15 100 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 Kinch, Ashby Published Kinch, Ashby. "'To thenke what was in hir wille': A Female Reading Context for the Findern Anthology." Neophilologus 91 (2007), pp. 729-44. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review The Findern MS (Cambridge University Library MS Ff.1.6), compiled in the last decades of the fifteenth century, is notable for bearing the signatures of several women, who may have been not just owners and readers but also scribes of at least some portions of the book, which was evidently compiled piecemeal over an extended period of time. For Kinch, the MS provides valuable evidence not just of the tastes of a provincial audience but also for the way in which it "illuminat[es] a literary subculture with demonstrable female participation" (p. 731). "Female reading interests" (p. 733) are discernible in the choice of texts, in the selection of portions of these texts, and in the juxtapositions of these selections within the book. Two of the three sections that Kinch examines most closely are the pairing of Gower's tales of Philomela and Rosiphelee and the juxtaposition of Chaucer's "Parliament of Fowls" with Gower's tale of "The Three Questions." In each case, her close readings of the texts themselves are complemented by the way in which each is "recontextualized in a manuscript compiled by women" (p. 740). In the first two tales, "The compilers . . . draw together two stories of female isolation and imprisonment (one involuntary, one self-imposed), and of female interiority (one a physical limitation, the other a will to self-reflection)" (p. 734) which "are both oddly illuminative reflections on the powers and limits--though mostly the limits--of female resistance" (p. 734). By preceding "Rosiphelee" with an excerpt from Amans' speech on his unsuccessful efforts to impress his lady, the compilers also set up a contrast between Tereus and Gower's "inoffensive dupe" (p. 734). "Of course, the two figures are not entirely oppositional: they strangely parallel one another in their persistence, and, again, in the way they impose themselves on the women they seek out. A reader of the court tradition might imagine that most men, though they profess the platitudes of courtly love like Amans, are really more like Tereus at heart; and the specific juxtaposition of these texts certainly facilitates this ironic reading" (p. 734). Both PF and "The Three Questions" "demonstrate intelligent female responses to authority" (p. 739). "The formel voices the positive response to the constraint to which Rosiphelee must submit: although forced to make a choice in love, the woman does exert a certain authority in retaining the prerogative on when and how to exercise that choice" (p. 740). Peronelle, on the other hand, "is shrewd, working on behalf of both her and her father's best interests, in many ways affirming the most positive aspects of the 'patriarchal bargain': if a woman can provide wisdom that advances the values of men between whom she is exchanged, then she validates the proper function of a patriarchal system, even as she benefits directly from the exchange. . . . Peronelle's eloquence implicitly attests to the importance of educating women as a vehicle for the social advancement of the family" (p. 740-41). The "marriage imperative" at work in these tales "no doubt resonated in direct ways" with the lives of the women who compiled this book (p. 742); "one also hopes," Kinch concludes, that "when some female reader . . . read that Rosphilee nestled under the shaw 'and ther sche stod al one stille/To thenke what was in hir wille," that this reader might have seen the potential for something different, an experience of reflexive self-awareness that we have come to identify as one the liberating powers of literature" (p. 743). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'To thenke what was in hir wille': A Female Reading Context for the Findern Anthology Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Sobecki, Sebastian I Published Sobecki, Sebastian I. "Educating Richard: Incest, Marriage, and (Political) Consent in Gower's 'Tale of Apollonius'." Anglia 125 (2007), pp. 205-16. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Gower's tale of Apollonius, Sobecki argues, forms part of the poet's artful attempt to offer advice to his king on the limits upon, and on the most effective way of exercising, his rule. The tale is preceded by a 200-line prologue that is concerned not so much with incest itself or with the "natural" taboo that prevents it as with "the legal discourse that has generated the incest prohibition. As Genius puts it at the end of his prologue, his concern will be 'lust' or lechery in relation to the law: 'Hou lust of love excedeth lawe, / It oghte for to be withdrawe" (CA, VIII.263-64)" (p. 209). Antiochus' offenses against his daughter are situated in "a place lying outside of the Christian restrictions on incest. . . . Measured against the yardstick of Genius' legalistic 'lust of love excedeth lawe", Antiochus is only partly guilty: he cannot be aware that he is offending canon law since he inhabits and gives birth to a pagan world of legend governed by natural law" (p. 210). His real offense is that he makes no attempt to marry his daughter, as in other similar tales, and his incest "is but a thematic device to demonstrate the efficacy of marriage as a cure for lechery. . . . [and that] it is legal discourse that regulates the definitional boundaries between lechery, incest, and marriage" (p. 211). Marriage also provides a metaphor for the relation between the ruler and his subjects. In the tale, Apollonius is not called "king" until after his marriage with Arcestrates' daughter. "It becomes clear that, like incest, Apollonius' political status is discursive, and the title of prince, which stands here for 'ruler, sovereign', is transformed by marriage into the king that he will become later" (p. 212). One important link between marriage and kingship is that both are based upon consent. Apollonius' abandonment of Tyre at the beginning of the tale takes place without "comun assent" (8.493), while his marriage at the end is sanctioned by the unanimous consent of a specially summoned parliament (8.1989-91). "This passage fuses two streams of assent or consensus, the political and the matrimonial one, in a final expression of marriage as a metaphor for harmonious polity" (p. 215). "Rather than viewing the tale as an expression of political cynicism or disillusionment," Sobecki concludes, "I propose to read Gower's legal interplay of incest, marriage, and kingship--fed through he catalyst of Apollonius--as an attempt to suggest to Richard that he should rule his realm in the same way in which he leads his marriage--with conjugal love" (p. 216). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Educating Richard: Incest, Marriage, and (Political) Consent in Gower's 'Tale of Apollonius' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream is indebted to Gower's version of the Pyramus and Thisbe story for the allusion to 1 Corinthians 2:9 in Bottom's speech as he awakens from his dream (MND 5.1.206-12; cf. CA 3.1417-28). Other possible similarities include the reference to a lion rather than a lioness (MND 5.1.217, CA 3.1398-1400; cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses. 4.96-97) and the lovers' conversation through a hole in the wall rather than a crack (MND 5.1.157, 198, CA 3.1370-71; cf. Met. 4.65-72). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Taylor, A. B Published Taylor, A. B. "John Gower and 'Pyramus and Thisbe'." Notes and Queries 54 (2007), pp. 282-83. 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 John Gower and 'Pyramus and Thisbe' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation examines the national economic discussion spurred by the crises of war and plague in fourteenth-century England. Bringing disparate texts into alignment with each other, I show that documentary and poetic writings from this period imagine economic activity and make economic arguments in strikingly similar ways. . . . Reading documentary texts such as parliamentary petitions and statutes alongside literature, including well-known works by Chaucer, Gower, and Langland as well as a variety of anonymous political satire, I identify and track four key strategies used by the middle strata in national economic debate. My chapters examine holistic conceptions of the realm's wealth, evaluations of the role of intermediary officials in financial systems, and appeals to "reason" as an economic standard and to "common profit" as a model of economic collaboration. Relying on the techniques of literary close reading, but applying them to productive groupings of texts that have often been separated by disciplinarily-dictated generic or linguistic criteria, I stress the importance of national economic concerns for the social, political, and literary imaginary of this period." Author/Editor Author/Editor Bryant, Brantley L Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Published Bryant, Brantley L. "Common profit: Economic morality in English public political discourse, c. 1340--1406." Ph.D. dissertation. Columbia University, 2007. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Common profit: Economic morality in English public political discourse, c. 1340--1406 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation investigates the reciprocal relationship between merchants and poets within late-medieval London's multilingual trade network. While modern scholars have tended to place them in different social spheres, merchants and poets shared a working knowledge of English, French and Latin, and I argue that they engaged in mutually informing types of textual production. Juxtaposing literary works by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Charles d'Orléans, and William Caxton with account books, civic documents, and bilingual phrasebooks, I identify points of contact between the city's mercantile and literary cultures. For example, poets imported merchant jargon from different languages into romance and lyric texts, and merchants incorporated poetic devices into their guild records and personal inventories. By examining the writings of literary figures alongside non-literary ones, I demonstrate how social spheres overlapped and shaped one another in the city. Most importantly, I contend that multilingual medieval writing plays a crucial role in English literary history. By approaching trilingual poets like Gower and even the most canonical of single-language authors like Chaucer as multilingual individuals with diverse influences, I reveal how the category of the secular, professional writer was articulated--perhaps even invented--in this period. Rather than identifying as French-speaking courtly lovers or as learned Latinate clerics, middling urbanites crafted hybrid personas that adapted traditions from many languages." A final chapter discusses The Book of Margery Kempe. Directed by David Wallace. Author/Editor Author/Editor Hsy, Jonathan Horng Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Published Hsy, Jonathan Horng. "Polyglot poetics: Merchants and literary production in London, 1300--1500." PhD thesis, The University of Pennsylvnia, 2007. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Polyglot poetics: Merchants and literary production in London, 1300--1500 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 years surrounding the Rising of 1381 witnessed socio-cultural struggles suggesting to authors of the day the fallen-ness of England. That impression had significant effects on the community imagined by writers. As authors such as John Gower and William Langland represented the perceived moral and social decay, they communicated multiple images of the nation simultaneously. One facet is the "monstrous nation," in which a people is unified by its immoral predilection for self-destruction; the other facet is the "reformist nation," in which texts communicate an ideal image, rooted in the theory of the Three Estates. Religion, therefore, becomes a structuring principle in medieval "imagined communities." Chapter One analyzes Gower's use of Nebuchadnezzar's statue in the Vox Clamantis, which Gower reuses in the Confessio Amantis, reading it as an image of a monstrous body politic that shadows the ideal image of community. Gower's adopted role as prophet for the English locates this community within a specifically religious discourse that elevates the ideal image of the nation to one of chosenness by God." Other chapters: Thomas Walsingham's Historia Anglicana, Henry Knighton's Chronicon and other accounts of the Peasants' Revolt; the letters attributed to John Ball; and Piers Plowman. Directed by Karma Lochrie and Patricia C.Ingham. Author/Editor Author/Editor Marshall, David W Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Published Marshall, David W. "Monstrous England: Nation and reform, 1375--1385." PhD thesis, Indiana University, 2007. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Monstrous England: Nation and reform, 1375--1385 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation argues that late medieval English literature was often forced to define itself against and around the problem of flattery, a notion which was used to encapsulate a wide range of cultural and linguistic corruptions. Flattery presented itself both as a practice--an often necessary means of speaking to patrons and rulers--and as a discourse, a conventional set of complaints about the evils of flattery found in many political, religious, and literary texts. This study examines the intersections between these two modes, as poets and flatterers use warnings against flattery to legitimize its practice, and explores how flattery was used as a figure for usurpation, rhetoric, and interpretation. By examining key texts and contexts from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, I show that the rhetorical paradoxes of flattery were essential to the medieval understanding of selfhood and literary language. My first chapter examines the genre of advice manuals known as mirrors for princes, and shows how John Gower's Confessio Amantis reformulated their discourse of flattery into a literary language addressed to Richard II, who was widely criticized for his susceptibility to flatterers." Other chapters consider Langland's Piers Plowman and the anonymous Mum and the Sothsegger; Chaucer's Melibee, Merchant's Tale, and Nun's Priest's Tale; and Hoccleve's La Male Regle and The Regiment of Princes. Directed by Seth Lerer. Author/Editor Author/Editor Walling, Amanda Published Walling, Amanda. "Vicious praise: Flattery in late medieval English politics and poetry." PhD thesis, Stanford University, 2007. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Vicious praise: Flattery in late medieval English politics and poetry Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Lipton, Emma Published Lipton, Emma. "Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval England." Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2007 Gower Subject Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Review Lipton's thesis is that a "politicized negotiation of social and religious authority can be found in late medieval England where an emergent lay middle strata of society used the sacramental model of marriage to exploit contradictions within medieval theology and social hierarchy" (p. 1). From the twelfth century on. "the substance of the sacrament of marriage was the mutual love between the two members of the couple. This love in turn was both the sign and substance of God's Grace" (p. 2). Lipton thus sets out to trace "the unprecedented popularity of the sacramental model of marriage as a literary topic in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to its role as a contested category in the ideological conflicts between the laity and clergy, and between the members of the middle strata and the aristocracy." (p. 2). By way of example, she concentrates her study on four texts, devoting a chapter to each: Chaucer's "Franklin's Tale," the N-Town plays, the "Book of Margery Kempe," and the eighteen Anglo-French balades (which Lipton calls "ballads") comprising John Gower's "Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz." Lipton takes up Gower in chapter two. She sees both Gower and his "Traitié" fitting very neatly within her targeted concerns--Gower himself because he epitomizes what Sylvia Thrupp ("The Merchant Class of Medieval London") defined as the "middle strata" of society, "the lesser types of gentry, the merchant class, and perhaps also the more substantial semi-mercantile elements in London and other cities" (quoting Thrupp, p. 9), and the "Taitié" "because it is in this poem [sic] that Gower most thoroughly explores the sacramental model and . . . ties marriage not to the governance of the realm but to the values of his own social position" (p. 18). In the process he redefines masculine virtues as more properly domestic rather than military by demoting classical and chivalric heroes (e.g., Ulysses and Tristan are "domestic horrors"); relocates the onus for moral and sexual responsibility onto men, rather than women; and rescues virtuous marriage from the traditional misrepresentation of clerical misogynists by ranking it above chastity. Lipton indeed holds Gower's work in (what only can be described as refreshingly) high regard. She identifies as his chief concern in the "Traitié" establishing marriage as a mark of superior status, and claims rather ringingly that "in fact the ballads of the "Traitié" participate in a new social vision for the emergent upper middle strata of society and reveal the ideological roots of the public voice of Ricardian poetry in a new masculinized vision of privat life" (p. 18)--and rather intriguingly that "the valuation of private behavior over class status makes the depiction of marriage in the poem similar to the representation of manners in conduct literature: as a venue for the development of an ideology of social mobility" (p. 87). [RFY. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.1] 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 Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval England. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Notre Dame University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Many of us," Simpson opines, "are the living heirs of Protestant anxiety regarding work and waste. We find it difficult to recover the charisma of idleness of any kind, be it religious or aristocratic" (p. 259). From such sectarian social anxiety he is particularly exercised in the rescue of "Wasted, idle reading" (p. 260): "My larger claim is that late medieval, pre-Reformation textual practice in not driven by a need to define and expel cultural waste; on the contrary, idle reading is an essential part of a cultural economy. More specifically, "otium" and idle reading are an essential part of a psychic economy" (p. 260). Simpson chooses to analyze Book IV (devoted to Sloth) of the Confessio Amantis to make his case, "since Amans' literary education in that book looks like nothing so much as a plain waste of time idly frittered. The text as a whole, further, seems unworried about idling away in archives of old texts" (p. 261). Subjecting Book IV to a rigorous reading, Simpson follows Amans along a path that, he argues, illustrates how easily "a literary education" can "feed the psyche's capacity for delusive satisfactions" (p. 284). He concludes by noting that there are [punctuation sic] "various ways in which Gower recognises the value of otium: there are some states of soul that cannot be broached directly, and that require homeopathic therapy that pretends to feed pathological desire even as it begins the cure. And that homeopathic psychic treatment involves a cultural commitment to idle, apparently wasted reading: like many other Middle English works that recycle prior texts, the Confessio demonstrates no desire to define books and libraries as waste. It offers instead a model of recreative relaxedness among many books; books will respond creatively to big questions, but only if we allow them to do their own work on us . . . . The recycling of old texts in the Confessio is less a matter of humble obeisance to older, higher literary authority, and more a matter of understanding how texts and traditions are creatively recycled through the complex operations of idle reading" (p. 284). [RFY. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Simpson, James Published Simpson, James. "Bonjour Paresse: Literary Waste and Recycling in Book 4 of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." Proceedings of the British Academy 151 (2007), pp. 257-84. 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 Bonjour Paresse: Literary Waste and Recycling in Book 4 of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The majority of this 890-page effort consists of 1) a transcription and paleographic discussion of the Prologue and Books I-IV; 2) a critical edition of the same selections; and 3) a comparative study of Gower's English text alongside the Portuguese version. Pages 1-114 offer "historico-cultural context"; and account of the marriages of John of Gaunt's two daughters, Philippa and Katherine, to (respectively) the kings of Portugal and Castile; discussion of what is known/can be surmised about the translators of the Portuguese and Castilian Confessios; the merits of the two courts as literary incubators; approximation(s) at chronology, both for Gower's writing and the translations; comments on the hands and the capitals in Madrid Bib. MS g.II.19 ("Confisyon del amante"). In Spanish, with multiple, clear reproductions of hands and color (albeit not in color). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 28.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Faccon, Manuela Published Faccon, Manuela. "La Fortuna de la Confessio Amantis en la Peninsula Iberica: Estudio Comparativo de las Traducciones Edicion del MS Madrid, Real Biblioteca, II-3088 (Prologo I, II, III, IV Libros." PhD thesis, University of Verona / University of Zaragoza, 2007. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource La Fortuna de la Confessio Amantis en la Peninsula Iberica: Estudio Comparativo de las Traducciones Edicion del MS Madrid, Real Biblioteca, II-3088 (Prologo I, II, III, IV Libros. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Carlson offers both a new account of the textual relations among the five surviving copies of the "Cronica Tripertita" and some provocative new proposals concerning the process of its revision. By 1400 or shortly thereafter, Gower had probably lost his sight, Carlson points out, and would thus have been unable to proofread each new MS as it was copied, but he remained alert, Carlson presumes, to the political events of his time, and intervened to update and correct the text in key passages. The surviving MSS are thus characterized by both increasing scribal corruption and a series of "new and improved authorial readings" (212). The bulk of this essay consists of an examination of the variations among these copies, distinguishing between those that are scribal and the more substantive ones that are more likely attributed to the poet. From these--and without regard to the separate textual history of VC, but equally without regard to the evidence of erasure and correction and the activities of the separate scribes enumerated by Macaulay (Works 4.lix-Ixxi) and Parkes, "Patterns of Scribal Activity" (see Carlson's note 9 on 213-14)--he constructs a new stemma (214), in which he argues that Hatton 92 (Macaulay's H3), though "poor [and] carelessly written" (219), nonetheless "represents [along with Harley 6291, Macaulay's H] the earliest state of the text in evidence" (221). H also contains, however, a unique passage at 1.55-56 that alters the characterization of Northumberland in a way that suggests knowledge of his implication in the attempts to overthrow Henry in 1403 and 1405 (as Macaulay hints in his note, 4.405). Such a revision must be authorial, Carlson implies (217), though if it was, Gower seems to have forgotten about it when he came to make other changes in the text (218-19). The other two most significant revisions suggest to Carlson an alteration in Gower's view of Henry that corresponds to the shift in his attitude towards Richard that many have detected in the revisions of CA. The first includes a small alteration in 3.479 that appears only in C, S, and G that mitigates somewhat the characterization of the chronicle of Richard's reign (222). The second is a fuller revision of the entire conclusion to the poem in which the former line occurs (3.478-89) that appears only in G, which allows that Richard "had once been a good king, at the beginning of his reign" (218); which describes the poem itself now not just as chronicle of Richard's reign but as a "mirror of the world"; and which transforms a judgment of Richard into a warning for all kings, that "the chronicle of any king's reign will becomposed by the king himself, in his own conduct, such as it will unfold in the course of a reign" (210). Carlson detects here "an incipient withdrawal of support, implicit, by attenuation of praise" (ibid.), and he proposes that the most likely cause of Gower's change of heart in this, his final revision of the poem (233), was Henty's execution of Richard Scrope, Archbishop of York, in June of 1405 (234-36). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R Published Carlson, David R. "Gower on Henry IV's Rule: The Endings of the 'Cronica Tripertita' and Its Texts." Tradiio 62 (2007), pp. 207-36. ISSN 0362-1529 Gower Subject Biography of Gower 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 Gower on Henry IV's Rule: The Endings of the 'Cronica Tripertita' and Its Texts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Kanno collects fifteen essays, some previously published in different form (largely in venues inaccessible outside Japan) but the majority fresh work--or work re-thought--for this volume. As his title suggests, Kanno is particularly concerned with Gower's vocabulary, in its nuances and in the ways Gower manipulated language to increase the range, depth and subtlety of his verse. Several essays go farther, beginning with words but then broadening to investigate subjects of wider interest: "Gower's Good Sense," "Gower as Pacifist," "John Gower as Humorist," "Gower's Narrative Art," "On the Sin of 'Gluttony' in John Gower's Confessio Amantis" are representative examples. Still, it is when he scrutinizes the words themselves that Kanno's learning best serves his insight. The result, especially in his chapters "'Kinde' and Related Terms in John Gower's Confessio Amantis," "An Aspect of Gower as an Innovator of Words," and "Gower's Archaic Words," is both revealing and exceptionally useful--necessary reading, one could argue, for anyone contemplating more than a passing acquaintance with Gower's English work. Or with Chaucer's, for that matter, since Gower's precedents so often illuminate Chaucer's usage as well. Nor is Kanno confined to the Middle English: throughout he includes cognates and other illuminating examples drawn from the Mirour de l'Omme and the Vox Clamantis. This range is of particular help in shedding light on "archaic" locutions, differentiating the Old English hold-overs from Anglo-French inductions--an assemblage of words that, as Kanno shows clearly, unequivocally influences the uniqueness of Gower's poetic voice. It is, in its specialized way, altogether ground-breaking work. In short, Kanno's book adds pillars and planks to the foundation on which Gower scholars of the future will build. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kanno, Masahiko Published Kanno, Masahiko. "Studies in John Gower, with Special Reference to His Words." Tokyo: Eihosha, 2007 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Studies in John Gower, with Special Reference to His Words Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Eihosha, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Spencer's treatment of Gower's poetry appears as "Part III" of her fourth chapter in a book-length study which she describes as an attempt "to explain the recurrent use of the Boethian dialogue model in literature concerned with courtly love." She argues that she will "cover new ground on two accounts: first, in considering the use of Boethius as a writer of philosophical dialogues rather than of dream visions and, secondly, in exploring the relationship between dialogue and erotic love and its political implications" (1). Spencer reads the CA as mightily influenced by Froissart's "Joli Buisson de Jonece," in its "use of the 'senex amans' motif and in the denouement . . . which, like Froissart's constitutes a rejection of the literary genre to which the work ostensibly belongs." Gower "also shares Froissart's thematic focus on the internal division of the self and the consequent breaking up of the poetic voice . . . . However . . . Gower's resolution to these problems differs significantly from Froissart's, presenting a far more horizontally inclined, inclusive and philiac vision of caritas and politics" (172-73). "For Gower, the path to truth and enlightenment seems to lie in a descent into detailed examination of the subjective self in its fallen state and the world around it rather that an immediate ascent beyond particular worldly concerns to monologic political preaching or religious contemplation" (173). Spencer's is a rambling study, somewhat over-ambitious in its apparent attempt to encompass the sum of themes and treatments in the CA. The result is replete with turns and reachings-out in multiple directions which do not always interconnect. Most of her conclusions are, perhaps, encapsulated in the following: "Worldly readers and writers, like worldly kings, aspire towards the divine harmony of Arion. However, it is in the nature of their earthly condition that any order they seek to impose upon the diverse, fallen world will inevitably be provisional and susceptible to renewed division . . . . Gower's 'Confessio' resembles Froissart's 'Le Joli Buisson de Jonece' in that it begins as a secular dialogue on 'cupiditas' and ends with a transition to 'caritas.' However, while Froissart's 'Joli Buisson' retains and indeed intensifies the exclusivity innate in the courtly love mode by transfiguring the love of the mortal particular one into the contemplation of the divine One, Gower's 'Confessio' seeks to pass from a blinkered, cupidinous world vision in to a vision of the One in the many and the many in the One . . . . The former approach could be associated with the 'vita contemplativa,' the latter with the vita active. The task of the 'active,' in some senses political writer, like that of the earthly king, is to attain to a universal, harmonious and ordered vision of the world and the common principles which tie its multiple elements together. The writer must seek to overcome his or her own internal divisions, and the subjectivity which divides them from others. Gower's fictional portrayal of his own internal division and cupidity dramatizes the difficulty of attaining to such a unity of self. At the end of the 'Confessio,' when Venus asks Amans' name, he responds, 'John Gower.' It is at this point that the wise, authoritative voice of the Prologue (which clearly belongs to the author of the 'Vox Clamantis') and the naïf limited protagonist of the dialogue finally come together. However . . . Gower proceeds to illustrate, through the Genius-Amans dialogue, just how difficult it is to attain to such perfection and unity. He ends the poem with a note of challenge to his hypocrite 'lecteur' to re-form and re-order the diverse and recalcitrant profusion of narratives left before us in such a way as to avoid falling into the various traps encountered by Genius and Amans" (200-201). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 33.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Spencer, Alice Published Spencer, Alice. "Dialogues of Love and Government: A Study of the Erotic Dialogue Form in Some Texts from the Courtly Love Tradition." Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2007 ISBN 9781847181855 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 Dialogues of Love and Government: A Study of the Erotic Dialogue Form in Some Texts from the Courtly Love Tradition. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cambridge Scholars, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This is the third collection of essays that Yeager has assembled from papers originally delivered at the sessions sponsored by the John Gower Society at the annual International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, and like its predecessors (in 1989 and 1998), it offers, in its juxtaposition of work by old and new hands, a valuable cross-section of where we are in Gower studies at the present time. Less theoretically oriented than its predecessors, it is also less concerned either with Gower's poetics or with traditional formal analysis, but each of the ten essays offers some interesting new insight into Gower's work. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F., ed. Published Yeager, R. F., ed. "On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium." Studies in Medieval Culture, 46 . Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007 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 On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute Publications, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Kruger observes that the growth of the merchant class in the late Middle Ages offered challenges to traditional Christian conceptions both of Christianity itself and of the three estates, and that "the changes and anxieties associated with mercantilism are intimately, indeed indissolubly, connected to questions of religious identity and difference: can the Christian remain a Christian if he is a merchant?" (3). In the texts that he uses as examples, the Mediterranean provides the ideal site for acting out questions both of religious and of mercantile identity. Gower's Mediterranean is most often the pre-medieval and pre-Christian setting of the tales he borrowed from his classical sources, but he too uses the contemporary Mediterranean as a site to "think through" the relation between Christianity and mercantilism (8). Kruger's principal example from Gower's work is the tale of Constance, in which the Barbar merchants of the opening initiate a "spiritual exchange" and a series of conversions, and in which Constance herself, in her several voyages, "takes on and spiritually transforms the merchants' role" (14). Many of the exchanges that she is involved in, however, result in violence. The merchants in the tale "may . . . be part of an attempt to rethink and assert the value of the mercantile for Christian purposes, but the Mediterranean stage of their actions remains riven by religious difference, a scene of conflict and disruption as much as of Christian self-promulgation" (14). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kruger, Stephen F Published Kruger, Stephen F. "Gower's Mediterranean." In On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium. Ed. Yeager, R.F. Studies in Medieval Culture (46). Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2007, pp. 3-19. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Mediterranean Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Even in "Constance," Wetherbee affirms, Gower is more concerned with social difference than with religious difference; like "Apollonius of Tyre," the tale offers a universally applicable "integrity of conduct which in this tale happens to be congruent with the heroine's role as an embodiment of Roman Christianity, but which Gower is at pains to represent largely in social, rather than religious terms" (22). He finds the poem to be shaped not by the historical opposition between Christianity and other faiths but by a broader opposition that Gower himself constructs, between Rome, as a site of "wise government," "stable institutions," and "justice" (24), and the world of "ceaseless random movement" of knighthood and chivalry (25) which Gower depicts in the many tales in CA associated with Troy. Gower's Trojan characters have little of the epic dignity of their classical counterparts. To cite only highlights of Wetherbee's analysis: in the tale of "Orestes," "the anti-social aspect of knightly conduct is presented as a function of chivalric education itself" (27); "Paris and Helen" "reveals a society betrayed by its inability to acknowledge the reckless desire to which it owes its origin, and committed by its blind pursuit of that desire to inevitable dissolution" (36); and "Ulysses and Telegonus" reveals "the ultimately self-betraying character of the chivalric life as Gower understands it" (36). The "defining instance" of the opposition that Wetherbee finds is the "Tale of the False Bachelor," in which the Roman knight's pursuit of chivalry . . . cut[s] him off from the stable center of his world" (24). "Rome may or may not be the religious and political hub of the universe," he concludes, "but it is the cultural center around which the world of the Confessio is organized and thus an essential aspect of the identity of the 'wel menynge' lover" (39-40). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wetherbee, Winthrop Published Wetherbee, Winthrop. "Rome, Troy, and Culture in the Confessio Amantis." In On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium. Ed. Yeager, R.F. Studies in Medieval Culture (46). Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2007, pp. 20-42. 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 Rome, Troy, and Culture in the Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bertolet sets Gower's many comments on the legal and social life of his city into the context of the concerns and anxieties embodied in the surviving civic records of London, particularly the Letter-Books and the Plea and Memoranda Rolls. He finds that both the governing authorities and the poet found "the principal threats to the civic order . . . to be deceptive trading, sedition, and dangerous speech" (45), or more concisely, in the three terms of Bertolet's title. His discussion of each of these in turn, each with particular examples drawn from the records, illuminates passages in each of Gower's three major poems and puts into relief some of the many differences in assumption between Gower and ourselves regarding the relation between the individual and the polis. "Common profit" (together with its opposite, "singular profit") assumes a literal economic sense in Bertolet's analysis as he discusses the background to the poet's protests against fraud and "division." He also documents a prevailing fear of disorder reflected in the many restraints upon what we would consider "free speech." "The charge then to the governors of London and its guilds, as Gower would agree," he concludes, "[was] to regulate the behavior of their members in their words and deeds, so that they eschew divisive practices and instead benefit the city through honest work and communal love" (62). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bertolet, Craig E Published Bertolet, Craig E. "Fraud, Division, and Lies: John Gower and London." In On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium. Ed. Yeager, R.F. Studies in Medieval Culture (46). Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2007, pp. 43-70. 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 Fraud, Division, and Lies: John Gower and London Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Traces the development of Gower's notions of pity and of the king's responsibility for justice through his three major works, beginning with the opposition between the tyrant and the merciful but just ruler in his discussion of Pitė as the daughter of Patience in MO (13897 ff). Even Pity, in that passage, faces the necessity of imposing the death penalty when circumstances warrant. Gower thus uses Pity as a way of creating an idealized portrait of the just and merciful king, and he implies that "only those who are capable of reconciling these competing moral demands can truly qualify as just rulers" (78). Under the force of later events, however, his later comments on pity "become increasingly complex and ambiguous" (72), and he finds it difficult to sustain this moral framework as the test of a good king. Later in MO he offers a warning against too much pity in the king (23029 ff.): pity is reduced to mere "misericordia," or as Gower later names it, "pusillamite" (CA 7). In VC 1, the patience that is allied to pity is depicted as weakness and powerlessness in the face of rebellion; the virtue of strong, swift justice that Gower advocates instead (as illustrated in the summary execution of Wat Tyler) "bears some unsettling resemblance to the figure of the angry tyrant" in the first passage in MO. In VC 6, the pity for his poorest subjects that Gower urges upon Richard II embraces a vehemence against those who take advantage of them and includes a severe punishment of evil counselors. In the tale of "Alexander and the Pirate" (CA 3.2363 ff.), in which the emperor grants a pardon in exchange for military service, Gower alludes to an actual practice: in the broader distribution of pardons near the end of Richard's reign, pity creates an opportunity for an abuse of justice. In the tale of "Orestes" (CA 3. 1885 ff.), on the other hand, Genius's apparent approval of the punishment of Clitemnestra is problematized by the Latin gloss at the beginning of the tale, by the fact that only Orestes is described as "wroth," and by the careful legal proceedings that precede the execution of Egistus. The tale thus "throws doubt on Gower's advocacy in other places of the absolute prerogative of the prince" (96) and "suggests that it may not be enough to limit the king's authority at the personal level of his conscience alone" (97). These last two tales together raise questions about the king's relation to the law that cannot be answered satisfactorily within the terms that Gower first proposes in MO. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kobayashi, Yoshiko Published Kobayashi, Yoshiko. "'Principis Umbra': Kingship, Justice, and Pity in John Gower's Poetry." In On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium. Ed. Yeager, R.F. Studies in Medieval Culture (46). Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2007, pp. 71-103. 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 'Principis Umbra': Kingship, Justice, and Pity in John Gower's Poetry Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Argues for restoring pre-eminence to the first recension of CA, as opposed to the "third recension" version that Macaulay chose as representing Gower's "final judgment," and also for restoring to Richard II major credit for the poem's inception. There is no reason for Gower to have invented the famous story of its commissioning, she points out. Citing the similarities in the depiction of the deities of love, with their allusions to Richard II and Queen Anne, and the references to the rivalry between the Flower and the Leaf in CA, the Legend of Good Women, and Clanvowe's Book of Cupid, she suggests that all three poets "may have been commissioned, or encouraged, to produce a complimentary poem incorporating these motifs (though, as with Chaucer and Gower, the critiques of Love's willful rule may have been more the poet's idea)" (112). She attributes the resistance to the acceptance of Richard's active role to a privileging of the later Lancastrian version of his text, to a "fascination with Gower's role as a Lancastrian ally" (105), and to a preference for the passages in the poem that offer "an attack on the king's excesses" (115) rather than for those that pay homage to him. But Gower's use of the cult of the Flower and the Leaf in order to "suggest the immaturity of life at Richard's court" suggests that "allegorizing the royals does not necessarily turn them into spun-sugar valentines" (116) and that the poets' acceptance of their commission need not be held against them. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Coleman, Joyce Published Coleman, Joyce. "'A Bok for King Richardes Sake': Royal Patronage, the Confessio, and the Legend of Good Women." In On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium. Ed. Yeager, R.F. Studies in Medieval Culture (46). Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2007, pp. 104-21. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations 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 Bok for King Richardes Sake': Royal Patronage, the Confessio, and the Legend of Good Women Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Reads the passages describing the deaths of Wat Tyler, of Simon Sudbury, and of the Flemish victims of the mob in VC 1 both through the echoes of the earlier works from which Gower has borrowed, in the manner of "cento," key lines and passages, and through theories of sacrificial violence derived from René Girard and Nancy Jay. That Tyler should be seen as a fitting sacrifice is not a surprise; that Sudbury is is a bit more surprising; but Gower displays considerable sympathy for the Flemings. "Gower emphasizes the spectacle of carnage surely to shock those in his ecclesiastical audience into reflection upon the events of the moment. . . . In the events of Tower Hill, the mock altar upon which the archbishop yielded up his spirit, these readers would surely see the implications of the execution of one of their own. Certainly these Latin readers would infer the meaning of unburied corpses lying about as silent witness to all the souls that had gone unsaved, to all the prayers that had been left unspoken. Certainly these Latin readers would be reminded of the mob violence that had a habit of repeating itself during Holy Week; surely they would see the need to wash their hands or accept responsibility for their own actions" (135-36). The poet's identification of himself in the riddling passage at the beginning of Book 1 represents Gower's own self-sacrifice: "In a brilliant move of self-conscious submission, the poet presents himself to the critical axe of his ecclesiastical audience. By enacting his own death in a symbolic sacrifice and taking on the mantle of John, the poet gains the authority of the sacred; at the moment that that transformation occurs he empowers the poem to speak for itself" (138). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.1]. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 200-10. Author/Editor Author/Editor Salisbury, Eve Published Salisbury, Eve. "Violence and the Sacrificial Poet: Gower, the Vox, and the Critics." In On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium. Ed. Yeager, R.F. Studies in Medieval Culture (46). Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2007, pp. 124-43. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Violence and the Sacrificial Poet: Gower, the Vox, and the Critics Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Examine Gower's use of wordplay in VC 1 to depict the most terrifying aspects of rebellion, particularly a series of puns (modeled on Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Alan of Lille) in which terms such as "caput," "pes," and "cauda" can refer either to parts of the body or to parts of a word or line. Gower begins with the riddle on the parts of his own name at the beginning of Book 1. "By making his readers aware of a word's body – its "pedes," "caput," "membra" – he prepares us for the rebels' heads and feet in the ensuing chapters. For him, syllabic play provides more than a poetic opening: it offers a way of seeing social inversion through a linguistic metaphor, in which the peasants, and not the poet, do the cropping and adding of heads to empower themselves" (148). In the rest of Book 1, the peasants are transformed twice, first into domestic beasts and then into wild ones, as they also seek to monstrously transform society, and in the passages that Zarins disentangles for us, Gower's linguistic play captures the violence and perversion of both transformations. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.1]. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 210-17. Author/Editor Author/Editor Zarins, Kim Published Zarins, Kim. "From Head to Foot: Syllabic Play and Metamorphosis in Book I of Gower's Vox Clamantis." In On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium. Ed. Yeager, R.F. Studies in Medieval Culture (46). Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2007, pp. 144-60. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource From Head to Foot: Syllabic Play and Metamorphosis in Book I of Gower's Vox Clamantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Though Virgil does not function as a direct source for Gower in anything like the way that Ovid does, he still serves as one of Gower's most important models, and Gower may be the most "Vergilian" of contemporary English poets, especially considered in contrast to Chaucer. The most important direct reference to Virgil is found in the verses "Eneidos Bucolis" which appear at the end of some MSS of CA and VC. If Gower himself did not write these lines, he at least must be responsible for attaching them to his work, and they affirm Virgil both as the model that he seeks to emulate and as the one that he seeks to surpass. Virgil was renowned in the late Middle Ages for his moral seriousness, for his wisdom, for his rhetorical achievement, and also for broad historical scope of his best-known poem, honoring both a heroic individual and the nation that he helped to found. Kuczynski cites evidence that Gower conceived of his own tripartite project in the same epic terms. But as the final lines of "Eneidos Bucolis" indicate, Gower also felt that his Christian ethical scheme conferred an inherent superiority over the pagan poet. A similar double view of Virgil is displayed in his three appearances in CA. In "Virgil's Mirror," it is his wisdom, extending to both moral and national self-knowledge, that is evoked, but in his other two appearances, in the discussion of Gluttony in Book 6 and in the procession of lovers in Book 8, he is the senex amans, "a type of the very lack of self-knowledge, enslavement to passion, that Amans escapes at the poem's close by gazing into Venus's marvelous glass" (178-79). Gower may have seen in Virgil a figure for his own self-subjection to the burdens of to the theme of fin'amor that he chose for CA, but at the end of the poem, "in the figure of the liberated Amans, he is released from its obsessive claims on his attention. That Virgil, Rome's greatest poet, is among the number who plead for his release is noteworthy and more significant if we understand Gower as having aspired to emulate and even to exceed Virgil's preeminent literary achievement" (180). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kuczynski, Michael P Published Kuczynski, Michael P. "Gower's Virgil." In On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium. Ed. Yeager, R.F. Studies in Medieval Culture (46). Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2007, pp. 163-87. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Virgil Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Discovers an interpretive nexus in the allusions to "timor dei" in Book 1 of CA. Traditionally associated with Humility, "timor dei" is portrayed in its most conventional form in "Capaneus" and "The Trump of Death," though the more serious part of the lesson appears to be lost upon Amans. Another traditional locus for "holy fear" was the Annunciation, which is echoed in both "Mundus and Paulina" and "The Three Questions," and which provides a model for the association of fear, the "conception" of the Word and, by extension, poetic creation as well, and amorous seduction. Gower plays upon these associations throughout Book 1 without fully resolving them. The tale of "Ulysses and the Sirens" suggests that a fear like Mary's at the Annunciation is an appropriate response to the seductions of poetry, particularly poetry of love, that ironically embraces CA itself. In the conversation that precedes the final lesson, on Vainglory, Amans describes his own futile efforts to seduce his lady with his poems and his fear of failure and rejection. In the lesson that Genius offers in reply, Nebuchadnezzar expresses his proper fear of God in his distinctly unpoetic braying. But Genius' second tale, of "The Three Questions," is not at all so straightforward. While echoing earlier references to "holy fear" and to the Annunciation, Peronelle herself exhibits no fear and uses her "eloquent plainness" (206) both to advance her social position and to achieve her own erotic ends. "Present and absent in this riddling culmination is an ever-shifting register of "timor domini," a theme Gower modulates in earnest and in game (and without resolution) throughout Book I and a motif that suggests an ironic sense of self and poetics as subtle and elusive as that of his literary friend and colleague Chaucer" (207). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Banchich, Claire Published Banchich, Claire. "Holy Fear and Poetics in John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Book I." In On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium. Ed. Yeager, R.F. Studies in Medieval Culture (46). Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2007, pp. 188-215. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Holy Fear and Poetics in John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Book I Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Examines the association between violence and sexuality, which is either suppressed or left unexpressed by Genius, particularly in the tales of "Phoenus and Daphne," "Canace and Machaire," and "Orestes," in which the construction of masculine selfhood either requires or results in violence against a woman. Donavin detects two conflicting sorts of taboo at work in Book 3, one preventing Genius' acknowledgment of the link between sexuality and violence, the other expressed in Genius' prohibitions against Wrath. Because of the former, Gower reveals, the latter are ineffectual in containing violence and instead result in its propagation. Gower also allows the implicit violence in heterosexual love to be revealed in his characterization of the stages of passion in "love's court" in Book 3. He reveals the antidote to this violence in the figure of Venus, who "escapes the position of the victimized feminine by actually encouraging the violent processes of heterosexual attraction" (229). The resolution does not come about until Book 8, when Venus hands Amans the glass in which he finally recognizes his old age. "The goddess, like other female characters in Book III, takes responsibility for her part in forming male identity, but does so in a way that deflects feelings about selfhood away from her and back onto the male subject" (230). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Donavin, Georgiana Published Donavin, Georgiana. "'When reson torneth into rage': Violence in Book III of the Confessio Amantis." In On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium. Ed. Yeager, R.F. Studies in Medieval Culture (46). Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2007, pp. 216-34. 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 'When reson torneth into rage': Violence in Book III of the Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Coleman, Joyce Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Review The first 16 pages (135-51) of Coleman's study paint a sensitive and revealing portrait of the daughter John of Gaunt married to the young king João I of Portugal in 1387. Pious, learned and intensely moral, but also convincingly sketched by Coleman as a patroness of many things English in her new kingdom, including the Sarum Rite and religious Nottingham alabasters alongside lighter pastimes and English styles of dress and accessories, Philippa here is brought to life as a popular and admired consort whose influence significantly helped shape the emergent Portuguese court. Coleman intends this biographical material as backdrop and support for her arguments that 1) "Philippa, having obtained a copy of the Confessio from one of her many English contacts, …then engaged Robert Payne to translate it as a present for her husband, and more generally their court, and that she further had the work translated from Portuguese into Castilian as a gift for her half-sister Catherine, and her brother-in-law, Enrique III of Castile" (p. 154); 2) that Robert Payne the translator was the son of "Thomas Elie/Elim Payn," Philippa's treasurer, and a Portuguese wife, Antónia Dias d'Arca (p. 153). These conclusions, whole or in part, have been severally raised in the past by P.E. Russell, John Matthews Manly, W.J. Entwhistle, Robert Hamm, Manual Alvar and R.F. Yeager, but Coleman, while giving full credit wherever it is due, constructs the most convincing case yet for Philippa's direct involvement, based upon the richer vision of the queen she is able to afford us through her adroit combing of historical sources for evidence overlooked or misinterpreted by earlier (male) scholars, whose own gender, she implies, led them to erroneous conclusions: "Can it be a coincidence that most of the alternative initiators proposed by these scholars are male? Not all of the scholars who speculate about the Iberian Confessio's [sic] exclude Philippa, but none pays sufficient attention to the web of associations that link her to the Payn family and to the prospective owners and readers of the translations. Nor has any scholar--even Russell, who cowrote a short biography of Philippa in 1940--discovered more in her than the hyper-pious and dutiful daughter, wife, and mother, Coleman writes (p. 154). All should agree with her subsequent conclusion, that "The account of her life in Portugal assembled here allows us to broaden that perspective considerably" (p. 154). [RFY. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.2] Published Coleman, Joyce. "Philippa of Lancaster, Queen of Portugal--and Patron of the Gower Translations?" In England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, 12th-15th Century: Cultural, Literary, and Political Changes. Ed. Bullón-Fernández, María. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 135-65. Dublin Core The Dublin 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 Palgrave Macmillan, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Philippa of Lancaster, Queen of Portugal--and Patron of the Gower 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 Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Gaffney, Paul Published Gaffney, Paul. "Controlling the Loathly Lady, or What Really Frees Dame Ragnelle." In The English "Loathly Lady" Tales: Boundaries, Traditions, Motifs. Ed. Passmore, S. Elizabeth and Carter, Susan. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2007, pp. 146-62. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review "'The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle' exemplifies the traditional stream of the Loathly Lady tale, little influenced by bookish traditions," Gaffney contends (p. 146). Thereafter substituting Roland Barthes' narratological distinction of histoire ("bare story") for "traditional stream," and discours ("the particular embodiment of a histoire") for "bookish traditions," and with recourse to John Miles Foley's and Carl Lindahl's notions of, respectively, "orally-derived" [sic] tales and oral/folk vs. "elite" styles, Gaffney seeks to situate the peculiar power of "Dame Ragnelle" in its indeterminate "discours," arguing that "the less fixed the meaning of a 'discours,' the more evocative it can be" and hence "the more is left to the audience" to "excavate." This suggests to him that tales originating in the oral tradition, and hewing closely to it, are "a different species of story, one in which the audience participates more in the construction of meaning" (p. 147). To illustrate this difference "and some of its special strengths," Gaffney compares "Dame Ragnelle" to Gower's "Tale of Florent" and Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale." Not surprisingly, he finds both Chaucer's and Gower's versions to be "elite" narratives, their "histoires" heavily reworked into exemplary discourses, each with a didactic point to make (p. 158 and passim.). Both Gower and Chaucer "seek to establish control over their sentence. This control is exercised through all manner of means: plot, style, characterization, and commentary"; "Ragnelle," on the other hand, "carried [no] such intent" (p. 158). Gower exerts control by making "his discourse more clerkly by giving it a classical setting and [his] characters Latin names" (p. 152) and by his addition of Latin glosses. He also emphasizes "the interior life, how the characters think and feel" (p. 153). This latter induces the audience also to think, and hence to interpret--the activity which in turn yields the "sentence," the point Gower wished to get across (p. 153). "'Florent's' strengths "are the strengths of good elite culture literature," as are those of the WBT, "while most of the strength of 'The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle' are the strengths of folk literature"--as Gaffney sees it, that means to be indeterminately evocative, free "to take many shapes" (p. 158). [RFY. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Controlling the Loathly Lady, or What Really Frees Dame Ragnelle Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew Published Galloway, Andrew. "Gower's Quarrel with Chaucer, and the Origins of Bourgeois Didacticism in Fourteenth-Century London Poetry." In Calliope's Classroom: Studies in Didactic Poetry from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Ed. Harder, Annette and MacDonald, Alasdair A and Reinink, Gerrit J. Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2007 ISBN 904291808X Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Review Galloway here positions the CA as significantly more important for what it "yields…to political and social theory than [what] it does either to clerical didacticism or love poetry" (p. 246). In a direct challenge to contemporary views, he reads the long-discredited "quarrel" between Gower and Chaucer as legitimate, but only if properly understood as reflective of a debate within a self-consciously mercantilized polity, not about issues of amour courtois and/or moral stricture, but rather about the nature and limits of power between what he argues is Gower's Lockian optimism and Chaucer's Hobbesian pessimism with regard to self-interest both public and private. It is a debate that reveals itself in Chaucer's failure to complete the "Legend of Good Women," which Galloway claims was abandoned not because Chaucer "became bored with its repetitive form and moralising requirements" (p. 259) but rather because he found the "task of showing an ideal union of political and moral absolutism" quite "impossible" (p. 259). "The unfinished Legend of Good Women, with its chillingly 'realist' view of atomized absolutist self-interest, and its demands for an encompassing absolutism that would merge moral authority with secular power," Galloway asserts, "was a major instigation for Gower to write the Confessio Amantis--at least as important as any commission by King Richard II" (p. 259); indeed, for Galloway, "the entire Confessio is a long and pre-emptive answer to the absolutist social didacticism of the "Legend of Good Women," one showing how governance of self-sufficient entities and self-interested society should be imagined in another way" (p. 260). Like Locke (whom Galloway likens to Gower among other ways by taking "Two Treatises on Government" to be an answer to Hobbes' "Leviathan," which he compares to Chaucer's LGW), Gower for Galloway is a kind of "constitutionalist" (p. 256), who continually creates narratives supporting the potential of "a consensual urban community to establish a principle of justice and freedom to pursue secular self-interest" (p. 262). Chaucer's trajectory after turning his back on the incomplete LGW is to the Canterbury Tales, which Galloway assesses from the perspective of the Manciple in the work's final tale as expressing its author's ultimately "bitter disenchantment about the possibilities of any governance over self-interest" (p. 264). This is a vision so dark as to move outside either a Lockian or a Hobbesian position, one that "anticipates later and more sweeping critiques of 'bourgeois philosophy'" such as those offered by Horkheimer and Adorno (p. 265), and Galloway contrasts it staunchly with "Gower's overarching optimism…that, with enough self-sacrifice (by himself or others) he and his poetry might offer [a] socially harmonising" alternative to "the Manciple's black concluding pessimism for any harmonious framework, poetic or social, containing a world of absolutism inherent in natural existence" (p. 266). In the end, while Galloway deems Chaucer the more "penetrating" ironist and--in a carefully turned phrase significantly pointed by his italics--"less 'intellectually' absolutist," he concludes that it is "Gower's Lockian genius, with his distinctive literary brilliance in conveying it [that] deserves far fuller credit than it has received" (p. 266). [RFY. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Quarrel with Chaucer, and the Origins of Bourgeois Didacticism in Fourteenth-Century London Poetry Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Peeters, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A Published Peck, Russell A. "Folklore and Powerful Women in Gower's 'Tale of Florent'." In The English "Loathly Lady" Tales: Boundaries, Traditions, Motifs. Ed. Passmore, S. Elizabeth and Carter, Susan. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2007, pp. 100-146. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review Peck argues that "John Gower's 'Tale of Florent' is the first sustained Loathly Lady narrative in English literature," and "that Gower, drawing on folk materials, put together the basic narrative as we know it. 'The Tale of Florent' then functioned as the primary literary source for 'The Wife of Bath's Tale' and, along with 'The Wife of Bath's Tale,' though less exclusively, for the Loathly Lady section of 'The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle" (p. 100). Although "there is an 'Irishness' about Gower's narrative as it subtly explores oppressions of disenfranchisement" (p. 102), Peck believes Gower could not have known Irish sources directly, as has sometimes been suggested; rather, he constructed his tale out of a congeries of folk motifs likely in oral circulation--"the cultural stock of ancient stories, whether Irish, English, French, Indian, or even beyond the Indo-European hegemony" (p. 105). For one thing, the concept of sovereignty in the Irish sources is essentially political; but "for Gower and Chaucer the notion of sovereignty is personal" and "psychological" (pp. 102, 103). Hence Peck connects "Florent" and WBT with coming-of-age narratives: Florent (and in his way Chaucer's nameless knight-rapist) is "full of puberty" (p. 108) and in need of an education in order to discover himself. Thus for Peck the landscape of tale is interior, as he makes clear when he breaks down its action into three parts: 1) "First life-exposure: The setting out;" 2) "Second Life: Social entanglement;" 3) "Third life: Discovery" (pp. 108-09). Florent, he points out, must gain insight into himself, and also into "that other outside himself, the hag to which he finds himself married…he must begin to understand women, that other half of humanity that nature has made both like and different from himself" (p. 112). While for Peck "women define and control all phases of the plot" (p. 112), it is (as in all folk-tales of the sort he describes) "the stepmother" who, "although [she] does not appear until the end of the tale…is the principal determinant, what might be called (with apologies to Greimas) the "destinateur" of the story, the 'why' behind the loathly hag's circumstance" (p. 113). This "destinateur" permits Peck to delineate Gower's hag with the truly "loathsome lady" of folktale "narratives we know so well from childhood": she who is "the bestower of curses in dozens of animal tales where beautiful youth, both male and female, get transformed into birds, serpents, cats, pigs, frogs, or whatever. Usually she is jealous--some cranky fairy or hateful elder person who lacks youth, beauty, or paramour; or perhaps she is one who has simply been passed over herself…but who has, nonetheless, the power to dock her enemies of their sovereignty, leaving them in a state of deformity until that sovereignty can be restored" (p. 113). Since Peck's primary focus is Florent's coming of age as a grown-up male, it is vital to his argument that this female hag-figure be female, and he insightfully identifies the underlying threat to the male psyche--"male fears of woman's sexuality that characterize folklore variants on the vagina dentata" (p. 115)--with Gower's hag-wife, and pointedly with Dame Ragnelle and both the Wife of Bath and her Loathly Lady surrogate (pp. 115-16). But his secondary focus (not much behind-hand, in essence) is to clarify the relationship of Chaucer's tale to Gower's, and less importantly to the "Ragnelle" version (although ultimately Peck will iterate the several ways "Ragnelle" agrees with Gower, while taking "the issues of the poem a step beyond its predecessors [p. 125]). Both in Chaucer's WBT, and especially in "Ragnelle," Peck states, "the 'vagina dentata' motif implicit in Gower's story is prominent" (p. 117). His argument here is complex and rich, and resists easy summary, since Chaucer's Wife as a narrator is quite different from Gower's Genius, vastly more invested and consequently exponentially more polyvalent in her shaping of the tale she tells. Peck's central point--and the difference he finds between Gower and Chaucer--is that "Gower's simpler narrative has become a showboat for the Wife's creative ingenuity, her 'queynte fantasye' of what in real life is too often denied to women" (p. 121). His conclusion is worth quoting "à la lettre": "The configuration of Loathly Lady motifs which Gower activates are attuned to matriarchal tensions that may be traced back to the most ancient of myths of furies and blessed ones negotiating with an Apollonian world of laws that codependent victims (victims of hatred, chance, ill-will, disenfranchisement) ultimately move beyond. As they proceed they discover a higher ethic, one founded in recognition of the other and the subsequent recovery of personal sovereignty that makes possible mutual love. This reading is distinctly Gowerian" (p. 126). [RFY. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Folklore and Powerful Women in Gower's 'Tale of Florent' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "The Politics of Strengthe and Vois in Gower's Loathly Lady Tale." In The English "Loathly Lady" Tales: Boundaries, Traditions, Motifs. Ed. Passmore, S. Elizabeth and Carter, Susan. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2007, pp. 42-72. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Gower's "Tale of Florent" is aptly suited for the purposes of instruction of Amans, Yeager notes, but it has more than a single target. Book 1 is not only drawn almost exclusively from classical sources; it is marked by the "clear effort Gower made to situate his narratives historically" (p. 45), mostly in the ancient past. In conjunction with the use of Latin for the verse headings and marginalia and the choice of Roman deities for the frame, the insistent antiquity of the stories helps lend authority to Gower's vernacular text. But it also, Yeager suggests, serves as a way of blunting and camouflaging--self-protectively--the poet's direct critique of his contemporaries, another of the purposes of the poem which Gower sets out expressly in his Prologue. The "historical matrix" for the tales is provided by Nebuchadnezzar's statue, which "helps reinforce just how far distant from the present they are to be taken" (p. 47) but also helps direct the attention of alert readers to the comparison of past and present, with all of the statue's implications of degeneration and decay; and to emphasize the relation, Yeager points out that Book 1 includes tales that can be matched to each of the five ages that the diverse materials of the statue represent. The marginal gloss firmly sets "Florent" as a Roman tale, from the "Age of Brass." The analogues suggest that this must have been Gower's deliberate choice, and the purpose, Yeager suggests, has to do with the tale's implicit "political critique" (p. 50). Though set in the past, the tale still concerns a knight and knighthood; and the "primary dichotomy" in the tale, unique to Gower's version, is between "obedience" and "strength" (CA 1.1401-2), "precisely the problematic facing the barony" in an age that was rife with "Murmur and Complaint" (p. 53). After Florent has demonstrated his strength in his successful combat with Branchus, it is "through his gentility . . . that the 'grantdame' (CA I.1445) perceives a means to neutralize Florent's combat potential" (p. 53), and "strengthe," from this point in the tale on, shifts from the purely physical to the inner strength manifested in Florent's "trouthe." At the same time, Gower emphasizes the "division" in Florent's struggle with the alternatives that he faces. These are resolved with his surrender to his lady and his decision to grant her "myn hole vois" (CA 1.1828). "For the first time since his quarrel began, Florent's quarreling inner voices are silenced at the prospect of reintegration. 'Bothe on,' the two will speak with a single 'vois,' and by this at last grow 'hole'" (p. 55). The construction of this scene recalls both the political (e.g. in the 'commun vois') and the apocalyptic significance that Gower attaches to "voice" in both CA and in his other works, notably in the Vox Clamantis, and again extends the tale beyond its merely literal application. "The political message of 'The Tale of Florent' is, . . . on one level, that the knightly class has only to gain by ceding sovereignty to where it rightly belongs" (p. 58), but "the political applicability [of the tale] extends to all whose Pride has led to Murmur and Complaint, and outright Inobedience to established sovereign rule" (p. 59). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Politics of Strengthe and Vois in Gower's Loathly Lady Tale Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower's primary concern in the "Confessio Amantis" was with politics, specifically right kingship and governance, prompted in large part, in McKinley's view, by his growing dissatisfaction with Richard II. Ovid, McKinley argues, was particularly useful to Gower in presenting both his views of right rule and his critique of Richard, who, McKinley believes, was among the readers. of CA "Throughout the "Confessio" Gower engages Ovid to effect metamorphosis within the understanding of his royal reader or his counselors. The most important transformation in Gower occurs when Genius interprets the tale for Amans, and thus for the king: what results is metamorphosis in hermeneutical terms" (p. 108). Following David Wallace's identification (in "Chaucerian Polity") of husband and wife as stand-ins in late medieval discourse for king and realm, McKinley provides close readings of two tale from Book V of the CA "Jason and Medea" (3247-4229) and "Tereus" (5550-6074). After comparing each to Ovid's version and, as relevant, in other sources ("Óvide moralisé," "Ovidius moralizatus," "Roman de Troie"), McKinley concludes that "In rendering the Jason and Tereus tales, Gower seems to follow Ovid's emphases much more strongly that those of the medieval moralising tradition . . . . Gower's political readings are finally similar to the classical uses of such characters and dissimilar to medieval moralising versions that then read such characters as emblematic of sinful spiritual states. By following closely Ovid's own emphases, Gower in this section of Book Five presents negative illustrations of rulers who violate oaths of various kinds. When one considers the various versions of these stories available to Gower and examines his departures from them, one can see both the independence of his judgment and his determination to recreate a more truly 'Ovidian' telling of each tale. In the 'Confessio Amantis,' Gower is concerned not just with the larger rubric of Amans' confession of sins to Genius; he intends above all to employ this larger framework to mediate his own reflections on proper governance and self-rule" (p. 127). [RFY. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor McKinley, Kathryn Published McKinley, Kathryn. "Lessons for a King from John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." In Metamorphoses: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Ed. Keith, Allison and Rupp, Stephen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007, pp. 107-28. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Lessons for a King from John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Toronto Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In their self-appointed roles as public poets, both Gower and Lydgate meditate on ancient and medieval ideas of rhetoric, the aspect of practical politics by which the eloquent presentation of words can "improve, provoke, enable and judge the social order" (569). At the same time, when their texts depict characters using rhetorical craft, we find great ambivalence about rhetoric's benefits and hazards, its rewards and risks. Despite rhetoric's pragmatic power, it remains constrained by 'human ineptitude and powerlessness,' narrative complexity, and the contingencies of audience response" (570). Although rhetoric expects response from audience, it cannot guarantee results. Gower expresses his optimism about rhetoric through two legendary harpists: Arion (in the Confessio's Prologue) and Apollonius of Tyre (in its Book 8). They frame the CA and "embody a rhetorical ideal" that pacifies, unifies, and rules society. In this idealized past, rhetoric is a subsidiary component of ruling a kingdom. Book 7, however, complicates this picture by recategorizing rhetoric into a "verbal science that employs but is not bound to possess congruity or integrity" (573), as shown by Gower's exempla of Ulysses, Tiresias, Phebus' crow, and Laar. Here, expediency trumps morality, tales and their lessons are misaligned, and exemplary lessons within the CA contradict one another. Rather than suspecting Gower of undermining exemplary rhetoric, we should remember that rhetoric is a practical art, provoking readers "to think 'about' rather than simply 'along with' the rhetoric" (575). In these and other examples, Gower provides his readers a way to conduct the ethical work of finding "the middle weye" (Prol 13). Lydgate also presents rhetoric as an effective necessary component for civil society. As his nostalgic depictions of Cicero in "Fall of Princes" indicate, however, rhetoric frequently fails to fulfill its civic functions. Like Gower, Lydgate promotes rhetoric's practical benefits; he also emphasizes the ways a refined language can civilize a people. Despite this affirmation of aureation, Lydgate is "highly conscious of the problems and possibilities of verbal artifice" (578), an awareness displayed in such poems as 'See myche, Say Lytell, and Lerne to Soffar in Tyme,' 'Say the Best, and Never Repent,' and the 'Churl and the Bird,' which explore the complex and frequently paradoxical referentiality between surface and core meanings. [CB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Mitchell, J. Allan Published Mitchell, J. Allan. "John Gower and John Lydgate: Forms and Norms of Rhetorical Culture." In A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c. 1350--c.1500. Ed. Brown, Peter. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007, pp. 569-84. ISBN 9780631219736 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 John Gower and John Lydgate: Forms and Norms of Rhetorical Culture. 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 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Antonio Cortijo Ocaña is the researcher who has published most extensively on the Spanish and Portuguese medieval translations of the "Confessio Amantis," including the edition of some sections of the latter. In this article he brings together the two versions in order to analyze the Juan de Cuenca's craft as Spanish translator of Robert Payne's Portuguese version. As he states that his purpose is to examine the "intrahistory" (87) of this rendering, he focuses on the opening of book VIII for his analysis, the story of Apollonius, which he edits in parallel. In the pages that precede this edition, Cortijo reminds us of the context in which the Confessio reached the Iberian Peninsula-–during the reigns of Philippa and Catherine of Lancaster–-suggesting that the Spanish humanist Alonso de Cartagena might have promoted Cuenca's translation, as "a propaganda literary text, of ethical, moral and entertaining character" (84). His study of Payne's and Cuenca's versions leads him to conclude that the Spanish text is highly faithful to the Portuguese at all levels--syntactical, semantic, lexical--to the point of calquing his source text. Cortijo Ocaña remarks that, in spite of this fidelity, Juan de Cuenca deliberately evinces his presence and work as translator in the Spanish text through some minor modifications like "amplificationes," abbreviations or changes in word order which however do not alter the sense of his source. Because, in Cortijo's opinion, the ruling principle of translation for Juan de Cuenca was that the Portuguese text was "almost a 100% transferable" (87). [ASH. Copyright. The John Gower Society JGN 29.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio Published Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio. "La traducción de Juan de Cuenca: el minúsculo oficio del traductor." In Traducción y Humanismo: Panorama de un desarrollo cultural. Ed. Recio, Roxana. Soria, Spain: [University of Valladolid], 2007, pp. 83-129. ISBN 9788496695184 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 La traducción de Juan de Cuenca: el minúsculo oficio del traductor. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available [University of Valladolid], Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review N.B.: This study is in Japanese: "Hi'ninshō yōhō no shūsoku katei ni okeru ichi danmen." Eigo Seinen. It surveys the use of verbs of dreaming "meten" and "dremen" in the works of Chaucer, Gower, and Langland. The verbs appeared with both dative (impersonal construction) and nominative (personal construction) subjects in the late fourteenth century, although the impersonal construction had started to disappear. First, the survey shows that Chaucer and Langland use both constructions, and Gower uses only the personal construction. Syntactically, the verbs tend to be used impersonally with a clausal complement (Type 1) or with no complement in a parenthetical expression like "as me mette" (Type 2), while used personally with a nominal one (Type 3). Next, dealing with Chaucer's examples, the study surveys the use of the two constructions in context. Sometimes co-occurring with the impersonal "thinken," Types 1 and 2 are used when a dream is described even though the speaker is uncertain about its veracity: the impersonal construction shows the speaker's uncertainty. In contrast, Type 2 is used when the focus of utterance is placed on the act of dreaming. Thus, the paper concludes that even in the midst of the transition, each construction functions differently. [English summary provided by Professor Ohno. Copyright. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ohno, Hideshi. Published Ohno, Hideshi. "A Synchronic Analysis of Transition from the Impersonal to Personal Construction." The Rising Generation, 153/2 (2007): 110-13. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Synchronic Analysis of Transition from the Impersonal to Personal Construction. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review As do most assessments of Gower-as-Chorus in Shakespeare and George Wilkins' "Pericles," Dymkowski's essay focuses--justifiably--on the range of functions of the choric character in the drama rather than on Gower the man or his tale of Apollonius as a source of the play. She is largely concerned with the metatheatrical functions of the character in various modern productions of the play, with most extensive attention paid to two productions (1958 and 1989) in which the character was played by a black actor in an otherwise white cast. Exploring how "contemporary productions negotiate the challenge of making the character work for a modern audience" (248)--whose members are largely ignorant of Gower and his poetry--Dymkowski assesses how the Chorus generally helps to make the "audience aware they are watching a play" and "consciously engage with the nature of theatre itself" (246), before going on to assess individual productions. Prefatory to this line of argument and exposition, she usefully rehearses "what Gower might have meant to the play's original audience" (237), offering a clear, if conventional, review (pp. 237-41) of Jacobean familiarity with Gower and his works, claiming that the original audience of "Pericles," "even without direct knowledge of Gower's work, could be presumed to identify him as an important literary figure, as an ethical and wise man, as a patriot, and as a storyteller" (239). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dymkowski, Christine. Published In The Narrator, the Expositor, and the Prompter in European Medieval Theatre, ed. Philip Butterworth (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 235-64. 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 "Ancient [and Modern] Gower": Presenting Shakespeare's "Pericles." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Benson, C. David. Published Benson, C. David. "Some Poets' Tours of Medieval London: Varieties of Literary Urban Experience." Essays in Medieval Studies 24 (2007): 1-20. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Review Benson's set of late-medieval poetic "tours" through London consists of appreciative commentary about William FitzStephen's Latin "Description of London," Gower's "Visio" (Book 1) of "Vox Clamantis," Chaucer's "Cook's Tale," Hoccleve's "Regiment of Princes" and "La Male Regle, Lydgate's "King Henry VI's Triumphal Entry," and the anonymous "London Lickpenny." Accompanied by various maps and details of maps from modern reconstructions of the medieval city (and Gower's tomb in color), Benson's essay reads something like the voice-over for a documentary about medieval London, helping to bring the city to life, as it were. Comments about the lives and London experiences of the authors juxtapose details from their works that depict medieval London's topography and sociology, although Gower's allegory in the "Visio" gives "little sense of the city's geography," and the countryside around London is only a "frightening bolt-hole into which the narrator flees in terror" (7) rather than an opportunity, as it is for FitzStephen, to describe various forms of recreation. When Gower compares the Tower of London to a ship riding out a storm it is "[p]erhaps as part of a hallucination" (7), while, for example, Chaucer's reference to Newgate in the "Cook's Tale" recalls "the London practice of parading with mocking music to and from prison and the pillory those guilty of civic misbehavior" (10). These and other contrasting examples--and there are many more--seem to privilege realism over representationalism, although Benson does emphasize the discursive variety that the "theme of London" generates among medieval English writers, closing with a call for "more scholarly attention" to the theme "than it has yet received." [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Some Poets' Tours of Medieval London: Varieties of Literary Urban Experience. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Through a thorough exploration of manmade marvels in late medieval English literature, Scott Lightsey "bring[s] familiar works by Chaucer, Gower, and Langland into the conversation on marvels and wonders, often for the first time" (7). He devotes a chapter to Gower's "Confessio Amantis," which he argues "carries the traces of marvelous artifice" (7), particularly the figures of Alexander and Arion and their literature. Lightsey suggests that the first recension of the CA was inspired by the marvelous appearance of a dolphin in the Thames in 1390 (108). Describing Gower's political allegory as containing manmade mirabilia which contribute to the "symbolization of flawed kingship and the misdirection of common profit" (107), Lightsey focuses extensively on Gower's depiction of Alexander the Great, a negative exemplar who contrasts with Arion's "positive potential" (108). Lightsey identifies Gower's Alexander as the "personification of sin, misrule, marvels, and misguided progress" (113), but also claims he is crucial to the "moral program" of the CA, and links Books VI and VII. Gower establishes Alexander's marvelousness in Book VI, and proceeds to connect it with the envisioned technical marvels mentioned in Book VII, all the while highlighting the "internal division and man's position in Christian redemption history" (134). Lightsey concludes that Gower "displayed his anxieties about the relationship between technological pursuits and social ills through comparison between the measure of Arion and the chaos of the marvel-saturated Alexander legend" (159-60). [CR. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lightsey, Scott. Published Lightsey, Scott. Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature. (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Lindeboom takes up the question of why Chaucer would write the prologues and tales of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner as both confessions of personal sinfulness but "encompassing all of the Seven Deadly Sins" (1). His answer (of 460 pages) can be summarized thus: contrary to John Fisher's guess that Gower and Chaucer were friends, they were in fact rivals, and for a period of "about a year" (i.e., 1390-91) antagonists in a literary "duel," encouraged by the Ricardian court, even perhaps judged by Richard and/or Anne of Bohemia: " . . . coming and going of a brief court entertainment, whose effectuation took close to one year, during which time Chaucer used part of the 'Canterbury Tales' to put Gower in his place" (450). The intricate revisions Lindeboom describes include rewriting/redirecting tales (especially the Parson's along with the Wife's and the Pardoner's), recasting the Man of Law character, his prologue and tale--much of which takes place in CT Group II--and then, once the "court entertainment" was complete with Chaucer the clear winner, much revision was shuffled to return to "business as usual." The "debt" Chaucer owes to Gower, highlighted in the title, is essentially an important element of high seriousness enforced on the CT by the need to counter Gower on his home ground. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lindeboom B. W. Published Lindeboom B. W. Venus' Owne Clerk: Chaucer's Debt to the Confessio Amantis. (Amsterdam: Academic Publishers; Open Humanities Press; Editions Rodopi B.V., 2007). Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Venus' Owne Clerk: Chaucer's Debt to the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Taylor, acknowledging that Bottom's Dream ("Midsummer Night's Dream" V.i.206-12) "contains a debt to Paul's discussion of 'the deep things of God'" (282), points out that " . . . it has escaped notice that John Gower also links 1 Corinthians 2: 9 and Pyramus in 'Confessio Amantis'" (III. 1417-28), a poem "Shakespeare knew well" (282). Taylor cites as Gowerian also the lion (changed from Ovid's lioness) and "there is also the hole in the wall" (282) which he attributes to Confessio III. 1370-71(283). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Taylor, A. B. Published Taylor, A. B. "John Gower and 'Pyramus and Thisbe'." Notes and Queries 54 (2007): 282-83. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower and "Pyramus and Thisbe." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review (In Chinese, with English summary.) Su takes on the "idea that Middle English vernacular literature capitalizes on a form of nationhood and identity" by examining "the prefaces of . . . collected texts": Layamon's "Brut," Wace's "Roman de Brut," Lydgate's "Troy Book," Manning's "Chronicle," "Cursor Mundi," and Gower's "Confessio Amantis." The study determines that "the two hundred years of vernacular English literature is found to have a prominent authorial ego which played a significant social role." [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Su, Qikang [So, Francis K. H.] Published Su, Qikang [So, Francis K. H.] "Gu zao di fang hua Ying wen wen xue de zi wo yi shi." Review of English and American Literature 10 (Spring 2007): 1-50. Gower Subject Background and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gu zao di fang hua Ying wen wen xue de zi wo yi shi. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article is the earlier and longer version of what became the chapter, "English Poetry in Late Summer 1399," in Carlson's book, John Gower: Poetry and Propaganda in Fourteenth-Century England (2012). Its subject is the extension to poetry of the Lancastrian "effort to manage information" (375) concerning the 1399 invasion and deposition. Carlson suggests, albeit through "indirect" evidence, that the Lancastrian regime not only managed information through official records and chronicles, but engaged in "public self-fashioning" (410) through a group of poems with certain key shared characteristics. While he admits that "[t]here is no evidence of writs going out to the English poets in late summer 1399 . . . nor are there receipts for payment and the like" (409), as there is for chronicle writers, Carlson finds in the poetry relating to the summer of 1399 consistencies which point to official pressure or encouragement. He analyzes five poems: two in Latin, "O deus in celis, cuncta disponens fidelis," and Gower's "Cronica tripertita," and three in English, "On King Richard's Ministers," and "Richard the Redeless", and the poem written as marginalia in a manuscript of Walsingham's "Chronicle," "Up on a hylle is a greene." At the end of the article (410-18), Carlson supplies an edition and translation of "O deus in celis," with extensive textual and explanatory notes. The four elements which suggest for "conspiracy" or "collaboration" are 1) how the poems discuss their own chronology with an implication of "predeposition composition" (381); 2) the poems "generic distribution and peculiar style," specifically, prophetic, recondite allegory; 3) their concern over the politics of the ruling elite; 4) their inclusion in a larger effort "to represent as righteous and lawful the lawlessness and crime used to put the Lancastrian regime in place" (377). He also argues that "the poetry was too particularly useful to the Lancastrian regime then in process of installing itself to pass now for spontaneous" (410). Specifically in terms of Carlson's treatment of Gower, he suggests that Gower does invoke contemporaneous composition ("journalism," in Carlson's words) "even though the 'Cronica's putatively current reportage often supersedes itself" (382). The section on "Genres and Allegorical Style" situates Gower's allegory in the CrT in a context of political writing, and provides a different explication for its political prophecy. Gower is also central in the construction of an image of "Henricus 'pius'," specifically, a Henry whose revolution was not bloody (403). [MWI. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R. Published Carlson, David R. "English Poetry, July--October 1399, and Lancastrian Crime." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007): 375-418. Gower Subject Cronica Tripertita 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 English Poetry, July--October 1399, and Lancastrian Crime. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Martin reads the "Kingis Quair" against Gower's "Confessio" and Hoccleve's "Regiment of Princes," "La Mal Regle," and the "Series." "The concerns of Gower and Hoccleve with exemplarity, self-reformation, and good governance," she argues, "were important for James's composition of the 'Quair,' offering sophisticated instances in which personal history is used to examine broader institutional conditions" (44). Both poets' work influenced the shifting position of the "Quair"'s narrator, helped James "negotiate the Lancastrian influences on his early life, finally proposing an alternative to the dangerous unpredictability of contemporary English politics" (44). Those influences stemmed from his treatment over eighteen years of captivity by Henry IV and V, of which there are conflicting accounts, and insights gained with the coronation of the child Henry VI (45). In Martin's view, the CA "cannot have made wholly comfortable reading for the Lancastrian dynasty" (46), as Hoccleve and Gower "envisage solutions to misrule as elusive" (50). James finds means to differentiate himself from Amans and Hoccleve's several narrators, "who cannot bring their reason to their predicaments, control their desires, or envision remedies for contemporary problems" (51). Martin sees parallels with the character of Apollonius in CA VIII: "A captive in another 'countree,' James's directionless 'planctus' is reminiscent of that of Gower's tormented and exiled prince" (52). Yet James, via love for his lady, grasps Gower's lesson, that "while escaping treachery in the political macrocosm may not be possible . . . one can better equip one's self for its challenges through inward virtue" (53). This wisdom is apparent in the "Quair" narrator's encounter with Fortune, in which he like Apollonius demonstrates "fortitude and true and patient service in love" that can be applied as well to "political treachery" (57). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Martin, Joanna. Published Martin, Joanna. "The Translations of Fortune: James I's 'Kingis Quair' and the Rereading of Lancastrian Poetry." In Nicola Royan and Sally Mapstone, eds. Langage Cleir Illumynate: Scottish Poetry from Barbour to Drummond, 1375-1630 (Amsterdam: Brill Academic Publishers; 2007), pp. 43-60. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Translations of Fortune: James I's 'Kingis Quair' and the Rereading of Lancastrian Poetry. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Giancarlo claims a close connection between the developing nature of parliament as a body at once "of the people" but with a distinct Pentecostal element (esp. 52), thus offering a functional re-interpretation of "Vox populi, vox dei" that becomes a major motif throughout the book. He variously expands and contracts this construct of parliament to characterize the development of poetry from the thirteenth century, although poets of the fourteenth occupy him primarily. He treats Gower in his third chapter (90-128), focusing largely on the second part of the "Mirour de l'Omme" and the "Cronica Tripertita," with a brief coda on several parliaments' appearances in the "Confessio Amantis." The "Septvauns Affair" becomes the lens through which Giancarlo characterizes the MO Part II--the "Devil's parliament"--and the CrT (the three sections are described as parliaments of different sorts); going further, he finds evidence of an overriding "tension" in Gower's writing, an insecurity about place (social, national, moral) and voice that mirrors parliamentary anxiety in the years between the depositions of Edward II and Richard II. "As the 'Mirour' and the 'Cronica' demonstrate, from the start of his career to the end of it, Gower represented a collective voice in his poetry that bore a complicated relation to the specifically parliamentary tropes of his contemporary social environment. It was not just the problems of 'kingship,' but the conflicted role of parliament and 'parlement,' which stand at the formal base of the poet's efforts to speak" (125). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Giancarlo, Matthew. Published Giancarlo, Matthew. Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme Cronica Tripertita Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In his note to Book I, line 1002 in his translation of VC, Stockton observed that Gower's comparison of Simon Sudbury to Helenus is "singularly ill-chosen" because "the ancient Helenus was a traitor to Troy." Not so in the sources most familiar to Gower, Van Dijk observes, for both Benoit and Guido refer only to Helenus's predictions about the outcome of Paris's expedition and his attempts to assure that Achilles receive a proper burial. Gower's invocation of Helenus thus implies no implicit criticism of Sudbury, as some who followed Stockton have assumed. Van Dijk attributes the mistake about Helenus's role to a confusion between Helenus and Thoas, the high priest who did betray Troy, whom Gower mentions in CA 5.1831-47, but while Van Dijk may be right about Gower, Stockton wasn't wrong about Helenus, for according to classical sources, Helenus was a traitor who provided crucial information to the Greeks following his disenchantment with the Trojan cause after Paris's death. In his defense of Helenus, Van Dijk also curiously neglects the reference to the prophetic powers that he shared with his sister Cassandra in CA 5.746-62, another positive allusion, also based on Guido and Benoit, that contains no hint of his later treachery. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Van Dijk, Conrad Published Van Dijk, Conrad. "Simon Sudbury and Helenus in John Gower's Vox Clamantis." Medium AEvum 77 (2008), pp. 313-318. 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 Simon Sudbury and Helenus in John Gower's Vox Clamantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Fisher pointed out (1964, pp. 68-69 and 342 n. 8) that Gower's "0 Recolende" seems to contain, in its promise of Henry's continuing fame, a reference to the king's grant of two pipes of Gascony wine in November 1399, and that it also seems to anticipate his composition of the "Cronica Tripertita." Carlson examines the same passage in closer detail, including both the earlier and later versions of "0 Recolende," explicating Gower's play on words more fully and pointing to several verbal similarities between this poem and the final eight lines of CrT, suggesting that the former "appears to incorporate an initial formulation of matter that Gower was to rework in the latter" (380). He concludes that Henry's grant to Gower preceded the poet's composition of both "0 Recolende" and CrT. In his citation of the passage from CrT, Carlson uses the version found only in the Glasgow MS (G) which in his 2007 essay he suggests was written after 1405. In this essay, however, he dates the composition of this conclusion to February 1400 (381). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R Published Carlson, David R. "Gower 'pia bita bibit' and Henry IV in 1399 November." English Studies 89 (2008), pp. 377-84. ISSN 0013-838X Gower Subject 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 Gower 'pia bita bibit' and Henry IV in 1399 November. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Readers coming to "Lordship and Literature: John Gower and the Politics of the Great Household" eager for fresh insight into Gower's poetry may initially be somewhat daunted. Lest any be beguiled by the subtitle, "Lordship and Literature," as the title states--and not John Gower--is what occupies the bulk of this book. The Confessio Amantis (nominally Kendall's central text) is not really Kendall's subject. Rather, as he clarifies (64): "Gower's poem offers us a lens on [sic] a landed habitus in the late fourteenth century. To explore the poem in this way will uncover the lordship economics that it disparages, promotes, or takes for granted in service, hospitality, marriage, dispute resolution, and kingship." For Kendall, thus, CA is "a lens," an instrument valuable to take sightings of the material that truly holds his interest "lordship economics . . . service, hospitality, marriage, dispute resolution, and kingship." In many ways, one thinks, "Piers Plowman" (about which Kendall says very little) or "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (about which he says a good deal, all of it quite thoughtful) might have served his turn equally well. Nevertheless, readers in search of Gower should persevere. Kendall can be a perceptive and credible witness to Gower's poem, notably in Chapter Five, "Women as Household Exchange in Genius's Tales," and Chapter Seven, "Retribution as Household Exchange in Genius's Tales." In both he approximates close readings--in the former case, of the tales of Leucothoe, Virginia, Dido, Phyllis, Rosiphelee, Medea, the princess of Pentapolis whom Apollonius marries, Jephte's daughter, and Rosemund; in the latter, of Mundus and Paulina, Constance, the False Bachelor, Tarquin, Arruns and Brutus, Virginius, and Orestes. Kendall's detailed readings of Virginia, the princess of Pentapolis, Rosiphelee and Rosimund as women both exchanged and resistant especially justify his careful study of Levi-Strauss, Gayle Rubin, Maria Bullon-Fernandez, and Larry Scanlon. Similarly, when he selectively applies Richard Firth Green's "Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England," Scanlon, and J.G. Bellamy to the False Bachelor, and, in a lesser degree, to Virginius, he is particularly thought-provoking. He is perhaps at his best in his treatment of Orestes, a "narrative [that] distinguishes Orestes from illicit killers, and in so doing creates a positive exemplum less against murder than for the ordering powers of reciprocalist (a term Kendall borrows from Felicity Heal, to mean "aristocratic") lordship" (234). It is the tensions in the tale that draw Kendall's attention, and he rightly makes the most of them as extendable into the Confessio's larger structure and concerns. In sum, then, there is in "Lordship and Literature" much matter, and many reasons to invest time in its study. Historians of a certain kind, and social theorists, will find it challenging. And if there is not a great deal new in its greater argument for those familiar with Gower's poetry (Kendall's major thesis--that "By deftly demeaning Amans and the magnificent politics to which he aspires, the Confessio supports a notion of a political community dominated by the mutual interests, aid, and responsibilities of gentry, nobility, and royalty" (264)--sounds rather like Russell Peck's "Kingship and Common Profit" in a new bottle), his closer readings, once rescued from the verbiage, are many of them illuminating, original, and instructive. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kendall, Elliott Published Kendall, Elliott. "Lordship and Literature: John Gower and the Politics of the Great Household." Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008 ISBN 9780199542642 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Lordship and Literature: John Gower and the Politics of the Great Household. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Clarendon Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Leff, Amanda M Published Leff, Amanda M. "Writing, Gender, and Power in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Exemplaria 20 (2008), pp. 28-47. ISSN 1041-2573 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review "The Confessio like [Chaucer's] Wife of Bath's Prologue explores the role of texts in gendered power negotiations," Leff writes (29). "Gower probes the tensions between authoritative literate women and the social norms that constantly threaten to suppress or control them. Men in power attempt to contain female expression, and women in turn appropriate writing to challenge the dominant social order and assert their own authority. By revealing the potential subversiveness of women's writing, Gower's Confessio generates the cultural anxiety that it simultaneously reflects" (31). Araxarathen provides the negative example: the epitaph on her and Iphis's tomb "permanently rewrites Araxarathen in Iphis' terms" and thus "enforces women's subordinate, voiceless place in society" (33). Four other women in the poem use writing somewhat more successfully, "to respond to a threat by a male authority figure. Philomela writes in response to her rape and mutilation at the hands of Tereus; Canace writes in reaction to her abandonment by her brother and the abuse of her father; Arcestrate writes to affirm her choice of mate and to reject the suitors that her father selects for her; Thaise employs her knowledge of books to escape forced prostitution. In all these cases, gender plays a key role in the power struggle in which the women engage: they employ writing to counteract familiar, physical, or social limitations linked to their gender. Rather than accepting their subordination, the women take up their pens and their books to contest the status quo, and they are able to re-negotiate their positions in social networks by means of their literacy . . . . Despite their ability to act in commanding ways, however, Gower's women do not seriously challenge the gender norms perpetuated by the Confessio Amantis and medieval English society. Indeed, their exercises in power typically affirm rather than negate traditional gender roles . . . . Gower's women . . . do not subvert the social hierarchy, but simply seek more favorable positions within it. In the end, their authoritative acts of writing do less to promote the advancement of women than to reinforce the transformative power of writing itself" (43). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.1] 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 Writing, Gender, and Power in Gower's Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Rayner invokes John Burrow's "Ricardian" periodization (in "Ricardian Poetry" [1971]), in some measure to reassess its currency in light of subsequent scholarship, in some measure to go beyond it by offering fresh, clos(er) readings of CA, "Piers Plowman," "Pearl," "Cleanness," "Patience," and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and a variety of Chaucer: "Lak of Stedfastnesse," "Ballad of Fortune," "Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse," the Dream poems, "Troilus and Criseyde," and "Canterbury Tales," ultimately with an aim to "show that the instabilities of the Ricardian label can resolve themselves into some solid conclusions about the ways in which major poets of the period responded to kingship" (4). She devotes her first chapter to Gower, focusing almost exclusively on Book 7 of CA, with very occasional forays into other Books and works, on the ground that "this establishes the widest exempla of references to kingship" (4). Rayner has a way with a summation, and one can do no better than to quote her on her own work: "Gower is the poet most openly concerned with the theme of kingship, and his 'Confessio' relentlessly examines the different types of king and the effect of their rule on their subjects. Yet even he contains this exploration within a very specific framework of an individual's journey towards greater self-governance, and one, moreover, who is not a king. Amans's behavour [sic] is paralleled with the kings who [sic] Gower discusses, but he is never described as anything other than a rather lowly cleric; though Gower includes a Mirror for Princes in Book VII of his work, it is to Amans that Genius directs it, and Amans turns out to be none other than Gower himself. What Gower indicates is that such advice is universally applicable, and that kingship is not only the responsibility of the king himself. All subjects must try to be like an ideal king, like Apollonius, whom Gower holds up as the epitome of wise and effective governance. The moral governance is the vital aspect of Gower's treatment of kingship, and it is this that transcends any other relevance to real kings that he makes in his poem" (161). Although Rayner offers few original insights about Gower per se, she nonetheless chooses insightfully among secondary sources, and quotes judiciously from, in particular, Nigel Saul, Russell Peck, Diane Watt, Kurt Olsson, and James Simpson in support of her points. Her reading of Book 7 is a satisfyingly cohesive one, its strength residing chiefly in how she applies a similar insightful judiciousness to selecting passages from CA. Indeed, often she calls attention to lines seldom dwelt upon--and in so doing succeeds in refreshing Gower's work in surprising ways, much as a washing and new paint can make familiar facades seem suddenly new. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rayner, Samantha Published Rayner, Samantha. "Images of Kingship in Chaucer and His Ricardian Contemporaries." Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008 ISBN 9781843841746 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 Images of Kingship in Chaucer and His Ricardian Contemporaries. 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 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This study uses the literary metaphor of the monstrous woman to trace the construction of a particular gender ideology in English narratives of the fourteenth through early sixteenth centuries. Drawing on recent scholarship on monster theory, the rhetorical uses of medieval misogyny, and the reception of the Middle English romance, this study argues that the character of the monstrous woman functions as a self-conscious literary tool that allows authors, and audiences, to reflect on the accepted conventions of misogyny, patriarchal authority, and the romance formula itself. I analyze Middle English narratives including the early sixteenth-century translation of the prose "Melusine," the Constance tale as adapted by Chaucer and Gower, and appearances of Medea in the works of Chaucer, Gower, and Caxton's translation of the History of Jason to discover the ways these narratives use female monstrosity--in literal and figurative form--to dramatize the anxieties arising in a patriarchal society that defines the female as a slightly aberrant category of human, yet depends on her for maintenance and reproduction of the social order. In offering a close reading of these stories that draws on literary, visual, ecclesiastical, and didactic contexts, I explore the new possibilities in fiction offered by the Middle English romance and demonstrate how the monstrous women act as a powerful and multivalent literary trope: they offer their narratives a means to interrogate the prevailing gender ideology; expose the constructedness of and agenda behind existing ideological, political, social, familial, and physical spheres; challenge the currents of medieval misogyny; and fully dramatize the demands of a social order that, in Othering and ordering its female elements, makes women into monsters." Author/Editor Author/Editor Urban, Misty Rae Published Urban, Misty Rae. "Monstrous women in Middle English romance." PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2008. 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 Monstrous women in Middle English romance. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Published Carlson, David R. "Gower's Beast Allegories in the 1391 Visio Anglie." Philological Quarterly 87 (2008), pp. 257-75. ISSN 0031-7977 Review The Visio Anglie that constitutes the first book of "Vox Clamantis" depicts the peasants as beasts in two not entirely consistent senses, Carlson explains. In the vision itself, the dreamer sees not humans but beasts of burden which are then transformed into monstrous versions of themselves. The representation of the peasants as beasts, Carlson points out, was a widespread topos serving to justify their repression and servitude, while in fact also representing the daily conditions under which they lived. The second trope is found in the prose heading to the Visio and in the verse that precedes the beginning of the dream, which Carlson suggests were added after the fact. Here Gower "apologetically mitigates his chief metaphor" (263): the rebels were humans (thus possessed of reason, and capable of making a different choice) who were transformed into beasts under force of their own vice. Carlson traces the roots of this "ethical-judgmental conceit" (269) to Boethius and Ovid, and notes, most importantly, that it serves to undermine the rationalization of feudalism implicit in the depiction of peasants as beasts by nature. "The mitigating change of conceit in the post-festal prose acknowledges the bad faith of the original verse misrepresentation of the rebels as subhuman; but the mitigation cannot eliminate or expunge. The fact remained that the feudal political economy was itself inhumane, treating human beings as unequal, reducing some to non-human status, the status of thingness, for exploitation." In a passage in which Gower gives voice to the rebels' complaints (ll. 693-96), he "acknowledges common humanity and calls oppression by its proper name. . . . Gower's vision-nightmare is an act of aestheticizing political will, properly anaesthetizing too, perhaps: while articulating the justice of the threat that the 1381 Social Revolt posed, willfully also still to deride it and its bestial or bestialized agents" (270-71). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2]. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Gower's Beast Allegories in the 1391 Visio Anglie. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article explores the appellative "nigromantesa" [necromanceress] given to Medea in "La Celestina" (1499) against the background of other Peninsular texts which mention the Greek character and magical issues in the fifteenth century. Antonio Cortijo, undoubtedly inspired by Lida de Malkiel, pays special attention to two Spanish works, Juan de Mena's "Laberinto de Fortuna" (c. 1444) and its extensive commentary made by Hernán Núñez de Toledo, the "Glosa a las Treszientas" (1499). Cortijo Ocaña provides the text of Toledo's glosses to the terms "magos" [magicians] and to Medea the "inútil nigromantesa"--as Mena names her--an outstanding example of the vast humanist knowledge of the commentator, known as "el Comendador Griego" [Greek commander]. Although the "Glosa a las Treszientas" was published the same year as "La Celestina," Cortijo suggests that Rojas could have known the text before it was printed--certainly, Núñez de Toledo was a prominent scholar when he returned from Bologna in 1498, though he spent the subsequent years as a private tutor in Granada. Cortijo adds another pair of works to the panorama of late medieval Iberian stories of Medea, the Portuguese and Spanish translations of "Confessio Amantis," where Gower had given his own approach to the Ovidian myth. Thanks to Cortijo's parallel edition of the English, Portuguese, and Spanish versions of this passage, we have an excellent example of how the Medean legend was transferred to the two peninsular languages. His annotation of the modifications by the translators helps to complete the literary background for Rojas' reference to Medea the enchantress and opens up the possibility of exploring the readership, dissemination and possible impact of the Gowerian poem on Iberian literature. [AS-H.] [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio Published Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio. "Medea a la 'Nigromantesa': A Propósito de los Hechos de Medea en Rojas y Gower." Revista de Literature Medieval 20 (2008), pp. 31-58. ISSN 1130-3611 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Medea a la 'Nigromantesa': A Propósito de los Hechos de Medea en Rojas y Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Newman, Jonathan M Published Newman, Jonathan M. "Satire of counsel, counsel of satire: Representing advisory relations in later medieval literature." PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2008. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review "Satire and counsel recur together in the secular literature of the High and Late Middle Ages. I analyze their collocation in Latin, Old Occitan, and Middle English texts from the twelfth to the fifteenth century in works by Walter Map, Alan of Lille, John of Salisbury, Daniel of Beccles, John Gower, William of Poitiers, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Skelton. . . . In the first chapter I introduce the concepts and methodologies that inform this dissertation through a detailed consideration of Distinction One of Walter Map's "De nugis curialium" . . . . Chapter two looks at how twelfth-century authors of didactic poetry appropriate relational discourses from school and household to claim the authoritative roles of teacher and father. In the third chapter, I focus on texts that depict relations between princes and courtiers, especially the Prologue of the "Confessio Amantis" which idealizes its author John Gower as an honest counselor and depicts King Richard II (in its first recension) as receptive to honest counsel. The fourth chapter turns to poets with the uncertain social identities of literate functionaries at court. Articulating their alienation and satirizing the ploys of courtiers--including even satire itself--Thomas Hoccleve in the "Regement of Princes" and John Skelton in "The Bowge of Court Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Satire of counsel, counsel of satire: Representing advisory relations in later medieval literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Contrary to the image offered by post-usurpation chroniclers and perpetuated by uncritical modern historians, Richard II's reign was consistent with the portrait of the ideal king offered by contemporary political theorists, for whom there was no inconsistency between absolute rule and the public welfare, as long as the king acted for the common good rather than for his own personal advantage. So does Jones argue in this impressively documented essay. Thus Richard's displays of magnificence manifest not his personal vanity but his assertion of his rightful role as king, fully justified even by religious writers, and his pursuit of Gloucester and Arundel beginning in 1397 reflects impartial justice rather than personal revenge. Jones includes Chaucer's "Melibee" among the works from which Richard might have learned how to govern, providing, as it does, a model for the seeking of counsel, for the choice of advisors according to their ability rather than their rank (one of the sore points with Richard's uncles), for his pursuit of peace (with France), for the role of women (such as Queen Anne) as intercessors, and for the use of the "semblant of wrath," which may be the source for the charge that Richard had a quick temper, in contrast the many recorded instances in which he exercised a calming influence instead. Gower figures in this essay, of course, as one of those who not only helped to justify Henry's usurpation but who also sought to "chang[e] the nation's collective memory about Richard" (27) by altering the historical record to make it appear that the post-usurpation attacks on Richard's rule and character actually emerged from events early in his reign. In Gower's case, this amounted to rewriting his comments on the youthful Richard and his advisors in the "Vox Clamantis." The reference to his "sors" (Stockton: "destiny") in VC VI.572 indicates, Jones states, that the entire revised passage "must have been written after the usurpation, but modified to make it look as if it had been written earlier" (28). Similarly, Gower revised the dedication of the "Confessio Amantis" to make it appear that he had presented the poem to Henry in 1393. In this case, he gives himself away by his reference to "Henry of Lancaster," a title that Henry could not have borne until 1397, in Prol. 87, as Gower in effect concedes in the marginal gloss at Prol 28, which states that the book was presented "domino suo domino Henrico de Lancastria tunc Derbeie Comiti." The "Cronica Tripertita" Jones dismisses as "mendacious and disgraceful" (13), and he cites it among those perpetuating the "lie" that Richard refused to seek the counsel of older men. Jones published an abbreviated summary of his essay in "Richard II: Royal Villain or Victim of Spin," The Times, 4 October 2008. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Jones, Terry Published Jones, Terry. "Was Richard II A Tyrant? Richard's Use of the Books of Rules for Princes." Fourteenth Century England 5 (2008), pp. 130-60. ISSN 1471-3020 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Vox Clamantis Cronica Tripertita Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Was Richard II A Tyrant? Richard's Use of the Books of Rules for Princes Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Even as the representation of women by medieval poets has been extensively studied, scholars have yet to explore how images of women have informed images of political counsel. In this study, I forge a connection between the "mirrors for princes" genre of advice giving and the subject of women. The connection between women and counsel, I argue, is one that poets found fruitful, vexing, enabling, and troublesome by turns. Following on the work of such scholars as Larry Scanlon, Richard Firth Green, Judith Ferster, David Wallace and Paul Strohm, I examine the major vernacular poetry of the late fourteenth and fifteenth century in light of both the mirrors for princes tradition and historical accounts of counsel. What distinguishes my work from prior scholarship is that I focus specifically on a neglected aspect of the history of counsel: the role of women in literary texts as counselors to kings. I examine selected Middle English works by John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Stephen Scrope, as well as manuscripts and French sources, in order to evaluate the association of women with political counsel. When authors articulate their instruction through female voices, the process of advice subsequently becomes a feminized one, and the female counselor emerges as a significant literary trope--as an outlet through which male poets articulate challenging political discourse. What this project ultimately demonstrates is that, far from exclusively using women's voices as an 'other' against which to define themselves, late medieval vernacular poets embraced the feminine as both a representation of their own subordination to kings and patrons, and a subject position from which to criticize, advise, and influence those in power. Understanding the poet's conception and development of female counselors is thus essential to understanding his or her own approach to the process of advice and the composing of politically-oriented narratives within the vernacular poetics of the late medieval period." See Schieberle's earlier essay on "'Thing which a man mai noght areche': Women and Counsel in Gower's Confessio Amantis," reviewed in JGN 26 no. 2. Author/Editor Author/Editor Schieberle, Misty Yvonne Published Schieberle, Misty Yvonne. "Feminized counsel: Representations of women and advice to princes in late medieval England." Ph.D, dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2008. 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 Feminized counsel: Representations of women and advice to princes in late medieval England Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Warner, Lawrence Published Warner, Lawrence. "Latin Verses by John Gower and 'John of Bridlington' in a Piers Plowman Manuscript (BL Add. 35287)." Notes and Queries 55 (2008), pp. 127-31. ISSN 0029-3970 Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Cronica Tripertita Review Identifies two Latin items on the final verso of BL Add. 35287, a copy of "Piers Plowman" B, as coming from Gower's "Cronica Tripertite" ("Tristia post leta. post tristia sepe," III.1) and "The Prophecy of John of Bridlington" (it is unclear whether they are in the same hand). The presence of the Gower tag here is particularly remarkable given George Shuffelton's discovery that the recto of this folio contains another Gowerian Leonine verse, "Explicit iste liber qui obsecro transeat liber," which introduces the closing envoy of the "Confessio Amantis." The relationship between these two tags remains obscure. In any case, this is only the second known medieval reference to the CrT apart from (?after) that work's initial copying, the other being two marginal verses added into BL Lansdowne 204, fols 196v, 204r, the sole manuscript of the first recension of Hardyng's "Chronicle" (post 1457). [LW] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latin Verses by John Gower and "John of Bridlington" in a "Piers Plowman" Manuscript (BL Add. 35287) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Burrow, J. A Published Burrow, J. A. "Medieval Writers and Their Work: Middle English Literature 1100-1500. 2d ed." Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Review John Burrow published the first edition of this little (currently 156 pp.) volume in 1982, noting in the Preface: "The present book is designed as a introduction. At the risk of giving an exaggerated impression of the strangeness of Middle English writings, I have concentrated on some of the chief differences which confront a reader of modern literature when he or she first approaches them: the differences in the notion of literature itself (Chapter 1), in the circumstances under which writings were produced and received (Chapter 2), in the types of writing produced (Chapter 3), and in the kinds of meaning to be found in them (Chapter 4). Chapters 1 and 5 also attempt to characterize the Middle English period in relation to earlier and later periods of English literature." In addition to providing a clear view of its purpose--"an introduction," and aimed not specifically at undergraduate students as most of such books are, but rather at any "reader of modern literature" upon first encounter with medieval writing--the preface thus succinctly outlines the book's contents. Commentary on Gower thus predictably runs throughout, tailored to suit the larger context of each chapter. Although this second edition is more than a quarter century more recent than the first, it remains in most ways a very similar presence. The bibliography, for example, has been "updated" by only nine citations post-2000. Yet Burrow himself remains one of the most sensitive and perceptive of readers, and his views of Gower here are profoundly worth knowing. His insight into "the contradiction . . . in which Chaucer, Gower and their immediate successors found themselves," is a case in point. "These writers . . . found themselves partially alienated from their native literary heritage (e.g., "adapted . . . to the practice or oral delivery"), in so far as that heritage represented conditions that were recessive in their day" (56). The different ways Chaucer and Gower found to respond to what Burrow calls "minstrel features" (57) stand for him as representative of major writers of the period: in the CantT Chaucer "came to terms" with that heritage by incorporating "addresses to the audience, oaths, asseverations, redundant phrases," to "speak 'ful brode' when he wants to" (57), while Gower looked to French and Latin literatures for better models than "minstrelisms," ultimately achieving a verse "purged (though at the cost of a certain debility) of minstrel features" (57). Burrow sees the "apogee" of "English narrative verse" in the work of Gower, Chaucer, and the Gawain-poet (71). And consider Burrow on the "complications of interpretation" that arise with some of the tales in the CA: "Sometimes it seems that [Gower] has simply failed to find a suitable story to illustrate this vice or that virtue, as required by his scheme; but on other occasions we can recognize a deliberate finesse in the relation between tale and context . . . . When the scale of the narrative is increased, complications . . . may arise . . . . [Yet] in literature as in life, events often appear less simple the more you know about them. Most stories, if they are told with any richness of human detail, tend to forfeit their straightforward relationship to exemplified truth. In the light of such a story, the 'truth' may come to seem complicated, or doubtful, or simply irrelevant." (118, 119) Few more sensible words have been written, perhaps, to answer complaints about Gower's narrative "failures." For many now, in the new age of Brexit, the most interesting chapter may be the last in which Burrow ponders the future of writers like Chaucer and Gower, when "poetry of that kind, in that kind of English and that kind of metre, and printed in that kind of book--will face increasingly strong challenges from rivals who do not recognize the language of the Authorized Version as their English. The tradition of Chaucer, Milton, and Tennyson can hardly fail to suffer such challenges in an age where English is a world language and England no longer a world power" (138). Reading that--written in 2007--one can dodge its eerie clairvoyance in the new reality of Brexit. Burrow's is still a book from which to learn much--and ought, perhaps, to be on every Introduction to the Middle Ages reading list. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Medieval Writers and Their Work: Middle English Literature 1100-1500. 2d ed Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Oxford University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Scribe D was "active in the London-Westminster area between the 1390's and the 1420's, although his linguistic origins were in the southwest Midlands" (42). Apparently he knew and worked with other prominent scribes and the major poets. He has been shown to be responsible for ("in whole or in part") the two Canterbury Tales MSS that are Thaisen's focus (Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 198 [Cp] and London, British Library MS Harley 7334 [Ha4]), a "De Proprietatibus Rerum," a "Piers Plowman," and eight "Confessios": Cambridge, Trinity College, R.3.2 (quires 9, 15-19, and parts of 14); London, British Library, Egerton 1991; New York, Columbia University Library, Plimpton 265; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 294; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 902 (fols. 2r-16v); Oxford, Christ Church College 148; Oxford, Corpus Christi College, 67. Thaisen sets out to demonstrate that orthographic variation can help establish "the number of exemplars a given scribe used and in what order he copied them" (58), since a scribe's native dialectal idiosyncrasies give way to those of other scribes as he "works in" to exemplars not in his own dialect. Ultimately Thaisen's data are intriguing, despite his admission of inconclusive results. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 28.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Thaisen, Jacob Published Thaisen, Jacob. "The Trinity Gower D Scribe's Two Canterbury Tales Manuscripts Revisited." In Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England. Ed. Connolly, Margaret and Mooney, Linne R. [York]: York Medieval Press, 2008, pp. 41-60. ISBN 9781903153246 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Trinity Gower D Scribe's Two Canterbury Tales Manuscripts Revisited. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available York Medieval Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Mooney argues that not only were London scribes ca. 1400-1476 responsible for vernacular literary manuscripts not working in scriptoria, they were not working in shops, either--but instead, "many of them were not members of the Textwriters' Gild ... and even worked in their homes or lodgings" (184). Mooney emphasizes the distinctions "vernacular literary" in her analysis, since the copiers of manuscripts of literary importance were not producing "the kinds of texts that were in regular demand in high numbers: indulgences, Bibles, Latin rites, breviaries, books of hours, primers, other schoolbooks, university set texts and so forth" (184). Those were the province of the Textwriters' Gild, since they supported the trade; nor were vernacular literary MSS produced by "the 'scriveners,' who after 1373 were a distinct gild of the Writers of Court Letter, really attorneys or notaries public, who could draft legally binding documents" (184) or by the "stationers," who were largely "retailers, selling second-hand and imported books and paper . . . perhaps also pens and plummet and so forth" (185). Rather, vernacular literary books were most often bespoke products, made by "'free-lance' scribes," some of whom (about a third, based upon surviving evidence) were foreign-born, "and it seems probable that many were working part-time at copying books after long hours put in at other full-time jobs, whether as canons, vicars or schoolmasters, as legal scriveners or as clerks in government offices in London and Westminster" (186). Crucially, such scribes needed to reside outside the London city limits, or in one of the several liberties within the City, to avoid violating gild laws, and much of Mooney's chapter seeks to identify who they were and where they lived. Hoccleve, partly responsible for the Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.2 Confessio Amantis, was one such (194-95; 197); another was the French-born "Richard Franceys or Ricardus Franciscus" who "appears to have moved from one government office to another, or possibly to have taken commissions from them as a free-lance scribe living outside the City or within one of the liberties of the City" (199). Franceys may have been "moonlighting out of the heralds' offices in the liberty of Blackfriars when he made copies of English vernacular works .. .including Gower's Confessio Amantis" (i.e., New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M 126) (200). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Socity. JGN 281.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Mooney, Linne R Published Mooney, Linne R. "Locating Scribal Activity in Late-Medieval London." In Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England. Ed. Connolly, Margaret and Mooney, Linne R. [York]: York Medieval Press, 2008, pp. 183-204. ISBN 9781903153246 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Locating Scribal Activity in Late-Medieval London. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available York Medieval Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Sargent seeks to determine "how we can use the evidence of numbers of surviving manuscripts as a way to deduce information about what was being made available to read in English from the end of the fourteenth century to the early sixteenth (205). His speculations have relevance for Gower studies, as the sixty-three manuscripts of Gower's Confessio Amantis, as Sargent counts them ("fifty-three originally complete copies, ten extracted tales or groups of tales, plus one manuscript each of a Portuguese and a Castilian Spanish translation of the complete work and one manuscript containing a Latin abridgement of the tale of Constance" [206]), make Gower's poem the fifth most common Middle English work in manuscript, behind the Wycliffite bible (250+ MSS), Brut (181 MSS), Prick of Conscience (123 MSS), Canterbury Tales (81 MSS). More specifically, Sargent notes a distribution pattern that "shows a rising rate of production for a period of a quarter- to a half-century, followed by a leveling off when some form of 'market saturation' was achieved" (243). The CA, Sargent finds, mirrors this conclusion exactly: "the book-length text most commonly produced by scribes participating in the early fifteenth century London book trade in vernacular manuscripts was John Gower's Confessio Amantis. Two manuscripts of the complete text are datable paleographically to the end of the fourteenth century, Huntington Library MS E126.A.17 and Bodleian MS Fairfax 3; one is datable to the beginning of the fifteenth century, Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 67; a further twenty-six manuscripts are datable to the first quarter of the fifteenth century, fourteen to the second quarter, seven to the third quarter, one to the final quarter of the century, and two to the sixteenth century. One manuscript of the first half of the fifteenth century, Bodleian MS Rawlinson D.358, contains a Latin abridgement of the story of Constance based on both the Latin and English of Gower's text; four manuscripts of extracts can be dated to the second half of the century, one to the last quarter, and two to the early sixteenth century. The overall pattern shows that the Confessio Amantis was particularly popular in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, but dropped off gradually over the rest of the century" (235-36). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sargent, Michael G Published Sargent, Michael G. "What Do These Numbers Mean? A Textual Critic's Observations on Some Patterns of Middle English Manuscript Transmission." In Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England. Ed. Connolly, Margaret and Mooney, Linne R. [York]: York Medieval Press, 2008, pp. 205-44. ISBN 9781903153246 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource What Do These Numbers Mean? A Textual Critic's Observations on Some Patterns of Middle English Manuscript Transmission Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available York Medieval Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor McKinley, Kathryn. Published McKinley, Kathryn. "The View from the Tower: Revisiting Gower, 1381, and Vox Clamantis, Book 1." Mediaevalia 29 (2008): 31-52. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Biography of Gower Review McKinley's essay includes three connected arguments: 1) Guillaume de Deguileville's "Pélerinage de vie Humaine" is a source of the tower scene in the dream-vision of Book 1 of "Vox Clamantis," sections 17-19, where the narrator, fleeing from the Rising of 1381, takes refuge in a ship (representing the Tower of London) threatened by a storm that represents the Rising; 2) in this scene, the multidimensional first-person narrator--a member of the gentry--confesses his own responsibility for the storm, representing in some way, McKinley says, aristocratic responsibility for the Rising, perhaps Richard II's own responsibility; 3) as a result, the scene reflects the earliest "beginnings of Gower's attribution of blame to the upper classes for the problems associated with the Rising" (p. 34), well before the 1390s when his accusations of such blame are usually dated. McKinley acknowledges that Gower's use of Guillaume's "Pélerinage" in the scene is only "probable" (37) and that their shared symbols are "quite common" (33), although she does not note that Eric Stockton long before connected the scene with the conventions of "The Ship of Religion," specifically Guillaume's "Pélerinage de l'Ame" ("The Major Latin Works of John Gower" 1962:366 n1 and pp. 16-17). McKinley uses Stockton's translation, but seems to miss or ignore this detail, while following Stockton's identifications of many echoes from Ovid. The penitential stance of Gower's narrator is clear, however, whether or not it derives from either of Guillaume's works or derives, more loosely, from a Ship of Religion topos, or the ubiquitous allegorical device of a narrator's lament or Confession. Whether the narrator represents Gower, the Self, a particular class, the body politic, the king, or all of these is impossible to determine, but McKinley emphasizes the king and the upper classes, maintaining that the Confession can be seen to reflect Gower's "growing disapproval of Richard's kingship" (34) as early as 1386, the date usually assigned to the composition of Book 1 of the "Vox." [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The View from the Tower: Revisiting Gower, 1381, and "Vox Clamantis," Book 1. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Hawes looks to the Actaeon story as an example of "the way in which evolving cultural and literary traditions can influence the reading of a mythological narrative" (21). She discusses Ovid's version in detail, concluding that he "raises the issue of (in)justice but does not seek closure for it. In the epic world of the 'Metamorphoses,' in which divine power determines all, there is little purpose in discussing justice in human terms" (24). In later antiquity the "Metamorphoses" tales were kept alive in allegorized form as exempla by Hyginus, Pseudo-Lactantius Placidus, and especially Fulgentius (28). The latter's "rather confusing account" presents Acteon as representing "the dangers of curiosity, fear, and . . . an excessively wasteful lifestyle" (28-29). This last aspect characterized twelfth-century approaches to Actaeon, e.g., Arnulf of Orleans and Giovanni del Virgilio; although in modified form, it remains visible in the "Ovide Moralisé" and the "Ovidius Moralizatus" (29). Dante recalls it in "Inferno" XIII.109-29, in his treatment of the squanderers Arcolano da Squarcia di Riccolfo Maconi and Iacopo da Santo Andrea, retrieving from Ovid the ravening dogs (33) while maintaining the medieval interpretation of wasteful spending and its consequent punishment, putting both to his own purposes. Gower resembles Dante in this, offering "not so much a translation of the original narratives as a bold remoulding, taking only what is necessary for the sense of the exemplum" (34)--which in this case is "mislok," or sinful looking. This sin Hawes goes to some length to connect with the emphasis placed on beauty by "courtly love" (34-35), and both with the dominant conceit of the "Confessio Amantis." Noting how Gower has adapted Ovid's story to his purposes (expending a good deal of space identifying aristocratic features of Gower's Acteon, and discussing the overlap of hunting and courtship), she comments: "Acteon's death appears as an afterthought: if the reader can comprehend the danger of indecent vision, then the punishment itself has a largely perfunctory role" (37). With Maria Wickert (quoted 37, fn. 53), Hawes finds this an "inept" and "dull" choice, aimed solely to "push his heroes and stories with high-principled directness towards a question of moral decision." A classicist to the end, she concludes: "It is testimony to the inherently flexible nature of classical myth that the same simple narrative of offense and punishment can . . . be utilised to illustrate both the pettiness and violence of the pagan gods within a world in which the frames of reference are constantly in flux, and the pitiless objectivity at the heart of the medieval conception of universal justice" (39). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hawes, Greta. Published Hawes, Greta. "Metamorphosis and Metamorphic Identity: The Myth of Actaeon in Works of Ovid, Dante, and John Gower." Isis: Journal of the Classical Association of Victoria, 21 (2008): 21-42. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Metamorphosis and Metamorphic Identity: The Myth of Actaeon in Works of Ovid, Dante, and John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In this article Kreg Segall focuses exclusively on Gower's choric role in "Pericles." His Gower here is Shakespeare's Gower. Segall argues that in the play Gower is "highly aware of his textual status" (248) which is "marginal-yet-mediating" (248). Segall explores the ways this textual awareness, sometimes evident in moments when Gower distances himself from the story, conveys an uneasiness about the incest theme that "underscores the prime anxiety of the play--the fear of becoming too intimate" (249). Throughout the play Gower tries "to redefine his choric position away from paternal author-figure" (250). Unlike Antiochus, whose incestuous desire seeks complete control of his daughter, Gower, who sometimes appears as author/father of the text, at times also appears to release this role and "drop the responsibility for narrative coherence onto the actors and the audience" (252). Gower, in other words, distances himself from Antiochus by distancing himself from his text. Pericles in turn learns to negotiate intimacy with his daughter in non-incestuous ways through his relationship with his retainer Helicanus. The article also draws a compelling parallel between releasing authorial control over a text and death or "Gower's desire to die away at the appropriate time" (261), as Segall puts it. While an in-depth analysis of the ways in which Shakespeare's Gower echoes writer John Gower's own authorial explorations may have been, understandably, beyond the scope of the article, one wishes Segall had gestured toward such echoes. [MB-F. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Segall, Kreg. Published Explorations in Renaissance Culture 34 (2008): 248-68. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and the Incestuous Father: The Intimate Author in "Pericles." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Duffell rewrites traditional English metrical history with the aid of the methods and terminologies of linguistic metrics (both statistical and generative), comparative linguistics, and cognitive science, and with recurrent attention to intercultural interactions. The book's ten chapters are frequently daunting, with data and metaphors drawn from this wide and exacting variety of fields, but contextualizing cultural descriptions and the brisk summary-conclusions that punctuate the chapters are sharply written, offering a clear-cut march "from the earliest surviving examples of versifying in a Germanic language to some of the most complex and subtle modern metrical experiments" (3), along the way discussing the metrical habits of "just over ninety poets" (4) including Gower. Chapter four, "Versifying in Bilingual England" (pp. 73-95), describes and analyzes Gower's English and French metrics, set in contrast to those of Chaucer and of the so-called "Poems of Ch," and rehearsing much of what Duffell has already published about Gower and Chaucer since 1996. The volume's extensive bibliography includes six essays on Gower and/or Chaucer written by Duffell, plus two on Gower's French metrics written collaboratively with Dominique Billy (as well a number of studies by Duffell that do not pertain to Gower or Chaucer). This large body of data is compressed and made more valuable by the "evolutionary" (Duffell's recurrent term) frame of the volume, its statistical tables, and the "Index of Linguistics and Metrical Terms," much used by me as I negotiated Duffell's statistical information and data-rich discussions. The rewards are many, both specific claims (some consigned to footnotes) and more sweeping generalizations. A few examples from the notes on p. 95: "Gower anticipated French poets of the sixteenth century in ignoring contemporary speech norms and requiring an artificial delivery by his readers." As well, Gower's "archaic convention of pronouncing 'e-atone' has survived in modern French song and drama" (n.33). Further, comparing the "78% of Gower's 'vers de dix' [that] have no strong syllable in an odd-numbered position" with "70% in Boccaccio's 'endecasyllabi'," and adding another "10% of Gower's lines [in which] a strong syllable in an odd-numbered position is prevented from becoming prominent in delivery by a phrasal stress that immediately follows it," Duffell deduces that "Gower's French long line could therefore be described as 88% iambic" (n.35). In his "Conclusion" to chapter four Duffell tells us that both Chaucer and Gower "learned from Italian models how to count beats in such a way as to produce a regular number of syllables," but that "two disasters hit their enterprise": the loss of "word-final schwa" and "the defeat of the Plantagenets in the Hundred Years War, which doomed the Insular variety of French." Thus, "[o]ne of Gower's most important metrical innovations" in Insular French was "lost forever," although "his English iambic tetrameter and Chaucer's pentameter were recovered in the sixteenth century, and became the canonical metres of subsequent English verse" (92). Without saying so overtly, Duffell prefers Chaucer's variations in beat to Gower's regularity, and Chaucer's greater influence among later poets is made evident. Yet, Gower has a larger place in Duffell's linguistics-rich metrical history than in traditional ones, even without discussion of his Latin verse. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Duffell, Martin J. Published Duffell, Martin J. A New History of English Metre. Studies in Linguistics, no. 5. (London and Leeds: Legenda, 2008). xi, 292 pp. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification 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 A New History of English Metre. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The first of two sections is devoted to Gower's "Love of Words," as evidenced by his copious production in three languages, and his contribution to "evolving English" as a sophisticated medium of expression (442). "The greatest example [of wordplay] . . . is the 'Confessio Amantis'," with its "disjunctions" built into a layered structure of Latin glosses, confessional dialogue, and exempla illustrating sins against love (441, 443). Peters draws from Foucault's confession theory to explicate the dialogue between Genius and Amans as a "parrhesia" or truth-telling on both sides, leading to "greater self-knowledge" on the part of "the confessing subject." In a "clear parallel," the poem itself--with its "tensions" calling for "judgment" on the part of the reader--"becomes Genius, the confessor, and the reader becomes Amans, or Everyman, in order to prompt greater self-knowledge" (443). To understand Gower's "Words of Love" (the title of the second section), Peters--per Foucault--argues that we must line them up against the "competing discourses" on love that were current in the late fourteenth century (446). First--following Duby--he cites the "lay model," which defined marriage as an arrangement for protecting landed property, while condoning male promiscuity/adultery (446-48). Its alternative, the "ecclesiastical model," accepted marriage only "as a lesser evil to control sexuality" (449), with the wife submissive to her husband. However--per D'Avray et al.--devout discourse by the late fourteenth century increasingly extolled married love, as it "model[s] the affective relationship between the individual soul and God" (449). The "Cinkante balades," considered by Peters as Gower's definitive expression on love (444), affirms the third of these discourses, while rejecting the first, and eliding the second (456). Ballad 49 presents the poet's "supreme" statement on love between spouses as divinely inspired, and a model of "'droite courtasie' toward all women" (457). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Peters, Harry. Published Peters, Harry. "John Gower--Love of Words and Words of Love." In Words of Love and Love of Words in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Albrecht Classen (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008), pp. 439-60 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Cinkante Balades Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower--Love of Words and Words of Love. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The verses--"Tristia post leta. post tristia sepe quieta," "Explicit iste liber qui obsecro transeat liber"--are, respectively, the first line of Book III of the "Cronica Tripertita" and the first line of the final envoy of the "Confessio Amantis" (with "obsecro" and "transeat" in reversed positions). Both are by different hands datable after the fourteenth century, and thus Warner sees them as indications of the "afterlives" of Gower's poems. In the case of the former, this is especially significant, since "BL 35287 contains only the second known medieval reference to the 'Cronica Tripertita'" [130], the other being in a copy of "Hardyng's Chronicle," BL MS Lansdowne 204, fols 196v and 204r. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1] (But see Eric Weiskott "John Gower and 'John of Bridlington': An Unnoticed Borrowing." Notes and Queries 68.2 (2021): 160-62). Author/Editor Author/Editor Warner, Lawrence. Published Warner, Lawrence. "Latin Verses by John Gower and 'John of Bridlington' in a Piers Plowman Manuscript (BL Add. 35287)." Notes and Queries 55.2 (2008): 127-31. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion 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 Latin Verses by John Gower and "John of Bridlington" in a "Piers Plowman" Manuscript (BL Add. 35287). Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review A wide-ranging work tracing the maritime influence on English literary identity from Gildas to Churchill with especial focus on the development of several topoi of the Sea during the Middle Ages. Sobecki centrally "argue[s] that the literary history of the sea in English literature becomes a part of the vernacular discourse of Englishness" (4). The introduction situates Churchill's propaganda speeches of the Second World War as the culmination of "a latent, residual understanding of British identity as insular" (2) from which Sobecki works backward to identify the roots of this relationship in Early and Middle English texts. Chapter 1 begins with a brief history of the Sea in Biblical, Classical, Anglo-Saxon and (to a lesser extent) Celtic traditions. Chapter 2 compares the related topoi of Sea-as-Desert and Sea-as-Forest within the context of the British Isles. Chapter 3 explores the medieval sense of Britain's geographical isolation at the edge of the Sea/known world. Chapter 4 deals with unwanted encounters of sea and shore including shipwreck and invasion. Chapter 5 focuses on English traditions of Jonah, Leviathans, and Christ-figures at sea. Chapter 6 follows the politicization of the Sea and the burgeoning concept of "territorial waters" (140). The epilogue deploys Shakespeare's "Tempest" as an example of the synthesis of these various maritime literary traditions and topoi in its expression of English identity. Of greatest interest to the field of Gower studies will be chapters 2 and 4 in which the author discusses the "Tale of Constance" and "Apollonius of Tyre" of the CA at some length. Sobecki not only captures Gower's engagement with existing English literary traditions of the sea (such as in the topos of the rudderless craft), but also identifies Gower's own innovations, specifically Gower's departure from his sources in his characterization of the sea as a personification of Fortune in CA's treatment of the Apollonius narrative (114-16) and in the poet's insistence on the materiality of the sea (117). Sobecki goes on to argue that even "The Tempest" reveals a Gowerian influence in its storms and seascapes (163). The connection between Gower and the sea was first identified by Macaulay, who noted that Gower's description of seascapes and storms were so "vivid and true" they demanded "more than a mere literary acquaintance with such things." Though not primarily about John Gower, "The Sea and Medieval English Literature" goes some way to contextualize Gower's particular genius within the indigenous maritime literary traditions of the British Isles and provides a necessary foundation for future research into the poet's vision of the sea. [CJK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sobecki, Sebastian I. Published Sobecki, Sebastian I. The Sea and Medieval English Literature. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008. xii, 205 pp. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Sea and Medieval English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "My thesis considers English literary representations of two notorious classical women, Helen of Troy and Medea, from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries. My primary focus is on the ways in which male authors in the period deal with the troubling spectres of the women's very different powers: Helen's alarming and captivating sexuality, Medea's magical abilities and unrestrained violence. First tracing how their power is represented in classical and late antique Greek and Latin texts, I then assess how their stories enter the English literary imagination. My project considers both longer renderings of their stories (Gower's Confessio Amantis, Lydgate's Troy Book, Heywood's Ages) and also the brief references to both women that recur time and again in the works of authors including Chaucer, Hoccleve, Gascoigne, Turberville and Greene. My research spans genres and media, considering the various uses the women are put to (didactic, cautionary, tragic, occasionally comic) in history, prose, poetry and drama, as well as in direct translation of classical works. Very often, authors use Helen and/or Medea ironically, in a way that demands a close familiarity with their classical incarnations (particularly, perhaps, with Ovid). Often paired as well as treated separately, Helen and Medea are used across the period to exemplify the unhappy effects of love, the dangerous effects of passion, and perhaps most frequently, the peculiar dangers women pose to men. Though their literary incarnations have often been considered separately by critics, by handling them together my research considers the way authors such as Chaucer, Lydgate, Gascoigne and Turberville choose their classical exemplars very carefully, how two apparently quite different notorious women may be turned to the same ends, used to caution both men and women. Taking their power, and concerted male efforts to undermine it, as its overarching theme, the thesis considers Helen and Medea in relation to medieval and Renaissance theories of translation, to instructional, didactic or cautionary literature, to Christianity, to political and religious upheaval, and most significantly, in relation to the male establishment of the period." Author/Editor Author/Editor Heavey., Katherine Published Heavey, Katherine. "as meeke as medea, as honest as hellen": English Literary Representations of Two Troublesome Classical Women, c1160-1650. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Durham, 2008. 413 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International C71.06. Abstract accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Fully accessible (in 2 downloads) at https://etheses.dur.ac.uk/2930/. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "as meeke as medea, as honest as hellen": English Literary Representations of Two Troublesome Classical Women, c1160-1650. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Echard's book is an extended answer to a question she asks on page 17: "what does it mean to reproduce a medieval author (or text) in 'his own shape and likeness'?" Gower figures in chapter 3, "Autocratic Antiquaries: Gower on Gower"--in this case, George Granville Leveson-Gower, (1786-1861), who produced the Roxburghe Club edition of British Library MS 59495 (olim Trentham), on John Gower the poet (97-98). Echard uses the Roxburghe edition, and to a lesser degree that of G. C. Macaulay, to center a thorough history of Gower's translation from manuscript to print--a history that covers editions by Caxton, Berthelette, and the most modern (e.g., Russell Peck's student edition based on Macaulay). In the process she makes a number of vital points directly responsible for how Gower has been understood for five centuries. She notes that "as soon as he enters the age of print, Gower's status as a multilingual poet disappears" (99), and illustrates how the process begins with Caxton and Berthelette (100-102), although Gower's tomb, with its three volumes, kept the multilingualism prominent into the nineteenth century, lending him "a monumentalism as much literal as literary" (102). Proceeding chronologically, Echard discusses Elizabeth Cooper, John Henry Todd (whose 1810 selective edition included an engraving of the tomb), and--especially--the Roxburghe edition in important detail, clarifying that Leveson-Gower had a handwritten copy made of the manuscript, and this--not the manuscript--was the copy-text for his 1818 edition (117). A major concern of Echard's throughout is "the facsimile impulse," linked "to the emphasis on the physical object over its textual content" (118). Leveson-Gower, Echard makes clear, saw the manuscript as a totem of the family and social class the Roxburghe Club members represented--and in that sense the poet, too (122). The chapter concludes with the four-volume edition of Macaulay who, by dividing Gower's work into separate volumes by language, reflects "the same tendency to concentrate on Gower's English . . . traced in this chapter from the fifteenth century onward" (123). Macaulay's decisions impacted how Gower has been seen in modern times in another way, perhaps more important: "It was Macaulay who divided the manuscripts of the 'Confessio' into three recensions, based on the degree to which they had shifted from Ricardian to Henrician sympathies, and it was Macaulay who decided that the Henrician version should be considered Gower's last word" (124). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân, Published Echard, Siân, "Aristocratic Antiquaries: Gower on Gower." In Siân Echard, ed. Printing the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 97-205. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translation Manuscripts and Textual Studies Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Aristocratic Antiquaries: Gower on Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In CA 1. 463-80, Gower refers to the asp with a jewel upon his head who protects himself from men who would entice him with enchantments by laying one ear upon the ground and stopping the other with his tail. The sources that are normally cited (Psalm 57, Augustine, and Isidore; see Macaulay Works, 2.468) do not mention the precious stone. Henkin (not Hankin or Hankins, as variously spelled by Conti) suggested that Gower had combined the legend of the snake that stops its ears with a different one drawn from medieval lapidary tradition about a snake or dragon with a jewel in its brain. But Conti has found that the combination already occurs in a homily in the 12th-13th century "Trinity homilies" (Cambridge, Trinity Coll. B.l4.52), which differs from Gower's only in that the snake lays its one ear upon a rock instead of upon the ground. In another 12th-homily found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 343, there are two snakes, one like Gower's that protects itself against enchantments and another less prudent one that bears golden gems in its head and allows itself to be beguiled. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 28.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Conti, Aidan Published Conti, Aidan. "The Gem-Bearing Serpents of the Trinity Homilies: An Analogue for Gower's Confessio Amantis." Modern Philology 106 (2009), pp. 109-116. 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 Gem-Bearing Serpents of the Trinity Homilies: An Analogue for Gower's Confessio Amantis. 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 Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Since the eighteenth century," Galloway contends, "economic thought has made identity legible in terms of production, consumption, and profit . . . . In later medieval culture social thought was often framed in terms of an economy of need" (310). Proceeding from the canonists (Gratian, and especially Aquinas [cf. Sum. Theo. 2a2ae q.77 art. 4], Galloway illustrates the presence of the notion of a common possession of necessities for all men to share when in exigency in the writings of English chroniclers (e.g., Knighton), canonists (William Lyndwood), Ranulph Higden, in John of Trevisa's translation (and Trevisa himself, in his "Dialogue" of 1387), and in "the London writers" Gower, Chaucer, and Langland. These "especially elaborated the contradictions of this frame of thought" (310); they each, despite their different temperaments and concerns, share a "critical scrutiny [that] shows how the idea of an 'economy of need' would ultimately collapse" (310). Galloway identifies Gower's narrative of "The Trump of Death" (CA 1.2021-2253) in which "poverty and age are reducible to the same 'ymage'--whose value is precisely that it reflects the viewer and the donor, not the perspective of the needy themselves" (319). The king in the tale thus can be read in "the surrogate role of natural law, by which he is able to impose the terror of mortality" (320). Gower's shaping of his material in "The Trump of Death" can thus be seen as "an acceptance of royal absolutism, by analogy with the arbitrary force of necessity," but also (and this seems to be more Galloway's own view) "as highlighting and critiquing how kings usurp the power of necessity for their own all-too-human desires, which here turn out to be mercifully instructive if somewhat cruelly applied, but which might as easily have been turned to more pernicious ends" (320).] [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew Published Galloway, Andrew. "The Economy of Need in Late Medieval English Literature." Viator 40 (2009), pp. 309-331. ISSN 0083-5897 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 Economy of Need in Late Medieval English Literature 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 Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Urban's monograph is a direct outgrowth of his 2005 Aberystwyth dissertation; to some degree, the older bones remain visible beneath the newer flesh. His focus in this volume is "the two writers' uses of the past within their texts, their different conceptualizations of history and its use-value for the present, and the ways in which we can read these from the vantage point of our (post)modern present" (12). Conveniently, Urban takes the time early on to identify influences on his work (primarily "Queer Theory and Historicism" [45] but also Jameson, Benjamin, Baudrillard, Bakhtin, Nietzsche--and Patterson and Strohm) and to acquaint his readers with several key terms, as he intends to employ them: by "authority," he means "all types of social actions and literary texts that are invested with a certain amount of prominence and truth-value within social and literary discourses" (13); by "the past" and "history" he means "the cultural past on the one hand and its narrativisation ('history') on the other" (p. 13). These terms enable discussion of his larger subjects, "the poetics of the past and the politics of the present," the former describing "the ways in which writers (in the present case, Chaucer and Gower) incorporate the past and history into their own literary creations. The possible motivations for these uses are referred to throughout . . . as the politics of the present," i.e., intended and unintended "reasons for and effects of . . . the poetics of the past" (13). Chaucer and Gower, Urban claims, "placed old books, the wisdom they contain and its retrieval through their readerly and writerly activity at the centre of their poetic projects" (18). He proposes a three-fold approach: 1) to "trace this common theme through a representative sample of both poets' works, spanning most of their careers, starting mid-1370's and ending around the middle of the 1390's; 2) to analyze the "poetics of the past" by examining how Chaucer and Gower make use of old books; and 3) to "examine the texts' interventions in their contemporary political discourses, reading the politics of the Ricardian present through the lens provided by the poetics of the past" (18). Urban thus offers primary discussions of the House of Fame, Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, and the Canterbury Tales of the Nun's Priest, Physician, and "Melibeus," alongside Gower's Vox Clamantis (primarily the "Visio," but also the differing attitudes toward Richard in versions of Book 6) and Confessio Amantis both generally, as a larger work, and specifically, in a close reading of the "Tale of Virginia." Throughout, Urban recurrently returns to the Troy story as a kind of touchstone and exemplary arena in which to illuminate the contrast he locates at the heart of his study. Ultimately Urban finds that Chaucer and Gower differ in the uses to which they put old books in precisely those ways that they each engage with the politicized world of late fourteenth-century England. Chaucer's approach is ever "a veiled engagement with the socio-political context" (210) while Gower's "general concern with kingship and the state of English society" (217) shows him to be "at pains to formulate clear and unambiguous statements in his poetry" (223), in order to address and heal the division he sees all around him. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Urban, Malte Published Urban, Malte. "Fragments: Past and Present in Chaucer and Gower." Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2009 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Fragments: Past and Present in Chaucer and Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Peter Lang AG, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Van Dijk argues that, in their respective wrestlings with "the question of sovereignty, whether the king . . . is 'legibus solutes,' or free from the law," Gower and Langland "despite their ostensible ideological differences . . . share a legal and political reference field that needs further study, and that discloses some surprising similarities" (310). He concludes that "the definition of equity that lies behind "Piers" and the CA is Ulpian's maxim that justice gives to each his due or law. The primary terms that describe this principle, as Gower and Langland interpret it, are consistency, uniformity, and reciprocity. As a result . . . equity is not to be associated strictly with the prerogative courts, but encapsulates instead the correct way to administer the law. Equitable justice is fair, and that is why it can sometimes seem fearful. Lastly, whereas justice is in theory strictly separate from the law, in practice the two are frequently conflated" (333-34). More specifically, "for Langland, this means that there is not a fundamental difference between Reason's call for the enforcement of the rigor of the law and the virtue of Justice in the later passus . . . . In the Mirour, Gower similarly associates equity with the scales of justice. The main point about equity, then, is that it considers all to be equal before the law and gives each his due reward or punishment . . . . In Gower's [CA] Book 7, the exposition of Pity entails that even the king's mercy must be without favor and follow the strictures of law and justice . . . . In nearly every instance the hope is that, if the proper administration of the law is hampered in any way, then the king might correct the problem so that the law can once more be applied justly to all who are subject to it" (334). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Van Dijk, Conrad Published Van Dijk, Conrad. "Giving Each His Due: Langland, Gower, and the Question of Equity." Journal of English and Germanic Philology 108 (2009), pp. 310-315. 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 Giving Each His Due: Langland, Gower, and the Question of Equity 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 Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Both lexically and visually, Cawsey points out, the distinction between Muslims to the south and non-Christians from northern Europe appears to have been blurred in late medieval England, in a way that challenges notions of "orientalism" based on a simple division between east and west: the word "saracen" is often used not as a racial epithet but as a designation of all pagans, including those from the north; and in manuscript illuminations of works such as Lydgate's "Lives of Sts Edmund and Fremund," the invading vikings are depicted with curved, hooked swords and with large turbans, a "visual 'shorthand' for a Muslim Saracen . . . well established in medieval art" (383), headgear which is given up when the invaders convert to Christianity. Religion, rather than race or geography, appears to have been the paramount determiner of "alterity." Both "Guy of Warwick" and the tale of Constance (as recounted by both Chaucer and Gower) contain parallel adventures, one set in the east and one in the west. Constance twice voyages to a pagan land (Syria and Northumbria), converts the king, and is expelled by her malicious mother-in-law. Cawsey counters the "orientalist" readings that focus only on the first episode, and she points out how neither Chaucer's nor Gower's text makes any distinction (for instance in appearance) based upon race. But she also asks why the Northumbrians are shown converting successfully while the Syrians are all slain, and she finds the answer in the reasons that are given for the conversion: the Sultan converts not in response to any teaching or any deliberate choice of the Christian faith but only to secure Constance as his bride, while in Northumbria Constance is shown preaching and instructing on the faith before the conversion. Gower's version in particular lays stress upon the efficacy of Constance's voice in the tale. Gower's also has a tripartite structure rather than merely a double one, as it gives more emphasis to the episode in Spain. "Constance thus has the chance to convert the three most significant non-Christian invaders of Europe of the Middle Ages: Easter Muslims who invaded Byzantium and Eastern Europe; Northern pagans who invaded the British Isles, France, and Germany; and Eastern/Southern Moors and Arabs who invaded Spain and France from Africa" (393). In their depiction of the second group, Cawsey finds both English poets confronting the awkwardness of their own nation's descent from a group linked to eastern pagans, and "in differentiating their ancestors from the Muslim Saracens, Chaucer and Gower ultimately turn to a difference more complex than the modern orientalist's answer of race: to one based on religious motivation, personal rather than political faith in God, and the ground of piety and conversion" (393). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society JGN 29.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cawsey, Kathy Published Cawsey, Kathy. "Disorienting Orientalism: Finding Saracens in Strange Places in Late Medieval English Manuscripts." Exemplaria 21 (2009), pp. 380-97. ISSN 1041-2573 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Disorienting Orientalism: Finding Saracens in Strange Places in Late Medieval English Manuscripts. 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 Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Martin surveys the few tantalizing references to the existence of MSS of the Confessio Amantis in Scotland before 1600. From them she infers that Gower's poetry was known and "was regarded as appropriate reading matter, or at least a fashionable addition to the library, for the intellectual elite, and the landed but also urban classes of late medieval and early modern Scotland" (563). The bulk of her essay, however, is concerned with tracing the influence of the CA in three Scottish works, each of which use it in a different but equally informed way. The anonymous prose "Spectacle of Luf" (1492) is framed as a dialogue between an old knight and his son on the dangers of the latter's subjection to love. The lessons, with their accompanying exempla, are divided into eight sections. The epilogue contains several detailed recollections of the ending of the Confessio. As the aged narrator abandons the didactic role of the main body of the poem, moreover, the ending recalls some of the ambivalences of Gower's conclusion and even "confronts the uncomfortable prospect considered by Gower . . . that maturity does not always bring a natural release form moral waywardness" (567). The reactions of the younger man to his father's lessons also recalls the stubborn persistence in love of Gower's Amans. Both works "therefore ultimately question the usefulness of the advisory genres to which they belong, foregrounding the power of readers to deflect the instructional intentions of authors in pursuit of validation of their own desires" (569), and they also draw a link between a lack self-governance in the ruler or ruling class and the resultant dangers of social disorder. Gavin Douglas' "Palice of Honour" (c. 1501) actually mentions Gower (in the company of Chaauer and Lydgate) by name. In part 1, the narrator's encounter with Venus contains recollections both of the opening of the CA and of Gower's "Tale of Rosiphelee." Like Gower, Douglas portrays his narrator "as one drawn perilously to the attractions of Venus's court, yet highly unsuitable for it, and unwelcome to its deity" (572), though the result is the narrator's rejection of love rather than a supplication for Venus's aid. And the narrator's second encounter with Venus, in part 3, recalls the conclusion to Gower's poem. "In both Confessio Amantis and The Palice of Honour, . . . the narrators are urged to use their literary skills in more fitting ways than writing about erotic love, in the service, respectively, of moral virtue and virtuous honour" (574). John Rolland's "Court of Venus" (c. 1560) also cites Gower by name, invoking him as an authority on how to avoid the dangers of subjection to Venus. It also imitates Gower in its conclusion, as the elderly narrator is expelled from Venus's court, but like "The Spectacle of Luf," it "returns to the problematic implications of the close of the Confessio Amantis" (576) that stories like those told by Genius "rarely succeed in convincing lovers to reform themselves," and it "leaves the reader with the problematic image of the poet-narrator as the reluctant outcast from Venus's court rather than the source of moral and ethical exemplarity" (576). Each of these three works also draws from other authors and "do not constitute a tradition," but as Martin notes in her conclusion, "they do give a clear indication of a Scottish habit of reading the Confessio Amantis that does not have an exact equivalent in contemporary English literature" (577). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Martin, Joanna M Published Martin, Joanna M. "Responses to the Frame Narrative of John Gower's Confessio Amantis in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Scottish Literature." Review of English Studies 60 (2009), pp. 561-77. ISSN 0034-6551 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Responses to the Frame Narrative of John Gower's Confessio Amantis in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Scottish Literature. 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 Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Olsson, Kurt Published Olsson, Kurt. "Composing the King, 1390-1391: Gower's Ricardian Rhetoric." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009), pp. 141-73. ISSN 0190-2407 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Review Olsson adopts as fact Gower's report of a royal charge from Richard II to write the what becomes the "Confessio Amantis," and deftly employs the Westminster Chronicler's vignettes of a dangerously volatile Richard to sketch the problematic position Gower very likely felt himself to be in, given his wish to advise the king honestly (Olsson presents it as a character trait which Gower could not compromise) and yet not incur his wrath. Gower's solution, Olsson argues, is to use "analogy to elicit judgment on a presumption of kingly power, and . . . he sets correction or a readjusting of perception as his goal. But rather than press for a verdict on this or that particular action, Gower works from patterns in Richard's conduct over the course of a decade to identify and address underlying and continuing problems in the governance of the realm" (146). To do this, "Gower creates [an] issue-based rhetoric in the portion of Book VII . . . devoted to explaining five virtues or 'pointz' of an ethical Policie--Trouthe, Largesse, Justice, Pite, and Chastite--as forming the basis of sound rulership" (147). In this essay, Olsson's focus is on Gower's management of Trouthe. The issue of kingly power had occupied controversy in Richard's court in the 1380's, and had led eventually to the Appellants' Revolt, Richard's near-disposition, and a reduced scope of kingship at the end of the decade. Gower, Olsson argues, makes this his focus in the tale of "The King, Wine, Woman and Truth" (Bk VII.1783-1984) his only exemplum on Trouthe, "significantly altering this tale from its source in 3 Esdras and his own synopsis of it in the Mirour de l'Omme" (147). In Olsson's view Gower does this in order to foreground (however subtly) his central point, i.e., that the "principal obligation of kingship [is] what a king swears to do in 'trouthe' as he is crowned" he then must do (152-53). The point was a risky one to make, Olsson notes, because "inconstancia regis" was a charge leveled at Richard often as the 1380's drew to a close. "Attracted more to the symbols than to the realities of governance". . . "Richard's preoccupation with maintaining his regal dignity . . . leads to neglect, a failure to uphold his coronation oath" (154/155). To teach the king how to do better, and why, Gower transforms the figure of Cyrus in the tale-within-a-tale told by the counselor Zorobabel into a tyrant, and projects the seducing courtesan Apeme as "the figure of fikelnesse (or Fortune) that, in the larger argument, will be offset by the trouthe of Alceste, the subject of Gower's second, newly added capsule tale and the means by which his Zorobabel will effect the transition to a fourth possible answer to Darius' question" about what entity possessed the most power universally. The answer is of course "Trouthe," and this, Olsson argues, is the point Gower wishes Richard to extract from the story, after seeing himself as both Cyrus and Darius, and--realizing that he should feel ashamed for the behaviors he has allowed himself to slip into--repent and change (156-65). Olsson then turns to the revisions of the poem which steadily excise Richard, and end indeed with Gower's submission of his poem to Henry IV for oversight and "correction." Arguing that "Gower's revision of the epilogue provides no evidence or a radical change of allegiance or of sudden alarm, a reaction to any one that the king has recently done . . . Gower appears to believe that change, or a refocusing and maturation, is possible and that his own fictive re-creation of the king could have a positive effect: that is suggested by the retention of the Thames narrative in the second recension of the poem" (169).In the subsequent revision, however, Gower shifts the focus of his audience from the king--i.e., Richard, and even Henry--to the other estates, particularly "to my lordis alle" (170-71). Olsson concludes, "But though Richard is no longer featured in the work, Gower's argument retains its vitality in providing a 'new' framework to guide discussion about kingship through the remainder of the reign and beyond. Indeed, this poem's continuing relevance for Henry IV is not far to seek." (173). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society JGN 29.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Composing the King, 1390-1391: Gower's Ricardian Rhetoric. 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 Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation . . . explores the varied representations of marriage and family in Middle English romance. While Middle English romances often act with disciplinary force to cultivate and popularize ideals about the family, many romances also stand in ambivalent relationship to this disciplinary function. Even if they end up valorizing the nuclear family, they do so through circuitous routes--such as depicting surrogate father-child relationships, interracial marriages, the loss of family members, and adultery--as they imagine alternatives means by which families cohere. . . . Chapter four focuses on a single romance--Gower's "Apollonius of Tyre"--arguing that how the loss of family members is memorialized creates a "virtual" family that is turned towards political ends. . . . In general, the thesis argues that while ecclesiastical ideas about the family in the high and late Middle Ages began to produce what we would now recognize as nuclear families, the Middle English romance remained a vigorous site where alternatives to doctrinal ideals about the family were imagined." Author/Editor Author/Editor Lim, Gary Published Lim, Gary. "Familiar estrangements: Reading family in Middle English romance." Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York, 2009. 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 Familiar estrangements: Reading family in Middle English romance. 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 Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Medieval London, unlike medieval Paris, did not have a university. The absence of a dominant local institution that regulated intellectual innovation in a historical moment that sees the collapse of distinctions between clerical and lay presented an opportunity for the poetic appropriation of the academy's disciplines in Latin and in Middle English. 'Poetry and London Learning' presents London as a center of English, intellectual culture, on par with Oxford and Cambridge. I argue that late medieval London poetry constitutes a coherent, innovative intellectual movement. London poets Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Thomas Usk, William Langland, Thomas Hoccleve, and the anonymous "Mum and the Soothesegger"-poet present poetry as local scholarship that is affiliated with the City and the nearby jurisdictions of Southwark and Westminster rather than the academy. These poets redefine medieval academic disciplines to make them immediately available, comprehensible and useful to a London reading audience. Chaucer narrates the history of alchemy; Gower revises late-medieval historiography; Usk makes a London ethics out of the materials of theology; and Langland narrates a common origin for poetry and natural philosophy. In the process of revising academic disciplines for the City, these poets present poetic, pedagogical narratives that intend to generate models of urban intellectual subject formation. Every chapter describes London, a community and a place experienced differently by each poet, and explains how each poet's specific location, career, and affiliations produced singular revisions of institutional, pedagogic tradition. Each chapter also presents the long histories of the disciplines concerned in order to describe how these poets' contributions become implicated or marginalized in English intellectual history. Hoccleve's invention of Chaucerian science contributed to sixteenth-century antiquarians' claims regarding the genealogy of an ancient urban, poetic scholarly tradition in spite of the continued absence of a university in the City. Gower's idiosyncratic performance of Latin history alienates his poetic production from the longer tradition of historical writing about the City. 'Poetry and London Learning,' therefore, refuses to narrate a history of English poetry periodized by regnal period, but insists upon imagining the place of London's late-medieval poets in the longer history of English scholarship." Author/Editor Author/Editor Pangilinan, Maria Cristina Santos Published Pangilinan, Maria Cristina Santos. "Poetry and London learning: Chaucer, Gower, Usk, Langland and Hoccleve." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2009. 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 Poetry and London learning: Chaucer, Gower, Usk, Langland and Hoccleve. 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 Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Butterfield, Ardis Published Butterfield, Ardis. "The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War." Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 ISBN 9780199574865 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Language and Word Studies Cinkante Balades Review Butterfield has written a book which, in the view of this reader, will alter entirely how the Anglo-French relationship can be understood henceforward by scholars of language, social history, and literature. To do such a book justice requires a format altogether other than this. Suffice it to say that her canvas is vast--the Hundred Years' War--although this is sometimes difficult to recall, amidst so much and so widely-cast learning that includes, among many things, "English, French, and Anglo-French," "puys," treaties, translation theory, politics at all levels of intimacy, from kings and diplomats to Guillaume and La Belle (and poet and poet, mutatis mutandis), music, merchants, manuscripts, stanzaic structure and an unusually clear set of maps that, thoughtfully examined, depict virtually by themselves the ebb and flow of Anglo-French "intertextuality" between 1157 and 1429. It is a book that (happily!) will gore a few sacred cows: Butterfield's gentle but unavoidable revision of English "nationhood" (she has her doubts), must needs give pause to those now busily engaged in defining that concept; and her argument that the assumption of Chaucer's centrality for the history of English letters requires rethinking is entirely persuasive. So also is the powerful case she makes for lyric poetry as having been taken as seriously--if not more so--as narrative poetry, long the sole focus of medieval literary scholarship in England and the U.S. Hence it is no surprise that Butterfield accords Gower's "Cinkante Balades" an important position on this panorama. Altogether rightly, she treats Gower's balades as part of "a passage of words across Anglo-French boundaries" (246). Reading five balades in particular through the lens of their common refrains (an approach grown out of meticulous studies of poetry and music she has pursued over the last decade), she positions Gower in relation to Chaucer, Graunson, Machaut, Thomas de Paien, and Froissart (and with Deschamps hovering in the background), developing convincingly the "conversational" nature of what is--clearly--self-conscious exchange. For Butterfield, these poets read each others' "forme fixe" work with high seriousness, borrowed from each other, fully expecting their own poems to be so scrutinized--and borrowed from--as well. Hers is the best, most powerful claim yet for the elevation of the balade as an intra-and international form, to a parallel place alongside the narrative and polemical verse of the late middle ages--and of course for Gower's substantial place amongst international practitioners, too. Typically, she moves from the micro to macro by way of concluding: "A further implication of such material is that it shows us another model of how language is exchanged. It is particularly pertinent to the larger argument of this book that these examples of cross-reference pass between authors that we now categorize as English and French, but that then had a much looser identity . . . . In short, the categories of English and French in the late fourteenth century are more porous than source study usually implies, and the linguistic and literary relationships are conducted by means of, and sometimes against the grain of, many subtle distinctions of position, status, and cultural ambition that are not adequately rendered by the single opposition English and French" (264-65). This is a magnificent book, rich, learned, challenging--one all who would know Gower should read. (One very minor point for Gowerians: the reference to the "800th anniversary conference held July 2008," on pg. 239, n. 20, adds an extra two hundred years to Gower's antiquity.) [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Oxford University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Kennedy, Kathleen Erin Published Kennedy, Kathleen Erin. "Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature." New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 ISBN 9780230606661 Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Biography of Gower Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Review Borrowing a trope from Barbara Hannawalt, Kennedy presents maintenance--the "lord-retainer relationship"--in the eyes of most late medieval English folk as akin to how the "Mob" would have seemed to residents of 1920s Chicago: "From your perspective, the Mob does bad things: it kills people, and it corrupts government and law. But at the same time you recognize that the Mob does good things as well: it can make obtaining goods and social services easier and less expensive, and may curtail some kinds of crime" (1). Marriage comes into it because, Kennedy argues, Middle English writers used the husband-wife model, and that of master-servant, as safer stand-ins for the lord-retainer relationship, ever a target, albeit just beneath the surface: "because of the status of the lords involved…criticism of this dynamic could be dangerously political" (6). Kennedy draws on the letter collections of the Stonors, Pastons and Plumptons to illustrate "different sorts of service relationships," and to provide an introduction to fifteenth-century litigation, by way of grounding her more literary material. Similarly--again as a grounding model--she examines legal discourse and precedent in rape cases, because "rape forced medieval legal officials and writers to consider the degree to which autonomy was compromised as the responsibilities of service clashed with the sense of autonomy modern readers associate with 'free will,' particularly in the social, legal, and religious institution of marriage" (12). In her fourth chapter she takes up contemporary works addressing the maintenance directly: Chaucer's Melibee, Langland's Lady Meed, the "Arthuriad" section of Lydgate's "Fall of Princes." Her final chapter considers "the relationships between masters and a particular category of servants: lawyers" (13). Here Kennedy finds the "Mirour de l'Omme" and "Vox Clamantis" especially valuable, and devotes the bulk of her chapter to showing that "legal professionals and the equity of the law suffered when service was involved. The question began to become whether a lawyer's lord was a man or the law itself. Which institutions or individuals had the right to constrain a lawyer's autonomy?...Gower seeks to map out the problem in detail . . ." (13). She finds Gower's witness valuable not only for its detail, but also because she takes it for granted that Gower "was probably a lawyer or other legal official" (89, 149, n.1). Kennedy's is the closest reader to take so seriously those sections of the MO and VC dealing with her subject. Placed in the broader context she establishes (Chapter 5 also includes Hoccleve's "Regement of Princes"), her insights are especially thought-provoking. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Palgrave Macmillan, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Lindeboom, Wim Published Lindeboom, Wim. "Rethinking the Recensions of the Confessio Amantis." Viator 40 (2009), pp. 319-48. ISSN 0083-5897 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review Lindeboom's long essay marks another attempt to make sense of the confusing evidence concerning the dating, the revision, and the publication of the "Confessio Amantis." Because he moves back and forth from one question to another, it is impossible to summarize his essay point by point, but one can pick out some of the main threads. Lindeboom reconsiders the significance of the dates that appear in the text and marginal notes of the different versions of the poem; he re-examines the evidence supporting Macaulay's classification of the many surviving copies into different "recensions;" he offers some new suggestions about the relation between the various alterations and revisions in the poem, the political events of the last two decades of the fourteenth century, and Gower's (presumably) shifting relations with his patrons; and he reconsiders the implications of Gower's suggestion to Chaucer, which appears in some versions of the poem, that he offer his own "testament of love." Much of his essay is devoted to dismantling what he considers the "preconceptions" (p. 348) of Macaulay and Fisher, and many of his criticisms, particularly with regard to the conclusions that they and others have drawn from the various dates that appear in the margins, have been stated before and are worth consideration. In many cases, however, it is difficult to say that the alternative views that he offers are any less speculative. He dismisses as improbable, for instance, the notion that Gower could have become disenchanted with Richard II in the early 1390s, as Fisher maintained, but he makes much of a supposed hostility between Richard and his cousin Henry during the same period, which, he insists, would have made it impossible for Gower to consider dedicating his poem to Henry at this time (331). He also argues that dedicating a poem to Henry that contains a long discussion of the education of a king (which is how he characterizes the purpose of Book 7) would have been "an essentially seditious political statement" (337) if Richard were still king. He then sees hints of a threat to Chaucer in the invitation to write a "testament of love," a comment that he interprets as a reminder of the fate of the unfortunate Thomas Usk, author of a poem of that name, who was beheaded in 1388 (338-44). Lindeboom's arguments lead him to suggest that portions of the poem, such as the address to Chaucer, date from earlier than has been supposed, but that others, such as all of Book 7, may be late additions, inserted only when Henry had become king. At the same time, he declares it "reasonable to assume" (326) and "in all likelihood" true (344) that the poem was intended to be presented orally long before it was circulated in manuscript form. This inference, however, is based on the analogy of arguments made about the "Canterbury Tales" (a work much more easily divisible into individual "performances" than is the CA) rather than on any evidence offered from the CA itself. (In disagreeing with Coleman over Henry IV's knowledge of Latin in his note 31, Lindeboom complicates his case further by, in effect, dismissing one of the strongest arguments on which her case for oral presentation is based.) In the end, we are left not knowing precisely which version of the poem Lindeboom is trying to date: some early "oral" version or one of the written ones? And a version that contained which parts of the poem as it is now known? In dismantling the poem in this way, Lindeboom pays virtually no attention to the manuscript evidence. It is not merely that he seems not to have examined any manuscripts on his own. He simply passes over the fact that Book 7, which he wants to believe was added for Henry, appears in all surviving copies of the poem in which Henry is not even mentioned. In another vein, while attacking Macaulay's notion of the three "recensions," he appears to adopt without reservation Macaulay's conclusions on the order in which the three different "versions" of "recension 1" arose (e.g. on 324 and on 334, where he calls the "unrevised version" "the earliest one"). He cites a 1985 essay by the reviewer in support of the notion that the differences among these three versions are mostly scribal in origin (322), but he overlooks the conclusion that follows (and hence the principal burden of that essay): that Macaulay got the order wrong, and that the one he called "unrevised" was actually the last in order of time, manifesting the highest degree of scribal corruption. At another point (331) Lindeboom offers the suggestion that the "intermediate" version might in fact be the earliest version of the poem. This suggestion is based on a completely mistaken account of the contents of the different "versions" that he offers on 324, where he claims that in the "intermediate" and "revised" versions, the lines in which Richard II and Chaucer are named are replaced with the passages less favorable to England and more favorable to Henry. This is simply wrong. One has to suspect that Lindeboom has confused the "intermediate version" with "recension two" and the "revised version" with "recension three," but one can't be sure. And that is true about much in this essay. One will find here a summary of some of the many questions that we are still debating about the origin and development of the poem, but we are still far from any clear and definite answers. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Rethinking the Recensions of the Confessio Amantis. 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 Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Batkie, Stephanie L Published Batkie, Stephanie L. "Sentenced to hard labor: Vernacular transformations in the late fourteenth century." PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2009. Open access at https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/64772 (accessed January 23, 2023). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review "This project re-characterizes the development of vernacular readership in late fourteenth century England. It offers a fresh heuristic for recognizing vernacular works that ostensibly limit their potential audiences through the use of recondite, Latinate, and otherwise hermetic discourses while, at the same time, making the labored interpretation performed by those readers the center of its textual purpose. It focuses on two poems, William Langland's 'Piers Plowman' and John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,' as examples of texts that are neither open nor easy--on the contrary, they are deliberately difficult. Through them it examines the relationship between vernacular difficulty, laborious reading, and readerly transformation in the context of late medieval devotional culture. Each chapter pairs one aspect of the text with an external, Latinate discourse in order to explore the ways in which the author adapts and re-calibrates it for the purposes of establishing a new form of vernacular reading. . . . Turning to Gower, the third chapter discusses the presentation of alchemy in the poem as an idealized form of interpretive labor that is simultaneously offered as a model for reading and rejected as a physical and textual practice. The final chapter examines the problem of producing accurate and effective language through vernacular confessional discourse in the 'Confessio.' Each transmuted discourse contributes to the 'hermeneutic narrative,' or the interpretive path readers generate as they work their way through the texts. The dissertation shows that the historical importance of these poems lies in their open commitment to the construction of this hermeneutic narrative, while their critical usefulness lies in their ability to highlight similar questions in other contemporary texts. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sentenced to hard labor: Vernacular transformations in the late fourteenth century. 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 Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Irvin, Matthew William Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Published Irvin, Matthew William. "'In propria persona': Artifice, politics, and propriety in John Gower's Confessio Amantis." PhD thesis, Duke University, 2009. Dissertation Abstracts International A70.12. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/items/13035f6e-6306-4cc2-85fa-6a63abab12f8. Review "This dissertation examines the use of personae, the rhetorical artifices by which an author creates different voices, in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." I argue that the "Confessio" attempts to expose how discourses of sexual desire alienate subjects from their proper place in the political world, and produce artificial personae that only appear socially engaged. The first three chapters consider the creation of the personae in the context of medieval Aristotelian political thought and the "Roman de la Rose" tradition. The last three chapters examine the extended discourse of Gower's primary personae in the "Confessio Amantis," drawing upon Gower's other works and the history of Gower 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/. 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 Thesis NonPeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource 'In propria persona': Artifice, politics, and propriety in John Gower's Confessio Amantis. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Williams, Jon Kenneth Published Williams, Jon Kenneth. "Languages of kingship in Ricardian Britain." PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2009. Gower Subject In Praise of Peace Minor Latin Poetry Cronica Tripertita Influence and Later Allusion Review "In 'Languages of Kingship in Ricardian Britain' I examine representations of King Richard II, most notably known to literature as Shakespeare's doomed protagonist, a hubristic, puerile, and clearly unfit king who awaits his deserved overthrow. This portrayal, written and performed centuries after Richard's deposition and subsequent murder, springs from a mythology perpetuated by Richard's supplanter, Henry of Lancaster, and his adherents: that the Ricardian regime existed only as a prologue to its own eclipse. Texts that date from Richard's twenty-two-year reign (1377-1399), however, used many of the same descriptors and rhetorical strategies that the Lancastrians would adapt--but with very different ambitions and ends. . . . In my fourth chapter I read a series of texts that date to the final year of Richard's reign and to the first years of the Lancastrian dynasty. I trace a debate amongst several poems about the nature and efficacy of advisory literature as a genre once it was evident that earlier literature of advice had failed to alter Richard's behavior. I argue that the anonymous poem 'Richard the Redeless' attempts to avoid tribulations similar to those that bedeviled Richard's earlier reign by declaring that learned men have a civic responsibility to advise the king and that John Gower's poems 'In Praise of Peace' and 'O Deus Immense' propose that divine favor must be earned through good government and not considered an expected appurtenance of kingship. Finally, I propose that Gower introduces into his narrative of Richard's fall, the Tripartite Chronicle, a psychological motive for the king's failure to heed prior good counsel: a mysterious, interior 'dark suffering' that would reappear for centuries in historical and biographical accounts of the late king. Gower's efforts, reflect the pervasive recognition that political sovereignty is ultimately a literary construct. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Languages of kingship in Ricardian Britain. 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 Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation explores attitudes toward literary form in fourteenth-century London's trilingual culture and what it means to package science, politics, and social upheaval as literature. John Gower, the author of substantial poems in the three languages of his day treating topics as varied as clerical greed, aristocratic vice, rebellion, astronomy, and alchemy, writes at the intersection of literature, history, and science. Though called a historian and a compiler, Gower was foremost a poet whose political, cultural, and scientific writings grew out of his sense of poetry as a whole built from smaller pieces. Division was a force Gower feared, yet exploited. Though Gower critiques the broken political body, most famously in his treatment of the 1381 Rebellion but also throughout his many writings on politics, division could also signify marvelous design. To Gower, the music of the mythical harper Arion is not pure magic but a technical product of 'mesure,' a word signifying notes organized in a pattern. Similarly, the stars of the zodiac are divided into signs, and alchemy, though it transforms diverse metals, requires divided elements before it can unite them through an elaborate process of refinement. Gower examines the sciences' negotiation between division and harmony as a way of articulating his own poetic project. Division is a theme throughout his corpus, physically rendered by the metaphor of the body--be it zodiacal, alchemical, political, bestial, incestuous, or verbal--and thus the body's valences are multiplied by examining its parts as well as its whole structure. Division is not always something to be feared; it can be a way to know an object more fully by examining its detailed composition. Broadly speaking, the chapters investigate Gower's poetic experiment with parts and wholes. Chapters One and Two explore the parts and wholes of language. Meaningful play in rhyme words can underscore words within words and differences in words that appear the same. Syllabic play, meanwhile, allows a poet to build words from pieces. Chapter Three investigates Gower's attitude toward alchemy, the process of converting base metals to gold, or multiplicity to singularity. While Gower lauds this science, he is aware of language's limitations in engaging in this process; words generate more words, and translations lose the secrets of older texts composed in other languages. In Chapter Two I discussed the bodies of the 1381 rebels, allegorized as beasts with hybrid forms, while Chapter Four explores processes of change in composite bodies, including the zodiac man, Nebuchadnezzar's Statue of Precious Metals, and the Greek pantheon as an anatomical man. Chapter Five contrasts Chaucer's and Gower's literary presentation of astronomy; Chaucer's 'House of Fame' seeks authority in literature, while Gower's praise of science is for its own sake. Gower's treatise is given a literary spin in the manner in which Gower writes of the constellations as objects that operate as couplets, both of which engage in meaningful repetition and productive duality. Chapter Six treats linguistic composite bodies through the theme of incest in riddles as developed in Gower's 'Mirour de l'Omme' and 'Confessio Amantis.' Author/Editor Author/Editor Zarins, Kimberly Published Zarins, Kimberly. "Writing the literary zodiac: Division, unity, and power in John Gower's poetics." PhD thesis, Cornell University, 2009. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Writing the literary zodiac: Division, unity, and power in John Gower's poetics 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 Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This volume has a foreword by Diane Watt, a brief introduction by the editor and nine essays, arranged as follows under three headings: "Manuscripts, Material, and Translation" (Peck, Galloway, Driver, Bullón-Fernández), "Rhetoric and Authority" (Mitchell, Donavin, Urban), "London Life and Texts" (Bertolet, Salisbury). See individual entries. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Urban, Malte, ed. Published Urban, Malte, ed. "John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts." Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009 ISBN 9782503524702 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 John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts 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 PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Although not concerned with Gower per se, Jones focuses squarely on medieval elements visible in "Pericles," whose plot was ultimately derived (whether wholly by Shakespeare or not) from Gower's "Apollonius of Tyre" in CA 8. Noting that for some in the Middle Ages (including the anonymous pamphleteer behind The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, ca. 1380-1425, with whose opinions Jones opens) "dead books" offered an illiterate public little spiritual solace or counsel. Preferable were plays, essentially "quike bookis" that all could read through the actors' efforts. Jones argues that such a view of the theatre's exemplarity underlies the development of the chorus or Prologue character as a figure of authority in early modern drama, both for good (e.g., Mercy in "Mankind") or for ill (as in the case of the "subversive authority" of the Machiavel [204-05]). One such figure is "Gower" in "Pericles" but because "Gower is also a historical figure and subject to . . . visual iconicity" (206) his recognized status as a moral writer for Shakespeare's audience (still inhabiting a time when print culture was fluid, and "where perhaps the literary and performative modes of storytelling were not so entirely disparate entities" [207]) could be counted on to lend his words added authority in his role as Prologue. Thus, Jones argues, "Shakespeare's play projects Gower as a hybrid of archaic alterity and iconic familiarity" (209). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Jones, Kelly Published Jones, Kelly. "'The Quick and the Dead': Performing the Poet Gower in Pericles." In Shakespeare and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Performance and Adaptation of the Plays with Medieval Sources or Settings. Ed. Driver, Martha W., and Ray, Sid. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009, pp. 201-214. 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 'The Quick and the Dead': Performing the Poet Gower in Pericles Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available McFarland, 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 As the reception history of Gower and his CA clearly shows, Jacobean England knew both the poet and his poem as representing values which were seen as those of an earlier age and quite distinctive from those of Protestant England. Whether through "Greenes Vision," Berthelette's black-letter edition of the CA, Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde," or Gower's tomb at St. Saviour's (Southwark's "theatrical parish"), Shakespeare's encounters with Gower were with the poet representing the moral authority of pre-Reformation, medieval England. Shakespeare's "Pericles," a re-conception of Gower's tale of Apollonius, foregrounds its source's medieval origins. In addition to the dumb show (a form "Shakespeare clearly connected . . . with the past"), Shakespeare highlights Gower's antiquity by embedding Latin within his English lines, clothing the poet in recognizably medieval garb, and placing the poet in the role of a presenter (a role associated with old-fashioned mystery and morality plays) who speaks in an antique register. These purposeful medievalisms provide a moral seriousness essential to understanding the play. And yet, it is these medieval elements that are quickly excised when "Pericles" has been staged in the past 150 years. Without them, however, the play loses its moral cohesion, giving us "sufficient reason to insist on the medieval presence when performing 'Pericles'." [CB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Shakespeare as Medievalist: What it Means for Performing 'Pericles'." In Shakespeare and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Performance and Adaptation of the Plays with Medieval Sources or Settings. Ed. Driver, Martha W. and Ray, Sid. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009, pp. 215-31. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Shakespeare as Medievalist: What it Means for Performing 'Pericles'. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available McFarland, 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. "Gower and Ovid: Pygmalion and the (Dis)illusion of the Word." In Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee. Ed. Galloway, Andrew and Yeager, R.F. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009, pp. 363-80. ISBN 9780802099174 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review Pointing out that Gower's "Tale of Pygmalion" (CA IV.37-450) is the only re-telling of Ovid's "Metamorphoses" X.238-97 by a Middle English author, Bullón-Fernández argues that "Gower shares with Ovid a similarly paradoxical view: fundamentally, the Ovidian desire for language to create reality, and the simultaneous awareness of the impossibility of its fulfillment" (364). She traces the major sources, in addition to Ovid, that Gower likely considered in producing his version--"Roman de la Rose," Petrus Berchorius' "Ovidius moralizatus"--to illustrate both the common agency of Venus' power in bringing the statue to life, and also the steady shift from Ovid's "active" Pygmalion, who prominently engages with his creation tactily (so much so, indeed, that we often fail to notice that animation comes via prayer) to a more verbal version in the "Roman" ("Jean's Pygmalion is articulate and seems a better love poet than sculptor," [368]), to an identification in Berchorius of Pygmalion with "preachers who sculpt souls, especially the souls of holy women" (369), and finally to the CA, in which "it . . . seems that it is solely Pygmalion's prayer, his appropriate use of words, which leads Venus, or love more generally, to reward him" (372). Bullón-Fernández points out that CA IV is concerned with Sloth, and that the Pygmalion story offers a counter-example to the sub-sin of Pusillanimity (which she defines as "a lack of courage to use words" [371]), i.e., because Pygmalion continually prays, sending up a never-ending stream of words until "Venus of hire grace herde" (IV.419). Thus, to a hasty reader the word in the CA might appear independently powerful, and encourage interpretations of the tale as Gower's vision of his own poetic art. Berchorius strengthens this reading, to a point, since the connection of Pygmalion with preachers in the "Ovidius moralizatus" gives Gower precedent to link Genius with Pygmalion, and consequently his labor to bring Amans to a better life with the vivification of the sculpture (369). But Bullón-Fernández argues against this, by underscoring the irony inherent in Genius' role as priest of Venus, and also by calling attention to the interchangeability of Venus and Fortune in the tale. While Genius strives to represent the word as responsible for the statue's animation, Gower (like Ovid, mutatis mutandis) on the contrary emphasizes the intervention of Fortune, a goddess arbitrary by nature. Genius' preferred lesson offers "the fantasy of fulfillment of desire" and is "only half the story . . . . Genius allows Gower to express his desire for control, his desire to shape others, evoking the Ovidan melancholic desire for a power that he does not have. At the same time, we can also see in the "Confessio" an Ovidian distancing from that desire and an awareness of the impossibility of its fulfillment. At the end of the poem, Gower becomes the disillusioned lover and the disillusioned writer who in recognizing his lack of amorous power also recognizes the limits of the power he has through writing" (375-76). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Ovid: Pygmalion and the (Dis)illusion of the Word. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Toronto Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 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 Kobayashi, Yoshiko Published Kobayashi, Yoshiko. "The Voice of an Exile: From Ovidan Lament to Prophecy in Book I of John Gower's Vox Clamantis." In Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee. Ed. Galloway, Andrew and Yeager, R.F. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009, pp. 363-80. ISBN 9780802099174 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Review It is difficult to do justice in a short summary to this closely-argued, entirely persuasive essay. Those with any interest either in the Vox Clamantis or Gower's centonic Latin strategies are therefore urged to read it themselves. Essentially Kobayashi demonstrates, by a carefully supported examination of Ovid's exilic poetry--"Tristia," "Heroides," and the Evander section of the "Fasti," added during revisions made in Tomis--along with the Philomela and Procne narrative from the "Metamorphoses," that Gower selectively borrows and incorporates Ovidian lines and passages into the Visio section of the VC in order to invoke the isolated, muted and feminized experience Ovid projects in his works composed in exile. Gower' s skillful choices permit him to triangulate the fate and sentiments of Hecuba at Troy's fall with the city of London ravaged (raped) by the 1381 rebels and with his own persona/poetic voice, hiding alone in the woods, emasculated, fearful of discovery and violation. The narrator/Gower's experience begins to turn, however, when the fearsome bestiary transforms into the dream of the voyaging ship (VC I.1600 ff.). Unlike Ovid, who decries his friends' abandonment of him in his hour of need, on the dream ship the narrator/Gower "is accompanied by 'many others of the noble class' ("[i]ngentui sexus alios . . . plures" [VC I.1603-04] (353), who join him in "a penitential sorrow" and "an admission of sin" (354). This facilitates a move away from Ovid to the Bible, specifically the Book of Lamentations, credited to the prophet Jeremiah. Kobayashi shows that the movement here is at once backwards--Jeremiah's early experience as an observer of Jerusalem's fall to Nebuchadnezzar recalls Troy's sacking and the narrator/Gower's fear of violation by the mob--and forwards, through Jeremiah's empowerment by the voice of the Lord, and consequent reinvention as the prophet and leader of his people in repenting their transgressions, the direct means to their ultimate deliverance. The obvious parallel with Jeremiah thus at the end of the Visio enables the narrator/Gower to restore his courage--and his masculinity--and speak powerfully in the ensuing books. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2]. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 228-39. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Voice of an Exile: From Ovidan Lament to Prophecy in Book I of John Gower's Vox Clamantis. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Toronto Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 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 Merrilees, Brian Pagan, Heather Published Merrilees, Brian and Pagan, Heather. "John Barton, John Gower and Others: Variation in Late Anglo-French." In Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c. 1100-c.1500. Ed. Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn and Collette, Carolyn and Kowaleski, Maryanne and Mooney, Linne R and Putter, Ad and Trotter, David. York: York Medieval Press, 2009, pp. 118-34. ISBN 9781903153277 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Review Although Merrilees and Pagan begin by introducing the "Donait" ("grammar") of John Barton, a Cheshireman schooled in Paris in the early fifteenth century, and examine three chronologically descending passages from the "Anglo-Norman Prose Brut" to 1332, their primary study is of Gower's French as exemplified in the Mirour de l'Omme. (They do not include the balades in their surveyed texts.) Noting that "John Gower's French works seem until recently to have fallen between the cracks in both French and Anglo-Norman scholarship" (123), and that he was "set aside as not being part of the Anglo-Norman canon" in the first edition of the 'Anglo-Norman Dictionary'" (123) ], he is set to make an appearance in the second edition, forthcoming at time of press. However much they approve of this revision (as they seem pleased enough by it), Merrilees and Pagan nonetheless use their chosen excepts from the MO to assert that "Gower's use of the French language seems particular" (124); indeed, "here we are dealing with a quite different 'niveau de langue,' consciously literary, and an Anglo-French that seems closer to continental than insular forms" (125). They position Gower in between continental and insular linguistic models (e.g., in the MO, most rhymes are continental, but "the orthography retains some Anglo-Norman features" (126). They note as well that this is not truly surprising, as "Gower is writing in a century that saw a flourishing of lexical creativity in French" and his reading demonstrably included both Anglo-Norman and continental poetry (126). In support they offer "a small sample of Gower's vocabulary, the letters A-E," selecting for four categories: 1) "words that appear to be restricted to French used in England;" 2) "words from continental French . . . but not recorded in Anglo-Norman;" 3) "words that, to date, we have not found other than in the works of John Gower;" 4) "words that may be debatable in their form or use but which should be considered in any treatment of Gower's French" (126-27). In addition to a number of detailed, technical observations, Merrilees and Pagan offer by way of general assessment that 1) "his adoption of fairly newly minted words" from the continental indicates "his familiarity with contemporary French" (130) and 2) "certainly Gower's French seems more standard than that of John Barton, and his overall ability to assimilate contemporary forms, and even to create his own, show a significant comprehension of French" (132). They posit as well that Gower, like "chancery officials, when addressing diplomatic documents in French to continental recipients," possibly "reduced the number of Anglo-Norman features" in his language--perhaps "recognizing or hoping for a wider audience than merely English" (134). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Barton, John Gower and Others: Variation in Late Anglo-French. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available York Medieval Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 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 Pouzet, Jean-Pascal Published Pouzet, Jean-Pascal. "Augustinian Canons and Their Insular French Books in Medieval England: Towards an Assessment." In Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c. 1100-c.1500. Ed. Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn and Collette, Carolyn and Kowaleski, Maryanne and Mooney, Linne R and Putter, Ad and Trotter, David. York: York Medieval Press, 2009, pp. 266-77. ISBN 9781903153277 Gower Subject Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review A prolegomenon to a larger study, this essay suggests "the extent to which Insular French books await more systematic investigation, if one attempts to sketch a literary geography of Augustinian agencies" (276). Notably, Pouzet cites the reproduction and dissemination of manuscripts of Langtoft ("regarded as production by a fellow canon") by Yorkshire Augustinian houses along "a route of circulation possibly running east (from Bridlington Priory . . .) to west--and such collaborative dissemination with the order is conceivable for other works as well, in Yorkshire and elsewhere" (276). The possibility has special relevance for Gowerians, as Pouzet remarks: "The situation is further enriched if we consider--in the light of John Gower's association with the Augustinian priory at Southwark--that the whole of the first booklet of London, British Library, MS Harley 3490, the 'Rede/Boarstall' manuscript of the Confessio Amantis, is a fifteenth-century copy of Edmund of Abingdon's Speculum Religiosorum, written by the same scribe as the subsequent Gower article," i.e., BL MS Stowe 951. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Augustinian Canons and Their Insular French Books in Medieval England: Towards an Assessment. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available York Medieval Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 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 Yeager's new essay – in this collection of studies on the use of French in England during the Middle English period – captures in one place the most important of the research he has presented in three earlier articles on Gower's works in French (see JGN 20 no. 1, 24 no. 2, and 26 no. 2) and adds some important new details, particularly on the "Traitié." MO, he believes, was written in two stages: the largest part of the work was composed in French on the model of Henry of Lancaster's "Livre des Seyntz Medicines" and for the same aristocratic audience; the concluding prayer to Mary, however, was added to make the work more suitable for the Austin canons of St Mary Overeys with whom Gower had taken up residence after 1378. The "Cinkante Balades" is the later of Gower's two ballade collections as evidenced by its use of an envoy, on the model of Deschamps rather than Machaut; and conceived as a response to the popular "Livre des Cent Ballades," it was addressed to an audience of "French chevalier poets" (142) of the sort with whom the future Henry IV associated during the early 1390s. The "Traitié" is the earlier composition: Yeager has little patience with the notion that it was composed in 1397 as a wedding gift for the poet's new bride. As evidence of its readership, Yeager reconsiders the identity of the "Quixley" who names himself as the author of the English translation of the "Traitié" in BL MS Stowe 951. Rather than the small landowner chosen by MacCracken, Yeager offers instead a Robert de Quixley, prior of Nostell Priory, near York, between 1393 and 1427. Nostell was also house of Austin canons, suggesting both the nature of Gower's original readership – identical to that which Yeager proposes for the completed MO – and the means of transmission to the translator. The very fact of the translation also attests to the decline in the use of French after 1399. Yeager notes that Gower's only known composition in French after Henry's accession is the pair of ballades that preface the "Cinkante Balades" in the sole surviving manuscript, dedicating the collection to the new king, and there, his reference to the Latin verses that follow the two ballades as being in "perfit langage" is itself a comment on the status of French and Gower's choice to use either English or Latin for all of the work he composed during the final decade of his life. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2]. Reprinted in virtually identical form, in Dutton, Elisabeth, ed., with John Hines and R.F. Yeager, "John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition." Westfield Medieval Studies, 3. Cambridge: Brewer, 2010, pp. 304-14. Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "John Gower's French and his Readers." In Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c.1100-c.1500. Ed. Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn and Collette, Caroline and Kowaleski, Maryanne and Mooney, Linne R and Putter, Ad and Trotter, David. York: York Medieval Press, 2009, pp. 135-45. ISBN 9781903153277 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Manuscripts and Textual Studies 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 and his Readers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available York Medieval Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 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 Recognizing that glossing establishes a form of "multi-voicing" in poetry, Galloway remarks that "such glossing of Middle English manuscripts is relatively rare, and generally thin when it appears" (40). The CA, however, offers "the great exception to this faint tradition of Latin glosses on English poetry" and because of the nonpareil nature of Gower's practice there, "this suggests that we need a fuller history of Latin glosses of English verse to appreciate its dynamic if ghostly functions, certainly to appreciate the unusual role that Gower has cast it in" (40). While not purporting to offer a complete version of that "fuller history," Galloway suggests the case of "The Prick of Conscience" as "an alternate tradition of Latin glossing of English poetry that points toward possibilities not otherwise exploited in the English literary tradition, not even by Gower" (41) and notes that "the case presents a particularly useful way to ponder the meaning of the relation between text and gloss in the Confessio Amantis as well" (43). The glosses in the "Prick of Conscience," Galloway argues convincingly via examples and illustrations of full pages (45-64), "are vital intellectual materials because the English text of that poem touches on matters where the Latin and English doctrinal materials have a living context and tradition, the confessional world" and it is a world in which "the glosses [are] productive of other glosses for the same reason: an audience that energetically uses it and needs it, with all the complexity they can find in it and explicate from it for themselves and others. 'The Prick of Conscience' glosses are extensions of the cultural energy that the poem itself was part of, in sifting sin, punishment, and penance" (65) This multi-vocal glossing tradition helps clarify Gower's practice, by contrast: his glosses have a "deadening and timeless quality . . . . Their point is clear only in its further highlighting of the vividness and action of the English poetry, and in terms of a subtle rejection of the clerically controlled confessional world. He addressed, at least potentially, a readership able to appreciate the irony of dull Latin glosses to rich English stories, just at the copyists and readers of the 'Prick of Conscience' addressed an audience possibly able to appreciate the enrichment of vital Latin glosses on moral theology. Gower's glosses at best emphasize by contrast the English poetry's display of individual and civic self-determination, and its psychological complexities of sin that no priest can take up and absolve, for which a secular writer is needed to impose the terms of civic and secular soul-searching and ethical ideals" (65). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew Published Galloway, Andrew. "Gower's Confessio Amantis, the Prick of Conscience, and the History of the Latin Gloss in Early English Literature." In John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts. Ed. Urban, Malte. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009, pp. 39-70. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Confessio Amantis, the Prick of Conscience, and the History of the Latin Gloss in Early English Literature Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brepols, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review 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 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 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 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 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 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 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