17 100 2176 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In spite of the difficulties of teaching "the basics of the literary canon" (180) at two-year institutions, McKinney argues, "Gower's works may provide community college instructors an excellent opportunity to present a deeply realized, potentially engaging lesson" (181). She shows, in particular, how Gower's "Tale of Philomene and Tereus" in combination with Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale" (both included in the "Norton Anthology"), "can illustrate the concept of thematic variance among authors and give students a layered perspective on the political culture of gender relations in the late medieval period" (181). These texts are particularly relevant to community college students: "The need to assign responsibility for, deal with the consequences of, and cope with guilt over types of relationship events similar to, if milder than, those discussed in the 'Tale of Philomene and Tereus' is a need all too familiar for many community college students" (181). McKinney then offers helpful suggestions on approaching these subjects and offers sample lessons on each of these selections, and then on both together. The last, comparative lesson allows "speculative discussion," with references to the texts, of subjects like the following (186-87): 1) the male voice representing women's issues and women's voices; 2) sexuality: shame and reputation; 3) sexual aggression; 4) women's responses to domestic violence; 5) the marital-reproductive contract; 6) the threat of the female voice. [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor McKinney, Carole Lynn Published McKinney, Carole Lynn. "Gower in the Community College Curriculum." In Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Ed. Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011, pp. 180-87. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower in the Community College Curriculum Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This essay considers teaching Gower in a sophomore-level British literature survey class, a class wherein Gower is often not taught but his contemporary, Chaucer, usually is" (188). Chewning describes the evolution of her own survey course over the years. Within the last decade, she has "come to a solution on the matter of Chaucer and Shakespeare that serves as a compromise between my need to raise the bar for my students so they are reading Middle and early Modern English at a high level of competence (high enough for sophomores) and their need for works that are accessible, interesting, and readable" (189-90). Her course now includes "a list of required readings and three categories of options, or 'threads,' for students to continue their reading beyond the minimum requirements. The threads are loosely based on spirituality, love and marriage, and politics" (190). Chewning has "made Gower the central Middle English assignment in [her] British literature survey, and most of Chaucer's texts that are included in other survey classes are now optional" (191). She states her rationale for the change, describes the Gower selections she uses, and how she incorporates the optional works, including excerpts from Chaucer, in the course. Of further note, in this new course she teaches Shakespeare's "Richard II" and ties the discussion back to the earlier consideration of the fourteenth century and the Ricardian court. [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Chewning, Susannah M Published Chewning, Susannah M. "Chaucer by Default? Difficult Choices and Teaching the Sophomore British Literature Survey." In Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Ed. Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011, pp. 188-93. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer by Default? Difficult Choices and Teaching the Sophomore British Literature Survey Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Passmore describes the evolution of this medieval survey, which was a new course, and her thoughts in retrospect on revisions to improve it. The course included a generous selection from Gower's "Confessio Amantis." The class met in weekly three-hour evening blocks over a 16-week semester, and four of these sessions were devoted to Gower. As part of their course assignments, over the semester students read a chapter a week from Nigel Saul's "Richard II." That reading increased in relevance as students began to see connections, as when they read Gower's account in the first recension of the "Confessio" of meeting Richard on the Thames. While the historical context remains important, Passmore is considering replacing assignments in Saul, a book that many students found "disjointed and confusing" (196), with multiple articles, chapters of books, or possibly even "Who Murdered Chaucer?," a book that "worked fabulously" (196) in her Chaucer class and she thinks would be an "invaluable . . . tool for discussion" (197) in the survey. Also looking for better ways to help students read Middle English--another challenge in the course--she describes in this essay several additional techniques she is considering incorporating in the next syllabus. On a similar note, in the first version of the course she had assigned the single-volume MART edition of the "Confessio," in part because of its coverage: it allowed her to include the entire Prologue, selections from Books 1, 3, and 4, and all of Book 7, a significant amount in a survey. But she found that the lack of "an overall glossary," and "the skimpy on-page glosses" (199) made reading the Middle English from this edition too great a challenge for students. She has therefore decided to shift to volume 1 of the TEAMS edition, supplementing it, as necessary, with the rest of the poem in the online version. She concludes her essay by describing and providing the rationale for her research and writing assignments. [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Passmore, S. Elizabeth Published Passmore, S. Elizabeth. "Teaching Gower in the Medieval Survey Class: Historical and Cultural Contexts and the Court of Richard II." In Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Ed. Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011, pp. 194-201. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Teaching Gower in the Medieval Survey Class: Historical and Cultural Contexts and the Court of Richard II Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Building on his experience in the 1980s of publishing with seven students a series of essays in a volume called "John Gower's Literary Transformations in the 'Confessio Amantis'" (University Press of America, 1982), Beidler here describes a more recent venture of a like kind, the preparation with a dozen graduate students of a volume to which he and these students each contribute an essay. Like the early book, this publication treats Gower's transformation of his sources, in this instance specifically of a tale in Nicholas Trevet's "Chronicle" into the story of Constance in the "Confessio." The essay assignments are arranged according to 13 episodes "or plot elements" identified in Trevet's account; to guide students, Beidler presents his essay as a model which each student then follows in analyzing her or his particular plot element. The resulting collection became a web publication posted in April, 2006 as http://www.wcu.edu/johngower/scholarship/beidler/index.html. Beidler offers his rationale for such undertakings: "where I got to teach a graduate seminar, I tried to plan at least one activity that got my students directly involved in a joint project that could, if all went well, lead to a conference presentation or to a publication" (202); offering a course that includes the CA "provides an opportunity not only to teach the work of a fine medieval writer but also to help fledgling graduate students." [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Beidler, Peter G Published Beidler, Peter G. "Gower in Seminar: The 'Confessio Amantis' as Publishing Opportunity for Graduate Students." In Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Ed. Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011, pp. 202-08. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower in Seminar: The 'Confessio Amantis' as Publishing Opportunity for Graduate Students Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review After their brief introduction, the editors divide this book into two major parts. The first, "Materials," contains three essays (Peck, Nicholson, and Gastle) on Gowerian texts for teaching, the critical tradition, and online resources. The second, longer part, "Approaches," contains twenty-two essays and is subdivided into five sections: 1) Historical Approaches and Context (Pearsall, Lightsey, Peck, Palmer, and Boboc), 2) Language, Literature, and Rhetoric (Coleman, Donavin, Koff, Echard, Yeager, and Kelemen), 3) Theoretical Approaches (Mitchell, Bullón-Fernández, and Kruger), 4) Comparative Approaches (Bertolet, Dean, Yeager, and Wetherbee), and 5) Specific Class-Room Contexts (McKinney, Chewning, Passmore, and Beidler). The work ends with notes on the contributors, a list of scholars and teachers whose responses to a survey on the teaching of Gower helped frame the contents of this volume, an inclusive list of works cited in these collected essays, and an index. In describing available teaching resources and examining a wide range of approaches to teaching Gower, this volume will prove useful to both instructors newly interested, and/or already practticed, in teacing the poet. [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W., eds Published Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W., eds. "Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower." New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011 ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Literary interest in old age," Feinstein claims, "has concentrated largely on the various stages of man topos, the 'senex amans' of fabliaux, and stylized poetic complaints, beginning with mid-twentieth century exegetical interpretations, and continuing with more recent feminist and historicist readings." (23) Feinstein's approach incorporates both of the latter. She examines three texts: Gower's "Tale of Florent," Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale," and "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle," focusing on the "loathly lady" figured in each, and the protagonists' responses to her. Citing historical and demographic records she contextualizes--and justifies--the argument, that after the Black Death social norms permitted more frequent marriages between young men and older, wealthier widows (24-25, 28). Understanding "social history," Feinstein asserts, makes "nuanced readings open to seemingly contradictory attitudes and representations" both possible and necessary. (26) Thus, "Gower's 'Tale of Florent' offers multiple points of view on male and female desire in young and old as well as on the power and the impotency of both." (26) Notably, unlike most studies of "Florent," Feinstein stresses the inability of so old a woman as Florent's "loathly" bride to bear children--he "stands to be the last of his line." But because she has the answer to the question he needs to find, in order to save his life, she offers a chance "to continue his line and whatever powers are associated with it" (27). Implicit is the connection with "social history" that Feinstein leaves unstated: the "loathly lady" of romance is empowered by knowledge precisely as were elderly widows, with inherited wealth. This is true in all three tales, she finds, pointing out that even (or especially, perhaps) as old women, the "loathly ladies" already possess the sovereignty they say all women want (41). Turning to the recognition of "Amans/Gower" of his own aged state in Venus' mirror at the conclusion of the CA, Feinstein points to the resemblance to the romance plot, albeit in reverse: perpetually young and beautiful Venus helps "Gower…as author, if not as lover…transform old age into youth" (31). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 36.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Feinstein, Sandy. Published Feinstein, Sandy. "Longevity and the Loathly Ladies in Three Medieval Romances." Arthuriana 21 (2011): 23-48. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Longevity and the Loathly Ladies in Three Medieval Romances. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Leff, Amanda M. Published Leff, Amanda M. Johnson's Chaucer: Searching for the Medieval in "A Dictionary of the English Language." Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 21 (2011): 1-20. ISSN 0884-5916. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Language and Word Studies Review Leff documents the strong presence of Chaucer in Samuel Johnson's "Dictionary of the English Language" and explores Johnson's views on Chaucer's language. Although he considers Middle English outdated, Johnson quotes and/or refers to Chaucer works a number of times as identified by previous scholars. Leff reviews this scholarship and, enjoying the benefits of digital research, adds significantly to the data of her predecessors, correcting a few errors and misconceptions along the way, and reporting hundreds of previously unremarked instances where Johnson quotes or refers to Chaucer's works in John Dryden's modernizations. Along the way, and of particular interest to Gowerians, Leff discusses Johnson's recurrent effort in his critical writings to "deflate Chaucer's reputation and boost Gower's" (13). Johnson praises Gower's "smooth numbers and easy rhymes," Leff tells us, calls Gower, not Chaucer, "the father of English poetry," and presents him as Chaucer's teacher, the latter notion seemingly based on Johnson's misreading of Venus's praise of Chaucer in the first recension of CA, perhaps reinforced (or inspired) by the lexicographer's familiarity with John Skelton's "Garland of Laurel" which privileges Gower over Chaucer. Leff observes that in the body of his "Dictionary" Johnson cites Gower only twice, in effect undercutting his praise of him elsewhere. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society 37.1]. 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/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Title A name given to the resource Johnson's Chaucer: Searching for the Medieval in "A Dictionary of the English Language." Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Machan begins by describing differences between oral and literary code-switching, including comments on the "pragmatic strategies" (306) and bibliographical codes available to authors and scribes for representing code-switching in late-medieval England. He distinguishes "intersentential" and "intrasentential" switching (between and within sentences), and comments on a full range of scribal possibilities, from "non-recognition" (310) of switching to "consistent graphic design that visually emphasizes moments where a text changes languages" (310), using the Trentham manuscript as one example of the latter. He then examines in greater detail the practices evident in psalters and in manuscripts of Langland's "Piers Plowman" and of Gower's "Confessio Amantis," using them to show that "code-switching constitutes a particularly elusive feature in the meaning of medieval manuscripts and their texts" (312). When discussing manuscripts of CA, Machan observes a general rarity of intrasentential switching (relative to that found in Langland), but he documents the "variety of ways" scribes used to "correlate the visual, rhetorical, and linguistic significances of code-switching" (323) that is found in trilingual Gower. BL MS Additional 12403 "offers no graphic distinction among languages or rhetorical functions" (323) while more lavish manuscripts offer several kinds of indications, from the red underscoring and glosses of Latin in BL MS Stowe 950 which represent a "slightly more complex design," marked by a "changing or even confused sensibility" (323), to the rich "panoply of bibliographical codes" (324) that align with language switching in BL MSS Egerton 1991 and Royal 18.C.XXII, the latter a manuscript that uses switching "to shape [its] 'mise en page'" (326). Machan closes by cautioning against the perils of generalizing in such a discussion and offering three generalizations nevertheless, commenting on 1) the fluidity of code-switching in medieval England, 2) the need to conceptualize code-switching as rhetorical rather than lexical, and 3) the literary productivity of code-switching. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 37.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Machan, Tim William Published Machan, Tim William. "The Visual Pragmatics of Code-Switching in Late Middle English Literature." In Herbert Schendl and Laura Wright, eds. Code-Switching in Early English (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), pp. 303-34. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Visual Pragmatics of Code-Switching in Late Middle English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Shoaf, R. Allen. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Published Shoaf, R. Allen. "'A Pregnant Argument': Bodies and Literacies in Dante's Comedy, Chaucer's Troilus, and Henryson's Testament." In Nicole Nyffenegger and Katrin Rupp, eds. Fleshly Things and Spiritual Matters: Studies on the Medieval Body in Honour of Margaret Bridges. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. Pp. 193–208. ISBN: 9781443827393. Review Shoaf argues for the need to expand critical notions of gendered "literacies," ranging widely in order to demonstrate how Dante, Chaucer, and Robert Henryson use various kinds of verbal play to explore expansions and contractions in literature and literacy, particularly focusing on Chaucer's allusion to Pyramus and Thisbe in "Troilus and Criseyde" (4.1247-48). In an aside that explores the meaning of the allusion in Chaucer. Shoaf includes discussion (pp. 195-97) of Gower's account of Pyramus and Thisbe (CA 3.1331-1502), observing in it punning play upon "contek" as a subset of anger and as the contact impossible for the lovers because of their dividing wall: "The impetuosity of the two lovers is the 'contek' that prevents their contact" (196). Like Ovid, Shoaf tells us, Gower explores the "necessity of walls" insofar as they provoke and restrict communication: without walls, communication paradoxically ends in self-destruction. [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/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Title A name given to the resource "A Pregnant Argument": Bodies and Literacies in Dante's "Comedy," Chaucer's "Troilus," and Henryson's "Testament." Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Beidler's essay expands on the paper of the same title Beidler delivered in London in 2008, at the inaugural Gower Society Congress. His focus is "the striking image of a man hiding like an owl after he marries an ugly old bride" (p. 105) which Gower and Chaucer both include. Chaucer borrows this image from Gower ("Gower's tale both preceded and influenced Chaucer's," p. 108) but, Beidler argues, "Gower and Chaucer make quite different uses of the owl similes in their tales and . . . the simile is more organically integrated by Gower than by Chaucer" (p. 108). Gower compares Florent to an owl that travels by night in order not to be seen with his unattractive bride (p. 110). Florent's shame is of a piece with his entire character as Gower limns it, Beidler shows. "For Florent, it is all a question of hiding his wife--by banishment to an island, by cover of night, by closed doors, by clothing--so that 'noman' can see how he has aligned himself with so ugly a bride. Significantly, the two are wedded not in the daytime, as was typical for a wedding, but 'in the nyht' [CA I.366] (p. 112). Beidler also notes the analogous significance of Florent's choice: for a man so motivated primarily by reputation, to have the world think his wife hideous would be a frightful fate indeed. Chaucer's nameless rapist-knight is "never once . . . said to be concerned about his worldly fame or his reputation among others" (p.114). Moreover, because Chaucer's Loathly Lady accompanies the knight to Arthur's court, to claim her promise when her answer prevails--unlike her counterpart who waits for Florent to return--there is no question of keeping the marriage a secret. "Chaucer's knight's hiding like an owl, then, has nothing to do with concealing either his bride or his marriage . . . . Rather . . . [he] hides like an owl for no other reason than that he wants to avoid having to look at his ugly bride between his morning wedding and the approaching night when he must pay his marital debt to her" (pp. 114-15). Beidler concludes that, because "owls by nature hide during the day to avoid being seen . . . not . . . to avoid having to look at their wives" (p. 115), the simile is less naturally adapted by Chaucer from Gower's more fully complementary original. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Beidler, Peter G. Published Peter G. Beidler. "Chaucer's Canterbury Comedies: Origins and Originality. Seattle, WA: Coffeetown Press, 2011. Pp 105-15. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Owl Similies in the Tale of Florent and the Wife of Bath's Tale. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "From the late fourteenth through the fifteenth century, Middle English writers experimented with new ways of imagining and representing women's lives and experiences," Williams asserts. "Two especially significant aspects of that experimentation were the coining of a number of new gendered terms, including 'womanhood' and 'femininity,' and the refashioning of others already in use, such as 'motherhood.' This book suggests that Middle English writers used these words . . . to signal moments where the writers are . . . exploring new ideas about femininity" (3). "Womanhood" she finds "particularly important, both because it directly invokes the conceptual problem of what defines women collectively . . . and because it was used so widely and in such interesting ways in the late Middle Ages" beginning with appearances in the work of Chaucer and Gower (3). Chapter 3 ("Beastly Women and Womanly Men"), 51-85, is devoted to the "Confessio Amantis," which she finds "crucial to the development of womanhood, providing a version that is at least as influential as Chaucer's for later writers" (51). "Gower constructs womanhood as analogous to both manhood and beastliness" and because it is "characterized by observable signifiers," identities can change, and also "be learned or feigned." Hence, "Gowerian gender is performative" (51); and "one must be able to interpret those signals accurately. This is the challenge that the frame story presents to Amans" (52). Genius' goal, in Williams' view, is to "teach Amans how to treat women," showing him their vulnerabilities by presenting "the effects of sin on female victims," an approach "that values women as worthy not only of pity but also of a respect and consideration that would have recognized and honored their virtue . . . . The epithet 'moral Gower' . . . remains apt in reference to Gower's portrayal of women" (52). The rest of the chapter is divided into three parts: the first on "'beastly women,' female characters who either seem to be or literally become beasts," the second on "'womanly men,' men who adopt feminine roles or characteristics" (53), and the third on the character of Amans--how he develops, or fails to. Under "beastly women" Williams examines the Loathly Lady from the "Tale of Florent" (where, she asserts, "Gower's exploration of womanhood begins" [54]), and the transformations of Philomena and Procne, Cornix, and Calistona. Gower innovates by depicting the effects of sin on women, and "underscores their significance in purely human terms" (58-9), though at the same time, through Genius' depictions of the maidenhead as a woman's "treasure"--which, like treasure, can belong to others (a husband, a father), raises "disquieting" issues he leaves unresolved (61-62). In the continuation of Calistona's love for her infant son even after her transformation into a bear Williams finds another aspect of womanhood for Gower: "it involves specific emotions" and "persists in observable ways: not in appearance, but actions" (64). Under "womanly men," Williams considers the tales of Achilles and Deidamia, Sardanapalus, and Iphis, in disagreement with Diane Watt, as examples not of "transgressive genders" but as narratives that "reveal that any person might show evidence of womanhood or manhood, because those conditions are identified by appearance" (65). While this applies particularly well to Achilles and Sardanapalus, who "choose their identities," Iphis, who "has an identity imposed upon him/her," poses a more complex case (70), which Williams interestingly resolves by positing that desire, "like clothing and actions," is learned behavior (72). In the third section, "'Mi ladi, which a woman is', argues that Amans' problem is not his lady's lack of love for him, but rather her failure to conform to the model of the lady-love made available in chivalric stories. He falls into the same traps as Tereus, "in his desire to violate his lady" (beastliness), and Sardanapalus, "in his inability to allow reason to overcome love" (womanliness). (74). It takes the "shock" of Venus' revelation of his age and impotence to bring Amans to see the error of his ways, in the vision of lovers he has while swooning. "In this vision, Amans . . . is able to censure male misbehavior, sympathize with female victims, and recognize female virtue" (84). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Williams, Tara. Published Williams, Tara. Inventing Womanhood: Gender and Language in Later Middle English Writing. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2011. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Language and Word Studies 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 Inventing Womanhood: Gender and Language in Later Middle English Writing. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Dauby seeks to "approach the art of Chaucer and Gower by comparing their adaptations of some textual points of [Nicholas] Trevet," from the "Man of Laws' Tale" and "The Tale of Florent," leaving aside "the question of factual differences or the . . . possible influence of one poet on the other" (80). Her focus is on proper names and titles; her conclusion is that "Gower follows Trevet faithfully…even to the point of monotony. Chaucer, on the contrary, does not hesitate to intervene and comment on both the story and the craft of narration" (83). She supports this with five pages of three-columned, comparative charts with examples from Trevet on the left, Chaucer in the middle, and Gower on the right (83-88). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dauby, Hélène. Published Dauby, Hélène. "From Trevet to Gower and Chaucer." Anglophonia: French Journal of English Studies 29 (2011): 79-88. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource From Trevet to Gower and Chaucer. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Sprang examines Shakespeare's interest in the Middle Ages apparent in his late "tragi-comedies," taking both "Pericles" and "Kinsmen" as essentially Shakespearean. What drew his attention, in Sprang's view, was "an exploration of narrative structures and generic boundaries," rather than "themes or ideas" that might be called medieval. In particular, Sprang finds that "in the juxtapositions of grief, happiness, suffering, and joy that the (re)construction of the Middle Ages as an era ruled by 'fatum' [Fate] is clearly evident." The plays "tell the story of a world of inconsistencies and abrupt changes, and the key to their stereotypical view of the Middle Ages lies in their approach to narratives" in the "choice and/or creation of genres that can accommodate these narratives." [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sprang, Felix C.H. Published Sprang, Felix C.H. "Never Fortune Did Play a Subtler Game: The Creation of 'Medieval' Narratives in 'Pericles' and 'The Two Noble Kinsmen'." EJES: European Journal of English Studies 15 (2011): 115-28. 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 Never Fortune Did Play a Subtler Game: The Creation of "Medieval" Narratives in "Pericles" and "The Two Noble Kinsmen." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Williams identifies the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a turning-point when "Middle English writers experimented with new ways of imagining and representing women's lives and experiences" (3). She centers her study around "womanhood" as a "gendered term," "both because it directly invokes the conceptual problem of what defines women collectively, beyond specific experiences or roles, and because it was used so widely and in such interesting ways in the late Middle Ages" (3). The book accords a chapter each to Chaucer, Lydgate and Henryson, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe; chapter 2 treats "Beastly Women and Womanly Men: Gower's Confessio Amantis." Citing Judth Butler, Williams finds that Gowerian gender is "performative" (51). Gower is interested in transformations, which for him are "physical and explore how any figure can combine elements of womanhood, manhood, and beastliness. The intersections of these identities intrigue Gower and he locates them in many figures, including Amans . . . the loathly lady in the 'Tale of Florent' . . . Achilles and Iphis" (52). He also "is interested in the relationship between womanhood and social power," focusing on "how [womanhood] can act as a register of the morality of others, especially men" (52). These concerns lie behind the larger purpose of the frame narrative, which is "to teach Amans how to be a man" by showing him "how he should think about and react to women, especially the lady who is the object of his desire" (52). "The chapter connects Gower's concept of womanhood in the tales with the figure of Amans' lady in the frame narrative. As parts of his attempt to educate Amans on how to be a man and hence how to react to women, Genius persistently interprets his exempla, and even those with female protagonists, as lessons about male behavior. Only by understanding and sympathizing with female victims can Amans absorb the morals of the tales, but his continuing insensitivity toward his lady signals his inability to read women's experiences accurately" (53). The chapter has three sections. The first, "Beastly Women," treats the tales of "Florent," "Tereus," "Neptune and Cornix," and "Calistona" (53-65); the second, "Womanly Men," treats the "Tale of Achilles and Deidamia," "Sardanapalus," and the "Tale of Iphis" (65-72) ; the third, "'Mi ladi, which a womman is'," focuses on Amans' divided and underdeveloped understanding, revealing "his beastliness in his desire to violate the lady, like Tereus, and his womanliness in his inability to allow reason to overcome love, like Sardanapalus" (72-85, quote at 72). Amans' larger problem, in Williams' view, is that he suffers under an illusion: he expects his lady to act in accord with romance conventions while she, realistically, resists that stereotype. Ultimately, forced by Venus to acknowledge reality, Amans discovers himself, and a new purpose. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Williams, Tara. Published Williams, Tara. Inventing Womanhood: Gender and Language in Later Middle English Literature. (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2011). 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 Inventing Womanhood: Gender and Language in Later Middle English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review McKinley opens her essay by surveying the paucity of Ovidian references and allusions in Middle English poetry, apart from works by Gower and Chaucer, describing the pair as the "most Ovidian of the Middle English poets" and setting out to explore the "nature of the two poets' relative Ovidianisms." For both, Ovid "was the classical poet par excellence" (198), although their emphases differ, McKinley tells us initially, offering a familiar, even traditional summary: "If for Gower Ovid is useful in constructing an ideal world--a coherent, but highly stratified mundus of political, ethical and theological dimensions--for Chaucer Ovid is useful in exploring the larger, often open-ended, moral and ethical questions one should ask while making one's way through a rather less clearly delineated world" (198-99). For most of her essay, however, McKinley steers in a somewhat different direction, focusing on instances where, she argues, Gower and Chaucer use a range of Ovidian sources in diverse, even "startling" (230) ways. She offers four extended examples; Gower's incorporation of lines from Ovid into his own Latin in VC Book 1, comparison of Gower's and Chaucer's versions of the Pyramus and Thisbe stories in CA Book 5 and "The Legend of Good Women," their versions of Theseus/Ariadne material in the same works, and Chaucer's adaptation of Ovid in his "Manciple's Tale," with a nod to Gower's version in CA Book 3. Throughout, McKinley emphasizes the work that Ovid does for Gower and Chaucer even when they use Latin school texts, translations, and moralizations as their sources, often in complicated combinations, modified by the overarching contexts of the poets' medieval larger narratives. In VC 1.2021–50, Gower cherry picks ten lines directly from Ovid and uses them so that "Ovid is made a proponent of the virtues of self-mastery," of "ratio" over "amor," in a "startling reversal" of the Roman poet's original (206). In the cases of the Thisbe/Pyramus and the Ariadne/Theseus accounts, McKinley's comparisons lead her to observe how and where the medieval poets adjust the Ovidian materials to fit their own concerns: Gower, the "principles of self-restraint and oath-keeping" (230); Chaucer, the ironic, even comic or bathetic potential of love tragedy. The modification of Ovidian details and emphases in the "Manciple's Tale" and its juxtaposition with the "Parson's Tale," McKinley argues, "opens up a new vein of exploration in the poem: the analysis of intention in relation to sin." In this instance, Chaucer is more the moralizing poet than is Gower, and so a particularly surprising example, it seems, of the "extraordinary creativity" of the poets' in their "'glosynge' of Ovid" (230). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor McKinley, Kathryn L. Published In Ovid in the Middle Ages, ed. James G. Clark, Frank Thomas Coulson, and Kathryn L. McKinley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 197-230. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Chaucer: Readings of Ovid in Late Medieval England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Sierra, Juan David. Published Sierra, Juan David. "Voice and Meaning: Writing Authority in Late Medieval England and Iberia." Ph. D. Dissertation. Cornell University, 2011. Open access at https://hdl.handle.net/1813/30761 (accessed January 28, 2023). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Review From Sierra's abstract: "My dissertation tells the story of how the separation of voice and meaning in discursive structures became bound up with legitimating the fifteenth-century conquest of non-Christian lands. This is because the possibility of extending secular dominion into lands outside traditional legitimating practices necessitated a new rethinking of the use and discourse of authority. At the center of this change in meaning and voice were the Iberian translations of John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' that joined two different modalities of questioning the presentation of authority through writing: a Castilian approach, which disassociated the experience of reading from the verisimilitude of narration, and an English one, which undermined the possibility of speech to communicate truth. This synthesis justified colonialism because it gave sovereigns the means to speak with authority in a place outside universal language and law. The Iberian and English traditions which influenced Gower's translation into Portuguese, therefore, support the idea that there was a growing disconnect between the power of their ideas and the ways in which they were conveyed . . . . They made . . . spaces which proved that signs could divorce their social uses from their ability to signify while still retaining their ability to change the world. These spaces, in being taken up by the Portuguese translations of Gower's 'Confessio,' helped Europe fashion a concept of sovereignty applicable outside the boundaries of Western discourse." [MA. eJGN 42.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Voice and Meaning: Writing Authority in Late Medieval England and Iberia. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Summers, Karen Crady. Published Summers, Karen Crady. Reading Incest: Tyranny, Subversion, and the Preservation of Patriarchy. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2011. v, 162 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A73.04. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/listing.aspx?id=8321. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Review From Summers' abstract: "This dissertation explores usage of the incest theme in the medieval and early modern literary periods, and into the mid-eighteenth century," assessing Gower's "Confessio Amantis," Malory's "Morte Arthure," Shakespeare's "Pericles," Beaumont and Fletcher's "A King, and No King," Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi," and Walpole's "The Mysterious Mother" and "The Castle of Otranto" to show how "writers and storytellers appropriate [the incest taboo] to reflect some of the anxieties attendant upon their times," with recurrent attention to "a common desire to preserve, uphold, and defend patriarchy." Summers finds CA to be "filled with tales of incest" (10) which "analogize incest to tyranny, and prove that personal lives or social institutions built upon a foundation of incest tend not to stand" (11), comparing and contrasting it with Malory's treatment, and commenting on relations between Gower's tales and later literature, especially Shakespeare's "Pericles." [MA] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading Incest: Tyranny, Subversion, and the Preservation of Patriarchy. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This study develops a critical method for reading the vernacular frame narratives of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate based on the grammar-school commentaries that taught them classical rhetoric, philology, and history. In the course of developing this method, I answer the following questions: why do the school texts and vernacular works exist in the same format? Why is it that Christian writers appropriate the structuring principles of Ovid's pagan 'Metamorphoses' for their works? Furthermore, what inspired England's obsession with Ovidian narrative structure during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, to name just a few, participated in this Ovidian vogue--attempting to capture the Roman's sinister and playful voice and, more specifically, to master the frame-narrative device that gave it critical direction. Seeing Ovid's collection of pagan myths as a cohesive and continuous poem, medieval commentators uncovered an argument about abuses of power. Vernacular writers adopted this approach to Ovid, interpreting his work as a model for literary navigation in a historically turbulent period. I hereby alter the assumption that medieval writers mined classical literature merely as sources for their compilations of exempla with which to practice moralizing strategies. Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and their literate contemporaries would have learned in school that the 'Metamorphoses' was a text replete with masterful grammar, syntax, and rhetoric--but also with drama, subversion, and political intrigue" (ii-iii). Focusing in her second chapter on Book 4 of "Confessio Amantis, particularly the tales of Aeneas and Ulysses, Gerber argues that Gower's poem "contains two competing texts: Genius' moral expositions and Gower's literary frame narrative. The former text follows the [moral] allegorical tradition recorded by early medieval Ovidian commentators; the latter text follows the [political] commentary tradition from Orléans and the English prose paraphrases emerging at the end of the Middle Ages, which elucidate and mimic his rhetorical craft. The second text implicitly allows Gower to extend political criticisms from a safe distance." In this way, the CA "provides an early imitation" of the "Metamorphoses": "By removing the motivations for the actions of gods and the ruling class in general, Gower and Ovid similarly criticize those in positions of power for their seemingly arbitrary decisions that are based on selfish purposes" (133-34). [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gerber, Amanda J. Published Gerber, Amanda J.  Reframing the "Metamorphoses": The Enabling of Political Allegory in Late Medieval Ovidian Narrative. Ph.D. Dissertation. The Ohio State University, 2011. viii, 298 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A73.06. Freely accessible at http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1323788507. Abstract accessible at ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reframing the "Metamorphoses": The Enabling of Political Allegory in Late Medieval Ovidian Narrative. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Carlson presents his argument succinctly in the Introduction: "… to establish that poetry was written in fourteenth-century England by sponsorship of the monarchic state, in prosecution of state-official purposes, and that the … official verse-production culminated in the late writings of … John Gower" (1). The book is divided into two main sections: "Fourteenth-Century Panegyric Verse and Official Writing" and "Gower's State-Official Late Poetry." The term "propaganda" used in the title is not to be understood in its modern sense of a presentation designed to foster a state-proposed view of events or persons, likely a misrepresentation, but simply as a propagation of an official view which may or may not support it, more in the sense of classical panegyric. The reader is cautioned not to conclude that the fourteenth-century English state had anything like the unity of organization and purpose that would allow it to function in concerted support of the stated goals of monarchs and ministers in the manner we would today take for granted, even though it had centralized institutions and leaders at various levels who could enforce their conclusions. Chapter One, "Official Verse: The Sources and Problems of Evidence," begins and ends with poets associated with the defeat of Edward II's forces by the Scots at Bannockburn in 1314. Edward, expecting to win a great victory, took with him the poet Robert Baston to record and extol his accomplishments. Awkwardly, Baston was taken prisoner in the rout and required to win his release by celebrating the Scottish victory. Scots poets also celebrate the victory and at least one English author, Laurence Minot, records a generation later the avenging of the defeat. The case of Baston is intended to establish a "baseline of belief current amongst the English from early in the fourteenth century: this is what poets were, or were for, in some measure or other … promiscuous tools … to be used for propaganda production on behalf of commissioning agencies within the secular state" (6). No direct evidence of such commissioning survives prior to the mid-fifteenth century but Carlson discusses possible indirect indicators in a selection of poems, poets, and patrons, concluding that the indirect evidence is inconclusive. Chapter Two, "The State Propaganda," discusses pamphlets, newsletters (i.e. letters containing contemporary news) and official documents produced and circulated to propagate the state's achievements and "used by poets as matter for transmutation into metrical propaganda" (26). Rarely do such sources survive and they typically must be inferred from their traces, in which evidence of dependence is ephemeral. Where, however, such dependence can be established, we must conclude that the product, typically official Latin verse, can be characterized as state-sponsored. Carlson illustrates how the "only contemporary example of the pamphlet literature to survive directly in evidence, more or less complete, as it originally was, and unaltered" (32), an instance by one Thomas Favent supporting the Appellants in the coup of 1387, made use of state-documents and official records. He shows as well the presence of official documents and newsletters in Robert Avesbury's "Mirabilia gesta" and official documents and pamphlets in Henry Knighton's "Chronicle." All three authors had access to and employed state-sponsored versions of events whatever use they ultimately made of their sources and whether or not they were sponsored in their writings. Chapter Three concerns itself with "Occasions of State and Propagandistic Verse in Mid-Century," investigating such poetry written upon occasions of special significance in the reign of Edward III as epitaphs upon his claim to the French throne, heroic celebrations of his naval victory at Sluys, lamentations upon the death of his eldest son, and eulogies composed at his own passing. In all instances, "one suspects but may not confirm" (67) some sort of linkage between state and poet. Two poems which do evidence poets' "dependence on official sources, and so possibly of commissioning" (68) come in for special treatment in subsequent chapters. Walter Peterborough's "Victoria belli in Hispania," about the battle of Nájera in 1367, is the subject of Carlson's Chapter Four, and Richard Maidstone's "Concordia," written in 1392 to celebrate the reconciliation of Richard II with the city of London, is discussed in Chapter Five. These two poems "set precedent for what Gower was to take on in 1400 [in the CrT], making what he was to do not surprising or innovative, but perhaps only better and more effective, with the way having been prepared in advance by these near-contemporary local poets" (68). The evidence for the use of state-documents and the expectation of sponsorship is complex and resists easy summation. The reader will simply have to work through it in detail. Chapter Six, "Official Writing at the Lancastrian Advent," details official Henrician maneuverings and propaganda upon the occasion of the new king's usurpation of his cousin's throne in 1399, most especially the records of the Westminster Committee of Advisors that recommended various strategies to Bolingbroke as he schemed to attain the throne, and the so-called "Record and Process," a document purporting to be the official account of the parliamentary proceedings connected with Richard's deposition and Henry's installation that became a widely-circulated justification of events and a source book for subsequent apologists for the new king. Chapter Seven presents "English Poetry in Late Summer 1399," and suggests that there exists "some evidence to the effect that poets may have been … employed" as spokespersons "in propagating state-views of the Lancastrian advent," specifically five "contemporary local poems [one of them the CrT], all sharing the same curious array of properties" (121), specifically a "shared disposition of the same deliberately veiled manner of speaking, in riddling and opaque allegories of a specialized type" (135) and "their coincident concentration on the same group of minor Ricardian place-holders" [Scrope, Bussy, Green, and Bagot] (136) whose dispositions are presented as just accession to the "clamor populi" even if the people, in Carlson's view, are but the five poets themselves. "Rather than popular effusions … the contemporary English poems on the events of July and August [1399] are, on balance, more likely to be evidence again of the Lancastrian regime's labour of public self-fashioning and disposition to manipulate the verbal record" (152). Chapter Eight, "The 'Cronica Tripertita' and its Official Source," is the keystone in Carlson's argument for the presence of Lancastrian propaganda in late fourteenth-century Anglo-Latin poetry, concluding upon a study of correspondences in overall structure as well as "particular structures of selection, arrangement, emphasis, and interpretation" between the "Record and Process" and the Cronica Tripertita that "whenever possible, as much as possible, Gower used the 1399 parliamentary record" (169), although eventually forced to other sources simply because the "Record and Process" "gives out" on him. Finally, Carlson judges, the poem "is a technically complex reassembly, built out of a difficult, disorderly prose source, supplemented from disparate other materials. For the substance of events that the poem treats, Gower can be shown to have drawn from time to time on half a dozen sources and kinds of sources: on other parts of the public records, of the parliaments of October 1399 … and of 1388 … on talk in circulation … on his own personal connections among the grand … and, finally, on his own (considerable, professional) capacity to invent, especially when bound to tell of events he could know little about, remote from his base in London …" (196). Mostly, however, employing a copy of the "Records and Process," Gower, "like Walter Peterborough or Richard Maidstone … rendered the state verse service" (196). Chapter Nine, "Gower after the Revolution," presents the evidence in state papers and his own words of Gower's acknowledgement of his status as a client of Henry, although "nothing is directly in the evidence to the effect that Gower took the payment to write just what poetry he did deliver up, or that the payment from Henry was conditioned with an express understanding to the same effect on the royal part." In brief, "Henry took the throne, Gower entered the new king's pay, and his poetic apology for his usurpation appeared, along with some other, briefer poems" (203). Moreover, "Gower's poems written after the revolution--the epigrammata as well as 'In Praise of Peace'--served Henry, 'ad laudem serenissimi'" (209). Yet no sooner had the Lancastrian taken the throne than disturbing indicators of his own high-handed ruling style began to appear and it is probable that, "in the end, the same Gower who had made himself an official Lancastrian client-mouthpiece, Henry's poet like no other, when faced afterwards with an again altering social-political circumstance, remained still capable of speaking against the same authority's improprieties, with the 'vox clamantis in deserto'" (226). Carlson's book is an important contribution to the study of Anglo-Latin verse and Lancastrian historiography. His sensitive analysis of records and verse shows how, although we are inevitably dependent in various ways upon what they say, the records and documents are difficult to interpret because we know so little about them and their authors, who are typically in service to authority in some way albeit indistinctly and/or covertly. Gower offers the clearest instance of the relationship between poets and patrons in the fourteenth century, especially because his views of the two monarchs who occupied him most continually evolved. He moved from one extreme to another about Richard and proved critical of Henry even after going on the record in his support. Yet there is no reason to conclude that he adopted his positions for the sake of the support he received or hoped to receive. As far as anybody can tell, his positions are the result of his convictions even though at life's end he was in a favored status and receiving state subsidies. Both Richard and Henry were issue of an arrogant and willful ruling caste devoted to its own interests and authors of many questionable acts and decisions. As a devout and learned man committed to an ongoing analysis of English society, yet closely associated with and at various times both sympathetic to and critical of the two rulers about whom he writes, Gower might likely, as Carlson recognizes, have drawn the same conclusions about the pair whether his interpretations were solicited and supported or not. [Robert J. Mendl. Copyright JGN 31.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R Published Carlson, David R. "John Gower: Poetry and Propaganda in Fourteenth-Century England." Cambridge: Brewer, 2012 ISBN 9781843843153 Gower Subject Biography of Gower Cronica Tripertita In Praise of Peace Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower: Poetry and Propaganda in Fourteenth-Century England. 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 2012 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 Ma examines the different ways in which Gower and Pisan appropriate the authority of Latin in their respective vernacular works. In the passage on "Letters and Language" (as Macaulay termed it) in Genius' discourse on virtuous labor in CA 4.2633-74, Ma suggests that Gower holds up Latin writing as an exemplum to be imitated by writers in English. "Both Amans and Gower's vernacular readers stand to benefit from acquiring specific skills that Gower emphasizes in his representation of Latin's authority, and both need to transfer the benefits of studying Latin to their respective conditions, which are perceived as having inherent shortcomings that need to be 'confessed' in order to be redressed" (21). Gower adopts this process in his own writing, as he invokes the aid of Carmente (cited as the inventor of "the ferste letters of Latin" in IV.2637) in the Latin epigram that stands at the head of his Prologue. "Carmente symbolizes the transfer of learning from Latin into English, which Gower sees his Confessio as facilitating" (22). But while Gower theorizes the relation between Latinity and the vernacular, Christine enacts it palpably in the construction of her "Épître Othéa," with its fictional goddess figure and the divisions among texte, glose, and allégorie, as she "directly demonstrates the Latinate practices that further the literary capacities of the vernacular" (26). [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ma, Ruen-chuan Published Ma, Ruen-chuan. "Vernacular Accessus: Text and Gloss in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and Christine de Pisan's 'Épître Othéa'." ES: Revista de Filología Inglesa 33.1 (2012), pp. 17-28. ISSN 0210-9689 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Vernacular Accessus: Text and Gloss in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and Christine de Pisan's 'Épître Othéa' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Pérez-Fernández examines the use of language in the poem itself, in its original form and in the Portuguese and Castilian translations, as Gower's multilingual work became (somewhat ironically) monolingual as the translators either ignore or translate into their vernaculars the Latin apparatus that accompanies Gower's English text. The manuscripts in which the two translations are contained also add another type of apparatus, in the form of a detailed table of contents, constructed from the marginal summaries to the tales. Pérez-Fernández considers some of the puzzles posed by these indexes (in the Portuguese version, the table is in Spanish, though the surviving Spanish translation is based on the Portuguese), but she is most concerned with the alteration of the experience of reading the poem, as Gower's role both as learned auctoritas and as commentator is reduced with the loss of Latin and the reduction of the glosses to mere summaries, and his role as compiler is heightened, as the dialogue frame is de-emphasized and the stories themselves assume greater prominence. [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pérez-Fernández, Tamara Published Pérez-Fernández, Tamara. "The Margins in the Iberian Manuscripts of John Gower's Confessio Amantis: Language, Authority and Readership." ES: Revista de Filología Inglesa 33.1 (2012), pp. 29-44. ISSN 0210-9689 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Margins in the Iberian Manuscripts of John Gower's Confessio Amantis: Language, Authority and Readership Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 McGerr introduces a new possible model for the discussion of kingship in Book 7 of the CA. The "Nova Statuta Angliae" ("New Statutes of England") is a compilation based on the Rolls of Parliament beginning with Edward III's first Parliament in 1327. It opens with an account of the deposition of Edward II meant to justify his removal from the throne that emphasizes his violation of the terms of his coronation oath in his failure to uphold the laws protecting the clergy, the nobility, and the commons. This document circulated widely, McGerr notes, among the same audience that might have read the CA (including a copy owned by King Richard himself), and Gower "was certainly familiar" with the text (54). Gower would have found in the account of Edward II's deposition an exemplum on bad kingship of the sort that he himself constructs. He would also have found a model for the emphasis upon the king's duty to uphold the law as a condition of his right to rule that runs through the discussion of kingship in Book VII, several passages of which might well have reminded his readers of Edward II's fate. And finally, McGerr suggests, Gower would have found in this section of the "Nova Statuta" a model of the type of "hybrid discourse" that he himself practices in Book VII: "Both texts interweave discourses of legal argument, romance narrative, mirrors for princes, and religious exemplum in ways that strengthen their representation of the English king's sacred obligation to uphold the laws of the land" (59). [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor McGerr, Rosemarie Published McGerr, Rosemarie. "Gower's 'Confessio' and the 'Nova Statuta Angliae': Royal Lessons in English Law." ES: Revista de Filología Inglesa 33.1 (2012), pp. 45-65. ISSN 0210-9689 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 'Confessio' and the 'Nova Statuta Angliae': Royal Lessons in English Law Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Mandel takes no interest in which came first, but in contrasting the ways in which conflicts are presented and resolved in the two poems, he says a great deal about the broader differences between the two poets. In the Wife's version, in contrast to her Prologue, in which somebody must win and might makes right, interpersonal conflicts "are resolved by appeal to authority-but that authority is constantly undermined, debated, and circumvented by negotiation" (72); and in the final scene, the knight and his new wife "have arrived at mutual common gain, at equal happiness, through a negotiation in which each gave up something--sovereignty, authority, the power to choose--to get something" (76). In "The Tale of Florent," on the other hand, the appeal to authority is absolute and there is no negotiation. All of the conflict takes place within Florent himself as he weighs his choices. At the end, "the hag's transformation to a naked eighteen-year old is completely gratuitous, the implicit reward of the true and honest man guided by principle who honors his pledges" (77). "'The Tale of Florent' reveals Gower as a poet who defines character in terms of an individual's thinking and commitment to the principles which ultimately define 'the good' and direct his behavior accordingly. Gower's is a moral tale designed to instruct. The 'Wife of Bath's Tale' reveals Chaucer as a poet who reveals character in terms of discussion, negotiation, compromise--the contingencies of business rather than the demands of absolutes. Chaucer's is a dramatic tale designed to entertain" (69-70). [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Mandel, Jerome Published Mandel, Jerome. "Conflict Resolution in the 'Wife of Bath's Tale' and in Gower's 'Tale of Florent'." ES: Revista de Filología Inglesa 33.1 (2012), pp. 69-79. ISSN 0210-9689 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 Conflict Resolution in the 'Wife of Bath's Tale' and in Gower's 'Tale of Florent' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Schieberle finds the definition of Gower's ethical project in the "Confessio" in the passages in the Prologue that link political stability to the proper pursuit of love and in the lines that proclaim that "That we fortune clepe so / Out of man himself it groweth" (Prol. 548-49). Contrary to the notion that both Love and Fortune exercise their power uncontrollably and arbitrarily (as depicted in their "wheels"), Gower asserts man's power to control both, Schieberle argues, through the exercise of virtue in both the amatory and the political realms. For illustration, she cites the tales in Book I in which virtuous conduct is rewarded and vice is punished (as one would expect to find in a moral exemplum), even in the case of love. Schieberle traces this "anti-Boethian" view to Machaut, who also demonstrates, particularly in the "Remede de Fortune," the benefits that derive to those who practice virtue. (Others have argued that Machaut's views are quite consistent with Boethius', since he depicts Hope, like the practice of virtue, as constituting in itself a sufficient reward.) [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Schieberle, Misty Published Schieberle, Misty. "Controlling the Uncontrollable: Love and Fortune in Book I of the 'Confessio Amantis'." ES: Revista de Filología Inglesa 33.1 (2012), pp. 81-96. ISSN 0210-9689 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 Controlling the Uncontrollable: Love and Fortune in Book I of the 'Confessio Amantis' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Peebles maintains that while he may simply have been following his source, Gower's choice to set his "Tale of the Three Questions" in Spain establishes a direct connection to issues arising out of debates concerning England's engagement with Spain during the late 1380s, when she presumes the story to have been written. Much of the essay is concerned with England's relation with Spain, beginning with Edward I's marriage to the sister of Alfonso X in 1254. More immediately relevant is John of Gaunt's involvement with the Spanish succession, which, Peebles points out, "began and ended with marriages" (106). The costs and even the necessity of England's Iberian engagement was the subject of repeated and fractious parliamentary debate, which Gower also addresses through the tale, offering a model less for the king than for those who would advise him. "The pointed advice that the tale offers is that members of a court should avoid direct challenge or pacifying acquiescence in favor of calming voices expressing an insistent logic that the king can accept. . . . Gower is using the Spanish setting of the tale to gain leverage for advisors not, perhaps, possessing great innate power [in their relationship with the king]. . . . He imagines and communicates a situation in which the strategy works, and that imaginative power offers a way to reframe the Spanish political situation and domestic politics in a way that suggests a more acceptable set of choices: intermarriage, alliance, and realignment instead of the absolutism of either conquest or avoidance. Thus, the Spanish setting of the 'Tale of the Three Questions' both reframes the political argument over Lancastrian Castilian engagements and models a role for counsel in domestic concerns" (110). [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Peebles, Katie Published Peebles, Katie. "Arguing from Foreign Grounds: John Gower's Leveraging of Spain in English Politics." ES: Revista de Filología Inglesa 33.1 (2012), pp. 97-113. ISSN 0210-9689 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Arguing from Foreign Grounds: John Gower's Leveraging of Spain in English Politics Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Burke focuses on the way in which the two nearly precisely contemporary poets adopted, and adapted, the role of prophet, the one who "speaks truth to power," from biblical tradition, Gower in his VC and CA, Christine in her "Lamentacion sur lex maux de la France," which was written during a time when Christine feared that on-going disputes between the factions of Armagnac and Orléans might lead to civil war. Burke explains how each poet made a strategic selection of tropes associated with the "vox clamantis," as she depicts two writers "who struggled to engage with the moral and political challenges of their troubled situation. Clearly, neither saw any contradiction between their role as poets crafting works of pleasure and instruction, and as prophets calling on the powerful to repent and mend their ways, for the salvation of all their people. Indeed, they may have perceived the two roles as practically one and the same" (130-31). [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.1]. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 246-57. Author/Editor Author/Editor Burke, Linda Barney Published Burke, Linda Barney. "'The Voice of One Crying': John Gower, Christine de Pizan, and the Tradition of Elijah the Prophet." ES: Revista de Filología Inglesa 33.1 (2012), pp. 117-35. ISSN 0210-9689 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'The Voice of One Crying': John Gower, Christine de Pizan, and the Tradition of Elijah the Prophet Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Farber presents a defense of "a method of reading that explicitly guides the reader towards the ethical and didactic content of the text" (144), as opposed to "allegorical reading," which in the interpretation of the "Confessio Amantis" has (in the examples she cites, most from the 1970s and none later than 1992) placed more emphasis on what is not present in Gower's text at the expense of what is, and has been used to diminish or undermine Genius' authority as moral instructor. Following Minnis and others, she examines the background for the practice of "ethical reading" in the "accessus ad auctores," demonstrating that "a long tradition of allegorical interpretations [of a particular text] . . . does not rule out the possibility of using the text for other purposes" (146). Such purposes are evident, she maintains, in Gower's tales of "Phebus and Daphne" and "Ceyx and Alceone." In each, she notes, "the moral Genius provides is not a normative prescription. He is not giving Amans strict rules to follow, but rather, offering him exemplary scenarios that highlight specific ethical issues. If Amans is going to find relief from his love, he must learn to read his own situation in terms of its broader ethical implications" (148). In that way, the poem enacts the "very process of reading" that Gower expects from his reader as well (151). [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Farber, Annika Published Farber, Annika. "Genius and the Practice of Ethical Reading." ES: Revista de Filología Inglesa 33.1 (2012), pp. 137-53. ISSN 0210-9689 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 Genius and the Practice of Ethical Reading Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Urban begins by citing the rather horrific conclusion to Gower's version of the tale of Virginia alongside the passage in the Man of Law's Prologue (CT II.77-89) that has long been understood as a dig at Gower to demonstrate "Gower's marked preference, especially when compared to his contemporary Chaucer, for ever so slightly uncomfortable images and events and then pushing them to quite an extreme level of shocking detail, if not quite literally over the edge of normally acceptable behavior. Alongside Virginius, we have infanticide, incest, duplicity and other kinds of cruelty. . . .Gower's Confessio . . . is not for the squeamish" as the poet "situates himself on the edge between morality and 'unkynde abhominaciouns'" (157-58). In fact, Urban argues, "Gower uses all levels of his texts, from content to multi-linguality and manuscript layout, for his location of his poetry on the edge between acceptable and unacceptable behavior" (158). In the VC, the "edge" is actually an "edgy space" or "chasm" between "past and present, good and wrong, righteous and sinful" (159). The CA itself, in its unstable juxtaposition of two different languages, "is often confusingly situated on the edge between Latin and English, as well as between competing moral messages" (160); and in the passage at the beginning of Book 1 in which he defines his project, "Gower is situating his book quite specifically on the edge between lust and lore, and as he proceeds with the text, it soon becomes apparent that this is also an edge between good and bad, virtue and evil" (164). Urban's final two examples come from Gower's tales of the "Trojan Horse" and "Florent." The latter, in his reading, like the much more sophisticated "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," works "to highlight the cracks and fissures on the edges of the chivalric code. It is impossible for either Gawain or Florent to perfectly embody the code of chivalry, but their reactions to the pressures of specific situations display the kind of flexibility and creativity that Gower's texts in particular urge upon their readers" (168). [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Urban, Malte Published Urban, Malte. "Cracks and Fissures: Gower's Poetics on the Edge." ES: Revista de Filología Inglesa 33.1 (2012), pp. 155-70. ISSN 0210-9689 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis 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 Cracks and Fissures: Gower's Poetics on the Edge Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Houlik-Ritchey considers the implications of the omission of Gower's references to "Saracens" in the Castilian translation of the CA by Juan de Cuenca. Her close reading reveals considerable paradox in Gower's attitude, as he evidently finds justification for the Roman emperor's harsh reprisal in the tale of Constance in Book 2 but has Genius note the sanctity of even Muslim souls in his comments on crusading in Book 3, and also in his ambivalent portrayal of the Sultaness, Constance's first mother-in-law, who sets Constance adrift after the slaughter at the feast, but also carefully makes sure that she has sufficient provisions on her boat. The term "Saracen" itself, however, clearly denotes difference, and by implication either moral depravity or a threat to the author's and readers' Christian culture, and because of its use in earlier medieval romances, "evokes the realm of fantasy, of an aggressor against which violence is always permissible because it is always necessary" (183). The Castilian text removes the link between the Sultaness' villainy and her religion by referring to her only as "la mala vieja" ("the evil old woman"), and in the passages in which Genius considers the morality of the crusades, it uses the more generic "infiel" ("infidel") where Gower uses "Sarazin." Juan de Cuenca is obviously less concerned with "fantasies of religious aggressors threatening Christianity" (183), and although his version of the poem too is marked by the triumph of Christianity, both in the conversion of Northumberland and in the ethic that makes it possible to condemn killing even of one's enemies, the long history of Jews, Christians, and Moslems living side by side on the Iberian peninsula, while not necessarily bringing about an ideal of mutual tolerance, "created an environment in which anxieties about one's religious neighbors did not take the same form as in late medieval England" (186). [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Houlik-Ritchey, Emily Published Houlik-Ritchey, Emily. "Rewriting Difference: 'Saracens' in John Gower and Juan de Cuenca." ES: Revista de Filología Inglesa 33.1 (2012), pp. 171-89. ISSN 0210-9689 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 Rewriting Difference: 'Saracens' in John Gower and Juan de Cuenca Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 "Calling" embraces both "summoning" (or "vocation") and "naming," not only in Modern English but also in Middle English (by way of the verb "clepen") and in the Latin "vocare," as used, for instance, in the Vulgate in 1 Corinthians 7:20, the ultimate source for many of the passages that Davis discusses: "Unusquisque in qua vocatione vocatus est, in ea permaneat." Davis explores the notion of "calling" in four late fourteenth-century texts ("Piers Plowman," "Vox Clamantis," "House of Fame," and the "Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale"), countering, along the way, Weber's oversimplification of pre-Lutheran notions of "calling," especially with regard to significance of activity in the world and the possibility of salvation for those in secular life. "Instead of earthly names and estates being naturalized, fixed, and God-given, or alternatively, alien and anathema to God, God temporarily suffers imperfect human 'callings' at the same time that he issues his own call. Thus, although human and divine 'callings' are not identical, they are also not necessarily distinguishable and in fact often coincide; as such, the characters within these poems, and sometimes the poems themselves, do not always disambiguate them" (55). Davis's analysis expands to include discussion of "use" vs. "possession" and "precept" vs. "counsel," and it perhaps offers its richest insight into WB and PP, especially where she draws parallels between the Wife and Langland's Will. Her discussion of VC centers on the narrator's role in Book I. Taking issue with those who, conflating poet and narrator, blame Gower for the disturbing allegorical depiction of the revolting peasants as animals in the vision in Book I, Davis emphasizes how "the poem reframes its invective as self-scrutiny" (80). Wisdom, exercising a role similar to that of Conscience in PP C XXI, "alerts the narrator to the call to redemption and does achieve his contrition, which is signaled by his kneeling. This call forces two related recognitions on the part of the narrator: first, that the revolt and storm are divine instruments and, second, that the target of God's displeasure is the narrator himself, who, despite having fled the terrors of revolt, has internalized and carries it within: he is the revolt. . . . In recognition of his own sinfulness, Gower's narrator evacuates the cavities of his heart. This thorough cardiac examination enables him to hear, on or over the wind, the divine voice to which Wisdom has already alerted him. Once the storm has subsided, . . . the narrator kneels in thanks . . . . The narrator's contrition and prayers, which culminate in this act of kneeling, are the turning point around which the whole poem pivots. . . . His own crying to God and God's answering call produce an antiphonal that emerges from, rather than being antithetical to, the tumult of other calls, which together constitute the revolt" (79-81). Elsewhere, Davis describes both the narrator's loss of his own voice and Gower's well-known use of the words of other poets as acts of "kenosis," in imitation of Christ's setting aside of his divinity upon assuming human form, as described by Paul in Philippians 2:5-11 (85-88). She concludes by setting side by side the ending of VC and the close of Alain de Lille's "Anticlaudianus" (91-97), illustrating "a commitment [in Gower's, Langland's, and Chaucer's work] . . . to imagine--although perpetually defer--the spiritual recoverability of the imperfect life" (97). This subtle and wide-ranging essay deserves to be read in full. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.2]. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 257-79. Author/Editor Author/Editor Davis, Isabel Published Davis, Isabel. "Calling: Langland, Gower, and Chaucer on Saint Paul." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 34 (2012), pp. 53-97. ISSN 0190-2407 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 Calling: Langland, Gower, and Chaucer on Saint Paul. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 For Nowlin, the passage in CA 4.2362-2745 that Macaulay headed "The Uses of Labour" actually consists of three separate "chronicles of invention," detailing "the greatest 'inventions' of human culture" (183), and these chronicles, he argues, "allow Gower to speak to the historical project of the "Confessio" as a whole--that is, the historical project of rewriting narratives of the past in order to help restore a fallen present" (183). Gower reveals his interest in historiography and his awareness that "'history' itself is a discursive construction" (184) throughout his works, but particularly in the "Visio" in VC Book 1 and also elsewhere in CA, where he claims "the form as well as the matter of history" (185). The chronicle form does pose a certain dilemma, however, for while offering instructive examples from the past, it also suggests inevitable decay, contrary to Gower's own purpose, as illustrated in the discussion of "gentilesse" that precedes the passage in Book 4 that Nowlin examines. "This, then, is the problem for Gower the chronicler: How can a poet activate the productive aspects of the chronicle form without reintegrating its potentially corrosive elements?" (188). The answer lies in Gower's imitation of "practices in late medieval English chronicles that embed within a historiographic expression a dramatization of the processes of invention. The productive, imaginative, and ultimately generative work of invention counteracts the corrupting effects of chronicle narratives" (188). The model is provided by Ranulf Higden's "Polychronicon" and Trevisa's translation, which offer a model of "invention" both in their principles of selection and arrangement and in the invitation to the reader to participate in the historiographic process. In Book 4, "Gower carefully works through the conflation of historiography and invention characteristic of the "Polychronicon." There, he locates and enacts a compositional process that works to restore the productive potential of the chronicle form and estrange that form from the movement toward discord demonstrated by the history of 'gentilesse'" (192). The details of Nowlin's account of that process cannot adequately be summarized here. In brief, "Gower begins in the first chronicle of invention by emphasizing the form and labor of historiographic production, then by narrating the simultaneous emergence of poetry and historiography from the chronicle of cultural development" (192). Alchemy seems to offer "an analogue for poetic invention" that might be able to "'invent' a way out of the corrosive chronicle form established in the history of 'gentilesse.' But the opposite turns out to be the case" because of the failure of modern alchemists to match their predecessors (195). "Alchemy represents at once the failure of historiographic narration and productive invention" (196). "The final chronicle in book 4 is something of a restart. It focuses specifically on 'our Marches hiere' (4.2633), that is, the Roman tradition that produced Latin grammar, rhetoric, and ultimately Ovid--and by extension, the 'Confessio Amantis'" (197). The operating principle is "congruite" (4.2646): "the Roman chronicle operates through an appositional, congruous organization that combines the tenets of poetic invention with chronicle form. Gower encodes the process of poetic composition into the structure of the Roman chronicle, replacing chronology with inventional topics. He thereby replaces the temporal discord that characterizes the progression of chronicles with a structural system that, by definition, encourages discovery, choice, and possibility" (198). "Here, then, Gower generates a new kind of English poetry, one that invests the chronicle form with a vitality that would seem to have productive consequences for the invention of both historiography and poetry" (199). In conclusion, "These chronicles reveal Gower's working through the central historical problem for the "Confessio"--the effort to salvage the form of historiography along with its matter, but in a 'newe' way. . . . Adapting a fourteenth-century chronicle practice and applying it to his long poem about love, Gower foregrounds the mechanism of poetic and historiographic composition and transforms the force of codified historical progression into productive poetic creation. His chronicles prompt reflection and investigation, but they also suggest how a massive English poem like the "Confessio" might be imagined as self-sustaining, and capable of becoming a kind of imaginative algorithm for poetic posterity. The labor of an English poet-chronicler, the Confessio itself becomes a new kind of chronicle that invents history rather than a poem that merely uses it" (201). [PN. Copyright. JGN 33.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Nowlin, Steele Published Nowlin, Steele. "Gower's Chronicles of Invention: Historiography and Productive Poetry in Book 4 of the Confessio Amantis." Modern Philology 110 (2012), pp. 182-201. ISSN 0026-8232 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis 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 Gower's Chronicles of Invention: Historiography and Productive Poetry in Book 4 of the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation analyzes the function of animal speakers in political poetry by William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Gower, and it claims that late fourteenth-century poets describe the marginalized voices of emerging politicians by using animal expressions and noises. These writers invent a playful yet earnest poetics of acknowledgment in comparing politicians' calls to animal cries. In unveiling novel interpretations of Langland's mouse, Chaucer's goose, and Gower's jay, I argue that the speeches of animals contribute to significant strains within several late fourteenth-century poems, which remain obscure if the reader ignores the signal contribution of the animal. Finally, I study the use of animal speech in the Lancastrian poem, "Richard the Redeless," to understand the ways in which the anti-Ricardian regime appropriated this malleable animal imagery to pursue its own political agenda." [JGN 33.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fulton, Sharon Published Fulton, Sharon. "Animal Speech and Political Utterance: Articulating the Controversies of Late Fourteenth-Century England in Non-Human Voices." PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2012. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Animal Speech and Political Utterance: Articulating the Controversies of Late Fourteenth-Century England in Non-Human Voices. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This project looks at confessional moments in three texts from the late Fourteenth and early Fifteenth centuries in which the subjectivities of the central figures shift noticeably in relation to challenges to orthodox behaviors and beliefs, both on a secular and a sacral level: John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,' the anonymously translated 'Partonope of Blois,' and Geoffrey Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde.' In all these confessional moments, which involve secrecy and fear, the interiority of the confessant and that of the confessor contour the confession and reveal potentially subversive and political criticisms. Late medieval English poets use the very discourses of the institutions under scrutiny in order to challenge institutional corruption as well as cultural, social, and political corruption. By bringing an insular mechanism to challenge itself, such as confessional discourse to challenge confessional efficacy, poets enable a dual dialectic in order to illuminate the inefficacy of ideologies, social and cultural codes and structures, and institutional hierarchies; once brought under scrutiny, poets can position various subjectivities through mobile figurations in order to posit reformation on an individual level." [JGN 33.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Moreno, Christine M. Published Moreno, Christine. "Secrecy and Fear in Confessional Discourse: Subversive Strategies, Heretical Inquisition, and Shifting Subjectivities in Vernacular Middle English and Anglo-French Poetry." PhD thesis, The Ohio State University, 2012. Open access at http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1354665293 (accessed January 23, 2023) 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 Secrecy and Fear in Confessional Discourse: Subversive Strategies, Heretical Inquisition, and Shifting Subjectivities in Vernacular Middle English and Anglo-French Poetry. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "My project engages vernacular theology from the perspective of Middle English secular literature, examining how authors shape the late medieval discourse of the mixed life affecting self and community, as well as textual production--the cultural effects of ascetics. I argue that the 'Clerk's Tale,' the 'Confessio Amantis,' and the 'Play Called Wisdom' imagine separate applications of Walter Hilton's 'Medled Liyf' (or mixed life) and evaluate living as a secular ascetic. I contend that contrary to theological and ecclesiastical texts, these writings acknowledge lay piety's ascetic impulse as a secular act, tentatively in the fourteenth century and then more boldly in the fifteenth century." [JGN 33.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stasik, Tamara Published Stasik, Tamara. "Forms of Living: Asceticism, Culture, and Articulating the "medeled liyf" in Late Medieval English Literature." PhD thesis, Indiana University, 2012. 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 Forms of Living: Asceticism, Culture, and Articulating the "medeled liyf" in Late Medieval English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F Published Yeager, R. F. "Gower in Winter: Last Poems." In The Medieval Python: The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones. Ed. Yeager, R. F and Takamiya, Toshiyuki. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 87-103. ISBN 9780230112674 Gower Subject Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Minor Latin Poetry Review Yeager questions an earlier reading of Gower's work, a commonly held perception regarding the poet's revelation at the end of CA that he--or Amans/"John Gower"--is an old man. Though a literary "masterstroke" (to borrow C. S. Lewis' term), this admission could strain credibility, for in 1386--"the usually accepted date . . . for the completion of the Confessio" (90)--the poet would only have been in his mid-40s or mid-50s. Yeager here asks "at what age" Gower could "have begun to speak of himself as old" and still be taken seriously (91). Even as early as 1380 he was beginning to develop for himself the literary persona of a man of "great age." The reference to age then, and again in CA, however, could "have been intended, and understood, altogether differently from how we commonly assess it nowadays: not . . . as doddering incapacity . . . but rather as achieved sagacity" (92). It is through the wisdom of age that Gower could aspire to offer advice to his "patron," the 19-year-old Richard II. Of course the effect of emphasizing that orientation, as Yeager remarks, may be "to play down . . . the framing fiction of love . . . and to configure Gower's poem as primarily political" (92). Alternatively, however, one may argue that the work's political power rests upon Gower's capacity to speak in not just one, but two languages, those of a mature wisdom and, as initially more appealing to a youthful king, of love. The conflict between these two languages is sustained through the work. It is reflected in Amans' "Debat and gret perplexete" near the end (VIII. 2190), and though it appears finally to be resolved when he or "John Gower" walks away, seemingly cured of his love sickness and ready to "act his age," it lives on in the poet's later "self-portraitures," specifically in several short Latin poems that he wrote at about the time he married Agnes Groundolf, in 1398. In "Est amor," he thus applies to himself the oxymora of love he had treated negatively earlier in his career, intimating, Yeager suggests, "a degree of inner turmoil seldom associated with our carefully, fostered image of the old, moralist poet" (93). "Ecce patet sensus," Yeager further remarks, "is similarly anguished": in Gower's words, "O human nature, which always has war within itself, / Of body and soul, both seeking the same authority." This poem sustains that conflict and still comes "to a perfectly plausible, though rather tortured, conclusion" (94). But by the end of his career, Yeager notes, Gower has evidently moved beyond this question, perhaps having found in marriage, as he himself suggests, a "rule of morality / Which makes it sacred in the world for those who are to be saved" (93). Now in several late poems (1400-02)--one an epistle dedicating the VC and CrT to Archbishop Arundel, and another, "Quicquid homo scribat," a short poem appended to those works--the aged Gower focuses on aspects of his physical decline. Again these allusions form a literary device, one that here allows the poet to excuse himself from further comment on the conflict now emerging because of questionable actions undertaken by his new king, Henry IV. Yeager suggestively concludes that the poet's "simple plea to 'love each other'. . . is strikingly anti-Lancastrian (albeit not un-Gowerian), but it could easily emanate, not incongruously, from the pen of a deeply religious and reflective older man recently wed, who was beginning to think differently about the new state faction" (97). [Kurt Olsson. Copyright JGN 31.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower in Winter: Last Poems. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Palgrave Macmillan, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter Published Nicholson, Peter. "Gower's Manuscript of the 'Confessio Amantis'." In The Medieval Python: The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones. Ed. Yeager, R. F and Takamiya, Toshiyuki. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 75-86. ISBN 9780230112674 Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Review Nicholson challenges what he himself had argued in an important 1987 essay, that Gower played a minimal role in the production of manuscript copies of the CA. Here basing his argument on a new comparison of two early manuscripts--Oxford, Bodleian Library, Fairfax 3 (F) and Bodley 902 (A)--Nicholson seeks to provide "a closer and more precise idea of what Gower's prototype manuscript looked like and of the ways in which the poet prepared his manuscript for copying" (76). Each of these manuscripts was copied by three separate scribes. The copies of the middle section, virtually in its entirety (fols. 22- 81 in F, and fols. 21-80 in A), are remarkably similar, lining up "precisely column for column" (p. 76) in two 46-line columns per page. Neither manuscript is taken from the other, however, but "copied from a common exemplar" (77). The visual presentation in this section, ordered to reflect Gower's conceptual organization of his material, suggests his involvement: major new divisions are moved to the top of columns, for example, and major and minor divisions are distinguished and announced by initials of appropriately varying size. The third section is different. This portion of the poem, which Gower continued to revise, is less finished, and in the copies, there is "less correspondence of arrangement to structure" (79). The first section is different again. Nicholson suggests that it was originally in as finished a state as section two, but later "disturbances . . . made the scribes' intervention necessary" (82). The decision to include illustrations, for example, was not part of the original plan, and their eventual inclusion in different number, size, and location in the copies affected the 46-line arrangement in each. Thus, though the texts in this portion of the poem are, for the most part, aligned, occasional differences are telling. Whereas A sometimes moved marginalia into the text and left blank lines at the bottom of some pages, F did neither. This scribe "not only fills up every line of the available space . . . but works to align new sections of the poem with the first line of the column whenever possible, and he does so by supplying new lines of English text" (83). The precise number of needed lines could only have been ascertained during the process of copying, and Nicholson persuasively argues that these passages were most likely composed by Gower. Ultimately, then, it appears that the poet worked "collaboratively" with his early scribe(s) to effect a presentation that matches nuances of his conceptual design. This is a closely argued paper, and Nicholson is to be applauded for venturing to re-examine the evidence, and on that basis to question and ultimately revise his earlier findings. [Kurt Olsson. Copyright JGN 31.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Manuscript of the 'Confessio Amantis'. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Palgrave Macmillan, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The Biblical version of the story of Jephte and his daughter, Yeager notes, contains little register of emotion--a bare reference to the father rending his garments, which in context might indicate either his horror or his grief--and the loss that is foregrounded is less that of her life than that of her inability ever to bear children. Yeager examines the brief allusion to the story, as an analogue to Virginia's plight, in Chaucer's 'Physician's Tale' and both Gower's retelling of the story in the CA and the accompanying illustration in Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.126 in order to define the very different sense of both loss and pain in the medieval versions. Chaucer's is made problematic by the possibly conflicting purposes of the Physician and the poet, but the description of the two characters' reactions in the key scene reveals an interest in their pain and suffering as "worthy of exploration" (51) in themselves, and consistent with that purpose, Virginia's evocation of her predecessor highlights both her innocence and her powerlessness, as she is not given the period of reprieve in order to bewail her loss. Gower's too has two narrators, Genius and the poet. For Genius, it is a tale of sloth in love, and he makes little more of the daughter's feelings than the biblical account. In her plea for time in order to "bewepe / Hir maidenhood, which sche to kepe / So longe hath had and noght beset / Wherof hir lusti youthe is let" (CA IV.1565-68), he finds an appeal to a "peculiarly modern-seeming, existential angst" for which he invokes Kafka as a model: "Jephte's daughter's tragedy in Gower's hands share elements with Gregor Samsa's: following the best social code, she has preserved her virginity as her years mounted toward a marriage and motherhood that, suddenly and irrationally, are snatched beyond her reach, leaving her body transmogrified and her self without purpose" (53). In their separate reactions to what the father must do in the lines that follow, each also "raises unavoidable questions about the purposes, if any, of suffering, in a universe that may or may not be just" (54). The illustration in the Pierpont Morgan manuscript is equally alert to the "larger, polyvalent exploration of suffering, both overt and suppressed" of Gower's tale and the "emotional complexity" of the father's situation (55). Both Chaucer and Gower thus demonstrate a keen understanding of suffering that goes beyond mere bodily pain. Their works, Yeager concludes, "manifest a developing social awareness of the emotional as a broad landscape, dim as yet but noticeably broadening, and deepening to account for complexity of feelings irrelevant to questions of sin and salvation yet too intense, and too universally present, to be left any longer unexplored in art" (57). [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Gower and Chaucer on Pain and Suffering: Jephte's Daughter in the Bible, the 'Physician's Tale' and the Confessio Amantis." In Knowledge and Pain. Ed. Cohen, Esther, and Toker, Leona, and Consonni, Manuela, and Dror, Otniel E. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012, pp. 43-62. ISBN 9789042035829 Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Chaucer on Pain and Suffering: Jephte's Daughter in the Bible, the 'Physician's Tale' and the Confessio Amantis. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rodopi, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This special issue of ES: Revista de Filologia Inglesa 33.1 (2010) contains ten papers from the Second International Congress of the John Gower Society in Valladolid, Spain in July 2011, each, as the editors explain in their introduction, situating Gower's work in one of the contexts relevant to its interpretation. [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Filardo-Llamas, Laura, Brian Gastle, Marta Gutiérrez Rodríguez, and Ana Saez-Hidalgo, eds. Published Filardo-Llamas, Laura, Brian Gastle, Marta Gutiérrez Rodríguez, and Ana Saez-Hidalgo, eds. "Gower in Context(s): Scribal, Linguistic, Literary and Socio-historical Readings." ES: Revista de Filologia Inglesa , 33 (1). Valladolid: Universidad, 2012 ISBN 9788484487258 ISSN 0210-9689 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 Gower in Context(s): Scribal, Linguistic, Literary and Socio-historical Readings Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Universidad, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Jamison, Carol. Published Jamison, Carol. "John Gower's Shaping of 'The Tale of Constance' as an Exemplum contra of Envy." In Richard G. Newhauser and Susan J, Ridyard, eds., Sin in Medieval and Early Modern Culture: The Tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The University of York / York Medieval Press, 2012, Pp. 239–59. ISBN 9781903153413. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review Considering several versions of the Constance story, Jamison argues that in the Constance section of Book II of CA Gower pointedly replaced Trivet's political concerns, eschewed Chaucer's high rhetoric, and, shortening and simplifying the known narrative, produced an exemplum of Charity as a remedy to Envy. Focusing on characterization, Jamison argues that the sultan's mother "exemplifies envy" (247), that the Northumbrians charitably respond to the virtue in Constance, an embodiment of Charity itself, and that the knight who threatens Constance "reflects the first branch of envy that Genius mentions, sorrow over another man's joy" (250). Constance's marriage to King Allee "emphasizes the triumph of charity over envy," Jamison tells us, and the execution of Domilde "evokes the sin of envy" through fire imagery (252). Other details of Gower's version evince the generative power of charity in familial bonds and neighborly love. While consistently contrasting Gower's version and its analogues, Jamison also indicates how his tale "plays against the other tales and commentary in Book Two" (242), especially "The Tale of Constantine and Sylvester," to produce an exemplum pro Charity and contra Envy. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 37.1]. 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's Shaping of "The Tale of Constance" as an Exemplum contra of Envy. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review For Coley, "representing the spoken word within a poetic text was always an act charged with political potential" (5). Following this line of thought, and after dispensing with Macaulay's three recensions in favor of a poem of two versions, one Ricardian, the other Lancastrian, he makes three main points, about the "Confessio Amantis" in his fifth chapter, and sketches a fourth: 1) "Whereas the Ricardian version balances its references to speech and writing in a manner consonant with the remainder of the poem, the Lancastrian version emphasizes the written word to the exclusion of spoken language, suggesting a conscious and rather startling deemphasis of speech" (156). 2) The reason for this, Coley argues, appears especially in Book 7, in the discussion of Rhetorique, which Gower wrote ca. 1389 in order to model what a commanding king ought to sound like for a Richard struggling with public and private doubts about his masculinity and precarious authority (esp. 163-80). 3) With the usurpation, the anxiety of the new king changes to overcoming his illegitimacy. The Lancastrian strategy being to claim that Henry IV "recovered" the kingdom from the near-disaster of Richard's reign, Gower in his post-1399 version emphasizes the memorious nature of writing and of books, which function to recover the past for the present and future (180-89). The sketched fourth point is the suggestion, indirectly offered by way of concluding the chapter, that Gower made his Lancastrian changes during and shortly following Henry's coup (190). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Coley, David K. Published Coley, David K. The Wheel of Language: Representing Speech in Middle English Poetry, 1377-1422 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis 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 The Wheel of Language: Representing Speech in Middle English Poetry, 1377-1422 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012). Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This paper addresses a scholarly lacuna identified by Thomas Cable (1998: 39), who has complained of the "lack of phonological and metrical concern in studies whose subject was Gower." Werthmüller begins by assuming that, in the bulk of Gower's English verse, grammatically-determined rhythm (here referred to as "linguistic stress") aligns with metre. She then analyses a range of forms to show how Gower deploys both Germanic and Romance patterns of emphasis within his iambic measure. Especially useful in this regard are a pair of tables (pp.429-450). In the first, Werthmüller lists a set of words that she considers tended to be stressed on the second syllable in Gower's English (e.g. "desese," "merveille," "fortune," "nature," etc.), in the manner of French, contrasting with a second set of forms where Germanic-style stress on the first syllable seems commonly to have been used, even when the forms in question are etymologically derived from French (e.g. "vertu," "meschief," "tresoun"). It is interesting that all these usages seem to have been prototypical rather than invariable; "merveille," for instance, seems to have received stress on the second element in 84.6% of tokens, but that still leaves 15.4% of occurrences with stress on the first syllable, while "conseil," by contrast, was front-stressed in 75.7% of occasions, but stressed on the second syllable in 24.3% of tokens. And the form "peril," a fairly common noun in the CA, seems to have stressed equally frequently (50:50) in both ways. Some contrasts are drawn with Chaucer's practice, e.g. with "batailles," where Gower it seems tends to stress the second element whereas Chaucer prototypically emphasises the first syllable. The author also makes some suggestive comments on Gower's conservative retention of –e (which she contrasts with perceived greater Chaucerian apocope), and on the appearance--albeit fairly limited--of prototypically "low-stress" words, e.g. "the," in positions where, metrically, strong stress might be expected. The paper is largely descriptive in its orientation, and, rather controversially, sets aside issues of poetic motivation for rhythmical variation against the metrical norm. It is avowedly a preliminary piece of work, flagging at the end the need for further research of this kind across the whole range of Middle English poetry: "It is my view that the serious scrutinisation of the interaction of metre/phonology on the one hand, and syntax on the other, can ensue only after this task had been at least partially completed by scholars of M[iddle] E[nglish]" (434). Reference: Cable, Thomas 1998. "Metrical similarities between Gower and certain sixteenth-century poets," in Robert F. Yeager (ed.), Re-visioning Gower (Asheville: Pegasus), 39-48. [JJS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Werthmüller, Gyöngyi. Published Werthmüller, Gyöngyi. "John Gower's Germanic and Romance English (A Phonological/Metrical Analysis)." Tanulmányok Nyelvtudományi Doktori Iskola, ed. Bárdosi Vilmos (Budapest: Eötvös Loránd University, 2012), 419-36. ISBN: 9789632843605. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower's Germanic and Romance English (A Phonological/Metrical Analysis). Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Book VII of the "Confessio Amantis" draws upon Brunetto Latini's "Li Livres dou Trésor" for its discussion of the divisions of knowledge, but whereas Latini organizes knowledge into theory, practice, and logic, Gower's division is theory, practice, and rhetoric. Newman's essay focuses upon this difference and argues that, for Gower, logic is subordinate to rhetoric because "logic has the same situatedness in human relations, and thus makes the same ethical claims on practitioners traditionally ascribed to rhetoric" (38). For Newman, Gower's view of logic is that it "is never simply an abstract intellectual activity or formal operation that produces stable meanings which exist independent of the discursive community in which it is practiced" (44). This approach to logic as inherently contextual, and not intrinsically truthful or "trewe and plein" (CA 7.1734) is especially problematic for Gower because logic's position as rhetorical is not necessarily apparent, which undermines its utility in legal, political, and theological arenas. As evidence, Newman analyzes several specific and subtle instances in the CA of syntactical ambiguity, especially passages employing double and triple negatives, that appear to undermine logic's authority. Newman's close readings are meticulous and provocative and rely upon subtle differences in the possible syntactical functions of specific words and constructions. In the final section of this essay, Newman suggests that Gower may have subordinated logic to rhetoric in order to "cast considerable doubt on the idea that logic might offer any more moral guidance than rhetoric" (51). Since logic is rhetorical, and therefore unstable, it may be one cause, he suggests somewhat speculatively, of the divisions in the Church Gower addresses in the CA (and elsewhere), including the schism. In support, Newman draws attention to parallels between the discussion of logic in Book 7 and the discussion of the schism in CA 1.1370-1374. [BWG. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Newman, Jonathan M. Published Newman, Jonathan M. "The Rhetoric of Logic in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' Book 7." Medievalia et Humanistica 38 (2012): 37-57. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis 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 The Rhetoric of Logic in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis" Book 7. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Rosenfeld offers a new way of seeing the sin of envy as particularly useful in understanding the "Confessio Amantis." Citing Chaucer's "Parson's Tale," the "Fasciculus Morum," and "On the Seven Deadly Sins," she explains how envy in medieval penitential writing is distinct from other sins because it is an "inwardly experienced sin that is also necessarily social" (84), and because it is neither "directed toward the pursuit of pleasure" nor is pleasure its "instigating cause" (85) as it is with other sins. Rather, "envy is marked by a viciousness that inheres in a disposition of antipathy toward a neighbor's experience of happiness and sorrow. Envy thus demands a shift in morality from a focus on the discipline of desire, the seeking after 'true' pleasures, to a focus on one's proper relationship to the painful and joyful experiences of others." This shift is "one of the motivating concerns" of Gower's poem, Rosenfeld argues, exploring how envy is "a central problem" (86) of the CA and how the sin is remedied through compassion, pity, or charity that is the means to achieve the common good. Tales from Book II, of course, are important here--Polyphemus "betrays a viciousness beyond a desire for personal profit" (88) when he kills Acis in envy, for example, and in the "Tale of the Travelers and the Angel" the "unique viciousness" of the sin "is marked not by misplaced desire but by an opposing affective reaction to the pleasures and pains of others, no matter the specific goods involved" (90). As a form of charity and the remedy of envy, compassion "involves mimetic identification with the pain and pleasure of others," while "envy is marked by both failed and successful mimesis" (90), Rosenfeld tells us, helping to align several other tales with her thesis: "Amphitrion's feigning the voice of Geta" (91), the brass trumpet of Boniface's usurpation of Celestine, and the "imitated voices and counterfeit communication" (92) in the "Tale of Constance" all manifest envy in or through distorted mimesis, while the account of Nebuchadnezzar and the "Tale of Three Questions" (both in Book I) are "interested in the process by which people shift from dismissal of others because of perceived difference to recognition of likeness" (93) that engages the "golden rule" (92) and effects compassion. Genius offers the "Tale of Constantine and Sylvester" to illustrate "Charité / Which is the moder of Pité" (II.3173-74), a tale which "carefully unpacks the moment in which compassion is felt" (95), when Constantine, awakened by the lamentation of the mothers and children to be sacrificed for his sake, recognizes the likeness of all humans and leads eventually to a "Christian empire through love's defeat of envy" (97). This does not, Rosenfeld observes, resolve all the problems of worldly distortion of proper ethical values; Constantine's elite social status can be seen to compromise the moral value of his compassion, and Gower's allusion to the "Donation of Constantine" (97) makes clear that the temporal church compromises the spiritual community. Yet, the very operation of exemplarity depends upon likeness across human social and economic boundaries, Rosenfeld tells us, much as does compassion, and in this way, Gower shows in form and theme that "the ethical subject must desire the common good, and must first understand what it means to have things in 'common' rather than first to understand what is good" (99). Moreover, Rosenfeld concludes, "For Gower, charity is the recognition that one's relationship to others should not be determined by relative possessions, but by shared emotion borne of the realization that each has only one real earthly possession--life itself" (100). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rosenfeld, Jessica. Published Rosenfeld, Jessica. "Compassionate Conversions: Gower's Confessio Amantis and the Problem of Envy." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42 (2012): 83-105. 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 Compassionate Conversions: Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and the Problem of Envy. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Probably the best place to begin Sierra's essay is with the last two sentences, which state (more or less) its point, and also provide a taste of its style: "This is why the Portuguese translators use the Confessio's Latin frame but do not explicitly translate it. Their translation shows that the authority of a work is not derived from its meaning or relationship to a tradition but to its ability to be reproduced, and so their work portrays the Confessio's Latin frame only in so far as it confirms the logic present in Gower's English--a textual logic that does not simply wish to narrate 'authorial' truth from some abstract meaning but which also seeks to imbue the process of narrative reproducibility with the authority of utterance itself" (450). What he apparently means by this is worked out in an elaborate comparison of the Vulgate version (which he calls "Jerome's 'Vulgata'") of the punishment of Nebuchadnezzar with Gower's and with selected passages from the Portuguese translation of the CA (435-48): the Portuguese translator(s)--Sierra prefers the plural--took the Latin apparatus for part of the poem, and the poem as a compilation, not as an "authorial" product, which gave them permission to adopt an "authorial" approach to translation themselves. They adapted what Gower wrote, that is, to their own way of reading the poem, as well as into their own language. The Castilian translation, in some fashion, fades from attention not far into the essay. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sierra, Juan David. Published Sierra, Juan David. "Readers as Authors: Reproducing Authority in the Iberian Translations of John Gower's Confessio Amantis." eHumanista 22 (2012): 429-53. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Manuscripts and Textual Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Readers as Authors: Reproducing Authority in the Iberian Translations of John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Ellis, Robert. Published Ph. D. Dissertation. Queen Mary, University of London, 2012. Open access at https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/8821 (accessed January 29, 2023). 2 vols.; continuous pagination. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz Review Ellis's dissertation explores the "anxieties concerning the notoriety of empty words" as they are evident in "urban writings" produced in London in the 1380s and 1390s, works not only about "idle talk--such as 'janglynge,' slander, and other sins of the tongue--but also about the deficiencies of official discourses which are partisan, fragmentary and susceptible to contradiction and revision" (3). His texts are varied--"Letter Book-H," various petitions, city records, Richard Maidstone's "Concordia," three tales by Chaucer ("Cook's Tale," "Squire's Tale," and Manciple's Tale), John Clanvowe's "Boke of Cupide," and the tales of Phebus and Cornide and of Orestes from Gower's CA. Generally, Ellis tells us, these texts reveal "specific responses to the prevalence of empty words in the city, while also reflecting more broadly on the remarkable cultural, linguistic, social, and political developments witnessed in this period." His treatment of Gower's two tales (pp. 162-97)--read alongside the "Manciple's Tale and accounts of the execution of London cordwainer, John Constantyn--focuses on how "words incite violence, and the ways in which words are used to give meaning to that violence" (157). Concerned with the tales as exempla and engaging the role of silence, particularly the silence (and silencing) of women, Ellis discloses how the seemingly straightforward messages of the tales are problematized in several ways: by proximate tales and/or attendant Latin glosses in the case of "Cornide," and, further, by the thematics of fame and notoriety and the difficulty of controlling discourse in "Orestes." In Ellis's reading, Gower's tales reveal interest in and anxiety about "authorial control over the fate of tidings" (191), and they reflect the poet's ongoing concern with "revision and reinvention" (197), which, he demonstrates, is refracted in the figure of Clytemnestra in "Orestes" and in Gower's later treatment of her in his "Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz." Volume II of Ellis's dissertation comprises texts (with photographic facsimiles) and translations of the bureaucratic materials he discusses in volume I. [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 "Verba Vana": Empty Words in Ricardian London. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review A CD ROM featuring readings by Brian W. Gastle, Clara Pascual-Argente, and Tiago Viúla de Faria of the "Confessio Amantis" 2888-*3114 in (respectively) Middle English, Castilian, and Portuguese. The accompanying book includes an introduction detailing Gower's life and work by Sáez-Hidalgo and Yeager in contemporary English, with translations into modern Spanish and Portuguese. The readings are accompanied by the selected CA text, presented in Middle English from the edition of G. C. Macaulay, the Castilian ("Confesión de amante") from that of Carlos Alvar, and the Portuguese ("Confisyon de Amante") from the edition of Antonio Cortijo Ocaña. Luis Delgado, perhaps Spain's foremost performing expert on medieval music, provides appropriate musical accompaniment, playing a variety of period instruments in arrangements both original and historic. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sáez-Hidalgo, Ana, ed, Yeager, R. F., ed. Published Sáez-Hidalgo, Ana, and R. F. Yeager, eds. Royal Entertainments: The Poetry of John Gower in the Fifteenth Century (English, Portuguese, and Castilian Courts). Valladolid: International John Gower Society, 2012. 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 Royal Entertainments: The Poetry of John Gower in the Fifteenth Century (English, Portuguese, and Castilian Courts). Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Despite the use of "Gowerian" in its title, Obermeier's essay has relatively little to do with Gower's works. The "Ricardian Context" to which she refers, however, is her presentation of indications of Richard II's despotism during his reign and--much the bulk of the essay--argument that Chaucer's "Manciple's Prologue and Tale" comprises a veiled critique of Ricardian tyranny, with Apollo representing Richard and the crow's punishment signifying Chaucer's awareness of the need for self-censorship and, by extension, a warning to Gower to do the same. Building on her previous discussions of censorship and self-criticism in Chaucer's Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women" and his Retraction in "The Canterbury Tales," Obermeier explores several complex ways in which Ovid's poems in exile underlie, she contends, Chaucer's notions of royal power and poetic caution in ManPT. Almost as a coda, and quoting James Simpson at some length on Ricardian and Henrician Ovidianism ("Breaking the Vacuum: Ricardian and Henrician Ovidianism." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29 (1999), pp. 325-355), Obermeier observes a similar "power struggle with an Ovidian root" (95) in Richard's command that Gower write "Som newe thing" in the original Prologue of the "Confessio Amantis." Further, quoting Gower's "O deus immense" and observing its second-person-singular advice to kings, Obermeier accepts R. F. Yeager's suggestion that the composition of the poem was at least begun "during Richard's reign," and therefore, Obermeier adds, Chaucer's warning against reporting "tydynges," false or true, in the "Manciple's Tale" "could have been meant for his friend Gower, who might have been too bold for Chaucer in this authorial approach" to royalty (98). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Obermeier, Anita. Published Obermeier, Anita. "The Censorship Trope in Geoffrey Chaucer's Manciple's Tale as Ovidian Metaphor in a Gowerian and Ricardian Context." In Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel, eds. Author, Reader, Book: Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press; 2012). Pp. 80-105. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Minor Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Censorship Trope in Geoffrey Chaucer's "Manciple's Tale" as Ovidian Metaphor in a Gowerian and Ricardian Context. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower figures only once, but interestingly, in Van Dussen's study of Lollard/Hussite connections, primarily in the fifteenth century. Recently discovered in Prague, Knihovna Metropolitni kapituly MS H. 15 are three eulogies to Queen Anne, copied on site by an anonymous Bohemian visiting her Westminster tomb, in front of which he notes they hung. The third of these, "Nobis natura florem," Van Dussen attributes to Richard Maidstone, rejecting Gower's authorship in the process (26-27). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Van Dussen, Michael. Published Van Dussen, Michael. From England to to Bohemia: Heresy and Communication in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 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 From England to to Bohemia: Heresy and Communication in the Later Middle Ages. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Nafde, Aditi. Published Nafde, Aditi. Deciphering the Manuscript Page: The "Mise-en-Page" of Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve Manuscripts. D.Phil Dissertation. University of Oxford, 2012. viii, 268 pp.; 11 illus. Dissertation Abstracts International C73.08 and C81.07(E). Fully accessible at https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b2c67783-b797-494a-b792-368c14d1fe49. Abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Review From Nafde's abstract: This thesis "offers close analysis of the 'mise-en-page' of the manuscripts of three central authors: Chaucer's, Gower's, and Hoccleve's manuscripts [which] were . . . produced when scribal methods for creating the literary page were still unformed. Previous studies have focused on the localised readings produced by single scribes, manuscripts, or authors, offering a limited examination of broader trends. This study offers a wider comparison . . . , analysing the layout of seventy-six manuscripts [twenty-six of Gower's Confessio Amantis], including borders, initials, paraphs, rubrics, running titles, speaker markers, glosses and notes, [and arguing] that scribes were deeply concerned with creating a manuscript page specifically to showcase texts of poetry. The introduction outlines current scholarship on 'mise-en-page' and defines the scribe as one who offers an individual response to the text on the page within the context of the inherited, commercial, and practical practices of layout. The three analytical chapters address the placement of the features of 'mise-en-page' in each of the seventy-six manuscripts, each chapter offering [one of three] contrasting manuscript situations. Chapter 1 analyses the manuscripts of Chaucer, who left no plan for the look of his page, causing scribes to make decisions on layout that illuminate fifteenth-century scribal responses to literature. These are then compared to the manuscripts of Gower in Chapter 2, directly or indirectly supervised by the poet, which display rigorous uniformity in their layout. This chapter argues that scribes responded in much the same way, despite the strict control over meaning. Chapter 3 focuses on Hoccleve's autograph manuscripts which are unique in demonstrating authorial control over layout. This chapter compares the autograph to the non-autograph manuscripts to argue that scribal responses differed from authorial intentions. . . . Focussing on the 'mise-en-page,' this thesis . . . mount[s] a substantial challenge to current perceptions that poetic manuscripts were laid out in order to assist readers' understanding of the meaning of the texts they contain. Instead, it argues that though there was a concern with representing the nuances of poetic meaning, often scribal responses to poetry were bound up with presenting poetic form." Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Deciphering the Manuscript Page: The "Mise-en-Page" of Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve Manuscripts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bertolet describes a London fully embracing a newly mercantile present, which brings with it "all the temptations a rich market can provide." Drawing upon passages from the MO principally, the CA secondarily, and the VC occasionally, he demonstrates that for Gower as for Chaucer and Hoccleve, "the principal tensions in London focused on commerce--how it worked, who controlled it, how it was organized, and who was excluded from it" (both quotes from the foreword). Although the book is relatively short--150 pages, excluding bibliography and index--Bertolet covers a surprising amount of ground. Despite the relative narrowness of his title, his subject is in reality the sweep of London life, for in the city as portrayed here all were engaged in buying and selling, from the nobility to the street beggars to the rituals and practices of the church. To supplement his close reading of textual passages Bertolet produces copious evidence from cases entered into the London Letter-Books and the Plea and Memoranda Rolls. The reality of these vignettes helps shore up his larger, rather ambitious theoretical framework for which he relies primarily on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau and the recent economic studies of Christopher Dyer, Martha C. Howell and Lianna Farber. Ultimately this is a book less about literature qua literature than it is an excursion into psycho-social theory by way of poetic texts and economic archaeology. As such, it is hardly surprising to find Bertolet invoking Fernand Braudel or John Maynard Keynes--though altogether refreshing in these jargon-ridden days to discover Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen judiciously and thoughtfully employed alongside. The value of Bertolet's work for Gower studies lies in the particularity of his angle; it is likely to be a book much mined by others. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society JGN 32.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bertolet, Craig E Published Bertolet, Craig E. "Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and the Commercial Practices of Late Fourteenth-Century London." Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013 ISBN 9781409448426 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Vox Clamantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and the Commercial Practices of Late Fourteenth-Century London Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Ashgate, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The locus of Hsy's study is London, which he, like David Wallace, Ardis Butterfield, and others of late, casts as a city of many languages, a kind of crucible for "code-switching"--the kind of "shifting between different languages (or identifiable registers of any given language) . . . not only for pragmatic purposes but also for deliberately artistic ends: using different languages to develop distinct expressive registers, to stylize certain types of speech, or to evoke a vivid sense of place" (5-6). London's status as a city of languages rests on its prominence as a commercial hub; hence much of Hsy's focus like many of his examples derives from or connects with merchants and mercantile-driven enterprise (lawyers, guildsmen, the printer William Caxton, Chaucer, with emphasis on his commercial associations through the staple, etc.). In this regard, Hsy's book is a good companion to Craig Bertolet's "Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and the Commercial Practices of Late Fourteenth-Century London" (London: Ashgate, 2013)--a study Hsy acknowledges in a footnote (7-8, n. 12) that was at press simultaneous with his own. Indeed, Hsy and Bertolet discuss many of the same passages, especially from the MO, where Gower's sharpster Triche (Fraud) receives commentary from both, but importantly to different ends. Hsy's concern is invariably linguistic: he wants to show how Gower's (and Chaucer's, Caxton's, etc.) language works, where it comes from, who its target audience might have been: e.g., Hsy concludes a comparison of the Constance story in his second chapter, "Overseas Travel and Languages in Motion," as told by Trevet, Chaucer and Gower, noting that "by transforming Constance's story from a cleric's narrative into a merchant's tale, both poets find a new literary mode that exploits the transitory and fluid potential of language transversal" (73). In his third chapter, "Translingual Identities in John Gower and William Caxton," Hsy brings the poet and his first printer--also a polylingual--together in enlightening ways, as he sees them as similar spirits. He offers, he says, "a sustained assessment of Gower's polyglot persona and Caxton's literary ambitions . . . . Through first-person prologues and autobiographical excurses, Gower and Caxton develop innovative discourses for discussing cross-linguistic exchange and literary production, and each invests a considerable amount of thought into how his own translingualism informs an ever-shifting literary persona" (92). This chapter contains the extended discussion of the merchant section of the MO noted previously, and draws occasional examples from the CA, stressing the interplay of the Latin with the Middle English in both the verses and the commentaries, and helpfully reminding us that the great majority of Gower manuscripts (and none of those thought to devolve from his own likely oversight of an exemplar) are trilingual. Of particular interest also in this chapter is Hsy's close reading of Cinkante Balade XVII, pointing out the multiple valences Gower achieves with the shift from the lover's French to the lady's rejection of his suit in Middle English: "nay" (113). The example in many ways is a good one to stand for Hsy's larger purpose for the book--"to change our views of medieval writing" (209) from monolingual and nationalist to polylingual and transcultural. He writes of "nay": "Gower foregrounds the alterity of the lone English word spoken by a fictive French speaker, and he dramatizes this word's increasing estrangement from its original moment of utterance. Through this ensuing narrative, the poet suggests the corresponding unease an English speaker experiences when acquiring (and using) a second language like French, a tongue that is at once very close to the speaker but perpetually eluding his grasp" (113). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hsy, Jonathan Horng Published Hsy, Jonathan Horng. "Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature." Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013 ISBN 9780814212295 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Cinkante Balades Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Ohio State University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Meindl is the English translator of Maria Wickert's "Studien zu John Gower" (1953), which, among other things, offered the first important critical analysis of Gower's VC. As he prepares a second, revised edition of his translation, Meindl offers here an essay that is part reminiscence (of his 1970 visit to Wickert's husband), part biography (of Wickert's career and the writing of her ground-breaking work), and part criticism, as he situates her work in the devastation and national self-analysis that followed Germany's defeat in World War II. The portion of Wickert's book that is still cited most often is her careful disentanglement of the different layers of composition of the VC. Meindl is more interested, however, in the reasons that she chose to write about the work and in the passages that she chose to single out for special attention, which stem, he argues, from Wickert's perception of the similarities between the setting in which Gower wrote and her own. "Like Gower, . . . Wickert had survived a time in which men had behaved like beasts, a nation that had long considered itself the heir of ancient Rome had been, like Troy, devastated, and, to use a metaphor often employed also by post-war German poets, a land and its institutions had been battered by a storm of epic proportions. Severe historical trauma led in the immediate post-war period to an investigation of the national psyche that insisted upon the acceptance of responsibility both collectively and individually" (13). Wickert, Meindl speculates, would have found Gower's blame of his nation's leaders, his weighing of individual responsibility for the calamities of his time, and his emphasis on penance and redemption particularly resonant with her own and her nation's experiences, and he credits her with "one small piece" (27) of her nation's recovery. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Meindl, Robert J Published Meindl, Robert J. "The Message of the Ruins: Reading Devastation." Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis 18 (2013), pp. 13-19. ISSN 1087-5557 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 The Message of the Ruins: Reading Devastation. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The entire CA, Shutters argues, offers "a complex set of meditations on how medieval Christian authors and readers might interpret the classical pagan past," for "Gower does not merely make use of classical source materials in the 'Confessio' but also ponders the limits of their usability" (39). "Whether or not the classical past is ethically usable to a Christian reader," she goes on to say, "requires historical reflection, as the reader must contemplate in what ways pagan antiquity is continuous with or discontinuous with late medieval cultural values" (42). Gower first raises the issue in his two different readings of Nebuchadnezzar's dream in the CA Prologue, but he leaves open the question of whether the reader ought to embrace the classical past or reject it. He makes the choice that the reader must make more explicit by offering "two discrete versions of the classical past" (48) in the stories he draws from the history of Rome and the history of Troy. Echoing Wetherbee, Shutters notes that for Gower, "Rome embodies concepts of social and political cohesion, and Roman leaders sacrifice personal interests for the common good," while Troy (quoting Wetherbee now) is "a world of individuals unified only by the preoccupations and besetting whims of knighthood" (48). Rome offers models of virtuous conduct, in love and elsewhere, or of the rejection of vice, while the Trojan figures in the poem are motivated only by their own erotic desires. "Rome and Troy are [also] markers of different relationships between the classical past and Gower's medieval present. Just as Rome represents cultural cohesion, it also represents historical cohesion. That is, Rome represents a version of the past that can be situated within its historical setting and then made continuous with the present. Troy, through its focus on individual, erotic pursuits, represents a decontextualized mode of relating to the past. The many Troy stories centering on erotic love in the 'Confessio' can achieve their attractiveness only when decontextualized from the larger history of the destruction of Troy. Once placed in their proper historical settings, these stories lead to Troy's downfall . . . . Thus, while Gower's Rome is located within history, his Troy is ahistorical in the sense that it its cut off from future events" (48-49). The most important of the "Trojan" figures in the poem is Venus (who is described in Book 5 as the object of worship of the Greeks but not of the Romans), "since erotic love is frequently the motivation for the chivalric adventures that Gower contrasts against the social institutions of Rome" (51), particularly, of course, in the tale of Paris and Helen. "Taken together, Venus and Troy operate as synecdoches for a classical past associated with erotic, individualistic pursuits that, when appropriately contextualized in their own time, result in tragedy and, when situated in Christian historiography, amount to a benighted, superseded era. Thus the 'Confessio' suggests that to avoid this seductive but ultimately sinful and destructive version of classical antiquity, the good reader must avoid extracting only those moments he or she likes from the wide tapestry of pagan legend and instead locate those moments within the 'longue durée' of both ecclesiastical and secular histories" (52). Yet Gower himself has failed to view the 'longue durée,' as he must have been aware, for instance in his refusal to acknowledge the direct historical link between Troy and Rome. "By using Rome and Troy to contain different versions of the classical past, Gower presents himself as a highly sophisticated reader and arranger of classical antiquity who nonetheless runs up against limits to the control he can impose on classical materials on account of the 'prior meanings' that they convey. . . . Thus Gower writes himself into something of a quandary, which results from his own interpretive practices" (53). He creates two different ways to extract himself from this quandary in the poem's two conclusions. In the first, Venus rejects the narrator Gower, the opposite of what one might expect if the focus were on ethical behavior alone. In contrast to earlier readings, Shutters argues that "the Venus who appears at the end of the 'Confessio' is not successfully incorporated by Christian interpretive strategies, but rather appears as a pagan love-goddess who evades and forecloses such strategies" (55). She is a constitutent of "a fantasy of a pagan past not under the Christian author's control and, as a result, it is a fantasy that complicates the relationship between ethics and history in the poem" (56). Her prompting of the narrator to reveal his actual name, "John Gower," "reverses the pattern established throughout the poem whereby the pleasures of Venus are associated with historical shortsightedness. In Book 8, Venus contextualizes 'Gower' within his own life history and reveals the folly of his pursuit of love." Though this encounter, "Gower draws attention to the relationship between Christian author and classical source materials, and by giving Venus the upper hand, Gower signals a shift in the dynamics that have governed this relationship throughout much of the poem. Venus's contextualizing of Amans as the aged 'Gower' applies not just to the author, however, but to the poem's audience as well. Due to the deep-seated homology between individual, human age and historical time, 'Gower' the old man is also 'Gower' the representative of the Christian era, that is, representative of the final era through which historical time would pass" (56). This "Gower" betrays a reluctance to leave Venus behind, and it is Venus herself who must instruct him "because he is advanced in age, in more than one sense of the term, residing in a pagan love court would be, for him, inappropriate" (58). Here "virtuous behavior is transformed from an ideology to an identity, and . . . this identity becomes a Christian identity cut off from the pagan past" (58). Venus's rejection of the narrator offers one "solution to the obstacles to ethical reading that the classical past raises in the Confessio" and can be seen as a "critique of [Gower's] own method" (61), but it is not the final word, since Gower himself, in offering the poem to his readers, does not leave the world of pagan antiquity behind. In the second conclusion, constituted by the closing lines, "Gower abandons identity-based difference, in which different perspectives and locations in history justify different codes of ethics between pagans and Christians, in favor of ideological difference: Christian love is right, erotic love is wrong, and one must choose between them" (62). "Throughout the Confessio," Shutters writes in conclusion, "Gower rehearses fantasies of continuity and inclusion that link Christians and pagans, but he also rehearses fantasies of leave-taking and rupture, as we see at the end of the poem. Venus's expulsion of Gower rehearses the fantasy that a classical source might inform the Christian author when he needs to extract himself from pagan antiquity, while Gower's choice to leave love behind rehearses the fantasy that the author can cut himself off from non-Christian pursuits. Disengaging from the classical past might seem like an easy solution to the problems that pagan antiquity posed to medieval authors, yet the ending of the Confessio suggests that figuring out how and why medieval Christians did not relate to pagan antiquity was as complex as figuring out how and why they did. In both endeavors, questions regarding ethics and history were at stake" (64-65). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Shutters, Lynn Published Shutters, Lynn. "Confronting Venus: Classical Pagans and Their Christian Readers in John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Chaucer Review 48 (2013), pp. 38-65. ISSN 0009-2002 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 Confronting Venus: Classical Pagans and Their Christian Readers in John Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Penn State University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 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 Yeager's essay is about everything that has happened since he and others have labored to get Gower "onto the grid," and he offers the story as a model for others who seek canonical and classroom status for less well-known writers and who, to switch the metaphor, pursue that particular Holy Grail of inclusion in the "Norton Anthology." The events that Yeager recounts here will be familiar to those of us who have been following Gower studies over the years: the publication of the bibliographies, translations, and concordances; the famous MLA session in 1981 that led to the formation of the John Gower Society (and to the creation of the journal in which this review appears); the sessions at Kalamazoo; the institution of the Publications of the John Gower Society through D.S. Brewer; and the new resources that have been made possible by the advent of the Internet. For more recent converts to the cause, this essay will serve as a lesson on the shoulders on which they stand; and while one cannot help being reminded of how central Yeager himself has been to the entire effort, his story is also one of collaboration and of the many hands that have contributed to the seriousness and energy that characterize Gower studies today. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Off the Grid for Forty Years: Bringing John Gower into the Classroom." Pedagogy 13 (2013), pp. 357-70. ISSN 1531-4200 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 Off the Grid for Forty Years: Bringing John Gower into the Classroom. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Arner, Lynn Published Arner, Lynn. "Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace after 1381." State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013 ISBN 9780271058931 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review Arner's study makes two large claims. First, as she states in her introduction, she "examines the transmission of Greco-Roman and European literature into English while the ability to read was burgeoning among significant numbers of men and women from the nonruling classes in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England. This transmission required a dissemination of cultural authority and offered a radically democratizing potential for accessing, interpreting, and deploying learned texts"(p. 2). More specifically her focus is on the numerous and disparate readership among the "upper strata of nonruling urban classes," defined as "the most affluent and powerful layers of the population, beneath the wealthy merchant class, in the approximately thirty largest cities and towns in late medieval England. Regarding London: this category refers, in part, to the rank and file of the greater companies . . . artisans and retailers, including . . . prosperous shopkeepers . . . the master craftsmen and . . . other leading members of lesser companies, including…trained employees in their respective crafts [but excludes] servants or waged laborers." (p. 23) Culling from an array of published sources, in chapter 1 she develops a case that the ability of this group to read English texts has been underestimated--and that these precisely were the major audience imagined by Gower for the CA and Chaucer for the "Legend of Good Women," the text Arner (who is also concerned with how these poems illuminate both poets' treatments of gender) examines by way of example. Indeed, it is to reach these wealthier readers that the former chose English for the CA. Her second claim is that "while Geoffrey Chaucer's and John Gower's writings were key conduits of [Greco-Roman and European literature] into the language of the populace . . . [their] poetry attempted to circumscribe the democratizing potential of this new knowledge and worked to grant certain socioeconomic groups leverage in public affairs, all the while promoting . . . dependency for others . . . . By doing so, [Chaucer's and Gower's] writings participated in determining, at the sites of vernacular poetry and poetics, who could legitimately contribute to the production of knowledge in late medieval England." (p. 2) For Arner, Chaucer and Gower "'both . . . were from the ruling classes' [emphasis hers]." (p. 22); their works transmitted values and "conversance with the Greco-Roman literary tradition" (p. 153) to the "upper strata of nonruling urban classes." These benefitted from their poetry, even as the premises of the work effectively excluded, to variable degrees, the less privileged members of society. Arner (albeit in language often derived from Pierre Bourdieu and Karl Marx), as do many others, argues that Chaucer and Gower had different views of what poetry ought to do: the former "offers an art that guarantees the poet's right to liberal self-expression, without repercussions or accountability. Chaucer engages in cultural pastimes as a game, demonstrating casualness, mannered elegance, and statutory assurance, characteristics that . . . indicate a mastery of culture and signal membership in the elite" (p. 157); and the latter "proceeds as if poetry is a means of social reformation and a vehicle for social engineering." (p. 158) In an interesting rethinking of the more familiar litany of "pedantic Gower/aesthetic Chaucer," Arner finds in Gower's work an "agency" for lower classes via the facility of language (chapter 3); Chaucer, on the other hand, intentionally undermined both this acknowledgement of peasant agency and also Gower's insistence that poetry engage in socially responsible ways. Thus Chaucer "helped to thwart one of the most politically progressive possibilities of Gower's poetry and of similar literature in late medieval England." (p. 160) These arguments of Arner's are sharply rendered in her consideration of time in chapter 3. Despite these different attitudes toward poetry, in Arner's view Chaucer's and Gower's work nevertheless achieves the same end: "English literature from its nascence did not offer a democratization of culture but represented a new means of constructing authority and imposing social control as a form of education. Lacking an appropriate pedigree to become the legitimate inheritors of this cultural tradition, readers from the nonruling classes were still refused entry into the inner sanctum of culture." (p. 160). [RFY. Copyright. JGN 33.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace after 1381 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pennsylvania State University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Arner writes: "Deploying conventions from medieval courtesy manuals, Gower's "Visio Anglie" assigned varied degrees of authority to Englishmen and women at the bodily level, a system of signification in which food, physical appearances, and overall comportment were key elements. Echoing courtesy manuals, the "Visio" constructed corporal marks of distinction, interpreted physical signifiers as indices of people's inner character and value, and classified bodies into social groups accordingly. Offering understandings of civility that began with codes of bodily conduct and that expanded to claims about the cosmos, the "Visio"'s corporal regulatory system promoted particular understandings of citizenship and governance that sought to protect the socioeconomic hierarchy in late fourteenth-century England. According to the "Visio," the insurgents in 1381 not only thwarted bodily classifications and threatened to liquidate the attendant systems of social stratification, but they eroded more global differences that subtended civilization itself. Constituting a force of annihilation, Gower's rebels took up and occupied a queer position--not unlike that articulated by Lee Edelman--that imperiled both health and futurity, ultimately demonstrating the need to further disenfranchise and control the non-ruling classes in the wake of the English Rising of 1381." [JGN 33.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Arner, Lynn Published Arner, Lynn. "Civility and Gower's 'Visio Anglia'." Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media 1.1 (2013), n.p. Article 5. Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Civility and Gower's 'Visio Anglia' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Only Bahr's final chapter, "Rewriting the Past, reassembling the Realm: The Trentham Manuscript of John Gower" (pp. 209-54), deals with Gower, and is very little changed from his article, "Reading Codicological Form in John Gower's Trentham Manuscript," previously published in "Studies in the Age of Chaucer" 33 (2011): 219-62, and reviewed in JGN 31.1 (2012) by PN. [RFY. Copyright. JGN 33.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bahr, Arthur W Published Bahr, Arthur W. "Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London." Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013 ISBN 978-0226924915 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 Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Chicago Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Barrington writes: "Gower's Trentham manuscript allows us to think about pre-modern disabilities in three ways. First, because it encourages Henry IV to restore the body politic disabled by Richard II, we can see the manuscript as presenting itself as a prosthesis able to compensate, even cure, Henry's illegitimate claims to the throne. Here, disability is a condition that needs to be eradicated at best, repaired at least. Second, because the Trentham manuscript reports Gower's blindness, we can examine how it registers that disability. As "Henrici quarti primus" makes clear, Gower's disability allows him to assert his own legitimacy as king's advisor. Here, disability is a means by which Gower asserts his authority. Finally, because the manuscript duplicates poems found elsewhere in markedly substantially versions, we can query how editorial decisions have marked it as a deformed text. Here, apparent disability disappears when digitizing eliminates the need for editorial choices." [JGN 33.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Barrington, Candace Published Barrington, Candace. "The Trentham Manuscript as Broken Prosthesis: Wholeness and Disability in Lancastrian England." Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media 1.1 (2013), n.p. Article 4. 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 Trentham Manuscript as Broken Prosthesis: Wholeness and Disability in Lancastrian England Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Griffiths presents a detailed description of a previously unknown manuscript of selections from CA, for which she is not able to provide the present location because the owner wishes to remain anonymous. (Shall it therefore be known as the "Griffiths MS"?) It consists of 17 folios in double columns of 34 lines. Griffiths describes the hand as "an early form of Bastard Secretary with anglicana influence" (245). She dates it to the first quarter of the fifteenth century (244) and localizes it in the area "around London, Kent, and Sussex" (246). Textually it is most like Royal MS 18.C.xxii (Macaulay's R), a manuscript of Macaulay's first recension, group c. It is unique among manuscripts of extracts from the poem in presenting only a single tale, that of Codrus, on the final folio, and of eliminating all references to the dialogue between Genius and Amans except an occasional reference to "mi sone." It consists entirely of edited passages of moral instruction in both Latin and English, chosen from the Prologue and each book but the last. The compiler's choices suggest both a very personal response to CA and an engagement with the entire poem, and the framing of the collection with a passage from the Prologue on the decline of the world at the beginning and a "discussion of the nature of good kingship" (250) at the end suggests a deliberate intention to create "regiminal work . . . pertaining to ethical government" rather than offering merely "personal improvement" (250). Griffiths provides six pages of excerpts. There is one small slip. In discussing the relation of this MS to other copies, she notes that it includes 1.579-84, "hitherto known only from the Fairfax manuscript" (247). The passage in question appears in all copies that contain that portion of the poem; it is Prol.579-84 that occurs only in Fairfax and its successors. Based on Griffiths account, it appears that this manuscript contains none of the passages that appear in "recension 3" MSS alone. [PN. Copyright. JGN 33.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Griffiths, Jane Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Published Griffiths, Jane. "Gower's Confessio Amantis: A 'New' Manuscript." Medium Aevum 82 (2013), pp. 244-59. ISSN 0025-8385 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Gower's Confessio Amantis: A 'New' Manuscript Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Hsy writes: "Toward the end of his life, medieval poet John Gower (d. 1408) composed Latin poetry about his own progressive blindness, and later nineteenth-century Blind readers appropriated Gower's work as part of a platform to advocate for changed perceptions and opportunities for the blind and other people with disabilities. In this essay, I approach nineteenth-century narrative compilations of blind lives (which include Gower's) as transformative acts of literary historiography. These compilers not only appropriate the medieval blind poet to advance their own social and political ends, but they also create a new disability-centered approach to the entire Western artistic tradition. I furthermore argue that Gower's own poetry, when taken seriously as the writing of a self-identified blind poet, adopts highly innovative formal and rhetorical strategies for representing visual impairment, and his writing anticipates aspects of modern disability activism and critical theory. The essay ends by considering the discourses of present-day online venues that seek to make Gower's work more accessible to blind and low vision readers. Such websites invite a more careful consideration of the activist-oriented mode of Gower's blindness poetry and his work as a whole, and these online venues profoundly reorient how we think about the social construction of Blind identity and heterogeneous modes of access in our digital age." [JGN 33.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hsy, Jonathan Published Hsy, Jonathan. "Blind Advocacy: Blind Readers, Disability Theory and Accessing John Gower." Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media 1.1 (2013), n. p. Article 2. Gower Subject Biography of Gower 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 Blind Advocacy: Blind Readers, Disability Theory and Accessing John Gower Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Irvin, Matthew Published Irvin, Matthew. "The Poetic Voices of John Gower: Politics and Personae in the Confessio Amantis." Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013 ISBN 9781843842507 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review "The Poetic Voices of John Gower" is an ambitious, wide-ranging, and inclusive study of the characters and tales in CA. The book is a handsome Brewer production of 315 pages, which includes a brief introduction (Chapter 1: "Making and Doing Love"), seven chapters on various issues in the CA, a conclusion ("Identifying Amans"), full bibliography, and even fuller Index. Irvin chiefly explores the characters and stories of the CA from the standpoint of Amans, central persona of Gower the author, but it soon emerges that Amans, whose chief object is his lady, has different goals and objectives from the "Gower" who seeks to guide and educate. Irvin examines the various persons of the CA with help from a philosophical approach based on Brunetto Latini's adaptation of Aristotle's "Ethics," especially the qualities of right reason, prudence, and wisdom: qualities that emerge especially from Gower the author (so to speak). Irvin discovers that the allegedly trustworthy issues of romance literature, including his CA--the topics of "fin amour," love generally, "trouthe," "pite," reason, and others--are not stable and steadfast but contingent, requiring education, negotiation, and interpretation. As Irvin puts it with respect to love, seemingly a universal quality: "the place of love in the world depends on the relationship of prudence and art" (1). Although Irvin treats many characters and situations in the CA, his principal interest is in Amans and his identification as a persona for Gower. He argues that "Gower's poetry dramatizes the intellectual and emotional action of finding his proper place in the world, of making his own presence as writer part of the prudential, political world about which he writes" (27). Hence the personae Irvin analyzes are not just literary characters but, in Maitland's terms, "Moral Personality and Legal Personality." Explaining the relevance of this formulation to the CA, Irvin says: "Gower employs the legal discourse of the persona to bring together prudence and art, wisdom and affect, in a manner that differentiates his work formally from Latini's" (15). According to Irvin's formulations, the personal is the political. The chapters of "The Poetic Voices of John Gower" are well organized and well provided with subheadings. Chap. 2, for example, is titled "The Orientation of the Prologue to the Confessio Amantis," with subheadings "Gower's Double Readership" (clerical and non-clerical audience), "The Failure of Interpretation," and "Arion and the Possibility of Good Government." Irvin does not examine every story in the CA equally. Some merit more detailed discussions than others. Tales that evoke considerable discussion include "The Tale of Florent," in Chap. 3 ("Amorous Persons"); "The Tale of Constance" and "The Tale of Canace and Machaire," Chap. 4 ("Pity and the Feminine"); and "The Tale of Apollonius," Chap. 7 ("The love of Kings"). In his chapter dealing chiefly with "The Tale of Florent," Irvin argues that Gower challenges readers' sense of morality regarding "gentilesse," producing contradictory interpretations that readers, using prudence and wisdom, must decide for themselves. In the following chapter, on Constance and the moral qualities of "pite," the story occasions a "tension" between "duty" and "affect"--requiring that readers sort out the tangle of emotions which the "Tale of Constance" elicits. Irvin's most persistent discussions involve the personae of Gower and Amans or Gower as Amans. Things come together especially in the Conclusion, "Identifying Amans," when Irvin focuses on Book 8, the denouement. In this book, toward the close, as is conventional, Gower discloses his name to Venus in Book 8. This self-disclosure was a staple of French romance literature, of course. Jean de Meun provides his name (in a "prediction") in his continuation of "Le Roman de la rose," which Gower remembers and in some ways answers in his CA. Irvin does not read humorously Venus's explanation to Amans/Gower that he is inappropriate as a lover. Instead, he reads it as a moment of education, of wisdom and schooling, when Amans finally comes to know himself: "Through the knowledge and art of his 'scole,' of this education, Gower's readers can truly know their own personae, and act prudently" (285). A key point about Amans and his education is that any man, any human, cannot and does not act solely on good advice, even if the advice is particularly fitting. In the CA and with the depiction of Amans, there is a concession to humanity and its propensity to sin; it is part of the human condition. As Irvin puts it, referring to the letter that Amans writes to Venus and Cupid pleading for their help: "The letter is a failure for Amans but a success for Gower" (283). That formulation epitomizes Gower's double readership of the CA and the relationship of the persona Amans to the poet John Gower. Amans is a student who must be schooled; Gower is a tutor whose goal, as auctor, is to educate and provide context. Irvin places the letter, and the conclusion of the CA generally, in a very human perspective. Irvin can interpret on several levels, and his close reading often operates on the level of the word. A good example is his discussion of word play in a passage bristling with rime riche from the Prologue. The passage concerns the "wise" and those who "pleye" in a sequence which concerns the meeting of Richard II and "Gower" rendered in a rhetoric display of antanaclasis: So as I made my byheste / To make a book after his heste, / And witte in suche a maner wise / Which may be wisdom to the wise / And pley to hem that luste to pleye (Prologue 81-85*). Irvin explains how the equivocation of the word play, expressed in "antanaclasis" helps support his reading of the CA as a poem working through contingencies--here in a passage concerning dream interpretation. Some may read the passage in the manner of the wise; some may read it in a context of "pleye." The "wisdom to the wise" would seem to be Irvin's clerical readership; the "pley to hem that luste to pleye" would seem to be those who fail to grasp the deeper meaning. The point of the Prologue, according to Irvin, is to trace the world's contingent status to human duplicity and falseness (like Chaucer in his "The Former Age"). Everything is insincere and untrustworthy, including human and political relationships. Even interpretation (hermeneutics) has been infected and compromised. "Therefore, 'wisdom' of the Prologue," argues Irvin, "is not given as doctrine, but is used to stir up emotions by pointing out humanity's own failure to be wise. Prudence has failed, and Gower's art imitates the frustration of the wise observer, the observer who hears the 'vox populi,' and who knows 'lore'" (67). The strength of Irvin's book is its presentation of Gower and his persona as Amans. He chronicles the complexities of the figure who learns about worldly contingency and finally absorbs Venus's lessons, such as they are. Gower scholars are fortunate to possess this extended meditation on Amans and personae. [James M. Dean. Copyright. JGN 33.1]. 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 Poetic Voices of John Gower: Politics and Personae 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 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Johnson's book is a rewarding work of literary criticism. It sets out to trace the philosophical and aesthetic function of the "mixed form" (prosimetrum, i.e., the oscillation between lyrical verse and didactic prose) in the "Consolation" of Boethius and its legacy in late-medieval vernacular literary traditions. Through lucid close readings, it also reveals how literary texts enact ethical transformations through their literary form. The chapter on Gower carefully attends to the dynamic relationship between form and content throughout the CA. In her chapter 4, Johnson investigates two facets of the work's mixed nature: its integration of verse and prose, and its use of two mutually informing languages (Latin and Middle English). The chapter treats Usk's "Testament of Love" alongside Gower's CA. Johnson observes how both authors adopt "a mask--a genre-based persona" through which "a sociopolitical critique" with can be launched (166). Johnson reads Gower's sudden shift into rhyme royal stanzas in the verse epistle at the end of the CA as a formal allusion to Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde." Gower, like his contemporary, "uses stanzas [in the epistle] to bumper syntactic units at the level of the sentence," and the formal aspects of this passage set it apart from Gower's use of enjambment elsewhere (192). Through formal juxtapositions and shifts in narrative voice, Gower enacts "a comical revision and reinterrogation" of Boethian modes of consolation (198). The most revealing aspect of Johnson's analysis its attention to the interplay between Latin glosses and Middle English verse in the CA. She deftly reveals how prosimetrum enacts both a formal and linguistic mode of code-switching. Gower's Latin prose glosses showcase the "complexity and alterity" of Middle English verses and present the Middle English as its own sort of "Latin" with a philosophical heft that demands critical unpacking (191). Through its mixed form, the CA effectively breaks down a rigid binary between Latin and the vernacular. Since Johnson's chapter on Gower only discusses the CA, the integrative function of prose and verse in his major Latin and French works remains unexplored. Nonetheless, the book offers fruitful readings of the CA that not only encourage new approaches to literary Boethianism but also restore the importance of form and aesthetics to an understanding of Gowerian ethics. [Jonathan Hsy. Copyright JGN 33.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Johnson, Eleanor Published Johnson, Eleanor. "Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve." Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013 ISBN 9780226015842 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Chicago Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The modern, scientifically based disapproval of artificially sweetened foods was matched, Newhauser argues, by the moral disapprobation of sweeteners in the late Middle Ages, particularly in the works of John Gower. In this wide-ranging essay, Newhauser traces both the changes in diet among the peasantry that resulted from their greater spending power following the Black Death and the growing use of sugar as a sweetener, particularly among the wealthy, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as demonstrated both by commercial records and by the cookery books of the time. For both Langland and Gower, the peasants' emulation of the tastes of their social superiors was one of several signs of the breakdown of society. For Gower as for others, sweetness has a double valence, often used in descriptions of the Virgin, for instance, but also depicted as an enticement to sin. Gower's most consistent use, Newhauser claims, is the latter, "an expression of the deception utilized by evil or the self-deception of the sinner" (755), for instance in MO 505-16, where "sweetness" applies both to the devil's rhetoric and to the temptations of the flesh. And the desire for sweet foods is one of his most common images for the corruption of the contemporary clergy, as Newhauser illustrates with passages from MO, VC, and CA, including this passage from Prol. 325-27, "Delicacie his swete toth / Hath fostred so that it fordoth / Of abstinence al that ther is," that is evidently the first use of the term "sweet tooth" in the English language. [PN. Copyright. JGN 33.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Newhauser, Richard Published Newhauser, Richard. "John Gower's Sweet Tooth." Review of English Studies 64 (2013), pp. 753-69. ISSN 0034-6551 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower's Sweet Tooth Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Pearman writes: "Much scholarship on Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' has focused on the poem's assertion that poetic narration, represented by Amans' ongoing confession, has the ability to restore the fragmentary natures of social and spiritual bodies. Surprisingly, the role that the (dis)abled body plays in the poem's struggle with fragmentation and integration has been ignored. By focusing on the poem's representation of blindness in the tales of Medusa and Constance, I will demonstrate that the formal structure and thematic explorations of the 'Confessio,' in fact, rely upon the (dis)abled body and its inextricable relationship to narration. Indeed, it is Amans' disabling illness that inaugurates the poem and provides Gower with the vehicle through which to critique the fractured body politic of fourteenth-century England, and it is only through the act of narration that both bodies may be "cured." Using modern and medieval disability scholarship, this paper will posit that the poem's reliance on a topos of disability that creates a "problem" that the poem must then attempt to unify. In particular, the poem fixates on blindness, linking physical and metaphorical blindness to sin, and thus division, and its cure to unification. In the 'Confessio,' this cure is contingent upon the act of confession, of providing a story that unifies the "trouble" of the deviant body. As a result, Gower asserts the poet as the rememberer and re-memberer of bodies spiritual, social, and physical." [JGN 33.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearman, Tony Vandeventer Published Pearman, Tony Vandeventer. "Blindness, Confession, and Re-membering Gower's Confessio." Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media 1.1 (2013), n.p. Article 3. 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 Blindness, Confession, and Re-membering Gower's Confessio Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "The sacramental and legal discourses of confession--penance and inquisition--were reinforced by the Church in 1215 on a grand scale and became central to the Church's project of regulating Christian moral codes and behaviors in both the public and private spheres. In the centuries following, however, the applications of these discourses moved beyond ecclesiastical boundaries and into the fields of cultural production. Contributing to a more nuanced understanding of this movement, my dissertation argues that confession transformed the development of vernacular literary consciousness in late medieval England. In my analyses of works by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland, Thomas Usk, and Thomas Hoccleve, I demonstrate that these writers synthesized confessional elements from various traditions, including the religious, legal, and erotic, to explore contemporary issues, challenge traditional literary authority based in Latinity, and--most importantly--authorize their own literary productions. In this dissertation, I contend that we cannot properly understand the history of English literature without acknowledging the central role of confession and the confessional authorial voice in the establishment of the English vernacular tradition." [JGN 33.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Lee, Jenny Veronica Published Lee, Jenny Veronica. "Confessio Auctoris: Confessional Poetics and Authority in the Literature of Late Medieval England, 1350-1450." PhD thesis, Northwestern University, 2013. 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 Confessio Auctoris: Confessional Poetics and Authority in the Literature of Late Medieval England, 1350-1450 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation examines the narrative landscapes of Middle English Ricardian political poetry in light of the split between creation and reception of these literary environments. Environmental descriptions are significant and nuanced political statements in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and William Langland. These authors do not use environment as background or mere scenery because perception of environment is highly political, based upon temporal and cultural distinctions. This dissertation argues that medieval authors seek to focus audience attention upon the figure of the sovereign via textual depictions of the realm. Covert political criticism is activated through the latent cultural power of forests, rivers, and agricultural spaces like fields and gardens. In contrast to these bounded and regulated places, the wilderness serves as an 'a priori' state of political disorder that demonstrates, through its own fluidity and uncontrollable nature, the inherent stability of place. . . . The second chapter argues that Gower's use of the River Thames in the Ricardian Prologue of the 'Confessio Amantis' infuses the work with uniquely English political qualities that the Lancastrian recensions of the poem lack." [JGN 33.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Johnson, Valerie Published Johnson, Valerie. "Politicizing the Landscape: Ricardian Literary Languages of Power." PhD thesis, University of Rochester, 2013. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Politicizing the Landscape: Ricardian Literary Languages of Power. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Longo offers a study of the complex layers of "voicing" in VC, with special attention to the way in which the addition of the Visio (the present Book 1)--with the addition of the new voice of the reluctant prophet--reinforces the lessons on the need for personal reform in the present Books 2-7, which were written before the events of 1381. The appeals to the authority of the "vox populi" and its association with the "vox dei" occur, she notes, only in Books 2-7. In Book 1, the voice of the "people" is animal-like and cacophonous, and it is contrasted with the "vox celica" that summons Gower to his role as poet in 1.2019. In Books 2-7 he submerges his own voice beneath the authority of his Latinate sources and the appeals to "vox populi." But Longo notes that "the unanimity of this voice is undercut by the very social strains that the poem attempts to overcome" (360). Other references in 2-7 to the plebs and vulgus throw into question whose authority is being invoked and also who is responsible for reform, and force the reader to examine his or her own role and responsibility. Book 1 puts the poet in the position of enacting that self-examination himself, in anticipation of the duty he expects of his readers. Longo pulls together the complex threads in her argument in her conclusion: "The addition of "Vox" 1 to Gower's public outcry enhances the poems call for self-reflection, a personal reform that leads to communal reform. Indeed, the prefatory "Vox" 1 makes the poem's critique even more powerful after the Rising. All the more so after observing the irrationality of rebellious voices, Gower's readers must weigh the voice of the people to whom he credits his criticism of clerical and lay elites. "Any uncertainties over this voice have been matched by uncertainties over the voices of the Rising. With the addition of "Vox" 1 it seems that the poem's "vox dei" contrasts sharply with the animalistic voices of the rebels; but these voices are no less powerful. To evaluate them is to prepare to evaluate the voice of the people Gower cites in the other books. The added "Vox" 1, with its naming of Gower and depiction of the turmoil in "New Troy," hints at the void Gower takes upon himself to fill through "Vox" 2-7's layered voicing. The "vox celica" at the end of "Vox" 1 indeed comes with divine authority and stresses the lack of moral coherence among those Gower believes should preserve order. In the context of the seven-book poem, tensions surrounding the people persist in "Vox" 2-7 and demand careful readers to decide if they will allow rebel voices to dictate the social order or if they will take up the call to reform themselves. "The complete poem leaves the future of civil society up to its reading public; indeed, it calls this public into being through its fraught outcry. If Gower's 'Vox' speaks with the voice of God, it only does so because those who ought to lead by example lack the moral coherence to maintain that civic enterprise, as 1381 would show with devastating consequences. Gower indicates that readers may take up the cause of reform if they learn from history and from the poem's contemporary voice: that is, if they carefully examine the signs of the times and their own culpability. Tensions between the portrayal of the rebels in 'Vox' 1 and the claim to the voice of the people in 'Vox' 2-7 ensure that voicing always points back to the people. For readers to ponder who has the right to reform society is to begin to look to themselves to heal divisions within the body politic" (378-79). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 34.1]. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 285-303. Author/Editor Author/Editor Longo, Pamela L Published Longo, Pamela L. "Gower's Public Outcry." Philological Quarterly 92 (2013), pp. 357-87. ISSN 0031-7977 Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Public Outcry Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Yeager examines not the humor that might provoke the reader's laughter in Gower's poems but rather the instances in which the poet refers directly to laughter, in CA and MO. Many of these are merely hypothetical, and these often occur in formulaic expressions (e.g. "lawhe and pleie") or in patterns of conventional rhyme. In the instances in which characters are actually depicted laughing (Nectanabus in CA 6.2026-34, Zoroaster at his birth in 6.2370-76, and the majority of instances in which allegorical figures are described as laughing in MO), the laughter is either malicious, hollow (in that someone else gets to laugh last), or both. There are no examples of the laughter of pure joy as there are in Chaucer. All of the best examples of humorous laughter in Chaucer are attributed to women, and among the more hypothetical examples in Gower, there are two (in 5.2473-75 and 8.848-55) in which Gower too imagines a laughter "devoid of irony" (152), also only with reference to women. And though there is nothing in Gower precisely like Troilus's laugh at the world at the end of T&C, Troilus reflects Gower's, not Chaucer's, "deeper sense of the nature and value of laughter in narrative and points us to Gower's probably source," in Psalms 2:1-4 (153).[PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Gowerian Laughter." In ." Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Medieval English Literature: The Influence of Derek Brewer. Ed. Brewer, Charlotte and Windeatt, Barry. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013, pp. 144-53. ISBN 9781843843542 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gowerian Laughter Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D. S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Included as Chapter 5 in a book-length study on the recovery of classical histories of Alexander the Great in twelfth- to seventeenth-century England, Stone's chapter on Gower examines the portrayal of Alexander to trace the evolution of the poet's ideas about the causes and ramifications of the collapse of Alexander's empire through his three major works. Stone demonstrates that whereas Gower represents Alexander as the victim of Fortune's whims in the MO, he gravitates toward a more "historical" view of Alexander in his subsequent works, ascribing his fall to his lack of self-control and his failure to heed Aristotle's teaching. As Gower looks more deeply into the question of moral culpability, he also pays increasing attention to the magnitude of the suffering that the conqueror caused through his incessant pursuit of personal gain. Stone argues that in thus presenting Alexander as a paradigm of misguided and destructive rule, Gower's poems reject the positive conceptions of the conqueror found in the romance tradition and align themselves instead with such twelfth-century monastic texts as the St Albans Compilation, the first compendium of classical sources on the history of the Macedonian Empire, produced, like Gower's later works, in an era of political unrest. [YK. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 36.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stone, Charles Russell. Published Stone, Charles Russell. "'Moral' Gower and the Rejection of Alexander." In From Tyrant to Philosopher-King: A Literary History of Alexander the Great in Medieval and Early Modern England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 141–63. Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) 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 "'Moral' Gower and the Rejection of Alexander. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This monograph, revised from the author's 2007 University of Western Ontario dissertation, establishes a solid grounding for the law as an important component of Gower's thinking, through close readings of moments in the Confessio Amantis (primarily) his other major works, and some of the less-read ones, as well. Van Dijk resists the argument that we can settle the question of Gower's pre-retirement career on the basis of his poetic content and style, but along the way he does provide as deft a discussion of the Gower-as-lawyer question as one can reasonably expect, barring additional evidence on the subject. Van Dijk neither rules out nor insists upon identifying Gower as a lawyer, but along the way he makes it very clear that Gower was intimately familiar with the workings and discourse of the legal profession. Using that familiarity as a guide, van Dijk analyzes the genres of the exemplum and the legal case, which he sees as similar in key ways. Though many readings of the Confessio have focused on its construction of exempla, van Dijk argues effectively (without investing too much in the notion of stable literary forms) that the case as a form is sometimes a best match for Gower's didactic stories. In the following chapter, on "legal questions" in the Confessio, van Dijk interrogates what sorts of legal issues Gower may have been exploring. The later chapters explore in depth notions of kingship and justice. This allows van Dijk to engage with a variety of central issues in Gower scholarship (such as Gower's sense of balance between royal authority and the rule of law). Each chapter focuses around an important concept," regalie," "equite," and retributive justice, respectively, and each covers solid ground, including in-depth examinations of Books II and VII, as well as the "Cronica Tripertita." Though Van Dijk carefully avoids totalizing readings that would overstate the connection between the ideas raised in these chapters, he does effectively argue for how past readings of legal and political issues in Gower's work have been able to base such different conclusions on the same literary work. [RAL. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 36.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Van Dijk, Conrad. Published Van Dijk, Conrad. John Gower and the Limits of the Law. Publications of the John Gower Society VIII. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013. ISBN 9781843843504. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Cronica Tripertita Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower and the Limits of the Law. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Munro, Lucy. Published Lucy Munro, Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590-1674 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 69-104. ISBN 978-1-107-04279-7 Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Review As part of her broader, book-length study of archaism as a "barometer" of early modern English literary and national self-awareness, Munro examines representations of Chaucer, Gower, and their works in Renaissance poetry and drama. Chaucer receives much the lion's share of the attention here, with Munro remarking at one point on the "downward trajectory of Gower's reputation in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries" (91). Nevertheless, according to Munro, the "embodiment" of Gower in Shakespeare and Wilkins' "Pericles" was "one of the period's most sustained attempts to assert the value of the archaic style" (92), with the "imaginative antiquarianism" of the play challenging the "assumptions about archaism's obsolescence that are anxiously negotiated" in other works, particularly Book 4 of Spenser's "Faerie Queene," where Chaucer's "Squire's Tale" figures so largely, and "The Return from Parnassus," a Cambridge University play that, more directly than Spenser, confronts the "question of Chaucer's scurrility" (86). In its "fragments of a recreated Gowerian English," "Pericles" reanimates Middle English for its original audience, reinforced, Munro argues, by the medieval costuming of Gower as narrator and chorus. Moreover, the meter and style of Gower's choric comments on the dumb-shows in the play successfully emphasize "visual story-telling" and contribute to its "performative antiquarianism" that "foreground[s] the act of the recuperation of the past" (95). William Cartwright's play "The Ordinary" also "reanimates" Middle English (through the character of Robert Moth, the antiquarian) and thereby recuperates the past, but it does so in a more sardonic, less direct way than Shakespeare and Wilkins do with their characterization of Gower. [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 Chaucer, Gower and the Anxiety of Obsolescence. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Walsh, Brian. Published Walsh, Brian. "A Priestly Farewell": Gower's Tomb and Religious Change in "Pericles." Religion & Literature 45, no. 3 (2013): 81-113. ISSN 0888-3769 Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Biography of Gower Review Walsh casts his essay as a contribution to ongoing questions about sustained or residual Catholic attitudes and practices in post-Reformation England, arguing that the characterization of Gower in William Shakespeare and George Wilkins's "Pericles" contributes to the play's "Catholic-Protestant dialectic" (82), more specifically, its "syncretistic tendency" in depicting "old and new forms of worship" cast as, respectively, "sacramental" and "commemorative" mourning rituals (91-92). The "legacy" of Gower, Walsh argues, "encoded [early modern] England's medieval religious past," and the character Gower, presented as a revenant in the play, is an "avatar of the medieval" (93) that enabled "the fantasy" that Gower himself has left his tomb "and come down the street to the Globe," standing forth as "a figure for ongoing, even mobile appropriations of the religious past" (101). Walsh posits that the playwrights and their audience plausibly, even probably, were familiar with Gower's tomb, and he suggests the tomb should be considered a source for the play's dialectic of religious outlooks. He describes the state and status of the tomb in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, considers the discussions of it in Thomas Berthelette's edition of CA (a clear source of "Pericles") and in John Stow's "Survey of London," and emphasizes the fact that the tomb survived the sixteenth-century destruction of the chapel of St. John the Baptist's chapel that originally surrounded it. Constructed as a chantry for intercessory prayer, the tomb was never "wholly disenchanted" (100), Walsh tells us, and, in the play, the effigy was "animated" by a "living, breathing actor" (96), thereby effecting a bridge between past and present that is foregrounded by archaic speech, various details of Gower's choric commentary, and (one might add) costuming. Among various observations that Walsh makes about Gower's early modern reception is the detail that Gower appears as an "advertising hook" on the title page of George Wilkins's 1608 "novelization" of "Pericles" ("The Painfull Aduentures of Pericles . . ."), even though Gower never appears in this prose version, indicating that "Wilkins or his printer evidently expected possible customers to see Gower as inseparable from the story" (93). The title-page image, however, looks nothing like the tomb effigy. On the other hand, in supporting his claims about early modern familiarity with Gower's tomb, Walsh offers "a tantalizing bit of circumstantial evidence" (104) that Shakespeare knew the interior of St. Saviour's--an account of the burial of Edmund Shakespeare in 1607. Earlier in his essay, Walsh suggests in passing that Gower's tomb may also have influenced Paulina's tomb in Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale." [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Title A name given to the resource "A Priestly Farewell": Gower's Tomb and Religious Change in "Pericles." Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 part of her broader, book-length study of archaism as a "barometer" of early modern English literary and national self-awareness, Munro examines representations of Chaucer, Gower, and their works in Renaissance poetry and drama. Chaucer receives much the lion's share of the attention here, with Munro remarking at one point on the "downward trajectory of Gower's reputation in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries" (91). Nevertheless, according to Munro, the "embodiment" of Gower in Shakespeare and Wilkins' "Pericles" was "one of the period's most sustained attempts to assert the value of the archaic style" (92), with the "imaginative antiquarianism" of the play challenging the "assumptions about archaism's obsolescence that are anxiously negotiated" in other works, particularly Book 4 of Spenser's "Faerie Queene," where Chaucer's "Squire's Tale" figures so largely, and "The Return from Parnassus," a Cambridge University play that, more directly than Spenser, confronts the "question of Chaucer's scurrility" (86). In its "fragments of a recreated Gowerian English," "Pericles" reanimates Middle English for its original audience, reinforced, Munro argues, by the medieval costuming of Gower as narrator and chorus. Moreover, the meter and style of Gower's choric comments on the dumb-shows in the play successfully emphasize "visual story-telling" and contribute to its "performative antiquarianism" that "foreground[s] the act of the recuperation of the past" (95). William Cartwright's play "The Ordinary" also "reanimates" Middle English (through the character of Robert Moth, the antiquarian) and thereby recuperates the past, but it does so in a more sardonic, less direct way than Shakespeare and Wilkins do with their characterization of Gower. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Munro, Lucy. Published Munro, Lucy. "Chaucer, Gower and the Anxiety of Obsolescence." In Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590-1674 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 69-104. 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 Chaucer, Gower and the Anxiety of Obsolescence. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Novak takes as her starting point what has "often been remarked, that typically for the Ricardian period in which he lived, John Gower's poetic style is essentially public, in the sense that it is written on behalf of what he calls the people, for their moral edification, their 'common profit,' and usually in the form of direct address to the nation as a whole or class by class" (311). Examples are drawn from the MO and the VC Books II-VII, to illustrate Gower's early employment of "vox populi, vox dei" is in a sense unqualified--but this, Novak argues, shifts dramatically with the Revolt of 1381, as evidenced by his presentation of the peasants turned into brutes, incapable of human language. This leads her to conclude that: "When Gower speaks with the voice of the people, he means people like himself: educated, owning land, namely the rising middle estates, who are worthy of counseling and passing judgment on the upper end of the hierarchy. He does not credit serfs and artisans with speaking in God's own voice, and there is no reason to believe that anyone in his time understood the proverb to include them" (322). For Novak, this exclusion of the lowest classes extends to Gower's denial to them of human speech: "Gower believes in the power of language to repair the ills of society, to compose peace. However, just as God denies wealth and freedom to the peasant class for the common good--because someone must work the land--Gower deprives them of language, which would prove too dangerous in their mouths" (322). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Novak, Sarah. Published Novak, Sarah. "Braying Peasants and the Poet as Prophet: Gower and the People in the Vox Clamantis." Études Anglaises 66 (2013): 311-22. ISSN 0014-195X. Rpt. in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 279-85. ISBN 9781410332592. Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Vox Clamantis 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 Braying Peasants and the Poet as Prophet: Gower and the People in the "Vox Clamantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Shutters, Lynn. Published Shutters, Lynn. "Confronting Venus: Classical Pagans and Their Christian Readers in John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Chaucer Review 48 (2013): 38-65. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review Shutters seeks to explain why "Amans/Gower" seems reluctant to abandon his pursuit of love at the conclusion of the "Confessio," treating "his conversion to a Christian life . . . [as] less a free choice than a forced exile." Gower appears to "risk undermining his poem's ethical program when it would seem far simpler to make the authorial persona reject Venus" (38). Her argument is a complex one, and difficult to summarize briefly. In essence, she follows Winthrop Wetherbee's model of contrasted "worlds" of Rome and Troy (JGN 27.1), the former of which for Gower (quoting Shutters) "embodies concepts of social and political cohesion, and . . . sacrifice [of] personal interests for the common good" which "represents cultural cohesion . . . [and] . . . historical cohesion" while the latter, "through its focus on individual, erotic pursuits represents a decontextualized mode of relating to the classical past" (48). Shutters argues that "the discontinuity between the two cities is in fact necessary for a continuous history between virtuous pagans and Christians to emerge" (48). "Gower establishes continuity between Roman and fourteenth-century British values by associating Rome with secular political virtue and Christianity" as can be seen in Gower's treatment of "Julius Caesar, the Emperors Maximin and Constantine, and the consuls Gaius Fabricius and Carmidotirus" and also "the Holy Roman Emperor Conrad, who demonstrates the continuity of Roman virtue between the pagan and Christian eras" (49). Counter-examples Arrons, Claudius, and Mundus are punished, which "illustrates the degree to which Rome is disassociated from it" (i.e., "destructive, individual erotic desire") (49-50). While Gower's Rome is set in historical relation to England, Troy isn't: rather, "historical discontinuity and decontextualization characterize Troy." When, infrequently, Gower "does locate Trojan lovers within a longer historical trajectory, that trajectory is tragic" (50). Gower's model is Guido delle Colonne's "Historia destructionis Troiae," "in which . . . secular history does not proceed toward imperial glory (the Virgilian tradition)"--nor toward England, either (50). Shutters applies the Roman/Trojan contrast to "characters and stories not specifically connected to these cities": thus "non-Romans, such as Alexander the Great and Aristotle in Book 7 can adhere to Roman values and find a place in a continuous model of history connecting pagans and Christians" while others who "embody the historically decontextualized, individual eroticism" of Troy--of which her primary example is Venus--are only "contextualized into a larger history demonstrating the transitoriness and deleterious effects . . . [of] the attractions of Venus" (51). In Book 5's "Religions of the World" section, Gower presents the Greeks as responsible for the elevation of human beings to gods (the Romans merely followed along), and through Genius' denigration of Venus as one such (particularly louche) elevated human "Gower clears the way for a different concept of pagan antiquity, one that is associated with virtuous male pagans who represent positive understanding of nature, such as reason and charity" (51). He thus employs "gender, politics, ethics and religion to sort the pagan past." (51) Yet in his bifurcation of religious and secular histories, Shutters asserts, Gower "is not fully successful"--as he himself seems to have known. (52) Classical materials come with "prior meanings" that can escape even Gower's authorial control. He thus "writes himself into something of a quandary" which he seeks to evade by having Venus reject him in Book VIII, rather than the other way around, as one would expect of a devout Christian (53). There Venus does not behave as expected: she "historically contextualizes" him by showing him his aged state, and thus his unsuitability for love, demonstrating "her own agency by defying Amans' and Genius' previous depictions" of her. (53-6). While a "fantasy," this Venus nonetheless "complicates the relationship between ethics and history in the poem" because "due to a deep-seated homology between individual, human age and historical time, 'Gower' the old man is also 'Gower' the representative of the Christian era." (56) His reluctance to leave Venus' service implicates Gower's awareness of a similar reluctance on the part of Christian intellectuals, and conflicts with reader expectations of a Christian repudiation--one that Shutters, relying on Walter Benn Michaels, deems an "ideological choice"--by Amans/Gower of his misguided affections. Instead, Shutters argues, Venus' handling of the Gower persona renders his exit from the court of love a matter of "identity": as an old man (and not incidentally, an old man who represents Christianity) "he simply doesn't belong" there (56-60). As Shutters has it, the ethical choice is denied the Gower persona, in a sense, by his contextualization in his own history. It is only when, in the poem's closing, Gower the poet reasserts himself, and plumps for ideology, that he affirms the expected: "Christian love is right, erotic love is wrong, and one must choose between them" (62). "The final lines of the poem . . . emphasize the superiority of Christian love" (64). But, Shutters concludes, arriving at this goal has been difficult: "Disengaging from the classical past might seem like an easy solution to the problems that pagan antiquity posed to medieval authors, yet the ending of the 'Confessio' suggests that figuring out how and why medieval Christians did not relate to pagan antiquity was as complex as figuring out how and why they did" (65). ]RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Confronting Venus: Classical Pagans and Their Christian Readers in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Smith, Bruce R. Published Smith, Bruce R. "Shakespeare's Middle Ages." In Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents. Ed. Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 19-36. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Biography of Gower Review With a certain aptness, given that Smith's essay opens the volume, he takes the notion of "middle" as his point of departure, pointing out how much of Shakespeare's London was medieval, and further that more or less mid-way between the Globe and London city proper stood St. Saviour's Church, with its prominent tomb of John Gower (includes photo, 20). Gower's tomb becomes a reference point, Smith suggests, for what he views as Shakespeare's "medieval" imagination: that is, a "whole-body model of perception" derived from "Aristotle and Galen; more immediately, Aquinas" (28-29): "We can witness the importance of the middle, the domain of imagination and passion, by pausing before Gower's tomb" (29). A description of the decoration follows, leading to: "The imaginative space created here in stone, pigment and gilding is the visual equivalent of the imaginative space created through words in Gower's 'Mirour de l'Omme,' or 'Speculum Meditantis,' written in French . . . ." (29) Noting that on the tomb the MO volume is "the middle of the 'Confessio Amantis' (in English) on the bottom and 'Vox clamantis' (in Latin) on the top." (29) Smith asks: "Is there a hierarchy of languages here, as there is a hierarchy of architectural spaces and states of being? Does the French of fourteenth-century high culture occupy a middle ground between the homeliness of English and the divinity of Latin?" (29) Smith suggests that answering such questions about what Gower expected from his tomb requires a "whole-body model of perception" that must be applied to understanding how Shakespeare understood theatrical space and guided his shaping of plays: "The most important of the implications for the Aristotelian/Galenic model of perception . . . was this: rational judgment [by which Smith means that of Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke 27-28] does not trump kinaesthetic experience. For me, that is the continuity that connects Shakespeare most forcefully with the so-called Middle Ages" (31). He concludes by applying this observation to "the middle plays," examining three very briefly ("Twelfth Night," "King Lear," "Antony and Cleopatra"), and "Hamlet" in greater (but still cursory) depth (31-33). He returns to Gower's tomb to note the "two angel heads that receive the vaulted ribs of Gower's tomb." (33). Although damaged by iconoclasts, "the imaginative surrounds [of the heads] were . . . still intact and gave onlookers an imaginative cue for encountering a vanished past that 'ancient Gower' in 'Pericles' suggests was not yet firmly distinguished from Classical antiquity" (33). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Shakespeare's Middle Ages. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor van Es, Bart. Published van Es, Bart. "Late Shakespeare and the Middle Ages." In Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents. Ed. Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 37-51. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Review Noting that in Shakespeare's late plays "'romance' no longer blends [as it did in earlier plays] but instead becomes conspicuous," van Es takes up "the conspicuous presence of archaic ways of being and telling," linking it to "the emergence of the cultural category of 'the Middle Ages' in the early seventeenth century" (37). "Pericles" presents a case-in-point. For van Es, the character of Gower is largely misread by contemporary critics. Observing that Thomas Berthelette's edition of the "Confessio Amantis" would have been Shakespeare's source text for "Pericles," he employs Tim Machan's characterization of Gower in that edition as a "humanist" (JGN 17.2) to offset the self-consciously medieval gestures (e.g., the tournament, the dumb shows) inserted into the play but not found in Shakespeare's "Confessio" text (38-41). Van Es points out that this "Tudor" Gower was considered a father of English poetry and a refiner or the language (43), but by 1607, the date of "Pericles," he had become comic. What happened? Apparently, Cervantes, who "made the medieval narrator a figure of fun" (46). Shakespeare's collaborator on "Pericles," George Wilkins, was "in the vanguard of the movement of early seventeenth-century playwrights who responded to Cervantes: Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Nathan Field, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher" (47). "Ancient Gower's" character in "Pericles," in van Es's view, "can be tracked with precision to the years 1605 to 1607. Shakespeare's oeuvre sits astride this temporal fault line, so that the late plays become at once more modern and more medieval than those that came before" (51). N.B.: van Es remarks on Gower's "shift from a Yorkist to the Lancastrian camp" (42), apparently confusing Richard III with Richard II. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Late Shakespeare and the Middle Ages. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In the chapter entitled "Chaucer, Gower, and Barbarian History: 'The Man of Law's Tale' and the Prologue to Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'," Birns argues, as part of his wider set of claims about uses of late antique European history by medieval and Renaissance writers, that Gower and Chaucer both drew on "barbarian history" as source material and as "a mirror for their own times" (44): Chaucer using Paul the Deacon in his "Man of Law's Tale," and Gower using Otto of Freising to extend into the near past the four-empire image from the book of Daniel in the Prologue to the Confessio Amantis. Birns claims that "It is likely that Otto's 'Chronica sive Historia de duabus civitatibus' was the principal source for the historical portions" (44) of the Prologue to CA, although the claim is largely unsubstantiated, relying on a rather loose connection between 5.19 of Otto's "Historia" and lines 739–45 of Gower's Prologue, and partially undercut by Birns's observation that the poetic account by Godfrey of Viterbo (who Gower cites in his tale of Apollonius) may well be an alternative source. Birns's comments on the "translatio" of Rome as the Holy Roman Empire in Gower's time and place are more apt, as are his observations about Gower's moral anxieties concerning the "way history was going" (52) in his own time and about the "pastness of the past" (54), but they are undercut by obscurity: "beneath Gower's recuperative veneer there is an entropic dynamism-within-decay that cannot keep history boxed in one direction" (48). Similar problems haunt Birns's discussion of Chaucer's tale, although his efforts to avoid a simplistic view of history are commendable as he pursues a nuanced "historical consciousness" of medieval and Renaissance writers who were influenced by earlier historiography. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Buirns, Nicholas. Published Birns, Nicholas. Barbarian Memory: The Legacy of Early Medieval History in Early Modern Literature. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 44-59. Gower Subject Confessio Amanti 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 Barbarian Memory: The Legacy of Early Medieval History in Early Modern Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Meindl does a large service to Gower studies in this article, translating the first three chapters of the sixth book of the "Vox Clamantis," offering commentary that aims "to demonstrate the depth and extent of Gower's knowledge of the law and the way in which that knowledge deepens his text" (1). Meindl makes it clear that his point is not to suggest Gower himself was a lawyer; rather, he asserts that Gower clearly had "an extensive . . . knowledge of legal matters and the law in its several late fourteenth-century expressions . . . and is eager to use that knowledge in a wide variety of literary contexts, whether first-person commentary as in the 'Mirour de l'Omme' and 'Vox clamantis,' or exemplary narrative as in the 'Confessio amantis' (2). After providing the translations and commentaries on the first three chapters of Book VI of the VC, Meindl concludes that Gower is not critical of lawyers per se, but rather that "Gower sees the danger with the law originating in the sinful nature of the men who administer it and who through their avaricious misconduct seek to augment their worldly advantages by its improper appropriation and application" (59). Meindl reminds us that, for Gower, the law is ultimately derived from God. This belief drives Gower's exploration of avaricious lawyers (what Meindl translates as "shysters"), finding their conduct to be exceptionally reprehensible. Meindl concludes, "the poet will make clear that legal practitioners who subvert the law to their own avaricious purposes forfeit its protections and condemn themselves before the bar of final judgment" (60). [JGS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Meindl, Robert. Published Meindl, Robert. "Semper Venalis: Gower's Avaricious Lawyers." Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media 2.1 (2013): n.p. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Confessio Amantis Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Semper Venalis": Gower's Avaricious Lawyers. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Nolan's essay covers a wide ground. Ultimately her concern is to capture and delineate Gower's notion of the poet and poetry throughout his work: his "exploration, carried on in French, Latin, and English, repeatedly asks what poetry is 'for'" (243) [emphasis hers]. In the MO she finds Gower coming to terms with a dichotomous tension between "agency" (there complexly identifiable with Fortuna, and with the Kantian "sublime") and "sensation" (embodied in the beauty of the Virgin, and the aesthetic reward of its replication experienced through adoration). Each formative purpose requires its own unique poetic language/discursive mode. By contrasting Fortuna, especially present in the second of the Mirour's three large sections, with the Virgin, the focus of the third, Nolan is able to argue for the poem as foundational to Gower's oeuvre, an "experimental" space in which he adjudicates for the first time the "didactic and the sensual" (i.e., what later he himself terms "lust" and "lore" in the "Confessio Amantis"). As she concludes: Recreating the experience of the sublime or the beautiful, radical contingency or divinity, lies at the heart of Gower's aesthetic enterprise, beginning with the 'Mirour' and persisting throughout his career, and always in tension (but never subordinate to) his identity as 'moral Gower'" (243). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nolan, Maura Published Nolan, Maura. "Agency and the Poetics of Sensation in Gower's 'Mirour de l'Omme'." In Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England, ed. Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway. (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013). 214-43. Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Agency and the Poetics of Sensation in Gower's "Mirour de l'Omme." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Volume 1, pp. 279-80, discusses Thomas Berthelet's 1532 edition of the CA, finding "reason to consider the Gower and Chaucer (i.e., Thomas Godfray's edition of Thynne's "Works of Geoffrey Chaucer") as companion volumes" (279), citing John Leland's belief that the Chaucer was Berthelet's production. Blayney describes Berthelet's loan to Godfray of "at least four initials and the woodcut border" used in the Chaucer (279). "It is," he notes, "therefore reasonable to suspect that Berthelet may have had a stake in this edition, though whether as a major or minor shareholder is a matter for guesswork only" (280). Blayney establishes that this border design passed about among printers, appearing in books produced by Pynson and Redman, as well as Godfray and Berthelet, the latter using it "at least five times in 1533-5 before lending it again for Godfray's (dated) folio New Testament of 1536" (280), further strengthening the collaboration of the two printers--an idea also accepted by E. Gordon Duff and Andrew W. Wawn, the latter in his essay on The Plowman's Tale (280). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Blayney. Peter W. M. Published Cambridge UP, 2013. 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 The Stationers' Company and the Printers of London, 1501-1557, 2 vols. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Newlin is exclusively concerned with Gower the character in Shakespeare's "Pericles." "Pericles," he argues, is a kind of sequel to "The Merchant of Venice," with Gower's speeches offering "not only a manual of sorts" for reading both plays, but a "frame . . . for reading any" Shakespeare play (111). Newlin starts off by addressing the perennial view of a literary text as a box with an inside and an outside, a form and a meaning--or is it the other way around? As a basis for reading a text, this image lends itself to an endless succession of readings, each "itself a new text to be read . . . [never] finished"(109), with language itself exposed as "open-ended . . . aporetic" (114). In "The Merchant of Venice," Shakespeare addressed this "unceasing deconstruction" (111) through the Christian interpretive device of allegory by figuration, for example, by repeating the equation of Portia/Balthasar with the Old Testament figure of Daniel (120). Like caskets, women, and gold, textual "meaning" itself has a monetary value defined by the Christian patriarch, and all are objects of exchange (118). "Recalling "Merchant'"s many prefigurations . . . the central structural device that drives "Pericles" is its repetitions" (123). This device is not limited to the recurrences driving its tripartite plot, but includes verbal repetitions often ascribed to textual corruption, but more likely "genetic" and "intentional" (124, 125). Passages of bad writing, "weak text," may also be strategic in their "literary power" (122). It is the choric Gower, especially in his closing speech, who explains how a dubious ancient text may be read as "evermore" providing "new joy," with no final "ending," as author and new readers collaborate to make this "our play" (126). Thus, today, Shakespeare's text can be liberated from a "heterosexist" reading (217). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Newlin, James. Published In New Readings of The Merchant of Venice, ed. Horacio Sierra (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), pp. 109-30. 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 "How Every Fool Can Play Upon the Word": Allegories of Reading in "The Merchant of Venice" and "Pericles." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Stone proposes "to offer a history of the histories of Alexander, the classical texts that were interpolated, redacted, and translated by scholars from the twelfth to the seventeenth century and that account for our modern dichotomous conception of Alexander as a disturbingly violent tyrant or a political visionary who established a harmonious, multicultural empire" (2). The Middle Ages knew Alexander in two versions: as a decadent, corrupt pagan tyrant who deserved poisoning, or as a political idealist who sought to "defeat and unite disparate cultures under the yoke of political and philosophical idealism" (5). The first position is that of Pompeius Trogus, and later of Orosius; the second was spread initially by Diodorus Siculus, Arrian, Quintus Curtius, Plutarch, and Justin in the Roman world, and subsequently, combined with folk Eastern elements, through romances. Chapter 5 (141-63) is devoted to "'Moral' Gower and the Rejection of Alexander." Stone sets Gower firmly in the former camp: "By the end of his career Gower possessed an extensive knowledge of the various traditions of Alexander literature in circulation and clearly rejected Alexander as one of history's imitable models of kingship" (141). Gower's Alexander emerges gradually but steadily over the course of his oeuvre as "an extended moral warning on kingship" (142). Stone traces this progress through the "Mirour de l'Omme" (Alexander is undone by Fortune, and his empire by the greed and treachery of his successors); the "Vox Clamantis" (Gower as Aristotle to Richard II/Alexander, arguing in Senecan fashion that "the fall of a man is due in part to his own faults and errors, not merely the machinations wrought by Fortune" [144], and--like Aristotle--failing to be heard); the "Confessio Amantis" (writing to advise both Richard and Henry IV, Gower "effectively graduates from echoing . . . Seneca and Cicero . . . to the manner of Augustine and Orosius" [157-58], and holds up Alexander's insatiable appetite for conquest, "for waging perpetual warfare and disturbing world peace . . . a clear condemnation of war," as his undoing); and "In Praise of Peace" ("clearly marks the culmination of Gower's development of a singular, definitive reception of Alexander, as he condemns more explicitly than at any point in his writings the ancient ruler's inability to restrain his will and mad desire for conquest") (159). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stone, Charles Russell. Published Stone, Charles Russell. From Tyrant to Philosopher-King: A Literary History of Alexander the Great in Medieval and Early Modern England. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. 254 pp. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditatntis Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis In Praise of Peace Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource From Tyrant to Philosopher-King: A Literary History of Alexander the Great in Medieval and Early Modern England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The influence of medieval romance is omnipresent throughout the plays of Shakespeare. In the late plays, however, it becomes "conspicuous" to the point of defining a Shakespearean "romance" genre of its own (37). A prime example of "'the medieval' in Shakespeare" is the character Gower in "Pericles: 564 ff., as he narrates an episode of knights in armor not found in any source for the play, including the "Confessio Amantis" (38). Why such "deviation from precedent," including the "remarkable decision to use Gower as presenter" . . . [speaking in] "old-fashioned tetrameters" that would have sounded, to a "sophisticated" audience, decidedly "then" as opposed to "now" (40)? This semi-comic Gower (1607 or later) is in stark contrast with the poet's sixteenth-century reputation for "authority, moral weight, and contemporary relevance," as well as a humanistic devotion to "renew[ing] the vernacular" and excellence of English style (42), per Berthelette, Spenser, Gabriel Harvey, and Robert Greene (41-43). What explains this skeptical new approach to Gower and medieval romance? "Shakespeare's oeuvre sits across [the] temporal fault line" (51) of 1605, when the term "Middle Age" was first used by William Camden to define the centuries in between the classics and the Elizabethan revival of learning. Camden "values [the Middle Age] as one of high martial honour and poetic passion, but also stresses its lack of decorum" (44). The year 1605 also saw the publication of "Don Quixote," with its new "authorial self-consciousness" and "delicate irony" at the expense of the still-"admire[d]," but now "outmoded" conventions of medieval romance (45-46). In his latest plays including "Pericles," Shakespeare manipulates the perception of "antiquity . . . artificiality" and "Cervantean play" to heighten the effect of "an old tale," deploying "characters [such as Gower who] articulate the fictive quality of the events that they see unfold" (49). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor van Es, Bart. Published van Es, Bart. "Late Shakespeare and the Middle Ages," in Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents, ed. Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 37-51. 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 Late Shakespeare and the Middle Ages. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Baker, David Philip. Published Ph. D. Dissertation. Durham University, 2013. Open access at http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/7716/ (accessed January 28, 2023). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Minor Latin Poetry Review From Baker's abstract: "This thesis assesses the extent to which fourteenth-century Middle English poets were interested in, and influenced by, traditions of thinking about logic and mathematics. It attempts to demonstrate the imaginative appeal of the logical problems called 'sophismata,' which postulate absurd situations while making use of a stable but evolving, and distinctly recognisable, pool of examples . . . . Clarifying the "sophismatic method" as an important aspect of the "symbiotic relationship" of medieval logic and mathematics, Baker tells us, he goes on to study "the prominence of logical and mathematical tropes and scenarios in the works of . . . Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower and the 'Gawain'-poet," treating "The Summoner's Tale," "The Nun's Priest's Tale," "Troilus and Criseyde," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," "Pearl," and "Patience," as well as the "Confessio Amantis," addressing in these works, "problematic promises; problematic reference to non-existent things; problems associated with divisibility, limits and the idea of a continuum; and, most importantly, problems focused on the contingency, or otherwise, of the future." In Chapter 3, "Causation and the Future in the 'Confessio Amantis'" (pp. 186-239), Baker suggests that Gower's familiarity with these concerns relates to his acquaintance with Ralph Strode, perhaps evinced in "Eneidos, Bucolis," the authorship of which Baker explores. Whether written by Strode or by Gower himself, Baker argues, the "Eneidos" represents "Gower's attempt to recover for his audience the 'philosophical dimension'" of the CA in order to help escape "the distinction between 'moral' and 'philosophical' . . . with which Chaucer had unfortunately trapped him" (197) at the end of "Troilus." Baker then demonstrates the depth of concern with philosophical issues in CA by discussing causation, future contingency, aging, mutation, dicing, probability, chance, and determinism in the poem. In several of these discussions, Baker illuminates Gower's work by expanding on Nicolette Zeeman's comparison of CA with "the widely-circulated pseudo-Ovidian 'De vetula' of the thirteenth century" (197), a work Baker aligns with medieval logicians on his way to demonstrating successfully that Gower should not be considered only a moral poet. [MA]. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Literature, Logic and Mathematics in the Fourteenth Century. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Galloway's complex argument--a quest to identify what he calls "literary voicing"--uses "voice" as a tool "to explore the boundary between works making primarily aesthetic claims and those with more direct claims on social and other social and other extra-narrative meaning" (244). To reach his subject, he triangulates between texts of Wyclif ("De civile dominio"), Chaucer ("Parliament of Fowls"), and Gower ("Vox clamantis"), with briefer excurses into John Clanvowe's "Book of Cupid" and--initially--Thomas Usk's "Appeal" (1383). Galloway sees Usk's behavior described there to influence the mayoral election pitting John of Northampton against Nicholas Brembre as an early attempt to harness the "common voice" of the people to influence a political result--something made to seem possible by the growing sense, from 1371-72, that such a "voice" existed, that it could be located in parliament, which should be accommodated by the king and lords' council in any laws passed. This surfaced powerfully in the Good Parliament of 1376 (246-50), hardened in the Merciless Parliament in the hands of the Appellants in 1388, and was further manipulated by Richard II in 1397 (251). This "common voice" could also be impacted by religious discourse. John Wyclif was especially effective in this, providing "intellectual resources" (252) to the concept, while developing "his own theory of 'collective voicing'" in "De civile domino" (253) and preaching against the Good Parliament. One result was the accusation that Wyclif bore responsibility for the 1381 Rising, to which Galloway accords some credence (254-58). Such developing concepts of "common voice" thus laid groundwork for the development of "further theoretical articulations [that] took place among the poets" (260). Chaucer, and especially Gower, cleared space for individual "literary voices"--an altogether new entity--through a trope of the "poet as reader"--bringing the collective "voice" of "old books" to bear on political issues which engaged the "configuration of society's 'voices'" (261). Gower uses "old books" to "give him words to describe modernity, and thus to articulate his contemporary condemnations" (263). This "wresting of original meanings to his own uses shows how history . . . is a language or medium of art, malleable to present purposes" (264). Gower manages a "blending of his voice of present condemnation with the texts he lifts and reapplied produces a temporal retrojection of himself as narrator. His 'common' voice becomes archaized: he utters the direct speech of textual wisdom . . . his voice seems of a piece with his ancient books--and hardly allows credit to be granted to it as his own" (264). Gower furthers this sense of his as the voice of "ancient wisdom" by casting himself as old and blind--a move Galloway suggests is more a trope than a fact--and somewhat ironic in light of the Septvauns affair (265-71). Chaucer's approach to old books and "authorities" in the "Parliament of Fowls" and to a lesser extent the "Book of the Duchess" Galloway presents as inextricable from his interaction with Gower from 1377 on (271-74), even suggesting that while there "is no direct proof that Chaucer used the Parliament to respond critically to Gower's "Vox" . . . the circumstantial evidence is compelling" (274). Gower's reply to the Parliament, Galloway decides, was the "Visio Anglie"--another "beast fable"--and the CA. In both of these, Gower's emphasis is on "self-sacrifice," in direct rebuttal of Chaucer's (and the cuckoo's) "Hobbsian" (283) world of self-interest and authoritarian control (280-85). In VC, this self-sacrifice is the subsumption of the individual authorial voice into an impersonal "speaker from long ago: less a modern reader of old books than a fragment of old books himself, a frozen image deictically aiming his poem's frozen arrows to a future that only the works readers could vivify by lived experience" (281). In the context of contrast with Chaucer, Galloway concludes with something like a plea for critical acuity: "The argument over whether Gower's entire poetic work is somehow 'unified' or endlessly dissonant should include not just what his work is, but also what it persists in seeking. Gower's continued and paradoxical effort both to speak for but also renew the 'old' suggests what we may call a Wycliffian ideal of the common voice: radical and elitist in its hopes of remaking institutions and society, yet conservative in its loyalty to what is imagined as having always been 'truly' expressed" (286). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew. Published Galloway, Andrew. "Common Voices in Theory and Practice in Late Fourteenth-Century England." In Richard W. Kaeuper, ed. Law, Governance, and Justice: New Views on Medieval Constitutionalism. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Pp. 243-86. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Style, Rhetoric, and Versification 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 Common Voices in Theory and Practice in Late Fourteenth-Century England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In this brief essay, Langum sketches several rudiments common to medieval medical and pastoral thought on the interrelations between illness and sin, with discussion of the role of human passions, particularly the passions of envy and wrath--also considered to be vices or sins--as they were explained generally in various medieval sources and as they are used in Gower's "Mirour de l'Omme" and "Confessio Amantis." Such passions, Langum shows, were used both figuratively and literally, and raise questions about the "responsibility for sin" (119) insofar as passions are natural to humans (and to some animals) but need to be subdued in moral creatures: "It falls to reason to rule the passions" (121). As passions, both wrath and envy "may be unavoidable conditions of human psychology" but, left unchecked by reason, they are vicious or sinful; at times, it is even unclear "whether what is being described is the vice or the passion or a conflation of the two" (122). To illustrate details of her discussion, Langham uses Gower's works recurrently, along with other secular writers and a number of medical and pastoral authorities and encyclopedists. Admitting that Gower does not "use the word 'passion' to denote the physiological forces of emotion in the body" (126), Langum nevertheless addresses Gower's "medically specific descriptions of wrath and envy as passions" through which, she tells us rather unclearly, "Gower extends beyond the figurative to suggest a more material relationship between the body and ethics" and thereby "raises the question: do these allusions to wrath and envy as passions contradict [the poet's] argument for human responsibility and culpability?" (125). Her answer is a qualified "no": "In my view, Gower encourages the reader to recognize physiological forces at work in human choices and actions, if not ultimately excusing him for bending to these forces." The particular "physiological" force Langham cites here is Amans's advanced age, in spite of which, he "still actively desires to love against reason" (126)--a passion, therefore, that is presumably sinful by being unreasonable, although Langum leaves this unsaid. Instead, she closes her essay with a brief reading of the "Tale of Constantine" from Book II in which "Gower uses the story to reflect upon human bodily weakness" (126). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Langum, Virginia. Published Langum, Virginia. "Medicine, Passion and Sin in Gower." In Rachel Falconer and Denis Renevey, eds. Medieval and Early Modern Literature, Science and Medicine. SPELL: Swiss Papers in Language and Literature, no. 28. Tübingen: Narr, 2013. Pp. 117-30. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditatis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Medicine, Passion and Sin in Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Guy-Bray examines three plays--Marlowe's "Dido, Queen of Carthage," Jonson's "Poetaster," and Shakespeare/Wilkins' "Pericles"--finding in them a "strong if usually implicit tension between the earlier and newer versions" (133). "This tension was greater," he goes on to say, "in the case of plays based on well-known texts or events, and greater still if playwrights chose to make this tension part of the subject of their plays--to confront, more or less explicitly, the question of the secondary status of their own texts, and, by extension, the secondary status of theatre itself as a form that was new in an English context and of lower status than poetry" (133). This thesis guides Guy-Bray's analysis of "Pericles," which focuses on the character Gower, whose "Confessio Amantis" would have been only one of the sources of the play (he claims without offering evidence) known to the audience--the others being Godfrey of Viterbo's "Pantheon" and the "Gesta Romanorum" (146). Gower the character, he notes, could be identified not as the author of the source per se, but as a "presenter," one who "embodies the author function" (146). By this means, Shakespeare/Wilkins "may be seeking to give 'Pericles' a higher status than if the source were a folktale or a relatively recent English prose work" (146--but see also n. 19 on that page, in which it is suggested that the name Apollonius was changed to Pericles in order to invoke Pyrocles from Sidney's "Arcadia"). Pointing out that by underlining the visual--the watched drama with its potential to show rather than "merely" narrate--Shakespeare/Wilkins register some credit for their new form (148); yet, as the necessity of Gower's narration is made clear in the otherwise-unintelligible dumb-show, "Gower reminds us that we can still rely on him to tell the truth of the visual representation" (149). Thus, "'Pericles' suggests that however different a play may be from its source, the source is still necessary" (149). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Guy-Bray, Stephen. Published Guy-Bray, Stephen. "Sources." In Henry S. Turner, ed. Early Modern Theatricality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 133-63. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sources. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review When I was asked to review Bruce Holsinger's new novel, "A Burnable Book," for the "John Gower Newsletter," I sat for a few minutes trying to recall the last time John Gower was a featured literary character--outside of the self-fictionalizing within his poetry. In the end I could think of only one fictional Gower of note: the John Gower of Shakespeare's "Pericles," that phantom narrator of the grave who so forcefully directs what Ben Jonson once called a "mouldy tale." It was that Gower, perhaps combined with Chaucer's reference to "moral Gower"--and, in all honesty, the oft-repetitive pontificating that can be traced across Gower's career--that has no doubt painted the humorless and relentlessly severe image of "dour Gower" that is the popular understanding of the man. Thankfully, Gower scholars have fleshed out a more nuanced man behind the famed CA. Even so, Holsinger, a medievalist at the University of Virginia whose academic credentials are beyond repute, imagines Gower as a figure who is even more complicated--"compromised" is the term used by the author (p. 442)--than anything scholarship has yet suggested. The Gower of "A Burnable Book" could hardly be further from the single-minded moralist of old, even if his friend Geoffrey Chaucer bitingly chides him there for being so in his writings. Holsinger's Gower is a tortured father, a manipulating blackmailer, an information-hoarding spy, and at times even a sleuthing detective, who at the behest of Chaucer becomes embroiled in a web of conspiracies. A young woman has been murdered in the fields outside 1385 London. By her moving death (which forms a powerful opening prologue), a mysterious book is lost somewhere in the streets of the city, and in the race to find it the corpses and the conspiracies begin to mount. If Gower fails to find the book and unravel its many intrigues, we learn, the next to die may well be King Richard II himself. Holsinger puts together an impressively large cast of characters for this twisting tale, most of them known to history and familiar to scholars of the period. Arguably chief among them is Chaucer himself, who is (perhaps inevitably?) the more interesting of the poets in the novel: in addition to Gower, we encounter sometime-poet John Clanvowe in Oxford. We spend time, too, in Florence: with the dark figure of John Hawkwood and the ruthless men of the White Company, who lurk in Italy like wolves just beyond the light of the lamp. Most of the book is set in London, however, with a swarm of figures that the non-specialist will likely be troubled to keep straight. Even aside from the king, there are numerous figures of the aristocracy who take part in the tale, including John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford, Robert de Vere, and Michael de la Pole. There are bishops and priests, a curate and a prioress, and more officials of London than you can shake a yerde at--the vast majority of them indebted to Gower as he blackmails them for one sin or another. And then (speaking of sin) there are the prostitutes. Lots and lots of prostitutes. And a great deal of talk (and action) about what went on in places like Gropecunt Lane. There is also (why not?) a "swerver," the transgendered Eleanor/Edgar Rykener, based on the very real John Rykener--to say nothing of the many tradesmen and freemen who take part in the tale. Holsinger's plot amid this colorful cast is a complex weaving and not without its enjoyments--it's hard for a Gowerian not to smile at a sequence of final scenes in which "moral" Gower comes as close to an action hero as he probably ever will--but the unquestionable star of this novel is London itself. In vivid strokes "A Burnable Book" paints the living, breathing, oft-stinking soul of a late-medieval city. Like a narrative version of works like Ian Mortimer's "The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England," Holsinger's novel carries us from the fine confections of the royal court to the bloody dissections of a butcher shop--and a great many teeming, filth-strewn streets between. There are, moreover, "Easter eggs" for the educated reader: the walk-on appearance of a clerk named Pinkhurst, e.g., or the reimagining of Gower's boatride across the Thames with the king, during which the idea for the CA was supposedly born. Though these many esoteric intricacies at times threaten to derail the thrust of the actual narrative, the reader "in the know" will surely find in them a satisfying kind of delight. The one constant through it all is John Gower--his distance from our own biased expectations serving as its own measure of how little we really know about the man. Holsinger's morally compromised Gower is unexpected and surprising, and as such the scholars of the John Gower Society will no doubt find "A Burnable Book" a quite fascinating book indeed. And no need to put it to the fire. [Michael Livingston. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 33.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Holsinger, Bruce Published Holsinger, Bruce. "A Burnable Book." London: William Morrow, 2014 ISBN 9780062240323 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 A Burnable Book Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available William Morrow, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Challenging the received view both of the genesis of Gower's poem and of the poet's relationship with King Richard, Barrington proposes that from the very first, the CA was designed as moral criticism rather than entertainment, adopting a wholly different strategy but continuing the same critique of the king that Gower had expressed in his earlier works, notably the VC. His strategy in the "first recension" of the poem, she argues, consists of three successive transformations of his authorial self: first, from the moral preacher to the courtier poet in the scene that Gower creates in which Richard commissions the poem; then from courtier poet to courtier "tout court," as Gower adopts the role of lover at the beginning of Book I; then from courtier to the aged Gower himself in the conclusion. In each of these transformations Barrington detects implicit or direct allusions to the criticisms that were most often leveled at the king. In the river scene, Gower transforms himself "from a moralizing didactic poet who dourly sings his lines to a courtly versifier who cheerily accepts the king's bidding" (420), but he depicts the king as exercising his power despotically and arbitrarily. The alert reader will recognize the guise and will perceive Gower's own continued presence in the Latin glosses and in the enigmatic epigrams. In 'infiltrating" Richard's court in this way, moreover, Gower distinguishes himself from the king's more flattering courtiers by offering "wisdom" as well as "pleye": "His verse will bear as its outward demeanor the court's sensibilities, but it will be shaped underneath by Gower's call to reform" (422). At the beginning of Book I he adopts the role of Amans, making a transition from "courtly versifier" to "courtly attendant" (423), but only in order to "produce a text that appears courtly while criticizing courtly behavior" (424). In his initial encounter with Venus, Amans' behavior reflects that of the courtiers surrounding Richard who are not worthy, either by birth or upbringing, for the role. His confessions contain repeated allusions to the "delinquencies of Richard's court as Gower's contemporaries perceived them" (426), and Genius reinforces the criticism by allegorizing the different vices of love as courtiers. As others have observed, moreover, many of the exempla are more concerned with governance than with love, and in perhaps its most pointed criticism of the court, Amans fails to realize their application or to profit from them. "In short, Amans's allegorical confession reveals not his own guilt, but rather that of the court" (431). Finally, as Venus unmasks him in the conclusion, "his fictional roles exposed, Gower abandons the role of courtly lover and reclaims his true name and age" (431), and he turns to deliver a prayer that enacts "the fantasy in which Richard is at once and already the ideal king, while at the same time acknowledging the poet's inability to influence the king without divine intervention" (432). "The 'Confessio' is, first and foremost, a didactic poem; it only masquerades as a courtly poem" (431), and that it was directly aimed at the well-known failings of Richard and his court helps explain why it continued to be copied after Henry became king. Barrington's essay offers a new way of viewing the link between love and politics in the poem, and it reads like the brief for a book-length study which we should encourage her to produce. The strength of her argument lies in its coherency, but it does depend upon assumptions about Gower's attitude to the king as much as it does upon her close reading of the poem. As Wayne Booth pointed out long ago, the detection of irony often depends upon knowledge that we bring from outside the text. Barrington draws numerous connections between passages in the CA and complaints of contemporary chroniclers, but in quoting from the VC (e.g. on page 418), she cites passages from the final version of the poem that may not have been composed until after Richard's deposition. This is nonetheless a very important article, and it offers challenges that well deserve our attention. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 33.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Barrington, Candace Published Barrington, Candace. ""Personas and Performance in Gower's Confessio Amantis."." Chaucer Review 48 (2014), pp. 414-33. ISSN 0009-2002 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis 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 "Personas and Performance in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Penn State University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The central contention of Collette's study is that Chaucer's work is best viewed as produced "in a moment of literary and cultural hybridity, when . . . the courtly conventions of love poetry were consciously melded with a broader definition of love's 'thousand formes.' . . . This notion of love is closely linked to what . . . English termed common profit in late fourteenth-century vernacular literature. As Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' demonstrates, love becomes a trope through which to examine right action, and charity becomes a template for creating a more just polity." (1) She cites a humanist impulse underlying this widening of love's scope, taking account of Italian predecessors (Boccaccio, Petrarch), French fellow-travellers (Machaut and Christine de Pizan), but also reflecting a native strain present in the court of Edward III, led by Richard de Bury, and a circle including Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley, Richard FitzRalph and Robert Holcot. Her study presents "a comparative reading of these authors' work . . . how all adapt and shape well-known stories for their own cultural purposes." (5) The section on Gower ("John Gower: The Personal and the Political" 59-68) includes detailed discussion of those tales of women also told by Chaucer in 'Legend of Good Women': Pyramus and Thisbe, Medea, Dido, Ariadne, Philomela, and Lucrece. Her findings take on a general character, as follows: "The structure of the 'Confessio Amantis' is overtly didactic, the alignment between exemplar and moral point always articulated. Gower's examples, however, are often expressed in rich poetry, while Chaucer chooses an opposite course: the naked text, brief narratives which pare down the stories so that what details and elements of plot remain achieve significance for the reader without interpretive directives from the author." (61)] [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 33.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Collette, Carolyn P Published Collette, Carolyn P. "Rethinking Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women'." Woodbridge, Suffolk: York Medieval Press/Boydell and Brewer, 2014 ISBN 9781903153499 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 Rethinking Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available York Medieval Press/Boydell and Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Lipton argues that Gower's discussion of marriage in the 'Traitié' is shaped as much by legal doctrine (and his own legal training) as by the sermons and confessional manuals that are more frequently cited and that lie closer to the heart of CA. She notes the prevalence of legal vocabulary in the 'Traitié' and traces the way in which the opening ballades incorporate marriage within an account of the descent of law from divine to natural to positive and from old to new. Both law and marriage, for both Gower and for the writers of the legal treatises that she cites, are regulatory in nature, and they originate in paradise in response to man's fallen condition. The main body of the 'Traitié' is shaped by the "case-based ethical thinking" of Aristotle and Aquinas that was central to medieval legal theory as well, and in contrast to their analogues in CA, the exempla that Gower presents, with their emphasis on punishment, "repeatedly represent transgressions of marriage as occasions for exercising justice rather than teaching moral truth" (495). The address of the poem "a tout le monde en general," finally, reflects an evolving view of the social foundations of law. "The poem makes marriage instead of kingship emblematic of legal principles. Rather than presenting law as a divinely given monarchical prerogative, the balades feature principles of common good and contractual integrity, which are essential to the law as a foundation of wide-ranging social order. The poem thus reflects both a contemporary legal view of marital crime as social and the increasingly broad public participation in English criminal justice" (497). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 33.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lipton, Emma Published Lipton, Emma. "Exemplary Cases: Marriage as Legal Principle in Gower's 'Traitié pour les amantz marietz'." Chaucer Review 48 (2014), pp. 480-501. ISSN 0009-2002 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Exemplary Cases: Marriage as Legal Principle in Gower's 'Traitié pour les amantz marietz' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Penn State University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Tracing the emergence of the author function in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, during which writers began to name themselves and their other works in their own texts, this project examines the hitherto ignored role that prophetic self-representation played in the construction of medieval authorial personae. Building upon already established connections between classical authorship and prophecy, medieval authors exploited the prophetic subject position in order to clarify their function as mediators between subject and audience. More than a mask from behind which to safely advance political critiques, the persona of the prophet allowed medieval authors to define the nature of their authority and their relationships to their readers. The first half of this project examines the works of two authors, John Gower and Christine de Pizan, who use prophecy to assert their superior analytical skills. Although both authors draw heavily from the tradition of the prophet Daniel, a prophet known for his inspired interpretive abilities, they claim their inspiration from entirely different sources. Gower represents himself as being prophetically inspired by the public voice, which under the maxim, 'Vox populi,vox Dei,' is divine. Gower consistently represents himself as the public prophet of England in the 'Mirour de l'Omme,' the 'Vox Clamantis,' and the 'Confessio Amantis.' Christine de Pizan, on the other hand, promotes her career in the traditionally masculine fields of literature and politics by implying that her gender gives her prophetic intuition. . . . The second half of this project looks at the work of two authors, William Langland and Margery Kempe." [JGN 33.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fonzo, Kimberly L Published Fonzo, Kimberly L. "Late medieval authorship and the prophetic tradition." PhD thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013. Open access at https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/items/45609 (accessed January 22, 2023). Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Vox Clamantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Late medieval authorship and the prophetic tradition. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The Second International Congress of the John Gower Society at Valladolid in 2011 prompts Bowden to suggest two areas for future Gower scholarship. The first concerns the possibility that Gower himself might have made an undocumented trip to Spain before undertaking to write CA. Citing the ease with which Margery Kempe was able to visit Santiago de Compostella (rather later), Bowden also points out how descriptions of sea voyages in CA seem to be more closely based on real experience than that in VC, and she notes that while in Spain, Gower could have come into contact with Juan Ruiz's 'Libro de Buen Amor,' with its suggestive invocation of the Seven Deadly Sins and its use of the story of Nebuchadnezzar (both much more briefly than in Gower). Bowden also suggests that the movement of proverbs across linguistic boundaries during the Middle Ages and Gower's own use of the same proverb in more than one of his languages might provide another fruitful ground for further research. [eJGN 34.1 PN] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bowden, Betsy Published Bowden, Betsy. "Gower and. . . Pilgrimage? 'Pamphilus?' Proverbs? Some Promising Preguntas Raised but Far from Answered at Valladolid." John Gower Newsletter 33.2 (2014), pp. 6-13. ISSN 1051-3493 Gower Subject Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and. . . Pilgrimage? 'Pamphilus?' Proverbs? Some Promising Preguntas Raised but Far from Answered at Valladolid Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Cannon's own earlier studies of surviving fourteenth-century textbooks concluded that, contrary to the testimony of Higden and Trevisa, instruction in literacy at the time that Langland, Chaucer, and Gower all learned to read took place neither in French nor in English but in Latin: "from the beginning of their education children were not only taught to read and write by construing Latin, they were taught to read and write in Latin" (351). Later, each of these poets "needed to move their very understanding of language and its grammar from the Latin forms and terminology in which they learned it to the English in which they were writing" (352). Their consciousness of that process is reflected, he argues, in the use of grammar as a trope in both Langland and Chaucer, and he proposes that "the period at issue here might be best called the 'Era of Grammaticalization.' That designation would describe the way in which English literature of the fourteenth century so often used grammatical concepts and terminology to shape allegory and image that it elevated grammar into something like a literary technique. It would also describe the way such literature hewed so close to the practices of basic literacy training that literary production often proceeded by means of the simplest exercises used to teach children how to read and write" (352-53). Gower figures only briefly in Cannon's essay, in a paragraph on schoolroom translation exercises, "which are most significant to Middle English poetry . . . where they are not anterior to the poem's English but parallel to it, where a poem can be said to unfold as a translation into and out of English for its entire length" (357). He suggests that the Latin of the CA not be dismissed as mere apparatus: "The Latin and English in the 'Confessio' are often precise equivalents, a fact embraced by the scribes who copied the poem and placed both Latin and English together in the main column of text (Pearsall, 'Gower's Latin' 14) or, on one occasion, made the Latin so large and colorful that it appears as if 'the English text is to be read as a commentary on the Latin . . . rather than vice versa' (Echard and Fanger xxvii-xxviii). In all such cases the 'Confessio' takes the form of literacy training, a grammaticalization insofar as it pairs what could be English prompts with their 'Latyns' or Latin prompts with their 'vulgars' for its entire length" (357). [PN. Copyright eJGN 34.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cannon, Christopher Published Cannon, Christopher. "From Literacy to Literature: Elementary Learning and the Middle English Poet." PMLA 129 (2014), pp. 349-64. 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 From Literacy to Literature: Elementary Learning and the Middle English Poet Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review At heart, Carlson's essay is a close reading of some key passages from Gower and Chaucer in comparison to their sources: CA 4.3063-64, the brief description of the storm in the tale of "Ceix and Alceone," in contrast to the much longer passage in Ovid's "Metamorphoses" 11.474-572; VC 1.1593-2012, another description of a storm, in comparison to the same passage in Ovid; VC 1.1623-38, which incorporates five lines from a different passage in Met., 1.264-82; Gower's "Ceix and Alceone" in comparison to Chaucer's account in "The Book of the Duchess," which omits the final transformation that Gower retains; and VC 1.1231-32, in which Gower atypically turns to Vergil (Aeneid 4.173), in comparison to "House of Fame" 713-20, in which Chaucer atypically turns to Ovid instead (Met. 12.43-46). Carlson's discussion is informed by his own deep immersion in the Latin texts, so that he is able to describe, for instance, how Gower's borrowings from Ovid in VC are selected not just for their imagery but as evocations of the broader context in which they occur, and his comments are illuminating. He frames his analysis within an argument on Gower's efforts to outdo both Ovid and Chaucer, whom he viewed as rivals, as well as an effort to outdo his own earlier youthful work. Thus the briefer account of the storm represents Gower's correction of Ovid's excess, and the comparison to Chaucer betrays an underlying jealousy: "Though Gower was senior, perhaps by as much as a generation, Chaucer arrived earlier as an English poet," Carlson concludes. "Greater, prior success for Chaucer's English writings--evidently widely copied, by contrast with Gower's earliest efforts--may also have engendered a degree of disapprobation in Gower for the younger, less serious, but better-received English writer. Gower's more thoroughly informed Ovidian usage in the "Visio Anglie" represents the superiority of his learning, by contrast with the boy Chaucer. The still more thorough command of Ovidianism, still more subtly expressed, in the final "Confessio amantis" reuse of the Ceyx and Alcione matter--where the Chaucerian ineptitude seems to have offended Gower ('Ther mai no worldes joie laste' topping 'To lytel while oure blysse lasteth')--represents Gower's greater seriousness and knowledge, by comparison with the own, younger self that had engaged thoroughly with the same Ovid, and in the learned language itself, for the "Visio Anglie" section of 1381" (952). [PN. Copyright John Gower Society eJGN 34.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R Published Carlson, David R. "Gower Agonistes and Chaucer on Ovid (and Virgil)." Modern Language Review 109 (2014), pp. 931-52. ISSN 0026-7937 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis 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 Gower Agonistes and Chaucer on Ovid (and Virgil) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review As his title suggests, Epstein pursues a double agenda in this essay: linking both Gower's and Chaucer's views on alchemy to their understanding of economics, first of all; and secondly, contrasting their views not just on alchemy, which we already knew were quite different, but on economics too. In his final paragraph, he writes: "Alchemy is, for both Chaucer and Gower, an essential trope for understanding economics. But whereas Gower idealizes alchemy as a vision of natural increase and pure wealth that is the opposite of the monetized economy, Chaucer reviles alchemy as the obscurantist antithesis of both scientific technology and economics, which are logical systems that, while artificial, can only be understood rationally and empirically" (248). It is not a small part of the merit of Epstein's essay that it provides a brief, very clear account of the background, both classical and medieval, to both poets' understandings of both alchemy and economics. The connection between the two in Chaucer's work is a bit more speculative than in Gower's. Epstein makes much of the depiction of the priest who is the victim in "Canon Yeoman's Tale" as an unsophisticated gull in order to portray his lack of understanding of economics as somehow parallel to his susceptibility to the deceptions of alchemy. Chaucer's "scientific" understanding of economics is inferred from his background as collector of customs, his understanding of the nature of financial dealings as revealed in "Shipman's Tale," and the interest in scientific measurement and calculation displayed in his "Treatise on the Astrolabe." It is rather more difficult to demonstrate that these experiences underlay his dismissal of alchemy as false science. Epstein has a bit more to work with in Gower's case since Gower has much to say about profitlessness of the quest for gold in an economic sense in his discussion of Avarice in Book V of CA, in seeming contrast to his approval of the "science," if not the modern practice, of the production of gold by alchemy in Book IV. Epstein explains Gower's allusion to "the time, er gold was smite / In coign, that men the florin knewe" (V.334-35), when there was no deception and no war, as a reference not to some vague Golden Age in the ancient past but to Edward III's minting of gold coins beginning in 1344, which Gower and other contemporaries blamed for the social divisions and other turmoil of their own time. In Book IV, on the other hand, in praising the ancient practice of alchemy, Gower describes it as a natural process, not "transmuting" base metals into some other form but instead restoring them to their purest form. Epstein summarizes the significance of this juxtaposition as he brings his discussion of Gower to a close: "Gower begins Book V of the 'Confessio' with the words 'Obstat auaricia legibus' (Avarice obstructs the laws of nature). He endorses alchemy before he excoriates money because alchemy stands in contrast to mercantilism as a myth of natural wealth. Alchemy in Book IV is everything that money in Book V is not: ordered, organic, bounded by natural extremes, rational, obedient to consistent laws, commensurable, and equitable. One of the qualities of money that most disturbed ancient and modern thinkers was that, through exchange and interest, it seemed to be able to multiply itself, and therefore to create wealth "ex nihilo," without labor or material. But in Gower's understanding, the alchemist's labor leads the material, through "the comfort of the fire," to the ideal form it most desires. "Some of the greatest minds of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries worried that alchemy, by increasing the amount of (natural or synthetic) gold and silver, could destabilize the money economy. Gower seems to have harbored greater concerns about the destabilizing effects of the money economy itself. Alchemy for Gower was a myth of profit without money or exchange, of value that is absolute rather than relative, of wealth that is organic, natural, universal, elemental, and inalienable from the innate value of material. Alchemy allowed him, as it must have allowed many of his contemporaries, to entertain a vision of labor, wealth, and profit while maintaining his belief in a moral social system rooted in ancient concepts of justice and fair exchange. The elixir, Gower says, can refine every metal, 'And pureth hem be such a weie / That al the vice goth aweie' (IV:2555-56). "But, it is also lost. The science itself is true, but we cannot recover it to the modern world, which, even by Gower's time, was thoroughly monetized" (231-32). [PN. Copyright John Gower Society. eJGN 34.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Epstein, Robert Published Epstein, Robert. "Dismal Science: Chaucer and Gower on Alchemy and Economy." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 36 (2014), pp. 209-48. ISSN 0190-2407 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 Dismal Science: Chaucer and Gower on Alchemy and Economy Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Although the bible lists only sons as offspring of Adam and Eve, it also mentions "other progeny," number unspecified. In Book VIII of the CA, Gower names two daughters of Eve as Calmana and Delbora "as the sister-wives of Cain and Abel, respectively." Glaeske examines "Gower's use of Calmana and Delbora within the wider contexts of Middle English literature and medieval literature" in order to show "which other traditions concerning the daughters of Eve were known by a Middle English audience, where Gower accords with these traditions, and where he contradicts them, and might have used other traditions." Glaeske traces the variants of the Eve's daughters narratives through diverse sources, including Greek, Armenian, Georgian, and Old Church Slavonic, as well as the Latin "Vita Adae et Evae," Pseudo-Philo's "Biblical Antiquities," "The Book of Jubilees," "The Cave of Treasures," "The Combat of Adam and Eve with Satan," and "The Book of the Bee." Among Middle English texts including mention of the Adamic offspring, Glaeske reports on the "Middle English Genesis and Exodus," "The Historye of the Patriarks," "The Middle English Paraphrase of the Old Testament," three prose versions of the "Life of Adam and Eve," a Middle English version of the stanzaic "Canticum de Creatione," the "incomplete Auckinleck Couplets," and the "Cursor Mundi." Of these, "besides the 'Confessio Amantis,' the only Middle English texts to name Calmana and Delbora as the daughters of Eve are 'The Historye of the Patriarks' and the 'Cursor Mundi'" (164). There are differences even in these accounts: "'The Historye,' however, does not tell us which sister married with brother; instead, this is noted by 'Cursor Mundi' and 'Confessio Amantis'" (165). "Outside of vernacular versions of the Latin 'Vita Adae et Evae,' the names Calmana and Delbora are recorded within several medieval chronicles, both from the Continent and from England. Middle High German metrical chronicles record both names, as does the 'Weltchronik' of Heinrich von München and the prose chronicle of Jean de Preis. Among the Middle English chronicles their names appear both in the 'Polychronicon' of Ranulph Higden and the English translation made by John Trevisa, as well as the 'Chronica majora' of Matthew of Paris and the 'Eulogium historiarum.' Many of these texts cite their source as Methodius, and Trevisa translated a tract ascribed to him, which does mention the two sisters, but all of these chronicles are largely indebted to the late twelfth-century 'Historia Scholastica' of Peter Comestor, and it is there where we find the earliest mention of Calmana and Delbora as the twin sisters of Cain and Abel" (169). Glaeske concludes that 1) "Gower's use of Calmana and Delbora as the daughters of Eve seems to derive either directly from the 'Historia scholastica' of Peter Comestor, or indirectly from other Middle English texts that use it as source material. Gower does not appear to have known any of the texts of the secondary Adam literature" (169); 2) "Gower's designation of Delbora as the inventor of weaving remains puzzling" (170); 3) "Since Gower appears not to have derived this designation [i.e., weaving] from contemporary Middle English texts, it suggests that he knew other traditions concerning the two sisters, possibly from other insular texts" (170). [RFY. Copyright The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Glaeske, Keith Published Glaeske, Keith. "Gower and the Daughters of Eve." SELIM: Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature 19 (2014), pp. 161-74. ISSN 1132-631X 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 and the Daughters of Eve Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review No, not that Batman. Stephan Batman was in the service of Matthew Parker, possibly as his household chaplain, and he aided him in the acquisition of his vast library as well as acquiring a collection of books of his own. His "Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation" was published in 1569. It includes a discussion of the Seven Deadly Sins, and under Sloth, a brief version of the story of Dido and Aeneas that Reid argues is modeled on CA rather than any classical source: in it, Aeneas does not abandon Dido when he departs from Carthage but is merely "long tyme absent," and his sloth lies in the slowness of his return, with its ultimate tragic consequence, not in his delaying the founding of Rome. The episode still poses two puzzles, Reid notes: this account of Aeneas' sloth does not fit well with either of the two ways in which Batman defines the sin, and it is "somewhat surprising" that Batman should turn to Gower, given his "rather ambiguous status among sixteenth-century Protestant reformers," in an anti-papist tract (350). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Reid, Lindsay Ann Published Reid, Lindsay Ann. "Gower's Slothful Aeneas in Batman's 'Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation'." Notes and Queries 61 (2014), pp. 349-54. ISSN 0029-3970 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's Slothful Aeneas in Batman's 'Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Schieberle opens the introduction to her monograph with a reading of Gower's tale of the "King, Wine, Women and Truth" from CA Book VII. She finds that "For Gower, 'King, Wine, Woman, and Truth' has a double function. First [the tale] models the process of advising princes that Gower . . . deploys in the Confessio overall: ethics are derived from historical and literary exempla that illustrate moral principles--here, the connection between women and truth. Second, the story embeds an image of feminine counsel within its account of ethical advising . . . . The conclusion of Gower's exemplum--that women and truth are intimately bound together--strongly implies that counsel itself is a feminized practice, a relationship between a subordinate adviser and a masculine ruler that enables wisdom, or 'trouthe'." (2) Her expansion of the observation forms the central argument of her study: "the connection between women and truth that Gower articulates here is not exclusive to him; various writers, including Chaucer, from the late fourteenth century and fifteenth century found in the notion of feminine counsel a compelling image for their own writing" (2). The following four chapters take up a writer and a work each: Chapter 1, Gower's CA; Chapter 2, Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women"; Chapter 3, Chaucer's "Melibee"; Chapter 4, Christine de Pizan's "Epistre Othea," as rendered by Stephen Scrope. For Gowerians, the most pertinent of these is the first, entitled "Women, Counsel, and Marriage Metaphors in John Gower's Confessio Amantis" (21-60). Schieberle characterizes the CA as "a vernacular mirror for princes that presents a remarkable sensitivity to women . . . . What makes Gower's mirror for princes unique, however, is its interest in women and their contributions both ot political culture and to the individual cultivation of virtue" (21). She offers close readings of two tales--"Florent" and "The Three Questions"--by way of proof for the claim that "Gower links advice to princes with women's counsel in order to imagine a gendered structure of authority and advice in which men and women work in tandem to create a harmonious whole" (21). In contrast to the essentially anti-feminist attitude of Giles of Rome, whose "De regimine principium" Gower knew and adapted, "Gower strikingly depicts women in both 'Florent' and 'Three Questions' as the "only" [Schieberle's italics] individual who can instruct a powerful male" (24). Male counsellors are generally less effective in advising their superiors than are women in the CA. "Men designated as counsellors simply give advice, and whether a superior acts upon it or not determines the outcome and the moral lesson. By contrast, in takes with prominent women counsellors such as 'Florent' and 'Three Questions,' the successful conclusion to the narrative hinges upon the woman's counsel and, in 'Three Questions' on her ability to correct her king without threatening his authority as ruler. Gower's women counsel boldly, whereas male counsellors, even when they are older, sage, and right (as in 'Rehoboam') rarely demand to be heard or correct the king. Only the 'Courtiers and the Fool' offers an exception: male courtiers give their king poor counsel, but the Fool obliquely admonishes him in a surprising contrast (VII.3945-4026). This exception proves the rule: as women generally do, the Fool lacks the expectation of authority or threat that allows him to open the king's eyes . . . . Gower more often uses women to represent the disenfranchised voice of morally and politically responsible counsel not provided by traditional male counsellors" (25). Schieberle develops an argument via word-field studies of "conseil," "avys," and "rede" that for Gower the last term meant both to read a text and interpret it carefully. In macrocosm, this means for the CA that "Gower's complex narratives require readers to reinvestigate Genius's imprecise moral lessons, rather than accept any of his morals as universal truths." His purpose, she believes, is to create a continuing movement to and fro between "fundamental ideals of love and politics." He uses this "mediating space" in "Florent" and "Three Questions" to "promote women counsellors as characters that can negotiate between amorous and political discourses," giving "prominence to women as model counsellors who intervene efficaciously in "political" [italics hers] impasses" (33). She follows these observations with careful readings of "Florent" and "Three Questions" (33-56). Ultimately, she argues, Gower's project is to create a "new vision of the polity" in which the ideal is a harmonious marriage, not a competition for power. She links this ideal with Gower's decision to write in English, and to advise in an oblique rather than a directive fashion, concluding "Gower's evidence that women may often be more effective counsellors than men equally conveys the argument that even though his 'feminized' text does not carry the same immediate authority as its paternal Latin predecessors, the CA's vernacular advice can nevertheless be fundamental in encouraging English audiences to embrace moral virtues" (60). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Schieberle, Misty Published Schieberle, Misty. "Feminized Counsel and the Literature of Advice in England, 1380-1500." Turnhout: Brepols, 2014 ISBN 978-2-503-55012-1 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 Feminized Counsel and the Literature of Advice in England, 1380-1500 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 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed