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 Review In this essay Pérez-Fernández assesses examples of variation in the paratextual materials of the manuscripts of the Portuguese and Castilian translations of Gower's "Confessio Amantis": Madrid, Real Biblioteca MS II-3088 and Madrid, Biblioteca del Escorial g-II-19. She focuses on the translations of the Latin summaries (generally thought to have been written by Gower) that preface the narratives of CA and on the table of content written in Castilian but found in each Iberian manuscript. Pérez-Fernández discusses details of these materials, contributing to what is already known about their transmission, and offering perspective on their cultural contexts. Some variations, she shows, "can be understood as a desire to cater to the concerns of the new Iberian audience" (119-20)--mention of Spain, for example, not found in the Latin original, or specific emphasis on the "wisdom" ("sabedoria") of Alphonse X, "commonly known as Alphonse the Wise" (120). Conversely, when the table of contents in MS Real Biblioteca omits reference to the wisdom of Alphonse, Pérez-Fernández surmises, it may reflect the "complicated relationship between the Trastamara rulers and Alphonse's legitimate and illegitimate heirs" (121). Other details invite "us to reconsider the relation of the Portuguese and the Castilian manuscripts both from a textual and a translatological point of view" (125): the tabulator's sensitivity to capital letters and spaces, for example, shows that he "used the Portuguese text itself to create the new entries where there was no summary available," an act of "conscientious labor of adaptation and improvement" (126). Details drawn from "external sources"--e.g., Tristan's origins in "leonjs" (Leonis) and Isolde's "brunda" (blonde) hair--indicate familiarity with the "Castilian version of the story, and not with the Castilian-Aragonese" and "help us draw a more defined portrait of the scribes and translators." Pérez-Fernández tallies, she tells us, "some of the most notable examples of deviations in the paratexts of the Iberian manuscripts" of CA in order to "reveal the processes of textual transmission and reception" of the work (129). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pérez-Fernández, Tamara. Published Pérez-Fernández, Tamara. "Paratextual Deviations: The Transmission and Translation of Gower's Confessio Amantis in the Iberian Peninsula." In Martha Driver, Derek Pearsall, and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books. Publications of the John Gower Society, no. 14. Rochester, NY: Brewer, 2020. Pp. 113-30. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Paratextual Deviations: The Transmission and Translation of Gower's "Confessio Amantis" in the Iberian Peninsula. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review 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 Japanese. Out of the 297 examples of paronomasia found by Ito in the entire VC, 31 are included in the lines borrowed or imitated from such authoritative texts as Ovid's poetry, Peter de Riga's "Aurora," Nigel de Longchamps's "Speculum Stultorum," Gregory the Great's "Cura Pastoralis," and the Vulgate Bible; the rest are Gower's own inventions. Although there are cases in which paronomasia is used merely for the sake of rhetorical ornamentation, Ito finds many instances where this rhetorical device, through its witty juxtaposition of words that are similar in sound but opposite in meaning, becomes an effective means of expressing the conflicts and contradictions that beset English society in Gower's time. Ito thus argues that paronomasia is an important element of Gower's Latin style that he employs to enhance the impact of his social and moral satire in the VC. [Yoshiko Kobayashi; rev. MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ito, Masayoshi Published Ito, Masayoshi. "Paronomasia in 'Vox Clamantis'." Bulletin of College of General Education, Tohoku University 6 (1967), pp. 21-35. [ISSN 0287-8844]. English version in Ito's John Gower, The Medieval Poet (Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1976), pp. 199-213. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations 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 Paronomasia in "Vox Clamantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1967 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 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 Given the frequent attention paid in previous criticism to Gower's depiction of father-daughter relations, Peck chooses to focus his attention in this essay on Gower's portrayal of father-son relationships, beginning with what he calls "the dramatic presence of the father-son trope for the whole of the 'Confessio,' namely the relationship of Genius and Amans" (61). His analysis then focuses on three tales: the "Tale of the False Bachelor" (CA II.2510-781); "The Tale of Canace and Machaire" (CA III.143-360); and "The Tale of Constance" (CA II.587-1598). In his account, each of these narratives concern battles between the heart and the intellect, split priorities necessitated by the fact that, in Peck's formulation, "Genius, as priestly confessor, serves two masters: the pagan goddess Venus and the Christian Trinity . . ." (61). From these materials, Peck argues that: "In his 'Confessio Amantis,' John Gower may not be revolutionary in his critique of patriarchy and familial relationships under patriarchal jurisdiction, but no fourteenth-century English writer is more aware of and articulate about the limitations of patriarchal behavior in the practices of his own day" (59). [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A. Published Peck, Russell A. "Patriarchy, Family, and Law in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 59-78. 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 Patriarchy, Family, and Law in Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation explores the relationships between different constructions of ethics and politics in the intricate thematic and narrative structures of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis.' Chapter 1 reconsiders [the] confession[al] . . . dialogue of Amans and Genius as an internal dialogue between faculties of a single psyche . . . , [arguing] that Gower's use of penitential materials is one of secular appropriation . . . [whereby] various ethical and ecclesiological norms of penitential writings exert even less pressure on [CA] . . . than on Gower's earlier 'Mirour de l'Omme.' Genius's tendency to represent spirituality as immanent in secular society is given its fullest and most idealistic treatment in a cluster of romance narratives which I define in my second chapter: these are tales with a basic narrative structure in common, through which Gower can resolve the poems' ethical, sexual, familial and political themes harmoniously and in parallel. The optimistic closure, however, is resisted by a more sceptical narrative current, owing much to Ovid's 'Metamorphoses.' The patterns of competition between more confident and more sceptical currents is a recurrent feature of the 'Confessio's' design, its most striking and problematic manifestation in the poem's politics, which I explore in Chapters 3 to 5. In narrative and 'in propria persona', here as well as elsewhere in his works, Gower asserts and explores the authorial role of a public poet addressing the king and the nation." Author/Editor Author/Editor Dimmick, Jeremy Neil. Published Dimmick, Jeremy Neil. "Patterns of Ethics and Politics in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." Ph. D. Dissertation. University of Cambridge, 1997. Index to Theses, with Abstracts: Accepted for Higher Degrees by the Universities of Great Britain and Ireland 47.3 (1998), no. 5506. Dissertation Abstracts International C70.19. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Patterns of Ethics and Politics in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Parkes' new essay constitutes a sequel to the groundbreaking study of the Trinity College MS of CA that he and Ian Doyle (the dedicatee of the festschrift in which the present essay appears) published in the festschrift for another of the century's great palaeographers, Neil Ker, in 1978. In the earlier essay, Doyle and Parkes studied the collaboration of five scribes in the production of a single copy of Gower's poem, and they concluded that while the scribes worked simultaneously, they must have worked independently, and that they could not therefore have been part of the same scriptorium. In his new study, Parkes examines a very different situation, the evident collaboration of ten different scribes whose hands can be detected either copying or revising six of our most important MSS of Gower's works: the four earliest MSS of VC, the "Fairfax" MS of CA (which served as the basis for Macaulay's edition), and the "Trentham" MS, containing shorter French and Latin compositions. All but the last of these contains significant rewriting over erasure and additions to the text that evidently reflect Gower's own revisions and alterations. Based on deductions from the nature of the revisions and from the pattern of the scribes' activity, Parkes drives what ought to be the final nails into the coffin of Macaulay's notion of a scriptorium in which Gower himself supervised the production of copies of his works, and adds some important details to our understanding of the operation of the London booktrade in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. His suggestions also complicate rather than simplify our understanding of the evolution of Gower's text. Parkes begins with a conventional account of Gower's revisions to his text as the poet's responses to contemporary events, an explanation that works better for the changes in VC than it does for those in CA. In the latter case, the allusions are not as direct, and many of the links to specific events that have been proposed are only speculative. For Parkes' purposes, however, sufficient evidence of chronology is provided by the non-controversial allusions to three key events: Henry's accession to the throne in 1399, Gower's blindness in approximately 1400, and his death in 1408. The most detailed and most interesting part of Parkes' essay is his close examination of the work of the ten scribes (illustrated in eight very valuable plates from the MSS that he discusses). His identification of the different hands at work in each MS is evidently identical to Macaulay's, but he gives a more precise account of the different stages of the work of the scribes who entered some of the more extensive revisions, based on changes in their handwriting and in the color of the ink. He also goes much further than Macaulay in identifying the same hand when it appears in other MSS, and he is thus able to compare the contribution that each scribe made in each copy on which he worked. One of his more important observations is that a scribe didn't necessarily work from the same exemplar when he entered revisions in different copies. Parkes is also able to show that there is no evidence of collaboration among the different scribes, or even that they worked simultaneously. He thus concludes that they worked fully independently of one another, as well as outside the poet's supervision. How did such a situation arise? The revised MSS must not have been produced for Gower himself, he deduces, but for different patrons who were likely the original owners of the "unrevised" copies, and who commissioned scribes to provide them with updated revisions. "The owners of these manuscripts must have been persons who knew that Gower had revised his texts, or perhaps that he had revised his views," who independently chose the same scribes since they all probably lived nearby in London. They evidently left to the scribes themselves, however, the procuring of an exemplar. The picture that Parkes offers here explains a great deal about the appearance of the surviving copies, but in other respects it raises more questions than ever. Parkes refers to these manuscripts as "first generation" copies, but it appears from his argument that none of them can be considered a replica of Gower's own exemplar. His discussion of the many layers of revision of the "Fairfax" MS casts doubt on all of the assumptions that Macaulay made in using it for his edition; it remains to some future editor to figure out how it and the other surviving copies, each with its own very complicated history, can be used in reconstructing Gower's text. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Parkes, Malcolm Published Parkes, Malcolm. "Patterns of Scribal Activity and Revisions of the Text in Early Copies of Works by John Gower." In New Science out of Old Books[:] Manuscripts and Early Printed Books: Essays in Honour of A.I. Doyle. Ed. Beadle, Richard and Piper, A.J.. London: Scolar, 1995, pp. 81-121. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Patterns of Scribal Activity and Revisions of the Text in Early Copies of Works by John Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Scolar, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "The penitential fictions that frame Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women" and Gower's "Confessio Amantis" ostensibly measure each poet's fidelity to the amorous ideology codified in courtly literature, but the real object of the poems' critique is the courtly code itself. This critique complicates the operation of the poems' framed narratives as simply moralized exempla; instead, they offer the reader a challenge in independent ethical interpretation. . . . In the Confessio Amantis, allegorical figures borrowed from orthodox scholastic cosmography masquerade as presiding deities of the conventional 'Court of Love' to engage Gower's protagonist is a penitential dialogue, with the covert purpose of challenging his amorous obsession. Gower's exemplary tales often supersede or contradict their stated amorous significations, serving instead as rich aesthetic reworkings of the poem's theological and political themes." [JGN 14.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gould, Cynthia Marie Published Gould, Cynthia Marie. "Penitential Fictions, the Trial of Courtly Love, and the Emancipation of Story in the 'Legend of Good Women' and the 'Confessio Amantis'." PhD thesis, Northwestern University, 1994. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Penitential Fictions, the Trial of Courtly Love, and the Emancipation of Story in the 'Legend of Good Women' and the 'Confessio Amantis' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review From Ward's abstract: "My dissertation elucidates how . . .William Langland [in 'Piers Plowman'], John Gower [in 'Confessio Amantis'], and Geoffrey Chaucer [in 'The Canterbury Tales'] . . . address the challenge posed to Christian ethics due to the proliferation of urban markets and increased personal wealth in medieval England . . . . [and] demonstrates that these vernacular authors appropriate the various genres of penitential literature, one of the most popular forms of writing in the period, to foster their readers as moral subjects . . . . [T]hese poets deploy the rhetorical techniques of a specific penitential discourse to argue that avarice--not pride--is the most pernicious vice because it diminishes communal wellbeing and harms individuals and their relations to God." Author/Editor Author/Editor Ward, Jessica D. Published Ward, Jessica D. "Penitentials to Poetry: The Literary Critique of Avarice in Fourteenth-Century England." Ph.D. Dissertation. The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2019. 218 pp. DAI A81.01 (2019). Full text accessible at http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/Ward_uncg_0154D_12677.pdf (unrestricted); accessed February 22, 2022. 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 Penitentials to Poetry: The Literary Critique of Avarice in Fourteenth-Century England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review General survey of background to "Pericles," citing Gower as a major source, particularly for place- and character-names. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hoeniger, F. David, ed. Published Hoeniger, F. David, ed. Pericles. The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1963, pp. xiii-xix, xliiin. 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 Pericles. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1963 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Citing its "unforced yet profound symbolism" (128), Dean finds Gower's Tale of Apollonius (CA VIII) a treasury of prototypes for Shakespeare's "Pericles," which he sees as a play about "the storytelling process itself" (125) and the very meaning of "tales," which varies from an idle "old tale" to a revelation of secret truth (126-27). Imagery and symbolism skillfully deployed by Gower, and channeled in "Pericles," include the descent of Apollonius into the pitch-dark hold of the ship, suited to his despair, and his daughter's following him there. When her philosophical discussion fails to revive him, "in the derke forth sche goth / Til sche him toucheth" (VIII.1692), whereupon he begins to awaken. "Gower's episode concludes nobly," according to Dean, who quotes the evocative lines "This king hath founde newe grace / So that out of his derke place / He goth him up into the liht (1739-41, p. 129). Spiritually reborn, Apollonius learns that his life has a "destination" (130) despite the vagaries of fortune, much as Gower the character interprets the tumultuous series of events in Shakespeare's "Pericles." The music metaphor introduced by Gower, as Apollonius learns how to be "wel grounded" (l. 1992), is expanded by Shakespeare as the resurrected Pericles is divinely privileged to hear "the music of the spheres" (129). Dean speculates on possible common sources for both Gower and Shakespeare, including the story of Jonah, albeit modified by the sea journeys of the Apostle Paul as described in the Acts of the Apostles, especially the shipwreck and casting forth of Paul and his maritime companions. Like Paul, Apollonius and Pericles are anti-Jonah figures, who receive the divine command--in Gower, an "Avisioun" of the hero's future course (VIII.1801)--but unlike Jonah, they obey, and unlike Jonah, their presence on shipboard is protective to others (137). The extra-biblical sea journey described in the Golden Legend and the Digby Play of Mary Magdalene, which also features the casting overboard of a wife and child, the husband's patience, and their ultimate near-miraculous reunion (134-36) may also have been influential on both. [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dean, Paul. Published Dean, Paul. "Pericles' Pilgrimage." Essays in Criticism 50.2 (Apr 2000): 125-44. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Pericles' Pilgrimage. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This essay is not concerned, as might be expected from the title, either with Gower's lyrics or with Petrarch's, but instead draws a broader comparison between CA as a whole and Petrarch's own definition of his life and career as contained in his "Letter to Posterity." Despite the great differences in form between these two works, Wood asserts that their general aims are the same: the denunciation of the vanity of youthful pleasure, and the diminution of all earthly rewards as compared to heavenly. More specific details reinforce the impression of a common heritage: similar imagery to describe the departure from love, similar addresses to posterity, and similar modesty topoi. Petrarch's letter ends inconclusively, however, while he is still in a restless state of wandering. To account for this and some other differences in CA, Wood turns to Augustine's Confessions, with its case history of the author's own life and its movement from restlessness to rest. Rather than being merely reductive, Wood concludes, the similarities to these two earlier works suggest some of the ways in which Gower tried to create something different and better, following precisely Petrarch's counsel on a poet's use of his sources. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wood, Chauncey Published Wood, Chauncey. "Petrarchanism in the Confessio Amantis." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 239-256. 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 Petrarchanism in the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 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 Review Argues that Gower's popularity in his own time, and in the hundred or so years following his death, was due primarily to a contemporary taste for elaborate allegory, not to the poet's talent. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pauli, Reinhold. Published Pauli, Reinhold. Pictures of Old England. Translated by E.C. Otto. London: Macmillan, 1861, pp. 212-16, 220-26. Argues 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 Pictures of Old England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1861 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Brief reference to Gower/Chaucer friendship, Gower's interests, and the relationship of Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women" to Gower's CA. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Owen, Charles A., Jr. Published Owen, Charles A., Jr. Pilgrimage and Storytelling in the Canterbury Tales: The Dialectic of 'Ernest' and 'Game.' Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977, pp. 22n, 25, 74. 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 Pilgrimage and Storytelling in the Canterbury Tales: The Dialectic of "Ernest" and "Game." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1977 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Knapp's is the first of two essays in this collection concerned with Gower's knowledge of regions lying at the edge of Europe. Egypt is depicted at length in two passages in CA, in the excursus on religions in Book 5 and in the tale of Nectanabus in Book 7. In the first, Gower condemns the Egyptians, who worship animals, more severely than he does the Chaldeans, who worship planets and elements, because of the loss of distinction between the worshipper and the worshipped and the "full immersion of human beings in the world of nature" (32). The tale of Nectanabus illustrates the limits of astrology, particularly as compared to God's power, but also its truthfulness, within those limits. "Within the closed circuit of astrology, the world does indeed proceed as a purely mechanical process, with the human positioned as simply another object pushed and pulled by celestial causation. And this fatalism, I would argue, is to be read as a specifically Egyptian temptation, as the surrender of the self into a world of natural mechanisms" (33). But while the death of Nectanabus suggests passing beyond astrology and sorcery, certain aspects of the story, including the accuracy of his prophecy and the portents surrounding Alexander's birth, suggest that "Egypt is not so easily left behind" (34). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Knapp, Ethan Published Knapp, Ethan. "Place of Egypt in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition. Ed. Dutton, Elisabeth, and Hines, John, and Yeager, R.F. Cambridge: Brewer, 2010, pp. 26-34. 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 Place of Egypt in Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This chapter pertains to Shakespeare's "Pericles," but with a pervasive emphasis on Gower's "Confessio Amantis" Book VIII as foundational not only to the tale of Apollonius/Pericles retold in the play, but also to the centrality of old age and "infirmities" in the character of Shakespeare's choric Gower (1.0.2-3). Rogers uses the term "prosthesis" metaphorically, as a visual or verbal "supplement" that fills the "gaps" in a portrayal (105 et passim; "Pericles" 4.4.8). Both Gower-characters, in the CA and in "Pericles," personify the "prosthetic role of old age . . . [as] debility . . . [but also] as an additive to power and authority" with wisdom to impart (104-5). In parallel fashion, both Gowers deploy a fusty old tale to serve their present-day audience as a "restorative" capable of bringing "new life" and "ethical healing" (106; also 114-16, 118-19). Shakespeare's Gower is himself a "prosthetic" figure, as his narrative voice fills in the missing pieces of the story and supplements the dumb shows (111, 117). Rogers asserts the "central position" of the Gower-persona's "surprise appearance at the end of Book VIII [as an old man]" to "moments of revision within Shakespeare's own text." In this famous scene in the CA, Venus presents the poet-persona with a mirror in which he sees his ravaged face through "myn hertes yhe" (8.2824), as he evocatively describes, and thus is cured of his love (116). Just as the earlier Gower must rely on his inward eye "as a prosthesis to his powers of sight," so Shakespeare's Gower must call upon the devices of the theater and the imagination of the audience (3.0.58) as a "crutch" to help them "see" the story (122-23). The wisdom personified in both figures is the "confession of impairments and debility, all of which serve as the staff for the old man" (124). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rogers, Will. Published Rogers, Will. "Playing Prosthesis and Revising the Past: Gower's Supplemental Role." Chapter 4 in Will Rogers, Writing Old Age and Impairments in Late Medieval England (Leeds, UK: Arc Humanities Press, 2021). Pp. 103-24. 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 Playing Prosthesis and Revising the Past: Gower's Supplemental Role. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Iwasaki lists a number of different constructions involving as from CA, e.g. "as forto," "as for," "as in," "as of," "as be weie of," "as touchende," "as tho," and "as thanne." In almost all cases the as is evidently pleonastic, and included for sake of meter alone, and to prove the point Iwasaki lists other passages that seem in every way similar in both meaning and construction but that omit the as. He also points to a small number of passages in which as cannot be omitted (e.g. "as for" in the sense of "concerning"), and in which as has some restrictive force [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Iwasaki, Haruo Published Iwasaki, Haruo. "Pleonastic 'as' in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Philologia Anglica: Essays Presented to Professor Yoshio Terasawa on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday. Ed. Oshitari, Kinshiro, and others. Tokyo: Kenkyushi, 1988, pp. 176-183. 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 Pleonastic 'as' in Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Kenkyushi, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Prints entirely of VC, with CrT, based on MS. All Souls, collated with MSS. Digby and Cotton A IV. Also prints "Quicquid Homo Scribat," "Eneidos Bucolis," and "O Deus Immense." [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Coxe, Rev. H. O., ed. Published Coxe, Rev. H. O., ed. Poema quod dicitur Vox clamantis, necnon Chronica tripartita. London: Roxburghe Club, 1850. Unrestricted access at http://mdz-nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10800469-2. Accessed June 15, 2022. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Cronica Tripertita Minor Latin Poetry Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Poema quod dicitur Vox clamantis, necnon Chronica tripartita. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1850 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The poems that are assembled in this superb new volume are the two long additions that Gower made to the original six books of the "Vox Clamantis": his nearly hysteric depiction of the 1381 peasants' uprising (which received its title, "Visio Anglie," from Maria Wickert, who first deciphered the layers of composition of the VC), and the "Cronica Tripertita," his post-usurpation Lancastrian propaganda piece on a very different assault on Richard's rule. The justification for bringing them together lies not just in their later composition but also in their shared departure from the original moralizing schema of the VC to "something else, effectively more satiric. On these two occasions, Gower wrote contemporary history" (David R. Carlson's introduction, p.8). These are certainly the portions of the work that will be of greatest interest to our students, and the value of the service that Carlson and Rigg have performed is heightened by the exemplary way in which they have executed it. Both texts have been freshly re-edited. Where Macaulay used a single manuscript for both (Oxford, All Souls College, Oxf. 98) in the belief that it was "certainly written and corrected under the direction of the author" (Works 4.lxi), Carlson uses Dublin, Trinity College MS 214 (Macaulay's T) for the "Visio" and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 92 (Macaulay's H3) for the "Cronica" (the only copy in which the Cronica appears apart from the Vox), in both cases seeking to represent what he deduces to be the earliest rather than the most revised state of the text.(For his choice of Hatton, see his 2007 essay, reviewed in JGN 28 no. 1.) At the same time, Carlson's record of variants from other manuscripts is much more complete than Macaulay's is. Carlson has also provided a whole new set of explanatory notes. In the "Visio," these are mostly concerned with tracing the source of Gower's borrowings. Macaulay identified most of the passages that Gower took from Ovid, but later scholars traced many additional lines to works such as the "Aurora" and the "Speculum Stultorum," for which we now rely on the notes in Stockton's translation. Carlson has few new citations to add (though there are some, e.g. section 1, lines 25 and 26), but where both Macaulay and Stockton tend to provide only the line references to the source, Carlson provides a complete quotation, highlighting the borrowed words in boldface, and when appropriate, a translation, and he also provides perceptive commentary on the choices that Gower made, both in selecting and in altering his borrowings. His commentary on the "Cronica" is more extensive and even more valuable, providing a detailed explanation of the events to which Gower alludes and of the relation between Gower's account and other sources, particularly the "Record and Process of the Renunciation and Deposition of Richard II" (which Carlson has also edited for PIMS) on which Gower's poem seems largely to be based. If the text and notes are not already enough to make this volume worth owning, we also have A. G. Rigg's verse translation. The unrhymed elegiac couplet of the "Visio" he renders in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameters), and the leonine hexameters of the "Cronica," with their disyllabic internal rhyme ("Isla tripertita, sequitur que, mente perita") he puts in rhyming hexameter couplets. And in both cases, to the extent that I can judge, the translation enhances rather than detracts from the sense of the original. The effect is best illustrated with an example. Here's Stockton's literal translation of "Cronica" 3.186ff. (a passage I chose almost at random): "With the situation like this, the King remained where he remained before, until his whole following trembled uneasily. Such highly inexperienced men rarely become prompt in action; similarly, all these men hesitated to be helped from any source. Fortune then turned her wheel away from them and remained blind while the King crossed over the seas. His own guilt cast [him] back into those snares which he had fashioned; he was to be ensnared when he reached the shores of his fatherland." Here is Riggs' version of the same passage (and a little more): "While things stood thus, the king still stood as he before / Had stood, until his court was fearful all the more. / Thus few are quick to act, by ignorance dismayed; / All equally have doubts from whence might come their aid. / Then Fortune turns her wheel aside, far off from these, / And blindly waits until the king should cross the seas. / His crimes now drove him to the snares that he had set; / When he seeks home, he'll be entangled in the net. / Yet nonetheless, where winds propelled him for their sport, / Fate gave to him his own and predetermined port. / Wild Wales received the royal ships within her quays, / But quickly let them go, in view of Richard's deeds. / The king cast lots and ordered troops to be enrolled, / But got no help where he no favours had bestowed. / On seeing this, some smiled and murmured quietly, / But others wept for sorrow, grieving inwardly. / The royal pomp declines, since happy times have gone; / All quickly turn aside and will not fight, not one." Stockton's will still have its uses, but it reads like a translation. Rigg's is more accessible; it is more like the experience of reading Gower's poem; the verse engages the attention in a way that prose cannot; and it is difficult to see that anything has been lost. Rigg has given the students who become interested in these poems a chance to see that Gower's Latin is not as dry as dust, as they might otherwise have supposed. Let's hope that PIMS doesn't wait too long to issue an affordable paperback edition. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R., ed. Rigg, A. G., trans. Published Carlson, David R., ed., and A. G. Rigg, trans. John Gower: Poems on Contemporary Events: The "Visio Anglie" (1381) and "Cronica tripertita" (1400). Toronto and Oxford: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies and Bodleian Library, 2011 ISBN 9780888441744 (PIMS); 9781851242900 (Bodleian Library) Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Minor Latin Poetry Vox Clamantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Cronica Tripertita Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Poems on Contemporary Events: The Visio Anglie (1381) and Cronica tripertita (1400) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies and Bodleian Library, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In this essay, Beatrice White surveys medieval depictions of the third estate, ranging widely among works by French, German, and English writers, but focusing on Langland, Chaucer, and Gower as the "outstanding English poets of the fourteenth century." She comments on works by some of their near-contemporaries as well, "the rank and file of versifiers" (69), and concludes, rather sweepingly, that "medieval poets, as might be expected, were often prejudiced and unreliable witnesses to the hard lot of the peasant, tending to present him as humble saint, surly, embittered serf, carousing bumpkin, patient toiler, or menacing figure of evil" (73). Stereotyping abounds, White shows, especially in the recurrent association of labor with poverty and, in her conclusion, she contrasts the poets' views with those of chroniclers, to the disadvantage of the former. Gower, in particular, for White, is a "theoretical liberal and practical conservative . . . moralist and landowner [who] looked at the peasant with distrust and suspicion, if not positive dislike" (65). She cites passages from the "Mirour de l'Omme" as predecessors to the "brutal and raging" peasants of "Vox Clamantis," while in "Confessio Amantis" there is "no room for them at all" (66-67). White concedes that Gower--like Chaucer and Langland--"resorted to" a "commonplace concerning equality" (67) but offers no citation. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor White, Beatrice. Published White, Beatrice. "Poet and Peasant." In F. R. H. Du Boulay and Caroline M. Barron, eds., The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack. (London: Athlone, 1971). Pp. 58-74. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Poet and Peasant. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Summary provided by the author: "Macaulay's account of the textual history of CA, particularly of the evolution of its three "recensions," depends on his assumption that Gower himself supervised the copying of the early MSS of his work. A close examination of the Fairfax and Stafford MSS, the earliest copies of "recension three" and "recension two," reveals that each is the complex product of several different layers of textual history, in none of which is Gower's own hand absolutely clear. Gower's revision of the poem, therefore, did not necessarily take place in the stages that are embodied in the surviving copies, and though it will make the job of Gower's next editor immensely more complicated, we must distinguish between the history of these MSS and the history of the text." [JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter Published Nicholson, Peter. "Poet and Scribe in the Manuscripts of Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Manuscripts and Texts: Editorial Problems in Later Middle English Literature. Ed. Pearsall, Derek. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1987, pp. 130-142. 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 Poet and Scribe in the Manuscripts of Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D.S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article relates the medieval sacrament of confession, and the manuals created to support it, to the emergence of true literary characters in late medieval fiction. Braswell's main focus is Ricardian (late fourteenth-century English) poetry, including the "Confessio Amantis. As mandatory auricular confession took root in European culture following the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), "the sinner" became "a complex individual who could both understand and articulate his feelings and actions . . . [he could also] convincingly change . . . " (40). Essential to character development in fiction was an interlocutor, not necessarily a priest, who questions the sinner to discover her personal situation and guide her inner progress. First, Braswell outlines the profusion of instructional manuals for priest and penitent on how to make a good confession. These include examples of dialogue in the first person, with the priest asking questions and sometimes answering with instruction on points unclear to the penitent. The confessor invariably started off with questions on the deadly sin of pride, as it was first important to break down the sinner's "self"--only as a penitent-in-progress does the sinner have a character, not after a full confession. By giving detail on the many branches of sin, the manuals encourage the priest to engage the penitent in "a moral psychodrama" allowing for "a variety of plots" (43) as every sin had a unique array of characteristics. Over time, this concern for interiority and motive gave rise to character development in literature (46-47). Turning to the four great Ricardian poets, Braswell explains how the priest-figure who elicits character development needn't be a priest, nor is the confessant necessarily contrite. In "Piers Plowman," the personified Seven Deadly Sins confess defiantly, as does Lady Meed to a corrupt friar. Among the Ricardians, Gower in CA follows most closely the sacramental question-and-answer process as set forth in the manuals. Like a true penitent, Amans changes character in the course of his confession: "Earlier, he had asked his confessor to shrive him so that 'ther schal nothing be left behinde.' Having lost his sinful nature, he has lost his personality as well. He begins as an egotistical sinner and ends as a humble old man" (50). While auricular confession was abolished by the reformation in England, the "sinner as a literary character" lived on into the English Renaissance, especially in tragic theater (52). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Braswell, Mary Flowers. Published Braswell, Mary Flowers. "Poet and Sinner: Literary Characterization and the Mentality of the Late Middle Ages." Fifteenth-Century Studies 10 (1984): 39-56. 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 Poet and Sinner: Literary Characterization and the Mentality of the Late Middle Ages. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This is a study of the dream poem in the context of medieval ritual, exploring the interaction between poetry and London civic ceremony in late medieval England. In it I examine the poetic use of visions of civic life to illustrate and negotiate an individual's place in their community, the way that late medieval poetry used elements of civic ceremony to critique London life. Each chapter of my thesis presents the work of a medieval author – Langland's Piers Plowman; Chaucer's Legend of Good Women; Gower's Confessio Amantis, Mirour de l'Omme and Vox Clamantis; Lydgate's Troy Book, Siege of Thebes, Fall of Princes, and coronation verses – in close comparison with a different type of London performance recorded in church processionals and civic records, reading the language of each ceremonial text side by side with poetry and examining the form of literary texts alongside performances. . . . In the second chapter [I discuss] Gower's poetic visions of public chastisement, alienation and exile, which I argue echoed the ridings to Newgate used to punish both perceived sin within the community and civil disobedience. . . . In each case, I attempt to establish the thesis that by using medieval ceremony to re-imagine city life each of these authors negotiated an individual relationship with civic order and communal harmony. Author/Editor Author/Editor Horsley, Katharine Frances Published Horsley, Katharine Frances. "Poetic visions of London Civic Ceremony, 1360-1440." PhD thesis, Harvard University, 2004. 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 Poetic visions of London Civic Ceremony, 1360-1440 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "The thesis examines the poetics and politics of 'olde bokes' (Legend of Good Women, G25) in selected works by Chaucer and Gower, paying particular attention to the way in which both writers appropriate their sources and the theories of history and political ideas informing these appropriations. It argues that Chaucer eschews metanarratives in his appropriations of the past and its writings, emphasizing the multiplicity of voices that are contained in written discourse across time. In contrast, Gower, while acknowledging the presence of multiple voices, appropriates the writings of the past in an attempt to arrive at a harmonized poetic voice of his own. These poetics of the past result in different politics of the present in both writers' work. While Gower's politics are generally nostalgic and conservative, Chaucer is apolitical and primarily interested in the processes of political discourse. In this respect, Gower is a writer who strives to make sense of history and tradition and formulate poignant political statements in the face of contemporary struggles, whereas Chaucer does not offer unambiguous statements, but rather creates a multi-facetted poetic voice that highlights the reasons why such statements are impossible to achieve in the face of discursive heterogeneity." [JGN 27.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Urban, Malte Published Urban, Malte. "Poetics of the Past, Politics of the Present." Ph.D. dissertation. University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 2005. Fully accessible via https://research.aber.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/poetics-of-the-past-politics-of-the-present/ (accessed April 6, 2026). Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Poetics of the Past, Politics of the Present. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Muscatine, Charles. Published Muscatine, Charles. Poetry and Crisis in the Age of Chaucer. South Bend, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1974, pp. 24-25 Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Review Gower, like Chaucer's early French models, writes conservative though "charming" verse which Chaucer transcends. [RFY1981] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Poetry and Crisis in the Age of Chaucer. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1974 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "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 Review Green frequently refers to Gower in arguing that the literature of late medieval England is less influenced by a rising middle class than by the patronage of the royal court. For instance, Green uses Gower's initial dedication of the CA to Richard II to suggest that royal commissions of literary works may have been commonplace (62). The same claim is made for regiment of princes material (like Book 7 of the CA). Indeed, according to Green, Gower "is a moralist who does little to hide the fact that the fortunes of the state interest him more than the fortunes of love's servants" (143). Gower's interest in the affairs of state is particularly evident in the CrT. The CrT's propagandist support of Henry IV provides a good example of "the potential value which a literary reputation might have for those in the service of astute princes" (179). However, Gower was not "cynically backing a winning horse" (180) when he switched his allegiance from Richard to Henry in the early 1390's. In addition, Gower was financially secure and did not need to write the CrT for monetary reasons. Green concludes, "There is, thus, little in Gower's work to suggest that his espousal of Henry's cause was merely the dutiful act of a loyal servant, and still less to lead us to suppose that he was a cynical timeserver writing to order" (182). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Green, Richard Firth Published Green, Richard Firth. "Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages." Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis 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 Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages 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 1980 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 Kane focusses primarily on Langland and Chaucer, drawing most of his examples from their works. He mentions the "Confessio Amantis" as a "tour de force" poem about sin, describing it as a model of how a sustained renunciation of unrequited love in the form of an oral confession leads Amans to practical virtue. [CEB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kane, George. Published Kane, George. "Poets and the Poetics of Sin [1989]." In Daniel Donoghue, Daniel, James Simpson, Nicholas Watson, eds. The Morton W. Bloomfield Lectures, 1989-2005. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Press, 2010. Pp. 1-19. 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 Poets and the Poetics of Sin [1989]. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 1989 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Beer's is the first (alphabetically) of three essays from Palmer and Kimmelman's collection of studies of the importance of Machaut's "Jugement dou roy de Behaigne" and "Jugement dou roy de Navarre" as models not just for the works of his immediate successors but also, more provocatively, for aspects of the modern novel. Both "Behaigne" and CA, Beer argues, like the earlier love-debate poetry from which both derive, are "centrally concerned with a conflict between idealism and pragmatism" (217) and "between two views of love: one that sees it as aligned with virtue, and one that sees it as aligned with immoral or amoral carnal desire" (218). And like such debate poetry, which typically leaves the final judgment to the reader, both poets make large concessions to both opposing views though finally tilting in favor of a more strictly orthodox moral position. In his discussion of "Behaigne," Beer insists on the priority given to the role of Reason, who dismisses all love as "charnel affection" (taking issue with the reviewer's account of the moral bearings of the poem), and he argues that Genius' final dismissal of love in Book 8 is anticipated by earlier assessments of the moral status of love during Amans' confession, though neither Joenesce (in "Behaigne") nor Amans is held to be completely in error. "Gower, like Machaut, offers the inevitable moral conclusion on love, but also acknowledges the appeal of the un-arbitrated 'jeu-parti' that allows us to believe that the debate--along with love, poetry, and the imaginative realm in which these things operate--can go on perpetually. What is at issue here is nothing less than the appeal of 'this lyves lust.' Machaut and Gower invest sympathetically in the idea that such worldly pleasure can be idealized and given enduring value, and the energy and persistence of this fantasy constitutes a significant part of these poems' appeal. It is a fantasy, nonetheless, because both poets also figure the attempt to align love with virtue as essentially futile. Both the 'Behaigne' and the 'Confessio' make this point clearly and conclusively: earthly love, they say, simply is carnal and sinful, and therefore can never can be an adequate substitute for, or (on its own) a sufficient means of attaining, any form of salvation" (237). [PN. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 37.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Beer, Lewis. Published Beer, Lewis. "Polarized Debates, Ambivalent Judgments: The 'Jugement Behaigne' and the 'Confessio Amantis'." In R Barton Palmer, and Burt Kimmelman, eds. Machaut's Legacy: The Judgment Poetry Tradition in the Later Middle Ages and Beyond (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), pp. 217-39. 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 Polarized Debates, Ambivalent Judgments: The "Jugement Behaigne" and the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1967 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Astell, Ann W Published Astell, Ann W. "Political Allegory in Late Medieval England." Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Cronica Tripertita Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review Astell devotes a chapter entitled "Gower's Arion and 'Cithero'? to the Confessio Amantis in this collection of studies of the (largely covert) political allegory in late medieval English poetry. She re-examines some familiar passages in the Prologue and Book 7 and comes up with some subtle if not entirely surprising new readings. In her discussion of the Prologue she begins by re-opening the question of the dating of the different versions of the poem. She dismisses the allusions to 1390 that occur in some late glosses as irrelevant to the date of composition of the poem, and she argues instead that the reference to Arion that occurs in all versions of the Prologue must have been written after the Christmas season of 1391/92, when Thomas Walsingham records that a 10-foot long dolphin swam up the Thames as far as London Bridge. Drawing in part from the reviewer's essay in the 1984 Mediaevalia, she goes on to argue that except for the two lines of Latin that occur at the very end of Book 8 in some MSS ("Derbeie Comiti, recolunt quem laude periti, . . .), all of the references to Richard's cousin Henry in the English text and the accompanying Latin glosses that are preserved in MSS of the "second? and "third? recensions must have been added after Henry became king in 1399. The copy that Gower presented to Henry in 1393 must therefore have been a "first recension? copy, and the two-line Latin presentation, like the allusion to Chaucer that is also preserved in this version, indicates that Gower from the very beginning was thinking of a wider audience for his poem than just Richard alone. Arion also figures largely in Astell's interpretation of the political content of this version. She adopts the view (presented most forcefully by R.F. Yeager) that Arion is meant as a figure for the poet himself. She notes, however, the omission of any reference to boats and sea-faring in the passage on Arion, one of the most traditional parts of the story as it is preserved, for instance, in Gower's likely source in Ovid's Fasti. The lack is supplied, she argues, by the account of Gower boarding Richard's barge at the very beginning of the Prologue; and if we read the two passages together in light of Ovid's version in the Fasti, then Richard implicitly becomes the captain of the pirate ship who captures Arion and who is the first audience of his song. "Interpreted allegorically and intertextually,? she concludes, the entire episode "is much less complimentary to the king than it seems at first sight? (p. 81). The two lines of Latin at the end of Book 8 indicate that "Henry of Derby stands, dolphin-like, in the second tier of Gower's original intended audience? of this version. "From him the poet seeks rescue for himself and the realm, should Richard prove to be a pirate after all and inattentive to the song of 'an other such as Arion' (Prologue, l. 1054)? (83). In her examination of Gower's discussion of Rhetoric in Book 7, Astell emphasizes the similarity between the account of the trial of the Catalinian conspirators and Gower's depiction of the Merciless Parliament in the Cronica Tripertita. Gower's dismisses Caesar just as in the later work he condemns those who pleaded for mercy for the presumed traitors, and he implicitly identifies himself with Cicero "in his plainspoken opposition to the abuses of licentious nobles and riotous peasants? (84). Gower thus "aligned his poetic and rhetorical project with the reformist project of the Lords Appellant? (89), and the entire discussion provides an effective prelude to the outline of the five points of Policy, where Gower offers his own advice to the young king. Chief among the virtues that he advocates is Truth, and Astell sees here an allusion to the Appellants' requirement that Richard retake his oath as king. In her conclusion, Astell argues that Gower splits the figure of Cicero in two: he "embraces the political stance of 'Cithero,' while rejecting the ornate doctrine of 'Tullius,' . . . opting to speak in a low style, using 'rude wordes and . . . pleyne; (VIII.3067*)? (91). His message is wisdom only for the wise, however, and it will be hidden from those for whom the poem is seen merely as entertainment. (It appears that Astell fails to note that paradox here of Gower's use of plain words to conceal.) Gower provides a clue on how to read his poem, however, in the four opening tales, in the section on the "Sins of the Eyes and Ears,? which provide lessons on how to pierce through appearances in order to find the "message veiled behind the obvious one? (92). In her other chapters Astell consider John Ball and Piers Plowman, LGW, MkT, NPT, SGGK, and Malory's Morte Darthur. There is a useful review by Candace Barrington in SAC 22 (2000): 448-51. [PN Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 20.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Political Allegory in Late Medieval England. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cornell University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Prints CrT, based on MS. Cotton Tiberius A IV, collated with MSS. Harley 6391 and All Souls; "In Praise of Peace," based on MS. Trentham; and "Carmen Super Multiplici Vitiorum Pertilentia," "De Lucis Scrutinio," "O Deus Immense," and "Rex Coeli Deus," based on MS Cotton Tiberius A IV, collated with MS. Trentham. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Wright, Thomas, ed. Published Wright, Thomas, ed. Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History. 2 vols. London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1859, 1:417-54. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Cronica Tripertita In Praise of Peace Minor Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1859 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Rigby replaces the traditional distinction between absolutist and constitutional theories of kingship with a parallel but a somewhat more discursive distinction between "royal" and "political" kingship theories (394). Exploring "the nature of Gower's political views" (383) in light of this spectrum, Rigby surveys the fundamental concern in Gower's works with the necessity of moral virtue in a king, and clarifies notions of just governmental action in late-medieval England, particularly focused on ideas of tyranny, treason, uses of violence, the proper role of counsel, and the voice of the people. Rigby reviews recurrent, even persistent, tensions between the forms of political theory and instances of political action during Gower's life and in his works, and he rejects arguments that Gower was inconsistent or opportunistic when shifting loyalty to Henry after Richard's deposition. The "poet's view that divine providence could employ human agency to strike down evil tyrants," Rigby argues, "had always possessed the potential to be used in support of a 'political' conception of the king's relationship with his subjects." After the deposition and particularly in "Cronica Tripertita," Gower drew upon this "potential" and he "welcomed the fact that Henry Bolingbroke had replaced Richard II on the throne . . . as part of the workings of divine providence." In Rigby's argument, the "tractability of Gower's political principles and language" (424) is of a piece with the subtleties of late-medieval political theory and the flexibility of their applications, obviating censure of the poet as an opportunist. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rigby, Stephen H. Published Rigby, Stephen H. "Political Theory." In Historians on John Gower. Ed. Stephen H. Rigby, with Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 381-424. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Biography of Gower Cronica Tripertita Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Political Theory. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation examines the narrative landscapes of Middle English Ricardian political poetry in light of the split between creation and reception of these literary environments. Environmental descriptions are significant and nuanced political statements in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and William Langland. These authors do not use environment as background or mere scenery because perception of environment is highly political, based upon temporal and cultural distinctions. This dissertation argues that medieval authors seek to focus audience attention upon the figure of the sovereign via textual depictions of the realm. Covert political criticism is activated through the latent cultural power of forests, rivers, and agricultural spaces like fields and gardens. In contrast to these bounded and regulated places, the wilderness serves as an 'a priori' state of political disorder that demonstrates, through its own fluidity and uncontrollable nature, the inherent stability of place. . . . The second chapter argues that Gower's use of the River Thames in the Ricardian Prologue of the 'Confessio Amantis' infuses the work with uniquely English political qualities that the Lancastrian recensions of the poem lack." [JGN 33.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Johnson, Valerie Published Johnson, Valerie. "Politicizing the Landscape: Ricardian Literary Languages of Power." PhD thesis, University of Rochester, 2013. 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 Politicizing the Landscape: Ricardian Literary Languages of Power. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In examining political verse of the fifteenth century, Scattergood gives occasional attention to Gower. He provides a brief overview of Gower's work (19) and refers sporadically to Gower's views on such topics as Henry IV's accession to the throne, the need for peace among European rulers, the papal schism, and the possibility of a new crusade against the infidel. Scattergood's main focus is on "In Praise of Peace." [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Scattergood, V. J Published Scattergood, V. J. "Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century." London: Blandford, 1971 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism In Praise of Peace Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Blandford, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971 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 Yeager, R.F Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Language and Word Studies Published Yeager, R.F. "Politics and the French Language in England during the Hundred Years' Way: The Case of John Gower." In Inscribing the Hundred Years' War in French and English Cultures. Ed. Baker, Denise. Albany, NY: University of New York Press, 2000, pp. 127-157. Review Yeager takes a new look at how Gower's responses to the political events of his time are reflected in his writing by focusing on the poet's choice of language, particularly his use of French, in the context of the ebb and flow of his country's wars with France, which began when the poet was a child and showed no sign of abating at his death. All language is political, Yeager reminds us, a truism that takes on particular force when, in time of war, the poet's readership is waiting to judge his work by his conformity to their expectations of him and he, in turn, is anxious to influence them by both his overt and his covert instruction. Yeager attempts to document the evolution of Gower's and his readers' expectations of one another, and he sees Gower's career falling into three periods. (1) In the first, that of MO, Gower writes exclusively in French, the language of the landed aristocracy and of the king. Yeager challenges the traditional dating of MO to the late 1370's, pointing out first of all that so long and ambitious a work is unlikely to have been the poet's first composition suggesting that it was probably the product of continued work over a long period of time. The most appropriate time for undertaking such a work in French, he argues, would have been between the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 and the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360, when Gower would have had greatest reason to look forward to a "'greater England' encompassing France? (p. 138). The references to the Schism indicate that Gower did not finish revising the poem until after 1378, but with the death of Edward III in 1377 the moment for a long work in French had passed. (2) The second period encompasses VC and CA. Both Latin and English were appropriate choices for addressing Richard II. When Richard was a youth, Gower probably had quite high expectations of his learning. The rebellion of 1381 led to a profound shift in Gower's attitude, first towards his own poetic project, as he abandons his direct address to the king for a broader goal of reforming society, and second, towards the war, as his "belligerent patriotism? yields to an "international pacifism? (p. 142) and a sustained effort to overcome division, primarily at home. The shift from international to domestic concerns, which correlates with Richard's own primary interests, is reflected in CA, which is "overwhelmingly a poem in English? (p. 145). (3) Gower's attitude towards Richard changed abruptly, however, in the early 1390's, as reflected in his revisions of both VC and CA; and while he did not reject English he did reconsider its relation to French and Latin "as media for reaching the king and for commenting on political events? (p. 148). Except for "In Praise of PeaceP,? all of Gower's last compositions are in Latin or French. Most are explicitly directed to Henry IV. (In order to fit in the notoriously undatable CB and Traitie into his chronology, he focuses on their dates of publication rather than that of their composition, the more significant event, as he points out, from a political perspective.) The resuscitation of French corresponds with a revival of interest in the wars in France. Gower's use of all three languages is a tribute to his sovereign's linguistic skills, while the brevity of these works is an indication both of Henry's get-to-the-point personality and of Gower's closer relationship with his new king. But Gower avoided English, Yeager suggests, in part because of the association of literacy in English with Lollardy, which could have been dangerous to the poet in the first decade of Henry's reign. And his choice to record the titles of all three of his works on his tomb effigy in Latin indicates Gower's final preference for "the most learned, the most lasting, and perhaps the safest tongue of all? (p. 153). Yeager covers a great deal of ground here, there will inevitably be a great deal to discuss in any effort to sort of Gower's attitude to political events that are no less compli-cated in retrospect than they must have seemed to those who were alive at the time. If there is a single reason to be disappointed with this essay, it is that space did not allow Yeager to engage more fully with the many alternative views to some of these matters that have been expressed by other scholars, and in omitting from his notes any reference to those who have seen some of these matters differently, he leaves the impression that many of these issues are much more settled than they really are. To take a minor instance: he dates Gower's revisions of Book 6 of VC to the period before 1393 (p. 147). Maria Wickert argued in 1953 (in a book that Yeager doesn't cite) that the changes were actually made after 1400, and most subsequent scholars have accepted her view. Yeager may well have reason for thinking Wickert was wrong, but he doesn't provide it to us. For his account of the revisions in CA, he depends upon a single problematic essay by George Stow that actually proves, in the reviewer's mind, how desperate the attempt to find a justification for Gower's presumed change of heart regarding Richard in the early 1390's has become. Whatever one thinks of Stow's argument, there are a great many dif-ficulties both in reconstructing the evolution of the text and in assessing Gower's response to events that he never refers to that other scholars have discussed and that Yeager passes over. Even the scholars that Yeager cites take some very different positions on some key issues that aren't acknowledged here. Fisher, of course, appears repeatedly in Yeager's notes, but if one reads Fisher and Yeager side by side several large differences emerge. Fisher takes a very different view of the change of the CA dedication, for one. And where Yeager sees both MO and VC as addressed directly to the reigning king (referring to MO at one point as "in many ways a mirror for princes,? p. 139), Fisher sees MO as a private devotional work (p. 104) and VC as its public counterpart, addressed, however, not to the young king but to influential clerics (pp. 105-6), leading to a very different conclusion on the reasons for Gower's choice of language for both works. None of this is to diminish the importance of Yeager's essay, but instead merely to wish that it could have had somewhat greater scope. Both its real significance and also the specula-tive nature of some of its conclusions will be evident only to those who have read around in the other literature on the subject, not all of which is accessible through Yeager's notes. This essay appears in a provocative and well-rounded collection of essays on responses to the Hundred Years' War on both sides of the channel (some of which have already appeared in print elsewhere). In addition to Yeager's essay, the contents are: Norris J. Lacy, "Warmongering in Verse: Les Voeux du Heron;? Patricia DeMarco, "In-scribing the Body with Meaning: Chivalric Culture and the Norms of Violence in The Vows of the Heron;? Denise N. Baker, "Meed and the Economics of Chivalry in Piers Plowman;? Judith Ferster, "Chaucer's Tale of Melibee: Contradictions and Context;? John M. Bowers, "Chaucer after Retters: The Wartime Origins of English Literature;? Earl Jeffrey Richards, "The Uncertainty in Defining France as a Nation in the Works of Eustache Deschamps;? Anne D. Lutkus and Julia M. Walker, "The Political Poetics of the Diti de Jehanne d'Arc;? Susan Crane, "Clothing and Gender Definition: Joan of Arc;? Michelle Szkilnik, "A Pacifist Utopia: Cleriadus et Meliadice;? and Ellen C. Cald-well, "The Hundred Years' War and National Identity.? [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Politics and the French Language in England during the Hundred Years' Way: The Case of John Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of New York Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Strakhov, Yelizaveta. Strakhov, Elizaveta. Published Strakhov, Yelizaveta. Politics in Translation: Language, War, and Lyric Form in Francophone Europe, 1337-1400. University of Pennsylvania, 2014. ix, 339 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A76.01(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Background and General Criticism Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Language and Word Studies Review From Strakhov's abstract: "The dissertation examines the so-called 'formes fixes,' an important lyric genre widely used across Francophone Europe in the late Middle Ages. It argues for this genre's emergence as a privileged medium for Francophone poets to explore the difficulty of retaining trans-European cultural affinity during the rise of protonationalist and regionalist faction in the Hundred Years War . . . . The dissertation organizes itself around a large, but little studied, late medieval manuscript anthology of 'formes fixes' lyric, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, MS Codex 902 (formerly French 15). . . , the largest, oldest, and most formally and geographically diverse 'formes fixes' collection extant today. Chapter One argues that, unlike other, later, 'formes fixes' anthologies, the Pennsylvania manuscript is not structured by author or sub-genre, but rather by form, chronology, geographic diversity, and dialectal difference . . . , reveal[ing] not only its compiler's awareness of the diffusion of 'formes fixes' lyric, but a desire to memorialize this genre's transmission across regional divides. Chapter Two explores the political effects of the diffusion of 'formes fixes' lyric by mapping literary borrowings between a corpus of anti-war texts in this anthology and other lyric corpora written in France, England, and the Low Countries. Chapter Three focuses on Francophone responses, both positive and negative, to the transmission of 'formes fixes' lyric into England, centering on the implications of Eustache Deschamps' praise of his English Francophone contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer, as a 'great translator' of 'formes fixes' lyric. Chapter Four examines the adoption of 'formes fixes' lyric in the work of Chaucer and . . . John Gower. It demonstrates that, like their Continental counterparts, Chaucer and Gower also view the appropriation of 'formes fixes' lyric as a means of carving a geopolitically specific identity out of Francophone cultural belonging" (vi-vii), focusing on Chaucer's Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women" and Gower's "Traitié selonc les auctours pour essampler les amantz marietz," with commentary on Gower's multi-lingualism elsewhere in his corpus. [MA] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Politics in Translation: Language, War, and Lyric Form in Francophone Europe, 1337-1400. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This 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 Author/Editor Author/Editor Kruger, Steven F Published Kruger, Steven F. "Postcolonial/Queer: Teaching Gower Using Recent Critical Theory." In Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Ed. Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011, pp. 127-35. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Review Kruger shows how "Gower could play an important role in advanced undergraduate seminars on medieval gender and sexuality or on nation and (post)coloniality" (127). After offering a shortened list of basic theoretical readings for such a course, he identifies sites in Gower's works where theory might be introduced most productively. He arranges his presentation according to a series of topics: 1) Hybridity. Gower's trilingualism, for example, points to "complex power dynamics in play when different cultures and languages come together in colonizing situations" (129). 2) Identity. Gower's "writing constructs a sense of identity, a sense of the subject both as interested and deeply implicated in the historical and [especially in the "Confessio Amantis"] as possessing a complex internal life" (130). 3) Sociality/Sexuality. This ranges from Gower's representation of the "animal-like, hardly human mob" of peasants in the 'Vox' as resonating" with postcolonial critiques of discourses that ontologize natives as less than human" (132) to the poet's placing individuals into social worlds as providing an occasion for questioning, for example male-male cooperation and conflict, or for asking whether there are "spaces (e.g., in the Apollonius story)] where Gower also considers the possibility and implications of female homosociality as an alternative social space" (132). 4) (Trans) Nationalism. England, for Gower, may or may not "correspond to the kind of nation defined in contemporary theoretical formulations" or "bear any of the features, for instance, of [Benedict] Anderson's 'imagined communities" (133). 5) Periodization. "Gower himself consistently uses historical material to think about his contemporary world. Do Gower's reflections help us think about our own contemporary situation?" (134-35) "To what extent [do] the medieval world and modernity in fact stand separate from each other--generally, and more specifically, in relation both to international/(post)colonial relations and to gender/sexuality" (134). [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1]. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 239-46. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Postcolonial/Queer: Teaching Gower Using Recent Critical Theory Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Johnson's book is a rewarding work of literary criticism. It sets out to trace the philosophical and aesthetic function of the "mixed form" (prosimetrum, i.e., the oscillation between lyrical verse and didactic prose) in the "Consolation" of Boethius and its legacy in late-medieval vernacular literary traditions. Through lucid close readings, it also reveals how literary texts enact ethical transformations through their literary form. The chapter on Gower carefully attends to the dynamic relationship between form and content throughout the CA. In her chapter 4, Johnson investigates two facets of the work's mixed nature: its integration of verse and prose, and its use of two mutually informing languages (Latin and Middle English). The chapter treats Usk's "Testament of Love" alongside Gower's CA. Johnson observes how both authors adopt "a mask--a genre-based persona" through which "a sociopolitical critique" with can be launched (166). Johnson reads Gower's sudden shift into rhyme royal stanzas in the verse epistle at the end of the CA as a formal allusion to Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde." Gower, like his contemporary, "uses stanzas [in the epistle] to bumper syntactic units at the level of the sentence," and the formal aspects of this passage set it apart from Gower's use of enjambment elsewhere (192). Through formal juxtapositions and shifts in narrative voice, Gower enacts "a comical revision and reinterrogation" of Boethian modes of consolation (198). The most revealing aspect of Johnson's analysis its attention to the interplay between Latin glosses and Middle English verse in the CA. She deftly reveals how prosimetrum enacts both a formal and linguistic mode of code-switching. Gower's Latin prose glosses showcase the "complexity and alterity" of Middle English verses and present the Middle English as its own sort of "Latin" with a philosophical heft that demands critical unpacking (191). Through its mixed form, the CA effectively breaks down a rigid binary between Latin and the vernacular. Since Johnson's chapter on Gower only discusses the CA, the integrative function of prose and verse in his major Latin and French works remains unexplored. Nonetheless, the book offers fruitful readings of the CA that not only encourage new approaches to literary Boethianism but also restore the importance of form and aesthetics to an understanding of Gowerian ethics. [Jonathan Hsy. Copyright JGN 33.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Johnson, Eleanor Published Johnson, Eleanor. "Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve." Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013 ISBN 9780226015842 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Chicago Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The presentation of a text is also a response to it and an interpretation of it, Echard asserts, echoing Doyle and Parkes (1978) among many others. Because of its length and the complexity of its structure, CA presented a number of challenges to both scribes and editors which resulted in very different presentations despite the high level of consistency in the text. In this essay Echard is concerned with a single editorial device, the prefatory tables of contents by which CA was introduced, and she chooses four examples for contrast. Each shapes the reader's experience of the poem in a different way; and though all are in English, each draws in different proportions from the Latin and English texts. In Princeton Univ. Lib. MS Taylor 5, the table consists only of a list of stories, ignoring both the dramatic and the conceptual frames and thus neglecting the exemplary function of the tales; and it also passes over the contents of the Prologue. The tabulator evidently relies exclusively on the English text, and examining only the first few lines, often gives a misleading view of the contents of the stories. The table in Magdalen Coll. MS 213 is more careful and more detailed; it makes use of both the Latin and the English; it sometimes makes reference to the framework of the sins within which the tales are contained, but not in any consistent manner; and it includes references to Nebuchadnezzar's dream and to Daniel's prophecy in the Prologue. Caxton, in his edition of 1483, is even more thorough. In his introduction, he describes both the dramatic frame and the framework of the sins, and in his table he includes a detailed account of the subcategories of sin. He nonetheless portrays the poem primarily as a collection of tales. Berthelette, in his edition of 1532, enlarges Caxton's table. He gives fuller treatment to the long and multi-episodic tales. He includes headings for the different topics in the Prologue and for the mythographic and scientific topics in Books 5 and 7, and the reader thus perceives the work as encyclopedic in nature as well as as a collection of stories. At the same time, Berthelette is more sensitive than Caxton to the actual moral import of many of the tales. In including so complete a description of the poem, Berthelette's table is the most useful, but it is also the one that imposes its own vision of the poem most fully upon the reader. While they may or may not be based upon classical models, Echard concludes, these various efforts to provide an epitome to the poem represent the beginnings of Gower criticism. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 17.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân Published Echard, Siân. "Pre-Texts: Tables of Contents and the Reading of John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Medium AEvum 66 (1997), pp. 270-287. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Pre-Texts: Tables of Contents and the Reading of John Gower's Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor N.A. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Crticism Review Partly a review of John H. Fisher's "John Gower, Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (1964); partly a critical piece, assessing Gower's main themes of love, sin, justice, and salvation in all poems. [RFY1981] Published "Preacher or Poet?" Anonymous Review. Times Literary Supplement, 18 November 1965 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Preacher or Poet? Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1965 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review As the title implies, Heather surveys folklore about precious stones in Gower's time period. Heather is quick to point out that for the fourteenth century no radical distinction is to be made between an illiterate "folk" and a cultured elite. As a result, Gower's learned references in the CA are frequently listed as examples of more widespread beliefs or superstitions. Along with Book 7 of the CA, tales that are repeatedly mined for evidence include the stories of Jason and Medea, Adrian and Bardus, and Lucius and the Statue. Occasionally Heather pauses to explain a point about a Gower quotation. For instance, Heather argues that in the description of the stones associated with the sun in Book 7, the name "Ceramius" might be a corruption of "Ceraunius," also known as the "thunderbolt," because this stone supposedly falls down with lightning. Aside from connecting stones with magic, royalty, and with other natural objects (stars, herbs, etc.), Heather briefly dwells on Gower's understanding of eclipses (394). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Heather, P. J Published Heather, P. J. "Precious Stones in the Middle-English Verse of the Fourteenth Century." Folklore 42 (1931), pp. 217-264. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Precious Stones in the Middle-English Verse of the Fourteenth Century. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1931 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 Compares Gower to Chaucer, citing the latter as the more musical versifier. [RFY1981; rev. MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dryden, John. Published Dryden, John. "Preface to The Fables, 1700." In Selected Works of John Dryden. Edited by William Frost. New York: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston, 1967, p. 397. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification 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 Preface to The Fables, 1700. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1700 1967 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Anatomizes the uses of prepositions in CA, offering "General Considerations" of their history, usage, and flexibility in Middle English, and a detailed dictionary of the meanings, uses, and functions of Gower's individual prepositions, arranged in alphabetical order. [RFY1981; rev. MA]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Kanno, Masahiko. Published Kanno, Masahiko. "Prepositions in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Bulletin of Gifu Pharmaceutical College 18 (1968): 13-46. Unrestricted access at https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/229509444.pdf; accessed July 26, 2022. 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 Prepositions in Gower's Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1968 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Higl, Andrew Published Higl, Andrew. "Printing Power: Selling Lydgate, Gower, and Chaucer." Essays in Medieval Studies 23 (2006), pp. 57-77. ISSN 1043-2213 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Review At the center of this essay is a 6-page table (59-64) showing the chronology of the appearance of the major printed editions of the works of Gower, Lydgate, and Chaucer between 1477 and 1598. Alongside the three editions of CA (one by Caxton, two by Berthelette) stand 18 separate imprints of Lydgate and 19 of Chaucer, and Higl seeks to explain why Chaucer was regarded as a more marketable commodity than either of his near contemporaries. The monk Lydgate, Higl notes, fell increasingly out of fashion with the onset of the Reformation. He had diminished his own auctoritas, moreover, by placing himself below "Father Chaucer," and he was often identified merely as translator rather than as poet. Gower too was out of step with the Reformation: he expresses his strong opposition to Lollardy and schism, and Higl notes that the three editions of CA appeared either before the Act of Supremacy in 1534 or during the brief return to Catholicism under Mary. And though Gower is sometimes cited during this period for the quality of his English, as the author of major poems in three different languages, he did not contribute as Chaucer did to the advancement of the growth of English. "In an era dominated by humanist scholarship of classical Greek and Latin, English printers and editors needed to market English as worthwhile--something served by elevating the figure of Chaucer but not plausible with Gower" (p. 70). Chaucer was more marketable, finally, because his works were both more varied and more malleable. Fragmented and incomplete, unlike the single major monument that Gower left in English, they invited revision and expansion and allowed editors and printers to construct a Chaucer appropriate to the market demands of the time.] [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 Printing Power: Selling Lydgate, Gower, and Chaucer Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Higl is concerned to demonstrate that the preponderance of printed Chaucer works over those of Lydgate and Gower, usually perceived as by modern scholars as evidence of their relative popularity, was in fact caused primarily by early printers' assessments of their marketability. Because Chaucer had fewer ideological markers than either Gower or Lydgate, and wrote a greater number of middling-length poems that could be added to other works to create "new, improved" collections, "the canon of Chaucer and the idea of Chaucer himself proved malleable--not an uncommon quality of medieval works but something that marks Chaucer even in the early modern period. Chaucer was flexible, and he could be manipulated in order to match the 'sentence' of the nation and proved 'solaas' for consumers" (65). Lydgate and Gower were harder for profit-seeking printers to "manipulate"--to some degree because after Henry VIII broke with Rome they were identified with an out-of-fashion religiosity, and pre-humanistic views. Higl's major claim, however, is that Gower's work was more troublesome still for printers because he "simply did not have a varied corpus of English that could be published . . . . Language is the key, and for Gower, his command of three languages--Latin, French, and English--would prove to cause his downfall in the English tradition" (66). "The market forces at work in the sixteenth century would have made such an undertaking as publishing the works of Gower financially ridiculous" (67). Ultimately, then, for Higl, "though early moderns often placed Gower's name next to Chaucer's when tracing the English tradition, the name Gower coupled with his work could not effectively sell the importance of English since a majority of his corpus was in languages other than English" (68). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Higl, Andrew. Published Higl, Andrew. "Printing Power: Selling Lydgate, Gower, and Chaucer." Essays in Medieval Studies 23 (2006): 57-77. ISSN 1043-2213. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations 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 Printing Power: Selling Lydgate, Gower, and Chaucer. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Driver examines Caxton's 1483 edition of CA with reference to contemporary productions in both MS and print. Her scholarly detective work solves a number of riddles and fills in a number of significant gaps. Her most important conclusion regarding Caxton's Gower is to place it in its political context. She dates the printer's interest in Gower to a period of stability in the 1370's when he enjoyed the favor of those surrounding Edward IV, and his printing of CA to the period of rapidly shifting allegiances in the first year of the reign of Richard III; and she suggests that Caxton's choice of the Lancastrian dedication announces an early adherence to Henry Tudor. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Driver, Martha W Published Driver, Martha W. "Printing the Confessio Amantis: Caxton's Edition in Context." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Charlotte, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998, pp. 269-303. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Printing the Confessio Amantis: Caxton's Edition in Context. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pegasus Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "My dissertation explores confession as a form or structure organizing four late-medieval texts: John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Geoffrey Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, The Book of Margery Kempe and Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid. I find that in these medieval texts confession functions as a discourse for producing truth and for constructing or inventing textualized bodies. Therefore, in part, I approach confession through the popular medieval analogy of a "the body" to "the book" and thereby consider how confession works to represent "truth" via the figure of a Christian body divided between inner and outer space. In each of the four texts I discuss, memorable bodies emerge as effects of confessional discourse: the senex amans in the Confessio ; the suffering women of the Legend ; the chaste body of Margery Kempe; and Cresseid's leprous body in the Testament. These problematic bodies all bear out the difficulties and frequent failures of confessional representation. Ultimately, during a period of institutional collapse and social, religious, and political upheaval, I demonstrate that desire ---for truth, renewal of faith, recuperation of the fallen body, stability, closure---underlies the need to confess." Directed by Elizabeth Scala and Marjorie Curry Woods. Author/Editor Author/Editor Meyer, Cathryn Marie Published Meyer, Cathryn Marie. "Producing the Middle English corpus: Confession and medieval bodies." PhD thesis, The University of Texas at Austin, 2006. 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 Producing the Middle English corpus: Confession and medieval bodies Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Herrold, Megan. Published Herrold, Megan. Productive Misogyny in Medieval and Early Modern Literature: Women, Justice, and Social Order. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Southern California, 2018. 267 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A84.12(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review In her dissertation, Herrold shows how in medieval and early modern literature "misogyny offers surprising ethical and political philosophical opportunities to explore gendered constructions of personhood." She considers "how authors ranging from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, including Chaucer, Gower, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Aemilia Lanyer, appropriate conventionally misogynistic figures to rethink radically the ethical and political capacities of personhood, and therefore justice, in society" (7-8). Literature of "productive" misogyny, Herrold tells us, contemplates "the place and/or the idea of women in a system of social order . . . ethically and seriously," and, in this literature, either society changes "to more justly accommodate the troubling woman within it" or, more conservatively, the troubling woman is herself transformed "to render the systemic injustice she elucidates moot in her particular case" (8). She reads Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, Gower's Tale of Florent, and "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle" as examples of her more conservative category, together comprising "a commentary on the limitations of individual autonomy in society-building: the just social order is forged by shunting the notion of compromised subjectivity onto women in general and the loathly lady in particular" (21). Each of the individual versions "stages and restages the fiction of men's autonomous subjectivity; [while] the recursive nature of the tales reveals the toll patriarchy takes on women." When considered together as a "genre"--arguably, not a very precise use of the term here--the loathly-lady stories come "very close to an exploration of a radical, post-patriarchal order" (27). In each poem, the presiding social order is tested by a "loathly" woman, but that social order--unjust though it is--is neither corrected nor replaced. Nevertheless, the reiterated challenges--and ongoing feminist readings of them--prompt questions for Herrold about how such corrections or replacements might be imagined when individual women are no longer subsumed allegorically into a single, universalized, compromised subjectivity. Extending her arguments into early modern England, Herrold incorporates queer attention to Spenser's Britomart as a "gender-bending loathly lady" (22). She moves to analysis of Shakespeare's uses of troubling women in several of his plays, including those where the traditional bed-trick plot engages questions of justice and those where Lady Fortune is involved in depictions of gambling with justice. In her final two chapters, Herrold addresses Lanyer's fusion of Petrarchanism and Marian compassion in her "Salve Dues Rex Judaeorum" and closes with exploration of "the ways in which the tradition of representing justice as female--as Lady Justice--allegorically justifies the exclusion of women from the political order even while acknowledging its dependence on them" (23). [MA] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Productive Misogyny in Medieval and Early Modern Literature: Women, Justice, and Social Order. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The title of Meecham-Jones' essay does not refer to the Prologue of CA: it identifies it instead as the opening chapter in this collection on the self-presentation of the author, the remaining essays in which are concerned with post-medieval writers. Meecham-Jones takes a very broad view of Gower's fashioning of himself and of his conception of his role as poet in CA as a whole. His essay is addressed in part to Foucault's incautious claim that "the idea that from one's own life one can make a work of art" is absent during the Middle Ages, and in part to the many readers of Gower who fail to recognize the mature subtlety of his late poetry; and his argument is itself so wide-ranging and so subtle that it defies easy summary here. "The reticence of medieval authors in making use of the autobiographical style," he writes, should be understood "as expressing an anxiety at appearing to set their works in competition with the 'authoritative' texts of the revered literary past" (14). One solution to this dilemma of self-representation is found "in the emergence of a self-consciously 'literary' tradition in the English language in the second half of the fourteenth century" (15). Gower provides his principal example both of the intricacy and the "artificiality" of the late medieval autobiographical mode. Meecham-Jones focuses on the beginning and ending of CA. In the gloss in which the author depicts himself "fingens se . . . esse Amantem," Gower creates "a balance of sympathy and disengagement" (16) as he "strives to establish the poet in a position simultaneously within and outside the texture of his poem" (17). These two positions allow "two potentially antagonistic traditions of moral analysis" (17), the scheme of the Seven Deadly Sins with its apparent moral rigidity and the more tolerant view of the actions of the characters in the tales that emerges from the narration. The significance of this frame lies in its very inclusiveness: "Gower aspires to be recognised as an encyclopaedist of Love. The bulk of the poem is, therefore, to be regarded as a guarantee of its quality, in so far as it witnesses Gower's assiduous garnering of material from the sources of inherited wisdom" (19). Gower's plan here "is perhaps best understood as an homage to the texts of classical 'auctors', in whose poetry the consideration of love had been granted such especial prominence" (20). At the end of the poem, "in a mischievous parody of the predisposition of audiences to read lyric poetry as presenting an accurate record of 'real' events" (20), Gower portrays Ovid and Vergil both as lovers as well as poets, and implicitly associates himself with them, thus abandoning the authoritative stance of MO and VC in favor of a more limited role based upon direct experience. The "mirour" of society in MO becomes the mirror in which he is "forced to see himself without pretense" (22). "It is at this point that Gower's distinctive conception of the nature of authorship at this stage of his career is revealed" not as the achievement of fine phrases or inspired imagery but in the accumulation of a lifetime's wisdom" (23). Such wisdom "like the very comprehensiveness of the poem" is won at considerable physical cost, as the poet is now old and impotent. "In a curious display which combines self-assertion and humility, Gower succeeds in creating a work of art not from the events of his life, but from the self-denial of action which enabled him to achieve a literary career. Whereas, in Chaucer's poetry, the idea of the narrator as being exiled from the action is constantly and humorously invoked, Gower goes beyond this device to create a work in which the value of the work is explicitly related to that foregoing of life which has enabled its writing" (26). In the poet's swooning after seeing his image in the mirror, "Gower achieves, for a moment, an unaccustomed note of vulnerability, which must however be recognised as constituting one element in the poem's artful strategy to exploit the affective possibilities of the autobiographical mode as a means to establish his poetic value" (26). And as Gower allows himself to be "gathered into the company of his esteemed mentors" (27), he also "seeks to appropriate for himself the prestige that passing time has accorded their work" and effects a vision of the enduring contemporaneity of literature" (28). Along the way, Meecham-Jones manages to address a great many other issues, including the challenging morality of such tales as "Canace and Machaire" and what he perceives as the irony of Gower's invocation of Arion in the Prologue to CA. This essay deserves careful consideration. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 21.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Meecham-Jones, Simon Published Meecham-Jones, Simon. "Prologue: The Poet as Subject: Literary Self-Consciousness in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts. Ed. Dragstra, Henk and Ottway, Sheila and Wilcox, Helen. New York: St. Martin's, 2000, pp. 14-30. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Prologue: The Poet as Subject: Literary Self-Consciousness in Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. Martin's, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review John Gower married Agnes Groundolf in 1398, in a wedding taking place in his private chapel by special indulgence of the Bishop of Winchester. All remaining evidence--a Latin epitaph, a tomb (now lost), a generous bequest upon her husband's death--points toward Agnes having been highly respected by Gower, at the very least (219-21). Salisbury's "reading of . . . 'the Agnes fragments' is divided into three parts--historical, hagiographical, and philosophical--each defined as 'promiscuous' in order to indicate the discursive fields within which the subject operates and to suggest ways in which the eclectic combination of Gower's disparate genres (legal documents, tomb writing, and poetry) produce meaning. The first part combines a discussion of the sex trade known in Southwark with John and Agnes's personal history to suggest an alternative reading to the Gower marriage and its relation to the Confessio Amantis; the second explores the tropes of prostitution enacted in Gower's 'Tale of Apollonius' within the context of two saints lives, one of St Agnes, the other of the legendary courtesan, Thaïs. That Gower's Thaise, the daughter of Apollonius sold into the brothels of Mitilene, bears a closer resemblance to St Agnes than to the courtesan for whom she is named offers a means by which we may better understand the shaping of Agnes Gower's identity and 'afterlife' by her husband. The third part of the essay revisits Gower's philosophy of common profit in relation to 'common women', the group upon whom the efficacy of redemption and charity may be tested" (222). Salisbury finds the Gower marriage to have been celibate but rewarding, probably, to each, and that the poet's affection and respect for his wife as expressed in the epitaph, will, and tomb seems to have been genuine. Intriguing are Salisbury's suggestions that Agnes's "inclusion among four notable men [as executrix of his will] indicates literacy in Latin" (240) and her reading of the character of Thaise "and other female characters in the Confessio" offers evidence that "Gower seems to have supported . . . the education of young women" (240). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Salisbury, Eve Published Salisbury, Eve. "Promiscuous Contexts: Gower's Wife, Prostitution, and the Confessio Amantis." In John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts. Ed. Urban, Malte. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009, pp. 219-40. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Promiscuous Contexts: Gower's Wife, Prostitution, and the Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brepols, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This essay examines "the private library of the kings of Spain" (33), in light of its unique manuscript of a Portuguese translation of "Confessio Amantis." Intersecting cultural interests informed assembly of the Royal Library in Madrid, by way of the private collections at its core and the "cultural, ideological, and … cognitive purposes" served by the library a symbol of monarchy in the 19th c. Unfortunately, scholars did not appreciate the value of its manuscript of CA until the early 1980s. The manuscript came to the Royal Library from the great private library of Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, count of Gondomar (d. 1626), located in Valladolid. Gondomar served as ambassador to the court of James I of England in the early seventeenth century. The manuscript's binding and bookplates suggest arrival in the Royal Library "between 1807 and 1808" (43) and permit identification of a previous owner: the humanist bibliophile Luis de Castilla (c.1540-1618). [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor López-Vidriero Abelló, María Luisa. Published López-Vidriero Abelló, María Luisa. "Provenance Interlacing in Spanish Royal Book-Collecting and the Case of the Confessio Amantis (RB MS II-3088)." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014). Pp. 33-49. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Provenance Interlacing in Spanish Royal Book-Collecting and the Case of the "Confessio Amantis" (RB MS II-3088). Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation analyses the political, confessional, and psychological frames of John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' (c. 1390-93). This dissertation proposes an integrated understanding of the poem's frames, in which both the confessional and psychological frames respond to the political one that Gower presents in the poem's Prologue. By moving the discussion of politics to a setting of unrequited courtly love and then establishing a need for the failed lover to confess (his sins against love), Gower creates complex layers of meaning. Each of this dissertation's chapters examines Gower and the 'Confessio' in a different context. The first two chapters provide a broader perspective on the external factors that influence Gower's writing. Chapter 1 examines Gower's self-establishment as a figure of authority writing in the vernacular to lay a foundation for the meticulous production of his texts. Chapter 2 examines the English political situation that led Gower to write the 'Confessio,' in particular politics of 1380s and how they are represented in the poem, as well as Gower's position as a public poet. The 'Confessio' is a response to the division Gower sees corrupting both the nation and its people; this chapter thus sheds light on how the poet moves from the body politic to the individual. Chapter 3 includes an overview of confession as a practice in the late Middle Ages and compares medieval manuals for penitents and theological treatises on confession to the portrayal of the lover's confession in the poem. This chapter establishes that confession is not just a listing of sins but an examination of the penitent's conscience and that both the penitent and the priest learn from the confessional process. Chapter 4 studies the frame characters, the lover and the priest (i.e., Amans and Genius), and how they represent the mental faculties of Will and Wit in Gower's scheme of the psyche. Highlighting their development as the confession progresses, the chapter shows how these characters come to represent the model of the readers' education. Finally, Chapter 5 delves into the perceived 'incongruities' of the poem, particularly those in Book VIII, and suggests a reading that reconciles its seeming disparate frames under one unified voice." [eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Castilho Ribeiro Santos, Paulo Eduardo. Published Castilho Ribeiro Santos, Paulo Eduardo. "Public Poetry and the Psychology of Confession in John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Ottawa, 2024. Fully accessible via https://ruor.uottawa.ca/items/13093764-63a8-4da8-8dce-3461f50409e8. 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 Public Poetry and the Psychology of Confession in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Excerpts copied in miscellanies occupy a significant place in the literary culture of late-medieval England. This dissertation surveys manuscripts excerpting Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales,' Rolle's 'Commentary on the Song of Songs,' Lydgate's 'Fall of Princes,' and Gower's 'Confessio amantis.' These manuscripts display a fifteenth-century attitude to authorship that re-shapes modern assumptions about canon formation and the laureation of Chaucer, whose works were often attributed to Lydgate and re-framed to be read through the lens of his poetry. This fifteenth-century 'culture of the excerpt' shaped both the composition and reception of canonical Middle English texts, many of which may have been read more often partially than as complete works, with a preference for morally or spiritually instructive excerpts." [eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Adams, Abigail Marie. Published Adams, Abigail Marie "Putting Together the Pieces: Excerpts from Rolle, Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate in Fifteenth-Century Miscellanies." Ph.D. Dissertation. The University of Texas at Austin, 2022. DAI-A 84.06 (E). Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Putting Together the Pieces: Excerpts from Rolle, Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate in Fifteenth-Century Miscellanies. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Prints "Pyramys and Tysbe," CA Book III, 1331-1502, plus 18 lines not in Macaulay's edition (1899-1902). Text based on MS. Ballantine 354. [RFY1891]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Flügel, Ewald. Published Flügel, Ewald. "Pyramys and Tysbe." Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie 12 (1889): 16-20. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations 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 Pyramys and Tysbe. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1889 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This is a shorter version of the essay entitled "Rivalry, Rape and Manhood: Gower and Chaucer," that appeared in Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange, ed. Robert F. Yeager (1991). [JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dinshaw, Carolyn Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Published Dinshaw, Carolyn. "Quarrels, Rivals and Rape: Gower and Chaucer." In A Wyf Ther Was: Essays in Honor of Paule Mertens-Fonck. Ed. Dor, Juliette. Liége: L3 – Liége Language and Literature, Département d'anglais, Université de Liége, 1992, pp. 112-122. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Quarrels, Rivals and Rape: Gower and Chaucer Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available L3 – Liége Language and Literature, Département d'anglais, Université de Liége, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book 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 Federico. Sylvia. Published Federico, Sylvia. "Queer Times: Richard II in the Poems and Chronicles of Late Fourteenth-Century England." Medium Aevum 79.1 (2010): 25-46. ISSN 0025-8385. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Federico examines the "idea of royal queerness" in English literature produced between the mid-1380s and the early 1390s (i.e., before the Lancastrian propagandists), exploring how details of literature by Chaucer, Gower, Walsingham, and Henry Knighton "uncannily predict[s]" Lancastrian depictions of Richard II. By disturbing our ideas of past, present, and future, Federico suggests, the literature can be seen to participate in "queer historicism" (26). Used by Lancastrians, but not invented by them, the "discourse of the king's perversion" has "Edwardian precedents" that "brought the word 'sodomite' into the later fourteenth-century narrative of failed kings" (33). Subsequently, Federico argues, no pre-Lancastrian writer actually accused Richard of sodomy, but they engaged the "cultural discourse of sexual misrule . . . as a kind of code with which to speak about unnatural politics" (33), Chaucer doing so in "The Miller's Tale," Maidstone in his "Concordia," and Gower in Book VII of CA, where Lechery is postponed as a topic and Politics takes its place temporarily. Warnings against womanish behavior recur in Book VII, and in the plough imagery and oblique reference to unnaturalness in lines 4215-25, Gower "seems to warn against the specifically queer type of lust we have come to associate with Richard II" (40). Furthermore, Federico suggests, Gower's seriatim revisions to CA, while not indicating that he was a "closet Lancastrian," show that he "entertained the desire for another," duly fulfilled when Richard was replaced by Henry, a "less legitimate but preferable man" (41). [MA.Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 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 Queer Times: Richard II in the Poems and Chronicles of Late Fourteenth-Century England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Allen-Goss, Lucy. Published Allen-Goss, Lucy. "Queerly Productive: Women and Collaboration in Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff. 1. 6." postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 9 (2018), 334-48. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review Allen-Goss, focusing primarily on the fragmentary "Tale of Tereus" in the Findern manuscript, argues, "female queer desire is potentially hyper-productive, with each female body simultaneously an inscribable surface and a prosthetic pen/penis that can inscribe" (334). The Findern manuscript's compilational strategies "privilege a distinctly queer mode of female textual practice," Allen-Goss claims, and she identifies the placement of the names Elizabeth Cotton and Elizabeth Francis as a memorial to "female-female collaboration" within this manuscript (335). Allen-Goss uses Anna Klosowska's "Queer Love in the Middle Ages" to inform her queer reading of female collaboration on the feminized page as well as work by Anne Laskaya that posits the potential of "female interactions with books in terms of queer erotics" (336). Allen-Goss suggests that women writing is a form of "pleasuring" the female page (337). The competing hands of men are just that--competing--while women's competing hands suggest female queer desire. Allen-Goss focuses on the story of Philomena in Gower's CA in the Findern manuscript that is "widely marked by textual recombinations, excisions, and reassemblies . . . as being particularly typical of women's manuscript culture" (338). In Findern, the "Tale of Tereus" begins when Tereus realizes he has just eaten Itys, and Allen-Goss calls Philomena's speech after she has been violated by Tereus "penetrative." Because this tale is removed from the prologue of the CA in Findern, Allen-Goss suggests, "Philomena is placed at the origin point of a new and female tradition of textual interpretation, her words mediated through female authorities" (341). The omissions in this manuscript version create a female-centric experience of this tale that excludes male authority. When considered in the context of the texts that follow Gower's in the Findern manuscript, especially Chaucer's "Parliament of Fowles," Philomena's song is for women, and, according to Allen-Goss, the "queer erotic" of this lyric is echoed in the female collaboration of the manuscript between Cotton and Francis (343-44).] [JS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Queerly Productive: Women and Collaboration in Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff. 1. 6. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bech analyzes Chaucer's Legend of Good Women (LGW) not only in relation to Gower's CA, but also in comparison with works by Ovid and Boccaccio, among others. The first section (314-65) thus catalogues the various sources for the LGW. The story of Pyramus and Thisbe is the first major tale where Bech closely compares Gower and Chaucer. Chaucer's superiority is clear, for he copies Ovid faithfully and with rich psychological insight. Gower lacks an artistic eye for dialogue and monologue, and generally turns Ovid's "schöne miniaturbild" (320) into mere plot summary. Next, Bech turns to the story of Aeneas and Dido, which both authors tell in the contemporary language of chivalry and courtly love. Gower gives a very general account of this narrative, however, and his reference to King Menander (in Dido's letter) is a misreading of Ovid's phrase "vada Meandri" that Chaucer avoids (323-24). Bech further notes that while Gower makes no mention of Jason's adventure on Lemnos (as Chaucer does), he does relate the story of Jason and Medea at length. Bech argues that Chaucer and Gower use the same source (Benoît de Sainte-Maure) independently from one another (332). The story of Lucrece is also borrowed independently, although Bech suggests that at a crucial moment in the narrative (where Lucrece's relatives argue for forgiveness on the basis of other examples), both Gower and Chaucer turn to Livy rather than Ovid. Yet another tale where Chaucer and Gower do not borrow from one another is the story of Ariadne. Gower does not have Minos imprison Theseus and omits some of the latter's dramatic dialogue with Ariadne. Nevertheless, both writers elaborate on two points, namely the story of how Minos's son Androgeus was killed in Athens, and the defeat of the monster. Any parallels at this point may be explained by the possibility that they both used similar medieval manuscripts of Ovid, as well as by the fact that the means of killing the Minotaur may be influenced by the biblical narrative of the dragon in Daniel 14. Similar conclusions about Gower and Chaucer's independent story-telling are drawn about other narratives (including the story of Procne and Philomela and the story of Phyllis and Demophoon) before Bech turns in part 2 (365-71) to a more direct comparison between the CA and the LGW. Aside from the fact that both works use classical sources and have an "erotischen charakter" (365), Gower borrows much from Chaucer's Prologue to the LGW. Although Gower downplays Cupid's role, he too uses the deities of love (Cupid and Venus), sets his narrative in the month of May, and has Venus tells Amans to confess his love, just as Alceste tells Chaucer to write the LGW as an act of penitence. While it might be objected that the Romance of the Rose was the source for both authors, it seems improbable that two poets with such different poetic talents ("leute von so ganz verschiedener dichterischer begabung" 368) would borrow the same material. It seems more likely that, for instance, Gower's praise of Alceste is the result of Chaucer's "verherrlichung dieser frau" (368). When Gower tells the story of Alceste in Book 7, certain plot details suggest an acquaintance with the LGW. Bech indeed dates the CA later than the LGW, although when it comes to the legends themselves (rather than the prologue), Gower's only indebtedness may be his mention of the death of Cleopatra. When Gower mentions Cleopatra and Thisbe in Book 8 as members of the company of young lovers, he names them in the same sequence as their tales are related in the LGW, but this may be due to the fact that both women led similar lives: they both committed suicide and their lovers followed suit. Part 3 (371-82) of Bech's study focuses on the structure and plan of the LGW, although he includes some brief commentary on the Man of Law's Tale and its relation to the CA (376). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bech, M Published Bech, M. "Quellen und Plan der Legende of Goode Women und ihr Verhältnis zur Confessio Amantis." Anglia 5 (1882), pp. 313-382. 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 Quellen und Plan der Legende of Goode Women und ihr Verhältnis zur Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1882 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 Linda Barney Burke reports that she has found a copy of this rare study in the library at Columbia University, in a volume entitled John Gower Dissertations (catalog no. 822G74.Z8), bound together with Karl Eichinger's 1900 dissertation, also from Munich, "Die Trojasage als Stollquelle fur John Gowers Confession Amantis"). The book which she describes as "very fragile," may be the only copy in existence: the issuing university's copies were destroyed in the was, and apparently few were printed. [PN. Copyright the John Gower Society. JGN 2.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Strollreither, K Published Strollreither, K. "Quellennachweise zu Gowers Confessio Amantis." PhD thesis, Munich, 1901. 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 Quellennachweise zu Gowers Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1901 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 Meecham-Jones, Simon Published Meecham-Jones, Simon. "Questioning Romance: Amadas and Ydoine in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Parergon 17 (2000), pp. 35-49. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review Mid-way through his confession of his "Delicacy" in love, Amans describes to Genius how his ear is fed with "redinge of romance / Of Ydoine and of Amadas, / That whilom weren in mi cas" (6.878-80). The allusion itself, Meecham-Jones observes, might possibly be a parody of a conventional stylistic device of contemporary romance: both "Emare" and "Sir Degrevant" (both of which, he points out, may be too late to have been available to Gower) contain similar passing references to the story of Amadas. Meecham-Jones is more interested, however, in the purposes of Gower's evocation of this particular story. It stands out as one of the very few references to popular romance in the poem, and the characters that Amans names are notably excluded from the ranks of the famous lovers who appear in Amans' vision in Book 8. The implicit critique of the romance genre, Meecham-Jones asserts, goes beyond treating the reading of such books as an instance of Delicacy. Amans claims to seek consolation in characters whose condition resembles his own, but Amans does not get the happy ending that the romance provides. The difference in outcomes for Amadas and Amans reflects the difference between two different moral visions. The romance is structured to demonstrate "the benign justice of divine providence" (p. 47), while Gower's moral analysis is based on "the congruence of act and consequence" (p. 46). "The operation of divine grace is necessarily absented from the exemplary discourse of Gower's work . . . precisely because the opacity (to human reason) of the workings of grace is incompatible with the schematic and designedly practical dissection or moral possibility Gower attempts in the Confessio. . . . The story of Amadas is briefly introduced less to disparage its ethical stance than to assist Gower in defining, by contrary example, the particular moral stance of the Confessio as an exploration of human conduct in the fallen temporal sphere" (p. 46). It is at this point that the essay becomes interesting. Meecham-Jones makes a bit too much of the uniqueness of Amans' allusion, passing over the references, for instance, to both Tristram and Lancelot elsewhere in the poem, including the vision in Book 8, where Meecham-Jones states that Gower deliberately omits any reference to the romance form (p. 41). The difference between a theology of grace and a morality of rewards and punishments would seem to be rather central, however. The question is how this distinction operates in the poem, and Meecham-Jones may define Gower's position a bit too starkly. There are, after all, other very significant tales in which grace and Providence play a major role. Meecham-Jones dismisses "Apollonius of Tyre" from his discussion by classing it with "Florent" as "social narratives above all," quoting Dimmick (see JGN 19, no. 2, p. 9), and he does not even mention "Constance." Perhaps there is a bit more to say about this issue which Meecham-Jones poses so provocatively. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Questioning Romance: Amadas and Ydoine in Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review MacCracken publishes a Middle English translation of Gower's ballade sequence Traitié. This remarkably close translation by a certain Quixley had not been noted before, and MacCracken's is the first (and only) edited version. It is in a northern dialect and likely from Yorkshire, and MacCracken suggests a number of Quixleys (after the village of Whixley, just north-west of York), as possible authors. He settles on a lord, John Quixley, whose daughter married in 1402, on which occasion a poem of this nature would have been appropriate. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor MacCracken, Henry Noble Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Manuscripts and Textual Studies Published MacCracken, Henry Noble. "Quixley's Ballades Royal (?1402)." Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 20 (1909), pp. 33-50. Dublin Core The Dublin 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 1909 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Quixley's Ballades Royal (?1402) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Sobecki's essay is "a response" to the others in this cluster of Speculum essays--hence its concerns on arguments. pro and con, with Adam Pinkhurst as Chaucer's "Adam scriveyn" (Sobecki is not convinced), and so are largely extraneous to Gower. He does reprint Linne Mooney's Fig. 2, the portion of Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.2 fol. 9ra (791), and comments interestingly that this manuscript "has clear Westminster connections" and may point to a circle of Westminster scribes, with scribes A, B (if not Pinkhurst), and D perhaps belonging to Anglicana-specialized clerks working in Westminster Hall, that is, Chancery, Exchequer, the central law courts" (804). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sobecki, Sebastian. Published Sobecki, Sebastian. "Quo vadis, Adam Pinkhurst? Scripts, Scribes, and the Limits of Paleography: A Response Essay." Speculum 99.3 (2024): 780-804. 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 Quo vadis, Adam Pinkhurst? Scripts, Scribes, and the Limits of Paleography: A Response Essay. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Mast, Isabelle Published Mast, Isabelle. "Rape in John Gower's Confessio Amantis and Other Related Works." In Young Medieval Women. Ed. Lewis, Katherine J. and Menuge, Noël James and Phillips, Kim M.. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999, pp. 103-32. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Language and Word Studies Review Mast's long essay falls into three unequal parts: a consideration of the instances of rape in three other collections of tales nearly contemporary with Gower's, an examination of the language Gower uses for rape in each of his three major poems, and an analysis of some of the major instances of rape in CA. The three other tale collections--the "Gesta Romanorum," the "Alphabet of Tales," and Christine de Pisan's "Cité des Dames"--treat rape very differently from one another, but none explores the consequences of rape for the woman, the principal way in which Mast finds Gower's treatment differs from that of his predecessors. Gower's vocabulary for rape is shaped in part by the framework of the confession. In Book 5, where many of the instances of rape in the poem are found, the vocabulary of theft, with its implication that women or their sexuality are mere commodities, is drawn from the metaphor of Avarice that governs the book as a whole, but it also embodies the woman's lack of consent, it suggests that rape is less an act of desire than of aggression and power, and it does not prevent Gower from considering the consequences for the victim. Other expressions, such as "hadde his wille," are more androcentric, but Gower never stoops to pornographic descriptions of the violent act. The incidents of rape in CA appear to be carefully chosen: Gower depicted far fewer than the fifty such acts, for instance, in the "Metamorphoses." His alterations in the tales of Philomela and Lucrece reveal his attitude towards rape. In the former tale, Gower places the rape and its consequences at the center. He betrays his sympathy for Philomela by allowing her to voice her feelings of shame and embarrassment, and in the transformations at the end he affords her some partial compensation for her fate. He alters the story of Lucrece in order to emphasize the victim's innocence. She too experiences the shame of pollution. In both these tales, "the victims are cleared as fully as possible. In both cases Gower tried to think himself into the position of the victim. He successfully expressed the feeling of shame which is not based on complicity, a reproach women often had and still have to endure, in addition to the pain that has already been inflicted upon them. He also makes every attempt to show the effects on the women's identity" (pp. 120-21). In two briefer examples of Book 5--Cornix and Calistona--the woman's lack of consent is less explicit but it may be inferred from the context of the frame. Gower focuses on "the violent and unsympathetic reaction of the girls' social environments" (p. 123): even when her struggle is not depicted, the woman is still depicted as the victim. This essay appears to have been put together in some haste: it contains a couple of sentence fragments and a number of paragraphs that don't quite cohere, and at one point a line from "Sir Degaré" is attributed to Chaucer (p. 107). There is a more troubling problem at the core of its thesis. Gower demonstrates his sympathy for women, Mast repeatedly asserts, by allowing them to voice the shame that they experience as a consequence of being raped. This shame is associated with the "concomitant loss of reputation and, implicitly, social standing" (p. 107); in the tale of Philomela, Gower "is displaying thoughtfully how a young woman could be shamefully embarrassed about the sexual pollution and common knowledge of her rape and how she might try to avoid the public stare" (p. 116); Lucrece is ashamed because "the rape has destroyed a significant part of her identity as a woman and may by association besmirch the name of her family on the public stage, regardless of her actual innocence" (p. 119). Mast does not interrogate either the basis of this public (as opposed to private) shame or its validity, and she appears to accept that the woman's loss of reputation following a rape is both natural and inevitable. She thus dismisses Augustine's condemnation of Lucrece's suicide ("Si pudica, cur occisa?") as misogynistic, not recognizing the misogyny in the notion that a woman can be "besmirched" by an act of violence against her; and in the course of her discussion, she mentions the tale of Leucothoe (p. 123), but she has nothing to say about how the father has his daughter buried alive because she suffered her maidenhood to be stolen (CA 5.6764-75). Gower betrays a sympathy for the victims of rape, to be sure, but that is not necessarily to say that he is fundamentally sympathetic towards women. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 18.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Rape in John Gower's Confessio Amantis and Other Related Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. Martin's Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review From Ensley's abstract: "this dissertation argues that for the producers and readers of the medieval romance, the genre and the books that preserved it were a means by which readers could both travel to the past and meditate on their connections with that past. Combining bibliographical analysis, reception history, literary interpretation, and theories of cultural memory and historiography, this project demonstrates that polytemporal material objects allowed readers to experience both present and past in directions that unsettle the period divisions foundational to much modern scholarship . . . . Chapter Four uses Thomas Berthelette's 1532 folio edition of John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' alongside William Shakespeare's reimagining of Gower in his late romance 'Pericles' to explore the monumentality of fourteenth-century authors and texts in early-modern literary cultures. I argue that while Berthelette's edition buries Gower in a monumental folio, separating the medieval author from a work deemed timeless, Shakespeare's play both recognizes Gower's alterity and simultaneously insists on his presence in living cultural memory." Ensley also comments recurrently on Gower's early modern reputation elsewhere in her study. [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ensley, Mimi. Published Ensley, Mimi. Re-forming the Past: The Medieval Romance Book as a Dynamic Site of Memory. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Notre Dame, 2019. vi, 315 pp.; illus. Dissertation Abstracts International A81.09(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion 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 Re-forming the Past: The Medieval Romance Book as a Dynamic Site of Memory. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This is the third collection of essays on Gower that Yeager has edited (see "John Gower: Recent Readings" (1989) and the 1993 special issue of Mediaevalia). Without diminishing its predecessors, this volume, containing fifteen studies based on papers presented at the meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo between 1992 and 1997, may very well be the best. The range of interests is very wide; the level of quality is almost without exception very high; and as a cross-section of Gower studies at the present moment, it gives evidence, in the numerous disagreements among its authors, of considerable vitality, including a few spirited challenges to received orthodoxy. In its recurring themes, it also indicates where the interests of Gower scholars have been directed recently: to CA more than to any other Gower's other works (still); and in that work, to the margins as much as to the center, both literally, in the layout of the page, and metaphorically, in recuperating the voices of the silenced. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F., ed. Published Yeager, R. F., ed. "Re-Visioning Gower." Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Re-Visioning Gower. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pegasus Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Despite their immense popularity with medieval audiences, the Middle English texts about Alexander the Great have been little studied because modern scholars viewed them in isolation from their classical antecedents and their religious context. In this dissertation, I examine how classical and medieval authors adapted Alexander's story into different genres of various levels of historical fidelity for their respective audiences. My underlying argument is that Alexander's influence over his own legacy ensured that his life story became not only a powerful historical example to kings with imperial ambitions but a critical opportunity for these successors and their opponents to make ideological assertions about the past and the present. . . . In the fourth chapter, I examine how John Gower combines moralized episodes from different editions of Alexander's life to educate Amans in self-control in love and politics in his Confessio Amantis." [JGN 21.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Girard, Karen Lee Published Girard, Karen Lee. "Re-writing Alexander the Great: Literary adaptations of Alexander's life in medieval England." PhD thesis, Stanford University, 2001. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Re-writing Alexander the Great: Literary adaptations of Alexander's life in medieval England Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor 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 Probably the best place to begin Sierra's essay is with the last two sentences, which state (more or less) its point, and also provide a taste of its style: "This is why the Portuguese translators use the Confessio's Latin frame but do not explicitly translate it. Their translation shows that the authority of a work is not derived from its meaning or relationship to a tradition but to its ability to be reproduced, and so their work portrays the Confessio's Latin frame only in so far as it confirms the logic present in Gower's English--a textual logic that does not simply wish to narrate 'authorial' truth from some abstract meaning but which also seeks to imbue the process of narrative reproducibility with the authority of utterance itself" (450). What he apparently means by this is worked out in an elaborate comparison of the Vulgate version (which he calls "Jerome's 'Vulgata'") of the punishment of Nebuchadnezzar with Gower's and with selected passages from the Portuguese translation of the CA (435-48): the Portuguese translator(s)--Sierra prefers the plural--took the Latin apparatus for part of the poem, and the poem as a compilation, not as an "authorial" product, which gave them permission to adopt an "authorial" approach to translation themselves. They adapted what Gower wrote, that is, to their own way of reading the poem, as well as into their own language. The Castilian translation, in some fashion, fades from attention not far into the essay. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sierra, Juan David. Published Sierra, Juan David. "Readers as Authors: Reproducing Authority in the Iberian Translations of John Gower's Confessio Amantis." eHumanista 22 (2012): 429-53. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Manuscripts and Textual Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Readers as Authors: Reproducing Authority in the Iberian Translations of John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Zieman, Katherine Grace Published Zieman, Katherine Grace. "Reading and Singing: Liturgy, Literacy, and Literature in Late Medieval England." PhD thesis, University of California at Berkeley, 1997. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Review "This study shows liturgy's intimate connection with changes in definitions of literate status, the articulation of the components of literate skills, and the production of vernacular literature in late medieval England. The fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries witnessed a considerable growth in liturgical benefactions. This upsurge in liturgical activity affected ecclesiastical institutions, their personnel, patrons and clientele. Both cleric and lay might be motivated to produce or consume liturgy through various desires related to piety, education, charity, or display. The variety of motivations, in fact, combined with the multiplication of contexts for performance, led to the unmooring of literate skills associated with the singing and reading of liturgical texts from the traditional context of the choral community. The resulting fluidity of definitions -- both of the skills required for adequate performance of the liturgy and of the spiritual and ethical value of those skills -- is manifested in the decontextualized collocation 'reading and singing.' "The first chapter charts the development and social implications of the collocation 'reading and singing' in elementary educational practices (generally known as the 'song school'). The second examines the fluidity of the term literatus in relation to liturgical and devotional performance. The third describes lay and clerical strategies for investing in the liturgy and the ethical dilemmas this commodification produced. "The final two chapters show how vernacular literature emerges from the foment of activity surrounding 'reading and singing.' Langland's Piers Plowman depicts a vernacular maker inhabiting the boundary between cleric and lay, justifying his literary activity as a socially useful labor that synthesizes fragmented clerical discourses while foregrounding ethical questions about their appropriate use, questions he increasingly associated with the 'reading and singing' repertoire. In his Vox Clamantis, Gower derives his performative authority from the vernacular concept of the 'voice of prayer' in order to divorce his project from the liturgical pretensions of the participants of 1381 rebellion. Chaucer takes up the issue of voice in House of Fame and The Miller's Tale, turning it into a poetic principle that imputes to the vernacular the authoritative rationality generally restricted to Latin litteras. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading and Singing: Liturgy, Literacy, and Literature in Late Medieval England Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Knox, Poole, and Griffith's carefully written article asserts that the commendatory verses appended to Francis Kynaston's seventeenth-century Latin translation of Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" reveal an academic circle of scholars associated with New College, Oxford, who had a passion for Middle English literature in general and the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, in particular. Examination of the verses proceeds from those which praise Kynaston for rendering Chaucer's presumably rustic poetry into the international language of Latin and therefore both improving it and making it widely available before moving on to several verses which "exonerate" Chaucer of his primitive language, while still praising Kynaston's adaptation (49). The authors conclude that Kynaston's "Troilus" is "an important record of a moment in English literary history when language change was rendering Chaucer's work ever more remote even as the idea of his originary status remained strong" so that "Chaucer's English could be more intelligible to the English when rendered in a language other than English" (50). Of particular interest to Gower scholars are several notes about the language of Francis James, whose verses are written in an imitation of Middle English. James describes Chaucer as an "orpyd knight" (l. 8, p. 46) which Knox et al. identify as a phrase not from Chaucer, but from Book III of the "Confessio Amantis" which also contains the "co-occurrence of the rhyme-words 'lond' and 'hond'" (46). Additionally, James uses the "form -end of 'clepend'" (48) in his verse, which also appears to be a borrowing from Gower. Since Knox identifies James as the author of another imitation of Middle English verse in a commendatory poem for an English translation of "Leucippe and Clitophon," which reveals that "Middle English literature was imaginatively associated with the exotic prose romances of the ancient world" (45) for James, just as it was for Shakespeare in "Pericles," it seems possible that this particular member of the academic circle around Kynaston had an enthusiasm for Gower's Middle English, even if mediated through Spenser and Shakespeare. Further exploration the "narrow but rich seam of evidence" (34) of these verses might offer hints about early modern Oxford readers' engagements with Gower as well as Chaucer. [NG. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Knox, Philip Poole, William Griffith, Mark Published Knox, Philip, William Poole, and Mark Griffith. "Reading Chaucer in New College, Oxford, in the 1630s: The Commendatory Verses of Francis Kynaston's ' Troili et Creseidæ'." Medium Aevum 85.1 (2016): 33-58. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion 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 Reading Chaucer in New College, Oxford, in the 1630s: The Commendatory Verses of Francis Kynaston's :Troili et Creseidæ." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The Trentham MS (British Library Add. MS 59495) is well known to Gowerians. It contains our only texts of "In Praise of Peace" and the "Cinkante Balades" as well as copies of the "Traitié" and some of the minor Latin poems, and it is expressly addressed to the newly crowned Henry IV. Its contents are usually examined separately, however. Bahr studies the manuscript as a whole, but not as the simple product of Gower's attempt to honor and flatter the king. He treats the collection itself as an independent aesthetic object, and he argues that the choice and the arrangement of the texts open up interpretive possibilities that both enrich the reading of each separate work (in many cases running counter to their ostensible meaning) and that add up to a whole that is different from, and greater than, the sum of its parts. Justification for treating the book as a single object is provided by the evidence of its careful design. Though diverse in contents, it is not difficult to find continuing themes, in particular a recurring emphasis upon kingship; the texts are provided with links that help tie them into a coherent whole; and there is a striking symmetry in the arrangement of the texts, as Bahr illustrates in his outline on pp. 225-26. The "Cinkante Balades" stand at the center, and the three texts on either side answer to each other either formally or thematically or both. The most surprising correspondence is that between "In Praise of Peace" and the "Traitié," standing opposite one another in the manuscript, Gower's only two independent compositions in rime royal, and each containing precisely 385 lines. That pairing, and the differences that exist between these two works and the other pairs, draw our attention to the possibility of reading each work in light of the other rather than taking each solely on its own. In this broader reading, not everything is as it seems to be. The celebration of Henry at the beginning yields to hesitation, reservations, ambivalence at the end, suggesting a tension between initial hopes and darker possibilities. Bahr finds the same sort of ambivalence emerging from the opening texts themselves when they are viewed in relation to Gower's own earlier writings. As has been noted before, "In Praise of Peace" reverses the roles of Solomon and Alexander from their use as examples in "Confessio Amantis," suggesting an instability and a "tension between moral idealism and political reality" (231) that might apply to Henry too. The opening of "Rex Celi Deus" repeats lines used in a passage laudatory of Richard II in Book VI of "Vox Clamantis," invoking in a different way the possibility of a fall. The "Cinkante Balades" at the center of the book also constitutes a rewriting, in this case of authorial history, since Gower had twice before (in "Mirour de l'Omme" and at the end of the "Confessio Amantis") turned away from the composition of lyrics about love. Bahr's discussion of the "Cinkante Balades" emphasizes the connections it offers between the "bon amour" that it celebrates and the peace and political harmony that Gower urges in "In Praise of Peace" and the subtle ways in which ambivalences in the treatment of love itself undercut some of the ostensible celebration. In the two works that follow, "Ecce patet tensus" offers a blind and tyrannical Cupid as a mirror image to Gower's real king, and the "Traitié" continues the emphasis upon kingly conduct while also, by its juxtaposition of exempla, raising more questions about the virtuous force of love. If these latter texts have a relevance to Henry, Bahr observes, they do so only in the context of the manuscript as a whole in which they are contained. But his evidence, which we have only barely summarized here, lends strong support to his conclusion regarding the manuscript's "codicological form": "My larger argument about Trentham . . . is not that it conveys a specific 'message,' or is 'about' a specific figure. It is an artfully constructed meditation on the multiple natures and implications of kingship, and the very complexity of its construction serves to acknowledge both the visceral pleasure of using aesthetic modes to grapple with such vitally important questions and the impossibility of creating clear-cut 'propositional content' as answers to them" (261). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bahr, Arthur W Published Bahr, Arthur W. "Reading Codicological Form in John Gower's Trentham Manuscript." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011), pp. 219-62. ISSN 0190-2407 Gower Subject In Praise of Peace Minor Latin Poetry Cinkante Balades Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading Codicological Form in John Gower's Trentham Manuscript Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "'Reading Emotional Bodies' utilizes the history of emotions, phenomenology, and gender theory to argue for a culturally specific performance of love in medieval English literature. Texts such as Sir Launfal' and 'Ywain and Gawain' reveal an English performance of love and its ties to performances of masculinity that differ from their Old French sources. The selections of John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' found in Cambridge University Library MS Ff.1.6 offer further support for an English performance of love as an emotion. Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde' presents a critique of late medieval feminine embodiment and the bodily expressions of love and the 'Legend of Good Women' not only supports Chaucer's critique found in the 'Troilus,' but also subverts the culturally acceptable and expected literary presentation of women." Author/Editor Author/Editor Beck, Christian Blevins Published Beck, Christian Blevins. "Reading emotional bodies: Love and gender in late medieval English literature." PhD thesis, State University of New York at Binghamton, 2010. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading emotional bodies: Love and gender in late medieval English literature Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review At CA VII.3545-47, "Genius voices the astonishing advice that the king should shape his face so as to control what it expresses to others. 'A king schal make good visage / That no man knowe of his corage / Bot al honour and worthinesse" (73), thus seeming to condone a form of deception as a strategy for rule. However, this counsel is not unexpected, as the medieval "science" of physiognomy was a staple of advice to princes and is ubiquitous to a major source for CA Book VII, the "Secreta [sic] Secretorum" (74-76). In a world much declined from the Golden Age, a king must control his own "visage" and also read faces if he seeks to preserve his rule. Both Chaucer and Gower offer numerous examples of the "good visage"--in all its moral ambiguity--as a strategy for survival in royalty and other walks of life (78-82). As a poet who writes for kings, Gower resolves the tension by trusting the king to keep his face a plain reflection of his "corage" (82). In Taylor's argument, Gower deleted the tribute to Chaucer from the Henrician version of the CA as a rebuke to his friend for failure to comment on the political crises of 1386 and 1388 (83). Chaucer responded by injecting the Gowerian theme of "corage" versus "visage" into his Clerk's reworking of Petrarch's translation of the "Tale of Griselda," with Walter the archetypal tyrant who conceals his uncontrolled desires behind a "good visage" (88). For Chaucer, "The result of Genius' Machiavellian advice . . . is not a disciplined, ethical ruler, but a Walter," and Gower is following the example of Petrarch by trimming his ethical standards to write for tyrants (90). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Taylor, Karla. Published Taylor, Karla. "Reading Faces in Gower and Chaucer." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 73-90. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading Faces in Gower and Chaucer. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "I argue that John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer engage in a case-based ethics, or moral casuistry, which has roots in traditions of Aristotelian ethics and Ciceronian rhetoric passed down through the Middle Ages in a wide variety of philosophical, rhetorical, and homiletic sources. Focusing on Gower's Confessio Amantis and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, I claim that the fourteenth-century poets presuppose an approach to discovering practical precepts that depends on both the rhetoric of exemplarity and the deliberation of readers. The thesis is therefore an interdisciplinary investigation into the ethical and aesthetic qualities of early English literature. As a metaethical inquiry, my study inaugurates a critique of the notion that morality in the Middle Ages was invariably restricted to a uniform system of values, a naive conception of divine-command, or prescriptive ideological statements." [JGN 23.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Mitchell, J. Allan Published Mitchell, J. Allan. "Reading for the Moral: The Ethics of Exemplarity in Middle English Literature (John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer)." PhD thesis, Dalhousie University, 2003. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading for the Moral: The Ethics of Exemplarity in Middle English Literature (John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Emmerson, Richard K. Published Emmerson, Richard K.. "Reading Gower in a Manuscript Culture: Latin and English in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999), pp. 143-186. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review Macaulay's edition of CA, however useful for the study of the text of the poem, "masks the complexity of the manuscript presentation of the text and thus . . . the variety of ways in which Gower was received by his contemporaries and later-fifteenth-century readers" (p. 146). Emmerson sets out to remedy this fault by studying the manuscripts more closely, to see particularly how they "encouraged different readings of the 'Confessio Amantis' and different representations of Gower as auctor" (p. 147). He focuses on two aspects of their layout: their arrangement of the Latin apparatus that accompanies the English text and their placement of the first two illuminations. In the first part of his essay he summarizes recent studies of the functions of the Latin apparatus, in five categories, adding the running titles and table of contents to the four categories described by Pearsall (1989). The manuscripts differ in the placement of the passages that Macaulay called "Latin summaries" and that Emmerson refers to as "Latin prose commentary," some placing them in the margin, some in the text column, and some omitting them altogether; and in the color of the ink (red or black) used for the apparatus generally. In the table at the end of his essay, Emmerson identifies the relevant features of each of the twenty illuminated manuscripts of the poem. He notes that one color ink is generally chosen for all of the Latin throughout and he observes that the placement of the "commentary" varies according to recension. He postulates two large groups: the "revised first recension," "second-recension," and "third recension" copies place the Latin commentary in the margins and write all Latin in black; the "unrevised" and "intermediate first recension" copies plus some "transitional" copies of the "second recension" place the commentary in the text column and present the Latin in red. The manuscripts also fall into two groups according to the placement of the two introductory miniatures, though rather less perfectly. There are two versions of the miniature of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, one showing just the statue (which occurs only in copies of the "unrevised" version of the "first recension") and the more familiar one showing Nebuchadnezzar himself in bed which appears in all other copies and which must therefore represent the "original design" (p. 167). The manuscripts of the "third recension" uniformly place the miniature at the beginning of the Prologue, while most "first recension" copies reduce it in size and place it later in the text, near the beginning of the account of the dream. (The "second recension" is mixed.) Similarly, the illumination showing Amans kneeling before Genius appears at the beginning of Book 1 in all copies of "recension three,," while it is placed near line 1:202 in the copies of "recension one." From this variety of forms, Emmerson argues, we can deduce the different ways in which Gower's text was received by its earliest readers. The earliest illustrated manuscripts, he argues, were intended for "aural reception" and for public reading: the text column contains only the portions that would be read aloud (including the English poem, of course, but also the Latin epigrams), while the commentary and other apparatus, which was not meant to be performed, was relegated to the margins for the "prelector's" use alone. The large initial miniatures, moreover, "could be shown to the audience at the beginning of a reading" (p. 175), and would serve to introduce the two major themes of the poem. Later copies suggest that aural reception continued into the mid-fifteenth century, but that there were two other forms of reception as well. The copies in which the Latin has disappeared suggest that CA "was read as an essentially English collection of tales" (p. 176), while the "first recension" copies in which the Latin is written in red and the commentary moved into the text column present Gower as "a highly Latinate poet, . . . a scholarly protohumanist" (p. 177). Emmerson concludes his essay with an examination of the two most fully illustrated copies of the poem. One emphasizes the English character of the poem, he argues, and the other represents the culmination of the presentation of Gower as a protohumanist. Emmerson presents a great deal of information about the manuscripts of CA in accessible form; the table at the end is particularly helpful, as far as it goes. He also provides nine very useful photographs illustrating the variety of manuscript presentations of the poem. In other respects, however, this essay an exasperating mix of weakly supported propositions and missed opportunities. Why, for instance, is the table showing the arrangement of the Latin text limited to the illuminated copies of the poem? To be fair, Emmerson refers to the non-illuminated copies in his discussion but for most he relied upon Macaulay's descriptions (see note 43) rather than examining them personally, which not only diminishes his credence but also draws attention to the fact that most of the information that he presents is already available in other forms. In his attempt to organize the manuscripts into groups, Emmerson passes over a great many of the details of presentation of individual copies--the fact that in Bodley 902, for instance (which provides his figure 1), the scribe has written not just most of the commentary but also some of the Latin verses in the margin. He is also less than compelling in his presentation of his views of the relations among the different versions of the poem. He claims at the beginning of his essay (p. 145) that he retains Macaulay's classification of the manuscripts into "recensions" only as a "useful organizational tool," but it becomes clear that he has also silently adopted all of Macaulay's views on the development of the text. On page 178, for instance, he refers to a manuscript that Macaulay identified as "unrevised" as containing "the very first version of the Confessio," though in the very same sentence he goes on to quote from an essay by the reviewer, the main point of which is that this was not the first version at all but a product of scribal corruption. He comes close to the same conclusion himself when he notes that the same group of manuscripts do not seem to contain the "original" version of the illustration of Nebuchadnezzar, but he doesn't observe the contradiction. Similarly, he adopts Macaulay's view that Fairfax represents Gower's "final" intention for his poem (pp. 152 and 170), but the only evidence that he presents for this conclusion is that others have defended it. As for his argument that the early copies of CA were intended for "aural reception," the best that can be said is that it is purely speculative. We have no other evidence of Gower's poem being read aloud, particularly not in the court; each of the features that Emmerson points to could easily have some other explanation; and Emmerson makes no effort to compare the manuscripts that he refers to to contemporary copies of other works, either those that we know were read aloud or those that we know weren't. This essay will be widely read because of its location, but it needs to be used with a great deal of caution. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 19.1.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading Gower in a Manuscript Culture: Latin and English in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Summers, Karen Crady. Published Summers, Karen Crady. Reading Incest: Tyranny, Subversion, and the Preservation of Patriarchy. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2011. v, 162 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A73.04. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/listing.aspx?id=8321. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Review From Summers' abstract: "This dissertation explores usage of the incest theme in the medieval and early modern literary periods, and into the mid-eighteenth century," assessing Gower's "Confessio Amantis," Malory's "Morte Arthure," Shakespeare's "Pericles," Beaumont and Fletcher's "A King, and No King," Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi," and Walpole's "The Mysterious Mother" and "The Castle of Otranto" to show how "writers and storytellers appropriate [the incest taboo] to reflect some of the anxieties attendant upon their times," with recurrent attention to "a common desire to preserve, uphold, and defend patriarchy." Summers finds CA to be "filled with tales of incest" (10) which "analogize incest to tyranny, and prove that personal lives or social institutions built upon a foundation of incest tend not to stand" (11), comparing and contrasting it with Malory's treatment, and commenting on relations between Gower's tales and later literature, especially Shakespeare's "Pericles." [MA] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading Incest: Tyranny, Subversion, and the Preservation of Patriarchy. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Richmond, Andrew Murray. Published Ph.D. Dissertation. The Ohio State University, 2015. Open access at http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1428671857 (accessed February 3, 2023). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review From Richmond's abstract: "My dissertation . . . interpret[s] the textual landscapes and ecological details that permeate late-medieval British romances . . . c.1300 – c. 1500, focusing on . . . fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English and Scottish conceptions of the relationships between literary worlds and 'real-world' locations. In my first section, I analyze the role of topography and the management of natural resources in constructing a sense of community in 'Sir Isumbras,' 'William of Palerne,' and 'Havelok the Dane,' and explain how abandoned or ravaged agricultural landscapes in 'Sir Degrevant' and the 'Tale of Gamelyn' betray anxieties about the lack of human control over the English landscape in the wake of population decline caused by civil war, the Black Death, and the Little Ice Age. My next section examines seashores and waterscapes in 'Sir Amadace,' 'Emaré,' 'Sir Eglamour of Artois,' the 'Awntyrs off Arthure,' and the Constance romances of Chaucer and Gower. Specifically, I explain how a number of romances present the seaside as a simultaneously inviting and threatening space whose multifaceted nature as a geographical, political, and social boundary embodies the complex range of meanings embedded in the Middle English concept of "play" – a word that these texts [including Gower's tale of Apollonius] often link with the seashore. Beaches, too, serve as stages upon which the romances act out their anxieties over the consequences of human economic endeavor, with scenes where shipwrecks are configured as opportunities for financial gain for scavengers and as mortal peril for sailors [including Constance]. In my third section, I move beyond the boundary space of the sea to consider the landscape descriptions of foreign lands. . . , focusing in particular on representations of Divine will manifested through landscape features and dramatic weather in the Holy Land of 'Titus and Vespasian' and the Far East of 'Kyng Alisaunder.' Finally, my concluding section returns to literary descriptions of medieval Britain, examin[ing] the idea of the 'foreign at home.' I discuss here how romances of Scotland and the Anglo-Scottish border such as 'Sir Colling,' 'Eger and Grime,' and 'Thomas of Erceldoune' cast the Border landscape as one defined by rugged topography, extreme weather, and an innate sense of independence, while also emphasizing its proximity to the Otherworlds of Fairy and Hell. I then trace how these topics get developed later, in the early modern ballads that are based on some of these romances, explaining how song-texts persist in communicating some of these same ideas regarding Scottish and northern English landscapes." Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading Landscapes in Medieval British Romance. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Sylvester seeks to identify the roots of rape fantasies and the appeal of rape narratives, offering a "reader-response" analysis of the tales of Lucretia in Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women," Gower's "Confessio Amantis" (Book VII), and Christine de Pizan's "Le Livre de la Cité des Dames," attending in particular to how the versions reflect notions derived from "romance and romantic texts" of "female masochism that is erotic, rather than psychological," (116), and how they deal with "the idea of female pleasure in enforced sex" in the Middle Ages and modern society. All three texts, Sylvester tells us, "acknowledge the possibility of an erotic response to these rape narratives," and because they do, she sets out to assess "how eroticism is inscribed within or erased from these texts" and to "examine the kinds of conditioning and experiences that might allow readers to experience them as erotic" (120). All three versions present male "competition about wifely virtue" (128), although the topic is displaced in de Pizan. It is "emphasized most strongly" in Gower's version, and "we may see in it . . . the working out of masculine hierarchies, with women's sexuality as the space across which power relations move" (129). De Pizan's displacement, however, "refuses to offer the reader the pleasure of narrative" by disconnecting the rape from "falling in love" (132), a connection made in both male-authored texts, and a parallel to the love-leading-to-sexual encounter trope of romance. Furthermore, only in de Pizan's version is Lucretia's suicide presented as an "unambiguous counter-example" to "refute the suggestion that women want to be raped," while "Lucretia's conscious decision to submit to the rape in the source texts [in order to save her good name] appears to have suggested to Chaucer and Gower an acquiescence that could be constructed as having led to enjoyment, and so, in their texts, Lucretia faints rather than actively submit to her rapist" (133). "The well-documented fantasy of rape," Sylvester concludes, "may well be derived from a culturally dominant set of beliefs about passivity or lack of female desire announced in conventional depictions of male and female sexual roles" (135). Rape narratives "may function for the woman reader as the correlative of the erotic desire for the annihilation of self . . . perceived as antipathetic to a feminist project . . . yet paradoxically . . . [they] may work to liberate female desire from the bounds of a dominant representation of sexuality enacted as a struggle for power which offers a reductive and limiting articulation of the possibilities of sexual pleasure" (136). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sylvester, Louise. Published Sylvester, Louise. "Reading Narratives of Rape: The Story of Lucretia in Chaucer, Gower and Christine de Pizan." Leeds Studies in English 31 (2000): 115-44. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading Narratives of Rape: The Story of Lucretia in Chaucer, Gower and Christine de Pizan. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review From Stewart's abstract: "Reading Nobility examines the paratextual, literary, historical, and physical ways print books serve as brokers of authority. Over the course of four chapters, I analyze how English printers--with a primary focus on the incunabular period from 1476-1500--invoke concepts of nobility, negotiating authority newly accessible to emerging readerships . . . . The final chapter examines Caxton's 1483 edition of the 'Confessio Amantis,' oddly printed with gaps left for illustrations. An analysis of multiple copies held in the United States and England reveals that owners occasionally exploited these spaces to add optional embellishment. Considering the 'Confessio Amantis''s manuscript history of 'standardized' deluxe volumes, I argue that Caxton made his edition socially nimble through its optional embellishment as purchasers could elect to elevate the status of their texts and, in turn, themselves." Author/Editor Author/Editor Stewart, Vaughn. Published Stewart, Vaughn. "Reading Nobility: Authority and Early English Print." Ph.D. Dissertation. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2016. 174 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A77.11(E) (2017). Full text accessible at ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (restricted); accessed February 21, 2022. 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 Reading Nobility: Authority and Early English Print. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Fredell offers a subtle and intriguing argument that links the textual tradition of CA, its reception in the early years of the fifteenth century, its illumination, and modern issues of interpretation. The earliest deluxe MSS of the poem all contain what Fredell refers to as the "Henrician" version, with the revised dedication and epilogue. (He groups together here the copies that Macaulay labeled as recensions "two" and "three.") In most of these MSS, the Prologue is headed by the miniature depicting Nebuchadnezzar and the statue that he sees in his dream. The deluxe MSS of the presumably earlier "Ricardian" version of the poem ("recension one") appear somewhat later; in these, the Nebuchadnezzar miniature has been moved to a place later in the Prologue, closer to Gower's reference to the episode in the text. In most of these, moreover, Nebuchadnezzar himself no longer appears, and the miniature depicts only the statue. That the Ricardian version of CA should still be copied after Richard's death is puzzling enough; that three copies of this version should actually have been owned by sons of Henry IV is even more puzzling. But Fredell suggests that the Lancastrians might have had reason for preferring the earlier version of the poem. Where the image of Nebuchadnezzar's dream appears first, he claims, it serves not only as a Biblical model for the type of vision experienced by Amans, but also as an exemplar of kingship. Nebuchadnezzar, here, is "a royal type of tyranny, madness, and desperate penitence after a fall" (p.63); and the miniature directs the reader's attention to the ways in which the entire poem can be read as a "penitential mirror for princes" (p. 63). Such a view of CA, severely moral and intended for the instruction of kings, is also reflected in the revisions that Gower made for the Henrician version of the poem, with its reminders of the failings of King Richard that brought about his fall and that resulted in the rededication to his successor. In the later manuscripts, the miniature, placed later in the Prologue, no longer functions as a frontispiece to the entire work. When Nebuchadnezzar himself is removed, moreover, the emphasis is shifted from the instruction of the king to the content of the dream, in which the statue functions as a morally neutral figure for impersonal Fortune. The poem, as well as the image itself, is freed not only from an instructional frame but also from its association with the historical context of Henry's usurpation. Such a view would have been preferable to the Lancastrians, Fredell argues, because by the early years of the fifteenth century, the "sterner [revised, 'Henrician'] version might be unflatteringly applied to them also, a sword of moral judgment that could cut two ways" (p. 69). The alternative, "humanist" reading, which emphasizes the "'literary' rewards of recreation and wisdom" over "the mirror for princes frame and moral absolutism" (p. 70), is also the one that is more congenial to many, though not all, modern readers of Gower's poem. In support of his argument, Fredell cites other evidence that by the early fifteenth century even Richard himself was seen as an icon of mutable fortune rather than as the deserving victim of his own crimes. Fredell also invokes the history of the same image in the MSS of Machaut's Remède de Fortune; and at the end of his essay, reproduces and describes the principal examples of the miniature in the MSS of CA. Fredell's essay is well documented and thought-provoking, but it argues for more than can be accepted without reservation. His fundamental premise, that the Nebuchadnezzar frontispiece, which illustrates his dream rather than his later madness, invokes an exemplar of kingship that determines a reading context for the entire poem, is not supported by his own account of how diversely the story of Nebuchadnezzar was read in the Middle Ages. It is also undermined by the example of the Remède. In the earliest MS of Machaut's poem, Nebuchadnezzar appears in the illustration with the statue of his dream, but in later copies only the statue appears because, Fredell suggests, the "fall of princes" motif is of no relevance to the poem's central theme. Fine, but that does not explain why Nebuchadnezzar is present in the first place. The example indicates that he could appear even when the "fall of princes" was not a central concern, an analogy that could easily extend to his appearances in CA. There are many other quibbles one might make (readers should make careful use of Fredell's notes, which qualify some of the assertions on which his argument is based), but this essay deserves serious consideration, if only because of the broad range of materials and methods that the author brings to bear in support of his conclusions. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fredell, Joel Published Fredell, Joel. "Reading the Dream Miniature in the Confessio Amantis." Medievalia et Humanistica 22 (1995), pp. 61-93. ISSN 0076-6127 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading the Dream Miniature in the Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The anonymous pamphlet entitled "A Certaine Relation of the Hog-Faced Gentlewoman called Mistris Tannakin Skinker," published in London in 1640, includes at the end a five-page prose translation of Gower's "Tale of Florent" with full attribution to the poet. Patterson uses the pamphlet as one of two principal examples in her examination of the efforts of seventeenth-century Englishmen to use medieval "monster literature" to define their own historicity with reference to the past. "By juxtaposing, mingling, or amalgamating figures of the past with present trends, audiences, writers, and readers could effectively define a 'modernity' that was their own" (284). The inclusion of Gower's tale served a more specific purpose: with it, "the author disrupts the boundary between fact and fiction: while he employs the pamphlet as a medium typically used to report facts, his use of Gower as part of a 'true history' situates Tannakin within the realm of fiction--or, as an early modern urban loathly lady" (302), with the intention of mocking the credulity of the readers. Unlike his other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century appearances, Gower here "is no longer simply a tale-teller or antiquarian but rather an active agent in the production and dissemination of the concept of the 'modern monstrous'--a performative category that intersects a complex web of social anxiety, domesticity, and print culture" (305). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Patterson, Serina Published Patterson, Serina. "Reading the Medieval in Early Modern Monster Culture." Studies in Philology 111 (2014), pp. 282-311. ISSN 0039-3738 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations 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 Reading the Medieval in Early Modern Monster Culture. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Ricardian poets have been seen in the past as rejecting their native tradition in favor of a more "sophisticated" continental mode. I contend, however, that Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower continue their English predecessors' themes of public duty and morality. Although by the fourteenth century Middle English romances had already begun to distance themselves from their French antecedents in terms of ethics and themes, the Ricardian romancers of London in the 1380s and 90s took this distancing a step further. Indeed, instead of embracing the literary themes of French romances, these tales explicitly reject the courtly values and ethics of continental literature and are thus in many ways a natural development of Middle English romance tradition. I argue that by both distancing themselves from the literature of the continent and addressing current socio-political issues, these works participated in a nation building project and formed the beginnings of an English national literature. As an expression of, and means for, this distinctive style of English romance, these texts all portray characters reading. While the progressive shift from oral, communal reading to silent, individual reading in the fourteenth century encouraged a multiplicity of interpretations, the danger inherent in critiquing the king and court constrained the poets to use allusion and allegory in referencing political concerns. I show that these two forces combine to cause an alteration in the very structure of narrative to create a reflexive and multilayered metafictional environment. By depicting failed acts of interpretation of French romances within the tales themselves, the Ricardian poets criticize the king's own predilection for French literature and create a sort of metafictional boot camp through which they train their readers in both what to read and how to interpret." Directed by Ann W. Astell. Author/Editor Author/Editor Gould, Mica Dawn Published Gould, Mica Dawn. "Reading the reader: Metafictional romance in Ricardian London." PhD thesis, Purdue University, 2006. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading the reader: Metafictional romance in Ricardian London Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Using the tale of Paris and Helen (at the end of Book 5) and the accompanying discussion of sacrilege as his focus, Olsson examines Gower's use of the different interpretive voices in the poem, each offering a different kind of wisdom. He treats the relation between the English and Latin passages, exploring how CA is concerned with a search for ethical truth (and with the proper judgment of Amans' and Paris' conduct); and he focuses on the ways in which Gower advances that search while denying the possibility of any final answer. Olsson treats both the marginal glosses and the epigrams as prosopopoeia: the former is the fictitious voice of a "prose grammarian-commentator" who links the tales to the ordinatio and who offers the most literal and straightforward meaning of the text. The function he serves, however, is to provide memorial signposts rather than final interpretations, and to initiate the reading rather than close it off. The epigrammist speaks more proverbially, more paratactically, more enigmatically: he often poses puzzles that can only be solved through a close reading of the English text, and in doing so, he directs our attention to relevant moral issues. Genius offers a third outside commentary, and his role is least stable of all, shifting between judgments based on the two different divinities that he serves. He thus demands the greatest amount of discretion from the reader; and it is upon the reader that Gower places the burden of discrimination, in choosing among these different interpreters and in filling in the gaps where the poem provides only hints and no explicit judgments, in the hope that by the experience he or she may become more wise. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Olsson, Kurt Published Olsson, Kurt. "Reading, Transgression, and Judgment: Gower's Case of Paris and Helen." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Charlotte, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998, pp. 67-92. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading, Transgression, and Judgment: Gower's Case of Paris and Helen. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pegasus Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Easton's monograph, in the series Philology, Literature and Archaeology, published by the University of Pennsylvania, consists of two parts: a list of suggested emendations (13-50) to the Reinhold Pauli edition of the CA (1857); and an introduction (1-11) explaining both the rationale behind these variant readings as well as the need for a new edition of the CA. As Easton reveals in the introduction, the manuscripts he has consulted are those available in the British Museum, and he gives a description of each from the Museum catalogue. Whereas Pauli confined himself primarily to B (Harl. 7184), Easton focuses on A and C (Harl. 3490 and Harl. 3869 respectively). Of particular interest to Easton are erroneous spellings and the writing of silent –e. Easton further proposes that the study of Gower's language should be carried out without reference to the works of Chaucer, particularly given the possibility of dialectal differences. Easton then asks whether there were "several recensions of the poem" (5), and whether the version dedicated to Henry IV should be followed as "the last word of the poet" (5). Easton refuses to accept a single answer, but does propose a more fluid notion of Gower's text. Given the frequent revisions in various manuscripts, "the poet wrote not merely two, but many copies of the book, or of parts of the book" (6). As a result, the editor should consider all the manuscripts as a kind of single recension from which he might draw the best readings. Easton's own readings (13-50) aim to correct the sense of Gower's diction (in relation to Pauli), and to fix grammatical problems, harsh constructions, odd stresses, and so forth. Easton ends his introduction with a brief explanation why he has not used the 1889 edition by Henry Morley (he critiques its expurgation of some narratives, and its uncritical correction of Pauli's text), as well as with a short comparison of Gower and Chaucer. While Gower "had nothing of the dramatic instinct of Chaucer" (11), his charm lies in the fact that, like a "gentleman" (11) he cannot hide himself behind his narrative, but always reveals his own thoughts openly and honestly. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Easton, Morton W Published Easton, Morton W. "Readings in Gower." Boston: Ginn, 1895 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Readings in Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Ginn, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1895 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 From Martin's abstract: This thesis is the first full study of the transmission and reception of John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Scotland. It examines the cultural and political applicability of the 'Confessio' in Scotland, the channels through which the poem reached Scottish audiences, and the literary responses to Gower generated in the texts of Older Scots writers . . . . [T]he thesis re-examines the thematic and poetic complexity of the 'Confessio,' the reasons for its popularity in Lancastrian England, and its transmission, both as a complete work in manuscript and print form, and as expected tales . . . . [I]t provides the first full account and interpretation of the extant evidence for the circulation of copies of Gower's poetry in Scotland from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century." The remaining chapters address the "political and admonitory agenda" of the CA and "its simultaneous interest in love and kingly duty, in particular in kings as lovers, [which] was fundamental for the formulation of the discourses on kingship and self-sovereignty . . . in the works of Older Scots writers," including "The Kingis Quair," "The Quare of Jelusy," "Lancelot of the Laik," "the Gowerian presentation of the amorous monarch" in Roberts Henryson's "Orpheus and Eurydice," the "Thre Prestis of Peblis," and "King Hart," with a brief consideration of "how the Gowerian concerns identified as being taken up by fifteenth-century Scots writers were absorbed and pursued by later sixteenth-century poets such as Gavin Douglas and John Rolland." Author/Editor Author/Editor Martin, Joanna/ Published Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Oxford, 2002. Dissertation Abstracts International C70.34. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Readings of John Gower's "Confessio Amantis" in Fifteenth- and Early Sixteenth-Century Scotland. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Galloway finds a "devastatingly sceptical scrutiny" of earlier literary dream-visions in what is likely the first instance of a dream in Gower's writing, the portrait of Somnolence in MO 5180-96. "If a dream vision is supposed to be a disturbing revelation, here it is a comforting fraud. If it is traditionally brought on by a dreamer falling asleep in the lap of nature's bounty, here it is the result of a willed desire to remain in bed. . . ." (294). The same themes – the tension between transcendent authority and self-serving purpose and between rationality and mere appetite – Galloway also finds in the major dream episodes in both VC and CA. In VC 1, which is ostensibly about the rebels' surrender of reason to sensual desire, the poet's overt and conscious shaping of the dream, including a displacement of Nature from her central roles, creates "an unsettling analogy between the rebels' deforming appetite and the writer's literary manipulation" (196). Gower characterizes his vision as a "waking sleep," which "epitomizes his difficult balance between a writer's own desires and those of the disruptive social world that he is analyzing, and between a self-conscious emphasis on control and a claim to transcendent inspiration" (298). In CA 4, Amans' wish not to awaken from his gratifying fantasy of being with his beloved placed appetite securely over visionary authority and ominously anticipates Ceix and Alceone's own responsibility for "the horrible outcome of their story" (302). Gower's shifts of emphasis amount to a major reassessment of the dream-vision form, one that, by undermining its own claims, contributed to its demise, but echoes of Gower's explorations of "intellection driven by appetite" (302) can be found, Galloway concludes, in later English literature outside the dream-vision tradition. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew Published Galloway, Andrew. "Reassessing Gower's Dream-Visions." In John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition. Ed. Dutton, Elisabeth, and Hines, John, and Yeager, R.F. Cambridge: Brewer, 2010, pp. 288-303. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reassessing Gower's Dream-Visions Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Baldo offers a broad and provocative consideration of the role of memory in "Pericles," including the ways in which the adventures of the eponymous king and his family might have suggested to Shakespeare's audience the memory of their national past at a time, following the Reformation, when historical memory was contested and when changes in religion practice altered the relationship to one's ancestors and thus to the past. Gower, in his appearances in the prologue and epilogue to the play, is resurrected from his nearby tomb in order to enact a kind of recovery of the past while also marking its difference, and he does so not just in his archaic language and verse form but also, as a teller of moral stories himself, in the lessons he offers on the use of the past, a practice that Shakespeare imitates in reviving him. "'Pericles' recalls a world where memory's value and sway were more stable than they were in post-Reformation England, and indeed in most of Shakespeare's own plays. Awash in restorations of various kinds, 'Pericles' stages a recovery of not only a particular voice of the late Middle Ages, but also its culture of memory" (172). In contrast to some of Shakespeare's other plays, "memory has the less equivocal function of promoting recovery, virtue, and eventually redemption, and in this respect Shakespeare appears to be following the lead of Gower himself, who in the "Confessio" casts memory as a virtue and forgetting as a source of manifold evils; memory as a source of psychological and political unity, and forgetting as a source of distraction and division" (178). Gower "bestrides the gulf between pre- and post-Reformation England, thereby helping audiences to recollect the very different status that recollection itself held in the period in which he lived and wrote. A bodied memory of late medieval England and a poet of memory who in his own time sought to shake a people out of their mnemonic slumber by teaching them how to recollect the past and thereby achieve psychological and political wholeness, Gower fittingly presides over a public, ceremonial restoration to life of the recently broken and buried culture of memory that not a few of Shakespeare's contemporaries apparently wished to exhume, if only for the two hours' traffic of the stage" (183). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Baldo, Jonathan Published Baldo, Jonathan. "Recovering Medieval Memory in Shakespeare's 'Pericles'." South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015), pp. 171-88. ISSN 0277-335X Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Recovering Medieval Memory in Shakespeare's 'Pericles' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Mooney discusses comparatively some distinctive letter forms in MSS Hengwrt and Ellesmere of the "Canterbury Tales," and in Trinity College R.3.2, the "Confessio Amantis," choosing for illustration a section of fol. 9ra of the latter to support an observation that "the spaces between lines in the Gower are more similar to the oath [of Adam Pinkhurst in the London Common Paper] than in the other two (702). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Mooney, Linne R. Published Mooney, Linne R. "Reexamining the Evidence Regarding Adam Pinkhurst, Scrivener." Speculum 99.3 (2024): 697-712. 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 Reexamining the Evidence Regarding Adam Pinkhurst, Scrivener. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation employs the methodology of feminist thematics to examine the motif of the reflecting pool in signalling and shaping gender relationships in medieval romances by Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Gower. It has long been recognized that later medieval romances create and perpetuate masculine and feminine stereotypes, hierarchies of reason and love, spirit and flesh, strength and weakness. My work identifies a steady movement toward thickening the boundaries of these stereotypes and rejecting earlier, semi-mythological representations of female power. By examining a series of traditional canonical texts through a common motif invested with the cultural and poetic ideals of medieval love poetry, my study illuminates the means by which the definitions of gender which permeate our culture today were absorbed into western literary tradition." Directed by F. Anne Payne. [JGN 17.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Grinnell, Natalie Published Grinnell, Natalie. "Reflecting Pools: The Thematic Construction of Gender in Medieval Romance." PhD thesis, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1997. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reflecting Pools: The Thematic Construction of Gender in Medieval Romance. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Boyar has studied the production and availability of mirrors in Gower's London, and uses the information valuably to draw conclusions as to the possible intended reading of the concluding image of "John Gower" seeing his image in a mirror. Mirrors were not common items in the Middle Ages, and most--if available--would have had only "hazy reflective properties." "Ultimately," she suggests, "that, more than a revelation through reflective recognition, the Confessio's ending would have proven most resonant for its portrayal of seeing through a complicated medium." [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 35.2 ] Author/Editor Author/Editor Boyar, Jenny Published Boyar, Jenny. "Reflection, Interrupted: Interior Mirror Work in the 'Confessio Amantis'." Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media 3 (2016), n.p.. 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 Reflection, Interrupted: Interior Mirror Work in the 'Confessio Amantis'. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 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 Aers explores the fissures in VC rather than its unity. His target is a large one, the view of Gower as a coherent as well as comprehensive moral and political philosopher first advanced by Coffman and Fisher (whom Aers does not cite) and more recently reaffirmed by such writers as Minnis, Yeager, Olsson, Simpson, and Scanlon. Aers slyly lays out some of the contradictions among those who defend the coherency of Gower's thought, but he give most attention to the contradictions within Gower's own writing. In VC, he finds it impossible to resolve Gower's advocacy of an evangelical pacifism in Books III and VI with his "unironic celebration of aristocratic violence" (p. 190) in his advice to King Richard to follow the example of his father. Such a contradiction, he points out, was encouraged by the medieval church, where it had become "normalized and internalized" (p. 192). It is allowed by the structure of VC, in which the "units . . . are paratactically sealed off from each other rather than brought into dialogue. . . . [VC's] paratactic mode becomes a powerful impediment to moral inquiry, to sustained critical reflection on the difficulties that are raised. The mode protects the poet from having to confront sharp contradictions in his ethics, let alone from having to explore their sources in the traditions he inherits and the culture he inhabits" (p. 193; his italics). The same failure can be found in Gower's treatment of the church in CA, in which the poet alternately condemns the church for the degeneracy of its practices and for the mystification of its claims of spiritual authority and upholds the church against the Wycliffites whose criticisms he echoes. "Are we being invited to cultivate ironic reflections on the grounds of all doctrine, on the grounds of all claims to unfeigned, uninvented authority in matters concerning the divine?" (p. 200). No, Aers concludes; to a "paratactic mode" corresponds a "paratactic moralism" (p. 201). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Aers, David Published Aers, David. "Reflections on Gower as 'Sapiens in Ethics and Politics'." In Re-Visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Charlotte, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998, pp. 185-201. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reflections on Gower as 'Sapiens in Ethics and Politics'. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pegasus Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The surviving fifteenth-century Spanish prose translation of CA has suffered a fate quite similar to that of the English poem on which it is ultimately based (by way of a no longer extant Portuguese intermediary): despite its historical importance as the first major instance of the translation of a work of English vernacular literature into a foreign tongue, it was largely ignored until a revival of interest in the twentieth century. In the case of the Spanish version, that revival seems to be in progress at this moment. Santano Moreno's essay is for the most part a review of a new edition of the Spanish translation by Manual Alvar and Elena Alvar, eds., "Confesión del amante: Traducción de Juan de Cuenca (s. XV)" (Madrid: Anejos del Boletín de la Real Academia, 1990), which replaces that of Birch-Hirschfield, first published in 1909 and now almost unavailable. Santano Moreno offers several corrections to the account of Gower's life in the introduction, and adds some information on the dates and circumstances of both the Portuguese and Spanish translations, some of which is also contained in his own earlier essay (1991). He also points out some errors in the editors' transcription of the translation. The greatest value of this essay, however, may simply be to bring English and American readers up-to-date on Spanish scholarship on this important work. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Santano Moreno, Bernardo Published Santano Moreno, Bernardo. "Reflexiones en torno a la presencia de Confessio Amantis de John Gower en la península Ibérica." Fifteenth-Century Studies 19 (1992), pp. 147-164. 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 Reflexiones en torno a la presencia de Confessio Amantis de John Gower en la península Ibérica Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This study develops a critical method for reading the vernacular frame narratives of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate based on the grammar-school commentaries that taught them classical rhetoric, philology, and history. In the course of developing this method, I answer the following questions: why do the school texts and vernacular works exist in the same format? Why is it that Christian writers appropriate the structuring principles of Ovid's pagan 'Metamorphoses' for their works? Furthermore, what inspired England's obsession with Ovidian narrative structure during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, to name just a few, participated in this Ovidian vogue--attempting to capture the Roman's sinister and playful voice and, more specifically, to master the frame-narrative device that gave it critical direction. Seeing Ovid's collection of pagan myths as a cohesive and continuous poem, medieval commentators uncovered an argument about abuses of power. Vernacular writers adopted this approach to Ovid, interpreting his work as a model for literary navigation in a historically turbulent period. I hereby alter the assumption that medieval writers mined classical literature merely as sources for their compilations of exempla with which to practice moralizing strategies. Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and their literate contemporaries would have learned in school that the 'Metamorphoses' was a text replete with masterful grammar, syntax, and rhetoric--but also with drama, subversion, and political intrigue" (ii-iii). Focusing in her second chapter on Book 4 of "Confessio Amantis, particularly the tales of Aeneas and Ulysses, Gerber argues that Gower's poem "contains two competing texts: Genius' moral expositions and Gower's literary frame narrative. The former text follows the [moral] allegorical tradition recorded by early medieval Ovidian commentators; the latter text follows the [political] commentary tradition from Orléans and the English prose paraphrases emerging at the end of the Middle Ages, which elucidate and mimic his rhetorical craft. The second text implicitly allows Gower to extend political criticisms from a safe distance." In this way, the CA "provides an early imitation" of the "Metamorphoses": "By removing the motivations for the actions of gods and the ruling class in general, Gower and Ovid similarly criticize those in positions of power for their seemingly arbitrary decisions that are based on selfish purposes" (133-34). [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gerber, Amanda J. Published Gerber, Amanda J.  Reframing the "Metamorphoses": The Enabling of Political Allegory in Late Medieval Ovidian Narrative. Ph.D. Dissertation. The Ohio State University, 2011. viii, 298 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A73.06. Freely accessible at http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1323788507. Abstract accessible at ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reframing the "Metamorphoses": The Enabling of Political Allegory in Late Medieval Ovidian Narrative. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review As should be expected, Gower is cited a number of times in this collection of essays by some of the leading students of Middle English dialectology and textual transmission. M.L. Samuels includes Gower in his discussion of the appearance of western forms in manuscripts written in London, in "Scribes and manuscript traditions" (pp. 1-7). His argument is that western forms are more prominent than other non-London spellings because eastern forms are less different, and because Northern scribes, because of the greater difference in their dialect, would strive harder to copy literatim. And Jeremy Smith's earlier demonstration of the prevalence of literatim copying in the tradition of Gower manuscripts is cited here by Smith himself, in his essay on "Tradition and innovation in South-West-Midland Middle English" (pp. 53-65), and by Ronald Waldron, in his "Dialect Aspects of Manuscripts of Trevisa's Translation of the Polychronicon" (pp. 67-87). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Riddy, Felicity, ed. Published Riddy, Felicity, ed. "Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts: Essays Celebrating the Publication of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English." York Manuscript Conference: Proceeding Series, 2 . Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts: Essays Celebrating the Publication of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D. S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Notes that the swan clasp on the "S" collar insignia of Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, and the "Cygnus" of the VC are similar, and posits that Gloucester was Gower's true patron. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Anstis, John. Published Anstis, John. Register of the Garter. London: Order of the Garter, 1724, II, 116. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Register of the Garter. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1724 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Brief biography of Gower. N.B.: Title varies. Normal running title for this work is "De Illusttibus Anglae Scriptoribus." [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Pits, John. Published Pits, John. Relationum Historicarum de Rebus Anglicis, Tomus Primus Quatuor Partes Complectens, Quorum Elenchum Pagina Indicat. Paris: R. Thierry and S. Cramoray, 1619, pp. 575-77. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Relationum Historicarum de Rebus Anglicis, Tomus Primus Quatuor Partes Complectens, Quorum Elenchum Pagina Indicat. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1619 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 was ignorant of the mystical tradition, and was a critic of the church. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Shepherd, Geoffrey. Published Shepherd, Geoffrey. "Religion and Philosophy in Chaucer." In Derek Brewer, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer. Writers and Their Background (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1975), pp. 266. 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 Religion and Philosophy in Chaucer. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1975 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 Castilian "Confesión del amante" is a collection of classical materials that, for Pascual-Argente, represents "the European secular nobility's cultural capital and collective memory" (154) and competing ideas about the classical past. The scribe of the unique manuscript introduces his table of contents with Gower's Latin gloss concerning how bees assemble their honeycomb from various flowers, emphasizing the book as a compilation: a memorial work that selects from and preserves antiquity. Refashioned stories concerning Alexander the Great and the Trojan War would have appealed to "literary circles close to the royal court" (160). Castilian aristocrats were also interested in classical rhetoric and secular ethics. The CA may have influenced later Castilian works such as "El Victorial," a chivalric biography written by Gutierre Díaz de Games in the 1430s, being especially relevant for the Castilian court during the first half of the fifteenth century, when "the debate about knightly access to classical culture was at its most heated" (164). [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pascual-Argente, Clara. Published Pascual-Argente, Clara. "Remembering Antiquity in the Castilian Confessio Amantis." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014). Pp. 153-64. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Remembering Antiquity in the Castilian "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014