internal in clear focus, but Robins rejects Olsson's recent argument on the efficacy both of Thaise's words and of Genius' teaching. This last exemplum is ineffectual for Amans, who is brought to his senses only by the forced recognition of his old age. At this point Amans does move from one model of self-definition to another, from the external evaluation (his lack of success) to the internal (he is no longer capable of being "amans"). But it is not a simple matter of choosing one narrative mode over the other. Amans is caught between the two, neither of which is adequate to his case, and in casting off the "romance" view, he does not commit himself to the "exemplary," for it is "unresponsive to lived experience" (p. 175). He is thus "finally positioned as a subject who has to adjudicate between the competing narrative modes that constitute his ability to think about himself" (ibid.). The reader, Robins argues, is put in the same position as Amans, beginning with the Prologue of the poem, which in its invocation of exemplum, chronicle, and complaint, serves "to bring the readers to an admission that their own predicament of making sense of the world is bound up in competing narrative understandings of temporality" (p. 177). The subject-position that is created for the reader is "not equivalent to a romantic notion of a fully autonomous interior self, for reflection is seen as participation in discursive modes shared by society and preceding the individual. And yet this situation differs from the postmodern, decentered subject for which the self is an illusion created by language, for Gower dearly holds to the belief in an interiority from which to choose between, or at least to feel and endure, competing narrative options. The ground upon which to order one's thoughts, desires, and actions, is constituted rather by an activity of first-person enunciation" (p. 178). At the end of the poem, Amans/Gower resumes both his proper name and his personal history as a writer. "Able now to review and give shape to the experience of having read his own life through and against available narrative patterns, the character/narrator recognizes that he occupies an individual position of ethical responsiveness, and his readers are spurred to realize that they too can articulate their course of engagement with various models of self-conception" (ibid.). In conclusion, Robins asserts, "Gower is not primarily concerned to represent the subjectivity of a character, but rather to provoke the subjectivity of the reader, to create the conditions whereby a reader can come to understand the site he or she occupies at the intersection of incommensurable modes of narrative self-conception. The "Tale of Apollonius," bearing the pattern of ancient romance into the fourteenth-century culture of exemplarity, becomes one of the told Gower strategically manipulates for implementing that purpose, a purpose which, however, can only be a gambit for Gower, for he knows that he cannot guarantee the success of his strategy of provocation no matter how earnestly he wishes to secure it" (pp. 180-81). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 17.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Robins, William Published Robins, William. "Romance, Exemplum, and the Subject of the Confessio Amantis." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 19 (1997), pp. 157-181. 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 Romance, Exemplum, and the Subject of the Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 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. "'Scripture Veteris Capiunt Exempla Futuri': John Gower's Transformation of a Fable of Avianus." In Retelling Tales: Essays in Honor of Russell Peck. Ed. Hahn, Thomas and Lupack, Alan. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997, pp. 341-54. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review Yeager examines Gower's tale of "The Travellers and the Angel" (CA 2.291-372) in comparison to its source in Avianus (Fables 22). In order to depict the nature of Envy, Gower chooses a tale whose central metaphor is blindness. He brings it within a sphere of Christian reference by attributing to Jove many of the attributes of the Christian God and replacing Apollo with an angel. He also emphasizes the choices that each man makes: each man is depicted as a sinner rather than merely as an embodiment of a sin. The choice of the greedy man, to defer his request, better reveals his nature than in Avianus, where he asks for nothing. The angel's offer of a gift for the "kindeschipe? of their hospitality resonates ironically: where the word implies fellowship and likeness, it also draws attention to the men's difference from the angel and to the way in which they act irrationally, according to "kinde.? In his conclusion, finally, Genius draws an application not just to Amans but to the broader world which "empeireth? because of sins like those that the two men illustrate, asserting again the relation between individual virtue and common profit that was identified as the major theme of the poem by the man who is honored by the festschrift in which Yeager's essay appears. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.2] 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 'Scripture Veteris Capiunt Exempla Futuri': John Gower's Transformation of a Fable of Avianus 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 1997 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 Though there is no essay devoted exclusively to Gower, he is named frequently in the pages of this collection, as one might expect from the friends and colleagues of J. A. Burrow, who himself has written so compellingly on our poet. Among the more important references: Ardis Butterfield ("French Culture and the Ricardian Court," pp. 82-120) offers a subtle and well-informed examination of the inter-penetration of French and English literary culture during the Ricardian period, emphasizing the mutuality of cultural influences that was a natural product of the close family ties between royal and aristocratic houses in contrast to a common tendency (among Anglophone writers) to emphasize the distinctness of the English from the French. In a brief consideration of the puy as an example of cultural imitation, Butterfield dismisses the suggestion of Gower's association as far-fetched since there is no evidence of continuity much beyond 1300; and in her discussion of the practice of quoting already existing refrains in new compositions she cites CB 25. In the final part of her essay she gives more direct attention to Gower as one whose works are "supremely poised between linguistic cultures" (p. 107). She compares CB 37 to a ballade of Guillaume Machaut, not to establish borrowing, though an argument for at least indirect influence would not be difficult to make, but to demonstrate how thoroughly at home Gower is in contemporary French poetic idiom, contrary to the judgment of those who have seen either a discontinuity with French courtly writing or a reaction against it in Gower's work. She also gives brief consideration to Traitie as a conclusion to CA, which it follows in 8 of the 10 MSS in which it is preserved. There is more than a single paradox to the relation, Butterfield points out, as Gower turns to more love poetry immediately after renouncing any further writing about love, and as he draws upon the authority of French to offer a very un-French defense of married love, creating an instability that is typical of the "endemic restlessness" of Gower's poetic career and his constant habit of setting up "oblique contrasts between different kinds of cultural perspectives" (p. 120). A.G. Rigg ("Anglo-Latin in the Ricardian Age," pp. 121-41) cites Gower at least once on almost every page in his survey of the role and status of Anglo-Latin during the last half of the fourteenth century, focusing on the Ricardian era in particular. "In this period," he writes, "we begin to see clearly the trends that would later lead to both the demise of Latin as a medium for creative writing and its protection as a unique manifestation of classical civilization" (p. 122). His essay is an engaging supplement both to his own History of Anglo-Latin Literature (1066-1422) and to Burrow's Ricardian Poetry, as he describes how Latin writers were like or unlike contemporary writers in English, using the features that Burrow defined as characteristic of the Ricardian age. Along the way, he makes many useful observations about how Gower was like or unlike other contemporary writers in Latin. To use a small example, Gower's use of the enclitic que for et, which stands out so prominently for those more accustomed to classical Latin, is, Riggs asserts, entirely typical of his age (p. 133); and on a larger matter, he notes that the most typical subject matter of late 14th-century Latin poetry is "historical" (as opposed to classical, Biblical, or devotional), the only exceptions being a few of Gower's own short poems. In the last part of his essay, he juxtaposes three different examples of such historical writing, Thomas Barry's "Battle of Otterburn" (a straightforward factual account in verse), Gower's CrT (in which the poet "has entirely manipulated history for his poetic and political agenda," p. 138), and the Visio in Book 1 of VC, "the most striking example of the use of contemporary history . . . for literary purposes" (pp. 138-39), presenting a vision that "more than any other dream-vision I know, mirrors the common experience of a bad dream" (p. 139). More briefly, Stephen Medcalf ("The World and Heart of Thomas Usk," pp. 222-253) cites Venus' instruction that Chaucer write his own "testament of love" (CA 8.2955*) as "the only probable evidence of a contemporary's having read" Usk's poem of that name; and Charlotte Morse ("From 'Ricardian Poetry' to Ricardian Studies," pp. 316-44) cites a number of recent studies of Gower (including works by Middleton, Yeager, Scanlon, and Spearing) in her survey of critical work on the Ricardian period that appeared following the publication of Burrow's ground-breaking study in 1971. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Minnis, A. J., Charlotte Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. Published Minnis, A. J., Charlotte Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. "Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J.A. Burrow." Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies 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 Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J. A. Burrow. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Clarendon Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 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 Butterfield offers a subtle and well-informed examination of the inter-penetration of French and English literary culture during the Ricardian period, emphasizing the mutuality of cultural influences that was a natural product of the close family ties between royal and aristocratic houses in contrast to a common tendency (among Anglophone writers) to emphasize the distinctness of the English from the French. In a brief consideration of the puy as an example of cultural imitation, Butterfield dismisses the suggestion of Gower's association as far-fetched since there is no evidence of continuity much beyond 1300; and in her discussion of the practice of quoting already existing refrains in new compositions she cites CB 25. In the final part of her essay she gives more direct attention to Gower as one whose works are "supremely poised between linguistic cultures" (p. 107). She compares CB 37 to a ballade of Guillaume Machaut, not to establish borrowing, though an argument for at least indirect influence would not be difficult to make, but to demonstrate how thoroughly at home Gower is in contemporary French poetic idiom, contrary to the judgment of those who have seen either a discontinuity with French courtly writing or a reaction against it in Gower's work. She also gives brief consideration to Traitie as a conclusion to CA, which it follows in 8 of the 10 MSS in which it is preserved. There is more than a single paradox to the relation, Butterfield points out, as Gower turns to more love poetry immediately after renouncing any further writing about love, and as he draws upon the authority of French to offer a very un-French defense of married love, creating an instability that is typical of the "endemic restlessness" of Gower's poetic career and his constant habit of setting up "oblique contrasts between different kinds of cultural perspectives" (p. 120). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Butterfield, Ardis. Published Minnis, A. J., Charlotte Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. "Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J.A. Burrow." Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. 82-120. 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 French Culture and the Ricardian Court. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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.G. Rigg cites Gower at least once on almost every page in his survey of the role and status of Anglo-Latin during the last half of the fourteenth century, focusing on the Ricardian era in particular. "In this period," he writes, "we begin to see clearly the trends that would later lead to both the demise of Latin as a medium for creative writing and its protection as a unique manifestation of classical civilization" (p. 122). His essay is an engaging supplement both to his own "History of Anglo-Latin Literature (1066-1422)" and to J. A. Burrow's "Ricardian Poetry," as he describes how Latin writers were like or unlike contemporary writers in English, using the features that Burrow defined as characteristic of the Ricardian age. Along the way, he makes many useful observations about how Gower was like or unlike other contemporary writers in Latin. To use a small example, Gower's use of the enclitic "que" for "et," which stands out so prominently for those more accustomed to classical Latin, is, Riggs asserts, entirely typical of his age (p. 133); and on a larger matter, he notes that the most typical subject matter of late 14th-century Latin poetry is "historical" (as opposed to classical, Biblical, or devotional), the only exceptions being a few of Gower's own short poems. In the last part of his essay, he juxtaposes three different examples of such historical writing, Thomas Barry's "Battle of Otterburn" (a straightforward factual account in verse), Gower's CrT (in which the poet "has entirely manipulated history for his poetic and political agenda," p. 138), and the "Visio" in Book 1 of VC, "the most striking example of the use of contemporary history . . . for literary purposes" (pp. 138-39), presenting a vision that "more than any other dream-vision I know, mirrors the common experience of a bad dream" (p. 139). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rigg, A. G. Published Minnis, A. J., Charlotte Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. "Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J.A. Burrow." Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. 121-41. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Cronica Tripertita 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 Anglo-Latin in the Ricardian Age. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Medcalf cites Venus' instruction in Confessio Amantis 8.2955* that Chaucer write his own "testament of love" as "the only probable evidence of a contemporary's having read" Usk's poem of that name. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Medcalf, Stephen. Published Minnis, A. J., Charlotte Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. "Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J.A. Burrow." Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. 222-53. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The World and Heart of Thomas Usk. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Morse cites a number of recent studies of Gower (including works by Middleton, Yeager, Scanlon, and Spearing) in her survey of critical work on the Ricardian period that appeared following the publication of Burrow's ground-breaking study in 1971. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Morse, Charlotte. Published Minnis, A. J., Charlotte Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. "Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J.A. Burrow." Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. 316-44. 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 From Ricardian Poetry to Ricardian Studies. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Turville-Petre considers Burrow's "four Ricardian poets" from the perspective of their "claim to be national poets, two of them explicitly [i.e., Chaucer and Gower] and the third [Langland] implicitly" (276). The poet of "Pearl" is more problematic in this regard, and hence the subject of Turville-Petre's examination. He finds in Cambridge, University Library MS Mm. V.14, copied by the scribe Richard Frampton and containing a "Siege of Jerusalem" clearly made in London for a wealthy client of the sort that purchased such manuscripts of Gower's poetry (284-85), suggestive evidence that alliterative poetry such as "Pearl" might have found an audience at the center of the nation no less than Gower's, Chaucer's, and Langland's.[RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society] Author/Editor Author/Editor Turville-Petre, Thorlac. Published Minnis, A. J., Charlotte Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. "Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J.A. Burrow." Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp.276-94. 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 The "Pearl"-Poet in his "Fayre Regioun." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 dissertation has two purposes: to uncover a critique of chivalry in a twelfth-century roman antique, Benoît de Sainte-Maure's 'Roman de Troie,' and to assess its implications for two fourteenth-century English poems, Geoffrey Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde' and John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis.' The first chapter of this thesis examines the 'Roman de Troie' in light of the cultural environment of Henry II's court, where the aristocracy and the secular clergy collaborated to promote knightly duties and virtues. While purporting to endorse this ideological project, Benoît simultaneously questions it by exposing not only the egotism, aggression, and violence that underlie knightly activities but also the discursive strategies of concealment and suppression deployed in elevating knighthood. Benoît's critical inquiry into chivalry is conducted largely in two ways. First, he uses female characters as a site from which to criticize the oppressive mechanisms whereby the chivalric class maintains the status quo. Second, he points to the incompatibility of knightly conduct with good government by emphasizing the individualistic nature of knights' pursuit of honor and revenge. The subsequent two chapters of this thesis demonstrate that these two methods were adopted by Chaucer and Gower respectively. While basing his 'Troilus' primarily on Boccaccio's 'Filostrato,' Chaucer occasionally alluded to the Briseida story in the 'Roman de Troie' to amplify Criseyde's role as a victim of chivalric society and to highlight through her experience the Trojan nobility's preoccupation with class solidarity and war effort. Gower, on the other hand, chose to translate those episodes in the Roman which problematize the chivalric principles of honor and revenge ("Ring Namplus and the Greeks," "Athemas and Demephon," "Orestes," "Telaphus and Teucer," "Jason and Medea," "Paris and Helen," "Ulysses and Telegonus"). Gower used these tales to reflect on the nobility's self-interested exercise of armed force and the threat it poses to civil order and justice. Although Chaucer and Gower responded to different aspects of Benoît's critique of chivalry, they were united in that they both developed the borrowings from the Roman into an implicit commentary on the Hundred Years War and its consequences for the late fourteenth-century English society." [eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kobayashi, Yoshiko. Published Kobayashi, Yoshiko. "Chivalry, Power, and Justice in Three Medieval Romances." Ph.D. Diss. Cornell University 1997. DAI 58(8): 3144. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chivalry, Power, and Justice in Three Medieval Romances. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Seymour examines in this essay the revisions evident in the G version of Chaucer's Prologue to "Legend of Good Women" found in Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.4.27, the only witness to this version of the poem; he assesses both "accidental and intentional revisions to the text" (832). Along the way, he argues that Chaucer undertook his revision to please the newly crowned Henry IV and--he suggests in passing and without development--"in imitation" (841) of Gower's revision of his Prologue to the CA: "Some years earlier Gower had pointedly revised the Prologue to the 'Confessio Amantis' in Henry's favour, and the two poems and the two poets have much in common" (840). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Seymour, M. C. Published Seymour, M. C. "Chaucer's Revision of the Prologue to 'The Legend of Good Women'." Modern Language Review 92 (1997): 832-41. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer's Revision of the Prologue to "The Legend of Good Women." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review From Harper's abstract: [In my introduction I argue that] "the widespread interpretation of madness as a spiritual metaphor has only a limited application to late-medieval literature and that there is a need to consider the secular as well as the religious import of madness." He then addresses "the meaning of madness in romance . . . . as a sort of social alienation . . . related to the increasingly positive perceptions of the Wild Man." Chapter three "discusses the dream vision of Book I of the Vox Clamantis ["Visio Anglie"]; it shows how Gower repeats the commonplaces of medieval didactic writers, regarding the peasant insurrection of 1381 as an outbreak of demonic derangement. It is seen that Gower makes use of the 'organic analogy' of society to show this madness as an infection of the entire social body. The sufferings of the nobility at the hands of the rioting mobs are described sympathetically in terms of 'grief-madness'. Thus Gower presents two very different, class-based, attitudes towards insanity." Chapter four "continues the investigation of the link between madness and social class" in Chaucer's "Miller's Tale" and "Summoner's Tale"; Chapter five argues that "the apparently insane narrator of Hoccleve's major poems stresses that insanity is a hidden and undetectable affliction," while Harper's "final chapter explores the association of madness, female unruliness and mystical rapture in The Book of Margery Kempe," concluding that the Book "contains a craftily double-edged attempt by Kempe to vindicate her conduct." Author/Editor Author/Editor Harper, Stephen. Published Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Glasgow, 1997. Open access at https://theses.gla.ac.uk/3152/1/1997HarperPhD.pdf (accessed January 30, 2023). 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 The Subject of Madness: Insanity, Individuals and Society in Late-Medieval English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "By explaining and comparing the treatment of five of the tales about classical women that appear in Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women' and recur in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' this thesis examines the interrelationships between late fourteenth-century poetry and the socio-political environment of the times. . . . An investigation of the Prologues of both poems . . . introduce[s] the range of issues and material". . . , including "socio-legal consideration of rape ('Philomela') . . . [and] concerns with the female body, female sexual desire and the mechanisms of the marriage market ('Ariadne'). It then considers how a rejection of conventional gender roles in both literary and social spheres is used to articulate anxieties regarding the preservation of noble and national hegemony ('Dido') . . . , broadened out ('Medea' and 'Lucrece') to an examination of both poets' inscription of contemporary political concerns in their tales . . . [and revealing] the gendered poetics and sexual politics that underlie both Chaucerian and Gowerian verse." Author/Editor Author/Editor Canty, R. Published Canty, R. "The Representation of Gender in Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women' and Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and Its Relation to Cultural Anxieties in England at the End of the Fourteenth Century." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Exeter, 1997. Index to Theses, with Abstracts: Accepted for Higher Degrees by the Universities of Great Britain and Ireland 47.5 (1998), no. 10628. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Representation of Gender in Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women" and Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and Its Relation to Cultural Anxieties in England at the End of the Fourteenth Century. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 dissertation explores the relationships between different constructions of ethics and politics in the intricate thematic and narrative structures of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis.' Chapter 1 reconsiders [the] confession[al] . . . dialogue of Amans and Genius as an internal dialogue between faculties of a single psyche . . . , [arguing] that Gower's use of penitential materials is one of secular appropriation . . . [whereby] various ethical and ecclesiological norms of penitential writings exert even less pressure on [CA] . . . than on Gower's earlier 'Mirour de l'Omme.' Genius's tendency to represent spirituality as immanent in secular society is given its fullest and most idealistic treatment in a cluster of romance narratives which I define in my second chapter: these are tales with a basic narrative structure in common, through which Gower can resolve the poems' ethical, sexual, familial and political themes harmoniously and in parallel. The optimistic closure, however, is resisted by a more sceptical narrative current, owing much to Ovid's 'Metamorphoses.' The patterns of competition between more confident and more sceptical currents is a recurrent feature of the 'Confessio's' design, its most striking and problematic manifestation in the poem's politics, which I explore in Chapters 3 to 5. In narrative and 'in propria persona', here as well as elsewhere in his works, Gower asserts and explores the authorial role of a public poet addressing the king and the nation." Author/Editor Author/Editor Dimmick, Jeremy Neil. Published Dimmick, Jeremy Neil. "Patterns of Ethics and Politics in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." Ph. D. Dissertation. University of Cambridge, 1997. Index to Theses, with Abstracts: Accepted for Higher Degrees by the Universities of Great Britain and Ireland 47.3 (1998), no. 5506. Dissertation Abstracts International C70.19. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) 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 Patterns of Ethics and Politics in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "My dissertation argues that the pose of melancholy was a vital framing fiction in later medieval poetry . . . . a therapeutic strategy, which used a playful fiction to try to unveil the more dangerous fictions of those in power. I investigate the medical, philosophical and religious traditions of melancholy . . . prov[ing] that, by the middle of the fourteenth century, an accepted bank of symptoms had been established in literature as well as in medical treatises . . . . I then trace the political role of the melancholic narrator in vernacular poetry from Machaut to Lydgate . . . ." In CA, Gower "highlights the melancholic nature of Amans and Genius . . . to justify the creative feigning of his poetic process and to create parallels with socially disruptive characters in the text. He loads his poem with the threat of violence which will erupt if melancholic voices are ignored." Author/Editor Author/Editor Dunlop, L. M. Published Dunlop, L. M. "Cities without Walls: The Politics of Melancholy from Machaut to Lydgate." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Cambridge, 1997. Index to Theses, with Abstracts: Accepted for Higher Degrees by the Universities of Great Britain and Ireland 47.3 (1998), no. 5507. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Cities without Walls: The Politics of Melancholy from Machaut to Ly.dgate Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 obscure work "Chaucer's Ghoast" (full title: "Chaucer's Ghoast. Or, A Piece of Antiquity. Containing twelve pleasant Fables of Ovid penn'd after the ancient manner of writing in England Which makes them prove Mock-Poems to the present Poetry. With the History of Prince Corniger, and his Champion Sir Crucifrag that run a tilt likewise at the present Historiographers. By a Lover of Antiquity"), printed in 1672, contains twelve poems: eleven free-standing and the twelfth in a short prose piece. Of these, none are by Ovid nor by Chaucer, although all are rewritten to resemble Chaucer's style. In fact, eleven are by taken from the "Confessio Amantis," Prologue-Book V. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Joshua, Essaka. Published Joshua, Essaka. "'Chaucer's Ghoast' and Gower's 'Confessio Amantis.'" Notes and Queries 44 [242] (1997): 458-59. 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 "Chaucer's Ghoast"' and Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Lowe's book is divided roughly into halves, the latter portion focusing mainly on the rise of humanism during the late fifteenth century and the reigns of the pre-Elizabethan Tudors. The medieval portion presents adherents and arguments concerned with two discourses on war that governed in the period--"jus ad bellum" and "jus in bellum," i.e., "law or right to go to war" and "ethical behavior in war" (2). John Gower, Lowe argues, whom he inexplicably deems "'a man of peace' (as opposed to …'pacifist')," which--his book title notwithstanding--he considers "anachronistic" (36), "developed the most substantial appraisals of the just war" (36), being more committed to, and more sophisticated in his understanding of, the issues--particularly economic--involved in waging war and bringing peace during the Hundred Years' War, than his contemporaries Chaucer, Langland, or Lydgate. Although, as a good Augustinian, Gower probably took no issue with the idea of some wars being just "in theory" (38), by 1369 his views of the French War were changing, so that "over the next twenty years Gower turned completely against the war and in both major works of the period, 'Vox clamantis' and 'Confessio amantis,' condemned the bloodshed on strictly moral grounds" (82). In the latter work, "Gower complained vehemently about the use of the just war by the nobility and 'greedy lords' to amass great wealth" at the expense of the common people (142). Lowe sees Gower's critique becoming "standard over the next century" (142-43) and, through the publication by Caxton and Berthelette of the CA having an impact on the "pacifism" of early humanists, like Erasmus (147-50). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lowe, Ben. Published Lowe, Ben. Imagining Peace: A History of Early English Pacifist Ideas. (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Vox Clamantis 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 Imagining Peace: A History of Early English Pacifist Idea. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Federico's dissertation "Shows how selected late medieval narratives (Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde' and 'House of Fame,' John Gower's 'Vox Clamantis,' Richard Maidstone's 'Concordia Facta inter Regem Riccardum II et Civitatem Londonie,' the anonymous 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,' and Lydgate's 'Troy Book') theorized England's relationship with its mythic past by incorporating fantasy, sexuality and symbolization into historiographical discourse. England's mythic origins in Trojan legend constitute a particularly ambivalent historical precedent, since the same lust that ruined Troy is also the fortunate flaw that permitted the establishment of later empires. Accordingly, English historical identity is both permitted and threatened by a Trojan precedent that is at once the fruition of the glory of empire and the epitome of self-destruction through unnatural desire." In Federico's reading (pp. 64-87), Gower's depiction of London as "New Troye" feminizes the city as a widow, both vulnerable and voracious, and when he adds Book 1 to the rest of the VC after the Uprising of 1381, Federico argues, Gower "reinterpret[s] how his book should be read" and offers "a utopian manual for the post-revolt England. Similarly, Gower' s authorial persona is no longer that of a single voice crying (unheeded) in the wilderness of Southwark; his is a London voice bravely crying for obviously necessary social reform." His social criticism, however, "rests on a backwards-looking idealism and imagines a future defined by an illusory golden age of relations between and among the estates" (86). [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Federico, Sylvia Published Federico, Sylvia. Old ''Stories'' and New Trojans: The Gendered Construction of English Historical Identity. Ph.D. Dissertation. Indiana University, 1997. v, 229 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A58.08. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. 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 Old ''Stories'' and New Trojans: The Gendered Construction of English Historical Identity. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 dissertation traces the emergence of three landmarks of the Renaissance English canon--an author (John Donne), a genre (the English Sonnet), and a work (The Tempest). The canonical represents not only positive content, but also the exclusion of an unstable material context. Responding to recent developments in textual criticism, attribution study, and theories of canon formation, the thesis draws on the work of Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva to show how canonicity (the preference for a given text, author or word over another in a given context) involves ritual pollution and purification. Much of what was later considered impure or corrupting was deeply woven into the early modern experience of texts now generally read in cleaned-up, anachronistically coherent versions. Chapter 3 argues that 'The Tempest' radically revises, then supplants earlier and more popular versions of the story of Apollonius of Tyre, such as 'Pericles.' Critical hostility to 'Pericles' and adulation of 'The Tempest' have precluded full consideration of the canonical play's debt to the Apollonius tradition, the most widespread and obvious repository of The Tempest's romance motifs and the proximate source of its Virgilian echoes. Reversing the earlier myth's perspective to make the tyrant the hero, Prospero derives his authority and cruelty from the father-kings in the Apollonius tradition and his choric, pseudo-Christian epilogue from Gower's frame narrative in the 'Confessio Amantis'." Includes discussion of how Shakespeare's Miranda echoes "the daughter of the King of Pentapolis" (143) of CA. Author/Editor Author/Editor Johnson, Nathaniel Paul. Published Johnson, Nathaniel Paul.  Canonicity and Identity: Mythologies of English Renaissance Writing. Ph.D. Dissertation. Cornell University, 1997. vi, 204 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A58.04. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. 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 Canonicity and Identity: Mythologies of English Renaissance Writing. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Kamayabee's study re-examines "Middle English animal fables as teaching vehicles. For each fable, four governing pedagogical questions are raised and certain suggestions proposed. First, what lesson(s) does the fable teach? Does it encourage a virtue or warn against a vice? Second, who is the teacher: the poet, the narrator, or the anthropomorph? Third, to whom the lesson is addressed? Though it is often next to impossible to identify the historical audience of the fable, the imagined audience of the poet is often suggested. Fourth, how the lesson is offered? Surprise, reward, and punishment are among the most frequent didactic strategies that fables employ. 'The Introduction' establishes the background of the genre and the related traditions as well as their historical applications. Fables served as a convenient tool to teach grammar, rhetoric, and translation both in antiquity and in the Middle Ages. They were also used in sermons for purposes of edification. 'Chapter II' discusses Henryson's use of fable as a vehicle of social criticism. 'Chapter III' discusses Chaucer's NPT and ManT and the manipulation of the genre in the greater picture of 'Canterbury Tales.' The use and abuse of language are the main issue of Chaucerian fables. 'Chapter IV' discusses Gower's 'Phebus and Cornide' and 'Adrian and Bardus,' which expound lessons to be learned from silence and justice. 'Chapter V' discusses Langland's 'Belling the Cat' and its political implications. 'Chapter VI' discusses Lydgate's 'Isopes Fabules', 'Churl,' and 'Debate,' that teach not only practical wisdom, but also nationalism and integrity. 