2 100 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 Summers, Karen Crady. Published Summers, Karen Crady. Reading Incest: Tyranny, Subversion, and the Preservation of Patriarchy. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2011. v, 162 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A73.04. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/listing.aspx?id=8321. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Review From Summers' abstract: "This dissertation explores usage of the incest theme in the medieval and early modern literary periods, and into the mid-eighteenth century," assessing Gower's "Confessio Amantis," Malory's "Morte Arthure," Shakespeare's "Pericles," Beaumont and Fletcher's "A King, and No King," Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi," and Walpole's "The Mysterious Mother" and "The Castle of Otranto" to show how "writers and storytellers appropriate [the incest taboo] to reflect some of the anxieties attendant upon their times," with recurrent attention to "a common desire to preserve, uphold, and defend patriarchy." Summers finds CA to be "filled with tales of incest" (10) which "analogize incest to tyranny, and prove that personal lives or social institutions built upon a foundation of incest tend not to stand" (11), comparing and contrasting it with Malory's treatment, and commenting on relations between Gower's tales and later literature, especially Shakespeare's "Pericles." [MA] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading Incest: Tyranny, Subversion, and the Preservation of Patriarchy. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Wagner's dissertation explores the topic of English vernacular linguistic identity, particularly anxieties about using English in literary and theological texts, arguing that "even texts traditionally considered to be confident in their use of English, like 'The Canterbury Tales,' are preoccupied with the subject of unrestricted speech and the nature of the English language" (ii). Wagner considers attitudes toward the use of English in Lollard and Wycliffite discourses and reactions to them, tracing their topical concerns in works by Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, Pecock, Capgrave, and other medieval writers, with discussion of post-print reformed attitudes of Foxe, Tyndale, and More. She compares Chaucer's and Gower's views by comparing their tales of suppressed speech, the Manciple's Tale and the Tale of Phebus and Cornide, arguing that Gower's tale is essentially conservative, i.e., "largely concerned with maintaining the status quo and thus silencing revolutionaries, while Chaucer is much more concerned with the freedom to speak" (13). [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wagner, Erin Kathleen. Published Wagner, Erin Kathleen.  Linguam Ad Loquendum: Writing a Vernacular Identity in Medieval and Early Modern England. Ph.D. Dissertation. Ohio State University, 2015. vii, 315 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A81.12(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Linguam Ad Loquendum: Writing a Vernacular Identity in Medieval and Early Modern England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database 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 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 Review From Ensley's abstract: "this dissertation argues that for the producers and readers of the medieval romance, the genre and the books that preserved it were a means by which readers could both travel to the past and meditate on their connections with that past. Combining bibliographical analysis, reception history, literary interpretation, and theories of cultural memory and historiography, this project demonstrates that polytemporal material objects allowed readers to experience both present and past in directions that unsettle the period divisions foundational to much modern scholarship . . . . Chapter Four uses Thomas Berthelette's 1532 folio edition of John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' alongside William Shakespeare's reimagining of Gower in his late romance 'Pericles' to explore the monumentality of fourteenth-century authors and texts in early-modern literary cultures. I argue that while Berthelette's edition buries Gower in a monumental folio, separating the medieval author from a work deemed timeless, Shakespeare's play both recognizes Gower's alterity and simultaneously insists on his presence in living cultural memory." Ensley also comments recurrently on Gower's early modern reputation elsewhere in her study. [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ensley, Mimi. Published Ensley, Mimi. Re-forming the Past: The Medieval Romance Book as a Dynamic Site of Memory. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Notre Dame, 2019. vi, 315 pp.; illus. Dissertation Abstracts International A81.09(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Re-forming the Past: The Medieval Romance Book as a Dynamic Site of Memory. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 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 Brenner, Caitlin R. Published Brenner, Caitlin R. Translating Ovid's "Heroides": Three Middle English Collections of Women. Ph.D. Dissertation. Texas A&M University, 2019. vi, 158 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A83.11(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/items/a54ed9ad-791b-44fa-9fc6-810cb25a111c. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review Brenner's abstract: "This work foregrounds gendered metaphors of translation in three collections of 'good' women's lives adapted and compiled from Ovid's 'Heroides' ('Epistulae Heroidum'): Geoffrey Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women,' John Gower's 'Confessio amantis,' and Osbern Bokenham's 'Legendys of Hooly Wummen.' While these texts remain understudied, I argue that these collections constitute the authors' most overt representations of themselves as English translators. As each poet restrains and restricts the 'heathen' women's complaints during translation, he likewise restrains and restricts the feminized 'heathen' tongue: English. By identifying how these and other early English authors theorized their approach to translation, I demonstrate that metaphors of reproduction, exile, and female writing are replicated in important vernacular works up until the end of the sixteenth century. Chapters examine how the three authors appropriate Ovid's poetic exile, the poets' gendered ventriloquism as a vernacular authorial position, and the texts' engagements with the Catalog of Women genre and its emphasis on feminine reproduction." Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Ovid's "Heroides": Three Middle English Collections of Women. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Alberghini, Jennifer. Published Alberghini, Jennifer. Divided Loyalties: Family and Consent to Marriage in Late Middle English Literature, 1300-1500. Ph.D. Dissertation. City University of New York, 2019. Dissertation Abstracts International A80.08(E). Abstract accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Fully accessible via https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/3085/ (accessed April 1, 2026). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Background and General Criticism Review Alberghini's dissertation studies the theme of marital consent in late medieval literature in English, providing background in Derridean consent theory and in medieval social and legal discourse about tensions between marital consent and parental control. As she describes it in her abstract Alberghini's analysis ranges widely in the literature, sifting a number of works to offer some rather blunt conclusions: "I begin with Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde' and 'The Legend of Good Women,' which conflict over this dilemma [personal choice versus deferral to higher authority], and show how the issues brought up in both texts are resolved in 'The Man of Law's Tale.' This leads me to Chapter 2 on 'The King of Tars' and John Gower's 'Tale of Apollonius of Tyre' in the 'Confessio Amantis,' which combine parental support and filial obedience to satisfy both individual desire and political needs. The texts of Chapter 3, 'Blanchardyn and Eglantine' and the Charlemagne romance 'The Sultan of Babylon,' further show how female characters, in these cases, Saracen princesses, could affect their countries' political futures through marriage. This message likely resonated with the patron of the former, Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII's mother. Patrons also figure in Chapter 4, as Osbern Bokenham's 'Legendys of Hooly Wummen,' which I read next to John Capgrave's 'Life of St. Katherine,' were written for married women and couples. I conclude looking at mother's [sic] perspectives throughout these texts. Through my reading of this wide variety of works, I find that consent is very much emphasized in literature, with 'good' parents supporting their children's choices and 'bad' parents, who were also often non-Christian, trying to prevent these marriages from occurring. This emphasis thus suggests that we reconsider the opposition between medieval and modern ideas of gender, with marriage as one area in which medieval women could have some freedom." [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 Divided Loyalties: Family and Consent to Marriage in Late Middle English Literature, 1300-1500. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Walther's dissertation focuses on the "ideological horizon of expectations"--a concept derived from Hans Robert Jauss, modified by Mikhail M. Bahktin and Pavel N. Medvedev--evident in "Piers Plowman," considering the work's use of vernacular English, its rural and legal vocabularies, and its rustic protagonist as reflections of audience expectations. He compares and contrasts these features with those found in Gower's "Vox Clamantis," the play "Mankind," and various works by Chaucer to show how such features can help modern readers understand the perspectives of targeted medieval audiences. Walther's treatment of the VC is limited largely to observing that Gower's use of Latin in the work restricts its audience, along with commentary on his use of legal vocabulary and on the use of English in the "Confessio Amantis." [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Walther, James Thomas. Published Walther, James Thomas. Imagining the Reader: Vernacular Representation and Specialized Vocabulary in Medieval English Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of North Texas, 2000. ii, 166 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A62.07. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2592/. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Imagining the Reader: Vernacular Representation and Specialized Vocabulary in Medieval English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 thesis examines the depiction of social antagonism in certain texts written in the 1380s and 1390s, in the London area. It focuses on Chaucer, looking at 'Troilus and Criseyde' and the 'Canterbury Tales' alongside other, contemporary texts. These include Thomas Usk's 'Testament of Love,' the guild returns of 1388-89, the letters accusing three London aldermen of betraying the city in 1381, 'St. Erkenwald,' Richard Maidstone's 'Concordia,' and John Gower's 'Vox clamantis.' Most critics have assumed that Chaucer's vision of society, or of social possibility, was benign. Critics writing from diverse perspectives and in various periods, have generally agreed that Chaucer's texts promote an idea of coherence, and that the author was genial and optimistic. In contrast, I argue that Chaucer's texts depict social groups as essentially fragmentary and antagonistic, and offer no hope for social - or personal - redemption. In Troilus and Criseyde, the city, and fellowship, are shown to be debased and self-seeking; equally, the Canterbury 'compaignye' is a destructive, anti-social group. Both of these works challenge an idea of teleology by suggesting that there is no final goal for society, and both refuse to offer a sense of progress or closure." Author/Editor Author/Editor Turner, Marion. Published Turner, Marion. Urban Chaucer: Fragmented Fellowships and Troubled Teleologies in Some Late Fourteenth-Century Texts. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Oxford, 2002. Dissertation Abstracts International C70.03. Abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Urban Chaucer: Fragmented Fellowships and Troubled Teleologies in Some Late Fourteenth-Century Texts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 thesis explores issues regarding the oft-debated 'discovery of the individual', specifically in relation to the literature of the late medieval period. Critical debates concerning whether a medieval person was able to conceptualise a sense of individual self that was distinct from social norms, the accepted models or personae of being that were instantiated in culture and propagated as patterns around and within which a life should be led, have become confused because they have not properly addressed the related question of whether that awareness led to a specific ideology of 'individualism', in which, akin to modern Western notions of the self, to be a person uniquely distinct from all pre-existing forms of being was affirmed as desirable . . . . Chapter two [pp. 105-98] discusses John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis.' This chapter contests claims made by recent critics that Gower's poem shows that the human faculty of reason is enough to correct personal sin and error. Instead, it is shown that the 'Confessio' advocates a much more traditional, even theologically extreme, position concerning the route via which the fallen human condition might achieve its goal of spiritual salvation." In Smyth's reading of CA, human reason is limited and "divine revelation is necessary" (178), so that "Hope lies not in the capacity of man to save himself, but simply in the willingness to have faith that there is a guiding benevolence that encompasses the confusion and division, and that it can and will bring men, and perhaps society at large, to their salvation" (177). [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Smyth, Benjamin Michael. Published Smyth, Benjamin Michael. Errant Individualism in Late Medieval English Literature: The Poetics of Failure. Ph.D. Dissertation. The University of Liverpool, 2009. Dissertation Abstracts International A81.01(E). Abstract accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Fully accessible via https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/3174137/. 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 Errant Individualism in Late Medieval English Literature: The Poetics of Failure. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "My thesis considers English literary representations of two notorious classical women, Helen of Troy and Medea, from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries. My primary focus is on the ways in which male authors in the period deal with the troubling spectres of the women's very different powers: Helen's alarming and captivating sexuality, Medea's magical abilities and unrestrained violence. First tracing how their power is represented in classical and late antique Greek and Latin texts, I then assess how their stories enter the English literary imagination. My project considers both longer renderings of their stories (Gower's Confessio Amantis, Lydgate's Troy Book, Heywood's Ages) and also the brief references to both women that recur time and again in the works of authors including Chaucer, Hoccleve, Gascoigne, Turberville and Greene. My research spans genres and media, considering the various uses the women are put to (didactic, cautionary, tragic, occasionally comic) in history, prose, poetry and drama, as well as in direct translation of classical works. Very often, authors use Helen and/or Medea ironically, in a way that demands a close familiarity with their classical incarnations (particularly, perhaps, with Ovid). Often paired as well as treated separately, Helen and Medea are used across the period to exemplify the unhappy effects of love, the dangerous effects of passion, and perhaps most frequently, the peculiar dangers women pose to men. Though their literary incarnations have often been considered separately by critics, by handling them together my research considers the way authors such as Chaucer, Lydgate, Gascoigne and Turberville choose their classical exemplars very carefully, how two apparently quite different notorious women may be turned to the same ends, used to caution both men and women. Taking their power, and concerted male efforts to undermine it, as its overarching theme, the thesis considers Helen and Medea in relation to medieval and Renaissance theories of translation, to instructional, didactic or cautionary literature, to Christianity, to political and religious upheaval, and most significantly, in relation to the male establishment of the period." Author/Editor Author/Editor Heavey., Katherine Published Heavey, Katherine. "as meeke as medea, as honest as hellen": English Literary Representations of Two Troublesome Classical Women, c1160-1650. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Durham, 2008. 413 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International C71.06. Abstract accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Fully accessible (in 2 downloads) at https://etheses.dur.ac.uk/2930/. 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 "as meeke as medea, as honest as hellen": English Literary Representations of Two Troublesome Classical Women, c1160-1650. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Rust, Martha Dana. Published Rust, Martha Dana.  Odd Texts and Marginal Subjects: Towards a Hermeneutics of the Book in Late Medieval English Manuscript Culture. Ph. D. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2000. v, 376 pp.; illus. Dissertation Abstracts International A62.01. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review Rust's dissertation explores "the bibliographic sensibility that characterized late medieval English manuscript culture," analyzing "the dialectical interaction between literary representation and its material support in a selection of late Middle English poems," focusing on how each poem "calls attention, self-reflexively, to a feature of its own material instantiation, in this way extending the boundaries of its poetics to include its physical frame." She considers medieval alphabet poems, literary epistles in Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" and elsewhere, the dynamics of text and marginal apparatus in Gower's "Confessio Amantis, and "the calligraphic oeuvres of three late-medieval scribes, John Shirley, Ricardus Franciscus, and John Lacy," finding that, to best approach these poems and their books, we must inhabit the "eye of a beholder" that characterizes medieval reception. Mirrorings between text, marginal commentary, and illustrations are Rust's concerns in her discussion of Gower. She argues that "prismatic refraction enabled by the technology of manuscript commentary is one of the topics of Gower's 'Confessio amantis' and one that is presented with especial vividness in Morgan M.126" (173). She focuses on specific aspects of folio 9 of the manuscript and then moves to various features of its presentation of Book 4 on Sloth, including the "scribal laziness" of its copyist, and how "certain 'slothful' aspects" of the illustrations to and commentaries on three particular tales in this book--the "Tale of Rosiphelee," the "Tale of Nauplus and Ulysses," and the "Tale of Iphis and Araxarathen"--"reflect both unnoticed perils in the text of 'honeste love' and possible lines of resistance to it" (179)--concerns that mirror those of the CA at large, evident in and magnified by Venus's mirror at the close of the poem. In several intriguing and complicated moves, Rust reads the "vision" of CA to be "Gower depicting a bibliophile's fantasy of journeying through the looking glass of his own book" (206), not only a meta-commentary on his book about love, but also a meta-meta-commentary that reflects it through dense, even Wonderland-ish techniques of construction. [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 Odd Texts and Marginal Subjects: Towards a Hermeneutics of the Book in Late Medieval English Manuscript Culture. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Reid, Lindsay Ann. Published Reid, Lindsay Ann. Bibliofictions: Ovidian Heroines and the Tudor Book. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Toronto, 2009. vii, 284 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A74.08(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Review Reid's dissertation "explores how the mythological heroines from Ovid's 'Heroides' and 'Metamorphoses' were catalogued, conflated, reconceived, and recontextualized in vernacular literature; in so doing, it joins considerations of voice, authority, and gender with reflections on Tudor technologies of textual reproduction and ideas about the book" (ii). One of Reid's recurrent concerns is how Gower's "Confessio Amantis"--along with works by Chaucer and Lydgate--influenced Tudor understandings of and approaches to Ovidian texts and, more generally, ideas about books as material and conceptual objects. In particular, for Reid, the CA presents the "putative authors" of the "Heroides" as "sources of tangible, historical documents, and the complaints of a number of mythological heroines are likewise posited as written, circulating texts. 'Heroides' 1, 2, 7, and 11 are redacted and worked into Gower's narratives about Penelope, Phyllis, Dido, and Canace, and Gower digressively adapts 'Heroides' 13, the epistle of the 'lusti wif" of 'The worthi king Protheselai' ([Laodamia] 4.1906, 1901), in the midst of a story about Ulysses." Laodamia's epistle serves as Reid's "representative example of the cameo appearances that the 'Heroides' often make in Middle English literature" (152), arguing that in CA "we sense that Gower's Laodamia is not merely, 'like' Ovid's Laodamia, a letter-writing character. Rather, as his description of the letter and its contents confirms, Gower's Laodamia is in the process of writing and sending 'Heroides' 13" (153), and exemplifying how "an aura of assumed materiality and historicity as well as an exterior layer of narrative context" (156) was carried into Tudor understanding of Ovidian epistles. [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 Bibliofictions: Ovidian Heroines and the Tudor Book. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "John Gower's 'Confessio amantis' is a text deeply informed by concepts of the late fourteenth-century aristocratic household and the social structures it supported. This thesis offers an interpretation of Gower's poem guided by the poem's own language of the great household and its intersection with contemporary texts within this discursive territory. These texts include parliamentary petitions on livery and maintenance, the appeal and impeachments of the Merciless Parliament of 1388, vision poetry of Chaucer and Sir John Clanvowe, and household administrative records. Many critical readings of the 'Confessio' deploy concepts of the political too narrow adequately to illuminate the work's historical situation of production and use. I attempt to locate the 'Confessio' in an aristocratic milieu of magnates and landed gentry. The generic strands blended in Gower's text evince an aristocratic readership (designated and actual), and register a bifurcation of interests within this readership. This splitting, and the literary themes and generic expectations which reflect it, are examined under headings of the 'courtly' and the 'traditionalist.' The 'Confessio' functions as an appropriation of ephemeral, exclusive courtly poetry, endeavouring to refashion it as edifying and socially (that is, aristocratically) responsible, or traditionalist. Evidence of textual usage, including manuscript provenance and Gower's own revisions, suggests accommodation and resistance to this transformation. Theories of symbolic and material exchange, meanwhile, align one-sided 'magnificence' and asymmetrically ordered 'reciprocity' with courtliness and traditionalism respectively. The representation of household-based social relations and exchanges in Genius and Amans's confessional dialogue, in its petitionary frame (which sequesters penance to lay, seigneurial authority), and in the exemplary tales supports the poem's traditionalist politics. It also aligns these politics with the interest in the privileges of a landed community (and magnate responsibility for them) which is manifest in contemporary parliamentary texts. Gower's discussion of kingship, like aspects of these texts, discloses a slippage towards magnificence which casts into relief the tension between reciprocity and hierarchy inherent in traditionalist, reciprocalist discourse." Author/Editor Author/Editor Kendall, Elliot.  Published Kendall, Elliot. The Landowner's Book of Courtly Love: Languages of Lordship and the "Confessio amantis." Ph.D. Dissertation.  University of Oxford, 2003. Dissertation Abstracts International C70.36. Abstract accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis 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 Landowner's Book of Courtly Love: Languages of Lordship and the "Confessio amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 thesis proposes that, with the 'Confessio Amantis' John Gower produced a philosophy of kingship that defended the freedoms of the king whilst accepting the legal possibility of royal deposition. This thesis will begin with a discussion of royal legitimacy, arguing that Gower saw heredity as the beginning in a king's search for legitimate authority and not the end. This discussion continues with the theory of separation and [the] relationship between the king and his crown, thereby placing Gower's view within its historical context. The thesis continues by analysing the relationship between the king and the law as descried in the 'Confessio Amantis.' Although Gower accepts that the king is above the law, he argues that a just ruler should willingly subjugate himself; he is not the crown but its first subject. A discussion of Gower's view of counsel follows this, arguing that the king has absolute freedom to choose royal councillors alongside total responsibility for the results; Gower will not allow his monarch to escape blame for his mistakes by hiding behind his advisors. Warfare is a constant theme within the 'Confessio Amantis,' and Gower's attitude has attracted much critical discussion. This thesis argues that Gower is uncompromising in his abhorrence of royal militarism, seeing it as a rejection of a king's duty to give peace and justice to his subjects. The thesis concludes with a discussion of a number of contemporary poetic texts. This allows the thesis to put the 'Confessio Amantis' within its literary context; there are places where the work is expressing relatively common sentiments and others where Gower is taking a stand on his own." Author/Editor Author/Editor Hodgson-Jones, T. J. Published Hodgson-Jones, T. J.  Deposition and the Absolute King: The 'Confessio Amantis' and Gower's Philosophy of Kingship. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of London, King's College, 2006. Dissertation Abstracts International C70.45. Abstract accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis 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 Deposition and the Absolute King: The 'Confessio Amantis' and Gower's Philosophy of Kingship. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 Grigsby examines leprosy, bubonic plague, and syphilis in various texts to show how "doctors, priests, and literary authors interpreted certain diseases through a moral filter" (abstract) in late medieval and early modern England. His treatment of Gower is brief (pp. 139-43), commenting on leprosy and its associations with various sins in "Mirour de l'Omme" and "Confessio Amantis." [MA]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Grigsby, Bryon Lee.  Published Grigsby, Bryon Lee. "The doctour maketh this descriptioun": The Moral and Social Meanings of Leprosy and Bubonic Plague in Literary, Theological, and Medical Texts of the English Middle Ages and Renaissance. Ph.D. Dissertation. Loyola University, 2000. vii, 324 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A60.12. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Mirour de l'Omme 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 doctour maketh this descriptioun": The Moral and Social Meanings of Leprosy and Bubonic Plague in Literary, Theological, and Medical Texts of the English Middle Ages and Renaissance. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Gingell, C. J.  Published Gingell, C. J.  "Gazing into the void": Apocalypse, Authority and Culture on the Margins of Medieval Society. Ph.D. Dissertation. The University of Wales College of Cardiff, 2004. Dissertation Abstracts International C70.37. Abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Mirour de l'Omme Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Review "The thesis examines ways in which . . . . apocalyptic feeling . . . . was one of the principal ways in which ordinary people responded to the crises of late fourteenth-century Europe, especially in England. The modern apocalyptic tradition is examined in the Introduction, looking at popular culture, such as TV, films and the Internet, whilst Chapter 1 reviews the medieval apocalyptic tradition and its equivalent means of expression – Mystery Plays, sermons, manuscript illustrations and lyrics. Chapter 2 examines 'Piers Plowman' as a text not only explicitly apocalyptic, but also explicitly fourteenth-century, grappling with many contemporary trends and traumas. Chapter 3 takes a similar approach to Gower's three major works, which have not previously been considered to be especially apocalyptic. The chapter also examines Gower's use of humour and satire, not just as didactic tools, but as further ways of reacting to crisis. The final two chapters detail the third form of response, that of seeking to take control of a threatening situation. These chapters review diverse activities such as alchemy and witchcraft, and look in more detail at those on the margins of society, often forced there by their lifestyle choices: in times of uncertainty and crisis the majority seeks to banish the unorthodox or unknowable in order to reaffirm its collective identity." Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Gazing into the void": Apocalypse, Authority and Culture on the Margins of Medieval Society. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Gilders, Adam Penn. Published Gilders, Adam Penn. "My Substitutes I send ye": Allegory and the Matter of Representation in "Paradise Lost." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Toronto, 2002. vii, 314 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A63.12. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Mirour de l'Omme Review "This thesis explores the allegory of Sin and Death in 'Paradise Lost' as an expression of Milton's ambivalence towards poetic representation, indeed, towards the figural as such. I argue that Sin and Death's representation of their concepts, to wit, sin and death, is mediated by their mimesis of representation. Satan's infernal progeny arrive at their concepts indirectly, substituting their own genealogy as figures for the actual genealogy--the genealogy of evil--which they figure. Milton's fable of evil, in other words, doubles as a fable of the fictions which mediate its production and interpretation . . . . My first chapter locates Milton's allegory within a literary and critical spectrum that ranges from the 'poetics' of Plato to the eighteenth century reception of 'Paradise Lost.' I examine the allegory of 'Pecché' and 'Mort' in John Gower's fourteenth century poem the 'Mirour de l'omme' [pp. 42-59] and the allegorical poetics of Spenser's 'The Faerie Queene. My second and third chapters address the division in Milton's allegory--posited, most famously, by Samuel Johnson--of the material and the spiritual. In my final chapter I investigate an exchange between the poetics and the politics of representation. Satan's deployment of Sin and Death in Book Ten as "Substitutes" (10.402), I argue, points to a figural impasse at the heart of Early Modern discourses of political representation. My treatment of this problem focuses on George Wither's 1645 poem 'Vox Pacifica' and on Milton's 'Eikonoklastes'" (ii-iv). Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource My Substitutes I send ye": Allegory and the Matter of Representation in "Paradise Lost." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 thesis investigates a particular discourse which conflated ideas of male sexuality and work. It argues that, although this lexical and conceptual elision was not new to the late-medieval period, it was invested with new significance in the particular social and economic climate of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century London. In particular the labour shortages, effected by the demographic crises of earlier fourteenth century, generated a moral fashion for discussions about work as a force for social cohesion. Despite the relevance of women's work to the contemporary economy, social and economic regeneration was often considered to be a male responsibility. In the capital, a particular commission was given to male householders to keep the peace and regulate labour, rendering men's domestic lives central to the administration of social and economic order. This thesis is organized around five major authors of the period--William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Usk, John Gower and Thomas Hoccleve--and considers how their works engaged with this discursive tradition. A strong difference is discerned between the work of Chaucer and that of his near contemporaries. The literary efforts of Langland, Usk, Gower and Hoccleve are demonstrably more anxious about the condition of society and, in their different ways, they represent narrators who are at odds with the systems of masculine ethics they propose. In contrast, Chaucer's narrators are not so central to his poetry and they exist comfortably along side a plurality of other speakers, a plurality which is unchallenged by a unifying moral code. In particular 'The Canterbury Tales' celebrates male enterprise and play in a way which demonstrates an acceptance of contemporary social challenges. At the same time, the characters of Troilus and the Canon's Yeoman are portraits of interior anxiety which operate as a commentary on contemporary moral concerns about male responsibilities." Author/Editor Author/Editor Davis, Isabel Melanie. Published Davis, Isabel Melanie. Work, Sexuality and Urban Domestic Living: Masculinity and Literature, c 1360- c 1420. Ph.D. Dissertation. The University of York, 2002. Dissertation Abstracts International C67.02. Abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. 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 Work, Sexuality and Urban Domestic Living: Masculinity and Literature, c 1360- c 1420. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 Codling's abstract: "The thesis breaks new ground in examining Henry IV's kingship from the perspective of its 'theatre', and in looking at how the king fashioned and projected a convincing image of majesty. Its principal themes are: the king's personality and the practice of his kingship; his response to problems of a dubious title; the public and private aspects of his piety; his court; his relations with parliament; his responses to challenges to his kingship; the use of 'propaganda' to establish his regime and his patronage of art and architecture. The underlying assumption is that, whilst Henry IV's finances and the composition of his retinue have already been extensively covered, little has been done to bring to life the character and kingly style of Henry himself. The main sources used are the two surviving Wardrobe accounts for the region (E101/404/21 and MS Harleian 319) and other Exchequer and Wardrobe material in E101 and E403 (Public Record Office); the Duchy of Lancaster Accounts (DL28); letters, for example: 'Royal and Historical Letters of Henry IV,' ed. F.C. Hingeston and 'Anglo-Norman Letters & Petitions,' ed. M. D. Legge; chronicles for 1399-1413; literary sources, in particular the work of John Gower; and surviving material evidence, such as Henry's tomb at Canterbury Cathedral." Author/Editor Author/Editor Codling, Deborah Ann. Published Codling, Deborah Ann. The Kingly Style of Henry IV: Personality, Politics and Culture. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of London, Royal Holloway College, 2005. Dissertation Abstracts International C70.40. Abstract accessible via ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global. 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 The Kingly Style of Henry IV: Personality, Politics and Culture. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Kamayabee's study re-examines "Middle English animal fables as teaching vehicles. For each fable, four governing pedagogical questions are raised and certain suggestions proposed. First, what lesson(s) does the fable teach? Does it encourage a virtue or warn against a vice? Second, who is the teacher: the poet, the narrator, or the anthropomorph? Third, to whom the lesson is addressed? Though it is often next to impossible to identify the historical audience of the fable, the imagined audience of the poet is often suggested. Fourth, how the lesson is offered? Surprise, reward, and punishment are among the most frequent didactic strategies that fables employ. 'The Introduction' establishes the background of the genre and the related traditions as well as their historical applications. Fables served as a convenient tool to teach grammar, rhetoric, and translation both in antiquity and in the Middle Ages. They were also used in sermons for purposes of edification. 'Chapter II' discusses Henryson's use of fable as a vehicle of social criticism. 'Chapter III' discusses Chaucer's NPT and ManT and the manipulation of the genre in the greater picture of 'Canterbury Tales.' The use and abuse of language are the main issue of Chaucerian fables. 'Chapter IV' discusses Gower's 'Phebus and Cornide' and 'Adrian and Bardus,' which expound lessons to be learned from silence and justice. 'Chapter V' discusses Langland's 'Belling the Cat' and its political implications. 'Chapter VI' discusses Lydgate's 'Isopes Fabules', 'Churl,' and 'Debate,' that teach not only practical wisdom, but also nationalism and integrity. 'Chapter VII' discusses 'The Owl and the Nightingale' as an animal fable with its emphasis on justice, honesty, and above all on winning. In their different ways, medieval English animal fables teach their prospective audiences not only what to think, but more urgently how to think." Author/Editor Author/Editor Kamyabee, Mohammad Hadi. Published Kamyabee, Mohammad Hadi. "And out of fables gret wysdom men may take": Middle English Animal Fables as Vehicles of Moral Instruction. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Toronto, 1997. Dissertation Abstracts International A59.06. Freely available at https://utoronto.scholaris.ca/items/0fee8a77-d2c0-403f-829a-91c046d1cb35. 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 "And out of fables gret wysdom men may take": Middle English Animal Fables as Vehicles of Moral Instruction. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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, Fanale studies the functions of confessors and confessor figures in late medieval English literature: Gower's "Confessio Amantis," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and Chaucer's "Parson's Tale," "Book of the Duchess," and Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women," with attention to aesthetic backgrounds in the "Roman de la Rose" and late-medieval art, and theological backgrounds in penitential legislation, handbooks, sermons, and liturgies. His treatment of Gower (pp. 211-27) attends to background to the figures of Genius and Venus, structural similarities between the CA and "the post-Lateran IV style of confessing" (216), Venus and Genius as "co-confessors for Amans" (220), and Amans' "imperfect contrition" (226). [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fanale, James Francis. Published Fanale, James Francis. God's Ear: The Confessor in the Theology, Art, and Literature of the Late Middle Ages. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 1987. iii, 300 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A48.02 (1987): 387. 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 God's Ear: The Confessor in the Theology, Art, and Literature of the Late Middle Ages. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In her dissertation, Otey shows that Clanvowe's "Boke of Cupide" and his "The Two Ways" establish him as "an intense and innovative writer of vernacular theology" (183), assessing the writer in light of Lollard discourse on the use of English in religious writing and political reactions against such discourse. She includes comments on Chaucer's and Gower's uses of English in religious contexts, evincing that both poets use it for nationalistic purposes, but that Gower, more than Chaucer, reflects "anxiety" about doing so. Addressing Gower's stylistic "middel weie" as reference to using vernacular English in his "Confessio Amantis," commenting on Gower's recitation of the story of Babel, and treating Latin as a framing device for his English poem, Otey concludes that "Gower, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, exhibits an anxiety precipitated by using English for religious writing at a time when it was increasingly controversial to do so" (160). [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Otey, Kirsten Johnson. Published Otey, Kirsten Johnson. "The law of God in here modyr tonge": The Vernacular Theology of Sir John Clanvowe. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Colorado at Boulder, 1999. viii, 198 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A60.12. Fully accessible vis ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "The law of God in here modyr tonge": The Vernacular Theology of Sir John Clanvowe. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation traces the emergence of three landmarks of the Renaissance English canon--an author (John Donne), a genre (the English Sonnet), and a work (The Tempest). The canonical represents not only positive content, but also the exclusion of an unstable material context. Responding to recent developments in textual criticism, attribution study, and theories of canon formation, the thesis draws on the work of Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva to show how canonicity (the preference for a given text, author or word over another in a given context) involves ritual pollution and purification. Much of what was later considered impure or corrupting was deeply woven into the early modern experience of texts now generally read in cleaned-up, anachronistically coherent versions. Chapter 3 argues that 'The Tempest' radically revises, then supplants earlier and more popular versions of the story of Apollonius of Tyre, such as 'Pericles.' Critical hostility to 'Pericles' and adulation of 'The Tempest' have precluded full consideration of the canonical play's debt to the Apollonius tradition, the most widespread and obvious repository of The Tempest's romance motifs and the proximate source of its Virgilian echoes. Reversing the earlier myth's perspective to make the tyrant the hero, Prospero derives his authority and cruelty from the father-kings in the Apollonius tradition and his choric, pseudo-Christian epilogue from Gower's frame narrative in the 'Confessio Amantis'." Includes discussion of how Shakespeare's Miranda echoes "the daughter of the King of Pentapolis" (143) of CA. Author/Editor Author/Editor Johnson, Nathaniel Paul. Published Johnson, Nathaniel Paul.  Canonicity and Identity: Mythologies of English Renaissance Writing. Ph.D. Dissertation. Cornell University, 1997. vi, 204 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A58.04. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Canonicity and Identity: Mythologies of English Renaissance Writing. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Federico's dissertation "Shows how selected late medieval narratives (Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde' and 'House of Fame,' John Gower's 'Vox Clamantis,' Richard Maidstone's 'Concordia Facta inter Regem Riccardum II et Civitatem Londonie,' the anonymous 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,' and Lydgate's 'Troy Book') theorized England's relationship with its mythic past by incorporating fantasy, sexuality and symbolization into historiographical discourse. England's mythic origins in Trojan legend constitute a particularly ambivalent historical precedent, since the same lust that ruined Troy is also the fortunate flaw that permitted the establishment of later empires. Accordingly, English historical identity is both permitted and threatened by a Trojan precedent that is at once the fruition of the glory of empire and the epitome of self-destruction through unnatural desire." In Federico's reading (pp. 64-87), Gower's depiction of London as "New Troye" feminizes the city as a widow, both vulnerable and voracious, and when he adds Book 1 to the rest of the VC after the Uprising of 1381, Federico argues, Gower "reinterpret[s] how his book should be read" and offers "a utopian manual for the post-revolt England. Similarly, Gower' s authorial persona is no longer that of a single voice crying (unheeded) in the wilderness of Southwark; his is a London voice bravely crying for obviously necessary social reform." His social criticism, however, "rests on a backwards-looking idealism and imagines a future defined by an illusory golden age of relations between and among the estates" (86). [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Federico, Sylvia Published Federico, Sylvia. Old ''Stories'' and New Trojans: The Gendered Construction of English Historical Identity. Ph.D. Dissertation. Indiana University, 1997. v, 229 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A58.08. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Old ''Stories'' and New Trojans: The Gendered Construction of English Historical Identity. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This study concerns the relationship between signs and phenomena as it is elaborated in selected medieval texts. Part I discusses the basic difficulties of accounting for magical and miraculous phenomena at the level of theory. In Part I.1 I compare the discussions of several modern anthropologists on the topic of magic and cultural translation. Part I.2 is an analysis of the problematics of magic, miracle and sign theory in certain writings of St Augustine. Part II approaches the problems of miracle and magic at the level of practice. The problems which two Anglo-Saxon hagiographers encounter in their attempts to explain and account for individual miracles is discussed in Part II.1. Part II.2 illustrates the function of language in practical magic through analysis of some Old English charms. Part III treats several late medieval attempts to synthesize practice and theory. In Part III.1 I focus on the way natural philosophy is used by Roger Bacon in his attempt to give new legitimacy to the use of words in practical magic. In Part III.2 I look at how another thirteenth-century writer, Henry of Avranches, uses natural philosophy to resolve some of the problems miracles present the hagiographer. Part III.3 discusses the understanding of magic and morality implicit in the fourteenth-century 'Confessio Amantis' of John Gower. My conclusion draws together the main threads of the preceding parts and suggests some alternative ways of looking at the problematics of magic and miracle." Fanger's section on CA (pp. 278-318) addresses how "Gower's coupling of magic with gluttony becomes significant in a cosmological sense: like gluttony, magic seems to represent a type of intemperance with respect to worldly things" (317). She also shows how Gower's views relate to those of Augustine and Roger Bacon, and how, for Gower, magic "is given a place among human properties or powers which are, like speech and language, special, and yet more natural than supernatural; liable to abuse, and yet not wholly diabolic" (318). Author/Editor Author/Editor Fanger, Claire. Published Fanger, Claire. Signs of Power and the Power of Signs: Medieval Modes of Address to the Problem of Magical and Miraculous Signifiers. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Toronto, 1994. ii, 353 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A55.12. 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 Signs of Power and the Power of Signs: Medieval Modes of Address to the Problem of Magical and Miraculous Signifiers Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 thesis explores John Gower's English work, the 'Confessio Amantis,' from three primary perspectives. This produces an interpretation of the work that emphasizes the completeness of Gower's vision therein whilst also explaining the methods by which he made that original 'intentio' manifest. Chapters I and IV focus on the physical structure and framework of the text: the design, the schema of the Seven Deadly Sins, the prologue and epilogue, and the metre. To demonstrate the significance of the structure of the 'Confessio Amantis,' the thesis analyzes the relationship of these elements to the text's 'intentio' and its reception. Chapters II and V examine the 'Confesssio Amantis' in its social, political and cultural context. The history of the Church's original appropriation of 'auctoritas' is explored, along with Gower's subsequent reappropriation of it as a lay political concept and his narrative justifications for this. As a parallel to this, Gower's own references to the contemporary domestic political situation are examined for the insight which they offer into his reactions to the cultural climate and his motivation in writing the text. Chapter III demonstrates the underrated narrative artistry of the 'Confessio Amantis,' and discusses failings of the prevailing critical tradition. Comparison with some key texts from Gower's contemporary, Chaucer, explores possible reasons for Gower's poor reputation by examining narrative in terms of factors such as theme, genre and 'intentio' rather than the stylistics and characterization that have attracted most attention in the past. This chapter also explores the effect of those factors on the alterations which Gower made to his source narratives, and how this emphasizes Gower's commitment to a distinctive 'middel weie'. The thesis concludes by emphasizing the sustained and coherent nature of Gower's vision for his work and the literary significance which this affords him." Author/Editor Author/Editor Chatten, N. M. L. Published Chatten, N.M.L.  "A gret ensample thou schalt finde": On the Artistry and Ethics of the "Confessio Amantis." Ph.D. Dissertation. The University of Wales College of Cardiff, 1999. Dissertation Abstracts International C70.23. Abstract available 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 "A gret ensample thou schalt finde": On the Artistry and Ethics of the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 thesis presents the results of an investigation of antifraternal materials produced in France during the thirteenth century and in England during the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries. Primary materials include theological tracts such as William of Saint Amour's 'De periculis novissimorum temporum' and 'De pharisaeo et publicano' and Richard FitzRalph's 'Defensio curatorum' and vernacular works such as several of Rutebeuf's 'dits,' Jean de Meun's continuation of 'The Romance of the Rose,' John Gower's 'Vox clamantis,' Chaucer's 'Summoner's Tale,' John Skelton's 'Collyn Clout,' Thomas More's 'Utopia,' John Heywood's 'The Pardonner and The Friar,' Robert Greene's 'Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,' William Shakespeare's 'Measure for Measure,' and Thomas Fuller's 'Chaucer'. These materials collectively confirm that, during the late Middle Ages following FitzRalph's influential attack on friars, a particularly British body of antifraternal literature, distinct from its French progenitor, emerged. The distinctly British treatment of friars, marked by its emphasis on fraternal oratories and friars as peddlers, continued until the Reformation when it faded away as the friars themselves silently dissolved into the rapidly changing British religious landscape. Despite the appearance of antifraternal motifs and images in post-Reformation literature, this body of literature lacks a particularly British colouring." Brim's section on Gower's VC (pp.149-79) observes his interest in polemical issues rather than historical details. She focuses on his continuation of earlier motifs derived from his predecessors--with the exception of their emphasis on "apocalyptic trappings" (156)--and his particularly British critique of fraternal fixation with "ornate churches" (170) and "graven images" (171). Later in her discussion, Brim comments recurrently on resemblances between VC and later English antifraternal literature. [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Brim, Constance E. Published Brim, Constance E.  The Development and Decline of British Antifraternal Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation. McMaster University, 1990. x, [343] pp. Dissertation Abstracts International 53.01. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & ThesesGlobal and via https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/items/8dc547b3-dd54-45f0-a9e6-ffdf5c4524e6. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis 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 The Development and Decline of British Antifraternal Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In her dissertation on the theme of exile in medieval English narratives, Lawler follows Mary Metz Gwin (1987; Auburn dissertation) in treating Amans' trajectory in Gower's "Confessio Amantis" as a form of "spiritual journey" (101)--for Lawler, an essentially "ironic" (102) one that indicates the need to abandon courtly affection as a means to self-recovery. Comparing Amans with Chaucer's Troilus, Lawler argues that each lover jeopardizes his soul through worldly love and must abandon it for "higher matters": "Just as devotional lyrics remind Christians that they should exile themselves from the temptations of the world," Lawler observes, "so too do some love poems reiterate this belief" (103). [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lawler, Jennifer L. Published Lawler, Jennifer L. Representations of Exile in Early English Literature: 1100-1500 A.D. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Kansas, 1996. 241 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A57.07. 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 Representations of Exile in Early English Literature: 1100-1500 A.D. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Chapter four explores "connections between four of Shakespeare's plays and the story of Medea as Shakespeare read it in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' "(p. 16): "The Merchant of Venice," "Othello," "King Lear," and "The Tempest." Author/Editor Author/Editor Thomsen, Kerri Lynne. Published Thomsen, Kerri Lynne. Disappearing Daughters: Proserpina and Medea in the Works of Spenser and Shakespeare. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1994. Dissertation Abstracts International A55.08. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. 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 Disappearing Daughters: Proserpina and Medea in the Works of Spenser and Shakespeare. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 frame as a permeable boundary between the 'inside' and the 'outside' of a work of art, this study presents the frame as a strategic locus of value in the literary text, arguing that the frame both constitutes and is constituted by an interplay between stylistic 'insides' and ideological 'outsides'. Part One examines theoretical models and historical instances of framing manipulation. The first chapter considers the concept of framing as a theoretical tool for the interpretation of literature, and Chapter Two aligns ideological framing in the metaphorics of the medieval 'Book of Culture' with literal acts of framing in the arts by way of an account of framing in medieval drama, illuminated manuscripts, and the cornice of the traditional frame-tale. Chapter Three pursues the latter subject in more detail, and culminates in readings of framed works by Boccaccio, Gower, and Chaucer. Part Two of the study turns its attention to literal and political elements of framing in the commodified book: Chapter Four explores links between text and economies of value in the novel and in film, while Chapter Five focuses specifically on entitlement in the novel and on the framing possibilities of narrative voice. The final chapter traces ideological resonances of literary framing and frame-breaking in the explicitly political context of recent South African fiction." Author/Editor Author/Editor Macaskill, Brian Kenneth.  Published Macaskill, Brian Kenneth. Framing Value in Literature: Style and Ideology. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Washington, 1989. Dissertation Abstracts International A50.08. Abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. 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 Framing Value in Literature: Style and Ideology. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This study examines the role played by the exemplum in the emergence of the English literary tradition in the later Middle Ages, arguing that the mode provided a crucial vehicle for the assertion of secular moral authority. Part I traces the Christian expropriation of the exemplum from classical tradition, its development from an incidental rhetorical device to a discrete narrative genre . . . . [It} concludes with an examination of the exemplum's efflorescence in the great preaching campaigns of the later Middle Ages. Part II examines Gower's attempt in the Confessio Amantis to ground the secular exemplum's moral authority in the ideal of kingship, which, in a revision of his principal antecedent, the Romance of the Rose, he proposed as a replacement for courtoisie as the central value of aristocratic life. Part III argues that Chaucer's use of the exemplum is structurally identical to Gower's, though he doesn't tie it to any specific political value. In the incompletion of the Monk's Tale and fabular resolution of the Nun's Priest's Tale he uses the mode to dramatize both the moral inadequacy of history and the inability of secular life to escape it. Part IV traces the attempts of Hoccleve and Lydgate to generate a positive affirmation of kingship without violating Chaucer's disjunction between morality and history." [from the abstract shortened in ProQuest with permission of author]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Scanlon, Larry. Published Scanlon, Larry. Literal Authority: The Exemplum and Its Traditions in Middle English Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation. The Johns Hopkins University, 1986. Dissertation Abstracts International A48.02. Abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. 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 Literal Authority: The Exemplum and Its Traditions in Middle English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Tarvers, Josephine Koster. Published Tarvers, Josephine Koster. The Language of Prayer in Middle English,1200-1400 (Medieval, Religious, Katherine Group, Chaucer). Ph.D. Dissertation. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1985. DAI-A 46.11. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review Tarvers studies prayer in Middle English literature, analyzing "about 200 published Middle English prayers" and "21 hitherto-unpublished prayers from Bodleian manuscripts (which are presented in appendices). The analysis identified nine components commonly found in prayers (formulae of address, two kinds of honorifics, professions of faith, petitions, grounds for petitions, interpolated amplification, homiletic elements, and closing formulae) and the various forms each component takes." Then Tarvers "goes on to examine historically the treatment of these components in Middle English pious and didactic collections, such as "The South English Legendary," "The Lay Folks' Mass Book," "The Pricke of Conscience," and the Vernon MS. The examination brought to light three generally identifiable styles: a plain one; a second strikingly characterized by repetition, which I call "iterative," and a third which I call "elaborate," because the writer appears to be conscious of style and the result is mannered. The examination revealed that prayers tend to become more iterative and elaborate as the fourteenth century progresses. But the progression is not a steady one: there is a peak of stylistic elaboration in the prayers embodied in the "Katherine group" to which subsequent prayers rarely attain. The last part of my study, which is of prayers in literary works, including the romances and the works of the "Pearl-poet," Langland, Gower, and Chaucer, produced two unexpected results. The prayers in these works proved to have the same components [as] those composed primarily for devotion and differed only in one structural particular, the occasional interruption of the prayer by the narrator to relate it to the narrative situation. Otherwise, what distinguished the prayers in the literary works was, effectively, a superior command of style in those writers" (n.p.). Tarvers (pp. 177-82) comments on stylistic features of eight prayers in Gower's Confessio Amantis: the narrator's early address to Venus, Amans' prayer to Genius, Nabuchadnezzer's prayer to God, a prayer at the end of Iphis and Araxarathen, two prayers in Jason and Medea, one in Philomena, and the narrators' rhyme-royal prayer to Cupid and Venus near the end of the poem. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 Language of Prayer in Middle English,1200-1400 (Medieval, Religious, Katherine Group, Chaucer). Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "'Pericles,' a popular play based on the old legend of Apollonius of Tyre and produced in London sometime between 1605-08, has long been the subject of scholarly conjecture. Although all contemporary sources attribute the play wholly to William Shakespeare, most scholars believe the play to be a revision by Shakespeare of a play written by another author. Basing their arguments on internal evidence of changes in literary style between Acts I-II and Acts III-V and on the fact that 'Pericles' was excluded from both the First and Second Folios, scholars have attempted to name either George Wilkins, Thomas Heywood, or John Day as co-author of the play. The first evaluative section (Chapter II) is devoted to a comparative analysis between 'Pericles' and the known sources of the play. The resultant conclusion is that 'Pericles' is based primarily upon Book VIII of John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' with additional detail from Laurence Twine's 'The Patterne of Painefull Adventures' and the Latin 'Historia Apollonii Regis Tyrii.' More importantly, this section reveals that the story was adapted for the stage and structured by only one author, a craftsman of considerable dramatic skill. Evidence examined in Chapter III demonstrates that the first printed quarto of 1609 (Q1), upon which all other copies are based, is corrupt, for it abounds in mislineations, lost phrases, and jumbled verse. While this corruption accounts for many of the stylistic inconsistencies between Acts I-II and Acts III-V, differences in style which indicate two levels of workmanship continue to exist. The concluding hypothesis of this study is that early in his career, Shakespeare began a play based on the Apollonius legend only to lay it aside in order to concentrate on the more popular comedies and chronicle histories. Sometime between 1605 and 1608, Shakespeare, tiring of the heavy psychological demands of the major tragedies and aware of increasing audience interest in the sensationalism of romantic drama, such as that done by Beaumont and Fletcher, revived the play he had earlier begun, transforming the long, rambling Apollonius narrative into a tightly compressed, highly imaginative morality tale which encompassed the values of patience and of reconciliation with life, later to be expressed more fully in 'The Tempest'." [eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pease, Ralph W., III. Published Pease, Ralph W., III. "The Genesis and Authorship of 'Pericles.'" Dissertation Abstracts International 33 (1973): 4358A. 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 The Genesis and Authorship of "Pericles." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1973 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This study demonstrates that medieval goods were active and often animated participants in the daily lives of medieval individuals. Rather than merely giving voice to dead objects, these lively 'things' speak about the emotional, sensual, and experiential lives of late medieval men and women. Seemingly disparate goods--Books of Hours, stone idols and invisible flowers, clothing, and skull cups--provide a spectrum of possible readings for users, who simultaneously interpreted objects as essential to a spiritual and communal existence, while also fearing that goods might inhibit the soul's relationship with the divine. All matter was, in some way, linked with creation and the divine, and as a result objects inherently possessed degrees of agency that might affect the human user. Chapter One considers how Books of Hours combine animal, plant, and stone matter and join them with prayers and illuminated images to instruct women in proper touching in this life and the next. Chapter Two considers worldly and mystical matter in Chaucer's 'Second Nun's Tale' to demonstrate how looking at and touching manmade objects can ultimately limit knowledge of the divine. Though Chaucer provides an exemplum in the form of St. Cecile, who requires no contact with goods to realize her destiny of becoming an early Christian martyr, he ultimately concludes that, for less saintly individuals, it is impossible to ignore the senses, and particularly vision, when forming belief. Chapters Three and Four discuss Margery Kempe's worldly and religious attire. Margery's clothes and tears become a form of livery that reinforces her relationship with the Heavenly household. As a result, her text itself is actually a narrative of cloth, in which she employs a sartorial vocabulary to understand her transition from mother to mystic. Chapter Five focusses on the tale of 'Albinus and Rosemund' in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and consider how the substance or matter of an object has inherent power, even if it cannot be perceived immediately though senses. In that tale, the central object, a golden and bejeweled cup that was crafted from a human skull, controls the destiny of all the characters." [eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Parkin, Gabrielle. Published Parkin, Gabrielle. "Objects and Anxiety in Late Medieval English Writing." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Delaware, 2014. Dissertation Abstracts International 84.02(E) (2022). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Objects and Anxiety in Late Medieval English Writing. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Keifer, Lauren. Published Keifer, Lauren, "Gower and Literary Tradition: Jean de Meun, Ovid, and the 'Confessio Amantis.'" Ph.D. Dissertation. Cornell University, 1994. Dissertation Abstracts International 55, no 4 (1995): 1946A. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review "This project attempts to alert the reader to John Gower's literariness. In the 'Confessio Amantis,' Gower deliberately turns away from the straightforward didacticism of his earlier works and of the Middle English penitential tradition, and adopts instead the narrative strategies of poets such as Jean de Meun and Ovid. Gower's literary complexity in the 'Confessio' links with the work's secular concerns, demonstrating Gower's growing awareness of the complex social problems surrounding him and leading him to abandon the didactic stance of his early works. Chapter One outlines Gower's progression from the rigid structures and spiritual emphasis of his earlier major works to the complexity and secular emphasis of the "Confessio Amantis." Gower's revisions of the 'Vox Clamantis' offer evidence of his growing social and political concerns, and show how the first chapter of the 'Confessio' deliberately rejects the medieval penitential manual's paradigm of divine justice, preferring instead a paradigm of personal responsibility. Chapter Two outlines the poetic strategies which Gower borrows from Jean de Meun. In particular, this chapter explores the way Jean and Gower turn the traditional function of the exemplum on its head, by using the form to impugn the credibility of the narrator. While traditional exemplum narrators choose and revise stories for clarity and appropriateness, Jean's and Gower's narrators make choices and revisions which merely reflect their own limitations. While Chapters One and Two examine isolated tales within the 'Confessio,' Chapter Three discusses the way several tales interact with each other. Gower's Ulysses tales--'Ulysses and the Sirens,' 'Ulysses and Penelope,' 'Nauplus and Ulysses,' 'Achilles and Deidamia,' and 'Ulysses and Telegonus'--place him in dialogue with both Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' and the Trojan historiographical tradition. I show how Gower deliberately rejects the didactic tendency of medieval historiography in favor of the more elusive poetic strategies of the epic and romance traditions, just as he rejected the didacticism of the penitential and exemplum traditions in favor of Jean's elusive structures." [eJGN 43.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Literary Tradition: Jean de Meun, Ovid, and the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation argues that the vernacular literature of late medieval England contributes importantly to the theorizing of psychological subjectivity and that this theorizing is connected fundamentally with the history of shame. Forms of Shame thus establishes an interpretive context for Middle English literature drawn from medieval theories of emotion. It describes and analyzes the ways in which the topic of shame was addressed, conceived, and critiqued prominently in sophisticated literary works by three late-medieval English authors--John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Thomas Hoccleve. Shame, the preeminent emotion of self-assessment, and its literary representation are enduring concerns for all of these authors. Shame acts as a diachronic intertextual thread linking these authors and their intellectual influences. The dialogues that they produce offer rich and subtle analyses of shame, ever shifting in their functions and their responses to cultural paradigms and to each other. The study argues, further, that the authors operate within a discursive matrix of shame that includes idealized norms of at least three broadly delineated emotional communities: ecclesiastic, chivalric, courtly. A theoretical understanding of shame--a problematic and protean feeling, uneasily categorized--remains largely unresolved at the end of the fourteenth century. The authors respond by embedding a discourse of shame within narrative representation in order to interrogate, test, and better understand the possibilities of shame within human experience. Moments of shame and narrative conflict caused by differences in its formulation heighten the awareness of self for a character or reader, reshaping the subjectivity of both agents in the process." [eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Chelis, Theodore. Published Chelis, Theodore. "Forms of Shame: Gower, Chaucer, Hoccleve." Ph.D. Dissertation. Pennsylvania State University, 2022. Abstract available at https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/22564tbc126. 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 Forms of Shame: Gower, Chaucer, Hoccleve. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 purpose of this study is to compare the narrative and framing techniques used by Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. These authors were selected for several reasons. Being contemporaries, they lived through the days of the reign of Richard II, his deposition, and the accession of Henry IV. This was a time change: the age of chivalry and true knighthood was ending; the middle class was establishing commerce, towns, guilds; openly and violently the peasants were beginning to reject their servile positions; the corruption within the organized church was being publicly exposed, and efforts, believed heretical by some, were being made to effect its purification. The discussion … will be limited to the major work of each author. For Gower this is the Confessio Amantis, his only English work of any length; for Chaucer it is the Canterbury Tales, which, incomplete as it is, is generally accepted as the crown jewel of medieval English literature. The discussion will be limited further to the framing and linking devices and to the four tales which appear in both books: 'Constance' (Man of Law's tale), 'Florent' (Wife of Bath's tale), 'Phebus and Cornide' (Manciple's tale), and 'Virginia' (Physician's tales)." [eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Byerly, Margaret Joan. Published Byerly, Margaret Joan. "A Comparison of Two Medieval Story-Tellers: Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower." M.A. Thesis, University of the Pacific, 1967. Available at https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/uop_etds/1630. 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 A Comparison of Two Medieval Story-Tellers: Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1967 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Excerpts copied in miscellanies occupy a significant place in the literary culture of late-medieval England. This dissertation surveys manuscripts excerpting Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales,' Rolle's 'Commentary on the Song of Songs,' Lydgate's 'Fall of Princes,' and Gower's 'Confessio amantis.' These manuscripts display a fifteenth-century attitude to authorship that re-shapes modern assumptions about canon formation and the laureation of Chaucer, whose works were often attributed to Lydgate and re-framed to be read through the lens of his poetry. This fifteenth-century 'culture of the excerpt' shaped both the composition and reception of canonical Middle English texts, many of which may have been read more often partially than as complete works, with a preference for morally or spiritually instructive excerpts." [eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Adams, Abigail Marie. Published Adams, Abigail Marie "Putting Together the Pieces: Excerpts from Rolle, Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate in Fifteenth-Century Miscellanies." Ph.D. Dissertation. The University of Texas at Austin, 2022. DAI-A 84.06 (E). 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 Putting Together the Pieces: Excerpts from Rolle, Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate in Fifteenth-Century Miscellanies. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review With characteristic depth of detail and good humor, Yeager offers a chronological description of the formulation and development of the John Gower Society (JGS), tracing its origins to a conversation in 1980 and identifying--almost year by year--how and when its phases and projects were planned and realized, leading up to the Society's fifth International Congress, scheduled for 2022 (although delayed by COVID until 2023, after this essay was written). Seemingly based on the minutes of the JGS meetings and the programs of its conferences--as well as Yeager's own capacious memory--the essay makes clear the Society's history, mentioning individual scholars (a list too long to include here) and affiliated organizations (again, too many to list) through whom and by which the Society has blossomed. Dues rates, membership numbers, lists of publications, accounts of individual meetings, launchings of newsletters, bibliographies, and websites may sound dry, but here they are definitely not. Leavened and spiced with Pete Beidler's comic poem about how to pronounce "Gower," prospective plans (later dropped) for a JGS T-shirt, the "insurmountable bureaucratic twaddling of the MLA" (61), exciting future prospects, and much more, this history of the JGS comes to life, lacking only, perhaps, a clear account of Yeager's own foundational, central, and ongoing contributions. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R. F. "A Brief History of the John Gower Society." New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession 4, no. 1 (2023): 57-67. Open access at https://escholarship.org/uc/ncs_pedagogyandprofession/. ISSN: 2766-1768. Gower Subject Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Brief History of the John Gower Society. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In this survey, Whitehead describes Middle English lyrics before Chaucer, emphasizes his innovative uses of French courtly "formes fixes" in English, and assesses interactions among courtly, religious, and liturgical material in ME lyrics generally. Her brief comments on Gower (336-37) have a small place in her account: she treats him (along with Hoccleve, Lydgate, and, at somewhat greater length, Charles d'Orléans) as one of Chaucer's "Successors" (334) in his use of "formes fixes"--the ballade in "Cinkante Balades" and "Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz". Like Chaucer, Whitehead observes, Gower "draws extensively" on his French predecessors, "transposing lines from their poems into his own oeuvre," but unlike Chaucer, "whose reworkings tend to stay broadly within the ideological [courtly] parameters of his models," Gower uses his ballade sequences "to mount a wholesale attack on the immorality of 'amour courtois,' condemn extra-marital liaisons, and celebrate the goodness of love within marriage" (336), quoting from CB 49 as an example. Whitehead tentatively attributes Gower's "return to French" (as opposed to Chaucer's use of English? Gower's own English in "Confessio Amantis"?) to, perhaps, "disillusionment with the Ricardian court . . . and his increasing interest in the political claims of Henry of Lancaster," but opts instead for agreeing with R. F. Yeager (2005) that Gower was motivated to "compete with" Chaucer and his French contemporaries. Further, Whitehead comments "[w]here Chaucer had written ballades in elegant triptychs, Gower . . . set them to work on an altogether larger scale." [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Whitehead, Christiania. Published Whitehead, Christiania. "The Middle English Lyrics in Their European Context." In Raluca Radulescu and Sif Rikhardsdottir, eds. The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature. Milton: Routledge, 2022. Pp. 332-44. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Cinkante 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 The Middle English Lyrics in Their European Context. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Weiskott's essay casts many lines in many ponds, making summarization difficult. Setting out "to demonstrate that 'O deus immense' can illuminate Gower's attitudes to poetry, his rebarbative late Latin poetic style, the shape of his career, his position in literary and political culture late in life, and the broader political moment of those years," as well as offering "new evidence for the influence of 'O deus immense' on one of his own subsequent compositions" (209)--i.e., the "Cronica Tripertita"--he scarcely has space, even in forty-one pages, to do full justice to all of them. The topic that holds his attention longest is making a case that Gower saw himself as "vatic" poet (235), consciously casting himself in the role of a prophet (esp. 235-44), with some similarities to John of Bridlington. Lack of firm dates for many of the poems Weiskott discusses makes this case difficult: it's hard to claim foresight if a poem is written after the fact. The essay does, however, offer a strong argument for reading the shorter, late Latin poems with greater care and attention. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Weiskott, Eric . "'Loquela gravis iuvat': Gower's 'O deus immense' and the Place of Poetry, 1398–1400." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 45 (2023): 205-46 . Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry 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 "Loquela gravis iuvat": Gower's "O deus immense" and the Place of Poetry, 1398–1400. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In this note, Weiskott's shows how Valerius Maximus's "De factis et dictis memorabilibus" 1.7.5 can be seen as a source for the ending of Gower's "Cultor in Ecclesia," adducing the poet's familiarity with "De factis" (based on Macaulay's notes to four passages in the "Confessio Amantis"), exploring bits of common language and imagery, citing the "popularity" of Valerius's work "in premodern European literary culture," and claiming that the "author of the surreal, classicizing, prophetic dream vision 'Visio Anglie' had every reason to be hunting around 'De factis dictis memorabilibus' 1.7, on dreams" (463). Acknowledging that the "borrowing is not an open-and-shut case" (462), Weiskott pushes his evidence further and suggests that "the Valerius passage accounts for the unreal, ethereal quality of the closing image of Gower's Cultor" (463). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Weiskott, Eric. "Dreaming of Cicero in John Gower's 'Cultor in Ecclesia'." ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 36.4 (2023): 462–63. Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry 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 Dreaming of Cicero in John Gower's "Cultor in Ecclesia." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Waterhouse and Stephens discuss the principle of retrospectivity, by which they mean how the poet organizes the poem to cause readers at the end of a poem or passage to reassess what they thought they learned at its beginning. They suggest that medieval writers differ from others in subsequent periods in that they were content to leave readers in suspense at the end of their poems without necessarily a conclusion that reconciles the whole work. They identify three kinds of retrospectivity: simple (information at the end of a passage changes what one thought at the beginning: e.g., "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"); complex (what seemed like a minor detail now appears major: e.g, "The Tale of Florent"); cumulative (one needs to constantly reconsider what one is reading throughout: e.g., "Beowulf"). The authors focus on "Florent" as an example of complex retrospectivity by suggesting that the description of the hag is suppressed when she first appears and her loathliness is determined throughout the tale by Florent's attitude toward her. Similarly, in the "Confessio Amantis," Gower writes in Book 1 about what he did "in his youth," a statement that seems more significant when Venus shows him in Book 8 that he is an old man. [CEB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Waterhouse, Ruth. Stephens, John. Published Waterhouse, Ruth, and John Stephens. "The Backward Look: Retrospectivity in Medieval Literature." Southern Review: Essays in the New Humanities 16.3 (1983): 356-73. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Backward Look: Retrospectivity in Medieval Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1983 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower figures only once, but interestingly, in Van Dussen's study of Lollard/Hussite connections, primarily in the fifteenth century. Recently discovered in Prague, Knihovna Metropolitni kapituly MS H. 15 are three eulogies to Queen Anne, copied on site by an anonymous Bohemian visiting her Westminster tomb, in front of which he notes they hung. The third of these, "Nobis natura florem," Van Dussen attributes to Richard Maidstone, rejecting Gower's authorship in the process (26-27). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Van Dussen, Michael. Published Van Dussen, Michael. From England to to Bohemia: Heresy and Communication in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource From England to to Bohemia: Heresy and Communication in the Later Middle Ages. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Like so many reference works being produced in the past few decades, the volume contains a number of signed chapters on different point of focus around its broad topic. There are seven overall sections: I) Literary Production, II) Literary Consumption, III) Literature, Clerical and Lay, IV) Literary Realities, V) Complex Identities, VI) Literary Place, Space, and Time, and VII) Literary Journeys. Each contains five signed chapters, in addition to a prologue by Treharne ("Speaking of the Medieval") and an Epilogue by Walker ("When did the 'Medieval' End"). Most Gower scholars will be unsurprised to learn that Gower lags well behind mentions of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and even John Lydgate. Indeed, many of the references to Gower (and also to these other poets) are as part of the following lists of "usual suspects:" "Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate" (27, 112); "Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate" (29, 64, 589, 728); "Chaucer, Gower, and Langland" (61, 80); "Langland, Gower, Chaucer and Hoccleve" (489); "Chaucer, Langland, Gower, and Lydgate" (542), or just "Chaucer and Gower" (587). More detailed discussions of or allusions to Gower appear in several chapters, however. In "The Professionalization of Writing," Simon Horobin uses the "Trinity Gower" as an example of sorting out the different scribal hands in a "Confessio Amantis" manuscript and other contemporary texts (59-65). Similarly, Siân Echard, in "Insular Romance," goes into a brief discussion of Gower's trilingual oeuvre (162-63), and in "Writing Heresy, and the Anticlerical Muse," Mishtooni Bose goes into some detail about the participation of the "Vox Clamantis" in anticlerical tropes concerning land ownership (284) and use of a prophetic tone (291-92). Alison Wiggins includes Gower and his background in her discussion of London in "London Poets" (541-42); Ralph Hanna refers to him as a "gentryman" (127), and Stephen Kelly mentions his depiction of the 1380 rebels as "braying monsters" (371). [RAL. Copyright. John Gower Newsletter. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Treharne, Elaine, ed. Walker, Greg, ed. Green, William Green, assistant ed. Published Treharne, Elaine, and Greg Walker, with the assistance of William Green, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Gower Subject Background 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 Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Thomas's primary focus is cultural--asserting a claim for the powerful influence of the Bohemian court on that of Richard II, brought about by his wife Anne--and unsurprisingly literature finds a central place in his discussion. Chaucer and the "Gawain"-Poet, per his title, occupy most of his interest (Langland is mentioned once, on p. 20), he devotes a portion of chapter 2 to Gower, denoting him, along with Richard Maidstone, "another Ricardian writer who appears to have partaken of [the] spirit of poet-patron familiarity" (44), based on the meeting of Richard and Gower on the Thames, described in Ricardian manuscripts of the "Confessio Amantis." Thomas recognizes the lack of evidence that this happened, but configures it as a "fiction of engagement," borrowing a term from Deborah McGrady. He largely follows the claim of Linda Burke ("Bohemian Gower"--see online Gower bibliography), that Queen Anne inspired the CA, and he goes on to assert independently that "Anne of Bohemia is probably the real-life inspiration for the two pivotal figures of Venus and Alceste in Gower's 'Confessio' and Chaucer's 'Legend'" (46). Anne's presence in the works of the two poets differs, however: for Chaucer, Anne/Alceste is "a mediatrix or intercessor between the contrite poet and the irate God of Love" while "Gower's Venus/Anne, by contrast, [is] the source of moral authority at a court riotously led by Youth (an allegorical designation for the youthful Richard II in the mid-1380s). In her role as the clear-sighted and realistic assessor of Gower as too old to be a member of her court of Love, Venus resembles Anne's role as the sensible and restraining consort of Richard's waywardness" and the rosary she gives Amans/Gower in Book VIII "recalls Anne's reputation as a pious queen" (47). No evidence is offered for any of this, nor for the claim (203) that "Poets like Chaucer and Gower who placed self-interest above factional loyalty were more likely to survive and prosper under the new regime [i.e., Henry IV] than those whose allegiance bound them to the old order." [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Thomas, Alfred. Published Thomas, Alfred. The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture: Literature and Art in the Age of Chaucer and the "Gawain" Poet. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2020. 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 The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture: Literature and Art in the Age of Chaucer and the "Gawain" Poet. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review (In Chinese, with English summary.) Su takes on the "idea that Middle English vernacular literature capitalizes on a form of nationhood and identity" by examining "the prefaces of . . . collected texts": Layamon's "Brut," Wace's "Roman de Brut," Lydgate's "Troy Book," Manning's "Chronicle," "Cursor Mundi," and Gower's "Confessio Amantis." The study determines that "the two hundred years of vernacular English literature is found to have a prominent authorial ego which played a significant social role." [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Su, Qikang [So, Francis K. H.] Published Su, Qikang [So, Francis K. H.] "Gu zao di fang hua Ying wen wen xue de zi wo yi shi." Review of English and American Literature 10 (Spring 2007): 1-50. Gower Subject Background 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 Gu zao di fang hua Ying wen wen xue de zi wo yi shi. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Strohm challenges literary periodization in this essay, particularly the medieval/early modern divide, asking more generally whether a literary work can be modern not only by being "progressive" in its own time but by "reach[ing] beyond itself--to achieve modernity according to 'subsequent' standards" (194; original emphasis). Strohm's test case is Chaucer, who was recognized as up-to-date, Strohm argues, by Robert Greene in his "Greenes Vision" (1592/94), where fictionalized versions of Chaucer and Gower engage in a debate about literature and a tale-telling contest. Greene, Strohm tells us, "credits Chaucer's [Bahktinian] polyphonic style and mixed vocalities without condescension and as totally deserving of contemporary (that is, Early Modern) respect" (201)--an example, it seems, of achieving modernity according to a subsequent standard. Greene's Gower, Strohm points out, is associated instead with a strain of "stylistic and moralistic conservatism within Early Modern practice" but not one that matches standards of being progressive or polyphonic. The fact that Greene's persona prefers Gower's tale to Chaucer's is paradoxical, Strohm tells us, noting that Greene's praise of Chaucer is thereby "achieved under a sign of negation . . . the mechanism of negation identified by Freud, in which a difficult or problematic truth maybe uttered, on the condition of an accompanying nullification or disavowal" (203n2). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Strohm, Paul. Published Strohm, Paul. "Chaucer and the Streams of Parnassus." In Jonathan Fruoco, ed. Polyphony and the Modern. New York: Routledge, 2021. Pp. 192-205. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer and the Streams of Parnassus. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Strakov's argument is that poets on both sides of the Channel (Jean de la Mote, Philippe de Vitry, Jean Campion, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Eustache Deschamps, Charles d'Orléans, Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, even Lydgate) shared what she terms "formes fixes discourse" (17), all seeing in their various approaches to poetic form a means to reify "Francophone culture"--implicit in her title, "Continental England"--in the divisive period of the Hundred Years' War. Shared form allowed for what she terms "reparative translation," permitting "canon-building as the bulwark against war-time cultural fragmentation" (18). Whether working in English or French (or Latin), these poets looked to lyric form "to redraw, or blur, or sometimes even erase lines of regionalist division in an aspiration to restore unity to newly politically fragmented Francophone culture" (48). Clearly there were differences in how this thinking could be applied, over the decades that the war continued: Gower, whom she discusses in the first half of chapter four, focusing on London, British Library, MS Additional 59495 (olim Trentham), explored and rejected the possibility of finding a "perfit language" to speak wisdom to Lancastrian sovereigns. For Gower, Strakhov argues, "multilingualism fails as a mode of address," requiring "some other mode" (138-39). Gower turns to two elements of "formes fixes discourse," classical allusion, and the exemplum: "Gower . . . presenting a newly troubled world in which multilingualism has run amok, falls back on Vitry's position: well-known exempla offer a bedrock of cultural knowledge, on which the shifting sands of multilingualism can securely rest. Pan-European knowledge of discrete forms are the true 'perfit langage,' fully understood because it is already known" (147). Strakhov also discusses Quixley's English translation of the "Traitié pour les amantz marietz," arguing that the translation "fuses Gower's French and Latin together because, left by themselves, neither is fully sufficient in representing the exemplum's meaning. He thus presents an English text that solves multilingualism's failures by means of judicious interlingual translation practice seeking to repair the fragmentation engendered by Gower's original" (145). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Strakhov, Elizaveta. Published Strakhov, Elizaveta. Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Years' War. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Traitié pour Essamplar les Amantz Marietz 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 Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Years' War. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Sobecki brings together studies of five poets--Gower, Hoccleve, Caudray, Lydgate, and Ashby--as, in a sense, test cases for a theory of the medieval self as what he terms "indexical": "the indexical self is not a discrete entity . . . it is comprised of social interactions, contexts, and relationships. It could even be argued that the indexical self is not strictly a self in that it cannot exist outside of its social context" (11). To illustrate this via Gower, Sobecki focuses on London, British Library, MS Additional 59495 (olim Trentham), owned by Gower at his death, and more specifically two poems from that manuscript, "In Praise of Peace" and "Henrici Quarti primus" (also known as "Quicquid homo scribat" or "In fine"). The argument of the chapter on Gower (19-64) is primarily the same as presented in a previously published article, "Ecce patet tensus': The Trentham Manuscript, 'In Praise of Peace,' and John Gower's Autograph Hand," Speculum 90 (2015): 925-59 (see online Gower bibliography), although recast to reflect the book's different, and larger, purpose. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sobecki, Sebastian. Published Sobecki, Sebastian. Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies In Praise of Peace Minor Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Sharp examines Gower's approach in Book VII of the "Confessio Amantis" in terms of "deliberative rhetoric" (257 and passim), examining Gower's incorporation of a rhetorical understanding into the counselling purpose of that section of the poem. Sharp argues that "Gower's positioning of his discussion of rhetoric within the genre of the mirror for princes, or Fürstenspiegel, suggests that he understood rhetoric as an inherently political practice and that the knowledge contained under the category of rhetoric was instrumental for the governance of a kingdom" (257). He contextualizes this alongside medieval adaptations of Aristotelian rhetorical understanding, and the broader genre of "the offering and acceptance of counsel between lord and vassal" (258), arguing that "Gower depicts rhetoric as a hierarchical system specifically adapted for the monarchy in its melding of rhetorical practice with Aristotelian virtue ethics. Thus, his 'Confessio Amantis' represents an important and overlooked contribution to medieval rhetoric" (258). Sharp foregrounds "how Gower accounts for the ambiguity, contingency, and sensibility of language within his theory of deliberative rhetoric" (259), making a case to identify that theory of rhetoric in terms of Gower's practice in Book VII. Sharp engages significantly with Gower's rhetorical understanding of late medieval approaches to Aristotelian ethics, such as Latini and Aquinas (260), arguing that the exempla featured by works like the CA are analogous to the "habituation" to virtue called for by Aristotle (261). Sharp further notes the association of sensory desire with the vices Gower critiques throughout the CA, to associate Gower's rhetoric in Book 7 to the need to manage speech and language (265). Sharp argues that Gower thus relates the moral goals of Fürstenspiegel to the rhetorical goals of his verse, ultimately focusing on an endorsement of "chasteté" (266). Gower's retelling of the Lucrece story illustrates a sovereign's potential use of language interactions to create the possibility of "deliberation and political intervention" (267), tying details of the narrative to figures in the story with power negotiating ambiguity and contingency for "individual or common profit" (267), and overall makes a reasonable case for the rhetorical complexity of this portion of Gower's poem. [RAL. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sharp, Joseph. Published Sharp, Joseph. "Rhetoric and Chastity: Gower's Depiction of Rhetorical Practice in the Lucrece Myth." Journal for the History of Rhetoric 25, no. 3 (November 2022): 257–78. 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 Rhetoric and Chastity: Gower's Depiction of Rhetorical Practice in the Lucrece Myth. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Schieberle, Misty. Published Schieberle, Misty. "Gower's Aristotelian Legacy: Reading Responsibility in the Confessio Amantis and the Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod." In Valerie B. Johnson and Kara L. McShane, eds. Negotiating Boundaries in Medieval Literature and Culture: Essays on Marginality, Difference, and Reading Practices in Honor of Thomas Hahn. Boston: De Gruyter; Medieval Institute Publications, 2022. Pp. 305-22. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review Schieberle sets the agenda for her essay briskly: "I outline some of Gower's key Aristotelian views, trace their legacy, and argue that they influence a unique fifteenth-century adaptation of Christine de Pizan's 'Epistre Othea'"--"The Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod"--that "was copied by Anthony Babyngton into a collection that includes lessons in heraldry, hunting terms in French and English, genealogies of English kings, and other arguably educational material. The Gowerian features that I identify lay the groundwork for understanding the "Bibell" translator's work as a consciously framed Aristotelian reading of Christine's "Othea" shaped by the English literary trends of his day" (305). Specifically, Schieberle tells us, Gower's assertion of the Aristotelian mean at the opening of the "Confessio Amantis" (Prologue, 17-21), his concern with the "middle weie" between "social obligations and personal moral decisions" (307), and his notions of fate, fortune, and the figure of Atropos indicate that moral agency is effective in negotiating the "external controls over human lives" (308). Schieberle shows that "wise, prudent behavior . . . can forestall fate" (312) in tales such as that of "Rosiphele" and, in subtler ways, that of Jephthah's daughter. She argues that these concerns are also entailed ironically in Amans's "misunderstanding of what it means to be morally alert and active." evident in his thoughts on Atropos and destiny (CA 4.2754-70) that include a relevant "joke" on Troilus's comic inactivity in Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" (312). Schieberle then traces similar concerns with determinism and Atropos in Lydgate's "Troy Book" and in Babyngton's "Lytle Bibell" to argue that the latter is not only an adaptation/translation of Pizan's "Epistre Othea" but also part of a growing tradition in English in which human responsibility balances fateful influences in the shaping of events and outcomes, with the potential to defer even death. Schieberle presents Gower as "the forefather of a literary movement that transforms English views of Fortune, fate, and virtue" (307) without arguing that he is the ultimate or only source of these ideas. She carefully acknowledges that Gower does not fail "to acknowledge that man's power over his future has limits" (308), citing the "Tale of Two Coffers," but she emphasizes the predominant importance of prudent moral responsibility in CA. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Aristotelian Legacy: Reading Responsibility in the "Confessio Amantis" and the "Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Only the third of Sargent's three "notes" pertains to Gower. Sub-titled "Religious Form, Amorous Matter: Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women' and Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'" (pp. 159-80), it compares the two poems as "strikingly similar in many aspects." Sargent's tally of similarities begins with the fact that each work opens with reference to "books of former ages" (160), each "offers a vision in which the narrator is met by the court of the god of Love," each includes reference to the "debate of the flower and the leaf" (161), and each connects the court of its vision with the court of Richard II. This "similar framing device" is matched by a "similar generic motif: the parody of a major form of popular religious literature" (162), i.e., books of saints' lives in Chaucer's poem and a "version of the confessor's manual" (163) in Gower's. "Another similarity" of the two poems, Sargent tells us, "is that both poems exist in more than one recension" (172), positing that the poets may have shared "a common motive for revision": reducing or eliminating Ricardian material, perhaps because "political developments made it wise to obscure" such material (177). Next, Sargent apparently abandons his list of similarities--but only apparently--to consider the putative quarrel between Gower and Chaucer. He cites the references to tales of incest (Canace and Apollonius) in Chaucer's "Man of Law's Prologue" which, traditionally, underlie the idea of a quarrel which Sargent thinks, possibly, should "be interpreted as one friend's joke on another" (180). Earlier in his essay, Sargent had deduced that incest was crucial to Gower's parody of a confessional manual: after summarizing at length his views of the poem's presentation of how and to what extent six of the seven deadly sins and their branches align Christian morality and, parodically, courtly ethos (167-70), Sargent claims that Gower's "use of the format of the confessor's manual" raises a question "which should have been hovering in the consciousness of every medieval reader" of CA: "How can Lechery ever be considered a sin in a religion based on idealized eroticism?" (171). The only answer offered by Genius (and Gower) is incest, Sargent tells us, because incest is unnatural and "the only sin of Lechery that the religion of Cupid could admit" (179). Chaucer's "gentle parody" of Gower's parody, it seems, can "be taken as evidence of similar outlook" (180).] [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sargent, Michael G. Published Sargent, Michael G. "Three Notes on Middle English Poetry and Drama." In Wilfried Haslauer, intro. A Salzburg Miscellany: English and American Studies 1964-1984. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1984. II: 131-80. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Three Notes on Middle English Poetry and Drama. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Salisbury explores "a kinship between the art of writing and the art of healing" (1), crediting as her model Rita Charon's theory of "narrative medicine, which teaches how to engage a text both by observing its representation of physical symptoms and by listening closely to the stories told by patients in practice, and, in this case, by some of the most innovative and perceptive English poets and prose writers of the late Middle Ages" (2). The book addresses Chaucer (chapter 1), Gower and Langland (chapter 2), Lydgate and Hoccleve (chapter 3), the Thornton manuscript (chapter 4), and "Women Healers" (chapter 5). Salisbury terms Gower and Langland "therapeutic writers," composing the "Confessio Amantis" and "Piers Plowman" "at a pivotal historical moment beset by recurrent outbreaks of the plague" (49). Gower, she argues, understood the plague "as a marker of the species of social disruption (or dis-ease) that affects the equanimity of the body politic as well as the humoral balance of the body human" (50)--entities which Salisbury sees as integrally connected no less than the body is connected to the soul (56-61). Somewhat surprisingly, she reads Amans as a "young man" in need of (less surprisingly) "healing," whose cure is "storytelling and dialogue" (51). The organization of the CA around the seven sins constitutes a "moralization of medicine" that, by prompting self-reflection and reform, leads to better health for the individual and society both (esp. 76-78). In this sense, Genius, as a priest, is also recognizable as a physician (61-63). The effect is carried forward by medically specialized terminology and references throughout, i.e., to "physicians and surgeons, or empirics, to medicine and medical practice, maladies of the psychophysiological body, as well as a variety of medicaments--gemstones, plants, and organic substances--used as remedies" (53). Noting that, following Aristotle, most fourteenth-century thinkers (Gower included) located the soul in the heart, Salisbury finds the "Tale of Constantine and Sylvester" (CA II. 3187-3496) representative of how narrative medicine (along with a little "holy medicine"--full body immersion baptism) can cure a disease (leprosy) with both physical and moral dimensions (67-72); later in CA Book VIII. 1151-1271), in the recovery of Apollonius' wife from apparent death by the physician Cerymon, she finds another--perhaps clearer--presentation of Gower's close attention to medical issues (72-74). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Salisbury, Eve. Published Salisbury, Eve. Narrating Medicine in Middle English Poetry: Poets, Practitioners, and the Plague. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Backgroud 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 Narrating Medicine in Middle English Poetry: Poets, Practitioners, and the Plague. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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's survey of the role(s) of Alexander in the "Confessio Amantis" identifies the many places where Alexander appears in CA and explores "the emperor's figural prominence" (223) in the work. Most often he focuses on the limitations of the ruler's knowledge and the ultimate futility of his conquests, suggesting implications of this characterization for the ruling class in Gower's day, specifically the Black Prince, Richard II, and Henry of Derby. Peck discusses Alexander's role in Nebuchadnezzer's dream in the Prologue of CA, two references to the emperor in Book 2, the tales of "Diogenes and Alexander" and of "Alexander and the Pirate" in Book 3, and two more references in Book 5. The "Tale of Nectanabus," with Alexander's unwitting killing of his father, Peck argues, is juxtaposed against the preceding father-son tale in "Ulysses and Telegonus" in Book 6 and he presents the large presence of Alexander in Book 7--with "fifteen citations of his name" amidst the concerns for the education of a king--as something of a crescendo in the CA overall. Deliberately on Gower's part, Peck tells us, Alexander is not mentioned in Book 8, where "Alexander's story is replaced by that of Apollonius of Tyre, a king who is basically different from all that Alexander stands for" (234), one who "provides the antidote to Alexander's kind of rule which leads to tyranny and oppression rather than enlightenment" (235). In the "ennobling spirit" of Apollonius's virtuous actions, idealized kingship, and peace, Peck concludes, Gower "would send forth his book, in hope that for generations to come it might keep his voice and vision alive," observing that in the Explicit to the Lancastrian recension of the CA, he sends it specifically to Henry Bolingbroke, Count of Derby (236). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A. Published Peck, Russell A. "Alexander the Great: A Study of Legitimacy, Futility, and the Problem of Getting Home Safely in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." In Valerie B. Johnson and Kara L. McShane, eds. Negotiating Boundaries in Medieval Literature and Culture: Essays on Marginality, Difference, and Reading Practices in Honor of Thomas Hahn. Boston: De Gruyter; Medieval Institute Publications, 2022. Pp. 223-37. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alexander the Great: A Study of Legitimacy, Futility, and the Problem of Getting Home Safely in Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 here offers a crash course in how to read a manuscript for what it can reveal beyond the text, using the Wollaton Hall "Confessio" manuscript (WLC/LM/8) as evidentiary case. Pointing out that MS WLC/LM/8 would "stand at the very heart of the best manuscript tradition of the 'Confessio,' were it not for the absence of decoration and illustration" (60), Pearsall discusses ownership (briefly, deferring to Kate Harris's "Ownership and Readership" study), the scribe's work, including ruling of lines, punctuation, rubrication, and correction (60-65); textual identity (i.e., "recension" issues) and likely period of production (65-67). Importantly, Pearsall argues that "the reputation of the Stafford MS (now San Marino, CA, Huntington Library MS Ellesmere 26 A 17) as exceptionally early in date and possibly a presentation copy for Henry, earl of Derby, is questionable. It may be no earlier than MS Fairfax 3, completed early in Henry IV's reign, and its text, though good, is inferior to that of MS Fairfax 3, especially in its carelessness with regard to metrical final -e" (67). [RFY. Copyright, John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek. Published Pearsall, Derek. "The Wollaton Hall Gower Manuscript (WLC/LM/8) Considered in the Context of Other Manuscripts of the 'Confessio Amantis'." In Ralph Hanna and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. The Wollaton Medieval Manuscripts: Texts, Owners and Readers. Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2010. Pp. 57-67. 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 Wollaton Hall Gower Manuscript (WLC/LM/8) Considered in the Context of Other Manuscripts of the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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's concern is the "comparative neglect of vernacular text illustration by art historians" and the attention paid by literary scholars primarily to the relation of words to image, "as if the significance of the image began and ended in its fidelity to the text" (197). Here he presses instead for "more consideration to be given to two other factors: the importance of the idea of the book (rather than the text) in the choice and disposition of illustrations; and the possibility that pictures may have their own significance, deriving from their own historical apparatus of visual convention, that may go beyond or against the grain of or contradict or have nothing to do with the texts they illustrate" (197). Often, illustrators had constraints put upon them by supervisors--an example being Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902, a manuscript of Gower's "Confessio Amantis," where "clearly written in the margin of fol. 8 beside where the picture is now: Hie fiat confessor/ sedens & confessus coram se genufiectendo" (197). Pearsall for the most part takes examples from manuscripts of Chaucer's works, but concludes with further discussion of Bodley MS 902, in particular the confession miniature which portrays Amans as an old man, in company with Genius. This shows, Pearsall argues, that "someone, whether the artist or the person who gave him his instructions, had evidently read enough of the poem to know of this startling dramatic revelation [i.e., that Amans is old] and chose the literal truth rather than the literary subterfuge which drives the narrative of the poem. It is fidelity to the text of an extraordinary kind, fidelity to the text which actually gives the game away, and ruinously anticipates the moment upon which the poem depends for its moral impact. It is a very odd picture, and unique" (206). Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 307, fol. 9 has the same picture, "but this is reversed copy of the Bodley picture and therefore not an independently idiosyncratic choice but a mere production economy" (206). [RFY. Copyright, John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek. "Beyond Fidelity: The Illustration of Late Medieval English Literary Texts." In Marlene Villalobos Hennessey, ed. Tributes to Kathleen L. Scott: English Medieval Manuscripts: Readers, Makers and Illuminators. London: Miller, 2009. Pp. 197-220. Published Pearsall, Derek. Gower Subject Background and General Criticism Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confession 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 Beyond Fidelity: The Illustration of Late Medieval English Literary Texts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review With Chaucer as its focus, the paper surveys Chaucer's use of impersonal verbs, sorting them by syntactic and lexical criteria. It enumerates differences between Chaucer's usage and those of Gower and Langland. Based on an admittedly small data base, the paper does not draw any larger conclusions about Chaucer's practices or linguistic history, though it does suggest that his usage is more "sensitive" than that of his contemporaries. [TWM. Copyright, John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ohno, Hideshi. Published Ohno, Hideshi. "The Impersonal and Personal Constructions in the Language of Chaucer." In Osamu Imahayashi, et al. eds., Aspects of the History of English Language and Literature: Selected Papers read at SHELL 2009, Hiroshima. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2010. Pp. 115-29. 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 The Impersonal and Personal Constructions in the Language of Chaucer. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article explores how legal issues and language make an impact on the "Mirour de l'Omme." In particular, Ni examines Gower's handling of property rights and ownership in terms of the medieval doctrine of "enfeoffment to use" (87 and passim). She starts with the familiar case of the much-discussed Aldington Septvauns property (87), but focuses less on questions of Gower's possible legal misbehavior than on how the legal language of property use and ownership then appears in the MO. Ni draws on Michael Bennett's recent analysis of that case (87, n. 6) to agree that the distinction between ownership and use implied by the mechanism of "enfeoffment to use" goes far to help resolve the problems in the land case, and then to argue that "this legal device could have found its way into the poem" (88). In particular, Ni promises "to illuminate the poet's humanistic accentuation of free will and intentionality, that is, Man's control of himself and his choice between spiritual and material property in the face of demonic influences" (88). Ni initially seeks to show "how Gower recasts enfeoffment to use as a metaphor for Man's Fall" (88), via a detailed explanation of how "enfeoffment to use" works as a legal device separating ownership of land per se from the right to make use of it (89-92). Ni then pivots to seeing this principle of land ownership as a model for Man's status is the MO, owning worldly property but being owned in a sense by the devil (93). To support this reading, Ni digs into the terms "use" and "saisine" (possession) in the Anglo-French legal register and the MO, along with the term "demure" (residence) (93-94). Analyzing Gower's wording in his discussion of Man, Ni notes that "Gower does not say that Sin and Death take 'seisine,' or 'possession,' of man; rather, he says that they take demure, or 'residence,' in him. The rights of residence and use must be separated from the rights of ownership" (94). Ni also notes that "in the MO, almost all of the uses of 'use' and 'saisine' are negative, with an emphasis on the impossibility of fully owning anything in the postlapsarian world" (97). She extends this distinction to address details of Man's relationship to the World in the "devils' parliament" (98). Ni concludes that only enfeoffment to use would explain the balance of use and ownership represented there (99). Thus, "for Man . . . having the 'contractual' right to enjoy the world does not mean having the 'property right' to own the world. The World, in contrast, can easily transform the 'contractual right' (rights 'in personam') to hold Man's soul to his use into the devils' property right (rights 'in rem') to fully claim his soul" (99). Finally, Ni "demonstrates that the 'Mirour' explores the tension between legalism, defined as 'strict adherence to the letter rather than the spirit of law,' and humanism, defined broadly as belief in the legibility of God and the constructive powers of human nature" (88), arguing in this final section that this legal distinction does not necessarily function as a totalistic reading of the poem; she suggests that Gower's treatment of the soul's use and ownership ultimately support a notion of Gower's "humanism" (104), which she contrasts to a modern sense of the term. Ni concludes that Gower's legal focus here reinforces his moral and didactic (humanist) focus, particularly in terms of the need to own one's soul. [RAL. Copyright, John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ni, Yun. Published Ni, Yun. "Enfeoffment to Use, Legalism, and Humanism in Gower's 'Mirour de l'Omme'." JEGP 122, no. 1 (2023): 86-106. Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification 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 Enfeoffment to Use, Legalism, and Humanism in Gower's "Mirour de l'Omme." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Murchison asks "it is worth considering whether textually constructed audiences were simply approached with more flexibility in medieval literary contexts" (499). She suggests this issue would have mattered more for didactic texts and entertainment texts, which then frames how she will divide the remainder of her essay. Murchison first examines the "ars predicandi" beginning with Gregory the Great's "Pastoral Care." She later notes Alan de Lille's assertion that "both approach and subject matter should match the needs of one's actual audience" (502). She goes on to examine other examples in this genre before then moving into didactic works with narrower audiences. Speaking to religious guides, Murchison observes stark specificity in guides intended for one audience as opposed to another, but then she adds that "we cannot conclude from these examples alone that medieval writers and audiences were comfortable with such diversity" (505). She then examines the "Ancrene Wisse" and its constructed audience as well as the opportunities some texts would take to add constructed audiences. Shifting her attention to the "ars poetica," Murchison describes a similar expected diversity of audiences for poetic texts. In particular, she looks at Gower's textually constructed audience in the "Confessio Amantis." Murchison details the history of the poem with its initial constructed audience being Richard II then changing to Henry IV, concluding, "A deliberate act of adaptation such as this one suggests that writers of more secular texts, much like the writers of sermons, were attuned to the importance of audiences" (512). This change, however, does not lead Gower to change his other implied audiences, which, Murchison suggests, reflects his understanding of the diversity of audiences. [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Murchison, Krista A. Published Murchison, Krista A. "Is the Audience Dead Too? Textually Constructed Audiences and Differentiated Learning in Medieval England." Modern Language Review 115, no. 3 (2020), pp. 497-517. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual 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 Is the Audience Dead Too? Textually Constructed Audiences and Differentiated Learning in Medieval England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Knox contends, sweepingly, that the "Roman de la Rose" was responsible for "modernizing" poetry in England: introducing would-be writers from "aristocratic communities" (36) like Chaucer, Gower, the author of "Gawain"--even Langland--to a sophisticated form of satire, new attitudes toward sexual desire and Latin literature, to the concept, in fact, of being a poet in the Classical tradition. He makes much of the "Valentine" poems written by Chaucer, Gower, and Oton de Graunson, suggesting that they formed a "network of literary interactions" (64) to produce them. With a nod to its roots in the "'Chartrian' allegories," Knox contends that the "Confessio Amantis" came about via the "Rose": "It was in the 'Rose' that [Gower] found a way of combining a love narrative with an encyclopaedic (or anti-encyclopaedic) discussion of myth, history, and philosophy, with an examination of nature and desire at its core" (115). "Gower . . . exemplifies the importance of the 'Rose' for making available a heightened literary mode of learned philosophical or cosmological poetry. He reveals what is disturbing or threatening about how the 'Rose' has intervened in this tradition, but also what is enabling" (116). As evidence Knox provides a close reading of one tale, "Iphis and Iante," from Book IV (118-20); he argues further that in combination Amans-Gower's withdrawal from love at the end of the CA, the balades of the "Traitié pour les Amantz Marietz," and the sentiments expressed in the Latin poem "Est amor" represent a kind of "implicit 'erotic pseudo-autobiography'" (122) that is also a response to ideas found in the "Rose." Subsequently Knox suggests that the satire of the "Mirour de l'Omme" and the Latin verses accompanying the "archer portrait" found in three manuscripts of the "Vox Clamantis" echo "Jean de Meun's infamous 'apology' in the 'Rose'" and give proof of Gower's "self-fashioning in the image of a satirist" and "his own authorial ambition" (170-71). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Knox, Philip. Published Knox, Philip. The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues and Literary Relations Confession Amantis Mirour de l'Omme Vox Clamantis Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz Minor Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Kane focusses primarily on Langland and Chaucer, drawing most of his examples from their works. He mentions the "Confessio Amantis" as a "tour de force" poem about sin, describing it as a model of how a sustained renunciation of unrequited love in the form of an oral confession leads Amans to practical virtue. [CEB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kane, George. Published Kane, George. "Poets and the Poetics of Sin [1989]." In Daniel Donoghue, Daniel, James Simpson, Nicholas Watson, eds. The Morton W. Bloomfield Lectures, 1989-2005. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Press, 2010. Pp. 1-19. 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 Poets and the Poetics of Sin [1989]. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 1989 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Hsy opens his essay with a discussion of Teresa de Cartagena and her treatment of deafness in "Arboleda de los Enfermos" [Grove of the Infirm], by way of anchoring his argument that "disability [is] more than a topic or trope pervading literature" (27); instead, he offers it as a way of both depicting and understanding one's orientation in the world. Of especial interest to Gower scholars, Hsy offers some insights on Gower's autobiographical writing that reflect on Gower's visual impairment later in life. Gower, rather than seeking some spiritual meaning in his blindness, instead explores how his impairment has altered his "strategies of literary composition" (33). Hsy offers a powerful reading of a poem in which Gower discusses his blindness, suggesting that despite claiming he will no longer write Gower actually develops "new opportunities for poetic self-fashioning" (34). Hsy then goes on to explore representations of disability in Chaucer's "The Monk's Tale" and Margery Kempe's "Book" before concluding: "As literary criticism and theory continue to address conceptions of disability across different cultural and historical contexts, new forms of knowledge proliferate" (38). [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hsy, Jonathan. Published Hsy, Jonathan. "Disability." The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, edited by David Hillman and Ulrika Maude. Cambridge UP, 2015. pp. 24-40. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Minor Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Disability. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review (In German.) Grabes' focus is the mirror when used as a device to foresee--or misperceive--events, or to represent introspection. Per his title, he is concerned with origins (when did the mirror used in these ways first appear in English literature, and in what contexts) and continuities (how and when did the metaphoric function transform into something other). His is a wide survey, tracking a multi-faceted device through multiple works across a long-running tradition discernible in written and graphic material (manuscript margins, designs on backs of actual mirrors, e.g.); hence by necessity little space is afforded any specific work. Grabes takes Gower and Chaucer jointly as putting the mirror to such uses very early in their works, in ways that set a tradition followed into the seventeenth century (69) (The study does not acknowledge Gower's early application of the mirror metaphor in the title of the "Mirour de l'Omme," instead concentrating wholly on the "Confessio," and only on the "Tale of Virgil's Mirror"(143), "Fals Semblant" (164), and Venus' mirror showing Amans that he's old in CA Book VIII (173). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Grabes, Herbert. Published Grabes, Herbert. Speculum, Mirror und Looking-Glass: Kontinuität und Originalitatät der Spiegelmetapher in den Buchtitleln des Mittelalters und der englischen Literatur des 13. Bis 17 Jahrhunderts. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1973. 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 Speculum, Mirror und Looking-Glass: Kontinuität und Originalitatät der Spiegelmetapher in den Buchtitleln des Mittelalters und der englischen Literatur des 13. Bis 17 Jahrhunderts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1973 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 translation of the "Confessio Amantis" finally brings to the contemporary English reader a complete version of Gower's poem in Modern English verse. The only prior translation of the CA was Terence Tiller's 1963 Penguin edition, which summarized as much as it versified the poem. The enormity of translating the entire CA perhaps caused many others to think less about a subsequent book's portability and more about its parkability. However, Carter and Gastle's is a manageable single volume with a clear and friendly two-column format per page. Their translation tries to keep Gower's octosyllabic line, if not his rhyme or word order, to achieve "clarity and contemporary presentation over form" (xxx). The elegance of their translation captures the poet's inventiveness, profundity, and occasional grumpiness. Footnotes contain Andrew Galloway's translations of the Latin rubrics as well as explanatory notes for lines or passages. Three Appendices appear at the back: Appendix A contains the Ricardian Recensions (the main text uses the Third Recension); Appendix B is a glossary of names and their locations in the poem; Appendix C lists the sources and analogues of the CA. This book will cast a long shadow, especially when enjoyed by a sunny window. [CEB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gastle, Brian, trans. Carter, Catherine, trans. Published Gastle, Brian, and Catherine Carter, ed. and trans. The Lover's Confession: A Translation of John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2024. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Lover's Confession: A Translation of John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Fredell, Joel. Published Fredell, Joel. Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis. The New Middle Ages. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. xvi, 324 pp. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Minor Latin Poetry Manuscripts and Textual Studies Biography of Gower Review Fredell's "Fictions of Witness" studies the manuscripts of the "Confessio Amantis"--the Latin as well as the English portions, along with their layouts, marginalia, illustrations, and accompanying texts--and interprets how the presentation reflects not only the supervision and production of the manuscripts, but the political conditions and intentions to which these manuscripts bear witness. Fredell discusses the dates of the manuscripts--an important issue throughout his study--against the events and chronology of Lancastrian usurpation and the subsequent transfer of power from Henry IV to Henry V. "Since the earliest surviving manuscripts of the 'Confessio' may date from after the deposition of Richard," Fredell tells us, "we must consider the effects of Lancastrian patronage and ideology for all elements of the poem, Ricardian and Henrician" (129). Fredell negotiates, but does not wholly resolve, several important uncertainties covered by the qualifying phrase "'may' date from after the deposition" (my emphasis added here), though he goes on later to offer what he calls "a clear timeline of development and popularity" for the "public 'Confessio'," treating Henrician material first and linking it with "Lancastrian aspirations," but also with "Gower's three-pronged claims to laureate status in the early days of Henry IV." In Fredell's timeline the Ricardian version, as we have it in the manuscripts, dates from after the Henrician version--after "Henry IV began succumbing to a series of health crises" in 1405 (261)--and reflects the preferences of a Guildhall group of scribes (John Marchaunt foremost among them) who set the poem "in a distant Ricardian love court rather than among the immediacies of Henry's political problems" (262) as part of a larger program of promoting English literature by Gower, Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate. Fredell later complicates the notion of a simple distinction between Ricardian and Henrician versions of CA by arguing that some portions of the work (e.g., the "Parliament of Exemplary Lovers," 8.2440ff.), usually assumed to be "Ricardian" originals are more likely to have been written by Gower at or about the same time as he produced the "Henrician" revision--"that the whole great poem we have . . . may be the product of . . . the late 1390s and after" (267), labelled by Fredell the "late-state model" (263), a phrase that seems to conjoin historical, thematic, and textual concerns uncomfortably, and one used to call into question whether the poem ever circulated in a form that preceded it (279). Extracted from "Fictions of Witness" in this way, my reduction of Fredell's timeline does an injustice to the breadth of his study, which integrates aspects of Gower's life and death, wide-ranging events and trends in English political history, and numerous questions of codicology and manuscript study. The textual history of the CA is not the fundamental concern here, but Fredell criticizes G. C. Macaulay's three-recension theory at length (following Peter Nicholson and Derek Pearsall) as it underlies so much traditional (and inferential) understanding of Gower's political views--which Fredell largely anchors, instead, in interpretations of Gower's brief poems and marginalia that frame and/or accompany the body of CA (and VC) in manuscripts. These interpretations support Fredell's somewhat fuzzy idea of Gower's "laureate status"--the term here associated with John Fisher's grouping of four Gower poems as "laureate"--leaving unclear what this "status" may have entailed in the very early Lancastrian court (as do other studies; but see Robert J. Meyer-Lee, "Poets and Power" [2007] on Lydgate's importance in the application and understanding of the term, a caution against applying it too early in the fifteenth century). Fredell's timeline, however, does make clear that the extant "Confessios" (a plural he uses recurrently, sometimes confusingly: 2 versions? three recensions? forty-nine manuscripts?) are, for him, propaganda for this court rather than prophecy of Richard's demise, as some followers of the Macaulay theory would have it. Fredell bases his most detailed dating of the CA manuscripts on examination of illustrations and layout (a discussion lavishly accompanied by more than 100 color reproductions of pages and details), relying heavily on Kathleen L. Scott's "Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390–1490" (1996). He includes cautions about overly specific dates and dating techniques generally but, it must be said, he treats dates less cautiously at times--posing dates, qualifying them, and then reprising them or generally taking them for granted when pursuing his political readings and structuring his timeline. His provocative title prompts a need to understand how literary works pose, or can be posed, as "artifacts" of, or as "fictional witnesses" to (both are used throughout), particular political outlooks or attitudes, so dating is important to the entire study--more precise dating, perhaps, than is possible when based on approximations from manuscript illustrations reinforced by thematic interpretation. Nevertheless, this intricate study offers fresh, provocative assessments of the manuscripts and why they were produced when they were, informed by capacious knowledge, generally thorough attention to relevant scholarship, and sensitivity to historical context. It is a big task, one well worth doing, and one that might have been done better with tighter editing and proofing--better overall organization, more sharply defined terminology, less repetition, fewer rhetorical questions, unheeded qualifications, and more careful attention to relatively minor issues of execution, such as gaffs in layout, e.g., pp. 54 and 151; "Arial" for Arion(?), p. 75; residual mark-up, e.g., "'GowerAIGower'" and "MarchauntAIMarchaunt," p. 220; bolded "and," p. 160; LGW for LGM abbreviating Scott's work on several occasions, e.g., 184n26, 220n16, 221n17, and 244n52; etc.[MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Fictions of Witness in the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 German. Erzgräber's is a survey of English literature's rise at the end of the fourteenth century through Chaucer and Gower to the level of French and German poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. (Langland, whom he sees as a religious poet, becomes more prominent after the Reformation.) Although Gower appears throughout by way of comparison with Chaucer and Langland, primary discussion is localized at 224-27 and 239-246. In the latter pages he discusses the three major works, dwelling primarily on the "Vox Clamantis" and the "Confessio Amantis," with brief consideration of the "Mirour de l'Omme." He points out affinities with Boethius and the frequent reliance on Ovid, calls Gower's style "graphisch" (227), comparing it favorably to Chaucer's "malerischen" style. He presents Gower as a "powerful critic of his times," and positions him in the company of Robert Manning, William of Waddington, and Dan Michel of Northgate (239). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Erzgräber, Willi. Published Erzgräber, Willi. "Langland, Gower, Chaucer." In Willi Erzgraber. Europaisches Spatmittelalter. Wiesbaden: Athenaion; 1978, pp. 221-74. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Style, Rhetoric, and Versification 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 Langland, Gower, Chaucer. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1978 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Elias analyzes "a representative section of medieval English literary texts from the late fourteenth century in terms of [identified gnostic tenets], showing how the texts adapt them through the use of a specifically chosen genre (the dream vision), the technique of subversion, and the overall function of art as 'The possibility of making the invisible visible, [and] of giving presence to what can only be imagined,' to create what I call the 'late-medieval gnostic moment'" (3). In the chapters not focused on Gower, Elias discusses the "Pearl"-Poet's oeuvre and "Piers Plowman" (the first chapter and introduction sets up her "gnostic paradigm" framework). The fourth and final chapter of her book, "Gower's Bower of Bliss: A Successful Passing into Hermetic Gnosis," offers readers a thought-provoking interpretation of Gower's "Confessio Amantis," particularly in the relationship of glossing and marginalia as representing both knowledge and nonknowledge (119). Elias argues, "the scope of the 'Confessio' is not necessarily socially oriented but rather a specifically individual endeavor for the salvation in a kind of mystical progress of the soul. In this manner, social change may become possible through personal and individual reflection, which may be attained through a reawakening of the self via the regaining of dormant knowledge (i.e., gnosis)" (120). Elias focuses on the duality of Genius in the poem to make her argument. She suggests this duality of Genius leads to a convergence that then causes Amans to self-reflect, ultimately leading into a gnostic Passing. Elias explains the manuscript and production history of the CA, even inserting her gnostic framework into Gower's formulation of the text to suggest Venus as some sort of Gnostic savior--a "guiding hand" (121). She then explains how "the digressive book (Book 7)" is actually the logical line of the poem to facilitate such Passing. Elias transitions into her chronological close reading of Gower's poem, offering insightful analyses of lines of specific tales in support of her argument. Upon reaching Book 7, Elias reiterates her opinion of the book's Hermetic nature that brings Amans into a sort of spiritual rebirth that takes shape in Book 8 (142-45). Through his introspection in Book 8 initiated by Venus, Amans gains "an epiphanic moment of revelation that culminates in the passing of the spirit into knowledge, a spiritual salvation, a poetic closure" (146). [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Elias, Natanela. Published Elias, Natanela. The Gnostic Paradigm: Forms of Knowing in English Literature of the Late Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Gnostic Paradigm: Forms of Knowing in English Literature of the Late Middle Ages. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In this brief encyclopedia entry Echard outlines Gower's life and briskly describes his works. She summarizes the structuring principles and some details of "Mirour de l'Omme," "Vox Clamantis," and "Confessio Amantis," citing Gower's other works where they align with these three by language--French, Latin, and English--emphasizing his trilinguality. Echard also observes some of Gower's connections with Chaucer, mentions editions of Gower's works, and cross-lists a variety of biographical and literary sub-topics, such as "Henry of Derby," "Ballade," "Frame-tale Narration," etc. Gower is mentioned recurrently elsewhere in this "Encyclopedia," largely in passing, but carefully listed in the comprehensive index. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân. Published Echard, Siân. "Gower, John." In Richard G. Newhauser, gen. ed. The Chaucer Encyclopedia. 4 vols.; continuous pagination. The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2023. Vol. II, pp. 832-35. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Biography of Gower Language and Word Studies 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 Gower, John. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân. Published Echard, Siân. "John Gower." In Raluca Radulescu and Sif Rikhardsdottir, eds. The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature. New York: Routledge, 2022. Pp. 289-99. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Minor Latin Poetry Language and Word Studies Review Echard opens her introduction to Gower's poetry with comments on the Portuguese and Castilian translations of the "Confessio Amantis" as evidence that "the English poet found an interested audience" (289) abroad in Europe, remarking in her conclusion that "he would, I imagine, have been glad" that the CA "made it across the sea" (297). Taken out of context in this way, Echard's remark is unremarkable, but she continues more resoundingly in her closing: "A trilingual poet who aspires to match the authors of old requires an international and transhistorical audience, but Gower seems profoundly aware that exchanges of all sorts could have negative effects . . . . [H]is work is threaded through with exchanges between past and present, between authors old and new, and between lands and peoples. He is self-consciously England's poet; he is equally self-consciously one who can speak to the larger world, however ambivalent he may be about the mechanisms of exchange" (297). Throughout her essay, Echard focuses on Gower's ambitious trilinguality, and on his uses of English and Englishness in CA in relation to the prestige of French and, especially, Latin. She broadens these out to analysis of thematic and formal concerns with localization and expansion, particularity and generality--to "the idea that [in CA] apparent marginalization of English comes from, or intersects with, a tension between the local and the universal" (291). The complex coherence of Echard's demonstration is difficult to describe briefly, so I offer sample insights from her rich variety instead. She clarifies how the "particularly localised" Ricardian version of the CA Prologue capitalizes on the generalizing implications of London as "newe Troye," and how the Henrician version--offered as a book for England--frames the universalizing "exemplary narratives with an explicitly English location," each version bracketing Gower's tales in English with complementary Latin (292-93). Although it is only in some copies of CA, Echard shows us that "Quam cinxere freta" presents Gower as "England's own poet," "exemplifies the productive tension between universality and particularity," and reflects "Gowerian anxiety" about assured posterity (293). For Echard, the Tale of Constance "is a negotiation of English and Roman identities" that "invokes an explicitly English past" (294), while the tales of Constance and of Apollonius together, "at the beginning and end" of CA, "use overseas travel to work through issues relating to identity, to the intersection of the particular, localised origin with a world of contact and exchange" (295). In light of these (and others) of Echard's observations, I have little doubt that Gower would have been glad that CA made it across the sea--and also glad to have Siân Echard as a reader. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Unlike many, Donavin's title helpfully outlines her areas of concern, and argument. Rhetoric--figures, modes and impact of instruction of "artes dictaminis" especially--has ever been a primary focus, and here she brings her extensive knowledge to bear on Gower's work, devoting the first chapter to "Gower's 'Rhethorique'," chapter four to "Epistles and Rhetorical Experimentation, Part I: Contexts and Practices," and five to "Epistles and Rhetorical Experimentation, Part II: Music and Letters in the Trentham Manuscript." "Biblical ethos" takes two broad forms: 1) a back-and-forth identification of "John" in the "Vox Clamantis" and Amans/Gower in the "Confessio" variously with John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, primarily in chapter two ("My Name is John. Biblical Ethos and Apocalyptic Narrative"), although this remains a major source of interpretation throughout, particularly guiding her reading of the VC Book I ("Visio Anglie") and the denouement of CA Book VIII; and 2) a claim for Gower's "unusual" devotion to the Virgin, traced through the "Mirour de l'Omme" and the CA (chapter three: "'Virgo bona dicendi perita.' The Good Maiden Speaking Well," and chapter six, "The 'hortus conclusus' in Gower's Poems"). A "coda"--"Renaissance Receptions of Gower's 'Repetitio'"--brings a detailed look at Chicago, Newberry Library, MS 33.5 and Jonson's "English Grammar," complementing the final section of chapter three which offers remarks on the character Marina in Shakespeare's "Pericles," and fulfilling the title's promise of "Renaissance Receptions." [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Donavin, Georgiana. Published Donavin, Georgiana. John Gower's Rhetoric: Classical Authority, Biblical Ethos, and Renaissance Receptions. Turnhout: Brepols, 2022. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Mirour de l'Omme Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower's Rhetoric: Classical Authority, Biblical Ethos, and Renaissance Receptions. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 Review Brunner examines works proposed as sources for Ben Jonson's "Volpone," including Gower's "Tale of the King and the Steward's Wife" (CA V. 2643-2825), concluding that (219) "Die Erzahlung bei Gower steht Ben Jonson sicher näher als alle anderen bisher herangezognen" ("The narrative of Gower's is certainly closer than all others consulted up to now"). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Brunner, Karl. Published Brunner, Karl. "Die Quellen von Ben Jonson's 'Volpone'." Archiv für Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literature 152, n.s. 52 (1927): 218-19. 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 Die Quellen von Ben Jonson's "Volpone." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1927 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bentick explores the conceptualization of vernacular English poetry depicting alchemy during the medieval and early modern period, arguing that alchemy's mystical reputation lingers because "its literature is not only read by . . . those who have the chemical acumen to decipher its operations, but it is also read by . . . interested readers who would not have the faintest idea how to [interpret the art]" (2). In Chapter 2 he claims that Gower's understanding of alchemy was influenced by the ideologies of late medieval alchemists such as Roger Bacon and pseudo-Ramon Lull (64). In his analysis of "Mirour de l'omme," "Vox Clamantis," and the "Confessio Amantis," Bentick further suggests that Gower's image of alchemy is "rooted in ideas of the microcosm/macrocosm and inextricably linked to social improvement" (64). According to Bentick, the CA in particular "sits in a tradition that sees a template for social reform in the transformative power of the alchemical promise" (16). For Gower, human sin is entangled with the mutability of the sublunary world, and both division and change emerge as symptomatic of this postlapsarian decline (67). In Gower's time, successful and noble alchemists are of a bygone era, and "it is the degenerated wits of his age that abuse the 'trewe' science of alchemy with their ignorance and fraudulence" (73). As Bentick puts it, "Gower was interested in how alchemists could rid the world of impurities and imprint something more noble onto raw materials," which he links to the notion of humankind as microcosm (76). Despite its failings in contemporary times, however, "alchemy proves to Gower that if people were as intellectually busy as those who preceded him, then the world could be improved" (82). Bentick concludes that "Gower did not think himself up to the task of understanding alchemy and yet his belief in the possibility of doing so gave him [ . . . ] hope in the possibility of reform" (169), which in turn helped to popularize vernacular poems about alchemy among lay communities in the late medieval and early modern period. [CR. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bentick, Eoin. Published Bentick, Eoin. Literatures of Alchemy in Medieval and Early Modern England. Rochester, NY : D.S. Brewer, 2022. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Mirour de l'Omme Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Literatures of Alchemy in Medieval and Early Modern England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 'Physician's Tale'," Bartlett argues, "Chaucer presents a legal case that functions solely as a ruse to enable sexual assault" (259). Her focus is thus almost entirely on Chaucer, drawing parallels between Chaucer's tale and the "raptus" charge in legal documents relating to Cecily Chaumpaigne brought forward by Euan Roger and Sebastian Sobecki, responding to Roger's and Sobecki's revelation. Bartlett offers a succinct explanation of medieval "raptus" before exclaiming that Roger's and Sobecki's findings are "not a set of new facts, but new documents" (260). She, in essence, counters the reactions of medievalists who thought Chaucer exonerated: "these documents and the 'big reveal' in which we learned about them are illuminated by the very lessons of the "Physician's Tale" imparts about gendered labor, sexual assault, and discursive power--who holds that power, and what happens when that power is challenged" (260). In making her case, Bartlett examines other versions of this tale, explaining that in Gower's CA, "the focus is . . . overtly political" (264). She continues to examine the tale, offering close readings to support her case. Gower's version of the tale is used a few times in contrast to Chaucer's, namely to show the alterations Chaucer makes in what Bartlett presents as a blatant attempt to excuse sexual assault. [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bartlett, Robyn A. Published Bartlett, Robyn A. "On Chaucer, Raptus, and the Physician's Tale." Exemplaria 35, no. 4 (2023): 259-83. 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 On Chaucer, Raptus, and the "Physician's Tale." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Allen-Goss charts the history of the Philomela narrative from its classical origins, in which the woven tapestry she uses to betray Tereus's crime is the central story. She examines how the tapestry and weaving more generally are conflated with women's speech, suggesting that "the textile is a form of 'écriture feminine,' woman's art, which writes back against the patriarchal narrative of violence" (81). Medieval readers would have been "textile-conscious" and thus she argues that "as weaving, Philomela's testimony offers crucial new possibilities for the interpretation of rape testimony, offering a model concentrated upon recuperative expression for the rape survivor rather than a performative or exploitable 'breaking of silence'" (83). In Gower's version of this tale, she concludes, "the display of rhetorical skill and erudition . . . works to discredit Philomela's emotional testimony amongst the very group of readers with the greatest social and legal capital: Latin-literate men" (84). Allen-Goss offers insightful close readings of Gower's text in support of this claim before then moving into an analysis of Chaucer's version of the tale. She focuses on Philomela's weaving during her imprisonment and how the rough, coarse material she weaves mirrors Philomela's state of being in the tale. Furthermore, this larger-scale tapestry, weaving, and memory all interplay to produce a lasting and communal form of testimony. [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Allen-Goss, Lucy M. Published Allen-Goss, Lucy M. "Dismembered Memories: Philomela in Chaucer and Gower." Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature, edited by Sarah Baechle, Carissa M. Harris, and Elizaveta Strakhov. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022. Pp. 80-96. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Style, Rhetoric, and Versification 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 Dismembered Memories: Philomela in Chaucer and Gower Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yeager suggests "an underestimated Spanish influence on Middle English poetry" (129) in the "Disciplina Clericalis," a collection of exempla assembled by the twelfth-century Spanish author, Pedro Alfonso. The text survives in 76 manuscripts, all but one of these--Worcester Cathedral Library MS F.172 (a careless Middle English translation)--in Latin. The essay traces the clear influence of the "Disciplina," probably by way of a French translation, on Chaucer's "Tale of Melibee," where Pedro and the "Disciplina" are mentioned at least five times; and on Gower's Anglo-French poem, the "Mirour de l'Omme," where they are mentioned twice. Yeager also suggests the possible influence of the "Disciplina" on Gower's enigmatic "Tale of the Three Questions" in Book I of "Confessio Amantis," devoted to the sin of pride. No source for the tale has been identified. Its narrative, however, involves the posing of three seemingly unanswerable questions by an unnamed king of Spain to a knight named Pedro, arguably invoking Pedro Alfonso and his work. [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R. F. "Spanish Literary Influence in England: John Gower and Pedro Alfonso." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. 119-29. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Spanish Literary Influence in England: John Gower and Pedro Alfonso. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review A taxonomy of five types or models of exempla used in the "Confessio Amantis" structures Yeager's essay. He affiliates the exempla of CA with those found in homilies, crediting G. R. Owst's landmark study, "Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England," and he sets out "to demonstrate in what ways Gower makes use of the exemplum in constructing his most successful poem" (307). The "secular" exempla of CA, Yeager tells us, are essential to making the CA "readable" as both "pleasing fiction, and, in a very real way, as sermon" (312); the device is clearly signaled by Gower (Yeager lists numerous instances where "ensample" refers to a tale or tales, pp. 312-13), helps to justify Genius's role as priest and confessor (310-11), and, Yeager suggests, may help to explain both the poet's "plain writing" (313), and his didactic mode. In short, "Gower made use of the exemplum as a paradigm for narration" in CA (314). Description and elucidation of the five types or models follow: detailed explications of single representative tales drawn from Book 1 of CA, read in light of their sources. The "Tale of Capaneus" represents Gower's straightforward "extraction of a narrative from its source" (315); in Narcissus he borrows with added details "to adapt a tale more precisely to his needs" (318); and in the Trojan Horse, the horse is not just an "object" in a plot but an "emblem" (322) of the vice it illustrates. The other two types of exempla, Yeager shows, work by negation; for instance, the "Tale of Florent" dramatizes a "direct negation of 'Murmur and Complaint'" (323), and the "Tale of Three Questions" negates Pride by presenting the "offsetting virtue" (325) of Humility in complex ways. Indeed, the intricacy of Yeager's analysis of humility as theme in the "Three Questions" is quite subtle, as are, for example, his emphasis on psychological process in "Florent" and the suggestive diction of feigning in the "Trojan Horse." Yet, these matters operate outside the parameters of Yeager's taxonomy. He is attentive to detail and nuance and his close readings disclose Gower's successful integration of style, form, and theme, but the five categories are quite general and, Yeager admits, subject to "variations" (330) elsewhere in the CA. The categorization antedates and adumbrates the critical examination and theorizing of exempla and "exemplarity" of many later studies--including Yeager's own "John Gower's Poetic" (1990). Here it structures Yeager's readings of five individual tales [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R. F. "John Gower and the Exemplum Form: Tale Models in the "Confessio Amantis." Mediaevalia 8 (1982): 307-35 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 John Gower and the Exemplum Form: Tale Models in the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Citing previous studies by W. C. Curry, R. E. Kaske, and T. J. Garbáty, Wood connects the Summoner's skin disease and fondness for garlic, onions, and leeks with Numbers 11: 5 (240), but suggests that perhaps Chaucer borrowed not directly from the Vulgate, but instead from Gower ("Vox Clamantis" III. 85-90), and/or Gower's own source, Peter Riga, "Aurora," Numeri 215-22 (241-42). "We may also note," he concludes, "Chaucer departs from Gower's method by changing an abstract 'exemplum' . . . into a more rounded literary figure, thus almost completely Gower's procedure, which was to concentrate on the spiritual implications of his images rather than on the surface details of the images themselves" (243). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wood, Chauncey. Published Wood, Chauncey. "The Sources of Chaucer's Summoner's 'Garleek, Onyons, and eek Lekes'." Chaucer Review 5.3 (1971): 240-44. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Sources of Chaucer's Summoner's "Garleek, Onyons, and eek Lekes." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In this essay, Beatrice White surveys medieval depictions of the third estate, ranging widely among works by French, German, and English writers, but focusing on Langland, Chaucer, and Gower as the "outstanding English poets of the fourteenth century." She comments on works by some of their near-contemporaries as well, "the rank and file of versifiers" (69), and concludes, rather sweepingly, that "medieval poets, as might be expected, were often prejudiced and unreliable witnesses to the hard lot of the peasant, tending to present him as humble saint, surly, embittered serf, carousing bumpkin, patient toiler, or menacing figure of evil" (73). Stereotyping abounds, White shows, especially in the recurrent association of labor with poverty and, in her conclusion, she contrasts the poets' views with those of chroniclers, to the disadvantage of the former. Gower, in particular, for White, is a "theoretical liberal and practical conservative . . . moralist and landowner [who] looked at the peasant with distrust and suspicion, if not positive dislike" (65). She cites passages from the "Mirour de l'Omme" as predecessors to the "brutal and raging" peasants of "Vox Clamantis," while in "Confessio Amantis" there is "no room for them at all" (66-67). White concedes that Gower--like Chaucer and Langland--"resorted to" a "commonplace concerning equality" (67) but offers no citation. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor White, Beatrice. Published White, Beatrice. "Poet and Peasant." In F. R. H. Du Boulay and Caroline M. Barron, eds., The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack. (London: Athlone, 1971). Pp. 58-74. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Poet and Peasant. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Examines Gower's views of the ancient world and epic poetry in "Confessio Amantis," finding them complex and "in [their] implications remarkably bleak" (165). Benoît de Sainte-Maure's 12th-c. "Roman de Troie" was a major influence on Gower, by way of its content and its implied critique of ancient heroism. Gower adapts episodes from the "Roman" in the CA, such as the voyage of the Argonauts and the story of Jason and Medea. Whereas Genius's treatment of such material can be "myopic" (168)--for example, his muted criticism of Jason's betrayal of Medea--Gower himself displays "more sophisticated probing" (169). Genius valorizes chivalry and aggression in war and love, notably in the Tale of Aeneas and Dido in Book IV, a view that Gower qualifies. Like Benoît, Gower "shows markedly little interest in the classical gods and goddesses" (173). Genius, however, emphasizes Mars and his influence in stories of "epic-chivalric violence" (177), such as the "Tale of Ulysses and Telegonus." [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wetherbee, Winthrop. Published Wetherbee, Winthrop. "Gower and the Epic Past." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014). Pp. 165-79. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and the Epic Past. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Viúla argues that "Confessio Amantis" was translated into Portuguese and then Castilian through the influence of Henry Despenser, bishop of Norwich (1370-1406). Despenser, a collector of fine books and "a consumer of contemporary poetry" (137), was a close associate of Philippa of Lancaster, eldest daughter of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster and, by marriage, Queen of Portugal (1387-1415). Although not pro-Lancastrian, Despenser escaped imprisonment during Henry Bolingbroke's struggles with Richard II through Philippa's interventions. Letters of gratitude from Despenser to Philippa attest to her support. Another, from Philippa herself, thanks Despenser for various gifts, to be conveyed to her by her treasurer, "Thomas Payn" (136). This man may have been the father of Robert Payn, another member of Philippa's household and translator of the Portuguese version of CA. The CA probably "made its way to Philippa in Portugal from a source outside the Lancastrian affinity, as a presentation copy from Henry Despenser" (137). [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Viúla, Tiago de Faria, Published Viúla, Tiago de Faria, "From Norwich to Lisbon: Factionalism, Personal Association, and Conveying the "Confessio Amantis." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. 131-38. Gower Subject Coinfessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource From Norwich to Lisbon: Factionalism, Personal Association, and Conveying the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Taylor, acknowledging that Bottom's Dream ("Midsummer Night's Dream" V.i.206-12) "contains a debt to Paul's discussion of 'the deep things of God'" (282), points out that " . . . it has escaped notice that John Gower also links 1 Corinthians 2: 9 and Pyramus in 'Confessio Amantis'" (III. 1417-28), a poem "Shakespeare knew well" (282). Taylor cites as Gowerian also the lion (changed from Ovid's lioness) and "there is also the hole in the wall" (282) which he attributes to Confessio III. 1370-71(283). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Taylor, A. B. Published Taylor, A. B. "John Gower and 'Pyramus and Thisbe'." Notes and Queries 54 (2007): 282-83. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower and "Pyramus and Thisbe." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Stoyanoff's admonition to teach fewer texts and teach them more deeply is well-taken, and he describes his experiences with teaching Gower's "Tale of Virgil's Mirror" from Book V of the "Confessio Amantis" in order to accomplish depth of analysis by using Actor-Network Theory (ANT), drawn from the sociological approach of Bruno Latour and others. The description derives from Stoyanoff's undergraduate course designed for majors, and it summarizes student discussions of the animate and inanimate actors in the tale, their networks, and their resulting collectives. Brief as it is, Stoyanoff's essay encourages slow, close reading, but the concepts and terms from ANT are not explained at length, so that instructors unfamiliar with ANT will do well to read as a companion essay his earlier, more theoretical study, "Covetousness in Book 5 of "Confessio Amantis": A Medieval Precursor to Neoliberalism," Accessus 4.2 (2018): Article 2. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stoyanoff, Jeffrey G. Published Stoyanoff, Jeffrey G. "Confessio Amantis" in the Undergraduate Classroom: Using Actor-Network Theory to Teach Less Text More." Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 30.1 (2023): 45-52. 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 "Confessio Amantis" in the Undergraduate Classroom: Using Actor-Network Theory to Teach Less Text More. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Stemmler here comments on Gower's "Vox Clamantis" (particularly the "Visio" of Book 1) as one among eleven examples of political poetry written in response to the Revolt of 1381, in all cases, emphasizing "political effect" while identifying "artistic techniques" that support the politics (22). He surveys "the most important historical facts about the Revolt" (23) and then divides the eleven poems into two group: seven that express the "voice of the disadvantaged," centering on verse letters attributed to John Ball, and four (including VC) in which the "political position reflects contemporary orthodox doctrines" (35) and the use of Latin indicates an educated and/or courtly audience. Stemmler treats each work in turn as they together represent a "broad spectrum of political convictions" (38), although he generally speaks more favorably of those on the political left. Concerning VC, he remarks on the "immense apparatus of political / rhetorical artifice and numerous quotations from Latin authors" (35) and how, in his view, "artistic methods are subservient to the [conservative] political intent" of Gower's poem (38). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stemmler, Theo. Published Stemmler, Theo. "The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 in Contemporary Literature." In Ulrich Broich, Theo Stemmler, and Gerd Stratmann, eds. Functions of Literature: Essays Presented to Erwin Wolff on His Sixtieth Birthday. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984). Pp. 21-38. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 in Contemporary Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Smith's primary focus is the language of London, British Library MS Harley 7334--a "Canterbury Tales"--but by way of getting to that, he extends the argument of Doyle and Parkes, regarding the five scribes of Cambridge, Trinity College R. 3. 2, by pursuing especially their Scribe D. "The trouble with D," he notes, "is that the forms he uses to replace Gowerian features and the features he retains from Gower do not . . . form any consistent dialectal picture" (108). Smith explains this by positing that "the nature of the scribe's repertoire is changing under the influence of the manuscripts he is copying" (109)--i.e., Scribe D (who probably came from North Worcestershire [110]), because he copied more Gower manuscripts than anything else, was most influenced by forms natural to Gower, "localised to two smallish areas of South West Suffolk and North West Kent" (107). Smith shows the evolution of Scribe D's spelling by comparing the chronological development of "Gowerian" forms in four manuscripts: Oxford, Corpus Christi College B. 67, London, British Library, Egerton 1991, Oxford, Bodleian Library 294, and Bodleian Fairfax 3 (100).] [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Smith, Jeremy J. Published Smith, Jeremy J. "Linguistic Features of Some Fifteenth-Century Middle English Manuscripts." In Derek Pearsall, ed. Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England (York: York Medieval Press, 1983). Pp. 104-12. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies 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 Linguistic Features of Some Fifteenth-Century Middle English Manuscripts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1983 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Shailor describes various types of damage to the Yale manuscript of "Confessio Amantis": for example, extensive damp and mildew, resulting probably from a fire in the 18th-c. library of a previous owner; and the loss of the codex's first and third quires. Drawing on a wide range of curatorial and academic authorities, she also discusses what can be known about the stability of the volume and its text despite this damage: for example, the likelihood that the mildew is not spreading, that the book's third quire was removed and sold at auction (its present whereabouts, however, unknown), and that the manuscript was copied and decorated c.1410-1420 in an identifiable London shop. She presents new readings of damaged text and new information about different pigments used for rubrication and decoration, based on the technology of hyperspectral imaging, which allows for "a much broader spectrum of color definition and recognition, going from ultraviolet to infrared" (82). [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Shailor, Barbara A. Published Shailor, Barbara A. "The Yale Gower Manuscript, Beinecke Osborn MS fa.1: Paleographical, Codicological, Technological Challenges and Opportunities." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. 77-85. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Yale Gower Manuscript, Beinecke Osborn MS fa.1: Paleographical, Codicological, Technological Challenges and Opportunities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Severs takes for granted here that Nicholas Trivet's Anglo-Norman "Chronicle" is the immediate source of Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale and of Gower's "Tale of Constance" in the "Confessio Amantis," and that Chaucer's "general correspondence" to Trivet is "closer than Gower's" (196). Comparing and quoting passages from the three versions, he argues that an original stanza has been lost from Chaucer's poem in the scene where Hermengyld's prayer miraculously cures the blindness of the old man. He also suggests that if Chaucer "borrowed bits of his tale from Gower's prior version, he certainly would have eked out any defective account in his Trivet MS by adopting the climactic events . . . from Gower, for these events are more striking and artistically more important than any of the minor touches which Chaucer did borrow from Gower" (197n4). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Severs, J. Burke. Published Severs, J. Burke. "A Lost Chaucerian Stanza?" Modern Language Notes 74.3 (1959) 193-98. 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 A Lost Chaucerian Stanza? Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1959 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Rothauser synopsizes her essay as follows: "Medieval authors describe not only the presence of water near and in cities, but also the use of waters by the citizens. We see water being used primarily in three roles in these texts: 1) a defining element; 2) a protective barrier; and 3) a cleansing agent. In depictions of historical or fictitious earthly cities, we see water used in these functions individually, or perhaps dually, suggesting an important topos for water, but not a formulaic use of it. When all of these roles appear in one description, we find the perfection that exists in the celestial city of 'Pearl.' But when these roles are subverted, we see the apocalyptic nightmare of John Gower's London in 'Vox Clamantis.' It is through the author's manipulation of water in these three roles that we can see how medieval authors may express their concept of the urban space" (246). Rothauser considers a variety of medieval texts--including descriptions of London from William Fitz Stephen, the London "Letter-Books," and Lydgate's "Troy Book"--but Pearl (along with "St. Erkenwald") and VC (at times accompanied by "Mirour de l'Omme") are the texts she assesses most consistently, observing allegorical idealizations in "Pearl" and distortions or inversions of these ideals in Gower, but leaving what they reveal about ideas of urban space not sharply articulated. When discussing water as a "defining element" of urban depiction, she argues that in VC (and in MO) it "does not define the city itself, but rather Gower's preferred social hierarchy between city and country," so that, in the cities, water "much like the peasants . . . must be constrained" (257). Similarly, water offers no urban protection in VC, where the gates in the vision of London are breached and its walls destroyed by the "flood" of peasants (264). Moreover, the "normative function" of water as cleansing agent is inverted when the nurturing fountains of Gower's city are bloodied and rendered pestilent (269). At the end of Book 1, however, through a figurative version of water as the "baptismal medium" (270), Rothauser argues, social order is restored and the dreamer's apocalyptic vision approaches closure through "God's manipulation of water" (272). Here, and elsewhere in her argument, Rothauser discloses less about Gower's "concept of the urban space," her stated goal, than she does about his notions of the moral dimensions of social order. If the two are somehow inextricable or analogous, as they may well be, clarification of their relations would be helpful. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rothauser, Britt C. L. Published Rothauser, Britt C. L. "'A Reuer … Brighter Þen Boþe the Sunne and Mone': The Use of Water in the Medieval Consideration of Urban Space." In Albrecht Classen, ed. Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age. (Berlin: De Gruyter; 2009). Pp. 245-72. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "A Reuer--Brighter Þen Boþe the Sunne and Mone: The Use of Water in the Medieval Consideration of Urban Space. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 chapter pertains to Shakespeare's "Pericles," but with a pervasive emphasis on Gower's "Confessio Amantis" Book VIII as foundational not only to the tale of Apollonius/Pericles retold in the play, but also to the centrality of old age and "infirmities" in the character of Shakespeare's choric Gower (1.0.2-3). Rogers uses the term "prosthesis" metaphorically, as a visual or verbal "supplement" that fills the "gaps" in a portrayal (105 et passim; "Pericles" 4.4.8). Both Gower-characters, in the CA and in "Pericles," personify the "prosthetic role of old age . . . [as] debility . . . [but also] as an additive to power and authority" with wisdom to impart (104-5). In parallel fashion, both Gowers deploy a fusty old tale to serve their present-day audience as a "restorative" capable of bringing "new life" and "ethical healing" (106; also 114-16, 118-19). Shakespeare's Gower is himself a "prosthetic" figure, as his narrative voice fills in the missing pieces of the story and supplements the dumb shows (111, 117). Rogers asserts the "central position" of the Gower-persona's "surprise appearance at the end of Book VIII [as an old man]" to "moments of revision within Shakespeare's own text." In this famous scene in the CA, Venus presents the poet-persona with a mirror in which he sees his ravaged face through "myn hertes yhe" (8.2824), as he evocatively describes, and thus is cured of his love (116). Just as the earlier Gower must rely on his inward eye "as a prosthesis to his powers of sight," so Shakespeare's Gower must call upon the devices of the theater and the imagination of the audience (3.0.58) as a "crutch" to help them "see" the story (122-23). The wisdom personified in both figures is the "confession of impairments and debility, all of which serve as the staff for the old man" (124). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rogers, Will. Published Rogers, Will. "Playing Prosthesis and Revising the Past: Gower's Supplemental Role." Chapter 4 in Will Rogers, Writing Old Age and Impairments in Late Medieval England (Leeds, UK: Arc Humanities Press, 2021). Pp. 103-24. 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 Playing Prosthesis and Revising the Past: Gower's Supplemental Role. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 valuable study ". . . deliberately diverges from existing scholarship on Shakespeare's reception of Ovid by looking at yet also [sic] beyond the Roman poet's place of primacy in the humanist schoolroom. It equally diverges from scholarship on Shakespeare's reception of Chaucer and Gower by considering how their spectral presences can be perceived in Shakespeare's texts other than 'Troilus and Cressida,' 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' 'The Two Noble Kinsmen,' and 'Pericles'--in other words, those dramatic pieces whose plots have overt Chaucerian or Gowerian analogues" (49). Reid finds that much of what she calls "the under-acknowledged, spectral presence of the medieval" (2) in Shakespeare's work turns out to be from the "Confessio Amantis." She notes especially (chapter 5) that the close affiliations of "the interactions between Olivia and Viola in 'Twelfth Night' build not only upon the 'Metamorphoses' . . . but also upon a strikingly different tradition . . . that seems to have entered English literary tradition by way of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'" (7). By way of making her larger argument, Reid offers a uniquely insightful analysis of the little-known "Chaucer's Ghoast" (which proves to be largely extracts from CA), presenting thereby a compact survey of early Modern readers' engagement with Gower (9-38, and Appendix 1). She finds Gower's "spectre" significantly influential on many well-known Shakespearean scenes (e.g., in "The Taming of the Shrew": "When Petruccio boasts that he is ready to take on a rich wife, whether she be 'as foul as was Florentius' love,' his reference is seemingly to Gower's tale of the knight, Florent, from the 'Confessio Amantis'") (67), and argues for the influence of the CA on Caxton's edition of the "Metamorphoses" (177-78), with major implications, in her view, for much sixteenth and seventeenth century poetry, including Sidney's "Old Arcadia" (esp. 188-92). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Reid, Lindsay Ann Published Reid, Lindsay Ann. Shakespeare's Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2018. 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 Shakespeare's Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval. 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 Batman, a fiercely partisan Protestant, published his "Christall Glasse" in 1569. Like the "Confessio Amantis," it is organized around the Seven Deadly Sins. Reid argues that "it is clear that [Batman] follows Gower's earlier tale [i.e., "Aeneas and Dido" in Book IV] by likewise positing Dido's unhappy end as the tragic consequence of Aeneas' 'sloth and forgetfulness' in love" (353). But Batman's choice is "peculiar," given that "the exemplum of slothful Aeneas, guilty essentially of violating courtly love conventions, does not comfortably fit" either of Batman's two expressed categories for Sloth--physical and moral; thus, we are left with the questions why would Batman have turned to (Catholic) Gower, and "what does it mean to press a recognizable Middle English 'exemplum in amoris causa' into the service of a new Protestant message?" (354). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Reid, Linday Ann. Published Reid, Linday Ann. "Gower's Slothful Aeneas in Batman's 'Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation.'" Notes and Queries 61 (2014): 349-54. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Slothful Aeneas in Batman's "Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek. Published Pearsall, Derek. "Early Revision in the Text of Gower's Confessio Amantis." Journal of the Early Book Society 24 (2021): 247-61. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Criticism Review [For a response to this essay, see Peter Nicholson, "Gower's Early Revisions Revisited," JEBS 25.] Pearsall seeks to identify the earliest form of the "Confessio Amantis," based on manuscript evidence of authorial changes that led G. C. Macaulay to posit the familiar "three recensions" theory. Pearsall looks at passages from seven manuscripts (using Macaulay's sigils, S, Δ, Ad, T, B, Ʌ, p2) that he terms the "Huntington group" (251), named for S, the oldest among them--San Marino, CA, Huntington Library MS EL 26 A 17. All of these are "second recension" manuscripts, according to Macaulay, in part because they have additions and/or changes complimentary to Henry IV. "Attempts to date different versions of the 'Confessio' in relation to real historical circumstances, such as those made by Macaulay," Pearsall asserts, "lead only to confusion, and should in any case be disentangled from the discussion of manuscript affiliations" (249). Scrutinizing the various alterations differentiating these MSS from Macaulay's "first recension" MSS, Pearsall concludes that "the manuscripts of the Huntington group . . . must have been part of the original form of the poem, or at least the earliest surviving form" (258)--in direct disagreement with Macaulay. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Early Revision in the Text of Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 Review The Castilian "Confesión del amante" is a collection of classical materials that, for Pascual-Argente, represents "the European secular nobility's cultural capital and collective memory" (154) and competing ideas about the classical past. The scribe of the unique manuscript introduces his table of contents with Gower's Latin gloss concerning how bees assemble their honeycomb from various flowers, emphasizing the book as a compilation: a memorial work that selects from and preserves antiquity. Refashioned stories concerning Alexander the Great and the Trojan War would have appealed to "literary circles close to the royal court" (160). Castilian aristocrats were also interested in classical rhetoric and secular ethics. The CA may have influenced later Castilian works such as "El Victorial," a chivalric biography written by Gutierre Díaz de Games in the 1430s, being especially relevant for the Castilian court during the first half of the fifteenth century, when "the debate about knightly access to classical culture was at its most heated" (164). [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pascual-Argente, Clara. Published Pascual-Argente, Clara. "Remembering Antiquity in the Castilian Confessio Amantis." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014). Pp. 153-64. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Remembering Antiquity in the Castilian "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Despite the use of "Gowerian" in its title, Obermeier's essay has relatively little to do with Gower's works. The "Ricardian Context" to which she refers, however, is her presentation of indications of Richard II's despotism during his reign and--much the bulk of the essay--argument that Chaucer's "Manciple's Prologue and Tale" comprises a veiled critique of Ricardian tyranny, with Apollo representing Richard and the crow's punishment signifying Chaucer's awareness of the need for self-censorship and, by extension, a warning to Gower to do the same. Building on her previous discussions of censorship and self-criticism in Chaucer's Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women" and his Retraction in "The Canterbury Tales," Obermeier explores several complex ways in which Ovid's poems in exile underlie, she contends, Chaucer's notions of royal power and poetic caution in ManPT. Almost as a coda, and quoting James Simpson at some length on Ricardian and Henrician Ovidianism ("Breaking the Vacuum: Ricardian and Henrician Ovidianism." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29 (1999), pp. 325-355), Obermeier observes a similar "power struggle with an Ovidian root" (95) in Richard's command that Gower write "Som newe thing" in the original Prologue of the "Confessio Amantis." Further, quoting Gower's "O deus immense" and observing its second-person-singular advice to kings, Obermeier accepts R. F. Yeager's suggestion that the composition of the poem was at least begun "during Richard's reign," and therefore, Obermeier adds, Chaucer's warning against reporting "tydynges," false or true, in the "Manciple's Tale" "could have been meant for his friend Gower, who might have been too bold for Chaucer in this authorial approach" to royalty (98). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Obermeier, Anita. Published Obermeier, Anita. "The Censorship Trope in Geoffrey Chaucer's Manciple's Tale as Ovidian Metaphor in a Gowerian and Ricardian Context." In Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel, eds. Author, Reader, Book: Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press; 2012). Pp. 80-105. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Minor Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Censorship Trope in Geoffrey Chaucer's "Manciple's Tale" as Ovidian Metaphor in a Gowerian and Ricardian Context. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review As Nicholson points out in a prefatory note (185), his essay responds to Derek Pearsall, "Early Revision in the Text of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,'" JEBS 24, continuing a conversation interrupted by Pearsall's death. "The question before us," Nicholson notes, "is whether the passages in Books 5, 6, and 7 that distinguish MSS S [San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS EL 26.A.17] and P [Princeton University, Firestone Library, Robert H. Taylor Collection, Medieval MS 5] were in Gower's earliest manuscript and later deleted, as Derek Pearsall has proposed, or later additions to as text more like that of A [Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902], as Macaulay presumed" (187). Nicholson comes down on the Macaulay side: ". . . every indication that we find either in the text or in the manuscripts does point to the same conclusion: that Gower revised his poem by making short, selective additions to what was still a fluid portion of the text, and that as Macaulay believed, the shortest of the surviving versions is thus the earliest" (196). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter. Published Nicholson, Peter. "Gower's Early Revisions Revisited." Journal of the Early Book Society 25 (2022): 185-99. 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 Gower's Early Revisions Revisited. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022