19 100 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 Author/Editor Author/Editor Matthews, Ricardo. Published Ph.D. Dissertation. University of California, Irvine, 2016. Open access at https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2cz1v5sv (accessed February 2, 2023). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review From Matthews' abstract: "This dissertation examines a medieval genre that combines narration, in prose or verse, with inserted lyrical poems. . . . [a] 'mixed genre,' whether as a prosimetrum or its all verse variation. . . . [W]ithin the mixed genre, narrative frames surround. . . , song as a locus of subjectivity. . . , [and] I am interested in the form's capacity to suggest, or even stage, the impression of a singular, emotional subject in a variety of works: Chaucer's Knight's Tale, the Tristan en prose, John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Charles of Orleans' two books, one in French and the other English, and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet." Matthews' discussion of CA (pp.154-210) centers on Gower's "ongoing engagement" (156) with French forms, particularly instances where tensions and clashes recur, whether it be the "mixture" (162) of love with politics, shifts in stylistic registers, the use of "unharmonious and discordant" (176) complaints where we might otherwise find "elegant" dits amoureux, or the disjunction between Amans'/Gower's old age and the enterprise of love which makes "the songs he sings . . . naturally discordant"--"songs ill-suited to the poem's meter" (177), songs which, paradoxically, "reveal an embattled poet, unknown even to himself, inappropriately expecting success in love where none can be" (184). Reading Gower's Traitié for its tensions between ballade form and sober subject matter, Matthews argues further that "the Traitié and the Confessio Amantis form a continuous unity around the kind of poetic identity that the dits amoureux adopt, a poetics of persona that is . . . multiplicitous," (203), a "tangle of perspectives" resulting in a work that is "so unique" that "[u]nlike other prosimetra or mixed verse dits," it "concludes with no true authorial figure emerging from the work." Instead, "[s]ubjectivity becomes submerged into questions of genre--amorous, didactic, political, philosophical--with neither ceding ground to the other" (210). [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 Overheard Song: Medieval Lyric in the Mixed Genre. 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 Sweeten's abstract: "This dissertation explores the . . . trend of Middle English texts rendering marriage in economic terms and metaphor to determine what such treatment indicates about the shifting social relations of marriage in late medieval England. . . , contending that the rising prevalence of market exchanges in every day life gives rise to the use of economic language and metaphor to better understand changing social relations. The Introduction establishes the historical basis of marriage in this period as well as the development of medieval economic thought in a burgeoning market economy. Chapter 1 focuses on two major Middle English texts, Geoffrey Chaucer's the 'Wife of Bath's Prologue' and William Langland's 'The Vision of Piers the Plowman,' to consider how female figures taking part in the medieval marital market appropriate economic thought to dictate the parameters of their own exchange, the process of each commenting on the contradictory nature of the medieval marriage. Chapter 2 considers the role of avarice in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and the anonymous Middle English poem 'Wynnere and Wastoure' to plot how marriage is treated like local economies, where hoarding through avaricious desire harms all participants in the economy. Chapter 3 unpacks the function of widowhood in Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde,' ultimately contending that Crisyede's plight demonstrates the socioeconomic vulnerabilities of unfixed marital statuses in late medieval England. Finally, Chapter 4 looks at the function of labor in marriage as both a demonstration of marital identity and methodology for agency within marriage, focusing on the Middle English Breton Lay 'Emare' [and its] use of textile labor. . . ." Author/Editor Author/Editor Sweeten, David Wayne Published Ph. D. Dissertation. The Ohio State University, 2016. Open access at https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?accession=osu1468414544&disposition=inline (accessed February 3, 2023). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Ymaried moore for hir goodes": The Economics of Marriage in Middle English Poetry. 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 Knox, Poole, and Griffith's carefully written article asserts that the commendatory verses appended to Francis Kynaston's seventeenth-century Latin translation of Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" reveal an academic circle of scholars associated with New College, Oxford, who had a passion for Middle English literature in general and the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, in particular. Examination of the verses proceeds from those which praise Kynaston for rendering Chaucer's presumably rustic poetry into the international language of Latin and therefore both improving it and making it widely available before moving on to several verses which "exonerate" Chaucer of his primitive language, while still praising Kynaston's adaptation (49). The authors conclude that Kynaston's "Troilus" is "an important record of a moment in English literary history when language change was rendering Chaucer's work ever more remote even as the idea of his originary status remained strong" so that "Chaucer's English could be more intelligible to the English when rendered in a language other than English" (50). Of particular interest to Gower scholars are several notes about the language of Francis James, whose verses are written in an imitation of Middle English. James describes Chaucer as an "orpyd knight" (l. 8, p. 46) which Knox et al. identify as a phrase not from Chaucer, but from Book III of the "Confessio Amantis" which also contains the "co-occurrence of the rhyme-words 'lond' and 'hond'" (46). Additionally, James uses the "form -end of 'clepend'" (48) in his verse, which also appears to be a borrowing from Gower. Since Knox identifies James as the author of another imitation of Middle English verse in a commendatory poem for an English translation of "Leucippe and Clitophon," which reveals that "Middle English literature was imaginatively associated with the exotic prose romances of the ancient world" (45) for James, just as it was for Shakespeare in "Pericles," it seems possible that this particular member of the academic circle around Kynaston had an enthusiasm for Gower's Middle English, even if mediated through Spenser and Shakespeare. Further exploration the "narrow but rich seam of evidence" (34) of these verses might offer hints about early modern Oxford readers' engagements with Gower as well as Chaucer. [NG. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Knox, Philip Poole, William Griffith, Mark Published Knox, Philip, William Poole, and Mark Griffith. "Reading Chaucer in New College, Oxford, in the 1630s: The Commendatory Verses of Francis Kynaston's ' Troili et Creseidæ'." Medium Aevum 85.1 (2016): 33-58. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading Chaucer in New College, Oxford, in the 1630s: The Commendatory Verses of Francis Kynaston's :Troili et Creseidæ." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Offers a "a computer-generated listing of all the rhymes in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,'" based on Macaulay's edition and available as a downloadable PDF, with instructions for use. Author/Editor Author/Editor Werthmüller, Gyöngyi. Published John Gower Society website: https://johngower.org/596-2/ Accessed 22 February 2024 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Style, Rhetoric, and Versification 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/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Title A name given to the resource A Listing of the Rhymes in Gower's Confessio Amantis. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Coleman opens the conclusion of her essay with the "sneaking suspicion that some medievalists . . . would think 'Well, of course, it's obvious that English illumination would be influenced by "Roman de la Rose" iconography'" (192) and, in a way, she's right--but only in a way. In a crisp discussion of the influence of RR miniatures on three images from English illuminated manuscripts, she makes the influence obvious, contributes to audience or reception studies, and, one hopes, provides grounds for further investigations. The three images, treated in "chronological order by manuscript date" are "the confession scene in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 3), the dreamer scene in 'Pearl' (London, British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x), and the 'sermon' scene in the frontispiece to Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde' (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 61)" (177). The essay reproduces all three in color, accompanied by images from RR that are either their sources or strong analogues in one way or another. In the case of the Gower image (Fairfax 3, folio 8r), Coleman shows that the miniature of Amans confessing to Genius combines features of RR miniatures of Nature confessing to Genius and of Amant approaching the Garden of Love, and asks "How might a sophisticated late fourteenth-century English viewer of the Fairfax 3 confession miniature have read the image's recombinant iconography?" In its simplest form, Coleman's answer is that the image would have signaled to the viewer that "if Amans could learn from Genius the proper way to pursue love, access would be granted to the joys it brings" (181). This answer is made more intriguing by Coleman's attention to ways in which it engages "Gower's mixed literary goals" and "mingles political issues . . . with the courtly and the ludic" (183). She sidesteps the question of whether or not Gower was himself the "designer" of the image (but see note 11), commenting on gender issues in the image (no Dame Nature or Lady Idleness), the collar of SS worn by Amans, his apparent age (treated with due caution due to manuscript damage), and the similar miniature of the confession scene found in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 294.The influences of the French scenes are clear and the implications of the Fairfax designer's treatment for viewer response, complex. Coleman's discussions of the influence of RR illuminations on images from "Pearl" and the "Troilus" manuscripts are similarly convincing and, like her treatment of the Gower image, rich in implication for how English miniature designers used RR iconography, and for how viewers are likely to have responded to their designs. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Coleman, Joyce. Published Coleman, Joyce. "Translating Iconography in Gower, 'Pearl,' Chaucer, and the 'Rose.'" In Susanna Fein and David Raybin, eds. Chaucer: Visual Approaches. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016. Pp. 177-94. Gower Subject Confessio Amantic Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations 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 Translating Iconography in Gower, "Pearl," Chaucer, and the "Rose." 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 here examines the "idea" of "the literary" (or "literariness") in medieval English writings. The bulk of his essay is a lengthy and lucid survey of critical attempts to clarify "the literary" in general terms and specifically in Old and Middle English writing--addressing in impressive fashion key points of classical poetics, linguistic structuralism, and Renaissance humanism; modern theoretical attention to modes, genres, and aesthetics; and individual critics' attention to allegory, metaphor, the "accessus" tradition, oral delivery, prologues, dream visions, recreation, authorial self-consciousness, Lollard thought, and more. Galloway frames this survey with his own assessment of the literary/aesthetic qualities of the brief Towneley/Wakefield play, "The Salutation of Elizabeth," and he attends recurrently to Chaucer and to relations between medieval English "literariness" and that of classical and Continental traditions. In his very brief comments on Gower, Galloway treats, not the "moral didacticism and political sycophancy" attributed to the poet in traditional criticism, but how Gower is "most innovative"--and presumably most "literary"--in adapting classical conventions, especially Ovidian ones. He offers a single, sharp example of Gower's response to Ovid's hint toward a "possible lament for the coming of dawn by the goddess of dawn herself, Aurora" in "Amores" 1.1.339-40. Quoting the "Confessio Amantis" Book IV, 3232-27, Galloway observes that Gower "elaborates just how Cephalus would pray for the sun to come slowly, when he is in bed with Aurora" so that "Ovid's passing counterfactual becomes Gower's entire independent aubade" (226-27). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew. Published Galloway, Andrew. "Imagining the Literary in Medieval English." In Tim William Machan, ed. Imagining Medieval English: Language Structures and Theories, 500-1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. 210-37. Gower Subject Backgrounds aand 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 Imagining the Literary in Medieval 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 Cannon's topic is grammar schools, in which "the most basic literacy training" took place, "and that training's lasting and significant effects" in "the long moment during which a profusion of writing in Latin slowly mutated into a profusion of writing in English" (4). His basic argument is that what was learned in these schools "shaped . . . writing ever afterwards" (8). He takes Chaucer (his major focus), Langland, Gower, and (less often) Trevisa and the "Gawain" poet as his primary examples, while admitting that "our ignorance about their schooling is almost complete" (9). Training in grammar school inculcated the idea of language with rules and structure, while also encouraging "experimentation and exploration [i.e., composing verses], since knowledge of grammar was most fully proved when a student could deploy it to make phrases or sentences that were wholly new" (13). Cannon identifies the influence of Gower's grammar-school training throughout the "Confessio Amantis": Genius is presented as a kind of school-master, exhibiting "grammar-school style" in his tutelage of Amans (117-18); throughout, the Latin verses and prose glosses "translate" the English and vice-versa, thus replicating "the translation exercise that was one of the grammar school's most basic pedagogical forms." Medieval readers would have understood the Latin texts as "integral to the English" (146-147); the structure and approach to ethical narrative in the CA are derived (164-65) from early models encountered in the "Distichs of Cato," the "Fables of Avianus," debates from the "Eclogue" of Theodulus, Maximian's elegies, and "The Rape of Proserpina," for tragedy (on "Distichs" and "Avianus" see also 186-90). Cannon also identifies what he calls "patchwork"--the "piecing together" of lines, phrases, and images first discovered in grammar texts with original sections--as characteristic of "Ricardian style" as represented by Chaucer, Gower, and Langland (194-95). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cannon, Christopher. Published Cannon, Christopher. From Literacy to Literature: England 1300-1400. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource From Literacy to Literature: England 1300-1400. 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 Elmes, Melissa Ridley. Published Elmes, Melissa Ridley. Negotiating Violence at the Feast in Medieval British Texts. Ph.D. Dissertation. The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2016. viii, 330 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A77.11(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/listing.aspx?id=19566. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review From Elmes's abstract: "Making use of theoretical underpinnings from anthropology and history that characterize the feast as a culturally essential event and medieval violence as a rational and strategically-employed tool of constraint, coercion, and manipulation, I convert the essentially historical question of the cultural importance of feasts into a literary one by close reading feasting scenes and their aftermath in order to consider how the writers in medieval England used the motif of violence at or following the feast to illuminate, critique, and offer correction to social, political, and religious issues tied to the specific concerns of justice, loyalty, and treason within a community. Looking at texts ranging from the Anglo-Saxon epic 'Beowulf,' the Welsh 'Mabinogion,' and Latin 'Historia Regum Britanniae' to chronicle-based works by Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower, the Middle English Arthurian romances 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' and Sir Thomas Malory's 'Le Morte Darthur,' the Old Norse 'Clari's Saga,' and outlaw tales of Robin Hood, Gamelyn, and Hereward the Wake, I demonstrate through a comparative approach centered on interpretation and analysis supported with contextual historical evidence that violence associated with the feast is typically presented according to genre expectations and mirrors cultural anxieties that are specific to the community in which and for which a given text was produced." Elmes's discussion of Gower focuses on the "Tale of Albinus and Rosamund," with attention to the account in Paul the Deacon's "Historia Langobardorum" which "serves as a basis" for Gower's narrative. She also includes comments on versions of the story of Constance by Gower, Trevet, and, especially, Chaucer. [MA] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Negotiating Violence at the Feast in Medieval British Texts. 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 Hastings' abstract: "This dissertation explores the ways in which Old and Middle English poets made use of the poetic corpus of the Roman Augustan Age poet Horace (Quintus Flaccus Horatius) and the medieval commentary tradition that accrued around it. It considers especially the Late Antique commentaries of Porphyry and PseudoAcro as well as the scholia transmitted in Bern MS Bernensis 363 and Paris, BnF MS Latin 17897. The Old English elegies in the Exeter Book (Exeter Cathedral MS 3501) are the subject of the second chapter. Subsequent chapters focus on William Langland's 'Piers Plowman,' John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,' and Geoffrey Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' (with especial emphasis on Fragments VIII and IX)." In chapter four, Hastings assesses "what role the Horatian tradition may have played in the moral counsel Gower sought to provide to his king through the 'Confessio Amantis'." He comments on two spurious attributions to Horace of material in Gower's Latin commentary, followed by close analysis of four passages in CA where, Hastings argues, Gower "uses the Horatian tradition to inflect the tone and timbre of his other source material to admonish Richard II on the proper exercise of virtue. Specifically, "These subtle criticisms on ethical conduct and procreative sexuality provide counterweights to two of the criticisms most commonly laid against the Ricardian court: a culture whose excesses bordered upon the effete and a king whose relationship with Robert de Vere caused anxiety 'vis-à-vis' dynastic succession" (196). [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hastings, Justin A. Published Hastings, Justin A. "Englishing" Horace: The Influence of the Horatian Tradition on Old and Middle English Poetry. Ph.D. Dissertation. Loyola University, 2016. vi, 287 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A78.07(E). Fully accessible ProQuest Theses & Dissertations Global and at https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2283/. 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 "Englishing" Horace: The Influence of the Horatian Tradition on Old and Middle English Poetry. 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 Edwards maps out how "medieval discourses of survival" have something in common with modern-day understandings of what it means to "outlive" sexual violence, that is, to be a "survivor" rather than a "victim." Beginning with Augustine's response to the Lucretia story in the "City of God," she reminds us that he rebutted Livy's celebration of Lucretia's suicide as "a courageous act of devotion to spouse and city" (4). For Augustine, rape was a violation of a woman's body but not her mind, and he struggles to understand Lucretia's actions "so that he can more effectively dissuade rape victims in his own historical moment from doing likewise." Augustine concludes, according to Edwards, that "Lucretia's suicide was not a failure of her chastity, but rather evidence of her inability to live with shame" (7). This sets up the author's reading of Gower's version of the tale in Book VII of the "Confessio Amantis" (and her final chapter) in which "Lucrece's chaste fidelity is an exemplary model for the will's sovereignty over the body and for the ruler's sovereignty over the body politic" (113). The body of the suicidal woman, the incomparable spouse, and paragon of virtue thus becomes an exemplum of political violence; her dead body is displayed publicly to incite anger among the populace and provide a motive for rejecting the tyranny that rape and the rapist represent. The scene that Gower re-presents is sensitive to Lucrece's state of mind when Aruns plots his attack. Described as a "tigre his time awaiteth / In hope for to cacche his preie" (ll. 4945-46), he "tok thane what him liste,/ And goth his wey, that non it wiste" (ll. 4989-90) . When the terrorized woman faints during the assault, enacting the sense of dissemblance described by Edwards as a rape survivor's not knowing "how she thinks she knows herself" (9), we see the relevance of the scene to present-day rape survivors. Yet Lucrece lives in ancient Rome where the shame of rape for a married woman is unbearable; she is not a rape survivor in the modern sense, nor a martyr in the ancient sense. Rather, her violated body becomes an emblem of political turmoil and tyrannous rulership. And while this is clearly one of the points of Gower's tale, Edwards' tendency to look away from Lucrece's corpse to the men who find her body seems an abrupt swerve. Gower's representation of Lucrece's rape illustrates the mind/body separation that Augustine claims for her, but it also indicts the underlying rivalries among men that fuel violence both public and personal; the poet's sensitive rewriting of Lucrece's response to the violation of her "wommanhiede" is deserving of greater explication than is afforded in Edwards' concluding chapter. [ES. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, Suzanne M. Published Edwards, Suzanne M. The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 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 Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature. 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 Matthews here surveys "autobiographical fragments or moments . . . [that] appear to be performances of self" (27) in works of select fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English poets, gauging their "truth value" to be generally unreliable (39) but asking more broadly "what can be said about the ways in which such writers might have entwined life-writing into their larger literary projects?" (29). Before turning very briefly to Gower, Matthews usefully observes A. C. Spearing's distinction (2012) between "autography" and autobiography, glances at conventionalized uses of first-person pronouns in works of the early fourteenth-century writers, and explains why Chaucer's performances of self in "Book of the Duchess," "House of Fame," "Legend of Good Women," and "Canterbury Tales"--with the possible exception of his Retractions--are "difficult to label" as autobiographical because of the poet's playful ironic self-deprecation: the "Chaucerian self is clearly embodied in his work, but his self-presentations can rarely be taken at face value" (32). Matthews then turns to Gower (for two paragraphs only) for evidence that "inserting a version of oneself into literary works was by this time a viable poetic strategy." He mentions Gower's use of his own name in "Confessis Amantis," observes that Amans/Gower's "abjecting himself" to Venus is similar to Chaucer's self-abjection to the god of Love in the Prologue to "The Legend of Good Women," and points out that "There is little to be gleaned about the real Gower's autobiography from these passages." Matthews then sidesteps a more complex engagement with Gower and autobiography: "So far as autobiography is concerned, [Gower] critics have been more interested in what goes on at the beginning of the 'Confessio,' and the claim made there that the work was commissioned by King Richard himself" (33). Moving on immediately from this statement to discuss fifteenth-century poetry, Matthews neither cites the interested critics he mentions nor assesses the truth value of Gower's account of meeting Richard on the Thames in the first recension of the poem--perhaps because there is no easy or obvious way of establishing that the scene is historical or fictional, apart from the discovery of at-present-unknown documentary evidence. Is this an instance of genuine autobiography, maybe the first in English? Does it make any difference? How does Gower's revision/elimination of the scene affect his presentation of self elsewhere in the poem? As he proceeds, Matthews effectively shows that Hoccleve and Lydgate--like Chaucer (along with W. G. Sebald, Marcel Proust, and Karl Ove Knausgaard)--combine fact and fiction for rich thematic and stylistic effects in their various presentations of self. Gower's scene on the Thames might well be investigated in this light too. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Matthews, David. Published Matthews, David. "Autobiographical Selves in the Poetry of Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate." In Adam Smyth, ed. A History of English Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 27–40. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Autobiographical Selves in the Poetry of Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate. 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 Walling investigates the "paradox" that, "while Gower was clearly intrigued by the possibilities of Aristotelian pedagogy, very little of the 'Confessio Amantis' is based directly on the 'Secretum secretorum'" (343). Gower "specifically avoids dramatizing or voicing Aristotle as a character," using instead Nectanabus as a "darker alternative" to Aristotle (358) "to emphasize the distancing effect in his handling of Aristotle"--a strategy which shows "the complexity of his literary personae and his understanding of the pedagogical and psychological workings of literary fictions" (344), as well as, Walling suggests, "his misgivings about the risks and the efficacy of offering counsel to [Richard II]" (353). She briefly traces the origins and spread of the "Secretum secretorum" from the Orient through Roger Bacon and thence into the mainstream of Western European literature (345-46). Walling is reluctant to see Gower using the "Secretum" to forge a "speculum principis," as has been suggested by many; instead, he diffuses his own voice through several characters (rather than adopting an Aristotelian one), and provides Nectanabus as an alternative. In the conflicting pairing of Alexander's two counselors, Walling finds important evidence of Gower's strategy: "Gower's negotiation of the opposing literary poles of Aristotle and Nectanabus in the final books of the 'Confessio Amantis' helps us to see the drama of pedagogy at the poem's core, and the struggle to establish a way of relating to received textual authority that can plausibly lead to moral and psychological transformations" (364). What the CA ultimately offers readers, whether king or commoner, is "mediated access to Aristotelian knowledge for readers or students who wish to seek it, the poem's most effective lesson is its dramatization of self-transformation in the pursuit of knowledge . . . not an encyclopedic treatise of readily digested political wisdom, but a meditation on how to seek out wisdom and self-realization" (367). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Walling, Amanda. Published Walling, Amanda. "The Authority of Impersonation: Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and the 'Secretum Secretorum'." Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 47.3 (2016): 343-64. 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 Authority of Impersonation: Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and the "Secretum Secretorum." 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 McMillan, Samuel F. Published McMillan, Samuel F. Medieval Authorship at Reason's End: The "Roman de la Rose"'s Legacy of Misrule. Ph.D. Dissertation. Pennsylvania State University, 2016. v, 324 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A80.05(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/rr171x20k. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Review McMillan argues "that Guillaume de Lorris's and Jean de Meun's 'Roman de la Rose' initiates a literary tradition that understands reason to be in tension with and even antithetical to imaginative writing" and serves as a "speculative domain" for writers such as Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Hoccleve. In differing ways, these writers "imitate, correct, and reimagine the narrative conditions and implications of Raison's repudiation," enabling them "to recognize, accept, document, and value the morally questionable, the ephemeral, the earthly" (iii). Tracing this development through later fifteenth-century poets (Hawes and Skelton), McMillan argues that this poetics of "counter-rationality" (285) leads eventually to the "passionate sublime" (286) of early modern English writing. Treating Gower, but only the "Confessio Amantis" (pp. 114-70), MacMillan structures his discussion in four parts. First, he establishes that Gower posits "two different presentations of authorship . . . at the beginning of Book I for his fictional self and for Amans," casting the "frame" of CA "as the story of a poet coming to appreciate and employ the imaginative capacities of a love that cannot be known by rule." Next, MacMillan "analyzes the mode of authorship embodied by Genius" and Genius's "poetic shortcomings" to offer imagination as an alternative to the futility of trying to unite passion and rationality." In his third section, McMillan addresses how Gower, in Book VII, presents "rhetoric as a rational aesthetic," an ideal, however, that he is himself either unable or unwanting to attain." In his fourth section, McMillan reads "the closing of Book VIII" as a "dramatic reimagination" of RR and a depiction of "poetry as incapable of effecting the regeneration of an audience's reason." Here, "[i]maginative composition functions as misruled desire, a sensual longing for a reason that can resurface only in the wake of the literary" (116-17). Gower, McMillan tells us, "may be above all a moral poet hoping to return rational order to a world turned upside down, but to accomplish this feat, to bring a measure of harmony to man and beast alike, he must invest readers with an intense love of the mundane by relying on a poetry founded in reason's other" (170). [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 Medieval Authorship at Reason's End: The "Roman de la Rose"'s Legacy of Misrule. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The depiction of impotence as an inevitable consequence of old age in the conclusion to the CA is not found in any of Gower's other sources, but derives directly, Carlson argues, from the elegies of Maximianus. More specifically, Carlson traces Gower's "Qui cupit id quod habere nequit, sua tempora perdit. / Est vbi non posse, velle salute caret" (VIII.2376 vv. 1-2) and Venus' paraphrase, "Min herte wolde and I ne may" (VIII. 2412), to Maximianus' "nec quod possum, non voluisse meum est" (4.55), which Carlson translates, somewhat freely, as "my part is not to want what I am incapable of"; and he traces Venus' punning declaration that "The thing is torned into was" (VIII.2435) to Maximianus' "Non sum qui fueram; periit pars maxima nostri" ("I am no more what once I was; the best part of me has perished") (1.3). The largest part of this essay, however, is concerned with introducing Maximianus to modern readers: the little-known contemporary of Boethius whose reflections upon his sexual exploits, successful and unsuccessful, in youth and old age, were included, along with other products of a phallocentric Latin culture, in the medieval school curriculum. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 36.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David Richard. Published Carlson, David Richard. "Gower's Amans and the Currricular Maximianus." Studia Neophilologica 89 (2017): 67-80. 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's Amans and the Curricular Maximianus. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Biggs, Frederick M. Published Biggs, Frederick M. Chaucer's Decameron and the Origin of the Canterbury Tales. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017. ISBN 9781843844754. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review Biggs seeks to establish Chaucer's direct reliance on Boccaccio's Decameron for inspiration and for narratives in the Canterbury Tales. Gower figures prominently, especially in chapter 1, in a section sub-titled "The Canon' Yeoman's Prologue and Tale and Gower's Confessio Amantis" (32-42), and chapter 5, entitled "The Wife of Bath's Tale and the Tale of Florent" (178-227). Much of Biggs' rangy argument about Chaucer's use of the Decameron relies on establishing composition dates for various tales. It is important for his case to show that Gower's discussion of alchemy in Book IV was revised--and criticized--by Chaucer into the CYT. In Biggs' view Gower considered alchemy a true science (because Genius says so), and in mocking that notion Chaucer continued a "Quarrel" between the two (much debated of yore) that had begun with Chaucer's satirical portrait of Gower as the Man of Law, and a "sharp criticism" of Gower in the WBT--which, Biggs claims (relying in part on Tyrwhitt), Chaucer crafted out of the "Tale of Florent" to condemn "Gower's moral blindness to rape" and his failure "to treat the stories of others and women honestly," albeit that--in Biggs' view--Chaucer thought Gower had the capability to do so (214-15)." [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's Decameron and the Origin of the Canterbury Tales. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Edwards sets out the terms of his inquiry early in his introduction: "The central argument I want to advance is that literary authorship develops in medieval England from discrete acts of invention--that is, from the discovery of expressive possibilities within and against established conventions of reading and writing. As this description implies, authorship is at once rhetorical and literary, historical and poetic" (xi). He amplifies this a bit later, noting that "we must look . . . to moments when writers claim authorship and locate themselves in relation to literary culture . . . . These moments are not simply exemplary but constitutive; they are the primary record of writers acting within historical contexts to inaugurate themselves as authors" (xxviii). Clearly, Gower figures large in Edwards' subsequent analysis of writers and their works that carry his points. For Edwards, Gower is "the poet who most overtly seeks to become an author in trilingual medieval England. Throughout his career, Gower employs the textual apparatus of biblical and classical commentary to frame his poems. He sees his major works--the "Mirour de l'Omme," "Vox Clamantis," and "Confessio Amantis"--as comprising a literary canon, and he generates paratexts to sustain the structure of his canon, even as the works themselves undergo development, revision, and contextualization. Authorship figures internally in the Mirour and the Vox through the voice of an exemplary self, preacher, and prophet. It is marked externally in Gower's glosses in the Confessio and his creation of the persona of a lover whose final dismissal from erotic service coincides with Gower's return to his earlier body of didactic writing. Gower is also the custodian of his reputation as an author. Here he has his precedents in [Walter] Map obliquely and Marie [de France] explicitly, while his contemporaries embed their authorship with their fictions. Moreover, after completing the Confessio, Gower creates a secondary and parallel canon of shorter poems, in three languages, that stands as a commentary and extension of his major poem" (xxix-xxx). He devotes chapter 3 ("John Gower: Scriptor, Compositor, Auctor," 63-104) of the monograph to a work-by-work commentary on Gower's poems, major and minor, in all three languages. Again, Edwards sets out the terms of his larger argument very clearly: "In most reckonings, Gower figures as a poet who writes as a moralist" (65). However, as Edwards establishes in subsequent pages, for Gower the role of moralist was inseparable from--even dependent upon--his self-establishment as auctor: "Gower functions as a moralist precisely by being an author . . . . Gower's poetic career reflects a sustained and continually renewed performance of authorship in the service of ethical and political reflection. Authorship is the necessary condition of 'moral Gower'" (66). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 36.2 Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, Robert R. Published Edwards, Robert R. Invention and Authorship in Medieval England. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2017. ISBN 9780814213407. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Manuscripts and Textual Studies Language and Word Studies Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Vox Clamantis Confessio Amatis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Invention and Authorship in Medieval England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This collection of sixteen essays "originated as part of the Third International Congress of the John Gower Society, held at the University of Rochester, June 29-July 3, 2014. . . . All the essays here have been included because in one manner or another they comment on facets of selfhood: views of the inside, the personal, and of the exterior, the outside in its interaction with the 'other,' defined several ways" Introduction 1). The collection is divided into three sections: Part 1, "Knowing the Self and Others," consists of five essays "that, taken together, reflect on multiple aspects of self-encounter" (Introduction 1). Part II, "The Essence of Strangers," includes five essays united by "the expanding awareness by the singular self of an encompassing 'otherness'" (Introduction 2). "The six essays in Part III, "Social Ethics, Ethical Poetics," trace the trajectory of two of Gower's greatest concerns: honest government and honest craft, bringing together "the very public and the very private ("Others and the Self") in the fabric of life and thought" (Introduction 2). For individual essays, search for John Gower: Others and the Self under Published. [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A. and R. F. Yeager, eds. Published Peck, Russell A. and R .F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017. ISBN 9781843844747. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower: Others and the Self. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The essay begins by reconstructing the medieval view of neuroanatomy and cognition as inherited from Galen and illustrated in medieval and early modern diagrams, four of which are reproduced in the text. In medieval cognitive theory, the brain has three ventricles: first, the "imaginatio" (or "fantasia") forms an image based on input from the eye. Second, the "imaginativa" uses images from the first cell to create a "performative materialization," that is, a "staging" of multiple mental scenarios along with a sense of their meaning--this lively process is called "multiplication of species." The third is the storehouse of memory which also contains the "membrorum motiva," a link to intention and bodily motion (8-12). Other diagrams connect the brain to the heart (with music having the ability to bypass the brain) and provide for a "custos" (force of habit) that regulates cognition (13-17). All of these concepts are key to understanding the CA, where the sense of sight--both for good and ill--is the chief route of access to heart and mind and the entryway for love (17-18). While Amans obsessively stokes his "imaginative" with remembered images of the lady (19-20), Nectanabus generates visual stimuli to manipulate the performative faculties of Olympias, his target for seduction (21). Acting directly on the heart, music promotes peace and awakens Apollonius from despair (24-25), while a darkly parallel progress--from eye to "fantasia" to heart to members--brings on a disastrous coupling and death for Canace at the hands of her heartless father (25-29). In the "Tale of Three Questions," however, "all three ventricles are at peace with each other and their audience, through Peronelle's careful staging and balanced regulation" (31). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell. Published Peck, Russell. "The Materiality of Cognition in Reading, Staging, and Regulation of Brain and Heart Activities in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis.'" In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017) pp. 7-31. 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 Materiality of Cognition in Reading, Staging, and Regulation of Brain and Heart Activities in Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review How to explain the peculiar juxtaposition of pity and chastity among the virtues enjoined upon the king in Book VII of the CA? As Irvin argues, citing the political theory of Foucault and Agamben, " . . . pity is a form of 'power over life' that sovereignty claims . . . " (51). It descends from the classical virtue of "clemency" defined by Seneca as a function of superior power, be it of emperor or paterfamilias (53-56), combined with the Christian virtue of affective pity modeled after God's salvific love (56-58). In classical and Christian theory, failure of clemency (or pity) leads to lechery, as witnessed by the sexual sadism and uncontrolled womanizing of Nero (59-60). True power over life requires chastity, "a power available only to men" (63, discussing CA VII.4255-56). Like pity, chastity serves the agenda of biopower as monopolized by the male; the man who gives in to desire, as did the rapist Arruns, becomes a mere feminized "caitif" in the service of Venus (66). The suffering of Mary at her son's passion was expressed in the planctus, a "script" for the feeling of pity, but in Gower's response to the planctus, he always speaks in his own masculine voice (68-69, discussing MO 28909-220). Although he tells the story of Lucrece in his section on chastity, Gower's Lucrece is scarcely granted a voice, only a wordless, almost subhuman outpouring of tears. Even her last words are barely uttered, "noght withoute peine," and recorded only in paraphrase (71-72). "Her chastity is not a virtue, but a spontaneous natural event subject to the male gaze, compassion, and power over life: she is an object of male power over the household" (71). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Irvin, Matthew. Published Irvin, Matthew. "'Noght withoute Peine': Chastity, Complaint, and Lucrece's Vox Clamantis." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 50-72. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Noght withoute Peine": Chastity, Complaint, and Lucrece's "Vox Clamantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review At CA VII.3545-47, "Genius voices the astonishing advice that the king should shape his face so as to control what it expresses to others. 'A king schal make good visage / That no man knowe of his corage / Bot al honour and worthinesse" (73), thus seeming to condone a form of deception as a strategy for rule. However, this counsel is not unexpected, as the medieval "science" of physiognomy was a staple of advice to princes and is ubiquitous to a major source for CA Book VII, the "Secreta [sic] Secretorum" (74-76). In a world much declined from the Golden Age, a king must control his own "visage" and also read faces if he seeks to preserve his rule. Both Chaucer and Gower offer numerous examples of the "good visage"--in all its moral ambiguity--as a strategy for survival in royalty and other walks of life (78-82). As a poet who writes for kings, Gower resolves the tension by trusting the king to keep his face a plain reflection of his "corage" (82). In Taylor's argument, Gower deleted the tribute to Chaucer from the Henrician version of the CA as a rebuke to his friend for failure to comment on the political crises of 1386 and 1388 (83). Chaucer responded by injecting the Gowerian theme of "corage" versus "visage" into his Clerk's reworking of Petrarch's translation of the "Tale of Griselda," with Walter the archetypal tyrant who conceals his uncontrolled desires behind a "good visage" (88). For Chaucer, "The result of Genius' Machiavellian advice . . . is not a disciplined, ethical ruler, but a Walter," and Gower is following the example of Petrarch by trimming his ethical standards to write for tyrants (90). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Taylor, Karla. Published Taylor, Karla. "Reading Faces in Gower and Chaucer." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 73-90. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading Faces in Gower and Chaucer. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Cooper's analysis begins with the famous surprise ending to the CA, where Amans is curtly informed that he is old and unfit for love: "in ending his story collection like this, Gower is being true to the deep roots of the form in ways we do not normally think about. Ideas of mortality, the end of life, and the ends of storytelling are closely linked. Ends can be spatial or temporal," or synonymous with the "final cause," the aim or purpose of an action (92). In the latter sense, the end or purpose of a story may be found in its ending, for example: "The Apocalypse is the necessary conclusion to the volume that opened with Creation" (94). Although this "end" may include a moral, Cooper's discussion--ranging expertly from "Gilgamesh" to Gower--explains how the universal "end" of storytelling is to hold our common mortality at bay, at least in fantasy, yet somehow accommodate the reality that even the longest of story collections--like every human life--must end, must die. The final story of the CA--while ending happily--in that same happy ending artfully affirms mortality as the end of storytelling: "The echo of St. Paul's mystical experience [at Apollonius of Tyre, CA VIII.1898-99] suggests that the story is moving even beyond the world of time . . . the audience . . . mortal like Gower . . . when his tales come to their end, can share in his hope of joy on the other side of apocalypse, the end of the world, the end of the story" (106-07). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Cooper, Helen. Published Cooper, Helen. "Gower and Mortality: The Ends of Storytelling." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 91-107. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Mortality: The Ends of Storytelling. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Nolan's analysis opens with a classic example of biblical "sermo humilis," a simple teaching brought to life with a single sensory detail: "whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones . . . shall not lose his reward" (Matt. 10.42, discussed at 111). Nolan proceeds to analyze the same kind of "plain style" in Gower's CA, arguing that this style "is uniquely suited to represent and indeed to recreate sensory experience," together with the aesthetic and instructive values such experience is especially equipped to provide (113, 140). The medium of Gower's English plain style is a smooth and regular verse that never strives for effect or diverts attention from the story (114-19). The poet explains his moral purpose at CA 1.8 ff.: to engage with "the everyday . . . world governed by love" (121), in the plain and literal style required of priest and penitent in the sacrament of confession (121-25). The "Tale of Acteon and Diana" illustrates the riches of the plain style in action. Told by Genius as a warning against misusing the sense of sight, the exemplum places the reader within the consciousness of Acteon as he emerges from a flowery forest into an aptly titled "litel plein," where suddenly--but willfully--he views the naked goddess standing in a well (125-29). A different, morally ambiguous effect is accomplished by a single sensory detail in the passage where Amans describes an imaginary visit to his lady's bed at night: his disembodied "herte" finds her body "warm" (135). As Amans describes his painful return to reason, the imagery of a cold shower evokes the reader's empathy along with moral instruction (139-40). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Nolan, Maura. Published Nolan, Maura. "Sensation and the Plain Style in Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 111-40. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis 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 Sensation and the Plain Style in Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Zarins focuses her analysis on how Gower retells the stories of "two Ovidian villains who are known for their depravity" (141), Polyphemus in "The Tale of Acis and Galatea," and Tereus the rapist who mutilates his victim. "Gower writes sympathetically about them (141), treating their stories "without irony," that is, devoid of the heavy foreshadowing that in Ovid's telling, makes them evil from the start: " . . . throughout Gower's "Confessio," monsters are not born, but made" (143). The lonely Polyphemus is assailed by envy of the happy lovers Acis and Galatea, but only when he surrenders to his sinful urge--by burying the lovers in a landslide--is he named as a "giant," a monster (144). Tereus is declared an evil freak of nature both in Ovid and Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women," while Gower goes out of his way to portray the future rapist as a loving husband until the moment of his choosing to act on a criminal desire (152). In many other tales, Genius illustrates how "conversion" to evil is possible for anyone, thus providing a cautionary example for Amans in his spiritual struggle--and of course for the reader as well. The reader's sympathy with Gower's villains is based not on guilty identification, as is sometimes alleged, but on a sense of our common humanity and free will. Zarins notes: "Gower's greatest villains are unsettling because they started out happy, hopeful, and ordinary, and in Gower's sympathetic retelling, one can imagine an alternate ending in which they remain so" (155). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Zarins, Kim. Published Zarins, Kim. "Violence without Warning: Sympathetic Villains and Gower's Crafting of Ovidian Narrative." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 141-55. 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 Violence without Warning: Sympathetic Villains and Gower's Crafting of Ovidian Narrative. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review For Chaucer (or at least, his fictional Man of Law), the sin of incest is unspeakable because "unkynde," that is, unnatural, an "abhominacion" (158). Eschewing such repression, Gower presents a detailed accounting of incest as wholly natural and yet not natural: sibling marriages were necessary for the children of Adam and Eve; natural law does not forbid it, only positive law; siblings Canace and Machaire were drawn to their fatal union by a natural desire--yet the poet proceeds to contradict his own dispassionate analysis, as he excoriates Amon's rape of his sister Tamar as "ayein kinde," thus an object of horror (164, referring to CA VIII.215). Both Chaucer and Gower express an anxiety over incest consistent with the late medieval "tectonic shift" to the ideal of "companionate marriage" as natural and proper (166), but "it is Gower whose poetic is the fuller and more searching" (168). Scanlon discusses "three moments in particular in Lydgate's poetry where he confronts the legacy of Gower in the form of the problem of incest" (172). In the story of Oedipus, Lydgate dwells on the grisly unnatural union of mother and son as it gave rise to the unnatural crime of fratricide, but paradoxically notes the free choice of the brothers to sin (174). Departing from Gower, he darkens the union of Canace and Machaire as "unnatural," even as he appears to celebrate the "meek[ness]" of Canace as she obeys her father's murderous command (177). In the unfinished allegory Reason and Sensuality, the goddess Diana (as moral instructress) advises the protagonist to reject illicit unions, including the unnatural sin of incest (178); his reward will be marriage, uneasily "naturalize[d] . . . as the true consummation of erotic desire" (180). Lydgate has not resolved the contradictions in Gower's conflicted treatment of incest, but the tension may be strategic on his part as it is inherent in the topic. [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Scanlon, Larry. Published Scanlon, Larry. "Gower, Lydgate, and Incest." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 156-82. Gower Subject Confessio Amanti Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Lydgate, and Incest. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower was not preoccupied with the Jews. In all his vast trilingual corpus, fewer than 300 lines refer to Jewish people per se, "of which 122 make up the 'Tale of the Jew and the Pagan'," the primary focus of Yeager's analysis (184, referring to CA VII.3207*-3329*). The tale is anti-Semitic by any standard. Although unschooled by true religion, the pagan follows the law of nature by helping his fellow human, while the Jew observes Jewish law by helping only himself and his fellow Jew. The story presents an analogue to the parable of the Good Samaritan, where the Samaritan (a religious outcast, a sort of pagan) shows himself superior in compassion to the (obviously Jewish) priest and Levite (188-90). In both stories, however, it is only the wrongful exercise of free will "[that] makes a Jew, not ethnicity or genealogy" (190). Gower's work is notably devoid of the usual medieval tropes on Jewish people as condemned by mere fact of birth to "societal detrimentality, physical deformity, monstrosity or bodily filth" (191). Intriguingly, the story appears only in a group of manuscripts evidently designed for Henry IV (193-94). According to St. Augustine, the Jewish people were kept alive for a reason, and a few would be converted, so all must be treated fairly (195-96). The "Jew and the Pagan" appears in a discussion of "pity," a virtue the poet was especially concerned to promote in Henry (199). Also, Gower may have wished to encourage the new king in supporting London's "domus conversorum," a refuge for converted Jews that must have been familiar to Gower (197, 202). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R.F. "Gower's Jews." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 185-203. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Jews. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This essay focuses on Gower's "In Praise of Peace," which Kobayashi seeks "to situate in a cross-channel movement committed to the promotion of peace in Europe" (204-05). As her frame for comparison, she uses Philippe de Mézières' "Epistre au roi Richart" (1395) and "Songe du vieil pelerine" (1385), both of which offer advice to kings through the author-persona of "an old sage" (205) much like the self-construction of John Gower. After tipping his hat to just war theory in defense of Henry's usurpation, the English poet proceeds to his major preoccupations: the Christian-versus-Christian bloodshed between England and France, and the conflict of pope versus pope, the true source of disharmony between Christian nations (207-08). The resulting chaos leaves Christendom vulnerable to incursion by non-Christians (209). Remarkably similar themes are expressed in de Mézières' "Epistre": Christendom is diseased at the top, so Richard II and Charles VI must intervene to heal the schism by arranging a truce between England and France and proceeding to "rescue" the Holy Land (212-14). The poet Oton de Grandson, a courtier to John of Gaunt, may well have been a conduit for peace-promoting ideology between de Mézières and Gower (214-15). Another commonality with Chaucer and Gower is de Mézière's treatise defending marriage and married women (215).Both Gower and de Mézières share in the vilification of Alexander as the prototype of tyrants (218-22). A notable difference between the two authors is their opinion of crusading: de Mézières promoted it by founding a new chivalric order meant to recapture Jerusalem, while Gower was much more reserved, preferring to convert the misbelievers through preaching rather than warfare (216-17, 220-21). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Kobayashi, Yoshiko. Published Kobayashi, Yoshiko. "Letters of Old Age: The Advocacy of Peace in the Works of John Gower and Philippe de Mézières." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 204-22. Gower Subject In Praise of Peace 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 Letters of Old Age: The Advocacy of Peace in the Works of John Gower and Philippe de Mézières. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Giancarlo's argument begins by examining Gower's admonitory "regimen" for kings in general, including the mirror for princes in Book VII of the CA, and how the poet creatively reworked his sources, especially the "Secretum Secretorum" and the regiminal material in Brunetto Latini's "Livres dou Tresor." In so doing, the poet addressed "the pragmatics of governmentality," a term derived from the political theory of Foucault (228). The regiminal tradition was "constitutional" in that it theorized the king's power not as absolute, but always predicated on justice and the just rule of law (230-45). Following the English tradition enshrined by Bracton, Gower "made the relation of the king and the law one of mutual conditioning" (234). In an exemplum from the CA's mirror for princes, the wise sovereign Lycurgus gave his people a just law, then disappeared, never to return; the moral is that good law is necessary for good government, while the person of a king is not (242, citing CA VII.3002-07). Next, Giancarlo discusses Gower's regiminal theory as he expressed it in his writings addressed to the new king Henry IV, both the Latin encomia and the English "In Praise of Peace." All are "constitutional" (250) in specifying limits on the king's power, not through institutional checks and balances as in a modern democracy (246), but grounded in the voice of the people, justice, and law; if Henry violates the principle of "ius," he will incur both evil fame and the destruction of his rule (245-54). In "In Praise of Peace," Gower praised Henry, advised him, and expressed hope for his reign, while (constitutionally) affirming his loyalty to Henry's regal estate, not to his person (258, citing IPP 372-78). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Giancarlo, Matthew. Published Giancarlo, Matthew. "Gower's Governmentality: Revisiting John Gower as a Constitutional Thinker and Regiminal Writer." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 225-59. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Minor Latin Poetry In Praise of Peace Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Governmentality: Revisiting John Gower as a Constitutional Thinker and Regiminal Writer. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Meindl, Robert J. Published Meindl, Robert J. "Gower's 'Speculum Iudicis': Judicial Corruption in Book VI of the 'Vox Clamantis'." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 260-82. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review The title phrase "Speculum Iudicis" or "Mirror/Guidebook for Judges" is a take-off on the well-known genre "speculum principis/regis," the "mirror/guidebook for kings" (261 n.4), especially fitting as the judge is a stand-in for the king, who represents God (262). Meindl focuses his analysis on VC VI, Chapters 4 and 5 (VI.249-418), both concerned with the moral failings of English judges. Throughout these chapters, Gower condemns the entire judiciary for allowing "lex" (mere human law) to subvert "ius," the true justice that "lex" is meant to serve (262). Chapter 4 excoriates the judges from their earliest training as eager for bribes, thus making it impossible for the poor to receive justice; instead, justice must be unlocked with a golden key. These judges are willing prey to indirect forms of influence available only to the rich, known as "laboring" and "maintenance"; the royal treasury suffers thereby, while corrupt judges prosper (265-74). Chapter 5 addresses the judges directly, in a series of "commonplaces" borrowed from "De Vita Monachorum" (276): you scheme to steal your neighbors' land; rapacious on earth, you are losing treasure in heaven; you will find yourselves harshly judged and eternally suffering in hell--this last has an interesting parallel passage in the thirteenth century English law book cited by Meindl as "Bracton" (279). As explained by Gower (VC VI.179-80), the only hope for reform of a corrupt judge is the personal forum of his conscience: "Given his [Gower's] insistence everywhere on individual responsibility, we could hardly expect anything else" (280, 281). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 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 Gower's "Speculum Iudicis": Judicial Corruption in Book VI of the "Vox Clamantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Gastle, Brian L. Published Gastle, Brian L. "'The Lucre of Marchandie': Poet, Patron, and Payment in Gower's "Confessio Amantis'." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 283-94. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Biography of Gower Review This essay focuses on the specifically "Ricardian" dedicatory passages at the beginning and end of the CA as compared with the passages that replaced them in "recensions" of the CA addressed to Henry IV. As Gower describes his chance encounter with Richard II on the royal barge in Ricardian version of the poem, he received a "charge" from his king to perform the "busynesse" of manufacturing a product, a poem (285, citing CA Prol.47-56*). The poet's humble service and the commercial quality of the transaction are reinforced in the closing dedicatory passage of the Ricardian version (CA VIII.3050-52*, discussed at 289). In the replacement passage found in the Henrician Prologue, Gower abandons the persona of the dependent/supplicant to state his authorial intention with a bold first person indicative verb (CA Prol.52-52, 62-63, discussed at 289). In the final dedicatory passage as found in the Henrician version, Gower deleted the suggestion of patronage by expressing his moral agenda--to advise on the common good--in first person indicative constructions, with himself as subject, and with no suggestion of subservience or hope of royal favor (291). In the same passage, he indicates his discomfort with the "business" of exchanging payment for product--"the lucre of marchandie" (CA VIII.3037, discussed at 292)--as tending to corruption. It seems his intent was to establish a moral voice independent of patronage: "In the end, his most significant allegiance is neither to Richard nor to Henry, but to his craft" (294). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 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 "The Lucre of Marchandie": Poet, Patron, and Payment in Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This essay considers the material world in Gower's CA, with particular focus on "crafted things," a cause of particular "anxiety about the ways in which such goods are produced and used" (295) in a corrupt and declining world. Both Aristotle and Thomas taught that all things are "hylomorphic," inseparable in form and matter, while medieval poets believed the same of their craft. As her chief example, Parkin discusses the jewel-encrusted goblet in the "Tale of Albinus and Rosemund," which despite its polished surface and innocent appearance is really constructed around the skull of Rosemund's father, who was killed in battle by her husband Albinus. The ambiguous status of the cup can best be understood in the context of Aquinas and Ockham on form and matter. Following Aristotle, Aquinas taught that "the body of any animal is a substance, while manufactured things . . . are artifacts" (300). For Aquinas, the skull cup is now an artifact, as the body ceases to be a substance when it is no longer alive, but for Ockham, even a dead body retains some properties of a substance--else why do we venerate the bodies of the saints (302)? For Gower, along the lines of Ockham, the skull retains "a kind of vitality" (302), but it is the craftsman who transforms it into a deceptive artifact with the power to do harm. Despite his anxiety over crafted objects, Gower believed in the possibility of honest craft; his own poetry, including the plain morality of "Albinus and Rosemund," is evidence of that (304-05). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Parkin, Gabrielle. Published Parkin, Gabrielle. "Hidden Matter in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 295-305. 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 Hidden Matter in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter. Published Nicholson, Peter. "Writing the 'Cinkante Balades'." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 306-28. Gower Subject Cinkante Balades Confessio Amantis Review This essay discusses CB within the rich tradition of late medieval French ballades (especially the collections and numbered sequences) of Machaut, de Granson, the anonymous Pennsylvania chansonnier, and more. "Gower's relation to the tradition is complex. While he clearly adopted many of the most recognizable conventions of form, diction, and theme . . . the work also has some distinctive qualities that set it apart from every earlier collection of 'balades'" (307). The most original feature of the CB may be its near-ubiquitous use of the envoy, a short stanza concluding the ballade which addresses the poem "from one person to another . . . What is perhaps most unique about that communication is that in 35 of these 48 poems, it takes place explicitly in writing" (314-15)--hence, the title of the essay. This use of direct address has an intriguing variety of effects, for example: the lover may write what he doesn't dare to say in person (318), and/or "re-enact" as well as describe the futility of his verbal appeal (321). As a dramatic device, the envoy promotes "our awareness of the addressee" (321), thus recording a relationship (happy or otherwise), rather than the usual complaint of a lover in isolation (321-24). An exception to the pattern is the highly original "Balade" 46, where the woman persona muses on her silent pleasure at hearing her beloved praised by others, with no suggestion that her intimate thoughts were meant to be shared (319). The final ballade, addressed to the Virgin Mary, resembles the ending of the CA in moving the sequence beyond earthly love, while not rejecting it (325). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 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 Writing the "Cinkante Balades." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review It has long been accepted that the two fifteenth-century Iberian manuscripts of the CA--one in Portuguese and one a Castilian translation based on the Portuguese--were associated with John of Gaunt's daughters Philippa and Catherine, who were married to the kings of Portugal and Castile. This essay explores what we know and what we can reasonably conjecture about the path these manuscripts followed from their creation in some kind of courtly context, to intermediate owners of humanistic leaning, to the safe haven of royal libraries. The presence of the Castilian MS in the Library of El Escorial is first attested in 1576 in a catalog listing it among the donations by Philip II, whose goal was to create a world-class national library and center of learning. The king very likely received the book from the scholarly Hieronymite friar Juan de Huete, whom he had appointed as the first prior of the Escorial (331-37). In Philip's royal library, the Spanish CA was classified not as fiction or "fabula," but as a work of "filosofía" along with other mirrors for princes and didactic works (338-39). The Portuguese manuscript, owned since the early nineteenth century by the Royal Library in Madrid, can be traced along a circuitous path to the library of Luis de Castilla (d. 1618), a book collector whose library included works of "law, classics, history, and regiments of princes, all of them typically humanistic readings" (342). On the death of Castilla, it was acquired by the polymath Count of Gondomar, long-serving ambassador to the court of James II. Left to his descendants, the volume went next to the Royal Library. Throughout its travels, the Iberian CA "seems to have been continually valued for its moral advice" and especially its regimen for princes (344). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Saez-Hidalgo, Ana. Published Sáez-Hidalgo, Ana. "Gower in Early Modern Spanish Libraries: The Missing Link." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 329-44. 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 Gower in Early Modern Spanish Libraries: The Missing Link. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Batkie analyzes the "ambiguous" nexus of the two principle threads running through the CA--love and confession--to argue that Gower's text confounds any critical reconciliation between them. Gower's formulation of the "unstable" yet "generative" nexus between love and confession intervenes into Foucault's understanding of medieval confession and sexuality. Foucault's formulation of subjectivity is dependent upon the erasure and forgetting of the self. In contrast, Gower's MO shows confessional subjectivity arising from an act of narration that produces confessional history--orienting the subject within time, relative to a revised (because confessed) past and an anticipated salvific future. In short, the confessing subject is established via the creation of its history. Batkie cannily illustrates how Amans's confessional activity takes up memory, forgetting, and history in generative but unstable ways. Amans's agency (to narrate, remember, forget) and his desire (for the beloved, for absolution) both produce and trouble him as subject. Gower forges a chiasmatic relationship between confession and love in which Amans's particular failures as a lover "can only become generative as a confessional exemplum" as Amans reads his inability to express his present desire in the amorous past" via his "remembered desire in the confessional present." His failures in love, in other words, become confessional successes, although amorous confession also leaves him "without history"--he does not formulate a confessional subjectivity embedded in a narrated past and an anticipated future. Rather, Amans's confessed narrative "cannot extend past [himself], or past the present tense." Even as narratives of love point only to the past, desire, through the confessional process, "is summonded, named, and extended." [EH-R. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Baktie, Stephanie L. Published Batkie, Stephanie L., "Loving Confession in the' Confessio Amantis'." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 39 (2017): 99-128. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Loving Confession in the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Burke begins with the evidence that CA and Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women" originated with the same commission, from Anne of Bohemia, first wife of Richard II. Machaut's "Jugement dou roi de Navarre" is a recognized "paradigm" for LGW, and Burke sees CA as well both as a "creative reworking of the 'Navarre'" (195) and as a poem heavily marked by Anne's influence. The evidence for Anne's role is found not just in the similarity to LGW. She is not mentioned explicitly, but Burke notes that contemporary allusions to female patrons were "more likely to be coded" (196). The clearest allusion to Anne occurs in VIII.2470-75, beginning "The newe guise of Beauwme was there, / With sondri thinges wel devised." The "thinges" Burke takes as a possible reference to Machaut's "dits," noting that three of Anne's own relatives served as patrons to Machaut, and also that two others were both patrons of and putative collaborators with Froissart and that her family also included several other women who were prominent in the cultivation of the arts. Anne stepped into the same role upon her arrival in England, Burke suggests, quickly learning English, as evidenced by not only Chaucer's dedication of LGW but also Clanvowe's in his "Book of Cupid." Anne's presence in CA is felt in the prominence given to exemplary women, beginning with the reference to "Carmentis" in the Latin verses that head the Prologue and including the many tales of women who were virtuous in love and those who serve as examples of wise "wifely counsel." (Burke also detects an interesting "topical edge" in the "Tale of Albinus and Rosemund," which "implicitly recalls" the death of Anne's grandfather, John of Bohemia, at the hands of her late father-in-law, the Black Prince, at the battle of Crécy.) In their choice of many similar examples, Gower and Machaut both engage with the tradition of clerical misogyny, but in ways that reveal important differences between CA and "Navarre." Machaut, in defending his own earlier work, gives voice to the views that his poem finally opposes, while Gower merely takes women's virtues for granted, and unlike both Machaut and Chaucer, has no need to depict himself as defending women only "in deference to an authority beyond his control" (205). And where Machaut's poem ends with a judgment against the poet and the imposition of a penance in the form of new poems, Gower's persona is released from his subjection to love and reverts to his earlier style of writing. In doing so, he leaves writing of love to "him which hath of love his make" (*VIII.3078), suggesting that "yes, the 'Confessio' was originally created as a love poem to honor the great love between [Richard and Anne]. Beyond that, Gower expressed his expectation that further 'songes' and 'seyinges,' literary creations, will arise from their royal partnership" (207). [PN. Copyright. John Gower Society, eJGN 37.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Burke, Linda. Published Burke, Linda. "Bohemian Gower: 'Confessio Amantis,' Queen Anne, and Machaut's Judgment Poems." In R. Barton Palmer and Burt Kimmelman, eds. Machaut's Legacy: The Judgment Poetry Tradition in the Later Middle Ages and Beyond. Ed. R. Barton Palmer and Burt Kimmelman. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), p. 192-216. 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 Bohemian Gower: "Confessio Amantis," Queen Anne, and Machaut's Judgment Poems. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Drimmer focuses on the passage in Book I of CA in which Venus asks the narrator who he is. Most manuscripts, and all of the earliest ones, give the same reading for I.161: "I seid, 'A Caitif that lith hiere," as Macaulay prints it from F; but seven copies in Macaulay's group "1(c)" (which he labeled "unrevised" but which we now believe to be later than the group he called "revised") and the closely related MS B either omit the line entirely (in two cases, leaving a blank space but in the wrong position, following the rhyming line I.162 rather than before it) or present an alternative: "And I answerede wiþ drery [or 'ful myld'] chiere," or most remarkably, in two copies, identifying the narrator with the author, "Ma dame I sayde Iohn Gowere." Seven of these eight copies, Drimmer notes, figure among the fourteen manuscripts that contain miniatures showing the penitent narrator kneeling before Genius after I.202, in all but one case on the same page. The miniatures show the narrator either as an old man, consistent with the identity of the author, or as a youth, the persona that he adopts for the purposes of the confession, reflecting the same sort of indecision that might lie behind the alternative readings in I.161. Drimmer in fact argues provocatively that the various scribes' awareness of the image that would appear in most cases in the very next column may have been the reason for their hesitation to commit themselves to the reading in their exemplar. "Each scribe revised with the foreknowledge that whatever his revision was, an adjoining image that depicts the individual whose line of dialogue he inscribed would produce a moment of pictorial reckoning for which he would be held to account" (24). Instead of our viewing the illustrations as mere "translations" of the text, "these manuscripts demand that we resituate the position of the visual in our assessment of literary culture" (28). [PN. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 37.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Drimmer, Sonja. Published Drimmer, Sonja. "The Disorder of Operations: Illuminators, Scribes, and John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." Lias 44 (2017): 5-28. ISSN : 2033-4753. E-ISSN : 2033-5016.{http://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.php?url=issue&journal_code=LIAS&issue=1&vol=44}. 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 Disorder of Operations: Illuminators, Scribes, and John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The prince's role as judge is a central concern of the "Fürstenspiegel" tradition, McGerr notes, but the three works in question in this essay "complicate the depiction of legal judgment by inscribing the poet into the process of judgment. . . . The author's persona is literally judged within the poem but figuratively authorizes a process of judgment for readers that links literary judgment to legal judgment. In particular, by exploring the relationship between reading and judging, these authors constructed poems that highlight the role of reading as a means of developing good judgment, whether by princes or by other readers whose self-government contributed to creating a just society" (167). The link between reading and judging has deeps roots in language, McGerr observes, in the common Latin root of both "legible" and "legislation," for instance, and in the multiple uses, in Old and Middle English, of "raedan" and "reden." Isidore of Seville declared that "lex a legendo vocata," and John of Salisbury, echoing Deuteronomy, insisted that rulers should read the law each day. In Dante, the link between reading and legal judgment is most explicit in the sphere of Justice in "Paradiso" 18-20, a passage that McGerr labels a "mirror for princes" in its concern for just rulership. Machaut's "Navarre" explores the relation between reading and judgment by framing the debate about suffering in love in legal terms and by ascribing to the King of Navarre "'reading' skills superior to those of the poet-narrator" (177). Gower's CA is linked to both earlier works in its linking of love and kingship, in its education of both the lover-narrator and the prince, and in its emphasis on the importance of law to good kingship. Citing Mitchell and others, McGerr notes Gower's use of exempla to provoke the reader to more perceptive reading. She adds a discussion of Gower's pervasive use of "rede" and its derivatives in contexts invoking reading, judging, and advising (many of which also require the reader's alert attention in order to discern the proper sense) and Genius' repeated references to the lesson to be found in "bokes." "The 'Confessio' suggests strongly that reading can serve as a means of inquiry and analysis that facilitates ethical judgment, for kings and others. Gower's poem presents a portrait of the prince as judge and therefore one for whom reading skills are essential; but, through the poet-protagonist's experience of the process of judgment within the narrative, the 'Confessio' also presents its advice about royal judgment indirectly, at the same time that it . . . offers all readers a mean of gaining greater skill in ethical judgment" (186). [PN. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 37.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor McGerr, Rosemarie. Published McGerr, Rosemarie. "The Judge as Reader, the Reader as Judge: Literary and Legal Judgment in Dante, Machaut, and Gower." In R. Barton Palmer and Burt Kimmelman, eds. Machaut's Legacy: The Judgment Poetry Tradition in the Later Middle Ages and Beyond (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), pp. 165-91. 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 Judge as Reader, the Reader as Judge: Literary and Legal Judgment in Dante, Machaut, and Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yeager seeks to defend "the generally unrecognized complexity" of Gower's "Traitiė" by drawing attention to "the remarkable polyvalences, the aesthetic and allusive confrontations of his balades, [and] their challenges, inspirational, formal and doctrinal" (p. 259). He focuses on the second ballade in the sequence, one of the six non-narrative poems that envelop the twelve more familiar exempla of failed marriages in numbers 6-17. The first stanza invokes (in line 4) the injunction in Genesis 9:1 to "increase and multiply and fill the earth," as well as (in line 6) Genesis 3:17, "with labor and toil . . . ," but it is structured around a distinction between spirit and flesh from Romans 8:14-16. From the same passage in Paul, Gower adopts the engendering power of the Spirit in order to establish the "paradoxical equivalent inequality" between flesh and spirit, their "commonality" of both purpose and dignity (264-65). The vocabulary that Gower uses deepens the resonance: the juxtaposition of "experience" and "contemplation" (lines 2-3) invokes the Active and Contemplative lives, and thus Christ's words to Martha in Luke 10:38-42; and hanging over the entire stanza is the polyvalence of "amour" (line 1), both physical and spiritual, embodied elsewhere, as in the CA, in the dual roles of Venus. The image of the soul contemplating God in lines 1-2 has a long line of illustrious antecedents. Gower also draws upon Augustine both for the unique properties of the soul and for his insistence upon "a role and a dignity for the body" (269). The larger argument of the "Traitiė" is that marriage "conjoins body and soul. . . . It is this humane wholeness that lies at the heart of the 'Traitiė' balades, prompting a definition of marriage not as legitimate only for offspring, and only if lacking in pleasure, as some austere theologians would have it, but rather as valid and joyful" (270). The value of Yeager's essay lies in its very willingness to take Gower's aims and intentions both as moralist and as poet fully seriously. There are some odd asides--the assertion that Machaut's ballades are "structured narratively" (261), for instance, and that Gower would likely not have written ballades without an envoy after 1390 (268). (Deschamps, Granson, and Christine de Pisan, among others, all continued to write ballades without envoys after that date.) There are also some questions about exactly what some of Gower's lines mean. "Labour" (line 6) probably does not refer to childbirth (as Yeager suggests, p. 265); such a sense does not occur in French, and in Middle English only contextually, and only later, according to the MED; and "providence" (line 8) isn't used as a general synonym for divine agency until much later (p. 263). Lines 8-12 offer more than one difficulty, including the awkward anacoluthon in line 12. Where Yeager has "From the spirit which does this, Providence cannot withhold a subsequent reward. This understanding is greater in the soul. . . . Than in the body engendered in its sons," I would read instead "He who makes provision for the soul cannot fail of subsequent reward. That understanding is greater in the soul . . . Than is the body, engendering its offspring." Gower's ballades contain many similar challenges, and finding the best way of translating them must itself be part of our discussion of the "Traitiė." [PN. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 37.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R. F. "Twenty-First Century Gower: The Theology of Marriage in John Gower's 'Traitiė' and the Turn toward French." In Thelma Fenster and Carolyn P. Collette, eds. The French of Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 257-71. Gower Subject Traitie pour Essampler les Amants Marietz 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 Twenty-First Century Gower: The Theology of Marriage in John Gower's "Traitiė" and the Turn toward French. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Meindl and Riley present full Latin texts, followed by lucid translation into English, of "The Case of Sir William Septvans, 1366." They incorporate the five known documents associated with the case of Gower's obtaining the manor of Aldington Septvans via what have seemed to many rather shady dealings. The documents are: "Rotulus Parliamenti de anno Regni Regius Tertii quadragesimo" (Summary in French); The King's Writ (in Latin); Record of the Inquiry (in Latin); Evidence heard by the inquiry from the knights and respectable men of legal standing (in Latin); The decision of Parliament (in Latin). The volume thus does Gower studies a great service, by gathering in one place, and translating, disparate texts otherwise difficult to access, making them easily available. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Meindl, Robert J. and Mark T. Riley, eds. and trans., Published Meindl, Robert J. and Mark T. Riley, eds. and trans., A Latin Reader for the Study of Early English Law: with Introductions, Selections, Translations, Notes & Glossary. (St. Augustine, FL: Sophron Editor, 2017), pp. 585-605. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Latin Reader for the Study of Early English Law: with Introductions, Selections, Translations, Notes & Glossary. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This collection of twenty-six review articles is designed to build upon Siân Echard's "A Companion to Gower" (2004). While not ignoring older studies, the chapter authors especially focus on scholarship of the past twenty to thirty years, with the reader directed to the "John Gower Bibliography Online" (4) as a complement to the substantial bibliography in the book. Each article "not only presents a narrative and a review of the most recent scholarship on its identified topic, but a look at possible avenues for future work in that area" (6). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sáez-Hidalgo, Ana, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. Published Sáez-Hidalgo, Ana, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower. Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017. ISBN 9781317043034 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Hsy starts off by reviewing three important "waves" in recent theoretical scholarship on Gower: the role of "ethics . . . modern identity-based politics, and an increase in scholarship that explores the author's varied linguistic and socioeconomic milieu" (10). He proceeds to discuss earlier theoretical approaches as well as Gower himself as a practitioner of literary "theorique" (12), including the fruitful potential of multilingual "divisioun" (14). In the longest section, "Gower's Corpus," Hsy shows how the poet anticipates "radical crip theory" (15) by pushing his debilitated body into stark and thematically charged "visibility" (15), as somewhat surprisingly discussed by a fifteenth century scribe (18). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hsy, Jonathan. Published Hsy, Jonathan. "Gower and Theory: Old Books, New Matters." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 9-20. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Theory: Old Books, New Matters. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bullón-Fernández explicates the two foundational traditions in scholarship on Gower and gender, one claiming he is notably respectful to women, especially in the CA (22-23), and one finding women characters as misogynistically portrayed and marginalized to the "larger" concerns of men (23). Among her many examples of scholarship engaged with this complexity, Bullón-Fernández notes how rape in the CA is always the fault of the male (24), yet somehow gendered "effeminat" (25-26). She describes the manuscripts of the CA apparently commissioned by women and reflecting their influence (29), before calling for more research on the much less woman-friendly French and Latin poems (32-33). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bullón-Fernández, María. Published Bullón-Fernández, María. "Gower and Gender." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 21-36. 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 Gower and Gender. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In the CA Book 7, Gower produced the first treatise on rhetoric in the English language. Zarins highlights Gower's profound ambivalence toward rhetoric a gift from God to man alone (37), but also contrived, "unnatural" (37) and prone to abusive purposes, even goading to war (41). On rhetoric as a civilizing force, Gower appeals to Cicero, Horace, and the irenic harpist Arion (38-40). His use of rhetorical figures is skillfully varied across languages (42-47). The social classes, as well as women, have their special rhetorical gifts, to be used for good or ill (47-49), just as eloquence in general may be used or abused (49-50). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Zarins, Kim. Published Zarins, Kim. "Gower and Rhetoric." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 37-55. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Rhetoric. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review While staunchly orthodox, Gower's Christian faith is complex, like its counterpart today. Despite a generally Augustinian mindset, he never mentioned predestination (57). With few exceptions, he "privilege[es] the rational over the non-rational" (57), agreeing with Holcot that salvation is based on faith and good works (60). His sole foray into affective piety, the life of Mary in the MO, has the rational purpose of underscoring his "bedrock belief in the broad availability of human redemption" (61). He generally appealed to reason in refuting non-Christian faiths (61-66), allowing that misbelievers may repent and be saved (63), while more fanatically excoriating Lollardy as the devil's own work (68). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R .F. "Gower's Religions." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 56-74. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Religions. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Applying Bakhtinian theory, van Dijk defines law as a comprehensive "culture" allowing for contradiction and paradox, thus aligned with literature (75-77). Gower may have been some kind of lawyer, and he was certainly a litigant who knew the potential for "loopholes" in the legal practice of his time (78-79). Law was contiguous with justice in the Golden Age, but not always now (78). Despite this seeming pessimism, Gower held to a Christian "realist" view of the law as founded in nature, thus in love (80-82), although "love" is sometimes seen as problematic (82). Many times in the CA, exempla demonstrate the paradox that obedience to a just law really sets us free (83-84). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor van Dijk, Conrad. Published van Dijk, Conrad. "John Gower and the Law: Legal Theory and Practice." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 75-87. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower and the Law: Legal Theory and Practice. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review No manuscript of the CA can be dated earlier than 1399, the year of Henry IV's usurpation (91). Manuscripts containing the CA (forty-nine full MSS and nine fragments) show textual variants that have been used to support a theory of two or three authorial "recensions," as laudatory references to Richard II have been replaced by tributes to Henry Bolingbroke (91-93). More recently, the "recension" model has been questioned as unlikely on several grounds (93-94). The poet's only other work in English, "In Praise of Peace," survives in the pro-Henrician BL Add. MS 59495 (formerly MS Trentham, dated 1399) which may have been owned and even partially inscribed by Gower himself (95). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fredell, Joel. Published Fredell, Joel. "John Gower's Manuscripts in Middle English." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 91-96. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis In Praise of Peace Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower's Manuscripts in Middle English. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The MO is preserved only in Cambridge University Library Additional MS 3035 [no date proposed], which must have been copied from a witness now lost as it is not a holograph (97-98). Likewise, the CB survives in a sole MS, the trilingual BL Add. 59495, dated 1399 (98). Gower may have personally worked on this MS; if so, he must have had a special purpose for assembling poems in three languages (99). The ballade sequence "Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz" appears in thirteen MSS, including Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 3, the oldest to preserve the CA (99). The intended audience for the "Traitié" remains a subject of debate (99-100). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bertolet, Craig E. Published Bertolet, Craig E. "Gower's French Manuscripts." ." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 97-101. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) 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 Gower's French Manuscripts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The Latin works--VC, CrT, and short poems--all survive in fairly numerous witnesses. Reviewing the manuscript catalogues, Batkie notes the evidence for a scriptorium overseen by Gower, as well as authorial revisions as late as the Henry Percy rebellion of 1402-05 (103-04). Under "Manuscript production and conditions," she notes the probability of "redactions" showing the poet's increasing disillusionment with Richard II, as well as a network of scribes if not a scriptorium (105-06). Moving on to discuss "how those [material] conditions generate new readings of the texts themselves" (106), she notes, for example, how the famous trilingual MS BL Add. 59495 may really express an evolving critique of Henry IV's bellicosity (107). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Batkie, Stephanie L. Published Batkie, Stephanie L. "Gower's Latin Manuscripts." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 102-09. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Vox Clamantis Cronica Tripertita 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's Latin Manuscripts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The CA survives in two Iberian manuscripts, one in Castilian and one in Portuguese. The Castilian version is based on the Portuguese translation once thought to be lost, but rediscovered in the 1990s (110-11). Scholars generally agree on dating the Castilian MS to the late fifteenth century (11-12). By merging the Latin and English CA into a continuous vernacular text, the original translator has crucially altered its meaning (112). The Portuguese MS, dated by the scribe to 1430 and copied in Ceuta, North Africa, offers a gold mine of evidence on the history of book ownership and dissemination (112-14). Manuscript history shows the Iberian CA to have been preserved in "learned, humanistic circles" (114). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sáez-Hidalgo, Ana. Published Sáez-Hidalgo, Ana. "Iberian Manuscripts of Gower's Works." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 110-116. 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 Iberian Manuscripts of Gower's Works. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower "seems to have been the first English literary author to create an illustration program for his work," and the first in English to use illustrations "which feature an author-persona as part of a story's action" (117). For the VC, he commissioned the picture of an archer shooting an arrow at the world, underscoring his self-conceived, Bible-based role as a preacher and prophet excoriating abuses (118-21). For the CA, he used the statue from the dream of Nebuchadnezzar to picture the world's decline (121), and the highly self-conscious image of the author as Amans confessing to Genius (124-26). Two late manuscripts have more illuminations, in one case alleged to especially feature women (126). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Coleman, Joyce. Published Coleman, Joyce. "Illuminations in Gower's Manuscripts." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 117-131. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies 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 Illuminations in Gower's Manuscripts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The poet's "only documented residence is the house in the precinct of the Augustinian priory of St Mary Overey in Southwark" where he lived until his death (132). Carlin describes the rather working-class (137-38), noisy, and odoriferous district just south of the Thames (137-38). The bridge leading to London proper held a Great Gate adorned with the arms of King Richard II, Queen Anne, and Edward the Confessor (139). Gower may have moved into his residence as early as June 1385 (141). According to the lawsuit of 1394-95, he displaced the rightful tenant, one Feriby, and was forced to pay a fine, a case "not reflect[ing] well on his legal expertise" (142). Evidence is reviewed on the exact location of the house (142-44). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlin, Martha. Published Carlin, Martha. "Gower's Southwark." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 132-149. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Southwark. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower "was a 'court man' for life" in both meanings of the term, the noble household and court of justice (150). Gower's sophisticated trilingual corpus "could have found a comfortable home" in any courtly context (151). Despite his insider status, however, Gower was prone to role-playing the prophet in the wilderness boldly calling out abuses (151-52). Through the characters of Amans and Genius, both projections of the author, he channels both the courtly "subject of rule" and "voice of authority" (152). The poet's view of kingship, especially the usurpation of 1399, has evoked a range of interpretations, with some critics claiming sycophancy, and others a nuanced constitutionalism requiring even kings to obey the law (153-54). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Giancarlo, Matthew. Published Giancarlo, Matthew. "Gower's Courts." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 150-57. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism 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 Courts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower engaged with "business . . . merchants and trade" all across his corpus, but especially in the extended estates satire of the MO (158). Gower's economics are interwoven with his politics, as seen in his reference to the wool trade in "In Praise of Peace" (161-62). His critique of the estates is aimed at achieving social harmony through a hierarchical system that includes fair trade (162-63). In exempla using exchange terminology more broadly, Gower highlights the "moral risks" involved (163-64), such as "love" seeking its own advantage (165-66), and even defines his own poetry as a kind of merchandise (164). He referenced the economy of London in detail (164-65), as he wrote "specific and well-informed attacks" on mercantile abuses by the trade guilds and others (165). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ladd, Roger A. Published Ladd, Roger A. "Gower, Business, and Economy." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 158-71. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) In Praise of Peace Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Business, and Economy. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The Middle English word "science," used frequently by Gower, means "learning," a concept that includes "advancements in empirical thought" (172). In this expansive overview, Peck reveals the omnipresence, for Gower, of medieval cognitive theory: how the three-lobed brain records sense impressions, then interprets them through intellect and memory, and how this theory leads to an understanding of individual perspective as the gateway to science (172, 174, 178). Thus, science may be true or false, and used or abused (173-75). Recurrently, Peck explains the often-ambiguous exempla of the CA as exercises in the cognitive labor necessary to discover right choices for a confusing world (175, 178-79, 182, 186, 187). Gower's scientific thought rests on the "triangle" of Aristotelian empiricism, Islamic science of cognition, and Christian Platonic idealism (175-76). The CA follows Boethius's DCP in its process of individual therapy through confession and dialogue (176-77). In his exempla, Gower presented men and women of science mostly sympathetically (179-80), especially Daniel, whose analytical method he honored by imitation (180-82). In CA Book VII, he followed Aristotle's anatomy of the sciences, as channeled by Brunetto Latini and the "Secreta Secretorum," with an emphasis on the ethical component of each (182-84), e.g., "Armonie" in music as paradigm for the "common profit" (184). Melding all these themes together, the CA concludes with "the science of selfhood" (187) as key to healing through "memory . . . emotion . . . cognition . . . [and] confession," especially important for the man who would be king (187-88). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A. Published Peck, Russell A. "Gower and Science." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 172-96. Gower Subject Backgrounds 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 Gower and Science. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Through various tactics of authorial self-presentation, Gower largely controlled his own reception, even promoting his own work by the term "moral" also attached to him by Chaucer (197). In many testimonials following his death, Gower is cited as a canonical author generally linked with Chaucer, for example, in Bokenham's "Legendys of Hooly Wummen" (200). Manuscript culture gives evidence for an engaged readership, as shown by the creation of tables of contents, more illuminations, and excerpted versions, some possibly reflecting the interests of women (202-04). Early print editions are reviewed, several containing a dedication to Henry VIII (203-05). Early modern authors, including Shakespeare, found source material in Gower (205-06). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, Robert R. Published Edwards, Robert R. "Gower's Reception, 1400-1700." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 197-209. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Manuscripts and Textual Studies 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 Gower's Reception, 1400-1700. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Surviving in one manuscript apiece, the Castilian CA is based on the Portuguese translation once thought to be lost, but rediscovered in the 1990s (210). Portuguese translator Robert Payn belonged to Queen Philippa of Lancaster's entourage, suggesting she commissioned the work (212-14). Iberian readers may have valued the CA as a mirror for princes (used as a source by Philippa's son King Duarte), a redaction of ancient lore, and a trove of sentimental romance, which may have influenced the earliest Iberian examples of the genre (214-17). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pascual-Argente, Clara. Published Pascual-Argente, Clara. "Iberian Gower." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 210-221. Gower Subject 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 Iberian Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In its vast extent and high quality, Gower's trilingual output is unrivalled for an English poet (225). In contrast to earlier approaches, which separated languages and considered Gower's English poetry to be a stage in "the triumph of English" (226, 232-34), recent criticism sees his three languages as coequal and often engaged in "interplay" (227, 228), as in the CA, where English and Latin lines coexist in creative tension (227). Gower was a stylistic innovator both in Latin and French (227, 230), suggesting he saw an English future for both. Different languages often acted as "symbols" or "metonymies" for Gower, French for reconciliation (228), Latin for political "vitriol" (229), and English for a kind of "social resistance" (231), given its still-marginal status within his lifetime (232-34). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Machan, Tim William. Published Machan, Tim William. "Gower's Languages." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 225-36. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Languages. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Irvin's article reviews the iterations of Gower's author-persona, finding a "voice . . . who is sometimes a narrator, and sometimes not" (237), and includes both Genius and Amans. For the CA, foundational traditions label Genius inconsistent, with the priest of love and moral instructor at odds (237), even wildly conflicted (245), while other critics find his moral voice both Christian and "coherent" (238-40, 244, 246). In a variation on the latter view, the CA gives voice to a real dialogue, but with Amans reconciled to Genius's instruction by the end of the poem (242). The poet spoke out as preacher-prophet in VC, assuming the more modest persona of philosopher in the Prologue to the CA (241), and a woman's voice in some "Balades" (247). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Irvin, Matthew W. Published Irvin, Matthew W. "Voices and Narrators." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 237-52. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification 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 Voices and Narrators. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The value of history, as expressed by Gower, has been the subject of evolving views (253). Traditional criticism sees moral instruction, as voiced by the poet role-playing a prophet in the major Latin poems (253-54). Apocalyptic decay is affirmed, yet human choice may do much to counteract it (254-256). Currently, "(new) historicist" criticism sees Gower's history more as a trove of "competing temporalities and modes of experience" (257). Larger historical precedent is fused with personal experience in the unfolding present, as when Gower recycles the voices of Ovid's suffering heroines in the first-person "Visio" (257). Historical exempla may have no clear lesson, forcing the reader to "triangulate" for meaning (258-59). Affect theory promises insight into individual "engagements with an always partly imagined past" (261). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nowlin, Steele. Published Nowlin, Steele. "Gower and the Forms of History." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 253-65. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and the Forms of History. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower claimed the status of an auctor at CA Prol.4, but exactly how did he engage with classical, pre-Christian "auctores," a major issue for his contemporaries as well? His classical learning was "uneven," often second-hand, and not up to humanistic par (268, 273). The VC is a patchwork of Ovidian passages lifted verbatim, a practice recently defended as "cento" (268-69). He knew well, and skillfully interpreted, the ethical teachings of Aristotle through later works of advice to rulers in the Stoic tradition, including Cicero's "De Officiis" (270-71). He seems not to have known Virgil or Statius (273). It was Ovid, whose works he knew virtually by heart, who inspired "Gower's literary reinvention" (275) and vast original achievement in the CA (274-76). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew. Published Galloway, Andrew. "Gower's Classicizing Vocations." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 266-80. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Classicizing Vocations. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Compared to the MO and VC, the CA is a "different kind of visionary text" due to its engagement with romance (281). The dual purpose of the CA--pleasure and instruction--is reinforced by "inset tales" combining the narrative "memes" (281) of the genre with a "moral" and "exemplary" purpose (282-84). The shock of an "otherworldly encounter" (285) may dramatize a character's free choice (285), while "transformation" and "enchantment" may be "life-inspiring" or "devastating" (286). The "testing of virtue" provides a model for social reintegration (287-88). The conventional subject of love (281) is combined with a searching analysis of the emotional experiences and "agency" of women (288-89). These elements are melded in the capstone romance Apollonius of Tyre (289-92). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Saunders, Corinne. Published Saunders, Corinne. "Gower and Romance." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 281-95. 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 Romance. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower and Chaucer have long been cited in tandem as foundational English poets. Gastle reviews the documentation on their personal acquaintanceship (296-98), treating skeptically the inference that they quarreled (300). Much scholarship surrounds the major narratives they held in common--the "Loathly Lady," Constance, and the rapist Tereus (298-302), with their potential for "gendered readings" (301). Common themes are reviewed, especially the world in decay (302) and the need to advise their king, especially on peacemaking (304). Both were "champions of the vernacular" as authoritative (305), and both explored the potential of "multiple narrative voices" including women's (305-06). Both were pioneers in English versification, a potential area for digital analysis (306). Gower especially imbued the voices of women with "Arion's restorative music" (307). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gasyle, Brian. Published Gastle, Brian. "Gower and Chaucer." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 296-311. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Biography of Gower 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 Gower and Chaucer. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower wrote two ballade sequences, both in French, the "Cinkante balades" and the "Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz," eighteen ballades. The "cinkante" are mostly love poems in the voice of a man or a woman (312), while the "Traitié" ballades univocally excoriate infidelity in marriage (312-13). For both sequences, date of composition and source(s) have been debated, with recent scholarship noting the possible influence of Christine de Pizan (313, 316). Displaying its author's sophisticated command of the fourteenth-century French lyric tradition (314-15), the CB includes an encomium to the new King Henry IV (312). The "Traitié"--despite the reference in most MSS to Gower's impending marriage of 1398--has inspired a scholarly debate as to its original date and intended audience (315-17). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter. Published Nicholson, Peter. "The French Works: The Ballades." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 312-20. Gower Subject Cinkante Balades 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 The French Works: The Ballades. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Surviving in a single manuscript, the 30,000 line MO describes . . . the Seven Deadly Sins and their corresponding virtues, applications of these Virtues and Vices to contemporary England, and . . . [in conclusion] recounts the life of the Virgin" (321). Dating and intended audience are uncertain, with all or most of the poem appearing to predate the Rising of 1381 (322). In a context of "sophisticated social commentary" (323), Gower supports fair trade as necessary for the common good (323-24), while excoriating fraudulent practices with an expert focus on London (324). Nowhere else in his oeuvre would the poet devote so much attention to mercantile theory (324). The Life of Mary provides the "Antidote of sin" (323). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bertolet, Craig E. Published Bertolet, Craig E. "The French Works: Mirour de l'Omme." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 321-27. Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The French Works: Mirour de l'Omme. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Amid the "thematic continuity" across the Gowerian corpus (329), the CA is nonetheless "a new departure" (328). Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the Statue is retold in the VC unrelieved in all its apocalyptic horror, while in the CA, the same story is followed with the hopeful exemplum of Arion combined with "an allusion . . . to the peaceable kingdom in Isaiah 11:6" (329). The CA offers healing and redemption to the individual and society (330-36), with the reader "protreptic[ally]" sharing in the restorative process undergone by Amans (331, 336). Written for the new king Henry IV, "In Praise of Peace" continues the theme of healing, especially as a "salve" against the "pestilence" of war (337). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kobayashi, Yoshiko. Published Kobayashi, Yoshiko. "English Works." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 328-40. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis In Praise of Peace 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 English Works. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review From 1377 until his death, Gower wrote prolifically in Latin, especially to articulate his complex political views (341). His composite work VC (1377-81) has advice for the new King Richard II and also revisions expressing disillusionment with his rule (343-45). Highly intertextual, the VC has been explored as a "cento" as well as a work with a subtext calling out guilty persons in allusive terms (346-47). Written to justify the usurpation, the CrT is of course propaganda but also "heartfelt" (349) and skillfully composed (348-49). With their variety of topics, the short poems in Latin "resist uniform treatment" (349) but are increasingly acknowledged for their literary merit (349-50). Latin poetry and prose within the CA contribute to "the interplay of voices that is part of the Confessio's compositional strategy" (350). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Meindl, Robert J. Published Meindl, Robert J. "The Latin Works." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 341-54. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Cronica Tripertita Minor Latin Poetry Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Latin Works. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Flannery, Mary C. Published Flannery, Mary C. "Gower's Blushing Bird, Philomela's Transforming Face." postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 8 (2017), 35-50. ISSN 2040-5960; 2040-5979. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Flannery's essay considers "what happens when a blushing human is transformed into an animal" (36). Flannery focuses on Philomela's concern about others' ability to see her shame through her blushing face even after she has undergone her transformation into a nightingale. Flannery argues that Gower's "Tale of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela" (in CA, V) "expands upon the theme of avian transformation in order to show how Philomela's ultimate nightingale form offers her an escape from the social and emotional consequences of her rape." (37) Through such expansion, Philomela is the locus of human and animal emotional experience. Flannery then discusses the depiction of animal emotion and expression in the Middle Ages, demonstrating that animals, particularly birds, may share in the emotional range of humans. Flannery illustrates Philomela's "proleptic birdiness" (40), which blurs her human and animal characteristics before and after her transformation. Gower's tale "realizes the avian potential she already possessed" (40). Metamorphosis for Gower was an opportunity for him to investigate the emotional impact caused by it as much as the ways in which the transformation reflects character. Flannery suggests Philomela's loss of her human face allows her to hide her blush, the social signifier of the rape she has experienced, which prevents her from reliving this trauma when others would see perceive her blushing. Gower's retelling of this myth, Flannery concludes, transforms it into "a story about the relationship between faces (Philomela's human face, Philomela's avian face) and 'face,' that which Philomela has lost so completely that her 'schame . . . mai noght be lassed,' even if no man will now be able to tell (V.5953)" (48). [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 Gower's Blushing Bird, Philomela's Transforming Face. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Fonzo, Kimberly. Published Fonzo, Kimberly. "Richard II's Publicly Prophesied Deposition in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Modern Philology 114 (2016): 1-17. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review Fonzo reprises the question of why so many manuscripts of the "Confessio Amantis" produced after the deposition of Richard II present the first recension of the poem, dedicated to Richard, rather than the later versions dedicated to Henry. She locates her answer in Gower's self-stylization as a prophetic poet, a persona he used in "Vox Clamantis" and revived late in his career with the "Prophesy of the Eagle," for example, but which, Fonzo maintains, was also found in (or imposed upon) the CA and promoted by the Lancastrians after Richard was deposed: Gower's commentary on kingship in the CA was regarded, with tendentious hindsight, as prophecy or prediction of "Richard's imminent downfall" (8). Fonzo reviews the manuscript evidence for the prevalence of the first recension, links it with Derek Pearsall's notion of "standard" manuscripts of the CA, and argues that the Lancastrians promoted the version dedicated to Richard as part of their broader program of presenting Richard's rule as corrupted by youthful counsel, fated for failure, and worthy of usurpation. Drawing her material largely from CA Book VII, Fonzo shows that Gower's narratives of, for example, "Ahab and Machaiah," "David and Saul," and even the account of Gower's meeting Richard on the Thames could be, and seemingly were, read retrospectively as prophetic critiques of Richard's rule and predictions of his downfall rather than the way Gower probably intended them initially, that is, as "vox populi" reminders of a king's proper agency. After the deposition, Gower "cultivated a poetic voice that was more emphatically prophetic and critical of Richard II" (15), and the CA was read accordingly as justification of the usurpation, foreseen and inevitable. [MA. 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 Richard II's Publicly Prophesied Deposition in Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Stadolnik, Joe. Published Stadolnik, Joe. "Gower's Bedside Manner." New Medieval Literatures 17 (2017): 150-74. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review Stadolnik demonstrates through multiple citations from a range of medieval medical writers including Walter of Cantilupe, John of Arderne, Arnald of Villanova, and the penitential author Laurent d'Orléans ("Somme le Roi"), that "Clerical and lay discourses of confession articulated a form of dialogic examination that proceeded as measured and discerning talk of spiritual disease, and was thus akin to the inquisitive method of a skilled doctor" (151). This method incorporated "good and honest tales . . . to provoke laughter, tales of the Bible, and tragedies" that "share equal status as rudiments of useful medical narration" (165). For Stadolnik, it is this connection of medical and Confessional talk that provides Gower with the frame structure of the "Confessio Amantis": "Amans professes to suffer from lovesickness. Venus soon refers him to Genius . . . to confess" (151). Thus, "Amans's lovesickness attracts Venus's concerned--and explicitly medical--attentions" (165). Stadolnik likens Gower to a "confabulator," one who "must inform his practice with a familiar kind of expert discernment, answerable to both literary sensibility and pragmatic, medical savoir-faire. The confabulator must be a deft versifier who can tailor verse forms to the occasion, and employ rhetorical strategies of decoration and amplification to good effect." (167) Gower's frame follows these sightlines but, in order to extend the curative effects of the fiction to his readers, he develops "a genre concept of its own which specifies to readers how to use the text" (169). It is a "genre" Gower adapted from what Stadolnik (quoting Julie Orlemanski) takes as common readerly "habitus" in the Middle Ages, i.e., "florilegia, collections of exempla, and miscellaneous manuscript compilations which invite 'eclectic performances of reading'" (170). Since the confabulator is under no constraint to shape his narrations beyond a moment-to-moment need, and since such disconnected "performances of reading" were what medieval readers were used to, "Readers are invited not to read [the CA] from the beginning to . . . end but to ransack it for the literary experience they want, or need, or both." (171). Presumably this is curative; in any event, "In this way [Gower] recommends himself as a confabulator to princes . . . and for those of his readers who are mere subjects, he encourages a readerly practice that can simulate expertly that eclectic practice of confabulation" (174). Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all 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 Bedside Manner. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This book has a broad historical remit and its theoretical affiliations are likewise diverse," Blud notes in her introductory chapter (13). Essentially, the volume's title identifies her two areas of concern: by "the unspeakable" she means both a combination of the apophatic--the concept of the inexpressibility of the Divine, borrowed from Eastern Orthodox and mystical traditions--and "the suppression of same-sex eroticism" (3). The latter concern, with particular focus on women's same-sex desire, occupies most of the book, the theoretical grounding of which "crystallise[s] around the legacy of Foucault and Lacan's work on silence, language, and power" (13), punctuated throughout with appropriate ideas drawn from Giorgio Agamben, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Karma Lochrie, and Diane Watt. Her interest in Gower is confined to two tales in the Confessio Amantis: "Iphis and Iante" from Book IV and "Tereus" from Book V. Of the former, she says "The tale serves as an example of how female same-sex desire in medieval writing can be denied or undeclared, both in the text and by its readers. It is presented as both natural and unnatural, as both problematic and unproblematic; it is not punished, but nor [sic] is it permitted to go uncorrected" (89). Blud acknowledges that "the same-sex female couple . . . are not said to engage specifically in unspeakable acts [but] this union 'is' [emphasis hers] deemed to be untenable by the narrative and by nature (or 'kinde'). For Gower and for Cupid, it is a relation that should not be preserved and cannot be written unproblematically" (89). She cites the Latin gloss "in which Iphis is troubled by an inability to fulfil her desire" as "presenting a different story" from the English (90), apparently finding in "Set cum Yphis debitum sue coniugi unde soluere non habuit" indication of Iphis's intentions alongside her inability. She finds Ianthe's desire for Iphis provoked by the latter's presenting as male, noting that "the transformation seems to valorize the phallocentric discourse and access a missing phallus that will make the relationship intelligible" (92). For Blud, the tale is thus "a test case for Gower's (a)morality; in this framework, the 'Confessio' is particularly interested in 'transgressive' gendered identities, and not simply negative exemplars" (92). The central message of the "Tale of Tereus," Blud observes, is that "Tereus's performative bodily inscription of unspeakability on Philomela fails to silence her" (152). For much of her interpretation Blud relies on Watt's reading of Gower's version as an effort to "reinstate women as the real victims of rape, and to counter the misogyny so common in this sort of narrative" (157). She contrasts Gower's version more or less favorably with Chaucer's in the "Legend of Good Women," citing Chaucer's own suspect past as suggested by the Cecily Chaumpaigne case (157-58). Unlike Chaucer's, "Gower's account of Tereus's crime engages with its challenges to masculinity, rather than femininity. Here the narrative exposes . . . the boundary-crossing excess of rape" (158). Gower, in Blud's view, is "judicious" in his "treatment of the revenge scenario Chaucer omits [i.e., serving Itys to Tereus]" (159). Gower negotiates "infanticide, cannibalism, and metamorphosis" as well as--throughout the tale--rape and incest to present in its closing scenes the emasculation and diminution of Tereus, " . . . thus made less than natural, less than a king, less than a man . . . unceremoniously cut off by the intervention of the gods, who transform him into a bird" (164). And pointedly a silent one: for Blud (leveraging Cixous here), it is significant that Gower--again unlike Chaucer--describes the "voices" of the sisters transformed into birds, but by making Tereus a lapwing, a bird with no song, (171) he depicts a silence that speaks volumes. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Blud, Victoria. Published Blud, Victoria. The Unspeakable, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval Literature 1000-1400. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017. ISBN 9781843844686. 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 Unspeakable, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval Literature 1000-1400. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Cole's essay has two primary thrusts. In the first, after acknowledging that "Chaucer borrows from Gower" in various places, he sets out to demonstrate that in the "Legend of Good Women" at least "Gower copies Chaucer in a fashion similar both to how medieval readers often gloss texts in their focus on keywords and how scribes literally copy Chaucer often by rewriting his text, reordering his syntax, opting for easier readings, and quashing poetic effects" (47). Thus the major effort of this half of his essay is to show that 1) Gower's narratives of Pyramus and Thisbe and Cleopatra, on which he grounds his claims, are borrowed from Chaucer's tellings, since the same, or similar, words occur centrally in each other's versions; 2) words jotted by readers in the margins of manuscripts to locate ideas or discussion for future reference provide evidence of a period-specific manner of reading by "keywords" and "patterns" that Cole finds characteristically "medieval"; 3) when scribes "quashed" Chaucer's "poetic effects" by rewriting him more simply the result mirrors Gower's "copying" of Chaucer. In order to achieve #1, Cole posits that "LGW was an ongoing project for the poet, which can sustain an early date before the composition of Tr[oilus]" (59, fn.35)--i.e., prior to "the late1380s," (58) when possibly Gower began the CA (58). To achieve #2--a claim that he says illuminates the "shared 'pattern' (emphasis Cole's), whereby the story is formed around certain key terms clustered within coincident passages" (52)--Cole first cites as evidence the occurrence in both Gower's and Chaucer's narration of Thisbe and Pyramus the "key terms" "'Thisbe,' 'Priamus,' 'nyght,' 'tre' (in Chaucer) and 'Tisbee,' 'Piramus,' 'nihtes,' 'tree' (in Gower)" (52). For Cole, these words in both versions indicate that Gower was reading Chaucer (and not the other way around) "medievally," picking up patterns built around "key words" that he later replicated in the CA: "highlighting only the main points as if they were signposts--only taking in the key terms, in the manner of glossing and annotation, and then building poetry around those extractions" (53). The result is #3, "quashed poetry: "Gower reduces narrative details, simplifies them, and . . . inclines toward a simpler presentation, indeed a 'simplicior lectio,' that preserves key terms and narrative details only found in Chaucer" (53). That the reverse might have been happening fails to engage Cole's interest; neither does he suggest how either poet might have told the story of Pyramus and Thisbe without mentioning Pyramus, Thisbe, or the night, or a tree. The latter half of Cole's essay is devoted to unravelling what Chaucer meant by "moral Gower" in the closing lines of TC. "My claim," he says, "is that Chaucer coins the phrase 'moral Gower' as a way to evoke the more familiar locution 'ethicus Ovidius,' thus characterizing Gower's habits of reading and adapting or 'correcting' sources" (56). By way of arguing this, he asserts that the so-called "quarrel" between Chaucer and Gower supposedly initiated with the Prologue to the "Man of Law's Tale" (which Cole recognizes (59) as dependent upon Gower's "Tale of Constance") is really a good-humored disagreement about how to read Ovid, framing his case with a nod to Kosofsky Sedgwick: "Ovid is the important source text over which, it seems, both poets enact their rivalry. Which is to say, the rivalry is not between two poets; rather, it is about what is 'between' [Cole's emphasis] them, literally: Ovid" (60). The unspecified implication of Gower's Ovid as "ethicus" is that Chaucer's is then something else, something more . . . romantic? poetic? complex? aesthetically pleasing? To his credit, Cole does not fill in the blank, but concludes with an idea more interesting: "Hence the 'moral Gower': moral, because his handling of Ovid is not Chaucer's but is executed just as much within the Chaucerian frame. Likewise, Chaucer's own legends inevitably emerge within the Gowerian frame. Each does what the other will not do, but each is necessary to understanding the work of the other" (62). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cole, Andrew. Published Cole, Andrew. "John Gower Copies Geoffrey Chaucer." Chaucer Review 52 (2017): 46-65. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations 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 Copies Geoffrey Chaucer. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review After describing pilgrimage and voice-crying-in-the-wilderness social criticism as medieval modes of exile, Lee describes (in a chapter entitled "The Wretched Constance: Defining a Mens Exili") Gower's Tower/ship image from the Visio of "Vox Clamantis," where exile "becomes an essential part of the dreamer's experience" (19). For Lee's subsequent discussions of early modern literature, the dreamer's experiences serve as a "baseline or 'standard' discourse of exile" which entails "mens exili," i.e., the "cognitive steps undertaken by an exiled group or individual that manifests in the narratives they produce" and thereby influence or reflect the "category of national formation and nationalistic subjectivity" (21). To clarify "mens exili", (and using as a bridge Gower's image of a boat without rudder ["sine gubernaculo"], VC 1.Prologue, 20), Lee assesses in sequence Nicholas Trivet's, Gower's, and Chaucer's versions of the story of Constance where the protagonist, Lee tells us, becomes increasingly a figure devoid of agency, marginalized in her world, while becoming at the same time more "transformative," particularly associated with religious conversion. In Lee's reading, Gower's Constance is less educated than Trivet's and her agency is reduced through lack of direct speech. "Ironically," however, "Chaucer has Custance speak directly more than she does in Trivet and Gower combined," even though her "words further locate her in a subservient, powerless position" (26). Yet, as the agency of the Constance figure decreases from Trivet to Gower to Chaucer and her "marginalization" (26) increases, her "transformational" (22) impact on religion in her society rises, Lee maintains, suggestively linking the exile's role to Lollard/Wycliffite concerns, the topic of Lee's following chapter, subtitled "A Wycliffite Mind of Exile." [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lee, J, Seth. Published Lee, J. Seth. "The Wretched Constance: Defining a 'Mens Exili'." In The Discourse of Exile in Early Modern English Literature. (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 15–33. 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 Wretched Constance: Defining a "Mens Exili." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Published Dauphant, Clotilde. "Frontières d'un genre aux frontières d'une langue: ballades typiques et atypiques d'Eustache Deschamps, John Gower et Geoffrey Chaucer. In Le Rayonnement de la cour des premiers Valois à époque d'Eustache Deschamps. Ed. Miren Lacassagne. Paris: Presses de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2017. Pp. 81-94. Gower Subject Cinkante Balades Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Author/Editor Author/Editor Dauphant, Clotilde. Review Each of the defining features of the ballade--the number of stanzas, the use of the refrain, the presence of an envoy, the patterns of rhyme--was in fact subject to variation, Dauphant points out. Deschamps, in his "Art de dictier," helped fix the form as it was practiced towards the end of the 14th century, while also, there and in his own practice, encouraging the new breadth of subject matter and the development of a "style personnel" by taking advantage of the "élasticité" of the form (82). Gower figures prominently among her examples. His "Cinkante Balades" are notable first of all for their "pauvreté formelle" (85), all in decasyllables, with only two stanza forms, one of seven lines, one of eight. She finds further evidence of conscious formal planning in the choice to include exactly 50 ballades (not counting the ninth, which is instead a five-stanza "chanson royale," or the final unnumbered poem) and in a pattern of 5's and 3's that is based, however, on Dauphant's misapprehension that the two "dedicatory ballades" that precede the collection are also five-stanza "chanson royales" (85-86) (one has three stanzas, the other four). One "irrégularité" that she finds "involontaire," and by that she means unconscious on Gower's part, has to do with his lack of concern for the difference between masculine and feminine rhymes, rhyming "Pantasilée" with "couché," for instance, and having an unusually large number of ballades with exclusively masculine rhymes, contrary to Deschamps' advice and to the preference of most other poets to mix masculine and feminine rhymes in the same stanza. Other "irregularities" in both Gower and Chaucer she attributes to a "choix esthétique réflechi," a deliberate aesthetic choice (87). Ballades 13, 14, 16, and 17, for instance, all lack a refrain. By grouping them together, they create a counter-pattern that has the effect of drawing greater attention to the refrain of 15, which in context stands out as the exception. And unlike 15, these four are all concerned with the narrator's suffering in love. The absence of a refrain may itself be expressive of that which he lacks. Beginning with Deschamps, there was also considerable variation in the use of the envoy, some of which Dauphant describes, including Chaucer in her discussion, but her only comment on Gower, apart from the fact that he uses the envoy on all but one of his ballades, is that his choice of rhymes--"bcbc"--echoes the last four lines of his 8-line stanza but not of the 7-line stanza, which ends in a couplet. But she does suggest that Gower is inspired by the envoy's function to attach a final stanza--an "envoy" to the collection as a whole at the conclusion of both the CB and his "Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz." [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] 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 Frontières d'un genre aux frontières d'une langue: ballades typiques et atypiques d'Eustache Deschamps, John Gower et Geoffrey Chaucer. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review As made clear by the collection's title, essays here are focused on teaching practices. Houlik-Ritchey thus places her remarks within this frame. Gower's tale "upholds Christianity and Paganism as ethically superior to Judaism based on each religious creed's putative interpretation of human responsibility to one's neighbors" (102). Her lesson "models how a theoretical perspective such as neighbor theory can crack open the seemingly smooth surface of a text's construction to reveal a rough terrain of reader expectations, authorial ambivalences, elisions, and contradictions" (103). Using Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents" as a beginning point, Houlik-Ritchey identifies the "neighbor" as "'faceless,' by which [theorists] mean that the neighbor is no single, predictable person or identity category; rather, the neighbor is the 'next person,' whoever that may turn out to be" (104). "The lesson advances by delving into the scriptural passages that Freud references, precisely to make visible the complex religious history embedded within and around the well-known phrase 'Love thy neighbor as thyself'" (105). Bringing in the essential passages from Jewish and Christian scripture [Lev. 19:18, 33-34; Lk. 10:25-37], and commentaries from Origen and Augustine, she shows that Gower takes the Jew's position from "a narrow interpretation of Leviticus 19:18" and the Pagan's from Luke 6:31, the "golden rule," and asks why does Gower use a pagan and not a Christian in the tale? (111) Her answer(s) are complex, but trace an etymological path for the students, via examinations of what the tale means by "love" and "felawe," from a "supersessionist" Gower to something less easily defined--perhaps, as she says, "pre-sessionist" (110). She points out how the tale of the "Jew and the Pagan" can then become a basis for discussing the "Prioress's Tale," concluding that "A neighborly reading elucidates not only the process by which each tale condemns a fictional Jewish ethics in favor of a supposedly more wide-reaching Christian (or proto-Christian Pagan) ethics but also foregrounds the adroit ways that Gower and Chaucer expose that very condemnation as itself ethically suspect" (115). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Houlik-Ritchey, Emily. Published Houlik-Ritchey, Emily. "Love Thy Neighbor, Love Thy Fellow: Teaching Gower's Representation of the Unethical Jew." In Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the Other. Eds. Miriamne Ara Krummel and Tyson Pugh. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. 101-15. 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 Love Thy Neighbor, Love Thy Fellow: Teaching Gower's Representation of the Unethical Jew. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Knapp proposes an overall assessment of Gower's work, paying particular attention to what he calls its "mechanical allegory"--a concept he borrows from Coleridge, who opposed it as a poetic type to "a poetics based upon the symbol," i.e., Romanticism as we have come to know it. Such mechanical allegory, to quote Coleridge, was "but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses." Knapp then "considers what drew Gower to the mechanical side of things," arguing that Coleridge's notion is "central to several of [Gower's] most interesting solutions to problems of poetic representation." He looks at the "Mirour de l'Omme," the "Vox Clamantis," and the "Confessio Amantis" to observe how Gower's "mechanical allegory" functions in each. The M) he finds "exemplifies the significance of naming in the poetic project, along with its so-called voicing," pointing to the repetitions of "je te resemble" preceding descriptions of Sin (e.g., ll. 9949, 9961, 9973) as evidence, in that this naming moment "is clearly meant to be a climactic one." It is, however, "entirely devoid of narrative content," showing us instead "what we might call 'a drama of naming'" [emphasis his]. Gower turns to hand similarly a non/narratorial "je" (an example of what A.C. Spearing's termed "autography") to create not a "speaking subject" but a "rhetorical device for bundling together the rather miscellaneous catalogue form of the 'dits'." Such a "je," like the "drama" of naming fits Coleridge's notion of the "mechanical" because each "foregrounds the lack of organic connection between abstraction and image, and instead revels in the drama of the poet's act of naming." Knapp turns to what he calls the "'voicing' of the poem," seeking to explain the MO's "tripartite structure" in terms of the shift from the "je" of the first section to the "vox populi" in the second. (He never addresses the third, Marian section.) The VC he finds, somewhat controversially, also tripartite, taking the "Cronica Tripertita" to be, not a poem composed separately, but as an intended third section of a single VC--a kind of "eighth book," one might say. Thus, Knapp sees Gower "sandwiching . . . the estates satire material . . . between two explicitly historical narratives," which "must suggest an intent here to tie the satire very closely to actual historical reality." Asking why this should be, Knapp notices that this historical reality, particularly in the "Visio," is ekphrastic to a degree uncommon in Gower's work: his transformation of the rebelling peasants into animals "creates a world essentially without speech, a pure vision of movement and destruction." Such a wordless world "renders the agency of the poet null"--and produces a "mechanical allegory" which facilitates "Gower's project in this work, which is precisely to attack a historical event of agency without language or reason in the interests of establishing the primacy of the voice of ethical satire at the center of the work." As for the CA: "the grafting of the theological discourse of sin/ethics onto 'fin amor' . . . is also organized around a central representational difficulty: . . . how to represent the 'impairing of the world' that is crucial to the historical dimension of Gower's diagnostic scheme in the Prologue." Knapp focusses on sculpture as a medium of discussion, arguing that Gower (unlike Chaucer) rarely presents images two-dimensionally, preferring the three-dimensional. This dissimilarity with Chaucer Knapp explains as "two different semantic fields" surrounding "image," with Gower reading it theologically, "nearly as a synonym for 'icon'" (Knapp's emphasis), "honored in orthodox practice and attacked by the Lollards." He then examines various statues appearing in the CA: the account of the pagan gods in Book V, Nectanabus' use of the wax image to seduce Olympias in Book VI, finding Nectanabus an "anti-Pygmalion, one who sculpts not to create something of surprising vitality but rather something that is made in order to melt away," and ultimately the Man of Metal in the dream of Nebuchadnezzar--perhaps the best (in the sense of most obvious) example of "mechanical allegory." In the destruction of the Man of Metal, Knapp especially, but also in all of Gower's statues, "a strange projected temporality" that helps him read the CA as presenting "an object world caught between the quick and the dead." The CA then insists "that the entropic drift of history can never be eluded." [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Knapp, Ethan. Published Knapp, Ethan. "John Gower's Allegories." In Oxford Handbooks Online (2017): n.p. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.59 Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis 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's Allegories. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Peck explores notions of moral worthiness and penitential vigilance expressed in late-medieval vernacular literature, arguing that they developed out of earlier knightly ideals and practices, laid out by Richard W. Kaeuper in "Holy Warrior" (2009). Treating Harry Bailly and his relation to the Parson in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" most extensively, Peck also draws on Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde, and other works by Chretién de Troyes, Dante, Langland, and Gower, offering commentary on knights and mercantile trade in "Mirour de l'Omme" (349-50) and, in the same work, the need expressed for "vigilant analysis of how we see and don't see" as part of the penitential diagnosis of sin (355). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A. Published Peck, Russell A. "Chivalry and the Wise Watchman: A Study of Patience, Penance, and the Homeward Journey in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde." In Prowess, Piety, and Public Order in Medieval Society: Studies in Honor of Richard W. Kaeuper. Ed. Craig M. Nakashian and Daniel P. Franke. (Boston: Brill, 2017). Pp. 344-67. Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chivalry and the Wise Watchman: A Study of Patience, Penance, and the Homeward Journey in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" and "Troilus and Criseyde." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Pratt traces the development "of the Pyramus and Thisbe material . . . from its Ovidian origins via medieval Latin rhetorical exercises, adaptations in French, German, and Dutch and its eventual inclusion in late medieval story collections, notably Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women' and Boccaccio's 'De mulieribus Claris'," considering along the way Gower's version in "Confessio Amantis" III.1331ff., briefly comparing it with the Christine de Pizan's tale as a moralized exemplum of foolish haste in love--noting Gower's "innovative assertion" that the lovers "make the hole in the wall themselves" (275)--and contrasting it with Dirc Potter's account which exemplifies good love. Pratt reports Kathryn McKinley's claim (2011) that Gower removed the tragi-comic or bathetic features of Ovid's original by following the version in the "Ovide moralisé"; she does not address the manuscript contexts of Gower's version, as she does with most of the others she discusses. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pratt, Karen. Published Pratt, Karen. "The Dynamics of the European Short Narrative in its Manuscript Context: The Case of Pyramus and Thisbe." In The Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript: Text Collections from a European Perspective. Eds. Karen Pratt, Bart Besamusca, Matthias Meyer, and Ad Putter. (Göttingen: V&R Academic, 2017). Pp. 257-85. 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 Dynamics of the European Short Narrative in its Manuscript Context: The Case of Pyramus and Thisbe. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Examining the choric figure of John Gower in William Shakespeare and George Wilkins's 'Pericles,' this essay recuperates the funereal accoutrements often associated with dead poets in order to demonstrate their significance to late medieval and early modern notions of authorship" (212), Schreyer tells us near the beginning of his essay. He goes on to imagine an early modern production of "Pericles" in which John Gower as Chorus rises from a stage-tomb decorated to look like the poet's tomb in St. Saviour's church, reaching for the copy of "Confessio Amantis" (the source of the play) while delivering his opening monologue. Backgrounds to this imagined dramatization include the observation that "In the sixteenth century, Gower's social status was . . . questioned and debated, and was only resolved through recourse to his tomb monument" (213), followed by supporting references to John Leland, John Bale, and John Stow, evidence that "[m]edieval tomb effigies thus underpin early modern--and indeed modern--notions of authorship and biography in very material ways." By way of Ben Jonson's dismissive citation of "Pericles" as a "mouldy tale" (quoted by Schreyer) and exploration of the denotations of "mold," Schreyer asserts that the "significance of mold therefore lies both in its materiality and in the temporal obstinacy that arises from it: as both decayed remains and fecund soil, a locus of death and birth, mold leavens the authority of the past with the promise of the future" (214)--in this context, the authority of literary tradition in the production of new art. Much of the rest of the essay broadens the application of this nexus of tomb, mold-as-decay-and-as-fecundity, and the pastness and productivity of literature, including discussion, not only of "Pericles," but also of speaking images in Ovid's "Tristia" and on "Benedetto da Maiano's 1490 monument to Giotto in Florence Cathedral" (218); the portrait of Chaucer atop his son's tomb in Thomas Speght's 1598 and 1602 editions of Chaucer's "Works" and the title pages of these editions; Shakespeare's Sonnets 55 and 74; John Weever's "Ancient Funerall Monuments" of 1631; and the title page and frontispiece of the 1679 edition of the works of Edmund Spenser and Spenser's comments on Chaucer and his tomb in "Faerie Queene" 4.2.32–33. Wide-ranging and firmly anchored in studies of the significance of monuments, tombs, and their associations with literature in the classical revival of English humanism, Schreyer's essay stretches to include the rust of armorial bearings as a kind of mold, "the metallic form of corrosion and decay--that is to say, mold" (226), when discussing the armor of Pericles' father. Echoes between "wombs" and "tombs" in "Pericles" enable him to discover in the play's theme of incest a parallel concern with "authorial incest--the recycling of literary material from author to author" (229), leading to his closing claim: "this essay ends where many studies of "Pericles" begin: with the question of its shared authorship. Whether or not Shakespeare collaborated with George Wilkins on the text, the play finds its author--its authority--in the tomb of John Gower" (230). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Schreyer, Kurt A. Published Schreyer, Kurt A. "Moldy Pericles." Exemplaria 29 (2017): 210-33. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion 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 Moldy "Pericles." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The question of Gower's legal training and practice is Sobecki's point of departure, from which he challenges long-held assumptions about the nature of Gower's early relationship with Chaucer and lays groundwork for substantial new ideas about Chaucer's life and literary activities in Southwark, the original audience of the "Canterbury Tales," and the inspiration for the "General Prologue." That Chaucer wrote for a "Southwark audience," (645) and that the GP is modeled (at least in part) on the historical "Harry Bailey's check-roll of the poll tax reassessment of 1381" (653) are significant claims, but I focus here on Sobecki's concerns with Gower, particularly his argument that Gower was a trained, practicing lawyer. Anchoring this argument about Gower's legal standing, Sobecki revisits the Septvauns affair in 1365-69, from which he deduces that Gower may have "worked at the Court of Chancery" (640) at the time, leaving the nature of that work unspecified as indeed it must be since we know little of the early history of the legal procedures of the nascent institution. As others have done before, Sobecki cites (and reproduces) the fifteenth-century miniature from the 1460s that depicts the Court of Chancery, assuming it to be evidence of legal garb in the previous century. The miniature serves as backdrop to Sobecki's interpretation of the reference to striped sleeves in "Mirour de l'Omme" (21.772-75), reading the reference as feigned deference to legal hierarchies. Saying he wore only "la raye mance" ("striped sleeves"--not the red and blue of the cleric), the narrator of MO "inserts his status" as secular lawyer, Sobecki maintains, "into a professional hierarchy that places the canon law at its pinnacle," an example of "the paradoxical idiom of aspirational humility, so common in retractions and other medieval instances of simulated deference." That the "compliment [to clerical canon lawyers] . . . is feigned" is "confirmed" by the narrator's insistence that he knows "little Latin and little French" in the midst of a French poem of "almost twenty-five thousand lines" (633). These claims, it seems to me, beg stronger engagement with questions of the relation between Gower and his narrator, which Sobecki touches upon only lightly, and he only nods at the fact that other professionals wore striped garb. Similarly, he supports his claim that "gowns matter to Gower" (634), with two comments where, again, the narrator of MO "bewails the abuse of professional robes" when speaking of "those who wear the garb of law" (635). Offering additional, "circumstantial evidence" to associate Gower and his works with the Court of Chancery," Sobecki continues, more certain than most scholars on this topic: "I would argue that Gower was not only a trained lawyer, but . . . was also linked to Chancery and . . . to the court's developing equity side, in particular" (635-36). He then offers "new evidence" for his claim: four "previously unknown legal documents from the Court of Common pleas" (636) dating from 1396 and 1399 that refer to Gower. Three of them record that, in actions related to debts owed him, Gower sued "in propria persona," a phrase "used when someone appeared in court in person" (636), that is, without a representing attorney; the fourth shows that in one of these actions Gower used an unnamed attorney temporarily, to whom he paid (or intended to pay) one pound. Sobecki does not demonstrate--and nowhere claims--that only trained lawyers appeared "in propria persona" in late-medieval England, so it seems to me that the new documents, valuable as they are on their own as newly discovered life records, do not evince that formal legal training was necessary for Gower to present his own pleas. Our knowledge about such training and practice at the time is limited, as are details about the relations among legal training, bureaucratic clerking, and similar activities in the Chancery and elsewhere. Furthermore, there are at least six other known documents (five also from the Court of Common Pleas) in which an attorney appears for Gower (see pp. 11-12 and 17-18 of Martha Carlin's "Chronology of John Gower's Life Records" in Rigby and Echard's Historians on Gower, 2019); so, if nothing else, a lawyer represented him more often than he represented himself. Sobecki significantly expands the base of evidence that Gower had experience with several sorts of legal proceedings, but the jury is still out, so to speak, on whether or not he can be, or should be, considered a career lawyer. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sobecki, Sebastian. Published Sobecki, Sebastian. "A Southwark Tale: Gower, the 1381 Poll Tax, and Chaucer's 'The Canterbury Tales'." Speculum 92 (2017): 630-60. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Southwark Tale: Gower, the 1381 Poll Tax, and Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Deschamps' influence upon his English contemporaries lay not in their direct borrowing or quotation, Yeager demonstrates, but more generally, in providing an example of how to escape the dominant model for lyric poetry set by Machaut. Metrically, Deschamps made popular the decasyllabic line, eschewed by Machaut in his shorter poems which, even when not sung, were still closely tied in his mind to their musical origins. This "littérarisation" of the lyric (75)--the separation of the written poem from its musical setting--opened the way for a wide broadening of themes, including the many occasional poems among Deschamps' ballades, which provided the inspiration for poems such as Chaucer's "Adam Scriveyn" and "To His Purse," which, along with at least one copy of "Truth," also follows Deschamps' example in the addition of an envoy. Gower, writing in French, is keenly aware of the Englishness of his audience. In the "Traitié," he apologizes for his lack of skill in French, and in condemning adultery, which he associates with the French, he has a predecessor in Deschamps, "dont les ballades adoptent un ton moral proche du sien" (whose ballades adopt a moral tone close to his). In the "Cinkante Balades," written in response to the French "Livre des cent balades," he follows Deschamps' formal example in his regular use of an envoy. Yeager uses as another point of comparison the fifteen poems marked with a "Ch" in the Pennsylvania "chansonnier" (Philadelphia, Van Pelt Library, Codex 902, olim MS French 15). He gives much too early a date for the manuscript (70), and while he does not accept Wimsatt's suggestion that the "Ch" stands for Chaucer, he does assume that it is meant to identify a single poet for all 15, which is not at all certain, and that the poet must have been English, for which there is no real evidence, either linguistic or otherwise; but this little bit of confusion does not affect his argument on either Chaucer or Gower. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R.F. "Influences de Deschamps sur ses contemporains Anglais, Chaucer et Gower." In Le Rayonnement de la cour des premiers Valois à l'époque d'Eustache Deschamps. Ed. Miren Lacassagne. (Paris: Presses de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2017). Pp. 69-79, 183-91. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Cinkante Balades Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz 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 Influences de Deschamps sur ses contemporains Anglais, Chaucer et Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Ladd begins with the observation that "Estates satire . . . becomes relatively rare in the fifteenth century" (81), which he attributes chiefly to "the expansion of the available reading audience" (i.e., wealthy mercantile readers in English) and the consequent failure of the triadic social model to address concerns exterior to the antiquated "socioeconomic stereotypes" (81). Gower and Chaucer, recognizing that obsolescence, redirect their attention toward critiquing "what people do, rather than who they are imagined to be" (81), even as they adapt the extant estates format in organizing their poetry. This is more true of Gower, in the "Mirour de l'Omme" and "Vox " in particular, than of Chaucer; in the "Confessio Amantis," however, he like Chaucer in the "Canterbury Tales" "relegate[s] focused estates satire to an introductory role in their overall structure" (86). For Ladd, what brought Gower and Chaucer to realize the diminished literary value of estates satire was the shift in readers, away from aristocrats and clericals to merchants--a shift made apparent by recent work of Linne Mooney, Simon Horobin, and Estelle Stubbs tying the manuscripts to scribes affiliated with the Guildhall, and presumably commensurate customers (84-87). Lest they offend these readers with a format that proceeds "downward in social status" (86), they invent individual strategies for avoiding friction. "Gower's response is largely to avoid direct representations of a mercantile elite altogether" (88). As an example, Ladd cites the "Tale of Echo" in Book V, offering expectation of a critique of usury, as it comes under the heading of Avarice, "but Genius in the frame has shifted the focus of avarice from desire for money to desire of other things" (88). Gower is able to employ the vocabulary of commerce in the mythological tale (and in others, such as "Medea"), and criticize "brocours" and fraudulent weights and measures, within that fantasy context, thereby pointing fingers at no one directly. "Gower separates [the travel and luxury associated with the mercantile elite]," rendering moral judgment "by transposing these qualities to a mythological story," while dodging his reader's sense of identity and "open[ing] them up for effective critique" (90). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ladd, Roger A. Published Ladd, Roger A. "Selling Satire: Gower, Chaucer, and the End of the Estates." In Geoffrey Chaucer. Ed. James M. Dean. Critical Insights Series. Ipswich, Mass.: Salem Press, 2017. Pp. 81-96. 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 Selling Satire: Gower, Chaucer, and the End of the Estates. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review So aims to outline the self-consciously "authorial ego" with samples selected from prologues of medieval vernacular literary texts written in England, namely Layamon's "Brut," Wace's "Roman de Brut," Lydgate's "Troy Book," Mannyng's "Chronicle," the anonymous "Cursor Mundi," and Gower's "Confessio Amantis." In the first 25 lines of the prologue in CA, So has observed four examples indicative of Gower's authorial intention. So argues that Gower is primarily motivated by a consciousness of his own benefits rather than an interest in English nationhood, as has been argued in recent heated discussions. He sees the resort to classical symbol in the CA as Gower's means of safeguarding his own self-interest. He finds that Gower is aware of 1) his own writing as means of interaction, which responds to the moral themed writing tradition; 2) the competition among contemporary English writers; 3) the political circumstances; and 4) historic positioning. In each of these, So has caught a glimpse of a self, or the ego: an ego that aims to transcend the shade of influence cast by previous writers, an ego that intends to win over the reader amid the competition with his contemporaries, an ego who is sensitive to his political safety, and an ego who is caring about his own involvement in developing history. Noticing the possible correlation of Gower's historical sense of writing and Gower's individual benefits, So borrows from Pierre Bourdieu's theory to justify Gower's self-interested writing. On the one hand, So points out that historically Gower must have enjoyed some class advantage--"cultural capital," in Bourdieu's theory. On the other, Gower's advantageous language skill in classics continuously enhances the influential power of classics in the mind of his reader, which earns him further symbolic capital, as defined by Bourdieu. He infers that Gower's writing would result in a consolidation and an enhancement of his existing social advantages, and thus his own interest would be further defended. [XW. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Published So, Francis K. H. "Authorial Ego in Early English Vernacular Literature." Review of English and American literature 10 (2017): 1-50. [蘇其康.古早地方話英文文學的自我意識.英美文學評論. 10期 (2017): 1-50.] [N. B.: this article is in Chinese.] 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 [ Authorial Ego in Early English Vernacular Literature. ] Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Tracy is interested in the connection between memory and confession, which she finds is examined in much of the major poetry in Middle English: "Piers Plowman," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Chaucerian romance, and--in chapter four--"Gower: Confessio Amantis and the Fear of Forgetting" (53-66). She focuses on "two pivotal scenes" (54), both from the frame narrative: Book I, 216-29, in which Amans, about to undergo confession, expresses concerns that his memory will be insufficient to facilitate a useful resolution, and Book VIII, 2894-97, in which Genius, the confession complete, instructs Amans to "Forget it thou and so wol I," for at this point Amans, via Venus' mirror, has come to grips with the reality of his old age, and can be relied upon for only appropriate behavior in the future. Tracy connects this kind of appropriate remembering with Gower's larger purpose, expressed in Prologue 1-11, of learning from history as "remembered" in old books. "Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'," she notes, "relies on the concern with forgetfulness in the process of confession to justify the framework of the text and defines the final stage of confession as being able to forget past sins while, at the same time, recollecting personal realities . . . . As a result of recalled memories, the confessing individual's spiritual condition is changed; his state of being is reformed after being subjected to an act of recollection. This model is reflected in the ending of the CA. After engaging in the confessional process, Amans concludes that his life, his mental being, will never be the same again" (63). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Tracy, Kisha G. Published Tracy, Kisha G. Memory and Confession in Middle English Literature. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. 53-66. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Memory and Confession in Middle English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review From Driscoll's abstract: "'By The Will of the King' demonstrates how Ricardian poetry was shaped by and responded to the conflict between majestic and political rhetoric that crystallized in the politically turbulent years culminating in the Second Barons' War (1258-1265). By placing Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' in dialogue with this political tradition, I demonstrate how narrative became a site of conflict between vertical, cosmic descriptions of power and horizontal realities of power, a conflict from which the contours of a civic habit of mind began to emerge . . . . By looking at the narrative practice of Gower and Chaucer through the lens of thirteenth-century political innovation, I extend and fill in [the] depiction of a nascent political imaginary. Each poet responds to the new political circumstances in their own way. Gower, placing the political community at the center of Book VII of the 'Confessio,' rigorously reworks the mirror for princes genre into a schematic analysis of political power. For Chaucer, political rhetoric becomes visible at the moment that the traditional majestic rhetoric of kingship collapses. 'The Canterbury Tales,' as such, restages the conflict of the thirteenth century in aesthetic terms--giving form to the crisis of authority. Ultimately, Ricardian poetry exposes and works through an anxiety of sovereignty; it registers the limits of a majestic paradigm of kingship; and reshaping narrative, aesthetic, and hermeneutic practice, it conjures a new political imaginary capable of speaking to and for a community which had emerged during the reign of Henry III." Author/Editor Author/Editor Driscoll, William D. Published Driscoll, William D. "By the Will of the King: Majestic and Political Rhetoric in Ricardian Poetry." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Oregon, 2017. iii, 335 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A78.09 (2018): n.p. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses and at https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/items/06271349-f5bb-46a9-8b3e-7c25df952afb. 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 By the Will of the King: Majestic and Political Rhetoric in Ricardian Poetry. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Espie is concerned with Tudor reception of Chaucer, treating Gower and (more extensively) Lydgate as mediators of Chaucer for Spenser and his contemporaries, exploring several ways Chaucer was understood, presented, and emulated in Spenser's "The Shepeardes Calender." There are many kinds of "mediation" of Chaucer underlying Spenser's "Calender"--early Tudor editions of Chaucer among them, Espie shows. He pays most attention, however, to "networks of Medieval intertextuality" (244) as they play out in Spenser's work, offering as one example Gower's and Lydgate's possible influences on the June eclogue of the "Calender"--how this eclogue "integrates a commendation [of Tityrus/Chaucer] that Spenser may have derived from Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and a plaintive voice that he models on what I'll call the Lydgatian mode" (246). Espie assesses Venus's praise of Chaucer in CA 8.2499 as one who "has made 'as he wel couthe' many 'ditees and songes' of love" (Espie's emphasis), exploring how the "commonplace phrase" wel couthe "plays an uncommon role" at the end of CA insofar as "Gower's passage is unique in using the phrase . . . to describe Chaucer's skill as an amorous poet--unique, that is until the 'Calender'" (252-53), where Colin's pursuit of love is central to both his role as poet and his commendation of Tityrus/Chaucer, and where suggestive resonances of "couthe" recur as the phrase is repeated elsewhere in Spenser's work. Combining the Gowerian echo with Lydgate's "plaintive voice" in the June eclogue, Espie argues, Spenser "remakes the Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate triumvirate into a Chaucer and Colin pair" (256), assimilating an old tradition into a new one. Espie also suggests that Gower's presentation of Chaucer as a love poet underlies the inclusion of Thomas Usk's "Testament of Love" in William Thynne's and John Stow's editions of Chaucer, and that John Leland "implicitly align[s] himself with Gower" in his praise of Chaucer. Such "well-read Chaucerians in Tudor England not only consulted Venus's words from the 'Confessio' but also used them to shape their representations of Chaucer" (253). In much of his essay, Espie examines how Lydgate's idea of Chaucer's "Janus-faced poetics" might have influenced E.K.'s prefatory epistle and Spenser's own "paradoxical poetics" (261) in "the process of poetic succession" (262), and how Chaucer's Pandarus-like interpretive mode made its mark on E.K. as an interpreter. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Espie, Jeff. Published Spenser Studies 31-32 (2017): 243-71. 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 (Un)couth: Chaucer, "The Shepheardes Calender," and the Forms of Mediation. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Abstract supplied by author: "The study of friendship in the West often occludes any serious consideration of late medieval discourses of friendship, particularly in the English tradition. Privileging either a classical tradition rooted in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero or a modern liberal republican model, the study of friendship makes little room for medieval literature's go-betweens, sworn brothers, counselors, or allegorical friends. Medieval scholars have long recognized the ubiquity of friendship but commonly judge medieval friends to be forlorn, foresworn, and foredone. Taking my cue from emerging trends in affect theory and new formalism, I offer a reassessment of medieval friendship as it emerges in a body of literature close to the heart of the English literary cannon. [sic] The texts in each chapter are gathered according to a shared formal feature--dialogue, proverbial wisdom, the jealousy plot, and elegy--wherein I examine the affordances of the particular form. Throughout, I suggest that friendship in the Chaucer tradition operates in close proximity to a Boethian understanding of humanity's place in the universe, its subjection to the whims of Fortune, and its attempts to navigate a sublunary world of uncertainty. I argue that the oscillation between acknowledging friendship's ideals and accepting friendship's circumstances produces an uncertain ethics of friendship that simultaneously holds the friend up as an important and necessary intercessory figure while also holding the friend at distance lest the friendship fail or be found fraudulent." [John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Neel, Travis E. Published Neel, Travis E. "Fortune's Friends: Forms and Figures of Friendship in the Chaucer Tradition." Ph.D. Ohio State University, 2017. Fully accessible at http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/viewacc_num=osu1492705588117003 (accessed April 20, 2023). 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 Fortune's Friends: Forms and Figures of Friendship in the Chaucer Tradition. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The "Gower" of this article is the character Gower in Shakespeare's "Pericles." The poet Gower receives a passing mention. As an early modern romance, Shakespeare's "Pericles" is a "hodgepodge . . . polygeneric . . . unsystemic," and that is the point! "In this system, hybridity, change, and generic instability are ordering principles, not deviations from fixed marks" (238). Mentz defines his purpose as "craft[ing] a language to describe the variety and instability of early modern romance fictions" (238), using "Pericles" as his case study. In this context, multiple authorship (including with Gower) is a feature, not a bug: "Connecting this variety to Shakespeare's relationship with co-author George Wilkins and also with the play's internal narrator John Gower creates a version of romance authorship that attenuates and pluralizes itself" (239). Mentz proceeds to review three schools of current critical theory that help to explain the "plurality" that is "Pericles": Latour's actor-network theory of systems that are "centreless" (241); Glissant's post-colonial theory of text as a "relation," not a hierarchy (242); and Caroline Levine's view of genre as "flexible," while it is also "meaningful" (242). He proceeds to review the plot of "Pericles" as a dizzying succession of transitions from era to era and genre to genre, including classical tragedy, Bible story, Machiavellian theory, medieval chivalrous romance, and Jacobean city comedy where the good prevail (245-53)--starting with the name 'Pericles,' shared by the Athenian statesman, but also the hero of Sidney's romance the "New Arcadia" (245). Through all this purposeful chaos, narrator John Gower "provides a through-line of narrative stability," a tribute to Gower the poet, given his command of the many narrative genres that comprise "Confessio Amantis" (251). His foil is Marina, who in her "rhetorical and dramatic variety," personifies the glorious disjunctions of the romance genre (251). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Mentz, Steve. Published Mentz, Steve. "'Pericles' and Polygenres." In Goran Stanivukovic, ed. Timely Voices: Romance Writing in English Literature. (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017). Pp. 238-56. 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 "Pericles" and Polygenres. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Pearsall offers "a plea for the working man . . . professional commercial scribes who wrote for their living and were involved in the commercial production of books, particularly those of our newly emergent poets, in the first half of the fifteenth century" (1-2). He offers examples of scribal obstacles and challenges, drawing largely on manuscripts of Chaucer's work, "Piers Plowman," Hoccleve's, and the "Confessio Amantis." He observes that "the scribes of the Confessio. . .were put under the strictest supervision, the authority for which emanated from Gower himself" (15). As time went on, scribes became less experienced, and consequently encountered greater difficulty following the exacting format. A solution was column-for-column copying, but this "came to grief where there was a change of scribe, as in Cambridge, Trinity College MS R. 3. 2. and Cambridge, University Library, MS Mm. 2. 21" (16). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek. Published Pearsall, Derek. "The Tribulations of Scribes." In Simon Horobin and Aditi Nafde, eds. Pursuing Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts: Essays in Honour of Ralph Hanna. (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2017). Pp. 1-17. 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 Tribulations of Scribes. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Bubash, Connie K. Published Bubash, Connie K.  Contagious Texts Embodied: Melancholy Hermeneutics in Late Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation. The Pennsylvania State University, 2017. iv, 190 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A82.011(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/14869ckb5081. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Background and General Criticism Review The role of melancholy in medieval and early modern understandings of the contagion of plague is a central concern in Bubash's dissertation: she focuses on aspects of it in individual chapters on Chaucer's 'Book of the Duchess,' Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,' Sidney's 'Old Arcadia,' and Shakespeare's 'As You Like It,' with supporting discussion of various medical background works, penitential treatises, and how-to manuals. According to Bubash, these texts "encourage readers to inhabit literary environments in such a way that accounts for conceptions of the body as porous--i.e., equally capable of absorbing and emitting infectious disease. Into this body and from this body would pour melancholy, an ailment to which these instructional works devote much space" (iii). Analogies between disease and sin and between protagonist and reader are central to her argument that, in Gower's CA, the "corrective function of Genius," who "guides Amans's virtue vicariously . . . is not simply Genius's moralizing after each tale that leads to Amans's spiritual and physical well-being. Rather, Amans's virtue is shaped imaginatively in the way he experiences the feelings and actions of the characters in Genius's tales" and "Amans's absolution at the end of Book VIII signifies a newfound capacity to coordinate relationships affectively within both social and spiritual communities." In turn, "the moral and ethical program put forward in Gower's 'Confessio' is not only consistent with Genius's affective pedagogy but is in fact predicated upon it" (53). "Heavily influenced" by penitentials, Bubash argues, "Gower creates a virtual confessional that equips readers to independently stave off both sin and disease" (54). To underpin her argument and disclose "Gower's compositional strategy for mediating affective experiences through his fictional tales," Bubash focuses on "The Trump of Death" and "The Tale of Narcissus' from CA, Book 1. [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 Contagious Texts Embodied: Melancholy Hermeneutics in Late Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Espie, Jeffrey George. Published Espie, Jeffrey George. Forms of Mediation: Chaucer, Spenser and English Literary History. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Toronto, 2016. viii, 274 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A78.08(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://utoronto.scholaris.ca/items/28d36911-bcf5-4ce7-bc59-b40e5f14829d. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Review "This dissertation argues that Spenser represents his relation to Chaucer as an unresolved dialectic between the desire for an intimate, immediate connection with him, and the recognition of the obstacles and enabling qualifications to it. Spenser's version of English literary history is the product of a double vision which balances a linear genealogy of direct influence with a more circumlocutory sequence of indirect mediation. . . . [Spenser] fashions an English poetic tradition that is more capacious and erratic than scholarship has previously acknowledged. Chaucer and Spenser are at the center of English literary history, but their connection is also guided by people usually kept at the periphery of it" (ii-iii)--including Gower and Lydgate. For Espie's take on Gower's (and Lydgate's) "mediation" of Chaucer in Spenser's " The Shepheardes Calender," see Espie's " (Un)couth: Chaucer, 'The Shepheardes Calender' and the Forms of Mediation," Spenser Studies 31-32 (2017): 243-71, a revision of pp. 26-61 of this dissertation. [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 Forms of Mediation: Chaucer, Spenser and English Literary History. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Graham, April Michelle Adamson. Published Graham, April Michelle Adamson. "Penolopëes Trouthe": Female Faithfulness in Late Medieval English Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation. Rutgers University, 2017. ix, 208 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A79.08(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/55484/. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and LIterary Relations Review "This dissertation examines the figure of the faithful woman in late medieval English literature . . . . tak[ing] Penelope as its guiding figure for investigating how authors engaged with female faithfulness because, thanks to a distinctive medieval commentary tradition, she was taken by nearly all later medieval readers as a paragon of wifely faithfulness" (ii). Taking Penelope as paradigmatic, Graham examines various Chaucerian female protagonists, Mary Magdalene of the eponymous Digby play, and Gower's Penelope in his "Confessio Amantis" to show that "late medieval iterations of conservative-seeming "good women" stories turn out to contain seeds for challenging tradition and rethinking medieval readers' relationship to the past" (iii). In particular, "Gower's Genius rewrites Penelope's letter from the 'Heroides' to reconceive literature as authorized and even made necessary by morality and experience" (ii). [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 "Penolopëes Trouthe": Female Faithfulness in Late Medieval English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Rajendran, Shyama. Published Rajendran, Shyama. Modes of Multilingualism: Contemporary Language Theory and the Works of John Gower. Ph.D. Dissertation. George Washington University, 2017. viii, 163 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A79.01(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Vox Clamantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusioin Review In her dissertation, Rajendran applies modern theories of language and translation to selected potions of Gower's corpus in order "to provoke a reconceptualization of how we think about multilingualism, recognize when and where contemporary language ideology is structuring our expectations of the operations of language, and revisit our unmarked assumptions about language and cultural identity." Further, her "project aims to show that focusing in on textual moments of Gower's work serves to build a picture of his multilingualism that is more true to the operations of language, rather than the operations of language ideology. By distinguishing between his ideological investments and the operations of language at each of these textual moments, this project seeks to attend to the operations of language without succumbing to contemporary language ideologies" (vi). In chapter one, Rajendran draws "on contemporary sociolinguistic theorist Yasemin Yildiz's formulation of the postmonolingual condition [to] consider how Gower's divergent interpretations of the Babel story in Middle English verse and Latin prose annotations [in "Confessio Amantis'] speaks to modern multilingual resistance to monolingual frames of analysis and interpretation" (21-22). Chapter two assesses the notion of cultural identity in Gower's Tale of Constance in CA by viewing it in light of Gloria Anzaldúa's border theory and the practices of rap-artist M.I.A. (Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam), revealing "the unmarked and marked structures of cultural intelligibility in medieval literature as well as in the present" (23). Chapter three uses "cognitive linguist Mel Y. Chen's concept of feral methodology" to argue that Gower's "Visio Anglie" (Book 1 of "Vox Clamantis") helps us to think "critically about our modern tendency to categorize languages as living or dead" and to generate "a more nuanced understanding of allegory's ability to control or 'domesticate' language" (24). In chapter four Derrida's "idea of the specter" helps Rajendran to show how in Shakespeare's "Pericles" Gower's "resurrection" as chorus "functions as a textual haunting, complicating our understanding of a linear progression from one linguistic iteration to the next" (24)--in this case from Godfrey of Verbo's Latin "Pantheon" to Gower's Tale of Apollonius to Shakespeare's play. [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 Modes of Multilingualism: Contemporary Language Theory and the Works of John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Holchak, Paul. Published Holchak, Paul.  Intelligent Bodies and Embodied Minds: Reading Religious Performance in Middle English Writing from Syon Abbey, Nicholas Love, William Langland, and John Gower. Ph.D. Dissertation. City University of New York, 2017. x, 239 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A78.07(E). Freely accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1915/. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review In his dissertation Holchak uses current ideas from cognitive scientists and philosophers of the mind (e.g., Andy Clark, Alva Nöe, Antonio Damasio, Martha Nussbaum, and Daniel Kahneman) to argue for "a new reading of the relationship that texts have to performance, bodies have to agency, and that social construction has to literary criticism as these matters relate to the study of religious practice in late medieval England" (iv). It emphasizes the interrelation of embodiment, cognition, environment, and action in religious practice as evident in "The Myroure of Oure Ladye" and "The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ" from Syon Abbey, Nicholas Love's "Meditationes Vitae Christi" and "Treatise on the Sacrament," and fictive representation of pilgrimage in "Piers Plowman" and of confession in "Confessio Amantis," treating the latter two as similar in several ways: "the interest, energy, and narrative focus shift in both poems to zones of interactive participation in which the activity of bodies matters. In navigating those zones, an ability to use implicit, partially unstated information proves crucial to the protagonists' projects. As a consequence, Will and Amans learn that when they no longer expect their actions to be controlled discursively, the process of participating in devotion changes, and how one participates appears more significant than how far along one is in completing the performance" (220). For CA, Holchak focuses all but exclusively on the end of Book 8. After Amans resists confession throughout earlier portions of the poem, Holchak tells us, and tracing various shifts near the end of the poem--discourse to recognition, stasis to motion, Genius to Venus, Amans to Gower--Holchak argues that Gower "accepts and affirms that he does not really know what love is" (214), relaxing his "reliance on discursivity" and enabling him "to leave a narrative in which Amans had been trapped, (218), heading ambiguously but significantly "Homward" (8.2967). [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 Intelligent Bodies and Embodied Minds: Reading Religious Performance in Middle English Writing from Syon Abbey, Nicholas Love, William Langland, and John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain" (EMLB) is a comprehensive reference work with over 600 substantial entries, in four volumes, totaling over 2000 pages, covering the years 449-1541. As the introduction states, the EMLB "seeks to redefine the study of medieval British literature as the study of the literature of medieval Britain" (lxxxviii), thus one of its great strengths is its focus on the multilingual and multicultural aspects of the literature of medieval Britain, including Latin, French, Celtic, and continental as well as English literatures and issues. Gower appears in a number of entries in the EMLB, including those on Estates Satire (Roger Ladd), Exemplum (Larry Scanlon), Legal Writing (Candace Barrington), the Loathly Lady (S. Elizabeth Passmore), Mirrors for Princes (Misty Schieberle), and Apollonius of Tyre (Elizabeth Archibald), among others. The EMLB also contains entries devoted exclusively to Gower: a substantial (approx. 7000 word) main entry for John Gower (R. F. Yeager) and one shorter (approx. 3500 word) entry each on his English Poetry (Matthew W. Irvin), French Poetry (Siân Echard), and Latin Poetry (Siân Echard). Yeager's entry covers what we know of Gower's life, as well as his critical reputation and influence during and after his life. This is followed by an overview of Gower's works, with a section each devoted to the French, Latin, and English works, which all include discussion of the content, form, and manuscripts of the works. Yeager's overarching approach is to highlight just how revolutionary and significant Gower's works are. The three entries that follow focus upon Gower's poetry in each of those three languages. While there is some overlap in each section with Yeager's primary entry on Gower, the entries by Irvin (on the English works) and Echard (on the French and Latin works) provide more detail concerning the content, forms, and manuscript issues, as well as sources and analogues. Each of the Gower entries concludes with references and useful lists of further readings. While the entries as a whole will provide students a substantive foundation for further study of Gower, even the most experienced Gowerian will undoubtably find (or be reminded of) useful information in them as well. [BWG. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân, ed. Rouse, Robert Allen, ed. Yeager, R. F. Irvin, Matthew W. Echard, Siân Ladd, Roger Scanlon, Larry Barrington, Candace Passmore S. Elizabeth Schieberle, Misty Archibald, Elizabeth Published Echard, Siân, and Robert Allen Rouse, eds. The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain. 4 vols. (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2017). Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism 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 The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In his dissertation, Stadolnik shows how "Middle English writers tested the capabilities of their vernacular, experimenting with new genres and styles of literary composition, as well as with discursive conventions and practices borrowed from nonliterary fields" (i), particularly the scientific discourses of medicine, alchemy, and astronomy. In his second chapter, "Gower's Bedside Manner" (pp. 78-117), Stadolnik assesses the frame of Gower's "Confessio Amantis" as a "confabulation" between Amans and Genius, a unique genre than draws from medical and confessional discourse, along with encyclopedic concerns. For a published version of this chapter, see Stadolnik's essay of the same title in New Medieval Literatures 17 (2017): 150-74. Author/Editor Author/Editor Stadolnik, Joseph. Published Stadolnik, Joseph. Subtle Arts: Practical Science and Middle English Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation. Yale University, 2017. vii, 294 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A78.11(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 Subtle Arts: Practical Science and Middle English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bennett notes that "Though the status of John Gower as a squire of Kent is acknowledged, it has been generally assumed that the poet sold the manor at Aldington by Thurnham, his chief holding in Kent, in 1373, moving to Southwark shortly afterwards" (258). He clarifies the legal status of that transaction, which was not a sale but an enfeoffment to uses, which in fact allowed Gower all the privileges of ownership--including residential occupation--via a common sort of legal dodge. That Gower was "at home" in Kent in 1381 when the rebels swept through is evidenced by Bennett's discovery of "a plea of covenant [entered by Gower] against Walter Cookes, carpenter, requiring him to fulfil the terms of an indenture in which the latter agreed to construct 'de novo' a house at Aldington for Gower's use ['ad opus Iohannis'] and at his expense" (263). This document, if it "does not absolutely prove that Gower resided at Aldington, it demonstrates that in 1381, eight years after the grant of 1373, he still had a house there and was intent on rebuilding it for his use" (263). Bennett then analyses the "Visio," especially the first section which finds the authorial figure in the countryside, as a real-life narrative, if greatly transformed. The latter portion of the article devotes significant attention to the implications Gower's possible residence at Aldington has for, among other things, illuminating his circle of friends, and--through a strengthened connection with the Cobham family--his attitude in the "Cronica Tripertita" toward Richard II. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bennett, Michael. Published Bennett, Michael. "John Gower, Squire of Kent, the Peasants' Revolt, and the 'Visio Anglie'." Chaucer Review 53 (2018): 258-82. ISSN 0009-2002. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Vox Clamantis 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, Squire of Kent, the Peasants' Revolt, and the "Visio Anglie." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Runstedler sends the following description: "This thesis examines the role of alchemy in Middle English poetry from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, particularly how these poems present themselves as exemplary narratives to raise moral points about human behaviour, fallibility, and alchemical experimentation. The introduction suggests the compatibility between the emergence of the vernacular exemplum and the development of alchemical practice and literature in late medieval England. I follow J. Allan Mitchell's 'ethics of exemplarity' for reading the alchemical poems in this study, extending his reading of Middle English poetry to understand the exemplary and ethical values of alchemy in poetry, which in turn helps the reader to understand the good of alchemical examples in medieval literature. Reading these alchemical poems as exemplary reassesses the role of alchemy in medieval literature and provides new ways of thinking about the exemplum as a literary framework or device in Middle English poems containing alchemy. The third chapter concentrates on John Gower's use of alchemy in the 'Confessio amantis,' in which it is presented as a model for ideal yet unattainable labour. Following R.F. Yeager's reading of Gower's 'new exemplum' in the 'Confessio amantis¸' I suggest that Gower's alchemical section follows this new, emerging style of vernacular exemplary writing and can also be read on its own as an exemplary narrative, which recognises alchemical failure as a post-lapsarian decline and a sign of human shortcomings." [Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Runstedler, Curtis T. Published Runstedler, Curtis T. Alchemy and Exemplary Narrative in Middle English Poetry. Ph.D. Diss. University of Durham, 2018. Open access at http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/12593/ (accessed January 27, 2023). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alchemy and Exemplary Narrative in Middle English Poetry. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Burke argues that although the anonymous poem she translates and discusses neither influenced Gower nor was influenced by him, being composed after 1424, as one of the responses to Alain Chartier's "Belle dame sans mercy," it nonetheless should be seen "in context" (the term borrowed, in this sense, from Ardis Butterfield) with the "Confessio Amantis." Both are among "the riches of a common literary culture including, but not limited to, demonstrable 'borrowing' or direct influence from one text to another" (177). Burke makes a strong case for belated recognition, noting that the "Confession de la belle fille" had a fame substantially greater in its day than at present, as evidenced by some 45 extant manuscripts (197, n.14). Citing Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, Burke connects the French poem and the CA as representatives of "confessional poems" (183) that use "orthodox confession to a Christian priest" (182) for literary/fictional purposes. There are, she notes, significant differences, however: Gower "generally attempts to present the claims of an earthly love as in harmony with a Christian's obligation to follow the commandments of God" (184) while the "Belle fille" is "a frank parody of a Christian confession, where 'sins' against love equate to chastity in Christian terms, and a 'priest' commands his young female penitent to surrender her 'heart and body' not to God but to her lover's desire" (184). The closest the CA comes to this treatment is in "The Tale of Jephthah's Daughter," where the message is "lose your virginity now for tomorrow may be too late" (186) and more significantly in the "Tale of Rosiphelee" (both from Book 4, "Sloth," at 1565ff. and 1245ff., respectively), which carries the same message. Genius succeeds in linking such tales to an encomium of "procreation as a 'good' of marriage," but close examination, Burke claims, shows Gower's tone to be one of "mock religious parody" (186), not unlike that of the "Belle fille." [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burke, Linda. Published Burke, Linda. "'The Girl's Confession of Love': A Bilingual Edition and Translation of the Fifteenth-Century 'La Confession de la Belle Fille,' also Known as 'La Confession d'Amours,' with Introduction and Notes." Mediaevalistik 30 (2018 for 2017): 177-224. 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 Girl's Confession of Love": A Bilingual Edition and Translation of the Fifteenth-Century "La Confession de la Belle Fille," also Known as "La Confession d'Amours," with Introduction and Notes. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review By "pronomination" Burrow means the device "pronominatio," defined in the "Rhetorica ad Herennium" as "a device which designates, with a kind of alien cognomen, something which cannot be called by its own name" (trans. Burrow). Geoffrey of Vinsauf follows "Ad Herennium" in his "Poetria nova" and "Documentum de modo de arte dictandi et versificandi," similarly defining and classifying "pronominatio" a trope, along with metaphor, metonymy, and hyperbole--all cited as "more difficult" (because they require a knowledgeable reader) than similes, which "display their meanings openly and in literal terms" (142). The trope substitutes a famous (usually classical) name for another, e.g., referring to a brave soldier as "this Hector," making it clear that not the original, but another, is intended. In the "Poetria nova" Geoffrey builds upon "the Roman rhetorician's neat coupling of 'laudere' and 'laedere'" to point out that "pronominatio" can be used either to praise or blame (e.g., "this Paris" or "this Thersites")--and it can also be used "ironically and derisively . . . where there is no true likeness between the people in question: an ugly man may be ridiculed as 'Paris' or an artless speaker as 'Cicero'" (143). Although the bulk of Burrow's study focusses on Skelton, he also notes instances in Chaucer's practice, which often resemble Skelton's (143-44). "John Gower," however, "is a different case." Burrow finds "no pronominations at all anywhere in [the CA]" (144). They are there in the Latin verse, especially in the Visio section of the VC, from which Burrow cites a few examples in ll. 879 ff.--the entry of the mob into London ("Nova Troia"). (It is perhaps noteworthy that this article was published posthumously.) [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burrow, John. Published Burrow, John. "'Pronomination' in the Poetry of Chaucer, Gower, and Skelton." Medium Aevum 87 (2018): 142-52. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Pronomination" in the Poetry of Chaucer, Gower, and Skelton. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Meindl writes: "The king's court is the final element in Gower's analysis of the law in Book VI of the Vox Clamantis prior to the 'speculum principis' that is the Book's climax. Having discussed the men of law, judges, sheriffs, jurors, and bailiffs in chapters one through six, the poet now finds fault in chapter seven with the various advisers who surround the king for the purpose of providing him useful counsel in governing the realm. They, too, are found wanting in an analysis of the current situation in England." [Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Meindl, Robert J. Published Meindl, Robert J. "The Failure of Counsel: Curial Corruption in Book VI of the Vox Clamantis." Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media 4 (2018): n.p. Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/accessus/vol4/iss1/2 Gower Subject Vox Clmantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Failure of Counsel: Curial Corruption in Book VI of the "Vox Clamantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This essay analyzes the manner in which the marginalia in the CA were transferred to the extant manuscripts of the Iberian translations. Pérez-Fernández establishes that the key to understand this transmission is the cultural and intellectual context in which both the Portuguese and Castilian versions of the Gowerian poem were produced: the Latin apparatus of the original text, rather than being translated more literally, as is the case with the English poem, is "reduced to the minimum, whether omitted (in the case of the Latin verses) or translated into the vernacular (the rubrics)" (126). The fact that in Iberia in the late Middle Ages most translations were commissioned by noblemen with limited knowledge of Latin who gave some signs of discomfort with the marginalia from the medieval learned tradition leads Pérez-Fernández to propose that the near-absence of Latin verses (and most of the glosses) in the Portuguese and Castilian manuscripts of the CA was a strategy of adaptation to accommodate the needs of this new readership. [ASH. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Peréz-Fernández, Tamara. Published Peréz-Fernández, Tamara. "From England to Iberia: The Transmission of Marginal Elements in the Iberian Translations of Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Text, Transmission, and Transformation in the European Middle Ages, 1000-1500, ed. Carrie Griffin and Emer Purcell (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 119-40. ISBN: 9782503567402; 9782503567419. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource From England to Iberia: The Transmission of Marginal Elements in the Iberian Translations of Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018