'Chapter VII' discusses 'The Owl and the Nightingale' as an animal fable with its emphasis on justice, honesty, and above all on winning. In their different ways, medieval English animal fables teach their prospective audiences not only what to think, but more urgently how to think." Author/Editor Author/Editor Kamyabee, Mohammad Hadi. Published Kamyabee, Mohammad Hadi. "And out of fables gret wysdom men may take": Middle English Animal Fables as Vehicles of Moral Instruction. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Toronto, 1997. Dissertation Abstracts International A59.06. Freely available at https://utoronto.scholaris.ca/items/0fee8a77-d2c0-403f-829a-91c046d1cb35. 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 "And out of fables gret wysdom men may take": Middle English Animal Fables as Vehicles of Moral Instruction. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Kiefer, Lauren Published Kiefer, Lauren. "'A Good War Spoiled,' Part Two: Troy in the Late Middle Ages." In The Spoils of War: The Bright and Bitter Fruits of Human Conflict. Ed. Kleist, Jurgen and Butterfield, Bruce A.. Plattsburgh Studies in the Humanities (5). New York: Peter Lang, 1997, pp. 13-39. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Kiefer's is the second of two essays on the depiction of the Trojan War in this new volume. (The first, by Thomas J. Morrisey, covers Greek literature from Homer to Euripides.) She offers some brief comments on the standard Roman and medieval texts -- Ovid, Vergil, Hyginus, Bersuire, Benoit, and Guido -- emphasizing the portrayal of Ulysses as a smooth-talking trickster; but as will come as no surprise to those familiar with her other scholarly work, she devotes the bulk of her essay to Gower, who presents the war, she asserts, "as a pervasive, societal evil, rather than as an occasion for individual credulity and guile" (p. 19). Gower saw the war, she argues, as a mirror of his own violent times, and in his tales of Troy he demonstrates "how humans' own violent nature creates the destruction around them, and how, conversely, the institution of war distorts human impulses into duplicity and cruelty" (p. 25). She supports her conclusions with an examination of three tales. In "The Trojan Horse," Gower places blame on the falsity of the Greeks, but also shows that "the Trojan's own violent impulses [the eagerness and intensity with which they tear down their own walls] result in the destruction of the city" (p. 26). In "Nauplus and Ulysses," Gower demonstrates the incompatibility between war and familial love, and depicts the revelation of Ulysses' feigned madness as a cruel act of retribution, as Nauplus fights one ruse with another in order to separate Ulysses from his family. In substituting Nauplus for Palamedes, moreover, Gower draws a link (despite the difference in the spelling of the name) to his own earlier tale of "King Namplus and the Greeks": though he doesn't specify who actually killed Palamedes, Gower relies upon knowledge of the story to suggest that Ulysses killed Namplus' son because Nauplus threatened Ulysses' son, thus completing "the cycle of parental love warped into hatred and violence" (p. 32). Gower emphasizes the link between the Troy story and his own times by setting "Nauplus and Ulysses" within Genius' and Amans' discussion of the crusades. Amans speaks for Gower in this dialogue, echoing the narrator of the Prologue, as he undercuts Genius' enthusiasm for winning glory in battle and condemns the mentality that underlies the crusades. Genius replies with a tale that seems to exalt war over love and over the personal bonds between husband and wife and between father and son. Gower sets the personal against the mob mentality that results in war, Kiefer concludes, and "shows us that by the late fourteenth century, the age of chivalry was already approaching its end, and the rise of the individual was already beginning" (p. 37). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.2] 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 'A Good War Spoiled,' Part Two: Troy in the Late Middle Ages Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Peter Lang, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997-04. 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 Achorn, John Howard Published Achorn, John Howard. "A study of 'Apollonius of Tyre': Three English Adaptations of an Ancient Greek Romance." PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1998. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review "This thesis involves three English versions of Apollonius of Tyre: the Old English translation (OE) of the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri (HA), John Gower's version (CA) in the Confessio Amantis, and Shakespeare's Pericles. I discuss the social climate surrounding the production of each work and then concentrate on the tale's restorative property, particularly as it relates to gender issues. "Because HA represents the 'architext' of all subsequent versions, my Introduction fo-cuses on it. I compare HA to five extant Greek romances of an earlier period to ascertain what features they share, and to determine what distinguishes HA. HA's affiliation with hagiography proves especially instructive. The story's Providential motif is the source of the story's restorative power. However, along with this motif comes the potential for subversive content. This thesis examines the extent to which each text handles these seemingly divergent aims. "OE contains additional Christian resonances. As a result, the Providential motif becomes more evident. However, OE also retains the emphasis HA places on female rights, and therefore proves subversive of the norm. In contrast, Gower's text seeks to restore a Golden Age, one saturated in patristic ideals. The Providential motif is elaborate, but since CA seeks to reclaim past order, the subversive element gets quelled. Shakespeare revitalizes it. He gives voice to orthodoxy by means of his choric figure, but also raises questions about the ade-quacy of this figure and insists upon the value of femininity. "In the final analysis, all three versions prove restorative. CA offers hope by giving a clear message about the truth of Providence: despite the vagaries of fortune, Appolinus's life has meaning in the end. OE and Pericles have a restorative effect, too, only these works achieve this effect in a different way. Both contain Providential overtones, but more importantly, by presenting a liberal view towards women's rights and by projecting current institu-tions as harmful to the welfare of a nation, both inspire a healthy rejection of patriarchal norms. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A study of 'Apollonius of Tyre': Three English Adaptations of an Ancient Greek Romance 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 Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Barrington, Candace Published Barrington, Candace. "John Gower, the Confessio Amantis, and the Rhetoric of Omission." PhD thesis, Duke University, 1998. Gower Subject In Praise of Peace Vox Clamantis Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Review "My dissertation uses John Gower's widely-circulated trilogy to illuminate the role of legal discourse in the developing vernacular literatures of late-fourteenth-century England. By looking beyond the veneer of flatness and conventionality, which has often misled his twentieth-century readers, I demonstrate how Gower's poetry textualizes literary and cultural struggles in Ricardian England, where his social position was particularly vexed. Though not firmly ensconced in the aristocracy, as a man-of-law he belonged to that group of gentry serving the landholding classes and those whose interests were intimately tied to the hegemonic ideals. His role as the nobility's advocate shapes his major works: the Anglo-Norman Mirour de l'Homme, the Latin Vox Clamantis, and the English Confessio Amantis and In Praise of Peace. A careful examination of these poems reveals them to be a fascinating marketplace of competing voices, which Gower attempts to regulate using the principles of legal rhetoric. So effective is his regulation that critics have often assumed that the dominant voice both controls the poems' hermeneutics and eliminates all discord. By examining his social location, his legal career, and the literary traditions informing his major Anglo-Norman, Latin and English poems, I argue that his control is not absolute. Instead, the poems inadvertently expose the frailty of the aristocratic ideology they seek to defend. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower, the Confessio Amantis, and the Rhetoric of Omission 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 Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Lipton, Emma Published Lipton, Emma. "Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature." Ph.D. dissertation. Duke University, 1998. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Review "This dissertation explores the ways in which changing religious, political and social conditions interacted with literary tradition to transform the meaning of marriage in the literature of the later Middle Ages. Since the twelfth century, Latin monastic writings built on the exegetical tradition of the Song of Songs, envisioning mystical marriage to Christ as an allegory for the monastic contemplative life. In many vernacular works of the late Middle Ages, however, spiritual marriage was appropriated in the service of validating earthly marriage, thus blurring the boundaries between celibacy, the distinguishing feature of the clergy, and marriage, the sexual marker of lay status. This validation of marriage practices as spiritual can be linked to the growth of lay piety, which found an extreme expression in the increasingly visible Lollard heretics who made marriage part of their attack on clerical celibacy. As a uniquely lay sacrament which could legally be performed without the participation of the clergy, marriage also played a complex role in contemporary disputes over the sacraments, and the theological history of the development of the sacramental model of marriage provided crucial vocabulary for literature promoting the spirituality of marriage. Late Medieval English literature also appropriated the tradition of fin amors, the literary expression of aristocratic honor and identity, and transformed it into a validation of marriage and a medium for expressing bourgeois ideology. This generic appropriation can be linked to changes in the social structure of late medieval England, when the growth of the middle strata of society made the three estates model, traditionally used as a means of describing medieval society, an increasingly less accurate representation. My readings reveal that marriage was a particular preoccupation in the literature authored by and directed to these middle sections of society who were in search of a social identity and legitimizing ideology because they found in marriage a medium for appropriating clerical and aristocratic cultures and transforming them into a means of constructing bourgeois ideology. Individual chapters feature Chaucer's 'Franklin's Tale,' Gower's 'Traitié Pour Essampler Les Amants Marietz,' the 'Mary Plays from the N-Town Cycle' and The Book of Margery Kempe. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature 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 Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bowers uses entente and the distinction that Chaucer and Gower create among different "narratological levels" as a way of exploring some key differences between Confessio Amantis and The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer never introduces himself except as a companion on the pilgrimage, though a more distinctively authorial voice does emerge in the Retraction, and we are constantly aware of the possibility that "Chaucer the poet" and "Chaucer the character" are not the same. The lack of any explicit statement, together with the fact that the poem remains unfinished, leaves the author's precise entente unclear, presumably deliberately. Gower introduces himself as poet in the Prologue, composing CA at Richard's behest, and introduces his character as lover only in Book 1. The explicit addition of another "level" "actually simplifies, rather than complicates, the project" (32), since it makes authorial entente clear. In WBPT, Chaucer introduces a third voice whose motives are different from those of both the poet and "Chaucer the character," and it is from such disjunctions that irony results. There is no such distinction, however, between Genius and the Gower of the Prologue, both of whom advocate reason for the purpose of restoring harmony to the world. WB's rejection of reason is analogous to the breakdown of order that occurs in the first fragment of CT, and therein lies the largest difference that Brower finds between the Gower's and Chaucer's poems. The two authors take "opposite views of remembrance" (36). Gower seeks to reform the present with lessons from the past: he moves from disorder to order by way of moderation and reason, and ends with certainty and optimism in his poem's epilogue. Chaucer moves from order to disorder by way of Pride (the storytelling contest) and division. There is no closure but only a retraction in which Chaucer finally turns his attention to the salvation of his soul. "He is just beginning what Gower has just ended. And this retraction is part of the reason why Chaucer's work is canonical and Gower's is not" (38). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 22.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bowers, Robert Published Bowers, Robert. "Frame is the Thing: Gower and Chaucer and Narrative Entente." In Geardagum 19 (1998), pp. 31-39. ISSN 1933-8724 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Frame is the Thing: Gower and Chaucer and Narrative Entente 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 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 One might expect Gower, with his revisions in both CA and VC and with his "Cronica Tripertita," to occupy a significant place in a study of the Lancastrian enlistment of both poetry and history in their quest for legitimacy in the first decades of the fifteenth century, but Strohm mentions our poet only once, and without reference to Gower's participation in Henry's cause. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Strohm, Paul Published Strohm, Paul. "England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399-1422." New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998 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 England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399-1422. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Yale University Press, 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 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 addresses the Latin apparatus of CA that was evidently of Gower's own composition: the glosses in their various forms (the speaker markers, the identification of sources, and the prose summaries of the tales and discursive passages) and the elegiac couplets that are interspersed throughout. She identifies and contests two assumptions that underlie most recent commentary on these portions of the poem: that the Latin passages by their very nature constitute a hegemonic and authoritative discourse, and that glosses, whether marginal or otherwise, always successfully functioned to control the interpretation of the associated text. In CA, she argues, the Latin portions alone offer a variety of voices, contrasting in form, in accessibility, in function, and in reliability, and therefore cannot offer a single stable point of reference, especially on the meaning of the English. "Far from invoking authority," she claims, "Gower's Latin problematizes the question of authority in the Confessio by presenting a reader with several competing authoritative voices, Latin and vernacular, none of which seems capable of taming the text" (p. 7). Or as she puts it elsewhere, "The language of authority exposes the limitations of authority" (p. 27). She illustrates her point with passages from the poem in which different portions of the Latin apparatus collide either with one another or with the English text, including the opening of the dramatic frame, where the assertions of veracity based on real experience in the English and in the Latin verses are undercut by the marginal assertion that the whole thing is a fiction, and the tales of Florent, Albinus and Rosemund, Constance, and Narcissus, in each of which, for different reasons, it is difficult to locate a single interpretive center. Echard extends her argument to include a consideration of the ways in which the Latin apparatus is presented in the MSS of CA, and it is not among the smallest merits of her essay that she offers the most complete available description of the variety of ways in which scribes and editors arranged the Latin and English texts on the page, including four plates as illustrations, two each from Bodleian MSS Fairfax 3 and Bodley 294. Each different arrangement constitutes a different interpretation of the relationship among the different parts and of their relative authority, she argues. The variety of presentations multiplies the interpretive possibilities of the text, and constitutes a confirmation of the instability that appears to have been part of Gower's own intention in juxtaposing so many different voices. This is an essay that deserves to be read in its entirety, both for the author's specific observations and for the suggestiveness of her analysis. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 17.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân Published Echard, Siân. "With Carmen's Help: Latin Authorities in the Confessio Amantis." Studies in Philology 95 (1998), pp. 1-40. 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 With Carmen's Help: Latin Authorities in the Confessio Amantis. 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 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 "Modifying nature, keeping one's natural instincts under reason's control, and learning to love properly is a duty which Genius tries to teach Amans in John Gower's CA. The conflict between man's kinde, a word Gower uses to denote passionate love, and his reason, is a common theme in medieval literature. To Gower, marriage offers man the perfect reconciliation between the dueling forces of kinde and reason, and throughout the tales in the CA he proposes 'honeste love,' a reciprocal live which 'dar schewen the visage / In alle places openly,' as the remedy to what ails man and society (IV.1478-79). This dissertation explores how Gower uses the aspects of love in the CA--the notions of kinde and reason in the sphere of love; 'honeste love' in the Marriages Tales of the Four Wives; passionate and excessive live in the Forsaken Women's tales; and Amans' lovesickness--to emphasize and to illustrate his beliefs that reason must rule man in all things, including his natural instincts to love. Gower firmly believes each man or woman is responsible for his or her behavior and accountable for his or her love decisions, whether reasonable or foolish. That he maintains this perspective for woman as well as man is notable and admirable, especially since he employs anti-feminist rhetoric in the MO and VC. In the CA he is partial neither to man nor woman, and although it appears his sympathies lie with women, it is rather that he views woman as man's equal; if he is responsible for his love actions, then so is she. Gower's unique pro-woman voice in the CA proves this point: man cannot blame woman, and woman cannot blame man. In Gower there are no excuses for unrestrained and foolish behavior, although he recognizes that it is often difficult to restrain passion. Gower's Genius is a perfect Gowerian storyteller for in his moral tales lies the predicament facing all men--whether to follow his passionate nature, kinde, or his reasoning capabilities, his wise voice within." Directed by Robert R. Raymo. [JGN 17.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bakalian, Ellen Shaw Published Bakalian, Ellen Shaw. "Aspects of love in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis.'." PhD thesis, New York University, 1998. 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 Aspects of love in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis.' 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 Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This is the third collection of essays on Gower that Yeager has edited (see "John Gower: Recent Readings" (1989) and the 1993 special issue of Mediaevalia). Without diminishing its predecessors, this volume, containing fifteen studies based on papers presented at the meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo between 1992 and 1997, may very well be the best. The range of interests is very wide; the level of quality is almost without exception very high; and as a cross-section of Gower studies at the present moment, it gives evidence, in the numerous disagreements among its authors, of considerable vitality, including a few spirited challenges to received orthodoxy. In its recurring themes, it also indicates where the interests of Gower scholars have been directed recently: to CA more than to any other Gower's other works (still); and in that work, to the margins as much as to the center, both literally, in the layout of the page, and metaphorically, in recuperating the voices of the silenced. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F., ed. Published Yeager, R. F., ed. "Re-Visioning Gower." Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998 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 Re-Visioning Gower. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pegasus Press, 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 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 Examines the relation between in Latin gloss and vernacular tale in CA, using "Florent" and "Diogenes and Alexander" as principle examples. The glosses, with their invocation of the formal ordinatio and learned auctoritas of the scholastic tradition, both authorize the vernacular text and, in the very difference in language and position, subvert it. Gower exploits the paradoxical relation in order to win auctoritas for his poem even while placing the value of auctoritas itself in question. The tale of Florent offers a dramatic demonstration of its lesson on obedience, and Genius' concluding comments emphasize its didactic function. The gloss validates the tale in two ways: it carefully situates the tale in the poem's ordinatio; but paradoxically, it also emphasizes the most romance-like elements of the plot, the bewitching and restoration of the princess, lending validation, by its own language and lineage, to a vernacular literary form that by definition lacks auctoritas. The juxtaposition of two different interpretive strategies itself turns the tale into a philosophical puzzle which valorizes Gower's choice of the vernacular. In "Diogenes and Alexander," the tale recapitulates the choice offered between text and margin. Alexander is delighted to learn of the reputation of his teacher, but Diogenes dismisses his adulation, demonstrating his wisdom by his exercise of plain reason. The gloss authorizes the tale, but in its brevity, fails to displace it. The tale "confirms its own auctoritas by challenging the presumption of the commentary to act as an authorizing agent" (p. 14), a process that the commentary abets; and while the ME text depends on the Latin for its credibility, Gower foregrounds the issue of auctoritas in such as way as to appropriate authority for his vernacular text. [PN. Copright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Batchelor, Patricia Published Batchelor, Patricia. "Feigned Truth and Exemplary Method in the Confessio Amantis." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Ashville, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998, pp. 1-15. 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 Feigned Truth and Exemplary Method in the Confessio Amantis. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pegasus Press, 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 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 Both Chaucer's and Gower's lines, Cable claims, are written in a syllable-based alternating meter rather than in the foot-based meter more characteristic of later English verse. The theoretical implications of the distinction are lost on those who are not metrists, but the practical implication seems to be that some of the variations that are possible in, say, Shakespeare's iambic line are not found either in Gower or in Chaucer, even when the latter is writing decasyllables. The alternating stress line is nonetheless quite flexible, as Cable demonstrates by comparing Gower to three sixteenth-century poets who still employed it, Gascoigne, Turberville, and Googe. In order to avoid the tub-thumping monotony to which the latter are prone, Gower takes fuller advantage of normal variations in stress by using an effective mix of monosyllabic, disyllabic, and polysyllabic words; and he softens the transition between stressed and unstressed syllables by putting normally stressed words in unstressed position and lightly stressed syllables in stressed position. He also uses his syntax very skillfully to construct units longer than the single line. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cable, Thomas Published Cable, Thomas. "Metrical Similarities between Gower and Certain Sixteenth-Century Poets." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Ashville, NC: Pegasus, 1998, pp. 39-48. 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 Metrical Similarities between Gower and Certain Sixteenth-Century Poets. 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 Previously published in Studies in Philology 91 (1994): 250-69; previosuly reviewed in JGN 14.1. Briefly, Peck examines some of the differences between Genius and Amans--the exemplary tales of the former versus the fantasies of the penitent, and their opposing notions of love--in terms of medieval speculations about the relation between the outer world and the images formed in the mind, and describes Genius' attempt to reorder Amans with new images, the proper significance of which Amans resists. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A. Published Peck, Russell A.. "The Phenomenology of Make-Believe in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Ashville, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998, pp. 49-66. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Phenomenology of Make-Believe in Gower's Confessio Amantis. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pegasus Press, 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 Using the tale of Paris and Helen (at the end of Book 5) and the accompanying discussion of sacrilege as his focus, Olsson examines Gower's use of the different interpretive voices in the poem, each offering a different kind of wisdom. He treats the relation between the English and Latin passages, exploring how CA is concerned with a search for ethical truth (and with the proper judgment of Amans' and Paris' conduct); and he focuses on the ways in which Gower advances that search while denying the possibility of any final answer. Olsson treats both the marginal glosses and the epigrams as prosopopoeia: the former is the fictitious voice of a "prose grammarian-commentator" who links the tales to the ordinatio and who offers the most literal and straightforward meaning of the text. The function he serves, however, is to provide memorial signposts rather than final interpretations, and to initiate the reading rather than close it off. The epigrammist speaks more proverbially, more paratactically, more enigmatically: he often poses puzzles that can only be solved through a close reading of the English text, and in doing so, he directs our attention to relevant moral issues. Genius offers a third outside commentary, and his role is least stable of all, shifting between judgments based on the two different divinities that he serves. He thus demands the greatest amount of discretion from the reader; and it is upon the reader that Gower places the burden of discrimination, in choosing among these different interpreters and in filling in the gaps where the poem provides only hints and no explicit judgments, in the hope that by the experience he or she may become more wise. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Olsson, Kurt Published Olsson, Kurt. "Reading, Transgression, and Judgment: Gower's Case of Paris and Helen." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Charlotte, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998, pp. 67-92. 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 Reading, Transgression, and Judgment: Gower's Case of Paris and Helen. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pegasus Press, 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 Scanlon's essay is broadly conceived, incorporating both a history of clerical regulation of endogamy with a close psychoanalytic reading of Gower's version of "Apollonius of Tyre," and it resists any brief summary. Is central methodological principle is to unmask the repressed, which for Scanlon includes the modern failure to recognize the true extent of the medieval poet's confrontation with the nature of incest. Citing its initial marginal gloss, he identifies incest as the central theme of "Apollonius of Tyre," though it occurs explicitly only in the opening episode. Both Athenagoras' and Apollonius' relations with their daughters recapitulate Antiochus' with his. Athenagoras, in arranging the marriage that his daughter desires with Apollonius, also reveals the extent of his own control of her fate. "If the three-way exchange" among them "shows the patriarchal law of exogamy at its most beneficent, . . . [it] also reveals its violent underside. Even the best of good fathers bears this violent stain" (p. 121). Apollonius' situation is more complex. Unknown to him, his daughter has been sold into sexual slavery, which enacts "the guilty pleasure this narrative takes in imagining the possible violation of even this most virtuous of daughters" (p. 121). Apollonius, sharing in Antiochus' guilt, must suffer in order to expiate it, and it is finally Thais herself who redeems him. But "in achieving its resolution the narrative does not demonstrate the essential justice of the patriarchal law of exogamy. On the contrary, the narrative comes to resolution by demonstrating the law's essential injustice, then counterpoising it with the figure of the good daughter, who absorbs this injustice and transcends it" (p. 123). In offering this reading (which must be considered in all its detail), Scanlon is conscious of the possible anachronism of his use of terms drawn from modern psychoanalysis, but he insists that psychoanalytic insight is both anticipated and confirmed in medieval texts, and he credits Gower, in his implication of all patriarchal authority in Antiochus' guilt, with an awareness of the historical and social dimensions of incest which psychoanalysis, "like the rest of modernity," has managed to repress (p. 127). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Scanlon, Larry Published Scanlon, Larry. "The Riddle of Incest: John Gower and the Problem of Medieval Sexuality." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Charlotte, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998, pp. 93-127. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Riddle of Incest: John Gower and the Problem of Medieval Sexuality. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pegasus Press, 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 Bullón-Fernández examines the relation between clerical and lay authority in CA, using as her focus the tale of Constance, which she situates in the context of late medieval power struggles between kings and both popes and parliaments. Gower reduces the role of patriarchal ecclesiastical authorities in the tale, including that of the pope. In their place, he offers Constance. She is not only the daughter of the emperor, but figuratively also his wife (e.g. in providing him with an heir) and his mother (in the lines describing his reaction on being reunited with her, CA 2.1524-27), a "riddle" which recalls Mary's relationship with Christ and the Church's relationship with both God and the Christian community. Gower thus represents the church in a female figure, subordinate to and dependent upon lay masculine power. But he does not do so uncritically. Gower elsewhere uses father-daughter incest to condemn absolutist political power. The incestuous connotations in "Constance" offer a commentary on the pretensions of absolutism and "its fantasy of self-reproducing, in other words, incestuous, royal power" (p. 143). Thus at the same time that the tale supports lay claims to power (with regard to the church), it also suggests the need to delimit them (by implication with regard to parliamentary authority). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bullón-Fernández, María Published Bullón-Fernández, María. "Engendering Authority: Father and Daughter, State and Church in Gower's 'Tale of Constance' and Chaucer's 'Man of Law's Tale'." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Ashville, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998, pp. 129-146. 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 Engendering Authority: Father and Daughter, State and Church in Gower's 'Tale of Constance' and Chaucer's 'Man of Law's Tale'. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pegasus Press, 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 In a brief but suggestive essay, Sadlek examines Gower's allusions to the "labor of love" within the framework of contemporary ideologies of labor. The fourteenth century was a time of intense interest in work issues and in the nature of labor, which is reflected in an expansion of the lexicon and in the use of terms such as "besinesse" and "occupacion" with a new, largely positive connotation. Gower's poem, Sadlek argues, represents a "site of action" in which conflicting contemporary ideologies are simultaneously present. He identifies a "traditional medieval ideology of work" in the frame of the Seven Deadly Sins and its numerous branches. In Book 4, "aristocratic voices" defend idleness as a form of labor in the case of love, and knighthood as a more appropriate form of labor for worthy men. There is also the "voice of a new work ethic, which insists that legitimate work much also produce concrete results" (p. 157). None of these can be identified exclusively with either Genius or Amans. A different set of issues emerges in the poem's conclusion, in which both Amans and Venus revert to a definition of "love's labor" as successful procreation, a notion rooted in RR but also consistent with a "production oriented" work ideology. Gower criticizes wasteful idleness in love, Sadlek concludes, but he does so from a complex position that represents the changing labor ideologies of his time. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sadlek, Gregory M Published Sadlek, Gregory M. "John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Ideology, and the 'Labor' of 'Love's Labor'." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F. Charlotte, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998, pp. 147-58. 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 John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Ideology, and the 'Labor' of 'Love's Labor'. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pegasus Press, 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 VC is a monster, Salisbury asserts in its defense. Against those who have resisted both its patchwork use of extracts from many sources and its lack of adhesion to a single generic model, she sees it as an artfully constructed assemblage, a new, monstrous body formed from the dismembered bodies of the past, serving both "mostrare" and "monere," to show and to warn about, the monstrous political structures from which the monstrous events of 1381 arose. This is another essay that is impossible to summarize with any justice. It combines a close reading of chosen passages, calculated to show how Gower has selected his sources and how he has both altered the context of the lines he has borrowed and also invoked the context in which they first appeared, with a bold re-vision of the form of the entire poem, which she supports by reference to etymology, to Gower's use of the "body" of the statue of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, and to the illustrations of the archer shooting at the world found in several of the MSS. She also, of course, invokes the analogy of other literary models, including RR and the Cento Vergilianus de Laudibus Christi of Faltonia Betitia Proba, whose importance to VC was first noted by R.F. Yeager. Salisbury has gone much further than Yeager in linking Gower's formal procedure to the subject and content of his poem. Her essay is bold and thought-provoking, and repeatedly challenges us to take a fresh and more thoughtful look at VC. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Salisbury, Eve Published Salisbury, Eve. "Remembering Origins: Gower's Monstrous Body Poetic." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Charlotte, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998, pp. 159-184. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Remembering Origins: Gower's Monstrous Body Poetic. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pegasus Press, 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