18 100 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 Walz's published dissertation provides a brief introduction to Gower's use of proverbs as well as an exhaustive catalogue. Walz opens with a general distinction between folk and literary proverb, and briefly compares Gower's tally of 290 proverbs to Chaucer's approximately 187 proverbs. There is some overlap (about 60 proverbs), but they probably did not borrow from each other. Walz lists some of Gower's major influences (the Bible, the Church Fathers, and the Latin authors), and feels that Gower may have read many of them directly, rather than using florilegia. The main body of the dissertation consists of Gower's proverbs organized by theme (e.g., human relationships, relationships to authority, human endeavor, etc.). The provenance of each proverb is also charted in some detail. The catalogue ends with a list of proverbs that either only have English provenance or are not known outside of Gower. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Walz, Gotthard Published Walz, Gotthard. "Das Sprichwort bei Gower, mit besonderem Hinweis auf Quellen und Parallelen." Nördlingen: Beck, 1907 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Das Sprichwort bei Gower, mit besonderem Hinweis auf Quellen und Parallelen Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Beck, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1907 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 While Gough makes little reference to Chaucer and Gower's versions of the Constance Story, he does provide extensive background information about this tale type. The first half of the book catalogues numerous versions according to plot motifs. The second half analyzes what historical incidents may have influenced the changes to the narrative within various traditions. Here Nicholas Trivet's interaction with his alleged Saxon source is a frequent reference point. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gough, A. B Published Gough, A. B. "The Constance Saga." Berlin: Mayer & Müller, 1902 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Constance Saga Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Mayer & Müller, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1902 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 Fowler's Paris dissertation examines the MO's sources. Fowler focuses on the MO's section on the vices and virtues, and argues that Gower is closest to two thirteenth-century French sommes, the "Mirëour" or "Miraour du Monde" and the "Somme le Roi." Yet since Gower also borrows from the Latin "Summa Virtutum ac Vitiorum" by Gulielmi Peraldi, Fowler posits that Gower uses a now non-extant version of these three closely related texts, one that includes all of Gower's borrowings. Fowler provides a number of tables to shows corresponding passages, including two lengthy appendices: the first lists all the subdivisions of the vices and virtues in the MO and its possible sources; the second prints the MO's sections on Pride and Humility side by side with corresponding passages from the other texts. Fowler also includes a general introduction to Gower's life (borrowed mostly from Macaulay, but strong on possible contradictions in Gower's work) and focuses frequently on larger comparisons between Gower's three major works. She summarizes the essential differences as follows: "Le Mirour de l'Omme se rapproche des ouvrages cycliques et religieux, homélies ou mystères; la Confessio Amantis, des ouvrages encyclopédiques, et la Vox Clamantis, des ouvrages satiriques." (13). Fowler concludes by arguing that Gower is above all a conservator of older authorities (80), and his sources (the French sommes, Jean de Meun, Benoît, etc.) tend to come from the thirteenth century. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fowler, R. Elfreda Published Fowler, R. Elfreda. "Une Source Française des Poèmes de Gower." Macon: Protat Frères, 1905 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Biography of Gower 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 Une Source Française des Poèmes de Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Protat Frères, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1905 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Maynadier argues that Chaucer and Gower's loathly lady narratives (the Wife of Bath's Tale and the Tale of Florent) ultimately have an Irish origin and are not directly influenced by the Icelandic tradition. In addition, much of the Arthurian material belongs to a separate strand that diverges from Chaucer and Gower's versions (see 128 for a complete diagram). Gower in all likelihood borrowed his version from a Latin exempla collection such as the "Gesta Romanorum" (135). Chaucer's tale may have been suggested by Gower's, but since Gower was a completely unoriginal and uninventive poet (6, 134), there cannot be much indebtedness. Maynadier further discusses analogues to Gower's motif of capital punishment for answering a riddle incorrectly (126-27), and he notes that the light in the bridal chamber in the Tale of Florent is also of Irish origin (138). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Maynadier, G. H Published Maynadier, G. H. "The Wife of Bath's Tale: Its Sources and Analogues." London: Nutt, 1901 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Wife of Bath's Tale: Its Sources and Analogues Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Nutt, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1901 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In a section entitled "Gowers Französische Balladen und Chaucer," Koeppel argues that Chaucer may have been influenced by Gower's CB. Koeppel's best evidence is that Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls (PF) appears to repeat the refrain of Balade 25, "Car qui bien aime ses amours tard oblie." This line occurs in some MSS of PF after line 679, although it is also present in other French lyrics. The influence may be strengthened by similarities between Balade 35 (about Saint Valentine) and both PF and Book of the Duchess. Koeppel also notes that Book 2 of Troilus and Criseyde shares some phrasing with Gower's balades, especially in its expression of happy love (CB 44) and in its bird imagery (CB 46). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Koeppel, Emil Published Koeppel, Emil. "Kleine Beiträge zur Englischen Litteratur-Geschichte." Englische Studien 20 (1895), pp. 154-160. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Cinkante Balades Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Kleine Beiträge zur Englischen Litteratur-Geschichte Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1895 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Stegner asserts that in the "Confessio" "Gower represents a recuperative form of forgetting in order to signal the difficulty of reconciling auricular confession with narratives of desire" (489). Unlike the many who see Amans as more bewildered than sinful, and his confession as a deliberate amorous trope, Stegner treats Gower's Lover as a Christian sinner in need of penitential healing, and thus seeks to "reveal the deep pressure between the penitent's memory of past transgressions and his reformation through confession" (489). This allows Stegner ultimately to project the methodology of Amans' restitution as a blueprint for social recuperation: "Gower's concentration on the social . . . extends his understanding of memory to include productively forgetting the limitations of human agency. In holding on to and letting go of his memories, Gower indicates how remembering an English society bound together in unity first depends on forgetting the divisions that fracture the kingdom. This focus on forgetting present conflicts and remembering a unified past takes on a particular significance in the tumultuous political climate in which the 'Confessio' was composed and revised. In this sense, Gower uses memory and forgetting as one possible strategy for reconciling England's Ricardian past with its Lancastrian present and future" (507). The bulk of the essay, however, is very little about healing a fractured society; rather, Stegner focusses on the "Tale of Apollonius" in Book VIII and its presentation of incest, arguing Genius chooses the tale in order that Amans recognize himself (and his own "incest," which Stegner is hardly alone in stretching to define as "a synecdoche for amatory desire" [497] generally) in Apollonius, the better to turn the Lover toward reason, and away from "kinde." "Kinde" Stegner reads very darkly, as "bestial," in the pejorative sense, rather than "natural," as animals are, and so sinless in their irrationality. This move is essential for Stegner to complete his turn, which he does in a single, breath-taking leap: "Genius condemns the undercurrents of amatory desire by following the common medieval comparison of incest to the sexual behavior of animals" (498). Only when Amans can "forget" he ever experienced love's pull (while, like Apollonius, remembering the trial-beset journey to enlightenment), can he become a "John Gower" who "gestures toward [an] Augustinian conception of the individual mind's ascent through sensory perception to memory itself and finally beyond it to a form of mystical contemplation of God" (506-07). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stegner, Paul D Published Stegner, Paul D. "'Foryet it thou, and so wol I': Absolving Memory in 'Confessio Amantis'." Studies in Philology 108 (2011), pp. 488-507. ISSN 0039-3738 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 'Foryet it thou, and so wol I': Absolving Memory in 'Confessio Amantis' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In retelling the story of Apollonius of Tyre, Gower added the passages emphasizing Antiochus' and Apollonius' grief at the real or apparent death of their wives. In their different responses, Lim argues, in this essay heavily informed by Judith Butler's analysis of the discursive construction of family and of the constitutive power of loss, Gower explores how grief either threatens both the nuclear family and the properly gendered roles on which it is based or reaffirms the family through socially constructed rituals. Gower is alone in attributing Antiochus' incest with his daughter specifically to his grief at the loss of his wife rather than to his encounter with her suitors. His turn from protector to predator illustrates the necessity of some device to hold a ruler's power in check, and thus both the force and the perpetual necessity of social conventions. Apollonius' grief is described at greater length as he is completely overcome, and he too temporarily loses power both as ruler and as father. He re-establishes his family, however, by "socializing his grief in a controlled and structured manner" (343). As he places his wife's coffin into the sea, he assures her proper burial and commemoration in a letter in which he also resumes his authority as king. He places his daughter in a foster family, reasserting the nuclear ideal, and he explicitly anticipates her future marriage with his promise not to shave his beard, reaffirming exogamic family relations in contrast to Antiochus' abuse of his daughter. And he leads a solemn public mourning for his wife upon his return to Tyre, uniting his grief to that which they endured at his departure and reaffirming his status as their ruler. The narrative thus assumes a paradoxical form, for it "allocates more space to elaborating scenes of loss and memorialization than depicting interactions among Apollonius, his wife, and Thaise as a family, and in this manner, the integrity of the family unit depends upon representations of loss. Not only does loss constitute the individual in specific ways, it also determines how the family is thought of as a 'natural' unit of society" (343). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lim, Gary Published Lim, Gary. "Constructing the Virtual Family: Socializing Grief in John Gower's 'Tale of Apollonius of Tyre'." Exemplaria 22 (2010), pp. 326-48. ISSN 1699-3225 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 Constructing the Virtual Family: Socializing Grief in John Gower's 'Tale of Apollonius of Tyre' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Gilbert Maghfeld, "ironmonger, credit broker, and moneylender" (65), is already known to literary scholars for his financial dealings with both Chaucer and Gower. He was also cited by Manly as the possible model for Chaucer's satiric portrait of the Merchant. Galloway takes a broader view, using Maghfeld's surviving account book (which records his transactions with the two poets) as the starting point for an investigation of the ways in which mercantile practices and "technologies" (69) inform late fourteenth-century English poetry, even when the poets are not directly discussing either merchants or commerce. After summarizing Maghfeld's career, pointing out the many connections between his and Chaucer's worlds, Galloway discusses the metaphors of credit, debt, and accounting in "Piers Plowman," suggesting that Langland had a more sophisticated understanding of mercantile commerce than he has been given credit for, and he examines Chaucer's use of the vocabulary of accounting and moneylending, particularly in the Wife of Bath's and Shipman's Tales. The points of intersection between Maghfeld and Gower are provided by Maghfeld's 1392 loan to Gower to purchase a "cheste" and Maghfeld's acceptance of a copy of Brunetto Latini's "Trésor" as security on a loan to a certain Francis Winchester in 1393. Only in the "Mirour de l'Omme," Galloway notes, might Gower have directly addressed members of the merchant class regarding their profession. The "Confessio Amantis" contains little direct reference either to London or to commerce, and its references to money and contracts, "the basic technologies of mercantilism" (106), are not marked by satire or even by direct connection to the mercantile class in which they arose. The poem "participates more dynamically in such technology," Galloway asserts (106), in its repeated references to "chestes" or "cofres," the basic tool for both security and shipment at that time. In the discussion of Avarice, the "cheste" becomes the focus for the meditation on "use" versus hoarding. In the tale of "The Two Coffers," the grumbling courtiers are cast as "nervous merchant venturers," equally concerned with making the correct choice and with the profit that they might thereafter win. And in "Apollonius of Tyre," the "cheste" is a coffin, but it becomes the means of transporting the treasure that it contains, not without regard to the risk that is entailed. Gower may have viewed his own poem as a type of "treasure," imitating the form and purpose of Latini's "Trésor." It is also a type of account book, of "love's winnings" (110); and in its use of rhetoric, it demonstrates a power of language analogous to a merchant's, to commute and transform the experience with which it is concerned. In his final section, Galloway discovers an important biographical connection between Maghfeld and Thomas Usk, who in his previously undocumented role as sheriff's clerk served four writs upon the moneylender in 1383. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew Published Galloway, Andrew. "The Account Book and the Treasure: Gilbert Maghfeld's Textual Economy and the Poetics of Mercantile Accounting in Ricardian Literature." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011), pp. 65-124. ISSN 0190-2407 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Account Book and the Treasure: Gilbert Maghfeld's Textual Economy and the Poetics of Mercantile Accounting in Ricardian Literature Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Fredell's concern is to join the "gathering consensus (whose genesis is credited to Peter Nicholson)" seeking to refute the "elaborate three-stage creation story for the 'Confessio'" (1) posited by Gower's first editor, G.C. Macaulay that has guided Gower studies for over a century. Macaulay argued that there were three states of revision evident in the known manuscripts of the "Confessio," and that these corresponded to developing "phases of disenchantment with Richard II and enchantment with the future Henry IV, from 1390 to 1393" (1). As Fredell notes (and Nicholson's meticulous studies [1984, 1987, 1988] have shown), "[Macaulay's] argument depends upon a miniscule number of variants and glosses offered in evidence, and manuscript witnesses that contradict the model directly. Similar problems entangle the variants on Richard in 'Vox Clamantis'" (1). The "truths" told by the manuscripts, thus, are "inconvenient for scholars making political arguments that require evidence of Gower's disillusionment with Richard during the 1390's" (1, fn. 3). Fredell proposes a very different--and no less elaborate--explanation for the manuscript evidence: "Textual variants, marginalia, and layout indicate Lancastrian producers first issued versions dedicated to Henry, 'then created manuscripts of "Confesso" as artifacts' of the earlier Ricardian period"(1) [emphasis mine]. Thus for Fredell, "any pre-1399 version of the 'Confessio' is a speculative reconstruction at best whose first witnesses long post-date the Henrician version; that the Henrician version survives only from the time that Henry seized the throne of England; and that the surviving versions of the Ricardian 'Confessio' thus are very likely influenced by the Henrician version, not the other way around" (19). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fredell, Joel Published Fredell, Joel. "The Gower Manuscripts: Some Inconvenient Truths." Viator 41.1 (2010), pp. 231-50. ISSN 0083-5897 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Gower Manuscripts: Some Inconvenient Truths Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Trentham MS (British Library Add. MS 59495) is well known to Gowerians. It contains our only texts of "In Praise of Peace" and the "Cinkante Balades" as well as copies of the "Traitié" and some of the minor Latin poems, and it is expressly addressed to the newly crowned Henry IV. Its contents are usually examined separately, however. Bahr studies the manuscript as a whole, but not as the simple product of Gower's attempt to honor and flatter the king. He treats the collection itself as an independent aesthetic object, and he argues that the choice and the arrangement of the texts open up interpretive possibilities that both enrich the reading of each separate work (in many cases running counter to their ostensible meaning) and that add up to a whole that is different from, and greater than, the sum of its parts. Justification for treating the book as a single object is provided by the evidence of its careful design. Though diverse in contents, it is not difficult to find continuing themes, in particular a recurring emphasis upon kingship; the texts are provided with links that help tie them into a coherent whole; and there is a striking symmetry in the arrangement of the texts, as Bahr illustrates in his outline on pp. 225-26. The "Cinkante Balades" stand at the center, and the three texts on either side answer to each other either formally or thematically or both. The most surprising correspondence is that between "In Praise of Peace" and the "Traitié," standing opposite one another in the manuscript, Gower's only two independent compositions in rime royal, and each containing precisely 385 lines. That pairing, and the differences that exist between these two works and the other pairs, draw our attention to the possibility of reading each work in light of the other rather than taking each solely on its own. In this broader reading, not everything is as it seems to be. The celebration of Henry at the beginning yields to hesitation, reservations, ambivalence at the end, suggesting a tension between initial hopes and darker possibilities. Bahr finds the same sort of ambivalence emerging from the opening texts themselves when they are viewed in relation to Gower's own earlier writings. As has been noted before, "In Praise of Peace" reverses the roles of Solomon and Alexander from their use as examples in "Confessio Amantis," suggesting an instability and a "tension between moral idealism and political reality" (231) that might apply to Henry too. The opening of "Rex Celi Deus" repeats lines used in a passage laudatory of Richard II in Book VI of "Vox Clamantis," invoking in a different way the possibility of a fall. The "Cinkante Balades" at the center of the book also constitutes a rewriting, in this case of authorial history, since Gower had twice before (in "Mirour de l'Omme" and at the end of the "Confessio Amantis") turned away from the composition of lyrics about love. Bahr's discussion of the "Cinkante Balades" emphasizes the connections it offers between the "bon amour" that it celebrates and the peace and political harmony that Gower urges in "In Praise of Peace" and the subtle ways in which ambivalences in the treatment of love itself undercut some of the ostensible celebration. In the two works that follow, "Ecce patet tensus" offers a blind and tyrannical Cupid as a mirror image to Gower's real king, and the "Traitié" continues the emphasis upon kingly conduct while also, by its juxtaposition of exempla, raising more questions about the virtuous force of love. If these latter texts have a relevance to Henry, Bahr observes, they do so only in the context of the manuscript as a whole in which they are contained. But his evidence, which we have only barely summarized here, lends strong support to his conclusion regarding the manuscript's "codicological form": "My larger argument about Trentham . . . is not that it conveys a specific 'message,' or is 'about' a specific figure. It is an artfully constructed meditation on the multiple natures and implications of kingship, and the very complexity of its construction serves to acknowledge both the visceral pleasure of using aesthetic modes to grapple with such vitally important questions and the impossibility of creating clear-cut 'propositional content' as answers to them" (261). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bahr, Arthur W Published Bahr, Arthur W. "Reading Codicological Form in John Gower's Trentham Manuscript." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011), pp. 219-62. ISSN 0190-2407 Gower Subject In Praise of Peace Minor Latin Poetry Cinkante Balades Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading Codicological Form in John Gower's Trentham Manuscript Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation explores attitudes toward literary form in fourteenth-century London's trilingual culture and what it means to package science, politics, and social upheaval as literature. John Gower, the author of substantial poems in the three languages of his day treating topics as varied as clerical greed, aristocratic vice, rebellion, astronomy, and alchemy, writes at the intersection of literature, history, and science. Though called a historian and a compiler, Gower was foremost a poet whose political, cultural, and scientific writings grew out of his sense of poetry as a whole built from smaller pieces. Division was a force Gower feared, yet exploited. Though Gower critiques the broken political body, most famously in his treatment of the 1381 Rebellion but also throughout his many writings on politics, division could also signify marvelous design. To Gower, the music of the mythical harper Arion is not pure magic but a technical product of 'mesure,' a word signifying notes organized in a pattern. Similarly, the stars of the zodiac are divided into signs, and alchemy, though it transforms diverse metals, requires divided elements before it can unite them through an elaborate process of refinement. Gower examines the sciences' negotiation between division and harmony as a way of articulating his own poetic project. Division is a theme throughout his corpus, physically rendered by the metaphor of the body--be it zodiacal, alchemical, political, bestial, incestuous, or verbal--and thus the body's valences are multiplied by examining its parts as well as its whole structure. Division is not always something to be feared; it can be a way to know an object more fully by examining its detailed composition. Broadly speaking, the chapters investigate Gower's poetic experiment with parts and wholes. Chapters One and Two explore the parts and wholes of language. Meaningful play in rhyme words can underscore words within words and differences in words that appear the same. Syllabic play, meanwhile, allows a poet to build words from pieces. Chapter Three investigates Gower's attitude toward alchemy, the process of converting base metals to gold, or multiplicity to singularity. While Gower lauds this science, he is aware of language's limitations in engaging in this process; words generate more words, and translations lose the secrets of older texts composed in other languages. In Chapter Two I discussed the bodies of the 1381 rebels, allegorized as beasts with hybrid forms, while Chapter Four explores processes of change in composite bodies, including the zodiac man, Nebuchadnezzar's Statue of Precious Metals, and the Greek pantheon as an anatomical man. Chapter Five contrasts Chaucer's and Gower's literary presentation of astronomy; Chaucer's 'House of Fame' seeks authority in literature, while Gower's praise of science is for its own sake. Gower's treatise is given a literary spin in the manner in which Gower writes of the constellations as objects that operate as couplets, both of which engage in meaningful repetition and productive duality. Chapter Six treats linguistic composite bodies through the theme of incest in riddles as developed in Gower's 'Mirour de l'Omme' and 'Confessio Amantis.' Author/Editor Author/Editor Zarins, Kimberly Published Zarins, Kimberly. "Writing the literary zodiac: Division, unity, and power in John Gower's poetics." PhD thesis, Cornell University, 2009. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Writing the literary zodiac: Division, unity, and power in John Gower's poetics Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Even as the representation of women by medieval poets has been extensively studied, scholars have yet to explore how images of women have informed images of political counsel. In this study, I forge a connection between the "mirrors for princes" genre of advice giving and the subject of women. The connection between women and counsel, I argue, is one that poets found fruitful, vexing, enabling, and troublesome by turns. Following on the work of such scholars as Larry Scanlon, Richard Firth Green, Judith Ferster, David Wallace and Paul Strohm, I examine the major vernacular poetry of the late fourteenth and fifteenth century in light of both the mirrors for princes tradition and historical accounts of counsel. What distinguishes my work from prior scholarship is that I focus specifically on a neglected aspect of the history of counsel: the role of women in literary texts as counselors to kings. I examine selected Middle English works by John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Stephen Scrope, as well as manuscripts and French sources, in order to evaluate the association of women with political counsel. When authors articulate their instruction through female voices, the process of advice subsequently becomes a feminized one, and the female counselor emerges as a significant literary trope--as an outlet through which male poets articulate challenging political discourse. What this project ultimately demonstrates is that, far from exclusively using women's voices as an 'other' against which to define themselves, late medieval vernacular poets embraced the feminine as both a representation of their own subordination to kings and patrons, and a subject position from which to criticize, advise, and influence those in power. Understanding the poet's conception and development of female counselors is thus essential to understanding his or her own approach to the process of advice and the composing of politically-oriented narratives within the vernacular poetics of the late medieval period." See Schieberle's earlier essay on "'Thing which a man mai noght areche': Women and Counsel in Gower's Confessio Amantis," reviewed in JGN 26 no. 2. Author/Editor Author/Editor Schieberle, Misty Yvonne Published Schieberle, Misty Yvonne. "Feminized counsel: Representations of women and advice to princes in late medieval England." Ph.D, dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2008. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Feminized counsel: Representations of women and advice to princes in late medieval England Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "For late medieval English writers, temporality, the experience of living in time, proved a powerful tool. Manipulations of temporality allow authors to reshape the past, present, and future in order to create sophisticated literary meditations on political power. For example, Yorkist texts such as the "Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV" rely on a presumption of temporal continuity when they depict the Lancastrian Henry IV's usurpation of the throne sixty years earlier as a violent break in English history--a break that only the advent of Edward IV could make right. I show that these works not only rely on temporality as a thematic concern (as in the case of Edward IV), but also engage with this concept through their form. These works create their own textual temporalities, thereby enlisting readers in their politically-inflected understandings of human history. Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' and Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' reveal the power, dangers, and limitations of textual temporalities produced through form. Both poems sustain multiple temporalities within their borders, and both rely on linear narrative to structure the reader's engagement with these temporalities. 'The Canterbury Tales' concerns itself with the English present, mapping its relationship to the past and uncovering the omissions, rifts, and acts of violence required to construct this present. 'Confessio Amantis,' in contrast, focuses on the present as it becomes the future, anticipating the immanent collision of history and eternity. Occupying the charged time of the end, the 'Confessio' longs for temporal unity inaccessible in the present. In its search for a new Arion, the 'Confessio' calls on the formal properties of poetry to set time right, to render whole its hybrid mixture of genres and times." Author/Editor Author/Editor Meyers, Alyssa Published Meyers, Alyssa. "Telling Time: Temporality and Narrative in Late Medieval English Literature." PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2011. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. 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 Telling Time: Temporality and Narrative in Late Medieval English Literature 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 Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Contrary to the image offered by post-usurpation chroniclers and perpetuated by uncritical modern historians, Richard II's reign was consistent with the portrait of the ideal king offered by contemporary political theorists, for whom there was no inconsistency between absolute rule and the public welfare, as long as the king acted for the common good rather than for his own personal advantage. So does Jones argue in this impressively documented essay. Thus Richard's displays of magnificence manifest not his personal vanity but his assertion of his rightful role as king, fully justified even by religious writers, and his pursuit of Gloucester and Arundel beginning in 1397 reflects impartial justice rather than personal revenge. Jones includes Chaucer's "Melibee" among the works from which Richard might have learned how to govern, providing, as it does, a model for the seeking of counsel, for the choice of advisors according to their ability rather than their rank (one of the sore points with Richard's uncles), for his pursuit of peace (with France), for the role of women (such as Queen Anne) as intercessors, and for the use of the "semblant of wrath," which may be the source for the charge that Richard had a quick temper, in contrast the many recorded instances in which he exercised a calming influence instead. Gower figures in this essay, of course, as one of those who not only helped to justify Henry's usurpation but who also sought to "chang[e] the nation's collective memory about Richard" (27) by altering the historical record to make it appear that the post-usurpation attacks on Richard's rule and character actually emerged from events early in his reign. In Gower's case, this amounted to rewriting his comments on the youthful Richard and his advisors in the "Vox Clamantis." The reference to his "sors" (Stockton: "destiny") in VC VI.572 indicates, Jones states, that the entire revised passage "must have been written after the usurpation, but modified to make it look as if it had been written earlier" (28). Similarly, Gower revised the dedication of the "Confessio Amantis" to make it appear that he had presented the poem to Henry in 1393. In this case, he gives himself away by his reference to "Henry of Lancaster," a title that Henry could not have borne until 1397, in Prol. 87, as Gower in effect concedes in the marginal gloss at Prol 28, which states that the book was presented "domino suo domino Henrico de Lancastria tunc Derbeie Comiti." The "Cronica Tripertita" Jones dismisses as "mendacious and disgraceful" (13), and he cites it among those perpetuating the "lie" that Richard refused to seek the counsel of older men. Jones published an abbreviated summary of his essay in "Richard II: Royal Villain or Victim of Spin," The Times, 4 October 2008. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Jones, Terry Published Jones, Terry. "Was Richard II A Tyrant? Richard's Use of the Books of Rules for Princes." Fourteenth Century England 5 (2008), pp. 130-60. ISSN 1471-3020 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Vox Clamantis Cronica Tripertita Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Was Richard II A Tyrant? Richard's Use of the Books of Rules for Princes Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The volume makes available in published form Faccon's 2007 dissertation, "La Fortuna de la Confessio Amantis en la Península Ibérica: Estudio Comparativo de las Traducciones y Edicíon de MS Madrid, Real Biblioteca, II-3088 (rev. JGN 37.2). She presents a transcription and palaeographic discussion of Books I-IV in the Portuguese MS, a critical edition of those Books, a discussion of the courts of Castile and Portugal as literary environments for the translations of Portuguese and Castilian Confessios; includes a chronology of "references, studies and editions" of the Spanish and Portuguese translations from 1433-38 through her own doctoral defense in 2007 (pp. 32-35). Along with the text, readers may find useful the palaeographical section, for its reproduction of elements of the quite difficult Portuguese hand, as well as the full-page reproductions of selected folia (e.g., fol. 65v, p. 153), in black-and-white.] [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Faccon, Manuela Published Faccon, Manuela. "Fortuna de la Confessio Amantis en la Península Ibérica: el testimonio portugués." Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarius de Zaragoza, 2011 ISBN 9788415031352 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Fortuna de la Confessio Amantis en la Península Ibérica: el testimonio portugués Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Prensas Universitarius de Zaragoza, 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 Antonio Cortijo Ocaña continues with his long-term project of editing the Portuguese version of the "Confessio Amantis. In this case, he puts together the edition of book VI, thus culminating a process started in 2007, when the text itself was made available together with an introductory comment on the contents of the book, its sources and the translation (Antonio Cortijo Ocaña. "El libro VI de la Confessio Amantis." eHumanista: Journal of Iberian Studies 8 (2007): 38-72. (See the review in the Gower Bibliography online - http://gowerbib.lib.utsa.edu/). The article now published in the Revista de literatura medieval rounds off this first edition by providing the Portuguese text with a profuse annotation mainly intended to show the differences with Juan de Cuenca's Spanish translation, and occasionally with the English original. Those interested in a more visual parallel with Gower's original may also want to resort to the side-by-side Portuguese-English texts published by Cortijo in eHumanista, in the section devoted to the ongoing Confessio Amantis Project (http://www.ehumanista.ucsb.edu/projects/Confessio%20Amantis/index.shtml). As this online edition includes the above-mentioned annotation apparatus, it allows a thorough view of how the two medieval translations of the Confessio Amantis relate to the English original--an approach that Cortijo has been consistently pursuing in his project, and which is highly valuable for further studies on the Confessio and its Iberian versions. http://www.ehumanista.ucsb.edu/projects/Confessio%20Amantis/VIII%20Spanish%20Translation.pdf. √ No introduction – Spanish text (verse layout) – Some annotation, comparing with English and Portuguese texts. [AS-H. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio Published Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio. "El Libro VI de la Confessio Amantis." Revista de Literatura Medieval 22 (2010), pp. 11-74. ISSN 1130-3611 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 El Libro VI de la Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 volume collects twenty essays on five Canterbury tales (Miller, Wife of Bath, Shipman, Merchant, and Pardoner), spanning Beidler's career-long engagement with Chaucer. All but one have been previously published, most since 2000, but a few hearkening back to the 1970's. Two compare Chaucer's versions to Gower's in narratives both tell: "Transformations in Gower's Tale of Florent and Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale" (pp. 72-90), which appeared first in R.F. Yeager, ed., Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria Press, 1991, 100-14, rev. JGN), and the single essay to be published here for the first time, "The Owl Similies in the Tale of Florent and the Wife of Bath's Tale," pp. 105-15. The 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 Beidler, Peter G. "Chaucer's Canterbury Comedies: Origins and Originality." Seattle: Coffeetown Press, 2011 ISBN 9781603810913 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer's Canterbury Comedies: Origins and Originality Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Coffeetown Press, 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 "Many critics have seen 'Confessio Amantis' as a work of reformist rhetoric that, drawing deeply on medieval Aristotelian conflations of ethics and politics, urges readers toward personal moral reform as the crucial means by which to heal the body politic. In such a view, the moral and public interests on full display in 'Mirour de l'Omme,' 'Vox Clamantis,' and elsewhere remain central to Gower's purpose in 'Confessio.' However, while 'Mirour' and 'Vox' also foreground religious concerns, 'Confessio' is often seen as "secular" in a modern sense. I argue in this dissertation that 'Confessio' indeed bears strong affinities to Gower's other religious-ethical-political works, and that the main differences that set it apart from them must be understood in connection with Gower's decision to write this work 'in oure Englissh.' Notwithstanding its debt to aristocratic culture, 'Confessio' imagines a broader and more popular audience than do 'Vox' and 'Mirour.' Gower's novel language choice has major implications especially for Confessio's uncharacteristically delicate handling of religion. Chapter 1 examines Confessio's Ovidian debt and suggests that Confessio's many invocations of 'Metamorphoses,' given that poem's fourteenth-century reception, align 'Confessio' with Ovidian universal satire in a way that suggests totalizing religious-ethical-political synthesis. However, 'Confessio' departs from the mainstream of fourteenth-century commentated Ovids by stripping 'Metamorphoses' of its clergial patina and, crucially, adopting a markedly lay stance. Investigating Gower's attitude to English vernacularity, chapter 2 notes Confessio's association of translation with decay and demonstrates that scientific and theological passages in Gower's English works adopt a lower register than analogous passages in his Latin works. Chapter 3 investigates the probable causes of these downward modulations, comparing Gower's sense of linguistic decorum to those discernible in contemporary English vernacular theology. Chapters 4 and 5--on metamorphosis and art, respectively--argue that Gower finds in Ovidian writing rich resources particularly adaptable to the most delicate of Gower's rhetorical tasks in Confessio: to address, as layman, a lay audience on matters that are unavoidably, and indeed largely, religious. The dissertation concludes by suggesting that Gower's voice of lay religious critique plays an important role in the histories of laicization and secularization." Author/Editor Author/Editor McCabe, T. Matthew N Published McCabe, T. Matthew N. "Ethics, Rhetorical Accommodation, and Vernacularity in Gower's Confessio Amantis." PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2010. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ethics, Rhetorical Accommodation, and Vernacularity in Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "'Reading Emotional Bodies' utilizes the history of emotions, phenomenology, and gender theory to argue for a culturally specific performance of love in medieval English literature. Texts such as Sir Launfal' and 'Ywain and Gawain' reveal an English performance of love and its ties to performances of masculinity that differ from their Old French sources. The selections of John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' found in Cambridge University Library MS Ff.1.6 offer further support for an English performance of love as an emotion. Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde' presents a critique of late medieval feminine embodiment and the bodily expressions of love and the 'Legend of Good Women' not only supports Chaucer's critique found in the 'Troilus,' but also subverts the culturally acceptable and expected literary presentation of women." Author/Editor Author/Editor Beck, Christian Blevins Published Beck, Christian Blevins. "Reading emotional bodies: Love and gender in late medieval English literature." PhD thesis, State University of New York at Binghamton, 2010. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading emotional bodies: Love and gender in late medieval English literature Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review According to Bloomfield, "Gower is an important figure in the story of the seven deadly sins in English literature . . . [T]hey constitute a basic element of his worldview" (196). In all three major works, Gower demonstrates the kind of "proliferation of detail" (196) and propensity for symbolism in describing and classifying sin that is characteristic of late medieval and renaissance culture. For instance, Gower's references to alchemy and astrology are reminiscent of the classical linkage of the sins with their planets and metals. Likewise, Gower's association of the sins with particular animals and diseases (especially in the MO) demonstrates his systematic approach to life. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bloomfield, Morton Published Bloomfield, Morton. "The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature." East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1962 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Michigan State College Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1962 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 Audiau argues that in England there was a brief flowering of amorous poetry in the style of the Troubadours. The most significant imitators were Chaucer and (especially) Gower. Audiau provides a lengthy catalogue of examples where Gower's CB echoes the sentiments and metaphors of writers like Peire Vidal and Bernard de Ventadour. Audiau acknowledges that Gower may instead have copied the Trouveres and writers such as Petrarch, but he holds out the possibility that Gower knew Troubadour poetry directly. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Audiau, Jean Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Cinkante Balades Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Published Audiau, Jean. "Les Troubadours et l'Angleterre." Paris: J. Vrin, 1927 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available J. Vrin, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1927 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Les Troubadours et l'Angleterre Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Eisner's book is primarily a source study of Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, but he includes a chapter on Gower's Tale of Florent. Both stories are traced back (somewhat independently) to Irish myth and legend in which the loathly lady stood for the sovereignty of Ireland. This material was "elaborated in Wales, was carried by the bilingual Bretons to France and thence to Norman England" (15). Gower's version is very close to Chaucer's, but differs in including the following four motifs: "the stepmother who has enchanted the heroine, the hero who is identified as a nephew of his emperor, the choice offered the hero, and the anger displayed by Branchus's grandmother when Florent returned with the correct answer" (65). Especially the fact that Florent is the nephew of the emperor shows that the source text likely had Gawain as the hero and so belongs to the Matter of Britain. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Eisner, Sigmund Published Eisner, Sigmund. "A Tale of Wonder: A Source Study of the Wife of Bath's Tale." Wexford, Ireland: John English, 1957 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 A Tale of Wonder: A Source Study of the Wife of Bath's Tale Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available John English, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1957 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 Kar's study of the medieval lyric contains a chapter on Gower's CB entitled "Amorous Gower." After reviewing the opinions of Warton and Macaulay, Kar argues that the CB can be split into two sections: the first 5 discuss love leading to marriage, whereas the rest are more in the spirit of courtly love. In addition, Gower frequently invokes two central ideas of troubadour poetry: "fin amor" (pure love) and "joie." However, Kar disagrees with J. Audiau that every echo of troubadour imagery (e.g., the flight of birds, the attraction of the loadstone, the need of a physician) can be attributed to direct imitation of provençal poetry. For instance, Gower would have been more likely to have borrowed the image of the storm-tossed ship from Ovid. Finally, "the rhythm of Gower's Cinkante Balades [with its combination of syllabic and accentual measures] is almost openly anti-Provençal" (62). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kar, G Published Kar, G. "Thoughts on the Mediaeval Lyric." : Blackwell, 1933 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Cinkante Balades Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Thoughts on the Mediaeval Lyric Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Blackwell, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1933 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 Burrow's study of the hallmarks of Ricardian poetry makes frequent reference to Gower. Such typical features as "pointing," personification, a predilection for narrative, the exemplary mode, and the enclosure of poetic material in a framed story -- these are all amply illustrated by examples from Gower. For example, Gower shows "felicity, wit, and even profundity" (83) in his application of morals to his stories. What generally sets Gower apart is his style, which Burrow, in the tradition of Warton, Macaulay, and Lewis, calls "Augustan." In other words, at his best Gower writes in a plain style that is "free from constraint or stiffness, smooth and without a trace of effort" (29). Yet Gower's fastidiousness and desire for correctness also meant that his style frequently became "threadbare" (31), and thus Burrows concludes, "It is as if the English language was not yet rich enough to support the sacrifices which an exclusive doctrine of correctness demands" (31-32). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burrow, J. A Published Burrow, J. A. "Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Gawain Poet." London: Routledge, 1971 Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Gawain Poet Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Routledge, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower's name is "the last name on the roll of Anglo-Norman writers" (360). Even though his language and versification are influenced by continental French, Gower's French works can be said to have provided a "magnificent" (357) end to Anglo-Norman literature. Despite the praise, Legge dedicates only a couple of pages to the MO (consisting mostly of summary). Her discussion of the Traitie and the CB is a little longer and involves more close-reading. Legge dates the Traitie to just before Gower's marriage in 1398 and the CB to sometime after Henry IV's accession in 1399. The latter were written for the court. In each text Gower's versification is "freer than continental writers in making grammar give way before the requirement of metre and rhyme, [and] he has more feeling for rhythm and a tendency to write in iambics" (360). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Legge, M. Dominica Published Legge, M. Dominica. "Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background." Oxford: Clarendon, 1963 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Cinkante Balades Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz 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 Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Clarendon, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1963 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 Nitzsche's survey of the Genius figure touches on Gower as the last link in a chain of medieval adaptations. After reviewing the Geniuses of Bernardus Silvestris, Alanus de Insulis (Alain of Lille) and Jean de Meun, Nitzsche turns to the CA. Gower's Genius "appears to be an Orpheus figure who wishes to rescue Euridice (concupiscence, or Amans) from the underworld of demonic and disruptive love fantasy" (128). Gower's poem is original in having Amans, not Natura, complain to Venus. It also "offers the most optimistic view of the problem of sin and its solution" (133). Amans is able to move from the Venus of courtly love or lust to the Venus of "caritas" (132). By doing so he becomes a poet, an artificer, a role frequently associated with Genius. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nitzsche, Jane Chance Published Nitzsche, Jane Chance. "The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages." New York: Columbia University Press, 1975 ISBN 0231038526 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Columbia University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1975 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 Ito argues against James J. Murphy's controversial thesis that Chaucer and Gower did not know Geoffrey of Vinsauf's "Poetria Nova" directly. Ito points out that in addition to the well-known play on the acephalous name in VC 3.955-56, there is a further passage in Gower that is clearly indebted to Vinsauf. In VC 6.979-84, Gower's advice to Richard to avoid timidity is a detailed and skilful borrowing from Vinsauf's third example of apostrophe or "exclamatio." Ito also provides a number of other possible echoes, particularly in the description of a beautiful woman in VC 5.79-128) and in Gower's frequent use of the wordplay on "onus"/"honos" (labour/honour). While not many manuscripts of the "Poetria Nova" are known to have circulated in England, it is suggestive that a manuscript of the "Aurora" (a major source for Gower) also contained Vinsauf's work on rhetoric. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ito, Masayoshi Published Ito, Masayoshi. "Gower's Knowledge of Poetria Nova." Studies in English Literature 162 (1975), pp. 3-20. Reprinted in Ito's John Gower, The Medieval Poet (Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1976), pp. 272-90. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Knowledge of Poetria Nova Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1975 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 "Le Songe Vert" is a dream vision poem extant in two manuscripts – one in France and one in the Spalding MS that belonged to Henry Despenser, the crusading bishop of Norwich. In its focus on a grieving lover who must learn to love again, "Le Songe Vert" has some similarities with Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess." Seaton argues that it was likely written for Richard II, after his wife Anne of Bohemia died in 1394. It may have been written by Froissart, who arrived in England in 1395, but Seaton feels that Gower is a slightly more probable candidate for authorship. Seaton suggests that Gower, as "a poet of talent rather than of genius" (9), was likely to recycle poetic material, and so she lists a number of passages in Gower's known works that mirror (or invert) "Le Songe Vert." Seaton also feels that Gower's easy and graceful octosyllabic couplet perfected in the CA is stylistically similar to the French poem: "the light swift turn of dialogue, the unaffected handling of situations without overemphasis, these are common to both poems" (12). The fact that the poem survives in so few MSS is likely due to Gower's later change in allegiance from Richard II to Henry IV. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Seaton, Ethel Published Seaton, Ethel. "Le Songe Vert: Its occasion of writing and its author." Medium AEvum 19 (1950), pp. 1-16. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification 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 Le Songe Vert: Its occasion of writing and its author Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1950 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 Hatton argues against the view that Gower's figures of Genius, Cupid, and Venus are representatives of "honeste love." According to Hatton, these figures do not usually speak for the poet, and we have to learn to read the CA ironically in order to ascertain Gower's intentions. Gower's Venus and Cupid are largely unchanged from the "Roman de la Rose" (where they represent concupiscence), and Genius provides Amans with a very limited perspective. Specifically, Genius is guilty of a "doggedly literal handling of rich allegorical materials throughout the Confessio Amantis" (36). In the Tale of Aspidis, for example, Genius ignores the allegorical lesson (present in the MO) that the lover should avoid the temptations of worldly delight and focus on spiritual pursuits. Similarly, in the Tale of Mars and Venus, Genius changes Ovid's story in order to condemn jealousy; in doing so, he ignores the allegorical tradition that saw Venus and Mars as led astray by concupiscence. Hatton acknowledges that in Book 8 Venus seems to take on a different and more positive role, but he argues that this is in keeping with the medieval idea that there were two Venuses. The final Pauline message of the poem is that Amans must "put off the old man of the flesh and become a new man of the spirit" (39). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hatton, Thomas J Published Hatton, Thomas J. "The Role of Venus and Genius in John Gower's Confessio Amantis: A Reconsideration." Greyfriar 16 (1975), pp. 29-40. ISSN 0533-2869 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Role of Venus and Genius in John Gower's Confessio Amantis: A Reconsideration Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1975 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 Cowling traces the development of Amans's character in the CA from a general personification of "loving" to a complex psychological persona for Gower the poet. At the outset Amans is confused about love, and has trouble identifying his role in Venus's court. Gradually he "acquires a genius of his own" (66), and starts to think more critically. When he writes his verse complaint to Venus and Cupid in Book 8 he has become a poet, and so where he once was mostly a type of the lover, he has now been individualized as Gower specifically. To highlight the resulting complexity of representation, Cowling points out the ways in which the narrative becomes increasingly a parody of the Bible (e.g., Venus acts as Mary). In addition, Cowling highlights a number of ironies resulting from Gower's creation of a persona. Most importantly, Amans ends up denying the very religion of love that Gower the poet has created. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cowling, Samuel T Published Cowling, Samuel T. "Gower's Ironic Self-Portrait in the Confessio Amantis." Annuale Mediaevale 16 (1975), pp. 63-70. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Ironic Self-Portrait in the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1975 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review MacCracken publishes a Middle English translation of Gower's ballade sequence Traitié. This remarkably close translation by a certain Quixley had not been noted before, and MacCracken's is the first (and only) edited version. It is in a northern dialect and likely from Yorkshire, and MacCracken suggests a number of Quixleys (after the village of Whixley, just north-west of York), as possible authors. He settles on a lord, John Quixley, whose daughter married in 1402, on which occasion a poem of this nature would have been appropriate. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor MacCracken, Henry Noble Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Manuscripts and Textual Studies Published MacCracken, Henry Noble. "Quixley's Ballades Royal (?1402)." Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 20 (1909), pp. 33-50. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1909 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Quixley's Ballades Royal (?1402) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Ito argues that Gower constructs the CrT as an exemplum with a specific moral: omnia vincit amor (love conquers all). Gower borrows this maxim from Cassiodorus, and it not only occurs in the preface to the CrT, but also in all Gower's major texts. Ito traces the history of the phrase and suggests that Gower uses "amor" to mean both heavenly love and kingly pity. Ito further suggests that Gower may have been influenced by Cassiodorus' "Historia Ecclesiastica Tripartita," not only because of its title, but also because of its depiction of Constantine, who for Gower was also a model of kingly pity. As an exemplum on "amor," then, the CrT has an "architectonic beauty" (12), for it treats (in order) justice, cruelty, and pity. Ito concludes with a discussion of additional rhetorical devices Gower employs. [CvD; rev. MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ito, Masayoshi Published Ito, Masayoshi. "Omnia Vincit Amor: An Interpretation of Gower's Cronica Tripertita." Studies in English Literature 49 (1972), pp. 3-15 [ISSN 0039-3649]. Reprinted in Ito's John Gower, The Medieval Poet (Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1976), pp. 181-95. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification 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 Omnia Vincit Amor: An Interpretation of Gower's Cronica Tripertita Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1972 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 Theiner compares Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale" with Gower's Tale of Constance, not to determine any specific influence or borrowing, but to argue that the apparent complexity of Chaucer's story is largely due to the Man of Law's method of "arranging the narrative in such a way as to remove or confuse the natural, unobtrusive explanations for the events in the story" (179). This obfuscation then allows the Man of Law – a would-be literary critic – to ask pedantic questions about motivation and causation and to offer longwinded explanations and digressions. This tendency, much like the Man of Law's predilection for including every possible genre of narrative in his tale, is absent from Gower's much more straightforward narrative. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Theiner, Paul Published Theiner, Paul. "The Man of Law Tells his Tale." Studies in Medieval Culture 5 (1975), pp. 173-179. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Man of Law Tells his Tale Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1975 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 Pickford argues that Gower accommodates the concept of fortune to Christian teaching. Bad fortune is the result of mankind's sin. It is a general effect of the fall, rather than the result of one individual's choices. Fortune, then, "is a figurative way of expressing the observable fact that this world is a mutable world, whose outcome God foreknows and in a sense 'directs' since he has taken account of it in his overall plan for man" (24). People do have free will (as Gower shows by deciding to go boating on the Thames when he met King Richard II "par chaunce"), and the answer to the sin and division that create misfortune is love (caritas). Even Venus, a goddess very similar to Fortune, becomes a more Christian figure in Gower's work (24). Pickford ends his essay by illustrating his general argument with examples culled primarily from the CA Prologue and from the Tale of Apollonius of Tyre. Finally, he dismisses the idea that Gower's frequent use of the proverb "nede mot that nede schal" has much to do with Gower's concept of fortune. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pickford, T. E Published Pickford, T. E. "'Fortune' in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Parergon 7 (1973), pp. 20-29. 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 'Fortune' in Gower's Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1973 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 Blake examines Macaulay's argument that Caxton used "at least three manuscripts of the poem [CA]" (262) for his own edition of the CA, and that the most likely copytext was Magdalen College, Oxford, 213. First, however, Blake draws attention to Caxton's claim that Gower was from Wales and notes how unusual it is for Caxton to include a table of contents for a poetic work. The latter choice, however, turns out to be an example of Caxton's "opportunism" (284), since he simply adapted Gower's Latin headings for his own table of contents. Blake then returns to his main argument and suggests that all of Caxton's text can be found in third recension MSS (Blake calls this the "intermediate recension"). The problem, nevertheless is that "these features are not to be all found in the same manuscript" (288). Despite this difficulty, Blake suggests that "the balance or probability favours the view that Caxton had only one manuscript" (203). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Blake, N. F Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Published Blake, N. F. "Caxton's Copytext of Gower's Confessio Amantis." Anglia 85 (1967), pp. 282-293. Dublin Core The Dublin 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 1967 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Caxton's Copytext of Gower's Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Miller argues that the figure of the loathly lady present in Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale and Gower's Tale of Florent is not only found in the traditional analogues (romances, ballads, and so forth), but is also present in medieval collections of exempla. Specifically, exempla illustrating obedience and condemning lechery often invoke the figure of the succubus who tempts men with fornication. When the beautiful woman is resisted she usually turns into a stinking devil. The lesson is that "[f]air is foul and foul is fair" (447). Miller traces this motif in the Vitae Patrum, the Speculum Morale (attributed to Vincent of Beauvais), the Liber Exemplorum ad Usum Praedicantium, and similar texts. Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale thus becomes a parody of these clerkly exempla, while Gower's story is more straightforwardly a lesson in obedience. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Miller, Robert P Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Published Miller, Robert P. "The Wife of Bath's Tale and Mediaeval Exempla." English Literary History 32.4 (1965), pp. 442-456. Dublin Core The Dublin 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 1965 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource The Wife of Bath's Tale and Mediaeval Exempla Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review While Ferguson's study of civic consciousness is primarily about the early Renaissance (pp. 133-397), the early chapters deal with the medieval background. Ferguson singles out Langland and Gower as important figures in "the first important period in the history of English public discussion" (4). During this period (1360-1415), a new form of public discourse emerged from pure propaganda and from the more generalized complaint literature. Yet while Gower and others show an increasing sense of national identity and eagerly critiqued social maladies, their analysis of social ills generally stops short of actually providing "constructive policies" (42) for fixing the problems. Rather than suggesting systemic reform, Gower and his contemporaries tend to point to the need for personal moral reform (47). Only occasionally – as when Gower deals with the topic of justice – do we see "some awareness of the complexity of social relationships" (53). Otherwise, Gower's solution is to point out the king's need for good counsel and to focus on individual vices (especially sloth and avarice; 57). Gower in fact "failed to think in terms of institutions, much less of constitutions" (62). While Gower's writings become increasingly more political over time, he fails to provide a fully-fledged analysis of the root causes of such issues as the labour crisis, the problem of maintenance, and the war with France. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ferguson, A. B Published Ferguson, A. B. "The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance." Durham: Duke UP, 1965 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Duke UP, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1965 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 Williams, Jon Kenneth Published Williams, Jon Kenneth. "Languages of kingship in Ricardian Britain." PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2009. Gower Subject In Praise of Peace Minor Latin Poetry Cronica Tripertita Influence and Later Allusion Review "In 'Languages of Kingship in Ricardian Britain' I examine representations of King Richard II, most notably known to literature as Shakespeare's doomed protagonist, a hubristic, puerile, and clearly unfit king who awaits his deserved overthrow. This portrayal, written and performed centuries after Richard's deposition and subsequent murder, springs from a mythology perpetuated by Richard's supplanter, Henry of Lancaster, and his adherents: that the Ricardian regime existed only as a prologue to its own eclipse. Texts that date from Richard's twenty-two-year reign (1377-1399), however, used many of the same descriptors and rhetorical strategies that the Lancastrians would adapt--but with very different ambitions and ends. . . . In my fourth chapter I read a series of texts that date to the final year of Richard's reign and to the first years of the Lancastrian dynasty. I trace a debate amongst several poems about the nature and efficacy of advisory literature as a genre once it was evident that earlier literature of advice had failed to alter Richard's behavior. I argue that the anonymous poem 'Richard the Redeless' attempts to avoid tribulations similar to those that bedeviled Richard's earlier reign by declaring that learned men have a civic responsibility to advise the king and that John Gower's poems 'In Praise of Peace' and 'O Deus Immense' propose that divine favor must be earned through good government and not considered an expected appurtenance of kingship. Finally, I propose that Gower introduces into his narrative of Richard's fall, the Tripartite Chronicle, a psychological motive for the king's failure to heed prior good counsel: a mysterious, interior 'dark suffering' that would reappear for centuries in historical and biographical accounts of the late king. Gower's efforts, reflect the pervasive recognition that political sovereignty is ultimately a literary construct. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Languages of kingship in Ricardian Britain. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Peebles, Katie Lyn Published Peebles, Katie Lyn. Medievalism's Inheritance: Early Inventions of Medieval Pasts. Ph.D. Dissertation. Indiana University, 2010. ix, 309 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A71.08. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Minor Latin Poetry Review "This dissertation examines how and why medievalism--the use of elements from the European Middle Ages in social commentary--began in the Middle Ages itself. . . . Each chapter focuses on an author experiencing political crisis: William of Malmesbury (c.1095-c.1143), John Gower (c.1330-1408), Sir Thomas Malory (c.1405-1471), and John Aubrey (1626-1697). These writers constructed medieval heritages out of available historical fragments, narratives, and their own dreams in order to resolve contemporary issues. . . . The basic process of 'medieval' medievalism is the same as the process that has been established in post-medieval periods: to make the past instrumental in cultural debates, these writers compared the terms of the chosen medieval period to the immediate concerns of the present. However, early medievalism is more weighted to a search for continuity and metaphorical constructions of cultural heritage in order to naturalize certain kinds of violence and mitigate losses of the past. William of Malmesbury and John Gower make lessons from the past obvious in attempts to secure a more peaceful future. Both Malory and Caxton were concerned with asserting a stable transmission of heritage that could transcend cycles of violence and limits of the book marketplace. Aubrey's use of medievalism in early modern scientific historical projects set a pattern for the continued intimacy of heritage and folklore studies, and of medievalism and medieval studies" (vi-vii). Peebles summarizes her discussion of Gower as follows: "the second chapter addresses John Gower's attempt to rescue and revitalize certain British traditions of rulership, particularly the proper relationship of a king to his people. The tone of Gower's medievalism veers between fear in the 'Vox Clamantis,' wistfulness in the Tale of Three Questions [from Confessio Amantis, and optimism in some of the late Latin poems. I argue that the tension in Gower's medievalism, which transformed his experiences of surviving the Black Death, the Peasants' Revolt, and the usurpation of Richard II into fearful visions and hopeful dreams of virtuous reform, comes from a dialectic of kings and subjects in which women are best positioned to lead to reconciliation through wise counsel" (15). Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Medievalism's Inheritance: Early Inventions of Medieval Pasts Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Newman, Jonathan M Published Newman, Jonathan M. "Satire of counsel, counsel of satire: Representing advisory relations in later medieval literature." PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2008. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review "Satire and counsel recur together in the secular literature of the High and Late Middle Ages. I analyze their collocation in Latin, Old Occitan, and Middle English texts from the twelfth to the fifteenth century in works by Walter Map, Alan of Lille, John of Salisbury, Daniel of Beccles, John Gower, William of Poitiers, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Skelton. . . . In the first chapter I introduce the concepts and methodologies that inform this dissertation through a detailed consideration of Distinction One of Walter Map's "De nugis curialium" . . . . Chapter two looks at how twelfth-century authors of didactic poetry appropriate relational discourses from school and household to claim the authoritative roles of teacher and father. In the third chapter, I focus on texts that depict relations between princes and courtiers, especially the Prologue of the "Confessio Amantis" which idealizes its author John Gower as an honest counselor and depicts King Richard II (in its first recension) as receptive to honest counsel. The fourth chapter turns to poets with the uncertain social identities of literate functionaries at court. Articulating their alienation and satirizing the ploys of courtiers--including even satire itself--Thomas Hoccleve in the "Regement of Princes" and John Skelton in "The Bowge of Court Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Satire of counsel, counsel of satire: Representing advisory relations in later medieval literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Irvin, Matthew William Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Published Irvin, Matthew William. "'In propria persona': Artifice, politics, and propriety in John Gower's Confessio Amantis." PhD thesis, Duke University, 2009. Dissertation Abstracts International A70.12. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/items/13035f6e-6306-4cc2-85fa-6a63abab12f8. Review "This dissertation examines the use of personae, the rhetorical artifices by which an author creates different voices, in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." I argue that the "Confessio" attempts to expose how discourses of sexual desire alienate subjects from their proper place in the political world, and produce artificial personae that only appear socially engaged. The first three chapters consider the creation of the personae in the context of medieval Aristotelian political thought and the "Roman de la Rose" tradition. The last three chapters examine the extended discourse of Gower's primary personae in the "Confessio Amantis," drawing upon Gower's other works and the history of Gower criticism. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource 'In propria persona': Artifice, politics, and propriety in John Gower's Confessio Amantis. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Batkie, Stephanie L Published Batkie, Stephanie L. "Sentenced to hard labor: Vernacular transformations in the late fourteenth century." PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2009. Open access at https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/64772 (accessed January 23, 2023). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review "This project re-characterizes the development of vernacular readership in late fourteenth century England. It offers a fresh heuristic for recognizing vernacular works that ostensibly limit their potential audiences through the use of recondite, Latinate, and otherwise hermetic discourses while, at the same time, making the labored interpretation performed by those readers the center of its textual purpose. It focuses on two poems, William Langland's 'Piers Plowman' and John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,' as examples of texts that are neither open nor easy--on the contrary, they are deliberately difficult. Through them it examines the relationship between vernacular difficulty, laborious reading, and readerly transformation in the context of late medieval devotional culture. Each chapter pairs one aspect of the text with an external, Latinate discourse in order to explore the ways in which the author adapts and re-calibrates it for the purposes of establishing a new form of vernacular reading. . . . Turning to Gower, the third chapter discusses the presentation of alchemy in the poem as an idealized form of interpretive labor that is simultaneously offered as a model for reading and rejected as a physical and textual practice. The final chapter examines the problem of producing accurate and effective language through vernacular confessional discourse in the 'Confessio.' Each transmuted discourse contributes to the 'hermeneutic narrative,' or the interpretive path readers generate as they work their way through the texts. The dissertation shows that the historical importance of these poems lies in their open commitment to the construction of this hermeneutic narrative, while their critical usefulness lies in their ability to highlight similar questions in other contemporary texts. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sentenced to hard labor: Vernacular transformations in the late fourteenth century. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, Isabella Neale Published Yeager, Isabella Neale. "Did Gower Love His Wife? And What Has It to Do with the Poetry?" Poetica: An International Journal of Linguistic-Literary Studies 73 (2010), pp. 67-86. ISSN 0287-1629 Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry Biography of Gower Review [Includes additional notes by R. F. Yeager.] Fisher left us with a portrait of a decrepit Gower, entering into a marriage of convenience in his old age with a woman whom he needed to tend to him as a nurse. Yeager demonstrates how much this view, like so much about Gower's life, rests upon mere speculation, and how easy it is to construct a different view of Gower's reasons for entering into marriage. The references to his debility, she points out, begin much earlier than the time of his marriage, and he lived for at least 18 years after first describing himself as "old, Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Did Gower Love His Wife? And What Has It to Do with the Poetry? Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Lindeboom, Wim Published Lindeboom, Wim. "Rethinking the Recensions of the Confessio Amantis." Viator 40 (2009), pp. 319-48. ISSN 0083-5897 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review Lindeboom's long essay marks another attempt to make sense of the confusing evidence concerning the dating, the revision, and the publication of the "Confessio Amantis." Because he moves back and forth from one question to another, it is impossible to summarize his essay point by point, but one can pick out some of the main threads. Lindeboom reconsiders the significance of the dates that appear in the text and marginal notes of the different versions of the poem; he re-examines the evidence supporting Macaulay's classification of the many surviving copies into different "recensions;" he offers some new suggestions about the relation between the various alterations and revisions in the poem, the political events of the last two decades of the fourteenth century, and Gower's (presumably) shifting relations with his patrons; and he reconsiders the implications of Gower's suggestion to Chaucer, which appears in some versions of the poem, that he offer his own "testament of love." Much of his essay is devoted to dismantling what he considers the "preconceptions" (p. 348) of Macaulay and Fisher, and many of his criticisms, particularly with regard to the conclusions that they and others have drawn from the various dates that appear in the margins, have been stated before and are worth consideration. In many cases, however, it is difficult to say that the alternative views that he offers are any less speculative. He dismisses as improbable, for instance, the notion that Gower could have become disenchanted with Richard II in the early 1390s, as Fisher maintained, but he makes much of a supposed hostility between Richard and his cousin Henry during the same period, which, he insists, would have made it impossible for Gower to consider dedicating his poem to Henry at this time (331). He also argues that dedicating a poem to Henry that contains a long discussion of the education of a king (which is how he characterizes the purpose of Book 7) would have been "an essentially seditious political statement" (337) if Richard were still king. He then sees hints of a threat to Chaucer in the invitation to write a "testament of love," a comment that he interprets as a reminder of the fate of the unfortunate Thomas Usk, author of a poem of that name, who was beheaded in 1388 (338-44). Lindeboom's arguments lead him to suggest that portions of the poem, such as the address to Chaucer, date from earlier than has been supposed, but that others, such as all of Book 7, may be late additions, inserted only when Henry had become king. At the same time, he declares it "reasonable to assume" (326) and "in all likelihood" true (344) that the poem was intended to be presented orally long before it was circulated in manuscript form. This inference, however, is based on the analogy of arguments made about the "Canterbury Tales" (a work much more easily divisible into individual "performances" than is the CA) rather than on any evidence offered from the CA itself. (In disagreeing with Coleman over Henry IV's knowledge of Latin in his note 31, Lindeboom complicates his case further by, in effect, dismissing one of the strongest arguments on which her case for oral presentation is based.) In the end, we are left not knowing precisely which version of the poem Lindeboom is trying to date: some early "oral" version or one of the written ones? And a version that contained which parts of the poem as it is now known? In dismantling the poem in this way, Lindeboom pays virtually no attention to the manuscript evidence. It is not merely that he seems not to have examined any manuscripts on his own. He simply passes over the fact that Book 7, which he wants to believe was added for Henry, appears in all surviving copies of the poem in which Henry is not even mentioned. In another vein, while attacking Macaulay's notion of the three "recensions," he appears to adopt without reservation Macaulay's conclusions on the order in which the three different "versions" of "recension 1" arose (e.g. on 324 and on 334, where he calls the "unrevised version" "the earliest one"). He cites a 1985 essay by the reviewer in support of the notion that the differences among these three versions are mostly scribal in origin (322), but he overlooks the conclusion that follows (and hence the principal burden of that essay): that Macaulay got the order wrong, and that the one he called "unrevised" was actually the last in order of time, manifesting the highest degree of scribal corruption. At another point (331) Lindeboom offers the suggestion that the "intermediate" version might in fact be the earliest version of the poem. This suggestion is based on a completely mistaken account of the contents of the different "versions" that he offers on 324, where he claims that in the "intermediate" and "revised" versions, the lines in which Richard II and Chaucer are named are replaced with the passages less favorable to England and more favorable to Henry. This is simply wrong. One has to suspect that Lindeboom has confused the "intermediate version" with "recension two" and the "revised version" with "recension three," but one can't be sure. And that is true about much in this essay. One will find here a summary of some of the many questions that we are still debating about the origin and development of the poem, but we are still far from any clear and definite answers. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Rethinking the Recensions of the Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Kennedy, Kathleen Erin Published Kennedy, Kathleen Erin. "Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature." New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 ISBN 9780230606661 Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Biography of Gower Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Review Borrowing a trope from Barbara Hannawalt, Kennedy presents maintenance--the "lord-retainer relationship"--in the eyes of most late medieval English folk as akin to how the "Mob" would have seemed to residents of 1920s Chicago: "From your perspective, the Mob does bad things: it kills people, and it corrupts government and law. But at the same time you recognize that the Mob does good things as well: it can make obtaining goods and social services easier and less expensive, and may curtail some kinds of crime" (1). Marriage comes into it because, Kennedy argues, Middle English writers used the husband-wife model, and that of master-servant, as safer stand-ins for the lord-retainer relationship, ever a target, albeit just beneath the surface: "because of the status of the lords involved…criticism of this dynamic could be dangerously political" (6). Kennedy draws on the letter collections of the Stonors, Pastons and Plumptons to illustrate "different sorts of service relationships," and to provide an introduction to fifteenth-century litigation, by way of grounding her more literary material. Similarly--again as a grounding model--she examines legal discourse and precedent in rape cases, because "rape forced medieval legal officials and writers to consider the degree to which autonomy was compromised as the responsibilities of service clashed with the sense of autonomy modern readers associate with 'free will,' particularly in the social, legal, and religious institution of marriage" (12). In her fourth chapter she takes up contemporary works addressing the maintenance directly: Chaucer's Melibee, Langland's Lady Meed, the "Arthuriad" section of Lydgate's "Fall of Princes." Her final chapter considers "the relationships between masters and a particular category of servants: lawyers" (13). Here Kennedy finds the "Mirour de l'Omme" and "Vox Clamantis" especially valuable, and devotes the bulk of her chapter to showing that "legal professionals and the equity of the law suffered when service was involved. The question began to become whether a lawyer's lord was a man or the law itself. Which institutions or individuals had the right to constrain a lawyer's autonomy?...Gower seeks to map out the problem in detail . . ." (13). She finds Gower's witness valuable not only for its detail, but also because she takes it for granted that Gower "was probably a lawyer or other legal official" (89, 149, n.1). Kennedy's is the closest reader to take so seriously those sections of the MO and VC dealing with her subject. Placed in the broader context she establishes (Chapter 5 also includes Hoccleve's "Regement of Princes"), her insights are especially thought-provoking. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Palgrave Macmillan, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Davenport, W. A Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Published Davenport, W. A. "Dreams in Gower's Confessio Amantis." English Studies 91 (2010), pp. 374-97. ISSN 0013-838X Review [*Ed. note: We reproduce here the author's own abstract, since as a summary of his argument it is difficult to improve, though it gives an inadequate sense of the range of observation, the subtlety, or the depth of engagement with the Confessio Amantis that are manifested in this fine essay.] "Gower's name is not prominent in accounts of fourteenth-century English dream poetry and yet Confessio Amantis, though not composed as a dream poem, is full of dreams and Gower makes imaginative use of dream as part of the psychology of his central figure, Amans. This essay explores the variety of Gower's dreams. The dream of Nebuchadnezzar is used in the Prologue to establish the theme of division in history and in individual human life and this would seem to exemplify the conventional idea of the dream as cryptic revelation with an authoritative interpreter. The tales which Genius tells to teach Amans also include many examples of the oracular dream. And yet once one examines some of these dreams Gower's sense of their force appears surprisingly complex: the tale of 'Ceix and Alceone' shows dream as a staged illusion and the elaborate guile of Nectanabus confirms the link between dream and deception. False dreams and night-time deceits form a recurrent motif. In parallel to Gower's fictional dreams runs the dream experience of Amans himself who daydreams about the beloved and both enjoys the pleasure of wish-fulfillment and suffers the agony of frustration in his night-time dream life. The included dream poem of Youth and Age which brings Confessio Amantis to a close confirms Gower's reliance on dream both as a theme and as a structural device whereby he returns from illusion to the clarity of his own waking reason. Dublin Core The Dublin 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 2010 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Dreams in Gower's Confessio Amantis. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article explores the appellative "nigromantesa" [necromanceress] given to Medea in "La Celestina" (1499) against the background of other Peninsular texts which mention the Greek character and magical issues in the fifteenth century. Antonio Cortijo, undoubtedly inspired by Lida de Malkiel, pays special attention to two Spanish works, Juan de Mena's "Laberinto de Fortuna" (c. 1444) and its extensive commentary made by Hernán Núñez de Toledo, the "Glosa a las Treszientas" (1499). Cortijo Ocaña provides the text of Toledo's glosses to the terms "magos" [magicians] and to Medea the "inútil nigromantesa"--as Mena names her--an outstanding example of the vast humanist knowledge of the commentator, known as "el Comendador Griego" [Greek commander]. Although the "Glosa a las Treszientas" was published the same year as "La Celestina," Cortijo suggests that Rojas could have known the text before it was printed--certainly, Núñez de Toledo was a prominent scholar when he returned from Bologna in 1498, though he spent the subsequent years as a private tutor in Granada. Cortijo adds another pair of works to the panorama of late medieval Iberian stories of Medea, the Portuguese and Spanish translations of "Confessio Amantis," where Gower had given his own approach to the Ovidian myth. Thanks to Cortijo's parallel edition of the English, Portuguese, and Spanish versions of this passage, we have an excellent example of how the Medean legend was transferred to the two peninsular languages. His annotation of the modifications by the translators helps to complete the literary background for Rojas' reference to Medea the enchantress and opens up the possibility of exploring the readership, dissemination and possible impact of the Gowerian poem on Iberian literature. [AS-H.] [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio Published Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio. "Medea a la 'Nigromantesa': A Propósito de los Hechos de Medea en Rojas y Gower." Revista de Literature Medieval 20 (2008), pp. 31-58. ISSN 1130-3611 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Medea a la 'Nigromantesa': A Propósito de los Hechos de Medea en Rojas y Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Published Carlson, David R. "Gower's Beast Allegories in the 1391 Visio Anglie." Philological Quarterly 87 (2008), pp. 257-75. ISSN 0031-7977 Review The Visio Anglie that constitutes the first book of "Vox Clamantis" depicts the peasants as beasts in two not entirely consistent senses, Carlson explains. In the vision itself, the dreamer sees not humans but beasts of burden which are then transformed into monstrous versions of themselves. The representation of the peasants as beasts, Carlson points out, was a widespread topos serving to justify their repression and servitude, while in fact also representing the daily conditions under which they lived. The second trope is found in the prose heading to the Visio and in the verse that precedes the beginning of the dream, which Carlson suggests were added after the fact. Here Gower "apologetically mitigates his chief metaphor" (263): the rebels were humans (thus possessed of reason, and capable of making a different choice) who were transformed into beasts under force of their own vice. Carlson traces the roots of this "ethical-judgmental conceit" (269) to Boethius and Ovid, and notes, most importantly, that it serves to undermine the rationalization of feudalism implicit in the depiction of peasants as beasts by nature. "The mitigating change of conceit in the post-festal prose acknowledges the bad faith of the original verse misrepresentation of the rebels as subhuman; but the mitigation cannot eliminate or expunge. The fact remained that the feudal political economy was itself inhumane, treating human beings as unequal, reducing some to non-human status, the status of thingness, for exploitation." In a passage in which Gower gives voice to the rebels' complaints (ll. 693-96), he "acknowledges common humanity and calls oppression by its proper name. . . . Gower's vision-nightmare is an act of aestheticizing political will, properly anaesthetizing too, perhaps: while articulating the justice of the threat that the 1381 Social Revolt posed, willfully also still to deride it and its bestial or bestialized agents" (270-71). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2]. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Gower's Beast Allegories in the 1391 Visio Anglie. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Butterfield, Ardis Published Butterfield, Ardis. "The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War." Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 ISBN 9780199574865 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Language and Word Studies Cinkante Balades Review Butterfield has written a book which, in the view of this reader, will alter entirely how the Anglo-French relationship can be understood henceforward by scholars of language, social history, and literature. To do such a book justice requires a format altogether other than this. Suffice it to say that her canvas is vast--the Hundred Years' War--although this is sometimes difficult to recall, amidst so much and so widely-cast learning that includes, among many things, "English, French, and Anglo-French," "puys," treaties, translation theory, politics at all levels of intimacy, from kings and diplomats to Guillaume and La Belle (and poet and poet, mutatis mutandis), music, merchants, manuscripts, stanzaic structure and an unusually clear set of maps that, thoughtfully examined, depict virtually by themselves the ebb and flow of Anglo-French "intertextuality" between 1157 and 1429. It is a book that (happily!) will gore a few sacred cows: Butterfield's gentle but unavoidable revision of English "nationhood" (she has her doubts), must needs give pause to those now busily engaged in defining that concept; and her argument that the assumption of Chaucer's centrality for the history of English letters requires rethinking is entirely persuasive. So also is the powerful case she makes for lyric poetry as having been taken as seriously--if not more so--as narrative poetry, long the sole focus of medieval literary scholarship in England and the U.S. Hence it is no surprise that Butterfield accords Gower's "Cinkante Balades" an important position on this panorama. Altogether rightly, she treats Gower's balades as part of "a passage of words across Anglo-French boundaries" (246). Reading five balades in particular through the lens of their common refrains (an approach grown out of meticulous studies of poetry and music she has pursued over the last decade), she positions Gower in relation to Chaucer, Graunson, Machaut, Thomas de Paien, and Froissart (and with Deschamps hovering in the background), developing convincingly the "conversational" nature of what is--clearly--self-conscious exchange. For Butterfield, these poets read each others' "forme fixe" work with high seriousness, borrowed from each other, fully expecting their own poems to be so scrutinized--and borrowed from--as well. Hers is the best, most powerful claim yet for the elevation of the balade as an intra-and international form, to a parallel place alongside the narrative and polemical verse of the late middle ages--and of course for Gower's substantial place amongst international practitioners, too. Typically, she moves from the micro to macro by way of concluding: "A further implication of such material is that it shows us another model of how language is exchanged. It is particularly pertinent to the larger argument of this book that these examples of cross-reference pass between authors that we now categorize as English and French, but that then had a much looser identity . . . . In short, the categories of English and French in the late fourteenth century are more porous than source study usually implies, and the linguistic and literary relationships are conducted by means of, and sometimes against the grain of, many subtle distinctions of position, status, and cultural ambition that are not adequately rendered by the single opposition English and French" (264-65). This is a magnificent book, rich, learned, challenging--one all who would know Gower should read. (One very minor point for Gowerians: the reference to the "800th anniversary conference held July 2008," on pg. 239, n. 20, adds an extra two hundred years to Gower's antiquity.) [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Oxford University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This study uses the literary metaphor of the monstrous woman to trace the construction of a particular gender ideology in English narratives of the fourteenth through early sixteenth centuries. Drawing on recent scholarship on monster theory, the rhetorical uses of medieval misogyny, and the reception of the Middle English romance, this study argues that the character of the monstrous woman functions as a self-conscious literary tool that allows authors, and audiences, to reflect on the accepted conventions of misogyny, patriarchal authority, and the romance formula itself. I analyze Middle English narratives including the early sixteenth-century translation of the prose "Melusine," the Constance tale as adapted by Chaucer and Gower, and appearances of Medea in the works of Chaucer, Gower, and Caxton's translation of the History of Jason to discover the ways these narratives use female monstrosity--in literal and figurative form--to dramatize the anxieties arising in a patriarchal society that defines the female as a slightly aberrant category of human, yet depends on her for maintenance and reproduction of the social order. In offering a close reading of these stories that draws on literary, visual, ecclesiastical, and didactic contexts, I explore the new possibilities in fiction offered by the Middle English romance and demonstrate how the monstrous women act as a powerful and multivalent literary trope: they offer their narratives a means to interrogate the prevailing gender ideology; expose the constructedness of and agenda behind existing ideological, political, social, familial, and physical spheres; challenge the currents of medieval misogyny; and fully dramatize the demands of a social order that, in Othering and ordering its female elements, makes women into monsters." Author/Editor Author/Editor Urban, Misty Rae Published Urban, Misty Rae. "Monstrous women in Middle English romance." PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2008. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Monstrous women in Middle English romance. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Medieval London, unlike medieval Paris, did not have a university. The absence of a dominant local institution that regulated intellectual innovation in a historical moment that sees the collapse of distinctions between clerical and lay presented an opportunity for the poetic appropriation of the academy's disciplines in Latin and in Middle English. 'Poetry and London Learning' presents London as a center of English, intellectual culture, on par with Oxford and Cambridge. I argue that late medieval London poetry constitutes a coherent, innovative intellectual movement. London poets Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Thomas Usk, William Langland, Thomas Hoccleve, and the anonymous "Mum and the Soothesegger"-poet present poetry as local scholarship that is affiliated with the City and the nearby jurisdictions of Southwark and Westminster rather than the academy. These poets redefine medieval academic disciplines to make them immediately available, comprehensible and useful to a London reading audience. Chaucer narrates the history of alchemy; Gower revises late-medieval historiography; Usk makes a London ethics out of the materials of theology; and Langland narrates a common origin for poetry and natural philosophy. In the process of revising academic disciplines for the City, these poets present poetic, pedagogical narratives that intend to generate models of urban intellectual subject formation. Every chapter describes London, a community and a place experienced differently by each poet, and explains how each poet's specific location, career, and affiliations produced singular revisions of institutional, pedagogic tradition. Each chapter also presents the long histories of the disciplines concerned in order to describe how these poets' contributions become implicated or marginalized in English intellectual history. Hoccleve's invention of Chaucerian science contributed to sixteenth-century antiquarians' claims regarding the genealogy of an ancient urban, poetic scholarly tradition in spite of the continued absence of a university in the City. Gower's idiosyncratic performance of Latin history alienates his poetic production from the longer tradition of historical writing about the City. 'Poetry and London Learning,' therefore, refuses to narrate a history of English poetry periodized by regnal period, but insists upon imagining the place of London's late-medieval poets in the longer history of English scholarship." Author/Editor Author/Editor Pangilinan, Maria Cristina Santos Published Pangilinan, Maria Cristina Santos. "Poetry and London learning: Chaucer, Gower, Usk, Langland and Hoccleve." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2009. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Poetry and London learning: Chaucer, Gower, Usk, Langland and Hoccleve. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation . . . explores the varied representations of marriage and family in Middle English romance. While Middle English romances often act with disciplinary force to cultivate and popularize ideals about the family, many romances also stand in ambivalent relationship to this disciplinary function. Even if they end up valorizing the nuclear family, they do so through circuitous routes--such as depicting surrogate father-child relationships, interracial marriages, the loss of family members, and adultery--as they imagine alternatives means by which families cohere. . . . Chapter four focuses on a single romance--Gower's "Apollonius of Tyre"--arguing that how the loss of family members is memorialized creates a "virtual" family that is turned towards political ends. . . . In general, the thesis argues that while ecclesiastical ideas about the family in the high and late Middle Ages began to produce what we would now recognize as nuclear families, the Middle English romance remained a vigorous site where alternatives to doctrinal ideals about the family were imagined." Author/Editor Author/Editor Lim, Gary Published Lim, Gary. "Familiar estrangements: Reading family in Middle English romance." Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York, 2009. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Familiar estrangements: Reading family in Middle English romance. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Sadlek, Gregory M Published Sadlek, Gregory M. "Idleness Working: The Discourse of Love's Labor from Ovid through Chaucer and Gower." Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2004 ISBN 9780813213736 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Review Sadlek includes the Confessio Amantis in a Bakhtinian study of "the ideologically saturated discourse of love's labor" as present variously in as well the "Ars amatoria," "De amore," "De planctu Naturae," "Roman de la Rose," and "Troilus and Criseyde." His chapter on Gower revises and enlarges an earlier essay, "John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Ideology, and the 'Labor' of 'Love's Labor'" in Re-Visioning Gower: New Essays, ed. R.F. Yeager (1998; rev. JGN XVII.1). Sadlek's focus is Book IV, in which "Genius and Amans grapple with the question of what it means to be slothful in love, and whether Amans is guilty of this sin" (168). His contention is that "Gower's favored labor ideology is one that presents work as a necessary but positive human activity, one whose value derives not merely because it is an antidote to idleness but primarily because of its material contributions to the common profit" (171). This is an idea Sadlek finds consistent in Gower's work, from the Mirour de l'Omme forward; he cites the discussion of Accedie in MO 5125-6180 (186-89). Pointing out that "labor and productivity issues . . . played an important role in late fourteenth-century England, Sadlek surveys and assesses the impact of the Black Death on available labor and consequences for worker value, religious reforms aimed at the apparent idleness of what Wyclif termed "clerks possessioners" and changes in attitudes toward time-keeping brought on by the introduction of clocks (174-81). These "were essential parts of the writing context for both Chaucer and Gower" (181). The problem for Amans and Genius is that--far from being idle--Amans is ceaselessly working to win his lady's love. Genius shows him, however, that "Amans's labor ideology here is inconsistent. Although . . . he argued that he was not guilty of idleness because he kept himself busy, he [later] admits (IV.1757-60) that just keeping busy, just countering the vice of sloth, is not enough. One's work must produce results"(197). Sadlek clarifies helpfully that although Amans recognizes that "he is an idle man" (198), he does so "not on the basis of Christian morality, but rather on the basis of a labor ideology that equates labor with productive activity" (198). Such activity Amans equates with his lady falling in love with him--a goal he has failed to achieve, rendering his "busyness" mere wasted time (200). But Gower's concern is broader than Amans' compass. Genius goes beyond Amans' immediate situation to add other concepts of labor, including "the dignity of intellectual labor" (202). The result is that Book IV ultimately "contains a dialog among various ideologically colored voices," including "traditional medieval ideology of work based on . . . the Seven Deadly Sins;" "aristocratic voices" emphasizing amorous idylls and chivalric combat; and "finally, the voice of a humanist work ethic in process" (203). "In short," Sadlek posits that "Gower's ideology of labor in Book 4 is neither simply traditional nor avant-garde, neither completely aristocratic nor bourgeois. It is an ideology in process, mirroring to some extent ideological shifts in Gower's language and his society . . . a 'site of action' in which various late-medieval labor ideologies undergo a 'sustained literary engagement'"(204). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Idleness Working: The Discourse of Love's Labor from Ovid through Chaucer and Gower. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Catholic University of America Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Olsson, Kurt Published Olsson, Kurt. "Composing the King, 1390-1391: Gower's Ricardian Rhetoric." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009), pp. 141-73. ISSN 0190-2407 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Review Olsson adopts as fact Gower's report of a royal charge from Richard II to write the what becomes the "Confessio Amantis," and deftly employs the Westminster Chronicler's vignettes of a dangerously volatile Richard to sketch the problematic position Gower very likely felt himself to be in, given his wish to advise the king honestly (Olsson presents it as a character trait which Gower could not compromise) and yet not incur his wrath. Gower's solution, Olsson argues, is to use "analogy to elicit judgment on a presumption of kingly power, and . . . he sets correction or a readjusting of perception as his goal. But rather than press for a verdict on this or that particular action, Gower works from patterns in Richard's conduct over the course of a decade to identify and address underlying and continuing problems in the governance of the realm" (146). To do this, "Gower creates [an] issue-based rhetoric in the portion of Book VII . . . devoted to explaining five virtues or 'pointz' of an ethical Policie--Trouthe, Largesse, Justice, Pite, and Chastite--as forming the basis of sound rulership" (147). In this essay, Olsson's focus is on Gower's management of Trouthe. The issue of kingly power had occupied controversy in Richard's court in the 1380's, and had led eventually to the Appellants' Revolt, Richard's near-disposition, and a reduced scope of kingship at the end of the decade. Gower, Olsson argues, makes this his focus in the tale of "The King, Wine, Woman and Truth" (Bk VII.1783-1984) his only exemplum on Trouthe, "significantly altering this tale from its source in 3 Esdras and his own synopsis of it in the Mirour de l'Omme" (147). In Olsson's view Gower does this in order to foreground (however subtly) his central point, i.e., that the "principal obligation of kingship [is] what a king swears to do in 'trouthe' as he is crowned" he then must do (152-53). The point was a risky one to make, Olsson notes, because "inconstancia regis" was a charge leveled at Richard often as the 1380's drew to a close. "Attracted more to the symbols than to the realities of governance". . . "Richard's preoccupation with maintaining his regal dignity . . . leads to neglect, a failure to uphold his coronation oath" (154/155). To teach the king how to do better, and why, Gower transforms the figure of Cyrus in the tale-within-a-tale told by the counselor Zorobabel into a tyrant, and projects the seducing courtesan Apeme as "the figure of fikelnesse (or Fortune) that, in the larger argument, will be offset by the trouthe of Alceste, the subject of Gower's second, newly added capsule tale and the means by which his Zorobabel will effect the transition to a fourth possible answer to Darius' question" about what entity possessed the most power universally. The answer is of course "Trouthe," and this, Olsson argues, is the point Gower wishes Richard to extract from the story, after seeing himself as both Cyrus and Darius, and--realizing that he should feel ashamed for the behaviors he has allowed himself to slip into--repent and change (156-65). Olsson then turns to the revisions of the poem which steadily excise Richard, and end indeed with Gower's submission of his poem to Henry IV for oversight and "correction." Arguing that "Gower's revision of the epilogue provides no evidence or a radical change of allegiance or of sudden alarm, a reaction to any one that the king has recently done . . . Gower appears to believe that change, or a refocusing and maturation, is possible and that his own fictive re-creation of the king could have a positive effect: that is suggested by the retention of the Thames narrative in the second recension of the poem" (169).In the subsequent revision, however, Gower shifts the focus of his audience from the king--i.e., Richard, and even Henry--to the other estates, particularly "to my lordis alle" (170-71). Olsson concludes, "But though Richard is no longer featured in the work, Gower's argument retains its vitality in providing a 'new' framework to guide discussion about kingship through the remainder of the reign and beyond. Indeed, this poem's continuing relevance for Henry IV is not far to seek." (173). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society JGN 29.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Composing the King, 1390-1391: Gower's Ricardian Rhetoric. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Martin surveys the few tantalizing references to the existence of MSS of the Confessio Amantis in Scotland before 1600. From them she infers that Gower's poetry was known and "was regarded as appropriate reading matter, or at least a fashionable addition to the library, for the intellectual elite, and the landed but also urban classes of late medieval and early modern Scotland" (563). The bulk of her essay, however, is concerned with tracing the influence of the CA in three Scottish works, each of which use it in a different but equally informed way. The anonymous prose "Spectacle of Luf" (1492) is framed as a dialogue between an old knight and his son on the dangers of the latter's subjection to love. The lessons, with their accompanying exempla, are divided into eight sections. The epilogue contains several detailed recollections of the ending of the Confessio. As the aged narrator abandons the didactic role of the main body of the poem, moreover, the ending recalls some of the ambivalences of Gower's conclusion and even "confronts the uncomfortable prospect considered by Gower . . . that maturity does not always bring a natural release form moral waywardness" (567). The reactions of the younger man to his father's lessons also recalls the stubborn persistence in love of Gower's Amans. Both works "therefore ultimately question the usefulness of the advisory genres to which they belong, foregrounding the power of readers to deflect the instructional intentions of authors in pursuit of validation of their own desires" (569), and they also draw a link between a lack self-governance in the ruler or ruling class and the resultant dangers of social disorder. Gavin Douglas' "Palice of Honour" (c. 1501) actually mentions Gower (in the company of Chaauer and Lydgate) by name. In part 1, the narrator's encounter with Venus contains recollections both of the opening of the CA and of Gower's "Tale of Rosiphelee." Like Gower, Douglas portrays his narrator "as one drawn perilously to the attractions of Venus's court, yet highly unsuitable for it, and unwelcome to its deity" (572), though the result is the narrator's rejection of love rather than a supplication for Venus's aid. And the narrator's second encounter with Venus, in part 3, recalls the conclusion to Gower's poem. "In both Confessio Amantis and The Palice of Honour, . . . the narrators are urged to use their literary skills in more fitting ways than writing about erotic love, in the service, respectively, of moral virtue and virtuous honour" (574). John Rolland's "Court of Venus" (c. 1560) also cites Gower by name, invoking him as an authority on how to avoid the dangers of subjection to Venus. It also imitates Gower in its conclusion, as the elderly narrator is expelled from Venus's court, but like "The Spectacle of Luf," it "returns to the problematic implications of the close of the Confessio Amantis" (576) that stories like those told by Genius "rarely succeed in convincing lovers to reform themselves," and it "leaves the reader with the problematic image of the poet-narrator as the reluctant outcast from Venus's court rather than the source of moral and ethical exemplarity" (576). Each of these three works also draws from other authors and "do not constitute a tradition," but as Martin notes in her conclusion, "they do give a clear indication of a Scottish habit of reading the Confessio Amantis that does not have an exact equivalent in contemporary English literature" (577). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Martin, Joanna M Published Martin, Joanna M. "Responses to the Frame Narrative of John Gower's Confessio Amantis in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Scottish Literature." Review of English Studies 60 (2009), pp. 561-77. ISSN 0034-6551 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Responses to the Frame Narrative of John Gower's Confessio Amantis in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Scottish Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Both lexically and visually, Cawsey points out, the distinction between Muslims to the south and non-Christians from northern Europe appears to have been blurred in late medieval England, in a way that challenges notions of "orientalism" based on a simple division between east and west: the word "saracen" is often used not as a racial epithet but as a designation of all pagans, including those from the north; and in manuscript illuminations of works such as Lydgate's "Lives of Sts Edmund and Fremund," the invading vikings are depicted with curved, hooked swords and with large turbans, a "visual 'shorthand' for a Muslim Saracen . . . well established in medieval art" (383), headgear which is given up when the invaders convert to Christianity. Religion, rather than race or geography, appears to have been the paramount determiner of "alterity." Both "Guy of Warwick" and the tale of Constance (as recounted by both Chaucer and Gower) contain parallel adventures, one set in the east and one in the west. Constance twice voyages to a pagan land (Syria and Northumbria), converts the king, and is expelled by her malicious mother-in-law. Cawsey counters the "orientalist" readings that focus only on the first episode, and she points out how neither Chaucer's nor Gower's text makes any distinction (for instance in appearance) based upon race. But she also asks why the Northumbrians are shown converting successfully while the Syrians are all slain, and she finds the answer in the reasons that are given for the conversion: the Sultan converts not in response to any teaching or any deliberate choice of the Christian faith but only to secure Constance as his bride, while in Northumbria Constance is shown preaching and instructing on the faith before the conversion. Gower's version in particular lays stress upon the efficacy of Constance's voice in the tale. Gower's also has a tripartite structure rather than merely a double one, as it gives more emphasis to the episode in Spain. "Constance thus has the chance to convert the three most significant non-Christian invaders of Europe of the Middle Ages: Easter Muslims who invaded Byzantium and Eastern Europe; Northern pagans who invaded the British Isles, France, and Germany; and Eastern/Southern Moors and Arabs who invaded Spain and France from Africa" (393). In their depiction of the second group, Cawsey finds both English poets confronting the awkwardness of their own nation's descent from a group linked to eastern pagans, and "in differentiating their ancestors from the Muslim Saracens, Chaucer and Gower ultimately turn to a difference more complex than the modern orientalist's answer of race: to one based on religious motivation, personal rather than political faith in God, and the ground of piety and conversion" (393). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society JGN 29.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cawsey, Kathy Published Cawsey, Kathy. "Disorienting Orientalism: Finding Saracens in Strange Places in Late Medieval English Manuscripts." Exemplaria 21 (2009), pp. 380-97. ISSN 1041-2573 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Disorienting Orientalism: Finding Saracens in Strange Places in Late Medieval English Manuscripts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Rayner invokes John Burrow's "Ricardian" periodization (in "Ricardian Poetry" [1971]), in some measure to reassess its currency in light of subsequent scholarship, in some measure to go beyond it by offering fresh, clos(er) readings of CA, "Piers Plowman," "Pearl," "Cleanness," "Patience," and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and a variety of Chaucer: "Lak of Stedfastnesse," "Ballad of Fortune," "Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse," the Dream poems, "Troilus and Criseyde," and "Canterbury Tales," ultimately with an aim to "show that the instabilities of the Ricardian label can resolve themselves into some solid conclusions about the ways in which major poets of the period responded to kingship" (4). She devotes her first chapter to Gower, focusing almost exclusively on Book 7 of CA, with very occasional forays into other Books and works, on the ground that "this establishes the widest exempla of references to kingship" (4). Rayner has a way with a summation, and one can do no better than to quote her on her own work: "Gower is the poet most openly concerned with the theme of kingship, and his 'Confessio' relentlessly examines the different types of king and the effect of their rule on their subjects. Yet even he contains this exploration within a very specific framework of an individual's journey towards greater self-governance, and one, moreover, who is not a king. Amans's behavour [sic] is paralleled with the kings who [sic] Gower discusses, but he is never described as anything other than a rather lowly cleric; though Gower includes a Mirror for Princes in Book VII of his work, it is to Amans that Genius directs it, and Amans turns out to be none other than Gower himself. What Gower indicates is that such advice is universally applicable, and that kingship is not only the responsibility of the king himself. All subjects must try to be like an ideal king, like Apollonius, whom Gower holds up as the epitome of wise and effective governance. The moral governance is the vital aspect of Gower's treatment of kingship, and it is this that transcends any other relevance to real kings that he makes in his poem" (161). Although Rayner offers few original insights about Gower per se, she nonetheless chooses insightfully among secondary sources, and quotes judiciously from, in particular, Nigel Saul, Russell Peck, Diane Watt, Kurt Olsson, and James Simpson in support of her points. Her reading of Book 7 is a satisfyingly cohesive one, its strength residing chiefly in how she applies a similar insightful judiciousness to selecting passages from CA. Indeed, often she calls attention to lines seldom dwelt upon--and in so doing succeeds in refreshing Gower's work in surprising ways, much as a washing and new paint can make familiar facades seem suddenly new. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rayner, Samantha Published Rayner, Samantha. "Images of Kingship in Chaucer and His Ricardian Contemporaries." Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008 ISBN 9781843841746 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Images of Kingship in Chaucer and His Ricardian Contemporaries. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D. S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Leff, Amanda M Published Leff, Amanda M. "Writing, Gender, and Power in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Exemplaria 20 (2008), pp. 28-47. ISSN 1041-2573 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review "The Confessio like [Chaucer's] Wife of Bath's Prologue explores the role of texts in gendered power negotiations," Leff writes (29). "Gower probes the tensions between authoritative literate women and the social norms that constantly threaten to suppress or control them. Men in power attempt to contain female expression, and women in turn appropriate writing to challenge the dominant social order and assert their own authority. By revealing the potential subversiveness of women's writing, Gower's Confessio generates the cultural anxiety that it simultaneously reflects" (31). Araxarathen provides the negative example: the epitaph on her and Iphis's tomb "permanently rewrites Araxarathen in Iphis' terms" and thus "enforces women's subordinate, voiceless place in society" (33). Four other women in the poem use writing somewhat more successfully, "to respond to a threat by a male authority figure. Philomela writes in response to her rape and mutilation at the hands of Tereus; Canace writes in reaction to her abandonment by her brother and the abuse of her father; Arcestrate writes to affirm her choice of mate and to reject the suitors that her father selects for her; Thaise employs her knowledge of books to escape forced prostitution. In all these cases, gender plays a key role in the power struggle in which the women engage: they employ writing to counteract familiar, physical, or social limitations linked to their gender. Rather than accepting their subordination, the women take up their pens and their books to contest the status quo, and they are able to re-negotiate their positions in social networks by means of their literacy . . . . Despite their ability to act in commanding ways, however, Gower's women do not seriously challenge the gender norms perpetuated by the Confessio Amantis and medieval English society. Indeed, their exercises in power typically affirm rather than negate traditional gender roles . . . . Gower's women . . . do not subvert the social hierarchy, but simply seek more favorable positions within it. In the end, their authoritative acts of writing do less to promote the advancement of women than to reinforce the transformative power of writing itself" (43). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Writing, Gender, and Power in Gower's Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Readers coming to "Lordship and Literature: John Gower and the Politics of the Great Household" eager for fresh insight into Gower's poetry may initially be somewhat daunted. Lest any be beguiled by the subtitle, "Lordship and Literature," as the title states--and not John Gower--is what occupies the bulk of this book. The Confessio Amantis (nominally Kendall's central text) is not really Kendall's subject. Rather, as he clarifies (64): "Gower's poem offers us a lens on [sic] a landed habitus in the late fourteenth century. To explore the poem in this way will uncover the lordship economics that it disparages, promotes, or takes for granted in service, hospitality, marriage, dispute resolution, and kingship." For Kendall, thus, CA is "a lens," an instrument valuable to take sightings of the material that truly holds his interest "lordship economics . . . service, hospitality, marriage, dispute resolution, and kingship." In many ways, one thinks, "Piers Plowman" (about which Kendall says very little) or "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (about which he says a good deal, all of it quite thoughtful) might have served his turn equally well. Nevertheless, readers in search of Gower should persevere. Kendall can be a perceptive and credible witness to Gower's poem, notably in Chapter Five, "Women as Household Exchange in Genius's Tales," and Chapter Seven, "Retribution as Household Exchange in Genius's Tales." In both he approximates close readings--in the former case, of the tales of Leucothoe, Virginia, Dido, Phyllis, Rosiphelee, Medea, the princess of Pentapolis whom Apollonius marries, Jephte's daughter, and Rosemund; in the latter, of Mundus and Paulina, Constance, the False Bachelor, Tarquin, Arruns and Brutus, Virginius, and Orestes. Kendall's detailed readings of Virginia, the princess of Pentapolis, Rosiphelee and Rosimund as women both exchanged and resistant especially justify his careful study of Levi-Strauss, Gayle Rubin, Maria Bullon-Fernandez, and Larry Scanlon. Similarly, when he selectively applies Richard Firth Green's "Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England," Scanlon, and J.G. Bellamy to the False Bachelor, and, in a lesser degree, to Virginius, he is particularly thought-provoking. He is perhaps at his best in his treatment of Orestes, a "narrative [that] distinguishes Orestes from illicit killers, and in so doing creates a positive exemplum less against murder than for the ordering powers of reciprocalist (a term Kendall borrows from Felicity Heal, to mean "aristocratic") lordship" (234). It is the tensions in the tale that draw Kendall's attention, and he rightly makes the most of them as extendable into the Confessio's larger structure and concerns. In sum, then, there is in "Lordship and Literature" much matter, and many reasons to invest time in its study. Historians of a certain kind, and social theorists, will find it challenging. And if there is not a great deal new in its greater argument for those familiar with Gower's poetry (Kendall's major thesis--that "By deftly demeaning Amans and the magnificent politics to which he aspires, the Confessio supports a notion of a political community dominated by the mutual interests, aid, and responsibilities of gentry, nobility, and royalty" (264)--sounds rather like Russell Peck's "Kingship and Common Profit" in a new bottle), his closer readings, once rescued from the verbiage, are many of them illuminating, original, and instructive. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kendall, Elliott Published Kendall, Elliott. "Lordship and Literature: John Gower and the Politics of the Great Household." Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008 ISBN 9780199542642 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Lordship and Literature: John Gower and the Politics of the Great Household. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Clarendon Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Kanno collects fifteen essays, some previously published in different form (largely in venues inaccessible outside Japan) but the majority fresh work--or work re-thought--for this volume. As his title suggests, Kanno is particularly concerned with Gower's vocabulary, in its nuances and in the ways Gower manipulated language to increase the range, depth and subtlety of his verse. Several essays go farther, beginning with words but then broadening to investigate subjects of wider interest: "Gower's Good Sense," "Gower as Pacifist," "John Gower as Humorist," "Gower's Narrative Art," "On the Sin of 'Gluttony' in John Gower's Confessio Amantis" are representative examples. Still, it is when he scrutinizes the words themselves that Kanno's learning best serves his insight. The result, especially in his chapters "'Kinde' and Related Terms in John Gower's Confessio Amantis," "An Aspect of Gower as an Innovator of Words," and "Gower's Archaic Words," is both revealing and exceptionally useful--necessary reading, one could argue, for anyone contemplating more than a passing acquaintance with Gower's English work. Or with Chaucer's, for that matter, since Gower's precedents so often illuminate Chaucer's usage as well. Nor is Kanno confined to the Middle English: throughout he includes cognates and other illuminating examples drawn from the Mirour de l'Omme and the Vox Clamantis. This range is of particular help in shedding light on "archaic" locutions, differentiating the Old English hold-overs from Anglo-French inductions--an assemblage of words that, as Kanno shows clearly, unequivocally influences the uniqueness of Gower's poetic voice. It is, in its specialized way, altogether ground-breaking work. In short, Kanno's book adds pillars and planks to the foundation on which Gower scholars of the future will build. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kanno, Masahiko Published Kanno, Masahiko. "Studies in John Gower, with Special Reference to His Words." Tokyo: Eihosha, 2007 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Studies in John Gower, with Special Reference to His Words Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Eihosha, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Fisher pointed out (1964, pp. 68-69 and 342 n. 8) that Gower's "0 Recolende" seems to contain, in its promise of Henry's continuing fame, a reference to the king's grant of two pipes of Gascony wine in November 1399, and that it also seems to anticipate his composition of the "Cronica Tripertita." Carlson examines the same passage in closer detail, including both the earlier and later versions of "0 Recolende," explicating Gower's play on words more fully and pointing to several verbal similarities between this poem and the final eight lines of CrT, suggesting that the former "appears to incorporate an initial formulation of matter that Gower was to rework in the latter" (380). He concludes that Henry's grant to Gower preceded the poet's composition of both "0 Recolende" and CrT. In his citation of the passage from CrT, Carlson uses the version found only in the Glasgow MS (G) which in his 2007 essay he suggests was written after 1405. In this essay, however, he dates the composition of this conclusion to February 1400 (381). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R Published Carlson, David R. "Gower 'pia bita bibit' and Henry IV in 1399 November." English Studies 89 (2008), pp. 377-84. ISSN 0013-838X Gower Subject Cronica Tripertita Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower 'pia bita bibit' and Henry IV in 1399 November. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Carlson offers both a new account of the textual relations among the five surviving copies of the "Cronica Tripertita" and some provocative new proposals concerning the process of its revision. By 1400 or shortly thereafter, Gower had probably lost his sight, Carlson points out, and would thus have been unable to proofread each new MS as it was copied, but he remained alert, Carlson presumes, to the political events of his time, and intervened to update and correct the text in key passages. The surviving MSS are thus characterized by both increasing scribal corruption and a series of "new and improved authorial readings" (212). The bulk of this essay consists of an examination of the variations among these copies, distinguishing between those that are scribal and the more substantive ones that are more likely attributed to the poet. From these--and without regard to the separate textual history of VC, but equally without regard to the evidence of erasure and correction and the activities of the separate scribes enumerated by Macaulay (Works 4.lix-Ixxi) and Parkes, "Patterns of Scribal Activity" (see Carlson's note 9 on 213-14)--he constructs a new stemma (214), in which he argues that Hatton 92 (Macaulay's H3), though "poor [and] carelessly written" (219), nonetheless "represents [along with Harley 6291, Macaulay's H] the earliest state of the text in evidence" (221). H also contains, however, a unique passage at 1.55-56 that alters the characterization of Northumberland in a way that suggests knowledge of his implication in the attempts to overthrow Henry in 1403 and 1405 (as Macaulay hints in his note, 4.405). Such a revision must be authorial, Carlson implies (217), though if it was, Gower seems to have forgotten about it when he came to make other changes in the text (218-19). The other two most significant revisions suggest to Carlson an alteration in Gower's view of Henry that corresponds to the shift in his attitude towards Richard that many have detected in the revisions of CA. The first includes a small alteration in 3.479 that appears only in C, S, and G that mitigates somewhat the characterization of the chronicle of Richard's reign (222). The second is a fuller revision of the entire conclusion to the poem in which the former line occurs (3.478-89) that appears only in G, which allows that Richard "had once been a good king, at the beginning of his reign" (218); which describes the poem itself now not just as chronicle of Richard's reign but as a "mirror of the world"; and which transforms a judgment of Richard into a warning for all kings, that "the chronicle of any king's reign will becomposed by the king himself, in his own conduct, such as it will unfold in the course of a reign" (210). Carlson detects here "an incipient withdrawal of support, implicit, by attenuation of praise" (ibid.), and he proposes that the most likely cause of Gower's change of heart in this, his final revision of the poem (233), was Henty's execution of Richard Scrope, Archbishop of York, in June of 1405 (234-36). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R Published Carlson, David R. "Gower on Henry IV's Rule: The Endings of the 'Cronica Tripertita' and Its Texts." Tradiio 62 (2007), pp. 207-36. ISSN 0362-1529 Gower Subject Biography of Gower Cronica Tripertita Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower on Henry IV's Rule: The Endings of the 'Cronica Tripertita' and Its Texts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The majority of this 890-page effort consists of 1) a transcription and paleographic discussion of the Prologue and Books I-IV; 2) a critical edition of the same selections; and 3) a comparative study of Gower's English text alongside the Portuguese version. Pages 1-114 offer "historico-cultural context"; and account of the marriages of John of Gaunt's two daughters, Philippa and Katherine, to (respectively) the kings of Portugal and Castile; discussion of what is known/can be surmised about the translators of the Portuguese and Castilian Confessios; the merits of the two courts as literary incubators; approximation(s) at chronology, both for Gower's writing and the translations; comments on the hands and the capitals in Madrid Bib. MS g.II.19 ("Confisyon del amante"). In Spanish, with multiple, clear reproductions of hands and color (albeit not in color). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 28.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Faccon, Manuela Published Faccon, Manuela. "La Fortuna de la Confessio Amantis en la Peninsula Iberica: Estudio Comparativo de las Traducciones Edicion del MS Madrid, Real Biblioteca, II-3088 (Prologo I, II, III, IV Libros." PhD thesis, University of Verona / University of Zaragoza, 2007. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource La Fortuna de la Confessio Amantis en la Peninsula Iberica: Estudio Comparativo de las Traducciones Edicion del MS Madrid, Real Biblioteca, II-3088 (Prologo I, II, III, IV Libros. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "By exploring two premodern versions of the tale of Medea through the lens of J. L. Austin's speech act theory," Wade seeks "to tease out the 'unpremeditated articulations' [quoting Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text, xiii] latent within those texts." For Ovid, Medea is a means to explore "the social and moral ambiguities that involve a woman who chooses to speak and act independently, and as Medea depicts speech as a catalyst of power, her relationship with languages becomes integral to her utilization of the power she is given within Ovid's tale." Gower however "portrays Medea as an ideal figure to be perjured--an innocent, disempowered, and modest lover." The "discrepancy" between "what Genius 'intends' and what he actually does" allows Medea to emerge "from the facade of the disempowered ingenue to become a figure of power." This sequence reveals Gower's intent: he has Genius "take away the narrative space for her to speak in an attempt to control our reception of her through a subverted space of direct discourse." In the end, however, Medea's power is irrepressible, and leads to a violent conclusion elusive of Genius's narrative grasp: "his [i.e., Genius's] subversion of Medea's power through the confinement of her narrative space and illocutionary presence only demonstrates the unsettling nature of Medea as she remains a powerful figure despite her lack of speech." [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wade, James Published Wade, James. "'Sche made many a wonder soun': Performative Utterances and the Figure of Medea in Ovid's Metamorphoses and John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Postgraduate English 9 (2004), n.p. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'Sche made many a wonder soun': Performative Utterances and the Figure of Medea in Ovid's Metamorphoses and John Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article 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 Although his review is occasioned by the publication of volume 4 of Macaulay's edition of Gower (the Latin Works), Spies focuses primarily on Macaulay's general opinion of Gower's politics. Spies agrees with Macaulay's favorable assessment of Gower's switch in allegiance away from Richard II, and lists some of the criticisms traditionally leveled against Gower (from Colley Cibber to Karl Meyer). Spies provides more criticism, however, of Macaulay's views on the supposed quarrel between Chaucer and Gower. Spies feels that the Man of Law's opinion of Gower is shared by Chaucer, and he questions Macaulay's argument that Gower only struck the greeting to Chaucer from the later recensions to create room for other material. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Spies, Heinrich Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Published Spies, Heinrich. "Review of Macaulay's The Complete Works of John Gower, vol. IV." Englische Studien 35 (1905), pp. 104-109. Dublin Core The Dublin 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 1905 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Review of Macaulay's The Complete Works of John Gower, vol. IV Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 piece is a kind of appendix to Spies' article from 1900 ("Bisherige Ergebnisse") and consists of two parts: a further listing of allusions to Gower in later authors, and a fleshing out of Macaulay's descriptive catalogue of CA manuscripts. In the first part Spies makes only an occasional comment on the various references he lists. For example, he wonders whether George Puttenham had not seen the first recension of the CA since he only mentions Gower in relation to Henry IV. In the second part Spies describes a number of MSS in some detail (including one come to light after Macaulay's edition), and seems fascinated by some of the marginal notations and added verses, but makes no larger observations. Spies finishes with an initial tally of the number of extant copies of Caxton's and Berthelette's editions. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Spies, Heinrich Published Spies, Heinrich. "Goweriana." Englische Studien 34 (1904), pp. 169-175. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies 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 Goweriana Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1904 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 Spies' overview of the state of Gower scholarship came out nearly simultaneously with Macaulay's magisterial edition of Gower's works, and there is indeed significant overlap between the two scholars' work. Spies first traces the history of Gower's reception, from the initially favorable praise of Gower (and his inclusion in a literary triumvirate with Chaucer and Lydgate) to the increasingly more critical stance of later criticism. Despite Spies' fairly exhaustive summary he believes there must be many more references to Gower yet undiscovered (170). He also mentions some newly found allusions that illustrate, for example, that more research might be done to link Gower's work to particular families (e.g., the Bohun family) that kept his MSS as valued heirlooms (171, 178-79). Spies turns briefly to the Castilian and Portuguese translations (171) and to the biographies of Gower (he finds Reinhold Pauli's best), before stating the need for an edition of all the references and allusions to Gower in later authors. He then brings his own list of references up to date before focusing primarily on the work of Pauli, Meyer, and Macaulay. He argues (contra Meyer) that each recension of the CA had its origin prior to 1399 when Richard II was deposed (175-77) and that Gower was not spineless or self-serving in relation to the king. In fact, Gower was not afraid to be critical because he held his country in more esteem than his king ("Das vaterland stand unserem dichter höher als die person des königs"; 178). Spies also dedicates some pages to Gower's French and Latin works. Among other things, he suggests that the MO should actually be given its Latin title, since that is how Gower referred to it, and he criticizes Macaulay's lack of rigour in collating MSS of the Traitie (180). After a mention of Gower's shorter English poems, Spies' article turns to the editions of the CA. He criticizes Reinhold Pauli for his eclectic editorial choices and he finds Henry Morley guilty both for following Pauli's text unscrupulously and for being too populist (when Gower will never be very popular). Next follow brief summations of collections that include individual narratives from the CA (183-84), of collations (like Easton's inadequate Readings in Gower), and of relevant 19th century scholarship (particularly source studies). Most of the remaining pages of Spies' articles are taken up by a descriptive catalogue of CA MSS and some final reflections on the differences between the three recensions. Spies argues that Gower generally oversaw later changes and he notes that the MSS in group A should be split in two sections since a number of them show significant similarities with the B and Stafford version. Although Gower's alterations are generally light, Spies does believe that the scholarly world would benefit from another edition of a good base text to accompany Macaulay's admirable work. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Spies, Heinrich Published Spies, Heinrich. "Bisherige Ergebnisse und Weitere Aufgaben der Gower-Forschung." Englische Studien 28 (1900), pp. 163-208. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations In Praise of Peace Vox Clamantis Biography of Gower Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Manuscripts and Textual Studies Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bisherige Ergebnisse und Weitere Aufgaben der Gower-Forschung Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1900 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 Warwick, W. Published Warwick, W. "On Gower, The Kentish Poet, His Character and Works." Archaeologia Cantiana (1866), pp. 83-107. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Biography of Gower Cinkante Balades Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Review Warwick strengthens Gower's ties to Kent and assesses Gower's contribution to English letters. Warwick first outlines the dispute about whether Gower was from Stittenham in Yorkshire (the view of Leland and Todd), Wales (Caxton), or Kent (Weever and Nicolas). After reviewing Harris Nicolas's evidence for Kent – based primarily on deeds and on the poet's heraldic arms – Warwick adds further proof. In particular, Warwick reveals that the close rolls of the reigns of Edward III and Richard II seemingly paint an unflattering portrait of Gower. Gower may have been "somewhat of a speculator and land-jobber" (87) in Kent and nearby counties. Most damaging to Gower's reputation is his involvement with the notorious Septvans affair, where William Septvans, while legally a minor, alienated his lands to Gower and others under a false "probatio aetatis" (88). (The details of this incident are fleshed out in a lengthy footnote to Warwick's essay by another writer under the initials T. G. F.--perhaps Fleay). Warwick's final proof of Gower's "shrewd turn for business" is that Gower acted as attorney for Chaucer in 1378. This would suggest that the poets were friends, but Warwick next examines the possibility of an "estrangement" (91) between the poets. In particular, Warwick questions whether Gower's omission of his tribute to Chaucer from later editions of the CA should be interpreted in conjunction with the nearly simultaneous omission of the panegyric to Richard II. Influenced by the idea that Chaucer (rather than Usk) had written the Testament of Love, critics believed that Gower became a timid sycophant of Henry of Lancaster at the same time as he rejected his friend Chaucer who had landed in hot water for his support of Richard II. Warwick objects that the Chaucer reference is poetic and not political in character. Moreover, removing a panegyric and inserting a new one is an act that as a matter of course sends contradictory signals: it may seem obsequious and self-serving in relation to the new patron, yet represents a bold slap in the face to the form dedicatee (93-94). The remainder of Warwick's essay assesses Gower's literary merits. He argues that Gower's clear and smooth octosyllabic verse must have seemed "something marvellous" (94) to his own generation. Gower's educational program in the CA also supplied all the learning necessary for a gentleman up till the Renaissance. To the modern reader, however, Gower seems abstract, verbose, and lacking in "life" (95). Warwick concludes with some observations about Gower's relationship with Chaucer (he suggests that Chaucer's January is a parody of Gower the old lover) and about the meaning of the word "moral" in "moral Gower" (the word is more intellectual than ethical in connotation). [CvD] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource On Gower, The Kentish Poet, His Character and Works. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1866 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 Siegmund-Schultze, Dorothea Published Siegmund-Schultze, Dorothea. "John Gower und seine Zeit." Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 3 (1955), pp. 5-71. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Review Dorothea Siegmund-Schultze offers a thoroughly Marxist reading of Gower's work. Her objective is to demonstrate the extent to which Gower's literary works reveal an association with a particular social class (7). As a landowner and a member of the lower nobility, Gower is generally sympathetic to feudal ideals (and their ideological codification in scholastic reasoning about the three estates). However, he also shares much with the bourgeoisie, including their burgeoning nationalism and their generally positive view of profit. Siegmund-Schultze traces Gower's sometimes ambivalent apology for feudalism through his major three works, spending most time on the MO (7-53). Most of this treatment follows the progression of topics in Gower's works. After a brief overview of what is known about the Gower biography, Siegmund-Schultze discusses significant historical events in the fourteenth century. She notes that the effect of the Bubonic Plague was an increase in wages, which precipitated the Statute of Labourers and eventually the Peasants' Revolt. From a Marxist perspective, the increase of monetary and contractual agreements increasingly threatened feudal relationships (see especially the discussion of Marx's views on usury and mercantile capital in the late Middle Ages on page 21). The ideology of the old feudal order was further propped up by medieval spirituality (Siegmund-Schultze quotes Engels; 8). This explains also why Gower's ideal knight is a very pious man, aware of the impermanence of earthly fame (17), and why Gower's discussion of grace and salvation is imbued with the language of earning, reward, and investment (24). Gower's belief in an "Einheitskultur" (9) is further connected with his sense that Reason will teach us the wisdom of the past (Siegmund-Schultze lists Gower's primary sources; 14). In addition, his belief that education is a coherent system (unified in the seven liberal arts) leads him to link together a number of key values: "Bildung [education] Wissen [knowledge] governance und die aurea mediocritas [golden mean]" (15). This project, which links self-governance with the Three Estates model, is constantly threatened. Siegmund-Schultze mentions Gower's preoccupation with the rich burger who tries to imitate the aristocracy. In addition, while Gower is Boethian in his rejection of wealth, profit is often justified and the Vita Activa provides the most benefit to the social well-being. The latter emphasis on the common profit is typically bourgeois, and contradicts the individualism of feudalism (26; although on page 22 Siegmund-Schultze laments the increasingly cold ties of monetary transactions). This nationalistic focus goes hand in hand with a growing pacifism on Gower's part. Despite such bourgeois interests, Gower tends to depict labour as the pursuit of land-tied peasants, and he justifies poverty as something rewarded in heaven. Gower thus remains a tool of the ruling classes, despite the influence of bourgeois ideals (34). The latter ideals are further visible in Gower's scepticism about courtly love and in his xenophobia towards the Lombards (Siegmund-Schultze quotes Stalin to point out that the market is the first school in which the bourgeoisie learns nationalism; 47). Sometimes Gower's views are evidence of his association with both classes. Thus Gower complains about merchants pampering their wives so that they transgress social dress codes, but he is bourgeois in his concern over the cost of extravagance. Yet, despite the fact that we can classify nearly all of Gower's views as either feudal or bourgeois (e.g., even beer is a national drink and thus bourgeois), Gower is not very conscious of the ascendancy of the middle class. The fact that Gower hasn't learned much is evident in the VC, a kind of pamphlet that supports the use of force for containing the peasants (55). Gower here still supports the Three Estates model, which is why the murder of the Archbishop (Sudbury) is an important climax of Book I of the VC. Likewise, in the CA, Gower ignores the common people and generally focuses on exempla of the nobility, despite the fact that his stories about chivalry have an air of obsolescence. Even here, though, bourgeois realism creeps back in, especially as Amans recognizes his old age and sees the importance of marriage, emphases that are atypical of chivalric romance. Siegmund-Schultze concludes by observing that Gower's apology of feudalism meant that praise of Gower's achievements waned (esp. after the 17th century) along with the ideology he defended. [CvD] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 und seine Zeit Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1955 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 Iwasaki points out that in Gower's English syntax "part of a subordinate clause may precede the connective" (205). By "connective" Iwasaki means conjunctions and relatives. As an example we may take the following lines: "Sche bad Yris hir Messagere / To Slepes hous that she schal wende" (4.2972-73). In the second line, the adverbial phase "To Slepes hous" precedes the connective "that." This type of inversion is quite common in the CA and even parts of a sentence that begin with "and" or "bot" may have their order reversed. Macaulay often correctly points out how a line should be construed, but neither he nor the original scribes are always consistent with how they punctuate such inversions. Gower's principal motivation for using this peculiar word order was likely to maintain the iambic rhythm of the line. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Iwasaki, Haruo Published Iwasaki, Haruo. "A Peculiar Feature in the Word-Order of Gower's Confessio Amantis." Studies in English Literature 45 (1969), pp. 205-220. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Peculiar Feature in the Word-Order of Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1969 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 Ito compares the frequency and usage of rime riche in Gower's CA and MO as well as Chaucer's works. Gower uses 383 rime riches in the CA or about one for every hundred lines, whereas Chaucer uses about a third of that. Ito points out that modern translators avoid this device, "regarding it [as] too artificial, or even comical, whereas to ME poets … such sonorous, euphonic repetition of verbal sound as rime riche was far more 'poetical' than we suppose" (31). Of the CA's rime riches, three quarters are made of native words and the rest are French loan words. High frequency pairings tend to be of Old English origin and are generally used for colloquial speech or as poetic filler to complete the line. Most of Gower's rime riches play on semantic contrast, but a small number consist of words that are different only on a grammatical level. Gower's rime riches aim for "logical clarity" (36), whereas Chaucer's can also convey a sense of humour. Ito points out two passages (CA Book 5.79-90 and 8.3151-56) where multiple rime riches occur together and he notes that at times Gower uses rime riche to bridge two sentences (this is called "rime-breaking" or "a broken couplet"). Ito's conclusion summarizes the reasons for Gower's frequent recourse to rime riche wordplay and provides some final comparisons between Gower and Chaucer. [CvD; rev. MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ito, Masayoshi Published Ito, Masayoshi. "Gower's Use of Rime Riche in Confessio Amantis: As Compared with His Practice in Mirour de L'Omme and with the Case of Chaucer." Studies in English Literature 46 (1969), pp. 29-44. Reprinted version in Ito's John Gower, The Medieval Poet (Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1976), pp. 214-31. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Use of Rime Riche in Confessio Amantis: As Compared with His Practice in Mirour de L'Omme and with the Case of Chaucer Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1969 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 Isaacs compares three versions of the story of Constance – Chaucer's, Gower's and "Emare." He suggests that they were likely written within about 10 years of each other, but he does not try to trace the direction of influence. Isaacs finds Gower's octosyllabic couplets "aesthetically quite pleasing" (268), even though Gower's tale is otherwise sparse (or "colorless"; 268) on rhetorical figures. He then provides extensive plot summaries of the three versions, italicizing similarities and noting differences in the analysis that follows. In all three versions the incest-motif is downplayed and the attractiveness of the heroine is emphasized. Gower changes some of the focus to the sin of envy and he tends to concentrate on "the quality of things and people, questions of good and evil making up the bulk of his descriptions as well as of his incidents" (274). Gower also "makes an effort to regularize and keep track of the passage of time" (275). Isaacs concludes by noting that the three versions are emblematic of the diversity and richness of the medieval period. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Isaacs, Neil D Published Isaacs, Neil D. "Constance in Fourteenth-Century England." Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 58 (1958), pp. 260-277. ISSN 0028-3754 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Constance in Fourteenth-Century England Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1958 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 Whereas Tatlock (1906) found an analogue for Milton's allegorical treatment of Sin and Death in Gower, Steadman argues that Milton likely did not read Gower and that their common source was probably St. Basil's "Sixth Homily on the Hexaemeron." [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Steadman, John M Published Steadman, John M. "Milton and St. Basil: The Genesis of Sin and Death." Modern Language Notes 73.2 (1958), pp. 83-84. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion 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 Milton and St. Basil: The Genesis of Sin and Death. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1958 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 Cherniss examines the origins and characteristics of the allegorical figures Venus, Cupid, Nature, and Genius (as well as the concepts of Will and Reason). While the CA attempts to create some coherence out of these figures – specifically a reconciliation of natural love and charity – Cherniss feels that the result is often dissatisfying. Venus and Cupid both embody a natural love, and they seem morally neutral. This neutrality is also seen in Nature (for instance, in the tolerant attitude to incest expressed in her name). Here Gower follows Jean de Meun more than Alain de Lille. Cherniss further points out that "neither Venus nor Nature are permanently allied with Reason in the Confessio" (12). The result is that Genius is caught between representing Reason and the other figures. In general, "Genius is more fully the champion of Reason and Christianity than of Nature and Venus" (13). The only way to reconcile the two sides is to see Genius as representing human nature. The problematic relationship between Venus and Genius becomes especially apparent when Genius substitutes the sin of incest for lechery (what Venus condones) in Book 8. Cherniss argues that Gower deals with lechery in Book 7, where he discusses chastity. In the same book, Genius appeared to give up his role as confessor for Venus, yet later in Book 8 it is not clear whether he is still her servant. Indeed, the conclusion of the CA, where Amans comes to recognize his old age, struggles to sort out the various and conflicting meanings of the major allegorical figures. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cherniss, Michael D. Published Cherniss, Michael D.. "The Allegorical Figures in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Res Publica Litterarum 1 (1978), pp. 7-20. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Allegorical Figures in Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1978 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 Fison suggests that Gower's CA lacks the kind of structural or allegorical complexity that "delights young Empsonians" (16), and as a result Gower is largely out of fashion today. Neither are Gower's politics particularly controversial, and he is at his most interesting when he depicts the psychology of love. Gower's style "tends to preserve a smoothness of approach by lines whose effects complement each other, so that the impression left by the whole exceeds that of the individual parts" (19). Gower reminds Fison most of Dryden, not only in his restrained use of language or his "architectonic sense" (23), but especially in way he concludes the CA with a "sad nobility" (23). Throughout the article, Fison compares Gower with Chaucer, and while the latter comes off as more varied and versatile, Gower is still praised for "his technical command of the language" (25). The result of Gower's measured style is a sense of universality, openness, and tolerance. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fison, Peter Published Fison, Peter. "The Poet in John Gower." Essays in Criticism 8 (1958), pp. 16-26. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Poet in John Gower Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1958 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 Harder argues that Gower's tale of Lucrece makes eclectic use of both Livy and Ovid's versions of the story. In particular, from Livy Gower borrows specifics about the siege of Ardea, the kinship of Collatine and Arrons, the mention of a companion for Arrons on the journey to Lucrece's house, and the bearing of Lucrece's body to the market place or forum. Gower's use of two different sources (likely open by his side as he composed) is also the reason why Gower mistakenly treats Collatia as both a section and gate of Rome. The only detail that neither source explains concerns Gower's naming of the rapist as Arrons rather than Sextus. Harder wonders whether the political context of the 1390's may have some bearing on the change, but ultimately admits that he has "yet no solution" (5). Harder concludes with some observations about Chaucer's use of Livy, Augustine, and Ovid. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Harder, Henry L Published Harder, Henry L. "Livy in Gower's and Chaucer's Lucrece Stories." Publications of the Missouri Philological Association.2 (1977), pp. 1-7. 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 Livy in Gower's and Chaucer's Lucrece Stories Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1977 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 Gower's CA borrows from the "Vita Barlaam et Josaphat" in two places. First of all, the Trump of Death story is based on the first of the Vita's ten apologues. Analogues are further found in the Legenda Aurea, the Gesta Romanorum, and in the 16th century Japanese Christian text "Sanctos no gosagveo." Examples of Gower's changes include the greater contrast between the May setting and the age of the pilgrims, the sharp contrast in character between the king and his proud brother, and Gower's final emphasis on "the necessity of humble obedience to the law of nature established by God" (10). Gower's exposition on the gods in Book 6 is also based on the Vita, but Gower expands the section on the Greek deities by using Berchorius' "De formis figurisque deorum" (the first chapter of his Ovidius moralizatus). Comparison of the source texts reveals, for example, that "gentils" (in 5.1271) should be translated as "gentiles" (not "gentle people") and that naming Philyra as mother of Jupiter is not peculiar to Gower. Gower especially follows the Vita in "rejecting Berchorius' allegorical and favorable interpretations of pagan divinities" (15). Ito concludes with some comments on the Japanese text Sanctos no gosagveo." [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ito, Masayoshi Published Ito, Masayoshi. "Gower's Use of 'Vita Barlaam et Josaphat' in Confessio Amantis." Studies in English Literature 56 (1979), pp. 3-18. 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 Use of 'Vita Barlaam et Josaphat' in Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1979 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 Byrd explains the proverb in CA 3.585: "But Oule on Stock [perch or branch] and Stock on Oule." Similar language from "The Owl and the Nightingale" shows that the proverb means that the owl defiles her nest and is then defiled as she sits on the nest. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Byrd, David G Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Published Byrd, David G. "Gower's Confessio Amantis, III, 585." Explicator 29.1 (1970), Item 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 1970 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Gower's Confessio Amantis, III, 585 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 Book 6 of the CA, Amans mentions a number of courtly dances and uses the phrase "forto go the newefot." Macaulay interprets the word "newefot" as probably the name of some kind of dance. Byrd suggests that "it is a nonce word, meaning not a specific dance, but a 'new dance,' the latest dance craze of the court." [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Byrd, David Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Published Byrd, David. "Gower's Confessio Amantis, VI. 145." Explicator 33.5 (1975), Item 35. Dublin Core The Dublin 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 1975 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Gower's Confessio Amantis, VI. 145 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Van Dijk argues that, in their respective wrestlings with "the question of sovereignty, whether the king . . . is 'legibus solutes,' or free from the law," Gower and Langland "despite their ostensible ideological differences . . . share a legal and political reference field that needs further study, and that discloses some surprising similarities" (310). He concludes that "the definition of equity that lies behind "Piers" and the CA is Ulpian's maxim that justice gives to each his due or law. The primary terms that describe this principle, as Gower and Langland interpret it, are consistency, uniformity, and reciprocity. As a result . . . equity is not to be associated strictly with the prerogative courts, but encapsulates instead the correct way to administer the law. Equitable justice is fair, and that is why it can sometimes seem fearful. Lastly, whereas justice is in theory strictly separate from the law, in practice the two are frequently conflated" (333-34). More specifically, "for Langland, this means that there is not a fundamental difference between Reason's call for the enforcement of the rigor of the law and the virtue of Justice in the later passus . . . . In the Mirour, Gower similarly associates equity with the scales of justice. The main point about equity, then, is that it considers all to be equal before the law and gives each his due reward or punishment . . . . In Gower's [CA] Book 7, the exposition of Pity entails that even the king's mercy must be without favor and follow the strictures of law and justice . . . . In nearly every instance the hope is that, if the proper administration of the law is hampered in any way, then the king might correct the problem so that the law can once more be applied justly to all who are subject to it" (334). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Van Dijk, Conrad Published Van Dijk, Conrad. "Giving Each His Due: Langland, Gower, and the Question of Equity." Journal of English and Germanic Philology 108 (2009), pp. 310-315. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Giving Each His Due: Langland, Gower, and the Question of Equity Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In his note to Book I, line 1002 in his translation of VC, Stockton observed that Gower's comparison of Simon Sudbury to Helenus is "singularly ill-chosen" because "the ancient Helenus was a traitor to Troy." Not so in the sources most familiar to Gower, Van Dijk observes, for both Benoit and Guido refer only to Helenus's predictions about the outcome of Paris's expedition and his attempts to assure that Achilles receive a proper burial. Gower's invocation of Helenus thus implies no implicit criticism of Sudbury, as some who followed Stockton have assumed. Van Dijk attributes the mistake about Helenus's role to a confusion between Helenus and Thoas, the high priest who did betray Troy, whom Gower mentions in CA 5.1831-47, but while Van Dijk may be right about Gower, Stockton wasn't wrong about Helenus, for according to classical sources, Helenus was a traitor who provided crucial information to the Greeks following his disenchantment with the Trojan cause after Paris's death. In his defense of Helenus, Van Dijk also curiously neglects the reference to the prophetic powers that he shared with his sister Cassandra in CA 5.746-62, another positive allusion, also based on Guido and Benoit, that contains no hint of his later treachery. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Van Dijk, Conrad Published Van Dijk, Conrad. "Simon Sudbury and Helenus in John Gower's Vox Clamantis." Medium AEvum 77 (2008), pp. 313-318. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Simon Sudbury and Helenus in John Gower's Vox Clamantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Urban's monograph is a direct outgrowth of his 2005 Aberystwyth dissertation; to some degree, the older bones remain visible beneath the newer flesh. His focus in this volume is "the two writers' uses of the past within their texts, their different conceptualizations of history and its use-value for the present, and the ways in which we can read these from the vantage point of our (post)modern present" (12). Conveniently, Urban takes the time early on to identify influences on his work (primarily "Queer Theory and Historicism" [45] but also Jameson, Benjamin, Baudrillard, Bakhtin, Nietzsche--and Patterson and Strohm) and to acquaint his readers with several key terms, as he intends to employ them: by "authority," he means "all types of social actions and literary texts that are invested with a certain amount of prominence and truth-value within social and literary discourses" (13); by "the past" and "history" he means "the cultural past on the one hand and its narrativisation ('history') on the other" (p. 13). These terms enable discussion of his larger subjects, "the poetics of the past and the politics of the present," the former describing "the ways in which writers (in the present case, Chaucer and Gower) incorporate the past and history into their own literary creations. The possible motivations for these uses are referred to throughout . . . as the politics of the present," i.e., intended and unintended "reasons for and effects of . . . the poetics of the past" (13). Chaucer and Gower, Urban claims, "placed old books, the wisdom they contain and its retrieval through their readerly and writerly activity at the centre of their poetic projects" (18). He proposes a three-fold approach: 1) to "trace this common theme through a representative sample of both poets' works, spanning most of their careers, starting mid-1370's and ending around the middle of the 1390's; 2) to analyze the "poetics of the past" by examining how Chaucer and Gower make use of old books; and 3) to "examine the texts' interventions in their contemporary political discourses, reading the politics of the Ricardian present through the lens provided by the poetics of the past" (18). Urban thus offers primary discussions of the House of Fame, Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, and the Canterbury Tales of the Nun's Priest, Physician, and "Melibeus," alongside Gower's Vox Clamantis (primarily the "Visio," but also the differing attitudes toward Richard in versions of Book 6) and Confessio Amantis both generally, as a larger work, and specifically, in a close reading of the "Tale of Virginia." Throughout, Urban recurrently returns to the Troy story as a kind of touchstone and exemplary arena in which to illuminate the contrast he locates at the heart of his study. Ultimately Urban finds that Chaucer and Gower differ in the uses to which they put old books in precisely those ways that they each engage with the politicized world of late fourteenth-century England. Chaucer's approach is ever "a veiled engagement with the socio-political context" (210) while Gower's "general concern with kingship and the state of English society" (217) shows him to be "at pains to formulate clear and unambiguous statements in his poetry" (223), in order to address and heal the division he sees all around him. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Urban, Malte Published Urban, Malte. "Fragments: Past and Present in Chaucer and Gower." Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2009 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Fragments: Past and Present in Chaucer and Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Peter Lang AG, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Both Chaucer and Gower depict both Dido (in HF 373, LGW 1349-52, and CA 4.132-34) and Pyramus and Thisbe (in LGW 850, 915 and CA 3.1444, 1490) as taking their own lives by stabbing themselves in the heart, a detail not found in any of their known sources. The priority of HF suggests that Chaucer set the example here, but Sobecki is not primarily interested in who came first. He instead focuses on the significance of the heart, not as the most efficient target of a suicide, as we might presume, but as the seat of the passion that motivates its victims: "Eneas's blade, it seems, is directed by Dido into her emotive centre in a frantic attempt to extinguish her suffering" (112). And he links the force that compels their death to common medieval descriptions of love-sickness, suggesting that the poets attempted to place the characters' deaths within the narrow grounds that under medieval theology and law might provide exoneration for suicide. Thus for both poets "Dido is not only a victim of Eneas's sloth; she is also a casualty of lovesickness, a "Minneopjer," which circumstance, at least in its pathological right, could exculpate her from mortal sin" (112). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sobecki, Sebastian Published Sobecki, Sebastian. "'And to the herte she hireselven smot': The Loveris Maladye and the Legitimate Suicides of Chaucer's and Gower's Exemplary Lovers." Mediaevalia 25 (2004), pp. 107-121. 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 'And to the herte she hireselven smot': The Loveris Maladye and the Legitimate Suicides of Chaucer's and Gower's Exemplary Lovers Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 focus of this essay is Gower's decasyllables in CB and Traitié, building upon Macaulay's observation that Gower's meter appears to represent a blending of an English accentual measure with the French syllabic measure in the contemporary "vers de dix." Like Macaulay, the authors give close, in fact far more detailed, attention to Gower's frequent violation of the rules governing the use of the caesura in the French decasyllable, which they attribute to Gower's adoption of a predominantly accentual meter beginning with the octosyllables of both MO and CA. The iambic decasyllable of the later poems thus represents less an adaptation of the French "vers de dix" than an extension of the accentual meter from an 8-syllable to a l0-syllable line, following the example set by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde, who followed in turn the example of Il Filostrato, which he discovered during his journey to Italy in 1378. Gower and Chaucer are depicted as joint experimenters in English metrics, Gower providing the example for Chaucer of the virtues of the regular accentual iambic line. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 28.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Billy, Dominique Duffell, Martin J Published Billy, Dominique and Duffell, Martin J. "Le Decasyllabe de John Gower ou Le Dernier Metre Anglo-Normand." Revue de Linguistique Romane 69 (2005), pp. 75-95. ISSN 0035-1458 Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Cinkante Balades Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Le Decasyllabe de John Gower ou Le Dernier Metre Anglo-Normand Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Since the eighteenth century," Galloway contends, "economic thought has made identity legible in terms of production, consumption, and profit . . . . In later medieval culture social thought was often framed in terms of an economy of need" (310). Proceeding from the canonists (Gratian, and especially Aquinas [cf. Sum. Theo. 2a2ae q.77 art. 4], Galloway illustrates the presence of the notion of a common possession of necessities for all men to share when in exigency in the writings of English chroniclers (e.g., Knighton), canonists (William Lyndwood), Ranulph Higden, in John of Trevisa's translation (and Trevisa himself, in his "Dialogue" of 1387), and in "the London writers" Gower, Chaucer, and Langland. These "especially elaborated the contradictions of this frame of thought" (310); they each, despite their different temperaments and concerns, share a "critical scrutiny [that] shows how the idea of an 'economy of need' would ultimately collapse" (310). Galloway identifies Gower's narrative of "The Trump of Death" (CA 1.2021-2253) in which "poverty and age are reducible to the same 'ymage'--whose value is precisely that it reflects the viewer and the donor, not the perspective of the needy themselves" (319). The king in the tale thus can be read in "the surrogate role of natural law, by which he is able to impose the terror of mortality" (320). Gower's shaping of his material in "The Trump of Death" can thus be seen as "an acceptance of royal absolutism, by analogy with the arbitrary force of necessity," but also (and this seems to be more Galloway's own view) "as highlighting and critiquing how kings usurp the power of necessity for their own all-too-human desires, which here turn out to be mercifully instructive if somewhat cruelly applied, but which might as easily have been turned to more pernicious ends" (320).] [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew Published Galloway, Andrew. "The Economy of Need in Late Medieval English Literature." Viator 40 (2009), pp. 309-331. ISSN 0083-5897 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Economy of Need in Late Medieval English Literature Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Hamm, R. Wayne Published Hamm, R. Wayne. "A Critical Evaluation of the Confisyon del Amante, the Castilian Translation of Gower's Confessio Amantis." Medium AEvum 47 (1978), pp. 91-106. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Review Whereas earlier scholars such as Manly and Russell were primarily interested in tracing the Portuguese translation (and its translator) of the CA in the historical records, Hamm seeks to assess the quality of the Castilian prose translation. Hamm divides his article into four sections: Changes in Tone, Style, and Emphasis; Conscious Changes or Emendations; Unconscious Changes (primarily errors and mistranslations); and Changes in Textual Machinery, Organization, and Structure. Overall, Hamm finds the translation "surprisingly faithful to the English version" (92). Some differences include "a de-emphasis of the poem's English setting" (93), less focus on politics, a more devout tone, and (in contrast to the last point) an increase in sexually overt language. The translator reduced a lot of Gower's padding (especially the poetic tags used to fill out the line), yet added new embellishments. Some of the most dramatic changes are the omission of 419 lines in Book 4, the extensive rewriting of the Tale of Deianira and Nessus, and the addition of a long and artistic speech by the emperor in the Tale of Constantine and Silvester. Much of the Latin framework of the CA is removed, yet a new introduction and synoptic index are supplied. The result of all this is "a highly sensitive and intelligent interpretation of letter and spirit of Gower's original" (105). [CvD] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Critical Evaluation of the Confisyon del Amante, the Castilian Translation of Gower's Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1978 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 Olsson argues that in Chaucer's CT and in Gower's CA the apparently simplistic exemplum "becomes a complex form" (186). Olsson begins by pointing out that even in Gower's MO we already have a variety of exemplum types. The form can encompass the similitude or "homoeosis" (e.g., the tale of Ulysses and the Sirens), the precedential exemplum (e.g, the story of Codrus), the use exemplars (in part 3 of the MO), or the complex and meditative mode used in the final section of the MO, the life of the Virgin and Christ. Of particular interest in this overview are Olsson's comments on the overlap between exemplarity and allegory. In the CA, the exempla "demand our attention because the referent – which can be, beyond a specific idea, an auditor or speaker – does not always suit the narrative and because the tale and its referents can both be drawn into a fiction" (194). For example, the Tale of Rosiphelee suits the needs of Amans in Book 4, but is contradicted by the final message of the book. The reason is that in Book 4 love is judged according to nature, whereas in Book 8 the standard is reason (195). The exemplarity of Gower's stories thus "rests on the rhetoric: As the context of argument changes, tales and ideas assume a new value in the whole, and the result is an integral and more adequate insight into the complexity of human experience, as well as a fuller grasp of what a 'reule' demands. . . . In Gower's rhetoric, as in Chaucer's, the story often encourages the quest of a truth which is greater than that expressed in the tale itself" (196). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Olsson, Kurt O Published Olsson, Kurt O. "Rhetoric, John Gower, and the Late Medieval Exemplum." Medievalia et Humanistica 8 (1977), pp. 185-200. ISSN 0076-6127 Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Rhetoric, John Gower, and the Late Medieval Exemplum Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1977 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 Strohm, Paul Published Strohm, Paul. "Form and Social Statement in Confessio Amantis and The Canterbury Tales." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 1 (1979), pp. 17-40. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Review Strohm applies the Marxist concept of "mediation" (popularized by Raymond Williams) to Gower and Chaucer. Mediation is "the process by which a problematic social reality can be reconceived or restated, to appear in a work of art in a new and potentially more tractable guise" (17). The "problematic social reality" in the late fourteenth century is the increasing challenges to various social, political, and religious hierarchies. Strohm gives as examples the 1376 "Good Parliament," the "Merciless Parliament" of 1386-89, and the beginning of Richard II's despotism in 1397. In response to such factionalism, Gower in the CA prologue emphasizes that his poetry aims to overcome disorder and division and will "reconcile competing classes as did Arion" (27). Gower creates unity by showing the connections between love and kingly self-governance and through the teaching of Genius we learn that the "principal characteristic of viciousness in the Confessio is a tendency to thrust oneself into or overturn the rightful order of things – to alter one's station, to supplant others, to disrupt sanctioned relationships" (29). Gower further mediates political factionalism by creating an aesthetic structure which subordinates the individual tales to a larger vision and framework. By contrast, Chaucer's approach in the CT is through "juxtaposition of voices, perspectives, genres" (33). Finally, Strohm relates these aesthetic choices to the authors' biographies. Gower's financial and political independence made him more likely to promote traditional hierarchies. Chaucer was more subject to factionalism and thus saw reality as "comprised of a multiplicity of competing interests" (39). [CvD] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Form and Social Statement in Confessio Amantis and The Canterbury Tales Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1979 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 Economou elucidates the influences that shaped Gower's character Genius. Alan de Lille, in De Planctu Naturae, uses Genius as a kind of double to Natura. Genius is her representative on earth and is especially associated with procreation. Jean de Meun in turn expands the role of Genius by giving him the function of confessor in The Roman de la Rose. However, in the Roman, "the Christian cosmological and moral conception of sexual love as it is expressed in Alan is assigned to the character Raison rather than to Natura and Genius" (206). In addition, for Jean de Meun, Genius and Nature represent procreation without clear reference to marriage or Christian morality. Genius further enters the service of Venus, who is entirely associated with cupidity and "luxuria" in the Roman. It is Gower's intention, then, to restore Genius to Alan de Lille's initial conception, by making him subservient to a good Venus who is once more in touch with reason and nature. The resulting synthesis gives a greater understanding of the overall unity of the CA: "In this sense, his dual role as Christian priest and priest of Venus, as she is defined by Gower, does not create a problem, for Genius is the moral agent that bridges the worlds of true religion and the religion of love" (209). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Economou, George D Published Economou, George D. "The Character Genius in Alan de Lille, Jean de Meun, and John Gower." Chaucer Review 4.3 (1970), pp. 203-210. 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 The Character Genius in Alan de Lille, Jean de Meun, and John Gower 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 1970 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 In examining political verse of the fifteenth century, Scattergood gives occasional attention to Gower. He provides a brief overview of Gower's work (19) and refers sporadically to Gower's views on such topics as Henry IV's accession to the throne, the need for peace among European rulers, the papal schism, and the possibility of a new crusade against the infidel. Scattergood's main focus is on "In Praise of Peace." [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Scattergood, V. J Published Scattergood, V. J. "Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century." London: Blandford, 1971 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism In Praise of Peace Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Blandford, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review As Russell points out, the CA was translated "first into Portuguese prose by Robert Payn, an Englishman attached to the household of Queen Philippa – John of Gaunt's daughter – and thence into Castilian by Juan de Cuenca" (26). The terminus ante quem for the Portuguese translation must be 1438, for Philippa's eldest son, King Duarte, had a copy in his library when he died in that year. Duarte also mentions the CA in the prologue to his Leal Conselheiro. It may be from the latter work that Juan de Cuenca first heard of Gower's poem. Of Juan de Cuenca little is known. He came from Huete, and Russell points out that the town was part of the settlement of John of Gaunt's Castilian claims in 1388. Of Robert Payn we know that he was a significant figure at the court of Philippa, and we know that he was still alive at the end of 1430. He probably made his translation after leaving the Queen's service and taking on an ecclesiastical office. We also know of a Thomas Payn who may have been Robert's father, and the quality of Robert's translation makes it seem likely that the family were not fresh arrivals in Portugal but belonged to the well-established English colony in Lisbon. Russell feels that the dedication to Richard II in the first recension – used for the translation – would have given little offense to a Portuguese audience, even after Richard was deposed. Yet the translation was likely made before 1399 or after 1415. Russell favours the latter possibility. He ends with some comments on the possible influence of Gower on later Iberian literature. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Russell, P. E Published Russell, P. E. "Robert Payn and Juan De Cuenca, Translators of Gower's Confessio Amantis." Medium AEvum 30 (1961), pp. 26-32. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Robert Payn and Juan De Cuenca, Translators of Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1961 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 Minnis argues that in the CA Gower takes on the role of "sapiens" (wise man) in ethics and politics (two overlapping disciplines), and that "this role enables us to appreciate the essential unity of the diverse materials in his work." Minnis first points out that Gower's debt to the moralized Ovid of the Middle Ages explains the ethical framework of his exempla about love. For instance, from the commentaries on Ovid's Heroides, Gower borrows the idea that "exempla amantium" should juxtapose the fates of good and chaste lovers with the misfortunes of foolish and illicit lovers. By contrast, Chaucer's LGW is unusual in that all the stories figure good women. In his exempla, Gower sometimes widens the moral character of the Medieval Ovid (for instance, in his stories of Penelope and Phyllis, which he uses to illustrate Sloth), and he always treats the virtues and sins of the lover as Christian virtues and sins (214). Gower's role as "sapiens" is also evident in Book 7, which Minnis argues is closely integrated with the surrounding books. For instance, Book 6 introduces Aristotle in the story of Nectanabus, thus providing a smooth segue to an overview of Aristotle's teachings. In addition, Book 7 ends with a discussion of "the political virtue of chastity" (217), which reveals the close connection between kingly rule and self-rule. The relevance of the Prologue to the CA is explained in connection with the medieval classicizing commentaries on the Sapiential Books of the Old Testament. These suggested a significant overlap between Solomonic and Aristotelian wisdom, introduced and organized this wisdom by means of an extrinsic and intrinsic prologue, and distinguished between the various personae of the author. All of these features are evident in the CA's Prologue as well. Thus, Gower's heterogeneous materials "would have been regarded as quite compatible by the learned mediaeval reader" (225). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Minnis, A. J Published Minnis, A. J. "John Gower, Sapiens in Ethics and Politics." Medium AEvum 49 (1980), pp. 207-229. 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 John Gower, Sapiens in Ethics and Politics Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1980 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Schueler takes issue with the idea that "the advanced age of the Lover in the Confessio Amantis was a last-minute idea on Gower's part" (152). The opening lines of the Prologue are those of a "scholar-moralist, not a young lover" (153) and there are a number of passages that suggest that the narrator is no longer "freisshe" and "lusti" like the lady's other suitors. Gower also knew that his contemporary audience would identify the age of Amans with his own. Schueler adds that when we keep in mind the lover's age, a number of Gower's views on courtly love no longer seem haphazard or contradictory, but reveal Gower's "artistry" (152). For instance, Amans is unusual as a courtly lover because he desperately wants to be relieved from the service of love. In addition, Amans denounces chivalry (in Book 4) because he is too old to fight overseas. Yet while we are aware of Amans's old age, Gower "has saved the full impact of the revelation for the finale" (158). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Schueler, Donald G Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Published Schueler, Donald G. "The Age of the Lover in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Medium AEvum 36 (1967), pp. 152-158. Dublin Core The Dublin 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 1967 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource The Age of the Lover in Gower's Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In CA 1. 463-80, Gower refers to the asp with a jewel upon his head who protects himself from men who would entice him with enchantments by laying one ear upon the ground and stopping the other with his tail. The sources that are normally cited (Psalm 57, Augustine, and Isidore; see Macaulay Works, 2.468) do not mention the precious stone. Henkin (not Hankin or Hankins, as variously spelled by Conti) suggested that Gower had combined the legend of the snake that stops its ears with a different one drawn from medieval lapidary tradition about a snake or dragon with a jewel in its brain. But Conti has found that the combination already occurs in a homily in the 12th-13th century "Trinity homilies" (Cambridge, Trinity Coll. B.l4.52), which differs from Gower's only in that the snake lays its one ear upon a rock instead of upon the ground. In another 12th-homily found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 343, there are two snakes, one like Gower's that protects itself against enchantments and another less prudent one that bears golden gems in its head and allows itself to be beguiled. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 28.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Conti, Aidan Published Conti, Aidan. "The Gem-Bearing Serpents of the Trinity Homilies: An Analogue for Gower's Confessio Amantis." Modern Philology 106 (2009), pp. 109-116. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Gem-Bearing Serpents of the Trinity Homilies: An Analogue for Gower's Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Green frequently refers to Gower in arguing that the literature of late medieval England is less influenced by a rising middle class than by the patronage of the royal court. For instance, Green uses Gower's initial dedication of the CA to Richard II to suggest that royal commissions of literary works may have been commonplace (62). The same claim is made for regiment of princes material (like Book 7 of the CA). Indeed, according to Green, Gower "is a moralist who does little to hide the fact that the fortunes of the state interest him more than the fortunes of love's servants" (143). Gower's interest in the affairs of state is particularly evident in the CrT. The CrT's propagandist support of Henry IV provides a good example of "the potential value which a literary reputation might have for those in the service of astute princes" (179). However, Gower was not "cynically backing a winning horse" (180) when he switched his allegiance from Richard to Henry in the early 1390's. In addition, Gower was financially secure and did not need to write the CrT for monetary reasons. Green concludes, "There is, thus, little in Gower's work to suggest that his espousal of Henry's cause was merely the dutiful act of a loyal servant, and still less to lead us to suppose that he was a cynical timeserver writing to order" (182). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Green, Richard Firth Published Green, Richard Firth. "Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages." Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Cronica Tripertita Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Toronto Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1980 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Stevens, Martin Published Stevens, Martin. "The Royal Stanza in Early English Literature." PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 94.1 (1979), pp. 62-76. Gower Subject In Praise of Peace Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Cinkante Balades Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Confessio Amantis Review Stevens examines the origins of the royal stanza as a royal ceremonial device and then shows how Chaucer expands its usage and range. In the course of tracing the history of the stanza, Stevens points out that when John Quixley introduces Gower's French ballades in the Traitié (around 1400) he refers to them as "balades ryale." Stevens also agrees with John Fisher that the stanza may have been employed in the mock royal feasts of the London puy and that Gower's French balades should be read in that context (64). Finally, the stanza's association with royalty is amply demonstrated by the CA's departure from octosyllabic couplets in Book 8's supplication to (Queen) Venus and by its use in "In Praise of Peace" written for Henry IV (65). [CvD] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Royal Stanza in Early English Literature Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1979 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 Peter's book on the genres of complaint and satire in the Middle Ages and Renaissance occasionally uses Gower as an example of the "moralizing, quasi-sermonic bent" (51) typical of complaint literature. Peter suggests that Gower's attempt to take the "middel weie" between lust and lore, or between courtly love and moral teaching, was "like mixing oil and water" (52) so that much of the CA is "almost unreadable" (52). Peter mines the CA for some of the staple ingredients of complaint literature, including the nostalgic description of the Golden Age, the frequent reminder of the coming end times (forecast by the statue of Nebuchadnezzar), the conception of a retributive God, and the critique of the rich. Peter also uses Gower as an example of how the topics of complaint literature influenced the development of the morality play and (later) tragedy. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Peter, John Published Peter, John. "Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature." Oxford: Clarendon, 1956 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Clarendon, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1956 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 Bihl sees Chaucer and Gower's language as the culmination of the gradual fusion of English and French (and to a lesser degree Latin). Both metrically and grammatically, Gower is more conservative and archaic, while Chaucer is more progressive. Chaucer uses everything that has "Kraft und Leben" (power and life) and is the fountain of language, at least until Shakespeare. However, Bihl's main thesis has less to do with general differences between the two authors (most of the book describes only minor differences), and more with the effect of rhythm and rhyme on grammar and diction. Bihl argues that "Der Rhythmus wirkt also night nur als ein erhaltendes, sondern auch als ein neu schöpfendes Agens" ("Rhythm also does not work only as an agent of conservation, but also as one that creates anew"; 3). For example, since Middle English has a substantial hoard of synonyms and alternate word forms (e.g., coroun – croune), each poet's diction heavily depends on the constraints of versification. In addition, the accentuation of syllables is unregulated, which further increases the poet's versatility (especially Chaucer's). To demonstrate this thesis, Bihl's work is organized into five chapters: chapter 1 deals with syllabification and touches on the final –e, elision, and syncopation; chapter 2 examines meter and stress (where again Chaucer is more flexible than Gower), chapter 3 looks at word formation, particularly in relation to affixes (where aphesis occurs) and suffixes; chapter 4 reveals what remains of the old declensions in the late fourteenth century; and chapter 5 treats the subject of syntax. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bihl, Josef Published Bihl, Josef. "Die Wirkungen der Rhythmus in der Sprache von Chaucer und Gower." Heidelberg: Carl Winters, 1916 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Die Wirkungen der Rhythmus in der Sprache von Chaucer und Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Carl Winters, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1916 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 Neville responds to Leo Henkin's suggestion in "The Carbuncle in the Adder's Head," that the story of "Aspidis the Serpent" from Book 1 of the CA is based on two separate legends from folklore. Neville demonstrates that the combination of these stories did not originate with Gower, but with Brunetto Latini's "Li Livres dou Tresor," Gower's immediate source. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Neville, Marie Published Neville, Marie. "Gower's Serpent and the Carbuncle." Notes and Queries 197 (1952), pp. 225-226. 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 Serpent and the Carbuncle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1952 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 When Gower rewrites Nicholas Trivet's story of Constance, one of the details that he changes concerns the baptism of Dame Hermingild. Whereas in Trivet Hermingild is murdered after being baptized, Gower has her killed before she can be baptized. Gower makes this change, according to Dulak, in order to highlight that Hermingild had a "baptism of desire." This fits with the rest of the tale, where Gower also describes baptism by blood, and baptism by water. By illustrating these three types of baptism, Gower shows his "devoutness" and "originality" (369). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dulak, Robert E Published Dulak, Robert E. "Gower's 'Tale of Constance'." Notes and Queries 198 (1953), pp. 368-389. 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 'Tale of Constance' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1953 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed