16 100 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 Scanlon's essay is broadly conceived, incorporating both a history of clerical regulation of endogamy with a close psychoanalytic reading of Gower's version of "Apollonius of Tyre," and it resists any brief summary. Is central methodological principle is to unmask the repressed, which for Scanlon includes the modern failure to recognize the true extent of the medieval poet's confrontation with the nature of incest. Citing its initial marginal gloss, he identifies incest as the central theme of "Apollonius of Tyre," though it occurs explicitly only in the opening episode. Both Athenagoras' and Apollonius' relations with their daughters recapitulate Antiochus' with his. Athenagoras, in arranging the marriage that his daughter desires with Apollonius, also reveals the extent of his own control of her fate. "If the three-way exchange" among them "shows the patriarchal law of exogamy at its most beneficent, . . . [it] also reveals its violent underside. Even the best of good fathers bears this violent stain" (p. 121). Apollonius' situation is more complex. Unknown to him, his daughter has been sold into sexual slavery, which enacts "the guilty pleasure this narrative takes in imagining the possible violation of even this most virtuous of daughters" (p. 121). Apollonius, sharing in Antiochus' guilt, must suffer in order to expiate it, and it is finally Thais herself who redeems him. But "in achieving its resolution the narrative does not demonstrate the essential justice of the patriarchal law of exogamy. On the contrary, the narrative comes to resolution by demonstrating the law's essential injustice, then counterpoising it with the figure of the good daughter, who absorbs this injustice and transcends it" (p. 123). In offering this reading (which must be considered in all its detail), Scanlon is conscious of the possible anachronism of his use of terms drawn from modern psychoanalysis, but he insists that psychoanalytic insight is both anticipated and confirmed in medieval texts, and he credits Gower, in his implication of all patriarchal authority in Antiochus' guilt, with an awareness of the historical and social dimensions of incest which psychoanalysis, "like the rest of modernity," has managed to repress (p. 127). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Scanlon, Larry Published Scanlon, Larry. "The Riddle of Incest: John Gower and the Problem of Medieval Sexuality." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Charlotte, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998, pp. 93-127. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Riddle of Incest: John Gower and the Problem of Medieval Sexuality. 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 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 Previously published in Studies in Philology 91 (1994): 250-69; previosuly reviewed in JGN 14.1. Briefly, Peck examines some of the differences between Genius and Amans--the exemplary tales of the former versus the fantasies of the penitent, and their opposing notions of love--in terms of medieval speculations about the relation between the outer world and the images formed in the mind, and describes Genius' attempt to reorder Amans with new images, the proper significance of which Amans resists. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A. Published Peck, Russell A.. "The Phenomenology of Make-Believe in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Ashville, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998, pp. 49-66. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Phenomenology of Make-Believe in Gower's Confessio Amantis. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pegasus Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Both Chaucer's and Gower's lines, Cable claims, are written in a syllable-based alternating meter rather than in the foot-based meter more characteristic of later English verse. The theoretical implications of the distinction are lost on those who are not metrists, but the practical implication seems to be that some of the variations that are possible in, say, Shakespeare's iambic line are not found either in Gower or in Chaucer, even when the latter is writing decasyllables. The alternating stress line is nonetheless quite flexible, as Cable demonstrates by comparing Gower to three sixteenth-century poets who still employed it, Gascoigne, Turberville, and Googe. In order to avoid the tub-thumping monotony to which the latter are prone, Gower takes fuller advantage of normal variations in stress by using an effective mix of monosyllabic, disyllabic, and polysyllabic words; and he softens the transition between stressed and unstressed syllables by putting normally stressed words in unstressed position and lightly stressed syllables in stressed position. He also uses his syntax very skillfully to construct units longer than the single line. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cable, Thomas Published Cable, Thomas. "Metrical Similarities between Gower and Certain Sixteenth-Century Poets." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Ashville, NC: Pegasus, 1998, pp. 39-48. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Metrical Similarities between Gower and Certain Sixteenth-Century Poets. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pegasus, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Mahoney examines the passages at the beginning and ending of CA that exist in two versions, one written for Richard II (Macaulay's recension "one") and the other for his successor Henry of Lancaster (Macaulay's recensions "two" and "three"). Each creates a different "liminal frame" that shapes the reader's view of the entire poem. The Ricardian frame begins with the charming account of the poem's commissioning (which Dahoney discusses with reference to its analogues as an example of an Auftragstopos). Gower expresses hope both in his young king and in the "newe thing" that he offers him; and as he offers to follow a middle way, "somwhat of lust, somwhat of lore," he presents a self-confident and trustworthy persona. The epilogue contains Venus' compliment to Chaucer and a prayer for the king that emphasizes loyalty and obedience; and it attributes the poet's renunciation of love poetry to his realization of his age and the restoration of wholeness that occurs with his "healing." The Lancastrian prologue is less personal and more monitory; the emphasis shifts from promise to degeneration; and the poet's devotion to Richard is replaced by an extended moral and social critique. The renunciation of love at the end of this version is not founded on the contrast of youth to age but on "a more general, one-note, condemnation of secular love, which is blind, opposed to reason, a cause of division in the self" (p. 32), culminating in a contrast between secular and heavenly love. There is less sense of the presence of the court, and Gower himself "becomes less an observer, less a poet, and more a prophet" (p. 33). The later revision has been privileged by modern editors, and thus "it is not surprising that the official version of Gower is the 'moral' Gower" (p. 34). Dahoney presents the alternative versions as equally authoritative, but it is clear that she has strong reasons for preferring the former and for urging it upon our attention. She points out that it was still widely circulated, even after Richard's death. She argues that it was probably not as offensive as modern readers, influenced by Lancastrian propaganda, have believed, and that its dedicatory passage had an "authorizing value" that extended beyond political considerations and even beyond considerations of historical fact. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Mahoney, Dhira B. Published Mahoney, Dhira B.. "Gower's Two Prologues to Confessio Amantis." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Ashville, NC: Pegasus, 1998, pp. 17-37. 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 Gower's Two Prologues to Confessio Amantis. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pegasus, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Examines the relation between in Latin gloss and vernacular tale in CA, using "Florent" and "Diogenes and Alexander" as principle examples. The glosses, with their invocation of the formal ordinatio and learned auctoritas of the scholastic tradition, both authorize the vernacular text and, in the very difference in language and position, subvert it. Gower exploits the paradoxical relation in order to win auctoritas for his poem even while placing the value of auctoritas itself in question. The tale of Florent offers a dramatic demonstration of its lesson on obedience, and Genius' concluding comments emphasize its didactic function. The gloss validates the tale in two ways: it carefully situates the tale in the poem's ordinatio; but paradoxically, it also emphasizes the most romance-like elements of the plot, the bewitching and restoration of the princess, lending validation, by its own language and lineage, to a vernacular literary form that by definition lacks auctoritas. The juxtaposition of two different interpretive strategies itself turns the tale into a philosophical puzzle which valorizes Gower's choice of the vernacular. In "Diogenes and Alexander," the tale recapitulates the choice offered between text and margin. Alexander is delighted to learn of the reputation of his teacher, but Diogenes dismisses his adulation, demonstrating his wisdom by his exercise of plain reason. The gloss authorizes the tale, but in its brevity, fails to displace it. The tale "confirms its own auctoritas by challenging the presumption of the commentary to act as an authorizing agent" (p. 14), a process that the commentary abets; and while the ME text depends on the Latin for its credibility, Gower foregrounds the issue of auctoritas in such as way as to appropriate authority for his vernacular text. [PN. Copright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Batchelor, Patricia Published Batchelor, Patricia. "Feigned Truth and Exemplary Method in the Confessio Amantis." In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Ashville, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998, pp. 1-15. 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 Feigned Truth and Exemplary Method in the Confessio Amantis. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pegasus Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "The Body Politic and the Politics of Bodies in the Poetry of John Gower." In The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature. Ed. Boitani, Piero and Torti, Anna. Cambridge: Brewer, 1999, pp. 145-165. ISBN 085991545X Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Review One of the most studied images in Gower's writing is that of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar's dream, which appears both in VC Book 7 and in the Prologue of CA. Yeager takes a new look at the statue through the lens of the associated imagery of Christ's body and the body politic of the late Middle Ages. The opening section of his essay traces the history of the image from St. Paul, for whom the "body of Christ" provided a means of conceiving of the unity of the church in its many parts, to Boniface VIII, who revivified the metaphor in order to emphasize the supremacy of the "head." Secular theorists such as John of Salisbury, meanwhile, adopted the metaphor for political institutions as a way of expressing both the diversity of functions of the different ranks and also the naturalness of the political hierarchy. In the middle section of his essay, Yeager shows how this imagery is reflected in the chronicle accounts of the uprising of 1381, in which executions are almost without exception described as decapitations: the loss of the head represented from one point of view the breakdown of order in the destruction of God-ordained authority, and from the other (that of the peasants rather than the chroniclers), the overthrow of unjust rule. When Gower writes, in VC 7.5-6, "The golden head of Nebuchadnezzar's statue has now been cut off / Yet the two feet of iron and clay still remain" (Yeager's translation, p. 159), he is clearly invoking the same association between the body of the statue and organized hierarchical society, and echoing the views of the chroniclers. Yeager refers to Gower's description here as "but slightly modified from Daniel" (p. 160). Actually, his discussion draws attention to a fundamental change that Gower has made, for in the Biblical version it is the feet of clay and not the head that are destroyed. Gower sticks more closely to the vision in Daniel in his second use of the image, in the Prologue of CA. Without noting the shift, Yeager argues that the statue also provides a key to the fundamental political message of Gower's English poem. In support of his case, he also cites Gower's use of the episode of Nebuchadnezzar's madness from a later chapter of Daniel. In his conclusion he draws together a rich pattern of resonances from the different sources that he has invoked. The title "Vox Clamantis," he points out, associates Gower both with John of the Apocalypse and with John the Baptist. "And here beheading takes its place again, for of course the familiar icon of the Baptist is a severed head, symbolic at once of the dangers of speaking truth in the kingdom of Herod, a puerile, fitful tyrant, servant to his bodily lust and subject hence to rash decisions under Salome's rule. . . . If the poet is the Baptist (and the John of Revelation), then Richard (by the completion of the Vox at least, and in the Cronica Tripertita) is a type of Herod" (p. 163). In CA, however, Nebuchadnezzar learns before it is too late. Gower "offers his king and country a second chance. That no one took it cannot be placed at Gower's door" (p. 165). In a private correspondence, Yeager lamented "probably the worst typo in my scholarly life" in the sentence with which this essay concludes, which should read as follows: "The wrongs in his society Gower continually tried to right, never more thoughtfully and connectedly than when he brings the body – bodies shaped in every kind – to our attention, as our guides" (p. 165). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 19.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Body Politic and the Politics of Bodies in the Poetry of John Gower. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Williams, Deanne Published Williams, Deanne. "Gower's Monster." In Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures. Ed. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 127-150. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review "As a spiteful despot cum humble penitent, as a prophetic dreamer, gifted with foreknowledge of the apocalypse, and as a lamenting beast in the wilderness, Nebuchadnezzar is a figure for juxtaposition and the swift shifting of gears,," Williams writes (144). She surveys the use of Nebuchadnezzar in other fourteenth-century texts, including "Cleanness," Chaucer's "House of Fame" and "Monk's Tale," and "Piers Plowman," but she focuses on his appearance at the end of the Prologue and Book I of CA, seeing the Biblical figure as an image of the cultural and linguistic hybridity both of Gower's England and of his poem; of the multiple "divisions" of CA as a whole, including the tension between the orderliness of the frame and "the fascination with narratives of chaos, metamorphosis and monstrosity that make this ostensible orderliness spin out of control" (128); and of its form: "When Gower segues from the apocalyptic discourse and political analysis of the Prologue into the personal, amatory woes of Amans in the 'Confessio Amantis' he makes a generic move from prophecy, political treatise, and estates satire to dream vision and ars amatoria. With this shift of gears, . . . the 'Confessio Amantis' reveals itself to be as hybrid, generically, as Nebuchadnezzar is physically" (142). "The story of Nebuchdnezzar," she concludes, "suggests how we can be, simultaneously, one thing and the other: a paradigm that defeats the kind of binaries that distinguish East from West, civilized from barbarian, self from Other. Nebuchadnezzar is both/and as opposed to either/or: a tasteless barbarian and an expansionist conqueror; an ignoramus and a visionary; a king and a monster; a human and a beast. He at once embodies the binaries, and transcends the conflict between them. . . . [The] dichotomy between the self/Other binary and the hybrid continues to motivate postcolonial theory: the true choice, it seems, is not between East and West, colonizer and colonized, and self and Other, but instead between a mentality of unassimilable cultural difference and multicultural diversity and cosmopolitanism. Gower's alienated, ambivalent, yet compelling Nebuchadnezzar offers an alternative to these binaries that is monstrously resistant to classification: both" (144-45)]. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 25.2/] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Monster Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cambridge University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The title of Meecham-Jones' essay does not refer to the Prologue of CA: it identifies it instead as the opening chapter in this collection on the self-presentation of the author, the remaining essays in which are concerned with post-medieval writers. Meecham-Jones takes a very broad view of Gower's fashioning of himself and of his conception of his role as poet in CA as a whole. His essay is addressed in part to Foucault's incautious claim that "the idea that from one's own life one can make a work of art" is absent during the Middle Ages, and in part to the many readers of Gower who fail to recognize the mature subtlety of his late poetry; and his argument is itself so wide-ranging and so subtle that it defies easy summary here. "The reticence of medieval authors in making use of the autobiographical style," he writes, should be understood "as expressing an anxiety at appearing to set their works in competition with the 'authoritative' texts of the revered literary past" (14). One solution to this dilemma of self-representation is found "in the emergence of a self-consciously 'literary' tradition in the English language in the second half of the fourteenth century" (15). Gower provides his principal example both of the intricacy and the "artificiality" of the late medieval autobiographical mode. Meecham-Jones focuses on the beginning and ending of CA. In the gloss in which the author depicts himself "fingens se . . . esse Amantem," Gower creates "a balance of sympathy and disengagement" (16) as he "strives to establish the poet in a position simultaneously within and outside the texture of his poem" (17). These two positions allow "two potentially antagonistic traditions of moral analysis" (17), the scheme of the Seven Deadly Sins with its apparent moral rigidity and the more tolerant view of the actions of the characters in the tales that emerges from the narration. The significance of this frame lies in its very inclusiveness: "Gower aspires to be recognised as an encyclopaedist of Love. The bulk of the poem is, therefore, to be regarded as a guarantee of its quality, in so far as it witnesses Gower's assiduous garnering of material from the sources of inherited wisdom" (19). Gower's plan here "is perhaps best understood as an homage to the texts of classical 'auctors', in whose poetry the consideration of love had been granted such especial prominence" (20). At the end of the poem, "in a mischievous parody of the predisposition of audiences to read lyric poetry as presenting an accurate record of 'real' events" (20), Gower portrays Ovid and Vergil both as lovers as well as poets, and implicitly associates himself with them, thus abandoning the authoritative stance of MO and VC in favor of a more limited role based upon direct experience. The "mirour" of society in MO becomes the mirror in which he is "forced to see himself without pretense" (22). "It is at this point that Gower's distinctive conception of the nature of authorship at this stage of his career is revealed" not as the achievement of fine phrases or inspired imagery but in the accumulation of a lifetime's wisdom" (23). Such wisdom "like the very comprehensiveness of the poem" is won at considerable physical cost, as the poet is now old and impotent. "In a curious display which combines self-assertion and humility, Gower succeeds in creating a work of art not from the events of his life, but from the self-denial of action which enabled him to achieve a literary career. Whereas, in Chaucer's poetry, the idea of the narrator as being exiled from the action is constantly and humorously invoked, Gower goes beyond this device to create a work in which the value of the work is explicitly related to that foregoing of life which has enabled its writing" (26). In the poet's swooning after seeing his image in the mirror, "Gower achieves, for a moment, an unaccustomed note of vulnerability, which must however be recognised as constituting one element in the poem's artful strategy to exploit the affective possibilities of the autobiographical mode as a means to establish his poetic value" (26). And as Gower allows himself to be "gathered into the company of his esteemed mentors" (27), he also "seeks to appropriate for himself the prestige that passing time has accorded their work" and effects a vision of the enduring contemporaneity of literature" (28). Along the way, Meecham-Jones manages to address a great many other issues, including the challenging morality of such tales as "Canace and Machaire" and what he perceives as the irony of Gower's invocation of Arion in the Prologue to CA. This essay deserves careful consideration. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 21.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Meecham-Jones, Simon Published Meecham-Jones, Simon. "Prologue: The Poet as Subject: Literary Self-Consciousness in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts. Ed. Dragstra, Henk and Ottway, Sheila and Wilcox, Helen. New York: St. Martin's, 2000, pp. 14-30. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Prologue: The Poet as Subject: Literary Self-Consciousness in Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. Martin's, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Language and Word Studies Published Yeager, R.F. "Politics and the French Language in England during the Hundred Years' Way: The Case of John Gower." In Inscribing the Hundred Years' War in French and English Cultures. Ed. Baker, Denise. Albany, NY: University of New York Press, 2000, pp. 127-157. Review Yeager takes a new look at how Gower's responses to the political events of his time are reflected in his writing by focusing on the poet's choice of language, particularly his use of French, in the context of the ebb and flow of his country's wars with France, which began when the poet was a child and showed no sign of abating at his death. All language is political, Yeager reminds us, a truism that takes on particular force when, in time of war, the poet's readership is waiting to judge his work by his conformity to their expectations of him and he, in turn, is anxious to influence them by both his overt and his covert instruction. Yeager attempts to document the evolution of Gower's and his readers' expectations of one another, and he sees Gower's career falling into three periods. (1) In the first, that of MO, Gower writes exclusively in French, the language of the landed aristocracy and of the king. Yeager challenges the traditional dating of MO to the late 1370's, pointing out first of all that so long and ambitious a work is unlikely to have been the poet's first composition suggesting that it was probably the product of continued work over a long period of time. The most appropriate time for undertaking such a work in French, he argues, would have been between the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 and the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360, when Gower would have had greatest reason to look forward to a "'greater England' encompassing France? (p. 138). The references to the Schism indicate that Gower did not finish revising the poem until after 1378, but with the death of Edward III in 1377 the moment for a long work in French had passed. (2) The second period encompasses VC and CA. Both Latin and English were appropriate choices for addressing Richard II. When Richard was a youth, Gower probably had quite high expectations of his learning. The rebellion of 1381 led to a profound shift in Gower's attitude, first towards his own poetic project, as he abandons his direct address to the king for a broader goal of reforming society, and second, towards the war, as his "belligerent patriotism? yields to an "international pacifism? (p. 142) and a sustained effort to overcome division, primarily at home. The shift from international to domestic concerns, which correlates with Richard's own primary interests, is reflected in CA, which is "overwhelmingly a poem in English? (p. 145). (3) Gower's attitude towards Richard changed abruptly, however, in the early 1390's, as reflected in his revisions of both VC and CA; and while he did not reject English he did reconsider its relation to French and Latin "as media for reaching the king and for commenting on political events? (p. 148). Except for "In Praise of PeaceP,? all of Gower's last compositions are in Latin or French. Most are explicitly directed to Henry IV. (In order to fit in the notoriously undatable CB and Traitie into his chronology, he focuses on their dates of publication rather than that of their composition, the more significant event, as he points out, from a political perspective.) The resuscitation of French corresponds with a revival of interest in the wars in France. Gower's use of all three languages is a tribute to his sovereign's linguistic skills, while the brevity of these works is an indication both of Henry's get-to-the-point personality and of Gower's closer relationship with his new king. But Gower avoided English, Yeager suggests, in part because of the association of literacy in English with Lollardy, which could have been dangerous to the poet in the first decade of Henry's reign. And his choice to record the titles of all three of his works on his tomb effigy in Latin indicates Gower's final preference for "the most learned, the most lasting, and perhaps the safest tongue of all? (p. 153). Yeager covers a great deal of ground here, there will inevitably be a great deal to discuss in any effort to sort of Gower's attitude to political events that are no less compli-cated in retrospect than they must have seemed to those who were alive at the time. If there is a single reason to be disappointed with this essay, it is that space did not allow Yeager to engage more fully with the many alternative views to some of these matters that have been expressed by other scholars, and in omitting from his notes any reference to those who have seen some of these matters differently, he leaves the impression that many of these issues are much more settled than they really are. To take a minor instance: he dates Gower's revisions of Book 6 of VC to the period before 1393 (p. 147). Maria Wickert argued in 1953 (in a book that Yeager doesn't cite) that the changes were actually made after 1400, and most subsequent scholars have accepted her view. Yeager may well have reason for thinking Wickert was wrong, but he doesn't provide it to us. For his account of the revisions in CA, he depends upon a single problematic essay by George Stow that actually proves, in the reviewer's mind, how desperate the attempt to find a justification for Gower's presumed change of heart regarding Richard in the early 1390's has become. Whatever one thinks of Stow's argument, there are a great many dif-ficulties both in reconstructing the evolution of the text and in assessing Gower's response to events that he never refers to that other scholars have discussed and that Yeager passes over. Even the scholars that Yeager cites take some very different positions on some key issues that aren't acknowledged here. Fisher, of course, appears repeatedly in Yeager's notes, but if one reads Fisher and Yeager side by side several large differences emerge. Fisher takes a very different view of the change of the CA dedication, for one. And where Yeager sees both MO and VC as addressed directly to the reigning king (referring to MO at one point as "in many ways a mirror for princes,? p. 139), Fisher sees MO as a private devotional work (p. 104) and VC as its public counterpart, addressed, however, not to the young king but to influential clerics (pp. 105-6), leading to a very different conclusion on the reasons for Gower's choice of language for both works. None of this is to diminish the importance of Yeager's essay, but instead merely to wish that it could have had somewhat greater scope. Both its real significance and also the specula-tive nature of some of its conclusions will be evident only to those who have read around in the other literature on the subject, not all of which is accessible through Yeager's notes. This essay appears in a provocative and well-rounded collection of essays on responses to the Hundred Years' War on both sides of the channel (some of which have already appeared in print elsewhere). In addition to Yeager's essay, the contents are: Norris J. Lacy, "Warmongering in Verse: Les Voeux du Heron;? Patricia DeMarco, "In-scribing the Body with Meaning: Chivalric Culture and the Norms of Violence in The Vows of the Heron;? Denise N. Baker, "Meed and the Economics of Chivalry in Piers Plowman;? Judith Ferster, "Chaucer's Tale of Melibee: Contradictions and Context;? John M. Bowers, "Chaucer after Retters: The Wartime Origins of English Literature;? Earl Jeffrey Richards, "The Uncertainty in Defining France as a Nation in the Works of Eustache Deschamps;? Anne D. Lutkus and Julia M. Walker, "The Political Poetics of the Diti de Jehanne d'Arc;? Susan Crane, "Clothing and Gender Definition: Joan of Arc;? Michelle Szkilnik, "A Pacifist Utopia: Cleriadus et Meliadice;? and Ellen C. Cald-well, "The Hundred Years' War and National Identity.? [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Politics and the French Language in England during the Hundred Years' Way: The Case of John Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of New York Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review 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 Author/Editor Author/Editor Mehl, Dieter Published Mehl, Dieter. "Old Age in Middle English Literature: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Gawain-Poet." In Old Age and Ageing in British and American Culture and Literature. Ed. Jansohn, Christa. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004, pp. 29-38. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Middle English depictions of old age fall into several distinctive categories: the "ugly witch" (SGGK, WBT), the "disturbing reminder of death" (PardT, PP), but most numerous of all, the figure of the impotent lover. "The most disturbing, comical or sobering thing about old age, according to most medieval poets, is that it makes you unfit for love" (29). Female examples include the figure of Elde in RR and the old woman in WBT, but "the majority of Love's ageing victims . . . are old men" (31). A cruelly comic example occurs in MerT. More serious and more disillusioning is the experience of the aged lover at the end of CA. "In the end, the ageing poet is left feeling that he has wasted his time on an illusionary pursuit and had better go home to spend the remainder of his life in prayer. . . . This is a long way from the comedy of January, even though the final lesson may be the same: old age represents a time of life when man should turn his thought to more serious matters than love and think of his end. The universal symptoms of senile infirmity, so easily laughed at in the conventional fabliau, will turn into a frightening memento mori when taken seriously" (34-35). A more moving, and much less conventional, picture of ageing can be found in the Book of Margery Kempe, which describes Margery's caring for her invalid husband. "There comes through this account an impression of genuine devotion and human charity that says more about some real problems of old age than many more poetical texts" (38). [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.2/] 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 Old Age in Middle English Literature: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Gawain-Poet Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Lit Verlag, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor McDonald, Nicola F. Published McDonald, Nicola F.. "'Lusti Tresor': Avarice and the Economics of the Erotic in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Treasure in the Medieval West. Ed. Tyler, E.M.. York: York Medieval Press, 2000, pp. 135-156. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review McDonald explores the "discursive interplay between sex and commerce" (136) in medieval portrayals of Avarice, both verbal and visual, focusing on examples from Gower. She begins with an early sixteenth-century drawing found at the beginning of Book 5 in a Pierpont Morgan Library copy of Caxton's 1483 edition of CA. It shows a woman with an outstretched arm holding what appears to be a full set of male genitalia, interposing herself between a man and another woman who reach towards one another. This is a figure of Avarice holding her "purse," McDonald claims, citing other examples, both sculpted and painted, in which the sin is identified by the same or similar attributes; and the drawing illustrates the opening lines of the initial epigram of Book 5: "Obstat avaricia nature legibus, et que / Largus amor poscit, striccius illa vetat" (5 vv. 1-2). The image derives from a broader tradition, for which McDonald also provides examples, in which Lust and Avarice are juxtaposed as similar and equally sinful forms of desire and are given a similar iconography. Gower too juxtaposes commerce and sexual desire in his poem, in Venus' dismissal of Amans, for instance, at the end of Book 8, where she asks, "What bargain scholde a man assaie, / What that him lacketh forto paie?" (8.2431-32), but more importantly in Book 5, Amans' confession on Avarice. Sex and money are treated as virtually interchangeable in this book, not only in Genius' discourse and tales but also in Amans' confessions, as a woman's love or the woman herself is treated as a treasure or an object of value that one might give or gain. Genius' efforts to construct a morality of love, however, lead to failure, because Largitas, the virtue that is opposed to Avarice, would lead, if Genius pursued the logic of his own argument, to a type of behavior incompatible with Christian morality were it applied to conduct in love. "In Christian terms, terms which Genius invokes in support of his code of moral conduct, only monogamy and virginity constitute virtuous sexual conduct. In terms of the 'economy of love,' both states . . . , by insisting that love's treasure be either hoarded or spent sparingly, are necessarily avaricious. What is for the Christian a virtue is for Venus's disciples a vice. And what for Venus's disciples constitutes virtue, the free and generous expenditure of the lady's treasures, is for the Christian a damnable vice" (154). These contradictions and paradoxes, McDonald argues, are left unreconciled. The reviewer has recently examined the same juxtapositions of imagery in Book 5 (and wishes that he had known of McDonald's fine essay beforehand), but reached a very different conclusion, that Gower plays throughout on both the similarities and differences between love and gold, as evidenced in passages that McDonald chooses not to cite, including the lines with which the initial epigram of the book concludes: "Non debet vt soli seruabitur es, set amori / Debet homo solam solus habere suam" (5 vv. 5-6). [PN Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.22] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'Lusti Tresor': Avarice and the Economics of the Erotic in Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available York Medieval Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Harris' essay is a detailed description of Longleat House MS 174, in the possession of the Marquess of Bath, a compilation of mainly medical texts in several hands from the third quarter of the fifteenth century which Harris concludes was probably assembled for the use of professional medical practitioners. Its interest for readers of JGN lies in its inclusion on ff. 159-60 of Confessio Amantis 7.1281-1438, the description of the fifteen stars and their associated gems and herbs, among a group of other texts on the uses of herbs and other medical recipes. Longleat 174 is unique among the MSS containing excerpts from CA, Harris notes, in that it draws from the discursive portion of Gower's poem rather than presenting one or more of its tales, and also in that it includes the Latin apparatus associated with the extracted portion of the English text. Harris concludes her account by citing evidence that among a small circle of later, seventeenth-century readers as well, Gower may have been better known as a "scientist" than as a poet. [PN; JGN 22.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Harris, Kate Published Harris, Kate. "Longleat House Extracted Manuscript of Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions. Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall. Ed. Minnis, A. J.. York: York Medieval Press, 2001, pp. 77-90. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Longleat House Extracted Manuscript of Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available York Medieval Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Galloway has two aims in this essay: first, to situate the account Gower gives of the Merciless Parliament in his "Cronica Tripertita" in the body of literature about the "literature of 1388," most of it much closer to the event; and second, to argue that Gower's responses to some of the ethical and political issues aroused by these events are also detectable in Confessio Amantis, though Gower does not refer to them directly. Galloway begins with a survey of the procedural novelties and irregularities of the parliamentary trial, discussing too some of their precedents, including one initiated in 1384 by the hapless Thomas Usk, who was to be one of the Appellants' first and most gruesome victims. He then discusses three principal texts, the Westminster Chronicle, the chronicle of Henry Knighton, and the satirical tract of Thomas Favent, all strongly pro-Appellant yet each revealing, in a different way, some possibility of alternative responses to the events that they describe. Gower's account in "Cronica Tripertita," in its "epic somberness" (85), is most like the Westminster Chronicle in tone. Writing from a perspective fifteen years after the event, Gower offers a "thematic history" (86) focused on pietas versas impietas, embracing in the first term both "pity" and "piety," allowing pietas "to define both compassion and pious adherence to justice" (87). Gower demonstrates some of the first quality in his account of the deaths of some of the men whom the Parliament convicted: in contrast to the earlier, more ironic accounts, "Gower's view of the Ricardian party is governed by an almost Virgilian sense of the victims of history" (88). The "piety" that is attributed to Henry, however, is extended to include his "humility in the face of divine judgment, . . . carrying out the 'common cry' for justice by executing the traitors of 1388" (89). "Pious pity now covers a large ground of royal policy. Springing at first from the author's own perspective, the ethic has expanded to fill all the needs of a damaged kingdom. At the end it is an extension of Henry's power, rather than his or anyone's sympathy. So reconstituted, violent purgation has been redeemed as an act of mercy, a species of compassionate justice. A parliament without mercy has been made into a parliament embodying pietas" (90). It strains belief, Galloway notes, that Gower should have been thinking about such issues only in 1400, though there were some obvious risks in commenting on them explicitly in the early 1390's, as he composed CA. Rather than a direct commentary, Galloway therefore finds in CA evidence of the development of the idea of "pite" as "just punishment," with some of the ambiguities that this implies. Even in praising Richard for his pity, for instance, in *8.2992-97, Gower states that "he yit never impitously" sought vengeance against his subjects, implying that "royal pity . . . is predicated on a suspension of cruelty. As such, it is an expression of power, good or evil, and it therefore demands a careful if tenuous distinction between its good and bad forms" (93). Richard's later behavior, Galloway suggests, granting and denying his pardon both extravagantly and unpredictably, justified Gower's concerns. Gower's writing from 1390 on, Galloway claims, is characterized by an increasing emphasis on "pity as a principal element of the social contract of monarchy" while also displaying "an equally vigorous effort to disparage and crush 'pite' used as an oppressive instrument in the service of corruption, all the while advancing a sense of true 'pite' as including, indeed mainly being, justice, vengeance, even extreme violence" (95). In CA, "elaborate gestures or evocations of pity are revealed as hollow, inauthentic, or somehow inadequate," and "they are savagely exposed and crushed" (95). Galloway cites "The Trump of Death" as a prime example. Pity is directly associated with vengeance and upholding the law in several tales in Book 7, including "The Jew and the Pagan," evidently a late addition. The tale of "Apollonius of Tyre" "becomes in Gower's hands a vehicle for scenes emphasizing the connection between power and pity, where unjustly used pity is the object of savage retribution, and justly used pity the vehicle of enormous power" (100). The most complex presentation of "pity as vengeance" occurs in the poem's final scene. Amans' "absurd" supplication for relief leads to calls for "pity" from the procession of lovers in his vision, in a clamor that recalls scenes from the Parliament of 1388. The result "is that the Lover is subject to what amounts to a judicial punishment of castration, effectively if crudely carried out by the blind, 'groping' Cupid" (102). "Pity here becomes utterly merciless, a legal instrument of absolute power over individual subjects of a dictatorial parliament, however loudly the ethic's legitimacy is proclaimed by efforts to denounce a purge a putatively false and corrupt mirroring ethic" (103). In his conclusion, Galloway comments on Gower's efforts to reconcile the conflicting notions of pity that history offered him. "Charged as it became with enormous political and legal power, pity was a threat as well as a binding social ethic. Gower articulated both, and tried, in a dynamic dialectic and brilliant if ultimately impossible venture, to disentangle them" (104). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 22.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew Published Galloway, Andrew. "Literature of 1388 and the Politics of Pity in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England. Ed. Steiner, Emily and Barrington, Candace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002, pp. 67-104. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Cronica Tripertita Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Literature of 1388 and the Politics of Pity in Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cornell University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân Published Echard, Siân. "Last Words: Latin at the End of the Confessio Amantis." In Interstices: Studies in Middle English and Anglo-Latin Texts in Honour of A.G. Rigg. Ed. Green, Richard and Mooney, Linne R.. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004, pp. 99-121. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review Echard examines how the selection and presentation of the final matter (mostly in Latin) in both MSS and editions of Gower's works affect the reader's perception of the poet's achievement and reputation. The variety that she reveals is concealed, of course, beneath the arrangement that has become familiar to us from the choices that Macaulay made for his edition. Where we are accustomed to read the author's assertions about his "survival through his works " (100), for instance, two MSS of VC end instead with an epitaph, an offer of indulgences for those who pray for the poet's soul, and in one case an illustration of a tomb, drawing attention to his death and to an afterlife of a very different kind. Similar alternatives are evident in the two versions of the final Latin epigram of Book 8 of CA. One praises Richard, the other makes a more general prayer. Apart from the political motivation for the alteration, "one version could be seen as the poet's self-proclamation under the guide of the conventional courtly gesture; the other, as the equally conventional but different recognition, in the face of approaching death, of a spiritual imperative that supersedes the poetic claim" (103). The Latin Explicit that normally follows CA also exists, as is well known, in two versions, one with an additional two lines commending the book to Henry. But again, beyond whatever personal or political motivation for the addition, there is also a change in the poet's self-presentation, shifting attention from "his own poetic claims to attention" (104) to his subservience to his patron. In the revisions of the colophon, Echard sees not only a changing view of his first patron but also a shift from the attention given to the composition and structure of Gower's three poems to the language in which they are written: "the result of the process, whether it was Gower's process or not, is that this linguistic aspect of his poetic identity is heightened, and actually looms as large or larger in the manuscript tradition than do his political allegiances" (106). Gower's linguistic achievement is also emphasized in the verses beginning "Eneidos Bucolis," which are found in two copies of CA and four of VC. "This is a paradoxical piece," Echard notes, "asserting in Latin that the key aspect of Gower's poetic identity is his mastery of the vernacular" (108), a paradox heightened by the way in which it normally occurs in the company of his Latin or French compositions rather than his English, even in MSS of CA. The surviving copies also differ in the ways in which the end matter is decorated and arranged. The result is a variety of different presentations of the poet, a tradition that continues in modern editions, as both Berthelette and Macaulay, in Echard's account, can each be found making choices of presentation based on his own ideas about what constitutes an appropriate "last word." Echard's essay concludes with a helpful table showing the end contents of all of the surviving MSS of CA and VC. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.2.] 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 Last Words: Latin at the End of the Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Toronto Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Ricketts, Peter T. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Published Ricketts, Peter T.. "Knowledge as Therapy: A Comparison Between the Confessio Amantis of Gower and the Breviari d'Amor of Matfre Ermengaud." In The Court Reconvenes: Courtly Literature Across the Disciplines. Selected Papers from the Ninth Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society . . . 25-31 July 1998. Ed. Altmann, Barbara K and Carroll, Carleton W.. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003, pp. 57-69. Review The "Breviari d'Amor" by Matfre Ermengaud is a late thirteenth-century Medieval Occitan poem of 34,600 lines in rhyming couplets. Like CA, it can be considered a summa of love, and it probably derived from some of the same sources. It is structured very differently, however. Rather than a confession, the last part of the poem consists of a dialogue between the poet and the troubadours who have asked him to instruct them on the origin and nature of love. This section is preceded by a long expository treatment of the creation of the world and a recitation of biblical history which serves to situate the origins of love. The poem also contains an introduction in which the poet describes the "Tree of Love" (a device also used, according to Ricketts, by the pseudo Hugh of St. Victor and Raimon Llull) in which love between man and woman, love of children, the love of God and one's neighbor, and love of things are all represented as branches springing from a single trunk, having their origin in God by way of Nature. The tree is elaborated with the fruits that one may hope to obtain on each branch and with the leaves that one must pick in order to obtain the fruits. The fruits of sexual love are thus obtained by picking leaves that are labeled with virtues such as "largueza." The poet invokes the image of this tree again in the final part of his work. Ricketts' comments on CA are few. He steers his way between Minnis and Simpson on the relation between the Prologue and the rest of the poem, and he describes the "plot" involving Amans' education in terms largely drawn from Peck. (These three are the only commentators on CA to appear in Rickett's very brief bibliography.) The comparison between the Breviari and CA works largely in Gower's favor: by using a genuine dialogue and by embellishing it with tales drawn from "romance," Gower has created a more sophisticated structure, both artistically and morally. Someone with a great deal of patience might find it possible to mine the Breviari for analogues to some more specific aspects of Gower's poem, particularly for his notions of Nature and for his framework of the sins and virtues of love. [PN. Copyright. Th John Gower Society. JGN 23.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D.S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Knowledge as Therapy: A Comparison Between the Confessio Amantis of Gower and the Breviari d'Amor of Matfre Ermengaud Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "John Gower's Images: 'The Tale of Constance' and 'The Man of Law's Tale." In Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V.A. Kolve. Ed. Yeager, R.F and Morse, Charlotte. Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 2001, pp. 525-557. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Review Yeager takes as his starting point, in this essay that appears in a festschrift for V.A. Kolve, the latter's by now famous re-examination of the imagery of the Man of Law's Tale, with his discovery both of its primarily visual quality and of the rich layers of allegorical significance that it contains; and he applies Kolve's methods to the study of Gower's version of the same tale. Gower too was capable of arresting visual images: Yeager uses the examples of the massacre at the feast in CA 2.688-702, which is narrated from the point of view of Constance, the only survivor, and the tale of "Acis and Galatea" that comes earlier in Book 2 and that establishes in very concrete terms the signficances of fire and of water that will resonate throughout the later tale. But Gower's method is ordinarily not so visual, Yeager argues. Instead, "Gower relies on the working of his words qua words, on nuance and lexical suggestion. His images are briefer than Chaucer's, crossing more quickly sub oculos, alerting the consciousness scarcely at all while they creep into the memory, accumulating there nonetheless. Ultimately, these light images create a resonant sub-text which, once noticed, acts as effectively to the same purpose as Chaucer's more elaborate ones do, drawing us out of the literal towards higher levels of meaning" (527-28). He illustrates this thesis with some aptly chosen examples of particular words that in repetition acquire a meaningful resonance: "stiere," in the scenes in which Constance is set adrift on the sea, which subtly but effectively invokes God's presence as navigator; "good," which refers primarily to literal "goods" but which also establishes a contrast between Constance and her detractors and enables the depiction of the heroine as a representative of the church; "kepe," which is used particularly ironically by Domilde in 2.1036 but which elsewhere establishes the parallel between Constance's role and God's; the notion of motherhood, which Yeager points out occurs in some unusual contexts in the tale but which fits into the patterns created by the other imagery; and "joie," which especially at the end draws together the literal and the allegorical dimensions of Constance's story. The dominant recurring image in the tale, as in Chaucer's, is the sea, but Yeager establishes how differently the two poets used it: "In 'The Man of Law's Tale,' as Kolve has shown, it is 'the sea of this world' first and last, a medium alien to the ship of the Church, which alone provides safe transport to the hoped-for harbor. In 'The Tale of Constance,' however, the sea is, yes, the world, and something more--a medium of the Divine embrace and revelation (as water in every form always is in this tale, and generally in Book II of the Confessio Amantis), a physical expression of the power of a benevolent God, disguised to all but the truly faithful as a place of death, not life; so also the Christian mystery of baptism promises a 'dying' which in fact is the portal to a resurrected life; so Acis dies and is buried, to rise again as a spring recollective of the promise kept by the life and death of Christ; and so does Constance, twice come from the water, take on a kind of resurrection, as well" (550). As this last passage makes clear, this is a subtle essay, not well represented in summary. Insightful not only as a reading of this particular tale, it also, through the connection to "Acis and Galatea," opens up the possibility of a re-reading of Book 2 in its entirety, and here one has to feel that Yeager has missed a rather large chance. The book ends with the tale of "Constantine and Sylvester," with its obvious verbal and historical links to the tale of Constance in the protagonists' names, in their settings, and in their roles in the founding of the church, but even more importantly for Yeager's argument, in the rich significance given to baptism in the later tale, which echoes back upon the very episodes that Yeager describes so well in "Constance." Perhaps – and indeed one truly hopes – he has saved the exploration of these obvious connections for a future essay. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 20.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower's Images: 'The Tale of Constance' and 'The Man of Law's Tale Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pegasus Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Eberle provides a valuable list of "all texts known to me which were commissioned by or addressed to" (as opposed to known merely to have been owned by) King Richard II. Her list contains only 14 items. As she discusses them, she notes that they provide a better indication of how Richard might have wanted to see himself than of what he was, but she also provides valuable suggestions on what each work reveals about Richard's own interests and knowledge. Among the recurring themes she finds are an interest in the Secretum Secretorum and an emphasis on sapientia over fortitudo in the description of the king. Among the very small number of works of literary character on this list appear the original version of Book 6 of VC (the second item) and the entire CA (item 3), which "can be read as an extended discussion of the issues raised in the letter to Richard in the Vox Clamantis, combining an exalted view of royal prerogative with an equally exalted ideal of the moral and religious virtues required of the king" (236). The thirteenth item is the volume of his own poetry that Froissart claims to have presented to the king in 1395, a book that has since disappeared. Eberle notes that the loss "demonstrates the danger of assuming that our records of Richard's manuscripts, even of elaborate presentation copies, are at all complete" (249), but on looking over the list of books that are known to have appealed to Richard, one can't help wondering if both Gower and Froissart might not have misjudged the likelihood of the king's interest in their poems [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 24.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Eberle, Patricia J. Published Eberle, Patricia J.. "Richard II and the Literary Arts." In Richard II: The Art of Kingship. Ed. Goodman, Anthony and Gillespie, James. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999, pp. 231-253. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard II and the Literary Arts Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Clarendon Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Scribe D," so named because his is the fourth hand in the Trinity MS of CA (Cambridge, Trinity College R.3.2), was identified by Ian Doyle and Malcolm Parkes, in their groundbreaking essay of 1978, as having also participated in or as having been the sole copyist of 10 other MSS, including seven other copies of CA. He was evidently closely associated with another scribe, designated as Delta, whose six known MSS include another copy of CA. "Scribe D," Kerby-Fulton and Justice write, "(even without any help from Delta) is responsible for the largest identifiable corpus of vernacular Ricardian literary manuscripts extant today. As has often been noticed, they are all 'quality' manu-scripts, created mainly, it seems, for armigerous patrons. But what has not been noticed is that predominant among these patrons is a particular class of reader: parliamentarians and high-ranking civil servants associated with early Lancastrian Westminster. The portfolios of these two scribes, in fact, give us a window on the tastes and interests of an audience of Westminster lawmakers of varying ranks" (217). This group of readers "bears a striking resemblance to those Anne Middleton hypothesized in her classic Speculum essay: an audience concerned with the 'middel weie,' the common profit, and the 'public voice,' a savvy and assertively contemporary audience that sought the most recent and topical versions of the vernacular texts they cared for" (222) Among the productions of these two scribes, the authors take a particularly close look at Princeton University Library MS Taylor 5. They deduce from D's role in correcting the pages that he did not write that he ought probably be credited with supervising the entire production; and they note, among his strategies for pleasing his intended clientele, the substitution on f. 1 of the more up-to-date, revised dedication. Among the different lines of inquiry that his role suggests, they choose to discuss his and Delta's work "as an exercise in literary entrepreneurship, in the marketing of Ricardian literature" (223). In that respect, the prominence of Gower and Trevisa – 12 of their 17 known MSS – cannot be overlooked. "Taken together, the English Polychronicon and the Confessio Amantis make a striking couple: in the reflection of the other, each looks even more clearly and powerfully to reflect a repertory of historical exemplarity. If we add Trevisa's De Proprietatibus, which Scribe D copied, we might expand our definition of the category slightly to speak of works of secular exemplarity – works defining, by exemplifying, the conditions of public virtue and political efficaciousness" (225). The scribes' work also reveals a confidence in and respect for the vernacular, not only in the quality of the copies themselves but also in D's avoidance of the hierarchy of scripts that is usually employed to distinguish vernacular passages from Latin. The role of these scribes suggests, the authors assert, that "the reading, the 'reception,' of Ricardian literature, even when that literature was 'courtly,' did not merely happen, did not simply perpetuate itself by its mere appeal or through an agentless market, but that it was shaped by, and around the interests of, some of the scribes to whom we owe a good many of our important texts" (226). They return to the Taylor MS for a concluding consideration of D's possible use of illustrations as part of his marketing strategy, enhancing the authority of his text, as well as incidentally revealing an astute reading of Gower's poem. [PN Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 22.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn Justice, Steven Published Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn and Justice, Steven. "Scribe D and the Marketing of Ricardian Literature." In The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower. Ed. Hilmo, Maidie and Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. E L S Monograph Series (85). Victoria, BC: English Literary Studies, 2001, pp. 217-237. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Scribe D and the Marketing of Ricardian Literature Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available English Literary Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, A. S. G. Published Edwards, A. S. G.. "Gower in the Delamere Chaucer Manuscript." In The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector: Essays in Honour of Toshiyuki Takamiya. Ed. Matsuda, Takami and Linenthal, Richard A. and Scahill, John. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004, pp. 81-86. ISBN 1843840200 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review The former Delamere MS (now Takamiya MS 32) is one of the very few copies of CT still in private hands. It is also one of the rare MSS in which Chaucer's and Gower's works appear together (Edwards lists only 5 others), and of those that contains excerpts from CA, Takamiya has the largest selection, including 5 tales at the beginning and a sixth ("Nebuchadnezzar") at the end. Edwards skillfully disentangles the complicated history of the book. Though by the same scribe, the three gatherings containing the Gower excerpts were not originally part of the CT MS with which they are presently bound, and may once have been part of a much larger book. The order and formatting of the selections suggest that they were done in two phases. The tale of Nebuchadnezzar, finally, which immediately follows the conclusion of CT, may, Edwards suggests, have been "conceived as some kind of quire filler" (85). This essay (along with that of Derek Pearsall, summarized below) appears in a magnificently produced new festschrift in honor of the present owner of this MS, Professor Toshiyuki Takamiya of Keio University. Forty of our most distinguished medievalists here offer 39 essays in worthy tribute to Professor Takamiya's labors as a collector and his contributions to the study of medieval English literature, including his work on Chaucer, Malory, Hilton, and Gower. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.1.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower in the Delamere Chaucer Manuscript Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Grady, Frank Published Grady, Frank. "Generation of 1399." In The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England. Ed. Steiner, Emily and Barrington, Candace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002, pp. 202-229. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Cronica Tripertita Review Grady uses three main works – Gower's "Cronica Tripertita," "Richard the Redeless," and "Mum and the Sothsegger"--to define a "Lancastrian poetic," the shared thematic concerns and formal traits that unite the first generation of texts to appear after Henry's ascension of the throne. He gives his greatest attention to "Mum and the Sothsegger," the most problematic of these texts since it appeared a bit later in Henry's reign and thus has to deal with more of the consequences of the change of regime and since it takes a somewhat more skeptical view of the usurpation and its aftermath. He uses Gower's poem, along with "Richard the Redeless," to identify two important formal characteristics of this group of texts: first, the abandonment of the dream vision as a way of engaging with contemporary events, despite the importance of the dream in the predecessors to these texts, particularly "Piers Plowman" and VC; and second, "the concomitant increase of interest in documentary models of discourse, particularly legal texts and representations of parliamentary activity" (206). In place of the "authorizing immediacy" (210) of the claim to have witnessed the events of the poem that is allowed by the dream vision, Grady notes that in the Cronica, Gower adopts the analogous procedure of pretending that each of the three sections is "composed contemporaneously with the events that it describes" (209), though all are quite surely written after the fact. (It is not crucial to his argument, but Grady refers to CA as if it too is in dream-vision form, though it is not.) And as part of the turn to the stability and "apparent fixity" of "documents, chronicles, and statutes" (222) that characterized the response to the legal uncertainties and instabilities of the time, Grady notes that the Cronica "is largely organized by its references to parliamentary activity" and that the poet "is clearly concerned with the legality of each proceeding" (223). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 22.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Generation of 1399 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cornell University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Presents a computer-aided analysis of the number, the form, and the usage of speech acts (commands, promises, and requests) in selected passages from Chaucer and Gower. He uses as the basis for his study all of the tales in "Confessio Amantis," "The Canterbury Tales," and the "Legend of Good Women" that Chaucer and Gower tell in common, plus the tales of Cleopatra and Hypermnestra in LGW, "Albinus and Rosemund" and "Canace and Machaire" from CA, the prologue to LGW, and both the prologue and epilogue to CA. The differences in the distribution of the various types of speech act in the two authors are not statistically significant. Green finds, however, that Gower has a marked preference for performative verbs, and Chaucer a significantly greater number of imperatives; and that in Gower, the proportion of reported utterance to direct address is far higher than it is in Chaucer's writing. In examining the authors' use of these passages, Green focuses on the moments in which the speech act is of particular moral significance: instances of deception, the responses of female characters to danger or to a challenge, and the characters' apostrophes. Chaucer's preference for direct address is especially marked in his characters' attempts to deceive one another, but he frequently allows his narrator to draw attention to the deception. Gower's narrator inserts himself less often, but Gower is more likely to include the responses of other characters in order to explore the effects of guile. In reporting a woman's reaction to her plight, Chaucer makes heavy use of the imperative mood, while Gower depends more on performative verbs and other expressive devices. In reporting soliloquies, Gower tends to place the performative verb in the introduction to the speech, while Chaucer includes it within the speech itself; Gower's soliloquies thus tend toward portraiture, while Chaucer's tend more to depict the character in action. In sum, Gower's art is designed to encourage moral reflection, while Chaucer's reflects a commitment to his own art: "Gower invites his readers to contemplate the morality of antiquity as vital to them; Chaucer's art supposes that moral passions expressed by women of the past can find convincing expression in fourteenth-century England" (pp. 184-85). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 10.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Green, Eugene Published Green, Eugene. "Speech Acts and the Art of the Exemplum in the Poetry of Chaucer and Gower." In Literary Computing and Literary Criticism: Theoretical and Practical Essays on Theme and Rhetoric. Ed. Porter, Rosanne G.. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989, pp. 167-187. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Speech Acts and the Art of the Exemplum in the Poetry of Chaucer and Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Pennsylvania Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 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 Begins by reviewing the history of the notion that Chaucer and Gower had a falling out and quarrelled with one another through their poetry during the 1390's. She asks why the idea of a quarrel has appealed so strongly to scholars for more than two centuries: "What desire might it fantastically fulfill?" (p. 132). And she suggests that the underlying assumption is that "aggression is necessary to the articulation or assertion of a strong, coherent character, an identity" (p. 132). Such an assumption is dangerous, she argues, for the consolidation of masculine identity in a male-dominated culture takes place through the elimination of, and therefore at the expense of, the feminine; and there is a continuity between this habit of thought and the violent eradication of female identity and autonomy in rape. As a step towards the creation of other sorts of relationships between men, Dinshaw turns to Gower's tale of Philomela and Chaucer's T&C, and uses the first as a gloss to the second in order to construct a reading that "does not obfuscate but rather clarifies the fact and the threat of violence to women's bodies" (p. 136). Gower typically describes Tereus' rape of Philomela as an anomalous, bestial act, avoiding judgment of similar, but socially sanctioned, "gender-assymetrical acts" such as Tereus' marriage to Procne; and as elsewhere in CA, he treats the crime as an offense of one man against another. The sisters' revenge has an ironic appropriateness: through rape, Tereus reinforces his own identity, "thus violently refusing mortality and disaggregation," but in consuming his own son, "he destroys his own legitimate chance at life beyond his own decay" (pp. 138-39). In the metamorphoses with which Gower concludes the tale, finally, the violation of the woman is transformed, in Philomela's song, into the lyric conventions of amorous suffering. The story of Procne and Philomela lurks behind the action of Book 2 of T&C. The nightingale's song serves as the harbinger to Criseyde's dream of the eagle and the exchange of hearts, which anticipates the romantic love talk of the following books. But the dream puts the violent mutilation of the woman before our eyes. And Gower's tale helps us understand that courtly love discourse also "encodes the bodily violation and destruction of a woman" (p. 141). Taking the two poems together, she concludes, reveals the "violent obliteration of the woman" that each tends to conceal, and using the two texts in conjunction, rather than as rivals, also provides a model for a more productive sort of relationship among men. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dinshaw, Carolyn Published Dinshaw, Carolyn. "Rivalry, Rape and Manhood: Gower and Chaucer." In Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. ELS Monograph Series (51). Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1991, pp. 130-152. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations 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 Rivalry, Rape and Manhood: Gower and Chaucer Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available English Literary Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Learning to Read in Tongues: Writing Poetry for a Trilingual Culture." In Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange. Ed. Yeager, R.F. ELS Monograph Series (51). Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1991, pp. 115-129. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Review Reminds us how different the linguistically diverse culture of Gower's and Chaucer's England must have been from the monolingual culture of most modern readers. Where multilingualism was a common experience, English itself was in a state of flux, an evident cause of anxiety for some (see T&C 5.1793-98), but also a unique opportunity for those who would shape or transform the language. Gower allows us to see how English interacted with French and Latin since he wrote so extensively in all three. For one example, Yeager examines Gower's use of the near synonyms "nature" and "kynde" in his English writing. Where Chaucer used the two words with approximately equal frequency, Gower had a marked preference for "kynde," and he seems to have distinguished the words in a way that Chaucer did not. "Nature"----the Latinate, or "higher" form----refers more commonly to "Natura" as God's vicar, and with reference to humans, includes the power of reason and the necessity of moral choice, while "kynde"----from the native or "lower" register----refers to the domain of the instinctual, and thus amoral, "natural law." Gower can thus be seen taking advantage of the "polylinguistic fluidity" of his times. Yeager concludes by examining how Gower maintains his distinction between the two words in his "Tale of Iphis" (CA 4.451 ff.), and how they contribute to the understanding of his tale. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Learning to Read in Tongues: Writing Poetry for a Trilingual Culture Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available English Literary Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Undertakes a detailed, point by point comparison of Gower's and Chaucer's tales--the portrayal of the hero, the nature of his crime, the terms of his quest, his behavior both before and after his marriage, his final choice, and the concluding "disenchantment"--in order to bring to light the authors' separate purposes, and to defend the notion that Gower's tale has a logic and beauty of its own, however different from Chaucer's. The principal difference between the two embraces their moral purpose and their use of transformation: in Beidler's words: "Gower has Genius tell the Tale of Florent as a means of transforming Amans, a character outside the tale, into a man worthy of a good woman's love, while Chaucer, on the other hand, has Alice tell the 'Wife of Bath's Tale' to illustrate how a lusty young knight inside the tale is transformed into a man worthy of a good woman's love. . . . Gower's tale demontrates how a cautious and near-perfect knight does behave in a dangerous and hostile situation, whereas Chaucer's tale shows how an impulsive and most imperfect knight learns how to behave in a far less threatening situation" (pp. 100-101). Gower's is a more straightforward sort of romance, while Chaucer's might be seen as a feminist parody of the traditional romance form. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Beidler, Peter G Published Beidler, Peter G. "Transformations in Gower's Tale of Florent and Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale." In Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. ELS Monograph Series (51). Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1991, pp. 100-114. 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 Transformations in Gower's Tale of Florent and Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available English Literary Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Argues that not only did Gower provide Chaucer's most important model for his tale, but that he also may have been Chaucer's "source" for his copy of Trevet's "Chronicles." The evidence includes the known friendship of the two poets, the limited manuscript circulation of the work, the fact that Chaucer shows no familiarity with any of the rest of its contents, and the very important fact that Gower got to it first. It also includes the indications that the two poets had access to a very similar copy of Trevet, as revealed by their handling of the names of the characters in the tale. If Chaucer did borrow the book from his friend, the result is a more concrete instance of their literary interaction than we have otherwise been able to document. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter Published Nicholson, Peter. "Chaucer Borrows From Gower: The Sources of the Man of Law's Tale." In Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. ELS Monograph Series (51). Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1991, pp. 85-99. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations 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 Chaucer Borrows From Gower: The Sources of the Man of Law's Tale Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available English Literary Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Argues for a broader view of "source" and "influence" than merely narrative borrowing, and urges us to consider more than merely the tales with identifiable analogues in assessing Chaucer's debt to Gower. By this standard, Chaucer's most "Gowerian" tale is the Parson's, with its emphasis on sin and the consequent implications on the thematic structure of the pilgrimage. While Chaucer emphasizes grace and repentance, however, Gower places all his emphasis on individual moral reform. The comparison thus reveals contrasts as well as similarities between the two poets, and the Parson's might in this sense be Chaucer's least "Gowerian" tale. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wood, Chauncey Published Wood, Chauncey. "Chaucer's Most 'Gowerian' Tale." In Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. ELS Monograph Series (51). Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1991, pp. 75-84. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer's Most 'Gowerian' Tale Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available English Literary Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Treats "Confessio Amantis" as an "Ovidian" rather than as a "Boethian" poem and finds a particular sort of "dialogue" within CA. The form of the poem, he argues (as he has before), with its lengthy Prologue and its extensive marginal glossing, derives at least in part from the typical apparatus and vocabulary of the medieval commented versions of classical texts, particularly of Ovid. One of the issues raised by these earlier commentators was that of the moral "authority" of poetic texts, in comparison to those of philosophy. Dante set the example for applying the same question to vernacular poetry, particularly poetry concerned with love. In function, Gower's apparatus is very much like that of Dante's in the "Convivio": it attempts to show the moral usefulness of the work and to assert its claim to "authority"; and as Gower serves as critic of his own text, he also separates himself from it, distinguishing the auctor from his persona. Gower's effort was very different from Chaucer's, who neither sought "authority" for himself nor was inclined to attribute very much to his predecessors. The result, however, is not necessarily a complete congruence of all of the elements of CA, nor even a complete dominance of the Latin moralization over the vernacular portion of the poem. The tension between "auctor sapiens" and "persona amans" remains, Minnis asserts, following the model of the Ovidian tradition. And focusing on Amans rather than on Genius, Minnis argues that the vernacular portion of the poem, with its sympathetic treatment of human love, retains a self-justifying validity almost to the very end. The meaning of the poem is not summed up by its Latin glosses, therefore; and where there is a tension between Latin and vernacular, Gower must have been aware of it, and must have relished it. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Minnis, A. J Published Minnis, A. J. "De Vulgari Auctoritate: Chaucer, Gower and Men of Great Authority." In Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. ELS Monograph Series (51). Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1991, pp. 36-74. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource De Vulgari Auctoritate: Chaucer, Gower and Men of Great Authority Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available English Literary Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Reopens the question of Gower's relation to Boethius "De Consolatione Philosophiae" and to the well-known allegorical works that derived from it, notably Alan de Lille's "De Planctu Naturae" and RR. DCP, he claims, is less straightforward a work than is usually supposed, for in the dialogue between Lady Philosophy and the "Prisoner," its broadest philosophical affirmations are consistently punctuated, and undermined, by existential doubt. It also leaves unresolved a contradiction between two roles attributed to Nature: one the benevolent universal order, and the other, a constraint upon the freedom and aspirations of the individual. DPN preserves the same ambiguity regarding Nature and creates the same sort of irresolution, but it also suggests a different way of measuring human love in its brief echoes of the diction of courtly vernacular poetry. Jean de Meun's portion of RR continues the interplay of the "courtly" and "cosmic" perspectives, setting the model for CA. Gower's poem is also concerned with the relation between human life and the larger natural order, but like all of these, it sees this relation largely in terms of uncertainty rather than resolution. The Prologue, for instance, raises a number of serious issues, but offers no coherent definition of man's "nature" or of his relation to the larger cosmos. The same uncertainty is reflected in other ways in Gower's design. The functions of the dialogue in DCP, Wetherbee claims, are taken over in Gower's poem by the interplay between the Latin and the English portions of the text. The authority of the Latin tradition, moreover, is consistently undermined by being (literally) marginalized, and through the persistent, calculated ambiguities of the Latin head-verses. Genius is less a spokesman for a particular view in this plan than a mediator between the Latin and vernacular worlds of meaning, but he himself has no basis for resolving their conflicting claims. He also tries to create a relationship between the exemplary tales and Amans, the lover who is the prisoner of courtly convention, expressing the difficulty of applying Latin tradition to the "radically vernacular world" of the main body of the poem. Genius is marked by an "enlightened naturalism" and an instinctive sense of "kynde" and reason that offers one sort of mediation between the conflicting claims on human behavior, but his insight remains only tentative, and the poem finally offers no clear and definitive statement on the problem of human self-governance. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wetherbee, Winthrop Published Wetherbee, Winthrop. "Latin Structure and Vernacular Space: Gower, Chaucer and the Boethian Tradition." In Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. ELS Monograph Series (51). Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1991, pp. 7-35. 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 Latin Structure and Vernacular Space: Gower, Chaucer and the Boethian Tradition Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available English Literary Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yeager summarizes here in compact form what little is known of Spenser's relationship with a poet not often included among his sources. Spenser himself never mentions Gower's name, and the evidence that he knew Gower's work is only circumstantial: at least three printed editions of Confession Amantis were available at the end of the sixteenth century, three surviving MSS are known to have been owned by Spenser's friends, and there are direct references to Gower by both Gabriel Harvey and "E.K." Yeager identifies several ways in which Gower might have provided a model for Spenser. Like Spenser, Gower was a poet of moral and of social reform; and CA resembles Faerie Queene both in conception, as a collection of moral exempla, and in execution, created by an imaginative reshaping of his sources. There are also a number of specific passages in FQ for which sources in Gower's writing have been suggested, mostly from CA, but also the procession of the Seven Deadly Sins in FQ 1, which may be based on a passage in MO. In some cases Gower is the most likely source; in others Yeager points out that there are alternate or common sources in other works that Spenser is known to have used. The list of passages that he cites does not include the episode of Amavia and Mordant discussed by Arnold Sanders ("Ruddymane and Canace, Lost and Found: Spenser's Reception of Gower's Confessio Amantis 3 and Chaucer's Squire's Tale"), whose essay should now be added to the bibliography with which Yeager's article concludes. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Gower, John." In The Spenser Encyclopedia. Ed. Hamilton, A. C., and others. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990, pp. 337-338. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, John 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 1990 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 One of the two routes to instruction that Westrem describes is Gower's: the allegorical frame, the signposts provides by the sins, the tales drawn from the past, the long digressions, the conscious attempt to mix "lust" with "lore." The other is provided by contemporary "travel" literature, such as "Mandeville's Travels" and a similar, slightly later "Itinerarius" attributed to Johannes Witte de Hese of Utrecht. Westrem's real interest is in the second type. Using both the similarities and the contrasts to Gower's "Confessio Amantis," Westrem demonstrates that Mandeville's work also contains a great deal of "lore," presented in a particularly artful and alluring way, in response to the critical view that holds it to be merely a plagiarized fantasy. He gives particular attention to Mandeville's tolerance and respectfulness towards non-Christian religions, his use of pagans to instruct in proper behavior, his creation of a persona, and his deliberate reshaping of his sources. Witte's work is more fanstastical, but proves the growing importance of travel literature as a means of conveying information and instruction by around 1400. The works of this genre, Westrem concludes, provide an important model for later works of satire in the form of fiction such as "Gulliver's Travels." [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Westrem, Scott D. Published Westrem, Scott D.. "Two Routes to Pleasant Instruction in Late-Fourteenth Century Literature." In The Work of Dissimilitude: Essays from the Sixth Citadel Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Ed. Allen, David G. and White, Robert A.. Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware, 1992, pp. 67-80. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Two Routes to Pleasant Instruction in Late-Fourteenth Century Literature Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Delaware, 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 Review Sanders collocates four texts in his essay: Gower's tale of "Canace and Machaire" from CA 3.143-336, Chaucer's SqT, the episode of Amavia and Mordant from the Faerie Queene, Book 2, and Spenser's adaptation and completion of SqT in FQ Book 4. The entire episode of Amavia, her lover, and her child Rudddymane has a number of parallels with the story of Canace as Ovid depicts it in the Heroides, but as Amavia dies, Ruddymane bathes in the blood flowing from her breast, a detail that Sanders points out Spenser could have found only in Gower's version. In his retelling of the tale, Gower transforms a dramatic monologue into a third-person narrative, but maintains the moral bearings of Ovid's version: "Gower's appropriation of Ovid's pagan text takes advantage of its psychological astuteness to dramatize the medieval view of relations between the mind and nature when the Christian law of temperance and forgiveness was lacking" (p. 201). In his retelling, Spenser eliminates the woman's father (Ovid's Aeolus), and transfers his fury to the woman herself; he also has Guyon rescue the innocent baby, an act of mercy that compensates for Aeolus' wrath. His adaptation of Chaucer is somewhat more complex. Sanders argues that SqT, about a rather different Canace, is also an attempt to rewrite Gower's and Ovid's story: no other tale of Canace is known, and Chaucer's heroine is also provided not with just one brother but with two, raising the potential at least for another lapse into incest. The Squire, having heard Gower's tale misrepresented in MLIntro, anticipates objections to his tale from one of the Man of Law's middle class companions. He carefully provides his Canace with the means to protect herself from the failings of Ovid's and Gower's heroines, and he shifts the theme from youthful innocence to a concern for truthfulness and secrecy, but he is interrupted nonetheless, by the Franklin (in the manuscripts that provide the base for all modern editions) or by the Merchant (in Thynne's editions). Spenser would have sympathized with aristocratic Squire's prerogative to shape the tale in his own way. In FQ 4 he follows the Squire's example by carrying the transformation of the tale even further, by placing Canace in a setting within reach of Christian values. And his resolution of the conflicts of the story emphasizes the tempering of the extremes of love and hate, echoing the rescue of Ruddymane by the figure of Temperance in Book 2. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sanders, Arnold A. Published Sanders, Arnold A.. "Ruddymane and Canace, Lost and Found: Spenser's Reception of Gower's Confessio Amantis 3 and Chaucer's Squire's Tale." In The Work of Dissimilitude: Essays from the Sixth Citadel Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Ed. Allen, David G. and White, Robert A.. Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1992, pp. 196-215. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations 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 Ruddymane and Canace, Lost and Found: Spenser's Reception of Gower's Confessio Amantis 3 and Chaucer's Squire's Tale Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Delaware Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book 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 cup that Albinus has made of Rosemund's father's skull "was begrave / Of such werk as it scholde have, / And was policed ek so clene / That no signe of the Skulle is sene, / But as it were a Gripes ey" (CA 1.2541-45). Burrow explains the "Gripes ey" as a type of drinking vessel made of a griffin's (actually an ostrich's) egg, citing references from several late medieval wills, and he includes photos of two fifteenth- and sixteenth-century examples that clarify Gower's description. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burrow, John Published Burrow, John. "The Griffin's Egg: Gower's Confessio Amantis I 2545." In Chaucer to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of Shinsuke Ando. Ed. Takamiya, Toshiyuki and Beadle, Richard. Cambridge: Brewer, 1992, pp. 81-85. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Griffin's Egg: Gower's Confessio Amantis I 2545 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 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 Review Cites as unproblematic examples of both CA and VC in her discussion of the difficulties of editing and of establishing a clear chronology of revision for works that survive in more than a single version. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hudson, Anne Published Hudson, Anne. "The Variable Text." In Crux and Controversy in Middle English Textual Criticism. Ed. Minnis, A. J. and Brewer, Charlotte. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992, pp. 49-60. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Variable Text 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 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 Review Cites recent arguments (promulgated by Peter Nicholson) concerning the role of scribes in the creation of what Macaulay identified as stages of revision in the MSS of CA, in his discussion of the tendency of modern editors to resist or reject theories of authorial revision of Middle English works that were accepted by preceding generations of scholars. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek Published Pearsall, Derek. "Authorial Revision in Some Late-Medieval English Texts." In Crux and Controversy in Middle English Textual Criticism. Ed. Minnis, A. J. and Brewer, Charlotte. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992, pp. 39-48. 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 Authorial Revision in Some Late-Medieval English Texts 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 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 Review A passage from CA provides one of three samples of non-Chaucerian English of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries that Minkova uses to verify the consistency of the classic rule on preservation of final -e on monosyllabic adjectives in weak position that was formulated based on Chaucer. The other two texts are "The Bodley Version of Mandeville's Travels," ed. M.C. Seymour, and "Songs and Carols from a Manuscript in the British Museum of the Fifteenth Century," ed. Thomas Wright (British Library MS Sloane 2593), evidently in their entirety. The degree of conformity to the "rule" is about the same as has been reported for Chaucer, some 90% of possible instances or better. Minkova goes on to suggest that prosody rather than grammar provides the best explanation for the preservation of the final -e: citing the "Principle of Rhythmic Alternation," Minkova points out that the final unstressed syllable serves to separate two stressed syllables not only in the case of monosyllabic adjectives after an article but also in some of the other less easily categorizable instances in which it is found, e.g. in prepositional phrases such as Gower's "for pure dredde." The suggestion is interesting and plausible, but an argument based on prosody surely requires a comparison of the survival in verse and in prose. Minkova also makes no reference to the quality of our surviving texts; some of the studies of Chaucer that are cited are based on editions that were themselves regularized for meter, and the danger of a circular argument sneaks in here in the discussion of Gower: meter is used to verify the survival of -e in the passages that are listed, but then these passages are used to document the importance of the meter. There is, finally, a bit of confusion over the contents of CA. "My sample is taken from the Tale of Ulysses and Telegonus and The Tale of Nectanabus (the entire Liber Sextus of Confessio Amantis . . .)," Minkova states, evidently knowing the poem only from the extracts contained in Peck's edition. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Minkova, Donka Published Minkova, Donka. "Adjectival Inflexion Relics and Speech Rhythm in Late Middle and Early Modern English." In Papers from the 5th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, Cambridge, 6-9 April 1987. Ed. Adamson, Sylvia. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990, pp. 313-338. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Adjectival Inflexion Relics and Speech Rhythm in Late Middle and Early Modern English Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Benjamins, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book 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 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 Bunt begins with a general overview of the frame story, the structure, and the sources of CA as a prelude to his discussion of Gower's use of exempla. Using some of the most familiar tales from the poem, he points to the problems created by Genius' uncertain moral authority, especially in tales concerned with love (e.g. "Dido and Aeneas" and "Ulysses and Penelope"), and by the frequent conflict between the moral lesson and the particulars of the narrative in the longer and better developed tales (e.g. "Ceix and Alcyone," "Apollonius of Tyre," and "Canace and Machaire"). These discrepancies, he concludes, "seem to be inherent in [Gower's] method of exemplification," by which the poet concentrates upon a single lesson for each tale, even when this is not necessarily its dominant theme. A different sort of discrepancy arises in the many tales concerned with Alexander, who is referred to more often than any other hero in CA, and who provides the pretext for the long excursus in Book 7. One finds the same habit of concentrating upon a single lesson at the expense of the other moral issues each story might raise. In this case, moreover, Gower makes no effort to provide a consistent view of Alexander's character, and was clearly less interested in Alexander as a historical figure than as a source of a large number of well known, though sometimes conflicting, exemplary tales. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bunt, G. H. V. Published Bunt, G. H. V.. "Exemplum and Tale in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." In Exemplum et Similitudo: Alexander the Great and Other Heroes as Points of Reference in Medieval l]Literature. Ed. Aerts, W. J. and Gosman, M.. Mediaevalia Groningana (8). Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1988, pp. 145-155. 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 Exemplum and Tale in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Egbert Forsten, 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 Welsh uses PhysT and MancT to illustrate the relation between the often incompatible voices of tale and moralization that he finds characteristic of Chaucer and of medieval literature generally. PhysT, with its avoidance of any moralization of its central incident, Virginius' slaying of his daughter, and its proliferation of moral precepts and advice that do not apply to any of its characters, "seems to be a story in search of a moral," while MancT, with its flood of commonplace wisdom of equally dubious relevance to the story at hand, "seems to be a collection of morals in search of a story (85). The disjunction exemplifies for Welsh "some fundamental differences between narrative and nonnarrative forms that prevent any story, even one as simple as the tale of Virginia or the tale of the crow, from disappearing into sentence, or any sentence into story (88). Chaucer seems to have been uniquely aware of this "mutual resistance of story and sentence" (89), and it is fundamental to his more complex achievements in FkT, NPT, and WBP. As part of his demonstration of the nature of Chaucer's tales, Welsh cites for contrast Gower's tales of Virginia and of Phoebus and the crow, pointing out how in Gower's rather more straightforward handling story and sentence coincide in a clear and unambiguous moral. He doesn't explain why Gower proves to be such an exception to what he posits as a universal rule, nor does he make use of his insight to investigate whether or not there might be other sources of complexity in CA. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 21.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Welsh, Andrew Published Welsh, Andrew. "Story and Wisdom in Chaucer: The Physician's Tale and The Manciple's Tale." In In Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor of Whitney F. Bolton. Ed. Boenig, Robert and Davis, Kathleen. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000, pp. 76-95. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Story and Wisdom in Chaucer: The Physician's Tale and The Manciple's Tale Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Bucknell University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Following Aquinas," Donavin writes, "Genius presents us with contradictory origins for the incest and violence taboos. Because these injunctions are essential to the organization of family and society, Gower invites his readers to investigate Genius's contradictions through an independent inquiry into taboos and transgressions in the Confessio Amantis. For the contemporary reader, postmodern psychological and anthropological theories may provide the best methodologies for such an inquiry" (100). The contradictions stem from the attempt to trace the prohibitions of incest and violence to both natural law and to social constraints, which determine, in the one case, what degree of kinship is allowed in marriage and in the other, when killing might in fact be permissible. "Law alters and thus destabilizes 'natural' reactions" (100), leaving no firm basis for either sort of prohibition. Ground for "a consistent interpretation of [Genius's] discourse on taboos and his tales illustrating their transgression" may be found, however, in the "postmodern theories of social and familial structures" that "indicate that the root of incest and violence is the taboo itself and that continual sermonizing, such as Genius's, only exacerbates a problem better mitigated through an unblinking exposure of violations." She continues, "One of the most useful ideas from postmodern psychoanalysis . . . is that the taboo both prohibits and perpetuates activity. In other words, it induces in rebellious personalities the very behavior it condemns. Repudiating incest or violence, the taboo casts the allure of impossibility over the forbidden behavior and instigates a yearning for what cannot be" (101). This sequence is enacted in CA, as Genius consistently "first articulates the law and then illustrates its rupture," providing a clear hint of "the discursive genesis of pro-hibited desire" (102). Donavin's principal example, however, is the tale of "Apollonius of Tyre." Antiochus' "primary aim," she asserts, "is to commit a crime because it is a crime" (102). Genius demonstrates the "productivity of the incest taboo" (103), moreover, in his own refusal to name Antiochus' crime explicitly, in contrast to his clear statements on the nature of the offense preceding the tale. "The oblique vocabulary surrounding incest . . . euphemizes the incident and thus enables its recurrence" (103). Similarly, the obliqueness of Antiochus' riddle "ensures continued transgression of the taboo" (104). Antiochus' daughter too experiences an inability to name the offense because of the taboo, symptomatic of "a culture in denial of infractions" (107). ). But while in that respect the poem illustrates the effects of denial, Gower also sets before us Venus, a flagrant example of the offenses that Genius struggles to control. "Venus's libertinism blares amidst the confusion of Genius's statements about taboos; it depicts what is absent in his and Antiochus's vague references to incest and it voices the reality of transgression. Through Venus's character Gower insists that his readers confront the inevitable effect of mere moralizing" and that they "take further steps to mitigate the personal and social harm caused in the violation of the taboos, beginning with the bold admission that infringements often occur" (106). Gower also presents the "ineluctable reversal implied in the incest taboo" (107) in his depiction of the relationships of the other fathers and daughters in "Apollonius of Tyre," as the daughters find their spouses in their attempt to please their fathers, and as Apollonius' slap of Thaise reminds us, "the sentimentalized attraction between father and daughter always plays out in the shadow of rape" (109). Examples of family dysfunction are as common in CA as examples of happy families, Donavin concludes, as Gower "reveals that domestic harm precipitates from the same social principles intended to produce family harmony" (112). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 22.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Donavin, Georgiana Published Donavin, Georgiana. "Taboo and Transgression in Gower's Apollonius of Tyre." In Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts. Ed. Salisbury, Eve and Donavin, Georgiana and Llewelyn Price, Merrall. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002, pp. 94-121. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Taboo and Transgression in Gower's Apollonius of Tyre Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of Florida, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek Published Pearsall, Derek. "The Organisation of the Latin Apparatus in Gower's Confessio Amantis: The Scribes and their Problems." In The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector: Essays in Honour of Toshiyuki Takamiya. Ed. Matsuda, Takami and Linenthal, Richard A. and Scahill, John. Cambridge: Brewer and Tokyo: Yushodo Press, 2004, pp. 99-112. ISBN 1843840200 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review The remarkable stability of the text and the consistency in choice and placement of the illustrations and in the hierarchy of decoration in the earliest MSS of CA all suggest, Pearsall argues, their derivation from exemplars that had been "meticulously supervised by the author" (100). The consistency of presentation of the Latin apparatus in the same MSS suggests that it too "was in that tradition from the start and derives from the author's copies" (102); and in part because of the unlikelihood that anyone else either could or would have wanted to provide the Latin summaries, Pearsall concludes that these must be attributed to the author himself. In the longest part of his essay, he considers that problems that the scribes faced in incorporating the marginal apparatus, particularly in the instances when a long Latin summary began near the bottom of a column, or in later MSS, when the decision was made to incorporate the summaries into the column of text. Five plates illustrate some typical results of the scribes' decisions and miscalculations. Pearsall offers a broad and sympathetic conclusion that has implications that go beyond the subject of the glosses or of the MSS of CA: "What I have found is that the scribes of the Confessio mostly copy what is in front of them with care and accuracy and occasionally ingenuity but no more effort of thought than is immediately necessary. Where the exemplars or the general instructions for dealing with them are difficult to fol-low, scribes do their best to solve practical problems (sometimes of their own making) in the management of a complex layout, working with little or no supervision, evolving ad hoc expedients but not applying them consistently, trying to reduce the amount of extra work they are asked to do in organising the apparatus, growing exhausted. It is the world of Hard Work that the manuscripts open up to us, of uncomfortable benches and creaky desks, pens in need of repair and ink in need of replenishment, poorlight, strained eyes, strained patience" (112). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 24.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Organisation of the Latin Apparatus in Gower's Confessio Amantis: The Scribes and their Problems Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer and Tokyo: Yushodo Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yonekura has systematically checked every word in Pickles and Dawson's Concordance to Gower's CA against both MED and OED, and he offers several long lists presenting his results. He finds 265 words for which Gower appears as the first citation in the OED, of which 141 are still in current use, plus 26 other words "which only Gower first used in English," which evidently means "for which Gower's is the only recorded use." He finds an additional 459 words for which Gower provides the first use under a particular definition in the OED; 263 of these senses are still in current use. He evidently made rather less use of the MED: he cites eight words listed in the MED that OED omits (all beginning with A, C or D), and four words for which OED gives a citation earlier than the MED's (all beginning with A). A bit of bibliographical history might have been appropriate here: the anomalies he finds early in the alphabet (many of which involve collocations that may or may not be compounds, according to an editor's choice) are no doubt due to the appearance of Macaulay's edition of CA while the OED was already in progress. Yonekura also fails to note anywhere that the MED itself is still incomplete. There are a few other quibbles that one could make: the first that comes to mind is that Gower's "basketh" (CA 3.315) is not neglected by both OED and MED as Yonekura claims, but appears is OED s.v. "bask" (Yonekura evidently looked for a non-existent "baskle"). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yonekura, Hiroshi Published Yonekura, Hiroshi. "Gower's Contribution to the English Vocabulary." In Kotoba no kozo to rekishi. Structural and Historical Studies on Languages: Essays Presented to Dr. Kazuo Araki on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday. Ed. Nakano, Hirozo and Araki, Kazuo. Tokyo: Eichosa, 1991, pp. 503-24. 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 Gower's Contribution to the English Vocabulary Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Eichosa, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review 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 Minnis is concerned with the sort of authority that derives from authorship as viewed by scholastic commentators in the late Middle Ages. "Can one be an author and be in love?" he asks, as he examines how vernacular poets sought validation in auctoritas while writing about love and the effects of love. Gower is one of several authors he examines, along with Juan Ruiz, the anonymous author of the commentary on "Les Echecs Amoureux," the participants in the querelle de la Rose, and commentators on Dante (including the poet himself). Gower imitated one of the formal devices that had been used to create auctoritas in earlier writers when he attached an "extrinsic prologue," dealing with wisdom generally, to the beginning of his work. He also provided his poem with its own commentary, in the form of Latin marginal glosses, which distinguish between the poet and the persona who is the victim of love, and which adopt a strict and consistently moral view of the characters in the tales. Rather than an opposition between the glosses and the English text, Minnis prefers to speak of an "interpretive distance": the English poem offers an abundance of genuine "lore," while the gloss sometimes only anticipates ethical views made clearer somewhat later, and "consolidates" the moral views of the English text. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 14.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Minnis, Alastair J. Published Minnis, Alastair J.. "Authors in Love: The Exegesis of Late-Medieval Love-Poets." In The Uses of Manuscripts in Literary Studies: Essays in Memory of Judson Boyce Allen. Ed. Morse, Charlotte Cook and Doob, Penelope Reed and Woods, Majorie Curry. Studies in Medieval Culture (31). Kalamazoo: Western Michgan University, 1992, pp. 161-89. 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 Authors in Love: The Exegesis of Late-Medieval Love-Poets Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michgan University, 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 Review Eberle considers Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale" and its analogues in Trivet's "Cronicles" and CA as three different versions of a "story of origins," more particularly of the origin of Christian rulership in England. Each of them takes a different stance with regard to the opposition in contemporary political theory between the "ascending" view of authority (by which authority arises from the governed) and the "descending" view (by which authority descends from God through the king), a question that would have been of special interest to Chaucer, who sat as representative of Kent in the Parliament of 1386 in which these two views were set in direct conflict in the openly expressed challenges to the authority of the king. Trivet adopts a "descending" view especially suited to the royal princess for whom he wrote: his Constance is "forthright, self-confident, and empowered by her faith in God to speak out against those who wrongly attempt to force her to submit. . . . If 'all power is of God,' then God can grant power even to a woman, and a women of noble birth, good education, and a strong commitment to the Christian faith can play a founding role in the course of English history" (p. 131). Gower too seems to adopt a strict "descending" view in his Prologue to CA, expressing in his declaration of allegiance to the king a notion of royal authority that must have been completely congenial to Richard II. In his tale, however, he shifts the emphasis from Constance's personal accomplishments to God's grace; thus "he interprets the 'descending' theory in a way that is calculated to emphasize not the ruler's absolute authority over those beneath him but his absolute dependence on and duty of obedience to the God who is above him as the source of his power" (p. 132). Chaucer's version is more complex. He repeatedly calls attention to human inability to understand God's plan, and emphasizes the suffering that can inexplicably befall individuals in the fulfillment of the greater good. Not only is Custance's preservation attributed to God, but so too are her trials. The arbitrariness and incomprehensibility of Providence raise serious questions about the "descending" view of authority that the tale ostensibly endorses. In another distinctive aspect of Chaucer's version, moreover, Custance's suffering is repeatedly attributed to a confusion between God's will and that of a human ruler: her "submission to the authority of God is what preserves her from death at various points in the story, but her suffering originates in her unquestioning submission to secular authority, beginning with the authority of her father the emperor" (p. 139). The Man of Law's actual preference for an "ascending" view is made more explicit in the Prologue to his tale, where he responds to the Host's claims of authority over the pilgrims with a reminder (echoing Bracton) that "laws bind the lawgiver," asserting "the ongoing legal authority of his own power of assent" (p. 146) in a fashion quite unlike that of the long-suffering Custance. The conflict between these two views of authority, Eberle concludes, occurs throughout CT, and offers a way of discovering previously unappreciated interconnections among a number of important tales. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 14.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Eberle, Patricia J. Published Eberle, Patricia J.. "The Question of Authority and The Man of Law's Tale." In The Centre and Its Compass: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor John Leyerle. Ed. Taylor, Robert A. and Leyerle, John. Studies in Medieval Culture (33). Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1993, pp. 111-49. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Question of Authority and The Man of Law's Tale Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower is very much in the background in this excellent survey of Usk's debt to Chaucer for the conception and place of love in his Testament, but Carlson does revive a suggestion (first made by J.A.W. Bennett in his edition of Selections [1968]), that Venus' appeal to Chaucer to make his own "testament of love" (CA *8.2955) may echo the title of Usk's work, which may already have been circulating as Chaucer's, as it did later, at least from the time of Thynne until Skeat finally established its true authorship in 1893. "Gower may have meant to suggest that Chaucer had better do something to rectify the impression of himself that Usk's writing would have fostered" (p.31). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 14.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R Published Carlson, David R. "Chaucer's Boethius and Thomas Usk's Testament of Love: Politics and Love in the Chaucerian Tradition." In The Centre and Its Compass: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor John Leyerle. Ed. Taylor, Robert A. and Leyerle, John. Studies in Medieval Culture (33). Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1993, pp. 29-70. 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 Chaucer's Boethius and Thomas Usk's Testament of Love: Politics and Love in the Chaucerian Tradition Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book 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 Olsen maintains that Gower's descriptions of the hero's eleven sea-voyages in "Apollonius of Tyre" are modeled on a "type-scene" that the poet inherited from English oral poetic tradition. She borrows her description of the "type-scene" from Lee C. Ramsay's essay on "The Sea-Voyages in Beowulf" (NM 72 [1971]): "Beowulf gives an order to his men . . . and explains the purpose of his voyage. . . . He leads the way to the ship, . . . which waits at the shore laden with treasures. . . . The men depart in the ship and sail until they can observe the opposite shore. . . . They moor the ship . . . and are greeted by a coastal guardian. . . . They leave the ship and proceed to the hall." The skeptical reader, perhaps already too familiar with such passages from other works, may ask how else a sea-journey is to be described: one important point seems to be that it is described at all, for Olsen shows that nearly all of the passages she examines in "Apollonius of Tyre" are Gower's additions to a source that gives far less attention to actual journeying. As in Beowulf, she observes, these scenes provide an important transition between episodes, and they also contribute to the characterization of Apollonius as "a hero who matures into a good king" (p. 507). Olsen also claims that Gower "deliberately plays with the expectations of his audience" (p. 500) in departing from the "type-scene" she has defined in his accounts of the voyages of Thaise, the female hero, and of Taliart, the villain. The sea-voyages also function symbolically, suggesting both the overcoming of adversity in life and the journey towards death, both of which Olsen finds significant to the structure of CA as a whole. She concludes that Gower adopted the traditional "type-scene" for deliberate effect, and that we can better appreciate his literary artistry by being aware of his debt to oral-formulaic tradition. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Olsen, Alexandra Hennessey Published Olsen, Alexandra Hennessey. "Literary Artistry and Oral-Formulaic Tradition: The Case of Gower's Appolinus of Tyre." In Comparative Research on Oral Traditions: A Memorial for Milman Parry. Ed. Foley, John Miles. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1987, pp. 493-509. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Literary Artistry and Oral-Formulaic Tradition: The Case of Gower's Apollinus of Tyre Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Slavica, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review After discussing the availability of models, the problems created by page layout, and the very circumstances of MS production, Eberle presents convincing evidence that the miniatures in the Morgan MS were devised as a coherent program and that they reveal an interest in specific features of Gower's poem. The MS originally contained 110 illustrations, 108 of which survive. The placement and size of the miniatures in Book 7 (about half of the total) reflect the designer's concern for the hierarchical division of the text that corresponds to Gower's own concern for ordinatio. The illustrations of the tales reveal the designer's eye for content. In cases where two miniatures are found on the same page, he has chosen images that are either parallel or contrastive in some way, reinforcing the effects of the juxtaposition of the tales; some evidence of the same concern for parallelism can be found among widely separated tales. And in her detailed examination of the background and setting in some selected miniatures, Eberle discovers "an impulse to add interpretive detail" (p. 339), and offers revealing comments on how the painter responded to the designer's instructions. In her notes she hints at other patterns in the choice of which episode to illustrate. The evidence she presents for "the existence of an intelligent reading" behind these illuminations (p. 342) is compelling, and makes us look forward to hearing more. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Eberle, Patricia J. Published Eberle, Patricia J.. "Miniatures as Evidence of Reading in A Manuscript of the Confessio Amantis [Pierpont Morgan MS M.126]." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 311-64. 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 Miniatures as Evidence of Reading in A Manuscript of the Confessio Amantis [Pierpont Morgan MS M.126] Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book 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 Braeger estimates that in New College MS 266 there were originally at least 32 illuminations (13 of which have been lost). With some acknowledgment of the difficulties created by our lack of knowledge of the types of models that were available to the artist, Braeger claims that taken together, these illustrations guide the reader to a particular way of interpreting the poem. The emphasis, in the choice of which tales to illustrate, is on what he calls "conversion narratives," in which the protagonist is brought to self-discovery and from vice to virtue; within these tales, the event that is illustrated is typically the encounter or discovery that provides "the initial moment of the protagonist's moral insight, the beginning of conversion" (p. 280). The other illustrations also "often feature moments of self- examination and insight similar to those of the conversion narratives" (p. 290). This emphasis draws attention, of course, to the analogy of Amans' "conversion" as a result of his encounter with Genius, which is also illustrated in the MS. It also provides a model for the reader's encounter with the poem and the "conversion" from vice to virtue that it offers. [PN. Copyright The New Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Braeger, Peter C. Published Braeger, Peter C.. "The Illustrations in New College MS. 266 for Gower's Conversion Tales." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 275-310. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Illustrations in New College MS. 266 for Gower's Conversion Tales Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book 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 A broad-ranging discussion of Gower's notions of gentilesse, rich both in detail and in implication that resist brief summary. Gentilesse is treated in Book 4 under the rubric of "Idleness," the last of the five branches of Sloth. Olsson analyzes Genius' discussion in three parts, corresponding to three different medieval senses of otium: "idleness" proper, for which Genius offers the questionable remedy of "busyness in love"; "recreation," the rest that allows a person to return to work (the treatment of chivalry and gentilesse); and "leisure," the condition necessary for profitable study (the lists of discoverers and inventors). The middle section adopts the courtly mode of the demande to match its courtly subject. Genius typically argues more than one side of the issue, but he finally creates a hierarchy of worth of the various kinds of gentilesse, ranging from "sotie of love," to the practice to chivalry, to "honeste love," to "vertu moral," which embraces all of the other virtues commended in the poem. While this discussion has both a centrality and a thematic importance that correspond to Virgil's comments on love in Purg. 17-18, it does not bring about any immediate change in either Amans or Genius. Amans remains the captive of his hope and his imagination, which reason is unable to impress or alter, and thus follows the example of Pygmaleon. Genius' imagination is of a different sort: like Ulysses, who in Gower's portrayal is unable to hold to one purpose for very long, he is quick to generate images, but also quick to forget them, and unable to forge any resolution from the many conflicting ideas that he speaks for. Olsson's comments here are an important contribution to the discussion of Gower's characterization of Genius and of Genius' "dual role," serving either Venus or God according to the demands of the moment. In Book 4, Genius remains torn between his two masters and their different notions of gentilesse. The priest of Venus gives us to stone-turned-to-flesh of Pygmaleon's statue and the flesh-turned-to-stone of Araxarathen as the "type" and "antitype" of the beloved, each a projection of self-serving male desire. The priest of God understands the gentilesse of Amans' own mistress and corrects his misapprehension of her, and in Book 5, he offers an "antitype" in his own characterization of his mistress Venus. Genius himself is a personified "demande," Olsson concludes; in speaking for conflicting values, he makes CA as a whole a form of "recreation" like the discussion of gentilesse, and forces our participation in the creation of a resolution. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Olsson, Kurt Published Olsson, Kurt. "Aspects of Gentilesse is John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Books III-V." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 225-73. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Aspects of Gentilesse is John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Books III-V Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Discusses the difference between earthly and spiritual goods in Book 4 of CA, focusing on an episode near the end of Book 4, when Amans, despairing over his lack of rewards in love, points out that a sinner who had prayed to God with half as much bisinesse as he had prayed to his lady "scholde nevere come in Helle" (CA 4.3495). Amans unwittingly alludes to the proper goal of prayer; he also raises a question about the nature of God that was a subject of considerable late medieval theological speculation. The tale of "Iphis and Araxarathen" which follows is enigmatic at best as a counsel on avoiding despair. Allen suggests however that by making Iphis a "kinges Sone" (4.3579), Gower uses Iphis' suicide to recall Christ's sacrifice, echoing a common medieval moralization of Ovid's tale. But where Christ offers hope, Iphis dies in despair. The reminder of Christ's promise of redemption creates a contrast between Christ and Araxarathen, who is unmoved by prayer, that echoes Amans' comment on the difference between God and his lady and that offers a true remedy for despair. "God's favor is predictably attainable while an adored and idealized human's may or may nor be," Allen concludes (p. 214). Amans treats his lady as if she were God, and clearly needs a reorientation. The contrast to the earlier tale of Iphis, in which a lover's prayer does earn a reward, only reinforces the arbitrariness and unreliability of earthly love. The reliability of God, by contrast, as the object of bisinesse and prayer prepares the ending of the poem, when "an old, worn Amans will turn to God for the certainty that he could never find in his lady" (p. 220). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Allen, David G. Published Allen, David G.. "God's Faithfulness and the Lover's Despair: The Theological Framework of the Iphis and Araxarathen Story." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 209-23. 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 God's Faithfulness and the Lover's Despair: The Theological Framework of the Iphis and Araxarathen Story Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book 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 Links CA to the tradition of medieval "metaethics," which treats the meaning of the terms of our moral discourse rather than the rules that govern moral behavior ("normative ethics"). As his basic metaethical text he uses Abelard's "Scito Teipsum," the main concern of which is "intentionality and the extent to which ignorance of the nature of one's acts reduces moral culpability" (p. 190). Both Abelard and Gower share the use of dialogue as a way of exploring moral questions; both also use exempla not for simple moralitates on human conduct but as ways of exploring the nature of moral terms. Gower is more likely to have been familiar with the many anonymous vernacular moral treatises that imitated Abelard's method than with Abelard himself. From one such text, Kuczynski draws a discussion of bisinesse for comparison to Gower's portrayal of Amans in Book 4 of CA. The text he quotes distinguishes between two antithetical types of bisinesse, one the avid pursuit of things of this world, the other the avid pursuit of spiritual goods. Both Langland and Chaucer demonstrate familiarity with the distinction. Gower dramatizes it in the condition of Amans, who is caught in both a verbal and a moral paradox: his complaints about the unprofitability of his bisinesse in love betray a deeper misunderstanding of the difference between proper and improper bisinesse and the need to reconsider his definition of bisinesse itself. The exampla in Book 4 are meant to make Amans and the reader more conscious of the various possible meanings of the term. Because of his role, serving both Venus and God, Genius must proceed indirectly, but he thus forces both Amans and the reader to interpret his stories carefully and to become "more conscious of the nature of moral language itself" (p. 201). The tale of Pygmaleon, for instance, far from encouraging Amans' conduct, portrays a character who, like Amans, is merely a slave to fantasy; and despite the expressed lesson on the rewards for persistence in love, it offers not hope but the example of another man who is subject to the whims of Fortune, in both respects exposing the true nature of Amans' bisinesse. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kuczynski, Michael P Published Kuczynski, Michael P. "Gower's Metaethics." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 159-207. 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 Gower's Metaethics Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book 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 Discerns two views of history in Gower's writing: the apocalyptic -- emphasizing decline and punishment -- and the redemptive and penitential -- emphasizing the individual's ability to correct and improve himself. Gower found the models for both these views in the two dreams of Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel. Peck surveys other borrowings from Daniel in medieval literature to demonstrate that Gower's use of this source was exceptional, at least for secular writers. He then discusses how Gower used his model in VC and CA. VC is the more apocalyptic work: Gower draws on a number of eschatological sources in his Prologue, in preparation for Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the composite statue, representing the degeneration of mankind, in Book 7. In CA, Gower's two different views of history are juxtaposed. Even the dream of the statue in the Prologue is surrounded by imagery that is more penitential in nature and by repeated references to mankind's responsibility, and the Prologue ends with expressed hope for a new Arion (from the Book of Isaiah) who will bring about a new Golden Age. The penitential mode becomes dominant in Book I, in which Gower shifts from Nebuchadnezzar's first dream to his second, moving the apocalyptic rhetoric to the background and setting the tone for the remainder of CA. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2]. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 177-88. Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A. Published Peck, Russell A.. "John Gower and the Book of Daniel." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 159-87. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower and the Book of Daniel Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book 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 Correale is preparing a long-awaited edition of the entire Cronicles for the Chaucer Library. The editorial policy of the series requires him to choose as his base the MS that is closest to the one that Chaucer evidently used, and to try to reconstruct the text as Chaucer saw it. In this essay he applies the same method to determine which of the surviving MSS is closest to the one that Gower used in his version of the tale of Constance. Though the forms of the characters' names that Gower used pose a special problem, the variants that Correale considers indicate persuasively that Gower's source MS belonged to the same branch in the stemma as the MS that Chaucer used and "was probably not very different from Chaucer's" (p. 152). One of the consequences, as Correale points out, is that we will be able to consult the Chaucer Library edition for the study of Gower's use of his source as well as Chaucer's. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Correale, Robert M. Published Correale, Robert M.. "Gower's Source Manuscript of Nicholas Trevet's Les Cronicles." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 133-57. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Source Manuscript of Nicholas Trevet's Les Cronicles Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book 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 Finds that the model for Gower's process of composition in VC was provided by the classical and post-classical cento, the tradition of composing new poems by selecting lines and parts of lines from the works of earlier poets. As practiced by Greek and Roman poets, the art of the cento involved not just borrowing but adapting borrowed phrases to a new context and harmonizing borrowings from different sources. Except for the 10th-century "Ecbasis Captivi," the practice was not otherwise known to have been revived before the Renaissance. It is unlikely that this work circulated in England, nor is Gower likely to have been familiar with most classical examples. The most likely model, Yeager concludes, is the 4th-century Christian poet A. Faltonia Proba. Though Gower does not name her or quote her directly, her works were available in England, sometimes grouped with other works that Gower is known to have used. He may also have known of her second-hand: she is discussed by both Isidore and Boccaccio, ands the account in "De Claris Mulieribus" provides a strikingly apt description of Gower's practice in VC. Yeager says "we can be certain" that Gower had read Boccaccio's work (p. 122), but no one else has ever presented any real evidence that he had. Even if Proba does not provide Gower's actual model, however, the very knowledge that other poets composed such works is interesting in itself, and by providing a point of comparison, suggests that Gower's technique might be examined more closely for what it is rather than being dismissed as mere plagiarism. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Did Gower Write Cento?" In Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Micigan University, 1989, pp. 113-32. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Did Gower Write Cento? Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Micigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Considers both the textual and the manuscript evidence for Chaucer's and Gower's knowledge of the works of Virgil, who is often mentioned alongside Ovid as one of the most important classical influences in the late Middle Ages. In their retellings of the story of Dido and Aeneas, which Schmitz uses as his primary example, both poets adopt Ovid's view of Dido's misfortune, rather than Virgil's view of Aeneas' heroic calling. Gower shows no familiarity at all with Virgil's version, a lack of knowledge confirmed by his references to Virgil elsewhere in CA. Chaucer mentions Virgil more knowledgeably but remains equally bound to Ovid's version of the story, and may even have drawn his Virgilian material from a later French historical romance rather than from the original. The absence of direct knowledge of Virgil is consistent, Schmitz notes, with what others have observed about the lack of books in late medieval England, and suggests the need for care in our references to "classical influences" in fourteenth-century poetry. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Schmitz, Gotz Published Schmitz, Gotz. "Gower, Chaucer, and the Classics: Back to the Textual Evidence." In Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 95-111. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Chaucer, and the Classics: Back to the Textual Evidence Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book 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 Concerned with Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale," but argues that the examples of Gower's version of the story and of the CA as a whole, as invoked in MLIntro, provide a standard of moral responsibility that helps reveal the moral void at the heart of ML's performance. ML's allusions to "Canace" and to "Apollonius of Tyre" reveal both a preoccupation with incest and an inability to appreciate the positive lesson of Gower's tales, the importance of cultural institutions in "guiding and giving value to fallible natural impulse" (p. 67). Both attitudes also characterize ML's handling of his tale. The latter is revealed in the contrast between his Constance -- solitary, helpless, and consistently detached from any meaningful social reality -- and Gower's -- active, engaged with those around her, and fully portrayed in her roles as both wife and mother. ML's "stiflingly possessive attitude" towards his heroine (p. 69), his "desperate anxiety" (p. 96) about normal social relations and human feelings, moreover, amount to a type of incest that unwittingly recalls the tale's most traditional themes. The ostensible "moral" of the tale thus coexists uneasily with the private preoccupations of the teller. The combination reflects an ambivalence towards authority that stems from the teller's social status, Wetherbee suggests. It also points to the broader difference between the compassionate but morally normative CA and Chaucer's willingness to dramatize the tensions of his society more radically in CT. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wetherbee, Winthrop Published Wetherbee, Winthrop. "Constance in the World in Chaucer and Gower." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 65-93. 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 Constance in the World in Chaucer and Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book 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 Addresses the question of humor in CA in a rather different fashion by examining Gower's references to smiling and to laughter. She discerns three different attitudes towards laugher in medieval writing: the first two, which she labels "ascetic hostility" and "reluctant tolerance" (p. 42), are those discussed by Curtius and Kolve. But the third attitude, "which unreservedly affirms the inherent dignity of laughter" (p. 43), has equally venerable roots, she claims, and is the one that is more characteristic of Gower. She finds evidence for this attitude in the condemnation of joylessness that frequently occurs in medieval descriptions of Envy, and more positively, in the inclusion of laughter among man's natural endowments, for which she quotes Vincent of Beauvais. Both the negative and positive aspects of "natural" laughter are reflected in CA. She also finds examples in which laughter is ironic in effect, and examples in which laughter represents a rational corrective of sinful behavior. The latter are marked by a compassion and empathy that mark CA as a whole, and Burke's account of Gower's view of laughter generally supports her characterization of him as a man who could share a joke with his friend Chaucer. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. PGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burke, Linda Barney Published Burke, Linda Barney. "Genial Gower: Laughter in the Confessio Amantis." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 39-63. 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 Genial Gower: Laughter in the Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Argues that the conclusion of CA, in which Amans discovers that he is too old for Venus' service, derives much of its force from the contrast to the energetic allegorical consummation at the conclusion of RR, and thus should be seen at least in part as Gower's answer to Jean de Meun. Where Genius, in RR, urges Love's barons on by crying "Plow, for God's sake, my barons, plow," Gower's Venus reminds Amans that "mor behoveth to the plowh" than just his will alone; and instead of plucking the rose, as in RR, Amans discovers that Cupid plucks the arrow from his heart. Dean also examines Gower's use of the conventions and language of French courtly poetry, and shows how they are consistently subverted, sometimes ludicrously, by more colloquial Anglicisms and by the reality of Amans' condition. Gower has "modernized" Jean de Meun's conclusion in his poem. The result of his mixture of humor and pathos in these scenes is a "comedy more fitting for reflection than for unqualified mirth" (p. 34), and suggests an important statement on the human condition in both its comic and its tragic aspects. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dean, James Published Dean, James. "Gather Ye Rosebuds: Gower's Comic Reply to Jean de Meun." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medfieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 21-37. 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 Gather Ye Rosebuds: Gower's Comic Reply to Jean de Meun Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book 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 Here he offers an unusually clear and well illustrated summary of Gower's doctrine. Earlier sources had provided two different views of Nature, one the "law of (non-rational) instinct," the "nature" that man shares with the animals, the other the "law of (natural) reason," man's "nature" as a rational being (p. 2). These two views could be harmonized, yet they could also be set in opposition. In RR, one of Gower's most important sources, Nature is clearly opposed to Reason, though she is not for that reason completely amoral. In CA, "nature," or more normally "kinde," can be used with moral force, for instance in the discussions of ingratitude and murder. "Kinde" is distinguished, however, from "reason," opening up the possibility of conflict, a possibility that is realized for Gower in the sphere of human sexual love (p. 7). "Kinde" may refer broadly to man's "nature," including reason; and even with reference to the sexual impulse it may carry moral authority, though the most obvious examples, the prohibitions of incest and homosexuality, raise unresolvable problems in Nature's role. In other examples (e.g. "Canace and Machaire"), Nature can quite clearly operate against reason, and thus be conducive to vice. There are several key passages in CA on the need to keep natural impulse under the control of reason. But White observes that Gower evidently believes that such control is not always possible. Gower portrays man as trapped between two irreconcilable forces, and the ending of the poem illustrates that "the only truly safe condition is one in which man is no longer subject to the influences of love and nature" (p. 14). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor White, Hugh Published White, Hugh. "Nature and the Good in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the John Gower Society at the International Congress 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 1-20. 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 Nature and the Good in Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book 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 Lindahl conducts another examination of the similarities and differences among Gower's tale of Florent, WBT, and "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnall" within his wide-ranging essay on the relations between elite and folk cultures and between oral and written literature in the late middle ages. Gower, "the most secure financially of the three authors, and clearly the most conservative politically, presents an elitist version." Florent is "the most orthodoxly elite of the three leading men." The old woman who gives him the riddle to solve "does so because she realizes that Florent is too nobly connected to be killed by any but treacherous means. In neither of the other tales does there appear a female figure who so clearly symbolizes an attack against basic feudal values." Only in Gower's version is the correct answer that women desire sovereignty in love: Genius suggests both before and after the tale that men must be obedient only in love. Such a reading limits the women's threat to the dominant male, and the loathly lady's revelation that she is a king's daughter "further dispels any hint that she may limit the knight's status." "Florent is a paean to the nobility that Gower served and by whom he was served so well. In its symbolic structure and its glosses, the poem reaffirms that a modicum of deference is all that is required to maintain male dominance." (All on p. 72.) The three versions of the tale demonstrate that the same plot can serve different value systems; they also show the mixing of oral performance and reading in medieval literary culture. It is possible, moreover, that WBT "was intended as a playful inversion of, and as a festive response to the sober clerical cast of Gower's tale" (p. 75). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lindahl, Carl Published Lindahl, Carl. "The Oral Undertones of Late Medieval Romance." In Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages. Ed. Nicolaisen, W.F.H.. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies (112). Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995, pp. 59-75. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Oral Undertones of Late Medieval Romance Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 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 Author/Editor Author/Editor Kiefer, Lauren Published Kiefer, Lauren. "'A Good War Spoiled,' Part Two: Troy in the Late Middle Ages." In The Spoils of War: The Bright and Bitter Fruits of Human Conflict. Ed. Kleist, Jurgen and Butterfield, Bruce A.. Plattsburgh Studies in the Humanities (5). New York: Peter Lang, 1997, pp. 13-39. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Kiefer's is the second of two essays on the depiction of the Trojan War in this new volume. (The first, by Thomas J. Morrisey, covers Greek literature from Homer to Euripides.) She offers some brief comments on the standard Roman and medieval texts -- Ovid, Vergil, Hyginus, Bersuire, Benoit, and Guido -- emphasizing the portrayal of Ulysses as a smooth-talking trickster; but as will come as no surprise to those familiar with her other scholarly work, she devotes the bulk of her essay to Gower, who presents the war, she asserts, "as a pervasive, societal evil, rather than as an occasion for individual credulity and guile" (p. 19). Gower saw the war, she argues, as a mirror of his own violent times, and in his tales of Troy he demonstrates "how humans' own violent nature creates the destruction around them, and how, conversely, the institution of war distorts human impulses into duplicity and cruelty" (p. 25). She supports her conclusions with an examination of three tales. In "The Trojan Horse," Gower places blame on the falsity of the Greeks, but also shows that "the Trojan's own violent impulses [the eagerness and intensity with which they tear down their own walls] result in the destruction of the city" (p. 26). In "Nauplus and Ulysses," Gower demonstrates the incompatibility between war and familial love, and depicts the revelation of Ulysses' feigned madness as a cruel act of retribution, as Nauplus fights one ruse with another in order to separate Ulysses from his family. In substituting Nauplus for Palamedes, moreover, Gower draws a link (despite the difference in the spelling of the name) to his own earlier tale of "King Namplus and the Greeks": though he doesn't specify who actually killed Palamedes, Gower relies upon knowledge of the story to suggest that Ulysses killed Namplus' son because Nauplus threatened Ulysses' son, thus completing "the cycle of parental love warped into hatred and violence" (p. 32). Gower emphasizes the link between the Troy story and his own times by setting "Nauplus and Ulysses" within Genius' and Amans' discussion of the crusades. Amans speaks for Gower in this dialogue, echoing the narrator of the Prologue, as he undercuts Genius' enthusiasm for winning glory in battle and condemns the mentality that underlies the crusades. Genius replies with a tale that seems to exalt war over love and over the personal bonds between husband and wife and between father and son. Gower sets the personal against the mob mentality that results in war, Kiefer concludes, and "shows us that by the late fourteenth century, the age of chivalry was already approaching its end, and the rise of the individual was already beginning" (p. 37). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'A Good War Spoiled,' Part Two: Troy in the Late Middle Ages Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Peter Lang, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997-04. 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 Pearsall divides the Latin apparatus of CA into four different categories: the elegiac verses; the prose commentaries that Macaulay prints in the margins; the speech prefixes and citations of authority; and the colophon and other additions at the end. The systematic nature of this apparatus and its careful integration with the English text are exceptional in a vernacular work: the closest model he can find is Boccaccio's Chiosi to his Teseide; and the consistency with which it is preserved in the MSS indicates strongly that it is Gower's own. The general purpose seems to have been to lend the poem some of the authority of a classical text. Nonetheless, Pearsall argues, the Latin should not be taken as the poet's last word on the poem's meaning, but instead as another "voice" that is meant to be heard alongside that of the very different English text (pp. 15-16). The verse epigrams are characterized by an ostentation of style that strongly differentiates them from the simpler and more straightforward English; where "the English bids for a kind of literalness, . . . the Latin insists always on its own literariness" (p. 19), reflecting some of the differences between an oral culture and a written. The prose passages set themselves off from the English in a different way: when referring to the frame, they sharply diminish the dramatic illusion, and when referring to the tales, they "formalise the exemplary function of the stories in a manner that could be said deliberately to miss their point" (p. 22), denying the mimetic value of the tales and ignoring virtually everything that makes a story a fiction. They must be seen, Pearsall insists, not as summaries, but as "commentaries," "instructions on how to read it according to the conventions of a specific code of reading" (p. 24). The revised colophon, finally, he describes an even greater act of misappropriation. "As a whole," he concludes, "the Latin apparatus of the Confessio has considerable interest in relation to the English poem, and is relevant to it, but its interest and relevance is in its differentness: it cannot be used, in interpretation, without that qualification." [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek Published Pearsall, Derek. "Gower's Latin in the Confessio Amantis." In Latin and Vernacular: Studies in Late-Medieval Texts and Manuscripts. Ed. Minnis, A. J.. York Manuscripts Conferences: Proceedings Series., 1 . Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989, pp. 13-25. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Latin in the Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D.S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 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 Alvar studies de Cuenca's rendering of Gower's "clerc" in his Spanish translation of CA of c. 1400. The translations de Cuenca chose for different contexts -- clérigo, desperta en toda sabiduría, filósofo, letrado, maestro, poeta, sabidor, sabio, valientes teólogos, each of which Alvar examines in some detail -- indicate both how far the English word had developed from its original meaning of "ecclesiastic" and also the care with which de Cuenca worked with his text. When Alvar concludes that Gower's "clerc" is "un intelectual laico" (p. 12), it is difficult to tell whether he means from Gower's or from de Cuenca's point of view. Perhaps both: he makes much of CA 3.1782 ("Ne prest, ne clerc, ne lord, ne knave"), in which Gower makes some sort of distinction between "prest" and "clerc," and in which de Cuenca rendered "clerc" as lego, "layman" (pp. 4-5). But he doesn't give a full consideration of Gower's use in context, nor does he tell us how de Cuenca handled the role of Genius, who is both "Clerk" and "prest" in 1.196 and 203. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Alvar, Manuel Published Alvar, Manuel. "El Clerc de John Gower y su polivalencia en Juan de Cuenca." In Hispanic Studies in Honor of Joseph H. Silverman. Ed. Ricapito, Joseph V.. Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, Series Homenajes (5). Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 1988, pp. 1-13. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource El Clerc de John Gower y su polivalencia en Juan de Cuenca Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Juan de la Cuesta, 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 Wyclif, Langland, and Gower have all been cited by historians attempting to demonstrate that enthusiasm for crusading had completely died out by the end of the fourteenth century. By setting their remarks in context, Siberry attempts to show that support for the crusades remained undiminished. Wyclif's criticism was restricted to the Norwich Crusade of 1383, and Langland's advocacy of missions to convert Muslims was not inconsistent with military crusading. Gower's remarks on the crusades, actually spoken by Amans, in CA 3.1620-33, 1656-82, 2241-44, and 2484-2515 "should not be taken at . . . face value" (p. 130): they were dictated to some extent by the demands of courtly love, and "may also have been intended to be ironical, highlighting the absence of chivalric values amongst the knightly class" (p. 130). They would not have pleased Gower's patron, Henry earl of Derby, moreover, and are inconsistent with the sentiments expressed in VC Book 3, in "In Praise of Peace," and in "De lucis scrutinio," in which Gower asserts the Christian's right to the Holy Land, laments the decline of chivalry and crusading zeal, and urges his fellow Christians to turn their attention from fighting among themselves to defeating the Muslims. Siberry concludes by citing the large number of Gower's contemporaries who took part in crusades, including of course Henry. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Siberry, Elizabeth Published Siberry, Elizabeth. "Criticism of Crusading in Fourteenth-Century England." In Crusade and Settlement: Papers read at the First Conference of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East and presented to R.C. Smail. Ed. Edbury, Peter W.. Cardiff: University College Press, 1985, pp. 127-34. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Minor Latin Poetry 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 Criticism of Crusading in Fourteenth-Century England Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University College Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In his earlier essay in PQ, 64 (1985), 367-85, Hiscoe argued that Genius' storytelling in CA was actually an inducement to sin in the guise of moral preaching, in an elaborate display of rhetorical trickery modeled on Ovid, and that the reader's role was to signal his or her own superior moral sense through laughter. He makes a similar case in the present essay, but couches it in terms of a medieval theory of "signs." "The comic strategy of Confessio Amantis," he writes, "is built on the medieval assumption that the process of assigning meaning mirrors the spiritual condition of the humans who engage in the process" (p. 229). Citing Augustine and Ockham, he describes how, as a consequence of the fall, "words themselves remain empty of any significant content unless transformed by a speaker's awareness of how verbal signs gain ultimate authority solely from their capacity to call up Christian truths to their speakers and to their audiences" (p. 230). The same demand is placed upon secular literature; and the readers have the same role in constructing the meaning from their own experience with the power of language to refer to spiritual truths. In the Confessio Amantis, Genius is a spokesman for fallen mankind who cannot see the spiritual content of his own discourse, and he repeatedly either befuddles or distorts the meanings that the readers, from their position of superior understanding, are able to supply. In his earlier essay Hiscoe used "Ceix and Alceone" (CA 4.2927-3123) as his primary example, and drew upon Ovide Moralise as a guide to the moral that Genius misunderstands. In this essay he uses "Adrian and Bardus" ((5.4937-5162) to show how Gower handles tales without background in the mythographical tradition. Such tales are given "evocative details" that "urge readers to expect heavy spiritual weight; instead they are entertained with the spectacle of a storyteller comically unable to understand or control the inherent significances of the tales he himself chooses to tell" (pp. 232-33). "Adrian and Bardus," in Genius' telling, is laden with language that alludes to Christian redemption, but Genius fails to pursue any of the spiritual implications that are offered. Adrian is another, more literal, representative of mankind after the fall; Bardus comes in the role of savior; but neither fulfills his role according to expectation as the "fictional details spin madly toward no apparent end" and "Genius' story confounds itself at all possible planes of interpretation" (p. 238). In applying the tale to Amans' situation, finally, both Genius and Amans overlook the fact that his cupidinous love is a symptom of the attachment to worldly things that the tale should warn against, and in his defense of his fidelity, Amans quickly becomes tangled in the same sorts of equivocation that mark Genius' tale. One may subscribe to all of the theory in this essay without accepting any of what Hiscoe deduces in applying it to the reading of CA. In drawing us outside the text, Hiscoe may have paid too little attention to it: as only one instance, Bardus does not come "riding into the scene on an ass" (p. 236), but "walkende with his asse" (CA 5.4957); it makes a difference if one insists that we are supposed to make an identification with Christ. Like most "ironic" readings of the poem, moreover, Hiscoe gives us only two choices: either the poem is a dry moral treatise, a "compulsively scholastic gathering of ethical lore" (p. 228), or it is a "tour de force of comic skill and audience engagement" (same page). Most recent criticism has been concerned with carving out a large middle ground in which, for instance, Amans' love might not be purely cupidinous, and his fidelity to his lady might in some lights be held to be commendable. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hiscoe, David W. Published Hiscoe, David W.. "Heavenly Sign and Comic Design in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature. Ed. Wasserman, Julian N. and Roney, Lois. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1989, pp. 228-44. 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 Heavenly Sign and Comic Design in Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Syracuse University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book 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 Harriss considers Gower with reference to Henry V and discusses Gower's relation to the politics and society of his time. Harriss uses the works of Gower, Hoccleve, Lydgate, and a number of anonymous poets to illustrate prevailing concerns with government and kingship among the educated urban class of late medieval England. The repeated calls for "good governance" among the commons following the many disturbances of the end of the fourteenth century "only thinly concealed their own bewilderment and lack of effective remedies." It is in this context that Gower's political writings are to be seen. "Of all the Ricardian poets Gower is most representative of the middle and 'professional' stratum of free society which in the late fourteenth century had become alienated from royal government, and impotently voiced its grievances and remedies in a wide range of the surviving literature" (p. 2). The "strictly defined role" of this class "in the political hierarchy restricted their own capacity to effect reform" (p. 4). Hence they looked to the king, both as a model and as a leader. The bulk of Harriss' essay is taken up with a survey of the prevalent ideals of kingship, divided among the following topics: the role of the king, justice, counsel, finance, political harmony, chivalry, war and peace, and religion. Henry shared the same ideals, Harriss asserts, and made them the program of his reign; and his ability to win the confidence of his subjects was due not to his innovations but to his fulfilling the expectations of kingship as they had already been defined. All these topics are familiar, of course, from Gower's writing, and Gower is frequently quoted as Harriss defines the ideals that Henry attempted to put into practice. Harriss' survey also does much to set Gower's poetry in the context of other contemporary writing on political themes.[PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Harriss, G. L. Published Harriss, G. L. "Introduction: The Exemplar of Kingship." In Henry V: The Practice of Kingship. Ed. Harriss, G.L.. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 1-29. 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 Introduction: The Exemplar of Kingship Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Oxford University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek Published Pearsall, Derek. "Interpretive Models for the Peasants' Revolt." In Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture. Ed. Gallacher, Patrick J. and Damico, Helen. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989, pp. 63-70. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Vox Clamantis Review Pearsall considers various interpretations of the Peasants' Revolt in late-medieval literary and historical accounts, including the "Visio" of "Vox Clamantis." His general point is that it is necessary to recognize "the shaping power of interpretive models" in the study of history as well as in the study of literature, but without reducing objective knowledge to thorough-going illusion (an idea Pearsall attributes to the relativism of Karl Popper) because "the possibility of falsifiability implies the existence of truth, however difficult of access" (69). Pearsall treats Gower's depiction of the 1381 Uprising in Book 1 of "Vox Clamantis" in a brief paragraph, associating it with "the prevalent image or model of the well-being of the commonwealth" found in petitions against laborers that depict them as "mindless." For Pearsall, Gower's is "the most powerful and sustained account of the Peasants' Revolt in terms of the image of reason and nature overturned" but "Gower is not, to be frank, much interested in the actuality of the event, rather in the image of primal chaos and reversion to bestiality which follows on the challenge to the established political order" (65). Elsewhere, actuality is suggested--and a greater sense of historicity achieved--Pearsall shows, in several other versions of the Uprising (the "Anonimalle Chronicle," "Tax has tenet us alle," Froissart's account), distinguishing them from Gower's (and Walsingham's) by their degrees of "authenticating realism," a notion Pearsall draws from Morton Bloomfield's 1964 study of realism in Chaucer. [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 Interpretive Models for the Peasants' Revolt Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book 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 Admitting that his endeavor "at first looks unpromising," Axton proceeds to consider ways in which Chaucer may have influenced Gower. His argument includes commentary on their common sources, especially Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and French poetry, as well as their mutual involvement in the "tangles of the law" (22), characterizing the poetic relationship of the two men as "mutual attraction and responsiveness" (23), considering their "rivalry" as well as their interdependencies. Axton observes that Chaucer preceded Gower in finding "an English voice" and in "cultivating a sophisticated attitude towards both his reader and his subject matter" (24), especially when writing about love. Specific bits of diction and imagery are found earlier in Chaucer than in Gower, Axton avers, and Chaucer's first-person pose as an "outsider" in love may have inspired Gower, particularly in CA, to create a "mild and complaining, deferential, courtly" voice, different from the more familiar "admonitory voice of moral authority" found in Gower's earlier poetry and returning in the voice of Venus in Book 8 of CA. While raising these suggestions, Axton comments at length on Chaucer's uses of and attitudes toward Gower, particularly those evident in the Prologue to the Man of Law's Tale and in Manciple's Tale--evidence of Gower influence on Chaucer, rather than the reverse which his title implies. [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Axton, Richard Published Axton, Richard. "Gower--Chaucer's Heir?" In Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer. Ed. Morse, Ruth and Windeatt, Barry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 21-38. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower--Chaucer's Heir? Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cambridge University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "'Scripture Veteris Capiunt Exempla Futuri': John Gower's Transformation of a Fable of Avianus." In Retelling Tales: Essays in Honor of Russell Peck. Ed. Hahn, Thomas and Lupack, Alan. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997, pp. 341-54. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review Yeager examines Gower's tale of "The Travellers and the Angel" (CA 2.291-372) in comparison to its source in Avianus (Fables 22). In order to depict the nature of Envy, Gower chooses a tale whose central metaphor is blindness. He brings it within a sphere of Christian reference by attributing to Jove many of the attributes of the Christian God and replacing Apollo with an angel. He also emphasizes the choices that each man makes: each man is depicted as a sinner rather than merely as an embodiment of a sin. The choice of the greedy man, to defer his request, better reveals his nature than in Avianus, where he asks for nothing. The angel's offer of a gift for the "kindeschipe? of their hospitality resonates ironically: where the word implies fellowship and likeness, it also draws attention to the men's difference from the angel and to the way in which they act irrationally, according to "kinde.? In his conclusion, finally, Genius draws an application not just to Amans but to the broader world which "empeireth? because of sins like those that the two men illustrate, asserting again the relation between individual virtue and common profit that was identified as the major theme of the poem by the man who is honored by the festschrift in which Yeager's essay appears. [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 'Scripture Veteris Capiunt Exempla Futuri': John Gower's Transformation of a Fable of Avianus 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 1997 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Wetherbee, Winthrop Published Wetherbee, Winthrop. "John Gower." In The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature. Ed. Wallace, David. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 589-609. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review Wetherbee's chapter on Gower is proportionally only slightly longer than Russell Peck's in the "Dictionary of Literary Biography" (vol. 146, pp. 178-90. Detroit: Gale, 1994), something under 10000 words compared to about 8000 for Peck, but it offers a great deal more to grapple with, giving far more space to interpretive issues than to the purely factual. Gower's biography is reduced to a single footnote (p. 590), there is a single sentence on his acquaintance with Chaucer (same page), and one has to search hard for any hint that CA is arranged in books that are identified with the Seven Deadly Sins (it's in the middle of p. 604). There is a great deal, however, on the comparison between Gower's and Chaucer's "projects," and even more on Gower's sometimes ambivalent relation to the literary traditions from which he drew. That is perhaps the greatest difference between these two essays. Peck acknowledges Gower's debt to literary sources, but he emphasizes the poet's depiction of contemporary society. Wetherbee acknowledges the poet's self-defined role as social moralist, but he emphasizes the "evolving engagement with poetic tradition" evident in all three of his major works; and with reference to MO and VC, he declares, "the traditional emphasis on their doctrinal content has tended to distract attention from Gower's skill and versatility as a poet" (p. 591). The details of his account take a couple of surprising directions. As similar in content as MO and VC may be, each is referable to a distinct tradition of literary form associated with the language that Gower chose. MO draws from the popular vernacular homily and to traditions of penitential discourse. It is also, according to Wetherbee, marked by an engagement with the "Roman de la Rose": the "psychology of mankind, suspended between Reason and the World, recalls the Amant of the Rose, challenged by Reason and Cupid, but unnerved by Dangier and a latent fear of love's power" (p. 593), and Gower's French "is everywhere alert to the corrupting power of the courtly language it deploys" (ibid.). VC is drawn from traditions of learned Latin satire, despite Gower's claim to express the "vox populi." Wetherbee also discovers, in the conclusion to the "visio" in Book 1 and elsewhere, echoes of the anxious self-definition of the poet in Alan of Lille's "De Planctu Naturae" and Ovid's "Tristia" and "Ex Ponto." This "evolving engagement" culminates in the "synthesis" of CA, but CA is also a work of a different and more complex sort. Because of its dialogic structure, "moral judgments presented directly in the earlier works now sit in unresolved contradiction with a vision of man and the world that continually call the judge's assertions into question" (p. 598). This is a view of CA that has been expressed before but never with quite as much force or on the basis of so thorough a knowledge of the poem. Wetherbee cites the form of the poem, of course, with its English verse crowded by the Latin marginalia and epigrams: the tension among their different views "is part of a long-standing debate between poetry and the conventional scholarly assumptions that define its place in medieval pedagogy" (p. 600). Genius is as divided as the poem itself, speaking for both "cultural" and "natural" values, for both "courtoisie" and for chivalry, "a virtue which in its sexual aspect brings love into association with aggression and violence" (p. 601). Chivalry, Wetherbee declares, "is in effect the villain of the 'Confessio,' at odds with Gower's teaching in virtually every area" (p. 602), an assertion that he defends with a brief examination of a number of Gower's tales. Gower's goal is "a cultural system capable of controlling not only relations between the sexes but social relations of all sorts. And implicit in his treatment of love and chivalry is an awareness that the resources provided by courtly-chivalric culture are inadequate to this task" (p. 603). This awareness is reflected in the numerous contradictions in the poem, as "conventional paradigms fail to exercise a controlling function" (p. 603). It is also reflected in the inclusion of Book 7, whose departure from the form of the rest of the poem suggests that "the perfect synthesis of moral self-governance, courtly-chivalric 'gentilesse' and enlightened royal policy may finally be beyond the ordering power of Genius and his poet" (p. 604). Gower backs away from the full implications of his form and argument, however, ending his poem with "a ringing affirmation – in English and in his own voice – of the place of man in a divinely ordered universe"(p. 607-8), and in that Wetherbee finds the greatest difference between Gower and Chaucer, despite their substantial affinity. Where Chaucer's view is fragmented, Gower retains a "guarded faith that the 'well-meaning' love of Apollonius is finally accessible to his society and can prevail" (p. 607). This is a challenging view of the CA and it is unfortunate that Wetherbee has only the space of a chapter to develop it. While his argument is clear, he isn't able to deploy all of the evidence that we might expect. The issues in Gower's tale of Paris and Helen, for instance, are too complex to be summarized in a single sentence; the assertion that chivalry is the villain of the piece needs more than a paragraph of justification; and the argument on the fragmenting and unifying aspects of Gower's structure deserves more than the few pages that Wetherbee gives us here. We can only respond with a challenge of our own: Wetherbee owes us an entire book on Gower. [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 18.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cambridge University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A. Published Peck, Russell A.. "John Gower." In Dictionary of Literary Biography. Ed. Helterman, Jeffrey and Mitchell, Jerome. Detriot: Gale Research, 1994, pp. 178-90. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Biography of Gower Review Peck attempts to provide a one-chapter overview of Gower and his works. It begins with a list of Gower's works (including a selective bibliography of manuscripts and editions); it offers a discussion of Gower's biography and then of each of his works in turn; and it concludes with "References," a bibliography that includes the major book-length studies of Gower and a handful of important articles. About half of the section on Gower's life is concerned with his relation to Chaucer. Separate paragraphs treat Agnes Groundolf, the date of Gower's birth and his ancestry, his property dealings, his relation to the Priory of St. Mary Overey's, and his lost writings, including Fisher's speculation on Gower's participation in the "Pui." The discussion of the major works is given over mostly to their structure and a to summary of their contents. MO is labeled a "complaint against the ills of the world." Like Fisher, Peck gives only a passing reference to the catalog of the virtues, and he describes the poet turning at the end of the poem from the foolish songs of his youth to "a new song of disenchantment," passing over the penitential and redemptive spirit of the life of the Virgin with which the poem concludes. His discussion of VC gives a standard account of the textual history and revisions of the poem, of its contents, including Book 1 and the "Cronica Tripertita," and of its sources. In describing CA, Peck refrains from repeating the arguments of his own published writing on the poem, either his 1978 book on "Kingship and Common Profit" or his most recent essay on "The Phenomenology of Make Believe" (see JGN 14, no. 1), though both are rightfully included in his list of references. He gives a fairly detailed account of Gower's revisions of CA, then treats briefly the frame of the confession, the characters of Genius and Amans (each amusing in his partial understanding), the arrangement of the lessons, and the implications of the Prologue and the epilogue for Gower's penitential purpose. The "strength" of the poem, however, which he repeatedly describes as a delight, "lies in its stories," and he concludes with a list of the dozen tales that he finds most notable (p. 189). The chapter ends with brief accounts of Gower's shorter poems. Consistent with the format and purpose of the volume in which it is found, there is little in Peck's chapter that is new. Most, in fact, can be found in either Macaulay or Fisher, and though he takes a critical view of the notion that Gower's revisions in CA reflect a public change of allegiance (p. 188), Peck repeats some of the more speculative inferences about his relationship with Chaucer (p. 180), and he adopts the idea that Gower had his own scriptorium (pp. 178, 182) which most others who have worked on the text have by now pretty much discarded. There are a few other quibbles one could raise: his account of the revisions of CA suggests that the "third" recension evolved from the "second" when it is more sensible to think of it as a separate revision of the "first;" and Gower didn't receive his first collar of S's from Henry after his accession (Peck, p.189) but in 1393 (see Fisher, p. 68). Otherwise, Peck has presented in brief form a useful summary of what is currently known about the poet and his works, and his chapter could be a good starting point for students who are making their first acquaintance with his writing. [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 18.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Gale Research, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Mast, Isabelle Published Mast, Isabelle. "Rape in John Gower's Confessio Amantis and Other Related Works." In Young Medieval Women. Ed. Lewis, Katherine J. and Menuge, Noël James and Phillips, Kim M.. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999, pp. 103-32. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Language and Word Studies Review Mast's long essay falls into three unequal parts: a consideration of the instances of rape in three other collections of tales nearly contemporary with Gower's, an examination of the language Gower uses for rape in each of his three major poems, and an analysis of some of the major instances of rape in CA. The three other tale collections--the "Gesta Romanorum," the "Alphabet of Tales," and Christine de Pisan's "Cité des Dames"--treat rape very differently from one another, but none explores the consequences of rape for the woman, the principal way in which Mast finds Gower's treatment differs from that of his predecessors. Gower's vocabulary for rape is shaped in part by the framework of the confession. In Book 5, where many of the instances of rape in the poem are found, the vocabulary of theft, with its implication that women or their sexuality are mere commodities, is drawn from the metaphor of Avarice that governs the book as a whole, but it also embodies the woman's lack of consent, it suggests that rape is less an act of desire than of aggression and power, and it does not prevent Gower from considering the consequences for the victim. Other expressions, such as "hadde his wille," are more androcentric, but Gower never stoops to pornographic descriptions of the violent act. The incidents of rape in CA appear to be carefully chosen: Gower depicted far fewer than the fifty such acts, for instance, in the "Metamorphoses." His alterations in the tales of Philomela and Lucrece reveal his attitude towards rape. In the former tale, Gower places the rape and its consequences at the center. He betrays his sympathy for Philomela by allowing her to voice her feelings of shame and embarrassment, and in the transformations at the end he affords her some partial compensation for her fate. He alters the story of Lucrece in order to emphasize the victim's innocence. She too experiences the shame of pollution. In both these tales, "the victims are cleared as fully as possible. In both cases Gower tried to think himself into the position of the victim. He successfully expressed the feeling of shame which is not based on complicity, a reproach women often had and still have to endure, in addition to the pain that has already been inflicted upon them. He also makes every attempt to show the effects on the women's identity" (pp. 120-21). In two briefer examples of Book 5--Cornix and Calistona--the woman's lack of consent is less explicit but it may be inferred from the context of the frame. Gower focuses on "the violent and unsympathetic reaction of the girls' social environments" (p. 123): even when her struggle is not depicted, the woman is still depicted as the victim. This essay appears to have been put together in some haste: it contains a couple of sentence fragments and a number of paragraphs that don't quite cohere, and at one point a line from "Sir Degaré" is attributed to Chaucer (p. 107). There is a more troubling problem at the core of its thesis. Gower demonstrates his sympathy for women, Mast repeatedly asserts, by allowing them to voice the shame that they experience as a consequence of being raped. This shame is associated with the "concomitant loss of reputation and, implicitly, social standing" (p. 107); in the tale of Philomela, Gower "is displaying thoughtfully how a young woman could be shamefully embarrassed about the sexual pollution and common knowledge of her rape and how she might try to avoid the public stare" (p. 116); Lucrece is ashamed because "the rape has destroyed a significant part of her identity as a woman and may by association besmirch the name of her family on the public stage, regardless of her actual innocence" (p. 119). Mast does not interrogate either the basis of this public (as opposed to private) shame or its validity, and she appears to accept that the woman's loss of reputation following a rape is both natural and inevitable. She thus dismisses Augustine's condemnation of Lucrece's suicide ("Si pudica, cur occisa?") as misogynistic, not recognizing the misogyny in the notion that a woman can be "besmirched" by an act of violence against her; and in the course of her discussion, she mentions the tale of Leucothoe (p. 123), but she has nothing to say about how the father has his daughter buried alive because she suffered her maidenhood to be stolen (CA 5.6764-75). Gower betrays a sympathy for the victims of rape, to be sure, but that is not necessarily to say that he is fundamentally sympathetic towards women. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 18.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Rape in John Gower's Confessio Amantis and Other Related Works Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. Martin's Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review According to the editor of this volume, in his splendid essay on the many faces that Ovid has presented to poets and readers down through time, Harbert shows that Gower is "in some ways the leading Ovidian of the Middle Ages" (p. 1). Harbert does not actually do quite so much, but he does give a useful survey of Gower's use of Ovid in VC and CA. He finds that the degree and nature of Ovid's influence vary greatly in the two works. In VC, according to statistics borrowed from Stockton, Gower's borrowings range from about 2% of his lines (in Book 3) to about 12% (in Book 1, in the vision of the mob and the destruction of the city). In the passages most marked by Ovid, Gower has taken not just lines but also themes, and "as he borrows more and more from Ovid we find his work, even the original passages, becomes better not worse. Ovid is now not merely a quarry for Gower, but an inspiration" (p. 86). In CA, on the other hand, though the borrowings are more extensive (some 40 tales, in whole or in part), the framework of the confession is entirely unlike Ovid's, and Gower's octosyllabic couplets are not as well suited for translation as Chaucer's five-stressed line. Consequently he remolds rather than merely translates. His many alterations betray the influence of the common use of Ovid for exercises in both embellishment and condensation in medieval rhetorical training; of his use of Old French sources, which suggested "a tendency to concentrate more on the state of mind of the characters and less on the external world than Ovid" (p. 88); of native English romances (cf. Gower's "Acteon"); and of the Bible (cf. his "Arion"). He remains equally free of all his sources, however, and a consideration of his handling of scenes of transformation and of his "Pyramus and Thisbe" and "Jason and Medea" reveals both his independence and his ability to blend details from different texts. In contrast to VC, "the mode of narration of the Confessio is so different from Ovid's that Gower seems by this stage to regard Ovid's poetry as little more than raw material, to be manipulated and transformed without regard to its origin" (p. 96). The one place in CA that might have been inspired by Ovid comes in a surprising place, in the "palinode" and the revelation of Amans' old age: the germ for the persona that Gower adopts here is perhaps to be found in passages in the Tristia that he also drew from in his meditations on his solitude after he flees London in Book 1 of VC. Harbert has also written on the story of Tereus in Ovid and Gower in Medium AEvum, 41 (1972), 208-19. Other essays in the present volume take up single Ovidian themes in later writers and treat the influence of Ovid on Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dryden, T.S. Eliot, the Elizabethans, and the Augustans. Review by C.H. Sisson, TLS, July 15-21, 1988, p. 772.] [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Harbert, Bruce Published Harbert, Bruce. "Lessons from the Great Clerk: Ovid and John Gower." In Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art From the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. Ed. Martindale, Charles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 83-97. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Lessons from the Great Clerk: Ovid and John Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cambridge University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek Published Pearsall, Derek. "The Rede (Boarstall) Gower: British Library, MS Harley 3490." In The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths. Ed. Edwards, A.S.G. and Gillespie, Vincent and Hann, Ralph. London: British Library, 2000, pp. 87-99. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review For many years now we have been patiently but eagerly awaiting the publication of the Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts of the Works of John Gower, which was first mentioned in JGN in vol. 2, no. 1, in February 1983. Jeremy Griffiths was involved in this project at the time of his sudden death. Now that Derek Pearsall is free of teaching duties, though not, we hope and presume, retired in any other sense, we are promised that the work will soon be brought to completion, and Pearsall provides a glimpse of what we may expect in a sample description of Harley 3490 (Macaulay's "H1") in this collection of essays in Griffiths' memory. The new description occupies ten pages, compared to the half page in Macaulay (Works 2.cxlii-cxliii). It includes a photograph of a sample page from the MS (in this instance, the passage describing Nebuchadnezzar's statue in the Prologue), illustrating the scribe's mid-fifteenth-century hand, his handling of the Latin portions of the text that Macaulay printed as marginalia, and the decoration. It also provides much more detail on the distribution of the text, the illumination (including reference to other work by the same artists and identification of the 10 coats of arms that appear throughout the copy), the layout, the hand, later additions to the text, and both the original and later owners. The editors' presumption, Pearsall writes in his introduction, was that "everything about a literary manuscript, from the choice of material to write on and the kind of writing employed to the smallest comments and notes made by later readers, is significant to the understanding of the texts that it contains" (p. 87). But significant how? As with any reference work, the uses that will be made by the information in the new catalogue cannot be anticipated by the compilers and will depend entirely on the imagination of the users. Some of the editors' choices are suggestive, however, of what kind of results we might expect. Harley 3490 is not a very important copy for the traditional sorts of questions that editors asked, when all interest was focused on the single idealized moment when the poem took its final form: it falls into the middle group of Macaulay's "recension one" but it has unpredictable affiliations with other copies, both within that group and outside it, and there are thus many far better copies for establishing the "text." The uncertainty of its relation to other copies , however, is what makes it interesting to more recent textual scholars. If we could determine more precisely the relationship between this copy and its exemplar (or exemplars), we would know a great deal more than we do about the transmission of the text and the role of the scribes in producing the surviving copies, information that would be directly relevant to the assumptions that we must make whenever we choose one manuscript as superior to another. One of the great differences between the new description and the one given by Macaulay, apart from but not unrelated to its very length, is the editors' self-imposed neutrality on questions of this sort. Where Macaulay presented a minimum of observed detail, organized in support of his own conclusions on Gower's own role in the development of the text, the editors of the new catalog have abandoned all presumption on how variations in the text arose, and no longer refer, for instance, to "recensions," leaving open the question of authorial participation. Their greater attention both to the ownership of the MS and to later marginalia (neither mentioned by Macaulay at all) and their promised attention to the selection of contents in other copies are also consistent with the more modern notion of the text as both the possession and the product of many others besides the poet himself. There is a great deal with which to work here. Of course, the description of this one MS will be of greatest value when it appears in the company of all the others, and with the example before us, we now have even greater reason to hope that the entire catalogue will soon be complete. The original owner of Harley 3490 is also mentioned in Pearsall's essay on "The Literary Milieu of Charles of Orleans and the Duke of Suffolk, and the Authorship of the Fairfax Sequence," in Charles d'Orleans in England (1415-1440), ed. Mary-Jo Arn (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), p. 149 n. 14, which supplies a great deal of useful information on the culture in which this MS was written. [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 19.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Rede (Boarstall) Gower: British Library, MS Harley 3490 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available British Library, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Dimmick, Jeremy Published Dimmick, Jeremy. "'Redinge of Romance' in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance. Ed. Field, Rosalind. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999, pp. 125-37. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review The romances in CA, Dimmick writes, "constitute a link between Amans's private preoccupations and Gower's broadest thematic concerns, and provide the poem's most confident affirmations of moral, familiar and social good" (pp. 127-28). Amans reveals his predilection for reading romances in Book 6 (876-89): identifying with the characters about whom he reads, he is led to hope that the outcome of his own pursuit of love will be as happy as theirs. He is almost immediately brought back to the realization of how different his prospects are, however. His disappointment provides an opening for Genius to attempt to modify his view of himself and to release him from his obsession, and one of his means of doing so is to through his use of examples of Amans's own favorite reading-material. The three tales that Dinnick examines as examples of romance in CA are "Florent," "Constance," and "Apollonius of Tyre." He has pertinent and interesting comments on each. "Florent" appears to be a wish-fulfillment fantasy, but the hero obtains what he desires not by an act of his own will, as one might expect in romance, but by giving away his own freedom of choice. At that moment, "he recognises for the first time something which the virtue of trowthe does not require him to perceive: his own good (even his own moral good) is not the sole criterion of value. By yielding his 'hole vois' to his wife, Florent acknowledges that she is a narrative subject in her own right, is not merely an adjunct to his own desires or self-worth" (p. 130). At the end of the tale, as the lady reveals the reason for her enchantment, the tale shifts from a "quest romance" to an "exile-romance" of which she is the heroine. "The values of the exile paradigm win out: the reorientation of heroism in 'Florent', away from action to endurance, and finally to a new sense of oneself as operating in the context of other selves – in a society – is a tacit rebuke to Amans's self-isolating obsession with his lady as merely the object of his desire" (ibid.). Overcoming this obsession is also a central concern of "Constance" and "Apollonius of Tyre," in each of which "sexual love is not seen in isolation, as a dominating passion which excludes all other considerations; instead it takes its place in a continuum of 'kindly' bonds of love, integrating the love of parents and children, husbands and wives, humans and God," and where Amans habitually isolates sexual love as an all-encompassing obsession, 'Constance' [and by implication 'Apollonius' too] aims to integrate sexuality into a broader pattern, both social and cosmic" (p. 131). The optimism of such tales, manifested particularly in the "morally- and socially-resolved closure" of their endings (p. 133), is challenged elsewhere within the poem, and Dinnick sets forth "Jason and Medea" as an example of "a romance which goes badly wrong" (p. 134). Not only does it end disastrously for the participants but it also lacks proper closure, for Medea goes unpunished, and Genius goes on to tell the story of "Phrixus and Helle" to explain the origin of the fleece, which only emphasizes how Medea's act is the perpetuation of a cycle of family violence which in turn is only part of the larger cycle of events extending from the fall of Thebes to the fall of Troy. The poem appears to privilege the more optimistic view by its placement of "Apollonius of Tyre" at the end, but the conclusion involving Amans is considerably more complex, and Gower's hopes that Richard II might be a new Apollonius obviously turned out to be premature. Dinnick's attempt to explore the generic links among these tales is salutary. He rec-ognizes some of the problems in adequately defining romance on page 133, but the definition by which he links these tales, which emphasizes the pattern of reconciliation and reunion over what he calls "generic markers," excludes other tales that are legitimately entitled to be included as romances (e.g. "The False Bachelor," 2.2501-2781), and it also passes over the long passage on prowess, heroism, and "gentilesse" in the middle of Book 4, certainly central romance concerns. There is more that one might say, therefore, about "romance" in CA, but such an objection does not diminish the value of Dinnicks' discussion of the thematic connections that he discerns among the four tales that he chooses to focuses on. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 19.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'Redinge of Romance' in Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D. S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Duffell's principal thesis is that Chaucer was the first medieval poet in any language to compose in iambic pentameter. Both to support his claim and to establish its significance, he begins with a brief historical survey of the appearance of the ten-syllable line in French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese in the centuries that preceded Chaucer. This is a tall order for such a brief essay, and difficult for a non-metrist to evaluate. Duffell explains most of his terms well enough (though "proparoxytone" required the reviewer to reach for his dictionary), and makes sufficiently clear how the French décasyllable or vers de dix (which despite the name, might have eleven or twelve syllables) and the Italian endacsillabi (which despite the name, might have only ten) are related to one another and to the English "pentameter" line. His argument does depend, however, on some rather broad claims about the perceptual bases of metrical patterning that one has to suspect might be discussable, and occasionally on Duffell's own choice of one previous scholar's arguments over another's. (It would also be a bit easier to follow if Duffell had marked the stresses in his examples.) Chaucer's innovation, Duffell argues, was to transform Boccaccio's endecasillabos (e.g. in Filostrato) by excluding all "triple time" lines (the reviewer learned these long ago as "dactylic") to create a consistent "duple-time" (i.e. iambic) rhythm for his ten-syllable lines. Such a claim depends upon accepting that final –e is syllabic in Chaucer's verse. Duffell invokes Samuels (1972) and Windeatt (1977) in his support, claiming that their arguments are "overwhelming," and goes on the present some more evidence of his own. This is where Gower comes in, but it is also, I am afraid, where I find the argument hardest to follow. Gower also used décasyllables in his Ballades, but instead of the fixed caesura of his French predecessors, he used a variable caesura in the manner of the Italians. He was able to do so because the words stress in Anglo-Norman, as in Italian, was stronger than in continental French. Humans aren't capable of perceiving rapid counts as high as ten, Duffell argues in the first section of his essay. The French poets, writing in a language in which the differences among levels of stress was not as perceptible, were obliged to base their meter upon the total number of syllables but would inevitably lose count before they got to ten, and therefore wrote décasyllables in lines of 4 and 6 (or less commonly 5 and 5), using the caesura to mark off regular quantities that could be perceived. Gower and the Italians were able to base their metrics on the count of stressed syllables instead and, since there were fewer, would not lose count before the end, allowing them far greater freedom in the internal construction of the line. Gower's lines are also predominantly "duple" (i.e. iambic), in approximately the same proportion as Petrarch's though not in as high a proportion as Chaucer's. "It is likely that the strong-weak alternating structure of the English and Anglo-Norman languages made an entirely duple-time [ten-syllable line] acceptable to English ears long before it became the norm in Italian and Spanish," Duffell writes in conclusion (p. 218). Well, okay, that explains why "duple-time" might be more common in Anglo-Norman and English than in French, but Gower's use of "duple-time," proportionally nearly identical to Petrarch's, hardly explains why Chaucer abandoned "triple-time" so completely and so long before the Italians, whose language, Duffell judges, had a word stress as strong as Anglo-Norman (p. 218). Duffell does attribute to Gower, however, an innovation in the use of the décasyllable that is just about as significant as Chaucer's was in English versification, or that would have been if he had had as many imitators. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 19.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Duffell, Martin J. Published Duffell, Martin J.. "Chaucer, Gower, and the History of the Hendecasyllable." In English Historical Metrics. Ed. McCully, C.B. and Anderson, J.J.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 210-218. ISBN 0521554640 Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer, Gower, and the History of the Hendecasyllable Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cambridge University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 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 CA is one of 37 late ME texts that Tajima cites in his examination of the history of modal ought, expressing duty or obligation, and of its derivation from the past tense form of the verb that became modern owe, which in OE meant both "to possess" and "to have to pay." He demonstrates that the modal use was fully established by the end of the thirteenth century; that Chaucer's use of ought "followed by an infinitive either with or without the marker to and in impersonal expressions such as 'him ought' " was entirely consistent with the normal usage of his time, contrary to what had been claimed by an earlier scholar; and that the modern use of ought "with an infinitive with to, and only with a personal subject" was established by or shortly after the mid-fifteenth century. He summarizes his findings on CA and on each of the other texts that he examines in the tables on pages 199, 203, and 210: Gower uses owe only once, as an expression of obligation, and he uses ought once to mean "to possess" and once to mean "to have to pay." His remaining 49 uses of ought express obligation, either in the present or the past. The infinitives that follow owe or ought either include or omit the to in almost equal numbers, and 30% of his uses of ought occur in impersonal constructions. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 21.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Tajima, Matsuji Published Tajima, Matsuji. "Chaucer and the Development of the Modal Auxiliary Ought in Late Middle English." In In Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor of Whitney F. Bolton. Ed. Boenig, Robert and Davis, Kathleen. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000, pp. 195-217. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer and the Development of the Modal Auxiliary Ought in Late Middle English Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Bucknell University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This volume has a foreword by Diane Watt, a brief introduction by the editor and nine essays, arranged as follows under three headings: "Manuscripts, Material, and Translation" (Peck, Galloway, Driver, Bullón-Fernández), "Rhetoric and Authority" (Mitchell, Donavin, Urban), "London Life and Texts" (Bertolet, Salisbury). See individual entries. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Urban, Malte, ed. Published Urban, Malte, ed. "John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts." Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009 ISBN 9782503524702 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brepols, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This is the third collection of essays that Yeager has assembled from papers originally delivered at the sessions sponsored by the John Gower Society at the annual International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, and like its predecessors (in 1989 and 1998), it offers, in its juxtaposition of work by old and new hands, a valuable cross-section of where we are in Gower studies at the present time. Less theoretically oriented than its predecessors, it is also less concerned either with Gower's poetics or with traditional formal analysis, but each of the ten essays offers some interesting new insight into Gower's work. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F., ed. Published Yeager, R. F., ed. "On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium." Studies in Medieval Culture, 46 . Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute Publications, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Includes the following: discussions of the tales of Acteon, Acis and Galatea, Deianera and Nessus, Pyramus and Thisbe, Phebus and Daphne, Pygmalion, Iphis, Icarus, Ceyx and Alceone, Argus and Mercury, Iphis and Araxarathen, Midas, Echo, Tereus, Neptune and Cornix, Leucothoe, variously by Beidler, Carole Koepke Brown, Nicolette Stasko, Karl A. Zipf, Jr., John B. Gaston, Douglas L. Lepley, Judith C. G. Moran, Natalie Epinger Ruyak; chapters on "Diabolical Treachery in the "Tale of Nectanabus" (Beidler), "Thomas of Kent's Account of the Birth of Alexander (Patricia Innerbichler de Bellis), and "Julius Valerius' Account of the Birth of Alexander: Text and Translation" (Enda S. deAngeli). [PN. Copyright the John Gower Society. JGN 1.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Beidler, Peter G,, ed. Published Beidler, Peter G,, ed. "John Gower's Literary Transfomations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations." Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982 ISBN 0819125962 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 John Gower's Literary Transfomations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This volume, containing descriptions of "manuscripts and early printed books from libraries in and near Philadelphia illustrating Chaucer's sources, his works and their influence," is the catalog of the exhibition held as the Arthur Ross Gallery and the Rosenbach Museum and Library concurrently with the fifth International Congress of the New Chaucer Society. Pages 99-103 describe two parchment manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis, Rosenbach MS. f 1083/29 (ca. 1450) and the Taylor MS (no number) owned by Princeton Universiy Library (ca. 1400-1450). A portrait of Gower from the Rosenbach MS and an example of the hand of the so-called "Scribe D" from the Taylor MS are reproduced as well. [PN. Copyright the John Gower Society. JGN 5.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Anderson, David, ed. Published Anderson, David, ed. "Sixty Bokes Olde and Newe." Knoxville, TN: New Chaucer Society, 1986 ISBN 0933784082 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 Sixty Bokes Olde and Newe Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available New Chaucer Society, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 Gower gets his place (pp. 273-86) in this magnificently produced new classroom anthology by one of our most eminent Gowerians, with freshly edited excerpts from CA Book 4 (1118-1226), illustrating the delicacy and complexity of Amans' confessions, and Book 5 (5546-6052), the tale of Tereus and Procne, one of Gower's most personal adaptations of Ovid and a tale on which Pearsall himself has written our most perceptive commentary. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek, ed. Published Pearsall, Derek, ed. "Chaucer to Spenser: An Anthology of Writings in English 1375-1575." Oxford: Blackwell, 1999 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer to Spenser: An Anthology of Writings in English 1375-1575. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Blackwell, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A., ed. Published Peck, Russell A., ed. "John Gower. Confessio Amantis, 3 vols." Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2004 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Review LET ME SAY first of all that the production of this new edition of the "Confessio Amantis" is a remarkable achievement, and Russell Peck deserves every praise for his energy and erudition, and for his expedition in bringing the project to completion in such a comparatively short time. This praise must be added to the admiration he has won from all scholars and students of Middle English for his Herculean efforts in master-minding the TEAMS series (of which these Gower volumes are part) over the years since 1990. We should also add a word of praise for the team of helpers he has gathered around him at Rochester, and whom he is so generous in acknowledging, and for the Gower volumes a special commendation to Andrew Galloway, since it is he who has contributed the translations of the Latin (both the Latin verses and the marginal summaries and annotations) which are the single most important feature of the new edition. The lay-out of the fairly large format page, with good-sized print, wide margins, side-glosses, translations of the Latin verses at the foot of the page (the translations of the Latin marginal summaries and annotations are among the Explanatory Notes at the end of each volume), is very pleasing, and the volumes, though large, are easy to use. I like the little medieval-style hands with pointing fingers that signal the presence of marginalia, as translated in the Notes; the form of the speech-markers and of the titles for stories and subjects inserted at the beginning of 'chapters'; also the simple, unfussy way in which the text of revisions like those at Prologue 24 are set out. There are some changes and improvements in format in Volume III, and I presume that these and other changes will be extended to and incorporated in the other volumes in later reprints. In this context of overall praise, there are some issues to take up. In the first place, the organisation of the three volumes, with Prologue and Books 1 and 8 in the first volume, Books 2-4 in the second, and Books 5-7 in the third, now looks a little bizarre. Russell Peck associates me with the idea of doing things in this way, and thanks me, and so I can hardly complain. I think what I had in mind was that students should have the general shape of the poem made available to them from the start. I suppose I was assuming that it would be a good many years before the other volumes came out (perhaps with the experience of being on the Council of the EETS in mind) and that meanwhile this was a good interim measure. In the event, Russell has surprised us all with his speed in moving to completion, and all I can say is that what looked like quite a good idea at the time has turned out a little oddly. No matter: it is all there. The text is not a great problem with Gower. One could follow Macaulay exactly and produce a perfectly satisfactory text. Peck goes back to MS Fairfax 3, follows Macaulay in some of his few emendations, though not in some others that are necessary (e.g. bore for MS both at 1.397, "worldes" for MS "worldee" at 5.5552), and not in his attempt to standardise Gower's grammar, spelling and metre on a systematic basis (e.g. standardisation of "here" and "hire" respectively as "their" and "her", and elimination of otiose final -e). Peck introduces a few emendations of his own, based on the small number of manuscripts he seems to have consulted, and also substitutes "agein" for "ayein," "forgat" for "foryat," "thee" for "the," etc., presumably to help the reader (Peck may explain his editorial practice somewhere, but so far I have not found where). Generally speaking, Peck favours the idea that the variations between manuscripts mark the progress of Gower's opinions rather than the day-to-day realities of manuscript production, as argued consistently by Peter Nicholson (see, for instance, the discussion at Vol. I, pp. 286-7). He tends still to assume that Gower himself supervised the production of MS Fairfax 3 (see Vol. I, p.69). The punctuation of the text is generally too heavy, a common fault in modern texts of Middle English verse, where there is the modern tendency to punctuate by the clause rather than the pause and to neglect the function of the line-end as a form of punctuation. I count twelve superfluous commas at line-end in eighty lines at 4.1118-93 (and two further unnecessary medial commas, at 1179 and 1180) in the lover's eager outpouring of his puppyish devotion to his lady, a passage which above any must run freely and without impediment. Side-glosses can be for ever taxed with omission and superfluity, often on the basis of personal preference, but there is one general point worth making. Side-glosses are always in danger of providing too many contextualised senses for common words which are not really needed and which may deter the reader from doing the normal and necessary work of reading in context. For instance, "To stonde" in "To stonde at his commandement" (Prol.84) is glossed "To submit to," where the extended sense of "stand" is familiar and easy to come to through the context; likewise with "mot stonde" in "For trowthe mot stonde ate laste" (Prol.369), glossed "must remain" (see the very relevant note on the frequency of the verb "stand" in Gower at Prol.143, Vol. I, p.291). This kind of contextual explicitness will sometimes also lose the lively possibility of personification that is always present in Gower's poetry. In Prol.223, "Humilité was tho withholde," withholde is glossed "practiced (held with)," which misses the (for me) vital sense of "retained" (as a retainer) which is preserved a few lines later in the gloss to :Which coveitise hath now withholde," (Prol.263, where there might be some debate too about the capital letter). So in Prol.130, "And lawe hath take hire double face," the side-glosses are "lawyers" and "put on (donned) their," which miss the personification and violate the rule that Macaulay at least insists on that "hire" in Gower means "her" (while "their" is always "here"). Another kind of over-explicitness is present in the translation of "conquestes" in Prol.709, "Gaf the conquestes that he wan" as "booty," which obscures the point that "conquestes" include kingdoms, as the subsequent lines make clear. Kingdoms, to me, don't sound like "booty," and it would have been better to leave the word unglossed. These are general points, worth observing; though of course one could disagree also about particulars in the these first few hundred lines, e.g., "plit" (Prol.676) as "plight" (better, "manner"), "franchise" (Prol.761) as "sovereignty" (better, "freedom"), "redely" (Prol.948) as "skillfully" (needs no gloss), "saulf" (Prol.1016) as "safe" (better, "saved," especially since Noah is being referred to). Here, too, over-explicitness is often the problem. The translations of the Latin verses are sometimes very weird-sounding. At Vol. I, p. 70, Tempus preteritum, 'Legibus vnicolor tunc temporis aura refulsit' is translated "then the unicolored air of the times was aglow with laws" (compare Siân Echard and Claire Fanger, "The Latin Verses in the Confessio Amantis," p. 5, "The air of that age shone, one-hued, with laws," with no loss, as far as I can see, of accuracy). At p.84, Prosper et aduersus, 'Mundu in euentu versatur' is translated "The world is overturned in its outcomes" (compare Echard and Fanger, "The world is tossed and turned by chance," with maybe some loss of specificity). At p.134, Flectere quam frangi, 'olle/ Fictilis ad cacabum pugna valere nequit' is translated "the attack of the earthen pot cannot prevail over the cauldron" (Echard and Fanger, "the blow/ Of claypot 'gainst the kettle is in vain"). At p.173, Gloria perpetuos, 'Scandere sellata iura valebit eques' is translated "will succeed in mounting up the saddled laws as a knight" (Echard and Fanger, "The knight . . . mounts the saddled laws"--I suspect "mounted up" is the problem here). And so on. I think Galloway may be trying to convey something of the contortions of Gower's Latin verse, the ostentation of opacity, the straining of metaphor, the tortured verse-forms, the Hisperican cleverness that undoes the ambitious Latinitator. It is all very painful. Strangely enough, the clouds clear as Volume II begins, and the translations begin to run much more fluently, almost as if Galloway had seen the light, or had just gradually got the knack of doing it. The Explanatory Notes are enormously full and informative (Peck has made good use of the mass of material in Peter Nicholson's invaluable "Commentary," and acknowledges too his extensive use of Macaulay's notes, e.g. Vol. I, p. 329). They are generally even-handed in matters of interpretation, and Peck does not grind too many of his own axes. They are perhaps at times too expansive; if they had been at the foot of the page, I think there might have been more economy. Sometimes, for instance, they draw in references to critical works of comparatively little importance, often making points that are of only general relevance or sometimes hardly worth making at all (e.g. at Prol.196, 1022, 1.1769, 3, 213, 1193--Peck seems fond of this quotation, and repeats it in the note to 8.2339). I think such notes, though I consider them superfluous, are a tribute to Peck's collegiality, his generosity to all who have written on the poem and his desire to acknowledge them by including them somewhere; the same would be true with the more indulgently lengthy quotation from the seminar-paper of a Rochester graduate-student (at 3.1375). The recurrent notes on what is happening in "Chaucer's Ghoast" (1672) are a whimsical addition to the already expansive annotation. The Introduction to Volume I takes a few passages from Peck's 1968 edition of "Selections" from the CA, but is greatly expanded. It is a fine piece of writing, instinct with a deep knowledge of and a deep feeling for the poem. Peck is particularly good on the Augustinian physiology and psychology of reading and perception, on 'reading as therapy', on the stories as exercises in maturing understanding, on the long dramatic narrative of self-discovery. His views have not changed much over the years. He sees Gower as a moral poet rather than a love-poet, indeed a moralist before a poet, and considers Book 7 the king-pin of the whole. It is not my view of the poem, but I have to acknowledge it to be closer to the modern consensus of critics like Kurt Olsson, Winthrop Wetherbee and James Simpson. Volume II has another long Introduction, stressing the nature of the CA as a "psychological drama of reading," and making good analysis of approaches to the poem in terms of performance-theory, the frame-narrative, and the use of visual imagery in narrative. There is also lavish explication of the stories in Books 3-5. Volume III has another long Introduction (I think Russell may now have said all that he wants to say about the poem), especially important in marking the shift from the confessional mode of earlier books to the more explicitly educational mode made evident in Book 7. There are some reflections on "Gower the Historian" and then, as before, extended summary and explication of the matter of the three books in the volume. There are a good many changes in format in this volume, presumably the model for future revisions of the whole. Innovations include the valuable List of Contents with itemized titles for each story and "chapter," an Index of Subjects (for Vols. I-III) and an Index of References for Vol. III only.One or two startling moments: "novelly," as adverb (Vol. I, p.303); "ficticious" (sic, Vol.I, p.344), "breech" (for "breach," Vol. I, p. 354). And how did "Let he who . . . . (Vol. I, p.201) get past so many distinguished professors of English? Some moans and disagreements therefore, inevitably; but a magnificent achievement. [DP. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 25.1.] When I reviewed the first volume of Peck's new edition of CA for JGN in 2001, I welcomed the opportunity that it gave to teach the poem in entire books rather than just selections, and I praised the choice to put the Prologue, Book 1, and Book 8 together in one volume as an ingenious solution to the problem of presenting the poem to beginners. I also commended Andrew Galloway's translations of the complete Latin apparatus. But I had a few reservations. I pointed out the incomplete and to some extent misleading account of the presentation of the text; I felt that Peck could have done a lot more to update Macaulay's punctuation; and I felt that he gave an overly directive reading of the poem in place of a real introduction. The completion of the edition with the appearance of volume 3 offers a chance to reassess both the scheme as a whole and the details of its execution. In some respects the edition has improved as it progressed. There is evidence of much greater care in the preparation of the text, and there are, for instance, more textual notes in vols. 2 and 3 than appeared in vol. 1, and they are far more detailed. There is still, however, no good account of the editorial procedure, a problem that is now only exacerbated by the inconsistencies between the first and the subsequent volumes. Peck claims to have used the Fairfax MS as his "copy text" (3:485) and to have "consulted" (3:33) six others (Macaulay's A, B, C, J, S, and T). This is a different list from vol. 1 (which does not cite C or T, but includes Delta), and it is not clear what Peck means by "consulted," since A, C, and T are cited far less often in the notes than B, J, and S. Even with these latter copies, the notes do not offer a complete record of variants. (Macaulay's notes offer a much fuller selection.) The emphasis is on departures from Macaulay: in vol. 3 alone there are 42 instances in which Peck follows F where Macaulay chooses to follow a different MS; 17 instances in which Peck follows F where Macaulay's different reading has no evident MS support (These are evidently Macaulay's errors of transcription. All are very minor. They include 5.5918, where the note is incorrect.); and 19 instances in which Peck follows Macaulay in departing from F. At least Peck has provided the MS authority for his departures from Macaulay or from F (one of the issues that I had with vol. 1), though he still does not explain what principles guided his choice. (His understanding of the relation among the surviving copies appears to be based only on Macaulay and Fisher; see 3.33.) The text itself appears reasonably accurate. I checked a passage of a little less than 400 lines (5.2859-3246) against both Macaulay and my photocopy of F. I found one instance where Peck follows Macaulay in error (my for mi in 5.2939) and one new mistake (him where Macaulay and F have hem, 5.2884). This is pretty small stuff, on about the same level as the errors that Peck found in Macaulay. I also found that Peck has modernized the capitalization and some of the spelling in his text, following the normal practice for TEAMS editions, and that he has also taken far more liberty with Macaulay's punctuation than he did in vol. 1, making at least two dozen changes in the passage that I examined. These are welcome, but again I wish he had done more, and there are at least another dozen passages in which I feel that no modern editor, beginning fresh, would have chosen the punctuation that Macaulay did. Again, not a major problem, but it does lead me to the same conclusion that I reached with vol. 1: that Peck's "copy text" was not Fairfax at all but Macaulay, which he has read against F and some other copies and which he has modernized a bit. This is actually not a new edition of the poem in the usual sense, and I think that Peck could have been a little clearer about it. The introductions to vols. 2 and 3 are very much in the mold of that to vol. 1. They offer us Peck's reading of the poem. Amans is a lost sinner; the poem is "a study of the self's effort to reclaim its own estate" (2:39); and Amans' personal regeneration also has a political and social correlative, in the regeneration of the community. In vol. 2 Peck is somewhat hard-pressed to apply this understanding to Books 2 and 3 except in his discussion of individual tales (which he must treat in isolation from the dialogue), and in Book 4, it emerges only as an unexpressed and ironic counterpoint to what Genius and Amans actually say. In vol. 3 Peck has somewhat more to work with, as "Gower alters his earlier structural patterns to shift the focus from confession and impersonation to education--education in good rule" (3:1). Except in his discussion of the treatment of Chastity, however, there is little hint in the third introduction that the poem is actually concerned with love, and Peck arranges his discussion (as Gower does not) to conclude with the tale of Lycurgus and the importance of the rule of law. There is certainly much of value here: a good couple of pages on Nature in vol. 2, for instance, (2:14-17) (though I find the preceding discussion of CA as "drama" to be heavy with anachronism), and some good comments on the folkloric aspect of CA and on the range of Gower's style in vol. 3 (3:10-15). But overall, Peck has evidently viewed this edition as an opportunity to espouse the same view of the thematic structure of the poem that he has argued for since 1968. Whether or not I agree with this view is unimportant (just for the record: I don't); what is at issue is whether or not this is an appropriate function for the introductions in an edition that is intended for beginners. I see another missed opportunity here. Not only does Peck close off discussion of such issues as the roles of Genius and Amans (What really does happen in the conclusion? For a view very different from Peck's, students should be directed to Burrow (1983).), but some of the best of the recent writers on Gower have opened up the poem in ways that couldn't have been anticipated when Peck and I first studied it, and some have challenged both the necessity and the possibility of a single consistent moral message from beginning to end. Except in his discussion of Nature, however, Peck never acknowledges them. By being a little less prescriptive, by focusing a little more on what still must be regarded as unresolved issues in the reading of the poem, Peck could have done quite a bit more to prepare the way for the next generation of Gower scholars. Having studied the poem for so long, Peck certainly knows it very well, and there is therefore much of value in the explanatory notes, particularly, I feel, in Book 7. And I must say once again what a fine job Andrew Galloway has done with the Latin apparatus. (Note to the publisher: half of the translation to the gloss at 5.4579 was inadvertently left out.) The notes also record Galloway's discovery that the twelve Latin glosses to the discussion of the signs of the zodiac in Book 7 are metrically regular and together constitute a "Latin poem on the seasons" (3:449); to which I can add that the second of these, at 7.1015, contains a typically Gowerian quotation of Ovid's "Fasti" 3.240, the best evidence that I know of that Gower himself actually composed at least some of the glosses to the poem. As for the overall scheme of the edition: it appears to me now that if the original plan was to make each volume independent, it has not been carried out consistently, and if it was not, then there was perhaps much less reason for presenting the poem out of chronological order and placing Book 8 in vol. 1. Vol. 3 contains a subject index (a list of characters and topics) to all three volumes, suggesting that they constitute a single work. Peck seems to have thought of his three introductions as parts of a single composition, and indeed his discussions of such topics as Nature or law are as relevant to any of the volumes as to the volume in which they occur, and his own argument on the structure of the poem depends heavily on reading Book 7 before Book 8. Those who use vol. 1 alone are going to receive a very partial, very incomplete view of the poem, and those who use the complete edition will now have a rather disjointed view. I'm afraid that moving Book 8 to vol. 1 seems much less of a good idea now that the edition is complete than it seemed at the beginning. In sum: this is a very attractive and usable edition of the complete text of the "Confessio Amantis"; it has some very important features (notably Galloway's translations); and it is very affordable. We have to be glad to have it. But it also has its quirks, notably its arrangement; as a guide to reading the poem, it has to be used with great care; and in several important ways, it leaves me thinking about what might have been. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 25.1.] FOR ALMOST 40 years--from 1966 to the year 2004--Russell Peck's edition of selections from Gower's "Confessio Amantis" has been the best hope of teachers wishing to introduce Gower's great poem to undergraduate readers. There were other excerpted editions, but none was as ambitious as Peck's nor, from the time it was taken up by the MARTS series, so neatly combining availability and affordability. Nevertheless, the first version of Peck's Gower left many gaps. As a collection of excerpts, it privileged the stories in the poem, excising much of the frame. That excision also necessarily removed the Latin from the poem--most of the Latin verses and all of the prose glosses disappeared. And as a one-volume edition of the poem, Peck's first edition was limited in terms of introduction and explanatory notes. Then, in the year 2000, Peck's new Gower began to appear, and by 2004 the three-volume set was complete. It still has the undergraduate student very much in mind: Volume 1 contains what one might think of as the essence of the poem, while Volumes 2 and 3 offer all the rest of--one could still assign a one-volume, partial Gower. But a quick glance at Volume 1 shows how differently we now approach the question of the essential Gower. This volume offers the poem's frame--the Prologue and Book VIII, and Book I, the introduction of the confessional structure. Like the other volumes, it now includes all the Latin: the verses, on the page with translations in the notes, and the glosses in both Latin and translation in the notes, indicated in the text by the presence of pointing hands. The speaker markers found in many manuscripts of the poem have been included as well. The poem no longer ends with the "Explicit iste liber," but rather, with the "Quia vnusquisque," a restatement of Gower's whole poetical career. Even in this single volume, then, the poem is presented as a complex, ornately structured, multi-layered and multi-lingual text, the work of a highly self-conscious public poet. There are gestures towards its textual tradition as well: the first volume offers 5 illustrations drawn from the manuscripts, and prints the Ricardian and Henrician versions of the Prologue side-by- side. The first edition drew on Macaulay, checking the venerable editor's work against the Fairfax manuscript, then understood to show signs of Gower's personal intervention. This new edition continues to draw on Macaulay, but has sampled from seven manuscripts (note a typo in the reference to Trinity R.3.3--Peck of course consulted R.3.2), and the results of that sampling appear in the (relatively brief) textual notes at the end of each volume. Volume 1 is a reimagination of what one might teach if one were teaching part of the CA--but the edition as a whole is much more. It represents a lifetime's work on the poet, and thus is in many ways a very different beast from that first collection of excerpts. Each volume has a meaty introduction, often consisting of two parallel texts--Peck's reading of the poem, and a second critical conversation taking place in the extensive footnotes (there was little room for engagement with criticism--and of course, much less criticism with which to engage--in 1966). The extensive notes add further critical depth: where in the 1966 excerpted edition they consisted largely of brief references to sources and analogues, here they range widely through both medieval texts and modern critics. The notes to the Latin material, provided by Andrew Galloway, who also did the translations, are extremely thorough and thoughtful, restoring this part of the poem to its full role in the CA as a whole. And Peck's introductions, ranging as they do through medieval theoretical, social, political and literary contexts, and drawing extensively on Gower's other works, give a clear sense of many different ways one could approach the CA. Excerpted editions in the first part of the last century often gave the impression that they existed simply to allow a reader to compare Gower's stories (usually unfavorably) to Chaucer's. This new student edition of Gower, whether represented by its first volume or by the whole set, makes Gower's own claims central. The introduction to Volume 1 sets out the plan of the CA, reading it as a confessional text in the Boethian mode. Some of this material appeared in the first edition as well, but here the argument is enriched with considerable detail, for example from St Augustine and other medieval thinkers on the subjects of memory, history, and learning. Peck argues that Gower's "middle weie" is in part a reflection of a new, 14th-century mode of reading, one which attends to the gaps in fictions. He takes up the question of Gower's various authorial impersonations as part of this discussion of reading and reception. In Volume 2 (Books II-IV), he shifts his attention to what he sees as Gower's dramaturgical mode, in which confession is shown to be a performative art. Book IV, the last book in this volume, is read as the culmination and structural center of what Peck comes to call the "play"--before Gower shifts his attention to education, and takes on the mantle of this historian, a shift discussed in the introduction to Volume 3 (Books V-VII). Peck argues that by Book VII, Gower's legal and historical interests come to the fore, and he appears as the social counselor, concerned above all with the importance of right rule. It is a peculiarity of the non-sequential structure of these three volumes that the introduction to Volume 3 does not end explicitly with reference to the poem's frame--when surely it matters, as Peck makes very clear elsewhere, that the poem situates itself so clearly in Ricardian/ Henrician England. There are many references to this context throughout the three volumes--a student possessing all three would come away with a very clear sense that Gower imagined a public, political role for poetry. But the particular final moment at the end of the introduction to Volume 3 does seem to leave one hanging. I understand the decision to split the CA as has been done, and I can easily imagine, as I hope I've made clear above, how one would make use of Volume 1. I have a little more difficulty putting the three volumes together--I think what I'd most like would be either Volume 1 on its own, or three volumes which offered the poem--and thus Peck's many stimulating readings– in order. There are a few other decisions with which I might quibble. Apart from the side-by-side printing of the Prologue versions discussed above, most of the significant variation between versions is relegated to the notes, sometimes printed out and sometimes simply described– Macaulay's decisions about the relative status of the versions is still largely intact, in other words. Nevertheless, there is much more acknowledgement of variance here than was the case before, and Peck never claims to be providing a new scholarly edition to replace Macaulay's. There are many features of the texts intended to help students--words are glossed in the margins, difficult passages are translated at the bottom of the page, and there is even a brief glossary at the end of the third volume. But one feature of the 1966 excerpted edition, a long discussion of Gower's language, has been largely omitted--some teachers might miss this aspect of the text. These are minor points. There is no doubt that Russell Peck has done teachers and students (of many levels) of Gower a great service by so significantly re-imagining and reworking his old edition. Both the one- and three-volume versions present Gower as a vital, engaging and important poet. We all of us owe Peck and TEAMS a debt of gratitude for providing us the wherewithal to make that case to new generations of students. [SE. Copyright. The John Gower Newsletter. JGN 25.1.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower. Confessio Amantis, 3 vols. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 notes to the long-awaited revision of Robinson's Chaucer have been completely redone by a large team of well-known Middle English scholars, and if they do not provide a precise guide to current views of Chaucer's relationship with Gower, they do offer some idea of what students will be learning about Gower in their Chaucer classes for the next few years. Many will be pleased that the theory of a quarrel between the poets is given short shrift in this edition, both by Martin Crow and Virginia Leland in their biographical introduction (p. xxiii), who refer to "structural reasons" for Gower's removal of his compliment to Chaucer (CA 8.2941 ff.), and by Patricia Eberle in her notes to the Introduction to the Man of Law's Tale (p. 854), who points out the present uncertainty about the dating of Gower's revisions. (Robinson also dismissed the likelihood of a quarrel in his note to LGW G 315). Gower is given extensive coverage, however, either as a source or as an analogue for a great many passages in Chaucer's work, particularly in CT. CA is included in the discussion of contemporary tale collections in the General Editor's introduction (p. 3), but is omitted from the list in the notes on pp. 795-96. In the discussion of the General Prologue Gower is cited only once as a possible source, for GP 435-37 (from MO 8338-43), but illustrative passages are cited from all three of his major works in the notes to the portraits of the Monk, the Clerk, the Sergeant of the Law (as he is called), the Doctor of Physik, the Parson, the Plowman, and the Summoner. Gower is also cited in the notes to a number of the tales; e.g. KnT 2129, MLT 161, 302-8, 1183, WBT 1109, et al.: without a precise count, the number of such references seems much larger than in Robinson's edition. Of the four tales that have close analogues in CA: Both Benson and Patricia Eberle come down in favor of Gower's priority for the tale of Constance (pp. 9, 856-57), and to Block's list of nine passages that Chaucer borrowed from Gower Eberle adds the entire scene of Constance's departure from Northumberland, MLT 834-68. In his comments on the Introduction to the Man of Law's Tale Benson suggests that "perhaps Chaucer is teasingly challenging his friend to a storytelling contest parallel to that in which the pilgrims are engaged" (p. 9); while Eberle (p. 856) provides an excellent note on the complexities involved in inferring a reference to Gower. Christine Ryan Hilary declares, a bit surprisingly, that "Chaucer knew and probably echoes" Gower's tale of Florent in WBT, citing Chaucer's line 1081 and CA 1.1727-31 (pp. 872-73). She also compares WBT 1073 to CA 1.1587. She doesn't cite Fisher, however, the one scholar who would most certainly agree on Chaucer's borrowing. (Benson lists Gower's tale only as an analogue, p. 11.) Larry Benson asserts that Chaucer knew Gower's tale of Virginia before writing his PhysT (p. 14), but David Benson lists Gower's tale only as an analogue and concludes that "there is no convincing evidence that Chaucer drew on any earlier version except RR" (p. 902). Larry Benson includes Gower's "Phebus and Cornide" as one of the possible sources for Chaucer's MancT (p. 20), and V.J. Scattergood cites in a favorable context Hazelton's suggestion that Chaucer's tale is a parody of Gower's (p. 952). Colin Wilcockson cites Gower's "Ceix and Alceone" only once in his notes to BD (p. 968), not as an analogue but as containing the metamorphoses that Chaucer omits. Benson's introduction to The Parliament of Fowls (p. 383) cites Gower's 34th and 35th balades in a list of contempary Valentine's Day poems. John M. Fyler's notes to HF include a reference to Tatlock's belief (1907) that MO 22129-52 might be based on HF 1573-82 (p. 988). The notes to LGW by M.C.E. Shaner and A.S.G. Edwards (pp. 1059-75) reflect some of the complexity of the relationship between this poem and CA. They note that the "Flower and the Leaf" passage in CA 8.2468 "may be an imitation" of LGW F 72, while LGW G 315 "may be a friendly jab at Gower." Among the tales, Gower's Cleopatra "is probably based" on Chaucer's (p. 1066), particularly for the details of her death (LGW 678-80, 696-702); and Chaucer's and Gower's stories of Thisbe "seem related, but it is hard to say which came first" (p. 1067), in both cases echoing Robinson. Gower is cited only as an analogue for Chaucer's tales of Medea, Lucrece, Ariadne, Philomela, and Phyllis. No note is made of Root's suggestion (1909) that Chaucer's Lucrece may have been based on Gower's, and though other parallels are noted in this legend, no reference is made to one of the most interesting similarities between the two poems, Lucrece's swoon before she is violated by Tarquin (LGW 1815-17; CA 7.4986-87). Several other parallel passages from MO, VC, and CA are cited in the notes to LGW, many of them drawn from Fisher. Laila Z. Gross takes note of Fisher's account of the many parallels between Chaucer's "Lak of Stedfastnesse" and Gower's CA Prol. (p. 1086), and Stephen Barney lists Fisher as a general source on Gower's relation with Chaucer in his note to T&C 5.1856-59 (p. 1058). Otherwise Fisher is quite remarkably neglected in this edition: there is no reference, for instance, to his belief in Gower's influence on the conception of GP and the Marriage Group or to his identification of the Eagle in HF, and while he is cited (p. 1059) for his belief that LGW was written at the request of the queen, the rest of his proposal, that LGW and CA were written for the same commission in 1385, passes without notice. Despite the inevitable unevenness and inconsistency in a work involving so many different hands, the editors on the whole have done a commendable job of presenting the most useful scholarship on Chaucer in a clear and compact form. One small but revealing example of their care will cause some pleasure for those of us who decide to cite from this volume: except in the case of "Boece," which has been freshly edited by Ralph Hanna and Traugott Lawler, the editors have arranged the prose texts on the page so that the line numbers are the sa as in the edition that they are replacing. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Benson, Larry D., ed. Published Benson, Larry D., ed. "Riverside Chaucer 3rd ed." Boston, MA.: Houghton Mifflin, 1987 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations 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 Riverside Chaucer 3rd ed. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Houghton Mifflin, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A., ed. Published Peck, Russell A., ed. "John Gower: Confessio Amantis. Volume 1." Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2000 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Review This is the first volume in a projected three-volume edition of the complete Confessio Amantis published by the Medieval Institute for the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages (TEAMS) as part of their series of Middle English Texts. This volume contains the Prologue and Books 1 and 8; volume 2 will contain Books 2-4 and volume 3 Books 5-7. At first glance a somewhat bizarre arrangement, this way of dividing up the poem is actually an ingenious solution to the problem of presenting the Confessio to the primary audience of this edition, undergraduate and graduate students who are reading Gower for the first time. We have in volume 1 the indispensable elements for understanding the structure of the whole Confessio. This volume can be used alone or in conjunction with either one or both of the other volumes when they become available. It is possible, though perhaps less likely, that one might assign one or both of the other volumes without volume 1 as well. We will thus have six different ways of presenting extended portions of the poem in addition to the choice to teach it in its entirety. In doing so, we will be able to assign entire books instead of the selected passages (almost always from the tales) of the only other editions that have been available for classroom use (including Peck's own edition of 1968, which the present edition will probably replace), and all at a very reasonable price: this first volume lists for just {dollar}20. The appearance of this edition will thus be welcomed by everyone who has taught the poem in the past or who looks forward to doing so in the future. The version of the poem that Peck presents will also be familiar to those who choose to teach it, since he has followed Macaulay in his choice of manuscript both for the main body of the text (Bodleian Fairfax 3, Macaulay's F) and for the two alternative passages in the Prologue, lines 24-92 (Bodley 294, Macaulay's B), and in the epilogue, 8.2941 ff. (Bodley 902, Macaulay's A). (For some reason the former is presented with the main text, en face, but the latter is included only in the notes.) Peck claims (p. 44) also to have consulted Macaulay's MSS J, S, and delta, but there is no evidence for that in the Textual Notes (pp. 356-58). There he lists some 40 departures from Fairfax. Nine of these record editorial choices (e.g. the division of compounds such as "noman" into two words). All of the rest simply follow Macaulay (including eight for which Macaulay is not cited: Prol. 917, 1.293, 574 vv. 1, 593, 2680 vv. 5, 3398; 8.1687, 2970) without any reference to the MS authority upon which Macaulay's emendations are based. Peck also cites some 30 departures from Macaulay's text, divided roughly equally between corrections of Macaulay's mistranscriptions and rejections of his emendations, but again without reference to any authority other than the MS that serves as his base. Peck's presentation of the text (of which he gives an incomplete account in his Preface, p. x) follows Macaulay in the silent expansion of abbreviations, in the regularization of u/v and i/j, and in transcribing thorn as "th," but then goes a few steps further than Macaulay does in modernizing its appearance. Peck has completely regularized the capitalization; he adds an accent to a long final e (e.g. "humilité"); he inserts an apostrophe into contractions (e.g. "th'emperour," 1.762); and he provides quotation marks for the conversation between Amans and Genius, so that the entire main body of the poem is now punctuated as a dialogue. Nothing here will cause alarm. But he has also chosen silently to transcribe the manuscript's yogh as "g" rather than "y" in such words as "3iven" and its derivatives, "for3eten" and "a3ein" (though not in "3e," "3it," or "3owþe," for which he uses "y"), which some will feel is an unnecessary falsification of Gower's dialect. As a test of accuracy, I checked a passage of 500 lines (1.501-1000) both against Macaulay and against Fairfax. I found one transcription error ("Although" for "Althogh," 1.738); another that he shares with Macaulay and did not correct ("seemeth" for MS "semeþ," 1.665); an extra closing quotation mark (at the end of 1.707); one mistaken use of "é" (on "poverté," 1.613, ruining the rhyme with "decerte" in 614), and three instances in which MS "þe" (the pronoun) has been presented as "thee," either by mistake or, much more likely, as a deliberate but silent alteration (1.584, 587, 941). I also found nine differences in punctuation from Macaulay's text. Three of these (in 1.596, 723, 853-54) result in a slight alteration of the sense, in each case, in my judgment, for the worse. The other six (1.568, 594, 601, 825, 883, 884) do not affect the sense but represent a welcome attempt to bring Macaulay's punctuation more in line with modern conventions. Here it is to be regretted that Peck has not done more. One minor but constant irritation of Macaulay's edition is that it is over-punctuated, and his use of the colon in particular doesn't correspond to contemporary usage. The unintended effect is to make Gower seem even more dated that he is. But as one reads Peck's text alongside Macaulay's, one finds one line after another in which Peck has simply followed the example of his mentor. His practice here is consistent with what one might deduce from the textual notes about how this edition actually came into being. Rather than being based upon Fairfax, it is perhaps more accurate to describe it as being based upon Macaulay and checked against Fairfax, with some updating of the punctuation (the quotation marks, the apostrophe, the "é") and a small number of corrections, but if the sample I chose is representative, with at least an equal number of errors and silent emendations of its own. The apparatus to this edition consists of an 43-page introduction to the poem, a "Select Bibliography," a "Chronology of Gower's Life and Works" (taken almost verbatim from Peck's 1968 edition), 73 pages of explanatory notes, the textual notes, and a 5-page glossary. Peck provides five reproductions of the illustrations (of Amans confessing to Genius and of Nebuchadnezzar's dream) from the three MSS from which the text has been taken. He also provides extensive vocabulary glosses in the right margin of the page. In addition, Andrew Galloway has provided a complete translation of the Latin apparatus, which must certainly be counted as one the principal attractions of this edition. Galloway's prose translations of the Latin verses (which appear at the bottom of the page) are very helpful: they replicate to the extent that it is possible the difficult syntax of the original and they can therefore sometimes be more difficult to read than the freer verse translations of Echard and Fanger, but they provide a far more useful crutch for anyone who is trying to approach the Latin. The prose marginalia (which are placed, together with their translations, in the notes at the back of the volume) pose fewer challenges, but I suspect that the students will not be the only ones who are glad to have Galloway's clear and precise English renderings and I expect to see them appearing in the footnotes to scholarly articles on the poem in the near future. Galloway has also provided valuable notes to both the verse and the prose which can be used profitably alongside those of Macaulay and of Echard and Fanger. The rest of the apparatus is a mixed bag, and at this point one has to stop and sympathize with the editor. With the thousands of decisions that one must make in presenting an edition of this sort, one cannot possibly hope to satisfy every user. To begin with the glosses: one has to try to provide enough assistance for the readers with no experience in Middle English without distracting either them or the more experienced readers from the actual text. Some will feel that Peck has been too accommodating: the glossing is far more extensive than in his 1968 edition, especially at the beginning of the volume, but even at the end, many fairly common words are glossed that one might feel that a student who is reading the poem in Middle English ought to become familiar with, by recourse to a glossary if necessary. The glosses that I checked are sometimes a bit freer than one might wish, but are generally accurate (though on the very first page, "ensampled of" in Prol. 7 surely means "taught by" rather than "exemplified by"; cf. Prol. 47). The introduction is another matter. There, Peck's impulse to guide the reader is equally manifest, but not in a way that will be as useful to the novice. Instead of a true "introduction," what we are given is an argument for a very particular reading of the poem, taken over in large part from Peck's 1968 edition. From the very beginning, it assumes a familiarity with the whole poem and its structure, with the content of the tales, and with the context in which they are addressed by one character to another, and it launches into an abstruse discussion of Augustine's theory of knowledge, of the relationship between memory and history, and of "reading as therapy." When he finally gets to discussing the poem itself, Peck offers an interpretation of its moral structure that is grounded on a single-minded view of Amans' role as being a lost sinner: "in his fantasy, [he] has set himself apart from the mutual pleasures of Nature's domain in hope of enjoying singular pleasure. His main desire is to pamper his secretive emotions. The piercing of his heart by Cupid's dart clinches his loss of natural freedom. He is trapped in his amorous confusion, and many tales will pass before he returns home from spiritual exile" (p. 28; cf. Peck's 1968 edition, p. xiii). Peck also allows this reading to slip into the notes from time to time (e.g. at 8.2224 ff.). The basic question is whether or not this is an appropriate function for the introduction and notes to an edition with the intended audience of this one: should the editor be guiding the student to a particular reading, or providing the materials with which the students may construct a reading of their own? We might have done instead, for instance, with some more background on the several different genres of which the poem partakes and on Gower's own earlier poetry. (As it is, the only comments on MO and VC in this edition are hidden in the "Chronology of Gower's Life and Works.") We might have gotten some remarks on the complexity of Amans' role, or on the difficulties in interpreting Gower's use of such terms as "nature," "will," and "reason." We might also have been given some comments on the range of response that the poem has provoked, but there is nothing in the introduction to indicate that Peck's views are not shared by all other modern readers. The issue of appropriateness will obviously be most important for those who take a different view of the poem than Peck does (among whom I count myself), and in teaching the poem from this edition, we will each simply have to make our own choice on whether or not to assign the introduction. It is also a bit disappointing to note that there is some carelessness and inconsistency in the presentation of the apparatus. To begin with a trivial matter: in the "Selected Bibliography," under the heading "Editions (in chronological order)," Peck includes both Echard and Fanger's translations of the Latin verses and Stockton's translation of VC, which are not editions, and they are not listed in chronological order. He omits, moreover, Wilson's translation of MO, which is found, however, along with Stockton, in the notes to the colophon on p. 279. The bibliography of criticism (pp. 49-59) is also a bit of a puzzle. It is presented in simple alphabetical order, and it is very difficult to see what principles guided the selection. Recent work seems to be favored over older pieces, and thus some familiar and influential titles are missing. Works that treat the poem in general rather than a specific portion of it seem to be favored, but there are several exceptions there. In general, works that support the view of the introduction appear more prominently than those that do not. But no guidance is offered on where a student might best begin her own research on the poem, and what can one say about a bibliography on Gower that makes room for a book entitled An Illustrated History of Brain Function but that does not include either Pickle and Dawson's concordance or JGN? Somewhat more seriously: in his discussion of the manuscripts on p. 44, Peck gives a very misleading account of the relation among the versions of the poem that Macaulay labeled "recensions," implying that the revision of Prol. 24-92 and the replacement of the tribute to Chaucer in 8.2941-70 first appear in "third recension" copies (the former appears in all but one existing copy of "recension two," the latter in all "recension two" copies that are not damaged at the end), and making no reference to the revision of the epilogue that follows the Chaucer passage (8.2171 ff.). He also gives far more specific dates for the various stages of revision than the evidence allows; see Astell's discussion of the problems of dating the different versions in the book discussed above. In the same paragraph, he refers to the Spanish translation of the Confessio, "which purports to be based upon a Portuguese translation of the poem," apparently unaware that a MS of the Portuguese translation is also extant; see JGN 20, no. 1, 15-17. His description of MO on page 60 still omits (as it did in 1968) any reference to the survey of the estates that occupies the middle of the poem. And on page 28 (note 61), in his account of the opening of Book 1, his statement that "the romance devices here--the wandering in May, the music of the birds, the woeful frustration of the lovesick persona, the encounter with Venus and Cupid, and Cupid's fiery, captivating dart--are all found in the opening section of Guillaume de Lorris' Roman de la Rose" is a mischaracterization both of the Roman and of Gower's much more complicated relation to French courtly poetry. There are other smaller problems of this sort that one could point to in the introduction and notes. Peck and Galloway deserve our gratitude for, each in his own way, making the English and Latin texts of the poem so much more accessible, but it will nonetheless be worthwhile for both professor and student to use this edition with a bit of caution. With Latin Translations by Andrew Galloway.[PN. Copyright by the John Gower Society. JGN 20.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower: Confessio Amantis. Volume 1. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This collection of some of the landmarks of Gower criticism is meant to gather in one place representative examples of some major approaches to the Confessio Amantis, and to illustrate, by the choice of some of the landmarks of Gower criticism, how the study of the poem has evolved. It includes English translations of two essential essays available hitherto only in German. The contents are: G.C. Macaulay, `The Confessio Amantis' (from The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1908); C.S. Lewis, `Gower' (from The Allegory of Love, 1936); George R. Coffman, `John Gower in His Most Significant Role' (1945); J.A.W. Bennett, `Gower's ``Honeste Love''' (1966); Derek Pearsall, `Gower's Narrative Art' (1966); Arno Esch, `John Gower's Narrative Art,' translated by Linda Barney Burke (1968); George D. Economou, `The Character Genius in Alan de Lille, Jean de Meun, and John Gower' (1970); Götz Schmitz, `Rhetoric and Fiction: Gower's Comments on Eloquence and Courtly Poetry' (translated by the author from chapter three of The Middel Weie: Stil- und Aufbauformen in John Gowers `Confessio Amantis', 1974); Denise N. Baker, `The Priesthood of Genius: A Study of the Medieval Tradition' (1976); A.J. Minnis, `John Gower: Sapiens in Ethics and Politics' (1980); and Kurt Olsson, `Natural Law and John Gower's Confessio Amantis' (1982). The volume concludes with a list of `Suggestions for Further Reading. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter, ed. Published Nicholson, Peter, ed. "Gower's Confessio Amantis: A Critical Anthology." Publications of the John Gower Society, 3 . Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991 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 Gower's Confessio Amantis: A Critical Anthology. 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 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 This collection of previously published essays, in a series intended to illustrate the application of "the latest revisions in literary theory" to particular groups of texts, contains two studies already well known to readers of Gower: Anne Middleton's "The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II" (1978), and Robert F. Yeager's "English, Latin, and the Text as 'Other': The Page as Sign in the Work of John Gower" (1987). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Trigg, Stephanie, ed. Published Trigg, Stephanie, ed. "Medieval English Poetry." Longman Critical Readers. . London and New York: Longman, 1993 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Medieval English Poetry. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Longman, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This new edition of the Spanish translation of CA is the first of two products of the recent flurry of interest in Gower's work among Spanish scholars. It fills an obvious and longstanding need. Gower was the first major English author to be translated into a contemporary vernacular, shortly after his death. The surviving Spanish translation, by Juan de Cuenca, is actually based on an earlier Portuguese translation by one Robert Payn which is no longer extant, and thus by the middle of the fifteenth century CA had already been made available in two languages other than the author's, an unexpected tribute to Gower's reputation and an interesting opportunity to examine how the work has endured the transformation. The only existing edition of the Spanish version, published by Adolf Birch-Hirschfeld (using a transcription begun by Hermann Knust) in 1909, is now nearly impossible to find, and even when it is available, it cannot be relied upon. R.W. Hamm estimated in 1975 that it contained at least 17,500 errors of transcription, and it appears that this calculation may even have been somewhat low. Alvar's work serves at very least to make the translation more widely available, and for that reason alone is to be welcomed. Alvar presents the text in what she calls a "paleographic edition." Following scrupulously the presentation in the manuscript, Alvar not only uses the conventional editorial devices (italics for expanded abbreviations, brackets for other letters supplied by the editor), but she also distinguishes typographically the two different forms of s, and indicates both the beginning of each new column and, with a slash and superscript, the beginning of each new line. (Where is Edmund Wilson?) The punctuation is also that of the MS. A bit confusingly, however, she has adopted modern capitalization, and she has also regularized the use of accents. What she has not done is to give any indication (apart from the running head identifying the book number) of the corresponding line numbers in the English text, making reference from one version to another extremely tedious. Notes (indicated by a superscript within parentheses, almost impossible to find quickly among all the superscripts recording the line numbers) record other observable features of the manuscript, some of the more obvious differences from Gower's text, and the more important differences from Birch-Hirschfeld. As the passage quoted illustrates, the translation entirely omits the Latin epigrams of the original, and incorporates the longer marginalia in shortened form into the text column, treating them as chapter headings. Alvar records in the notes each place in which an epigram or a gloss that appears in Macaulay's edition has been omitted, though Manuel Alvar argues in the introduction that these were probably already lacking in the English MS from which the Spanish translation ultimately derives. It is not to be expected that an edited text of such complexity should be entirely free of mistakes. Bernardo Santano Moreno, in his review of this edition in Fifteenth-Century Studies 19 (1992): 147-64, points out some inconsistencies in the editor's treatment of abbreviations, and he finds a small number of errors in the passages that he compared, evidently painstakingly, to the MS. In the entire Prologue, these amount to five errors of transcription, three failures to indicate an expanded abbreviation with italics, one failure to expand an abbreviation, one failure to correct an obvious scribal error, and one scribal mistake corrected without a note. If this rate of error is consistent through the entire work, the level of accuracy is still very high, and Santano Moreno rightly concludes that though this is not yet a definitive text, it is still an enormous improvement on Birch-Hirschfeld. Perhaps we can hope for an errata list at some time in the near future; evidently it would not be very long, and we should not have to wait for an entirely new edition. The text is preceded by a long, 137-page introduction by Manuel Alvar, treating a wide variety of topics concerning both Gower's work and the translation. The opening portions are the least original, and also the least trustworthy. In the account of Gower's life, we learn that Chaucer conducted him to Italy in 1378; and the date that is offered for the lost Portuguese translation, between 1399 and 1415, is exactly the period that is excluded by P.E. Russell, whom Alvar cites. (Both errors are also noted by Santano Moreno in his review.) The entire discussion of the dating of both Portuguese and Spanish translations is now superseded by the findings of Santano Moreno, presented most fully in his book (reviewed below). Alvar's dating of the MS, to 1454-1490, is not inconsistent with Santano Moreno's, though Santano Moreno would choose the end rather than the beginning of this period. Alvar's discussion of the English MS from which the translations derive is much more detailed than that of Macaulay, who knew the Spanish version only from short extracts. His conclusion, that the Portuguese translator had a copy of recension "one," is the same, but Alvar goes further in pointing out that the absence of the Latin lyrics and the abbreviation of the marginalia suggest a very late copy, perhaps resembling Bodleian Ashmole 35. The reviewer is not qualified to evaluate Alvar's treatment of the language of the translation; Santano Moreno judges it competent and helpful. Alvar's greatest interest, however, is in the art of the translator, and the longest part of his introduction is concerned with the relation between the Spanish and English versions. He sees the translator's task as the faithful reproduction of the text of his original, and he is led to some speculations on what exactly that might mean, at one point defining it as presenting the poem as Gower would have had he written it had he written in Spanish. But most of the discussion is concerned with the devices by which the translator achieves this goal, concluding that, except in the case of the most obvious errors, he has been successful in doing so. The passages that Alvar examines includes some in which the translator follows Gower very closely, some in which he has expanded the text, some which he has shortened, and some that he has simply altered in some way. All provide an opportunity for Alvar to discuss the confron¬tation between two languages and two cultures; and such things as the translator's attempts to make more explicit or concrete what is only implied in English, or to transfer a comparison into more familiar imagery, are treated by Alvar as different ways of creating equivalencies. He gives special attention to the difficulty of translating certain key terms, concluding, as always, with his praise of the translator's precision. The discussion is complicated, of course, by the existence of the lost intermediary Portuguese version, but Alvar is not hesitant to give full credit for the successfully realized translation to both translators. As an introduction to the relation between the Spanish and English texts, Alvar's discussion is well worth reading, but it should be used alongside the very different treatment (discussing many of the same passages) by Bernardo Santano Moreno, in entry #131. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 14.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Alvar, Elena, ed. Published Alvar, Elena, ed. "John Gower: Confesión del Amante. Traducción de Juan de Cuenca (S. XV). Edición Paleográfica." Anejos del Boletín de la Real Academia Española (45). Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1990 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 John Gower: Confesión del Amante. Traducción de Juan de Cuenca (S. XV). Edición Paleográfica. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Real Academia Española, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Corsa summarizes earlier views of the relationship between PhysT and Gower's "Virginia" in her account of the analogues of Chaucer's tale (pp. 4- 8). She describes Gower's version as a "more or less faithful paraphrase of Livy" (p. 7) and emphasizes the "political moral" of the tale and the lesson on the king's need for self-control, citing Fisher (1964) and Peck (1978). "Scholars generally agree," she writes, that Gower's "can be neither source nor scion" of PhysT (p. 7), and she suggests that the two poets wrote their separate versions "perhaps almost simultaneously" (p. 3). Her "Survey of Criticism" (pp. 28-41) includes references to several earlier comparisons of the two tales (pp. 29-30, 32 and 38), and Gower is mentioned in the notes to lines 5, 35, 122, 139-64, and 240. Judging on the basis of the references to Gower, the index to this volume is not complete, and though Carol Weiher's article on "Chaucer's and Gower's Stories of Lucretia and Virginia" (ELN, 14 [1976], 7-9) is mentioned on p. 5, it is not included in either the index or the bibliography. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Corsa, Helen Storm, ed. Published Corsa, Helen Storm, ed. "The Physician's Tale." A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer., 2, part 17 . Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Physician's Tale. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Oklahoma Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The publication of this volume is certainly one of the major events in Gower criticism of the last few years. Its thirteen essays were originally read at the annual Gower sessions at Kalamazoo. Other papers from Kalamazoo have already appeared in print (e.g. Benson's study of "Canace and Machaire," in Chaucer Review, 19 [1984]). Those who have not been able to make it to Kalamazoo each year -- and those who have as well -- will be grateful that the best of the remaining papers have been gathered here. All have been revised and expanded, some substantially, for publication. Twelve of the thirteen essays are concerned all but exclusively with CA, but unlike those collected by Minnis in Responses and Reassessments, which offered new ways of looking at the structure of the poem as a whole, most are focused rather more narrowly on problems of Gower's sources, investigations of particular subjects in his poem, studies of particular passages, and examinations of particular MSS of CA. All are competently and professionally done, and several have implications that range well beyond the topic immediately at hand. Together, the volume presents a good cross-section of recent and current scholarship on Gower, and because of its very diversity, there is certain to be something of interest for every reader of Gower here. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F., ed. Published Yeager, R. F., ed. "John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88." Studies in Medieval Culture, 26 . Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1989 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Meindl's essay offers a translation and commentary on Book 6, lines 419-68 of VC, "de errore Vicecomitur, Balliuorum, nencon et in assisis iuratorum" (concerning "the error of sheriffs, bailiffs, and also jurors in assizes"; Meindl's translation), demonstrating by its detailed analysis that "the surface of Gower's text is deceptively bland and the sub-text surprisingly rich" (182). Meindl sets the composition of the passage in 1378-80, largely on the basis of the absence of any reference to the events of 1381. In the course of his commentary, he explains the rule and scope of responsibility of the fourteenth-century sheriff, the opportunities that the position offered for venality and corruption, and how the office was evolving at the time that Gower wrote; the role of the "iurati," which he points out can only loosely be translated as "jurors"; the function of the bailiffs; and the different forms and settings of the assizes, including how they differed from the courts per se, before centering in on the "assisa de nocumento" ("assizes of nuisance"), which Gower slyly invokes in lines 420 and 436 by referring to the "nocumenti" committed by sheriffs rather than those which serve as the basis for a complaint. It is no small part of the merit of Meindl's analysis that in addition to his concern for the precise referent of Gower's terms (such as "legifer," p. 195), he is also alert to Gower's frequent plays on words, and he also cites the sources for some of Gower's imagery. Beneath the broad condemnation of avarice and corruption offered by Gower's text, Meindl finds some circumspect reference to specific issues and events from the years in which this passage was composed. In lines 445-62, he asserts, Gower treats miscarriage of justice by those with responsibility to enforce it as not merely a crime but as treason, a betrayal of the king, taking "what was likely the official royal position" on an issue on which thought was evolving during Gower's time. And he suggests that Gower's criticism of the assizes may have reference to a particular well publicized case involving some prominent local names (among them Nicholas Brembre and John Northampton) in which the issue was a blocked drain in a property owned by the Franciscans, but in which Meindl finds hints of irregularities in the proceedings that led to the plaintiff's success. "As a poetic spokesman for the king's faction [at that time]," Meindl argues, "Gower would have seen in Northampton's victory over the Franciscans (the poor man of l. 432?) at the least an inappropriate gain for the opponent of someone he favored" (205). Meindl writes with the advantage of greater familiarity with the records that he has examined, but for the rest of us, it is difficult to know precisely how much weight to give to this one case without knowing what others there might have been that Gower might have been equally interested in, or even involved in. And it is actually a little difficult to find a precise reference either to the king or to treason in lines 445-62. The invocation of "ius" rather than merely "lex," the comparison to Judas, and the reference to rewards in hell might suggest a broader moral basis for Gower's condemnation, more typical of the rest of VC. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Meindl, Robert J Published Meindl, Robert J. "Nuisance and Trespass in the 'Vox Clamantis': Sheriffs, Jurors and Bailiffs." Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis 20 (2015), pp. 181-213. ISSN 1087-5557 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies 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 Nuisance and Trespass in the 'Vox Clamantis': Sheriffs, Jurors and Bailiffs 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 As the latter half of her title makes clear, Little's concern is to demonstrate that "the history of the medieval self . . . is bound up with the history of auricular confession" (3), an argument she grounds theoretically in those of Foucault ("History of Sexuality") and Emile Benveniste ("Problems in General Linguistics") regarding the inseparability of the "self" and language, as the latter defines and shapes the former: "To read the self in this way is to understand it as subject to the possibilities and limitations inherent in the language into which one is born; one does not preexist that language and shape it to reflect oneself." (4) The "resistance" in her title is Wycliffism/Lollardy, terms she uses nearly equivalently: "I shall investigate the Wycliffite reform of lay instruction, focusing on its consequences for self-definition" (13) as she seeks to show that "Wycliffism is . . . a disruption in the languages and practices of self-definition" (14)--especially as, following Foucault, that defining of the self takes place in confession. Hence her interest in literary texts especially related to confession: the "Parson's Tale," Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes", and the "Confessio Amantis." "The Wycliffite disruption," she argues, "can be understood largely, though not exclusively, in terms of debates around confession as a means of self-definition." (14) The "Confessio", like the "Parson's Tale," represents for Little texts that "can be mapped onto a pre-Wycliffite . . . spectrum," while Hoccleve's "Regiment," written in 1410-11, evinces a "post-Wycliffite" development of confession (102-03). "I shall argue that Gower's text stages a pre-Wycliffite confession, despite his awareness of and anxiety caused by the Wycliffite threat. For Gower, Lollardy might threaten the context of confession (the world in which it takes place), but it does not threaten its structure or its capacity to describe human experience and console the penitent." (102) Gower's awareness of the state of disruption in English society is manifest in the Prologue, and his trust in "traditional" forms of language, self, and normativities in the confession he provides for Amans, one apparently untroubled by the "topical concerns [that] interrupt and affect traditional languages, such as the exempla." 107) For Little, that the "estates satire" of the Prologue and the Lover's confession of Books I-VIII are never causally connected "suggests that confession is at this moment a kind of retreat from the present threat of Lollardy and schism into a self solipsistically concerned with love." (108) Yet "the lover's confession cannot eliminate the threat of the contemporary world completely, and there are moments in which the world of the Prologue interrupts the confession. These moments are important precisely because they signal the way in which the poem can no longer conceal or integrate the divisive forces of the present that it has attempted to set aside" (108-09). One such moment is brought about by the discussion of Homicide (III.2525-29); another--predictably--is Gower's inclusion of the "new Secte of Lollardie" amongst the "Religions of the World" section in Book V (1788-1830), passage which Little discusses in full, in order to argue that "For Gower . . . the danger of Lollardy cannot be combatted only by rejecting its 'lore' but by ensuring that one defines oneself according to examples that are undoubtedly orthodox--in this case following the saints and ancestors. Indeed, Gower not only opposes Lollards to saints but compares them--in stating that the saints are 'betre,' he underlines that what is at stake here is whom to imitate" (111). Little calls attention to "a choppiness in Gower's thinking" (111), noting that both in the awkward interpolation of Christ into his description of the dangers of Lollardy and in the presentation of Lollards as a "rownyng" in men's ears he inadvertently invokes Lollard positions (111-12). Ultimately, because of "how carefully Gower has crafted this confession to respond to the division described in the Prologue . . . the divisive power of the Lollards is nullified: although they appear in the Prologue as a threat to the social world, they do not reappear at the end in Amans/Gower's return to the world from the confession. In this way, Gower suggests that the dangerous influence of Lollards and the division they represent can be answered and disarmed by confession" (112). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Little, Katherine C Published Little, Katherine C. "Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England." Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2006 ISBN 978-2503547770 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Notre Dame University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In "Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature," Roger Ladd traces representations of merchants in later medieval English literature, "from the antimercantilism of William Langland's 'Piers Plowman' to the promercantile charity of the York Mercers' 'Last Judgement'" (157). Ladd is interested in the peculiar "ideological dialectic" of medieval merchants, "caught between the demands of their commerce and the church's skepticism of their financial practice" (20). The introductory chapter surveys some of the medieval and modern debates over the roles of merchants within communities, and grounds those theoretical debates in nods to historical mercantile figures such as Nicholas Brembre. Subsequent chapters are devoted to "Piers Plowman" (Chapter 2), Chaucer (Chapter 4), early fifteenth-century texts such as "The Book of Margery Kempe," "The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye," and the "Tale of Beryn" (Chapter 5), and the York Cycle (Chapter 6). Of particular interest to Gowerians is Ladd's third chapter, "The Mirour de l'Omme and Gower's London Merchants," in which Ladd suggests the poem is a kind of apologia for merchants. Ladd posits that "the poem's direct engagement with merchants' point of view suggests that Gower at least prepared for the possibility that merchants would read his poem" (50). The strength of Ladd's analysis stems from his interrogation of mercantile diction in the poem suggesting an audience that would "understand the business register" (54) at work, so to speak. For example, Ladd astutely examines Gower's use of terms such as "bargaign" or "essier" to foreground his critique of the merchants, and Ladd supports his analysis with deft references to documentary evidence in guild records and legal documents where such terms are used contemporaneously in the mercantile community. While these close readings are illuminating and crafty (pun intended), Ladd misses an opportunity to apply the import of such an argument to our understanding Gower's possible audiences. As Gower scholarship becomes more and more interested in the multilingual-nature of Gower's works, and of Gower's cultural environment, such studies can only further our understanding of who may have been reading Gower's non-English writings. While Ladd mentions briefly such debates over Gower's readership (and medieval readerly practices generally), his perceptive textual analysis would appear to have greater import on that issue than is covered. [BWG. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ladd, Roger A Published Ladd, Roger A. "Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature." New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 ISBN 978-0-230-62043-8 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Palgrave Macmillan, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 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 salient example of the "righteous heathen" as Grady intends it is the Roman emperor Trajan, whose apparent salvation after having lived and died a pagan comes via the intercession of Gregory the Great--a legend retold many times, and differently, throughout the Middle Ages, and one that caused theologians, Thomas Aquinas among them, no end of headaches explaining. Fortunately, in his introductory chapter, "The Rule of Exceptional Salvations," Grady makes clear, relatively brief work of the history and the problems related to this spiritual "promotion" (1-14). He addresses the CA in his chapter 4 (101-21), "The Rhetoric of the Righteous Heathen," (arguing that this "rhetoric . . . helps to organize the most difficult transition" in the poem: "Alexander's education by Aristotle is the prime example of the pedagogical relationship of ruler and sage on which Gower's idea of court poetry fundamentally depends, and the 'well-tutored Alexander' stands at the center of the 'Confessio' and Gower's conception of him." Yet, Grady notes, there are "several dangers inherent in this late-medieval rhetoric of exemplarity," and Gower, aware of them, "moving from the penitential model of book 6 to the Fürstenspiegel of book 7 . . . draws on the structural resources of the virtuous pagan scene to control these anxieties and to manage the intersection of the amatory and the political in his poem." (15) In his discussion of Books VI-VII, Grady situates Gower between Malory and the Chaucer of Troilus, finding closest comparisons between Troilus' apparent apotheosis at the end of that poem and Gower's use of "the pedagogical relationship between two virtuous pagans" (i.e., Alexander and Aristotle): "Like Chaucer, facing at the end of 'Troilus and Criseyde' a difficult transition from courtly love to Christian prayer, Gower at this point in the 'Confessio' finds the convention of the righteous heathen the means to move from love to politics; if his gesture is less spectacular (and the results less compact) than Troilus's apotheosis, it is just as crucial to the structure of his poem, and just as dependent on the contemporary discourse of the virtuous pagan." (121) In his concluding chapter, "Virtuous Pagans and Virtual Jews" (123-32), Grady takes up the "Tale of the Jew and the Pagan," found in Book VII in six manuscripts of the type Macaulay called "second recension." Grady's approach to the tale employs François Hertog's "rule of the excluded middle, a strategy that permits a narrative trying to represent alterity to handle more than two terms (i.e., self and other) at once." (125) In Grady's reading, "in order to express adequately the alterity of the Jew," Gower transforms the normal triad "Jew-Pagan-Christian" into a duality: "the pagan is temporarily assimilated into the field of Christian ethics, and the middle term--a non-Christian but nevertheless morally admirable paganism--is essentially elided." (125) Grady's conclusion to Gower's solution is highly critical: "But in making an anti-ecumenical ruthlessness a supposed tenet of Jewish law and contrasting it with the laudable mercy of another non-Christian, this noxious little anecdote implies that the praise of pagan virtue is structurally dependent upon the denigration of Jewish vice" (125). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Grady, Frank Published Grady, Frank. "Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England." New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 ISBN 978-1403966995 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 Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England 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 2005 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bychowski's focus is on the "Tale of Iphis and Ianthe," in Book IV of the CA, on Sloth. Gower's presentation of Iphis' transformation from a girl dressed as a boy into a man by the God of Love within the "hermeneutic of the seven deadly sins" is, as "medieval disability scholars have demonstrated," predictable, and fully within the accepted approach current in the late Middle Ages, when "religion and medicine were so intertwined as to be inseparable, especially in cases such as the management of sloth, where the symptoms of depression, despair, and sluggishness spanned the categorizes [sic] of physical and spiritual disease." In a three-part essay, Bychowski considers 1) "'Divisioun and Dysphoria' to establish how Gower prefigures the modern social model of transgender as an experience of living in a world full of change and contradiction"; 2) "the particular social forms of 'divisioun' identified as 'Acedia and Depression'" as signaling "Gower's discussion of the sin of sloth that frames the 'Tale of Iphis and Ianthe';" 3) "how Gower's removal of the dysphoric youth's voice and agency in the tale emphasizes the systematic character of suffering caused by a dysphoric Nature (represented by Isis) and a subjugating patriarchal Nature (represented by Eros)." [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bychowski, M. W Published Bychowski, M. W. "Unconfessing Transgender: Dysphoric Youths and the Medicalization of Madness in John Gower's 'Tale of Iphis and Ianthe'." 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 Unconfessing Transgender: Dysphoric Youths and the Medicalization of Madness in John Gower's 'Tale of Iphis and Ianthe' 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 Author/Editor Author/Editor Burrow, J. A Published Burrow, J. A. "Medieval Writers and Their Work: Middle English Literature 1100-1500. 2d ed." Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Review John Burrow published the first edition of this little (currently 156 pp.) volume in 1982, noting in the Preface: "The present book is designed as a introduction. At the risk of giving an exaggerated impression of the strangeness of Middle English writings, I have concentrated on some of the chief differences which confront a reader of modern literature when he or she first approaches them: the differences in the notion of literature itself (Chapter 1), in the circumstances under which writings were produced and received (Chapter 2), in the types of writing produced (Chapter 3), and in the kinds of meaning to be found in them (Chapter 4). Chapters 1 and 5 also attempt to characterize the Middle English period in relation to earlier and later periods of English literature." In addition to providing a clear view of its purpose--"an introduction," and aimed not specifically at undergraduate students as most of such books are, but rather at any "reader of modern literature" upon first encounter with medieval writing--the preface thus succinctly outlines the book's contents. Commentary on Gower thus predictably runs throughout, tailored to suit the larger context of each chapter. Although this second edition is more than a quarter century more recent than the first, it remains in most ways a very similar presence. The bibliography, for example, has been "updated" by only nine citations post-2000. Yet Burrow himself remains one of the most sensitive and perceptive of readers, and his views of Gower here are profoundly worth knowing. His insight into "the contradiction . . . in which Chaucer, Gower and their immediate successors found themselves," is a case in point. "These writers . . . found themselves partially alienated from their native literary heritage (e.g., "adapted . . . to the practice or oral delivery"), in so far as that heritage represented conditions that were recessive in their day" (56). The different ways Chaucer and Gower found to respond to what Burrow calls "minstrel features" (57) stand for him as representative of major writers of the period: in the CantT Chaucer "came to terms" with that heritage by incorporating "addresses to the audience, oaths, asseverations, redundant phrases," to "speak 'ful brode' when he wants to" (57), while Gower looked to French and Latin literatures for better models than "minstrelisms," ultimately achieving a verse "purged (though at the cost of a certain debility) of minstrel features" (57). Burrow sees the "apogee" of "English narrative verse" in the work of Gower, Chaucer, and the Gawain-poet (71). And consider Burrow on the "complications of interpretation" that arise with some of the tales in the CA: "Sometimes it seems that [Gower] has simply failed to find a suitable story to illustrate this vice or that virtue, as required by his scheme; but on other occasions we can recognize a deliberate finesse in the relation between tale and context . . . . When the scale of the narrative is increased, complications . . . may arise . . . . [Yet] in literature as in life, events often appear less simple the more you know about them. Most stories, if they are told with any richness of human detail, tend to forfeit their straightforward relationship to exemplified truth. In the light of such a story, the 'truth' may come to seem complicated, or doubtful, or simply irrelevant." (118, 119) Few more sensible words have been written, perhaps, to answer complaints about Gower's narrative "failures." For many now, in the new age of Brexit, the most interesting chapter may be the last in which Burrow ponders the future of writers like Chaucer and Gower, when "poetry of that kind, in that kind of English and that kind of metre, and printed in that kind of book--will face increasingly strong challenges from rivals who do not recognize the language of the Authorized Version as their English. The tradition of Chaucer, Milton, and Tennyson can hardly fail to suffer such challenges in an age where English is a world language and England no longer a world power" (138). Reading that--written in 2007--one can dodge its eerie clairvoyance in the new reality of Brexit. Burrow's is still a book from which to learn much--and ought, perhaps, to be on every Introduction to the Middle Ages reading list. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Medieval Writers and Their Work: Middle English Literature 1100-1500. 2d ed Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Oxford University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed