13 100 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 Aers explores the fissures in VC rather than its unity. His target is a large one, the view of Gower as a coherent as well as comprehensive moral and political philosopher first advanced by Coffman and Fisher (whom Aers does not cite) and more recently reaffirmed by such writers as Minnis, Yeager, Olsson, Simpson, and Scanlon. Aers slyly lays out some of the contradictions among those who defend the coherency of Gower's thought, but he give most attention to the contradictions within Gower's own writing. In VC, he finds it impossible to resolve Gower's advocacy of an evangelical pacifism in Books III and VI with his "unironic celebration of aristocratic violence" (p. 190) in his advice to King Richard to follow the example of his father. Such a contradiction, he points out, was encouraged by the medieval church, where it had become "normalized and internalized" (p. 192). It is allowed by the structure of VC, in which the "units . . . are paratactically sealed off from each other rather than brought into dialogue. . . . [VC's] paratactic mode becomes a powerful impediment to moral inquiry, to sustained critical reflection on the difficulties that are raised. The mode protects the poet from having to confront sharp contradictions in his ethics, let alone from having to explore their sources in the traditions he inherits and the culture he inhabits" (p. 193; his italics). The same failure can be found in Gower's treatment of the church in CA, in which the poet alternately condemns the church for the degeneracy of its practices and for the mystification of its claims of spiritual authority and upholds the church against the Wycliffites whose criticisms he echoes. "Are we being invited to cultivate ironic reflections on the grounds of all doctrine, on the grounds of all claims to unfeigned, uninvented authority in matters concerning the divine?" (p. 200). No, Aers concludes; to a "paratactic mode" corresponds a "paratactic moralism" (p. 201). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Aers, David Published Aers, David. "Reflections on Gower as 'Sapiens in Ethics and Politics'." In Re-Visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Charlotte, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998, pp. 185-201. 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 Reflections on Gower as 'Sapiens in Ethics and Politics'. 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 Fanger compares Gower's version of the tale of Circe and Ulysses (Macaulay's "Ulysses and Telegonus") to his sources in Guido and Benoit in order to explore each author's differing use of the nexus of magic, knowledge, power, and eroticism. Gower's differs from the earlier versions in important ways. His Ulysses is never successfully beguiled by Circe, and his impregnation of her occurs as part of the contest of enchantment by which he contrives his escape, in which he enchants Circe rather than vice versa. The resulting tale is more like Ovid's, but the change is dictated primarily by Gower's intended moral on the dangers of all forms of knowledge when indulged in for their own sake. Gower also alters the dream so that the mysterious figure, who speaks of the fatal consequences of an existing love, alludes more directly to Ulysses' relationship with Circe than to his relationship with Telegonus, an alteration which is further extended in Lydgate. Gower holds Ulysses responsible both for his misuse of Circe and for his failure to interpret the dream, consistent with the emphasis on personal responsibility for one's actions that characterizes the entire poem. Fanger concludes by examining the nature of moral conflicts in the poem. Rather than setting reason against desire in an opposition in which one or the other must prevail, Gower emphasizes the proper and improper uses of reason, either to control desire or to serve it. One consequence is that while Gower is by no means free of contemporary antifeminism, a woman like Circe is never blamed either for her own rape or for the seduction of a man like Ulysses. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fanger, Claire Published Fanger, Claire. "Magic and Metaphysics of Gender in Gower's 'Tale of Circe and Ulysses'." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Charlotte, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998, pp. 203-219. 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 Magic and Metaphysics of Gender in Gower's 'Tale of Circe and Ulysses'. 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 White looks at a number of cases in CA in which we are apparently invited to have sympathy for a less than completely virtuous character. Amans and the siblings Canace and Machaire win sympathy because they are the victims of love; moreover, none commits a "positively willed evil action" (p. 222), and no one else is injured by their errors. Mundus is a more difficult case, and Genius' apparent sympathy might be explained as ironic. Irony does not account for the sympathy shows Ulysses in "Ulysses and Telegonus," however, for Genius' explicit commentary on the story in entirely orthodox. Our satisfaction with Ulysses' trumping of Circe's enchantments (a reading that Fanger, in the preceding essay, clearly does not share) derives from an admiration for triumphant cleverness that escapes the confines of morality. White finds the same willingness on Gower's part to allow the tale "to flourish along lines not determined solely by moral concerns" (p. 233) in the pleasure we take in the "insouciant daring blasphemy" of Mundus' deception of Paulina (p. 222). Gower "is interested, like Chaucer, in writing good stories, and knows, like Chaucer, that though a good story can be a moral one, it can alternatively, or in addition, offer pleasures that have little to do with morality and which indeed are morally dubious" (p. 233). And as a final example of his point, White cites the fabliauesque tale of "Geta and Amphitrion." [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor White, Hugh Published White, Hugh. "The Sympathetic Villain in Confessio Amantis." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Charlotte, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998, pp. 221-235. 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 Sympathetic Villain in 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 Echard adds another valuable chapter to her on-going series of studies of the MSS of CA. Here she examines the presentation of the Latin apparatus in Bodleian MS Ashmole 35, with glances for comparison at Manchester, Chetham's Library MS A.7.38, both of Macaulay's "recension one." Chetham retains the Latin verses, but replaces the Latin glosses with an abbreviated mix of Latin and English. Ashmole omits the Latin altogether. The verses, the portion of the apparatus that is most resistent to loss in other copies, are simply omitted; and the glosses, while still in red to mark them off from the rest of the text, are entirely in English, and while often based on the Latin that they replace, they also draw from the English text of the poem, as can be seen in the numerous instances in which the gloss and the poem differ. Echard makes some fascinating deductions from the Ashmole glossator's many additions and revisions. Overall, she concludes, where the original Latin apparatus was intended to present an alternative voice in confrontation with the English text, the glossator has eliminated the confrontation, and he has opted for the English. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân Published Echard, Siân. "Glossing Gower: In Latin, in English, and in absentia: The Case of Bodleian Ashmole 35." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Charlotte, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998, pp. 237-256. 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 Glossing Gower: In Latin, in English, and in absentia: The Case of Bodleian Ashmole 35. 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 Edwards examines the nine MSS containing excerpts from CA, including three that have only very brief passages and six that contain one or more entire tales. This number of excerpts is much smaller than that for either Chaucer or Lydgate, and Edwards speculates that one reason may be the greater difficulty of detaching a passage from Gower's poem. Of the known excerpts, only one preserves a portion of the frame dialogue. Among the rest, the tales that are excerpted are placed in new contexts, sometimes according to discernible design: CUL Ee.2.15 includes most devotional pieces; Takamiya 32 is a collection of romance narratives; and CUL Ff.1.6 (the "Findern MS") shows a particular interest in stories about women. (One small correction: it appears from Edwards' tabulation of the excerpts on p. 267 that Takamiya 32 includes most of "Nebuchadnezzar's Punishment" in addition to "Nebuchadnezzar's Dream," and that the former should thus be included among the tales that are excerpted more than once on p. 259.) [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, A. S. G. Published Edwards, A. S. G.. "Selection and Subversion in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Charlotte, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998, pp. 257-267. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Selection and Subversion 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 Driver examines Caxton's 1483 edition of CA with reference to contemporary productions in both MS and print. Her scholarly detective work solves a number of riddles and fills in a number of significant gaps. Her most important conclusion regarding Caxton's Gower is to place it in its political context. She dates the printer's interest in Gower to a period of stability in the 1370's when he enjoyed the favor of those surrounding Edward IV, and his printing of CA to the period of rapidly shifting allegiances in the first year of the reign of Richard III; and she suggests that Caxton's choice of the Lancastrian dedication announces an early adherence to Henry Tudor. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Driver, Martha W Published Driver, Martha W. "Printing the Confessio Amantis: Caxton's Edition in Context." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Charlotte, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998, pp. 269-303. 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 Printing the Confessio Amantis: Caxton's Edition in Context. 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 Author/Editor Author/Editor Lochrie, Karma Published Lochrie, Karma. "Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy." Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999 ISBN 0812234731 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Lochrie's discussion of CA – headed "Confessio Amantis and the Limits of Heterosexuality" – is the final section of her book on the uses of secrecy in the Middle Ages and stands as the conclusion of her final chapter on "Sodomy and Other Female Perversions." Both book and chapter pursue very broad agendas. For an overview of the book's complex argument see the review by Sarah Beckwith in SAC 22 (2000): 503-7. The chapter is primarily concerned with the construction of gender and sexuality both in the Middle Ages and in our own time, particularly of normative heterosexuality and its perceived opposites. Lochrie works to expose the incoherence of western heteronormative ideologies, and this is where Gower fits in. She makes the most of the many disjunctions between narrative and morality that others have detected in CA in order to argue the instability of the entire framework upon which the poem's morality is based. In particular, she focuses on the contradictions in Gower's ideology of the "natural" and the "unnatural," with what she sees as the consequent regular eruption of the perverse into what is presented as normative natural love. The contradictions begin, of course, with the opening epigram of Book 1 and continue in Genius' attempts to label and categorize the incestuous relations of Canace and Machaire and of Antiochus and his daughter. The category of the natural itself is revealed to be "incoherent, contradictory, and discontinuous," she concludes (p. 209) – she evidently does not consider "paradoxical" – and a token of the incoherencies of Gower's ideology as a whole. She examines particular examples: in Book 4, the tales of sloth in love result in a reversal of gender roles which is corrected to some extent in the tale of Pygmaleon, but not before they have also produced a denial of Genius' oft repeated declarations of the irresistible force of love. In the same book, Iphis and Iante's relationship renders the role of Nature even more confusing than the tales of incest do, and in Book 5, "Achilles and Deidamia," in which Achilles impregnates Deidamia while still posing as a girl and is restored to his proper masculinity only by the call to arm himself for battle, further problematizes normative gender roles. Other tales in Book 5 trivialize crimes against women. The disjunction between tale and morality, she finds, is also reflected in the poem's conclusion, where Amans' forced abandonment of love renders virtually pointless all of the previous instruction. The description of the division of the world in the Prologue – modeled as it is upon divisions inherent in Nature – suggests, moreover, the impossibility of the moral stability that Amans is told to seek as Venus dismisses him at the end. In conclusion, she writes, "The confusion of natural categories throughout the work and the misfitting of theological categories of sins to the subject of courtly love point to problems in both, regardless of Gower's intentions. . . . Heterosexual love in its idealized form as courtly love both contains the perverse and is already perverted into those 'unnatural' forms that nature seems to permit, including incest, same-sex love, rape, and self-love. The bland moralizing that glosses over these blatant perversions of medieval gender and sexual ideology only calls attention to the problem. . . . What is useful is the way in which Genius's instruction exposes the perverse within the normative and the very instability of the normative itself" (223). But "For all its perversions, Gower's text is not finally subversive" (224). "The perversion that is heterosexual, courtly love as it has been codified in the Confessio clearly serves the narrative of masculine chivalric heroism . . . . Because the perverse functions to authorize vital cultural myths and ideals, such as those of love and masculine heroine, it is not only implicated in those ideals but it is essential to them" (earlier on the same page). [PN. Copyright by the John Gower Society. JGN 20.2] 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 Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy 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 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Siân Echard's essay is concerned with the relationship between the design of the MSS of CA and what it can imply about the reception and reading of Gower's work. Echard focuses on four MSS, including two deluxe copies, British Library, MS Harley 7184 (Macaulay's H3) and MS Egerton 1991 (E), and two plainer copies, London, College of Arms, MS Arundel 45 (Ar) and Cambridge, St. John's College, MS B.12 (J). In her comparison, she considers such elements as the hierarchy of script, the use of capitals, the color and placement of the Latin verses and glosses, the number and placement of speaker markers, the appearance of other marginal indications of textual divisions, and the use of borders and miniatures. In considering the effects of each of these on how the poem was read, she asks some of the same questions that Richard Emmerson poses in his recent essay in SAC (see JGN 19, no. 1, pp. 5-8), but she takes into account a far wider variety of features and she is also far more conscious of the uniqueness of each copy. She is consequently rather less dogmatic in her conclusions and hypothesizes a wider variety of ways in which these copies might have been used by their earliest readers. In the more ornate copies, appearance seems to be given much more importance than assisting the reader either in understanding or in finding her place in the text, while some at least of the plainer copies seem to be better suited for actual reading. The possibility of public reading by professional "prelectors" (using Joyce Coleman's term) as opposed to purely private reading complicates the matter and makes it more difficult to draw any hard and fast conclusions about the intended purpose, particularly of the more richly decorated copies. Echard also points to features that give greater or lesser attention to the Latin portions of the text and different relative weight to the stories and the frame, but her conclusion is appropriately open-ended. "The manuscripts," she writes, "may be telling us a great deal that we have not yet heard about the reading of Gower's poem" (p. 72). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân Published Echard, Siân. "Designs for Reading: Some Manuscripts of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." Trivium 31 (1999), pp. 59-72. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Designs for Reading: Some Manuscripts of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Summers, Joanna Published Summers, Joanna. "Gower's Vox Clamantis and Usk's Testament of Love." Medium AEvum 68 (1999), pp. 55-62. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Influence and Later Allusion Review Summers' essay begins a bit oddly, with the claim that the usual view among those who have commented is that Gower's call for Chaucer to write his own "testament of love" (CA 8.2955*) reflects his "amusement or disdain" for the poem of Thomas Usk of the same name. At least three of the four sources that she cites make no such claim. (I have not seen the fourth, an essay by David Carlson in the Leyerle festschrift of 1993.) The bulk of this short piece, however, is not about Gower's attitude towards Usk but about Usk's towards Gower. Skeat and others have suggested that the "Shippe of Traveyle" episode in Book 1 of the "Testament" reflects Usk's hearing or reading of the C-text of Piers Plowman. Summers proposes that there is greater similarity to the allegory in Book 1 of the Vox Clamantis, both in the structure of the episode and in some interesting if not exact verbal parallels. In her summary, "both texts present a narrator who foolishly leaves home to become lost in a forest; witnesses the rampages of domestic animals, like swine, who have turned wild; is rescued by a ship, but then is subject to a treacherous storm; and is finally driven to an island" (p. 57). In the Testament, the allegory refers to Usk's experiences in the trial of Northampton, and Usk may have been inspired by Gower's later comparison of a lawsuit to a voyage in rough seas (VC 6.474-80). Summers wishes to suggest that these allusions might have been recognized and that Usk might thus deliberately have cloaked himself in the conservative and royalist sympathies of poet of the earliest versions of VC. She also suggests that the "Margarete" that Usk discovers on the island at the end of his voyage and that he pledges to serve faithfully represents King Richard, an identification that she supports by pointing out that the island in Gower's vision is very clearly Britain. In the immediately following essay in the same issue of Medium AEvum, Lucy Lewis argues that Usk's "Margarete" is to be identified instead as Margaret Berkeley, wife of Sir Thomas Berkeley, well-known as a patron of Trevisa. [PN. Copyright John Gower Society. JGN 18.2]. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 195-200. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Vox Clamantis and Usk's Testament of Love Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Crowley, James Patrick Published Crowley, James Patrick. "Imagining and transmitting medieval literary authority: William Langland to Ezra Pound." PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1999. 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:9959736 (accessed January 22, 2023). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review "This study considers the nature of medieval literary authority, and the ways in which it has been constructed in several important medieval and non-medieval texts and contexts. Most of the editorial and critical work with medieval manuscripts has operated under the assumption of a single, static, and non-historicized authority behind each text, but literary authority is always potentially diffuse. Works we currently know in more than one version receive the majority of attention here, because they show in a very tangible way the results of dynamic interaction among authors, audiences, and other agents of literary production and consumption. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 and transmitting medieval literary authority: William Langland to Ezra Pound Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Watt, Diane Published Watt, Diane. "Literary Genealogy, Virile Rhetoric, and John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Philological Quarterly 79 (1999), pp. 389-415. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Review "Gower's construction of rhetoric," Watt asserts, referring primarily to the discussion that occupies the middle section of Book 7 but also with a view to the entire poem, "can be seen as both gendered and sexualized, especially when read alongside other classical and medieval discussions of the subject" (p. 393). As Schmitz, Craun, and others have noted, Gower departs from his source in Brunetto Latin's "Tresor" in treating rhetoric as a matter of ethical choice and in emphasizing the virtues of honesty and plainness, but "correct use of language is also gendered as masculine," Watt claims (393), and "the power of speech reaches its true fulfillment in men alone" (394). Gower also rejected Latini's class-based distinction between ordinary language and the eloquence that he associates with true nobility, but Book 7 is nonetheless concerned with the conduct of the king rather than that of ordinary men. Aristotle is quoted as urging truth primarily in kings (7.1731-36), and abuses of language such as flattery and deception are associated throughout the poem with the royal court. Watt sees a direct address to Richard II in these warnings, and more specific allusions to his attachment to Robert de Vere (in Gower's use of "assoted") and to his failure to produce an heir (in the play on "conceive") in 7.2338-43. By means of this collocation "rhetoric, reasonable behaviour, chastity, and the obligation to reproduce are interrelated" (396). Gower makes a tribute to the persuasive powers of rhetoric in 7.1630-40, but his discussion otherwise betrays considerable ambivalence about ornate language, as others have noted. Both Ulysses and Caesar are depicted as either implicitly or explicitly misusing language in order to obscure the truth. Gower's use of the word "colour" with reference to Caesar, like his use elsewhere of "peinte," evokes, furthermore, the condemnation of cosmetics as another form of deceptive covering among both classical and medieval writers and as a form of effeminacy by both Alain de Lille and Jean de Meun. Alain goes furthest in associating abuses of language with moral corruption, using the former as a figure for the latter throughout DPN. "The court satire and other literature of the later Middle Ages likewise reveal a nexus between rhetoric, dissimulation, self-indulgence, and all forms of lust including sodomy" (400). And such "masquerade and effeminacy" (401) was widely identified with Richard II's court. "The conceptual link between false eloquence and sodomy (in its most general sense of non-reproductive sexual intercourse) [thus] indicates that it would be wrong to isolate Gower's discussion of rhetoric from Genius' praise of 'honeste' love and marriage, or from the extended account of chastity as the fifth point of Policy" (401). Gower repeatedly condemns effeminacy. Both Caesar and Ulysses, moreover, are associated with effeminacy in earlier literature. Watt concedes the problem here, and her response is also a justification of her method: "Of course the objection might be made that in his discussion of rhetoric Gower does not actually refer to either Ulysses' womanliness or Caesar's depravity and that therefore, in Confessio, the connection between rhetoric and effeminacy and sodomy is not established, that unlike Dante [in his portrayal of Latini in Inferno 15] Gower does not represent the rhetorician as sodomite. Nonetheless, we cannot isolate the text from its literary and cultural contexts and such connections did exist whether or not Gower and his readers consciously made them" (403). She then goes on the link Gower's ambivalence about rhetoric to his doubts and questions about his own role as poet. In 7.2332-37, she notes (in "second recension" MSS only, not "first recension" as she claims, 403), Gower cites Dante, and identifies himself with the poet who tells the truth but who has less influence over the king than the flatterer does. She sees an attempt to dissociate himself from the misusers of language that he has condemned in Gower's claims in the epilogue to have used no rhetoric (*8.3064) and to have written "with rude wordis and with pleyne" (8.3122). But he has used such rhetoric. Moreover, he has falsified his own appearance in adopting the role of Amans, as the glossator points out in the well-known passage at 1.59-64 mar. "It is manifest throughout Confessio that Gower's double, Amans, is not exempt from charges of insincerity. . . . [And] by the end of the poem Amans has been exposed as a fraud when he beholds himself in the looking glass handed to him by Venus and sees his 'colour fade' (8.2825). . . . Having associated false language with masquerade and effeminacy, Gower (or the figure of the author-narrator) and his double Amans find themselves implicated in these very vices" (406). Watt also sees in the history of the dedications of the poem Gower's efforts to distance himself from the king who was its first sponsor and from "the accusations of incompetence and corruption made during his reign, and thus to preserve his book from moral taint. Indeed, if we connect this elision to Gower's failure to name Latini as the main authority for Book 7, we might be tempted to conclude that the author specifically wanted to avoid the stain of sodomy. At any rate, the Ricardian poet was aware that the writer, like the courtier, was susceptible to charges of effeminacy and degeneracy as he was to those of flattery and hypocrisy, and that not only his success but also his masculinity was contingent on the reputation of his patron" (407). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 20.2.] 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 Literary Genealogy, Virile Rhetoric, and John Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Astell, Ann W Published Astell, Ann W. "Political Allegory in Late Medieval England." Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Cronica Tripertita Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review Astell devotes a chapter entitled "Gower's Arion and 'Cithero'? to the Confessio Amantis in this collection of studies of the (largely covert) political allegory in late medieval English poetry. She re-examines some familiar passages in the Prologue and Book 7 and comes up with some subtle if not entirely surprising new readings. In her discussion of the Prologue she begins by re-opening the question of the dating of the different versions of the poem. She dismisses the allusions to 1390 that occur in some late glosses as irrelevant to the date of composition of the poem, and she argues instead that the reference to Arion that occurs in all versions of the Prologue must have been written after the Christmas season of 1391/92, when Thomas Walsingham records that a 10-foot long dolphin swam up the Thames as far as London Bridge. Drawing in part from the reviewer's essay in the 1984 Mediaevalia, she goes on to argue that except for the two lines of Latin that occur at the very end of Book 8 in some MSS ("Derbeie Comiti, recolunt quem laude periti, . . .), all of the references to Richard's cousin Henry in the English text and the accompanying Latin glosses that are preserved in MSS of the "second? and "third? recensions must have been added after Henry became king in 1399. The copy that Gower presented to Henry in 1393 must therefore have been a "first recension? copy, and the two-line Latin presentation, like the allusion to Chaucer that is also preserved in this version, indicates that Gower from the very beginning was thinking of a wider audience for his poem than just Richard alone. Arion also figures largely in Astell's interpretation of the political content of this version. She adopts the view (presented most forcefully by R.F. Yeager) that Arion is meant as a figure for the poet himself. She notes, however, the omission of any reference to boats and sea-faring in the passage on Arion, one of the most traditional parts of the story as it is preserved, for instance, in Gower's likely source in Ovid's Fasti. The lack is supplied, she argues, by the account of Gower boarding Richard's barge at the very beginning of the Prologue; and if we read the two passages together in light of Ovid's version in the Fasti, then Richard implicitly becomes the captain of the pirate ship who captures Arion and who is the first audience of his song. "Interpreted allegorically and intertextually,? she concludes, the entire episode "is much less complimentary to the king than it seems at first sight? (p. 81). The two lines of Latin at the end of Book 8 indicate that "Henry of Derby stands, dolphin-like, in the second tier of Gower's original intended audience? of this version. "From him the poet seeks rescue for himself and the realm, should Richard prove to be a pirate after all and inattentive to the song of 'an other such as Arion' (Prologue, l. 1054)? (83). In her examination of Gower's discussion of Rhetoric in Book 7, Astell emphasizes the similarity between the account of the trial of the Catalinian conspirators and Gower's depiction of the Merciless Parliament in the Cronica Tripertita. Gower's dismisses Caesar just as in the later work he condemns those who pleaded for mercy for the presumed traitors, and he implicitly identifies himself with Cicero "in his plainspoken opposition to the abuses of licentious nobles and riotous peasants? (84). Gower thus "aligned his poetic and rhetorical project with the reformist project of the Lords Appellant? (89), and the entire discussion provides an effective prelude to the outline of the five points of Policy, where Gower offers his own advice to the young king. Chief among the virtues that he advocates is Truth, and Astell sees here an allusion to the Appellants' requirement that Richard retake his oath as king. In her conclusion, Astell argues that Gower splits the figure of Cicero in two: he "embraces the political stance of 'Cithero,' while rejecting the ornate doctrine of 'Tullius,' . . . opting to speak in a low style, using 'rude wordes and . . . pleyne; (VIII.3067*)? (91). His message is wisdom only for the wise, however, and it will be hidden from those for whom the poem is seen merely as entertainment. (It appears that Astell fails to note that paradox here of Gower's use of plain words to conceal.) Gower provides a clue on how to read his poem, however, in the four opening tales, in the section on the "Sins of the Eyes and Ears,? which provide lessons on how to pierce through appearances in order to find the "message veiled behind the obvious one? (92). In her other chapters Astell consider John Ball and Piers Plowman, LGW, MkT, NPT, SGGK, and Malory's Morte Darthur. There is a useful review by Candace Barrington in SAC 22 (2000): 448-51. [PN Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 20.2] 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 Political Allegory in Late Medieval England. 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 1999 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 Emmerson, Richard K. Published Emmerson, Richard K.. "Reading Gower in a Manuscript Culture: Latin and English in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999), pp. 143-186. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review Macaulay's edition of CA, however useful for the study of the text of the poem, "masks the complexity of the manuscript presentation of the text and thus . . . the variety of ways in which Gower was received by his contemporaries and later-fifteenth-century readers" (p. 146). Emmerson sets out to remedy this fault by studying the manuscripts more closely, to see particularly how they "encouraged different readings of the 'Confessio Amantis' and different representations of Gower as auctor" (p. 147). He focuses on two aspects of their layout: their arrangement of the Latin apparatus that accompanies the English text and their placement of the first two illuminations. In the first part of his essay he summarizes recent studies of the functions of the Latin apparatus, in five categories, adding the running titles and table of contents to the four categories described by Pearsall (1989). The manuscripts differ in the placement of the passages that Macaulay called "Latin summaries" and that Emmerson refers to as "Latin prose commentary," some placing them in the margin, some in the text column, and some omitting them altogether; and in the color of the ink (red or black) used for the apparatus generally. In the table at the end of his essay, Emmerson identifies the relevant features of each of the twenty illuminated manuscripts of the poem. He notes that one color ink is generally chosen for all of the Latin throughout and he observes that the placement of the "commentary" varies according to recension. He postulates two large groups: the "revised first recension," "second-recension," and "third recension" copies place the Latin commentary in the margins and write all Latin in black; the "unrevised" and "intermediate first recension" copies plus some "transitional" copies of the "second recension" place the commentary in the text column and present the Latin in red. The manuscripts also fall into two groups according to the placement of the two introductory miniatures, though rather less perfectly. There are two versions of the miniature of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, one showing just the statue (which occurs only in copies of the "unrevised" version of the "first recension") and the more familiar one showing Nebuchadnezzar himself in bed which appears in all other copies and which must therefore represent the "original design" (p. 167). The manuscripts of the "third recension" uniformly place the miniature at the beginning of the Prologue, while most "first recension" copies reduce it in size and place it later in the text, near the beginning of the account of the dream. (The "second recension" is mixed.) Similarly, the illumination showing Amans kneeling before Genius appears at the beginning of Book 1 in all copies of "recension three,," while it is placed near line 1:202 in the copies of "recension one." From this variety of forms, Emmerson argues, we can deduce the different ways in which Gower's text was received by its earliest readers. The earliest illustrated manuscripts, he argues, were intended for "aural reception" and for public reading: the text column contains only the portions that would be read aloud (including the English poem, of course, but also the Latin epigrams), while the commentary and other apparatus, which was not meant to be performed, was relegated to the margins for the "prelector's" use alone. The large initial miniatures, moreover, "could be shown to the audience at the beginning of a reading" (p. 175), and would serve to introduce the two major themes of the poem. Later copies suggest that aural reception continued into the mid-fifteenth century, but that there were two other forms of reception as well. The copies in which the Latin has disappeared suggest that CA "was read as an essentially English collection of tales" (p. 176), while the "first recension" copies in which the Latin is written in red and the commentary moved into the text column present Gower as "a highly Latinate poet, . . . a scholarly protohumanist" (p. 177). Emmerson concludes his essay with an examination of the two most fully illustrated copies of the poem. One emphasizes the English character of the poem, he argues, and the other represents the culmination of the presentation of Gower as a protohumanist. Emmerson presents a great deal of information about the manuscripts of CA in accessible form; the table at the end is particularly helpful, as far as it goes. He also provides nine very useful photographs illustrating the variety of manuscript presentations of the poem. In other respects, however, this essay an exasperating mix of weakly supported propositions and missed opportunities. Why, for instance, is the table showing the arrangement of the Latin text limited to the illuminated copies of the poem? To be fair, Emmerson refers to the non-illuminated copies in his discussion but for most he relied upon Macaulay's descriptions (see note 43) rather than examining them personally, which not only diminishes his credence but also draws attention to the fact that most of the information that he presents is already available in other forms. In his attempt to organize the manuscripts into groups, Emmerson passes over a great many of the details of presentation of individual copies--the fact that in Bodley 902, for instance (which provides his figure 1), the scribe has written not just most of the commentary but also some of the Latin verses in the margin. He is also less than compelling in his presentation of his views of the relations among the different versions of the poem. He claims at the beginning of his essay (p. 145) that he retains Macaulay's classification of the manuscripts into "recensions" only as a "useful organizational tool," but it becomes clear that he has also silently adopted all of Macaulay's views on the development of the text. On page 178, for instance, he refers to a manuscript that Macaulay identified as "unrevised" as containing "the very first version of the Confessio," though in the very same sentence he goes on to quote from an essay by the reviewer, the main point of which is that this was not the first version at all but a product of scribal corruption. He comes close to the same conclusion himself when he notes that the same group of manuscripts do not seem to contain the "original" version of the illustration of Nebuchadnezzar, but he doesn't observe the contradiction. Similarly, he adopts Macaulay's view that Fairfax represents Gower's "final" intention for his poem (pp. 152 and 170), but the only evidence that he presents for this conclusion is that others have defended it. As for his argument that the early copies of CA were intended for "aural reception," the best that can be said is that it is purely speculative. We have no other evidence of Gower's poem being read aloud, particularly not in the court; each of the features that Emmerson points to could easily have some other explanation; and Emmerson makes no effort to compare the manuscripts that he refers to to contemporary copies of other works, either those that we know were read aloud or those that we know weren't. This essay will be widely read because of its location, but it needs to be used with a great deal of caution. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 19.1.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading Gower in a Manuscript Culture: Latin and English in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Grinnell, Natalie Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review As background to her discussion of Gower's version of the story, Grinnell surveys the transformations of Medea's character in western literature, identifying three major strands. In the Metamorphoses and in the "De Mulieribus Claris," she is the cruel monster, the "bloodthirsty emblem of female anarchy" (p. 70) and "the embodiment of a terror of female power" (p. 72). In the Heroides and in LGW, on the other hand, she is the innocent victim of love, with a resulting flattening of her character. "These poems, on the surface sympathetic to Medea's plight as a jilted lover, produce such sympathy by presenting her as mentally weak and emotionally unstable, a victim who lashes out with rhetoric and violence, rather than carefully plotted revenge" (p. 72). Despite the title of his work, Chaucer is clearly more interested in Jason, and his Medea is hardly distinguishable from his other "heroines." The third alternative is to "transcend the monster/victim dichotomy" (p. 74) by presenting both aspects of Medea's character. The model is set by Euripides, whose chorus "consistently reflects her experiences, her anger and her pain, without compromising the horror of her acts" (p. 74). This is also the route followed by Gower: in contrast to all other medieval authors, he too "attempts to unify Medea's character without suppressing any part of her story" (p. 74) and "restores Medea to the complex character of Greek tradition" (p. 70). In the tale itself, her "contradictory nature [is] emphasized rather than suppressed" (p. 75). She is shy and blushes in Jason's presence, but she also takes action to achieve her desire; she mixes emotion and reason; and even her modesty, in refusing to take credit for Jason's feat, highlights her power, for the populace in the tale is unable to believe that Jason acted without supernatural aid. "This combination of courtliness and power in the figure of Medea is enhanced," Grinnell asserts, "by the tale's complex links to the rest of the Confessio" (p. 76). At this point the reviewer must admit that he doesn't follow the transition. Grinnell has some interesting connections to draw between the tale and other parts of the poem, and while they make the tale more interesting, it is not entirely clear in each case how they contribute to the characterization of Medea. Jason's broken oath, for instance, is not merely an example of perjury; it recalls the series of violated oaths and covenants in the poem's Prologue and its theme of "division": the "faithlessness and resulting violence [in the tale] is part of a pattern which encloses the fate of humanity" (p. 77). Jason and Medea's mutual falling in love is linked to the theme of the "misdirected gaze" which is emphasized in particular in the opening tales in Book 1, and it confirms the pattern of "an inevitable metamorphosis from vision to desire to violence" (p. 79). Jason's choice of Hercules as his confidante is ironic because of all of the ways in which the tale echoes some of the cruelest episodes in his legend. And Medea's ascent to Minerva's court in heaven at the end of the tale recalls a passage in the description of the pagan gods in Book 5 which renders her triumph somewhat ambivalent. (Grinnell seems to have misread the passage in 5.1460-64 as the description of a statue; it is actually an account of the "patron deities" of the different parts of the body.) Medea's complex nature embodies "the internal division of the human soul, reflected on a macrocosmic scale by the corruption and death of the temporal world," Grinnell concludes (p. 81). But Medea does not achieve transcendence, a destiny reserved for the two male interlocutors of the dialogue frame, with whose salvation rather than with the that of the female characters in the tales the poem is centrally concerned. [PN. Copyight The John Gower Society. JGN 19.1] Published Grinnell, Natalie. "Medea's Humanity and John Gower's Romance." Medieval Perspectives 14 (1999), pp. 70-83. ISSN 1057-5367 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Medea's Humanity and John Gower's Romance. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Schutz, Andrea Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Published Schutz, Andrea. "Absent and Present Images: Mirrors and Mirroring in John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Chaucer Review 34 (1999), pp. 107-134. ISSN 0009-2002 Review Gower is "fascinated by the individual's reaction to things seen---particularly the self seen in a mirror---as much as he is concerned by the results of those reactions." The tales of CA, moreover, are "a series of mirrors by means of which Amans must examine himself" (both quotations on p. 107). Schutz is concerned with the analogy between these two processes, and she discovers that Gower represents the process of Amans' approach to self-understanding not only through his reactions to Genius' lessons but also through the transformations in the use of mirror imagery in four of Genius' tales, all in Book 1. The "sins of sight" constitute an important "preamble" to Book 1. The lover's sight of his beloved is linked to the painfulness of his experience of love. At the same time, Love is portrayed as blind, and thus both as arbitrary and as beyond the lover's control. The mirror imposes a different order on sight: it "throws the viewer back on himself: one must take responsibility for both the act of seeing and the state of being seen" (p. 109). The first two tales that Schutz examines, on Acteon and Medusa, are from the "preamble." Each is characterized by an "absent" mirror. Unlike his Ovidian counterpart, Acteon never has the moment of self-realization that occurs when he sees his transformed image in a pool of water: he is simply punished for his willful voyeurism (by means of Diana's sight). The absence of his self-reflection compels some sort of reflection from the reader, but none is yet forthcoming from Amans. In the tale of Perseus, Gower deletes the hero's use of the reflection in his shield as a way of avoiding looking directly upon the Gorgons: he simply does not gaze upon them at all. His "wisdom and prouesse mark him off from both Acteon and Amans: "Acteon takes too much heed of the world, Amans not enough; Perseus knows when to look and how to understand" (p. 113). The two tales are "mirrors" for one another, reinforcing the way in which each becomes a "mirror" for Amans. Amans, however, neither identifies with Perseus nor fully distinguishes himself from him: the honesty of his reaction marks a step forward in his "cure," and results in an alteration in the appearance of mirrors in the tales. Both "The Trump of Death" and the tale of Narcissus are concerned with recognition and reflections of self. The king in the first of these sees his own reflection in the faces of the old beggars. It is of course a reflection transformed: not apparent to others, it opens up a whole series of reflections of the spiritual in the worldly in the tale. Amans does not get the point, and Genius responds with the tale in which a youth falls in love with his own reflection. Narcissus turns out to be very much like Amans. Narcissus' "real sin is his folly of loving what does not love him. . . . This of course is Amans' problem, too. He is making a fool of himself over a woman who apparently cannot stand him" (p. 118). Only in Gower's version, moreover, does Narcissus believe that he sees a nymph, suggesting both the impossibility of his own self-knowledge and the way in which Amans images a lady who is actually a reflection of himself. The tale thus also offers a lesson on the ambiguity of images and of the need for interpretation. Amans is prevented from understanding fully what he might learn about himself because of the obstinacy of his will. At the end, however, he is given a direct glimpse into the mirror of self-awareness and he learns the truth about himself that eludes Acteon, the King of Hungary's brother, and Narcissus. One must have some obvious reservations about a study of CA that skips over Books II-VII. In its obsession with mirrors it is also a bit dizzying, very much a hall of mirrors itself in which it is difficult to hold any image clearly in view. This is a nonetheless both a fascinating and a challenging study. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 19.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. 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 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Absent and Present Images: Mirrors and Mirroring in John Gower's Confessio Amantis. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Simpson, James Published Simpson, James. "Breaking the Vacuum: Ricardian and Henrician Ovidianism." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29 (1999), pp. 325-355. ISSN 1082-9636 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review Simpson's agenda in this ambitious essay is re-open the question of the distinction between the "Renaissance" or Early Modern period and the later Middle Ages. He argues that two characteristics that are said to set off Early Modern writing---a "historical consciousness" and awareness of historical difference and a consciousness of the self as unstable and open to construction---are actually fully present in English Ovidian poetry of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. His secondary purpose is to demonstrate that Early Modern poets such as Wyatt and Surrey were constrained by their discursive environment from the full measure of rediscovered historical consciousness with which they have been credited. Ovid is given a large place in his analysis as a model both for the use of history and for the poetic manipulation of the self, while Petrarch's role as groundbreaker is correspondingly diminished. The two poets that Simpson uses to represent the period around 1390 are of course Chaucer, represented principally in his argument by his "Complaint unto Pity," and in the portion of the essay that interests us the most, John Gower and CA. Simpson's comments on CA draw upon his discussion is his earlier Sciences and the Self (see JGN 15, no. 2, pp. 11-15), but they offer a subtler reading of Gower's debt to Ovid and of his use of the voices of Amans and Genius and they have a great deal more to say about the way in which Gower's historical consciousness is manifested in the poem. The CA is "driven," he claims, "by an Ovidian deflection, even neutralization of history, just as it reveals the conditions in which history and politics can be reactivated and reformed by the elegiac experience" (p. 333). The opening invokes the beginning of the "Amores," in which Cupid commands that Ovid abandon his historical subject and write about his own pain in love: after attacking the division of the contemporary political world, the narrator of CA finds himself in Book 1 subject to the command of Cupid and required to confess as a demonstration of his truthful service. "If the confession should reconfirm Amans' integrity as a faithful subject to Cupid, however, the rest of the poem can only confirm the impossibility of psychic integration under the tyrannical regime of Cupid. Amans can only speak from, and deepen, the fissures of a self already divided" (p. 335). His "self-division" is also a "division from the political and historical world" and "an alienation from history and historical meaning" (p. 336). Neither Amans nor Genius, through most of the poem, are able to assemble any of the multiple historical incidents that are offered as exempla into any coherent narrative, and thus the CA, "like the Amores, is driven by the iterative force of desire, which seeks refuge from the relentlessness of history by fragmenting it" (p. 337). Genius also functions, however, as the means by which Amans' world and the world of history on which he has turned his back are reintegrated. (Simpson has some interesting comments on the similarity between Genius' and Pandarus' roles here, who both instruct in the art of love and offer remedies against its inevitable delusions, like the praeceptor amoris of the "Ars amatoria" and "Remedium amoris.") The turning point occurs at the opening of Book 7, when Genius, producing stories from "the treasury of the imagination" (p. 339), is suddenly governed by "rational desire, and not by sexual desire alone" (ibid.). Book 7 is dominated by the tale of Lucrece, which exposes "the political motives and consequences of cupidinous rapacity. . . . [Aruns'] sexual and military activities . . . become indistinguishable. The world of elegy has been brought into direct contact and identity with the political world that it replicates. There can be no escape from politics, since the psyche itself constitutes a 'political' arena" (ibid.). Genius' very telling of the tale, however, "affirms the possibility of psychic reintegration, whereby the imagination, personified by Genius, operates as a mediator between abstract reasoning and sensual desire. The very possibility of the Lucrece story, told as an exemplum against tyranny in sexual and political practice, itself testifies to the possibility of an imaginative remembrance of stories that is not driven by concupiscent desire; an alternative, fully ethical and political exercise of the imagination is possible. The poem as a whole is a fable of the psyche, in which the relations of the soul mirror the ideal practice of (Gowerian) politics, whereby the abstract principle of the law, the king, has commerce with the body politic by the mediation of counselors (or Parliament) capable of imaginative apprehension. The poem does register the capacity to escape from to escape from Cupid's jurisdiction, and to return to the political discourse of the prologue. The return to the public world is, however, profoundly reformist" (p. 340). None of these possibilities, Simpson suggests, particularly the critique of absolutism, was possible under the much more oppressive discursive conditions of the 1530's and 1540's. This is not an essay that is adequately represented in an abstract, and it well deserves to be considered in its entirety. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 19.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Breaking the Vacuum: Ricardian and Henrician Ovidianism. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Ambrisco, Alan Scott Published Ambrisco, Alan Scott. "Medieval Man-Eaters: Cannibalism and Community in Middle English Literature." PhD thesis, Indiana University, 1999. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review "This dissertation examines Middle English texts that use tropes of cannibalism to negotiate among, and occasionally critique, England's own national, religious, and linguistic identities. Medieval romance and travel literature, drawing on a tradition begun by Herodotus, typically figure cannibalism as a marker of barbarity associated with non-Christian cultures. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, representations of cannibalism were employed by Middle English texts in more complex ways. "Richard Coeur de Lion," "Mandeville's Travels," and John Gower's "Confessio Amantis" contemplate cannibalism (whether literal or figurative) on the part of the English subject. Each text thus articulates identity as a complex negotiation between the self and other, in the process recognizing otherness within the very enter of the identity (both personal and communal) being constructed. Eventually I move away from cannibalism proper, examining what I call a cannibalizing mode of translation operative in Chaucer's Squire's Tale. As the epitome of the process by which something alien is absorbed, the incorporative translation enacted in The Squire's Tale consumes the cultural difference of the East in an effort to promote the English language. Together, these four chapters argues that, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, English representations of the western subject occasionally and contradictorily utliize tropes of cannibalism in ways that are constitutive of a developing English identity. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Man-Eaters: Cannibalism and Community in Middle English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Gower gets his place (pp. 273-86) in this magnificently produced new classroom anthology by one of our most eminent Gowerians, with freshly edited excerpts from CA Book 4 (1118-1226), illustrating the delicacy and complexity of Amans' confessions, and Book 5 (5546-6052), the tale of Tereus and Procne, one of Gower's most personal adaptations of Ovid and a tale on which Pearsall himself has written our most perceptive commentary. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek, ed. Published Pearsall, Derek, ed. "Chaucer to Spenser: An Anthology of Writings in English 1375-1575." Oxford: Blackwell, 1999 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 Chaucer to Spenser: An Anthology of Writings in English 1375-1575. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Blackwell, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 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 Dimmick, Jeremy Published Dimmick, Jeremy. "'Redinge of Romance' in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance. Ed. Field, Rosalind. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999, pp. 125-37. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review The romances in CA, Dimmick writes, "constitute a link between Amans's private preoccupations and Gower's broadest thematic concerns, and provide the poem's most confident affirmations of moral, familiar and social good" (pp. 127-28). Amans reveals his predilection for reading romances in Book 6 (876-89): identifying with the characters about whom he reads, he is led to hope that the outcome of his own pursuit of love will be as happy as theirs. He is almost immediately brought back to the realization of how different his prospects are, however. His disappointment provides an opening for Genius to attempt to modify his view of himself and to release him from his obsession, and one of his means of doing so is to through his use of examples of Amans's own favorite reading-material. The three tales that Dinnick examines as examples of romance in CA are "Florent," "Constance," and "Apollonius of Tyre." He has pertinent and interesting comments on each. "Florent" appears to be a wish-fulfillment fantasy, but the hero obtains what he desires not by an act of his own will, as one might expect in romance, but by giving away his own freedom of choice. At that moment, "he recognises for the first time something which the virtue of trowthe does not require him to perceive: his own good (even his own moral good) is not the sole criterion of value. By yielding his 'hole vois' to his wife, Florent acknowledges that she is a narrative subject in her own right, is not merely an adjunct to his own desires or self-worth" (p. 130). At the end of the tale, as the lady reveals the reason for her enchantment, the tale shifts from a "quest romance" to an "exile-romance" of which she is the heroine. "The values of the exile paradigm win out: the reorientation of heroism in 'Florent', away from action to endurance, and finally to a new sense of oneself as operating in the context of other selves – in a society – is a tacit rebuke to Amans's self-isolating obsession with his lady as merely the object of his desire" (ibid.). Overcoming this obsession is also a central concern of "Constance" and "Apollonius of Tyre," in each of which "sexual love is not seen in isolation, as a dominating passion which excludes all other considerations; instead it takes its place in a continuum of 'kindly' bonds of love, integrating the love of parents and children, husbands and wives, humans and God," and where Amans habitually isolates sexual love as an all-encompassing obsession, 'Constance' [and by implication 'Apollonius' too] aims to integrate sexuality into a broader pattern, both social and cosmic" (p. 131). The optimism of such tales, manifested particularly in the "morally- and socially-resolved closure" of their endings (p. 133), is challenged elsewhere within the poem, and Dinnick sets forth "Jason and Medea" as an example of "a romance which goes badly wrong" (p. 134). Not only does it end disastrously for the participants but it also lacks proper closure, for Medea goes unpunished, and Genius goes on to tell the story of "Phrixus and Helle" to explain the origin of the fleece, which only emphasizes how Medea's act is the perpetuation of a cycle of family violence which in turn is only part of the larger cycle of events extending from the fall of Thebes to the fall of Troy. The poem appears to privilege the more optimistic view by its placement of "Apollonius of Tyre" at the end, but the conclusion involving Amans is considerably more complex, and Gower's hopes that Richard II might be a new Apollonius obviously turned out to be premature. Dinnick's attempt to explore the generic links among these tales is salutary. He rec-ognizes some of the problems in adequately defining romance on page 133, but the definition by which he links these tales, which emphasizes the pattern of reconciliation and reunion over what he calls "generic markers," excludes other tales that are legitimately entitled to be included as romances (e.g. "The False Bachelor," 2.2501-2781), and it also passes over the long passage on prowess, heroism, and "gentilesse" in the middle of Book 4, certainly central romance concerns. There is more that one might say, therefore, about "romance" in CA, but such an objection does not diminish the value of Dinnicks' discussion of the thematic connections that he discerns among the four tales that he chooses to focuses on. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 19.2] 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 'Redinge of Romance' in Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D. S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 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 Mast, Isabelle Published Mast, Isabelle. "Rape in John Gower's Confessio Amantis and Other Related Works." In Young Medieval Women. Ed. Lewis, Katherine J. and Menuge, Noël James and Phillips, Kim M.. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999, pp. 103-32. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Language and Word Studies Review Mast's long essay falls into three unequal parts: a consideration of the instances of rape in three other collections of tales nearly contemporary with Gower's, an examination of the language Gower uses for rape in each of his three major poems, and an analysis of some of the major instances of rape in CA. The three other tale collections--the "Gesta Romanorum," the "Alphabet of Tales," and Christine de Pisan's "Cité des Dames"--treat rape very differently from one another, but none explores the consequences of rape for the woman, the principal way in which Mast finds Gower's treatment differs from that of his predecessors. Gower's vocabulary for rape is shaped in part by the framework of the confession. In Book 5, where many of the instances of rape in the poem are found, the vocabulary of theft, with its implication that women or their sexuality are mere commodities, is drawn from the metaphor of Avarice that governs the book as a whole, but it also embodies the woman's lack of consent, it suggests that rape is less an act of desire than of aggression and power, and it does not prevent Gower from considering the consequences for the victim. Other expressions, such as "hadde his wille," are more androcentric, but Gower never stoops to pornographic descriptions of the violent act. The incidents of rape in CA appear to be carefully chosen: Gower depicted far fewer than the fifty such acts, for instance, in the "Metamorphoses." His alterations in the tales of Philomela and Lucrece reveal his attitude towards rape. In the former tale, Gower places the rape and its consequences at the center. He betrays his sympathy for Philomela by allowing her to voice her feelings of shame and embarrassment, and in the transformations at the end he affords her some partial compensation for her fate. He alters the story of Lucrece in order to emphasize the victim's innocence. She too experiences the shame of pollution. In both these tales, "the victims are cleared as fully as possible. In both cases Gower tried to think himself into the position of the victim. He successfully expressed the feeling of shame which is not based on complicity, a reproach women often had and still have to endure, in addition to the pain that has already been inflicted upon them. He also makes every attempt to show the effects on the women's identity" (pp. 120-21). In two briefer examples of Book 5--Cornix and Calistona--the woman's lack of consent is less explicit but it may be inferred from the context of the frame. Gower focuses on "the violent and unsympathetic reaction of the girls' social environments" (p. 123): even when her struggle is not depicted, the woman is still depicted as the victim. This essay appears to have been put together in some haste: it contains a couple of sentence fragments and a number of paragraphs that don't quite cohere, and at one point a line from "Sir Degaré" is attributed to Chaucer (p. 107). There is a more troubling problem at the core of its thesis. Gower demonstrates his sympathy for women, Mast repeatedly asserts, by allowing them to voice the shame that they experience as a consequence of being raped. This shame is associated with the "concomitant loss of reputation and, implicitly, social standing" (p. 107); in the tale of Philomela, Gower "is displaying thoughtfully how a young woman could be shamefully embarrassed about the sexual pollution and common knowledge of her rape and how she might try to avoid the public stare" (p. 116); Lucrece is ashamed because "the rape has destroyed a significant part of her identity as a woman and may by association besmirch the name of her family on the public stage, regardless of her actual innocence" (p. 119). Mast does not interrogate either the basis of this public (as opposed to private) shame or its validity, and she appears to accept that the woman's loss of reputation following a rape is both natural and inevitable. She thus dismisses Augustine's condemnation of Lucrece's suicide ("Si pudica, cur occisa?") as misogynistic, not recognizing the misogyny in the notion that a woman can be "besmirched" by an act of violence against her; and in the course of her discussion, she mentions the tale of Leucothoe (p. 123), but she has nothing to say about how the father has his daughter buried alive because she suffered her maidenhood to be stolen (CA 5.6764-75). Gower betrays a sympathy for the victims of rape, to be sure, but that is not necessarily to say that he is fundamentally sympathetic towards women. [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 Rape in John Gower's Confessio Amantis and Other Related Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. Martin's Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Wetherbee, Winthrop Published Wetherbee, Winthrop. "John Gower." In The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature. Ed. Wallace, David. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 589-609. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review Wetherbee's chapter on Gower is proportionally only slightly longer than Russell Peck's in the "Dictionary of Literary Biography" (vol. 146, pp. 178-90. Detroit: Gale, 1994), something under 10000 words compared to about 8000 for Peck, but it offers a great deal more to grapple with, giving far more space to interpretive issues than to the purely factual. Gower's biography is reduced to a single footnote (p. 590), there is a single sentence on his acquaintance with Chaucer (same page), and one has to search hard for any hint that CA is arranged in books that are identified with the Seven Deadly Sins (it's in the middle of p. 604). There is a great deal, however, on the comparison between Gower's and Chaucer's "projects," and even more on Gower's sometimes ambivalent relation to the literary traditions from which he drew. That is perhaps the greatest difference between these two essays. Peck acknowledges Gower's debt to literary sources, but he emphasizes the poet's depiction of contemporary society. Wetherbee acknowledges the poet's self-defined role as social moralist, but he emphasizes the "evolving engagement with poetic tradition" evident in all three of his major works; and with reference to MO and VC, he declares, "the traditional emphasis on their doctrinal content has tended to distract attention from Gower's skill and versatility as a poet" (p. 591). The details of his account take a couple of surprising directions. As similar in content as MO and VC may be, each is referable to a distinct tradition of literary form associated with the language that Gower chose. MO draws from the popular vernacular homily and to traditions of penitential discourse. It is also, according to Wetherbee, marked by an engagement with the "Roman de la Rose": the "psychology of mankind, suspended between Reason and the World, recalls the Amant of the Rose, challenged by Reason and Cupid, but unnerved by Dangier and a latent fear of love's power" (p. 593), and Gower's French "is everywhere alert to the corrupting power of the courtly language it deploys" (ibid.). VC is drawn from traditions of learned Latin satire, despite Gower's claim to express the "vox populi." Wetherbee also discovers, in the conclusion to the "visio" in Book 1 and elsewhere, echoes of the anxious self-definition of the poet in Alan of Lille's "De Planctu Naturae" and Ovid's "Tristia" and "Ex Ponto." This "evolving engagement" culminates in the "synthesis" of CA, but CA is also a work of a different and more complex sort. Because of its dialogic structure, "moral judgments presented directly in the earlier works now sit in unresolved contradiction with a vision of man and the world that continually call the judge's assertions into question" (p. 598). This is a view of CA that has been expressed before but never with quite as much force or on the basis of so thorough a knowledge of the poem. Wetherbee cites the form of the poem, of course, with its English verse crowded by the Latin marginalia and epigrams: the tension among their different views "is part of a long-standing debate between poetry and the conventional scholarly assumptions that define its place in medieval pedagogy" (p. 600). Genius is as divided as the poem itself, speaking for both "cultural" and "natural" values, for both "courtoisie" and for chivalry, "a virtue which in its sexual aspect brings love into association with aggression and violence" (p. 601). Chivalry, Wetherbee declares, "is in effect the villain of the 'Confessio,' at odds with Gower's teaching in virtually every area" (p. 602), an assertion that he defends with a brief examination of a number of Gower's tales. Gower's goal is "a cultural system capable of controlling not only relations between the sexes but social relations of all sorts. And implicit in his treatment of love and chivalry is an awareness that the resources provided by courtly-chivalric culture are inadequate to this task" (p. 603). This awareness is reflected in the numerous contradictions in the poem, as "conventional paradigms fail to exercise a controlling function" (p. 603). It is also reflected in the inclusion of Book 7, whose departure from the form of the rest of the poem suggests that "the perfect synthesis of moral self-governance, courtly-chivalric 'gentilesse' and enlightened royal policy may finally be beyond the ordering power of Genius and his poet" (p. 604). Gower backs away from the full implications of his form and argument, however, ending his poem with "a ringing affirmation – in English and in his own voice – of the place of man in a divinely ordered universe"(p. 607-8), and in that Wetherbee finds the greatest difference between Gower and Chaucer, despite their substantial affinity. Where Chaucer's view is fragmented, Gower retains a "guarded faith that the 'well-meaning' love of Apollonius is finally accessible to his society and can prevail" (p. 607). This is a challenging view of the CA and it is unfortunate that Wetherbee has only the space of a chapter to develop it. While his argument is clear, he isn't able to deploy all of the evidence that we might expect. The issues in Gower's tale of Paris and Helen, for instance, are too complex to be summarized in a single sentence; the assertion that chivalry is the villain of the piece needs more than a paragraph of justification; and the argument on the fragmenting and unifying aspects of Gower's structure deserves more than the few pages that Wetherbee gives us here. We can only respond with a challenge of our own: Wetherbee owes us an entire book on Gower. [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 Cambridge University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Eberle provides a valuable list of "all texts known to me which were commissioned by or addressed to" (as opposed to known merely to have been owned by) King Richard II. Her list contains only 14 items. As she discusses them, she notes that they provide a better indication of how Richard might have wanted to see himself than of what he was, but she also provides valuable suggestions on what each work reveals about Richard's own interests and knowledge. Among the recurring themes she finds are an interest in the Secretum Secretorum and an emphasis on sapientia over fortitudo in the description of the king. Among the very small number of works of literary character on this list appear the original version of Book 6 of VC (the second item) and the entire CA (item 3), which "can be read as an extended discussion of the issues raised in the letter to Richard in the Vox Clamantis, combining an exalted view of royal prerogative with an equally exalted ideal of the moral and religious virtues required of the king" (236). The thirteenth item is the volume of his own poetry that Froissart claims to have presented to the king in 1395, a book that has since disappeared. Eberle notes that the loss "demonstrates the danger of assuming that our records of Richard's manuscripts, even of elaborate presentation copies, are at all complete" (249), but on looking over the list of books that are known to have appealed to Richard, one can't help wondering if both Gower and Froissart might not have misjudged the likelihood of the king's interest in their poems [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 24.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Eberle, Patricia J. Published Eberle, Patricia J.. "Richard II and the Literary Arts." In Richard II: The Art of Kingship. Ed. Goodman, Anthony and Gillespie, James. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999, pp. 231-253. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard II and the Literary Arts 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 1999 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 Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "The Body Politic and the Politics of Bodies in the Poetry of John Gower." In The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature. Ed. Boitani, Piero and Torti, Anna. Cambridge: Brewer, 1999, pp. 145-165. ISBN 085991545X Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Review One of the most studied images in Gower's writing is that of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar's dream, which appears both in VC Book 7 and in the Prologue of CA. Yeager takes a new look at the statue through the lens of the associated imagery of Christ's body and the body politic of the late Middle Ages. The opening section of his essay traces the history of the image from St. Paul, for whom the "body of Christ" provided a means of conceiving of the unity of the church in its many parts, to Boniface VIII, who revivified the metaphor in order to emphasize the supremacy of the "head." Secular theorists such as John of Salisbury, meanwhile, adopted the metaphor for political institutions as a way of expressing both the diversity of functions of the different ranks and also the naturalness of the political hierarchy. In the middle section of his essay, Yeager shows how this imagery is reflected in the chronicle accounts of the uprising of 1381, in which executions are almost without exception described as decapitations: the loss of the head represented from one point of view the breakdown of order in the destruction of God-ordained authority, and from the other (that of the peasants rather than the chroniclers), the overthrow of unjust rule. When Gower writes, in VC 7.5-6, "The golden head of Nebuchadnezzar's statue has now been cut off / Yet the two feet of iron and clay still remain" (Yeager's translation, p. 159), he is clearly invoking the same association between the body of the statue and organized hierarchical society, and echoing the views of the chroniclers. Yeager refers to Gower's description here as "but slightly modified from Daniel" (p. 160). Actually, his discussion draws attention to a fundamental change that Gower has made, for in the Biblical version it is the feet of clay and not the head that are destroyed. Gower sticks more closely to the vision in Daniel in his second use of the image, in the Prologue of CA. Without noting the shift, Yeager argues that the statue also provides a key to the fundamental political message of Gower's English poem. In support of his case, he also cites Gower's use of the episode of Nebuchadnezzar's madness from a later chapter of Daniel. In his conclusion he draws together a rich pattern of resonances from the different sources that he has invoked. The title "Vox Clamantis," he points out, associates Gower both with John of the Apocalypse and with John the Baptist. "And here beheading takes its place again, for of course the familiar icon of the Baptist is a severed head, symbolic at once of the dangers of speaking truth in the kingdom of Herod, a puerile, fitful tyrant, servant to his bodily lust and subject hence to rash decisions under Salome's rule. . . . If the poet is the Baptist (and the John of Revelation), then Richard (by the completion of the Vox at least, and in the Cronica Tripertita) is a type of Herod" (p. 163). In CA, however, Nebuchadnezzar learns before it is too late. Gower "offers his king and country a second chance. That no one took it cannot be placed at Gower's door" (p. 165). In a private correspondence, Yeager lamented "probably the worst typo in my scholarly life" in the sentence with which this essay concludes, which should read as follows: "The wrongs in his society Gower continually tried to right, never more thoughtfully and connectedly than when he brings the body – bodies shaped in every kind – to our attention, as our guides" (p. 165). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 19.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Body Politic and the Politics of Bodies in the Poetry of John Gower. 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 1999 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 Chaucer, in Hanning's view, invented a "lapsarian poetics" for the "Canterbury Tales"--a poetics of shared humanity and subversion of literary authority--by "[r]esponding resistantly" to the "discourse of penance" as thundered down on the sinful estates of society in the poetic voice of Gower (31). In his first section, Hanning quotes the author-persona of "Troilus and Criseyde"--"Myn auctour shal I folwen, if I konne"--to argue that pre-CT, Chaucer experienced a sense of "anxiety and shortfall" (32) as an author "following" the greats of the past in both senses of the term, as he is late in time and possibly not measuring up to their example. Chaucer, however, announces his liberation from previous "worries about following" (33) through his "implicit rebuke" of Gower in the "Man of Law's Prologue," (38), which Hanning understands as a signal that Chaucer has "fallen away" from the older poet as a model even while "following" him in time. The Man of Law appropriates "an oft-told tale," a work of no authority, which he will perform with embellishments to compete with his fellow story-tellers in serving an agenda of far more "social eloquence" (30) than moral reform. At times, appropriation may shade over into counterfeiting, a moral danger addressed through the villainous deceptions portrayed in the "Man of Law's Tale" (37-38). To define what Chaucer was reacting against in the CT Tales, Hanning proceeds to outline the "penitential poetic" (40) as he sees it practiced by Gower, beginning with the sacrament of penance as mandated by the Fourth Lateran Council and explained to priest and penitent in manuals of confession that were produced to support it. The priest was instructed to inquire about the personal circumstances of the sinner, which led to discussion on the besetting sins of particular estates of society, including women, and to the genre of estates satire in literature. Especially post-Lateran IV, the father-confessor functioned as a preacher and a "quasi-prophetic voice" of authority (42). In the "Mirour de l'Omme" and "Vox Clamantis," Gower assumed the role of preacher and prophet by calling for the sacrament of penance and aiming his estates criticism from a position of superiority and detachment, as seen in the famous manuscript illumination of the poet standing somewhere in space and shooting an arrow at the world (46). Gowerian discourse dealt in "binaries" (45): edenic past versus corrupt present; sins versus their opposing virtues. For example, as prescribed in the VC, the solution to wrath gone out of control in the Rising of 1381 is that the English people will practice caritas (44). In his final section, Hanning produces a series of examples from the CT to support his view on Chaucer's poetic of resistance to the "penitential poetic" of Gower. Instead of a binary past and present, we have a personal "then and now" of April pilgrimage and remembering some time later (47). In the "General Prologue," the poet describes his fellow pilgrims, including their estate-based vices, with a "synthesis of ideology and personal response" and from the perspective of a boon companion, not a preacher making judgment in binaries (48-50). Even the Parson must establish his "bona fides" as a fellow pilgrim and receive permission to preach a "tale" on penance (51). The Wife of Bath and the Pardoner appropriate the discourse of confession in their Prologues as they flaunt their subversion of Pauline and Fourth Lateran norms on priestly (male) authority and the penitential mandate for consistency in thought, word, and deed (52-56). Their "lapsarian" confessions serve to push back against an authoritative social discourse that would "marginalize them and punish them for who they are" (57). The Wife proves herself to be a potent literary begetter as other storytellers respond to her--"follow" her--in socially eloquent competition. By his resistant "following" of Gower's poetic with its fierce estates satire, Chaucer transformed the decorous, all upper-class storytellers of Boccaccio's "Decameron" with "wonderful innovation" in the CT (58). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hanning, R. W. Published Hanning, R. W. "'And Countrefete the Speche of Every Man / He Koude, Whan He Sholde Telle a Tale': Toward a Lapsarian Poetics for The Canterbury Tales." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 29-58. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Influence and Later Allusion Sources, Analogues, and Literary elations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Countrefete the Speche of Every Man / He Koude, Whan He Sholde Telle a Tale": Toward a Lapsarian Poetics for "The Canterbury Tales." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Freedman's use of Gower is--per usual with historians until very recently--exclusive to Book I of the "Vox Clamantis," the "Visio Anglie," with two brief excursions into the "Mirour de l'Omme," and functions as support for claims about abuse of the peasantry by the elite classes. A sample: "The most sustained hysterical attack on rebellious peasants, likening them to animals, is book I of John Gower's 'Vox clamantis,' in which the rabble takes on the aspect either of domestic beasts that have escaped control (asses, oxen, swine, dogs) or of wild or verminous creatures (foxes, flies, frogs). At the end of book I, with the suppression of the revolt, the peasants have become draught animals, oxen, who have returned to the yoke after a terrifying episode in which they left the fields, forgot their nature, and turned into lions, panthers, and bears" (142-43). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Freedman, Paul. Published Freedman, Paul. Images of the Medieval Peasant. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. 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 Images of the Medieval Peasant. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 thesis explores John Gower's English work, the 'Confessio Amantis,' from three primary perspectives. This produces an interpretation of the work that emphasizes the completeness of Gower's vision therein whilst also explaining the methods by which he made that original 'intentio' manifest. Chapters I and IV focus on the physical structure and framework of the text: the design, the schema of the Seven Deadly Sins, the prologue and epilogue, and the metre. To demonstrate the significance of the structure of the 'Confessio Amantis,' the thesis analyzes the relationship of these elements to the text's 'intentio' and its reception. Chapters II and V examine the 'Confesssio Amantis' in its social, political and cultural context. The history of the Church's original appropriation of 'auctoritas' is explored, along with Gower's subsequent reappropriation of it as a lay political concept and his narrative justifications for this. As a parallel to this, Gower's own references to the contemporary domestic political situation are examined for the insight which they offer into his reactions to the cultural climate and his motivation in writing the text. Chapter III demonstrates the underrated narrative artistry of the 'Confessio Amantis,' and discusses failings of the prevailing critical tradition. Comparison with some key texts from Gower's contemporary, Chaucer, explores possible reasons for Gower's poor reputation by examining narrative in terms of factors such as theme, genre and 'intentio' rather than the stylistics and characterization that have attracted most attention in the past. This chapter also explores the effect of those factors on the alterations which Gower made to his source narratives, and how this emphasizes Gower's commitment to a distinctive 'middel weie'. The thesis concludes by emphasizing the sustained and coherent nature of Gower's vision for his work and the literary significance which this affords him." Author/Editor Author/Editor Chatten, N. M. L. Published Chatten, N.M.L.  "A gret ensample thou schalt finde": On the Artistry and Ethics of the "Confessio Amantis." Ph.D. Dissertation. The University of Wales College of Cardiff, 1999. Dissertation Abstracts International C70.23. Abstract available 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 "A gret ensample thou schalt finde": On the Artistry and Ethics of the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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, Otey shows that Clanvowe's "Boke of Cupide" and his "The Two Ways" establish him as "an intense and innovative writer of vernacular theology" (183), assessing the writer in light of Lollard discourse on the use of English in religious writing and political reactions against such discourse. She includes comments on Chaucer's and Gower's uses of English in religious contexts, evincing that both poets use it for nationalistic purposes, but that Gower, more than Chaucer, reflects "anxiety" about doing so. Addressing Gower's stylistic "middel weie" as reference to using vernacular English in his "Confessio Amantis," commenting on Gower's recitation of the story of Babel, and treating Latin as a framing device for his English poem, Otey concludes that "Gower, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, exhibits an anxiety precipitated by using English for religious writing at a time when it was increasingly controversial to do so" (160). [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Otey, Kirsten Johnson. Published Otey, Kirsten Johnson. "The law of God in here modyr tonge": The Vernacular Theology of Sir John Clanvowe. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Colorado at Boulder, 1999. viii, 198 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A60.12. Fully accessible vis ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "The law of God in here modyr tonge": The Vernacular Theology of Sir John Clanvowe. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 investigates how, in the wake of the English Rising of 1381, John Gower's Confessio Amantis addressed the highest ranks of non-ruling urban groups, ranks which produced numerous rebels. Using a methodology in dialogue with British Cultural Studies, this project argues that the Confessio worked to reshape the consciousness of readers from these strata, proposing to alter the ways in which they conceptualized their agency, interests, allies, and overall identities. This is the first study of the Confessio to examine an early readership from non-ruling groups or to consider readers who had participated in or sympathized with the uprising. Chapter One challenges claims that only ruling groups comprised the poem's earliest readership and explains that the upper strata of non-ruling urban groups (roughly, middle-rank guild members, including prosperous retailers and artisans) were in the Confessio's audiences from 1390 to 1425. This chapter examines studies of early Confessio manuscripts and their circulation but focuses primarily on the access of the upper strata of non-ruling urban groups to literacy and on their consumption of texts. Chapter Two argues that the Confessio's rendition of Nebuchadnezzar's dream represents history as a homogeneous mass and as a teleological progression into ruin. Through these contradictory models, the Confessio proposed to alter the terms in which readers understood how history happens, experienced their relation to the past and future, conceptualized their agency and identities, and understood their connections to the uprising and to insurrection in general. The third chapter argues that, through the grace of higher powers, the protagonist undergoes a rite of passage, improving his understanding, morality, and spirituality. The poem offers readers a similar gift, through its learned, textual tradition. The Confessio thus distinguishes informed men from the masses, thereby policing debates about England's problems, while fostering identifications between readers and higher ranks and encouraging contempt for lower ranks. Chapter Four holds that the Confessio's claims about popular insurrection echo the Vox Clamantis. However, the poems' overall approaches to the uprising differ radically, as their strategies were shaped by disparities between England's political terrain in 1381 and in the years immediately thereafter. Author/Editor Author/Editor Arner, Lynn Patricia Published Arner, Lynn Patricia. "Burying the Dead: John Gower and English Rising of 1381." PhD thesis, University of Rochester, 2000. 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 Burying the Dead: John Gower and English Rising of 1381. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Dissertation Abstracts International, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis 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 of the more intriguing recent developments in the study of the text of CA was the unexpected reappearance a couple of years ago of one of the seventeen missing leaves of the "Stafford" MS (Huntington Library Ellesmere 26.A.17). First announced in Quaritch catalog 1270 (pp. 37-40, including a color photograph of the recto), the leaf was acquired by Professor Toshiyuki Takamiya of Keio University, and Takamiya and Edwards have now provided a fuller description of the leaf, including a transcription. The sixth of the MS's missing leaves, it originally stood between ff. 68 and 69 of the present pagination, and contained lines 2351-2530 of Book 4. It has been cropped on the inner edge and at the bottom for use in the binding of a smaller book, with the result that about a quarter to a third of each line of text is now missing in the first column of the recto, a few letters are lost in about half the lines in the second column of the verso, and ten lines of text have been cut away at the bottom of each column. Whatever Latin marginalia there might have been have also disappeared. The leaf has also suffered some wearing and abrasion, particularly on the verso, so that several words are now rather indistinct. On the whole, though, it is exactly what one expects of Stafford: a clean, nearly error-free text that follows almost letter for letter that of the Fairfax MS which served as Macaulay's base. I'm sorry to have to note, in that regard, that Edwards' and Takamiya's transcription contains a few errors: 2360 e MS boe; 2362 vv. 4 experetuata MS [p]erpetuata (the authors have mistaken the descender of an f in the preceding line for an abbreviation stroke); 2370 whilome MS whilom; 2396 Than MS Cham; 2408 Pantules MS Pantulf; ffrigidisses MS ffrigidilles; 2420 physique MS physique; 2439 ons MS ous; 2440 labourerer MS labourrer; 2443 mankind MS mankinde; 2444 boke MS bokes; 2449 metal MS metall; 2461 eke MS ek; 2485 Author/Editor Author/Editor Quaritch, Bernard Published Quaritch, Bernard. "Bookhands of the Middle Ages: VI. Medieval Manuscripts: Leaves and Binding Fragments." : Bernard Quaritch, Ltd., 2000 Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bookhands of the Middle Ages: VI. Medieval Manuscripts: Leaves and Binding Fragments Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Bernard Quaritch, Ltd., Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Chapter 5 of Aers' study, "Reflections on Gower as 'Sapiens in Ethics and Politics'," was originally published in 1998 in R.F. Yeager's Re-Visioning Gower, and it was reviewed in JGN 18, no. 1, p. 17. A bit more briefly: Aers attacks Gower's reputation as a coherent moral philosopher by laying out some of the more obvious contradictions in his thought. Gower's advocacy of evangelical pacifism in VC Books 3 and 6, for instance, cannot be reconciled with the "unironic celebration of aristocratic violence" in his advice to the young King Richard to follow the example of his father (p. 107). Such a contradiction, Aers points out, was encouraged by the medieval church, where it had become "normalized and internalized" (p. 110). It is also allowed by the structure of VC, in which "the units . . . are paratactically sealed off from each other rather than brought into dialogue. . . . [VC's] paratactic mode becomes a powerful impediment to moral inquiry, to sustained critical reflection on the difficulties that are raised. The mode protects the poet from having to confront sharp contradictions in his ethics, let alone from having to explore their sources in the traditions he inherits and the culture he inhabits" (p. 110; his italics). The same sort of failure can be found in CA, in which the poet condemns the church for the degeneracy of its practices and for the mystification of its claims of spiritual authority yet upholds the church against the Wycliffites whose criticism he echoes. "Are we being invited to cultivate ironic reflections on the grounds of all doctrine, on the grounds of all claims to unfeigned, uninvented authority in matters concerning the divine?" (p. 117). No, Aers concludes; to a "paratactic mode" corresponds a "paratactic moralism" (p. 118). This provocative essay now stands in the company of chapters on Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain-poet, and Wyclif. Each of these Aers situates among the competing discourses on faith, ethics, and the nature of the church in late fourteenth-century England, when Wyclif and his followers raised questions about orthodox institutions and practices that prompted an increasing rigidity of doctrine and an increasing harshness of both ecclesiastical and secular attempts to control public discourse on theological topics. In such an atmosphere, each author inevitably takes stands with both doctrinal and politi-cal implications. One of Aers' principal themes, indeed, is that the doctrinal is political, not only because of the increasing involvement of secular institutions in ecclesiastical matters but also because of the common understanding on all sides of these debates that "faith" was not a purely personal commitment but membership and participation in the congregation of the faithful. The preference of some modern readers to imagine faith apart from the institutions in which it is embodied provides the opening for Aers' examination of Chaucer. He considers the implications of Griselda's unquestioning obedience of Walter in the context of contemporary discussions of faith and ethics, and he places it in contrast to the very different notions of obedience to authority embodied in the Second Nun's Tale. He also examines Chaucer's references to the sacraments. The absence of any allusion to the eucharist, even in the description of the Parson, suggests that Chau-cer's depiction of the church would have been congenial to his Wycliffite acquaintances even though Chaucer makes no pronouncement in favor of Wyclif's cause. The Gawain-poet comes off as rather breezy and superficial in his treatment of issues of faith and eth-ics in Aers' discussion. The heroic figure in Aers' study is Langland, who wrestles in a profound act of faith with the very issues that Aers examines, but who is not exempt from falling into his own contradictions, particularly on social issues, as Aers observes. Aers also finds a deep contradiction in Wyclif's notions of Christian discipleship, particularly for the laity, which he attributes to the theologian's own class interests and to his nationalistic politics. There is much more in these chapters than these few comments reveal, and Aers argues his case with both learning and conviction. The reason for offering even the briefest summary of the other portions of the book here is to give some indication of how Gower comes off by comparison to his contemporaries in Aers' hands, now that the chapter on Gower appears in its proper company. And in that context one has to feel that Aers has simply taken Gower considerably less seriously than he has the others. The contradiction in VC is an easy target, and if Gower does not carve out a sufficiently sophisticated position on church reform, it is also true that the structure of the church is not a central issue in CA. CA is centrally concerned, however, with issues of faith and ethics. In Genius, it gives us a priest who has duties both to God and to a sometimes tyrannical God of Love, and who must therefore mediate between them. In Book 7, moreover, Genius offers a lengthy discussion of the duties owed to secular authority (including unjust authority) and to God. Much of the poem can be read as a lengthy meditation on the sources of moral authority, raising questions that Gower did not reflect on to the same extent in his two earlier long works. Anyone deeply familiar with CA will find repeated echoes of the issues that Gower addresses in the chapters in Aers' book that are not concerned with Gower, and it is a bit of a disappointment to see the poem treated so superficially when its turn finally comes. Aers has a point to make about Gower, but it is a small one, and there is room for much larger. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Aers, David Published Aers, David. "Faith, Ethics and Church: Writing in England, 1360-1409." Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000 ISBN 0-85991-561-1 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis 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 Faith, Ethics and Church: Writing in England, 1360-1409 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 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Not all will be per-suaded, but Bullón-Fernández has worked strenuously to build her case, and we can take it as a token of the maturity of Gower studies that these are the types of issues that we are now discussing. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1] Father-daughter relationships occupy a prominent place in CA, Bullón-Fernández observes, and she discusses eleven particularly significant examples, including the two longest and most complex tales in the poem, "Constance" and "Apollonius of Tyre," and one of the most problematic, "Canace and Machaire." She sets out the broad lines of her argument in her first chapter. Gower uses the relationship between father and child, she asserts, as a device for exploring issues of power and authority not only in a family context but also in the political and textual realms. All three of these are informed by the same dynamics--the male authority figure appears to negotiate between the desire for an absolute control over the female subordinate figure and the constraints imposed by social forces (pp. 3-4). She thus treats incest not merely as a sin in a moral or religious sense but as an offense against society: the father, who has absolute authority over his daughter, is expected to use this authority to pass her on to somebody else, and his refusal to do so is a rejection of the patriarchal order from which his authority derives. The king's authority was also on occasion figured as that of a fa-ther towards his child, and the king's failure to recognize the limits on his authority, in his usurpation of their property rights, for instance, can thus be seen as an analogous disruption of patriarchal order. Bullón-Fernández draws heavily from the critics (notable among them Judith Butler) who have discussed the discursive nature of the incest taboo and the relation between the law of exogamy (which requires marriage outside the family) and the construction of patriarchal society, and who have explored the contradictions in the role attributed to the father in the system in which a female is the object of exchange and in the taboo that both creates and suppresses incestuous desire. Gower too explores the "gaps and fissures" (an expression that recurs several times in this book) inherent in patriarchal ideology. He is particularly concerned to mark the limits of the father's authority, and thus also the ruler's, pointedly directly his criticism to his own king, Richard II. Gower also uses the incest motive as a way of exploring his own role as author, imposing his authority on the narratives that he creates in his attempt to control their interpretation. He models the relation between artist and his creation as incestuous in the tale of Pygmaleon. Gower places Genius in the role of authority in the poem, and then he challenges that authority through Amans, through the multiplicity of Latin voices in the text of the poem, and through the contradictions in Genius' own lessons; thus "Gower's examination of the notion of incest, of absolute control over something or someone created by oneself, reveals his anxiety about his relationship with his own creation, the text, about his desire to have his text mirror his own will and his own meaning, unambiguously" (p. 37). The subsequent chapters offer very close readings of groups of related tales. There is space here to mention only some of the high points of Bullón-Fernández's argument. In chapter two she examines three tales in which incest hovers as a possibility but is averted, though the way in which the fathers and daughters carry out their roles also problematizes the patriarchal order within which incest is displaced. "Apollonius of Tyre" raises the largest number of issues. Bullón-Fernández reads the tale through Derrida's account (in his discussion of Rousseau) of the simultaneous origin of incest, society, and language. Apollonius and Thaise avert incest through their use of language while Antiochus' relation with his daughter takes place without language. Genius thus portrays incestuous desire as precultural, but Antiochus' behavior, including his use of a riddle to hide his sin, suggests nonetheless that incest is fundamentally discursive in origin. The tale shows the mutually reinforcing character of the ideologies that shape the power structures in family and nation and takes an optimistic view of the consequences of properly fulfilling one's role, but it also raises questions about Apollonius' construction of his self that reveal the instability of the notion of authority upon which patriarchy is itself constructed. In "The Three Questions," Peronelle's ostensible role as an example of humility on the model of Mary is at odds with the very active role that she plays, skillfully using language to assist her father and to achieve her own ambition of marrying a king. "The tale shows the potential both for female power and for the disruption of the system of exchange" (p. 68), but Peronelle's "potentially subversive empowerment through words ultimately works to sustain and repeat the accepted structures of kinship" (p. 74). In "Constance," the heroine performs her public duty and complies with the demands of the system of exchange at the expense of her own individuality, but only to an extent: her refusal to identify herself upon her arrival in both England and Rome indicates Genius' attempt to attribute to her a significant degree of both individuality and agency. With regard to her relation with her father, "her silences . . . suggest that she has a desire (an unspeakable desire) which, nevertheless, she controls" (p. 79). They thus also "contribute to the delimit and construct a domain of the unspeakable. The unspeakable is the refusal to 'communicate' in Lévi-Strauss's sense, that is, both the refusal to speak and the refusal to comply with the laws of exchange" (p. 82). Upon the death of her husband Alle, Constance is finally able to reaffirm her bond with her father. Genius does not conceal the incestuous implications of their reunion as she provides her father, for instance, with an heir and "he thus implies that daughters have a natural desire for their fathers that social laws, and particularly the incest taboo, have the function of repressing" (p. 86). In the portion of her analysis that has already appeared in print (see JGN 17, no. 1, pp 14-15), Bullón-Fernández argues that Constance's relation with her father is also meant to figure the relationship between the church and political authority. The church (represented in Constance) is made subordinate to and dependent upon lay masculine power, but in such a way as to undermine the royal pretensions of absolutism. Chapter three examines two tales, "The False Bachelor" and "Albinus and Rosemund," in which the roles of men and women are more sharply differentiated--the women, indeed, are merely passive objects of exchange--but in which the roles of the father and the husband are too easily interchanged as the woman is passed from one to the other, suggesting a fundamental flaw in the system of exchange. In "The False Bachelor," the way in which the emperor's son wins the hand of the sultan's daughter is made akin to the supplantation by which he loses her. Both tales also link male identity to chivalry and demonstrate some fundamental weaknesses of chivalric ideology. In "The False Bachelor" the constructedness of chivalric identity allows it so easily to be stolen by another knight, while in "Albinus and Rosemund," Albinus' boast, so integral a part of the chivalric accomplishment by which he wins Rosemund, proves to be inconsistent with his responsibilities as king and results in his undoing. In chapter four, Bullón-Fernández takes up "Leucothoe," "Virginia," and "Canace and Machaire," three tales in which the father slays his daughter. In the first two of these, the father's control of his daughter is tyrannically usurped by another male, but the father responds with his own tyrannical abuse of his daughter. Her virginity is thus merely a site for the exploration of the limits of authority in the private and public realms. Sexual desire is linked to the violation of private property, and Genius suggests that power, like sexual desire, is natural and inevitable but that it can and should be controlled. The political implications are clearest in "Virginia," in which the superior authority is a king rather than a god and in which justice is finally enacted by the "commune." "Virginia" also makes clear the analogy between the father's violation and the king's as he impinges upon his daughter's private rights out of a misplaced sense of possession. Such a relation is also explicit in "Canace and Machaire," in which the king and the father are the same. (This discussion has also previously appeared in print; see JGN 14, no. 2, pp. 6-7). Bullón-Fernández note that Eolus' anger has an incestuous character, being motivated less by his daughter's sin than by his loss of control over her body. His denial of the independence of his daughter serves as a metaphor for the abuse of authority in the public sphere, and it is equally self-destructive. Genius sympathizes with Canace because she is both procreator and also literary creator, as the author of her verse epistle to her brother. He is thus moved to condemn Eolus though he is silent about the fathers' abuse of their daughters in the two other similar tales. Genius' attempt to control the meaning of his stories puts him too in the position of fatherly authority, and the inconsistencies in his sympathies under-mine his attempts to establish the proper limits of that authority. In her fifth and final chapter, Bullón-Fernández examines the implications of Genius' fatherly role more closely. In "Rosiphelee," she argues, the heroine's vision reveals the discursive nature of courtly love ideology, and Genius replaces the father in compelling the daughter to sub-mit to the law of exogamy and to supply an heir. In "Jephthah's Daughter" he more clearly abuses his power as he overlooks the violence of the father and unfairly places blame on the daughter herself for dying still a virgin. Genius identifies with Pygmalion, finally, in the tale of the same name, as both he and the sculptor exercise the creative power primarily through their use of words. His identification leaves him "blind to the structures of authority and the incestuous implications involved in artistic creation" (p. 212), as evidenced by his omission of the allusions to the incestuous relationship between Pygmalion's grandson and his daughter found in both Ovid and Jean de Meun. "As a kind of father to his tales," moreover, "he himself is implicated in the relations of power that he tries to delimit in other tales, and, therefore, he himself is bound to transgress those limits" (ibid.). By his use of the figure of Genius, Gower explores his own desire to control the text. Like Jean de Meun, he refuses to impose a single authorial voice upon the poem. "The incestuous connotations in their versions of the myth [of Pygmalion]," however, "hint at their ambivalence, even anxiety, towards their own authority. These connotations remind us that the notion that a work of art will mirror its author's desire, the author's fantasy of absolute control over its meaning, is, ultimately, a problematic, even if irresistible, Pymalionesque fantasy" (pp. 214-15). This is obviously a challenging study, both because of the breadth of its concerns and because of the subtlety of some aspects of its argument. It is sure to have greatest appeal to those who share the author's theoretical interests. Those who read closely with one eye on the poem, however, are bound to find themselves raising some questions about some of Bullón-Fernández's readings. To take only a couple of examples: It is one thing to suggest that there is an analogy to be drawn between the supplantation that Genius identifies (and condemns) in "The False Bachelor" and the replacement of the sultan by his designated son-in-law in the same tale, and quite another to imply that there is little or no difference between the two actions. The tale seems designed, in fact, to draw the distinction between the legitimate and illegitimate means of winning the Sultan's daughter in marriage. In emphasizing the constructedness of chivalric identity in the tale, moreover, Bullón-Fernández passes over the fact that the plot is resolved by the decision of the emperor's son to reveal his true name just before he dies. She similarly elides the moral and immoral as Genius defines it in her discussion of "Albinus and Rosemund," treating Albinus' boasting as a constitutive part of his chivalric identity rather than as a violation of it. There may be little difference between a good knight and a bad knight from our point of view, but such differences are very carefully labeled in the poem. In her discussion of Apollonius' loving his daughter "kindely" before he recognizes her (pp. 58-59), Bullón-Fernández sees an ambiguity that allows her to argue that the prohibition of incest is shown in the tale to be verbally constructed rather than pre-verbal. Genius' (and Gower's) point, however, is surely the opposite: the line "yit he wiste nevere why" (8.1707) draws a distinction between "kinde" knowledge and rational knowledge in this episode just as as it does in the similar scene in the tale of Constance in which Alle is drawn to his son (2.1381-82), a passage that Bullón-Fernández does not refer to. She also stretches a bit when she suggests that Gower uses the examples of fathers abusing their daughters as a way of commenting on the political abuses of Richard II. The analogy that she draws (on pages 31, 33, 132-33, 136, 163 and 165) is based upon criticisms of the king's abuse of his subjects' property rights which did not occur, she admits when she first raises the issue on page 21, until 1397, long after the passages in question were com-posed. These, and many other similar quibbles, are the types of disagreements that one ought to expect in a study as dense and as ambitious as this one is. There are two more general issues that arise, however. One concerns the basis that we use for determining when a cigar is not merely a cigar. Bullón-Fernández would have us see the political and textual implications of the representations of incest in the poem. How do we know, however, that these should be read as something other than what they are offered as, as exam-ples in a lengthy disquisition on sexual ethics? There is no easy answer, but unfortu-nately for Bullón-Fernández's argument, there is less evidence in the poem itself for the implications that she draws than there is in other texts, some of which are very modern. Even the singling out of incest is problematic. She uses the association between tyranny and rape in "Athemas and Demophon" (she might also have cited Nero) as a justification for seeing political issues in questions of sexual laws, but then is the rape and mutilation of Philomela any less fraught with issues of abuse and power? Is there a real reason why victims of incest should be set apart from all the other examples of women who are abused in the Confessio? And if not, then the analogy starts to become very general indeed. The other major issue concerns Gower's role in these issues. Bullón-Fernández would have us see CA not merely as a chapter in the history of the western discursive construction of patriarchy and sexuality but rather as a sustained critique of that construction. She insistently distinguishes between Genius' position and Gower's in order to create a space from which Gower himself may share the views and concerns of twentieth-century theorists. This is the most difficult part of her case because in order to accept it, we have to accept virtually everything in her argument that precedes. Author/Editor Author/Editor Bullón-Fernández, María Published Bullón-Fernández, María. "Fathers and Daughters in Gower's Confessio Amantis: Authority, Family, State, and Writing." Publications of the John Gower Society, 5 . Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000 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 Fathers and Daughters in Gower's Confessio Amantis: Authority, Family, State, and Writing. 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 2000 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 Staley, Lynn Published Staley, Lynn. "Gower, Richard II, Henry of Derby, and the Business of Making Culture." Speculum 75 (2000), pp. 68-96. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review There are two unequal parts to this lengthy essay. The first, and shorter, considers the ways in which CA, "The Legend of Good Women," and Clanvowe's "Boke of Cupid" address issues of royal prerogatives and power. Since Gower's dedication of his poem records his relation with the king most explicitly (Chaucer's and Clanvowe's are encoded in their relations with the god of Love), he gets the least amount of attention of the three. Staley argues, however, that all three were engaged in a conversation with Richard that was possible in the mid-1380's but that would have been impossible after the Merciless Parliament of 1388. The second part considers the circumstances of Gower's revision of the dedication, when "Gower attempted to salvage a poem whose original conditions were no longer apparent" (p. 79). Staley gives more than merely passing regard to the events in the early 1390's that have been cited in the past to justify his change of view of the king, particularly to the quarrel with London in 1392. But the greatest amount of attention (indeed more than half this essay) is reserved for the role of John of Gaunt during this period and for his possible influence on the literary culture of the time. Staley cites Gaunt's longtime interest in acquiring a throne that he might pass on to his son, his care for improving Henry's position while retaining the good will of the king, his sponsorship of Henry's expeditions on the continent, and his efforts to acquire the prestige associated with his own court; and then points out the reversal of expectations that he must have suffered because of a series of unexpected events in 1394. Much of what Staley offers is speculative but closely enough grounded in documented fact to be interesting and at times intriguing. The consequences for Gower are disappointingly slight, however, and Staley's conclusion, expressed in an interrogative, can be quoted in full: "Are Gower's changes to the 'Confessio' a sign, possibly of dissatisfaction with Richard, but also of Gaunt's subtle co-opting of a poet's allegiance? To dedicate a poem about the state of England to Henry of Derby in 1392-93 served as one more indication of his status as protector of those virtues of ethical self-government that were memorialized in the poem itself and perhaps of a 'court' (even a virtual one) whose reality demanded an utterance that only a man with Gower's reputation for integrity could supply" (p. 96). The reviewer is cited in note 25 on page 78 as expressing in a series of essays published between 1984 and 1987 a view of the textual history of CA that Staley rejects, and so is perhaps not in the best position to offer an objective judgment of the merits of her argument. A few things do jump out, though. First, though she concedes that Gower finished CA in 1390 (p. 78), her entire discussion of the dedication is based on the assumption that it was written in 1385 or 1386, suggesting that she believes, somewhat implausibly, that Gower would have written the dedication first and then maintained it, despite its inappropriateness at the time of the poem's completion. Somewhat more seriously, when she states (on p. 71), that the F Prologue to LGW was written "at about the same time as the 'Confessio'," she allows us to infer that she believes that the entire poem was finished before 1388. Since all of her comments about the dedication depend upon its precise historical setting, the date is obviously not a small matter. Regarding the revisions in the text: despite the subtlety with which she reads between the lines of every other text that she considers, she refuses to see anything at all problematic about the dates contained in the margins of the revised passages in the Prologue and Book 8 in some MSS, and gives an account of Gower's rewriting that is pleasingly simple and straightforward and that may be correct, but that appears to be adopted more because of its convenience than because of a careful consideration of the complexities of the early textual history of the poem. One also has to wonder about her characterization of the "Confessio" as a whole. On page 70, she speaks of it as "a poem about the education of a prince," and on page 79 she appears to place the entire poem in the "Mirror for Princes" genre. Such a designation helps justify her attention to the dedication, but it also suggests that a more inclusive view of the poem's contents might make her entire argument somewhat less compelling. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 19.2.] 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, Richard II, Henry of Derby, and the Business of Making Culture Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Duffell documents much more fully his claim that Chaucer's model was Italian rather than French, and he also makes some rather more specific claims about Gower. He includes examples from CB under three of the types in his classification of ten-syllable lines (F, G, and H; pp. 279-82), none of which was used by medieval French poets. (This time, stresses are marked in boldface.) On the basis of the presumed early date of CB, he states that "it is probable that Gower was experimenting with this line in French at the same time as his friend Chaucer was doing so in English, in the late 1370s" (p. 279); and though he notes that Gower also employs iambic pentameters in English in IPP, he attributes Gower's use of all three verse types to an Italian model, claiming that one variant in particular "proves that Gower is here imitating an endecasillabo in French and not a Chaucerian pentameter" (p. 280). He thus refers in his conclusion to Chaucer's and Gower's "common interest in Italian versification" (p. 284). His earlier essay leads one to believe that Gower's line emerged as a direct consequence of the nature of his language. The more recent essay attributes to Gower a previously unknown familiarity with Italian, despite also observing that Chaucer's knowledge of Italian made him quite unusual for a fourteenth-century Englishman (p. 271). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 19.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Duffell, Martin J. Published Duffell, Martin J.. "'The Craft So Long to Lerne': Chaucer's Invention of the Iambic Pentameter." Chaucer Review 34.3 (2000), pp. 269-288. ISSN 0009-2002 Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Cinkante Balades Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'The Craft So Long to Lerne': Chaucer's Invention of the Iambic Pentameter 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 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân Published Echard, Siân. "House Arrest: Modern Archives, Medieval Manuscripts." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000), pp. 185-210. ISSN 1082-9636 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review Echard's essay is not concerned with Gower directly nor even with the scribes who produced the manuscripts of his works, but instead with our own engagement with and response to Gower and how these are mediated by the conditions in which his manuscripts are now housed and preserved. Drawing upon her own experiences with a wide range of libraries but focusing in particular on two copies of "Confessio Amantis" (Columbia University, MS Plimpton 265 and Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M690), she offers a number of loosely connected observations on "how archival practices and archival encounters structure and control our reading of medieval books and the texts that they contain" (p. 186). Gower is an ideal object for exploring the paradoxes of preservation, for as Echard points out, his manuscripts are often valued either for their ornate production or for the author's association with Chaucer by those who have little interest in reading his text. She places the present conditions of preservation of medieval books in contrast both to the use to which these manuscripts were put by their original owners and also to the habits and interests of the antiquarians and collectors who acquired many of the most important of the manuscripts that are now found on the west side of the Atlantic. Were it not for the collectors and their archivist descendants, she acknowledges, many fewer copies would be available to us now, yet the conditions imposed by the necessity of preservation make our modern encounter with medieval books entirely different in nature from that of their owners, who both used them in the best sense of the word and also often abused them. Nowadays "one worships at the altar of the manuscript; one does not doodle on it" (p. 189). In a historical aside, Echard traces the mixed motives of the antiquarians who replaced the owner-readers, including "nostalgia, competition, and the commodification of culture" (p. 194) as well as, in some instances, a genuine interest in history and in preserving the past. Even the efforts of the collectors are now effaced, however, as manuscripts are kept apart from the rooms in which they are read and are offered to readers individually, in isolation from the collection of which they were made a part. Each of us who has experienced a frisson in the presence of one of these ancient books will understand Echard's remarks on how our reverence amounts to a kind of fetishization, complete with the creation of a priesthood (ourselves) with unique rights of access to the sacred objects. She gives some consideration to the ways in which librarians can impose their own assumptions about the value of a book: in foliation, for instance, privileging either the text itself, the original material form, or the present material form (the prevalent modern practice); or giving greater attention to the illustration than to the text. And in looking to the future, she contemplates a final paradox: that the digitization of an increasing number of manuscripts may make them more widely available in one sense while perhaps also resulting in greater restriction of access to the actual physical book. Echard has no single conclusion to offer but instead simply requires us to think about our own assumptions and practices in a way that we might not have before. Her essay is provocative and often entertaining. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource House Arrest: Modern Archives, Medieval Manuscripts Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor McCarthy, Conor Published McCarthy, Conor. "Love and Marriage in the Confessio Amantis." Neophilologus 84 (2000), pp. 485-499. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Under this broad title McCarthy takes up some broad topics indeed: the relation between nature and reason in CA; that nature and background of Genius' ethical counseling; and the value of his recommendation of "honeste love" to a man (1) whose love is identified as sinful, (2) has no prospect of marriage with the woman that he loves, and (3) is revealed at the end to be elderly and impotent anyway. McCarthy does about as well at sorting out the many conflicting statements in the poem on each of these issues as many earlier critics who have gone over the same ground, the most important of whom he cites. He explains how nature might appropriately be governed by reason in the case of man while in other contexts nature might be said to be opposed to reason, a valuable concession to the lack of strictness in some of Gower's most important terms. He resorts nonetheless to blaming Genius for some of the other apparently conflicting advice in the poem, though conceding that his "moral authority," especially suspect at the beginning, improves as the poem goes on, and that he transcends his limitations as priest of Venus in Book 7. Genius' most important advice to Amans, occurring throughout the poem, not just at the end, is his recommendation of "honeste love," which comes to be equated with marriage, the place in which nature is most fully restrained by reason. McCarthy places that advice within the context of medieval discussion of the sacrament of marriage, and concludes from his examination of the different cases presented in the poem, "If Gower condemns extramarital love, he offers marriage primarily as a remedy for lust, as something that can make love honeste, rather than as something good in itself, and even marital intercourse is presented as something potentially sinful" (p. 495). This advice turns out not to apply to Amans, however: because of his age, the only reasonable course for him is to abandon his love entirely. Abstinence such as Genius advocates for Amans is only for the few, McCarthy notes; for the rest, for whom the lengthy argument in the poem is apparently intended, "the best that can be hoped is that they will love in accordance with the natural urge to procreation, and that they will modify that urge by the exercise of reason within lawful marriage" (p. 497). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 19.2.] 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 Love and Marriage in the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Ladd, Roger Alfred Published Ladd, Roger Alfred. "Merchants, Mercantile Satire, and Problems of Estate in Late Medieval English literature (Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Margery Kempe, William Langland)." PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2000. Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Review "This dissertation explores the long-overlooked trajectory of merchants through late medieval English literature, and argues that literary treatments of merchants are far more worthy of study than scholars have assumed. I discuss extended conflict between an early clerical ideology rejecting the money economy and the first stages of a guardedly pro-trade ideology. These two incompatible visions of the morality of trade coexist within each of the texts I study, and the continued struggle between these ideologies prevents either from dominating any of these texts. The dissertation begins with three poems that use estates satire: John Gower's "Mirour de l'Omme," William Langland's "Piers Plowman," and Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." Gower redirects familiar tropes of antimercantile satire by mixing them with proto-nationalist discourse, but then shifts to guild-specific descriptions of mercantile malpractice in London. Langland expands antimercantilism into his meditation on the paradox of materialism itself, so that Piers Plowman's merchants represent the material economy. The merchants of the Canterbury Tales overlap pro- and antimercantile uses of trade language, and as Chaucer collapses the two meanings of words like "chevisance, Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Merchants, Mercantile Satire, and Problems of Estate in Late Medieval English literature (Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Margery Kempe, William Langland) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 White, Hugh Published White, Hugh. "Nature, Sex, and Goodness in a Medieval Literary Tradition." Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review White's central concern, he writes, in his introduction to this new study of Nature in late medieval literature, "is with such overlapping questions as whether that provision with which human beings are endowed by nature tends toward their good, whether the natural circumstances of human beings conduce to their happiness, whether by nature human beings are inclined to the good, whether the law of nature directs human beings to the good; in short, is Nature benign and moral?" (5); and the answer that he reaches for each of these questions for the majority of the authors that he examines, to a greater or lesser degree, is "no," in contrast to the more optimistic view that is as he notes "often . . . taken for granted by modern students of medieval literature" (2). His greatest interest is in Gower and Chaucer, who occupy the last two chapters of his book. The first five chapters survey a very broad range of earlier texts that define the tradition of thinking on Nature on which the two English poets drew. Chapter 1 surveys "academic writings (philosophical, theological, legal, medical) from antiquity to the fifteenth century" (8). In these, Nature is commonly understood to promote virtue and to provide moral guidance for humans in association with Reason. Ulpian's linking of natural law with animals rather than humans, however, raised semantic and ontological issues regarding both "nature" and what is "natural" in human beings (33) which opened the way for a tendency to see the natural as non-rational. "Whilst it is true that an association between nature and reason is widespread and that nature is frequently seen as good--the natural defining a proper state of being for all things, and human beings possessing natural desires towards God and the good--it is also the case that a far from negligible strain in medieval thought associates the natural with the animal and the irrational and recognizes that there is a sense of nature in which nature can move to the bad" (44). Even the "natural" in this sense, however, was superior to the "unnatural," introducing what White calls a "three-tier" morality: "there is the natural and the right, the natural but wrong, and the unnatural, which is, just in virtue of being unnatural, wrong" (46). White finds a "basic consonance" (48) with the concept of the natural in academic writing among the authors of the Middle English devotional and moral works that he examines in chapter 2. Drawing upon an impressive array of sources, he demonstrates that "kynde" was often associated with the good – both with "natural reason" and with Biblical morality--but that especially in matters of sexual conduct, nature might "fall short of the highest virtue" (66) and might even have to be restrained. "There seems to be some reluctance among moralists and homiletic writers to allow that sin can be the result of natural pressures, but the explicit rejection of this idea suggests that it was in fact current" (66), leaving unresolved the issues of whether humans are fundamentally rational or fundamentally irrational according to nature. Chapter 3 treats the allegorized or personified "Natura vicaria Dei" in works by Boethius, Bernardus Silvestris, Alan of Lille, and Johannes de Hauvilla, all of whom present a creative Nature working in harmony with the divine and in most cases explicitly on the side of virtue. But even in these authors, White argues, the "ambition for the good does not deny a problematic aspect to the natural" (108). Particularly in the "De Planctu Naturae" and "Anticlaudianus" of Alan of Lille, Nature's reach is limited, especially in comparison to the power of grace, and her efforts to pass responsibility for the corruption of the system that she instituted onto Venus and others are not fully persuasive. "Her associations with the body and sex are already obscuring her moral glory, and the damaging effects of those associations will be allowed greater play as the Nature tradition develops" (109). Jean de Meun is the central figure in White's argument, making explicit the moral ambiguity of Nature that is implicit among his predecessors and providing the point of reference for all writers who follow. In chapter 4, White examines the radically different presentation of Nature in the "Roman de la Rose," separated from Reason and aligned more closely with Venus, expressing "a sense of the inseparability of the orthodoxly acceptable end of procreation from the orthodoxly dubious principle of sexual pleasure. Sex is to be regarded as natural even though it does not consciously aim at procreation" (133). This association, he suggests, "in a scenario very possibly designed to contrast with the rebellion of Venus from Nature in the 'De Planctu', seems to be commenting on Alan's treatment of the two figures. The Nature of the 'De Planctu' seeks to detach herself from Venus and thereby from responsibility for the seamier side of sexual behaviour. Jean suggests that this is an evasion . . . . And Jean's arrangement of the action of his poem dramatizes how the natural drive towards procreation may indeed go forward through channels less than pure" (133-34). Jean thus lets "the morally problematic association of nature with sex . . . run loose" and presents "a Nature who condones and encourages behaviour orthodoxly regarded as sinful" (139). The French writers who followed Jean, whom White examines in another impressive list of citations in chapter 5, all respond to the "Roman" in some way. Jean Gerson tries to resurrect the morally orthodox Nature and to defend her from what he sees as Jean's defamation of her; other writers present a Nature that explicitly leads humans to lechery; while a third group seeks to "accommodate two irreconcilable conceptions" of Nature (159), one adhering to Reason and one promoting illicit pleasure, attempting to preserve the notion that what is natural must be good but never satisfactorily resolving her relation to Amours and Venus or managing to countenance legitimate sex under Nature without also countenancing the immoral. White devotes the longest chapter in his book to Gower. He describes how Gower stands as heir to each of these conflicting conceptions of Nature, but Gower's deepest and most sincerely held view, he argues, is reflected in what he sees as the deliberate failure of the attempt to reach a reconciliation. Nature, he points out first of all, is most often linked to the intuitive, the instinctual, and the pre-rational in CA, differentiated both from Reason and from Grace, and aligned with the body rather than the soul, a version of Nature that is not far removed from Ulpian's. As such, Nature may be in harmony with Reason and moral law, as the instinctive emotion that binds families together, for instance, or as that which abhors killing and war. White also points to passages that suggest that "the idea of Nature is for Gower the focus for a vision of the healing of the fundamental division between soul and body and hence a talismanic concept" (187); and indeed "the general strategy of 'Confessio Amantis'"--as evidenced in Gower's deployment of the scheme of the Seven Deadly Sins and in the dual allegiance professed by Genius--"seems to be designed with a view to entertaining claims about the unifiability of aspects of the human being which at first sight might seem irreconcilable" (187-88). But the "idea of the goodness of natural human instinct coexists with darker suggestions about nature-as-impulse" (188), and it is "with sex that Nature's capacity to stimulate vice, to go against reason and to invite pardon for it, becomes clearly apparent" (189). The tales of "Iphis and Iante" and "Canace and Machaire" both suggest--despite some apparent efforts to redeem the natural, especially in the latter--that Nature presides "over an unconditioned sexual instinct which is capable of expressing itself in behavior contrary to reason and also to the positive human law which demands moral action and which yet cannot adequately constrain the natural impulses which may impel people away from moral behavior" (196). Even the passages in Book 7 that speak of "modifying" the laws of nature with reason "cut two ways" in White's view and reveal an underlying anxiety: "they suggest that an accommodation of the natural sexual urge can be made, but they point to the necessity of restraint of the natural. Nature may be a domesticable threat to morality, but it is a threat nevertheless" (201). And the tale of "Tobias and Sara" with which Book 7 concludes shows that restraint can be achieved, but that "in the normal course of events" restraint is quite unlikely (202). "That sharp sense of the antagonism between love on the one hand and reason and morality on the other and a consciousness of the unmanageability of the natural sexual impulses are what dominate the ending" to the poem (205). "Because love and reason are incompatible, . . . Genius requires Amans to give up love" (ibid.). Amans' very inability to choose--and the fact the he obtains his release only through the agency of Venus and Cupid--suggest how little love is governable by reason. Amans' petition acknowledges Nature's power over him and the overcoming of his reason; and Venus' final remarks suggest that Amans remains at risk from Nature despite the restoration of his reason. Despite all of the poem's optimistic gestures, therefore, division finally triumphs over harmony. Where at the beginning of CA Genius affirms a dual allegiance, at the end he denies his mistress and assumes a role different from any earlier Genius figure, as "the poem's initial generosity towards love" gives way to "an ascetic vision which focuses on the unsatisfactoriness of human sexual love, its irreconcilability with the claims of morality, and which sees clearly the need to turn to a love beyond the world" (213). And while both the length and structure of the poem express the poet's wish for reconciliation or at least for some "ultimately benign purpose in the ineluctable and apparently sometimes baneful influence of the sexual impulse on human beings" (218), Gower renounces this purpose as he resumes his own proper identity in the closing lines. In his final chapter White takes up Chaucer. In the broad variety of his works Chaucer holds a less consistent view of Nature than Gower does. There are several passages (e.g. in Mel and ParsT) in which Nature is invoked without qualification as providing a moral norm. More characteristically, however, White finds that Chaucer expresses a disillusionment with so morally optimistic a view. Such a response is visible in his reworking of a passage in Book 3, Meter 2 of "De Consolatione Philosophiae," in which Lady Philosophy proclaims a natural inclination to the good, in MkT 160-82 and SqT 607-20, where what is natural for both animals and humans turns out to be considerably less benign. It is also apparent in other poems--White cites passages from BD, PF, PhysT, and T&C--in which Chaucer first presents a favorable view of Nature which he then compels us to view it more skeptically, ending "with a vision of humanity let down, or even victimized, by Nature" (254). Chaucer's view of the relation of the natural and the human, he concludes, is "stalked by despair" (257), while Gower, being less committed to his role as a poet of love, "can walk away from that collision [between reason and morality] relatively unharmed" (ibid.). This is a fine book, because of its clarity, because of its comprehensiveness, and because of its alertness to the variety of manifestations that Nature assumes not only in medieval literature generally--for which it deserves to take its place alongside Teresa Tinkle's recent book on "Medieval Venuses and Cupids" (see JGN 16, no. 2)--but also in individual works, an alertness that is particularly evident in the illuminating sensitivity to nuance that White brings to bear upon many of the key passages that he examines. His central point--that Nature is not as beneficent as many have assumed--may be taken as proved, but what is most remarkable about this book is the great complexity of the figure that it offers in place of our earlier, simpler view. One must also be impressed with the complexity and the subtlety of some of the strategies with which the authors that White examines attempted to deal with Nature and her role. As some of the quotations above might perhaps suggest, White lays considerable stress upon the morally negative aspect of Nature for the purpose of his argument, sometimes implying either that this is the more correct view of Nature or that it is the one that the authors that he examines wished to affirm. For more than one of the authors that followed Jean de Meun, however, among whom we may wish to include Gower, it appears that Nature might represent a situation of moral ambiguity that might be addressed and even satisfactorily resolved on the moral plane without necessarily reaching a consistent and unitive view of the figure of Nature herself. There is still room for discussion, in other words, of precisely how Nature functions within the moral argument that some of these works present, but that discussion will be considerably aided by the care and precision with which White has presented his examination of how she is defined. This is now the most complete and most reliable source of information on Nature's appearance in the literary tradition that White examines, and it provides essential background to the study of Gower. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 21.1.] 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 Nature, Sex, and Goodness in a Medieval Literary Tradition. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Oxford University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 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 Both the Spanish translation of CA and the newly rediscovered Portuguese translation on which it was based are marked, Balestrini points out, by a fidelity to the original that corresponds better to modern expectations of a translator than it is characteristic of the practices of most medieval authors who reworked texts from other languages. The comparison of the translators' work with Gower's has nonetheless allowed earlier scholars to note a number of adjustments and alterations made for the benefit of the readers of a culture different from that of the English author. Balestrini builds upon these earlier studies in examining the effects of changing Gower's verse into prose, which she links to a shift from public to private reading in which the English lagged behind their continental contemporaries. Restricting herself to the CA Prologue, she points to the provision of chapter numbers (together with titles derived from the Latin summaries that were originally placed in the margins of Gower's text) and to a number of small revisions--some instances of amplification, the fuller provision of information that is only implicit in Gower's verse, the elimination of redundancy and other evidence of ornament, the insertion of conjunctions, the straightening out of the word order, and the omission of generic citations of authority such as "if that ye rede"--as evidence of the economy and efficiency that made prose more appealing than verse to late medieval readers. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 21.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Balestrini, María Cristina Published Balestrini, María Cristina. "A Propósito del Prólogo de la Confesión Del Amante." Letras 40-41 (2000), pp. 100-106. ISSN 0378-4878 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Propósito del Prólogo de la Confesión Del Amante Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Meecham-Jones, Simon Published Meecham-Jones, Simon. "Questioning Romance: Amadas and Ydoine in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Parergon 17 (2000), pp. 35-49. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review Mid-way through his confession of his "Delicacy" in love, Amans describes to Genius how his ear is fed with "redinge of romance / Of Ydoine and of Amadas, / That whilom weren in mi cas" (6.878-80). The allusion itself, Meecham-Jones observes, might possibly be a parody of a conventional stylistic device of contemporary romance: both "Emare" and "Sir Degrevant" (both of which, he points out, may be too late to have been available to Gower) contain similar passing references to the story of Amadas. Meecham-Jones is more interested, however, in the purposes of Gower's evocation of this particular story. It stands out as one of the very few references to popular romance in the poem, and the characters that Amans names are notably excluded from the ranks of the famous lovers who appear in Amans' vision in Book 8. The implicit critique of the romance genre, Meecham-Jones asserts, goes beyond treating the reading of such books as an instance of Delicacy. Amans claims to seek consolation in characters whose condition resembles his own, but Amans does not get the happy ending that the romance provides. The difference in outcomes for Amadas and Amans reflects the difference between two different moral visions. The romance is structured to demonstrate "the benign justice of divine providence" (p. 47), while Gower's moral analysis is based on "the congruence of act and consequence" (p. 46). "The operation of divine grace is necessarily absented from the exemplary discourse of Gower's work . . . precisely because the opacity (to human reason) of the workings of grace is incompatible with the schematic and designedly practical dissection or moral possibility Gower attempts in the Confessio. . . . The story of Amadas is briefly introduced less to disparage its ethical stance than to assist Gower in defining, by contrary example, the particular moral stance of the Confessio as an exploration of human conduct in the fallen temporal sphere" (p. 46). It is at this point that the essay becomes interesting. Meecham-Jones makes a bit too much of the uniqueness of Amans' allusion, passing over the references, for instance, to both Tristram and Lancelot elsewhere in the poem, including the vision in Book 8, where Meecham-Jones states that Gower deliberately omits any reference to the romance form (p. 41). The difference between a theology of grace and a morality of rewards and punishments would seem to be rather central, however. The question is how this distinction operates in the poem, and Meecham-Jones may define Gower's position a bit too starkly. There are, after all, other very significant tales in which grace and Providence play a major role. Meecham-Jones dismisses "Apollonius of Tyre" from his discussion by classing it with "Florent" as "social narratives above all," quoting Dimmick (see JGN 19, no. 2, p. 9), and he does not even mention "Constance." Perhaps there is a bit more to say about this issue which Meecham-Jones poses so provocatively. [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 Questioning Romance: Amadas and Ydoine in Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A., ed. Published Peck, Russell A., ed. "John Gower: Confessio Amantis. Volume 1." Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2000 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Review This is the first volume in a projected three-volume edition of the complete Confessio Amantis published by the Medieval Institute for the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages (TEAMS) as part of their series of Middle English Texts. This volume contains the Prologue and Books 1 and 8; volume 2 will contain Books 2-4 and volume 3 Books 5-7. At first glance a somewhat bizarre arrangement, this way of dividing up the poem is actually an ingenious solution to the problem of presenting the Confessio to the primary audience of this edition, undergraduate and graduate students who are reading Gower for the first time. We have in volume 1 the indispensable elements for understanding the structure of the whole Confessio. This volume can be used alone or in conjunction with either one or both of the other volumes when they become available. It is possible, though perhaps less likely, that one might assign one or both of the other volumes without volume 1 as well. We will thus have six different ways of presenting extended portions of the poem in addition to the choice to teach it in its entirety. In doing so, we will be able to assign entire books instead of the selected passages (almost always from the tales) of the only other editions that have been available for classroom use (including Peck's own edition of 1968, which the present edition will probably replace), and all at a very reasonable price: this first volume lists for just {dollar}20. The appearance of this edition will thus be welcomed by everyone who has taught the poem in the past or who looks forward to doing so in the future. The version of the poem that Peck presents will also be familiar to those who choose to teach it, since he has followed Macaulay in his choice of manuscript both for the main body of the text (Bodleian Fairfax 3, Macaulay's F) and for the two alternative passages in the Prologue, lines 24-92 (Bodley 294, Macaulay's B), and in the epilogue, 8.2941 ff. (Bodley 902, Macaulay's A). (For some reason the former is presented with the main text, en face, but the latter is included only in the notes.) Peck claims (p. 44) also to have consulted Macaulay's MSS J, S, and delta, but there is no evidence for that in the Textual Notes (pp. 356-58). There he lists some 40 departures from Fairfax. Nine of these record editorial choices (e.g. the division of compounds such as "noman" into two words). All of the rest simply follow Macaulay (including eight for which Macaulay is not cited: Prol. 917, 1.293, 574 vv. 1, 593, 2680 vv. 5, 3398; 8.1687, 2970) without any reference to the MS authority upon which Macaulay's emendations are based. Peck also cites some 30 departures from Macaulay's text, divided roughly equally between corrections of Macaulay's mistranscriptions and rejections of his emendations, but again without reference to any authority other than the MS that serves as his base. Peck's presentation of the text (of which he gives an incomplete account in his Preface, p. x) follows Macaulay in the silent expansion of abbreviations, in the regularization of u/v and i/j, and in transcribing thorn as "th," but then goes a few steps further than Macaulay does in modernizing its appearance. Peck has completely regularized the capitalization; he adds an accent to a long final e (e.g. "humilité"); he inserts an apostrophe into contractions (e.g. "th'emperour," 1.762); and he provides quotation marks for the conversation between Amans and Genius, so that the entire main body of the poem is now punctuated as a dialogue. Nothing here will cause alarm. But he has also chosen silently to transcribe the manuscript's yogh as "g" rather than "y" in such words as "3iven" and its derivatives, "for3eten" and "a3ein" (though not in "3e," "3it," or "3owþe," for which he uses "y"), which some will feel is an unnecessary falsification of Gower's dialect. As a test of accuracy, I checked a passage of 500 lines (1.501-1000) both against Macaulay and against Fairfax. I found one transcription error ("Although" for "Althogh," 1.738); another that he shares with Macaulay and did not correct ("seemeth" for MS "semeþ," 1.665); an extra closing quotation mark (at the end of 1.707); one mistaken use of "é" (on "poverté," 1.613, ruining the rhyme with "decerte" in 614), and three instances in which MS "þe" (the pronoun) has been presented as "thee," either by mistake or, much more likely, as a deliberate but silent alteration (1.584, 587, 941). I also found nine differences in punctuation from Macaulay's text. Three of these (in 1.596, 723, 853-54) result in a slight alteration of the sense, in each case, in my judgment, for the worse. The other six (1.568, 594, 601, 825, 883, 884) do not affect the sense but represent a welcome attempt to bring Macaulay's punctuation more in line with modern conventions. Here it is to be regretted that Peck has not done more. One minor but constant irritation of Macaulay's edition is that it is over-punctuated, and his use of the colon in particular doesn't correspond to contemporary usage. The unintended effect is to make Gower seem even more dated that he is. But as one reads Peck's text alongside Macaulay's, one finds one line after another in which Peck has simply followed the example of his mentor. His practice here is consistent with what one might deduce from the textual notes about how this edition actually came into being. Rather than being based upon Fairfax, it is perhaps more accurate to describe it as being based upon Macaulay and checked against Fairfax, with some updating of the punctuation (the quotation marks, the apostrophe, the "é") and a small number of corrections, but if the sample I chose is representative, with at least an equal number of errors and silent emendations of its own. The apparatus to this edition consists of an 43-page introduction to the poem, a "Select Bibliography," a "Chronology of Gower's Life and Works" (taken almost verbatim from Peck's 1968 edition), 73 pages of explanatory notes, the textual notes, and a 5-page glossary. Peck provides five reproductions of the illustrations (of Amans confessing to Genius and of Nebuchadnezzar's dream) from the three MSS from which the text has been taken. He also provides extensive vocabulary glosses in the right margin of the page. In addition, Andrew Galloway has provided a complete translation of the Latin apparatus, which must certainly be counted as one the principal attractions of this edition. Galloway's prose translations of the Latin verses (which appear at the bottom of the page) are very helpful: they replicate to the extent that it is possible the difficult syntax of the original and they can therefore sometimes be more difficult to read than the freer verse translations of Echard and Fanger, but they provide a far more useful crutch for anyone who is trying to approach the Latin. The prose marginalia (which are placed, together with their translations, in the notes at the back of the volume) pose fewer challenges, but I suspect that the students will not be the only ones who are glad to have Galloway's clear and precise English renderings and I expect to see them appearing in the footnotes to scholarly articles on the poem in the near future. Galloway has also provided valuable notes to both the verse and the prose which can be used profitably alongside those of Macaulay and of Echard and Fanger. The rest of the apparatus is a mixed bag, and at this point one has to stop and sympathize with the editor. With the thousands of decisions that one must make in presenting an edition of this sort, one cannot possibly hope to satisfy every user. To begin with the glosses: one has to try to provide enough assistance for the readers with no experience in Middle English without distracting either them or the more experienced readers from the actual text. Some will feel that Peck has been too accommodating: the glossing is far more extensive than in his 1968 edition, especially at the beginning of the volume, but even at the end, many fairly common words are glossed that one might feel that a student who is reading the poem in Middle English ought to become familiar with, by recourse to a glossary if necessary. The glosses that I checked are sometimes a bit freer than one might wish, but are generally accurate (though on the very first page, "ensampled of" in Prol. 7 surely means "taught by" rather than "exemplified by"; cf. Prol. 47). The introduction is another matter. There, Peck's impulse to guide the reader is equally manifest, but not in a way that will be as useful to the novice. Instead of a true "introduction," what we are given is an argument for a very particular reading of the poem, taken over in large part from Peck's 1968 edition. From the very beginning, it assumes a familiarity with the whole poem and its structure, with the content of the tales, and with the context in which they are addressed by one character to another, and it launches into an abstruse discussion of Augustine's theory of knowledge, of the relationship between memory and history, and of "reading as therapy." When he finally gets to discussing the poem itself, Peck offers an interpretation of its moral structure that is grounded on a single-minded view of Amans' role as being a lost sinner: "in his fantasy, [he] has set himself apart from the mutual pleasures of Nature's domain in hope of enjoying singular pleasure. His main desire is to pamper his secretive emotions. The piercing of his heart by Cupid's dart clinches his loss of natural freedom. He is trapped in his amorous confusion, and many tales will pass before he returns home from spiritual exile" (p. 28; cf. Peck's 1968 edition, p. xiii). Peck also allows this reading to slip into the notes from time to time (e.g. at 8.2224 ff.). The basic question is whether or not this is an appropriate function for the introduction and notes to an edition with the intended audience of this one: should the editor be guiding the student to a particular reading, or providing the materials with which the students may construct a reading of their own? We might have done instead, for instance, with some more background on the several different genres of which the poem partakes and on Gower's own earlier poetry. (As it is, the only comments on MO and VC in this edition are hidden in the "Chronology of Gower's Life and Works.") We might have gotten some remarks on the complexity of Amans' role, or on the difficulties in interpreting Gower's use of such terms as "nature," "will," and "reason." We might also have been given some comments on the range of response that the poem has provoked, but there is nothing in the introduction to indicate that Peck's views are not shared by all other modern readers. The issue of appropriateness will obviously be most important for those who take a different view of the poem than Peck does (among whom I count myself), and in teaching the poem from this edition, we will each simply have to make our own choice on whether or not to assign the introduction. It is also a bit disappointing to note that there is some carelessness and inconsistency in the presentation of the apparatus. To begin with a trivial matter: in the "Selected Bibliography," under the heading "Editions (in chronological order)," Peck includes both Echard and Fanger's translations of the Latin verses and Stockton's translation of VC, which are not editions, and they are not listed in chronological order. He omits, moreover, Wilson's translation of MO, which is found, however, along with Stockton, in the notes to the colophon on p. 279. The bibliography of criticism (pp. 49-59) is also a bit of a puzzle. It is presented in simple alphabetical order, and it is very difficult to see what principles guided the selection. Recent work seems to be favored over older pieces, and thus some familiar and influential titles are missing. Works that treat the poem in general rather than a specific portion of it seem to be favored, but there are several exceptions there. In general, works that support the view of the introduction appear more prominently than those that do not. But no guidance is offered on where a student might best begin her own research on the poem, and what can one say about a bibliography on Gower that makes room for a book entitled An Illustrated History of Brain Function but that does not include either Pickle and Dawson's concordance or JGN? Somewhat more seriously: in his discussion of the manuscripts on p. 44, Peck gives a very misleading account of the relation among the versions of the poem that Macaulay labeled "recensions," implying that the revision of Prol. 24-92 and the replacement of the tribute to Chaucer in 8.2941-70 first appear in "third recension" copies (the former appears in all but one existing copy of "recension two," the latter in all "recension two" copies that are not damaged at the end), and making no reference to the revision of the epilogue that follows the Chaucer passage (8.2171 ff.). He also gives far more specific dates for the various stages of revision than the evidence allows; see Astell's discussion of the problems of dating the different versions in the book discussed above. In the same paragraph, he refers to the Spanish translation of the Confessio, "which purports to be based upon a Portuguese translation of the poem," apparently unaware that a MS of the Portuguese translation is also extant; see JGN 20, no. 1, 15-17. His description of MO on page 60 still omits (as it did in 1968) any reference to the survey of the estates that occupies the middle of the poem. And on page 28 (note 61), in his account of the opening of Book 1, his statement that "the romance devices here--the wandering in May, the music of the birds, the woeful frustration of the lovesick persona, the encounter with Venus and Cupid, and Cupid's fiery, captivating dart--are all found in the opening section of Guillaume de Lorris' Roman de la Rose" is a mischaracterization both of the Roman and of Gower's much more complicated relation to French courtly poetry. There are other smaller problems of this sort that one could point to in the introduction and notes. Peck and Galloway deserve our gratitude for, each in his own way, making the English and Latin texts of the poem so much more accessible, but it will nonetheless be worthwhile for both professor and student to use this edition with a bit of caution. With Latin Translations by Andrew Galloway.[PN. Copyright by the John Gower Society. JGN 20.2] 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: Confessio Amantis. Volume 1. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review CA is one of 37 late ME texts that Tajima cites in his examination of the history of modal ought, expressing duty or obligation, and of its derivation from the past tense form of the verb that became modern owe, which in OE meant both "to possess" and "to have to pay." He demonstrates that the modal use was fully established by the end of the thirteenth century; that Chaucer's use of ought "followed by an infinitive either with or without the marker to and in impersonal expressions such as 'him ought' " was entirely consistent with the normal usage of his time, contrary to what had been claimed by an earlier scholar; and that the modern use of ought "with an infinitive with to, and only with a personal subject" was established by or shortly after the mid-fifteenth century. He summarizes his findings on CA and on each of the other texts that he examines in the tables on pages 199, 203, and 210: Gower uses owe only once, as an expression of obligation, and he uses ought once to mean "to possess" and once to mean "to have to pay." His remaining 49 uses of ought express obligation, either in the present or the past. The infinitives that follow owe or ought either include or omit the to in almost equal numbers, and 30% of his uses of ought occur in impersonal constructions. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 21.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Tajima, Matsuji Published Tajima, Matsuji. "Chaucer and the Development of the Modal Auxiliary Ought in Late Middle English." In In Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor of Whitney F. Bolton. Ed. Boenig, Robert and Davis, Kathleen. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000, pp. 195-217. 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 Chaucer and the Development of the Modal Auxiliary Ought in Late Middle English Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Bucknell University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Pearsall, Derek Published Pearsall, Derek. "The Rede (Boarstall) Gower: British Library, MS Harley 3490." In The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths. Ed. Edwards, A.S.G. and Gillespie, Vincent and Hann, Ralph. London: British Library, 2000, pp. 87-99. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review For many years now we have been patiently but eagerly awaiting the publication of the Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts of the Works of John Gower, which was first mentioned in JGN in vol. 2, no. 1, in February 1983. Jeremy Griffiths was involved in this project at the time of his sudden death. Now that Derek Pearsall is free of teaching duties, though not, we hope and presume, retired in any other sense, we are promised that the work will soon be brought to completion, and Pearsall provides a glimpse of what we may expect in a sample description of Harley 3490 (Macaulay's "H1") in this collection of essays in Griffiths' memory. The new description occupies ten pages, compared to the half page in Macaulay (Works 2.cxlii-cxliii). It includes a photograph of a sample page from the MS (in this instance, the passage describing Nebuchadnezzar's statue in the Prologue), illustrating the scribe's mid-fifteenth-century hand, his handling of the Latin portions of the text that Macaulay printed as marginalia, and the decoration. It also provides much more detail on the distribution of the text, the illumination (including reference to other work by the same artists and identification of the 10 coats of arms that appear throughout the copy), the layout, the hand, later additions to the text, and both the original and later owners. The editors' presumption, Pearsall writes in his introduction, was that "everything about a literary manuscript, from the choice of material to write on and the kind of writing employed to the smallest comments and notes made by later readers, is significant to the understanding of the texts that it contains" (p. 87). But significant how? As with any reference work, the uses that will be made by the information in the new catalogue cannot be anticipated by the compilers and will depend entirely on the imagination of the users. Some of the editors' choices are suggestive, however, of what kind of results we might expect. Harley 3490 is not a very important copy for the traditional sorts of questions that editors asked, when all interest was focused on the single idealized moment when the poem took its final form: it falls into the middle group of Macaulay's "recension one" but it has unpredictable affiliations with other copies, both within that group and outside it, and there are thus many far better copies for establishing the "text." The uncertainty of its relation to other copies , however, is what makes it interesting to more recent textual scholars. If we could determine more precisely the relationship between this copy and its exemplar (or exemplars), we would know a great deal more than we do about the transmission of the text and the role of the scribes in producing the surviving copies, information that would be directly relevant to the assumptions that we must make whenever we choose one manuscript as superior to another. One of the great differences between the new description and the one given by Macaulay, apart from but not unrelated to its very length, is the editors' self-imposed neutrality on questions of this sort. Where Macaulay presented a minimum of observed detail, organized in support of his own conclusions on Gower's own role in the development of the text, the editors of the new catalog have abandoned all presumption on how variations in the text arose, and no longer refer, for instance, to "recensions," leaving open the question of authorial participation. Their greater attention both to the ownership of the MS and to later marginalia (neither mentioned by Macaulay at all) and their promised attention to the selection of contents in other copies are also consistent with the more modern notion of the text as both the possession and the product of many others besides the poet himself. There is a great deal with which to work here. Of course, the description of this one MS will be of greatest value when it appears in the company of all the others, and with the example before us, we now have even greater reason to hope that the entire catalogue will soon be complete. The original owner of Harley 3490 is also mentioned in Pearsall's essay on "The Literary Milieu of Charles of Orleans and the Duke of Suffolk, and the Authorship of the Fairfax Sequence," in Charles d'Orleans in England (1415-1440), ed. Mary-Jo Arn (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), p. 149 n. 14, which supplies a great deal of useful information on the culture in which this MS was written. [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 19.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Rede (Boarstall) Gower: British Library, MS Harley 3490 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available British Library, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Welsh uses PhysT and MancT to illustrate the relation between the often incompatible voices of tale and moralization that he finds characteristic of Chaucer and of medieval literature generally. PhysT, with its avoidance of any moralization of its central incident, Virginius' slaying of his daughter, and its proliferation of moral precepts and advice that do not apply to any of its characters, "seems to be a story in search of a moral," while MancT, with its flood of commonplace wisdom of equally dubious relevance to the story at hand, "seems to be a collection of morals in search of a story (85). The disjunction exemplifies for Welsh "some fundamental differences between narrative and nonnarrative forms that prevent any story, even one as simple as the tale of Virginia or the tale of the crow, from disappearing into sentence, or any sentence into story (88). Chaucer seems to have been uniquely aware of this "mutual resistance of story and sentence" (89), and it is fundamental to his more complex achievements in FkT, NPT, and WBP. As part of his demonstration of the nature of Chaucer's tales, Welsh cites for contrast Gower's tales of Virginia and of Phoebus and the crow, pointing out how in Gower's rather more straightforward handling story and sentence coincide in a clear and unambiguous moral. He doesn't explain why Gower proves to be such an exception to what he posits as a universal rule, nor does he make use of his insight to investigate whether or not there might be other sources of complexity in CA. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 21.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Welsh, Andrew Published Welsh, Andrew. "Story and Wisdom in Chaucer: The Physician's Tale and The Manciple's Tale." In In Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor of Whitney F. Bolton. Ed. Boenig, Robert and Davis, Kathleen. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000, pp. 76-95. 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 Story and Wisdom in Chaucer: The Physician's Tale and The Manciple's Tale Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Bucknell University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 McDonald, Nicola F. Published McDonald, Nicola F.. "'Lusti Tresor': Avarice and the Economics of the Erotic in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Treasure in the Medieval West. Ed. Tyler, E.M.. York: York Medieval Press, 2000, pp. 135-156. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review McDonald explores the "discursive interplay between sex and commerce" (136) in medieval portrayals of Avarice, both verbal and visual, focusing on examples from Gower. She begins with an early sixteenth-century drawing found at the beginning of Book 5 in a Pierpont Morgan Library copy of Caxton's 1483 edition of CA. It shows a woman with an outstretched arm holding what appears to be a full set of male genitalia, interposing herself between a man and another woman who reach towards one another. This is a figure of Avarice holding her "purse," McDonald claims, citing other examples, both sculpted and painted, in which the sin is identified by the same or similar attributes; and the drawing illustrates the opening lines of the initial epigram of Book 5: "Obstat avaricia nature legibus, et que / Largus amor poscit, striccius illa vetat" (5 vv. 1-2). The image derives from a broader tradition, for which McDonald also provides examples, in which Lust and Avarice are juxtaposed as similar and equally sinful forms of desire and are given a similar iconography. Gower too juxtaposes commerce and sexual desire in his poem, in Venus' dismissal of Amans, for instance, at the end of Book 8, where she asks, "What bargain scholde a man assaie, / What that him lacketh forto paie?" (8.2431-32), but more importantly in Book 5, Amans' confession on Avarice. Sex and money are treated as virtually interchangeable in this book, not only in Genius' discourse and tales but also in Amans' confessions, as a woman's love or the woman herself is treated as a treasure or an object of value that one might give or gain. Genius' efforts to construct a morality of love, however, lead to failure, because Largitas, the virtue that is opposed to Avarice, would lead, if Genius pursued the logic of his own argument, to a type of behavior incompatible with Christian morality were it applied to conduct in love. "In Christian terms, terms which Genius invokes in support of his code of moral conduct, only monogamy and virginity constitute virtuous sexual conduct. In terms of the 'economy of love,' both states . . . , by insisting that love's treasure be either hoarded or spent sparingly, are necessarily avaricious. What is for the Christian a virtue is for Venus's disciples a vice. And what for Venus's disciples constitutes virtue, the free and generous expenditure of the lady's treasures, is for the Christian a damnable vice" (154). These contradictions and paradoxes, McDonald argues, are left unreconciled. The reviewer has recently examined the same juxtapositions of imagery in Book 5 (and wishes that he had known of McDonald's fine essay beforehand), but reached a very different conclusion, that Gower plays throughout on both the similarities and differences between love and gold, as evidenced in passages that McDonald chooses not to cite, including the lines with which the initial epigram of the book concludes: "Non debet vt soli seruabitur es, set amori / Debet homo solam solus habere suam" (5 vv. 5-6). [PN Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.22] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'Lusti Tresor': Avarice and the Economics of the Erotic in Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available York Medieval Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Yeager, R.F Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Language and Word Studies Published Yeager, R.F. "Politics and the French Language in England during the Hundred Years' Way: The Case of John Gower." In Inscribing the Hundred Years' War in French and English Cultures. Ed. Baker, Denise. Albany, NY: University of New York Press, 2000, pp. 127-157. Review Yeager takes a new look at how Gower's responses to the political events of his time are reflected in his writing by focusing on the poet's choice of language, particularly his use of French, in the context of the ebb and flow of his country's wars with France, which began when the poet was a child and showed no sign of abating at his death. All language is political, Yeager reminds us, a truism that takes on particular force when, in time of war, the poet's readership is waiting to judge his work by his conformity to their expectations of him and he, in turn, is anxious to influence them by both his overt and his covert instruction. Yeager attempts to document the evolution of Gower's and his readers' expectations of one another, and he sees Gower's career falling into three periods. (1) In the first, that of MO, Gower writes exclusively in French, the language of the landed aristocracy and of the king. Yeager challenges the traditional dating of MO to the late 1370's, pointing out first of all that so long and ambitious a work is unlikely to have been the poet's first composition suggesting that it was probably the product of continued work over a long period of time. The most appropriate time for undertaking such a work in French, he argues, would have been between the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 and the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360, when Gower would have had greatest reason to look forward to a "'greater England' encompassing France? (p. 138). The references to the Schism indicate that Gower did not finish revising the poem until after 1378, but with the death of Edward III in 1377 the moment for a long work in French had passed. (2) The second period encompasses VC and CA. Both Latin and English were appropriate choices for addressing Richard II. When Richard was a youth, Gower probably had quite high expectations of his learning. The rebellion of 1381 led to a profound shift in Gower's attitude, first towards his own poetic project, as he abandons his direct address to the king for a broader goal of reforming society, and second, towards the war, as his "belligerent patriotism? yields to an "international pacifism? (p. 142) and a sustained effort to overcome division, primarily at home. The shift from international to domestic concerns, which correlates with Richard's own primary interests, is reflected in CA, which is "overwhelmingly a poem in English? (p. 145). (3) Gower's attitude towards Richard changed abruptly, however, in the early 1390's, as reflected in his revisions of both VC and CA; and while he did not reject English he did reconsider its relation to French and Latin "as media for reaching the king and for commenting on political events? (p. 148). Except for "In Praise of PeaceP,? all of Gower's last compositions are in Latin or French. Most are explicitly directed to Henry IV. (In order to fit in the notoriously undatable CB and Traitie into his chronology, he focuses on their dates of publication rather than that of their composition, the more significant event, as he points out, from a political perspective.) The resuscitation of French corresponds with a revival of interest in the wars in France. Gower's use of all three languages is a tribute to his sovereign's linguistic skills, while the brevity of these works is an indication both of Henry's get-to-the-point personality and of Gower's closer relationship with his new king. But Gower avoided English, Yeager suggests, in part because of the association of literacy in English with Lollardy, which could have been dangerous to the poet in the first decade of Henry's reign. And his choice to record the titles of all three of his works on his tomb effigy in Latin indicates Gower's final preference for "the most learned, the most lasting, and perhaps the safest tongue of all? (p. 153). Yeager covers a great deal of ground here, there will inevitably be a great deal to discuss in any effort to sort of Gower's attitude to political events that are no less compli-cated in retrospect than they must have seemed to those who were alive at the time. If there is a single reason to be disappointed with this essay, it is that space did not allow Yeager to engage more fully with the many alternative views to some of these matters that have been expressed by other scholars, and in omitting from his notes any reference to those who have seen some of these matters differently, he leaves the impression that many of these issues are much more settled than they really are. To take a minor instance: he dates Gower's revisions of Book 6 of VC to the period before 1393 (p. 147). Maria Wickert argued in 1953 (in a book that Yeager doesn't cite) that the changes were actually made after 1400, and most subsequent scholars have accepted her view. Yeager may well have reason for thinking Wickert was wrong, but he doesn't provide it to us. For his account of the revisions in CA, he depends upon a single problematic essay by George Stow that actually proves, in the reviewer's mind, how desperate the attempt to find a justification for Gower's presumed change of heart regarding Richard in the early 1390's has become. Whatever one thinks of Stow's argument, there are a great many dif-ficulties both in reconstructing the evolution of the text and in assessing Gower's response to events that he never refers to that other scholars have discussed and that Yeager passes over. Even the scholars that Yeager cites take some very different positions on some key issues that aren't acknowledged here. Fisher, of course, appears repeatedly in Yeager's notes, but if one reads Fisher and Yeager side by side several large differences emerge. Fisher takes a very different view of the change of the CA dedication, for one. And where Yeager sees both MO and VC as addressed directly to the reigning king (referring to MO at one point as "in many ways a mirror for princes,? p. 139), Fisher sees MO as a private devotional work (p. 104) and VC as its public counterpart, addressed, however, not to the young king but to influential clerics (pp. 105-6), leading to a very different conclusion on the reasons for Gower's choice of language for both works. None of this is to diminish the importance of Yeager's essay, but instead merely to wish that it could have had somewhat greater scope. Both its real significance and also the specula-tive nature of some of its conclusions will be evident only to those who have read around in the other literature on the subject, not all of which is accessible through Yeager's notes. This essay appears in a provocative and well-rounded collection of essays on responses to the Hundred Years' War on both sides of the channel (some of which have already appeared in print elsewhere). In addition to Yeager's essay, the contents are: Norris J. Lacy, "Warmongering in Verse: Les Voeux du Heron;? Patricia DeMarco, "In-scribing the Body with Meaning: Chivalric Culture and the Norms of Violence in The Vows of the Heron;? Denise N. Baker, "Meed and the Economics of Chivalry in Piers Plowman;? Judith Ferster, "Chaucer's Tale of Melibee: Contradictions and Context;? John M. Bowers, "Chaucer after Retters: The Wartime Origins of English Literature;? Earl Jeffrey Richards, "The Uncertainty in Defining France as a Nation in the Works of Eustache Deschamps;? Anne D. Lutkus and Julia M. Walker, "The Political Poetics of the Diti de Jehanne d'Arc;? Susan Crane, "Clothing and Gender Definition: Joan of Arc;? Michelle Szkilnik, "A Pacifist Utopia: Cleriadus et Meliadice;? and Ellen C. Cald-well, "The Hundred Years' War and National Identity.? [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 Politics and the French Language in England during the Hundred Years' Way: The Case of John Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of New York Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The title of Meecham-Jones' essay does not refer to the Prologue of CA: it identifies it instead as the opening chapter in this collection on the self-presentation of the author, the remaining essays in which are concerned with post-medieval writers. Meecham-Jones takes a very broad view of Gower's fashioning of himself and of his conception of his role as poet in CA as a whole. His essay is addressed in part to Foucault's incautious claim that "the idea that from one's own life one can make a work of art" is absent during the Middle Ages, and in part to the many readers of Gower who fail to recognize the mature subtlety of his late poetry; and his argument is itself so wide-ranging and so subtle that it defies easy summary here. "The reticence of medieval authors in making use of the autobiographical style," he writes, should be understood "as expressing an anxiety at appearing to set their works in competition with the 'authoritative' texts of the revered literary past" (14). One solution to this dilemma of self-representation is found "in the emergence of a self-consciously 'literary' tradition in the English language in the second half of the fourteenth century" (15). Gower provides his principal example both of the intricacy and the "artificiality" of the late medieval autobiographical mode. Meecham-Jones focuses on the beginning and ending of CA. In the gloss in which the author depicts himself "fingens se . . . esse Amantem," Gower creates "a balance of sympathy and disengagement" (16) as he "strives to establish the poet in a position simultaneously within and outside the texture of his poem" (17). These two positions allow "two potentially antagonistic traditions of moral analysis" (17), the scheme of the Seven Deadly Sins with its apparent moral rigidity and the more tolerant view of the actions of the characters in the tales that emerges from the narration. The significance of this frame lies in its very inclusiveness: "Gower aspires to be recognised as an encyclopaedist of Love. The bulk of the poem is, therefore, to be regarded as a guarantee of its quality, in so far as it witnesses Gower's assiduous garnering of material from the sources of inherited wisdom" (19). Gower's plan here "is perhaps best understood as an homage to the texts of classical 'auctors', in whose poetry the consideration of love had been granted such especial prominence" (20). At the end of the poem, "in a mischievous parody of the predisposition of audiences to read lyric poetry as presenting an accurate record of 'real' events" (20), Gower portrays Ovid and Vergil both as lovers as well as poets, and implicitly associates himself with them, thus abandoning the authoritative stance of MO and VC in favor of a more limited role based upon direct experience. The "mirour" of society in MO becomes the mirror in which he is "forced to see himself without pretense" (22). "It is at this point that Gower's distinctive conception of the nature of authorship at this stage of his career is revealed" not as the achievement of fine phrases or inspired imagery but in the accumulation of a lifetime's wisdom" (23). Such wisdom "like the very comprehensiveness of the poem" is won at considerable physical cost, as the poet is now old and impotent. "In a curious display which combines self-assertion and humility, Gower succeeds in creating a work of art not from the events of his life, but from the self-denial of action which enabled him to achieve a literary career. Whereas, in Chaucer's poetry, the idea of the narrator as being exiled from the action is constantly and humorously invoked, Gower goes beyond this device to create a work in which the value of the work is explicitly related to that foregoing of life which has enabled its writing" (26). In the poet's swooning after seeing his image in the mirror, "Gower achieves, for a moment, an unaccustomed note of vulnerability, which must however be recognised as constituting one element in the poem's artful strategy to exploit the affective possibilities of the autobiographical mode as a means to establish his poetic value" (26). And as Gower allows himself to be "gathered into the company of his esteemed mentors" (27), he also "seeks to appropriate for himself the prestige that passing time has accorded their work" and effects a vision of the enduring contemporaneity of literature" (28). Along the way, Meecham-Jones manages to address a great many other issues, including the challenging morality of such tales as "Canace and Machaire" and what he perceives as the irony of Gower's invocation of Arion in the Prologue to CA. This essay deserves careful consideration. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 21.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Meecham-Jones, Simon Published Meecham-Jones, Simon. "Prologue: The Poet as Subject: Literary Self-Consciousness in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts. Ed. Dragstra, Henk and Ottway, Sheila and Wilcox, Helen. New York: St. Martin's, 2000, pp. 14-30. Gower Subject Biography of Gower 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 Prologue: The Poet as Subject: Literary Self-Consciousness in Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. Martin's, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This study examines four scenes of monarchic instruction in late-fourteenth-century England in light of the "mirror for princes" tradition. It suggests that these texts reflect a political climate in Ricardian England that simultaneously promoted the ethic of the necessity of advising the king while sometimes punishing voices of political dissent. Ricardian writers negotiated this tension by employing techniques of representation, structure, and camouflage that would allow them to articulate advice in a politically safe manner. Chapter 1 examines the Prologue to the B-text of William Langland's 'Piers Plowman,' whose scene of monarchic instruction serves as a formal paradigm for the test of this study. Here, Langland articulates a vision of limited monarchy in a scene that camouflages the instruction to the Visio King by placing in the mouths of three seemingly contrary interlocutors, a lunatic, an angel, and a goliard. The chapter argues that this trio of speeches is actually unified and shows how Langland represents the King as a student who knows to accept wise counsel. Chapter 2 explores similar scenes in Book 7 of John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis.' It shows how Gower creates a series of layers that separates the poet from the political speech voiced by his characters. Using two biblical scenes of instruction, Gower rewrites the narratives of Ahab and Rehoboam to illustrate (negatively) the importance of wise counsel. Chapter 3 finds a similar dynamic at work in the final section of the seemingly apolitical 'Cleanness.' It argues that the 'Cleanness'-poet was fully aware of the political valance of the stories of Zedekiah, Nebuchadnezzar, and Belshazzar and suggests that two discourses, the political and the homiletic, are at work here. The poet's rewriting of these stories, which includes subtle references to medieval England, allows them to be read as positive and negative examples of royal counseling. Chapter 4 examines the dynamic of advice-giving from the royal perspective. It argues that Richard II designed his tomb in Westminster Abbey as a political monument that responds to concerns voiced by contemporary literary texts and itself attempts to function as a political mirror. A close reading of the epitaph shows how that text participates in the genre of 'Fürstenspiegel'." [eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stallcup, Stephen Burr. Published Stallcup, Stephen Burr. "Counseling the King: Scenes of Monarchic Instruction in the Age of Richard II." Ph.D. Diss. Princeton University 2000. DAI 61(1): 172-73. 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 Counseling the King: Scenes of Monarchic Instruction in the Age of Richard II. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Sylvester seeks to identify the roots of rape fantasies and the appeal of rape narratives, offering a "reader-response" analysis of the tales of Lucretia in Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women," Gower's "Confessio Amantis" (Book VII), and Christine de Pizan's "Le Livre de la Cité des Dames," attending in particular to how the versions reflect notions derived from "romance and romantic texts" of "female masochism that is erotic, rather than psychological," (116), and how they deal with "the idea of female pleasure in enforced sex" in the Middle Ages and modern society. All three texts, Sylvester tells us, "acknowledge the possibility of an erotic response to these rape narratives," and because they do, she sets out to assess "how eroticism is inscribed within or erased from these texts" and to "examine the kinds of conditioning and experiences that might allow readers to experience them as erotic" (120). All three versions present male "competition about wifely virtue" (128), although the topic is displaced in de Pizan. It is "emphasized most strongly" in Gower's version, and "we may see in it . . . the working out of masculine hierarchies, with women's sexuality as the space across which power relations move" (129). De Pizan's displacement, however, "refuses to offer the reader the pleasure of narrative" by disconnecting the rape from "falling in love" (132), a connection made in both male-authored texts, and a parallel to the love-leading-to-sexual encounter trope of romance. Furthermore, only in de Pizan's version is Lucretia's suicide presented as an "unambiguous counter-example" to "refute the suggestion that women want to be raped," while "Lucretia's conscious decision to submit to the rape in the source texts [in order to save her good name] appears to have suggested to Chaucer and Gower an acquiescence that could be constructed as having led to enjoyment, and so, in their texts, Lucretia faints rather than actively submit to her rapist" (133). "The well-documented fantasy of rape," Sylvester concludes, "may well be derived from a culturally dominant set of beliefs about passivity or lack of female desire announced in conventional depictions of male and female sexual roles" (135). Rape narratives "may function for the woman reader as the correlative of the erotic desire for the annihilation of self . . . perceived as antipathetic to a feminist project . . . yet paradoxically . . . [they] may work to liberate female desire from the bounds of a dominant representation of sexuality enacted as a struggle for power which offers a reductive and limiting articulation of the possibilities of sexual pleasure" (136). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sylvester, Louise. Published Sylvester, Louise. "Reading Narratives of Rape: The Story of Lucretia in Chaucer, Gower and Christine de Pizan." Leeds Studies in English 31 (2000): 115-44. 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 Reading Narratives of Rape: The Story of Lucretia in Chaucer, Gower and Christine de Pizan. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Citing its "unforced yet profound symbolism" (128), Dean finds Gower's Tale of Apollonius (CA VIII) a treasury of prototypes for Shakespeare's "Pericles," which he sees as a play about "the storytelling process itself" (125) and the very meaning of "tales," which varies from an idle "old tale" to a revelation of secret truth (126-27). Imagery and symbolism skillfully deployed by Gower, and channeled in "Pericles," include the descent of Apollonius into the pitch-dark hold of the ship, suited to his despair, and his daughter's following him there. When her philosophical discussion fails to revive him, "in the derke forth sche goth / Til sche him toucheth" (VIII.1692), whereupon he begins to awaken. "Gower's episode concludes nobly," according to Dean, who quotes the evocative lines "This king hath founde newe grace / So that out of his derke place / He goth him up into the liht (1739-41, p. 129). Spiritually reborn, Apollonius learns that his life has a "destination" (130) despite the vagaries of fortune, much as Gower the character interprets the tumultuous series of events in Shakespeare's "Pericles." The music metaphor introduced by Gower, as Apollonius learns how to be "wel grounded" (l. 1992), is expanded by Shakespeare as the resurrected Pericles is divinely privileged to hear "the music of the spheres" (129). Dean speculates on possible common sources for both Gower and Shakespeare, including the story of Jonah, albeit modified by the sea journeys of the Apostle Paul as described in the Acts of the Apostles, especially the shipwreck and casting forth of Paul and his maritime companions. Like Paul, Apollonius and Pericles are anti-Jonah figures, who receive the divine command--in Gower, an "Avisioun" of the hero's future course (VIII.1801)--but unlike Jonah, they obey, and unlike Jonah, their presence on shipboard is protective to others (137). The extra-biblical sea journey described in the Golden Legend and the Digby Play of Mary Magdalene, which also features the casting overboard of a wife and child, the husband's patience, and their ultimate near-miraculous reunion (134-36) may also have been influential on both. [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dean, Paul. Published Dean, Paul. "Pericles' Pilgrimage." Essays in Criticism 50.2 (Apr 2000): 125-44. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Pericles' Pilgrimage. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Hanna traces connections/influences of Augustinian houses on literary production in the thirteenth through early sixteenth centuries. He notes Gower's tenancy at St. Mary Overy in Southwark, and that "a copy of Gower's 'Cronica tripartita' appears in the extensive late fifteenth-century library catalogue from Leicester, perhaps another case of transmission by ordinal channels" (34-35).] [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hanna, Ralph. Published Hanna, Ralph. "Augustinian Canons and Middle English Literature." In The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, ed. A.S.G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie, and Ralph Hanna (London: British Library, 2000), pp. 27-42. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Cronica Tripertita Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Augustinian Canons and Middle English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The discovery of the only manuscript with the Portuguese translation of the "Confessio Amantis," Cortijo notes, has helped clarify some questions that scholars had been posing about the reception of the poem in Iberia. The discovery of the manuscript shows, in Cortijo's view, that Gower's work had a wider diffusion and dissemination than previously envisioned. Equally consequential for evaluating the impact of the Gowerian text is the dating of the Portuguese manuscript, which confirms an early distribution in the CA in Iberia. For Cortijo, the relevance of this early date cannot be emphasized enough, as it coincides with the expansion of the sentimental novel, a genre that bears significant resemblances and points in common from a formal and thematic point of view. [AS-H. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio. Published Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio. "'La Confessio Amantis' en el debate del origen del sentimentalismo ibérico: un posible contexto de recepción." In Margarita Freixas, et al., eds. Actas del VIII Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval (Santander 22–26 septiembre, 1999) (Santander: Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval, 2000). Pp. 583-601. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "La Confessio Amantis" en el debate del origen del sentimentalismo ibérico: un posible contexto de recepción. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gail Ashton examines in this article three tales that share the motif of the exiled daughter, Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale," Gower's Tale of Constance, and "Emaré," in order "to explore the centrality of the family within society and the problematical role of 'daughter' itself" (416). On the surface, Ashton argues, these daughters are presented as passive "unsignified" (418) figures to be traded among men. Their role in their father's house is only temporary, as they wait to be married off. Ashton identifies a patriarchal ambivalence toward this temporary role. In trading his daughter, the father exerts power and, simultaneously, experiences the loss of power over his daughter, a loss that is also an emotional loss. Looking under this surface we can also see that the daughters are not merely passive but manage to have some control over their own identity and fate after leaving the father's house. Ashton notes that all three daughters choose the men they finally marry (Chaucer's and Gower's Constance do not marry the sultan, the man chosen by their father, but a king they meet on their own after they are set adrift following the sultan's murder; Emaré meets the man she marries after fleeing from her father). In addition, in all three stories, the daughters use silence in strategic moments to hide their identity and, in the cases of Gower's Constance and Emaré, they even change their names slightly at one point in their story. Constance, Custance, and Emaré also carefully stage their stories' final encounter scene, a reencounter of the daughters with both their fathers and husbands through the mediation of their sons. Ashton argues that through their sons the daughters return to their fathers, thus healing the breach signified by marriage and restoring the patriarchal structures, but they do so on their own terms, in effect critiquing marriage and patriarchal laws through a "re-positioning and rearticulation of 'daughter'"(420). [MB-F. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ashton, Gail. Published Ashton, Gail. "Her Father's Daughter: The Re-Alignment of Father-Daughter Kinship in Three Romance Tales." Chaucer Review 34.4 (2000): 416-27. Gower Subject Confessio Amantic Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Her Father's Daughter: The Re-Alignment of Father-Daughter Kinship in Three Romance Tales. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The "John Gower" discussed by Burrow is not the medieval poet, but the seventeenth-century translator of Ovid's "Festivalls, or Romane calendar, translated into English verse equinumerally" (published 1640). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burrow, Colin Published Burrow, Colin. "'That Arch-Poet of the Faerie Lond': A New Spenser Allusion." Notes and Queries 47 [245].1 (2000): 37. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "That Arch-Poet of the Faerie Lond": A New Spenser Allusion Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In his dissertation Grigsby examines leprosy, bubonic plague, and syphilis in various texts to show how "doctors, priests, and literary authors interpreted certain diseases through a moral filter" (abstract) in late medieval and early modern England. His treatment of Gower is brief (pp. 139-43), commenting on leprosy and its associations with various sins in "Mirour de l'Omme" and "Confessio Amantis." [MA]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Grigsby, Bryon Lee.  Published Grigsby, Bryon Lee. "The doctour maketh this descriptioun": The Moral and Social Meanings of Leprosy and Bubonic Plague in Literary, Theological, and Medical Texts of the English Middle Ages and Renaissance. Ph.D. Dissertation. Loyola University, 2000. vii, 324 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A60.12. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Mirour de l'Omme 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 doctour maketh this descriptioun": The Moral and Social Meanings of Leprosy and Bubonic Plague in Literary, Theological, and Medical Texts of the English Middle Ages and Renaissance. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Rust, Martha Dana. Published Rust, Martha Dana.  Odd Texts and Marginal Subjects: Towards a Hermeneutics of the Book in Late Medieval English Manuscript Culture. Ph. D. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2000. v, 376 pp.; illus. Dissertation Abstracts International A62.01. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review Rust's dissertation explores "the bibliographic sensibility that characterized late medieval English manuscript culture," analyzing "the dialectical interaction between literary representation and its material support in a selection of late Middle English poems," focusing on how each poem "calls attention, self-reflexively, to a feature of its own material instantiation, in this way extending the boundaries of its poetics to include its physical frame." She considers medieval alphabet poems, literary epistles in Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" and elsewhere, the dynamics of text and marginal apparatus in Gower's "Confessio Amantis, and "the calligraphic oeuvres of three late-medieval scribes, John Shirley, Ricardus Franciscus, and John Lacy," finding that, to best approach these poems and their books, we must inhabit the "eye of a beholder" that characterizes medieval reception. Mirrorings between text, marginal commentary, and illustrations are Rust's concerns in her discussion of Gower. She argues that "prismatic refraction enabled by the technology of manuscript commentary is one of the topics of Gower's 'Confessio amantis' and one that is presented with especial vividness in Morgan M.126" (173). She focuses on specific aspects of folio 9 of the manuscript and then moves to various features of its presentation of Book 4 on Sloth, including the "scribal laziness" of its copyist, and how "certain 'slothful' aspects" of the illustrations to and commentaries on three particular tales in this book--the "Tale of Rosiphelee," the "Tale of Nauplus and Ulysses," and the "Tale of Iphis and Araxarathen"--"reflect both unnoticed perils in the text of 'honeste love' and possible lines of resistance to it" (179)--concerns that mirror those of the CA at large, evident in and magnified by Venus's mirror at the close of the poem. In several intriguing and complicated moves, Rust reads the "vision" of CA to be "Gower depicting a bibliophile's fantasy of journeying through the looking glass of his own book" (206), not only a meta-commentary on his book about love, but also a meta-meta-commentary that reflects it through dense, even Wonderland-ish techniques of construction. [MA] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Odd Texts and Marginal Subjects: Towards a Hermeneutics of the Book in Late Medieval English Manuscript Culture. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Walther's dissertation focuses on the "ideological horizon of expectations"--a concept derived from Hans Robert Jauss, modified by Mikhail M. Bahktin and Pavel N. Medvedev--evident in "Piers Plowman," considering the work's use of vernacular English, its rural and legal vocabularies, and its rustic protagonist as reflections of audience expectations. He compares and contrasts these features with those found in Gower's "Vox Clamantis," the play "Mankind," and various works by Chaucer to show how such features can help modern readers understand the perspectives of targeted medieval audiences. Walther's treatment of the VC is limited largely to observing that Gower's use of Latin in the work restricts its audience, along with commentary on his use of legal vocabulary and on the use of English in the "Confessio Amantis." [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Walther, James Thomas. Published Walther, James Thomas. Imagining the Reader: Vernacular Representation and Specialized Vocabulary in Medieval English Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of North Texas, 2000. ii, 166 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A62.07. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2592/. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Imagining the Reader: Vernacular Representation and Specialized Vocabulary in Medieval English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This essay actually has little to say about Gower but it is included here because it shows up as pertaining to Gower in the periodical indexes, e.g. MLA's. It appears in this issue of CL as one of a group of essays on "Teaching Medieval Women." In teaching MLT, Rose uses the comparison to Trevet's version, which she considers Chaucer's "primary" source (157), in order to uncover how Chaucer has constructed his version of the story. What she finds is that Chaucer's principal alterations are all "gender- and power-related" (159) and that "Chaucer has systematically disempowered his heroine 'Custance,' and made her more 'feminized' (here read 'passive') and more reliant upon the power of God for her authority and her worldly fortune" (158). In the main part of her essay she demonstrates the validity of this reading by examining selected excerpts from MLT and from Trevet, taken from her own forthcoming edition of the early fifteenth-century English prose translation of his work. Gower is thus very much on the periphery. Rose assumes that Chaucer used Gower's version too, but "the changes Chaucer made to Trevet highlighted in this essay as sites of feminist inquiry about how the poet writes about a Christian woman overcoming a pagan world are not in Gower's work" (173). When she does suggest to her students an examination of Gower's version, she describes it as "streamlined and straightforward" where Chaucer's is "rhetorically complex," and as shaped by Gower's intention to provide an exemplum on Envy (160; also 173). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 20.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rose, Christine M. Published Rose, Christine M.. "Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale: Teaching Through the Sources." College Literature 28 (2001), pp. 155-77. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale: Teaching Through the Sources Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available West Chester University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 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 Reading Gower's tale of "Ceix and Alceone" alongside its analogue in Ovid (Metamorphoses, Book 11), Machaut ("Le Dit de la Fonteinne Amoureuse"), and Chaucer (BD), Krummel finds two key alterations. First, where the three earlier versions all have Ceix himself speak to Alceone in her dream, Gower has "Ithecus" and "Panthasas" provide her with a re-enactment of the storm and of the sinking of Ceix's ship. Krummel describes what Alceone observes in her dream as an "audible mime," and she places it in the context of the history of silent mimetic performance in the Middle Ages. Because of this performance, Rummel also asserts, Alceone is given a more active role, acting upon what she sees and less under the direct control of Ceix and his instructions, which is part of "Gower's more general subversion of the patriarchal and hegemonic script" (506) also evident in Gower's greater care to have the dream appear in response to Alceone's direct request for information about her husband. In combination, she concludes, Alceone's agency and the vision itself, which steers away from any overtly religious comment even though it is directly concerned with death, perform their own act of "silent speaking,"for they require us to read the poem "without the filtering distortions of a clerical prism"(498). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 21.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Krummel, Miriamne Ara Published Krummel, Miriamne Ara. "The Tale of Ceïx and Alceone: Alceone's Agency and Gower's 'Audible Mime'." Exemplaria 13 (2001), pp. 497-528. ISSN 1041-2573 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 Tale of Ceïx and Alceone: Alceone's Agency and Gower's 'Audible Mime' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Maney Publishing, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 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 Bratcher, James T. Published Bratcher, James T.. "Gower and Child, No. 45, 'King John and the Bishop'." Notes and Queries 246.48 (2001), pp. 14-15. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review Noting that no source for Gower's tale of "The Three Questions" has ever been identified, Bratcher points to the ballad of "King John and the Bishop" (Child, no. 45) as a possible analogue. The characters in the ballad are different (King John and the "Bishop of Canterbury") and the riddles differ too, but in both tales, the king is motivated by envy, he grants a similar period of time before the answers are required, and "a dependent relative of inferior standing, prompted by love and loyalty" (14) steps forward to provide the answers. In the ballad, it is the bishop's half-brother, a shepherd, whose answers are more clever than wise but which nonetheless finally win him a stipend from the king as well as a pardon for the bishop. A check of Sargent and Kittredge's edition of Child reveals that there are actually two versions of this ballad extant. Both their notes and the references in Bratcher lead to a number of other tales that are structurally similar to Gower's, but as Macaulay points out in his note (Works 2.478), the closest known analogue for the riddles themselves remains MO 12601-12. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 21.1] 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 Child, No. 45, 'King John and the Bishop' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 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 Watt, Diane Published Watt, Diane. "Sins of Omission: Transgressive Genders, Subversive Sexualities, and Confessional Silences in John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Exemplaria 13 (2001), pp. 529-551. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Watt considers such tales as "Deianira and Nessus," "Achilles and Deidamia," and "Iphis and Iante" as examples of "transgressive" gender identities, which "cross over and obfuscate the divide between male and female," and of "subversive sexualities," which "challenge societal norms and expose their inconsistencies" (531), and she also examines Amans' relation with Venus, Cupid, and Genius for its latent sexual implications, all as part of an argument that although Gower does not face directly the issue of male homosexuality, he takes a broader and less conservative attitude towards sexual issues than Karma Lochrie is willing to allow (in the book reviewed in JGN 20, no. 2). Watt's final paragraph provides an excellent summary of her conclusions: "Genius's position on gender transgression and subversive sexuality is ambivalent: while 'honeste love' (marriage) and self-governance are praised, transvestism, transgendering, and transsexuality are explored and even, at times, allowed to undermine norms of gender and sexuality. They are treated differently according to context, and according to the ethical issues raised. Hercules is viewed as effeminate because he is besotted with a woman and because, in dressing as a woman, he is guilty of 'Falssemblant.' He can thus be compared to negative exemplary figures like Saradanapulus, or even Ulysses. Achilles's cross-dressing is legitimized by his youth and because his chivalric masculine identity asserts itself. It is not a form of 'Falswitnesse' in so far as he remains true to himself. Iphis, like Penthesilea, is taken as a positive 'masculine' role model. These narratives destablilize not only male/female boundaries but also the oppositions of manliness and effeminacy, the ethical and the unethical, and the natural and the unnatural. Confessio presents the reader with a series of paradoxes: Nature can inspire unnatural desires and actions; it is possible, even desirable, for a woman to behave like or to turn into a man; the most manly of heroes can become effeminate; the most exemplary of figures can behave immorally, and vice versa. Yet, while neither female cross-dressing nor female homosexuality is condemned out of hand, male sodomy remains taboo." And because of Amans' sexually charged relationship with both Cupid and Genius, "one question remains. Is it simply Amans's folly as a senex amans, or a more deeply hidden sin, which ultimately constitutes the 'unwise fantasie' of which he must rid himself?" (550-51). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 21.1] 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 Sins of Omission: Transgressive Genders, Subversive Sexualities, and Confessional Silences in John Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 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 "Despite their immense popularity with medieval audiences, the Middle English texts about Alexander the Great have been little studied because modern scholars viewed them in isolation from their classical antecedents and their religious context. In this dissertation, I examine how classical and medieval authors adapted Alexander's story into different genres of various levels of historical fidelity for their respective audiences. My underlying argument is that Alexander's influence over his own legacy ensured that his life story became not only a powerful historical example to kings with imperial ambitions but a critical opportunity for these successors and their opponents to make ideological assertions about the past and the present. . . . In the fourth chapter, I examine how John Gower combines moralized episodes from different editions of Alexander's life to educate Amans in self-control in love and politics in his Confessio Amantis." [JGN 21.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Girard, Karen Lee Published Girard, Karen Lee. "Re-writing Alexander the Great: Literary adaptations of Alexander's life in medieval England." PhD thesis, Stanford University, 2001. 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 Re-writing Alexander the Great: Literary adaptations of Alexander's life in medieval England Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 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 Lightsey, Robert Scott Published Lightsey, Robert Scott. "Monstrous Anxieties: Reading Mirabilia in Chaucer and His Contemporaries (Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Sir John Mandeville)." PhD thesis, University of Delaware, 2001. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review "My dissertation explores the depiction of marvels and wonders in fourteenth-century English literature. I argue that late medieval representations of mirabilia -- such as Chaucer's flying Horse of Brass, the monstrous body of King Alexander, and Eastern wonders like Mandeville's automated peacocks -- reflect the preliminary stages of what would become in the seventeenth century a clockwork universe. . . . Chapter four expands on the notion of man's transgressive technological progress through a reading of John Gower's use of marvels and hybrid monsters in the story of Alexander the Great, representations of whom reflect the uncertain new position of man in the universal machine. . . . Throughout the study I examine how traditional marvel-stories were rationalized in transmission, in effect becoming readings of older marvel-texts that render former wonders into mundane, self-consciously portrayed hybrids of myth and science. My object is to balance the metaphor and the reality of the clockwork universe of the later fourteenth century in order to reveal new avenues for the consideration of the period's vital and lively intercourse with mirabilia." [JGN 21.1] 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 Monstrous Anxieties: Reading Mirabilia in Chaucer and His Contemporaries (Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Sir John Mandeville) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 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 Describes and transcribes the fragmentary portion of Confessio Amantis 4.2351-2520 found in the "Takamiya fragment," once a part of Huntington Library MS EL 26.A.17, folios 68 and 69. Comments briefly on the puzzling nature of the removal of seventeen leaves from the Huntington, perhaps for various reasons. [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 22.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, A. S. G. Takamiya, Toshiyuki Published Edwards, A. S. G. and Takamiya, Toshiyuki. "New Fragment of Gower's Confessio Amantis." Modern Language Review 96 (2001), pp. 931-936. 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 New Fragment of Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 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 "Scribe D," so named because his is the fourth hand in the Trinity MS of CA (Cambridge, Trinity College R.3.2), was identified by Ian Doyle and Malcolm Parkes, in their groundbreaking essay of 1978, as having also participated in or as having been the sole copyist of 10 other MSS, including seven other copies of CA. He was evidently closely associated with another scribe, designated as Delta, whose six known MSS include another copy of CA. "Scribe D," Kerby-Fulton and Justice write, "(even without any help from Delta) is responsible for the largest identifiable corpus of vernacular Ricardian literary manuscripts extant today. As has often been noticed, they are all 'quality' manu-scripts, created mainly, it seems, for armigerous patrons. But what has not been noticed is that predominant among these patrons is a particular class of reader: parliamentarians and high-ranking civil servants associated with early Lancastrian Westminster. The portfolios of these two scribes, in fact, give us a window on the tastes and interests of an audience of Westminster lawmakers of varying ranks" (217). This group of readers "bears a striking resemblance to those Anne Middleton hypothesized in her classic Speculum essay: an audience concerned with the 'middel weie,' the common profit, and the 'public voice,' a savvy and assertively contemporary audience that sought the most recent and topical versions of the vernacular texts they cared for" (222) Among the productions of these two scribes, the authors take a particularly close look at Princeton University Library MS Taylor 5. They deduce from D's role in correcting the pages that he did not write that he ought probably be credited with supervising the entire production; and they note, among his strategies for pleasing his intended clientele, the substitution on f. 1 of the more up-to-date, revised dedication. Among the different lines of inquiry that his role suggests, they choose to discuss his and Delta's work "as an exercise in literary entrepreneurship, in the marketing of Ricardian literature" (223). In that respect, the prominence of Gower and Trevisa – 12 of their 17 known MSS – cannot be overlooked. "Taken together, the English Polychronicon and the Confessio Amantis make a striking couple: in the reflection of the other, each looks even more clearly and powerfully to reflect a repertory of historical exemplarity. If we add Trevisa's De Proprietatibus, which Scribe D copied, we might expand our definition of the category slightly to speak of works of secular exemplarity – works defining, by exemplifying, the conditions of public virtue and political efficaciousness" (225). The scribes' work also reveals a confidence in and respect for the vernacular, not only in the quality of the copies themselves but also in D's avoidance of the hierarchy of scripts that is usually employed to distinguish vernacular passages from Latin. The role of these scribes suggests, the authors assert, that "the reading, the 'reception,' of Ricardian literature, even when that literature was 'courtly,' did not merely happen, did not simply perpetuate itself by its mere appeal or through an agentless market, but that it was shaped by, and around the interests of, some of the scribes to whom we owe a good many of our important texts" (226). They return to the Taylor MS for a concluding consideration of D's possible use of illustrations as part of his marketing strategy, enhancing the authority of his text, as well as incidentally revealing an astute reading of Gower's poem. [PN Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 22.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn Justice, Steven Published Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn and Justice, Steven. "Scribe D and the Marketing of Ricardian Literature." In The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower. Ed. Hilmo, Maidie and Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. E L S Monograph Series (85). Victoria, BC: English Literary Studies, 2001, pp. 217-237. 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 Scribe D and the Marketing of Ricardian Literature Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available English Literary Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 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 Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "John Gower's Images: 'The Tale of Constance' and 'The Man of Law's Tale." In Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V.A. Kolve. Ed. Yeager, R.F and Morse, Charlotte. Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 2001, pp. 525-557. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Review Yeager takes as his starting point, in this essay that appears in a festschrift for V.A. Kolve, the latter's by now famous re-examination of the imagery of the Man of Law's Tale, with his discovery both of its primarily visual quality and of the rich layers of allegorical significance that it contains; and he applies Kolve's methods to the study of Gower's version of the same tale. Gower too was capable of arresting visual images: Yeager uses the examples of the massacre at the feast in CA 2.688-702, which is narrated from the point of view of Constance, the only survivor, and the tale of "Acis and Galatea" that comes earlier in Book 2 and that establishes in very concrete terms the signficances of fire and of water that will resonate throughout the later tale. But Gower's method is ordinarily not so visual, Yeager argues. Instead, "Gower relies on the working of his words qua words, on nuance and lexical suggestion. His images are briefer than Chaucer's, crossing more quickly sub oculos, alerting the consciousness scarcely at all while they creep into the memory, accumulating there nonetheless. Ultimately, these light images create a resonant sub-text which, once noticed, acts as effectively to the same purpose as Chaucer's more elaborate ones do, drawing us out of the literal towards higher levels of meaning" (527-28). He illustrates this thesis with some aptly chosen examples of particular words that in repetition acquire a meaningful resonance: "stiere," in the scenes in which Constance is set adrift on the sea, which subtly but effectively invokes God's presence as navigator; "good," which refers primarily to literal "goods" but which also establishes a contrast between Constance and her detractors and enables the depiction of the heroine as a representative of the church; "kepe," which is used particularly ironically by Domilde in 2.1036 but which elsewhere establishes the parallel between Constance's role and God's; the notion of motherhood, which Yeager points out occurs in some unusual contexts in the tale but which fits into the patterns created by the other imagery; and "joie," which especially at the end draws together the literal and the allegorical dimensions of Constance's story. The dominant recurring image in the tale, as in Chaucer's, is the sea, but Yeager establishes how differently the two poets used it: "In 'The Man of Law's Tale,' as Kolve has shown, it is 'the sea of this world' first and last, a medium alien to the ship of the Church, which alone provides safe transport to the hoped-for harbor. In 'The Tale of Constance,' however, the sea is, yes, the world, and something more--a medium of the Divine embrace and revelation (as water in every form always is in this tale, and generally in Book II of the Confessio Amantis), a physical expression of the power of a benevolent God, disguised to all but the truly faithful as a place of death, not life; so also the Christian mystery of baptism promises a 'dying' which in fact is the portal to a resurrected life; so Acis dies and is buried, to rise again as a spring recollective of the promise kept by the life and death of Christ; and so does Constance, twice come from the water, take on a kind of resurrection, as well" (550). As this last passage makes clear, this is a subtle essay, not well represented in summary. Insightful not only as a reading of this particular tale, it also, through the connection to "Acis and Galatea," opens up the possibility of a re-reading of Book 2 in its entirety, and here one has to feel that Yeager has missed a rather large chance. The book ends with the tale of "Constantine and Sylvester," with its obvious verbal and historical links to the tale of Constance in the protagonists' names, in their settings, and in their roles in the founding of the church, but even more importantly for Yeager's argument, in the rich significance given to baptism in the later tale, which echoes back upon the very episodes that Yeager describes so well in "Constance." Perhaps – and indeed one truly hopes – he has saved the exploration of these obvious connections for a future essay. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 20.2] 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's Images: 'The Tale of Constance' and 'The 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 2001 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 Harris' essay is a detailed description of Longleat House MS 174, in the possession of the Marquess of Bath, a compilation of mainly medical texts in several hands from the third quarter of the fifteenth century which Harris concludes was probably assembled for the use of professional medical practitioners. Its interest for readers of JGN lies in its inclusion on ff. 159-60 of Confessio Amantis 7.1281-1438, the description of the fifteen stars and their associated gems and herbs, among a group of other texts on the uses of herbs and other medical recipes. Longleat 174 is unique among the MSS containing excerpts from CA, Harris notes, in that it draws from the discursive portion of Gower's poem rather than presenting one or more of its tales, and also in that it includes the Latin apparatus associated with the extracted portion of the English text. Harris concludes her account by citing evidence that among a small circle of later, seventeenth-century readers as well, Gower may have been better known as a "scientist" than as a poet. [PN; JGN 22.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Harris, Kate Published Harris, Kate. "Longleat House Extracted Manuscript of Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions. Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall. Ed. Minnis, A. J.. York: York Medieval Press, 2001, pp. 77-90. 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 Longleat House Extracted Manuscript of Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available York Medieval Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 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 As readers of JGN will already know, Echard has been engaged in a long-term study of the effect of MS design and layout upon reading and reception. In this new essay, she examines the use of "speaker markers," the identifications of "Amans" and "Confessor" that appear in the margins or text at the beginning of their respective speeches, in the complete or nearly complete MSS of CA. These are "the most flexibly treated of all the framing elements" of the text, she observes (58), varying in number, in placement, and in appearance (all of which it would be impossible to deduce accurately from Macaulay's edition). Fairfax has 280 such markers by Echard's count, but a large number of MSS have far fewer, whether out of scribal neglect, because of conflict with other design elements on the page, or because of a different understanding of how the poem should be read. A small quantity of MSS includes a greater number, supplying the markers at appropriate places where Fairfax does not. In many MSS, it is clear that the markers function as a design element as well as reading aid, in which cases they may yield to other elements that have a greater impact upon the appearance of the page. On the other hand, some scribes are careful to include the markers, even in their expanded form, "Opponit Confessor" and "Respondet Amans," even when the resulting appearance is awkward. When they do occur, the markers are generally (but not always) written in red, making them especially prominent. In some MSS, however, they are written at the end of the verse line rather than in the white space of the margins, where they have significantly greater impact. In a small number of copies they are centered in the text column, a practice imitated by Caxton. As she considers the significance of these variations, Echard makes an interesting distinction between seeing the poem as a collection of stories and seeing it as a dialogue; and while the long Latin glosses to the tales that appear in the margins or the text column of most MSS draw attention to the narrative portion of the work, the speaker markers pull in the opposite direction, and in the MS that first got Echard interested in the difference, they align CA with the form of Boethius' "De Consolatione Philosophiae," a version of which is included, in the same format, in the same book. The use of the longer speaker markers emphasizes, in turn, the confessional aspect of the poem. Echard is very cautious about equating effect with intent (74). She also notes a distinction "between manuscripts intended chiefly to be looked at, and manuscripts intended to be read" (75). Her observations, however, both about the way in which appearance affects reading and vice versa, are of significance not only to the early reception of the poem but also to the way in which it is presented in modern editions. [PN. JGN 22.1. Copyright John Gower Society] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Sian. Published Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions. Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall. Ed. A. J. Minnis. York: York Medieval Press, 2001, pp. 57-75. 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 Dialogues and Monologues: Manuscript Representations of the Conversation of the Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Archibald, Elizabeth. Published Archibald, Elizabeth. Incest and the Medieval Imagination. Oxford: Clarendon, 2001. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review Essentially, Archibald's study is a taxonomy of variations on the motif of incest in medieval literature, with attention to mother-son, father-daughter, and sibling sexual relations, contextualized with classical and biblical backgrounds, and complex cultural understandings (note the plural) of incest that broaden beyond the fundamental notion of "intercourse between blood relatives" (6) to include in-laws, god-parents, and other social and religious relations in medieval Christian communities. Gower has a minor but sustained presence throughout, including a possibly surprising appearance in Archibald's conclusion. Archibald comments that Gower's "mixed views on incest laws" (25), found at the opening of Book 8 of the "Confessio Amantis," reflect--but notably modify--Augustine's idea that consanguinity in marriage was necessary to populate the earth soon after it was created and that instinctive revulsion successfully curbed it over time; Gower, Archibald tells us, accepts the initial necessity of familial incest, but papal prohibition is the curb for him. Archibald also observes that Gower's Dame Incest in "Mirour de l'Omme" entails a concept broader than "what we would expect" (39), emphasizing sex between monks and nuns as incestuous, along with sex within nuclear families. In a portion of her chapter on "The Classical Legacy," Archibald focuses on medieval adaptations of Ovidian narratives, mentioning Chaucer's possible "gibe" (80) at Gower in the "Man of Law's Prologue" and assessing Gower's "Tale of Canace and Machaire." She follows A. C. Spearing (1993) in finding the love between these siblings to be sympathetic but paradoxical--both natural and unnatural, and an example of the "dangerous power of love" (83). Modern readers, Archibald surmises, may see it as "a rare instance of sibling love presented in a fairly positive light, as a mutual and genuine passion, though also a fatal one" (83-84). For Archibald, Gower's account of Philomena "seems to be interested not so much in incest [even though Tereus is Philomena's brother-in-law] as in the fact that Tereus is already married, and that Philomena is a virgin" (90), emphases also evident in the "Ovide moralisé," Chaucer, and Lydgate. Following her own 1991 study of the story of Apollonius of Tyre, Archibald recounts that Gower's version of the story is "an exception" to the tradition in that he "emphasizes the strong attraction" between Apollonius and Thaise in their recognition scene, and that Gower "suggests that it would be quite natural for an unrecognized father and daughter to feel drawn to each other" (98-99), repeating this claim verbatim later in her study (186). Here, as in his account of Canace and Machaire, "Gower uses incest to represent love out of control" (80), detrimental to the common good but not unnatural or especially perverse, as it is often represented elsewhere. Indeed, at the close of her study, Archibald loosely aligns Gower's view of Apollonius's attraction to Thaise with the "immaculate 'incest' of Mary and her Father/Brother/Son in the salvation of mankind" (244). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Incest and the Medieval Imagination. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Masciandaro, Nicola Published Masciandaro, Nicola. "The voice of the hammer: Work in medieval English literature (John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer)." PhD thesis, Yale University, 2002. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review "This dissertation investigates Middle English representations of work. Most previous scholarship has approached medieval work through autonomous disciplinary channels. I examine several kinds of evidence for late medieval attitudes toward work in the context of both socioeconomic conditions and intellectual traditions. . . . Chapter 2 examines three accounts of the history of work--the history of masonry contained in the Cooke MS (British Museum, Add. MS. 23198), John Gower's history of work in Book 4 of the Confessio Amantis, and Chaucer's Former Age--in order to show how the history of work was a site of ideological contest." [JGN 23.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The voice of the hammer: Work in medieval English literature (John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 the later Middle Ages, a wide variety of writers and readers collected texts, assisted by developments in manuscript production and the emergence of compilatio as an intellectual category. In turn, these collections influenced writers as aesthetic models and as vehicles for the circulation of texts. . . . . I argue for the miscellany's aesthetic importance as the essential material condition of vernacular literature before the introduction of printing. . . . Chapter 3 reads Gower's Confessio Amantis as an attempt to redress the fragile miscellaneity of the human body. Gower eventually came to rely on the collection of his own work in manuscript as a monumental substitute for his own body." [JGN 23.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Shuffelton, George Gordon Published Shuffelton, George Gordon. "The miscellany and the monument: Collecting in Chaucer, Gower, and Langland." PhD thesis, Yale University, 2002. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The miscellany and the monument: Collecting in Chaucer, Gower, and Langland Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Quejigo, Grande Javier, Francisco Santano Moreno, Bernardo Published Quejigo, Grande and Javier, Francisco and Santano Moreno, Bernardo. "The Love Debate Tradition in the Reception of Gower's Confessio Amantis in the Iberian Peninsula." Disputatio 5 (2002), pp. 103-126. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Review The authors address the appearance of CA in Portuguese and Castilian--the unique instance of the translation of an English poem into either language in the Middle Ages--by demonstrating how the Confessio fits into the tradition of works intended for the education of the nobility in the Iberian peninsula in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. They use as their principal points of comparison the Arcipreste de Hita's Libro de Buen Amor and Don Juan Manuel's Conde Lucanor. The external evidence that all three works responded to the same educational and cultural need is the presence of both Spanish texts in the library of King Duarte of Portugal, who also owned the only surviving copy of the Portuguese translation of the Confessio. The internal evidence consists of the similarities in form and theme and in their assimilation of Latin and vernacular models for educational purposes. All three make use of narration within a frame. The Libro de Buen Amor consists of a dialogue between a dejected lover and Amor into which the author has inserted a series of exempla and discussions of moral topics. Many of the exempla are drawn from Ovidian sources, and they are typically preceded by a passage of doctrinal exposition and followed by a brief moral explanation, as in the Confessio, and they include both positive examples and exempla ex contrario, the procedure that Gower follows in presenting Amans as guilty of the wrong sort of love in his poem's conclusion. The exempla in El Libro de Buen Amor are more evenly balanced between the disputants than in CA, however. In its use of the confession frame CA is closer to the Conde Lucanor, which also incorporates moral exempla but within a question and answer structure that is more typical of works intended for the education of nobles. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 23.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Love Debate Tradition in the Reception of Gower's Confessio Amantis in the Iberian Peninsula Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Book 7 of Confessio Amantis begins as an account of Aristotle's education of Alexander, and it concludes with the lesson on Chastity and with negative examples of lecherous rulers. "Gower's book of statecraft thus ends up offering an art of love as a manual of advice for rulers and in the process conflates sexual regulation and political rule" (428). Gower's strategy derives from a long tradition of criticism of Richard II and his counselors that "persistently focused on its alleged transgressive sexual practices" (423-24), culminating "in a politically motivated allegation of sodomy that sought to substantiate Richard's unfitness to rule and to justify Henry IV's usurpation of the throne" (424). Hanrahan begins with a discussion of the broad and often imprecise meanings of both "sodomy" and "unnatural" in contemporary texts, simultaneously designating that which was considered unspeakable and also a wide range of non-sexual acts. Gower reflects contemporary anxieties over the king's counselors both in VC Book 6 and in the CA Prologue, and in changing the dedication of CA to Henry of Derby, Gower appealed to an exemplary figure of good counsel. In Book 7, the discussion of chastity begins with the claim that lust effeminizes a man, echoing directly one of the charges that was laid against Richard and his court, for instance in Walsingham; and Genius' use of Sardanapalus, who finally lost his throne, as his example anticipates the later justification of Richard's deposition for the same cause. Though Gower never mentions sodomy by name, the allegation nonetheless "haunts" his poem (436), as it does the other texts that assert that lechery can lead men to become like women, and in his lessons in Book 7, "Gower creates a nexus of unnatural crimes that enmeshes his advice with implicit warnings against sodomitical practices" (437) . The implicit criticism of Richard extends to the linkage that Gower draws between Alexander and Richard as recipients of Aristotle's advice, for "born in treason and lust," as Genius demonstrates in his tale of Nectanabus in Book 6, "Alexander springs from the unnatural desires that Genius seeks to warn rulers against" (441). Hanrahan emphasizes the punishment of unnaturalness in the tales of "Lucrece," "Virginia," and "Tobias and Sara." The latter tale also anticipates Amans' "rejection of the sin against nature" in the poem's conclusion (443). Reformed, he has a vision of the court of Cupid dressed in the "newe guise of Beawme" (8.2970), a clear reference to the court of Richard II that identifies the king with ostentatiousness of dress and the pursuit of pleasure, the same "lecherous and luxurious practices that have transformed past rulers into effeminate men. Gower thus ends up offering his advice from the position of a reformed sodomite, and he effectively implicates the king as a sodomite in two ways: by offering negative examples of unnatural rulers for Richard's edification, and by providing his reformed persona as a model for the king to emulate" (445). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 22.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hanrahan, Michael Published Hanrahan, Michael. "Speaking of Sodomy: Gower's Advice to Princes in the Confessio Amantis." Exemplaria 14 (2002), pp. 423-446. 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 Speaking of Sodomy: Gower's Advice to Princes in the Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Grady asks us to consider Gower's account in the original Prologue of CA of his chance encounter with Richard II as they were both being rowed upon the river as a fiction constructed by the author both to flatter the king and to aggrandize his own relation with him. The passage has its roots, Grady notes, in several earlier texts: first, as Yeager and Astell observe, in the account of Arion in Book IV of the Fasti that Gower alludes to again at the end of the Prologue; but also in the historical record of another less happy encounter on the river between Richard and Archbishop Courtenay in March, 1385, which ended with Richard drawing his sword and chasing the Archbishop from his boat; in Gower's own advice on controlling his angry impulses in his epistle to the king in Book VI of VC; in the image of the rudderless ship in the VC Prologue; and in the episode in 1381 when Richard set out to meet the rebels on his barge and then changed his mind before disembarking, angering the rebels and provoking their invasion of the city. Each of these is rewritten in the CA Prologue in a "recuperative gesture designed to rescue the king from an already established reputation for irascibility and violence of temper" (4), showing the king at peace, at leisure, and in control both of himself and of his kingdom, and replacing the rebels with the image of the loyal poet. Grady's essay is a particular pleasure to read. Along the way, he draws upon the appealing picture of playwright and queen in the movie "Shakespeare in Love" in order to argue that our wish to believe in the truth of the river meeting derives from our own fondest fantasies about the relation between poet and patron; and he pauses several times to comment in choral fashion, in passages printed in italics, on his own New Historicist methodology and on the tactics that he uses to disarm objections to his argument. (The only tactic that he doesn't comment on is the most disarming one of all, which is this metacommentary.) "Shakespeare in Love" is self-consciously fiction, of course, and Gower's Prologue still only presumably so. One has to pause, moreover, over the ease with which Grady equates "historicizing" a passage with rendering it historically suspect: that it serves all the purposes that Grady describes does not prove that the event in question did not take place, unless nothing ever happens as one wishes. By a different reading, the historical record of the earlier encounter between the Archbishop and the king makes Gower's account of a river meeting all the more plausible. Grady does force us to reconsider our understanding of this passage, however, and if not to dismiss it, at least to give more thought both to why it is included and to the way in which the event is represented in Gower's poem. [PN; Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 22.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Grady, Frank Published Grady, Frank. "Gower's Boat, Richard's Barge, and the True Story of the Confessio Amantis: Text and Gloss." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44 (2002), pp. 1-15. Gower Subject Biography of Gower 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 Boat, Richard's Barge, and the True Story of the Confessio Amantis: Text and Gloss Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Arner offers a detailed explication of the image of Nebuchadnezzar's statue in the CA Prologue, which she sees functioning as part of Gower's address to those readers in "the upper strata of urban non-ruling groups"--the more prosperous shopkeepers, artisans, and craftsmen--who "had participated in or who had sympathized with the English Rising of 1381" in order to win them over to the ideology of the ruling class and to break their identification with the lower ranks of society (239). The statue represents history as predetermined. "The inevitability of this development ratifies the social order and social relations" of Gower's time and "positions medieval men and women as helpless object of great forces" (243) which have also operated over a vast expanse of time, implying that "political action is futile" and encouraging "resignation and accommodation" (244). CA nonetheless "addresses readers as having agency," but it "works to direct this agency to-ward specific ends" (245). The statue also suggests that Gower's England stands at the end of time. "Therefore, movement into the future holds little in store but further decline," and "the only hope for the continuation of Gower's society lies in the stabilizing measures offered by conservative groups" (246). The statue offers an image of society itself, with each component representing a different rank. The lowest order - the statue's feet - is the most unstable and threatens the survival of society as a whole. The statue thus suggests the need for control and repression of the lowest ranks. By placing late medieval England at the end of time, it also positions it outside of time, and paradoxically, while affirming that current social conditions are the result of an inevitable process, it also affirms the irrelevance of history to the present in order to delegitimate claims for relief based upon a history of oppression. "The erasure of the history of subordinate groups" (249) is also evident in the summary of history that accompanies the statue, which is all about the rulers rather than the ruled, suggesting that "subordinate groups . . . were irrelevant" (250). The identification of each class with a particular material "argues for an essentialist understanding of the social order" which therefore "cannot be changed" (251). Finally, "by conceptualizing rank and, by extension, interest apart from ongoing political struggles, the poem discourages readers from rearticulating their wants and needs in relation to a shifting ideological climate" (252). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 22.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Arner, Lynn Published Arner, Lynn. "History Lessons from the End of Time: Gower and the English Rising of 1381." Clio 31 (2002), pp. 237-255. ISSN 0884-2043 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource History Lessons from the End of Time: Gower and the English Rising of 1381 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Among the other genres of which it partakes, Rytting argues, Confessio Amantis can also be read as a marriage or conduct manual on the model of T"he Goodman of Paris," "he Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry,"and Christine de Pizan's "he Three Virtues." In presenting its ideal of a good marriage, it may be addressed specifically to Richard II, but it also certainly intended for a wider sphere, and its marital advice is continuous with its political concerns since for Gower "good government begins with self-government; [and] private morality leads to public morality" (115). The exploration of marriage takes place outside of the formal framework of the poem since so many of the most relevant tales arise only incidentally to the discussion of the Seven Deadly Sins, but the pattern that these stories create is nonetheless "carefully arranged" (116) in order to demonstrate the qualities of both good and bad spouses. The five important qualities of a good spouse, Rytting finds, are "honesty, compassion, mutual counsel, fidelity, and appropriate displays of affection" (118). Rytting discusses how these qualities are exemplified in the positive examples of "Florent," "Mundus and Paulina," "Constance," and "Tobias and Sara," and in the negative examples of "Iphis," "Albinus and Rosemund," "Tereus," and "Orestes." The final tale of the poem, "Apollonius of Tyre," summarizes the preceding lesions by providing examples of each of the qualities of a good spouse. It arises, moreover, out of the discussion of incest, which might be seen as the "direct opposite of marriage" since it is "a type of love that by church law cannot end in matrimony" (116). Following the tale, Venus cures Amans of his love which, "while not incestuous in any narrow sense, is unlikely to lead to marriage because of Amans' age, impotence, and failure to attract the interest of his beloved " (117). Her action stands in contrast to her intervention of behalf of the lover's plea in the tale of "Pygmalion." Implicit in this contrast "is the message that fruitful love (love with marriage potential) should be developed, while unfruitful love (love without marriage potential) should be avoided" (ibid.). As a marriage manual or conduct book, CA differs from the other well-known examples in that it is evidently addressed to men as well as women, and while the expected obedience of the wife is not absent from the poem, the qualities of a good spouse that Gower extols are expected of both spouses and they are reciprocal. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 22.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rytting, Jenny Rebecca Published Rytting, Jenny Rebecca. "In Search of the Perfect Spouse: John Gower's Confessio Amantis as a Marriage Manual." Dalhousie Review 82 (2002), pp. 113-126. ISSN 0011-5827 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 In Search of the Perfect Spouse: John Gower's Confessio Amantis as a Marriage Manual Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Coleman takes another look at the different components of the text of CA from the point of view of reception. Each portion - the English poem, the Latin glosses, and the Latin verse epigrams - not only serves a different function but also presumes a different linguistic capability and thus a different audience. The primary audience of the poem - its two dedicatees - would have been at home with the English, and they probably could have made out the gist of the glosses but would not necessarily have had the experience with textual interpretation to discover the disjunction between text and gloss that some modern scholars have observed. With their limited Latin, they would have been completely at sea with the epigrams. The "secondary audience" that Gower may have had in mind, the knights and civil servants that included several men with real interest in literature such as Usk, Hoccleve, and Chaucer, were evidently only slightly better equipped in Latin. The poets among them wrote exclusively in English, and only Strode, Coleman surmises, if he was the man that we suppose, would have been able to make sense of the Latin verses. (It is a bit of a shock to realize that they were probably out of reach of Chaucer.) Only trained clerics of the sort for whom Gower intended VC would have been fully able to appreciate the Latin verse, but they could not have been the intended audience because they would have had little desire for a poem in English and little need for the particular sort of wisdom that it offers. The solution to this complex riddle, Coleman suggests, lies in imagining an oral reading of the text by a clerical "prelector" to an audience of those who were only truly functional in English. Both the English and the Latin verses, she notes, refer to the text as being heard by others, but only the lector or interpres would have access to the entire page. He would interpret - both translate and comment upon - the Latin verses after reading them aloud, and he would use the glosses as a guide to commenting on the morality that is offered by the English text. Such a performance would vary not only according to the skill of the reader but also to the tastes and predilections of the audience that employed him and whom he was trying to please. By this account, the last line of the first epigram in CA - "et interpres stet procul oro malus" ["and let the interpretor evil in speech stand at a distance"] - becomes a plea, rather like Chaucer's to "Adam Scriveyn," for the proper oral transmission of his text; and the poet's lack of direct control over the performance is, as Coleman notes, a challenge to many of the assumptions that we all tacitly make as we derive meaning from our own silent and private reading. As part of her argument, Coleman has some interesting observations on the precedents for both the glosses and the epigrams, suggesting that the former are more homiletic in flavor than academic and tracing the latter to a tradition of Latin disputation that originated in verse contests in the schools; and in the most speculative part of her essay, she suggests the names of several men attached to John of Gaunt's household who might have served as the original prelectors of Gower's poem. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 22.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Coleman, Joyce Published Coleman, Joyce. "Lay Readers and Hard Latin: How Gower May Have Intended the Confessio Amantis to be Read." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002), pp. 209-234. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Language and Word Studies 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 Lay Readers and Hard Latin: How Gower May Have Intended the Confessio Amantis to be Read Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Epstein, Robert Published Epstein, Robert. "Literal Opposition: Deconstruction, History, and Lancaster." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44 (2002), pp. 16-33. Gower Subject Cronica Tripertita Confessio Amantis Review "We should be as studious to historicize deconstruction as we are to deconstruct history," Epstein writes in the conclusion to this essay (30), in which he describes how the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century construction of Lancastrian identity does not conform to postmodern expectation of "an idealized and ahistorical unity" (18). The Lancastrian texts that he examines "evince a unique consciousness of the underlying nature of language" (18) and in them, "identity is represented as relational rather than absolute" (30), being constructed of oppositions and represented "on the typographic level in ways that link the relational nature of identity to the relational nature of language and of all signification" (ibid.). Epstein uses Gower's revision of the dedication of CA, in which Gower "explicitly pitted Henry against his cousin Richard," to illustrate how "the idea of Lancaster . . . originates in opposition" (19). (Such an opposition is more visible, of course, in Macaulay's edition, in which the two passages are juxtaposed, than it would have been in any medieval copy.) He also examines the passage in TC 458-73 in which Gower sets Richard's abuses against Henry' virtues, referring to each only by his initial, "R." and "H.," a feature that is effaced in Stockton's translation. Epstein demonstrates that the lines in question scan only if the letters represent long monosyllables and that they therefore cannot be replaced by the kings' full names. "The text," he points out, "moves towards an originary opposition of signs, arriving ultimately at the level of writing" (22), an effect that is complemented by the punning in line 461, "[H.] Quem deus extollit, et ab R. sua prospera tollit": "the difference between divine favor and damnation is reduced to an arbitrary linguistic coincidence. . . . So, some fifteen years after originally opposing Henry to Richard in the 'Confessio,' Gower is still defining Lancaster through opposition rather than essential unity. Indeed the opposition has become only more central, emphatic, even elemental. It has been filed down to the irreducible basis of opposition in symbolic writing: alphabetical characters" (23). An opposition that is typical, one might add, of the self-conscious verbality of Gower's Latin throughout VC. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society JGN 22.1.] 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 Literal Opposition: Deconstruction, History, and Lancaster Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Palmer, James Milton Published Palmer, James Milton. "Narratives of Healing: Emotion, Medicine, Metaphor, and Late-medieval Poetry and Prose (John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, Diego de San Pedro, Spain)." PhD thesis, Purdue University, 2002. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review "As Barbara Rosenwein has noted, very little attention has been given to the history of emotions other than love. Posing the question "What is an emotion? Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Narratives of Healing: Emotion, Medicine, Metaphor, and Late-medieval Poetry and Prose (John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, Diego de San Pedro, Spain) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Watt offers a reading of Gower's "Apollonius of Tyre" informed by psychoanalysis, but rather rather than simply reading the events in the tale according to a Freudian script, she also uses a comparison to other versions of the story in order to demonstrate the ways in which Gower consciously reshaped the narrative. The mixture of methodologies is a bit dizzying. Statements such as this one, "But in a sense Amans is guilty of incest in so far as he seems to be engaged in an oedipal struggle with his own incestuous parents, Venus and Cupid, the Queen and King of Love" (182), which is offered without any further support, stand alongside the careful comparison of texts, for instance in Watt's demonstration that his tale of Apollonius Gower places much less emphasis on lineage and genealogy than any of the analogues (183-84). The juxtaposition of the two different sorts of arguments evidently presumes that Gower himself was as conscious of the psychoanalytical dimensions of his text as Watt is. Watt's purpose is to use the conclusions that she draws on Gower's depiction of the characters in assessing the way in which Gower intended to offer instruction through the tale to Richard II. "The political replaces the genealogical" in Gower's story, she asserts; "there exists a connection between the poem's construction of gender and sexuality and its political concerns and historical contexts" (185). But where María Bullón-Fernández, making a similar claim, sees the connection between Antiochus' incest and Richard's tyrannical rule, Watt claims that Gower also offers his criticism of Richard through Apollonius, who is "implicated in the crime of incest and tainted by homosexuality" and who "is culpable of misusing his knowledge and power" (185). In making her argument, she has a great many specific observations to make about the tale and about the poem, only some of which can be noted here. The impenetrability of the riddle in Gower's version, she observes, "is in itself a clue to its meaning," for in its "grammatical indeterminacy" it "reveals itself to be concerned with something that is unethical and corrupt" (187). But while "with its references to the devouring of the mother's flesh, [Gower's version of the riddle] expresses the speaker's repressed desire to devour or to marry/to sleep with his own mother" (188), mother figures are more active in Gower's tale, even in their absence, than in other versions of the story, beginning with Antiochus' wife. The daughters are imperiled not just by the sexual incontinence of their fathers but by "the absence or cruelty of the maternal figures" (189). "In Gower's tale, then, the role of women as wives and mothers is crucial to the proper functioning of the household" (191). Antiochus' riddle also expresses his repressed desire for his father, and "just as the infantile desire for the mother is displaced onto the daughter, so the fixation of the father reemerges in a search for the son" (192). The riddle thus "draws our attention to the homosociality, or what Luce Iragaray calls the hom(m)o-sexuality, of patriarchal society" (ibid.). Thus Antiochus allows Apollonius to escape, but as Apollonius continues to flee after he is already safe, he reveals that he himself "has become obsessed with the father figure" (194). As Freud suggested, such "father-fixations . . . resulted in the feminization of the son," as manifested by Apollonius' mastery of rhetoric, "traditionally associated with femininity and effeminacy," by his failure to kill Antiochus, and by "the passive role he plays in his relationship with his future wife" (194-95). Apollonius also becomes implicated in Antiochus' crime by this failure to reveal it, and though he has no conscious incestuous desire for his own daughter, Gower's depiction of his reunion with Thaise heightens the resemblance between Apollonius and Antiochus. In depicting his female characters, Gower uses the story "to examine and to attempt to unravel female sexuality and desire" (199). The conclusion reestablishes "normative male control of female desire," but along the way the sufferings of Thaise and her mother are an extension of those of Antiochus' daughter, and their "resurrections" represent her "posthumous redemption" (202). That Gower intended the tale as a comment on Richard II is indicated by the political purposes manifest throughout CA and by the historical reports of Richard's disturbed personality, a portrait that is "to some extent confirmed by Gower's complex representations of kingship" in this tale (203), which reveal "his cynicism about Richard II's conduct and rule" (205). Antiochus's behavior, of course, may "be intended as a warning to Richard II against arrogant behavior and arbitrary rule" (205). "The implicit praise of Artestrathes's wife," moreover, "might be read as a celebration of the mediatory role of Anne of Bohemia" (205-6), while "the resurrection of Apollonius's wife and daughter," representing the king's subjects and his country, "may also mark the (albeit temporary) restoration of the power of the council's to curb the king's will" (206), though "the recontainment of female sexuality" suggests that "Gower's political vision is ultimately a conservative one" and he does not advocate the overthrow of the king (206-7). Apollonius is a figure for the king both in his flaws and in the fact that he does not learn very much during the course of the tale. Amans too fails to learn, but "unlike Apollonius, he does not see the fulfillment of his desires either. . . . In the final analysis, Amans's misdirected desire reflects the king's unchecked will and it is perhaps his failure in love which looks most like a prognostication of the usurpation of Richard II's throne. At the same time, Gower's decision, not only to sign his own narrative, but to identify himself with Amans, and thus implicitly with Richard, may indicate his personal frustration with and sense of failure about his role, not as poet of love, but as political advisor" (207-8). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 22.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Watt, Diane Published Watt, Diane. "Oedipus, Apollonius, and Richard II: Sex and Politics in Book 8 of John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002), pp. 180-208. 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 Oedipus, Apollonius, and Richard II: Sex and Politics in Book 8 of John Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Following Aquinas," Donavin writes, "Genius presents us with contradictory origins for the incest and violence taboos. Because these injunctions are essential to the organization of family and society, Gower invites his readers to investigate Genius's contradictions through an independent inquiry into taboos and transgressions in the Confessio Amantis. For the contemporary reader, postmodern psychological and anthropological theories may provide the best methodologies for such an inquiry" (100). The contradictions stem from the attempt to trace the prohibitions of incest and violence to both natural law and to social constraints, which determine, in the one case, what degree of kinship is allowed in marriage and in the other, when killing might in fact be permissible. "Law alters and thus destabilizes 'natural' reactions" (100), leaving no firm basis for either sort of prohibition. Ground for "a consistent interpretation of [Genius's] discourse on taboos and his tales illustrating their transgression" may be found, however, in the "postmodern theories of social and familial structures" that "indicate that the root of incest and violence is the taboo itself and that continual sermonizing, such as Genius's, only exacerbates a problem better mitigated through an unblinking exposure of violations." She continues, "One of the most useful ideas from postmodern psychoanalysis . . . is that the taboo both prohibits and perpetuates activity. In other words, it induces in rebellious personalities the very behavior it condemns. Repudiating incest or violence, the taboo casts the allure of impossibility over the forbidden behavior and instigates a yearning for what cannot be" (101). This sequence is enacted in CA, as Genius consistently "first articulates the law and then illustrates its rupture," providing a clear hint of "the discursive genesis of pro-hibited desire" (102). Donavin's principal example, however, is the tale of "Apollonius of Tyre." Antiochus' "primary aim," she asserts, "is to commit a crime because it is a crime" (102). Genius demonstrates the "productivity of the incest taboo" (103), moreover, in his own refusal to name Antiochus' crime explicitly, in contrast to his clear statements on the nature of the offense preceding the tale. "The oblique vocabulary surrounding incest . . . euphemizes the incident and thus enables its recurrence" (103). Similarly, the obliqueness of Antiochus' riddle "ensures continued transgression of the taboo" (104). Antiochus' daughter too experiences an inability to name the offense because of the taboo, symptomatic of "a culture in denial of infractions" (107). ). But while in that respect the poem illustrates the effects of denial, Gower also sets before us Venus, a flagrant example of the offenses that Genius struggles to control. "Venus's libertinism blares amidst the confusion of Genius's statements about taboos; it depicts what is absent in his and Antiochus's vague references to incest and it voices the reality of transgression. Through Venus's character Gower insists that his readers confront the inevitable effect of mere moralizing" and that they "take further steps to mitigate the personal and social harm caused in the violation of the taboos, beginning with the bold admission that infringements often occur" (106). Gower also presents the "ineluctable reversal implied in the incest taboo" (107) in his depiction of the relationships of the other fathers and daughters in "Apollonius of Tyre," as the daughters find their spouses in their attempt to please their fathers, and as Apollonius' slap of Thaise reminds us, "the sentimentalized attraction between father and daughter always plays out in the shadow of rape" (109). Examples of family dysfunction are as common in CA as examples of happy families, Donavin concludes, as Gower "reveals that domestic harm precipitates from the same social principles intended to produce family harmony" (112). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 22.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Donavin, Georgiana Published Donavin, Georgiana. "Taboo and Transgression in Gower's Apollonius of Tyre." In Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts. Ed. Salisbury, Eve and Donavin, Georgiana and Llewelyn Price, Merrall. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002, pp. 94-121. 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 Taboo and Transgression in Gower's Apollonius of Tyre Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of Florida, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Grady, Frank Published Grady, Frank. "Generation of 1399." In The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England. Ed. Steiner, Emily and Barrington, Candace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002, pp. 202-229. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Cronica Tripertita Review Grady uses three main works – Gower's "Cronica Tripertita," "Richard the Redeless," and "Mum and the Sothsegger"--to define a "Lancastrian poetic," the shared thematic concerns and formal traits that unite the first generation of texts to appear after Henry's ascension of the throne. He gives his greatest attention to "Mum and the Sothsegger," the most problematic of these texts since it appeared a bit later in Henry's reign and thus has to deal with more of the consequences of the change of regime and since it takes a somewhat more skeptical view of the usurpation and its aftermath. He uses Gower's poem, along with "Richard the Redeless," to identify two important formal characteristics of this group of texts: first, the abandonment of the dream vision as a way of engaging with contemporary events, despite the importance of the dream in the predecessors to these texts, particularly "Piers Plowman" and VC; and second, "the concomitant increase of interest in documentary models of discourse, particularly legal texts and representations of parliamentary activity" (206). In place of the "authorizing immediacy" (210) of the claim to have witnessed the events of the poem that is allowed by the dream vision, Grady notes that in the Cronica, Gower adopts the analogous procedure of pretending that each of the three sections is "composed contemporaneously with the events that it describes" (209), though all are quite surely written after the fact. (It is not crucial to his argument, but Grady refers to CA as if it too is in dream-vision form, though it is not.) And as part of the turn to the stability and "apparent fixity" of "documents, chronicles, and statutes" (222) that characterized the response to the legal uncertainties and instabilities of the time, Grady notes that the Cronica "is largely organized by its references to parliamentary activity" and that the poet "is clearly concerned with the legality of each proceeding" (223). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 22.2.] 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 Generation of 1399 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 2002 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 has two aims in this essay: first, to situate the account Gower gives of the Merciless Parliament in his "Cronica Tripertita" in the body of literature about the "literature of 1388," most of it much closer to the event; and second, to argue that Gower's responses to some of the ethical and political issues aroused by these events are also detectable in Confessio Amantis, though Gower does not refer to them directly. Galloway begins with a survey of the procedural novelties and irregularities of the parliamentary trial, discussing too some of their precedents, including one initiated in 1384 by the hapless Thomas Usk, who was to be one of the Appellants' first and most gruesome victims. He then discusses three principal texts, the Westminster Chronicle, the chronicle of Henry Knighton, and the satirical tract of Thomas Favent, all strongly pro-Appellant yet each revealing, in a different way, some possibility of alternative responses to the events that they describe. Gower's account in "Cronica Tripertita," in its "epic somberness" (85), is most like the Westminster Chronicle in tone. Writing from a perspective fifteen years after the event, Gower offers a "thematic history" (86) focused on pietas versas impietas, embracing in the first term both "pity" and "piety," allowing pietas "to define both compassion and pious adherence to justice" (87). Gower demonstrates some of the first quality in his account of the deaths of some of the men whom the Parliament convicted: in contrast to the earlier, more ironic accounts, "Gower's view of the Ricardian party is governed by an almost Virgilian sense of the victims of history" (88). The "piety" that is attributed to Henry, however, is extended to include his "humility in the face of divine judgment, . . . carrying out the 'common cry' for justice by executing the traitors of 1388" (89). "Pious pity now covers a large ground of royal policy. Springing at first from the author's own perspective, the ethic has expanded to fill all the needs of a damaged kingdom. At the end it is an extension of Henry's power, rather than his or anyone's sympathy. So reconstituted, violent purgation has been redeemed as an act of mercy, a species of compassionate justice. A parliament without mercy has been made into a parliament embodying pietas" (90). It strains belief, Galloway notes, that Gower should have been thinking about such issues only in 1400, though there were some obvious risks in commenting on them explicitly in the early 1390's, as he composed CA. Rather than a direct commentary, Galloway therefore finds in CA evidence of the development of the idea of "pite" as "just punishment," with some of the ambiguities that this implies. Even in praising Richard for his pity, for instance, in *8.2992-97, Gower states that "he yit never impitously" sought vengeance against his subjects, implying that "royal pity . . . is predicated on a suspension of cruelty. As such, it is an expression of power, good or evil, and it therefore demands a careful if tenuous distinction between its good and bad forms" (93). Richard's later behavior, Galloway suggests, granting and denying his pardon both extravagantly and unpredictably, justified Gower's concerns. Gower's writing from 1390 on, Galloway claims, is characterized by an increasing emphasis on "pity as a principal element of the social contract of monarchy" while also displaying "an equally vigorous effort to disparage and crush 'pite' used as an oppressive instrument in the service of corruption, all the while advancing a sense of true 'pite' as including, indeed mainly being, justice, vengeance, even extreme violence" (95). In CA, "elaborate gestures or evocations of pity are revealed as hollow, inauthentic, or somehow inadequate," and "they are savagely exposed and crushed" (95). Galloway cites "The Trump of Death" as a prime example. Pity is directly associated with vengeance and upholding the law in several tales in Book 7, including "The Jew and the Pagan," evidently a late addition. The tale of "Apollonius of Tyre" "becomes in Gower's hands a vehicle for scenes emphasizing the connection between power and pity, where unjustly used pity is the object of savage retribution, and justly used pity the vehicle of enormous power" (100). The most complex presentation of "pity as vengeance" occurs in the poem's final scene. Amans' "absurd" supplication for relief leads to calls for "pity" from the procession of lovers in his vision, in a clamor that recalls scenes from the Parliament of 1388. The result "is that the Lover is subject to what amounts to a judicial punishment of castration, effectively if crudely carried out by the blind, 'groping' Cupid" (102). "Pity here becomes utterly merciless, a legal instrument of absolute power over individual subjects of a dictatorial parliament, however loudly the ethic's legitimacy is proclaimed by efforts to denounce a purge a putatively false and corrupt mirroring ethic" (103). In his conclusion, Galloway comments on Gower's efforts to reconcile the conflicting notions of pity that history offered him. "Charged as it became with enormous political and legal power, pity was a threat as well as a binding social ethic. Gower articulated both, and tried, in a dynamic dialectic and brilliant if ultimately impossible venture, to disentangle them" (104). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 22.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew Published Galloway, Andrew. "Literature of 1388 and the Politics of Pity in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England. Ed. Steiner, Emily and Barrington, Candace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002, pp. 67-104. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Cronica Tripertita Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Literature of 1388 and the Politics of Pity in Gower's Confessio Amantis 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 2002 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 Part II of her article, Williams discusses the choric "Gower" as father figure in the play, especially the literary "fader" he was assumed to be in Early Modern England (610). As this "Gower" introduces the action to follow, he humbly admits to his prolixity: 'Pardon old Gower, this longs the text'." By calling his speech a "text," however, Williams claims that the choric "Gower" is also claiming the superiority of moralizing words over mere dramatic spectacle, as playwright Ben Jonson also argued (600, 609). Throughout his speeches, choric "Gower" personifies the authority of Gower the "moral" poet recognized as such by Caxton and others in early modern England. However, in Williams' view Shakespeare understood the modest literary persona of the poet Gower as "a sophisticated narrative strategy that he developed to ameliorate the effects of his shocking and scandalous subject matter," including incest, discussed in the "Confessio Amantis" as inherent in human sexuality from the days of Adam and Eve (610). Like his archetype the poet, Shakespeare's "Gower" proposes to control the depiction of immoral actions with a running moral commentary: "I do beseech you/To learn of me, who stands in the gaps, to teach you" (first Chorus 7-8, p. 611). Ben Jonson famously admired Gower (612) and disparaged "Pericles," which Williams attributes to its dramatic spectacle placed "alongside, rather than in tension with, verbal testimony" (613). For all his preaching, however, choric "Gower" shows himself unable to "separate moral discourse from transgressive sexuality," any more than Pericles can "separate himself from the pervasive presence of incestuous desire . . . " Only "in the daughter" can "these contradictions [be] resolved" (614). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Williams, Deanne. Published Williams, Deanne. "Papa Don't Preach: The Power of Prolixity in 'Pericles'." University of Toronto Quarterly 71.2 (Spring 2002): 595-622. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Papa Don't Preach: The Power of Prolixity in "Pericles." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review For Gower, the Subject Index lists ninety-nine items, cited by number; on Gower-Chaucer connections and mutual influences, with annotations and some book reviews. Author/Editor Author/Editor Bowers, Bege K., ed. Allen, Mark, ed. Published Bowers, Bege K., and Mark Allen, eds. Annotated Chaucer Bibliography, 1986-1996. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. Gower Subject Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Annotated Chaucer Bibliography, 1986-1996. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 Martin's abstract: This thesis is the first full study of the transmission and reception of John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Scotland. It examines the cultural and political applicability of the 'Confessio' in Scotland, the channels through which the poem reached Scottish audiences, and the literary responses to Gower generated in the texts of Older Scots writers . . . . [T]he thesis re-examines the thematic and poetic complexity of the 'Confessio,' the reasons for its popularity in Lancastrian England, and its transmission, both as a complete work in manuscript and print form, and as expected tales . . . . [I]t provides the first full account and interpretation of the extant evidence for the circulation of copies of Gower's poetry in Scotland from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century." The remaining chapters address the "political and admonitory agenda" of the CA and "its simultaneous interest in love and kingly duty, in particular in kings as lovers, [which] was fundamental for the formulation of the discourses on kingship and self-sovereignty . . . in the works of Older Scots writers," including "The Kingis Quair," "The Quare of Jelusy," "Lancelot of the Laik," "the Gowerian presentation of the amorous monarch" in Roberts Henryson's "Orpheus and Eurydice," the "Thre Prestis of Peblis," and "King Hart," with a brief consideration of "how the Gowerian concerns identified as being taken up by fifteenth-century Scots writers were absorbed and pursued by later sixteenth-century poets such as Gavin Douglas and John Rolland." Author/Editor Author/Editor Martin, Joanna/ Published Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Oxford, 2002. Dissertation Abstracts International C70.34. 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 Readings of John Gower's "Confessio Amantis" in Fifteenth- and Early Sixteenth-Century Scotland. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 thesis investigates a particular discourse which conflated ideas of male sexuality and work. It argues that, although this lexical and conceptual elision was not new to the late-medieval period, it was invested with new significance in the particular social and economic climate of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century London. In particular the labour shortages, effected by the demographic crises of earlier fourteenth century, generated a moral fashion for discussions about work as a force for social cohesion. Despite the relevance of women's work to the contemporary economy, social and economic regeneration was often considered to be a male responsibility. In the capital, a particular commission was given to male householders to keep the peace and regulate labour, rendering men's domestic lives central to the administration of social and economic order. This thesis is organized around five major authors of the period--William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Usk, John Gower and Thomas Hoccleve--and considers how their works engaged with this discursive tradition. A strong difference is discerned between the work of Chaucer and that of his near contemporaries. The literary efforts of Langland, Usk, Gower and Hoccleve are demonstrably more anxious about the condition of society and, in their different ways, they represent narrators who are at odds with the systems of masculine ethics they propose. In contrast, Chaucer's narrators are not so central to his poetry and they exist comfortably along side a plurality of other speakers, a plurality which is unchallenged by a unifying moral code. In particular 'The Canterbury Tales' celebrates male enterprise and play in a way which demonstrates an acceptance of contemporary social challenges. At the same time, the characters of Troilus and the Canon's Yeoman are portraits of interior anxiety which operate as a commentary on contemporary moral concerns about male responsibilities." Author/Editor Author/Editor Davis, Isabel Melanie. Published Davis, Isabel Melanie. Work, Sexuality and Urban Domestic Living: Masculinity and Literature, c 1360- c 1420. Ph.D. Dissertation. The University of York, 2002. Dissertation Abstracts International C67.02. Abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Work, Sexuality and Urban Domestic Living: Masculinity and Literature, c 1360- c 1420. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Gilders, Adam Penn. Published Gilders, Adam Penn. "My Substitutes I send ye": Allegory and the Matter of Representation in "Paradise Lost." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Toronto, 2002. vii, 314 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A63.12. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Mirour de l'Omme Review "This thesis explores the allegory of Sin and Death in 'Paradise Lost' as an expression of Milton's ambivalence towards poetic representation, indeed, towards the figural as such. I argue that Sin and Death's representation of their concepts, to wit, sin and death, is mediated by their mimesis of representation. Satan's infernal progeny arrive at their concepts indirectly, substituting their own genealogy as figures for the actual genealogy--the genealogy of evil--which they figure. Milton's fable of evil, in other words, doubles as a fable of the fictions which mediate its production and interpretation . . . . My first chapter locates Milton's allegory within a literary and critical spectrum that ranges from the 'poetics' of Plato to the eighteenth century reception of 'Paradise Lost.' I examine the allegory of 'Pecché' and 'Mort' in John Gower's fourteenth century poem the 'Mirour de l'omme' [pp. 42-59] and the allegorical poetics of Spenser's 'The Faerie Queene. My second and third chapters address the division in Milton's allegory--posited, most famously, by Samuel Johnson--of the material and the spiritual. In my final chapter I investigate an exchange between the poetics and the politics of representation. Satan's deployment of Sin and Death in Book Ten as "Substitutes" (10.402), I argue, points to a figural impasse at the heart of Early Modern discourses of political representation. My treatment of this problem focuses on George Wither's 1645 poem 'Vox Pacifica' and on Milton's 'Eikonoklastes'" (ii-iv). Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Substitutes I send ye": Allegory and the Matter of Representation in "Paradise Lost." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 thesis examines the depiction of social antagonism in certain texts written in the 1380s and 1390s, in the London area. It focuses on Chaucer, looking at 'Troilus and Criseyde' and the 'Canterbury Tales' alongside other, contemporary texts. These include Thomas Usk's 'Testament of Love,' the guild returns of 1388-89, the letters accusing three London aldermen of betraying the city in 1381, 'St. Erkenwald,' Richard Maidstone's 'Concordia,' and John Gower's 'Vox clamantis.' Most critics have assumed that Chaucer's vision of society, or of social possibility, was benign. Critics writing from diverse perspectives and in various periods, have generally agreed that Chaucer's texts promote an idea of coherence, and that the author was genial and optimistic. In contrast, I argue that Chaucer's texts depict social groups as essentially fragmentary and antagonistic, and offer no hope for social - or personal - redemption. In Troilus and Criseyde, the city, and fellowship, are shown to be debased and self-seeking; equally, the Canterbury 'compaignye' is a destructive, anti-social group. Both of these works challenge an idea of teleology by suggesting that there is no final goal for society, and both refuse to offer a sense of progress or closure." Author/Editor Author/Editor Turner, Marion. Published Turner, Marion. Urban Chaucer: Fragmented Fellowships and Troubled Teleologies in Some Late Fourteenth-Century Texts. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Oxford, 2002. Dissertation Abstracts International C70.03. Abstract available 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 Urban Chaucer: Fragmented Fellowships and Troubled Teleologies in Some Late Fourteenth-Century Texts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Amans' identification of himself as "John Gower" at the end of CA is "a powerfully unsettling manoeuvre" that "heavily qualifies our ability to regard author, narrator, and lover as either stable or distinct categories," Butterfield writes (80). Gower also plays with the identity of the author in the "outer frame" of the work, including the Latin verse and glosses and the rubrics and illustrations on the page. "The multiple articulations of Gower in Confessio Amantis present John Gower as Latin, English, auctor, commentator, narrator, and amans, with several of these voicings occurring simultaneously on any one page" (82). Butterfield situates Gower's interrogation of the nature of authorship within the context of similar investigations occurring in the manuscript tradition of French vernacular works of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. She compares the revelation of Amans' identity and age, together with the famous problem of whether to represent Amans as a young lover or as an old man in the illustration that appears at or near the beginning of Book 1, to the "intricate web of confusion that Jean [de Meun] throws over his role as author [of the Roman de la Rose]" (84). But "while Jean is revealing a difference between two distinct authors, the Confessio explores this distinction within the tighter frame of a 'single' author. The doubt that grows in our minds as we watch Amans's face growing old is a kind of compressed version of that which we experience in the Rose: the doubleness involved in a single author choosing, with deceptive clarity, to lay bare his mechanism of pretence" (84). She cites Gui de Mori's compilation of a composite RR and a manuscript of Le Roman de Fauvel as examples of explorations of "the idea of authorship as coterminous with the sense of a work as a whole, and hence, with the work's physical length" (87) and of how "the author-figure was transformed into an agent of control over the material form of the book" (88) several decades before the better known example of Machaut. She also considers the ways in which fourteenth-century vernacular authors such as Machaut, Froissart, and the anonymous compiler of the Trésor Amoureux refer to their own roles in the prologues and rubrics to their works. She draws several conclusions regarding Gower. His speaker markers, first of all, "are very much part of a developing tradition in French of giving dramatic voice to the different elements of a first-person narrative," but since they are in Latin rather than in English, "Gower does not explore the power of the rubric to create a growing recognition of the vernacular author in the vernacular" (93-94). "Gower's decision to add a Latin layer to his own authorial compilation," moreover, "ranks as rare and distinctive even in the broader context of European vernacular writing" (94). "Like Machaut and Froissart before him, Gower makes use, not only of the Prologue, but also of the form of the explanatory rubric, to announce himself as author" (95). He extends these with the Latin prose and verse that usually follow the "Explicit." "Here, Gower is named three times in a final flourish, in which his principal works are named, catalogued, and described. Gower, the author, thus gains articulation through a wide variety of locations on the page. . . . Gower appears to be experimenting with different locations for authorship. . . . [and] there seems to be a desire to investigate the possibilities of meaning in these various sites" (95-96). "Gower emerges from this study of French precedents," finally, "as remarkably, perhaps unexpectedly, original. . . . Gower's use of Latin, far from being a sign of conservatism in any simple sense, seems rather a strikingly distinctive means of investigating the complex guises under which authorship was emerging in the books of vernacular writers. It is possible to understand it, in other words, not merely as a means of affirming his auctoritas, of lending gravity and cultural seriousness to his writing, but rather as a voice in a much larger dialogue, embracing vernacular as well as Latin, in which authorship is newly figured" (96). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 23.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Butterfield, Ardis Published Butterfield, Ardis. "Articulating the Author: Gower and the French Vernacular Codex." Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003), pp. 80-96. 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 Articulating the Author: Gower and the French Vernacular Codex Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 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 Jones, Terry Yeager, R.F Dolan, Terry Fletcher, Alan Dor, Juliette Published Jones, Terry and Yeager, R.F and Dolan, Terry and Fletcher, Alan and Dor, Juliette. "Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery." London: Methuen, 2003 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Biography of Gower Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review It wasn't Gower, readers of JGN will be relieved to know, and it is not giving too much away to reveal that the culprit is Thomas Arundel, the fiery Archbishop of Canterbury who, on being restored to his post with Henry IV's accession, relentlessly pursued not just Henry's enemies but his own as well, especially those who challenged either his authority over the church or its doctrine, as he himself defined it. (Arundel is perhaps best remembered for introducing the public burning of heretics to England.) Chaucer had placed himself in peril with the harsh anticlericalism of his depictions of the Monk, Pardoner, Friar, and Summoner and by daring, moreover, to present his criticism of the church in English, which would allow its dissemination beyond the community of the church itself. His attempts to appease Arundel--his "ABC," ParsT and the "Retraction"--proved inadequate, and so he was dispatched, in a manner that we will never be able to reconstruct in detail because of the care with which his murderers were able to cover their tracks, to the point of leaving no official record of his disappearance. Wait just a second, some will say. But the objections to this explanation of Chaucer's death are almost too obvious to list. The use of the lack of evidence of the crime as proof of the skill and high position of the perpetrators is a staple of all conspiracy theories (including those involving weapons of mass destruction), and as a method of argument it proves no less slippery here. Because of the very nature of their case, moreover, the authors are forced to rely on unanswered--and perhaps unanswerable--questions as much as on hard facts. In accounting for Chaucer's whereabouts following the Merciless Parliament, for instance, they write: "Did Chaucer pay a visit to Philippa's people in 1388? Did he meet Matilda Nemeg, or some of her relatives there? Did Philippa go along--and not come back? . . . The usual assumption is that she died. But where? If she died in England, where is she buried? And if she died in Hainault--perhaps nobody has been looking in the right places?" (311). On the other hand, they seem very confident of their ability to divine the thoughts of Thomas Arundel, especially as he read and pondered CT ("Beneath the fun and banter of Chaucer's pilgrims, the great prelate would have smelt the burning fire of dissidence;" 377). And in their treatment of such things as the Troilus frontispiece and the "ABC," some are going to feel that they have made a very selective use of the available evidence. So do the authors prove their case? Obviously not, and they admit it, repeatedly. Chaucer might have died in his bed or fallen off a ladder (see, inter alia, pp. 6 and 359). But the value of a book like this lies not in what it makes us believe but in what it makes us question, and the truth, which is much more obvious as a result of this study, is that we know astonishingly little about Chaucer's life after Henry's accession, and that fact, together with the absence of so much as a will, is in itself extremely puzzling, as writers before Who Murdered Chaucer? have already observed. The explanation that is offered here, suspicious because of its very preciseness, is actually no less plausible in its details than the imaginative descriptions of Chaucer's final days that have been offered by some of Chaucer's biographers, who want to believe only the best about everyone concerned, and that should cause us to doubt anything that we have ever read or assumed about the end of Chaucer's life. And despite its irritations, if this book makes us a little more cautious about taking an easy view of such matters as Chaucer's role in the political events of his lifetime, of his audience and the circulation of his works, of the state of his MSS when he died, of the date of his death, or of the consequences of Henry's usurpation on the intellectual life of the time--all subjects that the authors treat at length during the course of their discussion--then it will have served a very valuable purpose. John Gower appears frequently as a background figure to the drama that the authors describe. His revision and rededication of CA and VC--"in what resembles either a paroxysm of prudence, or just plain fear" (273)--and his composition of TC are cited, of course, as evidence of the constraints that were suddenly imposed upon writers with the change of regime (271-73); and the authors give very close attention to the passages in which Gower describes how his works came to be composed in order to demonstrate that the revisions did occur this late and not because of some earlier disenchantment with Richard (97-103). (The reviewer is cited several times in support of their argument in this section.) Elsewhere, Gower is cited as evidence of Chaucer's reputation (3), in support of the view that both he and Chaucer expected their works to be read by the aristocracy (26-28, 34), and as evidence of Richard's encouragement of composition in English (35-36). The survival of early MSS of his works (231, 239, 244-45), of his will (276), and of his elaborate tomb (285) are all cited in contrast to the fate that befell Chaucer. The authors also cite passages from both VC (67) and MO (216) as examples of the pervasiveness of Wycliffite ideas in late fourteenth-century writing in order to demonstrate the contrast between the intellectual openness of Richard's reign and the shutting down of debate that occurred during Henry's. In that regard, they provoke a question that is perhaps typical of the issues that ought to be raised by their argument as a whole. After 1399, Gower indeed tried hard to be "Henry IV's Ideal Poet," as the authors put it (171), rewriting the history of Richard's reign in order to justify Henry's usurpation. But the villain of the piece--the one who gets the blame for exterminating Chaucer--is not Henry but Thomas Arundel; and at the same time that Gower was kissing up to Henry, he presented the archbishop with a copy of VC with a very flattering new dedication (Works 4.1-2) but without any revision of the passage--so Wycliffite in tone--in which he criticizes the church and its officers and calls upon them to reform. True, he was writing in Latin, not English, but wouldn't Arundel thus have been more likely to see the work? And if Chaucer was in such peril for his depiction of the Pardoner, how did Gower, who was no more a member of the church than Chaucer was and whose condemnation was both more palpable and more severe, remain safe from Arundel's wrath? Or does VC, seen from this different angle, perhaps indicate that the archbishop wasn't quite as thin-skinned as the authors make him out to be? [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 23.2] 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 Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Methuen, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 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 Echard, Siân Published Echard, Siân. "Gower's 'bokes of Latin': Language, Politics, and Poetry." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 25 (2003), pp. 123-156. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Vox Clamantis Cronica Tripertita Review Currently fashionable attempts to "romance the vernacular," Echard writes, borrowing an expression from Sarah Stanbury, together with the prevalent characterization of Latin as an "authoritative monolith," tend to imply that "Latin does not have its own complexities, an implication which makes it difficult to read Latin as subtly--or even as politically--as we might read other languages" (124 n.). Echard challenges these and several other assumptions about the relations among the languages in late medieval England in her examination of Gower's use of Latin in VC and TC in light of Gower's own comments about language in these and in his other works. With regard to VC and TC, she argues that rather than expressing Gower's inherently conservative political agenda, Gower's choice of Latin for his two most historically oriented works "is far more complex, and more fraught with poetic uncertainties, than it has traditionally been understood to be" (130). VC contains recurring references to language, in the poet's references to the difficulties of his own speaking in Book 1, in the numerous references to the "speech which is not speech of the peasants" (134), and in the denunciations of the misuse of public rhetoric in the allusions to Wat Tyler and John Ball. The latter, combined with the poet's anxieties about his own discourse, lead to "an awareness of the perils inherent in Latin as well as the vernacular" (137). In the books that follow the opening vision, "Gower points many of the criticisms of the estates . . . in terms of the misuse and misapplication of both language and learning, and the ease with which people can be misled by educated abusers of both the spoken and written word" (139). His suspicions extend to "untrustworthy poets or, at best, unscrupulous people who take advantage of poetic words; for indeed, it seems that any wrought speech is necessarily anathema, and contrary to God's desire" (143). His comments here are echoed in MO, which in lines 14665-76 suggests that "Latin is particularly subject to misuse precisely because it carries the flavor of clerkly authority and the appeal to scholarly pride" (143), and in his often quoted praise of plain speech in Book 7 of CA. "The topos is not unusual, but Gower's almost obsessive return to it, no matter when or in what language he writes, is striking, as is his tendency to be both confident and pessimistic about plain truth's ability to be made manifest" (145). Gower's shift to English in CA might suggest that "Gower finds both his poetic voice, and unproblematic access to truth, in the voice and forms of the common folk" (145), but in fact Gower remains no less concerned about the evasive nature of language, as evidenced by his comments in the Prologue on the commons. In each of his works, therefore, Gower reveals his "deep uncertainty about the relationship between his poetic tongue(s) and the truth" (148), a concern that certainly does not exclude Latin. Echard concludes with a consideration of Gower's additions and revisions to VC and CA, including his rewriting of the account of his works in the colophon to CA. She points to Gower's "lifelong habit of aggregating, as well as revising, his texts" and his "constant--almost obsessive--desire to revisit his poetic mission" (154). In this repeated effort, "Rather than moving toward any kind of simple resolution of the dilemmas inherent in poetic speech, it seems Gower might in fact have recognized that his own multilingual, multiversioned oeuvre was in the end the closest approach he could make to truth, if her were not simply to fall silent and pray" (ibid.). "The progression from the Vox to the Confessio," she concludes, "and through the various revisions of each of these works, is not an evolution, if that means a discarding of outdated language or modes. It is, instead, an accumulation, in response to the recognition that England is a complex political space, requiring of its poet an equally complex poetic voice. Gower's head rests on three books, not one, and Latin remained with England's poet to his dying day, and beyond it" (156). It is no small part of the value of this essay that it contains, in its notes, a valuable survey of the on-going discussion of the issue of vernacularity in late medieval England. And as a bonus, Echard also provides her own excellent verse translations for each of the passages that she quotes from VC. One has to wonder how much Gower's reputation might improve in the sadly monolinguistic culture that has succeeded his if we could induce her to complete the translation of the entire poem. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 23.1.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's 'bokes of Latin': Language, Politics, and Poetry Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 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 "I argue that John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer engage in a case-based ethics, or moral casuistry, which has roots in traditions of Aristotelian ethics and Ciceronian rhetoric passed down through the Middle Ages in a wide variety of philosophical, rhetorical, and homiletic sources. Focusing on Gower's Confessio Amantis and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, I claim that the fourteenth-century poets presuppose an approach to discovering practical precepts that depends on both the rhetoric of exemplarity and the deliberation of readers. The thesis is therefore an interdisciplinary investigation into the ethical and aesthetic qualities of early English literature. As a metaethical inquiry, my study inaugurates a critique of the notion that morality in the Middle Ages was invariably restricted to a uniform system of values, a naive conception of divine-command, or prescriptive ideological statements." [JGN 23.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Mitchell, J. Allan Published Mitchell, J. Allan. "Reading for the Moral: The Ethics of Exemplarity in Middle English Literature (John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer)." PhD thesis, Dalhousie University, 2003. 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 Reading for the Moral: The Ethics of Exemplarity in Middle English Literature (John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 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 the preface to his Mirrour of Good Maners (his otherwise forgettable translation of Dominique Mancini's De Quattuor Virtutibus), Alexander Barclay explained his refusal to submit to his patron's wish that he instead translate Gower's Confessio Amantis by dismissing the poem, rather surprisingly, for its "wantonnes." Barrington takes another look at this passage, and she argues that Barclay was not so much concerned that the poem was either immoral or lascivious. He used "wanton" in a different sense, "undisciplined, ungoverned; not amenable to control, unmanageable, rebellious" (OED), referring more specifically to three characteristics of CA that Barclay catalogs in the explanation in the lines that follow: the inappropriateness of an old man posing as a young lover, of a priest speaking of anything but faith and virtue, and of the poem's attempt to mix "lust" with "lore" or "to express moral truths in tales of lust and desire" (p.19). All three of these Barrington labels as examples of "excessive performance and inappropriate role-playing" (p.196) and of "uncontained and excessive display, both linguistic and theatrical" (p.207), and she finds an analogy and model for Barclay's response to the poem in the reactions of Bishop John Fisher and Sir Thomas More to the excesses of display and performance in the 1520 convocation of the French and English kings and of their highest nobility known as the "Field of the Cloth of Gold," contrived by Cardinal Wolsey both to enact and to celebrate the peace between England and France, an event for which Barclay himself was enlisted in a minor role. Barclay's reaction to the convocation is not recorded, but much implicit criticism of the court is contained in his Eclogues. Barclay's reading of Gower, Barrrington suggests, points to "an equally skeptical reading of Henry VIII's court, with its increasing emphasis on transgressive pomp, ceremony, and role-playing" (p.207), and using Fisher's and More's views as an index of Barclay's, Barrington concludes that Barclay "sees in Gower's courtly satire the dangers inherent in the closed culture where all scripts are written by and performed for the monarch" (p.220). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Barrington, Candace Published Barrington, Candace. "'Misframed Fables': Barclay's Gower and the Wantonness of Performance." Mediaevalia 24 (2003), pp. 195-225. 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 'Misframed Fables': Barclay's Gower and the Wantonness of Performance Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 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 "Amoral Gower" is a rather short book--160 pages of text plus seven of preface. Its physical brevity is worth noting now, since in the future Watt's book may seem to loom much larger in the minds of those who come to know it only from its citation in what will be, doubtless and deservedly, a great many footnotes. Brief it is (to be fully accurate, it also contains 27 pages of notes and 17 of bibliography), but in that space it covers a great deal of ground, in disperse, rapid-fire chapters that, despite the care paid to summarizing and connection, more resemble individual essays or meditations (or, some might say, drive-by shootings) than a single argument. In every way, this is probably a wise strategy. Watt quite rightly perceives "Amoral Gower" to be a door-opening venture, not a final word. Her chief effort is to point up internal contradictions in Gower's poetry--primarily the CA, but with intermittent reference to the MO and the VC--and thereby call into question previous critical determinations that any unifying ethical vision exists in Gower's oeuvre. As she puts it: ". . . while it may initially seem unreasonable to suggest that Gower, or his poetry, rejects or even sidesteps ethical principles, I argue that the tensions, contradictions, and silences in Gower's text [i.e., the CA] expose the limitations of the ethical structures available to him and open up his text to multiple interpretations. A central argument of this study is that the poem destabilizes accepted categories of gender and sex, and that this has a profound impact on Gower's treatment of ethics and politics" (xii). The headings of sections and chapter titles convey Watt's targets, as well as hints of hommage: Introduction: "Social Gower"; Part I: Language: (1) "Gower's Babel Tower: Language Choice and the Grammar of Sex"; (2) "Writing Like a Man: Rhetoric and Genealogy"; Part II: Sex: (3) "Transgressive Genders and Subversive Sexualities"; (4) "Sexual Chaos and Sexual Sin"; Part III: Politics: (5) "Tyranny, Reform, and Self-Government"; (6) "Oedipus, Apollonius, and Richard II"; Epilogue: "Ethical Gower." "Hommage" is important in understanding what matters about "Amoral Gower" (major debts accrue to John Boswell, Carolyn Dinshaw, Georgiana Donavin, Patricia J. Eberle, Sián Echard, Richard K. Emmerson, María Bullón-Fernández, Joel Fredell, Marjorie Garber, Michael Hanrahan, Karma Lochrie, Eve Salisbury, Larry Scanlon, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jan Ziolkowski, and Freud) because in many ways what is new and significant are not Watt's particular observations about Gower's writing--most have appeared elsewhere in print before--but rather two things: first, the happy polyphony she has made, bringing so many voices together so succinctly; and second (by far more importantly) her central assertion that the discord and contradiction she finds in Gower's work derive not from poetic ineptitude but rather from conscientious authorial inclusion of these issues as quintessential elements in his view of the human condition. To put it somewhat differently: "Amoral Gower" proffers a positive reading of examples of chaos, of failure to connect, of truth as simultaneously both sides of the coin, assiduously rooted out of Gower's works in thematic rather than sequential order. Watt strives to supplant the "familiar" cohesive, ethical, and moral Gower with this alternative image, while claiming it as an authorial strategy. This is new, and the result both challenging and valid. More than a few will disagree with Watt's conclusions, but it is a measure of the evolution of Gower studies that the time has arrived when they can be drawn and claimed. Not long ago imagining Gower in Southwark faced with feminist criticism and queer theory was painfully risible. Watt gives Gower a newer face, and creates the suspicion that, just maybe, he would have seen something in it, dark and kindred though it be. [RFY, Copyright JGN 23.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Watt, Diane Published Watt, Diane. "Amoral Gower: Language, Sex and Politics." Medieval Cultures, 38 . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003 ISBN 978-0-8166-4027-0 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Vox Clamantis 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 Amoral Gower: Language, Sex and Politics Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Minnesota Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 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 Ricketts, Peter T. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Published Ricketts, Peter T.. "Knowledge as Therapy: A Comparison Between the Confessio Amantis of Gower and the Breviari d'Amor of Matfre Ermengaud." In The Court Reconvenes: Courtly Literature Across the Disciplines. Selected Papers from the Ninth Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society . . . 25-31 July 1998. Ed. Altmann, Barbara K and Carroll, Carleton W.. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003, pp. 57-69. Review The "Breviari d'Amor" by Matfre Ermengaud is a late thirteenth-century Medieval Occitan poem of 34,600 lines in rhyming couplets. Like CA, it can be considered a summa of love, and it probably derived from some of the same sources. It is structured very differently, however. Rather than a confession, the last part of the poem consists of a dialogue between the poet and the troubadours who have asked him to instruct them on the origin and nature of love. This section is preceded by a long expository treatment of the creation of the world and a recitation of biblical history which serves to situate the origins of love. The poem also contains an introduction in which the poet describes the "Tree of Love" (a device also used, according to Ricketts, by the pseudo Hugh of St. Victor and Raimon Llull) in which love between man and woman, love of children, the love of God and one's neighbor, and love of things are all represented as branches springing from a single trunk, having their origin in God by way of Nature. The tree is elaborated with the fruits that one may hope to obtain on each branch and with the leaves that one must pick in order to obtain the fruits. The fruits of sexual love are thus obtained by picking leaves that are labeled with virtues such as "largueza." The poet invokes the image of this tree again in the final part of his work. Ricketts' comments on CA are few. He steers his way between Minnis and Simpson on the relation between the Prologue and the rest of the poem, and he describes the "plot" involving Amans' education in terms largely drawn from Peck. (These three are the only commentators on CA to appear in Rickett's very brief bibliography.) The comparison between the Breviari and CA works largely in Gower's favor: by using a genuine dialogue and by embellishing it with tales drawn from "romance," Gower has created a more sophisticated structure, both artistically and morally. Someone with a great deal of patience might find it possible to mine the Breviari for analogues to some more specific aspects of Gower's poem, particularly for his notions of Nature and for his framework of the sins and virtues of love. [PN. Copyright. Th John Gower Society. JGN 23.2] 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/. 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 2003 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Knowledge as Therapy: A Comparison Between the Confessio Amantis of Gower and the Breviari d'Amor of Matfre Ermengaud Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Brown sees the battle of Nicopolis in 1396, after which "almost 20,000 crusaders" were beheaded "by the Ottomans" and "many more were enslaved," as the termination of "the Crusade era and European chivalry" (179). Gower, he argues, "was probably among those who had known enough to see the massacre coming" (179) because "he had been present when Philipe [de Mézières . . . presented his "Epistre" to King Richard urging an alliance with Charles [VI of France] and the Avignon pope against the much stronger Ottomans on the other side of the world" (179-80). In Brown's view, the Prologue to the CA, ll. 240-49 represent "at least one dissenting murmur in the English court" against taking up the crusade that ended at Nicopolis (181). Gower's opposition to the 1396 effort is the more apparent in alterations he made to Trivet's original narrative that provided the source for the "Tale of Constance." Brown finds significant Gower's omission of Tiberius' agreement with the sultan and the detail of 11,000 Saracens slaughtered: for Gower, these "would have represented the kind of pro-Crusade rhetoric being spread through England and all of Europe by reactionary propagandists like Philipe of Mézières" (184). Trivet's original narrative, Brown argues, in the end of which "the West is fully converted, Christendom is united, and the East is crushed under the avenging might of Rome," so that "all of [Pope] Urban's dreams [would] have been realized" (186), was for Gower too much like the propaganda he both feared and rejected. Hence "Gower suppresses this rhetoric. 'Moral Gower' warns against pursuing an ideology that at the close of the fourteenth century was not only obsolete, but potentially suicidal" (188). Brown concludes that "at the very least, the example of Gower's 'Tale of Constance' suggests that we reconsider such canonical medieval poets not simply as artists composing in the protective isolation of Church and court, but as active participants embroiled in a sometimes desperate ideological struggle" (188). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Brwon, Harry J. Published Brown, Harry J. "'For Worldes Good': John Gower's 'Tale of Constance' and the End of the Crusades." In The Crusades: Other Experiences, Alternate Perspectives: Selected Proceedings from the 32nd Annual CEMERS Conference, ed. Khalil I. Semaan (Binghamton, NY: Global Academic Publishing, 2003), pp. 179-89. ISBN 9781586842512. 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 "For Worldes Good": John Gower's "Tale of Constance" and the End of the Crusades. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Caie is primarily concerned with Chaucer, although he briefly treats several other writers as well (Langland, Marie de France, Boccaccio, e.g.) by way of describing how access to manuscripts, with marginalia, better replicates the medieval reading experience than modern editions. He follows Minnis in distinguishing the notion of "auctor" from "compilator," finding Chaucer more of the former and Gower the latter. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Caie, Graham. Published Caie, Graham. "New Corn from Old Fields": The "Auctor" and "Compilator" in Fourteenth-Century English Literature. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 47 (2003): 59-71. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "New Corn from Old Fields": The "Auctor" and "Compilator" in Fourteenth-Century English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review It is generally known that the "Visio" of the "Vox Clamantis" and the "Cronica Tripertita" were combined with an earlier shorter version of VC, and Carlson makes the case in this essay that an early, independent version of the "Epistola ad Regem" was also added and currently comprises "the imposed chapters 8-18 of the received book 6" of VC (VI.581-1200), described by Carlson as "some remnant (at least) of a once separate piece of writing--a coherent 'speculum principis' cast in epistolary form." The suggestion that an early "Epistola" was added to an early VC is not a new one; it was broached, though inconclusively, by John Fisher, for example, as Carlson reports. Yet, Carlson offers strong supporting arguments for the case while reviewing the structure and rhetoric of the passage as internal evidence for the claim, exploring the "quasi-internal evidence of the transmitted prose headings" (295) that clarify a self-standing structure (295). He also offers as a kind of external evidence John Bale's lists of Gowerian works found in his manuscript notebook "Index Britanniae Scriptorum" and his "Scriptorum Illustrium Catalogus," where, as Carlson puts it, "Bale sometimes reports having seen writings and kinds of manuscripts of Gower that do not now survive" (298). Bale reports in his "Catalogus," for example, the incipit line from a work he lists as "De eodem de Herico," a line which Carlson locates both in the "Epistola" of VC and in an independent 56-line poem by Gower, leading Carlson to compare closely the two versions and show, among other things, that the "Epistola" "embedded" in the VC "underwent revision, at some point or some several points, to better fit" into the larger poem (304). A second example, Bale's quotation of the incipit to what he labels Gower's "De regimine principum"--"O deus immense, sub quo dominator"--is a near match with that of an independent Gowerian poem of 104 lines. No version of this incipit, Carlson makes clear, is found in either the "Epistola" or the VC at large, but he also makes clear that there is a relation between a prose heading that accompanies the independent poem in one manuscript and several features of VC, raising the possibility that an early version of the "Epistola" can be "supposed to have begun with a prayer--something like the surviving 'O deus immense'" (306). Tracing another of Bale's incipit lines from Gower to its source in Peter Riga's "Aurora," Carlson locates the line in the "Epistola" section of VC and, again through close comparison, shows that Gower reworked Riga's original to a new purpose, for which "Bale's evidence" indicates circulation "as a separate poem" (309). Carlson characterizes the reworking he describes as a "standard, school-boyish exercise in Latin verse composition" (308), evidence in support of a general hypothesis that when such "scholastic exercises" are found in the VC they may be regarded as "the remains of originally independent shorter poems" (309). Carlson considers it a "plausible supposition" that Gower produced such "adaptations earlier rather than later in his career as a Latin poet" and proceeds to offer further plausible "supporting evidence" (310) by comparing Bale's listings, Riga's "Aurora," and related material--again from the "Epistola" section of VC. The material in this section eulogizes Edward, the Black Prince, in ways that Carlson finds similar to a eulogy for Edward III ("Epitaphium Edwardi tertii," 1377) and that, he claims carefully, "may be an embedded fragment of a once independent eulogy of the Black Prince, written at the time of his death" (312) in 1376. He offers a version of what this independent eulogy might have looked like, reconstructed from lines in the "Epistola" that praise the Black Prince and that echo the language and imagery of praise in the "Aurora," albeit largely reordered. We are not encouraged to accept Carlson's reconstruction as a new piece of Gower's Latin verse, but to accept it as a model of how Gower may have adapted an early Latin poem in the making of the "Epistola," itself revised when incorporated into the VC. And this is what Carlson ultimately offers: an approximate chronology and sequenced reconstruction of Gower's habits as a Latin poet--first, school-boyish exercises that adapt traditional material; next, modification of these exercises into what (following Fisher) Carlson calls "laureate" (317), occasional poems; and finally, further adaptation of these poems for incorporation into the capacious project of the VC. In the final section of this intricate argument (314-17), Carlson sets his hypotheses against social practices and political events of Gower's lifetime to offer a provisional history of Gower's habits with his Latin poetry. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R. Published Carlson, David R. "Gower's Early Latin Poetry: Text-Genetic Hypotheses of an Epistola ad Regem (ca. 1377-1380) from the Evidence of John Bale." Mediaeval Studies 65 (2003): 293-317. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Minor Latin Poetry Influence and Later Allusion Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Early Latin Poetry: Text-Genetic Hypotheses of an "Epistola ad Regem "(ca. 1377-1380) from the Evidence of John Bale. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article provides a careful examination of the Tale of Constance from Book 2 of the "Confessio Amantis" in terms of the shifts in attitudes toward crusading in the later fourteenth century. He leads with reference to the 1396 Battle of Nicopolis (a disaster for the European Christians), and goes from there to suggest that Gower would have been somewhat suspicious of the crusading impulse, as part of the "lawe positif" he critiques in the Prologue to the CA. When Brown brings his attention to the Tale of Constance, he examines its sources: the folkloric trope of the "calumniated queen," and Nicholas Trivet's Anglo-Norman "Chronicle." In particular, though Brown notes that Gower has to squeeze the story a bit to fit it into the book on Envy, most of his analysis will focus on Gower's changes to the details of Trivet's version of the story. He notes in particular that Gower leaves out some of the details of the treaty between Tiberius and the Sultan (the ceding of Jerusalem to the Christians), and the slaughter in revenge of "11,000 infidels" (183). He argues that for Gower had to eliminate these details because they reinforce the dangerous fantasy of the crusade, which was finding its last gasp in the fourteenth century. Brown goes on to cite scholars' analyses of Trivet's contributions to the story, as a "recollection of Christian glories from the early crusade era" (185). If, then, Trivet's story is a "Christian fantasy of the impossible Crusade" (186), for Gower, the cuts respond to the "volatile political climate and dangerous propaganda in England during the death throes of the Crusade era," especially in "response to Philipe of Mézières" (187). He concludes that this shows that Gower was ahead of many of his contemporaries in seeing that it was time for the crusades to be over. Brown's argument overall makes sense, at least for this story, and he makes a good case that Gower's work here contrasts with some of his contemporaries. He does not, however, tie this particular issue to Gower's broader preoccupation with war and peace across his oeuvre. [RAL. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Brown, Harry J. Published In The Crusades: Other Experiences, Alternate Perspectives: Selected Proceedings from the 32nd Annual CEMERS Conference, ed. Khalil I. Semaan (Binghamton, NY: Global Academic, 2003), pp. 179-91. 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 "For Worldes Good." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Oliveira provides a semantic analysis of the verb "muse" in Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and the various ways in which it has been translated in the Iberian versions of the poem. A comparative examination of the source text with the rendering of this term in diverse contexts shows how the translators were capable of understanding and conveying all the nuances of the original, despite the fact that the word was of recent coinage in its usage as a verb in the Middle English lexicon. [AS-H. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Oliveira, Maria do Carmo Correia de. Published Oliveira, Maria do Carmo Correia de. "Sobre muse e a Musa: (Com)textos de sabedoria em 'Confessio' de John Gower e Sua Tradução Ibérica." eHumanista: Journal of Iberian Studies 3 (2003): 1-18. ISSN 1540-5877 (electronic). → pdf Gower Subject Language and Word Studies 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 Sobre "muse" e a Musa: (Com)textos de sabedoria em 'Confessio' de John Gower e Sua Tradução Ibérica. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003