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 Gower's version of the tale of Lichaon (CA VII.3353-69) is short, only seventeen lines, and it omits most of the most vivid and significant details from the source in the "Metamorphoses." Newlin examines Ovid's version and the medieval commentaries on it, particularly the multiple transformations--in Lichaon's character, in Jupiter (in his disguise), in the hostage whom Lichaon serves to his guest, and finally in Lichaon himself, as he is changed into a wolf. Gower's version represents the English author's transformation of Ovid, first into English and then back in to the Latin of the gloss. "For Gower, I would propose, the articulation is the chief metamorphosis, the chief phenomenon (miraculous or not), and the chief display of power--whether divine or authorial. Here, wolfishness is scarcely a corporeal state for creatures, but rather a language. Put another way, the means take privilege over the event, the narration over the narrative . . . . Such a prioritization leads to a curious balance between stasis and movement. The most traditionally dynamic element--plot or action--is suppressed and flattened; the very language that does that suppression, however, is particularly metamorphic and mobile" (625). "Gower's encounter with his primary source is highly articulated, critically astute, and self-aware--what some critical discourses would call transtextual--and expansive (although within a focused, narrow range) rather than incidental . . . . What results is a narrative both successful as a story, as a commentary upon Ovid, and as a meditation upon the art of poetry, whether of Augustan, Lancastrian or perhaps of any place or age" (614). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Newlin, Robert Published Newlin, Robert. "Stasis and Change: Gower's Gloss on Ovid's Lycaon." Journal of English Language and Literature 60 (2014), pp. 613-32. 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 Stasis and Change: Gower's Gloss on Ovid's Lycaon. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The anonymous pamphlet entitled "A Certaine Relation of the Hog-Faced Gentlewoman called Mistris Tannakin Skinker," published in London in 1640, includes at the end a five-page prose translation of Gower's "Tale of Florent" with full attribution to the poet. Patterson uses the pamphlet as one of two principal examples in her examination of the efforts of seventeenth-century Englishmen to use medieval "monster literature" to define their own historicity with reference to the past. "By juxtaposing, mingling, or amalgamating figures of the past with present trends, audiences, writers, and readers could effectively define a 'modernity' that was their own" (284). The inclusion of Gower's tale served a more specific purpose: with it, "the author disrupts the boundary between fact and fiction: while he employs the pamphlet as a medium typically used to report facts, his use of Gower as part of a 'true history' situates Tannakin within the realm of fiction--or, as an early modern urban loathly lady" (302), with the intention of mocking the credulity of the readers. Unlike his other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century appearances, Gower here "is no longer simply a tale-teller or antiquarian but rather an active agent in the production and dissemination of the concept of the 'modern monstrous'--a performative category that intersects a complex web of social anxiety, domesticity, and print culture" (305). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Patterson, Serina Published Patterson, Serina. "Reading the Medieval in Early Modern Monster Culture." Studies in Philology 111 (2014), pp. 282-311. ISSN 0039-3738 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading the Medieval in Early Modern Monster Culture. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Jones reconsiders the evidence traditionally used to show that Gower rededicated CA to Henry in 1392-93, which has been the main argument to prove his disaffection to Richard II before he was deposed. His study starts with a detailed analysis of the two main manuscripts used by Macaulay for his theory of the second and third recension of the poem: Huntington Library MS Ellesmere 26 A.17 and Oxford, Bodleian library, MS Fairfax 3. Jones revises Macaulay's dating of Ellesmere 26 A.17 to 1397-99 through an in-depth examination of the heraldic ornaments in fol. 1, which leads him to conclude that it must have been produced later, in 1403. He discards the possibility of a posterior addition of these ornaments given the carefully planned design of the manuscript, concluding that "the fact that it is such a high-class production also reinforces the impression that this may have been a royal commission possibly paid for by the king as a gift to his son--as part of his ongoing propaganda campaign" (54). Jones reaches a similar conclusion about the corrections and changes made to MS Fairfax 3, the only pre-usurpation manuscript. As he reminds us, Macaulay already acknowledged that the First Revision Hand must have amended the text after Henry's accession –given that there is a reference to Richard's fate. Following Parkes' identification of one of the CA revision hands as the same Scribe 4 that updated four manuscripts of VC, Jones has been able to confirm that in one of these manuscripts (Oxford, All Souls College, MS 98) "every single passage disparaging Richard II is in a different ink, and written over an erasure" (56). In Jones' view, the two revisions must have been done after Henry's usurpation, as a result of the "pressure on his poets to make them fall in line with the new political correctness" (56). Therefore, Jones claims, there is no evidence that Gower rededicated CA to Henry in 1392-93--and even if he rededicated the poem some years later, that doesn't mean that he changed allegiance or he was disenchanted or disillusioned; he just changed patron, a common practice in the period. The rest of the article is dedicated to demonstrating that the dedication was amended after the deposition, based on three arguments. The first argument is the reference to Henry as "Henry of Lancaster," a title he only inherited on his father's death in 1399. Jones has been able to corroborate that this designation was rare before 1399, even in books of accounts, where the denomination "Earl of Derby" was used until that date, though after 1399 it was often corrected by sewing pieces of velum with the new designation "of Lancaster." Secondly, neither the political theories and mirrors for princes of the period would describe Richard's behavior as that of an oppressive ruler, nor do any of Gower's poems written prior to 1399 criticize him for being a bad king. Jones finds no credible evidence of Gower's disenchantment with Richard, nor of any degree of admiration for Henry, who before 1399 was not a particularly remarkable military or political figure. Finally, Jones analyzes the "black propaganda," the rewriting of history promoted by Henry and Arundel after the usurpation which not only depicted Richard in a negative light but also tried to show people dissatisfied with his rule. "Everywhere we see signs of nervous scribes conforming to the new political correctness" (71), he affirms. It is in this context that the rededication of CA must be understood, which, given the new dating proposed by Jones, seems to show the existence of two, and not three, recensions of the poem.] [ASH. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 33.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Jones, Terry Published Jones, Terry. "Did John Gower Rededicate His 'Confessio Amantis' before Henry IV's Usurpation?" In Middle English Texts in Transition: A Festschrift Dedicated to Toshiyuki Takamiya on his 70th Birthday. Ed. Horobin, Simon, and Mooney, Linne R. Woodbridge, Suffolk: York Medieval Press/Boydell and Brewer, 2014, pp. 40-74. ISBN 9781903153536 Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Did John Gower Rededicate His 'Confessio Amantis' before Henry IV's Usurpation? Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available York Medieval Press/Boydell and Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Rayner opens her study with an unusually apt précis: "The 'Confessio Amantis' connects directly and frankly through the persona of Amans with the tensions age brings to lust and love. Venus may tell Amans that 'Loves lust and lockes hore/ In chamber acorden neveremore,' but the 'Confessio' shows us Gower understood the complexities of impulse and behaviour that age and love created. In this essay I shall concentrate on how these complexities are brought out through the exchange between Amans and Genius, as well as Amans and Venus, showing how the 'Confessio' exploits conventions of courtly and classical literature to examine an essentially human experience with humour, wit and perspicacity" (69). Rayner's embrace of disparate issues is broad, and her progress toward a conclusion ranges widely. At the center of her concerns, however, is the single idea that readers should take Amans' erotic passion entirely seriously and at face value--as something that happens in nature, perhaps did to Gower himself. Ultimately she rejects readers (Watt, Nicholson, Wetherbee) who "have seen the end of the 'Confessio' as full of a sense of defeat." (82) Instead, Rayner finds in the poem's finish "an acceptance of a new view of life, of new priorities and new explorations, not a portrait of a man defeated, or even of a man saying that love has been an illusion. Unlike many of the sources, Amans is not part of an elaborate dream sequence: the fact that he is revealed to be Gower emphasizes the attempt to make his experiences more real, more relevant to the audience receiving them. Amans becomes Gower so that the poem becomes a very potent and ultimately optimistic experience. Age will come to all, just as love will, but there are positives. There is no delusion: love happens to old people--to all people" (82-83). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 33.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rayner, Samantha J Published Rayner, Samantha J. "'How love and I togedre met': Gower, Amans and the Lessons of Venus in the 'Confessio Amantis'." In Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain. Ed. Hopkins, Amanda, and Rouse, Robert Allen, and Rushton, Cory. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014, pp. 69-83. ISBN 9781843843795 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 'How love and I togedre met': Gower, Amans and the Lessons of Venus in the 'Confessio Amantis'. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D. S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This is the first of two articles (see also "'Pardonetz moi qe jeo de ceo forsvoie': Gower's Anglo-Norman Identity," co-authored with Michael Ingham) concerning whether Gower is best considered an Anglo-Norman poet or a writer of continental French. While acknowledging Gower's conscious choice of the diction and forms of contemporary French poetry, the Inghams argue that Gower's less conscious linguistic practices remain overwhelmingly insular in character. The focus in the present article is on Gower's phonology. Ingham identifies a number of features that distinguish fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman French from contemporary French of the continent in which Gower followed insular practice, among them, the rhyming of words such as "jours" and "fleurs" (which Gower spells "flours"), the rhyming of words such as "lieus" and "perdus," the rhyming of words such as "ligne" and "famine," and the preservation of the distinction, lost in continental French, between "–an" and "–en." In one respect, Gower follows continental usage, in adopting the /oi/ pronunciation for words that had /ei/ in Anglo-Norman, a choice that Ingham attributes to the necessity for rhyming words imposed by the stanza forms that Gower used. In sum, Ingham finds no evidence of an effort on Gower's part to reform his language to make it more acceptable to a those more familiar with continental French. Ingham also cites some grammatical features in support of this conclusion; these are superseded and in one respect corrected by the co-authored article. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ingham, Richard Published Ingham, Richard. "John Gower, poète anglo-normand: Perspectives linguistiques sur Le Myrour de l'Omme." In Anglo-Français: Philologie et Linguistique. Ed. Floquet, Oreste and Giannini, Gabriele. Paris: Garnier, 2014, pp. 91-100. ISBN 9782812434211 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 John Gower, poète anglo-normand: Perspectives linguistiques sur Le Myrour de l'Omme Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Garnier, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This superb volume collects nineteen scholarly essays based on papers delivered to the Second International Congress of the John Gower Society, held in 2011 in Valladolid, Spain. Its most original offerings concern Gower's under-examined connections with the Iberian Peninsula. These resulted from migration of a copy of CA to Portugal--probably by way of John of Gaunt's daughter, Philippa, who between 1387 and 1415 was Portugal's queen--and subsequent translation of Gower's English poem into Portuguese and then Castilian Spanish. Mauricio Herrero Jiménez's "Castilian Script in Iberian Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis" compares the types of professional Gothic book-hands used in copying Madrid, Real Biblioteca MS II-3088, the Portuguese "Livro do Amante," and Madrid, El Escorial Library MS g-II-19, the Spanish "Confysion del Amante." Each manuscript was made for private, noble readers who sought in Gower's poem "a model of ethical and political education and/or romantic diversion" (22)--that is, lore and lust. A Castilian table of contents added to the Portuguese codex and the conjoining of parts of two copies in the Spanish one, the author argues, indicates a wider audience for the Ca in Iberia than two surviving manuscripts suggest. María Luisa López-Vidriero Abelló's "Provenance Interlacing in Spanish Royal Book-Collecting" focuses on the Portuguese codex in the Spanish Royal Library. She describes its movement there from the private collection of Count Gondomar, an ambassador of Philip III of Spain to the court of James I of England, who himself acquired it from Luis de Castilla, son of a dean of Toledo Cathedral, whose humanist leanings link Gower's English work with high Iberian culture. In a more speculative vein, David R. Carlson connects a letter sent by the Black Prince from the Battle of Nájera, where Edward and John of Gaunt allied in 1367 with Pedro of Castile against his brother, with propagandist features of Gower's "Cronica Tripertita" in praise of the English usurper, Henry IV, while Fernando Galván investigates how the same battle established a nexus between England, Castile, and Portugal that led to the arrival of the CA in Iberia. R. F. Yeager suggests the influence of Pedro Alfonso's twelfth-century anthology of fables, "Disciplina Clericalis," on Gower's "Tale of the Three Questions," for which an exact source has yet to be identified, while Tiago Viúla de Faria proposes, against the prevailing hypothesis of a royal avenue for the CA's progress to Iberia, an ecclesiastical one--Henry Despenser, bishop of Norwich, who had "strong and enduring" (136) associations with Philippa of Lancaster. The poet who emerges from John Gower in England and Iberia is a more sophisticated and bracing figure than even Gower aficionados have hitherto acknowledged: global in his appeal, erudite in his textual practices, and refreshingly secular in his aesthetic concerns. [MPK. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sáez-Hidalgo, Ana, and R. F. Yeager, eds. Published Sáez-Hidalgo, Ana, and R. F. Yeager, eds. "John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception." Publications of the John Gower Society, 10 . Cambridge, UK: D. S.Brewer, 2014 ISBN 9781843843207 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Cronica Tripertita Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception 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 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This new, updated edition of the influential initial volume in the MLA's "Approaches to Teaching" series is welcome and timely, particularly given all the changes that have taken place, technologically and in the demography of our classrooms, since 1980, when the first edition appeared. If one seeks evidence in the new edition of increased recognition of the importance of Gower's works to the instruction of his contemporary, however, the results are very thin. Only Martha Driver, in her essay on "Multimedia Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's Middle English Texts" (187), acknowledges assigning her students to read any portion of the CA (the "Tale of Florent"). R.F. Yeager's 1991 collection of essays entitled "Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange" is cited by the editors in their discussion of "Materials" (13), but Gower himself is not listed among the "all-important [primary] texts" for students to consult on page 6. The inclusion of "Florent" in Kolve and Olsen's Norton Critical Edition of selections from the "Canterbury Tales" is noted on page 4. Michael Calabrese, however, in his essay on teaching the "Man of Law's Tale," gives more attention to the "jab" at Gower in MLP (p. 84) than he does to Gower's version of the tale of Constance (mentioned only alongside Trivet's in a note, p. 87). The other three references hardly give any greater prominence to Gower. Roger Ladd cites Gower's and Langland's use of exchange and "chevisance" in his discussion of the possibility of satire in Chaucer's portrait of the Merchant (74); Michelle Warren notes Gower's appearance among the listeners in Ford Madox Brown's painting of "Chaucer at the Court of Edward III" (114); and Alex Mueller claims that the subtitle of the online Chaucer blog, "Take That, Gower!," offers a "model of interaction" for his own students.] [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Travis, Peter W., and Frank Grady, eds. Published Travis, Peter W., and Frank Grady, eds. "Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales'." New York: Modern Language Association, 2014 ISBN 9781603291408 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Galloway finds Gower and Chaucer deriving much from "the medieval academic interpretative frameworks and . . . previous literary uses--particularly in French--that shaped . . . late medieval poets' encounters with Ovid," and sees them "anticipating the Ovidian fixation of Renaissance English literature" (187). Gower "likely owned a collected "opera" Ovidii" and made greater use than Chaucer of the "Fasti" and "Heroides." The Confessio Amantis, with its Latin in verse and prose framing each tale, is "much in the style of Metamorphoses manuscripts" (188). He believes both used the "Ovide Moralisé," but only Gower ("on that turf more up to date") knew and used Bersuire's "Ovidius Moralizatus" (189). Both Chaucer and Gower, Galloway argues, fashioned themselves as poets on Ovid's poetic biography--albeit to different degrees and in different ways. Whereas Chaucer follows more often the repentant Ovid of the "Remedia Amoris" (191-92) and presents himself as "a belated heir to an oppressively vast written tradition in which history, 'fame,' and identity are bookish, discursively layered, and all-too-human constructions" (193), Gower--while sharing these traits somewhat--adapts his Ovid "in more intellectual, even 'humanist' forms" (193), and not from the beginning of his career. Ovid is absent from the MO, but Galloway detects Ovidian influence in various balades of the "Traitié pour les amantz marietz" and CB (193), which he treats as early work. Chaucer, in his view, was the "spark" for Gower's turn toward Ovid (193-94). As Gower's heavy use of the "Tristia" and "Ex Ponto" in the VC evinces, Gower's debt to Ovid quickly overtook Chaucer's (194-95). The CA "constitutes a major departure" from Gower's earlier work, its "didactic plan" being simultaneously the fiction of the Amans' love affair and also "the implicit 'higher' ethical points of John Gower the author." "This duality," Galloway asserts, "which skews and refracts moral inquiry, is especially notable in the Ovidian narratives" (196)--and he takes the tale of Hercules, Eolen, and Faunus from Book 5 as an example (196-97), noting especially how "Gower lingers on the tale's playful loosening of gender identity" (197). To this Galloway adds the interesting observation that "Gower's elaboration of the [pleasures of cross-dressing] seems part of his constant concern with protean changes in social identity," motivated perhaps by his own "novel identity as a learned layman"--which in turn "was probably relevant to his pervasively keen response to Ovidian transformation" (197). Ovid's absence from Gower's later work suggests to Galloway "how potent yet potentially troubling Gower found Ovid to be" (198). "Ovid was of no use to Gower when writing more strictly moral or, as later, earnest political poetry . . . . This must be reckoned one of the great costs of the 'revolution' of 1399" (198). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew. Published Galloway, Andrew. "Ovid in Chaucer and Gower." In A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid, ed. John F. Miller and Carole E. Newlands (Chichester: Blackwell, 2014), 187-201. ISBN: 9781444339673. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ovid in Chaucer and Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Rayborn's observations on Gower come as part of a chapter entitled "England: The Turbulent 14th Century, and the Writings of Chaucer, Langland and Gower." Raymond's commentary on fourteenth-century English antifraternalism, part of his broader survey, summarizes the ravages of the Black Death and connects plague, estates satire, and antifraternal writing by English literary authors. In a separate chapter he discusses critiques of the friars by Matthew Paris, Richard FitzRalph, and John Wyclif. His treatment of Chaucer includes comments on the "General Prologue" description of the Friar and the satiric elements of the "Summoner's Tale," noting concerns with glossing in the latter and connections with The Roman de la Rose. Describing and summarizing "Piers Plowman," he observes associations between friars, Antichrist, and "apocalypticism" (133), and comments on relations between critique and reform. His section on Gower is his briefest, including in four pages (pp. 130-33) a short biography and descriptions of MO, VC, and CA. He emphasizes the typicality of Gower's "attacks and accusations" against the mendicants without providing details, and suggests that such assaults accumulate in VC "to the point of tedium" (133). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rayborn, Tim. Published Rayborn, Tim. "England: The Turbulent 14th Century, and the Writings of Chaucer, Langland and Gower." In Against the Friars: Antifraternalism in Medieval France and England. (Jefferson, N. C.: McFarland, 2014), pp. 117-33. Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource England: The Turbulent 14th Century, and the Writings of Chaucer, Langland and Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In this appreciative, even personal. essay, Yeager praises "Cinkante Balades" as "very fine art" and "finely crafted" (179), commending Gower's "very subtle work requiring poetic control and significant psychological acumen" (189). Yeager imagines a counterfactual "what-if" for English literary history, claiming that, had Gower chosen to write CB in English rather than in French, his "reputation would be far the better, and the history of English would have been written differently" (179) because CB is a "true poetic sequence" that uses "a lyric form to tell a story"--something not attempted in poetry in English until Philip Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella," two hundred years later. Yeager situates the writing of CB historically, showing that it was modeled on the very popular "Livre du Cent Ballades," analogous to Christine de Pizan's "Cent Ballades" in this respect, and influenced by Guillaume de Machaut's "Voir Dit" in others. The bulk of Yeager's essay, however, describes the aesthetic riches of CB--stanzaic structuring, narrative plotting, characterization, imagery, and manipulation of clichés--illustrated in large portion through close reading of two of the ballades, XLVI and XXXII, both of which show that "Gower's psychological insight is dead-on" (190), Yeager tells us, particularly in their subtle, delicate expression of the lovers' complex emotions and, in the Petrarchan mode, their anxious attitudes toward sexual relations. Speaking of XLVI in particular, Yeager says "This is poetry for grown-ups" (188); more generally, CB was written by a poet of superb skills and "artistic intelligence" (191), who, according to Yeager, "was never the prude modern critics have made him out to be" (186). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R. F. "Art for Art's Sake: Aesthetic Decisions in John Gower's "Cinkante Balades." In Essays on Aesthetics and Medieval Literature in Honor of Howell Chickering, ed. John M. Hill, Bonnie Wheeler, and R. F. Yeager. (Toronto: PIMS, 2014), pp. 179-93. Gower Subject Cinkante Balades Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Art for Art's Sake: Aesthetic Decisions in John Gower's "Cinkante Balades." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Youngman, William Auther. Published Ph.D. Dissertation. Cornell University, 2014. Open access at https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/36190 (accessed February 3, 2023). iv; 248 pp. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Minor Latin Poetry Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Manuscripts and Textual Studies Influence and Later Allusion Review Coining the phrase "senex style" in his dissertation, Youngman studies the "the function of old age as a textual and metaphorical category" (6) as expressed in "a particular rhetorical and stylistic set of practices that surround seemingly commonplace illustrations of old age, but mark these texts as resistant to the narrated restraints of what they describe of age" (7). He "traces the paradoxical treatment of old men from the Reeve in 'The Canterbury Tales' to John Gower's reanimated role in Shakespeare's 'Pericles' . . . , [i]ncorporating fifteenth century authors, such as Thomas Hoccleve, and scribes and printers, such as John Shirley and William Caxton, together with Chaucer, and Gower. . . . By focusing on a set of elements, which although shared are deployed differently, [Youngman] contend[s] that authors and speakers employ in new ways a paradoxical set of characteristics in depictions of old men taken from classical literature. . . . [T]his examination of senex style demonstrates how the figure of the old man bridges categories of language and body, by examining non-normative and less-than-able selves that are defined not only by bodily impairments but also rhetorical postures of disability and prosthesis" (ii). Youngman's treatment of Gower includes discussion of the juxtaposition of CA with several of Chaucer's lyrics in British Library MS. Additional 22139, Gower's use of senex style in CA and in "Quicquid homo scribat," and the use of the choral Gower as revision--a form of textual prosthesis--in "Pericles," where "Shakespeare reads Gower closely to the way I read him, as poeta senex, practitioner par excellence of senex style" (187). [MA] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Rewriting Old Age from Chaucer to Shakespeare: The Invention of English Senex Style. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In this lead essay to a collection of studies on the literary and cultural history of leisure in England, medieval to postmodern, Sadlek reprises the major concerns of his earlier studies "John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,' Ideology, and the 'Labor' of 'Love's Labor'," (1993; see JGN 18.1) and its expansion in "Idleness Working: The Discourse of Love's Labor from Ovid through Chaucer and Gower "(2004; see JGN 29.2). While work, busyness, and productivity anchor Sadlek's earlier studies, here he reorients, at least rhetorically, to their flipsides: leisure, idleness, and "acedia" or sloth, covering some of his previous territory (e.g., Chaucer's "Troilus" and Book IV of Gower's "Confessio"), but adding discussion of leisure and aristocratic love in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and leisure and sloth in "Piers Plowman." Relations among the classical/medieval notions of "otium," "negotium," and poetry as work also receive revised emphasis, the latter linked with Petrarchan humanism. Along the way, several claims about Gower are made forcefully: in CA Gower "is at his most creative in that he mixes aristocratic love with Christian morality and creates modalities of the Seven Deadly Sins within the context of the religion of love" (27), and CA is "made difficult because of the unorthodox blending of two different kinds of codes: the code of Courtly Love and the code of Christian morality" (29). Sadlek finds ironies in these tensions: though "otium" "was the foundational quality that made aristocratic love possible," Genius "systematically describes what it might mean for a lover to suffer from slackness, pusillanimity, forgetfulness, negligence, somnolence, depression, and even idleness" (27). On the productivity of poetic work, "we see [in CA, Book IV] a defence of the writer's 'otium negotiosum' that is not too different from that of Petrarch. Yet the emphasis is completely different. The writer here, unlike Petrarch, refuses to acknowledge the leisure that made his writing possible but tucks his defence of writing in the larger context of a celebration of legitimate work. He presents mental work as the clear equivalent of manual labour" (29). In his summary conclusion, Sadlek asserts that "the fundamental positions of Chaucer, Gower and Langland on 'otium' are not--in theory--so very different from that of Petrarch. The critical difference, however, is in emphasis. Chaucer, Langland and Gower, men from the middle to lower levels of medieval English society, had deeply imbibed the Christian distrust of 'acedia.' Whereas, a generation earlier, Petrarch felt free enough to celebrate his own 'otium' and that of monks, the Ricardian authors accepted 'otium negotiosum' uneasily, insisting that it be defended only within a broader and more urgent moral directive toward productive activity" (36). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sadlek, Gregory M. Published Sadlek, Gregory M. "'Otium,' 'Negotium,' and the Fear of 'Acedia' in the Writings of England's Late Medieval Ricardian Poets." In Monika Fludernik and Miriam Nandi, eds. Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. 17-39. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Otium," "Negotium," and the Fear of "Acedia" in the Writings of England's Late Medieval Ricardian Poets. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Torres, Sara Victoria. Published Torres, Sara Victoria. "Marvelous Generations: Lancastrian Genealogies and Translation in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and Iberia." Ph. D. Dissertation. University of California, Los Angeles, 2014. Open access at https://escholarship.org/uc/item/25n6t2gq (accessed January 28, 2023). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Review From Torres's abstract: "my dissertation tracks an understudied aspect of the legacy of Lancastrian kingship: its claims to the throne of Castile and the multiple Iberian marriages that materialize those claims as they shape late medieval and early modern international historiography." The first of six chapters "argues that Gower positions himself within a legacy of poetic genealogy and political counsel that is synchronous with the imperial lineages of the poem's exemplary narratives. The poem conceives of lineage in ethical terms, and thus the interplay between Gower's evocations of 'translatio studii' and 'translatio imperii' is fundamental to his narrated mechanisms of political descent. Under the patronage of Philippa of Lancaster, the 'Confessio Amantis' is translated into both Portuguese and Castilian, and within these material conditions of book production the political discourse of counsel is linked closely to the performance of queenship. In its Portuguese rendering, then, queen and poet are linked to the practice of just rule in a imagined textual community at once focused on the spiritual, intellectual, and physical regulation of the king and also on the wider readership of those encompassed within the bounds of 'common weal'." Later chapters engage Lancastrian-related texts of several sorts: Margaret of Anjou's Shrewsbury Book, the Burghley Polychronicon, Luís Vaz de Camões's Os Lusíadas, "a manuscript created by the exiled Syon nuns in Lisbon for the Habsburg monarchs, and "the journalistic relaciones of Andrés Almansa y Mendoza, which record [Charles Stuart's] visit to Madrid in the language of a chivalric romance." [MA. eJGN 42.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Marvelous Generations: Lancastrian Genealogies and Translation in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and Iberia. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Poverty, Bullón-Fernández points out, is not a major theme in "Confessio Amantis." Gower does, however, explore "the relation between subjects and objects" (187)--that is, between the self and possessions--in Book V of the poem, devoted to avarice. This exploration depends on the meaning of two words, "properte" and "astat." The tale of Midas depicts the discordant effects of avarice by presenting the boundary between the animate self and inanimate things as "excessively porous" (188). Midas's power to turn anything he likes into gold transforms his "astat" in two senses: the things around him and himself. For Bullón-Fernández, the story and its moral qualify Genius's discussion of "gentilesse" in Book IV. This discourse notes that the self and possessions are alike in being transient, whereas virtue endures as an outgrowth of the soul. Nevertheless, Genius's use of the terms "good" and "goods" remains ambivalent. On the one hand, he uses the terms to refer to moral realities; on the other hand, to material ones as well. [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bullón-Fernández, María. Published Bullón-Fernández, María. Goods and the Good in "Confessio Amantis." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. 183-92. 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 Goods and the Good in "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Carlson discusses accounts of the English invasion of Castile in 1367 that, like Gower's pro-Lancastrian "Cronica tripertita" (1400), may be analyzed as examples of state propaganda. These include: a French letter presumably written by Edward the Black Prince, who headed the invasion, to his wife Joan, presenting information on battlefield casualties and prisoners; a more detailed account of the same, included in a French verse biography of Edward; a Latin panegyric on John of Gaunt's heroism during the battle, by a Cistercian poet, Walter Peterborough; and another Latin panegyric, this one on the Black Prince himself, entitled "Gloria cunctorum." This last account of the siege of Nájera "is notably short on information" (95), but should be better known to scholars. An appendix presents a critical edition of the account based on three manuscripts and the text printed in Thomas Wright's "Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History" (1859). [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R. Published Carlson, David R. "The English Literature of Nájera (1367) from Battlefield Dispatch to the Poets." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. 89-101. 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 The English Literature of Nájera (1367) from Battlefield Dispatch to the Poets. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Echard questions the continuing critical focus on Gower's long poems and consequent "dismissal of [his] talents" (246) by many scholars; she draws attention to Gower's variety of forms and inclusion of "moments of short within the long" (247), such as prayers, letters, and other self-contained verbal episodes in "Confessio Amantis." She analyzes in detail some of Gower's shorter Latin verse, such as "O Deus immense" and "Ad mundum mitto," noting in these Gower's "self-reflexive exploration of voice" (258). "O Deus immense" returns to themes of kingship, and especially the king's responsibility to uphold the law, that Gower treats at much greater length in his long Anglo-French poem, "Mirour de l'Omme." "Ad mundum mitto" refers to the poet's vast corpus as a "mirror" and associates it with his Gower's self, by a "sequence of strong stresses and 'm' sounds" around the Latin word "mea." This "turning the mirror on the poet himself" (259) thus recalls the mirror that Venus holds up to Amans at the end of the CA: another interplay of short and long forms. [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân. Published Echard, Siân. "The Long and the Short of It: On Gower's Forms." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. 245-60. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Minor Latin Lyrics Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditatntis) 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 Long and the Short of It: On Gower's Forms. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Edwards considers modern sale prices of manuscripts and Caxton's 1483 edition of "Confessio Amantis" as evidence for "the acumen of individual collectors or book dealers" and "the relationship . . . between commercial value and cultural and/or academic significance" (281) of the CA. Of fifty-odd manuscripts, fifteen have been sold or offered since the late nineteenth century. Huntington Library MS EL 26. A. 17 and Folger Shakespeare Library MS SM 1 were purchased en bloc and had no specified prices. Only one is in a British Library: Bodleian Library MS Lyell 31. Pierpont Morgan Library MS M 126, one of two that "include a full cycle of miniatures" (282), now lacking nine, was purchased in 1902 for £1,727. The rarity of Caxton's edition--only seven complete copies survive--and his "mystique … as the father of English printing" (285), enhanced its sale prices: an imperfect copy sold in 1981 for £22,000. The essay concludes with two appendices, listing sales of CA manuscripts and of Caxton's "Gower" since c.1900. [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, A. S. G. Published Edwards, A. S. G. "Buying Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' in Modern Times." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. 279-90. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Buying Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' in Modern Times. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The essay discusses Gower's poetic career in the context of the Vergilian "cursus honorum"--"the sequence of works progressing from lower to higher genres" (144). Venus's dismissal of Gower at the end of the CA concludes his career as lover and poet and might echo the retreat into "philosophical contemplation" (145) that Suetonius describes in his biography of Vergil. Gower, unlike Vergil, continued writing poems, such as "In Praise of Peace," the "Traitié," and the "Cinkante Balades": a second cursus. This second canon, in one sense, is minor when compared with the magisterial achievement of Gower's three major works: the "Mirour de l'Omme," "Vox Clamantis," and "Confessio Amantis." At the same time, it is reflexive. For instance, "In Praise of Peace" reconsiders themes of anger and good government already taken up in the CA. Likewise, the CB "renegotiate and reimagine aspects of his major works" (150), such as his "dual roles as moralist and public poet" (151). [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, Robert R. Published Edwards, Robert R. "Gower's Second Cursus." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. 141-52. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism In Praise of Peace 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 Gower's Second Cursus. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Galloway begins with a discussion of the circumstances surrounding Gower's acquisition of a foreign "chest" ("kiste") and documents associated with the acquisition. These suggest the importance of mercantilism to Gower's life and poetry and may be applied to the puzzle of how "Confessio Amantis" traveled to Iberia, physically and by translation. The prevailing view cites the role of John of Gaunt's daughters in the travels of the CA, through their marriages to the princes of Portugal and Castile. The intersection of 14th-c. mercantile and "noble culture" (197), however, provides an alternative avenue. In the CA, chests have their traditional iconographic association with covetousness. They also signify, however, "the creation and circulation of . . . human political commodities," such as "the voice and words of people of high value" (204), and a poet's "political self-commodification" (210). Gower develops this theme in Book V of the CA, on avarice, where the "Tale of Two Coffers" functions as an exemplum of the allure and risk of venture mercantilism. [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew. Published Galloway, Andrew. "Gower's Kiste." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. 193-214. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Kiste. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Galván analyzes the "historical, political, and dynastic conditions that linked England to Iberia during the fourteenth-century" (103-4). He reviews England's unsuccessful pursuit of an alliance with Castile during the Hundred Years' War; France's alliance with Aragón; the Black Prince's service alongside Pedro the Cruel and others at the Battle of Nájera; Chaucer's treatment of these matters in the "Monk's Tale;" John of Gaunt's marriage to Constanza of Castile; and the deterioration of relations between Castile and France due to Gaunt's success. He discusses the Castilian chronicler, López de Ayala, who served as a diplomat. López fought at the Battle of Nájera, initially on the side of Pedro the Cruel, and was held prisoner briefly by the Black Prince. One of López's works may have influenced Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" and, like Philippa of Lancaster's possible involvement with the Portuguese and Castilian translations of the "Confessio Amantis," suggests lively English and Iberian cultural connections. [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galván, Fernando. Published Galván, Fernando. "At the Nájera Crossroads (1367): Anglo-Iberian Encounters in the Late Fourteenth Century." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. 103-17. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource At the Nájera Crossroads (1367): Anglo-Iberian Encounters in the Late Fourteenth Century. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gastle's very practical essay describes how to align classroom study of the "Tale of Florent" (in comparison with Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale") with a specific learning outcome of general education goals: awareness of other cultures. The essay will be helpful to instructors interested in serving academic accreditation requirements while including medieval literature in undergraduate general education courses. Particularly useful is Gastle's appendix which includes instructions and a rubric for students' final examination essays tailored to "the study of literature in a historical context in today's world" (28). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gastle, Brian W. Published Gastle, Brian W. "Teaching Gower's 'Tale of Florent' and Leveraging General Education Student Learning Outcomes." Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 30.1 (2023): 17 -30. Gower Subject Backlgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Teaching Gower's "Tale of Florent" and Leveraging General Education Student Learning Outcomes. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Herrero, Pérez-Fernández, and Gutiérrez discuss the scribal hands and selected codicological features of the unique manuscript copy of a Portuguese translation of "Confessio Amantis" (c.1430) and of the unique manuscript of a Castilian translation of the poem (late 15th c.), made from the Portuguese text. The Portuguese manuscript, copied in a bastard Gothic script by a named scribe, Joham Barroso, is an unprepossessing paper volume, its execution "a bit rough" (21). The Castilian manuscript, copied in a Gothic court hand and likewise on paper, by an anonymous scribe, is even more modest. Moreover, the second has an idiosyncratic structure: it is in two parts, each one written by the same scribe but only brought together in the 16th c. This "artificial codex" (27) suggests, therefore, a wider circulation for the Castilian translation than has previously been supposed. Both manuscripts were probably prepared for aristocratic use by private readers. Contains numerous plates illustrating the hands. [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Herrero Jiménez, Mauricio. Pérez-Fernández, Tamara. María Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Marta Maria. Published Herrero Jiménez, Mauricio, with Tamara Pérez-Fernández and Marta María Gutiérrez Rodríguez. "Castilian Script in the Iberian Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014). Pp. 17-31. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Castilian Script in the Iberian Manuscripts of the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Knapp argues that Gower shares with the nineteenth-century French novelist, Honoré de Balzac, a conservative political outlook, an analytical approach to economics, and a distrust of social conflict. In these concerns, he is "preeminent among the major Ricardian poets" (217). Gower focuses his satire in the "Mirour de l'Omme" and "Vox Clamantis" on mercantilism and on distinguishing between good and bad merchants. Merchants are a powerful "structuring force" (221) in society, influencing both the circulation of money and the circulation of narrative. In VC, Gower uses the trope of metamorphosis to suggest the chaos is caused by the peasantry, when it refuses its "proper role in the market relations between city and country" (224). But mercantile structures, while necessary, can be corrupted. In the CA's "Tale of Vergil's Mirror," a Book V exemplum of avarice, the philosophers who use a hidden store of gold to manipulate Emperor Crassus are fraudulent. They represent a "perverse danger underlying the world of exchange" (227). This danger has its analogue in mercantilism. [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Knapp, Ethan. Published Knapp, Ethan. "John Gower: Balzac of the Fourteenth Century." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014). Pp. 215-27. Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower: Balzac of the Fourteenth Century. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Ladd uses gift exchange to analyze a range of exempla in the "Confessio Amantis." Some of the gifts in Gower's tales are "incidental" while others "cluster . . . around the concept of magnificence" (230). Societies have gradually moved, according to gift theorists, from a gift-based to a profit economy. In the CA, gifts can be monetary or not and are exchanged within and across classes: "Aristocratic gifts could be expressions of authority over their recipients" (232). In the "Tale of Antigonus and Cinichus" (Book VII), King Antigonus denies Cinichus either a small or a large gift, demonstrating his honor and the honor due to him outside a material context. Gifts also establish commercial relationships: how "creditworthy" (238) a person is can depend on withholding or giving gifts. In the "Tale of Apollonius of Tyre" (Book VIII), Apollonius generously prevents a famine by a gift of wheat, acquiring honor thereby. The essay concludes with a chart of Gower's use of the words "gift" and "give" across the CA. [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ladd, Roger A. Published Ladd, Roger A. "Gower's Gifts." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. 229-41. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Gifts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This essay examines "the private library of the kings of Spain" (33), in light of its unique manuscript of a Portuguese translation of "Confessio Amantis." Intersecting cultural interests informed assembly of the Royal Library in Madrid, by way of the private collections at its core and the "cultural, ideological, and … cognitive purposes" served by the library a symbol of monarchy in the 19th c. Unfortunately, scholars did not appreciate the value of its manuscript of CA until the early 1980s. The manuscript came to the Royal Library from the great private library of Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, count of Gondomar (d. 1626), located in Valladolid. Gondomar served as ambassador to the court of James I of England in the early seventeenth century. The manuscript's binding and bookplates suggest arrival in the Royal Library "between 1807 and 1808" (43) and permit identification of a previous owner: the humanist bibliophile Luis de Castilla (c.1540-1618). [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor López-Vidriero Abelló, María Luisa. Published López-Vidriero Abelló, María Luisa. "Provenance Interlacing in Spanish Royal Book-Collecting and the Case of the Confessio Amantis (RB MS II-3088)." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014). Pp. 33-49. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Provenance Interlacing in Spanish Royal Book-Collecting and the Case of the "Confessio Amantis" (RB MS II-3088). Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review McCabe discusses the multiple readership that Gower cultivates: "an emergent literary public" (266) and a private aristocratic audience. Gower's poetry takes up themes of common profit, erotic love, and the complex relationships between the two. In this respect, it may be compared to the writings of Alain Chartier (c.1385-1430), who is interested in the "exchangeability" (267) of political and amatory matter. In his prose "Quadrilogue invectif," Chartier portrays "affairs of state in terms of desire" (268), generalizing civic responsibility across the three medieval estates. In "Confessio Amantis," Gower likewise assigns the blame for social chaos to everyone ("ous alle," Prol.525), directly connecting the public and the private. Similarly, in the "Traitié," Gower seems to be addressing both "one noble patron" and "an indeterminate, public readership" (275). His warnings about adultery here are not particular but general. Marriage, as Gower sees it, is a social good, the equivalent of Chartier's "l'affection publique." [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor McCabe, T. Matthew N. Published McCabe, T. Matthew N. "'Al université de tout le monde': Public Poetry, English and International." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014). Pp. 261-78. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Al université de tout le monde": Public Poetry, English and International. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Minnis contests assessments of Gower's Latin glosses to "Confessio Amantis" as dull and pedantic. He distinguishes between medieval textual glosses that merely clarify the grammar of a base text and others that comment on its sense or meaning. Some of Gower's glosses in CA "merely restate, and thereby emphasize [the poem's] lore" (60). Others, by contrast, "explain sense and sentence" (61). Gower's Latin glosses on Venus's retreat from Amans in Book VIII and on the Pygmalion story in Book IV, while typically "reductionist" (66), also complicate their vernacular narratives: concerning old age and concupiscence, in the first instance; and, in the second, the initially homosexual lovemaking of Iphis and Ianthe that is rendered heterosexual by Ianthe's transformation, during the exemplum introduced by Gower's retelling of Pygmalion. Throughout his Latin glosses to CA, Gower develops the sophisticated persona of an authority who resolves conflicting themes in his English poem, such as desire and reason.] [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Minnis, Alastair J. Published Minnis, Alastair J. "Inglorious Glosses?" In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014). Pp. 51-75. 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 "Inglorious Glosses? Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The Castilian "Confesión del amante" is a collection of classical materials that, for Pascual-Argente, represents "the European secular nobility's cultural capital and collective memory" (154) and competing ideas about the classical past. The scribe of the unique manuscript introduces his table of contents with Gower's Latin gloss concerning how bees assemble their honeycomb from various flowers, emphasizing the book as a compilation: a memorial work that selects from and preserves antiquity. Refashioned stories concerning Alexander the Great and the Trojan War would have appealed to "literary circles close to the royal court" (160). Castilian aristocrats were also interested in classical rhetoric and secular ethics. The CA may have influenced later Castilian works such as "El Victorial," a chivalric biography written by Gutierre Díaz de Games in the 1430s, being especially relevant for the Castilian court during the first half of the fifteenth century, when "the debate about knightly access to classical culture was at its most heated" (164). [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pascual-Argente, Clara. Published Pascual-Argente, Clara. "Remembering Antiquity in the Castilian Confessio Amantis." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014). Pp. 153-64. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Remembering Antiquity in the Castilian "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Batman, a fiercely partisan Protestant, published his "Christall Glasse" in 1569. Like the "Confessio Amantis," it is organized around the Seven Deadly Sins. Reid argues that "it is clear that [Batman] follows Gower's earlier tale [i.e., "Aeneas and Dido" in Book IV] by likewise positing Dido's unhappy end as the tragic consequence of Aeneas' 'sloth and forgetfulness' in love" (353). But Batman's choice is "peculiar," given that "the exemplum of slothful Aeneas, guilty essentially of violating courtly love conventions, does not comfortably fit" either of Batman's two expressed categories for Sloth--physical and moral; thus, we are left with the questions why would Batman have turned to (Catholic) Gower, and "what does it mean to press a recognizable Middle English 'exemplum in amoris causa' into the service of a new Protestant message?" (354). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Reid, Linday Ann. Published Reid, Linday Ann. "Gower's Slothful Aeneas in Batman's 'Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation.'" Notes and Queries 61 (2014): 349-54. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Slothful Aeneas in Batman's "Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Shailor describes various types of damage to the Yale manuscript of "Confessio Amantis": for example, extensive damp and mildew, resulting probably from a fire in the 18th-c. library of a previous owner; and the loss of the codex's first and third quires. Drawing on a wide range of curatorial and academic authorities, she also discusses what can be known about the stability of the volume and its text despite this damage: for example, the likelihood that the mildew is not spreading, that the book's third quire was removed and sold at auction (its present whereabouts, however, unknown), and that the manuscript was copied and decorated c.1410-1420 in an identifiable London shop. She presents new readings of damaged text and new information about different pigments used for rubrication and decoration, based on the technology of hyperspectral imaging, which allows for "a much broader spectrum of color definition and recognition, going from ultraviolet to infrared" (82). [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Shailor, Barbara A. Published Shailor, Barbara A. "The Yale Gower Manuscript, Beinecke Osborn MS fa.1: Paleographical, Codicological, Technological Challenges and Opportunities." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. 77-85. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Yale Gower Manuscript, Beinecke Osborn MS fa.1: Paleographical, Codicological, Technological Challenges and Opportunities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Viúla argues that "Confessio Amantis" was translated into Portuguese and then Castilian through the influence of Henry Despenser, bishop of Norwich (1370-1406). Despenser, a collector of fine books and "a consumer of contemporary poetry" (137), was a close associate of Philippa of Lancaster, eldest daughter of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster and, by marriage, Queen of Portugal (1387-1415). Although not pro-Lancastrian, Despenser escaped imprisonment during Henry Bolingbroke's struggles with Richard II through Philippa's interventions. Letters of gratitude from Despenser to Philippa attest to her support. Another, from Philippa herself, thanks Despenser for various gifts, to be conveyed to her by her treasurer, "Thomas Payn" (136). This man may have been the father of Robert Payn, another member of Philippa's household and translator of the Portuguese version of CA. The CA probably "made its way to Philippa in Portugal from a source outside the Lancastrian affinity, as a presentation copy from Henry Despenser" (137). [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Viúla, Tiago de Faria, Published Viúla, Tiago de Faria, "From Norwich to Lisbon: Factionalism, Personal Association, and Conveying the "Confessio Amantis." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. 131-38. Gower Subject Coinfessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource From Norwich to Lisbon: Factionalism, Personal Association, and Conveying the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Examines Gower's views of the ancient world and epic poetry in "Confessio Amantis," finding them complex and "in [their] implications remarkably bleak" (165). Benoît de Sainte-Maure's 12th-c. "Roman de Troie" was a major influence on Gower, by way of its content and its implied critique of ancient heroism. Gower adapts episodes from the "Roman" in the CA, such as the voyage of the Argonauts and the story of Jason and Medea. Whereas Genius's treatment of such material can be "myopic" (168)--for example, his muted criticism of Jason's betrayal of Medea--Gower himself displays "more sophisticated probing" (169). Genius valorizes chivalry and aggression in war and love, notably in the Tale of Aeneas and Dido in Book IV, a view that Gower qualifies. Like Benoît, Gower "shows markedly little interest in the classical gods and goddesses" (173). Genius, however, emphasizes Mars and his influence in stories of "epic-chivalric violence" (177), such as the "Tale of Ulysses and Telegonus." [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wetherbee, Winthrop. Published Wetherbee, Winthrop. "Gower and the Epic Past." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014). Pp. 165-79. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and the Epic Past. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yeager suggests "an underestimated Spanish influence on Middle English poetry" (129) in the "Disciplina Clericalis," a collection of exempla assembled by the twelfth-century Spanish author, Pedro Alfonso. The text survives in 76 manuscripts, all but one of these--Worcester Cathedral Library MS F.172 (a careless Middle English translation)--in Latin. The essay traces the clear influence of the "Disciplina," probably by way of a French translation, on Chaucer's "Tale of Melibee," where Pedro and the "Disciplina" are mentioned at least five times; and on Gower's Anglo-French poem, the "Mirour de l'Omme," where they are mentioned twice. Yeager also suggests the possible influence of the "Disciplina" on Gower's enigmatic "Tale of the Three Questions" in Book I of "Confessio Amantis," devoted to the sin of pride. No source for the tale has been identified. Its narrative, however, involves the posing of three seemingly unanswerable questions by an unnamed king of Spain to a knight named Pedro, arguably invoking Pedro Alfonso and his work. [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R. F. "Spanish Literary Influence in England: John Gower and Pedro Alfonso." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. 119-29. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) 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 Spanish Literary Influence in England: John Gower and Pedro Alfonso. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This study demonstrates that medieval goods were active and often animated participants in the daily lives of medieval individuals. Rather than merely giving voice to dead objects, these lively 'things' speak about the emotional, sensual, and experiential lives of late medieval men and women. Seemingly disparate goods--Books of Hours, stone idols and invisible flowers, clothing, and skull cups--provide a spectrum of possible readings for users, who simultaneously interpreted objects as essential to a spiritual and communal existence, while also fearing that goods might inhibit the soul's relationship with the divine. All matter was, in some way, linked with creation and the divine, and as a result objects inherently possessed degrees of agency that might affect the human user. Chapter One considers how Books of Hours combine animal, plant, and stone matter and join them with prayers and illuminated images to instruct women in proper touching in this life and the next. Chapter Two considers worldly and mystical matter in Chaucer's 'Second Nun's Tale' to demonstrate how looking at and touching manmade objects can ultimately limit knowledge of the divine. Though Chaucer provides an exemplum in the form of St. Cecile, who requires no contact with goods to realize her destiny of becoming an early Christian martyr, he ultimately concludes that, for less saintly individuals, it is impossible to ignore the senses, and particularly vision, when forming belief. Chapters Three and Four discuss Margery Kempe's worldly and religious attire. Margery's clothes and tears become a form of livery that reinforces her relationship with the Heavenly household. As a result, her text itself is actually a narrative of cloth, in which she employs a sartorial vocabulary to understand her transition from mother to mystic. Chapter Five focusses on the tale of 'Albinus and Rosemund' in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and consider how the substance or matter of an object has inherent power, even if it cannot be perceived immediately though senses. In that tale, the central object, a golden and bejeweled cup that was crafted from a human skull, controls the destiny of all the characters." [eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Parkin, Gabrielle. Published Parkin, Gabrielle. "Objects and Anxiety in Late Medieval English Writing." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Delaware, 2014. Dissertation Abstracts International 84.02(E) (2022). 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 Objects and Anxiety in Late Medieval English Writing. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Strakhov, Yelizaveta. Strakhov, Elizaveta. Published Strakhov, Yelizaveta. Politics in Translation: Language, War, and Lyric Form in Francophone Europe, 1337-1400. University of Pennsylvania, 2014. ix, 339 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A76.01(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Background and General Criticism Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Language and Word Studies Review From Strakhov's abstract: "The dissertation examines the so-called 'formes fixes,' an important lyric genre widely used across Francophone Europe in the late Middle Ages. It argues for this genre's emergence as a privileged medium for Francophone poets to explore the difficulty of retaining trans-European cultural affinity during the rise of protonationalist and regionalist faction in the Hundred Years War . . . . The dissertation organizes itself around a large, but little studied, late medieval manuscript anthology of 'formes fixes' lyric, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, MS Codex 902 (formerly French 15). . . , the largest, oldest, and most formally and geographically diverse 'formes fixes' collection extant today. Chapter One argues that, unlike other, later, 'formes fixes' anthologies, the Pennsylvania manuscript is not structured by author or sub-genre, but rather by form, chronology, geographic diversity, and dialectal difference . . . , reveal[ing] not only its compiler's awareness of the diffusion of 'formes fixes' lyric, but a desire to memorialize this genre's transmission across regional divides. Chapter Two explores the political effects of the diffusion of 'formes fixes' lyric by mapping literary borrowings between a corpus of anti-war texts in this anthology and other lyric corpora written in France, England, and the Low Countries. Chapter Three focuses on Francophone responses, both positive and negative, to the transmission of 'formes fixes' lyric into England, centering on the implications of Eustache Deschamps' praise of his English Francophone contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer, as a 'great translator' of 'formes fixes' lyric. Chapter Four examines the adoption of 'formes fixes' lyric in the work of Chaucer and . . . John Gower. It demonstrates that, like their Continental counterparts, Chaucer and Gower also view the appropriation of 'formes fixes' lyric as a means of carving a geopolitically specific identity out of Francophone cultural belonging" (vi-vii), focusing on Chaucer's Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women" and Gower's "Traitié selonc les auctours pour essampler les amantz marietz," with commentary on Gower's multi-lingualism elsewhere in his corpus. [MA] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Politics in Translation: Language, War, and Lyric Form in Francophone Europe, 1337-1400. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gillen seeks to '"illuminiate continuities and disjunctions between early Protestant drama and the commercial drama of William Shakespeare's stage" (172), in order to show that early modern drama is both '"reformed" and '"reforming." Her example of Protestant drama are the biblical plays of John Bale, whose 1544 "Epistle Exhortatory of an English Christian" vigorously condemned public theater; "Pericles" (crediting acts 1 and 2 to George Wilkins and 3-5 to Shakespeare) provides the commercial theatre test case. In each she focuses on the narrator figure: Baleus Prolocutor, and Gower. '"Gower's shifting role and his changing relation to dramatic action . . . are not merely indications of Shakespeare's stylistic preferences but are also reflective of Shakespeare's attempt to articulate the mimetic power and social role of public theater in light of antitheatrical objections" (174). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gillen, Katherine A. Published Gillen, Katherine A. "Authorial Anxieties and Theatrical Instability: John Bale's Biblical Plays and Shakespeare and Wilkins's Pericles." In James D. Maddock and Kathryn R. McPherson, eds. Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2014), pp. 171-93. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Authorial Anxieties and Theatrical Instability: John Bale's Biblical Plays and Shakespeare and Wilkins's "Pericles." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Mitchell, J. Allan. Published Mitchell, J. Allan. Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 249 pp.; 11 color illus. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Mirour de l'Omme Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Language and Word Studies Review Mitchell's volume is a study of the physical, social, and ethical issues of parturition and early development in medieval England, showing how these issues can be seen to underlie and inform modern concerns. Attentive to philosophical, psychological, and sociological formulations, with recurrent attention to differences between "ontogenesis" and "ontology" (and cosmogony and cosmology; see below), Mitchell contemplates the messiness involved in the culturally complex, never-quite-completed processes that produce what he calls "emergent creatureliness" (xxvi)--becoming human--as they are evident in, contiguous with, analogous to, or complicated by cross-species coexistence, environmental interactions, and cosmological speculations. The goal of his book, he tells us, is "to identify residual and emergent ideas of becoming where humanity is and remains at risk" (xxx). This is heady stuff. Mitchell connects modern theorizing about materialism, ethics, subject-object relations, tool-using, actor networks, and speculative realism with discussion of medieval philosophical texts, comportment books, and material objects, along with analyses of various literary works--Usk's "Testament of Love" and Chaucer's "Treatise on the Astrolabe," "Sir Thopas," and the Franklin's table "dormant"; portions of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and "Piers Plowman"; selections from Lydgate, John Russell's "Boke of Nurture," and more. Generally, Mitchell cites Gower to clarify medieval ideas, quoting, for example, the "Confessio Amantis" IV.2487-90 for its connection of alchemy and embryology (77), and briefly commenting on "Mirour de l'Omme" 107-19 in passing (140 and 145) when discussing gluttony and culinary transformation as concerns underlying medieval dining practice and etiquette, and as factors--even actors--in human acculturation. More expansively--and more crucial to Mitchell's entire enterprise--when explaining medieval human-as-micro, universe-as-macro analogies, Mitchell reads portions of CA as adumbration of modern ecological and cosmogenic concerns. In his section called "Little Worlds," Mitchell disrupts oversimplified notions of medieval analogical thinking, and uses portions of the Prologue to CA (913-44, 954-58, 970-90) to argue that, for Gower, universal disorder is a "postlapsarian one of human becoming" (41) but less anthropocentric than "egocentric and epigenetic, where creatures of all kinds are deeply enmeshed." This is an example, Mitchell tells us, of what "Timothy Morton calls ecological thought" (42), "owing to the strength of the contingent bonds between upper and lower elements" that Gower describes. Indeed, Gower "highlights the ligatures, joints, and connective tissues of the organized whole" and thereby exposes a "transhuman 'condicioun'" (43) that both echoes Macrobius and (mentioning Bruno Latour) anticipates modern philosophical analyses that seek "to compose commonalities without a pregiven harmony." The "embryological" cosmogony of Book VII of the CA is even more clearly "prescient" than the cosmology of the Prologue, Mitchell argues, insofar as it emphasizes elemental germination as "the world comes into being" (44). Mitchell surveys the world as egg in the classical and medieval imaginary from Aristotle and Lucretius to Bernardus Silvestris (with a nifty sidelight on Ovid as, etymologically, a cracker of eggs, "ova"), emphasizing ways in which the image depicts a "total picture of the universe that is never a finished totality but is rather composed of fluctuating intensities and heterogeneous extensities" (52). He follows this survey with close explication of Gower's brief, powerful discussion of "Ylem" (7.214-22)--the poet's English neologism for Greek "hyle"--as a "significant sequence of thought" insofar as it "posits a [kind of] matter that antecedes and exceeds formal causation" and is "tantamount to assuming something like a two-seed theory" of the universe coming into being "against Aristotle's single seed." Playing on "form" and "enform," Mitchell explains, Gower is "at once informed by his studies and formed from the same material substrate he is studying," and aided by Kellie Robertson's exploration of form/matter distinctions in medieval poetic metaphors ("Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto," 2010), Mitchell concludes that "All of this is surely meant to suggest that poetic matter, like the primordial matter of which [Gower] is speaking, is as polysemous as it is pluripotent" (53). As if this weren't enough, Mitchell goes on to explain that mid-twentieth century physicists, George Gamow and Ralph Alpher, "poached" Gower's term"--'ylem'--"to describe the volatile nucleogenesis immediately following the big bang," and, in commemoration, used it to relabel a celebratory bottle of Cointreau as Ylem, "Now on display in the Smithsonian National and Space Museum" (54; and see full-color plate 4 and its caption). For Mitchell, Gower's cosmogony, primordial causation, cosmic eggs, poaching, a bottle of spirits, and modern theoretical physics come together in rich ways to encourage us to wonder "is it not worth putting the medieval sciences in dialogue with modern physics and philosophy more generally?" (54). His implied answer is, of course, yes--in many ways a powerful justification for reading his provocative volume. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] 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 Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Arguing that the "study of the apocalyptic in the English literature of the late fourteenth cannot boil down simply to the tracing of sources or to historicist (New and otherwise) readings of contemporary texts and artifacts," Hackbarth instead explores "the ways in which apocalyptic comes to be known" (6). He assesses several broad, perhaps incommensurate "centers of meaning--mortality, authority, confession, and textual permanence" (1)--and dedicates a chapter to each. Late-fourteenth-century English literary works--Gower's "Confessio Amantis," Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," Langland's "Piers Plowman," "Pearl," and "Cleannesse"--are among the many works Hackbarth considers, but he addresses them impressionistically, providing insights but little sustained analysis or convincing evidence about the works themselves. Remarking on the evils of Division in Gower's Prologue to his "Confessio Amantis," 957-1062, for example, Hackbarth claims generally, that "terms laid out by Gower are as apocalyptic as it gets" (62), but he establishes no clear connections when he associates Gower's discussion with Papal Schism (60) and Lollardy (63). Gower introduces his concern for a stylistic "middle weie" (Prologue, 17), Hackbarth tells us, "to make sure that readers stay interested enough to continue the chain of information into the future" (191), a strategy that Hackbarth associates, rather loosely, with apocalyptic authors. Hackbarth acknowledges that Gower's "middel weie" recalls both Horace and Augustine, but only after asserting, tendentiously, that "The very incorporation of multiple sources within a text promotes apocalypticism" (184). Moreover, "Meaning is fragile in an apocalyptic environment" (195), Hackbarth tells us, and "Apocalypticism demands that readers be vigilant and discerning," both offered as evidence of a "climate of apocalyptic concern with texts" (196) in late-medieval (and somewhat earlier) England. Further, "The apocalyptic sense prevalent in the period proves to be connected to literacy itself" (202), so that in Gower's Prologue "Writing . . . is something done out of a sense of duty, something that is done quite purposefully, yet something that requires experimentation, trying-out." This "contradiction," as Hackbarth labels it, is embodied in "Any Christian apocalypticism (particularly as it must be defined by a certainty in an end of daily life and aware that 'time shall be no more')" (213). Stringing together--and recurrently leaping among--literary experimentation, literacy, readerly engagement, multiple sources, lust and lore, vernacular writing, meaning itself, and a sense of an ending, Hackbarth seems to find the apocalyptic everywhere. Surprisingly, he does not mention Frank Kermode's landmark study of Christian apocalypticism and literature, "The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction" (1967). [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hackbarth, Steven A Published Hackbarth, Steven A. Apocalyptic Mentalities in Late-Medieval England. Ph.D. Dissertation. Marquette University, 2014. ii, 245 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International 76.04(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/411/. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Background 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 Apocalyptic Mentalities in Late-Medieval England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Neatly situated among discussions of "translatio studii et imperii" and recent developments in translation studies, Stoll's dissertation "examines the importance of the trope of translation as a means for writers to conceive of their creative process throughout the Middle Ages . . . [exploring how translational] metaphors for textual production have a shaping influence on their narratives" (65). Her focus is medieval French literature that engages the story of Troy and recurrently posits a lost (presumably fictive) Trojan book as a source. Unusually, she includes Gower in this context, setting aspects of his three major works against two by Christine de Pizan ("Epistre Othea" and "Cité des Dames"; see Stoll's chapter three) for the ways they respond to the "tradition of conceiving textual production . . . as a form of translation" (62). Acknowledging that neither Pizan nor Gower wrote a detailed narrative of the Trojan War, nor that either "claims to have translated their texts," Stoll nevertheless includes them because they present a "distinctive concept of fiction" that is "structured" in a way similar to translation "through the concept of the example." Further, both writers "envisage their textual production in relation to Trojan material" and "introduce the figure of Carmentis," mythic inventor of the Latin alphabet, as a provocative figure of transmission (64-65). Gower's multilingualism is central for Stoll insofar as he "frequently puts passages from one of his own texts in one language into another, as well as quoting and translating from other texts" and "blurs the boundaries between translation and multilingual production" (64). Linking Gower's multilingualism, exemplarity, concerns with translation, and allusions and references to Troy (some deeply embedded) with French literary tradition, Stoll explores the poet's ideas about poetic creativity and cultural transmission in "Mirour de l'Omme," "Vox Clamantis," and "Confessio Amantis." [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stoll, Jessica. Published Ph.D. Dissertation. King's College London, 2014. 312 pp. Fully accessible via https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/studentTheses/imagining-troy/ (accessed February 23, 2026). Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Mirour de l'Omme 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 Imagining Troy: Fictions of Translation in Medieval French Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Beer argues that "John Gower's Confessio Amantis is a coherent poem, that its bleak conclusion is inevitable, and that the exemplary moral tales in the main body of the poem work to anticipate and prepare the ground for that conclusion." In support of this argument," he analyzes a sequence of tales from book V--the tales of Echo, Babio and Croceus, Adrian and Bardus, and Theseus and Ariadne--in order to show how they function on multiple levels. Ostensibly, they warn against sins of which the hapless Amans is not guilty (and which he accuses his lady of having committed herself); on a deeper level, and with the help of tactful hints from Genius, they warn Amans of the dangers to which his unrequited love may expose him, and of its inevitable end-point. In advancing these claims, Beer contests the views of scholars who have argued for the incoherence of CA, or for a more optimistic view of Genius's advice to Amans. He suggests "that coming to terms with the poem's coherence and bleakness enhances our appreciation of its subtlety and profundity." [LB/RFY. eJGN 34.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Beer, Lewis Published Beer, Lewis. "The Tactful Genius: Abiding the End in the 'Confessio Amantis'." Studies in Philology 115.2 (2015), pp. 234-64. 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 The Tactful Genius: Abiding the End in the 'Confessio Amantis' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The CA is a coherent poem, Beer argues, contra those who have celebrated its lack of coherence: the tales and the conclusion lead to a single consistent lesson. And that lesson is about the rejection of love in this world, contra those (such as the reviewer) who have found in the poem a complex but coherent lesson on the ethics of human love. In the conclusion to the poem, when Amans looks into the mirror and sees that he is old, he is also reminded that he must die: that life is transient, and that love is transient as well. This is the absolute that constitutes the final and this defining moral lesson. "Amans must turn away from vice and toward virtue not simply because he happens to be old now but because of the 'last things,' because he will die and be judged and pass into the afterlife. . . . According to Gower, the uncertainty of the world, and the inevitability of death, should drive us to the certainties of the Christian faith, to that invariable abstract form of the good which is God" (240-41). "Amans's love must and will be transcended and replaced by Christian love" (242). To demonstrate how the exempla in the preceding seven books support this lesson, Beer examines a sequence of four tales in Book V (V.4431-5495) and argues that the real lesson in each case differs from the ostensible lesson on Amans' conduct. When Amans complains, in the discussion of Usury, that he receives less in rewards from his lady than he feels he has earned, Genius replies with a statement on the essential arbitrariness of love which concludes, "Forthi coveite noght to faste, / Mi sone, bot abyd thin ende, / Per cas al mai to goode wende" (5.4564-66). "Amans should not covet too fast," Beer writes, "because he will not get what he covets; he should abide his end because one day (whether that day comes soon or not) he will die, and then it will matter a great deal whether or not he coveted too fast" (246). The tale of Echo that follows, while offering a warning against the use of "brocours," also offers, in the figures of Echo and Jupiter, images of the instability and deceptiveness of love, and in Juno, a model for the disillusionment that Amans experiences, as "both of them find out that their own idealized view of their love relationships have been divorced from the truth" (248). As a lesson on avoiding Parsimony, the tale of Babio and Croceus would seem to be irrelevant to Amans, since he has just insisted that his lady will not accept his gifts. The tale is less about material gifts, however, than it is about Babio's--and Amans'--lack of virility (in Gower's source, Babio is clearly old), and the surrounding discussion alludes to the difference between the "gifts" one offers a woman and those that one offers to God. Genius' definition of "Unkindeschipe" (V.4903-05) sounds very much like his earlier description of the arbitrariness of Love's rewards. In the tale that follows, Adrian serves as the example of the sin in question, but the real lesson for Amans lies in Bardus. "This is the story of a man who trusts that he will garner a material reward for his conscious and voluntary service to another person but is instead spurned by that person and rewarded far beyond his desert by those he had not consciously set out to help. . . . Amans, like Bardus, serves devoutly in the hope of a modest reward but he will get nothing from the person he serves. However, the virtue that he displays and nourishes in doing such service (provided it is 'honeste') will garner rewards in heaven" (253). And "while Bardus received an unlooked-for reward in exchange for his good deeds, the tale of Ariadne [which immediately follows] offers the bleak prospect of misdirected devotion going completely unrewarded" (260). Amans' "misguided love leaves him as vulnerable to the assaults of Fortune as was the otherwise reasonable Ariadne, once she had surrendered herself and her agency to Theseus" (259). Genius' final comments to Amans in Book V, while seeming to offer sympathetic encouragement, also contain a reminder of transiency in the allusion to the seasons (V.7823-31) and another anticipation of the final moral lesson in its references to "grace" (V.7832). Genius' role, Beer concludes, is to unfold the lessons of the poem gradually. "Genius is intimately associated with those feelings that have governed Amans, which is why he keeps Amans company for so long, why he is an unstable figure in some ways, and why he departs once those feelings have disappeared. By exploring such feelings in great depth and detail, Genius gradually exposes certain uncomfortable truths about them. He points toward, without quite encompassing, the full understanding of these truths that Amans finally attains when he looks into the mirror: just as that vision brings Amans to knowledge of himself, so Genius's exempla have worked to show Amans the truth about his own condition" (263). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Beer, Lewis Published Beer, Lewis. "The Tactful Genius: Abiding the End in the 'Confessio Amantis'." Studies in Philology 112 (2015), pp. 234-63. 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 The Tactful Genius: Abiding the End in the 'Confessio Amantis' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review [In grammar, Gower followed insular practices in preference to those of continental French, the Inghams argue. The insular features that they identify are the use of "quell" as a relative pronoun, the use of "qe" or "que" instead of "qui" as a relative pronoun in subject position, and the use of "nul" as a negative marker without an accompanying "ne," all of which are abundantly illustrated in Gower's French verse. While such choices could have been largely unconscious, they note, Gower may also have been aware of how his language differed from that of his French contemporaries, especially in his later works; and citing Yeager (1990) on Gower's attempt to "engage with the continental French poetic mainstream" for the purpose of correcting and reforming it, they suggest that "his linguistic identity as an insular writer came to serve an authorial purpose . . . when he was much less interested in joining his continental contemporaries than beating them." Finally, Gower's use of contemporary insular French, they maintain, demonstrates that Anglo-Norman could serve as a vehicle for serious writing "longer than has sometimes been supposed." [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ingham, Richard, Ingham, Michael Published Ingham, Richard, and Ingham, Michael. "'Pardonetz moi qe jeo de ceo forsvoie': Gower's Anglo-Norman Identity." Neophilologus 99 (2015), pp. 667-84. ISSN 0028-2677 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 'Pardonetz moi qe jeo de ceo forsvoie': Gower's Anglo-Norman Identity. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article studies an aspect of the Castilian CA (or "Confisyon del Amante") which, though pointed out by some scholars before, had never been elucidated: the modifications carried out in some classical stories by the Castilian translator, Juan de Cuenca, when rendering the Portuguese version of Gower's poem. Clara Pascual-Argente identifies the source for those changes in the stories of Frixus and Hellen (CA V.4248-4361 ); Ulysses and Thelogonus (CA VI.1391-1788); Hercules and Deianire (CA II, 2157-2307); and Tereus, Progne and Filomena (CA V.5551-6052). Through a systematic and detailed comparison of these stories in the Castilian Ca on the one hand, and in one of the most popular compilations of Trojan narrations in Iberia, the "Sumas de historia troyana," on the other, Pascual-Argente traces the origin of a variety of modifications, like changes in the names of characters, expansions, abbreviations and rewritings in the tales. Although some of these variations do not affect substantially Gower's narratives, in some other cases Juan de Cuenca follows the text of the "Sumas" in order to eliminate imprecisions, particularly causal and spatial imprecisions which he might have thought obscured the circumstances of the action in the original. Pascual-Argente connects Juan de Cuenca's usage of the "Sumas" for his rewriting of the CA with the Castilian political, cultural and literary context of the first half of the fifteenth century. From a political point of view, she explains the relevance of Hercules in connection with the popularity of the hero in Castilian historiographical and literary texts attempting to bestow classical lineage on the monarchy. Pascual-Argente cogently argues that from a literary perspective the modifications intended to fill causal and spatial gaps are the result of the "mise en prose" of the Gowerian poem: the prose style of the "Sumas" is thus a way of enhancing the narrativity of the tales, and making it closer to contemporary classical prose stories. Finally, the author contextualizes Juan de Cuenca's modifications in the atmosphere of fifteenth-century vernacular humanism. Following Cortijo Ocaña, she perceives a generic shift in the "Confisyon," from a "literaturized confession manual" to a tale compilation, more in tune with the tastes for classical material developed by the new reading elites, particularly by courtly nobility with intellectual aspirations. [ASH. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pascual-Argente, Clara Published Pascual-Argente, Clara. "La huella de las 'Sumas de historia troyana' en la 'Confessio Amantis' castellana." Revista de Filología Española 95.1 (2015), pp. 127-52. ISSN 0210-9174 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations 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 La huella de las 'Sumas de historia troyana' en la 'Confessio Amantis' castellana. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The essay argues that although Gower's meter has not been as widely respected as Chaucer's, it is in fact more regular and merits further study. The focus is final –e, strictly with respect to whether it was pronounced and not in terms of its phonetic value. This –e can arise either from a word's root or as an inflectional ending. Charts of percentages of when final –e appears (or not) for certain words affirm Gower's greater regularity in comparison to Chaucer. Further, this analysis suggests that Gower more than Chaucer tends to duplicate Romance stress patterns in multisyllabic words. The article does not address metrical context (e. g., how scansion might affect realization of a final-e), nor the syllabic irregularity of all late-medieval verse.[TWM. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Werthmüller, Gyöngyi Published Werthmüller, Gyöngyi. "Final -e in Gower's English Poetry, in Comparison with Chaucer's." South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015), pp. 6-19. ISSN 0277-335X Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Final -e in Gower's English Poetry, in Comparison with Chaucer's Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Driver returns to the scribe Ricardus Franciscus, and to a deluxe manuscript of John Gower's CA written ca. 1470 by this prolific and mysterious scribe. The manuscript is also known for its unique large-scale decorative program, including over one hundred miniatures, examined elsewhere by Driver. The main point of discussion here is evidence from textual editing in Morgan M.126 by Ricardus, in part to examine the theory that Ricardus was a French émigré, and in part to consider reception of the CA in this period. Ricardus is known for his banderoles and elaborately decorated ascenders (in which his name is sometimes inserted); his preferred script, the French "lettre bâtarde," has led some to assume this scribe was himself originally French. Although Ricardus was a remarkably accurate copyist, he has consistent habits in spelling ("Jubiter;" avoidance of thorn entirely and yogh only as the initial letter), preferences for overwriting dialect forms, and a small portfolio of inevitable errors. None of these features, however, has anything notably French about it. Ricardus worked with major English miniaturists such as William Abell, but also copied in French the "Epistre Othea" by Cristine de Pizan in a manuscript decorated luxuriously by the Fastolf Master, undoubtedly a French artist. However, this artist might well have come to England ca. 1450. During this period not only were literary patrons such as John Fastolf travelling to France, but artists from France were also crossing over to England to work on manuscripts with local producers. So Englishness itself is a tricky concept in the book trade during the time of Ricardus: a man who, like John Gower, must include fluency in French as a matter of course. Driver includes a comprehensive list of fifteen manuscripts attributed to Ricardus and a useful overview of the artists associated with these manuscripts. Very little ends up being said about reception of the Ca in the later fifteenth century, an interesting time politically and culturally for the creation of the most lavishly decorated manuscript of the poem that survives. Ricardus, though, remains a key figure in literary book production at the cusp of William Caxton's epochal appearance. [JF. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Driver, Martha W Published Driver, Martha W. "More Light on Ricardus Franciscus: Looking Again at Morgan M. 126." South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015), pp. 20-35. ISSN 0277-335X Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource More Light on Ricardus Franciscus: Looking Again at Morgan M. 126 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Derek Pearsall coined the image of the CA as a "dreadnought" poem, a massive battleship girded with the iron cladding of Latin marginalia. Stadolnik points out that despite the Confessio's fearsome unity in the London manuscripts that define the poem's identity, a number of excerpted versions survive from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries whose purposes may not be intellectual power projection in so overwhelming a form. Kate Harris and Tony Edwards have both trod this ground, noting that such excerpts were probably much more frequent than the survivors indicate (Harris) and that the removal of the tales from their massive penitential framework can have subversive effects (Edwards). Takamiya MS 32 is a carefully-designed and decorated compilation opening with five tales from the CA ("Three Questions," "Procne, Philomela, and Tereus," "Nectabanabus," "Perseus and Demetrius," and "Adrian and Bardus"). These tales are followed by the unique witness for the allegorical dialogue "Speculum Misericordie" and a complete text of the "Canterbury Tales" that has earned this manuscript its more familiar appellation as "the Delamere Chaucer." Closing the volume is a further CA excerpt that combines "Nebuchadnezzar's Dream" (including its Latin headverse) with "Nebuchadnezzar's Punishments." One consequence of this excerpting is the complete removal of moralizing structures imposed in the CA by the Latin marginalia and the commentary of Genius himself in the main text. The scribe in Takamiya 32 goes further by rewriting the final couplet of "Tereus" to replace its moral sting with a bland prayer that things go well for everybody, a move other excerpters such as the Findern manuscript (Cambridge University Library MS Ff.1.6) do not make. An even more elaborate disarming of moral authority occurs in a rewritten prologue and (to a lesser extent) expanded ending for "Demetrius and Perseus," reframing the tale's worth in the safe terms of an antiquarian response to romance. The scribe of Takamiya 32 also rewrites links in the "Canterbury Tales," but to a different end: highlighting the tales to accentuate the pilgrimage frame. Although this complete text of Chaucer's poem has always outweighed the presence of the CA extracts, nonetheless these Gower extracts literally (and, by all indications from its production, intentionally) frame the complete texts here. [JF. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stadolnik, Joseph Published Stadolnik, Joseph. "Excerpting Gower: Exemplary Reading in New Haven, Takamiya MS 32." South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015), pp. 36-51. ISSN 0277-335X Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Excerpting Gower: Exemplary Reading in New Haven, Takamiya MS 32 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The "frame" of CA, Stoyanoff argues, consists of both the Prologue and the scene in which Amans is finally confronted by Venus in Book VIII and is revealed to be an old man. With this revelation, both Amans and the reader are forced to reassess what they have learned during the course of the confession and to extract the wisdom that has been presented in the guise of lessons on love. The Prologue prepares both the theme of mutability that is most powerfully manifested in Gower's old age and the question of the relation between love and wisdom. Gower appears to be optimistic about the potential of wisdom as an antidote to the instability of the world (Prol. 66-67), but then, as he shifts to the main body of the poem, to give love power even over the wise. But Stoyanoff argues that the Prologue also offers the reader several warnings against deception, and the end reveals that Gower has been able to fool both himself--into believing that he is a young man--and the reader, who accepts his self-characterization, not realizing that the whole confession is a sham. Venus, in the way in which she asks Gower to state his name, reveals that she sees him for what he is all along, and she forces him not just to self-knowledge but to reflection: "old John Gower is instructed to remember how he individually became old--to use the knowledge of a lived life. This directive implies wisdom is gained in this way. The experiences that old John Gower has had through his life merit reflection; in fact, that is what "Confessio" expresses to its reader through the revelatory moment--the need for reflection on the experience of reading the poem" (57). "The revelatory moment of the poem, then, not only reveals Amans as Gower, but it also moves the reader to contemplate what she has read in light of the revelation that it is wisdom for which she should read, not love" (60). In sum, "[Gower's] poetic conceit that wisdom is too weighty and that love is more common has resulted in a dangerous, harmful way of reading that neglects both the body and society. With the revelatory moment, however, Gower remedies the effects of misguided reading by modeling the right way to read. The wisdom of 'Confessio Amantis' lies in its imposition of a reading process through its circular framing. The mutable content of the poem from wisdom to love and back to wisdom leads the reader to a con-structive reading process that acknowledges 'ernest,' game, and the 'middel weie' for which Gower aims (Prol. 17). Wisdom is found in what is read, yes, but wisdom, 'Confessio Amantis' shows its reader, is more often found in how something is read" (61). Stoyanoff's essay is provocative, but one wonders how he would explain the effect of the marginal note at 1.59 ("fingens se auctor esse Amantem . . .") in shaping the reader's response to the "deception" of the confession. It is also regrettable that the constraints of space don't allow him to explore in precisely what ways the interpretation of any portion of the poem might differ in retrospect from how it is perceived before reading the conclusion. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stoyanoff, Jeffrey G Published Stoyanoff, Jeffrey G. "Beginnings and Endings: Narrative Framing in 'Confessio Amantis'." South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015), pp. 52-64. ISSN 0277-335X 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 Beginnings and Endings: Narrative Framing in 'Confessio Amantis' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In having the righteous pagan in his "Tale of the Jew and the Pagan" express a philosophy based upon the "Golden Rule," Houlik-Ritchey notes, Gower locates the ethical foundations of Christianity in paganism and explicitly rejects its historical roots in Judaism, specifically in the injunction to "love thy neighbor" in Leviticus 19:18, an "alternate ethical kinship" (66) also reflected in the choice of Aristotle and the source of the instruction in CA Book 7. But viewing the tale through the lens of the "neighbor theory" of Kenneth Reinhard and others, Houlik-Ritchey argues that the tale also interrogates so reductive a relationship between Christianity and Judaism. The two men in the tale greet each other as both brothers and strangers, an ambiguous and indeterminate relationship that "marks them as neighbors" (67). While certainly unknown to Gower, the wide semantic field of the term "felawe" by which the Jew defines his own ethical obligation echoes rabbinical debates about the precise sense of "neighbor" in Leviticus 19:18, and "the pagan's astonished reaction to the Jew's speech figures, anachronistically, Christian judgment upon the limitations of Judaism 'as it has construed them'" (70; Houlik-Ritchey's emphasis). The pagan's own creed, moreover, echoes another injunction, to love strangers, in Leviticus 19:33-34. The tale takes place in a "wilderness," a setting in which both men are strangers as well as "felawes" in the sense of "traveling companions," and the men's respective ethical responsibilities are defined in this space removed from civilization yet also fraught with historical resonance, as it is located between Cairo and Babylon, the sites of Jewish exile. "In sum," Houlik-Ritchey concludes, "I argue that Gower's 'Tale of the Jew and the Pagan,' reimagining the origins of Christian ethics to efface its Jewish legacy, pinpoints a source of ambivalence regarding the ethical indebtedness of Christians to Jews that refuses to settle down. As I hope I have shown, the Jew and the Pagan are neighbors, and their ethical codes seem, in ways unforeseen and unintended by each, to share an ethical responsibility for those that chance, circumstance, and the physical world make proximate. Though neither man heeds his creed's call to neighbor-love in quite these terms, those implications of their analogous responsibility to each other are legible to us. The tale, by way of paganism, thus brings into sharp focus Gower's construction of a neighboring relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Gower's Jew and Pagan take us, in the end, back to where we historically began: Christianity's many debts to its Jewish neighbors" (73). Houlik-Ritchey has a great deal to offer to our understanding of this tale, but her essay contains a couple of odd statements (e.g. "Book VII is the book of Justice," 66), and her summary overlooks the pagan's prayer in 7.3300-09* and the implicit intervention of God in response, which one thinks might aid her case that the pagan is a proto-Christian but which would also seem to qualify a bit her emphasis upon the importance of the setting, particularly her reference to the "swift ecological punishment" as the wilderness "stalks the unethical man for the kill" in the form of the lion (72). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Houlik-Ritchey, Emily Published Houlik-Ritchey, Emily. "Fellows in the Wilderness: Neighborly Ethics in 'The Tale of the Jew and the Pagan'." South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015), pp. 65-75. ISSN 0277-335X 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 Fellows in the Wilderness: Neighborly Ethics in 'The Tale of the Jew and the Pagan' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Kara L. McShane addresses the "Visio Anglie" of Book I of the VC as a "healing narrative" using romance metaphors to conceptualize a healing process following the 1381 Rising. She acknowledges the poem's social conservatism while rejecting many earlier critics' negative reactions to it; Russell Peck's concept of "common profit" provides a framework for her analysis of Gower's reformist expectations. The essay opens with an explanation of the notion of social healing through narrative, which she grounds in Laurence Kirmayer's understanding of narrative as an essential component of recovery from trauma; this model of trauma and recovery then guides her close reading of portions of the "Visio Anglie." McShane argues that Gower anchors his depiction of the trauma of the Rising in metaphors of "voicelessness and bodily fragmentation" (77), indicating a social body traumatized by events. This leads her to an examination of the poet's speaking situation, as voicelessness would be moot without an interlocutor; the imagery of bodily fragmentation then complicates the narrator's situation, and characterizes the trauma depicted in the poem. This sense of voicelessness represents psychological trauma through bodily breakdown of the act of speech, itself metaphorical in a written poem. Gower's "sigh" (80) then articulates the poet's emotional state in reaction to the terrifying events of the Rising, and the resulting challenge to the integrity of the body politic. Once McShane has established the issue of voice in the poem as a response to trauma, she shifts her attention to Gower's use of the metaphor of a rudderless ship at sea, one which she finds common to many Middle English texts, including Gower's own later narrative of Constance. She draws on several scholars' analyses of this metaphor in Gower and elsewhere, and suggests that this particular metaphor is especially helpful for articulating a healing process, because of the "adaptive possibilities" (80) it offers Gower. Like the fragmented body politic, the rudderless ship becomes a metaphor both for the poem's speaker and for England; as the ship becomes the Tower of London, the poem shifts from the narrator's trauma from witnessing the Rising to the state's trauma at being challenged by the Rising. This metaphor thus makes the chaotic nature of the actual Rising legible to Gower's audience, and provides a way to understand how to go forward from such a moment of rupture. She concludes by arguing that the ship image provides both a metaphor of the larger community, and also a model for moving forward with (hoped-for) divine guidance. Returning to the notion of common profit, she argues that Gower uses this articulation of the trauma of the Rising to affirm the notion that the larger society cannot achieve healing and common profit without drawing together to keep the ship of state afloat. [RAL. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor McShane, Kara L Published McShane, Kara L. "Social Healing in Gower's 'Visio Angliae'." South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015), pp. 76-88. ISSN 0277-335X Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Social Healing in Gower's 'Visio Angliae' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Pamela M. Yee investigates Gower's use of illness in "The Tale of Constantine and Sylvester" in Book II of the CA, largely through analogy to recent work in the use of narrative formation in the medical diagnostic process. Yee characterizes a shift from seeing physicians as the protagonists in medical narratives toward Rita Charon's model of physicians attending to patients' own narratives of illness and treatment. She uses the work of Glending Olson to connect this relatively recent paradigm to some medieval medical approaches, though she concedes that Charon's model differs from medieval models. Yee then shifts her focus to Gower, by pointing out that the relationship between Genius and Amans parallels this doctor-patient relationship, with sin and redemption taking the role of medical illness and cure. This sets up her analysis of a tale that maps Amans' analysis of sin through narrative to an actual illness: the emperor Constantine's leprosy. After an overview of previous approaches to this tale, she contrasts the medical approaches of Constantine's court clerks and of Pope Sylvester--the court clerks do not model the use of patient-centered medical narrative theorized by Charon, with the result that their proposed cure, bathing in the blood of the innocent, fails to address the underlying cause for Constantine's illness, and also accentuates the "wider social disruption" (92) of the emperor's illness. Sylvester's approach then does manage to listen carefully enough to Constantine, and thus to model the sort of close attention to story advocated by Charon. This allows Sylvester to identify the underlying moral causes for Constantine's illness, and leads to the solution through moral exempla and conversion to Christianity. Yee's analysis extends Gower's metaphor of medicine for spiritual cure through the "ritualized contact between doctor and patient" (97) of Constantine's baptism. Yee goes on to argue, however, that once Constantine has benefitted from such a healthy affiliation with Sylvester, he ironically reverts to the same poor communication model of his court clerks that nearly led to his blood bath. His forcible conversion of his empire and the problematic Donation of Constantine challenge the very compassion that Sylvester modeled in his cure of the emperor. This reading thus extends the medical paradigm of the contrasting treatments of Constantine's leprosy to the emperor's own authoritarianism, and views Constantine as a failed physician. In contrast, when Yee returns her focus to the frame of Amans and Genius, she is able to explain Genius' roundabout narrative response to Amans' confession as a more successful instantiation of this discursive model of medicine. [RAL. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yee, Pamela M Published Yee, Pamela M. "'So schalt thou double hele finde': Narrative Medicine in the 'Tale of Constantine and Sylvester'." South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015), pp. 89-104. ISSN 0277-335X 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 'So schalt thou double hele finde': Narrative Medicine in the 'Tale of Constantine and Sylvester' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review William Rogers approaches his extended analysis of the Medea story in the CA with the understanding that Middle English literature often blurred the boundaries between medicine and magic. For him, this particular text encapsulates the slippages between the two. Looking at the way the Medea story addresses the Confessio's larger question of how to "cure" old age and the paradox of the "senex amans," in particular, Rogers presents Medea's approach in terms of its conflation of "old age and old sources" (106). Rogers clarifies the tale's participation in late medieval medical discourse through extended comparison to the treatise "On Tarrying the Accidents of Age," found in Trinity College MS R.14.52--though he carefully concedes that he cannot prove Gower's familiarity with that specific manuscript. Instead he argues that the resonance between Gower's poem and this particular collection of medical texts foregrounds Gower's thinking on rejuvenation of both the old body and the old book, resulting in a "poetics of rejuvenation" (107) that ultimately works considerably better with books than with bodies. Amans' rejuvenation, Rogers argues, proves no more effective than Eson's within the tale. As Rogers details Medea's story, he argues that Gower's approach to her is relatively sympathetic. He sees her power as a metaphor of sorts for the poet's own narrative method. Calling attention to Gower's reliance on the Middle English verb "newe" in his treatment of renewal and rejuvenation, Rogers notes that the usage is shared by "On Tarrying." The details of Medea's rejuvenation of Eson, then, maintain the same overall focus on "humoral balance and re-ignition of a bodily fire" (111) characterized in the medical text. The grim, violent nature of the tale's ending, wherein Eson is deprived of descendants to cherish, becomes cruelly ironic: Eson's renewed youth provides merely "more time to grieve" (113). Rogers then shifts his focus to the other old man requiring rejuvenation in the CA: Amans, or Gower himself. This shows the limits of the "poetics of rejuvenation," as old-age cures work only with old texts and authorities, not with the actual body. Curing the paradox of the "senex amans" by removing the "amans" side of the term cannot provide a satisfactory solution for the old lover's problem. The poem thus reinforces the idea that age is not really reversible, though old sources can be renewed through a poem like the CA. [RAL. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rogers, William Published Rogers, William. "Old Words Made New: Medea's Magic and Gower's Textual Healing." South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015), pp. 105-117. ISSN 0277-335X Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Old Words Made New: Medea's Magic and Gower's Textual Healing Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Countering past analyses that read the depiction of alchemy in Book IV of the CA as banal, Fletcher argues for that passage's centrality to the Confessio. Physically at the middle of the poem, Gower's discussion of alchemy is also in her view thematically essential, as it develops the role of human labor as a driving metaphor within the world of the poem. She sees the passage's treatment of the movement "from base to perfection, from ignoble to noble" (119) in metals as symbolic of the larger moral movement of the poem itself. Seeing vice or sin as parallel to the impurities to be purged from base metals, alchemy then becomes a model for Gower's conceptualization of the individual's moral development. Fletcher then goes on to outline critical reaction to Gower's approach to alchemy, noting the parallels to Chaucer's "Canon's Yeoman's Tale," and the apparent error of identifying Jupiter with brass, rather than with tin as in Chaucer. Gower's choice of words, using the term "vice" among other moral terms for the imperfections to be purged, then cements the idea that the passage is at least as philosophical and moralizing as it is alchemical. The term "clergie" to represent the learning required (120) further reinforces her vision of the scene's centrality to Gower's moral approach. Gower's explanation that certain purifications are no longer possible in a less-than-perfect world such as Gower's own, expresses in Fletcher's view the "senectus mundi" theory that James Dean has identified in late medieval culture. She is able to relate this sense of universal decay to Gower's analysis of human moral decay both in the Prologue to the CA and also in a passage in the MO that depicts a similar deterioration in the world. Returning to the dream of Nebuchadnezzar in the Prologue, Fletcher then uses the "error" of brass in the alchemy passage to link that passage to the body metaphor of the "ages of man" in the dream, which she sees as "alchemy in reverse" (125). The brass in the alchemy passage then becomes not an error, but a reference back to the dream image of the Prologue. This linkage of alchemy and a larger view of the world then leads to a more linguistic analysis, as Fletcher moves from the alchemy passage's observation that old alchemical texts are no longer legible to a sense that signification itself is decayed, as are the materials of alchemy and the world itself. The purging of vice in alchemy, even if imperfect, then becomes Gower's solution to this problem of moral decay, when Genius' analysis of sloth overlaps the alchemy passage's use of terms "vice" and "vertu." Ultimately for Fletcher, it is this link between alchemy and moral development that underlines Gower's sense of "the powerful elemental intertwining of mankind, earth, and the heavens" (129). [RAL. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fletcher, Clare Published Fletcher, Clare. "'The science of himself is trewe': Alchemy in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015), pp. 118-131. ISSN 0277-335X Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'The science of himself is trewe': Alchemy in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "England's two dominant legal systems, the ecclesiastical and the common-law, had opposite attitudes towards intentionality," Barrington writes. "According to the Church, intention was all. According to the common-law courts, intention counted for nothing" (134), except, she explains, during a brief period during King Richard's reign when Gower happened to be composing CA. In his poem, Gower juxtaposes and places into confrontation the assumptions from the two systems. "Throughout, Genius adopts a position comparable to the one found in penitential manuals: intention is all. Amans, however, maintains the common-law position that only the deed counts. Only reluctantly does Amans admit the culpability of his intentions even when he is unable to bring those intentions to pass. . . . Genius positions Amans as a penitential confessant, but Amans positions himself as a defendant in a criminal case" (136). As her principal illustration, Barrington uses the lesson on Sacrilege in CA Book 5. In interrogating Amans, "Genius adopts a position comparable to the one found in penitential manuals: the soul is judged by its intentions," while "Amans, in contrast, adopts the position associated with the law courts: the deed, intended or not, is all that counts. When Genius asks Amans if he ever committed sacrilege, the lover repeatedly admits to intending sacrilege but denies doing the deed and therefore sees himself as innocent" (137). Both, however, attribute a significant role to chance in determining whether or not an intent is carried out in deed. Chance also plays a large role in the "Tale of Paris and Helen" that follows. In its disjointedness, the tale resembles a "trial narrative" (140), made up of different accounts provided by different witnesses; and in its focus, finally, on the single issue of sacrilege, it recalls the need for a prosecutor to identify a prosecutable offense. The debate that occurs at the beginning of the tale identifies conflicting views of how the Trojans should proceed, but it links the eventual destruction of the city to the collective intention of the entire populace. Paris is given a kind of claim to Helen, but his ability to enforce it depends upon a series of unforeseen events. Once he sees Helen in the temple, however, he proceeds with conscious intention. But "the Trojans' collective involvement and Paris's intended deed--to abduct Helen--are set aside in preference to a legal model that limits the case to a single, provable deed: Paris's sacrilege. In this way, the tale entangles the penitential and the juridical, allowing Genius to rest his argument on a deed both intended and done" (138). Even such a perspective, however, offers no satisfying explanation either for the war or for the destruction of Troy. "The tale provides a barometer for the increasing difficulty of ignoring intention in the courtroom, indicating why Ricardian courts briefly made an allowance for intention because it invariably impinged on the proceedings and on the jurors' perceptions. Yet, the tale and framework also demonstrate why the courts found it the better part of wisdom to ignore the issue of intention. As long as criminal law was tied to a system of pleading that limited the case to a single issue, finding a prosecutable correlation between deed and intention adds complications that return us to the same problems caused by ignoring intention altogether" (140-41). Barrington's analysis is enlightening, but we do not read Amans' confession in V.7094-7182 in the same way. While he excuses himself from the type of indiscriminate flirting that Genius uses as his example of Sacrilege, Amans freely admits to a different sort of Sacrilege (5.7156), both in intent and deed, with regard to his own lady. This passage does not seem as good an illustration of a difference in understanding between Amans and Genius on the nature of culpability as Barrington suggests. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Barrington, Candace Published Barrington, Candace. "Common-Law and Penitential Intentionality in Gower's 'Tale of Paris and Helen'." South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015), pp. 132-43. ISSN 0277-335X 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 Common-Law and Penitential Intentionality in Gower's 'Tale of Paris and Helen' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Although Lydgate's and Gower's politics continue to be popular topics on their own, no real attention has gathered around any relations between the ideas of Gower and his successor in Lancastrian literary circles. Reimer begins with the unassailable point that both poets share an interest in a well-governed society led by a king whose virtuous rule starts with himself, and extends to bringing the estates of society into "good acord" rather than a state of war. Lydgate's only known prose work, "The Serpent of Division," examines Pompey's war with Julius Caesar and the resulting "catastrophic consequences to the nation of princely ambition and bellicosity" using "Gower-like themes" and a "Gower-like use of ancient stories" to understand contemporary politics (145). Both Lydgate and Gower focus on "Division" as a central cause of social breakdown, on prudent peace over rash war, and on the invocation of a mythic poet (Arion in Gower's CA, Amphion in Lydgate's "Siege of Thebes") able to bind up the golden chains of social harmony. Lydgate's two double hagiographies, the "Lives of Saints Edmund and Fremund" (which according to Jennifer Sisk functions as a "speculum regis" for Henry VI), and the "Lives of Saints Alban and Amphibal" (modeled on "Edmund and Fremund") offer a more complex view of virtuous governance in both spiritual and civic terms. Edmund's early reign generates a long passage on the ideals of righteous rule and a well-regulated body politic; still, "the text does not offer a single model of kingship but a set of alternatives, with no clear prioritizing of the one over the other" (147). St. Alban's story begins with the Roman conquest of Britain and the creation of a proto-Arthurian knighthood under the guidance of Emperor Diocletian, whose set of vows champion a similar set of virtues for good governance aimed at the upper classes, with a clear emphasis on common profit and a caution against rousing rebellion--presumably among the hotheads of the Third Estate so memorably personified in Gower's VC. Ultimately the argument here, that Lydgate is like Gower in his vision of good governance yielding a peaceable kingdom, is built with relatively little discussion of Gower himself beyond brief invocations at beginning and end; Gowerians will hear the resonances clearly, nonetheless. [JF. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Reimer, Stephen R Published Reimer, Stephen R. "A New Arion: Lydgate on Saints, Kings and 'Good Acord'." South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015), pp. 144-55. ISSN 0277-335X Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A New Arion: Lydgate on Saints, Kings and 'Good Acord' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In the mid-fifteenth century Osbert Bokenham and George Ashby both canonized the familiar poetic trinity of Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate as "the first rhetoricians" (Bokenham) and "premier poets" (Ashby) of England. Lydgate, the latecomer to this party, makes public and obvious his many appropriations of Chaucer as a poetic father. Edwards takes up the question of Lydgate as a descendant of moral Gower, a "deep source" for Lydgate as a public poet, visible in Lydgate's poetry only in what Lydgate figures as a "poetic trace" (156). Like his two predecessors, Lydgate joins a long tradition of medieval writers constructing fictions of authorship for earlier texts on which they have no claim to be coevals. Chaucer famously uses these constructions as an arena for play and deferral of literary authority from the historian Lollius to Chaucer the pilgrim. Edwards reminds us, however, that Gower asserts his authorship by deploying most of the terms Alastair Minnis has identified for us, and as such asserts a strong claim as a crucial forerunner for Lydgate. In "Fall of Princes" Lydgate himself puts Gower into a different triumvirate with Ralph Strode and Richard Rolle, a grouping that invokes a late-medieval vernacular humanism within which Lydgate created his poetic space. While Gower's meditations on social and political divisions remain unacknowledged in Lydgate's "Siege of Thebes" and "Serpent of Division" (as Maura Nolan points out), Gower's influence lingers in Lydgate's grasp of Lancastrian cycles of crisis at the difficult moment when the minor Henry VI ascends the throne in 1422. In the "Fall of Princes" Lydgate's chapter on Constantine seems to be drawn unacknowledged from Book II of Gower's CA, reshaping Gower's emphasis on pity to assemble the virtue of "royal compassion" that aligns spiritual interests with temporal power in terms that parallel Constantine with Lydgate's patron Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. The tale of Canace and Machaire in the "Fall" also reshapes Gower's version by expanding Canace's complaint to counterbalance the ravages of epic-heroic patriarchy surrounding her. More broadly, Edwards argues, Gower offered Lydgate a mode of address to the powerful in a particular state of being: triumph and conquest. Gower's odes, admonitions, and advice on peace and justice serve Lydgate as both a framework and an idiom for "Troy Book" and "Siege of Thebes." Lydgate's address to Henry V at the end of "Troy Book" deploys terms Gower uses to praise Henry's father: a mighty conqueror whose royal lineage is both secured by descent and ratified by election, but whose condition is always subject to mutable Fortune. While Chaucer remains Lydgate's example for poetic achievement in English, Gower in Edwards' view shows Lydgate how to maneuver rhetorically in the public sphere and amid its great themes of war, peace, and right action. For Lydgate this work does not end with the secular powers, but perseveres in the service of doctrine. [JF. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, Robert R Published Edwards, Robert R. "Lydgate and the Trace of Gower." South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015), pp. 156-70. ISSN 0277-335X Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Lydgate and the Trace of Gower Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Baldo offers a broad and provocative consideration of the role of memory in "Pericles," including the ways in which the adventures of the eponymous king and his family might have suggested to Shakespeare's audience the memory of their national past at a time, following the Reformation, when historical memory was contested and when changes in religion practice altered the relationship to one's ancestors and thus to the past. Gower, in his appearances in the prologue and epilogue to the play, is resurrected from his nearby tomb in order to enact a kind of recovery of the past while also marking its difference, and he does so not just in his archaic language and verse form but also, as a teller of moral stories himself, in the lessons he offers on the use of the past, a practice that Shakespeare imitates in reviving him. "'Pericles' recalls a world where memory's value and sway were more stable than they were in post-Reformation England, and indeed in most of Shakespeare's own plays. Awash in restorations of various kinds, 'Pericles' stages a recovery of not only a particular voice of the late Middle Ages, but also its culture of memory" (172). In contrast to some of Shakespeare's other plays, "memory has the less equivocal function of promoting recovery, virtue, and eventually redemption, and in this respect Shakespeare appears to be following the lead of Gower himself, who in the "Confessio" casts memory as a virtue and forgetting as a source of manifold evils; memory as a source of psychological and political unity, and forgetting as a source of distraction and division" (178). Gower "bestrides the gulf between pre- and post-Reformation England, thereby helping audiences to recollect the very different status that recollection itself held in the period in which he lived and wrote. A bodied memory of late medieval England and a poet of memory who in his own time sought to shake a people out of their mnemonic slumber by teaching them how to recollect the past and thereby achieve psychological and political wholeness, Gower fittingly presides over a public, ceremonial restoration to life of the recently broken and buried culture of memory that not a few of Shakespeare's contemporaries apparently wished to exhume, if only for the two hours' traffic of the stage" (183). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Baldo, Jonathan Published Baldo, Jonathan. "Recovering Medieval Memory in Shakespeare's 'Pericles'." South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015), pp. 171-88. ISSN 0277-335X Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Recovering Medieval Memory in Shakespeare's 'Pericles' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Introduces thirteen essays, collected in a special double issue of "South Atlantic Review," all based on work first presented at the III International Congress of the John Gower Society, 2014. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor McShane, Kara L Yeager, R. F Published McShane, Kara L and Yeager, R. F. "Introduction: John Gower's Twenty-First Century Appeal." South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015), pp. 1-5. ISSN 0277-335X Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Introduction: John Gower's Twenty-First Century Appeal Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "The Invention of Fire" represents Holsinger's follow-up to "A Burnable Book" (reviewed in eJGN 33.1 (2014) by Michael Livingston). It is the second of a projected three novels featuring John Gower as the central character. In Holsinger's telling Gower is part honest sleuth, relied upon by the great and powerful, part professional extortionist, who makes his living dealing in dirt. As in "A Burnable Book," murder, treason, forgery, prostitution and petty thievery find their way into every cranny and corner of Holsinger's noir London, intertwining with the precise historical detail (for which Holsinger has a fine nose) that is both accurate and workable. In "The Invention of Fire," the moment is 1386, the fire emanates from "handgonnes" just then being developed, in this telling, to effect a coup d'etat, and the results are slaughtered women and children in Normandy, entangled corpses below the Thames-side public privies, and high-level betrayals that, if true, would go far to explain events in parliament and court in that year. Gower, whose progressively deteriorating vision (clearly Holsinger's fortuitous take on the handicap requisite for "private eyes"--think Holmes' cocaine use, Philip Marlowe's drinking) plays a larger part in this second novel than in the first, is asked on the Q.T. to follow a thread that leads him not only abroad (!) where he meets his son, Simon (!!), but more plausibly to the highest and lowest social strata. Like "A Burnable Book," this one is a good yarn, and if it feels a bit thinner and more rushed-out than the first, it nevertheless still offers many pleasures for Gowerians, not the least of which is watching Gower perform as an almost-man of action, while Chaucer (again) comes off as more than a little shifty, a bit of a worm trending cad-ward directly. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Holsinger, Bruce Published Holsinger, Bruce. "The Invention of Fire." New York: HarperCollins, 2015 ISBN 9780062356451 Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Invention of Fire Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HarperCollins, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Meindl's essay offers a translation and commentary on Book 6, lines 419-68 of VC, "de errore Vicecomitur, Balliuorum, nencon et in assisis iuratorum" (concerning "the error of sheriffs, bailiffs, and also jurors in assizes"; Meindl's translation), demonstrating by its detailed analysis that "the surface of Gower's text is deceptively bland and the sub-text surprisingly rich" (182). Meindl sets the composition of the passage in 1378-80, largely on the basis of the absence of any reference to the events of 1381. In the course of his commentary, he explains the rule and scope of responsibility of the fourteenth-century sheriff, the opportunities that the position offered for venality and corruption, and how the office was evolving at the time that Gower wrote; the role of the "iurati," which he points out can only loosely be translated as "jurors"; the function of the bailiffs; and the different forms and settings of the assizes, including how they differed from the courts per se, before centering in on the "assisa de nocumento" ("assizes of nuisance"), which Gower slyly invokes in lines 420 and 436 by referring to the "nocumenti" committed by sheriffs rather than those which serve as the basis for a complaint. It is no small part of the merit of Meindl's analysis that in addition to his concern for the precise referent of Gower's terms (such as "legifer," p. 195), he is also alert to Gower's frequent plays on words, and he also cites the sources for some of Gower's imagery. Beneath the broad condemnation of avarice and corruption offered by Gower's text, Meindl finds some circumspect reference to specific issues and events from the years in which this passage was composed. In lines 445-62, he asserts, Gower treats miscarriage of justice by those with responsibility to enforce it as not merely a crime but as treason, a betrayal of the king, taking "what was likely the official royal position" on an issue on which thought was evolving during Gower's time. And he suggests that Gower's criticism of the assizes may have reference to a particular well publicized case involving some prominent local names (among them Nicholas Brembre and John Northampton) in which the issue was a blocked drain in a property owned by the Franciscans, but in which Meindl finds hints of irregularities in the proceedings that led to the plaintiff's success. "As a poetic spokesman for the king's faction [at that time]," Meindl argues, "Gower would have seen in Northampton's victory over the Franciscans (the poor man of l. 432?) at the least an inappropriate gain for the opponent of someone he favored" (205). Meindl writes with the advantage of greater familiarity with the records that he has examined, but for the rest of us, it is difficult to know precisely how much weight to give to this one case without knowing what others there might have been that Gower might have been equally interested in, or even involved in. And it is actually a little difficult to find a precise reference either to the king or to treason in lines 445-62. The invocation of "ius" rather than merely "lex," the comparison to Judas, and the reference to rewards in hell might suggest a broader moral basis for Gower's condemnation, more typical of the rest of VC. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Meindl, Robert J Published Meindl, Robert J. "Nuisance and Trespass in the 'Vox Clamantis': Sheriffs, Jurors and Bailiffs." Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis 20 (2015), pp. 181-213. ISSN 1087-5557 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Nuisance and Trespass in the 'Vox Clamantis': Sheriffs, Jurors and Bailiffs Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review By "spectral advocate" Barrington means that in London, British Library Additional MS 59495 (olim Trentham) Gower demonstrably but surreptitiously (hence "spectral") structures some of the poems according to formulae acquired in his legal training in order to support Henry IV's usurpation. Like Arthur Bahr, whose essay "Reading Codicological Form in John Gower's Trentham Manuscript" (reviewed in JGN 31.1), argued for reading the tri-lingual collection as a coherently planned entity, Barrington sees BL Add. MS 59495 as purposefully organized around what she calls "legal gestures" which are "particularly prominent at four points in the manuscript when the royal audience is addressed: the English 'In Praise of Peace,' the Latin 'Rex Celi Deus,' the Anglo-French dedicatory verse bookending Cinkante Balades, and the Latin explicit 'Henrici quarti primus'" (more commonly called 'Quicquid homo scribat' or In fine). When examined sequentially, they reveal Gower's legal strategy for defending and supporting Henry IV" (103). "In Praise of Peace" she finds developing "an accumulation of common law gestures that advocates for Henry's right to rule" without having to address directly the great difficulty that Henry seized the throne militarily, i.e., illegally (103). Underlying 'Rex celi Deus' on the other hand is the canon law practice of "the libel (libellus)" in which "after naming the plaintiff, defendant, and judge, the libel breaks into three sections: 'the grounds the plaintiff alleged in his lawsuit, . . . the remedy he sought to obtain,' and a section reserving 'the plaintiff's right to amend, withdraw, or enlarge any of the proceeding statements.' The 'libellus,' as canon-law advocates were advised, succinctly stated the plaintiff's case and avoided excessive verbiage in order not to introduce accidentally material that might be used by the defendant . . . . All in all, the process at the bishop's level could be swift, short, and not at all complicated" (107). In the Cinkante Balades, four lines in the poem "O Gentile Engleterre" are found to "invite us to compare their processes to the civil-law Court of Chivalry (and its access to wager by battle) and the ability to resort to wager of law." After Richard's humiliating exile of Henry, "the lines then acquit Henry of his shame by the only legal means available, the compurgator's oath" (110). In "the final Latin verse, 'Henrici quarti primus' ["Quicquid homo scribat"] . . . Gower's Latin again appropriates the language of legal documents; however, its procedural gesture veers from the verbal toward the visual: the manuscript's rubrication of the initial 'H' is the most ornate in the collection, transforming the majuscule into a crowned Henry, creating a visual corollary to the case the manuscript has been arguing all along. Additionally, the rubrication is so striking that it creates the effect of a royal seal, an image 'embellished even the humblest writ'" (113). BL Add. MS 59495, she concludes, is thus "full of praise for noble King Henry, the poems ultimately celebrate the adroitness with which a nimble man-of-law might make his client's case, no matter how overwhelming the odds might be, and no matter how many years have passes since he forsook the public spaces of the courts" (114] ). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Barrington, Candace Published Barrington, Candace. "The Spectral Advocate in John Gower's Trentham Manuscript." In Theorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England. Ed. Boboc, Andreea D. Medieval Law and Its Practice . Leiden: Brill, 2015, pp. 94-118. ISBN 9789004284647 Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Cinkante Balades In Praise of Peace Minor Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Spectral Advocate in John Gower's Trentham Manuscript. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brill, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review [van Dijk states his purpose in the essay as an "attempt to situate the Tale of Orestes in relation to contemporary cultural attitudes to vengeance, justice, and the (gendered) subject. My aim is not to collapse the historical/literary distinction, but to reveal something about how literature can help us to understand the legal subject in the late fourteenth century" (120-21). Orestes is included in Book III of the CA, the Book of Wrath (1885-2195), where it appears under the sub-section "Homicide"--a location that, given the tale's several threads, has been negatively received by the few readers who have commented on it. van Dijk however argues for its coherence, beginning with the observation that "the conflation of the terms 'murder' and 'vengeance' . . . suggests that we have to think of 'homicide' as a broader concept than merely an extra-legal killing" (122). He focuses on the tale's conclusion, the suicide of Egiona, Orestes' step-sister, noting that taking her own life testifies to her loss of legal personhood, and consequently represents her only avenue to vengeance of any sort. In van Dijk's view her case poses a significant difficulty for Gower, who "naturalizes retribution (even when apparently cruel), because so much of his poetics is based on poetic justice" (134) and Egiona rationally would seem to bear little, if any, guilt in the crimes of the tale. Elsewhere, for example in Book VII, Gower provides a number of stories that illustrate how the cruelty of tyrants and their counsellors receives its proper punishment. In every narrative the final act of poetic justice mirrors the original crime" (134). While Gower "worries that . . . cruel and unusual punishment is unjust," he has always a larger justification on which to call: "exemplary punishment, when it risks cruelty, empties itself of human agency and ascribes all responsibility to God" (136). While registering this as an option often availed upon by Gower, van Dijk nevertheless is less interested in it as an explanation of Gower's thought-processes. His conclusion probes deeper and is thus most provocative: "there are . . . times when Gower seems willing to uphold abstract ideas over personal concerns, law over circumstance, and example over pity. This is perhaps the cost of Gower's keen interest in poetic justice, that the individual must be sacrificed (rather than rehabilitated or excused) for the greater good (the law, the lesson). This will obviously not be a popular conclusion. We like to see Gower as inevitably kind and non-judgmental, perhaps an image of ourselves at our best. Yet Gower also remains a moralist, and sometimes he takes what seem like short-cuts. Egiona's death brings closure 'Thogh that non other man it wolde'." (137). (N.B.: the article contains three flagable errors of fact. Fn. 45 quotes three lines from the "Tale of Jew and the Pagan" VII. *3307-*3309, without the asterisk, Macaulay's indicator of presence in a subset of Ricardian MSS only-and attributes the speech to the Jew, when the speaker is in fact the Pagan. J. Allan Mitchell is cited as "Allan J. Mitchell" throughout, e.g., Fn. 59, Works Cited.) [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Van Dijk, Conrad Published Van Dijk, Conrad. "Vengeance and the Legal Person: John Gower's 'Tale of Orestes'." In Theorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England. Ed. Boboc, Andreea. Medieval Law and Its Practice . Leiden: Brill, 2015, pp. 119-41. ISBN 9789004284647 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 Vengeance and the Legal Person: John Gower's 'Tale of Orestes' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brill, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Whether he was formally trained or simply taught himself, the better to trade properties," Yeager writes, "whether he practiced or didn't, what is clear from his poetry in all three languages is how thoroughly the legal perspective guided, even governed, Gower's way of looking at the world" (73); and in contrast to "the commonplace view of 'moral Gower,'" Yeager describes what he calls Gower's "lawyerly habit of mind," by which he means a sharp ability to see both the strengths and weaknesses in both sides of any argument. "Every situation has more than one side for the 'lawyerly mind,' every side can be painted more or less favorably, and in the end the court should uphold the best presented and the most persuasive--albeit not always the right, the guiltless, or the deserving" (74). Such a habit of mind, Yeager asserts, better accounts for what others--notably David Aers--have described simply as unresolved contradictions in Gower's ethical and political beliefs. As his example, Yeager offers a subtle rereading of Gower's "Cronica Tripertita," not just as an anti-Ricardian tract but also as a muted warning to Henry. Throughout the CrT Gower carefully distinguishes between humanly created law and justice, which proceeds from God. Gower shows Richard manipulating the law in order to corrupt justice, while the Appellants are consistently described as "just." Upon Henry's accession, one of the new king's first acts is to pardon Richard's counselor and intimate William Bagot, an act of mercy that also "quite clearly re-established the superiority of royal will over the law" (89), and his attempt "to emulate Christ by extending his newly acquired power supra-legally, even to show mercy, exposes a potential in him to become Richard . . . . Gower withholds little in his praise of Henry, . . . Yet at the same time he knew Henry to be a man, as vulnerable at bottom as are all men" (90). The poem thus offers both praise and "caution to ambition" (91) and reflects "both a skeptical wisdom borne of worldly disappointment and a hope rejuvenated at new beginnings" (88). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "John Gower's Poetry and the 'Lawyerly Habit of Mind'." In Theorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England. Ed. Boboc, Andreea. Medieval Law and Its Practice . Leiden: Brill, 2015, pp. 71-93. ISBN 9789004284647 Gower Subject Biography of Gower Cronica Tripertita Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower's Poetry and the 'Lawyerly Habit of Mind' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brill, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In "Rex celi Deus," almost certainly written shortly after the usurpation of Henry IV in 1399, Gower--in Donavin's words--"combines structures and strategies taught in 'dictamen' (instruction on prose letters) with the singing of a popular hymn . . . 'Celi Deus Sanctissime,' one in a series of Gregorian chants about creation" (103-04). The result is "a worshipful tone that invokes the coronation liturgy" while simultaneously functioning as "a poetic missive that might be chanted in order to speak to the king directly about the historical moment, locate late fourteenth-century politics in the context of God's reign, remark upon Henry's participation in the cycles of creation, and emphasixe the coronation's liturgical nature" (104). Donavin follows Macaulay and Carlson in noting, further, that many of the later lines of "Rex celi Deus" appear in the so-called "Epistola ad regem" portion of the Vox Clamantis (VI. 581-1198)--thus indicating a typical Gowerian re-purposing of work originally composed for Richard II, as well as providing Donavin with a basis for her investigation of the poem's "rhetorical strategies for letter writing." (106) The epistolary and the hymnic combine in the poem, making it for Donavin "neither a dashed-off effort nor a sly undermining of the new King, but rather a repeated use of language that might be sung for any legitimate king, and yet verses aimed at this particular King who must honour his own position in historical and cosmic cycles." (108) Donavin speculates (necessarily inconclusively) on whether Gower learned his dictamen from Ovid or at the Inns of Court (109-111), and remarks insightfully on the epistolary quality of the "self-portrait: the poet is 'a poor man' on bended knee, offering his gift of words (lines 53-54). The belated, though appropriate, self-identifying image provides a substitute for the poet's absence: whether or not Gower was able to deliver 'Rex Celi Deus' in person, the self-portrait recreates a scene of the poet's epistolary speech wherever it is read." (112). She gives a detailed examination of the poem's rhetorical structure (113-15), and of its possible relation to the hymn "Celi Deus Sanctissime" ((115-18). She concludes, "By opening 'Rex Celi Deus' with a refashioned Gregorian chant, inviting all England to sing along, and attaching these moments of song to an epistolary structure, Gower can celebrate God's sanctioning of the new king, include the people in this blessed event, and directly address Henry. The overall effect of 'Rex Celi Deus,' then, is of language and music both representing eternal cycles and concentrating on a particular moment within them. The coronation of Henry IV to which the poem looks, like any liturgy, focuses on God's blessings from heaven, while at the same time speaks directly to the blessed." (119). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Donavin, Georgiana Published Donavin, Georgiana. "'Rex Celi Deus': John Gower's Heavenly Missive." In Public Declamations: Essays on Medieval Rhetoric, Education, and Letters in Honour of Martin Camargo. Ed. Donavin, Georgiana and Stodola, Denise. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2015, pp. 103-23. ISBN 978-2503547770 Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'Rex Celi Deus': John Gower's Heavenly Missive Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brepols, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Donavin outlines the argument of her essay in its opening paragraph, as follows: "'Rex Celi Deus' is a poem of fifty-six lines written in 1399 to celebrate Henry IV's ascent to England's throne after the deposition of Richard II. There John Gower forges an innovative conjunction of epistolary and musical conventions, as he combines structures and strategies taught in "dictamen" (instruction on prose letters) with the singing of a popular hymn… 'Celi Deus Sanctissime,' one in a series of Gregorian chants about creation. Although recent scholarship has promoted an ironic reading of Gower's poem, 'Rex Celi Deus''s deployment of 'Celi Deus Sanctissime' creates a worshipful tone that invokes the coronation liturgy…." Gower's purpose, she argues, is "to speak to the king directly about the historical moment, locate late fourteenth-century politics in the context of God's reign, remark upon Henry's participation in the cycles of continuing creation, and emphasize the coronation's liturgical nature" (103-04). The essay includes Donavin's translation of Gower's poem, in an appendix (122-23). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 36.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Donavin, Georgiana. Published Donavin, Georgiana. "'Rex Celi Deus': John Gower's Heavenly Missive." In Public Declamations: Essays on Medieval Rhetoric, Education, and Letters in Honour of Martin Camargo. Ed. Georgiana Donavin and Denise Stodola. Turnhout: Brepols, 2015. Pp. 103-23. Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'Rex Celi Deus': John Gower's Heavenly Missive. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Knapp's essay is preceded by his own summary, as follows: "This essay seeks to revise our sense of late medieval allegory by examining the representation of crowds and urban space in Hoccleve, Langland, and Gower. I begin by looking at Walter Benjamin's treatment of the flâneur, with a specific eye towards his sense that allegory is born in the hermeneutical challenge of making meaning out of the unknown faces in a city crowd. I then turn to readings of Hoccleve's 'La Male Regle,' Langland's "Piers Plowman," and the initial Visio in Gower's VC to establish both the surprising frequency with which late medieval English allegory turned to depictions of crowds as well as the particular narrative structures generated out of the attempts to represent urban space in these three poets." Knapp offers close readings of Hoccleve (concentrating on his travels through the London streets), Langland (concentrating on his vividly "meaningful crowds," in Benjaminian fashion), and Gower (concentrating on the 1381 rebels' invasion of "New Troy"--a form of "not-London"). Gower's narratives, Knapp finds, "are often organized around an oscillation from urban spaces to extra-urban wilderness and back again" (102). An example is the nautical wanderings of Apollonius in CA Book VIII. But "perhaps the most striking version of this narrative structure occurs in the dream visio that supplies a prologue to Gower's Vox Clamantis" (102). Knapp traces the narrator's flight from the crowd of rebels-turned-animals from city to woods, finding in it three levels of allegorical import--"at least three comments on the significance of 1381 in terms of the city and the crowd. First, the crowd's pursuit suggests that with the boundaries of the city and country loosened by rebellion, the urban mob is free both to enter the city and also to disrupt the Horatian refuge of the countryside. Second, the juridical force of the allegory suggests the downfall of yet another stabilizing urban institution as the court of law…has been swallowed up by sheer rumor. And, lastly, the fast pursuit of these tongues seems a wholly malevolent version of Langland's constant motion; here, the motion of the crowd must stand for…fear of the rapidity with which both the word and fact of rebellion spread from region to region" (105). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 36.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Knapp, Ethan. Published Knapp, Ethan. "Towards a Material Allegory: Allegory and Urban Space in Hoccleve, Langland, and Gower." Exemplaria 27 (2015): 93-109. Gower Subject 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 Towards a Material Allegory: Allegory and Urban Space in Hoccleve, Langland, and Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Marshall argues that Chaucer's Miller is linked to the rebels of the 1381 Rising by his large, furnace-like mouth. Before analyzing Chaucer's imagery, she establishes the common currency in which the rebels' linguistic apparatus was coined, investigating four contemporary chroniclers (Thomas Walsingham, Henry Knighton, Jean Froissart, and the Anonimalle author) and John Gower's Visio Anglie in Book I of the Vox Clamantis. Marshall sees the chronicles presenting the ruling classes as the victims of the Rising; they depict the unfree peasantry attempting to "silence the ruling speech through the destruction of legal and official documents, most often with fire as their weapon of choice" (77). The chroniclers, she argues, paint the rebels intending to rewrite the documentary record to give themselves, as the "commons," the same rights under the king that other social groups enjoyed. Following the arguments of Steven Justice and Paul Strohm, Marshall shows that the chronicles censor and discredit the rebels' voice by reducing it to animal noises and an incoherent clamor, a strategy replicated by Gower in the "Beast Vision" of the Visio. Here the commoners are further demeaned by Gower's use of curtailed forms of their English names and a simplified syntax in which to represent their bestial behavior. Especially notable, in her view, is that, as their disturbance reaches its destructive zenith, the noise issuing from the peasants' mouths becomes sulfurous flames that consume everything. Chaucer's Miller, while not explicitly connected to the rebels of 1381, likewise violates the conventions of order, cries out in a loud voice, and, in parodying the Knight's philosophical romance with a bawdy fabliau, suppresses the ruling elite's elegance with a peasant's coarseness. That the Miller's vision is destructive of conventional values is "emphasized by the presence of his furnace-like mouth" (94). Nevertheless, Chaucer, unlike Gower, makes no effort to suppress or censor his character's voice, instead advising any troubled reader to simply choose a different story, for "the peasant word is only as destructive as the author, firstly, and the reader, secondly, allow it to be" (97). In the end, the narrator "provides the necessary guidance so that the Miller's 'forneys' may safely remain closer to the cold black color of his nostrils than the fiery red of his beard and effectively shows us how we may, indeed, play with fire" (97). [RJM. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 36.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Marshall, Camille. Published Marshall, Camille. "Figuring the Dangers of the 'Greet Forneys': Chaucer and Gower's Timely (Mis)Reporting of the Peasant Voice." Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 46 (2015): 75-97. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Figuring the Dangers of the 'Greet Forneys': Chaucer and Gower's Timely (Mis)Reporting of the Peasant Voice. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Sobecki's essay addresses three major claims: 1) that the "Trentham Manuscript" (now properly London, British Library MS Additional 59495), commonly thought to have been a gift to Henry IV, instead remained very likely in Gower's possession until his death, and thereafter in St. Mary Overeys Priory until the Priory's surrender ca. 1541, during the Dissolution; 2) that "In Praise of Peace" was begun as a poem for Richard II supporting peace with France, and finished as a poem for Henry, urging the same--a purpose that governed the inclusion of the Traitié pour les amantz marietz balades and Ecce patet tensus as well, all of which concern "marriage," but not of people, rather of nations; 3) that the final two Latin poems ("Ecce patet tensus" and "Henrici quarti primus," so titled in Sobecki's article, elsewhere and more commonly "Quicquid homo scribat," or occasionally In fine"), copied in a hand identified by Malcolm Parkes as "Scribe 10," are in fact the work of Gower himself, as therefore is also the latter portion of BL MS Cotton Tiberius A.IV, which exhibits the same hand. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 36.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sobecki, Sebastian. Published Sobecki, Sebastian. "'Ecce patet tensus': The Trentham Manuscript, 'In Praise of Peace,' and John Gower's Autograph Hand." Speculum 90 (2015): 925-59. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies In Praise of Peace Minor Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Ecce patet tensus": The Trentham Manuscript, "In Praise of Peace," and John Gower's Autograph Hand. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yeager provides an overview of John Gower's engagement, in life and works, with the procedures, lexis and literary-creative influence of common (or civil) law. Biographical facts and conjectures are rehearsed (period of birth; county of origin; possible social, armigerous extraction and filiation; vexed 'striped-sleeves motif' at Mirour de l'Omme 21772-74; landed estate ownership and acquisition, including the 'Septvauns Case'; elaborate testament concerning real estate and chattels), all shown to evince vigorous, if involved, response to law and its proceedings. Moving on to the textual/literary level, Yeager reviews a number of passages (in Mirour, Vox, Cronica, Confessio) clearly indicative of the poet's writing under multi-sided, common-legal influence across his exceptionally trilingual corpus, critically addressing socio-literary topics from estates to justice and kingship to procedures of love as trial and verdict: "[Gower's] scathing critique of aspects of the judicial system and profession in general; the overt presence of legal terms in his trilingual writings; and often enough the almost judicial presentation of narrative matter have seemed to many largely to prove exact legal knowledge, if not first-hand practice" (650). Yeager thus contributes to a current revival of looking into the case for a "legal Gower." Yet missing from his account is how Gower's oeuvre also reflects forms of possibly rudimentary, yet significant absorption of canon law. Still unstudied is how Gower would have known about it, most conceivably (if not any earlier) through his exceptionally long residence at the Augustinian priory at Southwark facilitating familiarisation with canon law and ensuing synodal legislation (distinctive components of regular canons' habitus). The poems nevertheless reflect a sizeable awareness of that domain, especially in discussions of matrimony or socio-religious estates, not least Mirour (notably at 16081-92 ff., and 17137-748; both laws are in syntactic and prosodic equipoise at 16092 and 17140) and Traitié pour Essempler les Amantz Marietz." [J-PP. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 36.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R.F. "John Gower" in Écrivains juristes et juristes écrivains du Moyen Âge au siècle des Lumières, ed. Bruno Méniel (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015), pp, 648-652. ISBN 9782812451461. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Language and Word Studies Vox Clamantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Cronica Tripertita Confessio Amantis Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Cornelius offers a crisp and cogent review of scholarship on Gower's "Visio Anglie" and advances a compelling argument about its ideological significance. He identifies three major strands of scholarly activity on the poem that Gower wrote about the Rising of 1381 and inserted as the first book of the "Vox Clamantis." One strand has focused on the "ideological work" that the poem performs in its account of the insurgency; another has advanced and refined our understanding of Gower's use of his biblical and classical sources; and a third has exploration of the literary indecorum of Gower's "vertiginous dream vision": its mishmash of sources and allusion, including vernacular elements; and its "surrealistic shifts in character, setting, and generic mode" (23-4). Cornelius builds on all three strands of scholarship and seeks to integrate them in ideological framework. It suggests, in relation to the third strand, not only how the "aggressively dehumanizing" presentation of the rebels served to delegitimise their grievances and demands but also how the "transgressions of literary decorum" express, "at the level of prosody, the offense committed by English labourers who forced their way into the homes and into the thoughts of their social superiors in June of 1381" (24). In relation to the second strand, he shows how "the storehouse of Latin poetry . . . figures in Gower's poem as the mental equipment necessary for a proper understanding of contemporary events" (24), privileging again the educated elite. It also "delivers a deeper mythography of power," in which the insurrection and its defeat are given added cultural resonance and set in a larger providential history (29). Drawing the threads together, Cornelius incorporates Andrew Galloway's insight that, in the last analysis, the poem is not about the rebels and their outrages but about "the moral condition of the dreamer-speaker" (27). The study ends by offering a subtler sense of the poem's ideological work. The poem not only delegitimises the political agency of the serfs and the lower orders generally but also excludes them, as lacking reason, from the moral community. The poem likewise seeks to reduce the force of the insurrection: from a revolt of the commons, to animal hordes, to tempest and storm, the rising is "shrunk into a matter of the governing class's conscience." For Gower, "it follows that the governing classes must be educated, encouraged, and supported, and even prodded toward correct living" (44). [MJB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 37.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Cornelius, Ian. Published Cornelius, Ian, "Gower and the Peasants' Revolt." Representations 131 (2015): 22-51. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Minor Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and the Peasants' Revolt. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In Chapter 4, "Interlude: Nebuchadnezzar's Dream," Zayaruznaya explores the idol made of gold, silver, bronze and steel from Nebuchadnezzar's Dream in Daniel 2. As Zayaruznaya explains in the introduction to this chapter: "A cultural history of Nebuchadnezzar's statue has yet to be written" [142]. Despite its brevity, this chapter takes important steps in that direction. Tracing the images of the statue from biblical commentaries through Dante and Deguileville, Zayaruznaya offers a concise account of the image's history that supplements Russell Peck's much earlier "John Gower and the Book of Daniel" (1989). The core of this chapter thoughtfully juxtaposes Gower's vision of the statue in the CA with both Vitry's "Cum statua/Hugo" and Machaut's "Remède de Fortune." Although Zayaruznaya declares that "[it] is not the aim of this study to establish any definite links between Gower and the musical works of Machaut and Vitry," [171] the specific parallels between Gower's poetry and the work of Machaut and Vitry are compelling. "Hugo," she argues, "is split--like Fortune, like the statue, like mortal man in Gower's scheme--between opposites. Like the world, he began good and got worse; like the statue, he stands divided" [171]. Likewise, she argues, regarding CA Pro.935 and lines 876-80 of the "Remède": "In addition to the borrowed theme of Fortune, the "Confessio amantis" is linked to the "Remède" by a rhetorical device": anaphora [168]. Zayaruznaya, Gower, Vitry, and Machaut's "interpretations stand aside from Italian and French poets who use it as a more positive and sometimes even a stable symbol. The decision to cast it in a negative light thus becomes exactly that: a decision, rather than a mechanical retelling of a Bible story," [172]. As scholars continue to expand critical understandings of Gower's relationship to his French peers, Zayaruznaya's contribution illuminates a particularly significant point of intersection and, perhaps, exchange. [ZS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Zayaruznaya, Anna. Published Zayaruznaya, Anna. The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 142-72. ISBN 9781107039667. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Aude quotes in her own translation George Ashby's statement in "The Active Policy of a Prince" that Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate were the "premiers poètes de cette nation" but unlike the latter two, Gower alone wrote in three languages. About Gower's "multilinguisme" she poses two questions: 1) What status and functions did Gower accord to each, both for himself and for his listener? 2) Are there intersections between "les trois 'principaux poèmes' de Gower," and if so, of what sort? (57-58). She provides a chronology and very brief assessment of the major works: MO, Traitié, CB, VC, CrT, "Poèmes latins," CA, and "In Praise of Peace" (59-61). Aude finds that Gower was "très attaché" to trilingual composition, citing "Eneidos Bucolis" (61-62). Contrary to arguments tying Gower's language choices to particular functions, e.g., Latin to political critique, Aude sees the boundaries between his language choices "fluid" ("floues") but with (in a nice turn of phrase) "les ponts nombreux" (62-64). This latter point she argues using charts ("Concordances thématiques") showing overlapping areas of social criticism, by class and occupation (64-69). Gower also knew his audience, she asserts, as they were largely also trilingual (69-70)--and this was important, since his purposes were to effect social and individual reform (71). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Aude, Mairey. Published Aude, Mairey. "John Gower ou le Multilinguisme en Action." Médiévales 68 (2015): 57-72. [N.B.: this article is in French.] 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 John Gower ou le Multilinguisme en Action, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Werthmüller seeks to "highlight some hitherto neglected details about the presence, but mostly about the absence of the -e" (179) in word-finally positioned monosyllabic adjectives in Middle English. Her analysis focuses on the CA, accessed through Macaulay's edition. The "Canterbury Tales" are used as a point of comparison. In addition to scansion, the study makes use of grammatical (adjectival inflection) and lexical (etymology, word-formation) evidence. Based on her critical scrutiny of potential instances of the apocope (omission) of the unstressed final-e in adjective + noun structures, Werthmüller finds that this feature, "and especially unconditioned [purely metrical] apocope, is virtually non-existent in the Confessio" (188). Hence, "Gower's grammar and metre is highly regular . . . even more regular than has been considered" (195). The findings include useful observations on distinguishing premodifying adjectives from adjective-noun compounds (such as the compound trew man, 192–194). Werthmüller concludes with the observation that "[v]ery little linguistic interest has been expressed so far towards Gower" (195). She emphasizes that "[i]t would be highly important to give him the linguistic attention that his contribution to the English language and literature deserves." (195). The lines of the CA discussed in the study comprise Macaulay's I. 680, 2479; II. 295, 660, 2341; III. 300, 301, 889, 900, 2346; IV. 2064; V. 1323-1324, 2877, 3009, 4627, 6155, 7391; VI. 707, 1501, 2049, 4702, 4791, 4976; VII.1640, 2560. [MP. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Werthmüller, Gyöngyi. Published Werthmüller, Gyöngyi. "Final -e in Gower's and Chaucer's Monosyllabic Premodifying Adjectives: A Grammatical/Metrical Analysis." In Approaches to Middle English: Variation, Contact and Change, ed. Juan Camillo Conde-Silvestre and Javier Calle-Martín (Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang, 2015), 179-97. ISBN: 9783631655153. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Final -e in Gower's and Chaucer's Monosyllabic Premodifying Adjectives: A Grammatical/Metrical Analysis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Butterfield, Ardis. Published Butterfield, Ardis. "Afterwords: Forms of Death." Exemplaria 27 (2015): 167-82. Review Ardis Butterfield links John Gower's use of the ballade sequence to Guillaume de Machaut's innovative use of the same genre, especially considering how each poet uses language. Butterfield begins with Derrida's and Bakhtin's definitions of genre to bring us into her argument that Gower and Machaut using genre in much the same way, centuries earlier. Comparing Gower's "Cinkante Balades" to Machaut's "Voir Dit," Butterfield explains she will try to determine the differences between each poet's French and, for Gower, how his French relates to his English (170). Butterfield briefly cites Julia Kristeva, "in a spirit of retro-fashionability," on intertextuality, to come to the conclusion that "all discourse presupposes another discourse"--propelling Butterfield into an examination of cliché (172). Specifically, by way of illustration, she cites Gower's use of French cliché (providing lists of them in her article) to argue that such use demonstrates his mastery of the French language (175). Butterfield then compares aspects of the CB with Machaut's "Voir Dit." Within this "closed system of medieval French courtly language," Butterfield asserts that "Gower is making specific reference to the 'Voir Dit,' and seeking to engage with some of Machaut's aims, structures, and linguistic devices as he invents his own work" (177-78). Furthermore, in a coda on cliché, Butterfield suggests we might consider Gower's " Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz" as "a response to the 'Confessio amantis' . . . and hence a decision by Gower to trump the Englished erotic discourse with French preaching on adultery" (180). She concludes (quoting Frank Kermode's "The Sense of an Ending"): "In shaping our ends, the formula, the fixed form is a vital tool for living, a daily death, and a generic practice that meets our 'permanent need to live by the pattern rather than the fact'(11)" (180). [JGS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and LIterary Relations Language and Word Studies 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 Afterwords: Forms of Death. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Sarah L. Higley's essay explains the process by which she recreated three of Gower's tales from the "Confessio Amantis" ("The Travelers and the Angel," "Canace and Machaire," and "Florent") in Second Life, an online virtual world that uses avatars and allows users, within certain limits, to create space and to express their characters' selves through art, accessories, etc. Higley makes the argument that this project engages the very medieval urge of retelling and compiling: "I argue that the medieval collaboration of author, scribe, illuminator, and reader, along with the penchant for gathering stories and adapting them, is reflected by filming in a multiply-occupied virtual world like Second Life that exhibits its users' recyclable creations. The artistic spaces I find there provide analogues not only for the spaces through which Gower's characters wander, but also for the symbolic iconography that informs Gower's work" (9-10). In great detail, Higley explains to readers the inner workings of Second Life and machinima, noting especially its strengths of collaboration and community. She even notes that the limitations of the medium--"its limited range of animations and facial expressions" (16)--actually help her to "resemble the multi-media qualities of a medieval illuminated manuscript" (16). Noting the specific difficulties presented in rendering Gower's Middle English in the virtual world, Higley then explains and reflects upon her process of recreating each of the three tales in Second Life. She concludes of her machinima, "These are not virtual voices. They speak across boundaries. Gower speaks to us across time, just as Ovid and other ancients spoke to Gower. Making this machinima was my attempt to speak for Gower, not just to Gower scholars but to viewers who could become familiar with his work and the vitality of Middle English language and literature" (56). [JGS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Higley, Sarah L. Published Higley, Sarah L. "'For it Acordeth Noght to Kinde': Remediating Gower's Confessio Amantis in Machinima." Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media 2.1 (2015): n.p. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "For it Acordeth Noght to Kinde": Remediating Gower's "Confessio Amantis" in Machinima. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Focusing on depictions of shipwrecks, Richmond examines "how the littoral space of the seashore is cast as a source of perilous and problematic material bounty" (316) in four Middle English romances: "Sir Amadace," "Emaré," Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale," and Gower's "Tale of Constance" from Book II of CA. He first explores the Middle English semantics of "wrek" and "wrak,"and shows that in medieval English legal and historical records "shipwrecked property was a site of contested claims" (316). Similar contestation appears in the romances in various ways, recurrently depicting the "mercenary motivations of a notably English shore-dweller" (328). In "Amadace," the rights of the living are in conflict with those of the dead; in "Emaré," the eponymous protagonist and her marvelous gown represent survival and treasure in a single figure. Chaucer's version of Custance's shipwreck in Northumberland, Richmond tells us, emphasizes the "human cost behind this wreck" (329)--cost both to Custance and to the constable who seeks treasure from her ship. Notably, Richmond does not comment on Gower's version of this episode, perhaps because Constance's landing does not involve a wreck in Gower. He does discuss, however, the landing of Gower's Constance and her son in the realm of Theloüs (along with the analogous landing in Chaucer), even though Gower does not mention a shipwreck here either (Chaucer's mention is, at best, slight). Both versions of the tale include a threat of rape in this episode, which Richmond assesses as a "particularly disturbing and violent iteration" of the motif of the "vulnerability of crews washed up in foreign lands" and the "pillaging" of wrecks (329), a claim that cannot be made convincingly of Gower's tale since there is no mention of either wreck or pillage. Even less convincing is Richmond's further claim that the "perverted spirit of capitalist competition" proves to be the "downfall" of Theloüs's steward, even when the claim is qualified by acknowledgement that the "will of God" operates here. It is fair to say that Gower's scene "illustrates the dangerous position of stranded ships" but it is harder to find in it a shipwreck, much less a collocation of rape and pillage, or a depiction of "the dangerous consequences of blindly pursing the salvaging desire and anxiety over commercial competition" (331). Generally, Richmond's argument is persuasive and/or provocative, but it runs aground here. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Richmond, Andrew M. Published Richmond, Andrew M. "'The broken schippus he ther fonde': Shipwrecks and the Human Costs of Investment Capital in Middle English Romance." Neophilologus 99 (2015): 315-33. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "The broken schippus he ther fonde": Shipwrecks and the Human Costs of Investment Capital in Middle English Romance. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Trivellini considers four frame-tale "re-mediations" of the Philomela story derived ultimately from Ovid's "Metamorphoses": Margaret Atwood's "Nightingale" in "The Tent" (2006), George Pettie's in "A Petite Pallace of Pettie His Pleasure" (1576), Chaucer's in Legend of Good Women, and Gower's in Book V of "Confessio Amantis," focusing on how analysis of "the 'mise en discours' of the narrative material" (n.p.; quoted from the English abstract, also included in French) reveals "elaborate forms of discursivity that serve a wide range of generic purposes" (99). Concerned more with reception theory than with source study or with the individual works, Trivellini discusses the medieval works last and briefly, focusing on Chaucer's aesthetic concerns and on Gower's ethical ones, describing the "self-aware game with his readers" (96) that she finds in Chaucer's elliptical treatment of the narrative and the pragmatic approach to ethics and the "psychological realism" (97) evident in Gower's relatively vivid characterizations and his emphasis on the generative nature of speech acts. The abused sisters speak more, and more vividly, in Gower than in Chaucer, Trivellini maintains, and Tereüs's punishment is emphatically verbal--ongoing defamation rather than the death (and eating) of his child. To Trevellini, this emphasis on the ethical nature of language underlies much of CA: the "combination of intimate confession and didactic explanation in the exchanges between Genius and Amans finds a parallel in the tale of Philomela, specifically in the sisters' speeches and Genius's detailed explanation of their metamorphoses" (97).] [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Trivellini, Samanta. Published Trivellini, Samanta. "The Myth of Philomela from Margaret Atwood to . . . Chaucer: Contexts and Theoretical Perspectives." Interférences Litteraires / Literaire Interferenties 17 (2015): 85-99. Available at http://www.interferenceslitteraires.be. Last accessed November 9, 2020. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Myth of Philomela from Margaret Atwood to . . . Chaucer: Contexts and Theoretical Perspectives. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Conrad van Dijk frames his essay with two postmodern theorists, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida, and their arguments for the relationship between law and the exception to the law. From this context, he then discusses how two Middle English poets, William Langland and John Gower, present and understand the exception to the law in their poetry. van Dijk goes on to examine how these poets present a premodern understanding of the law and its exception, especially how the exception exists in relation to politics, philosophy, and faith (3). van Dijk explains the benefit of a postmodern reading of these authors: "Indeed, a postmodern reading of Langland clarifies how 'Piers Plowman' fails to resolve the tension between law and nature. It also reveals that John Gower is much more eager to provide a solution" (3-4). He adds, "Gower's work ["Confessio Amantis"] makes an ideal testing ground for how we might reconcile our own theoretical interest in the notion of necessity with an appreciation of historical alterity" (4). In "Piers Plowman," van Dijk concerns himself with the refrain throughout the poem: "redde quod debes." Need is a matter of nature (kynde) rather than law, he concludes (12). For Gower, van Dijk asserts that "the exception in terms of law determines much of his poetic output," but the need that Gower addresses is not economic--it is sexual (18). The basic human need for Gower is Cupid's law--love (23). van Dijk argues, "Gower's solution, then, is to make need the defining feature of love (the exception becomes the rule), and so it is only natural that when need subsides, so does love" (31). After returning to Derrida and Agamben, van Dijk concludes that our "postmodern awareness" of the exception in relation to the law might actually help us better understand "the alterity (the exceptionality) of medieval texts" (40). [JGS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor van Dijk, Conrad J. Published van Dijk, Conrad J. "Nede hath no law": The State of Exception in Gower and Langland. Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media 2.2 (2015): 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 "Nede hath no law": The State of Exception in Gower and Langland. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Readers who enjoy deep dives into etymology or nautical diction will take pleasure in Sayers' essay on lexical and technical backgrounds to Gower's use in "Confessio Amantis" V.7048 of "love," meaning "luff." His study is brief, but rich: after describing appropriate data and commentary in dictionaries and editions, Sayers proposes that "the Old Norse lexeme 'úfr' [a kind of sail-pin] is the ultimate source of 'luff' and congeners" (137), tracing the word through unattested French forms to attested "le lof," and surmising that nautical "[t]echnological evolutions, now difficult to trace, must have accompanied this refocus in vocabulary" before and after the word appeared in Gower. Gower's usage occurs as a metaphor in the context of commentary on the sacrilegious exchange of a love token in church. Sayers translates and explains the lines as follows: "'So close to the wind do they [i.e., the lovers] luff that it is as if to say, she shall not forget that I have obtained this token of her.' Gower's church-going lovers are engaged in close sailing, not 'dangerously' in the sense of exposing their suits to disaster [as usually explained], but in an expeditious manner, trying to win advantage from difficult circumstances--the headwind of church protocol, the coolness of the lady" (138). Sayers missed Alexandra Hennessy Olsen's 1986 comments on the punning of "luff" and "love" in this context, perhaps because "John Gower Newsletter" bibliographers missed it too--until this issue. See Olsen, "The Literary Impact of the Pun in Middle English Literature." In Geardagum: Essays on Old and Middle English 7 (1986): 17-36. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sayers, William. Published Sayers, William. "Gower's 'So nyh the weder thei wol love' (Confessio Amantis, 5, 7048)." ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 28 (2015): 135-39. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies 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 Gower's "So nyh the weder thei wol love" ("Confessio Amantis," 5, 7048). Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Truitt's study is of "medieval robots both actual and fictional," investigating "the complex history of medieval automata . . . to understand the interdependence of science, technology, and the imagination in medieval culture and between medieval culture and modernity" (1). In his third chapter, "'Talking Heads': Astral Science, Divination, and Legends of Medieval Philosophers," he discusses Gower's brief tale of Robert Grosseteste and the brass head he creates to foretell the future (CA IV.234-49), presented as an exemplum of one of the branches of Sloth (lachesse). Truitt points to an earlier brass head created by "Gerbert" [of Aurillac, the later Pope Sylvester II], citing William of Malmsbury's narrative as a source for the Grosseteste story (90), and alludes further to connections between the seven years Grosseteste labors and "the seven planets and their influence on the seven metals," as well as "the metaphor of 'Natura Artifex' employed by the Neoplatonist philosophers in the twelfth century" (90), without offering evidence or deeper explanation. He suggests that "Gower was familiar with Grosseteste, whose work (especially his 'Constitutions,' a treatise on clerical reform, and 'Le Chasteau d'Amor,' an Anglo-Norman romance) were influential in Ricardian England" (91); his source for these latter claims is George G. Fox (1931). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Truitt, E. R. Published Truitt, E. R. Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 89-91. 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 Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Richmond, Andrew Murray. Published Ph.D. Dissertation. The Ohio State University, 2015. Open access at http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1428671857 (accessed February 3, 2023). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review From Richmond's abstract: "My dissertation . . . interpret[s] the textual landscapes and ecological details that permeate late-medieval British romances . . . c.1300 – c. 1500, focusing on . . . fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English and Scottish conceptions of the relationships between literary worlds and 'real-world' locations. In my first section, I analyze the role of topography and the management of natural resources in constructing a sense of community in 'Sir Isumbras,' 'William of Palerne,' and 'Havelok the Dane,' and explain how abandoned or ravaged agricultural landscapes in 'Sir Degrevant' and the 'Tale of Gamelyn' betray anxieties about the lack of human control over the English landscape in the wake of population decline caused by civil war, the Black Death, and the Little Ice Age. My next section examines seashores and waterscapes in 'Sir Amadace,' 'Emaré,' 'Sir Eglamour of Artois,' the 'Awntyrs off Arthure,' and the Constance romances of Chaucer and Gower. Specifically, I explain how a number of romances present the seaside as a simultaneously inviting and threatening space whose multifaceted nature as a geographical, political, and social boundary embodies the complex range of meanings embedded in the Middle English concept of "play" – a word that these texts [including Gower's tale of Apollonius] often link with the seashore. Beaches, too, serve as stages upon which the romances act out their anxieties over the consequences of human economic endeavor, with scenes where shipwrecks are configured as opportunities for financial gain for scavengers and as mortal peril for sailors [including Constance]. In my third section, I move beyond the boundary space of the sea to consider the landscape descriptions of foreign lands. . . , focusing in particular on representations of Divine will manifested through landscape features and dramatic weather in the Holy Land of 'Titus and Vespasian' and the Far East of 'Kyng Alisaunder.' Finally, my concluding section returns to literary descriptions of medieval Britain, examin[ing] the idea of the 'foreign at home.' I discuss here how romances of Scotland and the Anglo-Scottish border such as 'Sir Colling,' 'Eger and Grime,' and 'Thomas of Erceldoune' cast the Border landscape as one defined by rugged topography, extreme weather, and an innate sense of independence, while also emphasizing its proximity to the Otherworlds of Fairy and Hell. I then trace how these topics get developed later, in the early modern ballads that are based on some of these romances, explaining how song-texts persist in communicating some of these same ideas regarding Scottish and northern English landscapes." Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading Landscapes in Medieval British Romance. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review From Zuraikat's abstract: "[Because] the anti-crusade voice of Gower and Langland has been discussed by many other scholars, this study focuses on Chaucer's poems and their implicit opposition of crusading. I argue that despite Chaucer's apparent neutrality to crusading as well as other sociopolitical and cultural matters of England, his poetry can hardly be read but as an indirect critique of war in general and crusading in particular . . . ." Before dedicating four chapters to Chaucer and his works, Zuraikat "discusses the dominance as well as nature of crusading in fourteenth-century England" in his first chapter and, in his second, "reads Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and Langland's 'Piers Plowman' as anti-crusade poems." After discussing selected passages from books IV and VII of CA (pp. 57-65), Zuraikat concludes that "read as a romance of courtly love or as a pilgrimage poem, the anti-crusade voice of Genius, Amans, and Gower is prominent enough not to ignore" (65). [MA. eJGN 42.2] ] Author/Editor Author/Editor Zuraikat, Malek Jamal. Published Zuraikat, Malek Jamal. "The Anti-Crusade Voice of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, 2015. Open access at https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/9 (accessed January 28, 2023). Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Anti-Crusade Voice of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Elias analyzes "a representative section of medieval English literary texts from the late fourteenth century in terms of [identified gnostic tenets], showing how the texts adapt them through the use of a specifically chosen genre (the dream vision), the technique of subversion, and the overall function of art as 'The possibility of making the invisible visible, [and] of giving presence to what can only be imagined,' to create what I call the 'late-medieval gnostic moment'" (3). In the chapters not focused on Gower, Elias discusses the "Pearl"-Poet's oeuvre and "Piers Plowman" (the first chapter and introduction sets up her "gnostic paradigm" framework). The fourth and final chapter of her book, "Gower's Bower of Bliss: A Successful Passing into Hermetic Gnosis," offers readers a thought-provoking interpretation of Gower's "Confessio Amantis," particularly in the relationship of glossing and marginalia as representing both knowledge and nonknowledge (119). Elias argues, "the scope of the 'Confessio' is not necessarily socially oriented but rather a specifically individual endeavor for the salvation in a kind of mystical progress of the soul. In this manner, social change may become possible through personal and individual reflection, which may be attained through a reawakening of the self via the regaining of dormant knowledge (i.e., gnosis)" (120). Elias focuses on the duality of Genius in the poem to make her argument. She suggests this duality of Genius leads to a convergence that then causes Amans to self-reflect, ultimately leading into a gnostic Passing. Elias explains the manuscript and production history of the CA, even inserting her gnostic framework into Gower's formulation of the text to suggest Venus as some sort of Gnostic savior--a "guiding hand" (121). She then explains how "the digressive book (Book 7)" is actually the logical line of the poem to facilitate such Passing. Elias transitions into her chronological close reading of Gower's poem, offering insightful analyses of lines of specific tales in support of her argument. Upon reaching Book 7, Elias reiterates her opinion of the book's Hermetic nature that brings Amans into a sort of spiritual rebirth that takes shape in Book 8 (142-45). Through his introspection in Book 8 initiated by Venus, Amans gains "an epiphanic moment of revelation that culminates in the passing of the spirit into knowledge, a spiritual salvation, a poetic closure" (146). [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Elias, Natanela. Published Elias, Natanela. The Gnostic Paradigm: Forms of Knowing in English Literature of the Late Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 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 Gnostic Paradigm: Forms of Knowing in English Literature of the Late Middle Ages. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Hsy opens his essay with a discussion of Teresa de Cartagena and her treatment of deafness in "Arboleda de los Enfermos" [Grove of the Infirm], by way of anchoring his argument that "disability [is] more than a topic or trope pervading literature" (27); instead, he offers it as a way of both depicting and understanding one's orientation in the world. Of especial interest to Gower scholars, Hsy offers some insights on Gower's autobiographical writing that reflect on Gower's visual impairment later in life. Gower, rather than seeking some spiritual meaning in his blindness, instead explores how his impairment has altered his "strategies of literary composition" (33). Hsy offers a powerful reading of a poem in which Gower discusses his blindness, suggesting that despite claiming he will no longer write Gower actually develops "new opportunities for poetic self-fashioning" (34). Hsy then goes on to explore representations of disability in Chaucer's "The Monk's Tale" and Margery Kempe's "Book" before concluding: "As literary criticism and theory continue to address conceptions of disability across different cultural and historical contexts, new forms of knowledge proliferate" (38). [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hsy, Jonathan. Published Hsy, Jonathan. "Disability." The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, edited by David Hillman and Ulrika Maude. Cambridge UP, 2015. pp. 24-40. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Minor Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Disability. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Wagner's dissertation explores the topic of English vernacular linguistic identity, particularly anxieties about using English in literary and theological texts, arguing that "even texts traditionally considered to be confident in their use of English, like 'The Canterbury Tales,' are preoccupied with the subject of unrestricted speech and the nature of the English language" (ii). Wagner considers attitudes toward the use of English in Lollard and Wycliffite discourses and reactions to them, tracing their topical concerns in works by Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, Pecock, Capgrave, and other medieval writers, with discussion of post-print reformed attitudes of Foxe, Tyndale, and More. She compares Chaucer's and Gower's views by comparing their tales of suppressed speech, the Manciple's Tale and the Tale of Phebus and Cornide, arguing that Gower's tale is essentially conservative, i.e., "largely concerned with maintaining the status quo and thus silencing revolutionaries, while Chaucer is much more concerned with the freedom to speak" (13). [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wagner, Erin Kathleen. Published Wagner, Erin Kathleen.  Linguam Ad Loquendum: Writing a Vernacular Identity in Medieval and Early Modern England. Ph.D. Dissertation. Ohio State University, 2015. vii, 315 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A81.12(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Linguam Ad Loquendum: Writing a Vernacular Identity in Medieval and Early Modern England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Downes' subject is the "relationship between bilingualism--whether individual or cultural--and the expression of emotion in literature" (51). She proposes to approach this problem psycho-sociologically, along lines suggested by Anna Wierzbicka: "Different languages are linked with different ways of thinking as well as different ways of feeling; they are linked with different attitudes, different ways of relating to people, different ways of expressing one's feelings" [quoting Wierzbicka] (52). Downes asks "How true might these observations be for those who read, thought, wrote, and spoke in more than one language in fourteenth- and fifteenth- century England?" (52). She takes for her case-study Gower's "Cinkante Balades" and "Traitié pour les amantz marietz" and Charles d'Orleans' "Fortunes Stabilnes," seeing them as works written in "L2" languages--i.e., acquired tongues--by speakers fluent in both French and English. She selects balade sequences as her material, since in general these are written from a first-person perspective ("je/jeo/I"), more easily quarried for emotional connection. Downes' working hypothesis is that writing about feeling in French is different from writing about it in English ("Psycholinguists tend to describe an emotional detachment from additional languages as related to an individual's sense of their own inadequacy in that language" [54]). Ultimately, however, she suggests that, for Gower at least, it is the nature of the love described that matters, not the language used to describe it (58-59). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Downes, Stephanie. Published Downes, Stephanie. How to Be "Both": Bilingual and Gendered Emotions in Late Medieval English Balade Sequences. In Susan Broomhall, ed. Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. 51-65. Gower Subject Cinkante Balades Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz 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 How to Be "Both": Bilingual and Gendered Emotions in Late Medieval English Balade Sequences. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Stoyanoff, Jeffery G. Published Stoyanoff, Jeffery G. Bringing Frames into Focus: Reading Middle English Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation. Duquesne University, 2015. viii, 163 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A77/01(E). Fully accessible via https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/ and via ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Review In his dissertation, Stoyanoff exemplifies how Middle English writers use "generically-situated framing devices to play with readers' expectations and to open up their texts for a number of possible interpretations" (iv). He focuses on three types of framing device to show how they "control the presentation of the text while implicitly recognizing that such ornamentation cannot, ultimately, control interpretation": "the circular frame in John Gower's compilation, 'Confessio Amantis'; the episodic, memory-based frame of contemplative writing in Margery Kempe's 'Book'; and the narratorial frame accomplished through narratorial tags in 'The Romaunce of Sir Beves of Hamtoun" (v). For a published a version of Stoyanoff's discussion of Gower's "frame," see his "Beginnings and Endings: Narrative Framing in 'Confessio Amantis'." South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015), pp. 52-64. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bringing Frames into Focus: Reading Middle English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Knox, Philip. Published Knox, Philip.  The "Romance of the Rose" in Fourteenth-Century England. D.Phil. Dissertation. University of Oxford, 2015. v, 281 pp.; 10 illus. Dissertation Abstracts International C75.01. A redacted version (without illus.) is fully accessible via https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d55e2158-a9ee-4bf2-b8e4-98d7e0c6a598. Abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses International. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues and Literary Relations Confession Amantis Mirour de l'Omme Vox Clamantis Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz Minor Latin Poetry Review "This thesis traces the afterlife of the 'Romance of the Rose' in fourteenth-century England. Whether it was closely imitated or only faintly recalled, I argue that the 'Rose' exercised its influence on fourteenth-century English literature in two principal ways. Firstly, in the development of a self-reflexive focus on how meaning is produced and transmitted. Secondly, in a concern with how far the author's intentions can be recovered from a work, and to what extent the author must claim some responsibility for the meaning of a text after its release into the world of readers. In the 'Rose,' many of these issues are presented through the lens of a disordered erotic desire, and questions of licit and illicit textual and sexual pleasures loom large in the later responses. My investigation focuses on four English writers: William Langland, John Gower, the 'Gawain'-Poet, and Geoffrey Chaucer. In my final chapter I suggest that the Rose ceased to be a generative force in English literature in the fifteenth century, and I try to offer some explanations as to why" (i). Knox's assessment of the influence of the RR on Gower includes attention to the archer "portrait" and Latin texts that accompany it and to aspects of "Mirour de l'Omme," "Vox Clamantis," "Traitié pour les Amantz Marietz," and relations between Gower's late-life marriage and his "Est amor." Generally, however, Knox focuses on "Confessio Amantis" and ways that the "Rose" was Gower's "model" for treating Ovidian myth as "unallegorised narrative with an exemplary moral" while also investigating "the proliferation of plural--perhaps unwelcome--meanings" (118). In treating these concerns, Knox addresses various tales (e.g., Narcissus and Pygmalion, Arion and Orpheus, Iphis and Iante) and the disclosure of Amans as Gower at the end of the poem. For a broadly revised version of Knox's thesis, see his monograph, "The Romance of the Rose" and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature (2022). [MA] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The "Romance of the Rose" in Fourteenth-Century England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review As her title suggests, Lears' essay is generally concerned with "Piers Plowman," but it does include one extended reference to Gower's "Visio Anglie" ("Vox Clamantis" 1.9). In her discussion of aural play, noise, and the "poetics of lolling" in Langland's poem, Lears describes Gower's depiction of the eloquent jackdaw or jay (a figure for Wat Tyler) whose address provokes his listeners to break into a "hubbub of animalistic bleating, barking, and roaring." This is one among a "number of moments in the literature of medieval England"--perhaps the most notable one as Lears puts it--where the "dynamic of noise emerg[es] from misdirected attention or irrational listening," even though, as Lears acknowledges, the scene is more often discussed as Gower's "conservative strategy . . . to marginalize the voices of the peasants" (184). Further on, Lears suggests that Gower's "bird analogy" finds a "telling echo" in the "Wycliffite Tretise of Miraclis Pleying," (185), but she does not mention that both are reflexes of a widely observed orator-as-jay satiric topos found, for example, in Chaucer's description of the Summoner ("General Prologue" 1,642-43) and in the "Poem on the Evil Times of Edward II" of the Auchinleck manuscript, anthologized in Thomas Wright's "Political Songs of England" (1839; 828). Lears changes little or nothing in her treatment of her brief discussion of Gower when revising this essay for inclusion in her book-length study (see pp. 121-22), but she rearranges other things as she revises, adds an assessment of "Mum and the Sothsegger," and later in the book (pp. 186-87), cites Gower's use in "Confessio Amantis" (Book I, 2391) of the clapping-bell topos to decry boasting. Chaucer receives a good deal of attention elsewhere in Lears' book, as do Richard Rolle, Margery Kempe, and others--but not Gower. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lears, Adin E. Published Lears, Adin E. "Noise, Soundplay, and Langland's Poetics of Lolling in the Time of Wyclif." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 38 (2016): 165-200. Reprinted as chapter 3, "'Wondres to Here': Noise, Soundplay, and Langland's Poetics of Lolling in the Time of Wyclif." In Adin E. Lears, World of Echo: Noise and Knowing in Late-Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020). Pp. 94-127. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Noise, Soundplay, and Langland's Poetics of Lolling in the Time of Wyclif. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Boyar has studied the production and availability of mirrors in Gower's London, and uses the information valuably to draw conclusions as to the possible intended reading of the concluding image of "John Gower" seeing his image in a mirror. Mirrors were not common items in the Middle Ages, and most--if available--would have had only "hazy reflective properties." "Ultimately," she suggests, "that, more than a revelation through reflective recognition, the Confessio's ending would have proven most resonant for its portrayal of seeing through a complicated medium." [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 35.2 ] Author/Editor Author/Editor Boyar, Jenny Published Boyar, Jenny. "Reflection, Interrupted: Interior Mirror Work in the 'Confessio Amantis'." Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media 3 (2016), n.p.. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reflection, Interrupted: Interior Mirror Work in the 'Confessio Amantis'. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bychowski's focus is on the "Tale of Iphis and Ianthe," in Book IV of the CA, on Sloth. Gower's presentation of Iphis' transformation from a girl dressed as a boy into a man by the God of Love within the "hermeneutic of the seven deadly sins" is, as "medieval disability scholars have demonstrated," predictable, and fully within the accepted approach current in the late Middle Ages, when "religion and medicine were so intertwined as to be inseparable, especially in cases such as the management of sloth, where the symptoms of depression, despair, and sluggishness spanned the categorizes [sic] of physical and spiritual disease." In a three-part essay, Bychowski considers 1) "'Divisioun and Dysphoria' to establish how Gower prefigures the modern social model of transgender as an experience of living in a world full of change and contradiction"; 2) "the particular social forms of 'divisioun' identified as 'Acedia and Depression'" as signaling "Gower's discussion of the sin of sloth that frames the 'Tale of Iphis and Ianthe';" 3) "how Gower's removal of the dysphoric youth's voice and agency in the tale emphasizes the systematic character of suffering caused by a dysphoric Nature (represented by Isis) and a subjugating patriarchal Nature (represented by Eros)." [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bychowski, M. W Published Bychowski, M. W. "Unconfessing Transgender: Dysphoric Youths and the Medicalization of Madness in John Gower's 'Tale of Iphis and Ianthe'." Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media 3 (2016), n.p. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Unconfessing Transgender: Dysphoric Youths and the Medicalization of Madness in John Gower's 'Tale of Iphis and Ianthe' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Maria Wickert's 1953 "Studien zu John Gower" is a foundational and influential work in Gower studies. Focusing primarily upon the VC, Wickert examines the poem's formal traits and its recensions to argue that Gower was composing the Vox throughout the end of Richard II's reign and even after Richard's deposition. Wickert's study has become central for Gowerians beyond even those who focus primarily on the Vox. Her examination of Gower's voice, of his political and social ties and interests, of his trilingual project, of his use of homiletic, Ovidian, and other materials, especially the iconographic archer, all hold central positions in our understanding of Gower over fifty years after her work was first published. Robert Meindl first translated and published an English edition of Wickert's work in 1981, and this second edition incorporates a number of useful updates. Notes include references to publications that have appeared since the original 1953 German edition. The text has been modernized both with respect to current scholarly standards and usage, such as current manuscript designations. Some German passages have been retranslated for clarity. And most significantly, translation of Latin citations has been largely redone to address some problematic translations noted in first edition. R. F. Yeager's Introduction to this edition succinctly and effectively summarizes and assesses Wickert's contribution to Gower studies. [BWG. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 36.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Meindl, Robert J., ed. Wickert, Maria. Published Meindl, Robert J., trans. Maria Wickert: Studies in John Gower, 2nd rev. ed. (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2016). ISBN: 9780866985413. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism 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 Maria Wickert: Studies in John Gower, 2nd rev. ed. Studien zu John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Nowlin, Steele. Published Nowlin, Steele. Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2016. ISBN 9780814213100. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Review "This book studies," Nowlin writes in his Introduction, (entitled "The Emergence of Invention") "the 'affect of invention,' a self-reflexive process that conceptualizes affect and invention in terms of each other and that understands invention as a process concurrent with the movements of affective emergence" (1). Clearly, the book doesn't lack for ambition. Two chapters on Gower ("'A Thing So Strange': Macrocosmic Emergence in the Confessio Amantis" [93-121] and "'The Chronique of the Fable': Transformative Poetry and the Chronicle Form in the Confessio Amantis" [122-50]) follow two on Chaucer, one considering the House of Fame, the other the Legend of Good Women. Nowlin sees Gower and Chaucer sharing basic poetic tenets: "The projects of both writers . . . actively work to understand the relationship between affective occurrence and inventional activity in a similar way, appealing not simply to scholastic rhetorical traditions or neoplatonic notions of poetic creation. The intersection of internal and external worlds, of cosmological concerns with the particular social, cultural, and political realities of lived experience that make both Chaucer's and Gower's writings so appealing to us today, constitutes the same conceptual realms in which they explore the relationship of affect and invention" (31). Nevertheless, for Nowlin there are differences between what the two poets considered the purpose of poetry, the most significant being the focus of each: Chaucer's gaze turned inward ("Chaucer's poems continually work to 'get behind' the discourses and emotions that structure experience" [32] , while Gower looked outward, attempting to write verse that would transform society ("Gower's poem works to move the potentially productive emergent qualities that characterize the affect of invention into the world outside of poetic fiction" [33]). By way of developing his argument, and in order to "show how this Gowerian formulation of invention as movement--as weie--operates thematically and metatextual in three significant and representative tales" (99): the "Tale of the Three Questions," "Constantine and Sylvester," and "Medea and Jason." Nowlin further provides a close reading of the Confessio Prologue and bits of the Book I, which in his view evince "how . . . emergent potential can be registered and generated through poetic invention" (98). In a final chapter ("From Ashes Ancient Come: Affective Intertextuality in Chaucer, Gower, and Shakespeare") Nowlin analyses Shakespeare's "Phoenix and the Turtle" with "The Parliament of Fowls," and Pericles with Book VIII of the "Confessio Amantis." He concludes that "'Phoenix' and Pericles . . . define their self-conscious interactions with Chaucer and Gower not only in terms of source material, medieval alterity, and authorial politics but also in ways that recognize and build on Chaucer's and Gower's self-conscious representations of inventional emergence" (210). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 36.2] 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 Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Cook offers a summary of and commentary on Robert Greene's dream-vision, "Greenes Vision" (1592), paying significant attention to Greene's use of Gower and Chaucer as spokesmen for two views of poetry: Gower representing moral appeal and Chaucer, ludic delight. Greene's persona "turn[s] away from ludic Chaucerianism in favour of Gowerian reform" (54), but then the debate is rendered superfluous by the appearance of Solomon who has been listening in and who abjures both views for the sake of more pure wisdom, convincing Greene's persona to turn to theology. As Cook makes clear, the very existence of the work shows that Greene has not rejected literature, and the presence of Gower and Chaucer leads her to explore the poem's engagement with literary tradition, "multifaceted temporality" (54), nostalgia, and "the limits of nostalgia itself" (39). Along the way, Cook considers the peculiarity of the Gower "avatar" espousing "anti-Ovidianism" (53), the detailed visual portraits of Gower and Chaucer, and Greene's probable familiarity with the original fifteenth-century version of Gower's tomb. In "Greenes Vision," Chaucer and Gower each tell a prose tale about marital jealousy, and Gower's is, according to Cook, more like Greene's earlier works than like Gower's own. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cook, Megan L. Published Cook, Megan L. "Nostalgic Temporalities in Greenes Vision." Parergon 33, no. 2 (2016): 39-56. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Nostalgic Temporalities in "Greenes Vision." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Galloway connects Gower to the English proto-humanists of the fifteenth century, albeit with qualifications, noting that "in many elements of substance he missed this take-off of the 'studia humanitatis' almost entirely" (436). Gower didn't know Plato, very little Statius or Virgil, and more--but not much--of Cicero. Ovid, however, is a different story: "Gower appropriated Ovid with unusual fidelity yet extraordinary freedom. At his most productive, he shows himself steeped in Ovid and up-to-date Ovidian commentators [i.e., the "Ovide Moralisé" and Bersuire's "Ovidius Moralizatus"] to a degree hard to parallel before the Renaissance, and rare thereafter" (438). Galloway tracks the trajectory of Gower's recourses to Ovid from the Ovidless MO to heavy reliance in the VC and a few of the balades to "a flowering of Ovidiana in the 'Confessio'," followed by "almost no mention in his final political poetry" (439). He sees this interest in Ovid driven by Gower's "legendary interest in ethics and 'morality'," although he came to it via "Ovidian materials"--i.e., "there is clear textual evidence that Gower's elaborations and framing were stimulated by the moralized, redacted, and summarized medieval Ovids he consulted" (439). The remainder of Galloway's essay specifically addresses, work by work, examples of Ovidian presence. He is particularly informative about Gower's uses of Bersuire (448-53). As Galloway sums it up, "The results show Gower responsible for a major transition in the intellectual as well as poetic uses of Ovid, a departure from using Ovid simply as a matrix for Christian allegory. Along with Ovid himself, the Ovidian commentators lead Gower not only into his best poetry, but also into his fullest participation in moral, social, literary, and political dialogue, though not always with the interlocutors and topics we might expect" (439). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew. Published Galloway, Andrew. "Gower's Ovids." In The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. I: 800-1558, ed. Rita Copeland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 435-64. ISBN: 9780199587230; 9780199587230. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Ovids. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Hsy, Jonathan. Published Hsy, Jonathan. "Close Listening: Talking Books, Blind Readers and Medieval Worldbuilding." postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 7 (2016): 181-92. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Biography of Gower Review Hsy addresses the medievalism of Bruce Holsinger's "The Invention of Fire," in which John Gower stars as detective/protagonist. Hsy brings together disability and literary scholarship in his discussion of Gower's works and Holsinger's. For Hsy, Holsinger's depiction of protagonist Gower's failing sight in the novels and the multi-modal ways in which one can access these novels reflect on poet Gower's eventual blindness and the tension surrounding assistive technologies in the fourteenth century. Vision in Holsinger's narrative, argues Hsy, serves "as a rhetorical conceit and tool for thought" (186). Hsy then shifts his attention to the audiobook version of Holsinger's text, asserting that is "an opportunity to attend to the story differently" and that, as a result, "the book's sonic artistry became its salient feature." (188) Listening to the audiobook, Hsy writes, "revealed how a text and the performing body become mutually constitutive through a technological surface." (190) This conflation of text and body corresponds to Gower's experience as a blind poet, experiencing the written word through the voice of another. At this point, Hsy discusses fourteenth-century assistive technology: eyeglasses. Eyeglasses, Hsy reminds us, "provoked anxious and unprecedented meditations on the relationship between impaired masculinity and perceived notions of intellectual capacity" (190). The cultural associations with these devices made their users uneasy, and Holsinger's novel reflects this unease when he has protagonist Gower refer to them as "crutches." For Hsy, the character Gower's response typifies disability theorist Robert McRuer's concept of "spectral disability": "Gower interprets the spectacles as a prosthetic device or assistive technology that delays an inevitable specter of disability" (190). Hsy's discussion of "multi-modal textual consumption," then, reflects doubly on Gower. In Holsinger's book, we experience a fictional account of what the poet Gower's struggle with failing vision may have been like, and if we listen to "An Invention of Fire," perhaps then we are closer to how the poet Gower would have experienced texts in his later years. [JS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Close Listening: Talking Books, Blind Readers and Medieval Worldbuilding. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In her first paragraph, Echard sets out the subsequent course of her argument with characteristic clarity: "This essay considers the development and significance of [Gower's] Latin voice. It focusses first on two short Latin poems, "Est amor in glosa" and "De lucis scrutinio," arguing that in these Gower explores the limits of poetic language in an explicitly Latinate tradition. It next turns to his Latin "Vox Clamantis" and his Middle English "Confessio Amantis," showing that the Latin poem is more likely to turn to the vocative to admonish, condemn, or express outrage, while the English poem is more likely to employ the vocative in moments of pathos. It concludes by considering "Rex celi deus," "O recolende bone," and "In Praise of Peace," poems addressed to King Henry IV, and argues that in them the resources of Latin and English come together to craft a uniquely multilingual, multipositioned speaker who is at once intimate and detached, warm advisor and stern critic, truly suited to function as the voice of England" (291). Among the many insightful observations in this article are these: "Gower's Latin is best understood as acting in constant relation to his vernaculars, because he is, fundamentally, a trilingual poet. His trilingualism makes him all the more aware of the failures of every language, including Latin" (292). Both "Est amor" and "De lucis scrutinio" are "self-consciously concerned with poetic technique . . . deploying repetition and variation with considerable deliberation and flare" (299); but "As in 'Est amor,' it is possible to see ['De lucis''] stance as simultaneously invested in, and uncertain about, the display of poetic skill; in each case, it brings the speaker near to the desired goal but must finally, it seems, be laid aside" (300). Placing "Gower's Latin alongside his English, to show the development of what [she] calls the Gowerian 'voxative,' the voice that, despite Gower's concerns about the limits of poetry, nevertheless seeks to speak in the public arena" (300). "Gower presents himself in Latin as the voice of one crying, and in English as the voice of England" (302), "Address to a king is clearly a particular focal point of vocative structures in the Latin work" (308). While "the sequence in some . . . manuscripts suggests a kind of deliberate, progressive structure of admonition, record, and advice . . . the unpredictability of manuscript culture can undermine even a carefully orchestrated organizational plan" (308). "If 'O' can signal, particularly in Latin, the admonitory voice, then we might wonder if under these 'O's' of praise [in "Rex celi deus"] there is also some warning; that is, Gower also plays with the multiple meanings of words . . . . I am suggesting he is also playing with the multiple meanings/effects/affects of structures" (310). The Trentham manuscript [London, BL MS Additional 59495], while appearing free from Gower's "admonitory voice," does in fact "channel that voice even in a collection that must be understood in the context of patronage and precarious politics, . . . by merging the resources of English and Latin" (311). The evidence for this last statement is to be found in "In Praise of Peace": "Where once Latin tilted towards admonition and outrage, and English towards lament and carefully suggestive exemplarity, the linguistic and formal layering here offers a new voice, a uniquely multilingual, multipositioned speaker who is at once intimate and detached, warm advisor and stern critic" (314). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân. Published Echard, Siân. "How Gower Found His "Vox": Latin and John Gower's Poetics." Journal of Medieval Latin 26 (2016): 291-314. Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis In Praise of Peace Style, Rhetoric, and Versification 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 How Gower Found His "Vox": Latin and John Gower's Poetics. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Alongside Chaucer, and to a lesser degree Lydgate, Gower figures as a touchstone in Cooper's essay, their poetry first recognized in the earlier sixteenth century as "rare late medieval exceptions to the predominant papist norm" (244), their rough, "native" English simultaneously judged preferable to imported "ynkehorne termes" and (quoting Thomas Wilson) "the habit of returning travelers to 'pouder their talke with ouersea language'" (246). By the 1590s, however, Gower's language, and Chaucer's and Lydgate's, was seen as in need of "improvement"--largely the vocabulary adopted from humanism, one result of which being that while the quality of Gower's versification was devalued, the morals of his matter retained esteem. Notably, Cooper concludes with Ben Jonson's "English Grammar" (1623/1640), pointing out "Not least interestingly, [Jonson] takes a high proportion of his examples of the language from Gower and Chaucer, in a practical confirmation of the belief that it was with them that the language had moved from its initial barbarism to achieve excellence" (257). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cooper, Helen. Published Cooper, Helen. "'The most excellent creatures are not ever born perfect': Early Modern Attitudes to Middle English." In Imagining Medieval English: Language Structures and Theories, 500-1500. Ed. Tim William Machan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. 241-60. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "The most excellent creatures are not ever born perfect": Early Modern Attitudes to Middle English. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review For Gower, the Subject Index lists 169 items, cited by number; on Gower-Chaucer connections and mutual influences, with annotations and some book reviews. Author/Editor Author/Editor Allen, Mark, ed. Amsel, Stephanie, ed. Published Allen, Mark, and Stephanie Amsel, eds. Annotated Chaucer Bibliography, 1997-2010. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2016. Gower Subject Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Annotated Chaucer Bibliography, 1997-2010. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gillespie's dictionary entry outlines the reception of Gower's "Confessio Amantis" in sixteenth-century England, citing CA as "one of the great achievements of fourteenth-century poetry" and listing comments by Sidney, Richard Greene, Spenser, Jonson, and Puttenham (159). He quotes Book VIII.1700-38 of Caxton's 1554 edition of the CA Apollonius tale as corresponding to the "recognition scene" in "Pericles" 5.1, and mentions a few other correspondences that critics have identified between CA and Shakespeare's plays and poems. But the focus here is "Pericles." Gillespie reports that Shakespeare combined the "main outline" of Gower's Apollonius plot with the version of Lawrence Twine, and that the "most striking difference" between the poem and the play "may be the figure of Gower himself as Chorus," generally synopsizing critical opinion supported by citation of some eighteen studies. He does, however, propose an additional, undeveloped observation: that "the limpidity of the Gower story and its affinities with the saint's life narrative" (162) may have influenced more than just the plot of "Pericles." [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gillespie, Stuart. Published Gillespie, Stuart. "Gower, John, (c. 1330-1408), Poet." In Shakespeare's Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare Sources. 2d ed. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). pp. 159-63. First edition published in 2001 by Athlone Press. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, John, (c. 1330-1408), Poet. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review From Stewart's abstract: "Reading Nobility examines the paratextual, literary, historical, and physical ways print books serve as brokers of authority. Over the course of four chapters, I analyze how English printers--with a primary focus on the incunabular period from 1476-1500--invoke concepts of nobility, negotiating authority newly accessible to emerging readerships . . . . The final chapter examines Caxton's 1483 edition of the 'Confessio Amantis,' oddly printed with gaps left for illustrations. An analysis of multiple copies held in the United States and England reveals that owners occasionally exploited these spaces to add optional embellishment. Considering the 'Confessio Amantis''s manuscript history of 'standardized' deluxe volumes, I argue that Caxton made his edition socially nimble through its optional embellishment as purchasers could elect to elevate the status of their texts and, in turn, themselves." Author/Editor Author/Editor Stewart, Vaughn. Published Stewart, Vaughn. "Reading Nobility: Authority and Early English Print." Ph.D. Dissertation. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2016. 174 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A77.11(E) (2017). Full text accessible at ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (restricted); accessed February 21, 2022. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading Nobility: Authority and Early English Print. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016