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 "Le Songe Vert" is a dream vision poem extant in two manuscripts – one in France and one in the Spalding MS that belonged to Henry Despenser, the crusading bishop of Norwich. In its focus on a grieving lover who must learn to love again, "Le Songe Vert" has some similarities with Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess." Seaton argues that it was likely written for Richard II, after his wife Anne of Bohemia died in 1394. It may have been written by Froissart, who arrived in England in 1395, but Seaton feels that Gower is a slightly more probable candidate for authorship. Seaton suggests that Gower, as "a poet of talent rather than of genius" (9), was likely to recycle poetic material, and so she lists a number of passages in Gower's known works that mirror (or invert) "Le Songe Vert." Seaton also feels that Gower's easy and graceful octosyllabic couplet perfected in the CA is stylistically similar to the French poem: "the light swift turn of dialogue, the unaffected handling of situations without overemphasis, these are common to both poems" (12). The fact that the poem survives in so few MSS is likely due to Gower's later change in allegiance from Richard II to Henry IV. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Seaton, Ethel Published Seaton, Ethel. "Le Songe Vert: Its occasion of writing and its author." Medium AEvum 19 (1950), pp. 1-16. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification 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 Le Songe Vert: Its occasion of writing and its author Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1950 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Though the traditional understanding of textual criticism is that it aims to bring stability," Kelemen maintains that "studying textual criticism is itself profoundly destabilizing to mass-culture notions of textuality" (104). Knowing that, students through the exercises Kelemen assigns come to understand how textual questions may elicit literary discussions. His goal is not to produce "budding editors but to produce readers who are aware of the ways in which their texts are mediated and what that mediation means" (107). Through these exercises, designed "to challenge the notion of the infallible text" (104), "students come to realize that, to edit well, one will need to understand the text and the work very, very well" (107). Thus led through "flexible and scalable" exercises of transcribing, collating, and editing proper, and then of introducing the edition, students come to recognize that in this setting "the point is not the product so much as the process" (109). [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kelemen, Erick Published Kelemen, Erick. "Learning Gower by Editing Gower." In Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Ed. Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011, pp. 104-09. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Learning Gower by Editing Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Learning to Read in Tongues: Writing Poetry for a Trilingual Culture." In Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange. Ed. Yeager, R.F. ELS Monograph Series (51). Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1991, pp. 115-129. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Review Reminds us how different the linguistically diverse culture of Gower's and Chaucer's England must have been from the monolingual culture of most modern readers. Where multilingualism was a common experience, English itself was in a state of flux, an evident cause of anxiety for some (see T&C 5.1793-98), but also a unique opportunity for those who would shape or transform the language. Gower allows us to see how English interacted with French and Latin since he wrote so extensively in all three. For one example, Yeager examines Gower's use of the near synonyms "nature" and "kynde" in his English writing. Where Chaucer used the two words with approximately equal frequency, Gower had a marked preference for "kynde," and he seems to have distinguished the words in a way that Chaucer did not. "Nature"----the Latinate, or "higher" form----refers more commonly to "Natura" as God's vicar, and with reference to humans, includes the power of reason and the necessity of moral choice, while "kynde"----from the native or "lower" register----refers to the domain of the instinctual, and thus amoral, "natural law." Gower can thus be seen taking advantage of the "polylinguistic fluidity" of his times. Yeager concludes by examining how Gower maintains his distinction between the two words in his "Tale of Iphis" (CA 4.451 ff.), and how they contribute to the understanding of his tale. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] 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 Learning to Read in Tongues: Writing Poetry for a Trilingual Culture 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 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Cites Chaucer's reference to "moral Gower" in "Troilus and Criseyde," Book V. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Reed, Henry. Published Reed, Henry. Lectures on English Literature from Chaucer to Tennyson. Philadelphia: Parry and Macmillan, 1855, p. 127. Gower Subject Gower's 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 Lectures on English Literature from Chaucer to Tennyson. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1855 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower is a distant "second in merit" to Chaucer; his CA is a "voluminous didactic poem," eclectic, but not distinctly English. [RFY1981; rev. MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Reed, Henry. Published Reed, Henry. Lectures on the British Poets. Vol. 1. Philadelphia: Parry & McMillan, 1857, pp. 49, 92-93. . Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Lectures on the British Poets. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1857 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 and Chaucer were friends and friendly critics. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Marsh, George P. Published Marsh, George P. Lectures on the English Language. Rev. ed. New York: Scribner's, 1885, p. 461n. 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 Lectures on the English Language. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1885 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Brief assessment of works and diction, with comparisons to Chaucer and Langland; knowledge of Wycliffite thought. [RFY1981; rev, MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nevin, Williams Marvel. Appel, Theodore, ed. Published Nevin, Williams Marvel. Lectures on the History of English Literature. Edited by Theodore Appel. Lancaster, PA: Intelligencer Printing Office, 1895, pp. 137-40 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism 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 Lectures on the History of English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1895 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Audiau argues that in England there was a brief flowering of amorous poetry in the style of the Troubadours. The most significant imitators were Chaucer and (especially) Gower. Audiau provides a lengthy catalogue of examples where Gower's CB echoes the sentiments and metaphors of writers like Peire Vidal and Bernard de Ventadour. Audiau acknowledges that Gower may instead have copied the Trouveres and writers such as Petrarch, but he holds out the possibility that Gower knew Troubadour poetry directly. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Audiau, Jean Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Cinkante Balades Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Published Audiau, Jean. "Les Troubadours et l'Angleterre." Paris: J. Vrin, 1927 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available J. Vrin, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1927 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Les Troubadours et l'Angleterre Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower's primary concern in the "Confessio Amantis" was with politics, specifically right kingship and governance, prompted in large part, in McKinley's view, by his growing dissatisfaction with Richard II. Ovid, McKinley argues, was particularly useful to Gower in presenting both his views of right rule and his critique of Richard, who, McKinley believes, was among the readers. of CA "Throughout the "Confessio" Gower engages Ovid to effect metamorphosis within the understanding of his royal reader or his counselors. The most important transformation in Gower occurs when Genius interprets the tale for Amans, and thus for the king: what results is metamorphosis in hermeneutical terms" (p. 108). Following David Wallace's identification (in "Chaucerian Polity") of husband and wife as stand-ins in late medieval discourse for king and realm, McKinley provides close readings of two tale from Book V of the CA "Jason and Medea" (3247-4229) and "Tereus" (5550-6074). After comparing each to Ovid's version and, as relevant, in other sources ("Óvide moralisé," "Ovidius moralizatus," "Roman de Troie"), McKinley concludes that "In rendering the Jason and Tereus tales, Gower seems to follow Ovid's emphases much more strongly that those of the medieval moralising tradition . . . . Gower's political readings are finally similar to the classical uses of such characters and dissimilar to medieval moralising versions that then read such characters as emblematic of sinful spiritual states. By following closely Ovid's own emphases, Gower in this section of Book Five presents negative illustrations of rulers who violate oaths of various kinds. When one considers the various versions of these stories available to Gower and examines his departures from them, one can see both the independence of his judgment and his determination to recreate a more truly 'Ovidian' telling of each tale. In the 'Confessio Amantis,' Gower is concerned not just with the larger rubric of Amans' confession of sins to Genius; he intends above all to employ this larger framework to mediate his own reflections on proper governance and self-rule" (p. 127). [RFY. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor McKinley, Kathryn Published McKinley, Kathryn. "Lessons for a King from John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." In Metamorphoses: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Ed. Keith, Allison and Rupp, Stephen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007, pp. 107-28. 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 Lessons for a King from John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Toronto Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review According to the editor of this volume, in his splendid essay on the many faces that Ovid has presented to poets and readers down through time, Harbert shows that Gower is "in some ways the leading Ovidian of the Middle Ages" (p. 1). Harbert does not actually do quite so much, but he does give a useful survey of Gower's use of Ovid in VC and CA. He finds that the degree and nature of Ovid's influence vary greatly in the two works. In VC, according to statistics borrowed from Stockton, Gower's borrowings range from about 2% of his lines (in Book 3) to about 12% (in Book 1, in the vision of the mob and the destruction of the city). In the passages most marked by Ovid, Gower has taken not just lines but also themes, and "as he borrows more and more from Ovid we find his work, even the original passages, becomes better not worse. Ovid is now not merely a quarry for Gower, but an inspiration" (p. 86). In CA, on the other hand, though the borrowings are more extensive (some 40 tales, in whole or in part), the framework of the confession is entirely unlike Ovid's, and Gower's octosyllabic couplets are not as well suited for translation as Chaucer's five-stressed line. Consequently he remolds rather than merely translates. His many alterations betray the influence of the common use of Ovid for exercises in both embellishment and condensation in medieval rhetorical training; of his use of Old French sources, which suggested "a tendency to concentrate more on the state of mind of the characters and less on the external world than Ovid" (p. 88); of native English romances (cf. Gower's "Acteon"); and of the Bible (cf. his "Arion"). He remains equally free of all his sources, however, and a consideration of his handling of scenes of transformation and of his "Pyramus and Thisbe" and "Jason and Medea" reveals both his independence and his ability to blend details from different texts. In contrast to VC, "the mode of narration of the Confessio is so different from Ovid's that Gower seems by this stage to regard Ovid's poetry as little more than raw material, to be manipulated and transformed without regard to its origin" (p. 96). The one place in CA that might have been inspired by Ovid comes in a surprising place, in the "palinode" and the revelation of Amans' old age: the germ for the persona that Gower adopts here is perhaps to be found in passages in the Tristia that he also drew from in his meditations on his solitude after he flees London in Book 1 of VC. Harbert has also written on the story of Tereus in Ovid and Gower in Medium AEvum, 41 (1972), 208-19. Other essays in the present volume take up single Ovidian themes in later writers and treat the influence of Ovid on Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dryden, T.S. Eliot, the Elizabethans, and the Augustans. Review by C.H. Sisson, TLS, July 15-21, 1988, p. 772.] [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Harbert, Bruce Published Harbert, Bruce. "Lessons from the Great Clerk: Ovid and John Gower." In Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art From the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. Ed. Martindale, Charles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 83-97. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Lessons from the Great Clerk: Ovid and John Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cambridge University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This essay focuses on Gower's "In Praise of Peace," which Kobayashi seeks "to situate in a cross-channel movement committed to the promotion of peace in Europe" (204-05). As her frame for comparison, she uses Philippe de Mézières' "Epistre au roi Richart" (1395) and "Songe du vieil pelerine" (1385), both of which offer advice to kings through the author-persona of "an old sage" (205) much like the self-construction of John Gower. After tipping his hat to just war theory in defense of Henry's usurpation, the English poet proceeds to his major preoccupations: the Christian-versus-Christian bloodshed between England and France, and the conflict of pope versus pope, the true source of disharmony between Christian nations (207-08). The resulting chaos leaves Christendom vulnerable to incursion by non-Christians (209). Remarkably similar themes are expressed in de Mézières' "Epistre": Christendom is diseased at the top, so Richard II and Charles VI must intervene to heal the schism by arranging a truce between England and France and proceeding to "rescue" the Holy Land (212-14). The poet Oton de Grandson, a courtier to John of Gaunt, may well have been a conduit for peace-promoting ideology between de Mézières and Gower (214-15). Another commonality with Chaucer and Gower is de Mézière's treatise defending marriage and married women (215).Both Gower and de Mézières share in the vilification of Alexander as the prototype of tyrants (218-22). A notable difference between the two authors is their opinion of crusading: de Mézières promoted it by founding a new chivalric order meant to recapture Jerusalem, while Gower was much more reserved, preferring to convert the misbelievers through preaching rather than warfare (216-17, 220-21). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Kobayashi, Yoshiko. Published Kobayashi, Yoshiko. "Letters of Old Age: The Advocacy of Peace in the Works of John Gower and Philippe de Mézières." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 204-22. Gower Subject In Praise of Peace 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 Letters of Old Age: The Advocacy of Peace in the Works of John Gower and Philippe de Mézières. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Willes' is a spirited account of the rich and often revolutionary history of Southwark, from its Roman antecedents up to modernity. Rather than approach such a complicated history chronologically, Willes organizes the book thematically, with chapters on such topics as London Bridge (Chapter 2: London Bridge is Falling Down) to the demographic breadth of residents over the years (Ch 7: A Mixed Community) to its importance in England's history as a center for health care and medicine (Chapter 10: Medical Matters) to its contribution to London's, and England's, financial security (Chapter 12: A Center for Commerce). But for all of its sprawling breadth, "Liberty over London Bridge" is grounded by two complementary areas of focus: the stories of individual people and families of Southwark (which greatly contributes to the book's liveliness) and the central role the Cathedral (from its establishment as St. Mary Overies, then as St. Saviour, and now Southwark Cathedral) played in the borough's history. It is mainly in the context of the Cathedral that Willes evokes Gower, primarily in Chapter 4: On the Road to Canterbury, which begins with a description of Gower's Tomb. The chapter spends little time on the Cathedral, or Southwark generally, in the context of pilgrimage, instead focusing on the borough's significance as reflected in its two most important medieval authors: Gower and Chaucer. "Liberty over London Bridge" appears to be targeting a more popular audience, and Willes focuses on summarizing Gower's life (including his will and his marriage to Groundolf) and the content of Gower's three major works, since they are represented in the tomb, and then similarly summarizes Gower's life and works, with special attention to Southwark's Tabard Inn in the "Canterbury Tales." [BWG. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Willes, Margaret. Published Willes, Margaret. Liberty over London Bridge: A History of the People of Southwark. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2024. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Liberty over London Bridge: A History of the People of Southwark. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Craun's study is concerned with the ethical evaluation of speech and language, and more particularly with the "Sins of the Tongue," as they appear in the "pastoral" literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (that is, in the manuals of instruction for priests that followed the Fourth Lateran Council and in the related handbooks for penitents) and in four major texts of fourteenth-century English literature. In his first chapter he surveys his corpus: it concludes some names that will be familiar to Gowerians, such as Peyraut and Frere Lorens, but also some that are much less well known, such as the long thirteenth-century treatise De Lingua (once attributed to Grosseteste) that Craun has examined in manuscript. In most of these the "Sins of the Tongue" have become a category of their own apart from the Seven Deadly Sins by which treatises of this sort are traditionally organized, but the purpose is the same, to identify, classify, and provide remedies for the various subtypes of the sin for the benefit of both priests and penitents. In his second chapter, Craun takes a closer look at both the form and the content of the treatment of speech in these works. He identifies an "Augustinian" strain in the treatises in the focus on intentionality as the ethical standard by which speech acts are to be judged and on the relation between speech and reason. The writers of the treatises are thus concerned more with "falsehood" than with "falsity" (p. 40): the relation between speakers and the social consequences of truthful or untruthful speech receives more attention than the problematic relation between sign and referent. There is also what Craun calls a "Solomonic" strain, which advises prudence and moderation over hasty or heedless speech. To enforce their lessons and to win their audience away from sin, the writers draw upon a variety of materials, including sententiae (but not usually proverbial or folk wisdom), analogies and comparisons, and narrative exempla, making both rational and emotional appeals; and Craun describes well the fragmentary and disjunctive quality that results from their copiousness (p. 67), in terms which, though he doesn't mention it here, will remind many readers of the experience of reading MO, the work of Gower's that is obviously closest to the tradition in question. In his four remaining chapters, Craun examines how both the contents of these works--their classification of the sins and their hortatory materials--and their rhetorical stance, the address of a moral authority to a penitent, have been adopted and adapted in Patience, Confessio Amantis, Piers Plowman, and fragments IX-X of the Canterbury Tales. Patience he treats as an exemplum on "murmur," a form of deviant speech given prominence in the treatises, which also provide a precedent for using Jonah as an example. The Biblical tale, Craun finds, is everywhere in the poem mediated by traditional pastoral discourse on adequate and inadequate speech; and he emphasizes the creation of the poem's speaking voice, the authoritative catechist who addresses his exemplum to a reading audience and who interprets it for them, and who at the end, portrays himself as affected by the tale and enacts the choice that the tale requires in the telling of the exemplum. In Piers Plowman, the connection is to the pastoral tradition is found in the Langland's discussion of minstrels, which may reflect his unease about the status of poetry, as others have claimed, but which also draws directly, Craun observes, from the treatises' condemnation of entertainers and of the two related sins of scurrilitas and turpiloquium. In establishing this link, Craun is able to draw a closer connection between Langland's references to minstrelsy and both his social and his spiritual concerns: the rebuke of nobles for rewarding sinful speech instead of helping the poor reveals his preoccupation with how wealth is distributed, while the contrasting uses of speech in the poem reflect his concern with the best way to achieve salvation. In the Canterbury Tales, Craun notes that the Manciple's Tale is as heavily marked by traditional pastoral discourse as the Parson's is. As the host seems to recognize, the Manciple's public criticism of the Cook is an example of the sin of Chiding as it is described in the treatises, while the Parson takes unusual care to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate reproof is his discussion of Ire. More important is the way in which each imitates the pastoral discourse from which he draws. The Manciple offers a parody, while the Parson practices the very norms that he advocates. "The Manciple parades jeeringly the inherent contradictions and limits of discourse on deviant speech in general, gutting its claims to provide comprehensive, binding norms for speech . . . [while] the Parson, in response, asserts that pastoral discourse on specific sins is a powerful instrument for moral analysis and religious formation" (p. 189). That Gower should be indebted to the pastoral tradition in a work that is concerned with a confession comes, of course, as no surprise. Formally, Craun points out, the pastoral interrogationes provide a model for Genius' role in the poem, the forma confitendi a model for Amans' replies, though not one that Gower follows slavishly. The interrogatio, for instance, was meant to follow a confession if the priest thought it incomplete, rather than precede it as is Genius' normal practice in the Confessio (pp. 134-35). The Confessio is also marked, Craun argues, by a pervasive concern with the moral dimensions of speech which derives from the same models. Seven of the confessional sequences in the poem are concerned with "Sins of the Tongue;" acts of verbal deception occupy a central position in many of the tales; and the "deviant" speech of the exempla is set in contrast to the honest self-revelation that Amans is encouraged to practice in his confession. One of the three sections of the encyclopedia of human knowledge in Book 7, moreover, is given to Rhetoric, and it is followed by an exposition of "Trouthe" which echoes many of the same ethical concerns. The comparison of Gower's work to his pastoral models reveals both similarities and differences, Craun observes, which can help us understand both Genius' and Amans' strategies. He focuses his examination of the poem on Book 7 and on Amans' lesson on Detraction in Book 2. Genius' treatment of Rhetoric departs from Latini, Gower's source for the structure of Book 7, is its emphasis on the moral use of language. He begins where the pastoral treatises do, with the origin and function of speech, deriving the moral imperative on the uses of speech from its divine creator. Both divine origins and the cognitive function of speech are invoked again in the lesson on "Trouthe." There, however, the pastoral concern is extended into the political, for what is at stake in the lesson for rulers is nothing less than civic concord and discord. The opposite of proper speech is portrayed in the lesson on Flattery. There and elsewhere in the poem, Gower reveals his consciousness of the "fragility" of the spoken word, and offers an alternative to deceit in plain, unselfish counsel. Book 7 thus sets the ethical norms for use of speech for all of the rest of the Confessio. Genius acts as the sage, providing both lessons on and a model of truth-telling speech, and Amans is the "ruler" who must rule both himself and his tongue, and whose experience as a lover "reveals the seductive appeal and destructive consequences of the deceiving word, paralleling the politically deviant speech of the flatterers" (p. 132). In his examination of the lesson on Detraction, Craun points out the many correspondences to the penitential manuals, both in form and in imagery. Along the way, he discovers a combination of logical and emotional appeals that is usually denied Genius but that echoes the multiple discursive strategies of the treatises. He is also alert to a number of differences from these sources, which he interprets in dramatic terms, as Genius' conscious attempts to influence the lover before him, as part of the recognized duty of the priest to adapt his instruction to the particular circumstances of the penitent. On the same basis, he offers a justification for Genius' inclusion of the long tale of Constance as part of the lesson on Detraction. It is, he says, a "rhetorical performance within a confessional sequence" (p. 148), not a self-contained exemplum. Amans has already acknowledged his guilt, and the tale serves less to define the sin than it does to win Amans away from his sin by illustrating the consequences both for the sinner and for his victims, appealing, along the way, to the universality of the moral norms that it teaches rather than illustrating them exclusively in terms of love. There is obviously a great deal of value in Craun's study. He is an alert and persuasive reader of Gower. He has also considered a broader range of earlier works than are usually cited, even by those who have concerned themselves with Gower's indebtedness to the penitential tradition, and his first two chapters thus provide a very useful introduction to this very important group of texts. In focusing on the "Sins of the Tongue," moreover, he has discovered an elegant way of relating the form and language of the works that he examines to their ethical teaching, following a path first laid down for the study of Gower by Schmitz in 1974. If there is any disappointment about his treatment of Gower, it is that it is too brief. His observation that language is a pervasive concern of the Confessio deserves to be demonstrated and analyzed at greater length. At the same time, there are some problems with isolating the lesson on Detraction in the way that Craun does: the tale of Constance might also be seen within a broader argument in Book 2 rather than in terms of an immediate rhetorical purpose deriving from the lesson at hand. It is also not clear how typical this lesson is of the entire poem. Craun is aware of many of the ways in which his argument impinges on current disagreements about CA, and takes time out to allude to some on these. It isn't evident, however, that he is aware of all. He points out how Gower, in contrast to some of his contemporaries, is almost exclusively concerned with the human victims of evil speech, not with the harm to the transcendent (p. 118), but he doesn't pursue the significance of his observation to our struggles over the spiritual dimensions of Genius' (or Gower's) instruction. In his discussion of Gower's debt to the penitentials, he doesn't mention R.F. Yeager's proposal (1984) that the "Sins of the Tongue" provide the explanation for the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated topics in Book 6, the only other instance I know of in which this category of sin has been invoked in the interpretation of the poem. And he equivocates a bit on Genius' role. In emphasizing the importance of Book 7 in supplying moral norms for the rest of CA, he attributes to Genius both a genuine moral authority and a practice that is consistent with it (pp. 130-31), but he takes it back at the very end of his chapter with an allusion to the critics who called into question Genius' reliability as a moral guide (p. 155). But then what are we to make of the parenthetical sentence that immediately follows? "Such ironic readings of individual sequences, however, are only fully convincing when they are grounded in the pastoral tradition of specific vices as well as in the conventions of confessional discourse." Can such readings be grounded in the texts that he has examined or can they not? Genius' moral authority is one of the most important questions that divides us in Gower criticism at this time, and where Craun might have been able to help settle the matter, he backs away. All of this is to say, of course, that he has opened up a very productive line of research, and that he has laid the foundations that others who come after may now build upon. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 17.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Craun, Edwin D. Published Craun, Edwin D.. "Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature: Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker." Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature., 31 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature: Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cambridge University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Wagner's dissertation explores the topic of English vernacular linguistic identity, particularly anxieties about using English in literary and theological texts, arguing that "even texts traditionally considered to be confident in their use of English, like 'The Canterbury Tales,' are preoccupied with the subject of unrestricted speech and the nature of the English language" (ii). Wagner considers attitudes toward the use of English in Lollard and Wycliffite discourses and reactions to them, tracing their topical concerns in works by Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, Pecock, Capgrave, and other medieval writers, with discussion of post-print reformed attitudes of Foxe, Tyndale, and More. She compares Chaucer's and Gower's views by comparing their tales of suppressed speech, the Manciple's Tale and the Tale of Phebus and Cornide, arguing that Gower's tale is essentially conservative, i.e., "largely concerned with maintaining the status quo and thus silencing revolutionaries, while Chaucer is much more concerned with the freedom to speak" (13). [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wagner, Erin Kathleen. Published Wagner, Erin Kathleen.  Linguam Ad Loquendum: Writing a Vernacular Identity in Medieval and Early Modern England. Ph.D. Dissertation. Ohio State University, 2015. vii, 315 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A81.12(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Linguam Ad Loquendum: Writing a Vernacular Identity in Medieval and Early Modern England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The essay constitutes a reply to Ad Putter's "Linguistic Change and Metre: The Demise of Adjectival Inflections and the Scansion of 'high' and 'sly' in Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve" (English Language and Linguistics 26 (2022): 471–85), which argued that while Gower and Chaucer typically did not often deviate from the grammatical principles of final -e as an adjectival inflection, the examples of "high" and "sly" in their poetry demonstrate the vulnerability of final -e when following vowels. In Putter's view, these words therefore provide examples of the gradual loss of adjectival inflections in English. Weiskott counters Putter's linguistic analysis by noting a long-acknowledged metrical subrule specifying that "the inflectional -e of weak adjectives regularly drops out of metre before a word with aft stress" (54). Putter draws on thirty-one uses of "high" and "sly" in Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve's works: twenty-eight of these, Weiskott argues, are accounted for according to this subrule. He identifies a metrical rather than grammatical reason for the alternating use or omission of final -e, which is that its usage is determined by the metrical shape of the next word in the line. Weiskott concludes, contra Putter, that "Chaucer and Gower, in their high-minded and traditionalist way, treat 'high' and 'sly' as metrically equivalent to any other monosyllabic adjective" (55). [RM. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Weiskott, Eric. "Linguistic Change and Metre: A Reply." Notes and Queries 268 (2023): 54-55. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Linguistic Change and Metre: A Reply. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article examines the inflectional system of adjectives in Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve, all of them careful metrists. Focusing in particular on the adjectives "high" and "sly," the essay argues that while Chaucer and Gower generally observe the inflection of weak adjectives, a presumptively regular and even rigid system in general was breaking down for these words in particular. The essay posits a phonological explanation--i. e., that a schwa in the adjectival inflection was more likely to disappear after a high front /i/. [TWM. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Putter, Ad. Published Putter, Ad. "Linguistic Change and Metre: The Demise of Adjectival Inflections and the Scansion of 'High' and 'Sly' in Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve." English Language and Linguistics 26 (2022): 471-85. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Linguistic Change and Metre: The Demise of Adjectival Inflections and the Scansion of 'High' and 'Sly' in Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Hsy, Jonatahn. Published Hsy, Jonathan. "Linguistic Entrapment: Interlanguage, Bivernacularity, and Life across Tongues." postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 9 (2018), 196-208. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Review Using the work of Alexandre Baril and José Esteban Muñoz, Hsy addresses how it feels "to be a multi-lingual author who is never 'at home' in any one language," specifically in the works of John Gower and Charles d'Orléans (196). Hsy begins by making the case for using contemporary theory to read medieval literature in order to consider "nonbinary social positioning" (196). Medieval multilingual authors' poetry demonstrates their experience of what Baril calls a "rhetoric of embodied entrapment" or "a feeling of 'wrong-bodness'" (198). To illustrate this argument, Hsy introduces a key term, "interlanguage," which he describes as "a phenomenon typically defined as the 'interference' of the system of rules of one language when using another language'" (198). Hsy discusses the effects of "interlanguage" on Gower's and d'Orléans's bivernacular poetry in relation to Anglophone and Francophone subjectivities. For Gower in particular, Hsy argues that we see "interlanguage" most clearly at work in his "intersex" personifications--that is, when Gower mixes grammatical and descriptive gender. In the "Mirour de l'Omme" in particular, Hsy identifies Gower's play with gender personifications as underscoring his attempt to make French more English. Hsy goes so far as to claim, "Gower puts French in 'English drag'" (201). Hsy clarifies, "Gower's 'franglais' offers a styled superimposing of features of L1 (the so-called 'natural gender' system in English) and L2 (a binary paradigm of grammatical gender in French), and his writing demonstrates both the artistic and the cognitive effects of language transfer" (202). Through such "translingual rhetorical craft," both Gower and d'Orléans trouble cultural binaries, creating "dynamically trans allegorical figures" (206). [JS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.2.] 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 Linguistic Entrapment: Interlanguage, Bivernacularity, and Life across Tongues. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Smith's primary focus is the language of London, British Library MS Harley 7334--a "Canterbury Tales"--but by way of getting to that, he extends the argument of Doyle and Parkes, regarding the five scribes of Cambridge, Trinity College R. 3. 2, by pursuing especially their Scribe D. "The trouble with D," he notes, "is that the forms he uses to replace Gowerian features and the features he retains from Gower do not . . . form any consistent dialectal picture" (108). Smith explains this by positing that "the nature of the scribe's repertoire is changing under the influence of the manuscripts he is copying" (109)--i.e., Scribe D (who probably came from North Worcestershire [110]), because he copied more Gower manuscripts than anything else, was most influenced by forms natural to Gower, "localised to two smallish areas of South West Suffolk and North West Kent" (107). Smith shows the evolution of Scribe D's spelling by comparing the chronological development of "Gowerian" forms in four manuscripts: Oxford, Corpus Christi College B. 67, London, British Library, Egerton 1991, Oxford, Bodleian Library 294, and Bodleian Fairfax 3 (100).] [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Smith, Jeremy J. Published Smith, Jeremy J. "Linguistic Features of Some Fifteenth-Century Middle English Manuscripts." In Derek Pearsall, ed. Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England (York: York Medieval Press, 1983). Pp. 104-12. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Linguistic Features of Some Fifteenth-Century Middle English Manuscripts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1983 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This study examines the role played by the exemplum in the emergence of the English literary tradition in the later Middle Ages, arguing that the mode provided a crucial vehicle for the assertion of secular moral authority. Part I traces the Christian expropriation of the exemplum from classical tradition, its development from an incidental rhetorical device to a discrete narrative genre . . . . [It} concludes with an examination of the exemplum's efflorescence in the great preaching campaigns of the later Middle Ages. Part II examines Gower's attempt in the Confessio Amantis to ground the secular exemplum's moral authority in the ideal of kingship, which, in a revision of his principal antecedent, the Romance of the Rose, he proposed as a replacement for courtoisie as the central value of aristocratic life. Part III argues that Chaucer's use of the exemplum is structurally identical to Gower's, though he doesn't tie it to any specific political value. In the incompletion of the Monk's Tale and fabular resolution of the Nun's Priest's Tale he uses the mode to dramatize both the moral inadequacy of history and the inability of secular life to escape it. Part IV traces the attempts of Hoccleve and Lydgate to generate a positive affirmation of kingship without violating Chaucer's disjunction between morality and history." [from the abstract shortened in ProQuest with permission of author]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Scanlon, Larry. Published Scanlon, Larry. Literal Authority: The Exemplum and Its Traditions in Middle English Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation. The Johns Hopkins University, 1986. Dissertation Abstracts International A48.02. Abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Literal Authority: The Exemplum and Its Traditions in Middle English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database 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 Review Olsen maintains that Gower's descriptions of the hero's eleven sea-voyages in "Apollonius of Tyre" are modeled on a "type-scene" that the poet inherited from English oral poetic tradition. She borrows her description of the "type-scene" from Lee C. Ramsay's essay on "The Sea-Voyages in Beowulf" (NM 72 [1971]): "Beowulf gives an order to his men . . . and explains the purpose of his voyage. . . . He leads the way to the ship, . . . which waits at the shore laden with treasures. . . . The men depart in the ship and sail until they can observe the opposite shore. . . . They moor the ship . . . and are greeted by a coastal guardian. . . . They leave the ship and proceed to the hall." The skeptical reader, perhaps already too familiar with such passages from other works, may ask how else a sea-journey is to be described: one important point seems to be that it is described at all, for Olsen shows that nearly all of the passages she examines in "Apollonius of Tyre" are Gower's additions to a source that gives far less attention to actual journeying. As in Beowulf, she observes, these scenes provide an important transition between episodes, and they also contribute to the characterization of Apollonius as "a hero who matures into a good king" (p. 507). Olsen also claims that Gower "deliberately plays with the expectations of his audience" (p. 500) in departing from the "type-scene" she has defined in his accounts of the voyages of Thaise, the female hero, and of Taliart, the villain. The sea-voyages also function symbolically, suggesting both the overcoming of adversity in life and the journey towards death, both of which Olsen finds significant to the structure of CA as a whole. She concludes that Gower adopted the traditional "type-scene" for deliberate effect, and that we can better appreciate his literary artistry by being aware of his debt to oral-formulaic tradition. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Olsen, Alexandra Hennessey Published Olsen, Alexandra Hennessey. "Literary Artistry and Oral-Formulaic Tradition: The Case of Gower's Appolinus of Tyre." In Comparative Research on Oral Traditions: A Memorial for Milman Parry. Ed. Foley, John Miles. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1987, pp. 493-509. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Literary Artistry and Oral-Formulaic Tradition: The Case of Gower's Apollinus of Tyre Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Slavica, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Scattergood attempts to discover what, if any, books were read by members of Richard's court through careful collection and analysis of historical documents and literary references; he concludes that, although the situation "is not a simple one . . . circumstances for the production and dissemination of literature were obviously not unfavourable," and that Gower's work was near the center of this activity. Author/Editor Author/Editor Scattergood, V.J Published Scattergood, V.J. "Literary Culture at the Court of Richard II." In English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages. Ed. Scattergood, V.J and Sherborne, J.W. London: Duckworth, 1983, pp. 29-44. ISBN 0715616374 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 Literary Culture at the Court of Richard II. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Duckworth, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1983 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database 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 Review Examines Gower as an early English example of a court-supported poet, with comments on laureation. [RFY1981; rev. MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Holzknecht, Karl Julius. Published Holzknecht, Karl Julius. Literary Patronage in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1923, 58, 69n29, 79, 82-83, 137, 147-49, 159, 171, 183, 194, 215, 223, 233 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Literary Patronage in the Middle Ages. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1923 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In Chapter 2, Hadfield considers the "Visio Anglie" ("Vox Clamantis" Book I) together with "Piers Plowman" (essentially A-Text) and Chaucer's tales of the Knight, Miller, and Reeve, concentrating on the latter two. Not surprisingly, he concludes a discussion--which he recognizes is "designed for readers who are not specialists in medieval language" (109, n. 1)--this way: "While Langland opted for the peasants, Gower sided with the nobility. The urban-dwelling Chaucer would seem to have situated himself somewhere in between" (109). An historian, Hadfield is consequently concerned to present the social environments described in each selection. Gower, here, comes across as one who knows agriculture, as a Kentish landowner (106), and hence the nature of peasant labor. Indeed, his description of medieval three-estate structure, is somewhat nuanced. He represents Gower's anger at the revolting peasants as derived from a concern for social stability ("Throughout the poem Gower reminds his readers that one of the worst aspects of the rebellion is its attempt to subvert the proper social order" [106]), yet also calling attention to rather mournful lines (in Rigg's translation) on the appearance of abandoned, and hence unproductive, fields (106). On the other hand, "in making the case Gower was surely being conspicuously reactionary and deliberately eliding the distinction made in English law that separated the free and the unfree, asserting the need for a noble class to control society as in other European countries. Like Chaucer and Langland his class-based politics were not founded on an obvious external reality--at least, not one that currently existed--but an ideologically-driven ideal" (109). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hadfield, Andrew. Published Hadfield, Andrew. Literature and Class: From the Peasants' Revolt to the French Revolution. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Biography of Gower Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Literature and Class: From the Peasants' Revolt to the French Revolution. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Discusses Gower's treatment of sermon materials and their presence in all of his major poems. Sees sermons as one of Gower's primary sources. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Owst, G. R. Published Owst, G. R. Literature and the Pulpit in Medieval England: A Neglected Chapter in the History of English Letters and of the English People. 2nd rev. ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966, pp. 97, 121, 187, 208, 212, 230-31, 260, 292, 353, 410, 414, 566. 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 Literature and the Pulpit in Medieval England: A Neglected Chapter in the History of English Letters and of the English People. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1966 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review 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 Author/Editor Author/Editor Baker, David Philip. Published Ph. D. Dissertation. Durham University, 2013. Open access at http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/7716/ (accessed January 28, 2023). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Minor Latin Poetry Review From Baker's abstract: "This thesis assesses the extent to which fourteenth-century Middle English poets were interested in, and influenced by, traditions of thinking about logic and mathematics. It attempts to demonstrate the imaginative appeal of the logical problems called 'sophismata,' which postulate absurd situations while making use of a stable but evolving, and distinctly recognisable, pool of examples . . . . Clarifying the "sophismatic method" as an important aspect of the "symbiotic relationship" of medieval logic and mathematics, Baker tells us, he goes on to study "the prominence of logical and mathematical tropes and scenarios in the works of . . . Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower and the 'Gawain'-poet," treating "The Summoner's Tale," "The Nun's Priest's Tale," "Troilus and Criseyde," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," "Pearl," and "Patience," as well as the "Confessio Amantis," addressing in these works, "problematic promises; problematic reference to non-existent things; problems associated with divisibility, limits and the idea of a continuum; and, most importantly, problems focused on the contingency, or otherwise, of the future." In Chapter 3, "Causation and the Future in the 'Confessio Amantis'" (pp. 186-239), Baker suggests that Gower's familiarity with these concerns relates to his acquaintance with Ralph Strode, perhaps evinced in "Eneidos, Bucolis," the authorship of which Baker explores. Whether written by Strode or by Gower himself, Baker argues, the "Eneidos" represents "Gower's attempt to recover for his audience the 'philosophical dimension'" of the CA in order to help escape "the distinction between 'moral' and 'philosophical' . . . with which Chaucer had unfortunately trapped him" (197) at the end of "Troilus." Baker then demonstrates the depth of concern with philosophical issues in CA by discussing causation, future contingency, aging, mutation, dicing, probability, chance, and determinism in the poem. In several of these discussions, Baker illuminates Gower's work by expanding on Nicolette Zeeman's comparison of CA with "the widely-circulated pseudo-Ovidian 'De vetula' of the thirteenth century" (197), a work Baker aligns with medieval logicians on his way to demonstrating successfully that Gower should not be considered only a moral poet. [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 Literature, Logic and Mathematics in the Fourteenth Century. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bentick explores the conceptualization of vernacular English poetry depicting alchemy during the medieval and early modern period, arguing that alchemy's mystical reputation lingers because "its literature is not only read by . . . those who have the chemical acumen to decipher its operations, but it is also read by . . . interested readers who would not have the faintest idea how to [interpret the art]" (2). In Chapter 2 he claims that Gower's understanding of alchemy was influenced by the ideologies of late medieval alchemists such as Roger Bacon and pseudo-Ramon Lull (64). In his analysis of "Mirour de l'omme," "Vox Clamantis," and the "Confessio Amantis," Bentick further suggests that Gower's image of alchemy is "rooted in ideas of the microcosm/macrocosm and inextricably linked to social improvement" (64). According to Bentick, the CA in particular "sits in a tradition that sees a template for social reform in the transformative power of the alchemical promise" (16). For Gower, human sin is entangled with the mutability of the sublunary world, and both division and change emerge as symptomatic of this postlapsarian decline (67). In Gower's time, successful and noble alchemists are of a bygone era, and "it is the degenerated wits of his age that abuse the 'trewe' science of alchemy with their ignorance and fraudulence" (73). As Bentick puts it, "Gower was interested in how alchemists could rid the world of impurities and imprint something more noble onto raw materials," which he links to the notion of humankind as microcosm (76). Despite its failings in contemporary times, however, "alchemy proves to Gower that if people were as intellectually busy as those who preceded him, then the world could be improved" (82). Bentick concludes that "Gower did not think himself up to the task of understanding alchemy and yet his belief in the possibility of doing so gave him [ . . . ] hope in the possibility of reform" (169), which in turn helped to popularize vernacular poems about alchemy among lay communities in the late medieval and early modern period. [CR. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bentick, Eoin. Published Bentick, Eoin. Literatures of Alchemy in Medieval and Early Modern England. Rochester, NY : D.S. Brewer, 2022. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Mirour de l'Omme Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Literatures of Alchemy in Medieval and Early Modern England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Harder argues that Gower's tale of Lucrece makes eclectic use of both Livy and Ovid's versions of the story. In particular, from Livy Gower borrows specifics about the siege of Ardea, the kinship of Collatine and Arrons, the mention of a companion for Arrons on the journey to Lucrece's house, and the bearing of Lucrece's body to the market place or forum. Gower's use of two different sources (likely open by his side as he composed) is also the reason why Gower mistakenly treats Collatia as both a section and gate of Rome. The only detail that neither source explains concerns Gower's naming of the rapist as Arrons rather than Sextus. Harder wonders whether the political context of the 1390's may have some bearing on the change, but ultimately admits that he has "yet no solution" (5). Harder concludes with some observations about Chaucer's use of Livy, Augustine, and Ovid. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Harder, Henry L Published Harder, Henry L. "Livy in Gower's and Chaucer's Lucrece Stories." Publications of the Missouri Philological Association.2 (1977), pp. 1-7. 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 Livy in Gower's and Chaucer's Lucrece Stories Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1977 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 Helena Znojemská deftly unravels the complex interplay of gender dynamics, transforming the 'loathly lady' motif from a mere narrative device into a profound commentary on power, transformation, and identity. Znojemská argues that the motif functions to interrogate and destabilize traditional gender roles and power dynamics before re-instating the status quo, even if this is not sustainable. In medieval literature, gender structures are often portrayed as rigid and hierarchical, with women typically positioned within a framework of submission, subservience, or objectification. However, texts like "The Tale of Florent," "The Wife of Bath's Tale," and "The Wedding of Dame Ragnelle" complicate these binaries by featuring women who challenge traditional gender roles through transformative encounters. These stories offer a nuanced exploration of how gender and power are intertwined, reflecting both societal expectations and the potential for female autonomy within the constraints of medieval norms. Znojemská's interpretation of gender structures highlights the ways in which the 'loathly lady' figure in medieval literature serves as both a challenge to and a negotiation of traditional gender norms. Her ability to draw connections between the texts offers a cohesive analysis that reveals recurring themes of transformation, agency, and subversion of gender norms. Additionally, Znojemská's interdisciplinary approach, blending literary analysis with gender theory, enriches academic discussion by providing fresh insights into how these texts interrogate medieval social structures. As academic discourse surrounding the 'loathly lady' figure remains limited, this analysis of the complex implications of gender roles within the text is a valuable contribution to existing scholarship while offering the potential for further discussion. [CM. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Znojemská, Helena. Published Znojemská, Helena. "Loathly Ladies' Lessons: Negotiating Structures of Gender in 'The Tale of Florent,' 'The Wife of Bath's Tale,' and 'The Wedding of Dame Ragnelle.'"Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philologica (2022): 21-37. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Loathly Ladies' Lessons: Negotiating Structures of Gender in "The Tale of Florent," "The Wife of Bath's Tale," and "The Wedding of Dame Ragnelle." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Passmore, S. Elizabeth Published Passmore, S. Elizabeth. "Loathly Lady Transformed: A Literary and Cultural Analysis of the Medieval Irish and English Hag-Beauty Tales." PhD thesis, University of Connecticut, 2004. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review "This dissertation examines five extant Middle Irish kingship tales . . . along with four Middle English Loathly Lady tales (Gower's Tale of Florent, Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, and The Marriage of Sir Gawain) to demonstrate their connection through the role of the Loathly Lady as counselor to the male protagonist. The themes of kingship (encompassing all aristocratic leadership) and counsel (focusing on the role of the Loathly Lady as advisor) are viewed through historical and cultural factors in eleventh to twelfth century Ireland and fourteenth to fifteenth century England. . . . Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Loathly Lady Transformed: A Literary and Cultural Analysis of the Medieval Irish and English Hag-Beauty Tales Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Mooney argues that not only were London scribes ca. 1400-1476 responsible for vernacular literary manuscripts not working in scriptoria, they were not working in shops, either--but instead, "many of them were not members of the Textwriters' Gild ... and even worked in their homes or lodgings" (184). Mooney emphasizes the distinctions "vernacular literary" in her analysis, since the copiers of manuscripts of literary importance were not producing "the kinds of texts that were in regular demand in high numbers: indulgences, Bibles, Latin rites, breviaries, books of hours, primers, other schoolbooks, university set texts and so forth" (184). Those were the province of the Textwriters' Gild, since they supported the trade; nor were vernacular literary MSS produced by "the 'scriveners,' who after 1373 were a distinct gild of the Writers of Court Letter, really attorneys or notaries public, who could draft legally binding documents" (184) or by the "stationers," who were largely "retailers, selling second-hand and imported books and paper . . . perhaps also pens and plummet and so forth" (185). Rather, vernacular literary books were most often bespoke products, made by "'free-lance' scribes," some of whom (about a third, based upon surviving evidence) were foreign-born, "and it seems probable that many were working part-time at copying books after long hours put in at other full-time jobs, whether as canons, vicars or schoolmasters, as legal scriveners or as clerks in government offices in London and Westminster" (186). Crucially, such scribes needed to reside outside the London city limits, or in one of the several liberties within the City, to avoid violating gild laws, and much of Mooney's chapter seeks to identify who they were and where they lived. Hoccleve, partly responsible for the Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.2 Confessio Amantis, was one such (194-95; 197); another was the French-born "Richard Franceys or Ricardus Franciscus" who "appears to have moved from one government office to another, or possibly to have taken commissions from them as a free-lance scribe living outside the City or within one of the liberties of the City" (199). Franceys may have been "moonlighting out of the heralds' offices in the liberty of Blackfriars when he made copies of English vernacular works .. .including Gower's Confessio Amantis" (i.e., New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M 126) (200). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Socity. JGN 281.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Mooney, Linne R Published Mooney, Linne R. "Locating Scribal Activity in Late-Medieval London." In Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England. Ed. Connolly, Margaret and Mooney, Linne R. [York]: York Medieval Press, 2008, pp. 183-204. ISBN 9781903153246 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 Locating Scribal Activity in Late-Medieval London. 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 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Discusses the social geography of the three adjacent communities with which Gower had connections. He explores the difficulties of reconstructing Gower's audience, particularly of associating him directly with those who are though to have made up the "Chaucer circle." He also notes some paradoxes in the relation between Gower's writing and his life: that the man who spent nearly his entire life in Southwark should have so little to say about the city, its government, or the majority of its citizens; and that a poet with so little personal or professional ties to the monarchy should be been so preoccupied with the nature and responsibilities of kingship. "Gower's uniquely urban condition," he concludes, "as a non-bureaucratic, non-aristocratic, privately employed professional, allowed him to develop a sense of the poet that was elevated in its autonomy, in its self-regard and in its ambition--but that required a strong and attentive monarch to legitimize his voice and to realize his social visions" (60). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Epstein, Robert Published Epstein, Robert. "London, Southwark, Westminster: Gower's Urban Contexts." In A Companion to Gower. Ed. Echard, Siân. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004, pp. 43-60. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource London, Southwark, Westminster: Gower's Urban Contexts Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Literary interest in old age," Feinstein claims, "has concentrated largely on the various stages of man topos, the 'senex amans' of fabliaux, and stylized poetic complaints, beginning with mid-twentieth century exegetical interpretations, and continuing with more recent feminist and historicist readings." (23) Feinstein's approach incorporates both of the latter. She examines three texts: Gower's "Tale of Florent," Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale," and "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle," focusing on the "loathly lady" figured in each, and the protagonists' responses to her. Citing historical and demographic records she contextualizes--and justifies--the argument, that after the Black Death social norms permitted more frequent marriages between young men and older, wealthier widows (24-25, 28). Understanding "social history," Feinstein asserts, makes "nuanced readings open to seemingly contradictory attitudes and representations" both possible and necessary. (26) Thus, "Gower's 'Tale of Florent' offers multiple points of view on male and female desire in young and old as well as on the power and the impotency of both." (26) Notably, unlike most studies of "Florent," Feinstein stresses the inability of so old a woman as Florent's "loathly" bride to bear children--he "stands to be the last of his line." But because she has the answer to the question he needs to find, in order to save his life, she offers a chance "to continue his line and whatever powers are associated with it" (27). Implicit is the connection with "social history" that Feinstein leaves unstated: the "loathly lady" of romance is empowered by knowledge precisely as were elderly widows, with inherited wealth. This is true in all three tales, she finds, pointing out that even (or especially, perhaps) as old women, the "loathly ladies" already possess the sovereignty they say all women want (41). Turning to the recognition of "Amans/Gower" of his own aged state in Venus' mirror at the conclusion of the CA, Feinstein points to the resemblance to the romance plot, albeit in reverse: perpetually young and beautiful Venus helps "Gower…as author, if not as lover…transform old age into youth" (31). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 36.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Feinstein, Sandy. Published Feinstein, Sandy. "Longevity and the Loathly Ladies in Three Medieval Romances." Arthuriana 21 (2011): 23-48. 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 Longevity and the Loathly Ladies in Three Medieval Romances. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database 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 Batkie locates "moral Gower" in the version of the poet's verse chronicle "Cronica Tripertita" found in MS Hatton 92, rather than (or in addition to) in Chaucer's reference in "Troilus and Criseyde" 5.1856. The only extant manuscript version of CrT found unattached to the "Vox Clamantis," the Hatton CrT is accompanied "compilationally" by various kinds of moral materials--axioms, proverbs, fables, parables, exempla, etc.--and Gower's poem is presented in a way that it "resonates with the strongly exemplaric and moralizing agenda of the collection as a whole" (36). Marginal references to Gower and to the VC near the opening of the Hatton CrT--marginalia added to the text in a sixteenth-century hand as Batkie observes--are occasion to explore the exemplarity of CrT for readers aware of the absent-but-present VC. Batkie then concentrates on the prologues and openings of the Hatton CrT and the CrT found in All Souls 98 (Macaulay's base text), showing that Hatton "re-ordered pieces of the opening of the text" (48) in ways that "favors exemplarity over chronicle" (49), in effect, emphasizing a moral Gower rather than a political one, even when the VC is not present. Her arguments are complicated, involving attention to several instances of "ghostly" (37) absent presence, to temporal slipperiness, and to negotiations "between the permanent and the ephemeral, between what remains behind and what disappears in time" (43). Such concerns, she maintains, define "the parameters by which Gower understands his chronicle form" (44), casting "history as exemplarity," a "relationship" which the "scribes and readers of MS Hatton 92 take . . . to heart and capitalize on" (45), bringing the CrT "in line with the other texts of the manuscript," perhaps compelling similar readings of the other, shorter Latin poems by Gower in the manuscript, and perhaps "preempt[ing] some readings of Gower's work even as it opens up others" (52). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Batkie, Stephanie L/ Published Batkie, Stephanie L. "Looking for Richard: Finding "Moral Gower" in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 92." In Martha Driver, Derek Pearsall, and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books. Publications of the John Gower Society, no. 14. Rochester, NY: Brewer, 2020. Pp. 33-53. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Cronica Tripertita Vox Clamantis Minor Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Looking for Richard: Finding "Moral Gower" in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 92. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Readers coming to "Lordship and Literature: John Gower and the Politics of the Great Household" eager for fresh insight into Gower's poetry may initially be somewhat daunted. Lest any be beguiled by the subtitle, "Lordship and Literature," as the title states--and not John Gower--is what occupies the bulk of this book. The Confessio Amantis (nominally Kendall's central text) is not really Kendall's subject. Rather, as he clarifies (64): "Gower's poem offers us a lens on [sic] a landed habitus in the late fourteenth century. To explore the poem in this way will uncover the lordship economics that it disparages, promotes, or takes for granted in service, hospitality, marriage, dispute resolution, and kingship." For Kendall, thus, CA is "a lens," an instrument valuable to take sightings of the material that truly holds his interest "lordship economics . . . service, hospitality, marriage, dispute resolution, and kingship." In many ways, one thinks, "Piers Plowman" (about which Kendall says very little) or "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (about which he says a good deal, all of it quite thoughtful) might have served his turn equally well. Nevertheless, readers in search of Gower should persevere. Kendall can be a perceptive and credible witness to Gower's poem, notably in Chapter Five, "Women as Household Exchange in Genius's Tales," and Chapter Seven, "Retribution as Household Exchange in Genius's Tales." In both he approximates close readings--in the former case, of the tales of Leucothoe, Virginia, Dido, Phyllis, Rosiphelee, Medea, the princess of Pentapolis whom Apollonius marries, Jephte's daughter, and Rosemund; in the latter, of Mundus and Paulina, Constance, the False Bachelor, Tarquin, Arruns and Brutus, Virginius, and Orestes. Kendall's detailed readings of Virginia, the princess of Pentapolis, Rosiphelee and Rosimund as women both exchanged and resistant especially justify his careful study of Levi-Strauss, Gayle Rubin, Maria Bullon-Fernandez, and Larry Scanlon. Similarly, when he selectively applies Richard Firth Green's "Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England," Scanlon, and J.G. Bellamy to the False Bachelor, and, in a lesser degree, to Virginius, he is particularly thought-provoking. He is perhaps at his best in his treatment of Orestes, a "narrative [that] distinguishes Orestes from illicit killers, and in so doing creates a positive exemplum less against murder than for the ordering powers of reciprocalist (a term Kendall borrows from Felicity Heal, to mean "aristocratic") lordship" (234). It is the tensions in the tale that draw Kendall's attention, and he rightly makes the most of them as extendable into the Confessio's larger structure and concerns. In sum, then, there is in "Lordship and Literature" much matter, and many reasons to invest time in its study. Historians of a certain kind, and social theorists, will find it challenging. And if there is not a great deal new in its greater argument for those familiar with Gower's poetry (Kendall's major thesis--that "By deftly demeaning Amans and the magnificent politics to which he aspires, the Confessio supports a notion of a political community dominated by the mutual interests, aid, and responsibilities of gentry, nobility, and royalty" (264)--sounds rather like Russell Peck's "Kingship and Common Profit" in a new bottle), his closer readings, once rescued from the verbiage, are many of them illuminating, original, and instructive. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kendall, Elliott Published Kendall, Elliott. "Lordship and Literature: John Gower and the Politics of the Great Household." Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008 ISBN 9780199542642 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 Lordship and Literature: John Gower and the Politics of the Great Household. 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 2008 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 This article has two foci: first, Balestrini reviews the circumstances in which late fourteenth-century English poetry developed and how authors like Chaucer and Gower would, within the next two centuries, become canonized and recognized as founders of English literature. Second, she examines the ways these authors contributed to make this period distinctive, not only through their usage of the vernacular but also with the construction of a public voice and the erection of literature as vehicle to create a sense of belonging to a cultural community. [AS-H. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Balestrini, María Cristina. Published Balestrini, María Cristina. "Los escritores ricardianos y la consolidación de la literatura en inglés medio." De Medio Aevo 10.1, 15 (2021): 169-79. 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 Los escritores ricardianos y la consolidación de la literatura en inglés medio. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter Published Nicholson, Peter. "Love and Ethics in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005 ISBN 9780472115129 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review Peter Nicholson's "Love and Ethics in Gower's Confessio Amantis," weighing in at close to 450 pages, mightily qualifies as what would once have been deemed "a hefty tome." Especially given the reluctance these days of publishers to commit to books of such size, it says much about the risen status of Gower studies internationally that the University of Michigan Press backed this capacious project. But like all fine books, which are themselves their own best recommendation, Nicholson's study needs no external hand-up from a burgeoning critical interest in Gower. "Love and Ethics in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'" speaks up for itself, confidently, often eloquently, thoroughly justifying its substantial heft. As Nicholson is clearly aware, however, his book will discomfit readers of a certain stripe, who will find it composed in a style of "forty years ago," as he himself (somewhat self-deprecatingly) has it in his preface (p. v). Apparently he means by this "close reading," and what he has produced is ample demonstration of why such an "old fashioned" methodology may still be the most effective approach to the multilayered CA, which as a work has largely eluded critical approaches "plus au courant." Taking as his starting points the notions first, that, to avoid the errors of the three blind Brahmins describing an elephant, the poem needs to be addressed not in parts but whole; and second that a half-century of focus on the CA as a political document is quite enough, Nicholson sets out to read Gower's poem from beginning to end, and "to argue that the principal subject of the Confessio Amantis is human love; that Amans is a quite ordinary mortal with his share of virtues as well as sins; that the issue in the poem is not whether Amans should be in love but rather how he might become a more virtuous lover; and most importantly of all, that the moral structure of the poem is the fundamental harmony rather than opposition between God's ethical demands and love's" (p. vi). A fairly ho-hum list, at first glance, and thus initially it seems odd that these are dubbed "rather large claims" (p. vi). Who doubts Amans' piebald mortality, or that a "Lover's Confession" would be about love? The validity of Nicholson's estimation--and the originality of his effort--very quickly become clear, however. Nicholson begins with an extraordinary opening chapter describing Machaut's influence on the CA which is sufficiently perceptive about the "dits amoreux" as to be independently publishable, and will no doubt be mined assiduously by "romanistes." Ultimately, however, his claims commit him to reading the CA not (as has been so often the case) primarily through the lens of its sources but, rather, transparently, one might say--altogether on its own terms. Hardly a novel notion in another field, but something Gower criticism has commonly avoided, given the magnitude of the task. The preference has been to read selectively, extrapolating conclusions about the full poem from this example or that, in accord with the fashion of adapting the text to theory. Nicholson, on the contrary, seeks to account for every tale, as well as most of the dialogue between Amans, Genius, and Venus, pressing his case that only such slow, digestive thoroughness adequately delivers Gower's thoughtful construction in its varietous dimensions. In the process he develops claims--all challenging, and for the most part well supported--that Gower organizes the eight Books of the CA in different ways, each requiring a separate imaginative response; that frequently individual tales are set out in clusters, informing and answering each other; that Books VII and VIII should be read more or less as a unit. This last idea, as Nicholson notes, he derives from a passing observation of John H. Fisher's which the latter failed to develop, and it may serve as a weather-vane for how Nicholson himself uses sources. More than a decade as bibliographer for the John Gower Society has given Nicholson a familiarity with the full range of Gower scholarship that is almost unique, and his own study, unsurprisingly, benefits immensely from his years of concentrated reading. Of those several claims named above, Nicholson's treatment of two undoubtedly will prove exceptionally influential. One is his treatment of Amans. Nicholson strives to view Gower's figure of the Lover with heretofore-unknown acceptance, crossing frequently into empathy. The result is an Amans no longer the familiar monochrome mouthpiece in a two-dimensional frame, but rather a figure altogether larger, a full-blooded person sprung free of the confines of allegory, engaged in an (ultimately bootless) affair of the heart in complex and legitimate ways. As Nicholson sees it, we are meant to care about Amans--a consideration itself permitting something larger, an in-depth evaluation of Gower as maker of fictions. (Indeed, "Love and Ethics in Gower's Confessio Amantis" frequently has this quality of Russian dolls, as each discovery progressively reveals another.) Yet it is when Nicholson convincingly integrates Amans' feelings, as microcosm, with Gower's over-arching enterprise, to demonstrate in the macrocosm the multivalent power of love as it emanates from God and governs every facet of society and creation, that his work moves to a level above, and provides rich, original insight. Nicholson's is thus a more coherent, and consequently more satisfying, understanding of the CA and of Gower's art therein than any yet offered. Not that his will be the last word: there are various moments, particularly in his discussion of the controversial excursus on the pagan gods in Book V (and Gower's attitudes toward classical material generally), and his account of the inspiration and plan for Book VII, where the argument seems driven forward rather too quickly. From time to time, too, in making the case for Gower's use of Machaut Nicholson forgets how combinative Gower was in his use of sources, especially in the CA. And one might offer as well, without summoning revenants, that there are political messages strewn here and there amid the "locus amoenus." But such concerns have their airings elsewhere, and in no way detract from Nicholson's achievement. Clearly, not unlike Fisher's seminal "John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer" (1964) in this as in much else throughout, "Love and Ethics in Gower's Confessio Amantis" is a book that will engage and enable Gower scholarship for a generation at least. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 25.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Love and Ethics in Gower's Confessio Amantis. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Michigan Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book 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 Kelly's book takes the middle road between the doctrine of courtly love as formulated by critics like Gaston Paris and C. S. Lewis and the sharp critique of such a tradition by exegetical critics like D. W. Robertson, Jr. Kelly disputes the idea that courtly love had to be adulterous and summarizes the medieval literary ethos as follows: "preference for marriage, but priority to love" (34-35). The book is rooted in an analysis of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, but has a chapter on John Gower as well as important sections on the Ovidian tradition, clandestine marriage, and canon law. Kelly argues that Gower and Chaucer both tie love and marriage to "trouthe" or loyalty. Yet, while Gower praises marriage, he does not always condemn adultery. The reason "lies in the nature of the exemplary technique … [as] an exemplum is normally told to illustrate one lesson alone, without much worry about whether it contradicts earlier or subsequent lessons" (131). Some characters also appear in multiple stories, which creates further inconsistencies. But Gower did not feel it necessary to iron out all the problems, since he clearly sets out his views on marriage elsewhere in the poem (135). For instance, at CA 7.5372-5383, Gower describes how reason is to modify nature and its instincts, although reason does not exclude pleasure. This does not resolve all the difficulties in stories such as those of Iphis or Canace, but Kelly feels that Gower generally believes that reason has to put a limit to nature. In discussing the treatment of incest in CA 8, Kelly returns to the question whether nature is not itself reasonable. His answer keeps nature and reason separate: "Natural law usually includes the moral law, but Gower makes it clear that for him, at least at times, it does not. Rather, natural law is the same law that God has given to men and animals alike; and positive law in this context refers to the law of reason that God has given only to men" (143-44). Nevertheless, nature does not merely consist of compulsive desire, and Kelly dismisses Genius's comments about the "absolute irresistibility of nature" in the story of Canace: "But the conclusion that we should draw from this is simply that Gower has once again let his confessor run away with himself; by overenforcing one lesson [against wrath] he damages another" (144). Kelly discusses at some length why the end of Book 8 seems to turn away from love. Certainly, the sudden turn away from love is not atypical for medieval narratives: "particularly at the end of treatises of spiritual instruction . . . one is to be left looking at the shortest way to heaven" (159). This focus on the foolishness of love may also explain why Gower omitted in later copies of the poem Venus's request to Chaucer to make his testament of love. Despite the concluding turn to charity as the better love, "We must not, however, allow this concluding description to make us forget that the treatise also marks out a via media of honest love, 'That alle lovers myhten wite / How ate laste it shal be sene / Of love what thei wolden mene' [8.2000-2002]" (160). Kelly also sees this via media in other parts of the CA, such as the story of Sara and Tobias (275-80). Similarly, Ballade 4 of the Traitie presents a good example of how the theoretical view of marriage (that its purpose is for companionship, children and the avoidance of lechery – according to MO 17197ff.) runs counter to more instinctive attitudes, namely that marriage is based on love, loyalty, beauty, and virtue. In this Ballade, the Latin rubric speaks of procreation, but the ballade speaks of the second set of motives (295-97). Marriage and love were thus seen as compatible in the Middle Ages, and Kelly is skeptical about whether the moralists' stern views against love where believed by the rest of the population. Instead we often see "an ideal of marriage as at once passionate and virtuous, in which both the sexual and the spiritual delights of love are unashamedly sought and enjoyed. That such an ideal could coexist with moralistic inhibitions is evident from the writings of both Chaucer and Gower" (334). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kelly, Henry Ansgar Published Kelly, Henry Ansgar. "Love and Marriage in the Age of Chaucer." Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz 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 Love and Marriage in the Age of Chaucer 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 1975 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 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 Yoshida, Shingo. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Review Throughout his three major poems, Gower insists on the opposition of passion and reason, here defined as "Christian humanism" or "recta ratio" informed by faith. In Japanese with an English abstract. [RFY1981] Published Yoshida, Shingo. "Love and Reason in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." Studies in English Literature (English Literature Society of Japan) 42 (1965): 1-11. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Reason in Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1965 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In Japanese, with the author's summary in English: "Gower is thoroughly 'moral Gower' as Chaucer calls him, as is demonstrated evidently by his views of the world, the society, and man in the M'irour de l'Omme,' the 'Vox Clamantis,' and the 'Confessio Amantis.' In the 'Confessio Amantis' his subject is love, but he does not treat it in itself as Chaucer does, but in indivisible relationship to the Seven Deadly Sins in the Christian ethics, with his immovable faith in the human duty of avoiding vices and following virtues as his premise. So far as the love of the Lover, the hero of the 'Confessio Amantis,' is concerned, Gower is a courtly love poet following the tradition of Guillaume de Lorris, the author of the former part of the 'Roman de la Rose.' The Lover is endued with all the possible conventions of courtly love. And yet Gower does not end with being a courtly love poet. He grasps the problem of love as the conflict between 'will,' 'hope,' or 'nature' (or 'Kinde') and 'resoun,' 'wit,' or 'wisdom,' that is, as the 'hertes contek,' the psychomachia, of passion vs. reason, and regards love as the usurpation of supremacy from reason by passion. In looking upon love as natural, and exhorting us to the subordination of passion to reason, he belongs to the pedigree of the naturalistic interpretation of love by Jean de Meun, the author of the latter part of the 'Roman de la Rose.' Gower's conclusion in the epilogue of the 'Confessio Amantis' is the renunciation of love--an insight into the death of love due to age and time, an elegy of the mutability of life--and at the same time the recovery of reason. In being the abandonment of passionate love and a conversion to divine love, it is in the tradition of medieval Catholicism. Gower thinks of love as the antagonism of passion against reason, insists on the subordination of passion to reason, and finally renounces love. It means that he follows the medieval orthodox of Christian humanism, and that his "reason" is that of Christian humanism, as is the case with Milton, the earnest believer in "rational liberty." Christian humanism is the fusion of faith and reason, regarding reason--originally classical and pagan, and later Christianized--as the divine nature in a human being, the quintessence of human nature, and calling it 'right reason,' 'recta ratio' as the intellectual and par excellence moral function, the principle of right thinking and right doing. It should be added that Gower believes in the traditional view of the cosmos as the scene of a divine order, the so-called 'chain of being,' which is at the bottom of Christian humanism. From the point of view of the opposition of passion to reason centering along the medieval tradition of love continuing from the courtly love of the later Middle Ages to the romantic love of the Renaissance, Chaucer is 'truly human,' a humanist in its modern sense, in that he is a poet of both courtly love and realistic love, depicting human passion as it is, and never preaching the subordination of passion to reason, while Gower offers resistance to that tradition, believing in reason and renouncing the passion of love." [John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yoshida, Shingo. Published Yoshida, Shingo. "Love and Reason in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Eibungaku kenkyu Studies in English Literature [Japan] 42 (1965): 1-11. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Love and Reason in Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1965 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor O'Callaghan, Tamara Faith Published O'Callaghan, Tamara Faith. "Love Imagery in Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, John Gower's Confessio Amantis, and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde." PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1995. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review "This thesis examines the imagery of love as it is depicted in three medieval versions of the story of Troy. The result is an attempt to determine to what extent Benoit, Gower, and Chaucer use love motifs and language to distinguish between the gendered experiences of the passion and to what extent love, as it is expressed by the various characters of both sexes, is considered to be the motivational force behind the events at Troy. . . . "In his Confessio Amantis, John Gower restructures the story of Troy around other tales of love and kingship which exemplify the same sin. By presenting the history of Troy out of sequence, by eliminating some of the traditional imagery and language, and by developing his own unique set of images and vocabulary, he effectively disassociates the love episodes from the war narrative. The love stories of Jason and Medea and of Paris and Helen become exempla of the sin of avarice, connected not so much by parallels in plot, but by similarities in the love experience of the main characters. . . . Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Love Imagery in Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, John Gower's Confessio Amantis, and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review As made clear by the collection's title, essays here are focused on teaching practices. Houlik-Ritchey thus places her remarks within this frame. Gower's tale "upholds Christianity and Paganism as ethically superior to Judaism based on each religious creed's putative interpretation of human responsibility to one's neighbors" (102). Her lesson "models how a theoretical perspective such as neighbor theory can crack open the seemingly smooth surface of a text's construction to reveal a rough terrain of reader expectations, authorial ambivalences, elisions, and contradictions" (103). Using Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents" as a beginning point, Houlik-Ritchey identifies the "neighbor" as "'faceless,' by which [theorists] mean that the neighbor is no single, predictable person or identity category; rather, the neighbor is the 'next person,' whoever that may turn out to be" (104). "The lesson advances by delving into the scriptural passages that Freud references, precisely to make visible the complex religious history embedded within and around the well-known phrase 'Love thy neighbor as thyself'" (105). Bringing in the essential passages from Jewish and Christian scripture [Lev. 19:18, 33-34; Lk. 10:25-37], and commentaries from Origen and Augustine, she shows that Gower takes the Jew's position from "a narrow interpretation of Leviticus 19:18" and the Pagan's from Luke 6:31, the "golden rule," and asks why does Gower use a pagan and not a Christian in the tale? (111) Her answer(s) are complex, but trace an etymological path for the students, via examinations of what the tale means by "love" and "felawe," from a "supersessionist" Gower to something less easily defined--perhaps, as she says, "pre-sessionist" (110). She points out how the tale of the "Jew and the Pagan" can then become a basis for discussing the "Prioress's Tale," concluding that "A neighborly reading elucidates not only the process by which each tale condemns a fictional Jewish ethics in favor of a supposedly more wide-reaching Christian (or proto-Christian Pagan) ethics but also foregrounds the adroit ways that Gower and Chaucer expose that very condemnation as itself ethically suspect" (115). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Houlik-Ritchey, Emily. Published Houlik-Ritchey, Emily. "Love Thy Neighbor, Love Thy Fellow: Teaching Gower's Representation of the Unethical Jew." In Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the Other. Eds. Miriamne Ara Krummel and Tyson Pugh. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. 101-15. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Love Thy Neighbor, Love Thy Fellow: Teaching Gower's Representation of the Unethical Jew. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Olsson's consideration of issues of "intimacy" and "love" leads not only to a substantial redefinition of what is at stake in Amans' confession but also to some interesting observations on the differences between medieval and modern expectations about privacy and personal relations. He focuses his discussion on the contrast between Amans and the four faithful wives of his concluding vision in Book 8: Penelope, Alceone, Alceste, and Lucrece. The comparison is obviously not favorable to Amans. Amans feels that his singleminded devotion to his lady is sufficient justification for his expectation of a "reward" and for his claims to intimacy with her. The fantasies that he conjures up when deprived of her real company indicate that he understands intimacy only in terms of sexual possession, as a desire to control which denies the woman any decision or choice, and which thus makes real intimacy impossible. His attempts to satisfy his passion have little to do with genuine love. The four wives illustrate a different conception both of self and of marital relations. They are distinguished from not only from Amans, but also from the younger lovers that precede them in Amans' vision, by their faithfulness, of course, but also by the maturity of their relationships and by their stable memory of their experience, the faculty that underlies and enables their strength of character. In MO, Gower reflects a common medieval ambivalence about the desirability of friendship and equality in marriage and the need for a hierarchy. In the ideal marriage, however, the virtues of each partner obviate whatever conflict might be implied in the choice. There is the risk, of course, that the woman's virtue might be defined simply in terms of her acceptance of her subordination, but Gower attributes to his ideal wives virtues that go beyond those required by a hierarchical marriage. That their virtues are associated with their waiting faithfully at home, moreover, places them at the nexus of the values that Gower associates with "home" in CA. Most notably, Amans is depicted as returning "home" with the recovery of his reason and his true sense of self at the very end of the poem, when he comes closest to understanding and practicing the virtues that the wives represent. As he recovers his memory, he becomes conscious of his age, and of the totality of human experience in which he participates. Home becomes for him not the place of forcible and immediate satisfaction but instead the place from which, by true understanding of oneself, one becomes truly qualified for intimacy with others. Where a modern places priority upon privacy, Gower valorizes openness instead, through confession and through the discovery of oneness with other human beings. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Olsson, Kurt Published Olsson, Kurt. "Love, Intimacy, and Gower." Chaucer Review 30 (1995), pp. 71-100. ISSN 0009-2002 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Love, Intimacy, and Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Penn State University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This paper explores an aspect of the traditional conflict between love and Nature on the one hand and reason on the other, in the poetry of Chaucer and Gower. It examines the special circumstances made by legal language and imagery in our awareness of the plight of medieval lovers. Both poets are commpassionately aware that in the irrational state of romantic love 'immortal longings' can be confused with powerful natural impulses; the deluded lover comes to believe that transitory temporal pleasure is transcendent eternal beatitude, and both poets challenge us to consider the essential quality of law and its appropriatness as a metaphoric vehicle for human emotions and physical drives. Legal metaphors for love are common and, on the surface, conventional. This paper attempts to show that they are nonetheless neither dead nor commonplace by examining them i) in the light of medieval theology and philosophy of law and ii) in the light of their frequent juxtaposition with terms recalling the rationality which distinguishes man from the beasts. Beginning with a short passage from each poet which raises essential questions, this paper moves to a short exposition of medieval legal theory and then returns to the poets to explore in more detail the crtical implications of that theory." [Summary by author. JGN 2.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Collins, Marie Published Collins, Marie. "Love, Nature and Law in the Poetry of Gower and Chaucer." In Court and Poet: Selected Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society (Liverpool 1980). Ed. Burgess, Glyn S. ARCA (5). Liverpool: Cairns, 1981, pp. 113-128. ISBN 0905205065 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies 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 Love, Nature and Law in the Poetry of Gower and Chaucer. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cairns, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1981 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 Gallacher, Patrick J. Published Gallacher, Patrick J.. "Love, The Word, and Mercury: A Reading of John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975. Based on the author's Ph.D. Dissertation, "The Structural Uses of the Theme of Speech in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,'" University of Illinois, 1966; open access at http://hdl.handle.net/2142/59792 . Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Review Gallacher argues that the CA provides a sustained reflection on the importance of the Word (Logos, Verbum) and that Gower's amorous and confessional themes are thus grounded in a broader philosophical and theological context. Gallacher mines the mythographical tradition for allegorical commentary on such recurring motifs as the figure of Mercury, who represents eloquence among other things. His central thesis is that the CA moves Amans from amorous persuasion and lust to a broader cosmic charity which has its fulfillment in prayer and in union with the divine Word. While Gallacher practices a kind of exegetical criticism, he does acknowledge that Gower does not ignore human love or the necessity for human action and politics. In chapter 1, "The Rhetoric of the Word," Gallacher notes that our use of language involves a paradox: "there is a natural progress towards perfection in the use of words motivated by an awareness of the inexpressible" (2). This tension is found from Boethius to Kenneth Burke. Burke, for instance, describes how words are used most thoroughly when they come to describe the transcendent concept of God. An example would be the word "grace," which means both God's forgiveness and can stand for the grace of a literary style or a hostess. This movement from the temporal to the divine goes both ways: "an awareness of the inexpressible leads inevitably to the Word and … this process is reversible and synecdochic. That is, the redemptive power of the Word traverses the way down, descending easily into such cognate spiritual actions as confession and prayer, but assuming flesh even in the amorous conversation itself" (4). The rest of the chapter shows how Andreas Capellanus reflects on the courtly love motif of speechlessness; how Gower's MO shows that confession is about finding truth through words; how prayer brings us closer to the divine Word, even though God already knows our thoughts; and how the CA's theme of "division" suggests both that our multitude of words proves our disunity and reminds us that the one Word is the solution. Chapter 2 deals with the annunciation motif present in a number of stories in the CA. Gallacher argues that medieval writers acknowledged the potentially seductive overtones of the annunciation. The annunciation was also said to teach Christians to accept the Word as Mary did. In the story of Mundus and Paulina, the Egyptian god Anubis equates to Mercury in the Latin tradition. The result is a kind of subversion of the annunciation, as Mundus plays the roles of both Gabriel and God. Book 1 ends with the story of Peronelle. She mentions the incarnation through Mary as an example of humility (1.3275ff.). Her father also trusts her council (her word) and allows her to speak for him. Finally, it is significant that Peronelle holds the king to his "word": "Peronelle's invocation of the solemnly binding and magically efficacious power of the king's word clearly evokes the connotations of the Verbum" (40). The third major annunciation story is the tale of Nectanabus at the end of Book 6. Though this is a false annunciation, the outcome (the birth of Alexander) is positive. The third chapter describes how the CA chronicles "a rejection of amorous persuasion in favor of Christian prayer, but the journey to this goal is by no means narrowly moralistic" (44). Gallacher argues that Gower praises open and honest speech. For instance, while "Cheste" (contentiousness) is a vice, it can also be "a means of overcoming ironia, an excessive self-dispraisal" (53). In particular, prayer is the kind of free speech in which you can say what is really on your mind. Something similar is true for counsel in a lord-subject relationship, as we see in Book 7, where flattery is opposed to a stinging honesty. Chapter 3 covers a range of stories (some allegorically) before focusing on tales from Book 4 that deal with the power of prayer. Some (Pygmalion, Iphis) are rather erotic and others (Cephalus) don't seem to fit Amans's predicament, but the overall point is that prayer brings us closer to the Word. In chapter 4, Gallacher uses the example of Dante's Beatrice to argue for the importance of the lady's speech: "The Speech of God on the way down to the lover manifests itself in the speech of the lady. Since the lover perceives that she is somehow ineffable, that his love is correspondingly inexpressible, and that some kind of prayer must characterize his conversation with her, the lady's verbal responses in turn appropriately demonstrate reversibility, the descent of God's words to the lover" (78). The song of the Sirens is an inversion of this process, whereas women like Constance, Alcestis, and even the hag in the Tale of Florent lead their lovers away from simple desire or from detraction and to a higher truth and wisdom. Chapter 5 describes how the counsel of Genius, the confessional mode, and the amorous discourse result in a double recognition scene in Book 8. First Apollonius becomes more dependent on the will of God, both through Fortune and through the effective speech of his wife and daughter. Secondly, Amans's solipsism is "transformed, through the penitent's verbal acknowledgment guided by the confessor's counsel, into a prayer for charity which will result in spiritual, social, economic, and political justice" (143). Stories that lead up to these final recognition scenes include Perseus and Medusa, Lycurgus, Constantine and Sylvester, and the tales on flattery in Book 7. Chapter 6 has two main sections. In the first, Gallacher describes Gower's sense of cosmic unity. For instance, in Book 7 the relationships between the elements, the stars, fortune, free will, speech, and truth remind us of the power of the word and especially of prayer. The second section examines how autobiographical or confessional writing fits within this cosmic setting. On the one hand, the speech of praise culminates in prayer, whereas the negative response is complaint. The CA, compared to Gower's other works, shows a softening of complaint. Gower uses the discussion of Avarice in Book 5 to show that "complaint, as a form of avarice, is unnatural. Opposed to this is an attitude of gratefulness to the generosity of nature" (152). The epilogue sums up the many faces of Mercury in the poem and in the tradition. Gallacher also returns to the importance of the "word" and ends with a reflection on formalist criticism's interpretation of poetic words. The words of a poem create internal unity in the poem. Together they form meaning. Northrop Frye refers to the poetic word as a "connector" – each word tends to link to all the other words and to a symbolic center. In the same way all works of literature refer to a kind of symbolic center. This formalist criticism is ultimately dependent on the theology of the Word that goes back to the Middle Ages and to writers like Gower. [CvD] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Love, The Word, and Mercury: A Reading of John Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of New Mexico Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1975 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Batkie analyzes the "ambiguous" nexus of the two principle threads running through the CA--love and confession--to argue that Gower's text confounds any critical reconciliation between them. Gower's formulation of the "unstable" yet "generative" nexus between love and confession intervenes into Foucault's understanding of medieval confession and sexuality. Foucault's formulation of subjectivity is dependent upon the erasure and forgetting of the self. In contrast, Gower's MO shows confessional subjectivity arising from an act of narration that produces confessional history--orienting the subject within time, relative to a revised (because confessed) past and an anticipated salvific future. In short, the confessing subject is established via the creation of its history. Batkie cannily illustrates how Amans's confessional activity takes up memory, forgetting, and history in generative but unstable ways. Amans's agency (to narrate, remember, forget) and his desire (for the beloved, for absolution) both produce and trouble him as subject. Gower forges a chiasmatic relationship between confession and love in which Amans's particular failures as a lover "can only become generative as a confessional exemplum" as Amans reads his inability to express his present desire in the amorous past" via his "remembered desire in the confessional present." His failures in love, in other words, become confessional successes, although amorous confession also leaves him "without history"--he does not formulate a confessional subjectivity embedded in a narrated past and an anticipated future. Rather, Amans's confessed narrative "cannot extend past [himself], or past the present tense." Even as narratives of love point only to the past, desire, through the confessional process, "is summonded, named, and extended." [EH-R. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Baktie, Stephanie L. Published Batkie, Stephanie L., "Loving Confession in the' Confessio Amantis'." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 39 (2017): 99-128. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Loving Confession in the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Although Gower speaks of it, both he and Chaucer in fact practice the "middel weie" of writing; but, while Chaucer seems to adopt a center style because he "meanders" between extremes, Gower has his sights firmly on his goal, and claims the plain style and subject-matter purposefully. [PN. Copyright the John Gower Society. JGN 4.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Shaw, Judith Davis Published Shaw, Judith Davis. "Lust and Lore in Gower and Chaucer." Chaucer Review 19 (1984), pp. 110-122. ISSN 0009-2002 Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Lust and Lore in Gower and Chaucer. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Penn State University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "The present study examines the traditional figures of speech--metaphor, simile, personification, metonymy and synecdoche, and oxymoron, along with certain subcategories--in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis.' Two chapters discuss the figures in some detail. They consider, as well, some important themes and tones in the 'Confessio' and the way in which Gower's figurative language either creates or emphasizes these themes. The core of the study, however, is provided by four appendices. Appendix A breaks the poem into its separate books and examines the occurrence of figurative language within the three main contexts: Amans, Genius, and Tales. The appendix offers both a line-count of figurative language and the percentages that these lines make up. Appendix B provides a visual representation of the information presented in Appendix A. In B the different contexts are represented by different colors of shading. By breaking the entire poem into ten-line segments and by charting how many lines in each segment are involved in figurative language, the chart vividly shows the peaks and valleys of figurativeness in the 'Confessio.' Appendix C examines one type of figure at a time. Again, breaking the poem into separate books and separate contexts, it lists the location of each figure of speech, its type, the "literal term" (what the poet is talking about, as nearly as it can be determined) and the 'figurative area' (the realm from which the poet has drawn his imagery for his figure of speech). Finally, Appendix D examines again the imagery content of Gower's figures, but from a different angle. Breaking down the figure by content rather than by type, the appendix makes certain patterns of occurrence more readily visible than they are in other appendices." [eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Greene, Linda Louise. Published Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Arkansas, 1978. Dissertation Abstracts International 39 (1978): 3567A. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Lust and Lore: Figures of Speech in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1978 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Jenni Nuttall's essay "charts the development of the lenvoy (or envoy) in English courtly verse in the fifteenth century, looking in particular at the poetry of Hoccleve and Lydgate" (35). Engaging Jonathan Culler's work on lyric, she concludes, "Form is thus an alluring fabrication of meaningfulness. Such self-generated authority is inculcated rhyme by rhyme, metrical line by metrical line, stanza by stanza" (35). For Nuttall's purposes, such self-authorization occurs in the envoy or lenvoy; furthermore, these textual apparatus serve as lines of communication between authors, readers, et al. (36). Chaucer and Gower establish the Middle English lenvoy. Nuttall asserts, "The lenvoy's flexible functions made this technical term of poetics usefully malleable, and Middle English authors and their scribes thus expand usage of the term beyond its strict definition as an optional element of a ballade" (37). Nuttall, at this point of her essay, shifts her focus to the new purposes for which Hoccleve and Lydgate will use the lenvoy. She considers how this structure uses the humility topos with conspicuous skill. Nuttall expands on Robert Meyer-Lee's discussion of such topoi, adding that they may serve as "affirmation of poetic license and self-authorization" and a "newly emerging license of form" (39, 40). After examining specific uses of the lenvoy in both Hoccleve and Lydgate (especially "Fall of Princes"), Nuttall provocatively concludes that the lenvoy might be a "significant location from which we might excavate Middle English literary theory and poetics" (45).] [JGS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nuttall, Jenni. Published Nuttall, Jenni. "Lydgate and the Lenvoy." Exemplaria 30.1 (2018): 35-48. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion 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 Lydgate and the Lenvoy. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In the mid-fifteenth century Osbert Bokenham and George Ashby both canonized the familiar poetic trinity of Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate as "the first rhetoricians" (Bokenham) and "premier poets" (Ashby) of England. Lydgate, the latecomer to this party, makes public and obvious his many appropriations of Chaucer as a poetic father. Edwards takes up the question of Lydgate as a descendant of moral Gower, a "deep source" for Lydgate as a public poet, visible in Lydgate's poetry only in what Lydgate figures as a "poetic trace" (156). Like his two predecessors, Lydgate joins a long tradition of medieval writers constructing fictions of authorship for earlier texts on which they have no claim to be coevals. Chaucer famously uses these constructions as an arena for play and deferral of literary authority from the historian Lollius to Chaucer the pilgrim. Edwards reminds us, however, that Gower asserts his authorship by deploying most of the terms Alastair Minnis has identified for us, and as such asserts a strong claim as a crucial forerunner for Lydgate. In "Fall of Princes" Lydgate himself puts Gower into a different triumvirate with Ralph Strode and Richard Rolle, a grouping that invokes a late-medieval vernacular humanism within which Lydgate created his poetic space. While Gower's meditations on social and political divisions remain unacknowledged in Lydgate's "Siege of Thebes" and "Serpent of Division" (as Maura Nolan points out), Gower's influence lingers in Lydgate's grasp of Lancastrian cycles of crisis at the difficult moment when the minor Henry VI ascends the throne in 1422. In the "Fall of Princes" Lydgate's chapter on Constantine seems to be drawn unacknowledged from Book II of Gower's CA, reshaping Gower's emphasis on pity to assemble the virtue of "royal compassion" that aligns spiritual interests with temporal power in terms that parallel Constantine with Lydgate's patron Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. The tale of Canace and Machaire in the "Fall" also reshapes Gower's version by expanding Canace's complaint to counterbalance the ravages of epic-heroic patriarchy surrounding her. More broadly, Edwards argues, Gower offered Lydgate a mode of address to the powerful in a particular state of being: triumph and conquest. Gower's odes, admonitions, and advice on peace and justice serve Lydgate as both a framework and an idiom for "Troy Book" and "Siege of Thebes." Lydgate's address to Henry V at the end of "Troy Book" deploys terms Gower uses to praise Henry's father: a mighty conqueror whose royal lineage is both secured by descent and ratified by election, but whose condition is always subject to mutable Fortune. While Chaucer remains Lydgate's example for poetic achievement in English, Gower in Edwards' view shows Lydgate how to maneuver rhetorically in the public sphere and amid its great themes of war, peace, and right action. For Lydgate this work does not end with the secular powers, but perseveres in the service of doctrine. [JF. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, Robert R Published Edwards, Robert R. "Lydgate and the Trace of Gower." South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015), pp. 156-70. ISSN 0277-335X Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Lydgate and the Trace of Gower Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 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 Nolan, Maura Published Nolan, Maura. "Lydgate's Literary History: Chaucer, Gower, and Canacee." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005), pp. 59-92. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Review Lydgate greatly expanded the story of Canacee that Laurent de Premierfait inserted into his translation of Boccaccio's "De Casibus virorum illustrium" when he translated Laurent's work in his "Fall of Princes," and his English rendering contains clear evidence of his consciousness of and his debt to both Gower's and Chaucer's very different representations of the heroine in Book III of "Confessio Amantis" and in "Man of Law's Tale." With this as her starting point, Nolan investigates the conflicting genres, discourses, and views of Fortune that Lydgate has drawn upon and set into opposition in his tale. Gower is a "lurking presence" throughout Book I of Lydgate's poem (62). In his version of the story, Gower accentuates the pathos of the heroine's plight, an example that Lydgate follows despite the moral bearings of his own work, particularly as he adopted the image of the baby bathing in his mother's blood. But in shifting the emphasis from the narrative back to the letter that Canacee writes, Lydgate also excises most of Gower's concern with the force of "kynde" together with his interest in the philosophical and moral issues that it poses and his inquiry into the causes of the heroine's predicament. Lydgate thus sets into bold opposition "didactic exemplarity and amorous complaint" (67), and "while the reader of the 'Confessio Amantis' is gradually being led through a complex process of education, in which he or she is asked to ponder some very fine points of moral theology (the role of "kynde," for example), the reader of the 'Fall of Princes' is merely stymied by the apparent contradiction between the logic of virtue that guides the enterprise as a whole (sin causes falls) and the affective principle of pity that the story of Canacee so insistently enforces" (68). In the rest of this rich and challenging essay, Nolan explores the significance to the "Fall of Princes" as a whole of the "incoherencies and incompatibilities" (78) that Lydgate creates. Let one passage stand both for the scope of her argument and the nature of her conclusions: "These two notions of Fortune (the idea of a remediable negative force and an efficacious poetry versus the fearsome thought of arbitrary contingency and the uselessness of speech) are the twin poles between which Lydgate suspends the Canacee story. Jumbled together in this episode we find precisely these opposing epistemologies, the former a model in which the world is saturated with a single meaning and the latter a paradigm that evacuates the human world of all significance and silences all speech. History is both subject to logic--available to hermeneutics--and utterly excessive and irrational at the same time. Lydgate knows this, in the sense that he knows that his sources fundamentally conflict--that Ovid, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Gower each propose a different solution to the basic problem of finding meaning in history. His instinctive response to these conflicts--a response utterly characteristic of him--is to seek some kind of synthesis. Ultimately, Canacee and her son represent ideal subjects for the kind of 'vernacular philosophy' that permeates the 'Fall of Princes,' precisely because they expose the structural contradictions at work in the historical models for human life in the world that Lydgate inherited from his predecessors" (88). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 25.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Lydgate's Literary History: Chaucer, Gower, and Canacee Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The "virtual coterie" that Lydgate constructs in his "Pilgrimage of the Life of Man," Perry argues, comprises the people named or alluded to in the poem--Chaucer, Guillaume de Deguileville, the Virgin Mary, and Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury--the people who as source, inspiration, or patron had agency in producing the work, lending it validity or authority and, in turn, enabling Lydgate to exert his own kind of agency to give his patron advice and to shape literary tradition at the same time. Outlining the concept and coining the term, Perry describes virtual coteries as the lists of names given in a poem, often in a prologue or dedication: "a record of distributed agency that details what a poet, a patron, or a source does to make a poem." Virtual coteries are "rhetorical performances, poetic displays that associate different individuals . . . . living and dead, real and fictional, local and distant," and allow for "a complex mediation between writer and patron." In the case of Lydgate's "Pilgrimage," the coterie allows Lydgate to advise Salisbury about the war in France and to influence "the Chaucerian tradition as it is being constructed in the fifteenth century" (671). Much of the "complex mediation" Perry explores in the "Pilgrimage" depends upon the fact that Salisbury was husband to Chaucer's granddaughter, Alice, and it is hard to imagine too many other poets being able to construct a virtual coterie of quite this sort or in quite this way, a limitation, perhaps, in more general application of the concept, despite its usefulness for describing Lydgate's roles as advisor to his patron Salisbury and as "Chaucerian" poet. Gower occupies an odd place in Perry's argument and perhaps in Lydgate's coterie, as Perry tells us: it is "unclear whether Gower is a member of this or any other of Lydgate's virtual coteries. Lydgate never mentions Gower [although he does in "Fall of Princes" 9.3412] and it is unclear whether Lydgate's audience, specifically Salisbury here, would have recognized Gower's technique in Lydgate's hands" (695). Yet, Perry argues, "In Praise of Peace" [IPP] is a major thematic and stylistic influence on Lydgate's "Pilgrimage": as Gower "praises the nobility while critiquing their actions at the same time" (689), so does Lydgate, and the younger poet adapts the "formal device of dual address" (695) modeled in Gower's IPP. "Lydgate's aims are Gower's," Perry tells us, "the earlier poet's pacifism an inspiration to the later one at a different time in the same war" (695). Praise and advice are a familiar combination in the mirrors of princes tradition (especially those addressed to a patron), and it is not unusual to find a writer addressing particular and universal audiences simultaneously. Moreover, Perry may be stretching things to call a dual audience a "formal device," especially since he acknowledges that Lydgate's technique only "resembles" Gower's, indeed "inverts" it: "Gower's dual mode of address speaks for a class, Lydgate's for a coterie" (694). Some verbal echoes would help to establish Perry's case for IPP as a source of the "Pilgrimage," although his argument that Lydgate "silenced Gower" and thereby "bolsters Chaucer's positon in literary history, while diminishing Gower's" (695) is a new take on an important issue. Perry's analysis of reciprocity between patronage and poetry is valuable--discussing the virtual coterie of Lydgate's "Title and Pedigree of Henry VI" as well as that of the "Pilgrimage"--and his discussion of Gower's IPP adds dimension to what Robert R. Edwards has called the "Trace of Gower" in Lydgate (South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 [2015]: 156-70; see eJGN 35.1) while clarifying Lydgate's virtual coteries as one facet of the Chaucerian tradition. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Perry, R. D. Published Perry, R. D. "Lydgate's Virtual Coteries: Chaucer's Family and Gower's Pacifism in the Fifteenth Century." Speculum 93 (2018): 669-98. Gower Subject In Praise of Peace 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 Lydgate's Virtual Coteries: Chaucer's Family and Gower's Pacifism in the Fifteenth Century. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Jose's abstract is as follows: "This thesis discusses presentations of madness in medieval literature, and the ways in which these presentations are affected by (and effect) ideas of gender. It includes a discussion of madness as it is commonly presented in classical literature and medical texts, as well as an examination of demonic possession (which shares many of the same characteristics of madness) in medieval exempla. These chapters are followed by a detailed look at the uses of madness in Malory's "Morte Darthur," Gower's "Confessio Amantis," and in two autobiographical accounts of madness, the "Book of Margery Kempe" and Hoccleve's "Series." The experience of madness can both subvert and reinforce gender roles. Madness is commonly seen as an invasion of the self, which, in a culture which commonly identifies masculinity with bodily intactness, can prove problematic for male sufferers. Equally, madness, in prompting violent, ungoverned behaviour, can undermine traditional definitions of femininity. These rules can, however, be reversed. Malory's "Morte Darthur" presents a version of masculinity which is actually enhanced by madness; equally divergent is Margery Kempe's largely positive account of madness as a catalyst for personal transformation. While there is a certain consistency in the literary treatment of madness--motifs and images are repeated across genres--the way in which these images are used can alter radically. There is no single model of madness in medieval literature: rather, it is always fluid. Madness, like gender, remains open to interpretation." Chapter 5, pp. 180-218, is on Gower--CA primarily, with occasional reference to VC. She summarizes her argument thusly: "There is no one unifying pattern of madness in the 'Confessio Amantis,' as we have seen with other authors: rather, madness occurs in a number of different, but interconnected, ways. Gower, unique among the authors I examine, uses madness primarily as a political metaphor. However, this use quickly becomes intertwined with those other connotations of madness: bestiality, unrestrained sexuality, gender slippage. If the 'Confessio Amantis' is a hybrid text, part confession, part mirror for princes, part collection of exempla, then Gower's uses of madness are a fitting match for this hybridity" (180). [RFY. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Jose, Laura. Published Jose, Laura. "Madness and Gender in Late-Medieval Literature." Ph.D. diss. Durham University, 2010. Supervisor: Corinne Saunders. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/217/ Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Madness and Gender in Late-Medieval Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review 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 Moral Gower "never rose above the plane of dull mediocrity." [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Houston, Percy Hazen. Published Houston, Percy Hazen. Main Currents of English Literature: A Brief Literary History of the English People. New York: Crofts, 1926, pp. 39, 50, 51, 463, 494. 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 Main Currents of English Literature: A Brief Literary History of the English People. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1926 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Kennedy, Kathleen Erin Published Kennedy, Kathleen Erin. "Maintaining injustice: Literary Representations of the Legal System c. 1400." PhD thesis, Ohio State University, 2004. Open access at https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_olink/r/1501/10?clear=10&p10_accession_num=osu1085059076 (accessed January 22, 2023). Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Review "Medieval English authors often regard aspects of the legal system to be in conflict with an endemic cultural practice, maintenance. Simply put, maintenance was the payment of a form of salary to a high-level servant by a lord. The salary this servant (or affine) might receive could consist of cash-payments, gifts, or access to lucrative official positions, including the proxy enjoyment of some portion of the lord's judicial rights. The more lavish the assistance, the more the lord honored the retainer. Obviously, the mutual ties of aid and loyalty between a lord and an affine threatened impartial justice at every level, and medieval authors strove both to bring its abuses to light, and to offer alternatives. Each of my chapters sheds light on how late fourteenth-century authors articulated the relationship between different legal institutions and maintenance. . . . John Gower spends a considerable amount of time writing about the legal profession, especially lawyers and other legal officials. I claim that Gower argues that if the king allowed maintenance and other personal considerations to influence his judgement, then legal officials would do the same; moreover, legal officials tarnish the king's reputation since they receive their legal powers by delegation from the king. . . . In sum, late-fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century authors demonstrated detailed knowledge of the law and used literature as a forum in which to discuss inadequacies of the system. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Maintaining injustice: Literary Representations of the Legal System c. 1400 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Kennedy, Kathleen Erin Published Kennedy, Kathleen Erin. "Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature." New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 ISBN 9780230606661 Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Biography of Gower Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Review Borrowing a trope from Barbara Hannawalt, Kennedy presents maintenance--the "lord-retainer relationship"--in the eyes of most late medieval English folk as akin to how the "Mob" would have seemed to residents of 1920s Chicago: "From your perspective, the Mob does bad things: it kills people, and it corrupts government and law. But at the same time you recognize that the Mob does good things as well: it can make obtaining goods and social services easier and less expensive, and may curtail some kinds of crime" (1). Marriage comes into it because, Kennedy argues, Middle English writers used the husband-wife model, and that of master-servant, as safer stand-ins for the lord-retainer relationship, ever a target, albeit just beneath the surface: "because of the status of the lords involved…criticism of this dynamic could be dangerously political" (6). Kennedy draws on the letter collections of the Stonors, Pastons and Plumptons to illustrate "different sorts of service relationships," and to provide an introduction to fifteenth-century litigation, by way of grounding her more literary material. Similarly--again as a grounding model--she examines legal discourse and precedent in rape cases, because "rape forced medieval legal officials and writers to consider the degree to which autonomy was compromised as the responsibilities of service clashed with the sense of autonomy modern readers associate with 'free will,' particularly in the social, legal, and religious institution of marriage" (12). In her fourth chapter she takes up contemporary works addressing the maintenance directly: Chaucer's Melibee, Langland's Lady Meed, the "Arthuriad" section of Lydgate's "Fall of Princes." Her final chapter considers "the relationships between masters and a particular category of servants: lawyers" (13). Here Kennedy finds the "Mirour de l'Omme" and "Vox Clamantis" especially valuable, and devotes the bulk of her chapter to showing that "legal professionals and the equity of the law suffered when service was involved. The question began to become whether a lawyer's lord was a man or the law itself. Which institutions or individuals had the right to constrain a lawyer's autonomy?...Gower seeks to map out the problem in detail . . ." (13). She finds Gower's witness valuable not only for its detail, but also because she takes it for granted that Gower "was probably a lawyer or other legal official" (89, 149, n.1). Kennedy's is the closest reader to take so seriously those sections of the MO and VC dealing with her subject. Placed in the broader context she establishes (Chapter 5 also includes Hoccleve's "Regement of Princes"), her insights are especially thought-provoking. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2.] 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 Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Palgrave Macmillan, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 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 Through a thorough exploration of manmade marvels in late medieval English literature, Scott Lightsey "bring[s] familiar works by Chaucer, Gower, and Langland into the conversation on marvels and wonders, often for the first time" (7). He devotes a chapter to Gower's "Confessio Amantis," which he argues "carries the traces of marvelous artifice" (7), particularly the figures of Alexander and Arion and their literature. Lightsey suggests that the first recension of the CA was inspired by the marvelous appearance of a dolphin in the Thames in 1390 (108). Describing Gower's political allegory as containing manmade mirabilia which contribute to the "symbolization of flawed kingship and the misdirection of common profit" (107), Lightsey focuses extensively on Gower's depiction of Alexander the Great, a negative exemplar who contrasts with Arion's "positive potential" (108). Lightsey identifies Gower's Alexander as the "personification of sin, misrule, marvels, and misguided progress" (113), but also claims he is crucial to the "moral program" of the CA, and links Books VI and VII. Gower establishes Alexander's marvelousness in Book VI, and proceeds to connect it with the envisioned technical marvels mentioned in Book VII, all the while highlighting the "internal division and man's position in Christian redemption history" (134). Lightsey concludes that Gower "displayed his anxieties about the relationship between technological pursuits and social ills through comparison between the measure of Arion and the chaos of the marvel-saturated Alexander legend" (159-60). [CR. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lightsey, Scott. Published Lightsey, Scott. Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature. (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 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 Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Author/Editor Author/Editor Brunet, Jacque-Charles. Review Apparently concerned only with Caxton's edition (1483) of CA; unexamined. [RFY1981]. Published Brunet, Jacque-Charles. Manuel du Librairie et de l'Amateur de Livres. Paris: Brunet-Leblanc, 1810. Dublin Core The Dublin 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 1810 Title A name given to the resource Manuel du Librairie et de l'Amateur de Livres. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Levelt begins his note by correcting the misattribution to Gower in Marcus Boxhorn's "Chronijck van Zeelandt" (1644) of Chaucer's lines from the description of the Merchant (General Prologue 1.273-77) and, tracking variants in Boxhorn's quotation of the lines, identifies the second-hand source of the quotation as an octavo edition of John Selden's "Mare clausum" (STC 22176) owned by Boxhorn. Levelt then goes on to explain that details of Boxhorn's brief biography of Gower which accompanies his misattribution apparently derives from John Bale's "Scriptorum illustrium majoris Britanniae . . . Catalogus," indicating, Levelt shows, that Boxhorn "somehow skipped to the wrong page" and followed Bale's mistaken claim that Gower died in 1402. Despite their interest in English history and literature, Boxhorn and others of his "learned circle" (16) in the seventeenth-century Dutch Low Countries, Levelt concludes, had only limited, secondhand acquaintance with Gower and Chaucer. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Levelt, Sjoerd. Published Levelt, Sjoerd. "Marcus Boxhorn's Misattribution of Verses from Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' to John Gower." Notes and Queries 67 [265], no.1 (2020): 14-16. Gower Subject 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 Marcus Boxhorn's Misattribution of Verses from Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' to John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Maria Wickert's 1953 "Studien zu John Gower" is a foundational and influential work in Gower studies. Focusing primarily upon the VC, Wickert examines the poem's formal traits and its recensions to argue that Gower was composing the Vox throughout the end of Richard II's reign and even after Richard's deposition. Wickert's study has become central for Gowerians beyond even those who focus primarily on the Vox. Her examination of Gower's voice, of his political and social ties and interests, of his trilingual project, of his use of homiletic, Ovidian, and other materials, especially the iconographic archer, all hold central positions in our understanding of Gower over fifty years after her work was first published. Robert Meindl first translated and published an English edition of Wickert's work in 1981, and this second edition incorporates a number of useful updates. Notes include references to publications that have appeared since the original 1953 German edition. The text has been modernized both with respect to current scholarly standards and usage, such as current manuscript designations. Some German passages have been retranslated for clarity. And most significantly, translation of Latin citations has been largely redone to address some problematic translations noted in first edition. R. F. Yeager's Introduction to this edition succinctly and effectively summarizes and assesses Wickert's contribution to Gower studies. [BWG. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 36.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Meindl, Robert J., ed. Wickert, Maria. Published Meindl, Robert J., trans. Maria Wickert: Studies in John Gower, 2nd rev. ed. (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2016). ISBN: 9780866985413. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism 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 Maria Wickert: Studies in John Gower, 2nd rev. ed. Studien zu John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Torres, Sara Victoria. Published Torres, Sara Victoria. "Marvelous Generations: Lancastrian Genealogies and Translation in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and Iberia." Ph. D. Dissertation. University of California, Los Angeles, 2014. Open access at https://escholarship.org/uc/item/25n6t2gq (accessed January 28, 2023). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Review From Torres's abstract: "my dissertation tracks an understudied aspect of the legacy of Lancastrian kingship: its claims to the throne of Castile and the multiple Iberian marriages that materialize those claims as they shape late medieval and early modern international historiography." The first of six chapters "argues that Gower positions himself within a legacy of poetic genealogy and political counsel that is synchronous with the imperial lineages of the poem's exemplary narratives. The poem conceives of lineage in ethical terms, and thus the interplay between Gower's evocations of 'translatio studii' and 'translatio imperii' is fundamental to his narrated mechanisms of political descent. Under the patronage of Philippa of Lancaster, the 'Confessio Amantis' is translated into both Portuguese and Castilian, and within these material conditions of book production the political discourse of counsel is linked closely to the performance of queenship. In its Portuguese rendering, then, queen and poet are linked to the practice of just rule in a imagined textual community at once focused on the spiritual, intellectual, and physical regulation of the king and also on the wider readership of those encompassed within the bounds of 'common weal'." Later chapters engage Lancastrian-related texts of several sorts: Margaret of Anjou's Shrewsbury Book, the Burghley Polychronicon, Luís Vaz de Camões's Os Lusíadas, "a manuscript created by the exiled Syon nuns in Lisbon for the Habsburg monarchs, and "the journalistic relaciones of Andrés Almansa y Mendoza, which record [Charles Stuart's] visit to Madrid in the language of a chivalric romance." [MA. eJGN 42.2] 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 Marvelous Generations: Lancastrian Genealogies and Translation in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and Iberia. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article is not primarily focused on Gower, but as it addresses the Digby Mary Magedalene play largely in terms of the trope of "the woman cast adrift" (25), it may well be of interest to Gower scholars working on the "Tale of Constance" (Confessio Amantis, II.587-1612). Findon contextualizes the play as an East Anglian work--not necessarily relevant for Gower's work. Still, the recurring story of Constance (or Custance for Chaucer) was certainly widely known, and helps ground a useful contrast between the saint in the play and other women "cast adrift." Findon finds the incorporation of this trope (or motif) useful in that that it provides a context for variations on the Mary Magdalene story that appear in the Digby play--the playwright's "alterations to Mary's story seem deliberately to enhance her status as a female hero through her connections with Chaucer's Custance, with Trivet and Gower's Constance, and with Emaré--virtuous but largely passive romance women who are 'cast adrift'" (29). She contrasts Gower's and the other versions of this sort of heroine primarily with Mary in an analysis of the play, noting that women in this trope are generally "cast adrift by evil forces beyond [their] control" (32). Mary's travels in the play are planned by her enemies, as are those of Constance or the more secular romance heroine Emaré. Findon provides a useful analysis of the drifting woman tradition, noting that "in medieval literature in general, a woman traveling alone in a ship is often in the midst of a deep personal crisis" (31), for example, and often the voyage is meant to be fatal to the woman (32). She also points out that "in both classical and medieval literature, female protagonists who undertake such journeys are rare, and those who are active during the course of their journeys are even more rare: this is what male heroes do" (34). Thus, as the Digby playwright adapts this trope to Mary Magdalene's story: "Mary Magdalene recalls the Constance figures yet does not share their lack of personal power" (36). Overall, Gower here provides a counterpoint for Findon's insightful reading of the Digby play. This article is most likely to be useful to Gower scholars working with this particular literary trope or with Constance; its comparison of the different analogues, though focused around the Digby play, is thorough and detailed, and many of Findon's insights may inflect how one looks at the Constance narrative, also, in implicit contrast, the Apollonius of Tyre story (42). [RAL. Copyrigtht. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Findon, Joanne. Published Findon, Joanne. "Mary Magdalene as New Custance?: 'The Woman Cast Adrift' in the Digby Mary Magdalene." English Studies in Canada 32.4 (2006): 25-50. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mary Magdalene as New Custance?: 'The Woman Cast Adrift' in the Digby Mary Magdalene. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Explaining that questions of Richard II's status as a boy and as a man were central to politics of late-medieval England, Fletcher assesses Gower's views on related political concerns through examination of his diction. Using computer analysis (textométrie) of Gower's masculine lexicon ("man," "manly," "manhood," etc.), Fletcher explores Gower's emphases in light of wider Middle English usage and then examines nuances of the denotations and connotations of the terms (especially "manhood") in Book I of "Confessio Amantis" and in the "Tale of Horestes," locating it in the structural "trajectory" (371) of Book III. Mining the narratives of Book I, Fletcher shows that Gower asserts "the superiority of moral virtue over the social dictates of manhood" (369), and although Gower does not link the "Tale of Horestes" to Richard's struggles in the 1380s, it "could have," Fletcher says, "provided Gower with a means of defending Richard in the last two years of his reign" (374). Revisions to CA and especially the "Cronica Tripertita," Fletcher argues, attribute Richard's deposition to his lack of the "fundamental qualities of manhood" (376)--moral vigor and justice--but they leave unclear how Gower's approved "kind of manhood . . . might be applied to concrete social and political practice" (378). Fletcher concludes that the "complexity" of the "framing structures" of CA and the "sheer variety" of its narrative materials enabled Gower both "to support and to condemn precisely the same line of action" (378). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fletcher, Christopher. Published Fletcher, Christopher. "Masculinity." In Historians on John Gower. Ed. Stephen H. Rigby, with Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 351-78. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Masculinity. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Cowdery is aware that the six writers he chooses to study here--Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Skelton, Wyatt--"have been received as the early foundation of a high-prestige English literary tradition" (13), and he seeks an original approach to them via the twin elements of his title, "matter" and "making." While the latter is clear enough--it's the writing--the former takes several shapes, i.e., "this book will follow Aristotle in arguing that 'literary matter' is . . . a relative term . . .that designates whatever a given text was understood to be made of" (6), i.e., its "source," one might say. Cowdery argues that "late medieval and early modern court poets followed the same basic procedure" when composing: "(1) the use of pre-existing matter and (2) the remaking of that matter into some new form" (10-11). He applies these definitions to Gower in chapter 2, "Gower and the Crying Voice" (52-82). Gower's habit was to work from the rhetorical figures "figura," "distinction" ("figura" expanded), and "exemplum," all of which are described and illustrated (61-64); Gower's purpose is to "draw out of these materials a set of structural principles, which then serve as the framework for an allegorical and exegetical elaboration upon some moral truth" (64). As many have noted, Gower's exegeses don't always cohere rationally, locus to locus, and so, Cowdery argues, Gower "pursues feeling alongside thought," seeking "to foster an affective connection between the reader and the text": "the voice of a literary character who cries out for mercy" (67). This voice has a special claim on the power of God (69) and is well exemplified in the "Tale of Constantine and Sylvester"--but although "the crying voice" is "a very powerful ethical tool," it too doesn't always seem to work (70-72). Such inconsistencies can be read as allegories, Cowdery asserts, reading the "Tale of Tereus" as just such an allegory critical of Richard II: a superimposition of a "microcosm of erotic greed onto the macrocosm of economic and social greed" (73). For Cowdery, the tale (which he discusses at length) is akin to political protest: "Philomela's woven cry for pity becomes an act of protest speech, and Procne's plot for personal revenge is reimagined as the lead-up to a putsch" (75). But "Tereus" also makes his point, that the matter of the tale can be remade to "allow us to hear the voices of those we cannot hear in our day-to-day lives" (76), as exemplified by Philomela's weaving; and its making "around those voices" (77) is evident throughout his work. Gower's position as himself/as poet at the conclusion of the CA presents the same crying, petitioning stance to Henry (78), Cowdery says--though perhaps here mixing up monarchs and poems, Richard with Henry, the CA with "In Praise of Peace"? Gower did not attempt to "reinvent his materials," Cowdery concludes, "but to draw out what is notable from within them" (82), thereby making something new. Despite several slips of fact (i.e., Gower was not "granted a right to live within the priory precincts of St. Mary Overie"--rather, he sub-let a house there; the priory had no "active scriptorium"; there is no evidence that Gower "once had been a lawyer" [57-58]; the confusion of monarchs, as noted above), and the difficulty of stretching a single thesis to fit six disparate poets across two centuries, Cowdery on Gower provokes thought. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cowdery, Taylor. Published Cowdery, Taylor. Matter and Making in Early English Poetry: Literary Production from Chaucer to Sidney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis In Praise of Peace Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Matter and Making in Early English Poetry: Literary Production from Chaucer to Sidney. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article explores the appellative "nigromantesa" [necromanceress] given to Medea in "La Celestina" (1499) against the background of other Peninsular texts which mention the Greek character and magical issues in the fifteenth century. Antonio Cortijo, undoubtedly inspired by Lida de Malkiel, pays special attention to two Spanish works, Juan de Mena's "Laberinto de Fortuna" (c. 1444) and its extensive commentary made by Hernán Núñez de Toledo, the "Glosa a las Treszientas" (1499). Cortijo Ocaña provides the text of Toledo's glosses to the terms "magos" [magicians] and to Medea the "inútil nigromantesa"--as Mena names her--an outstanding example of the vast humanist knowledge of the commentator, known as "el Comendador Griego" [Greek commander]. Although the "Glosa a las Treszientas" was published the same year as "La Celestina," Cortijo suggests that Rojas could have known the text before it was printed--certainly, Núñez de Toledo was a prominent scholar when he returned from Bologna in 1498, though he spent the subsequent years as a private tutor in Granada. Cortijo adds another pair of works to the panorama of late medieval Iberian stories of Medea, the Portuguese and Spanish translations of "Confessio Amantis," where Gower had given his own approach to the Ovidian myth. Thanks to Cortijo's parallel edition of the English, Portuguese, and Spanish versions of this passage, we have an excellent example of how the Medean legend was transferred to the two peninsular languages. His annotation of the modifications by the translators helps to complete the literary background for Rojas' reference to Medea the enchantress and opens up the possibility of exploring the readership, dissemination and possible impact of the Gowerian poem on Iberian literature. [AS-H.] [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio Published Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio. "Medea a la 'Nigromantesa': A Propósito de los Hechos de Medea en Rojas y Gower." Revista de Literature Medieval 20 (2008), pp. 31-58. ISSN 1130-3611 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 Medea a la 'Nigromantesa': A Propósito de los Hechos de Medea en Rojas y Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 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 Review In this brief essay, Langum sketches several rudiments common to medieval medical and pastoral thought on the interrelations between illness and sin, with discussion of the role of human passions, particularly the passions of envy and wrath--also considered to be vices or sins--as they were explained generally in various medieval sources and as they are used in Gower's "Mirour de l'Omme" and "Confessio Amantis." Such passions, Langum shows, were used both figuratively and literally, and raise questions about the "responsibility for sin" (119) insofar as passions are natural to humans (and to some animals) but need to be subdued in moral creatures: "It falls to reason to rule the passions" (121). As passions, both wrath and envy "may be unavoidable conditions of human psychology" but, left unchecked by reason, they are vicious or sinful; at times, it is even unclear "whether what is being described is the vice or the passion or a conflation of the two" (122). To illustrate details of her discussion, Langham uses Gower's works recurrently, along with other secular writers and a number of medical and pastoral authorities and encyclopedists. Admitting that Gower does not "use the word 'passion' to denote the physiological forces of emotion in the body" (126), Langum nevertheless addresses Gower's "medically specific descriptions of wrath and envy as passions" through which, she tells us rather unclearly, "Gower extends beyond the figurative to suggest a more material relationship between the body and ethics" and thereby "raises the question: do these allusions to wrath and envy as passions contradict [the poet's] argument for human responsibility and culpability?" (125). Her answer is a qualified "no": "In my view, Gower encourages the reader to recognize physiological forces at work in human choices and actions, if not ultimately excusing him for bending to these forces." The particular "physiological" force Langham cites here is Amans's advanced age, in spite of which, he "still actively desires to love against reason" (126)--a passion, therefore, that is presumably sinful by being unreasonable, although Langum leaves this unsaid. Instead, she closes her essay with a brief reading of the "Tale of Constantine" from Book II in which "Gower uses the story to reflect upon human bodily weakness" (126). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Langum, Virginia. Published Langum, Virginia. "Medicine, Passion and Sin in Gower." In Rachel Falconer and Denis Renevey, eds. Medieval and Early Modern Literature, Science and Medicine. SPELL: Swiss Papers in Language and Literature, no. 28. Tübingen: Narr, 2013. Pp. 117-30. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditatis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Medicine, Passion and Sin in Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor McMillan, Samuel F. Published McMillan, Samuel F. Medieval Authorship at Reason's End: The "Roman de la Rose"'s Legacy of Misrule. Ph.D. Dissertation. Pennsylvania State University, 2016. v, 324 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A80.05(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/rr171x20k. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Review McMillan argues "that Guillaume de Lorris's and Jean de Meun's 'Roman de la Rose' initiates a literary tradition that understands reason to be in tension with and even antithetical to imaginative writing" and serves as a "speculative domain" for writers such as Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Hoccleve. In differing ways, these writers "imitate, correct, and reimagine the narrative conditions and implications of Raison's repudiation," enabling them "to recognize, accept, document, and value the morally questionable, the ephemeral, the earthly" (iii). Tracing this development through later fifteenth-century poets (Hawes and Skelton), McMillan argues that this poetics of "counter-rationality" (285) leads eventually to the "passionate sublime" (286) of early modern English writing. Treating Gower, but only the "Confessio Amantis" (pp. 114-70), MacMillan structures his discussion in four parts. First, he establishes that Gower posits "two different presentations of authorship . . . at the beginning of Book I for his fictional self and for Amans," casting the "frame" of CA "as the story of a poet coming to appreciate and employ the imaginative capacities of a love that cannot be known by rule." Next, MacMillan "analyzes the mode of authorship embodied by Genius" and Genius's "poetic shortcomings" to offer imagination as an alternative to the futility of trying to unite passion and rationality." In his third section, McMillan addresses how Gower, in Book VII, presents "rhetoric as a rational aesthetic," an ideal, however, that he is himself either unable or unwanting to attain." In his fourth section, McMillan reads "the closing of Book VIII" as a "dramatic reimagination" of RR and a depiction of "poetry as incapable of effecting the regeneration of an audience's reason." Here, "[i]maginative composition functions as misruled desire, a sensual longing for a reason that can resurface only in the wake of the literary" (116-17). Gower, McMillan tells us, "may be above all a moral poet hoping to return rational order to a world turned upside down, but to accomplish this feat, to bring a measure of harmony to man and beast alike, he must invest readers with an intense love of the mundane by relying on a poetry founded in reason's other" (170). [MA] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Medieval Authorship at Reason's End: The "Roman de la Rose"'s Legacy of Misrule. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Da Rold's concern is to describe the training culture that produced scribal techniques, and to make a case for the use of scribal idiosyncrasies, or "quirks," as helpful in identifying hands, manuscript to manuscript. Her brief mention of Trinity College MS R.3.2, "Confessio Amantis," focuses on Hoccleve's slight contribution "in mixed script" (728). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Da Rold, Orietta. Published Da Rold, Orietta. "Medieval Clerical Culture: The Sociology of Scripts and the Significance of Scribal Quirks." Speculum 99.3 (2024): 713-43. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Medieval Clerical Culture: The Sociology of Scripts and the Significance of Scribal Quirks. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Discusses Gower's works in relation to Chaucer's, and the dependence of each poet on the French tradition. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Ker, W. P. Published Ker, W. P. Medieval English Literature. London: Oxford University Press, 1912, pp. 55-56, 63, 69, 134, 164-67. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism 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 Medieval English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1912 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This collection of previously published essays, in a series intended to illustrate the application of "the latest revisions in literary theory" to particular groups of texts, contains two studies already well known to readers of Gower: Anne Middleton's "The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II" (1978), and Robert F. Yeager's "English, Latin, and the Text as 'Other': The Page as Sign in the Work of John Gower" (1987). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Trigg, Stephanie, ed. Published Trigg, Stephanie, ed. "Medieval English Poetry." Longman Critical Readers. . London and New York: Longman, 1993 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 Medieval English Poetry. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Longman, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 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 Author/Editor Author/Editor Machan, Tim William Published Machan, Tim William. "Medieval Multilingualism and Gower's Literary Practice." Studies in Philology 103 (2006), pp. 1-25. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Review Machan---one of the most interesting and profound speculators about late medieval English sociolinguistics now writing---argues for "the strategic character of [Gower's] multilingualism, the way in which, within the grammatical and pragmatic constraints of a language, purpose can determine usage Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Multilingualism and Gower's Literary Practice Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This highly speculative article questions the idea of artistic taste and its foundation, pointing out about Gower that, if this generation of readers had more of the moralizing taste of the fourteenth century, his works would again to popular. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Howard, Donald R. Published Howard, Donald R. "Medieval Poems and Medieval Society." Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series 3 (1972): 99-115 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 Medieval Poems and Medieval Society. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1972 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Applies Geoffrey of Vinsauf's "Poetria nova" to VC; last chapter compares use of rhetoric in VC with CA and MO (all are judged "successful" uses of rhetoric and are designed to convince men to return to God-fearing behavior); sees Gower as an important rhetorician. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kloesel, Christian Johannes Wilhelm. Published Kloesel, Christian Johannes Wilhelm. Medieval Poetics and John Gower's "Vox Clamantis." Ph.D, Dissertation. University of Kansas, 1973. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Medieval Poetics and John Gower's "Vox Clamantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1973 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review A study of rhetorical manuscripts and their present whereabouts; speculation on the availability of some to, and use by, Chaucer and Gower. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Gallick, Susan. Published Gallick, Susan. "Medieval Rhetorical Arts in England and the Manuscript Tradition." Manuscripta 18, no. 2 (July, 1974): 67-95. Gower Subject 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 Medieval Rhetorical Arts in England and the Manuscript Tradition. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1974 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Truitt's study is of "medieval robots both actual and fictional," investigating "the complex history of medieval automata . . . to understand the interdependence of science, technology, and the imagination in medieval culture and between medieval culture and modernity" (1). In his third chapter, "'Talking Heads': Astral Science, Divination, and Legends of Medieval Philosophers," he discusses Gower's brief tale of Robert Grosseteste and the brass head he creates to foretell the future (CA IV.234-49), presented as an exemplum of one of the branches of Sloth (lachesse). Truitt points to an earlier brass head created by "Gerbert" [of Aurillac, the later Pope Sylvester II], citing William of Malmsbury's narrative as a source for the Grosseteste story (90), and alludes further to connections between the seven years Grosseteste labors and "the seven planets and their influence on the seven metals," as well as "the metaphor of 'Natura Artifex' employed by the Neoplatonist philosophers in the twelfth century" (90), without offering evidence or deeper explanation. He suggests that "Gower was familiar with Grosseteste, whose work (especially his 'Constitutions,' a treatise on clerical reform, and 'Le Chasteau d'Amor,' an Anglo-Norman romance) were influential in Ricardian England" (91); his source for these latter claims is George G. Fox (1931). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Truitt, E. R. Published Truitt, E. R. Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 89-91. 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 Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Brief discussion of the tales of Constance, Nebuchhadnezzar, Apollonius, and Pyramus and Thisbe from CA, in relation to romance versions; asserts Gower did not know the English version of "Partonope of Blois." [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Loomis, Laura Hibbard. Published Loomis, Laura Hibbard. Medieval Romance in England: A Study of the Sources and Analogues of the Non-cyclic Metrical Romances. New ed. with Supplementary Bibliographical Index (1929-1959). New York: Burt Franklin, 1963, pp. 24, 63, 165, 168, 192, 202, 231. 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 Medieval Romance in England: A Study of the Sources and Analogues of the Non-cyclic Metrical Romances. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1963 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Published Thomas, Mary Edith. Medieval Skepticism and Chaucer: An Evaluation of the Skepticism of the 13th and 14th centuries of Geoffrey Chaucer and his Immediate Predecessors--An Era That Looked Back on An Age of Faith and Forward to An Age of Reason. New York: Williams Frederick, 1950. Reprint. New York: Cooper Square, 1971, pp. 5, 30, 70-72, 108, 109-10, 113, 118, 120, 130 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review Argues that Gower satirized clergy; used "Gesta Romanorum"; was not skeptical about astrology; was piously superior to merchants. [RFY1981] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Skepticism and Chaucer: An Evaluation of the Skepticism of the 13th and 14th centuries of Geoffrey Chaucer and his Immediate Predecessors--An Era That Looked Back on An Age of Faith and Forward to An Age of Reason. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1950 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Minnis succinctly puts his thesis thus: "Thirteenth-century schoolmen produced a critical vocabulary which enabled the literary features of Scriptural texts to be analsed thoroughly, and which encouraged the emergence in the fourteenth century of a more liberal attitude to classical poetry. Something of the new status which had been afforded to Scriptural poetry in particular and to the poetic and rhetorical modes employed throughout Scripture in general, seems to have 'rubbed off' on secular poetry" (p. 6). Minnis goes on to illustrate Gower's dependence on a literary theory propounded initially by Scriptural exegesis. He shows, first, how this theory helped to shape the Vox Clamantis (viewed as an example of prophetic writing in the 'forma prophetialis'), then discusses Gower's adaptation of the role of philosopher/teacher in the Confessio Amantis. In the CA, Amans/Gower and Gower the 'auctor' (which voice appears in the Latin marginalia) are used skillfully to place the theme of love firmly within an ethical context. [PN. Copyright the John Gower Society. JGN 3.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Minnis, A. J Published Minnis, A. J. "Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages." London: Scolar Press, 1984 ISBN 0859676412 Gower Subject 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 Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Scolar Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Tinkle, Theresa Lynn Published Tinkle, Theresa Lynn. "Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics, and English Poetry." Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Chapter 7 of this important new study is devoted to CA. Tinkle places herself among those who have discerned in Gower's poem a formal and thematic multiplicity that deliberately juxtaposes a variety of interpretive perspectives without offering a precise resolution among them. By placing the lover's complaint within a penitential frame, Gower emphasizes both the similarities and the differences between amatory and pastoral discourses, and "accentuates the heterogeneity apparent in late medieval discussions of sexuality" (p. 179). On pages 180-83 Tinkle gives a good brief statement of an increasingly common view of Gower's strategy in deploying Amans, a glossator, and the author of the Latin epigrams alongside Genius, who himself adopts different positions according to need and circumstance. Rather than seeing Genius himself as merely inept, she points out that precedent both for his shifting moral standards and for his occasional reductiveness can be found among other medieval mythographers. CA differs from its predecessors in the commentary tradition by its greater valorisation of narrative and by Gower's foregrounding of the disjunction between narrative and Genius' interpretation, which forces a recognition of the limitations of the conventional authoritative tradition of moralizing commentaries. The disparity between tale and lesson offers another instance of the "multiplication of authorities and voices" in the poem, which "forcefully argues against the possibility of any single, unquestionably authoritative model of interpretation" (p. 182). Tinkle's principal interest is in Gower's use of the tradition of mythographic hermeneutics within this frame. She traces two general patterns. In the first, conventional medieval mythography is given a certain limited authority. Amans, the conventional literary lover, has deified his own desires by projecting them onto the figures of Venus and Cupid; guilty of idolatry, he "has fallen into the pseudo-pagan error of divinizing natural forces and humans" (p. 179). "Genius corrects him by means of familiar mythographic explanations that demystify sexuality and its supposedly divine representatives" (pp. 179-80), most explicitly in Book 5, where he offers a conventional historical explanation of Venus and Cupid, and in Book 7, where he turns to astrology to disclose their natural origins. Rational, Christian arguments against ancient pagan religion are used as a way of counteracting the neo-paganism of a medieval lover. But consistent with his refusal to grant final authoritative status to any discourse, Gower also declines to privilege any single mythographic explanation, instead deliberately juxtaposing irreconcilable ways of understanding ancient myths in such a way as to encourage meditation on the relations among them, and to reveal them as the products of separate, interested, individual points of view. His challenge to the authority of the astrological explanation in Book 7 is particularly clear, in the shifting role that Genius attributes to Nectanabus, first of all, and in the conflicts he describes among astrologers, divines, and philosophers over the potency of the will. Genius argues both the irresistibility of the law of nature and the need for reason to govern the flesh, but his statements on the supposed priority of reason turn out to be equivocal and suggest the "predetermined failure of self-governance" (p. 192). His notion of natural law has numerous ambiguities too, represented in the many different manifestation of Venus (p. 190). Gower thus depicts both astrology and natural law as "products of historical human activity," and like Chaucer, Gower "makes visible the culturally invisible ideological bent of science and nature" (p. 189). Even in the final scene, of Amans' "healing," Gower "develops a poetry of figurative ambiguities rather than an argument" (p. 193). "With Venus and Cupid," Tinkle concludes, "Gower exploits the multiplicity of traditions -- literary amatory conventions, historicizing and astrologizing hermeneutics, natural law -- so as to remake their meanings. . . . Within the poem, all the diverse traditions form an integrated whole, within which each convention, each discourse, each perspective enters into endlessly fascinating interplay with the others. The poem does not offer a single meaning but, rather, engaging invitations to reflect on the perspectives that create meaning and on the discourses that construct sexualities. We can of course resist the poem and select a single discourse (penitential, for instance) through which to read it. To the extent that humans tend to be uncomfortable with unresolved ambiguities, the text certainly invites this readerly activity. We might nevertheless choose simply to respect Gower's design, which calls into question the relationships between human wisdom and cosmic orders, between mind and body, between theological and scientific perspectives, without advancing the sure answers of a hegemonic discourse." The value of Tinkle's work for the study of Gower extends far beyond this challenging interpretation of CA. The opening chapters of her book contain a brilliant survey of the medieval mythographic tradition, in which she argues against the pervasive, naively historicist reading of such authors as Augustine, Fulgentius, Isidore, Alberic, and Bersuire in search of "transparent, immediately accessible meanings" (p. 211) that can be used for the explication of other, more "belletristic" texts; and against the corollary and equally common procedure of "torturing all medieval discourses until they confess the same truth" (p. 43). One must read her analyses for the evidence she presents that each of these authors "advances specific ideologies of sexuality" (p. 31), and that "there is no universal value, mythographic or ecclesiastical, to which we can refer for a fixed understanding of all medieval Venuses and Cupids" (p. 43). She disposes forever (one hopes) of the notion that all medieval authors recognized just two Venuses, the concupiscent one and the charitable one; and in dismissing the entire notion of a fixed value for either Venus or Cupid, she forces our attention upon individual texts. One discovers some unexpected sources for some of the ideas that show up in CA (see, for instance, her discussion of Fulgentius on page 56); but more importantly, Tinkle has opened up the study of the poem with her insistence that each author makes his own contribution to the medieval discussion of sexuality. Gower too can be allowed to have his own views on morality and sexuality, even if they are not precisely like Augustine's, and even if they are not quite as indeterminate as Tinkle herself asserts. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics, and English Poetry Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Stanford University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Burrow, J. A Published Burrow, J. A. "Medieval Writers and Their Work: Middle English Literature 1100-1500. 2d ed." Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Review John Burrow published the first edition of this little (currently 156 pp.) volume in 1982, noting in the Preface: "The present book is designed as a introduction. At the risk of giving an exaggerated impression of the strangeness of Middle English writings, I have concentrated on some of the chief differences which confront a reader of modern literature when he or she first approaches them: the differences in the notion of literature itself (Chapter 1), in the circumstances under which writings were produced and received (Chapter 2), in the types of writing produced (Chapter 3), and in the kinds of meaning to be found in them (Chapter 4). Chapters 1 and 5 also attempt to characterize the Middle English period in relation to earlier and later periods of English literature." In addition to providing a clear view of its purpose--"an introduction," and aimed not specifically at undergraduate students as most of such books are, but rather at any "reader of modern literature" upon first encounter with medieval writing--the preface thus succinctly outlines the book's contents. Commentary on Gower thus predictably runs throughout, tailored to suit the larger context of each chapter. Although this second edition is more than a quarter century more recent than the first, it remains in most ways a very similar presence. The bibliography, for example, has been "updated" by only nine citations post-2000. Yet Burrow himself remains one of the most sensitive and perceptive of readers, and his views of Gower here are profoundly worth knowing. His insight into "the contradiction . . . in which Chaucer, Gower and their immediate successors found themselves," is a case in point. "These writers . . . found themselves partially alienated from their native literary heritage (e.g., "adapted . . . to the practice or oral delivery"), in so far as that heritage represented conditions that were recessive in their day" (56). The different ways Chaucer and Gower found to respond to what Burrow calls "minstrel features" (57) stand for him as representative of major writers of the period: in the CantT Chaucer "came to terms" with that heritage by incorporating "addresses to the audience, oaths, asseverations, redundant phrases," to "speak 'ful brode' when he wants to" (57), while Gower looked to French and Latin literatures for better models than "minstrelisms," ultimately achieving a verse "purged (though at the cost of a certain debility) of minstrel features" (57). Burrow sees the "apogee" of "English narrative verse" in the work of Gower, Chaucer, and the Gawain-poet (71). And consider Burrow on the "complications of interpretation" that arise with some of the tales in the CA: "Sometimes it seems that [Gower] has simply failed to find a suitable story to illustrate this vice or that virtue, as required by his scheme; but on other occasions we can recognize a deliberate finesse in the relation between tale and context . . . . When the scale of the narrative is increased, complications . . . may arise . . . . [Yet] in literature as in life, events often appear less simple the more you know about them. Most stories, if they are told with any richness of human detail, tend to forfeit their straightforward relationship to exemplified truth. In the light of such a story, the 'truth' may come to seem complicated, or doubtful, or simply irrelevant." (118, 119) Few more sensible words have been written, perhaps, to answer complaints about Gower's narrative "failures." For many now, in the new age of Brexit, the most interesting chapter may be the last in which Burrow ponders the future of writers like Chaucer and Gower, when "poetry of that kind, in that kind of English and that kind of metre, and printed in that kind of book--will face increasingly strong challenges from rivals who do not recognize the language of the Authorized Version as their English. The tradition of Chaucer, Milton, and Tennyson can hardly fail to suffer such challenges in an age where English is a world language and England no longer a world power" (138). Reading that--written in 2007--one can dodge its eerie clairvoyance in the new reality of Brexit. Burrow's is still a book from which to learn much--and ought, perhaps, to be on every Introduction to the Middle Ages reading list. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Medieval Writers and Their Work: Middle English Literature 1100-1500. 2d ed 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 2008 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 Peebles, Katie Lyn Published Peebles, Katie Lyn. Medievalism's Inheritance: Early Inventions of Medieval Pasts. Ph.D. Dissertation. Indiana University, 2010. ix, 309 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A71.08. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Minor Latin Poetry Review "This dissertation examines how and why medievalism--the use of elements from the European Middle Ages in social commentary--began in the Middle Ages itself. . . . Each chapter focuses on an author experiencing political crisis: William of Malmesbury (c.1095-c.1143), John Gower (c.1330-1408), Sir Thomas Malory (c.1405-1471), and John Aubrey (1626-1697). These writers constructed medieval heritages out of available historical fragments, narratives, and their own dreams in order to resolve contemporary issues. . . . The basic process of 'medieval' medievalism is the same as the process that has been established in post-medieval periods: to make the past instrumental in cultural debates, these writers compared the terms of the chosen medieval period to the immediate concerns of the present. However, early medievalism is more weighted to a search for continuity and metaphorical constructions of cultural heritage in order to naturalize certain kinds of violence and mitigate losses of the past. William of Malmesbury and John Gower make lessons from the past obvious in attempts to secure a more peaceful future. Both Malory and Caxton were concerned with asserting a stable transmission of heritage that could transcend cycles of violence and limits of the book marketplace. Aubrey's use of medievalism in early modern scientific historical projects set a pattern for the continued intimacy of heritage and folklore studies, and of medievalism and medieval studies" (vi-vii). Peebles summarizes her discussion of Gower as follows: "the second chapter addresses John Gower's attempt to rescue and revitalize certain British traditions of rulership, particularly the proper relationship of a king to his people. The tone of Gower's medievalism veers between fear in the 'Vox Clamantis,' wistfulness in the Tale of Three Questions [from Confessio Amantis, and optimism in some of the late Latin poems. I argue that the tension in Gower's medievalism, which transformed his experiences of surviving the Black Death, the Peasants' Revolt, and the usurpation of Richard II into fearful visions and hopeful dreams of virtuous reform, comes from a dialectic of kings and subjects in which women are best positioned to lead to reconciliation through wise counsel" (15). Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Medievalism's Inheritance: Early Inventions of Medieval Pasts Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Brief biography; list of works; works assessment generally positive. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Raith, Josef. Published Raith, Josef. Meister in Poesie und Prosa. Munich: Lurz, 1947, p. 23. Reprinted in Geschichte der englischen Literatur. Munich: Heuber, 1961, p. 57. 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 Meister in Poesie und Prosa. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1947 1961 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Tracy is interested in the connection between memory and confession, which she finds is examined in much of the major poetry in Middle English: "Piers Plowman," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Chaucerian romance, and--in chapter four--"Gower: Confessio Amantis and the Fear of Forgetting" (53-66). She focuses on "two pivotal scenes" (54), both from the frame narrative: Book I, 216-29, in which Amans, about to undergo confession, expresses concerns that his memory will be insufficient to facilitate a useful resolution, and Book VIII, 2894-97, in which Genius, the confession complete, instructs Amans to "Forget it thou and so wol I," for at this point Amans, via Venus' mirror, has come to grips with the reality of his old age, and can be relied upon for only appropriate behavior in the future. Tracy connects this kind of appropriate remembering with Gower's larger purpose, expressed in Prologue 1-11, of learning from history as "remembered" in old books. "Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'," she notes, "relies on the concern with forgetfulness in the process of confession to justify the framework of the text and defines the final stage of confession as being able to forget past sins while, at the same time, recollecting personal realities . . . . As a result of recalled memories, the confessing individual's spiritual condition is changed; his state of being is reformed after being subjected to an act of recollection. This model is reflected in the ending of the CA. After engaging in the confessional process, Amans concludes that his life, his mental being, will never be the same again" (63). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Tracy, Kisha G. Published Tracy, Kisha G. Memory and Confession in Middle English Literature. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. 53-66. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Memory and Confession in Middle English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Gower's emphasis on remembrance is as evident as his preoccupation with division," Chandler asserts; in fact, remembrance or memory provides the means of overcoming division -- within the self, within the kingdom -- and also the motif that unifies diverse materials of the poem. "For Gower, disunity corresponds to failure." Amans' love is not so much evil as irrational, and an instance of disunity or division: he is in conflict with himself -- his will is in conflict with his reason -- because of his infatuation, and because of this division he is unable to recognize and experience until the very end of the poem the deeper love governed by reason and charity. The progress towards the restoration of his reason and the reuniting of his divided self requires three types of remembering: that of the confession, most obviously; that contained in the tales, a "more socially oriented type of remembrance," offering the memory of the successes and failures of others; and "spiritual memory," which awakens in Amans the type of love governed by charity and good will in the poem's conclusion. These three types of memory correspond to the three major parts of the poem's structure: the frame; the body; and the beginning and the end. The confession, in which the first type of memory is contained, is "more the skeleton than the focus" of CA, since it occupies fewer lines than the tales, and Amans frequently has nothing to confess. He does reveal, however, that he has allowed his imagination to supplant his reason. Genius tries to reactivate Amans' memory as a way of strengthening his wisdom and his prudence; and unlike the moment of transformation when Amans sees himself in the mirror, the reinforcement of the habit of remembering works cumulatively upon his behavior, and helps make that transformation permanent. The tales themselves, the second and most prevalent type of remembering in the poem, contain frequent references to memory, and they are typically followed by exhortations and promises to remember. "The tales provide Amans with examples by which he can remember patterns of behavior to emulate or avoid," and they serve a dual purpose: to help unify Amans so that he can govern his own nature, and to help him regain his consciousness of social conventions so that he can function constructively within his community. Some, like "Apollonius of Tyre," also teach the value of a good memory. "Spiritual memory," the third type, becomes dominant in the poem's conclusion, when John Gower the author steps forward as a Christian rather than lover and citizen, beseeching that "in thilke place / wher resteth love and alle pes / Oure joie mai ben endeles" (8.3170-72). Taking issue with Hugh White's more pessimistic analysis of the conclusion (1988; see JGN IX, no. 1), Chandler argues the compatibility of the different ideals -- of earthly love, Christian love, and Reason -- that are offered in the end, and the success of Amans' "healing." The failure of Amans' love is not a condemnation of earthly love generally; Genius attempts to lead Amans to a different type of love, governed by Reason, represented by Apollonius. Venus' banishment of Amans from love once his reason is restored is suspect, since she represents a type of love that Genius himself has rejected, and does not exclude Amans from a higher form of love. "Learning how to unify reason and love comes from remembering the eternal perspective, but White places divine and earthly love in opposition, while Gower united them by subordinating the latter to the former." The "spiritual memory" that recalls divine love surpasses the other forms of memory, but it also encompasses them, and thus provides not just the conclusion but also the binding together of the other elements of the poem. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Chandler, Katherine R. Published Chandler, Katherine R.. "Memory and Unity in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Philological Quarterly 71 (1992), pp. 15-30. 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 Memory and Unity in Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Gilbert justifies her provocative juxtaposition of these two unrelated texts in this way: "Both aim to promote ethical action on the part of their audiences and use exemplary figures as central strategies in this enterprise. Both take as their subject-matter language, desire, law and taboo, and both express anxiety concerning the writer's own position in relation to these matters. More particularly, both draw a connection between a desired linguistic purity and a perverse masculine heterosexuality centring on the maternal body" (77-78). The comparison leads to a consideration of both similarities and differences in the two authors' deployment of their exempla and in the ways in which they associate sexual transgression with the breaking of linguistic norms. With reference to Gower, she finds the latter linkage in the final stanza of Traitié, in which the poet appears to apologize for his poor command of French. In one respect a typical modesty topos, intended to draw attention to exactly the achievement that he denies, Gower's statement is also a claim to be taken seriously as an Englishman, capable of producing a text that meets the highest standards of the "international courtly language" (85). "By declaring his own linguistic insecurity," furthermore, "the commoner Gower deferentially flatters [the] superior competence of his audience," the French-speaking English court. But he also betrays an unease about his treatment of his subject. He employs the metaphor of the "proper path" both with regard to linguistic correctness and, in an earlier passage, with regard to sexual mores. "The poet's concern for the purity of his language is thus shadowed by the uncomfortable suggestion that he parallels his exemplars in mistaking foldelit for droit amour, an error which would destroy the Traitié's didactic value. Anxiety about erotic deviancy (and perhaps even about the erotic as essentially deviant or as tending inevitably to deviancy) is coupled with a corresponding disquiet about linguistic deviation" (86). The parallels between Gower's project and Derrida's, however, suggest that by choosing to write in French, Gower consciously calls into question the naturalness of the norms that his text advocates. "Conceptual confusion appears to derive from Gower's inability when working in French to anchor the earthly as a morally valid sphere between the divine and the corrupt. This sphere and its value are therefore not asserted but questioned and explored. These (no less ethically serious) activities here rely on the representation of French as the language in which Gower acknowledges constitutive alienation, which Derrida claims is a necessary condition of ethical responsibility. The Traitié's ruin as a didactic project is, in a different light, the commencement of its poetic and ethical potential" (87). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 26.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gilbert, Jane Published Gilbert, Jane. "Men Behaving Badly: Linguistic Purity and Sexual Perversity in Derrida's Le Monolinguisme de l'autre and Gower's Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz." Romance Studies: A Journal of the University of Wales 24 (2006), pp. 77-99. ISSN 0263-9904 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Men Behaving Badly: Linguistic Purity and Sexual Perversity in Derrida's Le Monolinguisme de l'autre and Gower's Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Musson describes the "legal profession" in Gower's lifetime, including the growth of various courts and proceedings. He explains the ambiguities and ranges of application of the labels "men of law," "gents de ley," "sergeant of the law," etc., and reviews evidence of Gower's purported legal training (including the sartorial evidence of the "striped sleeve"--"raye mance"--mentioned in MO 21772–5), concluding that there is "no unequivocal evidence which definitively confirms his status as a lawyer" (226) and that the "contention that he was a Chancery lawyer remains extremely conjectural" (229). Nevertheless, Gower's works display "familiarity with legal terminology and aspects of substantive law" (226), Musson explains, offering several examples of nuanced legal terminology missed by translators or critics of Gower's poetry. Further, Musson observes that Gower's knowledge at times extends beyond common law to canon law and Roman civic law, and, more importantly, that "his poetry engages in detail with issues relating to the conduct and role of men of law in the contemporary administration of justice" (229). Gower criticized legal rhetoric, obfuscatory language, and abuses of judicial power. In particular, Musson argues, Gower castigates the opportunistic "social climbing of men of law," made possible because of the rising "consumer demand for lawyers" and "new opportunities to purchase land" in the wake of outbreaks of the plague (237). Yet Gower "offered no practical reforms," Musson says, "other than a tax on lawyers' profits," relying essentially on the "personal integrity of men of law" (238). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Musson, Andrew. Published Musson, Anthony. "Men of Law." In Historians on John Gower. Ed. Stephen H. Rigby, with Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 213-39. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Biography of Gower 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 Men of Law. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database 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 Review Hawes looks to the Actaeon story as an example of "the way in which evolving cultural and literary traditions can influence the reading of a mythological narrative" (21). She discusses Ovid's version in detail, concluding that he "raises the issue of (in)justice but does not seek closure for it. In the epic world of the 'Metamorphoses,' in which divine power determines all, there is little purpose in discussing justice in human terms" (24). In later antiquity the "Metamorphoses" tales were kept alive in allegorized form as exempla by Hyginus, Pseudo-Lactantius Placidus, and especially Fulgentius (28). The latter's "rather confusing account" presents Acteon as representing "the dangers of curiosity, fear, and . . . an excessively wasteful lifestyle" (28-29). This last aspect characterized twelfth-century approaches to Actaeon, e.g., Arnulf of Orleans and Giovanni del Virgilio; although in modified form, it remains visible in the "Ovide Moralisé" and the "Ovidius Moralizatus" (29). Dante recalls it in "Inferno" XIII.109-29, in his treatment of the squanderers Arcolano da Squarcia di Riccolfo Maconi and Iacopo da Santo Andrea, retrieving from Ovid the ravening dogs (33) while maintaining the medieval interpretation of wasteful spending and its consequent punishment, putting both to his own purposes. Gower resembles Dante in this, offering "not so much a translation of the original narratives as a bold remoulding, taking only what is necessary for the sense of the exemplum" (34)--which in this case is "mislok," or sinful looking. This sin Hawes goes to some length to connect with the emphasis placed on beauty by "courtly love" (34-35), and both with the dominant conceit of the "Confessio Amantis." Noting how Gower has adapted Ovid's story to his purposes (expending a good deal of space identifying aristocratic features of Gower's Acteon, and discussing the overlap of hunting and courtship), she comments: "Acteon's death appears as an afterthought: if the reader can comprehend the danger of indecent vision, then the punishment itself has a largely perfunctory role" (37). With Maria Wickert (quoted 37, fn. 53), Hawes finds this an "inept" and "dull" choice, aimed solely to "push his heroes and stories with high-principled directness towards a question of moral decision." A classicist to the end, she concludes: "It is testimony to the inherently flexible nature of classical myth that the same simple narrative of offense and punishment can . . . be utilised to illustrate both the pettiness and violence of the pagan gods within a world in which the frames of reference are constantly in flux, and the pitiless objectivity at the heart of the medieval conception of universal justice" (39). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hawes, Greta. Published Hawes, Greta. "Metamorphosis and Metamorphic Identity: The Myth of Actaeon in Works of Ovid, Dante, and John Gower." Isis: Journal of the Classical Association of Victoria, 21 (2008): 21-42. 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 Metamorphosis and Metamorphic Identity: The Myth of Actaeon in Works of Ovid, Dante, and John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Looks at Gower's transformations of the tales of Midas, Florent, Iphis, and Pygmalion as examples of thoughtful, plastic art which transcends source study in the usual sense. [PN. Copyright the John Gower Society. JGN 3.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ricks, Christopher Published Ricks, Christopher. "Metamorphosis in Other Words." In Gower's Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments. Ed. Minnis, A. J. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1983, pp. 24-49. ISBN 085991142X 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 Metamorphosis in Other Words. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D.S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1983 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Weiskott's project lacks neither ambition nor targets. As he sets it out in the Preface, "The goal is to think of English metrical traditions as themselves unfolding historical times, whose experiences initially bore no relation to the later historical accretions through which we inevitably conceptualize English poetics today, such as the canonization of Chaucer, the dominance of pentameter, the usurpation by English of the social and intellectual spaces of Latin, Enlightenment historiography, nationalism, the institution of English departments, and free verse" (xviii). To encompass all this, he identifies four "Ages": of Prophecy, Alliterative Meter, Tetrameter, and Pentameter. The first, as he says, "represents a genre" (197), the other three metrical traditions, and he argues for mapping all four across the literature of his chosen three hundred years as a fresh approach to marking the passage of time. Weiskott identifies Langland (who perfected alliterative verse) and Chaucer (who invented English pentameter) as "the two most prominent fourteenth-century English poets" (4), but he allows occasional spaces for Gower scattered throughout, primarily (and not surprisingly) in chapter 10, "Chaucer's English Metrical Phonology: Tetrameter to Pentameter." Weiskott avers that the Age of Tetrameter began in the thirteenth century, "under influence from French octosyllables and Latin accentual-syllabic tetrameter" (163), and in the fourteenth "appeared as the best alternative to alliterative meter for serious compositions" (74); hence Gower used it for the "Confessio," and Chaucer for the "Book of the Duchess," "Hous of Fame," and "Romaunt of the Rose." In this their practices followed "Francien preference": early on, "Chaucer deployed his French- and Italian-derived English verse forms according to French metrical decorum. (Gower observed the same decorum throughout his career, across English and French: tetrameter/octosyllables for the narrative "Confessio Amantis" and "Mirour de l'Omme," pentameter/decasyllables for the lyric "Cinkante Balades," "Confessio" 8.2217-300, "In Praise of Peace," and "Traitié pour les amantz marietz")" (175-76). Several of Weiskott's most interesting observations concerning Gower occur in the notes. Of particular interest in this regard is the comment (247-48, n. 13) that three lyric styles that he, following Martin Duffell, identifies as exclusively Chaucerian and Italian, Gower also employs in the "Cinkante Balades." Similarly: pentameter being for Weiskott the badge of modernity, he would on metrical grounds "expand" claims for Chaucer's modernity made (for other reasons) by A. C. Spearing "to cover Gower, Clanvowe, Walton" and several others (253, n. 49); and (251, n. 52) he reflects on uses of "poete/poetical/poesie/poetrie" in Chaucer and Gower, in whose work the first two don't appear, and the second pair, with the exception of Venus' reference to Chaucer, alludes "exclusively to Ovid." His final Gower-related observation is to Quixley's fifteenth-century translation of the "Traitié" into Yorkshire English, arguing, following Yeager, that its unique production outside of the London ambit (albeit with probable Augustinian connections with St. Mary Overye) underscores how localized the work of Chaucer, Gower, and the rest were (183-84). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Cinkante Balades In Praise of Peace Traitié pour les amantz marietz Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Both Chaucer's and Gower's lines, Cable claims, are written in a syllable-based alternating meter rather than in the foot-based meter more characteristic of later English verse. The theoretical implications of the distinction are lost on those who are not metrists, but the practical implication seems to be that some of the variations that are possible in, say, Shakespeare's iambic line are not found either in Gower or in Chaucer, even when the latter is writing decasyllables. The alternating stress line is nonetheless quite flexible, as Cable demonstrates by comparing Gower to three sixteenth-century poets who still employed it, Gascoigne, Turberville, and Googe. In order to avoid the tub-thumping monotony to which the latter are prone, Gower takes fuller advantage of normal variations in stress by using an effective mix of monosyllabic, disyllabic, and polysyllabic words; and he softens the transition between stressed and unstressed syllables by putting normally stressed words in unstressed position and lightly stressed syllables in stressed position. He also uses his syntax very skillfully to construct units longer than the single line. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cable, Thomas Published Cable, Thomas. "Metrical Similarities between Gower and Certain Sixteenth-Century Poets." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Ashville, NC: Pegasus, 1998, pp. 39-48. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Metrical Similarities between Gower and Certain Sixteenth-Century Poets. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pegasus, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Galloway's entrée into a journal dedicated to pedagogy is his premise that Middle English by its very nature presents 21st-century students with a variety of dilemmas concerning vocabulary and syntax that were shared by medieval writers in England, many of whom were fluent in at least three languages (Latin, French and English) and for whom the "vernacular" was a poly-lingual work-in-progress. Their lot was thus to write (just as our students now read) possessed of a "sense of the foreignness of the English they use" (p. 89). In a series of closely read passages (CA I.2041-47; I.2080-2103; II.1936-57; Piers Plowman C.9.209-18; St. Margaret ll.83-84) Galloway demonstrates the complexity of (especially) Gower's English syntax, alongside the general self-consciousness of Langland and the St. Margaret author about words in English. His points about Gower are particularly bracing: Gower's "use of any one of these languages [i.e., Latin, French, English] must take account of his fluency in the others" (p. 91); "Gower regularly handles [syntax] with a sophistication far greater than Chaucer or indeed most any (and perhaps simply any) Middle English poet" (p. 91). So are some of his questions, e.g., does "Gower [use] a style that is explicitly 'Old French' to indicate the chivalric value system he then proceeds to shred or to refine?" (p. 95). Most revolutionary of all, however, is Galloway's suggestion that perhaps those who fail to teach Gower's work because they believe him to be "morally predictable and, worse, stylistically flat" (p. 91) reveal primarily their own failure to recognize, let alone comprehend, the subtlety of what he wrote. [RFY. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew Published Galloway, Andrew. "Middle English as a Foreign Language, to 'Us' and 'Them' (Gower, Langland, and the Author of The Life of St. Margaret)." Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 14 (2007), pp. 89-102. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Middle English as a Foreign Language, to 'Us' and 'Them' (Gower, Langland, and the Author of The Life of St. Margaret) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Virtually all of Bennett's chapter on Gower (pp. 407-29) is devoted to "Confessio Amantis," and it is for the most part an expanded version of the introduction to his "Selections from John Gower" (1968): one will find very much the same characterizations of Gower's relationship with Chaucer, of his narrative style, of his poetic achievement, of his general themes, and of the roles of the various characters in his poem, fleshed out with considerably more explanation and illustration. Bennett's Gower is a skilled poet and storyteller who is underestimated because of the unobtrusiveness of his art and a man of broad sympathy and insight, characteristics that Bennett illustrates with discussions of "Ceix and Alcione" and "Florent" and with brief quotations from other tales. Gower's most important model and predecessor is Ovid, not only for the tales that he borrowed but also for the topical references and philosophical statements with which his poem begins and ends. His confession frame derives from "Roman de la Rose" and "De Planctu Naturae" but it would also have been seen as a literary adaptation of sacramental penance, and the "therapeutic" function of the sacrament provided the "point of contact" to the treatment of love as a sickness in contemporary love-literature. The general theme of the poem is love: Bennett is not persuaded by attempts to see it as an expression of political or social doctrine, nor is he moved by the efforts to construct a precise moral underpinning for all of the various elements that it contains. Gower's "honeste love" links courtesy, charity, and the practical aims of marriage and the begetting of children. Genius does not represent a single point of view or value but carries out a composite and in some ways ambivalent role. And the unity of the poem is provided loosely by a group of five "distinctly Gowerian" concepts or themes: "Love and Charite as opposed to Lust and Will . . . ; Peace and Rest as opposed to War and Discord; Reason and Wit as against 'unreason'--folly and passion; Nature or Kind, and Mortality; Fortune and Necessity (but with Providence guiding them)" (p. 425). Bennett's view of CA is firmly rooted in a literal reading of Gower's "lessons" but it is also broad and generous and sensitive to the expressive qualities of Gower's verse. Review by A.J. Minnis in TLS, 6 February 1987, p. 140. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bennett, J.A.W. Gray, Douglas Published Bennett, J.A.W. and Gray, Douglas. "Middle English Literature." Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Middle English Literature. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Clarendon Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed