14 100 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 Author/Editor Author/Editor Woodring, Carl, and James Shapiro, eds. Published Woodring, Carl, and James Shapiro, eds. "The Columbia History of British Poetry." New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 ISBN 0231078382 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Review One can sometimes get a rough idea of the evolution of an author's critical reputation from the accounts of his or her writing in general works of literary history. Sometimes, moreover, these accounts can be unexpectedly insightful and thought-provoking. Both comments apply to the paragraph on CA provided by E. Ruth Harvey in her chapter on "Middle English Poetry" in this new history of British poetry (p. 41): ". . . Gower's technical expertise in handling his smooth octosyllabic couplets is unobtrusively masterful, and his stories, taken from a wide variety of sources, are woven together with playfulness and wit. The tales are recounted in the course of a long confession made by the lover to Genius, priest of Venus; they are organized as telling examples to illustrate the seven deadly sins, at least insofar as the sins apply to the crimes and follies of lovers. The work displays an extraordinary ingenuity: a fundamentally serious religious ethic is consistently viewed aslant through the monomania of love, and encumbered with enormous and fascinating digressions that serve to delay the inevitable progression to the most interesting sin of all, lechery. Gower teases his audience with surprising turns and twists on the themes of love and virtue, before summoning Venus at the very end to dismiss the lover, disqualified from her service by his impotence and old age. But the poet frames the Confessio with a stern indictment of the contemporary world: the prologue evokes a golden age when men truly knew how to love, and contrasts it with the degeneration of corruption, violence and lust in the world of Richard II. It is hard to hold all the elements of the Confessio together: Gower offers it as a combination of profit and pleasure ("lore" and "lust"); but its analysis of human love in all its manifestations from comic to sublime, its playful wit, fierce denunciations of vice, earnest plea for peace and charity, and splendid portrayal of a mutable and treacherous world in the inevitable and irresistible decline almost pull it apart. If Chaucer offers us a world without comment, Gower offers us something more like an encyclopedia with a moral commentary; not as risqué as The Canterbury Tales, but not in need of apology or retraction either." [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Columbia History of British Poetry Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Columbia University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower's name is cited frequently in this volume, the contributors to which provide a detailed and comprehensive survey of what is known about the many facets of manuscript production during the important time when Gower's and Chaucer's works first circulated. Among the more significant references: Kathleen Scott (in her essay on "Design, decoration, and illustration," pp. 31-64) discusses the illuminated MSS of CA in relation to other contemporary works (p. 33). Gower and Lydgate are the "two most illustrated of contemporary writers" (p. 39). The most common format in their works was the "column" miniature, which she illustrates with a reproduction of a page from Egerton 1991 (p. 36). Kate Harris ("Patrons, buyers and owners: the evidence for ownership, and the role of book owners in book production and the book trade," pp. 163-200) uses coats of arms as sure evidence of the commissioning of MSS, and cites four copies of CA in which the arms of the original owners are wholly or partially preserved (p. 168). She also cites another copy of CA in her discussion of the difficulty of using later ownership as evidence of provenance (p. 170). Carol M. Meale ("Patrons, Buyers and Owners: Book Production and Social Status," pp. 201-38) describes a previously unknown record of a charge brought in 1413 against a London stationer for removing nine books from the library of the late King Henry IV with the connivance of his "custodem librorum," and for retaining them "ad magnam decepcionem" of Henry V. Among the books mentioned is "unum alium librum vocat [sic] Gower." The document is important for the apparent reference to a palace "librarian" at so early a date, as Meale points out, but also because this is the first record we have of any direct connection between Henry V and a MS of Gower. The language of the MS is not specified, but Meale rather boldly identifies it "in all likelihood" as the Huntington Library copy of CA (p. 203). And A.S.G. Edwards and Derek Pearsall ("The Manuscripts of the Major English Poetic Texts," pp. 257-78) repeatedly cite what has been learned from the examination of individual MSS of Gower's works, in the chapter that has most to do with the cirumstances in which these copies were produced. CA is one of the works they believe was already being disseminated in some organized way before the end of the fourteenth century, "apparently under the author's supervision" (p. 258); the basis for their claim is not clear since there are no surviving copies from that period. They later attribute the consistency of format and the fineness of presentation of so many fifteenth-century copies of CA (in contrast, for instance, to the MSS of CrT and PP) to the availability of carefully prepared exemplars, rather than to the mode of production as some have supposed, and they endorse Doyle and Parkes' view (1978) of a largely "bespoke" trade, loosely organized by stationers and booksellers in reponse to particular orders from customers (pp. 260-61).] [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Griffiths, Jeremy, and Derek Pearsall, eds. Published Griffiths, Jeremy, and Derek Pearsall, eds. "Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375-1475." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 ISBN 0521257360 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 Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375-1475. 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 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor David, Alfred, and James Simpson, eds. Published David, Alfred, and James Simpson, eds. "Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8th ed. Vol. 1A: The Middle Ages." New York: Norton, 2006 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Review Gower finally joins the ranks of the elect: David and Simpson include an excerpt from Confessio Amantis, the tale of Tereus (5.5546-7074) in the new edition of English literature's holy canon (pp. 319-31). Their introduction briefly surveys Gower's life and works, and it offers a few comments on the structure of the poem, which culminates, in this account, in Amans' reintegration "with the psyche of which he is ideally a part." The tale that the editors reprint is the same chosen to represent CA by Derek Pearsall for his Chaucer to Spenser anthology in 1999 (see JGN 18, no. 1, 8-9). The text is based on Macaulay, but like the other examples of Middle English in the anthology, it has "been re-spelled in a way that is designed to aid the reader" (p. 15), evidently on the model of Donaldson's edition of Chaucer, which supplies the excerpts from CT in this volume. Thus, in the first few lines, "mi" becomes "my," "hiere" > "heere," "enheritance" > "inheritance," "therupon" > "thereupon," and "douhtres" > "doughtres." (The editors assure me that the substitution of "that" for "which" in the third line of the excerpt was inadvertent.) The introduction emphasizes the violence of the tale, in contrast to the "often pathetic, and always hopeless pursuit of Amans for his lady." It might also have noted that Amans' response (included in the excerpt) puts both Amans and his love for his lady in an unusually favorable light. Students who buy the anthology will also get a password that allows one year's access to the "Norton Literature Online" website, which includes material supplementary to the printed volume. They will find there an excerpt from the Prologue to VC describing the uprising of 1381, some excerpts from both VC and MO illustrating "Estates Satire," and a reproduction of the drawing of Gower aiming his arrow at the world from Cotton Tiberius A.IV (actually photographed from the frontispiece to vol. 4 of Macaulay's edition) illustrating "Medieval Estates and Orders." [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 25.1.] 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 Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8th ed. Vol. 1A: The Middle Ages. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Norton, 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 Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The twelfth selection in this new anthology, which illustrates the development of literary Middle English from the twelfth to the early fifteenth centuries, is an excerpt from CA (1.2399-2661), containing the warning against Boasting and the tale of "Albinus and Rosemund" (including the preceding Latin epigram, with translation, but not the two Latin side-notes), in a new transcription from Bodley Fairfax 3. The introduction to the selection provides a brief summary of Gower's life and works, his relation to Chaucer, and the structure of CA, highlighting Genius' dual roles and the sympathy with which Gower treats the figure of Amans; it also includes some brief notes on Gower's language, a very selective bibliography, and a reproduction of the page in Fairfax on which the excerpted text begins. The transcription of the text differs from Macaulay's in the regular use of thorn and yogh, and in several dozen minor differences in capitalization (Macaulay follows the MS more closely) and in punctuation (the omission of a single comma results in a slight difference in the sense at 1.2655). The notes to the text offer judicious help with the passages in which Gower's syntax differs from ours, and beginning students may not be the only ones to find them useful; the note to 1.2545 contains Burrow's explanation of the "Gripes ey." In addition to a broad range of selections from Middle English literature, both poetry and prose, the volume contains an unusually detailed linguistic introduction and a general glossary. One section of the introduction (pp. 56-57) contains a brief but very useful treatment of Gower's meter. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burrow, J. A., and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. Published Burrow, J. A., and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. "A Book of Middle English." Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Book of Middle English. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Blackwell, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The selections in this extraordinarily useful anthology, all in modern English translation, range chronologically from Aristotle to Christine de Pizan, and are divided into eight chapters, "The Roots of Antifeminist Tradition," "The Church Fathers," "The Legacy of the Church Fathers," "The Satirical Tradition in Medieval Latin," "Antifeminist Tales," "Vernacular Adaptations in the Later Middle Ages," "The Wife of Bath," "Responses to Antifeminism," and "A Woman defends Women." The second to last chapter includes (pp. 248-49) a brief excerpt from CA (7.4239-4307, translated in modern English prose), in which Genius argues, contrary to a long tradition that is manifested elsewhere in the anthology, that the man is to blame rather than the woman when he allows himself to be distracted by her beauty. The headnote to the selection suggests that the emphasis on personal responsibility reflected in this passage provides a main theme for the entire poem. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Blamires, Alcuin. Karen Pratt, and C. W. Marx, eds. Published Blamires, Alcuin. Karen Pratt, and C. W. Marx, eds. "Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts." Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts. 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 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The publication of this much needed concordance to the Confessio Amantis is perhaps the most important single event in Gower scholarship since the appearance of Macaulay's edition in 1900-1901, and certainly no better beginning could have been chosen for the John Gower Society Publications. The largest part of this book is a 764-page concordance to what Pickles and Dawson call the "main text" of the poem, Macaulay's edited "recension three" (the English portion alone). The editors have also provided a separate alphabetical listing of the vocabulary of this text; a reverse spelling list of the same vocabulary; a listing by frequency of all words that appear more than 12 times, with statistical analysis; a separate concordance, vocabulary list, and reverse spelling list for the "variant text" (the passages from the "first" and "second" recensions in the Prologue and Books 5, 7, and 8 that are printed at the foot of the page in Macaulay's edition); and in four appendices, a complete concordance to four of the 45 most frequent words omitted from the main concordance ("al," "alle," "love" [which appears in the main text a total of 855 times], and "man"), sample citations of the remaining most frequent words, a rhyme index (combining the "main" and "variant" texts), and a combined index of capitalized words. All is contained in a handsome volume of 1124 closely printed but easily legible pages, only slightly larger than a single volume of Gower's works. The editors report (p. ix) that they relied heavily on a computer for their work, and the volume that they have produced reveals both the advantages and disadvantages of the computer-aided analysis of a literary text. The broad array of material presented here would have been difficult and time-consuming to compile by hand, to be sure. The limitation of the computer, however, is that it works strictly on the basis of spelling. Thus with the single exception of "the," article, and "the," pronoun, the editors have made no attempt to distinguish homonyms or even different parts of speech. Under an entry such as "hold," for instance, one finds both "Demetrius was put in hold" and "Forthi, mi Sone, hold up thin hed." At the same time, both variant spellings and different inflectional forms of the same word receive separate entries: thus "thyng" is listed separately from "thing," and there are also entries for "thinge" and "thinges." Some adjustment will be necessary for those already familiar with either Tatlock and Kennedy's Chaucer Concordance or Kottler and Markman's Concordance to Five Middle English Poems, in which homonyms are distinguished and the problem of variants is eliminated by listing all words under a modern spelling. The editors' scrupulosity over what may well be merely scribal variation does not extend to other details of the text, for they accept Macaulay's practice of modernizing i/j and u/v and replacing thorn and yogh where they occur. Their arrangement also calls into question the value of their elaborate word-frequency analysis. It is difficult to know what significance to attach to the 855 appearances of "love" since the figure includes both the noun and the verb. To find the frequency of the verb alone one must do one's own sorting of the list of examples, and then add in the separate entries for "loved," "lovede," "loveden," "loven," and "loveth." The total, however, would presumably be meaningful only if one has done the same sort of recalculation for every other verb. One cannot expect the editors to have anticipated every need of their future users, but somewhat more intervention in the work of the machine might have been called for. And if the concordance itself had necessarily to be based strictly on the spelling of the text, the separate alphabetical list of the vocabulary of this text, entirely redundant to the concordance, might have been replaced with a glossary list distinguishing the different parts of speech, giving total frequency for each glossary entry, and cross-listing the forms under which each item is concorded. Some objection might also be raised to the editors' treatment of the "main" and "variant" texts. It is not clear why the two concordances could not have been combined, especially since no distinction is made in the rhyme index and the list of capitalized words at the end, and the present arrangement makes it necessary to check in two places for each item. The editors have gone much further than Macaulay, moreover, in enshrining the Fairfax MS as the study text of the poem. They are correct in stating in their introduction (p. vii) that Macaulay's choice of this MS as the basis for his edition is unlikely to be bettered, but it is doubtful that any contemporary editor would treat this MS as uncritically as he. And no doubt under the influence of Macaulay's edition, they have chosen only the longest of the passages in the "variant" text for their concordance: no notice is made of the many shorter passages scattered throughout the poem in which recensions "one" and "two" differ from "recension three," some of which, the present reviewer has argued elsewhere, might perhaps represent scribal alteration in the Fairfax copy. Whatever reservations one might have about the editors' procedure, they have nonetheless produced a valuable, indeed indispensable tool for all future study of Gower's poem, and we will all be grateful to Pickles and Dawson for finally having filled so plain a need. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pickles, J. D. and J. L. Dawson, eds. Published Pickles, J. D. and J. L. Dawson, eds. "A Concordance to John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Publications of the John Gower Society, 1 . Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1987 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Concordance to John Gower's Confessio Amantis. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D.S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In the section on "Sources and Backgrounds," the editors include Olson's translation of MO 20833-92 and 20953-21060, which "contain the closest parallels to Chaucer's portrait of the Monk" (pp. 267-69 and n.), and Gower's tale of Florent (CA 1.1396-1871), with lexical notes, as an analogue of WBT (pp. 359-69). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kolve, V. A., and Glending Olson, eds. Published Kolve, V. A., and Glending Olson, eds. "The Canterbury Tales: Nine Tales and the General Prologue by Geoffrey Chaucer. Norton Critical Edition." New York: Norton, 1989 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Canterbury Tales: Nine Tales and the General Prologue by Geoffrey Chaucer. Norton Critical Edition. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Norton, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Briefly noted. Includes none of Gower's Cinkante Balades "because of their late date (1399-1400) and their availability in the edition of George C. Macaulay" (p. 2, n. 3). Thomas L. Reed, Jr., Middle English Debate Poetry and the Aesthetics of Irresolution (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990) dismisses CA from consideration as a debate poem although it consists largely of dialogue. CA, "in spite of Gower's announced intention of keeping his audience refreshed and alert by finding a "middel weie" between "lust" and "lore," is so heavily moral and so dominated by the exampla [sic] of Genius that it might be classified as a dramatized sermon" (p. 307). Author/Editor Author/Editor Jeffrey, David L., and Brian J. Levy, eds. Published Jeffrey, David L., and Brian J. Levy, eds. "The Anglo-Norman Lyric: An Anthology Edited from the Manuscripts with Translations and Commentary." Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Anglo-Norman Lyric: An Anthology Edited from the Manuscripts with Translations and Commentary. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Though there is no essay devoted exclusively to Gower, he is named frequently in the pages of this collection, as one might expect from the friends and colleagues of J. A. Burrow, who himself has written so compellingly on our poet. Among the more important references: Ardis Butterfield ("French Culture and the Ricardian Court," pp. 82-120) offers a subtle and well-informed examination of the inter-penetration of French and English literary culture during the Ricardian period, emphasizing the mutuality of cultural influences that was a natural product of the close family ties between royal and aristocratic houses in contrast to a common tendency (among Anglophone writers) to emphasize the distinctness of the English from the French. In a brief consideration of the puy as an example of cultural imitation, Butterfield dismisses the suggestion of Gower's association as far-fetched since there is no evidence of continuity much beyond 1300; and in her discussion of the practice of quoting already existing refrains in new compositions she cites CB 25. In the final part of her essay she gives more direct attention to Gower as one whose works are "supremely poised between linguistic cultures" (p. 107). She compares CB 37 to a ballade of Guillaume Machaut, not to establish borrowing, though an argument for at least indirect influence would not be difficult to make, but to demonstrate how thoroughly at home Gower is in contemporary French poetic idiom, contrary to the judgment of those who have seen either a discontinuity with French courtly writing or a reaction against it in Gower's work. She also gives brief consideration to Traitie as a conclusion to CA, which it follows in 8 of the 10 MSS in which it is preserved. There is more than a single paradox to the relation, Butterfield points out, as Gower turns to more love poetry immediately after renouncing any further writing about love, and as he draws upon the authority of French to offer a very un-French defense of married love, creating an instability that is typical of the "endemic restlessness" of Gower's poetic career and his constant habit of setting up "oblique contrasts between different kinds of cultural perspectives" (p. 120). A.G. Rigg ("Anglo-Latin in the Ricardian Age," pp. 121-41) cites Gower at least once on almost every page in his survey of the role and status of Anglo-Latin during the last half of the fourteenth century, focusing on the Ricardian era in particular. "In this period," he writes, "we begin to see clearly the trends that would later lead to both the demise of Latin as a medium for creative writing and its protection as a unique manifestation of classical civilization" (p. 122). His essay is an engaging supplement both to his own History of Anglo-Latin Literature (1066-1422) and to Burrow's Ricardian Poetry, as he describes how Latin writers were like or unlike contemporary writers in English, using the features that Burrow defined as characteristic of the Ricardian age. Along the way, he makes many useful observations about how Gower was like or unlike other contemporary writers in Latin. To use a small example, Gower's use of the enclitic que for et, which stands out so prominently for those more accustomed to classical Latin, is, Riggs asserts, entirely typical of his age (p. 133); and on a larger matter, he notes that the most typical subject matter of late 14th-century Latin poetry is "historical" (as opposed to classical, Biblical, or devotional), the only exceptions being a few of Gower's own short poems. In the last part of his essay, he juxtaposes three different examples of such historical writing, Thomas Barry's "Battle of Otterburn" (a straightforward factual account in verse), Gower's CrT (in which the poet "has entirely manipulated history for his poetic and political agenda," p. 138), and the Visio in Book 1 of VC, "the most striking example of the use of contemporary history . . . for literary purposes" (pp. 138-39), presenting a vision that "more than any other dream-vision I know, mirrors the common experience of a bad dream" (p. 139). More briefly, Stephen Medcalf ("The World and Heart of Thomas Usk," pp. 222-253) cites Venus' instruction that Chaucer write his own "testament of love" (CA 8.2955*) as "the only probable evidence of a contemporary's having read" Usk's poem of that name; and Charlotte Morse ("From 'Ricardian Poetry' to Ricardian Studies," pp. 316-44) cites a number of recent studies of Gower (including works by Middleton, Yeager, Scanlon, and Spearing) in her survey of critical work on the Ricardian period that appeared following the publication of Burrow's ground-breaking study in 1971. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Minnis, A. J., Charlotte Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. Published Minnis, A. J., Charlotte Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. "Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J.A. Burrow." Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Cinkante Balades Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J. A. Burrow. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Clarendon Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In "Rex celi Deus," almost certainly written shortly after the usurpation of Henry IV in 1399, Gower--in Donavin's words--"combines structures and strategies taught in 'dictamen' (instruction on prose letters) with the singing of a popular hymn . . . 'Celi Deus Sanctissime,' one in a series of Gregorian chants about creation" (103-04). The result is "a worshipful tone that invokes the coronation liturgy" while simultaneously functioning as "a poetic missive that might be chanted in order to speak to the king directly about the historical moment, locate late fourteenth-century politics in the context of God's reign, remark upon Henry's participation in the cycles of creation, and emphasixe the coronation's liturgical nature" (104). Donavin follows Macaulay and Carlson in noting, further, that many of the later lines of "Rex celi Deus" appear in the so-called "Epistola ad regem" portion of the Vox Clamantis (VI. 581-1198)--thus indicating a typical Gowerian re-purposing of work originally composed for Richard II, as well as providing Donavin with a basis for her investigation of the poem's "rhetorical strategies for letter writing." (106) The epistolary and the hymnic combine in the poem, making it for Donavin "neither a dashed-off effort nor a sly undermining of the new King, but rather a repeated use of language that might be sung for any legitimate king, and yet verses aimed at this particular King who must honour his own position in historical and cosmic cycles." (108) Donavin speculates (necessarily inconclusively) on whether Gower learned his dictamen from Ovid or at the Inns of Court (109-111), and remarks insightfully on the epistolary quality of the "self-portrait: the poet is 'a poor man' on bended knee, offering his gift of words (lines 53-54). The belated, though appropriate, self-identifying image provides a substitute for the poet's absence: whether or not Gower was able to deliver 'Rex Celi Deus' in person, the self-portrait recreates a scene of the poet's epistolary speech wherever it is read." (112). She gives a detailed examination of the poem's rhetorical structure (113-15), and of its possible relation to the hymn "Celi Deus Sanctissime" ((115-18). She concludes, "By opening 'Rex Celi Deus' with a refashioned Gregorian chant, inviting all England to sing along, and attaching these moments of song to an epistolary structure, Gower can celebrate God's sanctioning of the new king, include the people in this blessed event, and directly address Henry. The overall effect of 'Rex Celi Deus,' then, is of language and music both representing eternal cycles and concentrating on a particular moment within them. The coronation of Henry IV to which the poem looks, like any liturgy, focuses on God's blessings from heaven, while at the same time speaks directly to the blessed." (119). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Donavin, Georgiana Published Donavin, Georgiana. "'Rex Celi Deus': John Gower's Heavenly Missive." In Public Declamations: Essays on Medieval Rhetoric, Education, and Letters in Honour of Martin Camargo. Ed. Donavin, Georgiana and Stodola, Denise. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2015, pp. 103-23. ISBN 978-2503547770 Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'Rex Celi Deus': John Gower's Heavenly Missive Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brepols, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 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 "Whether he was formally trained or simply taught himself, the better to trade properties," Yeager writes, "whether he practiced or didn't, what is clear from his poetry in all three languages is how thoroughly the legal perspective guided, even governed, Gower's way of looking at the world" (73); and in contrast to "the commonplace view of 'moral Gower,'" Yeager describes what he calls Gower's "lawyerly habit of mind," by which he means a sharp ability to see both the strengths and weaknesses in both sides of any argument. "Every situation has more than one side for the 'lawyerly mind,' every side can be painted more or less favorably, and in the end the court should uphold the best presented and the most persuasive--albeit not always the right, the guiltless, or the deserving" (74). Such a habit of mind, Yeager asserts, better accounts for what others--notably David Aers--have described simply as unresolved contradictions in Gower's ethical and political beliefs. As his example, Yeager offers a subtle rereading of Gower's "Cronica Tripertita," not just as an anti-Ricardian tract but also as a muted warning to Henry. Throughout the CrT Gower carefully distinguishes between humanly created law and justice, which proceeds from God. Gower shows Richard manipulating the law in order to corrupt justice, while the Appellants are consistently described as "just." Upon Henry's accession, one of the new king's first acts is to pardon Richard's counselor and intimate William Bagot, an act of mercy that also "quite clearly re-established the superiority of royal will over the law" (89), and his attempt "to emulate Christ by extending his newly acquired power supra-legally, even to show mercy, exposes a potential in him to become Richard . . . . Gower withholds little in his praise of Henry, . . . Yet at the same time he knew Henry to be a man, as vulnerable at bottom as are all men" (90). The poem thus offers both praise and "caution to ambition" (91) and reflects "both a skeptical wisdom borne of worldly disappointment and a hope rejuvenated at new beginnings" (88). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "John Gower's Poetry and the 'Lawyerly Habit of Mind'." In Theorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England. Ed. Boboc, Andreea. Medieval Law and Its Practice . Leiden: Brill, 2015, pp. 71-93. ISBN 9789004284647 Gower Subject Biography of Gower Cronica Tripertita Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower's Poetry and the 'Lawyerly Habit of Mind' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brill, 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 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 [van Dijk states his purpose in the essay as an "attempt to situate the Tale of Orestes in relation to contemporary cultural attitudes to vengeance, justice, and the (gendered) subject. My aim is not to collapse the historical/literary distinction, but to reveal something about how literature can help us to understand the legal subject in the late fourteenth century" (120-21). Orestes is included in Book III of the CA, the Book of Wrath (1885-2195), where it appears under the sub-section "Homicide"--a location that, given the tale's several threads, has been negatively received by the few readers who have commented on it. van Dijk however argues for its coherence, beginning with the observation that "the conflation of the terms 'murder' and 'vengeance' . . . suggests that we have to think of 'homicide' as a broader concept than merely an extra-legal killing" (122). He focuses on the tale's conclusion, the suicide of Egiona, Orestes' step-sister, noting that taking her own life testifies to her loss of legal personhood, and consequently represents her only avenue to vengeance of any sort. In van Dijk's view her case poses a significant difficulty for Gower, who "naturalizes retribution (even when apparently cruel), because so much of his poetics is based on poetic justice" (134) and Egiona rationally would seem to bear little, if any, guilt in the crimes of the tale. Elsewhere, for example in Book VII, Gower provides a number of stories that illustrate how the cruelty of tyrants and their counsellors receives its proper punishment. In every narrative the final act of poetic justice mirrors the original crime" (134). While Gower "worries that . . . cruel and unusual punishment is unjust," he has always a larger justification on which to call: "exemplary punishment, when it risks cruelty, empties itself of human agency and ascribes all responsibility to God" (136). While registering this as an option often availed upon by Gower, van Dijk nevertheless is less interested in it as an explanation of Gower's thought-processes. His conclusion probes deeper and is thus most provocative: "there are . . . times when Gower seems willing to uphold abstract ideas over personal concerns, law over circumstance, and example over pity. This is perhaps the cost of Gower's keen interest in poetic justice, that the individual must be sacrificed (rather than rehabilitated or excused) for the greater good (the law, the lesson). This will obviously not be a popular conclusion. We like to see Gower as inevitably kind and non-judgmental, perhaps an image of ourselves at our best. Yet Gower also remains a moralist, and sometimes he takes what seem like short-cuts. Egiona's death brings closure 'Thogh that non other man it wolde'." (137). (N.B.: the article contains three flagable errors of fact. Fn. 45 quotes three lines from the "Tale of Jew and the Pagan" VII. *3307-*3309, without the asterisk, Macaulay's indicator of presence in a subset of Ricardian MSS only-and attributes the speech to the Jew, when the speaker is in fact the Pagan. J. Allan Mitchell is cited as "Allan J. Mitchell" throughout, e.g., Fn. 59, Works Cited.) [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Van Dijk, Conrad Published Van Dijk, Conrad. "Vengeance and the Legal Person: John Gower's 'Tale of Orestes'." In Theorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England. Ed. Boboc, Andreea. Medieval Law and Its Practice . Leiden: Brill, 2015, pp. 119-41. ISBN 9789004284647 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 Vengeance and the Legal Person: John Gower's 'Tale of Orestes' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brill, 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 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 is the first of two articles (see also "'Pardonetz moi qe jeo de ceo forsvoie': Gower's Anglo-Norman Identity," co-authored with Michael Ingham) concerning whether Gower is best considered an Anglo-Norman poet or a writer of continental French. While acknowledging Gower's conscious choice of the diction and forms of contemporary French poetry, the Inghams argue that Gower's less conscious linguistic practices remain overwhelmingly insular in character. The focus in the present article is on Gower's phonology. Ingham identifies a number of features that distinguish fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman French from contemporary French of the continent in which Gower followed insular practice, among them, the rhyming of words such as "jours" and "fleurs" (which Gower spells "flours"), the rhyming of words such as "lieus" and "perdus," the rhyming of words such as "ligne" and "famine," and the preservation of the distinction, lost in continental French, between "–an" and "–en." In one respect, Gower follows continental usage, in adopting the /oi/ pronunciation for words that had /ei/ in Anglo-Norman, a choice that Ingham attributes to the necessity for rhyming words imposed by the stanza forms that Gower used. In sum, Ingham finds no evidence of an effort on Gower's part to reform his language to make it more acceptable to a those more familiar with continental French. Ingham also cites some grammatical features in support of this conclusion; these are superseded and in one respect corrected by the co-authored article. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ingham, Richard Published Ingham, Richard. "John Gower, poète anglo-normand: Perspectives linguistiques sur Le Myrour de l'Omme." In Anglo-Français: Philologie et Linguistique. Ed. Floquet, Oreste and Giannini, Gabriele. Paris: Garnier, 2014, pp. 91-100. ISBN 9782812434211 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 John Gower, poète anglo-normand: Perspectives linguistiques sur Le Myrour de l'Omme Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Garnier, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 By "spectral advocate" Barrington means that in London, British Library Additional MS 59495 (olim Trentham) Gower demonstrably but surreptitiously (hence "spectral") structures some of the poems according to formulae acquired in his legal training in order to support Henry IV's usurpation. Like Arthur Bahr, whose essay "Reading Codicological Form in John Gower's Trentham Manuscript" (reviewed in JGN 31.1), argued for reading the tri-lingual collection as a coherently planned entity, Barrington sees BL Add. MS 59495 as purposefully organized around what she calls "legal gestures" which are "particularly prominent at four points in the manuscript when the royal audience is addressed: the English 'In Praise of Peace,' the Latin 'Rex Celi Deus,' the Anglo-French dedicatory verse bookending Cinkante Balades, and the Latin explicit 'Henrici quarti primus'" (more commonly called 'Quicquid homo scribat' or In fine). When examined sequentially, they reveal Gower's legal strategy for defending and supporting Henry IV" (103). "In Praise of Peace" she finds developing "an accumulation of common law gestures that advocates for Henry's right to rule" without having to address directly the great difficulty that Henry seized the throne militarily, i.e., illegally (103). Underlying 'Rex celi Deus' on the other hand is the canon law practice of "the libel (libellus)" in which "after naming the plaintiff, defendant, and judge, the libel breaks into three sections: 'the grounds the plaintiff alleged in his lawsuit, . . . the remedy he sought to obtain,' and a section reserving 'the plaintiff's right to amend, withdraw, or enlarge any of the proceeding statements.' The 'libellus,' as canon-law advocates were advised, succinctly stated the plaintiff's case and avoided excessive verbiage in order not to introduce accidentally material that might be used by the defendant . . . . All in all, the process at the bishop's level could be swift, short, and not at all complicated" (107). In the Cinkante Balades, four lines in the poem "O Gentile Engleterre" are found to "invite us to compare their processes to the civil-law Court of Chivalry (and its access to wager by battle) and the ability to resort to wager of law." After Richard's humiliating exile of Henry, "the lines then acquit Henry of his shame by the only legal means available, the compurgator's oath" (110). In "the final Latin verse, 'Henrici quarti primus' ["Quicquid homo scribat"] . . . Gower's Latin again appropriates the language of legal documents; however, its procedural gesture veers from the verbal toward the visual: the manuscript's rubrication of the initial 'H' is the most ornate in the collection, transforming the majuscule into a crowned Henry, creating a visual corollary to the case the manuscript has been arguing all along. Additionally, the rubrication is so striking that it creates the effect of a royal seal, an image 'embellished even the humblest writ'" (113). BL Add. MS 59495, she concludes, is thus "full of praise for noble King Henry, the poems ultimately celebrate the adroitness with which a nimble man-of-law might make his client's case, no matter how overwhelming the odds might be, and no matter how many years have passes since he forsook the public spaces of the courts" (114] ). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Barrington, Candace Published Barrington, Candace. "The Spectral Advocate in John Gower's Trentham Manuscript." In Theorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England. Ed. Boboc, Andreea D. Medieval Law and Its Practice . Leiden: Brill, 2015, pp. 94-118. ISBN 9789004284647 Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Cinkante Balades In Praise of Peace 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 The Spectral Advocate in John Gower's Trentham Manuscript. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brill, 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 Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In 1931, Ethel Seaton attempted to demonstrate that Gower was the most likely author of the French dream vision "Le Songe Vert." Someone (I have lost the reference) later characterized Seaton's piece as an exercise in "misplaced ingenuity," and Yeager would no doubt agree. He sets aside most of the points of resemblance that Seaton cites as unpersuasive, and he points out differences from Gower's work that she doesn't take into account. The main thrust of his essay, however, is what can be deduced about the date, authorship, and preservation of the poem from the two manuscripts in which it is found. The earlier and more ornate, London, British Library MS Additional 34114, bears the arms (and mitre) of Henry Le Despenser, Bishop of Norwich from 1370 to 1406. "Le Songe Vert" appears there somewhat anomalously alongside three long verse narratives about heroes from the past, and Yeager speculates that the interest that binds the four works together lies in the models of behavior that they provide--in two very different realms--for the chivalric class. Bibliothèque de la ville de Clermont MS 249 dates from the mid-fifteenth century and originated, Yeager argues, not far from where it is presently found, and it bears traces of the dialect of the south of France. It would be difficult to explain how a work of Gower's found its way so far, and "it seems wiser," Yeager concludes, "to speculate that Bishop Despenser, whose travels to France and the Low Countries are firmly attested, brought it home with him . . . than that the poem is one of Gower's that travelled the other way" (87). Yeager doesn't cite James Wimsatt's discussion of "Le Songe Vert" in "Chaucer and the French Love Poets" (Chapel Hill, 1968), 137-43, in which Wimsatt suggests that the French poem was modeled on Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess," and that it served in turn as a source for Oton de Granson's "Complainte de Saint Valentin," which resembles it closely in narrative setting. If the latter is correct, it would help make the dating of "Le Songe Vert" a bit more precise since Granson died in 1397. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 33.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "'Le Songe Vert,' BL Add. MS 34114 (the Spalding Manuscript), Bibliothèque de la ville de Clermont, MS 249 and John Gower." In Middle English Texts in Transition: A Festschrift Dedicated to Toshiyuki Takamiya on his 70th Birthday. Ed. Horobin, Simon, and Mooney, Linne R. Woodbridge, Suffolk: York Medieval Press/Boydell & Brewer, 2004, pp. 75-87. ISBN 9781903153536 Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual 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 'Le Songe Vert,' BL Add. MS 34114 (the Spalding Manuscript), Bibliothèque de la ville de Clermont, MS 249 and John Gower. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available York Medieval Press/Boydell & Brewer. Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Rayner opens her study with an unusually apt précis: "The 'Confessio Amantis' connects directly and frankly through the persona of Amans with the tensions age brings to lust and love. Venus may tell Amans that 'Loves lust and lockes hore/ In chamber acorden neveremore,' but the 'Confessio' shows us Gower understood the complexities of impulse and behaviour that age and love created. In this essay I shall concentrate on how these complexities are brought out through the exchange between Amans and Genius, as well as Amans and Venus, showing how the 'Confessio' exploits conventions of courtly and classical literature to examine an essentially human experience with humour, wit and perspicacity" (69). Rayner's embrace of disparate issues is broad, and her progress toward a conclusion ranges widely. At the center of her concerns, however, is the single idea that readers should take Amans' erotic passion entirely seriously and at face value--as something that happens in nature, perhaps did to Gower himself. Ultimately she rejects readers (Watt, Nicholson, Wetherbee) who "have seen the end of the 'Confessio' as full of a sense of defeat." (82) Instead, Rayner finds in the poem's finish "an acceptance of a new view of life, of new priorities and new explorations, not a portrait of a man defeated, or even of a man saying that love has been an illusion. Unlike many of the sources, Amans is not part of an elaborate dream sequence: the fact that he is revealed to be Gower emphasizes the attempt to make his experiences more real, more relevant to the audience receiving them. Amans becomes Gower so that the poem becomes a very potent and ultimately optimistic experience. Age will come to all, just as love will, but there are positives. There is no delusion: love happens to old people--to all people" (82-83). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 33.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rayner, Samantha J Published Rayner, Samantha J. "'How love and I togedre met': Gower, Amans and the Lessons of Venus in the 'Confessio Amantis'." In Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain. Ed. Hopkins, Amanda, and Rouse, Robert Allen, and Rushton, Cory. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014, pp. 69-83. ISBN 9781843843795 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 'How love and I togedre met': Gower, Amans and the Lessons of Venus in the 'Confessio Amantis'. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D. S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 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 Jones reconsiders the evidence traditionally used to show that Gower rededicated CA to Henry in 1392-93, which has been the main argument to prove his disaffection to Richard II before he was deposed. His study starts with a detailed analysis of the two main manuscripts used by Macaulay for his theory of the second and third recension of the poem: Huntington Library MS Ellesmere 26 A.17 and Oxford, Bodleian library, MS Fairfax 3. Jones revises Macaulay's dating of Ellesmere 26 A.17 to 1397-99 through an in-depth examination of the heraldic ornaments in fol. 1, which leads him to conclude that it must have been produced later, in 1403. He discards the possibility of a posterior addition of these ornaments given the carefully planned design of the manuscript, concluding that "the fact that it is such a high-class production also reinforces the impression that this may have been a royal commission possibly paid for by the king as a gift to his son--as part of his ongoing propaganda campaign" (54). Jones reaches a similar conclusion about the corrections and changes made to MS Fairfax 3, the only pre-usurpation manuscript. As he reminds us, Macaulay already acknowledged that the First Revision Hand must have amended the text after Henry's accession –given that there is a reference to Richard's fate. Following Parkes' identification of one of the CA revision hands as the same Scribe 4 that updated four manuscripts of VC, Jones has been able to confirm that in one of these manuscripts (Oxford, All Souls College, MS 98) "every single passage disparaging Richard II is in a different ink, and written over an erasure" (56). In Jones' view, the two revisions must have been done after Henry's usurpation, as a result of the "pressure on his poets to make them fall in line with the new political correctness" (56). Therefore, Jones claims, there is no evidence that Gower rededicated CA to Henry in 1392-93--and even if he rededicated the poem some years later, that doesn't mean that he changed allegiance or he was disenchanted or disillusioned; he just changed patron, a common practice in the period. The rest of the article is dedicated to demonstrating that the dedication was amended after the deposition, based on three arguments. The first argument is the reference to Henry as "Henry of Lancaster," a title he only inherited on his father's death in 1399. Jones has been able to corroborate that this designation was rare before 1399, even in books of accounts, where the denomination "Earl of Derby" was used until that date, though after 1399 it was often corrected by sewing pieces of velum with the new designation "of Lancaster." Secondly, neither the political theories and mirrors for princes of the period would describe Richard's behavior as that of an oppressive ruler, nor do any of Gower's poems written prior to 1399 criticize him for being a bad king. Jones finds no credible evidence of Gower's disenchantment with Richard, nor of any degree of admiration for Henry, who before 1399 was not a particularly remarkable military or political figure. Finally, Jones analyzes the "black propaganda," the rewriting of history promoted by Henry and Arundel after the usurpation which not only depicted Richard in a negative light but also tried to show people dissatisfied with his rule. "Everywhere we see signs of nervous scribes conforming to the new political correctness" (71), he affirms. It is in this context that the rededication of CA must be understood, which, given the new dating proposed by Jones, seems to show the existence of two, and not three, recensions of the poem.] [ASH. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 33.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Jones, Terry Published Jones, Terry. "Did John Gower Rededicate His 'Confessio Amantis' before Henry IV's Usurpation?" In Middle English Texts in Transition: A Festschrift Dedicated to Toshiyuki Takamiya on his 70th Birthday. Ed. Horobin, Simon, and Mooney, Linne R. Woodbridge, Suffolk: York Medieval Press/Boydell and Brewer, 2014, pp. 40-74. ISBN 9781903153536 Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Did John Gower Rededicate His 'Confessio Amantis' before Henry IV's Usurpation? Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available York Medieval Press/Boydell and Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Putter describes his aim as a consideration of "the use of the word 'thing' in a range of Middle English writings (Gower, Chaucer and mystical authors)." He "argues that the vagueness of the word can paradoxically be a source of strength. Gower in his "Confessio Amantis" and Chaucer in "Troilus and Criseyde" use 'thing' with a lively sense of its power to conceal and tantalize, and in mystical writings and Chaucer's 'Second Nun's Tale' its blankness becomes suggestive of the darkness of God." (63). Putter is particularly intriguing in his application of Derrida's notion of "true secrets," Lacan's 'l'objet petit a," and Žižek's argument that the "paradox of desire" is that if "we mistake for postponement of the 'thing itself' what is already 'the thing itself,' we mistake for the searching and indecision of desire what is, in fact, the realization of desire," (68); and equally if not more informative in his animadversions on the meanings of "thing" apparent in Middle English usage. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 33.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Putter, Ad Published Putter, Ad. "The Poetry of 'Things' in Gower, 'The Great Gatsby,' and Chaucer." In The Construction of Textual Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Ed. Ghose, Indira, and Renevey, Denis. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2009, pp. 63-82. ISBN 9783823365204 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Poetry of 'Things' in Gower, 'The Great Gatsby,' and Chaucer Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Gunter Narr Verlag, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In its arrangement, this is an extremely useful supplement to existing bibliographies, as well as being more up-to-date. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân Lanz, Julie Published Echard, Siân and Lanz, Julie. "Chronology of Gower Criticism." In A Companion to Gower. Ed. Echard, Siân. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004, pp. 251-73. Gower Subject Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chronology of Gower Criticism 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 Considers the implications of Gower's "correctness," his "purity of diction" and his "plain style," the three terms that occur most commonly in the descriptions and assessments of Gower's style. The first is at least to some extent anachronistic, since there were no fixed standards of correctness in such matters as spelling, one of the features of language in which Gower's MSS are most consistent, in Gower's time. It does apply, however, Burrow observes, to the poet's handling of both meter and rhyme--both for their regularity and for the way in which they conform to spoken language--and to grammar and syntax, where Gower displays an impressive command of periodic syntax, perhaps because of his experience of writing in Latin. Gower's diction is notable for its virtual exclusion of "commonplace English poeticisms" (244) from contemporary popular poetry or from the alliterative tradition, both found in far greater numbers in Chaucer. The "plain style," finally, is best understood with reference to Gower's own comments on "plainness": it is a style unadorned by rhetorical display consisting of "simple words used in straightforward literal senses" (246). The resulting tendency towards the typical and the general is appropriate to a poem of exemplary wisdom. CA is not noted for its "richly poetic strokes" (248), Burrow concludes, which is one reason why it may fail to appeal. "In its limitations as well as its strengths, Gower's is essentially a long-poem style" (249), and while long poems themselves have gone out of style, the result can nonetheless be considered true poetry. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burrow, John Published Burrow, John. "Gower's Poetic Styles." In A Companion to Gower. Ed. Echard, Siân. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004, pp. 239-50. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Poetic Styles Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Peck summarizes the argument on the relation between personal and political governance in all of Gower's work, particularly in CA, that he first put forth in his "Kingship and Common Profit" in 1978: "Gower conceives of the hypostasis between the personal and social through images of kingship, domain, and right rule. Each--the social and the personal--is contingent upon the other and operates through metaphoric interdependence. The king of England is akin to the king of the soul; the state of England is linked to one's sense of personal domain; and right rule is mirrored simultaneously through both sides of the equation" (216). In the longer, second part of his essay, Peck traces Gower's commentary on the effects of royal misrule through VC, MO, TC, and "IPP," and he offers a new attempt to read the dedication of CA to "Henry of Lancaster" as a rejection of King Richard II motivated by Richard's dispute with the city of London in 1392 (cf. Fisher, 116-22). (The reasons for the second dedication are an issue on which Gower scholars are not yet of a single mind. For an assortment of views, see in the same volume pp. 26, 57, 61, 94 n. 45, and 159.) [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A Published Peck, Russell A. "The Politics and Psychology of Governance in Gower: Ideas of Kingship and Real Kings." In A Companion to Gower. Ed. Echard, Siân. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004, pp. 215-38. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Vox Clamantis Cronica Tripertita In Praise of Peace Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Politics and Psychology of Governance in Gower: Ideas of Kingship and Real Kings 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 Discusses Gower's treatment of his female characters, focusing on three tales: "Canace and Machaire," in which, Watt argues, contrary to most published commentary, the children are held responsible for their incestuous relationship and, at least at the beginning, the blame is equally shared between them; "Iphis and Iante," in which the two girls suffer no blame for their desire for one another or for Iphis's cross-dressing before Iphis is transformed into a man; and "Calistona," in which Gower's alterations subtly transform the rape into a seduction for which the woman herself can be held at least in part responsible. Watt reaches two important conclusions: one, "going against the tide of recent gender criticism," as she herself proclaims, that Gower's main concern is ethical, and that "when a writer like Gower writes about women or men, about homosexual or heterosexual desires, or about transvestism or transsexuality, he (or she) is not necessarily discussing something else" (211). And second (echoing an argument also recently made by Ellen Shaw Bakalian), that "the central ethical message of the Confessio Amantis as a whole is that the responsibility for sin or error falls firmly on the individual who commits it, male or female" (213). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Watt, Diane Published Watt, Diane. "Gender and Sexuality in 'Confessio Amantis'." In A Companion to Gower. Ed. Echard, Siân. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004, pp. 197-213. 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 Gender and Sexuality in 'Confessio Amantis' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 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 Author/Editor Author/Editor Wetherbee, Winthrop Published Wetherbee, Winthrop. "Chaucer and Boethian Tradition in the 'Confessio Amantis'." In A Companion to Gower. Ed. Echard, Siân. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004, pp. 181-96. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review According to Wetherbee, the essential ambiguity of "naturatus amor" in the opening Latin epigram of Book 1 of CA reflects "fundamental questions about the authoritative role of the Latin tradition in forming [Gower's] literary culture" as well as "larger questions about the relation of human life and history to the natural order" (181-82). The uncertainties about man's relation to nature--whether as a "paradigm of order" or as "a kind of cosmic determinism" (184)--can be traced to Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy." Boethius's successors--Bernardus Silvestris, Alain de Lille, and Jean de Meun--depict the contradictions that result in different ways. For Jean de Meun they are manifested in an unresolved dialectic between the Latin Boethian tradition and the love-cult of vernacular poetry. The same confrontation is made visible in the framing of Gower's English poem with its Latin apparatus, which fails to either contain or control the English text. It is also embodied in Genius, who partakes both of the Latin and the vernacular. "He is less a spokesman than a mediator--a mediator, moreover, whose own perception of the standards of 'kinde' and 'resoun' which he holds up to Amans preserves unresolved the ambiguous perspective of the Boethian tradition. . . . Genius participates in both worlds, but he can provide no authoritative bases for reconciling the conflicting claims of Nature and courtly idealism" (190). "Skeptical of its own authority," Wetherbee concludes, "the Latin tradition is thus normative for Gower, a stable framework for his questioning of the values of his own world" (196) rather than authoritatively re-affirming them. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer and Boethian Tradition in the 'Confessio Amantis' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 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 Discusses Gower's relation to Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun, and their successors Machaut and Froissart. All these poets, she writes, "are preoccupied by a desire to investigate the relationship between writing and the self, the kind of access a writer has to truth, and how the art of fiction both enables and inhibits this access. In all these writers, the figure of the lover acts as one of the main ways for them to represent the art of writing: the lover generates the poetry, and indeed is often represented as a poet" (165). So too Gower creates a "precarious distinction" (180) between poet and lover before collapsing the two roles at the poem's end, and he also includes Genius as a way of doubling his presence: "Genius is the interlocutor of the author and at the same time an internalized projection of him" (177). The confession frame is also enlisted in the exploration of the topic of identity. "Working within the central tradition of French writers," Butterfield concludes, love "becomes for him, as for them, a way of examining the art of fiction, and hence the multiple art of confessing the self" (180). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Butterfield, Ardis Published Butterfield, Ardis. "'Confessio Amantis' and the French Tradition." In A Companion to Gower. Ed. Echard, Siân. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004, pp. 165-80. 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 'Confessio Amantis' and the French Tradition 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 Situates Gower's Latin writing within the trilingual culture of late 14th-century England and within the traditions of Anglo-Latin writing. The authors point out that Gower's choice of unrhymed elegiac couplets for VC represented a return to a somewhat old-fashioned practice. VC's focus on politics and history is typical of Anglo-Latin writing of the time, and the "public" quality of the work distinguishes it from the more personal CA and MO. Most of VC attempts rather typically to summon historical evidence in support of the author's moral and political views; the "Visio" and CrT, however, offer a more exceptional re-creation of historical events. The "Visio," the authors note, also has important debts to vernacular literature. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rigg, A. G. Moore, Edward G Published Rigg, A. G. and Moore, Edward G. "The Latin Works: Politics, Lament and Praise." In A Comanion to Gower. Ed. Echard, Siân. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004, pp. 153-64. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Vox Clamantis Cronica Tripertita Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Latin Works: Politics, Lament and Praise 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 Surveys Gower's surviving works in his other vernacular. After giving careful attention to their survival in MS, Yeager has much to say about the quality of both Gower's verse and prose, about the uniqueness of conception of his works, particularly MO and CB, and about the significance of the fact that these works are in French. MO, he notes, has a breadth and ambition unprecedented in any of the works that have been identified as its possible sources, but it is unified, first of all by its "envelope of amorous address" (143), the invocation of "chascun amant" at the beginning, and the lyrical prayer to the virgin at the end; and second, by its examination, through is description of the vices and virtues, of good and bad desire. CB has a narrative structure centered on the poet-narrator's decision to absent himself for the sake of his lady's reputation, which leads to a more complete union based on trust and actual devotion rather than mere desire. In both these works, Gower "use[s] the culture of French courtly writing against itself" (144): he transcends the "essential immorality" (147) of courtly literature and reclaims it for legitimate love. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "John Gower's French." In A Companion to Gower. Ed. Echard, Siân. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004, pp. 137-51. Gower Subject Cinkante Balades 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 John Gower's French 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 Looks at Gower's reception through his publication history, from Caxton, through Berthelette, Todd, Morley, Pauli, and Macaulay, down to Peck, with a glance at the Roxburghe Club editions and at the editions of selected tales intended for use in the classroom. (Missing, however, both here and in the bibliography on p. 272, is any reference to Macaulay's 1903 edition of selections for "young students," who Macaulay evidently felt wouldn't be too put out either by the Latin glosses and epigrams or by thorn and yogh.) Echard skillfully traces the impact on Gower's reputation not only of the critical commentary included in each edition but also of such matters as typography, layout, and apparatus. She notes that on the whole, Gower has been hurt more than helped by those who have brought his works to print, and while not suggesting that there can be any perfect edition, she has high praise for Peck's. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân Published Echard, Siân. "Gower in Print." In A Companion to Gower. Ed. Echard, Siân. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004, pp. 115-35. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower in Print 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 Discusses the appearance of Gower the poet in Robert Greene's "Greenes Vision" of 1594 and in Shakespeare's "Pericles" (1611), and the borrowings from CA in Shakespeare's earlier "Comedy of Errors" and in a 1640 pamphlet entitled "A Certain Relation of the Hog-faced Gentlewoman, called Tannekin Skinker" (in which the example of Florent is narrated in order to suggest the possibility of an equally happy metamorphosis for the unfortunate young woman of the title). In Greene's work, Chaucer and Gower are each called upon to tell stories in which the issue of the moral value of literature becomes entangled with the issue of the moral dangers posed by the beauty of the women in their tales. The author awards the prize--for the uprightness of both tale and character--to Gower. Cooper has much of interest to say about how each of these works perpetuated Gower's reputation both as moralist and as storyteller. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cooper, Helen Published Cooper, Helen. "'This worthy olde writer': Pericles and other Gowers, 1592-1640." In A Companion to Gower. Ed. Echard, Siân. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004, pp. 99-113. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion 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 'This worthy olde writer': Pericles and other Gowers, 1592-1640 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 Provides a remarkable gathering in one place of what can be said about the appearance, format, arrangement, contents, illustration and decoration, production, ownership, and readership of the MS copies of Gower's works. Pearsall writes not only from long and intimate acquaintance with the books that he describes but also with characteristic sympathy for the scribes. The handlist of Gower MSS on pp. 74-79 will now be our basic point of reference until the appearance of the much awaited "Descriptive Catalogue," forthcoming under Pearsall's editorship. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek Published Pearsall, Derek. "The Manuscripts and Illustrations of Gower's Works." In A Companion to Gower. Ed. Echard, Siân. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004, pp. 73-97. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Manuscripts and Illustrations of Gower's Works 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 Provides a brief but comprehensible account of what we know of Gower's language--a mixture of Kentish and Suffolk forms (consistent with Gower's family background) that would have been "fairly easily accommodated" (69) within the great variety of London speech at the time but that might have struck some as a bit old-fashioned--and equally helpfully, of how we know it. Smith also points to the remarkably conservative character of scribes' spelling habits in the later MSS of CA as an example of the perpetuation of one of several competing "standard" forms of the language, this one serving the very specific purpose of disseminating Gower's text. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Smith, Jeremy J Published Smith, Jeremy J. "John Gower and London English." In A Companion to Gower. Ed. Echard, Siân. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004, pp. 61-72. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies 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 John Gower and London English 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 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 Surveys what can be inferred from Gower's scant life records (mostly on property dealings) and the references in Gower's own poetry; then gives greatest attention to the geography of Southwark during Gower's time (providing some helpful maps), to the layout of the priory church of St. Mary Overie, and to the construction of Gower's tomb, as it appears today and as it was described by 16th century observers. The tomb, they note, "represents a range of facets of a contemporary perception of Gower; several, perhaps all of them, his own model of how he saw himself, or wished to be portrayed" (40). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hines, John Cohen, Nathalie Roffey, Simon Published Hines, John and Cohen, Nathalie and Roffey, Simon. "'Iohannes Gower, Armiger, Poeta': Records and Memorials of His Life and Death." In A Companion to Gower. Ed. Echard, Siân. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004, pp. 23-41. 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 'Iohannes Gower, Armiger, Poeta': Records and Memorials of His Life and Death 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 Echard identifies five recurring themes in the critical response to the poet: his identity as "moral Gower," his political views, his choice of language, his relation to his sources, and both his personal and his literary relation to Chaucer. She traces these in large part to the poet's own deliberate self-fashioning, to "the qualities that he made central to his own poetic ethos" (17), and she points out how Gower's reputation has shifted over the centuries as each of these has provided either a stick with which to beat the poet (primarily during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) or as an opening to a greater understanding of his work (more recently), as, for instance, critics have taken a broader interest in the implications of "moral," in the complex issues of a poet's self-presentation, and in the political and ideological implications of the choice between Latin and the vernacular. That broadening of understanding is admirably illustrated by the writers that follow in this volume, and Echard's essay serves both to situate their contributions and to tie together the diverse approaches. [PN. Copyright John Gower Society. JGN 24.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân Published Echard, Siân. "Gower's Reputation." In A Companion to Gower. Ed. Echard, Siân. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004, pp. 1-22. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Influence and Later Allusion Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Reputation Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yeager examines not the humor that might provoke the reader's laughter in Gower's poems but rather the instances in which the poet refers directly to laughter, in CA and MO. Many of these are merely hypothetical, and these often occur in formulaic expressions (e.g. "lawhe and pleie") or in patterns of conventional rhyme. In the instances in which characters are actually depicted laughing (Nectanabus in CA 6.2026-34, Zoroaster at his birth in 6.2370-76, and the majority of instances in which allegorical figures are described as laughing in MO), the laughter is either malicious, hollow (in that someone else gets to laugh last), or both. There are no examples of the laughter of pure joy as there are in Chaucer. All of the best examples of humorous laughter in Chaucer are attributed to women, and among the more hypothetical examples in Gower, there are two (in 5.2473-75 and 8.848-55) in which Gower too imagines a laughter "devoid of irony" (152), also only with reference to women. And though there is nothing in Gower precisely like Troilus's laugh at the world at the end of T&C, Troilus reflects Gower's, not Chaucer's, "deeper sense of the nature and value of laughter in narrative and points us to Gower's probably source," in Psalms 2:1-4 (153).[PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Gowerian Laughter." In ." Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Medieval English Literature: The Influence of Derek Brewer. Ed. Brewer, Charlotte and Windeatt, Barry. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013, pp. 144-53. ISBN 9781843843542 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gowerian Laughter Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D. S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The Biblical version of the story of Jephte and his daughter, Yeager notes, contains little register of emotion--a bare reference to the father rending his garments, which in context might indicate either his horror or his grief--and the loss that is foregrounded is less that of her life than that of her inability ever to bear children. Yeager examines the brief allusion to the story, as an analogue to Virginia's plight, in Chaucer's 'Physician's Tale' and both Gower's retelling of the story in the CA and the accompanying illustration in Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.126 in order to define the very different sense of both loss and pain in the medieval versions. Chaucer's is made problematic by the possibly conflicting purposes of the Physician and the poet, but the description of the two characters' reactions in the key scene reveals an interest in their pain and suffering as "worthy of exploration" (51) in themselves, and consistent with that purpose, Virginia's evocation of her predecessor highlights both her innocence and her powerlessness, as she is not given the period of reprieve in order to bewail her loss. Gower's too has two narrators, Genius and the poet. For Genius, it is a tale of sloth in love, and he makes little more of the daughter's feelings than the biblical account. In her plea for time in order to "bewepe / Hir maidenhood, which sche to kepe / So longe hath had and noght beset / Wherof hir lusti youthe is let" (CA IV.1565-68), he finds an appeal to a "peculiarly modern-seeming, existential angst" for which he invokes Kafka as a model: "Jephte's daughter's tragedy in Gower's hands share elements with Gregor Samsa's: following the best social code, she has preserved her virginity as her years mounted toward a marriage and motherhood that, suddenly and irrationally, are snatched beyond her reach, leaving her body transmogrified and her self without purpose" (53). In their separate reactions to what the father must do in the lines that follow, each also "raises unavoidable questions about the purposes, if any, of suffering, in a universe that may or may not be just" (54). The illustration in the Pierpont Morgan manuscript is equally alert to the "larger, polyvalent exploration of suffering, both overt and suppressed" of Gower's tale and the "emotional complexity" of the father's situation (55). Both Chaucer and Gower thus demonstrate a keen understanding of suffering that goes beyond mere bodily pain. Their works, Yeager concludes, "manifest a developing social awareness of the emotional as a broad landscape, dim as yet but noticeably broadening, and deepening to account for complexity of feelings irrelevant to questions of sin and salvation yet too intense, and too universally present, to be left any longer unexplored in art" (57). [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Gower and Chaucer on Pain and Suffering: Jephte's Daughter in the Bible, the 'Physician's Tale' and the Confessio Amantis." In Knowledge and Pain. Ed. Cohen, Esther, and Toker, Leona, and Consonni, Manuela, and Dror, Otniel E. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012, pp. 43-62. ISBN 9789042035829 Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Chaucer on Pain and Suffering: Jephte's Daughter in the Bible, the 'Physician's Tale' and the Confessio Amantis. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rodopi, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter Published Nicholson, Peter. "Gower's Manuscript of the 'Confessio Amantis'." In The Medieval Python: The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones. Ed. Yeager, R. F and Takamiya, Toshiyuki. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 75-86. ISBN 9780230112674 Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Review Nicholson challenges what he himself had argued in an important 1987 essay, that Gower played a minimal role in the production of manuscript copies of the CA. Here basing his argument on a new comparison of two early manuscripts--Oxford, Bodleian Library, Fairfax 3 (F) and Bodley 902 (A)--Nicholson seeks to provide "a closer and more precise idea of what Gower's prototype manuscript looked like and of the ways in which the poet prepared his manuscript for copying" (76). Each of these manuscripts was copied by three separate scribes. The copies of the middle section, virtually in its entirety (fols. 22- 81 in F, and fols. 21-80 in A), are remarkably similar, lining up "precisely column for column" (p. 76) in two 46-line columns per page. Neither manuscript is taken from the other, however, but "copied from a common exemplar" (77). The visual presentation in this section, ordered to reflect Gower's conceptual organization of his material, suggests his involvement: major new divisions are moved to the top of columns, for example, and major and minor divisions are distinguished and announced by initials of appropriately varying size. The third section is different. This portion of the poem, which Gower continued to revise, is less finished, and in the copies, there is "less correspondence of arrangement to structure" (79). The first section is different again. Nicholson suggests that it was originally in as finished a state as section two, but later "disturbances . . . made the scribes' intervention necessary" (82). The decision to include illustrations, for example, was not part of the original plan, and their eventual inclusion in different number, size, and location in the copies affected the 46-line arrangement in each. Thus, though the texts in this portion of the poem are, for the most part, aligned, occasional differences are telling. Whereas A sometimes moved marginalia into the text and left blank lines at the bottom of some pages, F did neither. This scribe "not only fills up every line of the available space . . . but works to align new sections of the poem with the first line of the column whenever possible, and he does so by supplying new lines of English text" (83). The precise number of needed lines could only have been ascertained during the process of copying, and Nicholson persuasively argues that these passages were most likely composed by Gower. Ultimately, then, it appears that the poet worked "collaboratively" with his early scribe(s) to effect a presentation that matches nuances of his conceptual design. This is a closely argued paper, and Nicholson is to be applauded for venturing to re-examine the evidence, and on that basis to question and ultimately revise his earlier findings. [Kurt Olsson. Copyright JGN 31.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Manuscript of the 'Confessio Amantis'. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Palgrave Macmillan, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F Published Yeager, R. F. "Gower in Winter: Last Poems." In The Medieval Python: The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones. Ed. Yeager, R. F and Takamiya, Toshiyuki. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 87-103. ISBN 9780230112674 Gower Subject Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Minor Latin Poetry Review Yeager questions an earlier reading of Gower's work, a commonly held perception regarding the poet's revelation at the end of CA that he--or Amans/"John Gower"--is an old man. Though a literary "masterstroke" (to borrow C. S. Lewis' term), this admission could strain credibility, for in 1386--"the usually accepted date . . . for the completion of the Confessio" (90)--the poet would only have been in his mid-40s or mid-50s. Yeager here asks "at what age" Gower could "have begun to speak of himself as old" and still be taken seriously (91). Even as early as 1380 he was beginning to develop for himself the literary persona of a man of "great age." The reference to age then, and again in CA, however, could "have been intended, and understood, altogether differently from how we commonly assess it nowadays: not . . . as doddering incapacity . . . but rather as achieved sagacity" (92). It is through the wisdom of age that Gower could aspire to offer advice to his "patron," the 19-year-old Richard II. Of course the effect of emphasizing that orientation, as Yeager remarks, may be "to play down . . . the framing fiction of love . . . and to configure Gower's poem as primarily political" (92). Alternatively, however, one may argue that the work's political power rests upon Gower's capacity to speak in not just one, but two languages, those of a mature wisdom and, as initially more appealing to a youthful king, of love. The conflict between these two languages is sustained through the work. It is reflected in Amans' "Debat and gret perplexete" near the end (VIII. 2190), and though it appears finally to be resolved when he or "John Gower" walks away, seemingly cured of his love sickness and ready to "act his age," it lives on in the poet's later "self-portraitures," specifically in several short Latin poems that he wrote at about the time he married Agnes Groundolf, in 1398. In "Est amor," he thus applies to himself the oxymora of love he had treated negatively earlier in his career, intimating, Yeager suggests, "a degree of inner turmoil seldom associated with our carefully, fostered image of the old, moralist poet" (93). "Ecce patet sensus," Yeager further remarks, "is similarly anguished": in Gower's words, "O human nature, which always has war within itself, / Of body and soul, both seeking the same authority." This poem sustains that conflict and still comes "to a perfectly plausible, though rather tortured, conclusion" (94). But by the end of his career, Yeager notes, Gower has evidently moved beyond this question, perhaps having found in marriage, as he himself suggests, a "rule of morality / Which makes it sacred in the world for those who are to be saved" (93). Now in several late poems (1400-02)--one an epistle dedicating the VC and CrT to Archbishop Arundel, and another, "Quicquid homo scribat," a short poem appended to those works--the aged Gower focuses on aspects of his physical decline. Again these allusions form a literary device, one that here allows the poet to excuse himself from further comment on the conflict now emerging because of questionable actions undertaken by his new king, Henry IV. Yeager suggestively concludes that the poet's "simple plea to 'love each other'. . . is strikingly anti-Lancastrian (albeit not un-Gowerian), but it could easily emanate, not incongruously, from the pen of a deeply religious and reflective older man recently wed, who was beginning to think differently about the new state faction" (97). [Kurt Olsson. Copyright JGN 31.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower in Winter: Last Poems. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Palgrave Macmillan, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gaston summarizes Ovid's tale of the "tragic cruelty" of Leucothoe's death ("Metamorphoses" 4.190-270) and identifies ways that Gower alters Ovid's version in his own account in CA 5.6713-83. Gower reduces Venus' role in the plot, shifting blame to Phoebus for his use of stealth in pursuing Leucothoe, who is wholly innocent in Gower even though Ovid had presented her as "somewhat willing." [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gaston, John B Published Gaston, John B. "The Tale of Leucothoe (CA, V, 6713-83)." In John Gower's Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations. Ed. Beidler, Peter G. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1982, pp. 75-77. ISBN 081925962 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Tale of Leucothoe (CA, V, 6713-83) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section 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 Ruyak summarizes Ovid's tale of Neptune's attempted seduction of Cornix ("Metamorphoses" 2.569-88) and identifies ways that Gower alters Ovid's version in his own account in CA 5.6145-6217. Gower emphasizes Cornix's despair and her desire to retain her virginity, and the poet adds "functional imagery," transforming the rape in Ovid's original into a matter of theft or robbery--a kind of avarice. [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ruyak, Natalie Epinger Published Ruyak, Natalie Epinger. "The Tale of Neptune and Cornix (CA, V, 6145-6217)." In John Gower's Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations. Ed. Beidler, Peter G. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1982, pp. 71-74. ISBN 081925962 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Tale of Neptune and Cornix (CA, V, 6145-6217) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section 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 Lepley summarizes Ovid's tale of Tereus and Philomela ("Metamorphoses" 6.424-674) and identifies ways that Gower alters Ovid's version in his own account in CA 5.5551-6047. Gower heightens Tereus's villainy, presents Philomela as guiltless, and blunts Procne's cruelty. He reduces Ovid's "detailed dramatizations of inhuman passions and wanton revenge," offering a moral exemplum of the just punishment for rape rather than tale of horror. [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lepley, Douglas L Published Lepley, Douglas L. "The Tale of Tereus (CA, V, 5551-6048)." In John Gower's Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations. Ed. Beidler, Peter G. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1982, pp. 63-69. ISBN 081925962 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Tale of Tereus (CA, V, 5551-6048) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section 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 Zipf summarizes Ovid's brief account of Echo ("Metamorphoses" 3.359-69) and identifies ways that Gower alters Ovid's version in his own account in CA 5.4583-4652. Gower expands the account and renders it moralistic by developing the character of Echo, focusing on her "crime and punishment" as an "active procurer" of lovers for Jupiter, and by the setting more familiar for his contemporary courtly audience. [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Zipf, Karl A., Jr Published Zipf, Karl A., Jr. "The Tale of Echo (CA, V, 4583-4652)." In John Gower's Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations. Ed. Beidler, Peter G. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1982, pp. 59-61. ISBN 081925962 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Tale of Echo (CA, V, 4583-4652) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section 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 Moran summarizes Ovid's story of Midas's "irresponsible kingship . . . foolishness, and . . . wasted opportunity" (in "Metamorphoses" 11.85-145) and identifies ways that Gower alters Ovid's version in his own account in CA 5.141-332. By making Midas a "more sympathetic character" and having him recognize and repent his sin, Gower adapts the tale to his concern with avarice and makes it part of his "pervasive treatment of the responsibilities of kings." [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Moran, Judith C. G Published Moran, Judith C. G. "The Tale of Midas (CA, V, 141-332)." In John Gower's Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations. Ed. Beidler, Peter G. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1982, pp. 55-58. ISBN 081925962 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Tale of Midas (CA, V, 141-332) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section 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 Stasko summarizes Ovid's story of Iphis's death and Araxarathen's transformation ("Metamorphoses" 14.698-761) and identifies ways that Gower alters Ovid's version in his own account in CA 4.3515-3684. Generally expanding the plot, Gower radically alters the two protagonists by reversing their "social and moral positions" and thereby converts Ovid's story "into one which criticizes men for despairing." [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stasko, Nicolette Published Stasko, Nicolette. "The Tale of Iphis and Araxarathen (CA, IV, 3515-3684)." In John Gower's Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations. Ed. Beidler, Peter G. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1982, pp. 51-54. ISBN 081925962 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Tale of Iphis and Araxarathen (CA, IV, 3515-3684) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section 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 Lepley summarizes Ovid's story of Io's transformation ("Metamorphoses" 1.583-746) and identifies ways that Gower alters Ovid's version in his own account of Argus and Mercury in CA 4.3317-61. Radically revamping Ovid's emphasis, Gower's tale is not about Io's suffering nor Jupiter's lust; instead, Gower reduces sympathy for Io and develops the minor characters of Argus and Mercury in order to demonstrate the "dangers of sleeping when one should be awake." [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lepley, Douglas L Published Lepley, Douglas L. "The Tale of Argus and Mercury (CA, IV, 3317-61)." In John Gower's Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations. Ed. Beidler, Peter G. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1982, pp. 45-49. ISBN 081925962 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Tale of Argus and Mercury (CA, IV, 3317-61) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section 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 Gaston summarizes Ovid's story of Ceyx and Alceone ("Metamorphoses" 11.410-748) and identifies ways that Gower alters Ovid's version in his own account in CA 4.2927-3123. Generally compressing plot by eliminating "unnecssary detail," Gower retains an extensive description of the house of Sleep and he "builds sympathy" for Alceone, thereby focusing on the "recipient of the vision and on the mechanism by which the dream vision is bestowed on her." [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gaston, John B Published Gaston, John B. "The Tale of Ceyx and Alceone (CA, IV, 2927-3123)." In John Gower's Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations. Ed. Beidler, Peter G. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1982, pp. 41-43. ISBN 081925962 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Tale of Ceyx and Alceone (CA, IV, 2927-3123) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section 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 Zipf summarizes Ovid's story of the flight of Icarus ("Metamorphoses" 8.183-235) and identifies ways that Gower alters Ovid's version in his own account in CA 4.1035-71. Gower reduces details of plot and setting, and eliminates concern with Daedalus's greatness and his grief, emphasizing instead Icarus's negligence and his ambition to rise above his station. [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Zipf, Karl A., Jr Published Zipf, Karl A., Jr. "The Tale of Icarus (CA, IV, 1035-71)." In John Gower's Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations. Ed. Beidler, Peter G. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1982, pp. 37-39. ISBN 081925962 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Tale of Icarus (CA, IV, 1035-71) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section 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 Stasko summarizes Ovid's story of Iphis ("Metamorphoses" 9.666-797) and identifies ways that Gower alters Ovid's version in his own account in CA 3.2145-2307. Gower changes Ligdus from a commoner to a king, making him seem crueler; he reduces the role of the goddess Isis, eliminates Iphis's lament, and renders the love of Iphis and Ianthe more innocent--in all, changing Ovid's "story about the rewards of prayer and obedience into one about the wonders wrought by enduring and uncomplaining love." [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stasko, Nicolette Published Stasko, Nicolette. "The Tale of Iphis (CA, IV, 451-505)." In John Gower's Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations. Ed. Beidler, Peter G. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1982, pp. 33-35. ISBN 081925962 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Tale of Iphis (CA, IV, 451-505) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section 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 Brown summarizes Ovid's account of Pygmalion ("Metamorphoses" 10.243-97) and identifies ways that Gower alters this source in his derivative account in CA 4.371-436. Gower's Genius uses the tale to encourage Amans to avoid the sloth of speechlessness, a moral that Gower emphasizes by making Pygmalion much more verbally aggressive than his Ovidian counterpart, albeit somewhat more human. Gower "de-emphasizes Venus and the ivory maiden" to make Pygmalion's talk more important than Ovid's concern with transformation. [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Brown, Carole Koepke Published Brown, Carole Koepke. "The Tale of Pygmalion (CA, IV, 371-436)." In John Gower's Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations. Ed. Beidler, Peter G. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1982, pp. 29-32. ISBN 0819115962 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Tale of Pygmalion (CA, IV, 371-436) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section 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 Ruyak summarizes Ovid's account of Phebus Apollo and Daphne ("Metamorphoses" 1.452-567) and identifies ways that Gower alters Ovid's version in his own account in CA 3.2145-2307. Gower reduces plot, imagery, and sympathy for Daphne (even as he demotes her from nymph to human being) in order to emphasize the moral concern with "passion and foolhaste." [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ruyak, Natalie Epinger Published Ruyak, Natalie Epinger. "The Tale of Phebus and Daphne (CA, III, 1685-1720)." In John Gower's Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations. Ed. Beidler, Peter G. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1982, pp. 25-27. ISBN 081925962 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Tale of Phebus and Daphne (CA, III, 1685-1720) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section 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 Moran summarizes Ovid's account of Pyramus and Thisbe ("Metamorphoses" 4.55-166) and identifies ways that Gower alters Ovid's version in his own account in CA 3.1331-1494. Gower "eliminates the mulberry tree as the generative force in the story," "pares out sentimental detail to make way for his lesson," and "makes his lovers more active in their efforts to be together," particularly in ways that clarifies Pyramus's self-centered "foolhaste." [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Moran, Judith C. G Published Moran, Judith C. G. "The Tale of Pyramus and Thisbe (CA, III, 1331-1494)." In John Gower's Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations. Ed. Beidler, Peter G. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1982, pp. 21-24. ISBN 0819125962 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Tale of Pyramus and Thisbe (CA, III, 1331-1494) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section 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 Brown summarizes Ovid's account of "unjustified pain and sorrow" ("Metamorphoses" 9.93-133) and identifies ways that Gower alters Ovid's version in his own account of Deianira, Hercules, and Nessus in CA 2.2145-2307. Gower "moves to center stage" Nessus's abduction of Deianira and use of a love charm in order to demonstrate "Falssemblant" as a form of envy, reducing Deianira to "an innocent victim of another's hypocrisy" and deemphasizing Hercules's role in the plot while making him more human and less heroic.[MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Brown, Carole Koepke Published Brown, Carole Koepke. "The Tale of Deianira and Nessus (CA, II, 2145-2307)." In John Gower's Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations. Ed. Beidler, Peter G. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1982, pp. 15-19. ISBN 0819115962 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Tale of Deianira and Nessus (CA, II, 2145-2307) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section 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 Beidler summarizes Ovid's account of "Polyphemus's interruption of the love of Acis and Galatea" ("Metamorphoses" 13.738-897) and identifies ways that Gower alters this source of his own account in CA 2.97-200: he makes the characters "far more human" so that the tale is clearly applicable to Amans, increasing Galatea's attractiveness, eliminating Polyphemus's lament and much of his gigantic nature, and asserting the tale's concern with envy. [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Beidler, Peter G Published Beidler, Peter G. "The Tale of Acis and Galatea (CA, II, 97-200)." In John Gower's Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations. Ed. Beidler, Peter G. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1982, pp. 11-14. ISBN 0819125962 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Tale of Acis and Galatea (CA, II, 97-200) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section 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 Beidler summarizes Ovid's account of the death of Acteon ("Metamorphoses" 3.138-252) and identifies ways that Gower alters this source of his own account in CA 1.333-78: he "eliminates elements in Ovid's tale, however vivid or dramatic they were, which would not advance his moral purpose," which is to warn against "looking when one should not look." [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Beidler, Peter G Published Beidler, Peter G. "The Tale of Acteon (CA, I, 333-78)." In John Gower's Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations. Ed. Beidler, Peter G. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1982. Pp. 7-10. ISBN 0819125962 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Tale of Acteon (CA, I, 333-78). Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of America. Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section NonPeerReviewed Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Beidler compares Gower's Tale of Nectanabus (CA 6.1789-2366) with its primary source in Thomas of Kent's Anglo-Norman "Roman de toute Chevalerie," identifying ways in which Gower transforms "the story of the birth of Alexander into the story of the treachery of Nectanabus" by ameliorating the character of Queen Olimpias and, perhaps, by creating a "kind of rough parallel to the New Testament stories of the Annuniciation and Christ's birth." [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Beidler, Peter G Published Beidler, Peter G. "Diabolical Treachery in the Tale of Nectanabus." In John Gower's Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations. Ed. Beidler, Peter G. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1982, pp. 83-90. ISBN 081915962 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 Diabolical Treachery in the Tale of Nectanabus. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This facing-page (Anglo-Norman poetry, English prose) translation of Thomas of Kent's account of the birth of Alexander in "Roman de toute Chevalerie," the major source for Gower's Tale of Nectanabus in CA 6.1789-2366, includes a brief introduction. [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor De Bellis, Patricia Innerbichler Published De Bellis, Patricia Innerbichler. "Thomas of Kent's Account of the Birth of Alexander: Text and Translation." In John Gower's Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations. Ed. Beidler, Peter G. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1982, pp. 91-117. ISBN 0819125962 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 Thomas of Kent's Account of the Birth of Alexander: Text and Translation. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This facing-page translation (Latin and English prose) of Julius Valerius' account of Alexander's birth from "Res Gestae Alexandri Macedonis," one of the likely sources of Gower's Tale of Nectanabus in CA 6.1789-2366, includes a brief introduction. [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor DeAngeli, Edna S Published DeAngeli, Edna S. "Julius Valerius' Account of the Birth of Alexander: Text and Translation." In John Gower's Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations. Ed. Beidler, Peter G. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982, pp. 119-41. ISBN 0819125962 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 Julius Valerius' Account of the Birth of Alexander: Text and Translation. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section 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 After Speght's edition of Chaucer appeared in 1598, Francis Thynne produced a volume of criticism, or "Animadversions" the following year. A brief portion of Thynne's volume touches on the Gower biography (18-22). Thynne doesn't believe that Gower, in Speght's words, calls Chaucer "a worthie Poet" and that he makes him "the Iudge of his workes." Gower's also was not from Stittenham in Yorkshire. Likewise, the effigy on Gower's tomb wears a chaplet of roses and not a garland of ivy and roses. Lastly, Thynne casts doubt on the idea that Chaucer and Gower were of the Inner Temple and were thus trained in law. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Thynne, Francis Published Thynne, Francis. "Animaduersions vppon the Annotacions and Corrections of some imperfections of impressiones on Chaucer's workes." Early Early Text Society . London: Trübner, 1875 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 Animaduersions vppon the Annotacions and Corrections of some imperfections of impressiones on Chaucer's workes Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Trübner, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1875 [1598] 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 Ker's chapter on Gower repeats his 1903 review article on Macaulay's edition, entitled "John Gower, Poet." Please refer to that entry for a full description. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ker, W. P Published Ker, W. P. ""Gower"." In Essays on Medieval Literature. Ed. Ker, W. P. London: Macmillan, 1905, pp. 101-134. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Gower" Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Macmillan, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1905 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Building on his experience in the 1980s of publishing with seven students a series of essays in a volume called "John Gower's Literary Transformations in the 'Confessio Amantis'" (University Press of America, 1982), Beidler here describes a more recent venture of a like kind, the preparation with a dozen graduate students of a volume to which he and these students each contribute an essay. Like the early book, this publication treats Gower's transformation of his sources, in this instance specifically of a tale in Nicholas Trevet's "Chronicle" into the story of Constance in the "Confessio." The essay assignments are arranged according to 13 episodes "or plot elements" identified in Trevet's account; to guide students, Beidler presents his essay as a model which each student then follows in analyzing her or his particular plot element. The resulting collection became a web publication posted in April, 2006 as http://www.wcu.edu/johngower/scholarship/beidler/index.html. Beidler offers his rationale for such undertakings: "where I got to teach a graduate seminar, I tried to plan at least one activity that got my students directly involved in a joint project that could, if all went well, lead to a conference presentation or to a publication" (202); offering a course that includes the CA "provides an opportunity not only to teach the work of a fine medieval writer but also to help fledgling graduate students." [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Beidler, Peter G Published Beidler, Peter G. "Gower in Seminar: The 'Confessio Amantis' as Publishing Opportunity for Graduate Students." 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. 202-08. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower in Seminar: The 'Confessio Amantis' as Publishing Opportunity for Graduate Students Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Passmore describes the evolution of this medieval survey, which was a new course, and her thoughts in retrospect on revisions to improve it. The course included a generous selection from Gower's "Confessio Amantis." The class met in weekly three-hour evening blocks over a 16-week semester, and four of these sessions were devoted to Gower. As part of their course assignments, over the semester students read a chapter a week from Nigel Saul's "Richard II." That reading increased in relevance as students began to see connections, as when they read Gower's account in the first recension of the "Confessio" of meeting Richard on the Thames. While the historical context remains important, Passmore is considering replacing assignments in Saul, a book that many students found "disjointed and confusing" (196), with multiple articles, chapters of books, or possibly even "Who Murdered Chaucer?," a book that "worked fabulously" (196) in her Chaucer class and she thinks would be an "invaluable . . . tool for discussion" (197) in the survey. Also looking for better ways to help students read Middle English--another challenge in the course--she describes in this essay several additional techniques she is considering incorporating in the next syllabus. On a similar note, in the first version of the course she had assigned the single-volume MART edition of the "Confessio," in part because of its coverage: it allowed her to include the entire Prologue, selections from Books 1, 3, and 4, and all of Book 7, a significant amount in a survey. But she found that the lack of "an overall glossary," and "the skimpy on-page glosses" (199) made reading the Middle English from this edition too great a challenge for students. She has therefore decided to shift to volume 1 of the TEAMS edition, supplementing it, as necessary, with the rest of the poem in the online version. She concludes her essay by describing and providing the rationale for her research and writing assignments. [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Passmore, S. Elizabeth Published Passmore, S. Elizabeth. "Teaching Gower in the Medieval Survey Class: Historical and Cultural Contexts and the Court of Richard II." 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. 194-201. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Teaching Gower in the Medieval Survey Class: Historical and Cultural Contexts and the Court of Richard II Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This essay considers teaching Gower in a sophomore-level British literature survey class, a class wherein Gower is often not taught but his contemporary, Chaucer, usually is" (188). Chewning describes the evolution of her own survey course over the years. Within the last decade, she has "come to a solution on the matter of Chaucer and Shakespeare that serves as a compromise between my need to raise the bar for my students so they are reading Middle and early Modern English at a high level of competence (high enough for sophomores) and their need for works that are accessible, interesting, and readable" (189-90). Her course now includes "a list of required readings and three categories of options, or 'threads,' for students to continue their reading beyond the minimum requirements. The threads are loosely based on spirituality, love and marriage, and politics" (190). Chewning has "made Gower the central Middle English assignment in [her] British literature survey, and most of Chaucer's texts that are included in other survey classes are now optional" (191). She states her rationale for the change, describes the Gower selections she uses, and how she incorporates the optional works, including excerpts from Chaucer, in the course. Of further note, in this new course she teaches Shakespeare's "Richard II" and ties the discussion back to the earlier consideration of the fourteenth century and the Ricardian court. [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Chewning, Susannah M Published Chewning, Susannah M. "Chaucer by Default? Difficult Choices and Teaching the Sophomore British Literature Survey." 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. 188-93. ISBN 9781603290999 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 Chaucer by Default? Difficult Choices and Teaching the Sophomore British Literature Survey Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In spite of the difficulties of teaching "the basics of the literary canon" (180) at two-year institutions, McKinney argues, "Gower's works may provide community college instructors an excellent opportunity to present a deeply realized, potentially engaging lesson" (181). She shows, in particular, how Gower's "Tale of Philomene and Tereus" in combination with Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale" (both included in the "Norton Anthology"), "can illustrate the concept of thematic variance among authors and give students a layered perspective on the political culture of gender relations in the late medieval period" (181). These texts are particularly relevant to community college students: "The need to assign responsibility for, deal with the consequences of, and cope with guilt over types of relationship events similar to, if milder than, those discussed in the 'Tale of Philomene and Tereus' is a need all too familiar for many community college students" (181). McKinney then offers helpful suggestions on approaching these subjects and offers sample lessons on each of these selections, and then on both together. The last, comparative lesson allows "speculative discussion," with references to the texts, of subjects like the following (186-87): 1) the male voice representing women's issues and women's voices; 2) sexuality: shame and reputation; 3) sexual aggression; 4) women's responses to domestic violence; 5) the marital-reproductive contract; 6) the threat of the female voice. [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor McKinney, Carole Lynn Published McKinney, Carole Lynn. "Gower in the Community College Curriculum." 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. 180-87. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower in the Community College Curriculum Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Noting that "at least twenty-five of Gower's tales [in the "Confessio Amantis"] can be traced, directly or indirectly, to the 'Metamorphoses'," and "several others are drawn, wholly or in part, from the 'Fasti,' the 'Heroides,' and the 'Ars amatoria'" (172), Wetherbee frames an analysis of Gower's use of those stories by considering in broad terms how the poet deals with Ovid's irony. Gower's own framework--his apparatus of Latin marginalia and head verses, combined with the English text--"produces a continual tension," and "the net effect is finally to make clear how fully Gower shares Ovid's vision of a world rendered chronically unstable by ill-governed human desire" (173). Thus, "if Genius at times appears comically obtuse in seeking to wrestle an Ovidian tale into yielding the moral he needs, it is often possible to hear in the tone of phrasing of his lesson a hint, such as Ovid himself frequently gives, that such a judgment may be beside the point, that a Narcissus, a Canace or Anaxarete, even a Medea, is better viewed with sympathetic understanding" (173). Wetherbee then models an approach that respects this influence by analyzing one of these stories, the tale of Narcissus. Further remarking that "Gower's appropriation of Ovidian fable has affinities with Chaucer's, Wetherbee suggests that here students may "draw comparisons between the two, separate and apart from the more common comparisons of narrative idiosyncrasies" 174). A case in point is how "the comic ineptitude of Genius, so often a foil to Ovidian sympathy, can remind us of the narrator of Chaucer's 'Book of the Duchess,' the grumpy insomniac who whiles away a sleepless night reading a tale from Ovid's 'Metamorphoses'" (174). Such examples open an approach, a range of questions and a resource that can help others in the teaching of the "Confessio." In addition to pointing briefly to a few other Ovidian examples from the poem, Wetherbee finally considers two episodes in the "Confessio" that are based upon the "Achilleid" of Statius. These, the poet's "only direct engagements with non-Ovidian classical poetry" (177), he adapts in turn "to his Ovidian concern with aggressive desire" (178). [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wetherbee, Winthrop Published Wetherbee, Winthrop. "Gower Teaching Ovid and the Classics." 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. 172-79. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Teaching Ovid and the Classics Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yeager first reminds us, with due acknowledgement to Peter Nicholson, that Gower, not Chaucer, was the first redactor of the tale in Nicholas Trevet's "Chronicle," and it was he who distilled it into the form with which we are more familiar. While referring to Trevet at various junctures of his essay, then, Yeager focuses on the differences between the tales of Gower and Chaucer, and, just as importantly, between their tellers. Students can usually "see that the Man of Law is not 'Chaucer'" (162): this pilgrim "is an active teller, one of the most intrusive, in fact, in 'The Canterbury Tales'" (162), and one who is clearly "trying to win a free dinner at the Southwark Inn" (163). In the "Confessio Amantis," Genius is also an "authorial screen," but the temptation to mistake him . . . for "Gower" seems to be much greater, and consequently harder to banish" (162). His role is to "enlighten Amans . . . who, for most of Gower's poem, is the only other 'real' persona we encounter" (163). Obviously, this "framing fiction . . . will raise quite different demands" for storytelling than does Chaucer's, and thus considering the tale of Constance "in context," Yeager focuses on Gower's "poetics," or what he does with imagery and language that distinguish his treatment of the subject from that of others. The use of particular words and images repeatedly, in a variety of contexts and for different purposes, over the course of his treatment of Envy, the section of the poem that includes his tale of Acis and Galatea as well as that of Constance, reveals "what is exclusively and characteristically Gower's (163). In the end, his "Constance, by design a part of a very different, intentionally exemplary form of narrative [than Chaucer's], remains more 'constant' and loses not an ounce of her integrity or any of her value as a model of obedient virtue" (170). At the same time that virtue here garners a rich "poetic" analysis, then, the tale manifests the "unique, multilayed exemplarity of Gower's" which is what "we strive to teach our students . . . to see and to appreciate knowledgeably" (170). [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R. F.. "'The Tale of Constance' in Context." 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. 159-71. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations 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 'The Tale of Constance' in Context Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Dean compares the Tale of Florent with Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale and the anonymous fifteenth-century "Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell." Gower's tale, he writes, "addresses issues of self-governance when one must adhere to one's word--maintain one's trouthe--under trying circumstances. To varying degrees, these issues arise in the three versions of the story . . . and a fruitful entrée into discussion version is to have students . . . detail the differences in the versions of the tale they are reading" (143). A table compiled by one of his students, here presented in an appendix, provides an example of the basis for such ethical distinctions and refinements as Dean makes over the course of his essay. Noting that the ethical issues emerging in the Wife's Tale are 1) justice, and 2) "power, manipulation, and dominance in human relationships" (145), Dean asks how Gower shifts the focus to other issues in his version; in his view, "Florent comes very close to falling to 'murmur' and 'compleignte'--engaging in pride and grumbling because he expects his reputation to be damaged" (146). In this contrast, "what students can come to understand is that if Gower . . . emphasizes honor and gentilesse and turning 'inobedience' into 'obedience,' Chaucer's "storyteller stresses inward transformation and repentance" (149). As distinct from these two writers, the author of the "Wedding" maintains a certain distance from these matters and instead has Ragnelle "expose the fragility of courtly virtues" (155). [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dean, James M Published Dean, James M. "The Hag Transformed: 'The Tale of Florent,' Ethical Choice and Female Desire in Late Medieval England." 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. 143-58. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Hag Transformed: 'The Tale of Florent,' Ethical Choice and Female Desire in Late Medieval England Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bertolet compares treatments of fraud in three Canterbury tales with selections from Gower's Latin and French poems: the Miller's account of Nicholas's lie about a second Nowell's flood is juxtaposed with Gower's account of the Whisperer in "Vox Clamantis"(trans. Stockton, 216-19); the Reeve's characterization of Symkin as a cheater is studied next to a condensed criticism of fraud in the "Vox" (Stockton 214-16); and the Cook's Prologue and Tale is seen in the light of Gower's account of fraud in the "Mirour de l'Omme" (trans. Wilson, 330-49). These texts, together with summaries of actual contemporaneous cases tried before the court of the mayor and aldermen, testify to "a suspicion of commerce shared by writers and many ordinary Londoners" (137) in the period. [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bertolet, Craig E Published Bertolet, Craig E. "Gower and 'The Canterbury Tales': The Enticement to Fraud." 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. 136-42. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and 'The Canterbury Tales': The Enticement to Fraud 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 Kruger, Steven F Published Kruger, Steven F. "Postcolonial/Queer: Teaching Gower Using Recent Critical Theory." 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. 127-35. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Review Kruger shows how "Gower could play an important role in advanced undergraduate seminars on medieval gender and sexuality or on nation and (post)coloniality" (127). After offering a shortened list of basic theoretical readings for such a course, he identifies sites in Gower's works where theory might be introduced most productively. He arranges his presentation according to a series of topics: 1) Hybridity. Gower's trilingualism, for example, points to "complex power dynamics in play when different cultures and languages come together in colonizing situations" (129). 2) Identity. Gower's "writing constructs a sense of identity, a sense of the subject both as interested and deeply implicated in the historical and [especially in the "Confessio Amantis"] as possessing a complex internal life" (130). 3) Sociality/Sexuality. This ranges from Gower's representation of the "animal-like, hardly human mob" of peasants in the 'Vox' as resonating" with postcolonial critiques of discourses that ontologize natives as less than human" (132) to the poet's placing individuals into social worlds as providing an occasion for questioning, for example male-male cooperation and conflict, or for asking whether there are "spaces (e.g., in the Apollonius story)] where Gower also considers the possibility and implications of female homosociality as an alternative social space" (132). 4) (Trans) Nationalism. England, for Gower, may or may not "correspond to the kind of nation defined in contemporary theoretical formulations" or "bear any of the features, for instance, of [Benedict] Anderson's 'imagined communities" (133). 5) Periodization. "Gower himself consistently uses historical material to think about his contemporary world. Do Gower's reflections help us think about our own contemporary situation?" (134-35) "To what extent [do] the medieval world and modernity in fact stand separate from each other--generally, and more specifically, in relation both to international/(post)colonial relations and to gender/sexuality" (134). [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1]. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 239-46. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Postcolonial/Queer: Teaching Gower Using Recent Critical Theory Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bullón-Fernández describes the syllabi of two courses, the one a senior-level course (which she has already offered) on medieval sexualities; the other a junior-level course (which she has planned) on family ties in medieval literature. Neither course focuses exclusively on Gower, but tales from the "Confessio Amantis" are prominent in each. The first course emphasizes theory. A unit on sex and gender opens with readings from Toril Moi and Judith Butler, and examines Gower's tales of the False Bachelor, Eneas and Dido, Ulysses and Penelope, and Florent, as well as Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale. The second unit, on heterosexual desires, is divided into three sections: virginity, sex and marriage, and heterosexual perversions (i.e., rape and incest). Readings in this part of the course include works by Gayle Rubin, Butler again, and Ruth Mazo Karras, and the literature features tales by Gower and Chaucer, many of them parallel stories (some now drawn from Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women"). The third unit focuses on homosexual desires. Readings in theory are taken from Butler, Michel Foucault, and Carla Freccero, and literary texts include Heldris de Cornuälle's "Roman de Silence" and materials from the case of John Rykener, a male transvestite prostitute in fourteenth-century London, as well as Chaucer's Miller's Tale and Gower's tales of Iphis and Achilles in Book 4 of the "Confessio." The proposed 300-level course, on Family Ties in Medieval Literature, does not emphasize readings in theory, but does take a (new) historical and anthropological approach to the subject and still includes extensive background reading. Again, Gower and Chaucer are the dominant literary figures studied. The course has units on husbands and wives, parents and children, and siblings, and a fourth one called "beyond the biological family" (e.g., sworn brotherhood). Gower is represented in the first unit by his "Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz" and the tales of Florent and Ceix and Alceone, the second, on parents and children, by his tales of Apollonius, Constance, Virginia, Achilles, and Orestes, the third, on siblings, by stories of Canace and Machaire, and Tereus, Philomene, and Progne. The last unit, on sworn brotherhood, features "Amis and Amiloun." All of these units are enriched by the comparisons with others, not only Chaucer, but also writers such as Chretien de Troyes. [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bullón-Fernández, María Published Bullón-Fernández, María. "Gender, Sexuality, and Family Ties in the 'Confessio Amantis'." 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. 119-26. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz 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 Gender, Sexuality, and Family Ties in the 'Confessio Amantis' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The "Confessio Amantis", Mitchell argues, "is not easily assimilated to the typical repertoire of concepts and practices that belong to academic criticism" (110), and he asks why: "The lush 'ordinatio' ('arrangement') of the manuscript page, the varied discourse (amatory, dogmatic, and scientific), and the diverse representational strategies (literal and allegorical) all command attention. How can all the matter hang together?" (110-11) With guidance from Foucault and Bourdieu, he suggests, students can come to understand how Gower's poem "does all the merely functional things that are supposedly subliterary while inhabiting a specialized cultural field of the late fourteenth century," how "Gower belongs to an alternative literary experience" (112), and how his work, in its unique status, can inspire serious study. Indeed, Gower, as "both prophetic iconoclast and droll provocateur" (113), has produced a difficult poem that offers many "teachable moments." In it, students can find and productively examine, for example, "mimetic and didactic strategies [in] any number of exemplary cases," including especially those manifesting "incongruous moralization." After posing several additional, potentially fruitful questions about different features of liminality in Gower's poem, Mitchell observes that "Different aspects of the work will be illuminated depending on the theory of difference brought to bear--for example, intertextuality, bricolage, dialogism, or hybridity" (116). More broadly, "the multiplex nature of the work and the circumstantial, improvisatory reader-response provoked by it need theorizing generally" (117). Mitchell's closing comment summarizes what may make Gower so eminently teachable: "Gower's work stands apart from corrupting routines and rationalizations of its own time--and ours. It does not merely inhabit a different field of cultural and literary production; it can produce a new cultural field and redefine what literature can do." (117). [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Mitchell, J. Allan Published Mitchell, J. Allan. "Teaching Gower's Liminal Literature and Critical Theory." 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. 110-18. 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 Teaching Gower's Liminal Literature and Critical Theory Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review 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 Review Of Gower's two French "balade" collections, the "Cinkante balades" represent "the sole examples known of sequentially linked poems written by an Englishman, in English or French, before Philip Sidney's sonnet sequence 'Astrophil and Stella'" (100); the eighteen "balades" of "Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz," on the other hand, "are topically, not narratively, connected: all are concerned to establish the nature and role of sanctified marriage, most particularly by warding off adultery" (100). These collections together "furnish a solid keystone for fruitful discussions of late medieval multilingualism and an across-the-channel aesthetic and intellectual influence and exchange," particularly with poets of the stature of Guillaume de Machaut and Eustache Deschamps. The "Cinkante balades" can enrich discussions of medieval love poetry and its legacy; they are well-crafted poems and many "can be amusing, even moving, in their depiction of affairs of the heart" (100). As with the poems of the "Traitié," their short length makes them particularly adaptable to the syllabi of surveys. The "Traitié" in several of its aspects invites comparison with the "Confessio Amantis," which it follows in many manuscripts: it contains, in capsule form, a number of exempla also appearing in the "Confessio," including, for instance, the stories of Hercules and Deineira and of Tereus and Progne, and like the "Confessio," it is presented with Latin prose commentaries in the margins. It should be noted finally that the "Traitié" and the "Cinkante balades" are available, with translations, in an inexpensive TEAMS edition. [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F Published Yeager, R. F. "Gower's Triple Tongue (2): Teaching the 'Balades'." In Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Ed. Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011, pp. 100-03. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Cinkante Balades Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Triple Tongue (2): Teaching the 'Balades' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Echard argues that "Gower's trilingualism . . . can in fact frame a survey course, becoming a touchstone and recurrent point of reference" (91). She presents that frame in four modules--of material culture, manuscripts, multilingualism itself, and authority--to be spread across a syllabus, with each to be offered in a class or part of a class session. The first unit, on material culture, begins with a discussion of Gower's tomb. Whereas "Lydgate lacks both a monument and a tradition" and "Chaucer's monument is of a piece with the desire of later tradition to canonize him . . . Gower's tomb is clearly the poet's own statement, his summary of his poetic career, his staking of his own posterity" (92). This discussion leads to a brief account of recent archaeological studies of the tomb, Southwark, and Saint Mary Overeys, and Gower's positioning as, for example, a city poet. From the three books serving as the pillow for poet's head in the effigy, Echard advances to a discussion of Gower's mastery of three languages, the books in which they are employed, and the manuscripts in which they appear: of particular note are the surviving Gower manuscripts that "combine more than one language," and especially "the Trentham manuscript, a collection of pieces in Latin, French, and English" (94). Echard then treats the changing status of each of these languages in the culture of fourteenth-century England and concludes by exploring Gower's quest of his "poetic authority" or "right and obligation to speak" (96) by means of his very choice of language. [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân Published Echard, Siân. "Gower's Triple Tongue (1): Teaching Across Gower's Languages." In Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Ed. Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011, pp. 91-99. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Biography of Gower Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Triple Tongue (1): Teaching Across Gower's Languages Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Koff observes that in the CA "Gower's reformist voice has disappeared, . . . as has any vehement intervention into the moral or social values of the tales Genius tells" (84). Instead, Gower has introduced "'measured measures' of a storytelling discourse that promises social harmony by asking its readers to participate in the evaluation of values at a certain narrative distance" (83). His "ongoing, unruffled voice . . . is, for him, a perfect mode for breaking not the surface of a text but the concepts the text speaks" (84). In short, Gower "values form that works against itself," thereby creating "the intellectual space in which moral and social problems can be brought to readers" (84). This, in Koff's view, effectively makes Gower more accessible to students. For example, Gower's tale of Tereus and Progne, unlike its counterparts in Ovid and Chaucer's "Legend of Philomela", "removes a narrator's volatile response to his own work within that work itself" (85). Gower's teller is not present "in prepossessing ways" (85); in other words, he "deconstructs our expectations from the beginning" (87). By contrast, Chaucer in the "Legend of Good Women" already "assumes answers to questions not yet asked" (89). Koff sees as one possible explanation for this difference "something of the anxiety of influence that Gower's presence, which has yet to be valued by us, may have awakened in his friend" (90). While "teaching Gower clearly requires setting his work in the literary circles of his own day," in this essay Koff argues that in those circles Gower "may have led rather than followed" (90). [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Koff, Leonard Published Koff, Leonard. "Gower before Chaucer: Teaching Narrative and Ethics in 'The Tale of Tereus'." 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. 83-90. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower before Chaucer: Teaching Narrative and Ethics in 'The Tale of Tereus' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Donavin in teaching Gower seeks to evaluate his "voice" in the "Confessio Amantis" by means of medieval composition theory. In particular, she approaches the poem by studying Gower's invention ("the power of suggestion in Richard's II's commission of the poem and the formation of content through resources" [79]), arrangement (particularly "the context for each tale provided by the confessional frame" [80]), and style (specifically the commitment to "the superiority of plain speech" [81]). Gower's narrative voice in speaking directly to the reader in the prologue to the CA "shatters into a variety of speakers who utter their lines in a variety of tones and languages," and "students are eager to sort out some reasons for these vacillations in narrative voice. Review of the Rethorique section in CA, book 7, and of some basic principles of Ciceronian orations promote the understanding that invention, arrangement, and style are rhetorical offices that solicit, confine, and characterize the poet's voice" (81-82). [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Donavin, Georgiana Published Donavin, Georgiana. "Hearing Gower's Rhetoric." In Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Ed. Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011, pp. 77-82. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Hearing Gower's Rhetoric Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Coleman suggests that Gower's best hope for the "Confessio Amantis" was that it be left "to the worldes eere / In tyme comende after this." Recognizing that many important issues in the poem can be handled only by close textual reading, she argues that on occasion the best way to open a medieval text is through performance. After briefly discussing the theory and practice of medieval public reading, Coleman introduces several classroom performance exercises that she has found successful. In suggesting readings such as the performance of speeches by Genius and Amans in the confessional dialogue, or of a tale, or (for graduate students) of linked English text and marginal Latin gloss, Coleman constructs a series a questions for the performers and for the audience, asking what the passages, specifically as performed, contribute to the experience of the poem. She tailors her questions to each of these scenarios and finally explores the possibilities for a larger performance-based final project, which may include filming. [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Coleman, Joyce Published Coleman, Joyce. "Teaching Gower Aloud." 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. 67-76. ISBN 9781603290999 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 Teaching Gower Aloud 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 Boboc, Andreea Published Boboc, Andreea. "Teaching Gower and the Law." 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. 59-66. ISBN Modern Language Association of America Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Review Boboc suggests a number of approaches to teaching Gower and the law to upper-division undergraduates and graduate students. She usually begins her own course by introducing students to major legal resources, often by having them research a legal topic within a particular field of law (e.g., medieval law of contract, maritime law, natural law) as a preface to discussing a particular tale from the "Confessio Amantis." She draws on existing "interdisciplinary engagements with law and literature" for models (here her example is Sebastian Sobecki's chapter on Apollonius, maritime law, insularity, and identity). She introduces brief histories of medieval connections between law and literature, identifies challenges in pursuing interdisciplinary work, and offers a prospect of moving into the field of "new legal history" or the exploration of linkages among legal history, social science, and cultural and literary texts. More specifically, Boboc suggests, "medievalists can contribute to [this history] by engaging with what Bruce Holsinger has called 'vernacular legality'" or "the strategic manipulation of legal discourse by vernacular writers, who contribute to legal imagination and legal discourse by responding (sometimes correctively) to existent legal practices" (60). Relevant here is "the legal bilingualism of the 'Confessio'" and Gower's decision variously to use Latin or vernacular English "to discuss legal procedures and offenses" (61-62), and, further, sometimes to identify a legal phenomenon by its technical name and sometimes to describe it phenomenologically and withhold the name. Boboc sees additional prospects for teachers in using "the body of scholarship on Gower's audiences and multilingualism to discuss the relationship between language and truth, especially in the light of Richard F. Green's 'Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England'" (62). Near the close of her essay, Boboc introduces "hard cases," using the instances of Medea and (more briefly) Orestes, for example, to explore the question of "whether homicide is ever justified" (62). In another vein, she suggests drawing "on Giorgio Agamben's biopolitical theory of sovereignty to investigate the dangers posed by kings to their subjects whenever they reduce subjects to 'bare life'" (65). In particular, "sovereign power challenges the moral and legal order because sovereignty belongs to the law but, at the same time, paradoxically constitutes itself outside it" (65). Gower's works create an opportunity for fertile conversation on a range of other legal topics as well: "What counts as truth or evidence or a fair punishment? How do emotions influence the practice of justice? What are the legal duties of a leader? When does the law oppose justice?" (66). [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] 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 Teaching Gower and the Law Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This essay describes Gower's exploration of the links between practices of medicine and confession, especially in the like roles played by the physician and priestly confessor and the linkage of cures through storytelling. The connection between physical and spiritual healing is not new with Gower. As early as the beginning of the eleventh century, an influential book by Burchard of Worms introduced questions confessors might ask penitents; the book was entitled "Corrector, or Physician." The parallel in question-asking is suggestive of Venus's telling Amans she can apply no medicine if he does not describe his love "maladie," his "Sor," specifically in a conventionally confessional framework, to her priest. Palmer describes the connection at length, and where the relationship might be particularly suggestive in the classroom is in the stories of the CA: "Genius's [spiritual and physical] healing has taken place through storytelling" (58), Palmer argues, and it would be helpful to understand, perhaps through a single, well-chosen example, how this might have worked. Palmer takes his epigraph from John Arderne's fourteenth-century medical treatise, "It behooves a physician to know how to tell delightful and instructive tales that make patients laugh" (33) holds special promise; if Genius's, unlike Arderne's, are not for the most part designed to "make patients laugh," however, in what sense might they produce a genuinely curative effect? [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Palmer, James M Published Palmer, James M. "Bodily and Spiritual Healing through Conversation and Storytelling: Genius as Physician and Confessor in the 'Confessio Amantis'." In Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Ed. Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W. NewYork: Modern Language Association of America, 2011, pp. 53-58. ISBN 9781603290999 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 Bodily and Spiritual Healing through Conversation and Storytelling: Genius as Physician and Confessor in the 'Confessio Amantis' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In his British and medieval survey courses, Peck has taught Gower as a proto-humanist writer who distinguishes himself in five humanistic endeavors. 1) Gower evaluated "the ancients on their own terms," which paradoxically requires "translation of ethical and moral issues into 'our language.'" 2) He uncovers the complexity and "subtleties of reading as a mental, incorporative process," and, as a notably practical humanist, Gower recognized that "every reader functions as an individual perpetually making choices and drawing conclusions according to a combination of past experience and memory, strongly overshadowed by personal biases." 3) He drew upon "the rapid advance of empirical thought in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries," exploring "how the human brain works in conjunction with the senses to construct images . . . plots . . . and conclusions" and how it "works to effect both literary production and readerly reception." 4) Gower recognized, in keeping with his social humanism, that the "individual is part of a human estate" and "a social entity" with "an innate responsibility--a kingdom to justify outside oneself as well as within." 5) Because "these mental phenomena are linguistic and rhetorical," Peck contends, Gower observably understood that "the processes of making a good end" require "a transformational shift relative to another place" and "an adjustment requiring a different kind of voicing" (42-43). These endeavors, so introduced at the outset, are then richly exemplified and elaborated in subsequent sections of Peck's essay. The last point, however, may warrant a brief explanatory note. Peck had earlier described the "dark conclusion of the poem" where "Amans, though he has heard much and often responded intelligently, falls back into the confusion of his original biases and appears to have learned little" (49). Now the poet provides a shift in voicing, however, "to disengage the reader from the retelling of the plot" (50). Thus, "old John Gower [is sent] back to his books . . . to study moral virtue," and "this directive redefines the purposes of the protagonist, extracting him from his fiction so that he can make a more definitive concluding pronouncement" (51), a resolution to pray upon the points of the shrift and for the welfare of England. [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A Published Peck, Russell A. "Teaching the 'Confessio Amantis' as a Humanist Document of the First English Renaissance." 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. 42-53. ISBN 9781603290999 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 Teaching the 'Confessio Amantis' as a Humanist Document of the First English Renaissance Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Arguing that "few writers discuss the mutually supportive roles of medieval social structure with the clarity and moral forthrightness of John Gower," Lightsey maintains that this poet "can play a vital role in providing students with a solid base in the underlying concerns upon which estates literature is founded" (36). When his approaches to social position are incorporated into larger discussions of medieveal social hierarchy, his work shines in mutual illumination among the other great poets of his time, such as Chaucer and Langland" (37). In the undergraduate classroom, Lightsey thus introduces Gower as part of a unit on Ricardian authors which includes the prologues from the "Confessio," the B text of "Piers Plowman," and the "Canterbury Tales." He supplements this reading of Gower with handouts from Stockton's translation of the "Vox" and selections from Burton Wilson's translation of the "Mirour." In the end, "to understand Gower's approach is to understand what was typical of the time, to have a baseline from which to measure the many other approaches to the genre of estates literature" (41). [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lightsey, Scott Published Lightsey, Scott. "Social Class in the Classroom: Gower's Estates Poetry." 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. 36-41. ISBN 9781603290999 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 Social Class in the Classroom: Gower's Estates Poetry Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower, Pearsall argues, "has suffered throughout the centuries from his proximity to the greater poet," Chaucer. Indeed, "the label 'moral Gower," that Chaucer "stapled to him" has powerfully, but not entirely justly "shaped his reputation" (31). Pearsall claims that "'moral Gower' is not all there is . . . or even the most important of his claims upon us. For it is above all as a poet of human feeling that readers will remember Gower, both in the portrayal of the delicacy of love's courtesy and the fineness of love-feeling in the confessional 'frame' and also in the deep engagement with the conflicts of love's experience in the exemplary stories that make up the bulk of the poem. . . At times the pressure of feeling behind a story, the exactness and comprehensiveness of Gower's human sympathy, will set up a conflict with the moral of the story expounded by Genius or, more explicitly and brutally, in the Latin marginal summary that accompanies it" (31-32). Pearsall suggests that among the "discerning readers" of Gower who reach beyond "dutiful eulogizing" are Hoccleve, Lydgate, Sidney, Spenser, Jonson, and Shakespeare. Shakespeare made Gower the speaker of the prologue and linking passages in "Pericles," and though "there is little similarity in their treatments of that story, . . . the influence of Gower's narrative, of patient virtue ultimately blessed by providence, on Shakespeare and the movement toward the last plays should not be underestimated. Similiarities and contrasts of these kinds offer practical opportunities for teaching" (33). Gower's reputation fell into decline in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and he "remained a byword for tedious moralizing throughout the nineteenth century," but with Macaulay's edition in 1899, "a truer estimate of Gower's poetic ability began to emerge" (34). "The greatest rewards . . . now are likely to be in the independent stories . . . [for] they are often to some degree painfully unresolved," meant "to test and strain ideas of moral certainty" and in that regard come close to "Chaucer's most finely wrought narratives. . . . Some of the richest experiences of study and teaching are in the comparison of the two poets' narrative techniques" (34). [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek Published Pearsall, Derek. "Teaching Gower's Reception: A Poet for All Ages." 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. 31-34. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject 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 Teaching Gower's Reception: A Poet for All Ages Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This short chapter identifies major access points to bibliographical information in the web pages of the John Gower Society, the New Chaucer Society, and the Medieval Academy of America. Gastle mentions the online editions of Gower's works and also observes that excerpts of Gower's works are available in the Online Medieval and Classical Library and the Harvard Chaucer page. Additionally, he directs our attention to Gower manuscript material available online, specifically, sample pages of the CA and VC in Glasgow MS Hunter 7 and MS Hunter 59, respectively, and a large collection of whole pages and enlarged images of miniatures in Pierpont Morgan "Confessio" manuscripts M125 and M126. Finally, he identifies valuable library databases including "JSTOR" and "Project Muse," and several medieval study sites: "Labyrinth," "ORB" ("Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies"), the "Middle English Compendium," the "Middle English Dictionary," and Luminarium." [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gastle, Brian W Published Gastle, Brian W. "Electronic Resources." 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. 26-28. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Electronic Resources Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Nicholson focuses on works about Gower, including several important overviews of his literary career that have appeared in book-length studies and in essays such as those gathered, for example, in Siân Echard's recent "Companion to Gower." He identifies major bibliographies (by Yeager, Nicholson, and, again, Echard), and briefly discusses Gower's sources for the "Confessio." Most of this essay, however, attends to the critical tradition, not only major book-length studies extending from those by Wickert, Fisher, Schmitz, Gallacher, and Peck to the present, as well as important essay collections, but also major issues. Nicholson frames the latter with a brief discussion of Macaulay's introduction, C.S. Lewis's "Allegory of Love," and Fisher's "John Gower" and the issues these scholars raise. The fullest consideration is devoted to scholars who qualify Lewis's account of the poem and seek to address Gower's seemingly problematic treatment of love in a moral frame. In recent decades, that discussion has led to a spirited critical debate regarding "the poem's paradoxes and inconsistencies" (23). In the last analysis, "the 'Confessio Amantis' has served as a mirror of the preoccupations of its readers. Some extol its complex but coherent plan, others celebrate its fractures, but all find it worthy of study and exploration" (24-25). [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter Published Nicholson, Peter. "The Instructor's Library." 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. 17-25. ISBN 9781603290999 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 The Instructor's Library Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Peck sets out to identify the available major editions and translations of Gower's works. Macaulay's magisterial four-volume edition of the "Complete Works" (1899-1902) is no longer in print in its entirety, but volumes 2 and 3,"The English Works," continue to be published under the auspices of the Early English Text Society, and Volume 1, "The Latin Works," and Volume 4, "The French Works," are now available online in "Google Books." Peck's own recent three-volume edition of the complete "Confessio Amantis" in the TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (METS) is designed for classroom use. As with other METS volumes, it is available not only in print, but also in an electronic version (free to individual users). Peck's edition contains "all the Latin epigrams and marginal Latin paraphernalia of the manuscript along with English translations by Andrew Galloway; and extensive marginal glossing of words that are likely to be difficult for modern readers" (9). The introductions, bibliographies, and explanatory and textual notes are also extensive. Of the Latin works, Eric Stockton's translation of the complete "Vox Clamantis" and the "Chronica Tripertita" is no longer in print. It should be noted, however, that the "Visio Anglie" (Book 1 of the Vox) and the "Chronica Tripertita" have been newly edited by David Carlson and translated by A.G. Rigg in "John Gower: Poems on Contemporary Events," (see rev. JGN 30.2 [Oct 2011], 9-10); this work appeared too late to be discussed in this volume. Burton Wilson's translation of the "Mirour de l'Omme" (1992) is still in print. Peck also discusses the available editions and translations of Gower's shorter works; all of these have appeared relatively recently, and among their number, the "Cinkante Balades" and "Traitié," as well as "In Praise of Peace" and the shorter Latin poems have been edited and translated in METS volumes. [Kurt Olsson Copyright. The John Gower Society. Copyright. JGN 31.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A Published Peck, Russell A. "Texts for Teaching." In Appoaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Ed. Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W. New York: Modern Languge Association of America, 2011, pp. 7-16. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Texts for Teaching Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Languge Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Why is it, Windeatt wonders, that swooning is so common in medieval and early modern visual and literary art (the former depicting primarily the Virgin), and seldom probed by modern scholar/critics? While he never directly answers that question, he nonetheless does many others, picking out swoons and cataloguing them according to many types and purposes as he traverses, first painting, then literature from the bible to "The Court of Love" (ca. 1535). Gower furnishes him with a clutch of examples, all (per his title) from the "Confessio Amantis." These can be charted as follows: "Grief and shock of confronting another's death and mourning over a body": Thisbe discovering the lifeless Pyramus faints (III.1455)(p. 218) / "Swoons of recognition register shock at separation and loss, at partings and abandonment": Medea parting with Jason (V.3647); Ariadne (V.5466-67) / "Situation in which pleas and petitions for pity are voiced, or complaints and lamentations uttered": Canace (III.232-34) / "The widespread convention in medieval texts of multiple and serial swooning": Ariadne (V.5467); Apollonius (VIII.1060, 1077); Constance (II.846, 1063) / "Instances where a swoon registers . . . a self-absenting from something abhorrent": the king's daughter confessing to her father's incestuous rape in "Apollonius" (VIII.332); Lucretia (VII.4986) / "Swoons induced by shock and fury lead on to resolution, whether just or unjust": Procne (V.5788/5792-93). Windeatt also asks "Does the cumulative incidence of swooning across medieval literature suggest that, for this bodily practice at least, cultural attitudes to human behaviour have shifted perceptibly?" (p.224) He cites Anaxarete's frequent swooning over the dead Iphis as one of many "cases where instances of swooning were added to medieval versions of stories from earlier times and different cultures . . . [which] might be presented as evidence that a demonstrative sensibility is more pleasing to medieval taste than to taste before or since" (p. 224). "Swoons," he goes on to say, "become inseparable from the medieval stereotype of a lover's conduct," an example of which is Amans' swoon (VIII.2449) "when Venus intimates that he is too old for love" (p. 225). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Windeatt, Barry Published Windeatt, Barry. "The Art of Swooning in Middle English." In Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature: Essays in Honour of Jill Mann. Ed. Cannon, Christopher and Nolan, Maura. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011, pp. 211-30. ISBN 9781843842637 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Art of Swooning in Middle English 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 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Nolan's focus is on Book I of the "Vox Clamantis," first deemed the "Visio" by Maria Wickert, who showed that it was composed later than the six Books following, which were subsequently attached. Her argument is a wide-ranging one, and difficult to summarize. At its core is the idea that the Rising of 1381 acted on Gower as a kind of personal and aesthetic crucible, out of which he came to forge a poetics altogether new and different from that which governs the "Mirour de l'Omme" and the last six Books of VC. This early poetic Nolan terms "a Boethian account of the relation between self and society, individual and community, dramatized in part by a dialogue between the narrator and Wisdom" (p. 113), and she says it is present alongside a parallel Ovidan account in the "Visio." By "Boethian" Nolan apparently has in mind Gower's sense of the poet as guardian of the established social and cosmic orders--the Gower, in other words, of "comun profit" who speaks from a disembodied space and time. At one edge, this "Boethian" voice is (or seems to be) the "vox clamantis in deserto" persona most commonly recognized by traditional Gowerian scholarship. Nolan, however, offers several dualities by way of illustrating her point."Boethian/Ovidian" is just one; she also makes use of "the poetics of attachment/detachment" and "the poetics of disclosure and closure" (passim., but see especially p. 132), all of which seem to translate into Gower's recognition that the best poetry must involve the heart as well as the head. She like others sees in the "Visio" the Ovidian cento and, by much thoughtful and pointed analysis of selected passages shows that, for the majority of Gower's readers as for Gower himself, those centonic excerpts would have conjured up their original Ovidian context, and hence Ovid's passionate embrace of things living. The effect of this is to "puncture the surface of the poem, producing openings in the text through which readers can access Ovid's verse in all of its complexity and multivalence" (p. 115). Ovid thereafter comes to represent the involvement of the poet's emotions with his art, the healing value of which (both for poet and for society at large) in Nolan's view Gower is forced to discover by the violence of 1381. She keys on the emergence of Arion at the end of the "Visio," treating it as a bridge to the larger figure in CA, and also most persuasively as evidence of Gower's developing sense of himself as man and poet, whose emotions have significance, not only to him, but also as a means of uniting all living things in common purpose and harmony, i.e., Arion's music. Gower comes to see this as a way not merely to heal society, but to improve it. In the "Visio," Nolan finds him working this out--and recognizing his kinship as a poet even with the peasants at their most bestial: "The Rising, too, is kind of disclosure; it is a form of resistence to the closure embodied in social hierarchy and repression. It revealed possibilities; it exposed injustices; it opened closed doors and disclosed emblems of power within. Gower's poetics of disclosure is called into being by the demands of the peasants for self-determination; his narrator is created by the crisis the rebels brought about. Their demands were shocking--not least, Gower suggests, because self-determination was the obsession of clerks and poets" (p. 133). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society JGN 30.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nolan, Maura Published Nolan, Maura. "The Poetics of Catastrophe: Ovidian Allusion in Gower's 'Vox Clamantis'." In In Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature: Essays in Honour of Jill Mann. Ed. Cannon, Christopher and Nolan, Maura. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011, pp. 113-33. ISBN 9781843842637 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Poetics of Catastrophe: Ovidian Allusion in Gower's 'Vox Clamantis' 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 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review With the publication of this volume, the companion to Yeager's edition and translation of "The Minor Latin Works" (see JGN 26, no.1, April 2007), every last shred of Gower's writings in French and Latin is now available in modern English translation, for which some professional Gowerians are likely to be just as grateful as their students. In addition to the "Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz" and the "Cinkante balades," Yeager has included Quixley's early 15th-century English translation of the "Traitié," with its own introduction, plus a helpful "Note on Gower's French" by Brian Merrilees (which will be most useful to those who already have some familiarity with Middle French). For the two main works, Yeager provides an introduction, the text with an "en face" translation, explanatory notes, and textual notes. The introductions summarize Yeager's valuable earlier work on the dates and intended audiences of these poems. He places the "Traitié" earlier than is usually supposed, closer to the date of the composition of the "Confessio Amantis," and the "Cinkantes balades" not much later, in the very early 1390s. The French texts of the poems are enough to make this volume worth owning, since otherwise they are available only in Macaulay's hard-to-find edition. Together with the textual notes, they appear to be taken directly from Macaulay, though I could not find any description of Yeager's editorial procedure. (The text of Quixley is taken from MacCracken's 1909 edition rather than from the surviving manuscript; see p. 163.) The explanatory notes often provide a valuable supplement to Macaulay's, tracing more of Gower's references back to their source, but they are stronger on the patristic background to some of the doctrines expressed in the "Traitié" than they are, for instance, on the allusions to contemporary vernacular poetry in the "Cinkante Balades." The portion of this volume that will no doubt get the heaviest use, however, will be the translations. As in his volume of Gower's shorter Latin works, Yeager offers a line-by-line translation that does not aim to capture the poetic qualities of Gower's verse but that does serve the needs of the student who is trying to make sense of the original. As an illustration, here is Yeager's translation of number 35, one of the best known of the balades because of its recollection both of Chaucer's "Parlement of Foules" and of the opening of the "Confessio," 1.100-07: "St. Valentine, greater than any emperor, / Holds a parliament and assembly / Of all the birds,who come on his day, / Where the female takes her mate /5/ In proper love; but by comparison / Of such a thing I am unable to have my own part: / Whoever remains alone is unable to have great joy. / As the phoeniox is alone in its home / In the region of Arabia, /10/ Just so my lady in the place of her love / Remains alone, where whether I wish it or not, / She has no care about my supplication, / Because I know not how to find the pathway of love: / Whoever remains alone is unable to have great joy. /15/ Oh how Nature is full of favor / To those birds who have their choice! / Oh if, instead of my state, I might be / In just that same situation as theirs! / Nature is more capable than reason is, /20/ And in my state it senses very well the path: / Whoever remains alone is unable to have great joy. / Each gentle tercel has her falcon, / But I am lacking what I want to have: / My lady, it is the end of my song, /25/ Whoever remains alone is unable to have great joy." One has to have sympathy with any translator: there are always a countless number of choices to make and at each point, some reader is likely to be dissatisfied. With Gower, some of the challenges stem from the fact that French was not his native language, and he often seems uncertain both about his morphology and about his syntax. There is also always the question of how literal one should be. I have a number of quibbles with Yeager's translation which I have discussed with him, and the main difference between us is that I tend to be more literal where he sometimes bases his translation on his understanding of the poem as a whole and on his desire to eschew what he terms "the clunky." Here are my differences in this balade. In line 6, "D'ascune part ne puiss avoir la moie," I take d'ascune part to mean simply "nowhere": "Nowhere am I able to have mine [i.e., my companion]." En droit de, which Yeager translates as "because of" in line 5 and "instead of" in line 10, I would translate in the more general and usual sense of "with regard to" in both cases. In line 13, I would take sique as "so that" rather than "because." Line 20, "En mon estat tresbien le sente et voie," I would translate "In my condition very well do I feel and see it." And in line 22, I would put "his" falcon rather than "her": a tercel is by definition a male, and Gower wrote "sa faucon" rather than the usual "son," substituting the natural gender of the bird for the normal grammatical gender of "faucon." (Yeager, in our correspondence, justified his translation by pointing to line 4.) Differences such as these occur throughout CB. I find the translation of the "Traitié" to be closer to what I expect on the whole, but there are a few bones to pick there as well. Yeager will be making some revisions in the on-line version of this edition, but these few issues do not detract from the value of this volume, and it will be a welcome addition to our libraries. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society 30.2} Author/Editor Author/Editor Gower, John Published Gower, John. "The French Balades." TEAMS Middle English Text Series . Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2011 ISBN 9781580441551 Gower Subject Cinkante Balades Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations 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 The French Balades Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The poems that are assembled in this superb new volume are the two long additions that Gower made to the original six books of the "Vox Clamantis": his nearly hysteric depiction of the 1381 peasants' uprising (which received its title, "Visio Anglie," from Maria Wickert, who first deciphered the layers of composition of the VC), and the "Cronica Tripertita," his post-usurpation Lancastrian propaganda piece on a very different assault on Richard's rule. The justification for bringing them together lies not just in their later composition but also in their shared departure from the original moralizing schema of the VC to "something else, effectively more satiric. On these two occasions, Gower wrote contemporary history" (David R. Carlson's introduction, p.8). These are certainly the portions of the work that will be of greatest interest to our students, and the value of the service that Carlson and Rigg have performed is heightened by the exemplary way in which they have executed it. Both texts have been freshly re-edited. Where Macaulay used a single manuscript for both (Oxford, All Souls College, Oxf. 98) in the belief that it was "certainly written and corrected under the direction of the author" (Works 4.lxi), Carlson uses Dublin, Trinity College MS 214 (Macaulay's T) for the "Visio" and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 92 (Macaulay's H3) for the "Cronica" (the only copy in which the Cronica appears apart from the Vox), in both cases seeking to represent what he deduces to be the earliest rather than the most revised state of the text.(For his choice of Hatton, see his 2007 essay, reviewed in JGN 28 no. 1.) At the same time, Carlson's record of variants from other manuscripts is much more complete than Macaulay's is. Carlson has also provided a whole new set of explanatory notes. In the "Visio," these are mostly concerned with tracing the source of Gower's borrowings. Macaulay identified most of the passages that Gower took from Ovid, but later scholars traced many additional lines to works such as the "Aurora" and the "Speculum Stultorum," for which we now rely on the notes in Stockton's translation. Carlson has few new citations to add (though there are some, e.g. section 1, lines 25 and 26), but where both Macaulay and Stockton tend to provide only the line references to the source, Carlson provides a complete quotation, highlighting the borrowed words in boldface, and when appropriate, a translation, and he also provides perceptive commentary on the choices that Gower made, both in selecting and in altering his borrowings. His commentary on the "Cronica" is more extensive and even more valuable, providing a detailed explanation of the events to which Gower alludes and of the relation between Gower's account and other sources, particularly the "Record and Process of the Renunciation and Deposition of Richard II" (which Carlson has also edited for PIMS) on which Gower's poem seems largely to be based. If the text and notes are not already enough to make this volume worth owning, we also have A. G. Rigg's verse translation. The unrhymed elegiac couplet of the "Visio" he renders in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameters), and the leonine hexameters of the "Cronica," with their disyllabic internal rhyme ("Isla tripertita, sequitur que, mente perita") he puts in rhyming hexameter couplets. And in both cases, to the extent that I can judge, the translation enhances rather than detracts from the sense of the original. The effect is best illustrated with an example. Here's Stockton's literal translation of "Cronica" 3.186ff. (a passage I chose almost at random): "With the situation like this, the King remained where he remained before, until his whole following trembled uneasily. Such highly inexperienced men rarely become prompt in action; similarly, all these men hesitated to be helped from any source. Fortune then turned her wheel away from them and remained blind while the King crossed over the seas. His own guilt cast [him] back into those snares which he had fashioned; he was to be ensnared when he reached the shores of his fatherland." Here is Riggs' version of the same passage (and a little more): "While things stood thus, the king still stood as he before / Had stood, until his court was fearful all the more. / Thus few are quick to act, by ignorance dismayed; / All equally have doubts from whence might come their aid. / Then Fortune turns her wheel aside, far off from these, / And blindly waits until the king should cross the seas. / His crimes now drove him to the snares that he had set; / When he seeks home, he'll be entangled in the net. / Yet nonetheless, where winds propelled him for their sport, / Fate gave to him his own and predetermined port. / Wild Wales received the royal ships within her quays, / But quickly let them go, in view of Richard's deeds. / The king cast lots and ordered troops to be enrolled, / But got no help where he no favours had bestowed. / On seeing this, some smiled and murmured quietly, / But others wept for sorrow, grieving inwardly. / The royal pomp declines, since happy times have gone; / All quickly turn aside and will not fight, not one." Stockton's will still have its uses, but it reads like a translation. Rigg's is more accessible; it is more like the experience of reading Gower's poem; the verse engages the attention in a way that prose cannot; and it is difficult to see that anything has been lost. Rigg has given the students who become interested in these poems a chance to see that Gower's Latin is not as dry as dust, as they might otherwise have supposed. Let's hope that PIMS doesn't wait too long to issue an affordable paperback edition. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R., ed. Rigg, A. G., trans. Published Carlson, David R., ed., and A. G. Rigg, trans. John Gower: Poems on Contemporary Events: The "Visio Anglie" (1381) and "Cronica tripertita" (1400). Toronto and Oxford: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies and Bodleian Library, 2011 ISBN 9780888441744 (PIMS); 9781851242900 (Bodleian Library) Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Minor Latin Poetry Vox Clamantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Cronica Tripertita 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 Poems on Contemporary Events: The Visio Anglie (1381) and Cronica tripertita (1400) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies and Bodleian Library, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review John Gower married Agnes Groundolf in 1398, in a wedding taking place in his private chapel by special indulgence of the Bishop of Winchester. All remaining evidence--a Latin epitaph, a tomb (now lost), a generous bequest upon her husband's death--points toward Agnes having been highly respected by Gower, at the very least (219-21). Salisbury's "reading of . . . 'the Agnes fragments' is divided into three parts--historical, hagiographical, and philosophical--each defined as 'promiscuous' in order to indicate the discursive fields within which the subject operates and to suggest ways in which the eclectic combination of Gower's disparate genres (legal documents, tomb writing, and poetry) produce meaning. The first part combines a discussion of the sex trade known in Southwark with John and Agnes's personal history to suggest an alternative reading to the Gower marriage and its relation to the Confessio Amantis; the second explores the tropes of prostitution enacted in Gower's 'Tale of Apollonius' within the context of two saints lives, one of St Agnes, the other of the legendary courtesan, Thaïs. That Gower's Thaise, the daughter of Apollonius sold into the brothels of Mitilene, bears a closer resemblance to St Agnes than to the courtesan for whom she is named offers a means by which we may better understand the shaping of Agnes Gower's identity and 'afterlife' by her husband. The third part of the essay revisits Gower's philosophy of common profit in relation to 'common women', the group upon whom the efficacy of redemption and charity may be tested" (222). Salisbury finds the Gower marriage to have been celibate but rewarding, probably, to each, and that the poet's affection and respect for his wife as expressed in the epitaph, will, and tomb seems to have been genuine. Intriguing are Salisbury's suggestions that Agnes's "inclusion among four notable men [as executrix of his will] indicates literacy in Latin" (240) and her reading of the character of Thaise "and other female characters in the Confessio" offers evidence that "Gower seems to have supported . . . the education of young women" (240). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Salisbury, Eve Published Salisbury, Eve. "Promiscuous Contexts: Gower's Wife, Prostitution, and the Confessio Amantis." In John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts. Ed. Urban, Malte. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009, pp. 219-40. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Promiscuous Contexts: Gower's Wife, Prostitution, and the Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brepols, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower, Bertolet remarks, "seems to be uniformly hostile to aliens in England, especially alien traders . . . but he levels his harshest criticism against the 'Lombards' (Gower's term for all northern Italians) in both his 'Mirour de l'Omme' and 'Confessio Amantis'" (197). Nonetheless, "Anti-Lombard hostility . . . is not exceptional to Gower" (197) and it was at its height during "the third quarter of the fourteenth century when Gower was writing the 'Mirour'" (197). Bertolet sets out to discover "Why did Gower and his contemporaries find the Lombards such a threat to their sense of order?" (197). To pursue this line of inquiry, Bertolet will "read Gower's comments against events in and around London from roughly 1350-80," most of which he gleans from the "London Letter-books" (197-98), and from court records. Two murder trials offer particular good evidence: those of two prominent Italian merchants, Nicholas Sardouche and Janus Imperiale, the first in 1370 and the second in 1378 (199-209). The rest of the essay consists of a close reading of passages from the MO--in which "Gower makes one of the earliest arguments in England for local and national commercial policies to be in harmony with each other" (210)--and the CA--where Gower's "hostility towards the Lombards is consistent" with his position in the MO (218). Gower's views on the Lombards becomes part of his political agenda, since "His two poetic complaints about them serve as a warning to all readers to beware of a group of men who come from a land of division and who seek to spread this division wherever they go, undermining the moral function of trade and the vital fabric of harmony which keeps all cities, especially London, together in social love and common profit" (218).] [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bertolet, Craig Published Bertolet, Craig. "'The slyeste of alle': The Lombard Problem in John Gower's London." In John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts. Ed. Urban, Malte. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009. Pp. 197-218. Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'The slyeste of alle': The Lombard Problem in John Gower's London Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brepols. Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Urban, Malte Published Urban, Malte. "Past and Present: Gower's use of Old Books in Vox Clamantis." In John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts. Ed. Urban, Malte. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009, pp. 175-94. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Review Urban focuses on the Vox Clamantis, and "offers a reading of old books, the past, and the present in the Vox as informed by a cultural agenda that sees the present as corrupted in the sense that it still carries at least traces of the qualities of the past, but seems to have lost all cultural memory of those traces. In my view, Gower is offering a thorough indictment of his contemporaries, but one that holds up the image of the past as a model for a return to social harmony Gower sees jeopardized by the events of the Rising of 1381" (176). Urban builds his argument around two images: that of Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the statue, from the Book of Daniel, and Walter Benjamin's view of cultural history in terms of the 'monad' which results from a "shock" that "crystallizes" . . . "thinking suddenly stop[ped]in a constellation pregnant with tensions" as epitomized in Paul Klee's painting "Angelus Novus," once owned by Benjamin (177-78). For Urban, the VC is a "deeply apocalyptic" and represents "Gower's meditation on the meaning of history and his literary account of what he regards as significant in the history of England in the 1370s and 1380s" (180). Like the statue, society for Gower is crumbling about him; like the angel in Klee's painting, his attempt is to change directions through the gathering of bits and shards--which translates to wisdom from 'old books' in Urban's hands. The two come together as Gower attempts "to reassert the authority of writing and with it the traditional social order" (186). This did not occur, of course, and "in the last instance . . . Gower is aware of the relative futility of his project as he formulates it in the early version of the Vox, where he can only point out the general flaws in his society, but cannot indict specific social agents" (194). Ultimately Urban sees an kind of irony in Gower's achievement: "The rebels' questioning of the social system by force is mirrored in Gower's poetic questioning of society and its almost aggressive highlighting of corruption. In this sense, Gower and his old books are implicated in both the rebels' and the Vox's criticism (and vice-versa)"(194). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1]. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp.218-28. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Past and Present: Gower's use of Old Books in Vox Clamantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brepols, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "John Gower and other Aristotelians like him enquired into how speech convinced each individual to behave morally and thus to rule himself, his kingdom, or world rightly" (157). Thus for Donavin, the key to the structure of the Confessio Amantis is a proper understanding of Aristotle's "Rhetoric" as filtered for Gower through Roger Bacon, and especially the "Commentary" of Giles of Rome, as well as "possibly through one of the numerous abbreviations of the "Rhetoric" in medieval English manuscripts" (158). Despite the fact that "scholars have been reluctant to acknowledge the influence of Aristotle's "Rhetoric" in fourteenth-century England . . . because English university statutes do not mention the text until the fifteenth century . . .common sense dictates that the 'Rhetoric' had some influence over intellectual conversations about persuasive language" (159). Through his legal studies, Gower could have acquired "a much broader understanding of Aristotelian rhetorical appeals and their political applications than is offered in his basic source, 'De regimine principum'" (160). But from Giles' "Commentary" Gower would have discovered an Aristotle with a "new psychological emphasis to rhetorical studies" which placed him in the company of Cicero and Boethius in the connection of persuasion and ethics (161). A good deal like James Simpson ("Sciences and the Self") in her contention that the CA "portrays an Aristotelian psychomachia of invention, a scene in which Reason and Will conjoin to produce morally compelling speech" (162). Focusing her discussion on Book VII, Donavin finds "the purpose of Book VII's section on 'Rhetorique'" to be to "highlight the discipline in order to underscore [Gower's] own discursive assumptions for the entire poem" (168). "Through Aristotelian rhetoric, mediated by Giles of Rome, John Gower modeled a psychomachia of persuasion and taught in the 'Rhetorique' section of Book VII its high principles. Like Roger Bacon, Giles of Rome, and later Francis Bacon, Gower in the Confessio Amantis preserves an Aristotelian form of discourse that heals the soul and offers hope to the kingdom" (173). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1} Author/Editor Author/Editor Donavin, Georgiana Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Published Donavin, Georgiana. "Rhetorical Gower: Aristotelianism in the Confessio Amantis's Treatment of 'Rhetorique'." In John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts. Ed. Urban, Malte. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009, pp. 155-73. Dublin Core The Dublin 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 Brepols, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Rhetorical Gower: Aristotelianism in the Confessio Amantis's Treatment of 'Rhetorique' Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Mitchell, J. Allan Published Mitchell, J. Allan. "Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,' Natural Morality, and Vernacular Ethics." In John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts. Ed. Urban, Malte. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009, pp. 135-53. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review "Gower's Confessio Amantis . . . vernacularizes ethics for an emerging English polity," Mitchell contends (137)--meaning by "vernacularizing" not merely that Gower wrote in English, but that he put forward an alternative, pointedly practical (and hence un-scholastic) branch of Aristotelian ethics that more suited his readers and himself. "Gower opens ethics up to the 'sensis communis,' or what the poet thinks should be a common sense educated in the humanities, and he is characteristically rhetorical rather than metaphysical in his orientation toward ethics" (137). He settles ethical choice squarely on the individual: "Gower is especially skeptical of the idea of morality as theophany. God cannot be held responsible, Gower teaches, for ethics remains within the orbit of practical reason rather than inspiration or revelation" (150). Such an ethics is especially suited to narrative exemplification: "The exemplary narrative . . . supplements even as it desublimates the philosophy of natural law, or rather it creates a narrative ethics out of normative ethical theory . . . . The vernacular narratives of the Confessio are meant to make, move, and improve the 'res publica'" (151). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,' Natural Morality, and Vernacular Ethics Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brepols, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Bullón-Fernández, María Published Bullón-Fernández, María. "Translating Women, Translating Texts: Gower's 'Tale of Tereus' and the Castilian and Portuguese Translations of the 'Confessio Amantis'." In John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts. Ed. Urban, Malte. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009, pp. 109-32. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Review Noting that no "attempts have been made to analyse the three versions [of the Confessio], the two translations, and Gower's text, simultaneously" (111), Bullón-Fernández selects the "Tale of Tereus" as locus for comparison. The tale, with its focus on arranged marriages and foreign-born queens, is especially apt, since the Iberian translations were probably commissioned by Philippa, Queen of Portugal, and Catherine, Queen of Castile, both daughters of John of Gaunt who arranged their marriages as part of his price for abandoning his claims to the Castilian crown. "Tereus" Gower found in Ovid, but his own version is much altered. "While Ovid raises questions about the exchange of women between men and about the father-daughter bond, Gower is interested in the daughter's identification not only with her father, but more generally with her birth family. More so than Ovid, Gower develops the bond between the sisters, Philomena and Progne, and examines the latter's pull between her husband and her birth family. This reinterpretation of Ovid's story . . . is taken even further by the two Iberian translators (more so by Juan de Cuenca), both of whom comment on the practice of arranged foreign marriages and the question of the wife's identification with her birth family to a greater degree than does Gower, raising questions about the extent to which a daughter changes loyalty when she marries" (112). She concludes "with an analysis of the relation between these translations and the translations of Philippa and Catherine to Portugal and Castile. Reading these three versions of the 'Tale of Tereus' side by side allows us to illuminate the fears and anxieties associated with the 'translation' of actual royal and aristocratic women through marriage to foreign royal and aristocratic men and to raise complex and significant questions about this other process of 'translation'" (112).] [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1] 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 Translating Women, Translating Texts: Gower's 'Tale of Tereus' and the Castilian and Portuguese Translations of the 'Confessio Amantis' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brepols, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Driver makes two claims in her essay: 1) that the "visual representation [of women] in [Pierpont Morgan Library] MS M.126] . . . argues for active female engagement. In example after example, women are shown as central characters in the action as well as being the main speakers in many of Gower's texts). The majority of illuminations in MS M.126 emphasize female agency and intelligence, qualities that still appeal to women readers of Gower's instructive tales" (71-72) and 2) that "in such a book, a queen might see her own reflection. Given the visual evidence provided by MS M.126, the script, the iconography, and the suggestive scribal inscriptions decorating the ascenders and descenders, I strongly suspect it was made for a woman in the circles of Edward IV, most probably for the beautiful Elizabeth Woodville" (107). In support of her arguments she offers ample evidence; includes 15 figures. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Driver, Martha W Published Driver, Martha W. "Women Readers and Pierpont Morgan MS M. 126." In John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts. Ed. Urban, Malte. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009, pp. 71-109. 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 Women Readers and Pierpont Morgan MS M. 126 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brepols, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Recognizing that glossing establishes a form of "multi-voicing" in poetry, Galloway remarks that "such glossing of Middle English manuscripts is relatively rare, and generally thin when it appears" (40). The CA, however, offers "the great exception to this faint tradition of Latin glosses on English poetry" and because of the nonpareil nature of Gower's practice there, "this suggests that we need a fuller history of Latin glosses of English verse to appreciate its dynamic if ghostly functions, certainly to appreciate the unusual role that Gower has cast it in" (40). While not purporting to offer a complete version of that "fuller history," Galloway suggests the case of "The Prick of Conscience" as "an alternate tradition of Latin glossing of English poetry that points toward possibilities not otherwise exploited in the English literary tradition, not even by Gower" (41) and notes that "the case presents a particularly useful way to ponder the meaning of the relation between text and gloss in the Confessio Amantis as well" (43). The glosses in the "Prick of Conscience," Galloway argues convincingly via examples and illustrations of full pages (45-64), "are vital intellectual materials because the English text of that poem touches on matters where the Latin and English doctrinal materials have a living context and tradition, the confessional world" and it is a world in which "the glosses [are] productive of other glosses for the same reason: an audience that energetically uses it and needs it, with all the complexity they can find in it and explicate from it for themselves and others. 'The Prick of Conscience' glosses are extensions of the cultural energy that the poem itself was part of, in sifting sin, punishment, and penance" (65) This multi-vocal glossing tradition helps clarify Gower's practice, by contrast: his glosses have a "deadening and timeless quality . . . . Their point is clear only in its further highlighting of the vividness and action of the English poetry, and in terms of a subtle rejection of the clerically controlled confessional world. He addressed, at least potentially, a readership able to appreciate the irony of dull Latin glosses to rich English stories, just at the copyists and readers of the 'Prick of Conscience' addressed an audience possibly able to appreciate the enrichment of vital Latin glosses on moral theology. Gower's glosses at best emphasize by contrast the English poetry's display of individual and civic self-determination, and its psychological complexities of sin that no priest can take up and absolve, for which a secular writer is needed to impose the terms of civic and secular soul-searching and ethical ideals" (65). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew Published Galloway, Andrew. "Gower's Confessio Amantis, the Prick of Conscience, and the History of the Latin Gloss in Early English Literature." In John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts. Ed. Urban, Malte. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009, pp. 39-70. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Confessio Amantis, the Prick of Conscience, and the History of the Latin Gloss in Early English Literature Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brepols, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Published Peck, Russell A. "Reader, Editor, and Geometrician 'for Engelondes sake'." In John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts. Ed. Urban, Malte. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009, pp. 11-37. Review Peck concludes his essay by quoting the explicit at the end of the Confessio Amantis: (here in Galloway's translation): "Here ends this book, and may it, I implore, travel free so that without a bruise it may thrive in the reader's ear. May he who sits in the throne of heaven grant that this page of John remain for all time pleasing the Britains. Go, spotless book, to the Count of Derby, whom the learned honor with praise, and take repose when you will be in his keeping." He goes on to note: "The Explicit sums up the thesis of this essay succinctly. Gower, as editor/reader, brought forth from old books an idea that his poem begets anew, in hope that it may abide (dwell) freely amidst a new community who will help to edit it e-dare, 'to bring forth, beget, raise up') intelligently. The community will live as an idea that resides/dwells in the ear of its readers as long as it remains pleasing to them--these Britains whom Gower prays God will bless. He sends forth his book under the keeping of a good man, Henry Bolingbroke, knowing that health within the state is dependent on good leadership and good rule. That hope, set in a prayer, reflects a deep-seated anxiety on Gower's part: will his book have any influence whatsoever? In his trusting way, he hopes it will. But whether that trust is optimistic or pessimistic only the reader can determine" (36-37). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brepols, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Reader, Editor, and Geometrician 'for Engelondes sake' Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Driver considers Gower's afterlife in the form of the choric figure in Shakespeare's "Pericles." The play itself, she notes, draws upon both Gower's "Apollonius of Tyre" and his "Constance." Shakespeare's choice to cast Gower and never to give more than a passing reference to Chaucer stems from their respective reputations in Shakespeare's day and may reflect either Shakespeare's own Roman Catholic leanings (the evidence for which Driver surveys) or Gower's reputation as a moral teacher. It is as teacher that Gower is most commonly portrayed in modern productions, though sometimes without reference to his real biography. Driver gives greatest attention to a 2004 production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in which Gower was portrayed by an actress, Brenda Wehle. The resulting shift of focus to the agency of the female characters in the play, Driver maintains, is not inconsistent either with the story or with its original setting in CA, which "in some sixty-five stories celebrates women's strength, power, patience under adversity and in some cases their resistance to culturally constructed gender roles" (324). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Driver, Martha W Published Driver, Martha W. "Conjuring Gower in 'Pericles'." In John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition. Ed. Dutton, Elisabeth, and Hines, John, and Yeager, R.F. Cambridge: Brewer, 2010, pp. 315-25. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Conjuring Gower in 'Pericles' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Galloway finds a "devastatingly sceptical scrutiny" of earlier literary dream-visions in what is likely the first instance of a dream in Gower's writing, the portrait of Somnolence in MO 5180-96. "If a dream vision is supposed to be a disturbing revelation, here it is a comforting fraud. If it is traditionally brought on by a dreamer falling asleep in the lap of nature's bounty, here it is the result of a willed desire to remain in bed. . . ." (294). The same themes – the tension between transcendent authority and self-serving purpose and between rationality and mere appetite – Galloway also finds in the major dream episodes in both VC and CA. In VC 1, which is ostensibly about the rebels' surrender of reason to sensual desire, the poet's overt and conscious shaping of the dream, including a displacement of Nature from her central roles, creates "an unsettling analogy between the rebels' deforming appetite and the writer's literary manipulation" (196). Gower characterizes his vision as a "waking sleep," which "epitomizes his difficult balance between a writer's own desires and those of the disruptive social world that he is analyzing, and between a self-conscious emphasis on control and a claim to transcendent inspiration" (298). In CA 4, Amans' wish not to awaken from his gratifying fantasy of being with his beloved placed appetite securely over visionary authority and ominously anticipates Ceix and Alceone's own responsibility for "the horrible outcome of their story" (302). Gower's shifts of emphasis amount to a major reassessment of the dream-vision form, one that, by undermining its own claims, contributed to its demise, but echoes of Gower's explorations of "intellection driven by appetite" (302) can be found, Galloway concludes, in later English literature outside the dream-vision tradition. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew Published Galloway, Andrew. "Reassessing Gower's Dream-Visions." In John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition. Ed. Dutton, Elisabeth, and Hines, John, and Yeager, R.F. Cambridge: Brewer, 2010, pp. 288-303. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reassessing Gower's Dream-Visions Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bowers re-examines the chronology and the historical setting of Gower's and Chaucer's major works, particularly Chaucer's LGW, in order to reassess their literary relationship and also to offer a rather novel view of their respective reputations at the end of the 1390's. Following Paul Strohm and Kathryn Lynch, he places the composition of the F Prologue of LGW after 1392. Coming that late, it reflects Chaucer's use both of the Prologue to CA and also of Clanvowe's Boke of Cupide. Chaucer's borrowing, Bowers suggests, is consistent with his rewriting of Gower's tales of Florent and Constance in WBT and MLT, and Bowers describes the portrayal of the Man of Law as a friendly caricature of Gower himself. His revision of the LGW Prologue, Bowers claims, "reflects Chaucer's insecurity at the court of an increasingly volatile monarch" (286), and he contrasts Chaucer's "retreat" (286) into a "'closet' project not meant for courtly readers" (282) with Gower's cultivation of the Lancastrians, by which he became "temporarily their most-favoured poet" (287). It was Gower's "preeminence as the London author of English, Latin and French poetry during the 1390s," Bowers concludes, that served "as impetus for Chaucer's competitive, creative responses in his Canterbury Tales but also in his Legend of Good Women" (287). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bowers, John Published Bowers, John. "Rival Poets: Gower's Confessio and Chaucer's Legend of Good Women." In John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition. Ed. Dutton, Elisabeth, and Hines, John, and Yeager, R.F. Cambridge: Brewer, 2010, pp. 276-87. 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 Rival Poets: Gower's Confessio and Chaucer's Legend of Good Women Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Hume, Cathy Published Hume, Cathy. "Why did Gower Write the Traitié?" In John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition. Ed. Dutton, Elisabeth, and Hines, John, and Yeager, R.F. Cambridge: Brewer, 2010, pp. 263-75. Gower Subject Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Review Agreeing with others' recent rejection of the once-general theory that Gower wrote the Traitié as a wedding present for his wife, or as "a clever virtuoso French reworking of the Confessio" (266) to which it is attached in many manuscripts, Hume finds a clue to Gower's motivation in the balades' focus on adultery. "What is most striking, in my view," she notes, "is that [the Traitié] "shows signs of being addressed to a reader (or readers) who is (or are) already engaged in adultery" (267). Indeed, "there are several indications that the point at issue is not embarking on adultery but carrying on with it, failing to repent of it, or failing to stop when warned" (267). Another clue Hume pursues is "the poem's [i.e., the Traitié's] preoccupation with kings" (269). Observing that the Mirour de l'Omme also names many kings, she finds "striking similarities" with the treatment of David there and in the Traitié balade XIV (268), including God's punishment on the adulterous ruler and his people, bringing the former low and suffering upon the latter (269-70). She then examines a theory first proposed by Gardiner Stillwell in 1948 that perhaps Gower intended Edward III and Alice Perrers as his targets, countering the problem of so early a composition date as October 1376-June 1377, when Edward died, with the assertion that no hard evidence exists to pinpoint when Gower wrote the Traitié (273). The choice of French, then, "would be readily explained by [it] being the dominant language of Edward's court" 274). But there are other possibilities too. "Another . . . is that the intended addressee is John of Gaunt, the other notorious royal adulterer of the period"--a suggestion she credits in a note to "Mark Ormrod . . . in conversation" (274). If reforming either of these "royal" adulterers was Gower's purpose, then "the envoy, the prefatory French prose and the concluding Latin [are] all a way of deflecting our attention from the daring agenda and addressee of the original poem" (275). "If so," she asks further, "the reason for this smokescreen would be Gower's desire to give his elegant (if rather hectoring) ballade sequence a longer life once its original purpose had been superseded: events moved on, whether or not Gower ever delivered the poem to either Edward or Gaunt, and the poem could no longer stand on its own" (275). The answer to such questions, Hume concludes, is beyond us, but we can at least "reject Gower's claim that it [the Traitié] was originally composed with 'tout le monde' ('all the world') in mind" (275).] [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1] 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 Why did Gower Write the Traitié? Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed