21 100 2176 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Microform copy of eight leaves of Madrid, Biblioteca de Palacio, MS II-3088, i.e., the Castilian index to the Portuguese translation of Confessio Amantis. 2 microfiches; negative. Includes a printed guide. Author/Editor Author/Editor Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio Published Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio. "Texto y concordancias de Indices castellanos de la traducción portuguesa de la Confessio Amantis de John Gower (Palacio II-3088)." Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, Madison, WI. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Texto y concordancias de Indices castellanos de la traducción portuguesa de la Confessio Amantis de John Gower (Palacio II-3088). Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Type The nature or genre of the resource Other NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio Published Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio. "La traducción portuguesa de la Confessio Amantis de John Gower." Euphrosyne 23 (1995), pp. 457-466. ISSN 0531-2175 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review Announces the discovery of a manuscript of the Portuguese translation of CA, the source of the Castilian translation of the poem. The Castilian translation has long been known. (Macaulay has a few words about it, Works 2.clxvii-clxviii.) Dated (by Santano Moreno) sometime before 1454, it claims to be based on a Portuguese version by one Ruberto Payno, who has been identified with a clergyman who accompanied Philippa of Lancaster to Lisbon. Until now, no trace of this work has been found. The manuscript was discovered in the Biblioteco de Palacio, Madrid, where it had been catalogued simply as "Libro de las moralidades." Professor Cortijo had the good luck of having the existence of the manuscript communicated to him by Professor Angel Gomez Moreno, and then upon obtaining a microfilm, he had the perspicacity to identify it as the long lost translation of Gower. The manuscript is a paper quarto, about 10.25 x 7.5 inches. The main body, containing the translation, consists of 251 leaves written in two columns. It is preceded by 8 leaves containing an index to the poem in Castilian, evidently added later. The text begins with the first line of the English Prologue, with no mention of the title, the author, or the translator; but it is followed by a colophon which identifies the scribe (Joham Barroso, whom Cortijo has not been able to identify), his patron (D. Fernando de Castro the Younger, from Cepta, a small corner of Spanish territory in northwest Africa opposite Gibraltar), and the date of the completion of the copy, 1430. Santano Moreno recently argued that the translation was done after 1433. That date must now be revised and indeed pushed back beyond 1430 to allow enough time for the Portuguese version to become known, and a copy of it acquired, by a minor Spanish nobleman. The index was no doubt added for the convenience of the Spanish readers. It is not identical, however, to the index that is now attached to the Spanish translation, and that is one of several indications that the newly found manuscript is not that upon which the Spanish translation was based, allowing us to infer an even wider diffusion. It appears from Cortijo's account that the Spanish version follows the Portuguese very closely. Cortijo's essay contains the fullest description of the manuscript and it also provides the English, Portuguese and Spanish versions Book 1, lines 2681-2784, the portion of dialogue that precedes the tale of "Nebuchadnezzar's Punishment." [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society JGN 20.1.] 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 La traducción portuguesa de la Confessio Amantis de John Gower Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Explores the literary historical implications of the discovery of the Portuguese translation of "Confessio Amantis," source of the Castilian translation. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio Published Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio. "O Livro do Amante: The Lost Portuguese Translation of John Gower's Confessio Amantis (Madrid, Biblioteca de Palacio, MS II-3088)." Portuguese Studies 13 (1997), pp. 1-6. ISSN 0267-5315 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource O Livro do Amante: The Lost Portuguese Translation of John Gower's Confessio Amantis (Madrid, Biblioteca de Palacio, MS II-3088) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Barbaccia, Holly G. Published Barbaccia, Holly G.. "Kalendes of chaunge: Thinking Through Change in Middle English Poetry." PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2005. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review "The middle ages, so often assumed to be an epoch of orderly, hierarchical stability, is continuously fascinated or dismayed by the prospect and spectacle of change. My dissertation surveys representations of chaunge and eschaunge (interchangeable terms in Middle English) in fourteenth and fifteenth-century literature in order to arrive at a better understanding of how medieval authors struggled with the subjects of transformation and substitution, and what that struggle tells us about those authors, and about Middle English poetry. It transpires that the Middle English poetry paying most attention to chaunge and eschaunge attaches the language and imagery of transformation and substitution to female figures. My study investigates the most important of these figures and representative practices as they evolve in late fourteenth-century England, within the context of the literary exchanges and social changes of the Hundred Years War. Langland's Lady Meed and Gower's Constance, Chaucer's Criseyde, and the Gawain-poet's Lady Bertilak work differently to different ends, effecting change in masculine narrators and protagonists that excites outrage, astonishment, and admiration. . . . The figures and texts I study speak to complex concerns and questions for the Middle Ages: chaunge and eschaunge reveal the instability of the world, and are in turn used to theorize the ways instability itself might provide or deny us access to stable meaning. My aim is to show that what for moderns might seem trite or clichéd formulae, such as Lady Fortune and her wheel, might (as great poetry) speak powerfully to our deepest concerns: what happens next? What is happening to me? Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Kalendes of chaunge: Thinking Through Change in Middle English Poetry Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Olsson begins his essay by distinguishing three different perspectives on "place" in Vox Clamantis, each with a corresponding sense of justice, of time, and, we later learn, of fear, referring to geographical location in Book 1, social position in Books 3-6, and spiritual location in Book 7. The rest of his essay explores the implications of these distinctions and of the "expanding sense of place" in the poem in a detailed analysis of the separate sections, and it offers one of the most important attempts to treat VC as a work with an inner coherence of its own rather than as a mere collection of statements of Gower's political and social views. Olsson draws upon both classical and medieval rhetorical models to explain the relations among the three parts and how they constitute a single argument, leading readers from the "comun drede" pervading the England of his time to a reappreciation of their own responsibility, to a turning inward to repentance and a reexamination of their own inner life. His argument is sophisticated and complex and it defies brief summary. Among his most important contributions, however, is his redefinition of the function of the vision that constitutes Book 1 of the poem. As an exordium, the book is intended to win the readers' attention and good will for the argument that follows by implying that they too are the injured parties in the rebellion. The narrator too is clearly "vexed by injustices," but his bewilderment and fear are not a reflection of Gower's own attitude towards the peasantry but an indication that the narrator suffers from the same misperception and lack of sense of his proper "place" that the readers too must overcome. Book 2 begins the process of reordering his, and the readers', perception, and Gower shifts his narrative stance, adopting the vox populi to describe the proper duties and functions of each estate as part of his general argument that those who suffered from the peasants' attacks are themselves culpable. Book 7 juxtaposes Nebuchadnezzar's dream to the vision in Book 1: it depicts the recovery of proper place spiritually, but it also suggests a return to the world of Book 1 as a place of penance with new hope for the restoration of what has been lost. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Olsson, Kurt Published Olsson, Kurt. "John Gower's Vox Clamantis and the Medieval Idea of Place." Studies in Philology 84 (1987), pp. 134-158. 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 John Gower's Vox Clamantis and the Medieval Idea of Place Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Despite their immense popularity with medieval audiences, the Middle English texts about Alexander the Great have been little studied because modern scholars viewed them in isolation from their classical antecedents and their religious context. In this dissertation, I examine how classical and medieval authors adapted Alexander's story into different genres of various levels of historical fidelity for their respective audiences. My underlying argument is that Alexander's influence over his own legacy ensured that his life story became not only a powerful historical example to kings with imperial ambitions but a critical opportunity for these successors and their opponents to make ideological assertions about the past and the present. . . . In the fourth chapter, I examine how John Gower combines moralized episodes from different editions of Alexander's life to educate Amans in self-control in love and politics in his Confessio Amantis." [JGN 21.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Girard, Karen Lee Published Girard, Karen Lee. "Re-writing Alexander the Great: Literary adaptations of Alexander's life in medieval England." PhD thesis, Stanford University, 2001. 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 Re-writing Alexander the Great: Literary adaptations of Alexander's life in medieval England Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "I argue that John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer engage in a case-based ethics, or moral casuistry, which has roots in traditions of Aristotelian ethics and Ciceronian rhetoric passed down through the Middle Ages in a wide variety of philosophical, rhetorical, and homiletic sources. Focusing on Gower's Confessio Amantis and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, I claim that the fourteenth-century poets presuppose an approach to discovering practical precepts that depends on both the rhetoric of exemplarity and the deliberation of readers. The thesis is therefore an interdisciplinary investigation into the ethical and aesthetic qualities of early English literature. As a metaethical inquiry, my study inaugurates a critique of the notion that morality in the Middle Ages was invariably restricted to a uniform system of values, a naive conception of divine-command, or prescriptive ideological statements." [JGN 23.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Mitchell, J. Allan Published Mitchell, J. Allan. "Reading for the Moral: The Ethics of Exemplarity in Middle English Literature (John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer)." PhD thesis, Dalhousie University, 2003. 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 Reading for the Moral: The Ethics of Exemplarity in Middle English Literature (John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Watt, Diane Published Watt, Diane. "Sins of Omission: Transgressive Genders, Subversive Sexualities, and Confessional Silences in John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Exemplaria 13 (2001), pp. 529-551. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Watt considers such tales as "Deianira and Nessus," "Achilles and Deidamia," and "Iphis and Iante" as examples of "transgressive" gender identities, which "cross over and obfuscate the divide between male and female," and of "subversive sexualities," which "challenge societal norms and expose their inconsistencies" (531), and she also examines Amans' relation with Venus, Cupid, and Genius for its latent sexual implications, all as part of an argument that although Gower does not face directly the issue of male homosexuality, he takes a broader and less conservative attitude towards sexual issues than Karma Lochrie is willing to allow (in the book reviewed in JGN 20, no. 2). Watt's final paragraph provides an excellent summary of her conclusions: "Genius's position on gender transgression and subversive sexuality is ambivalent: while 'honeste love' (marriage) and self-governance are praised, transvestism, transgendering, and transsexuality are explored and even, at times, allowed to undermine norms of gender and sexuality. They are treated differently according to context, and according to the ethical issues raised. Hercules is viewed as effeminate because he is besotted with a woman and because, in dressing as a woman, he is guilty of 'Falssemblant.' He can thus be compared to negative exemplary figures like Saradanapulus, or even Ulysses. Achilles's cross-dressing is legitimized by his youth and because his chivalric masculine identity asserts itself. It is not a form of 'Falswitnesse' in so far as he remains true to himself. Iphis, like Penthesilea, is taken as a positive 'masculine' role model. These narratives destablilize not only male/female boundaries but also the oppositions of manliness and effeminacy, the ethical and the unethical, and the natural and the unnatural. Confessio presents the reader with a series of paradoxes: Nature can inspire unnatural desires and actions; it is possible, even desirable, for a woman to behave like or to turn into a man; the most manly of heroes can become effeminate; the most exemplary of figures can behave immorally, and vice versa. Yet, while neither female cross-dressing nor female homosexuality is condemned out of hand, male sodomy remains taboo." And because of Amans' sexually charged relationship with both Cupid and Genius, "one question remains. Is it simply Amans's folly as a senex amans, or a more deeply hidden sin, which ultimately constitutes the 'unwise fantasie' of which he must rid himself?" (550-51). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 21.1] 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 Sins of Omission: Transgressive Genders, Subversive Sexualities, and Confessional Silences in John Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "John Gower's Audience: The Ballades." Chaucer Review 40 (2005), pp. 81-105. ISSN 0009-2002 Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Cinkante Balades Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review Gower's Cinkante Balades must in all likelihood be dated after 1385, not, as so many have believed, from Gower's youth, for all but two of the ballades consist of three identically rhymed stanzas plus an envoy, "the form that became standard for ballades only in the last years of the fourteenth century, influenced especially by the theories and practices of Eustache Deschamps? (82). This is just one of the many new insights into the origin and audience of both CB and Traitié that Yeager offers in this new essay, a complement to his piece in Echard's "Companion to Gower" (JGN 24.1), in which he provided the first convincing description of the thematic and narrative unity of CB. Christine de Pisan's Livre de Cent Balades was both a token of and an inspiration for the great fashion for the ballade in the early 1390s which, given the extensive contacts between French and English during the period, would certainly have been communicated to both poets and readers in England as well. Chaucer's ballades might well all date from this period, Yeager suggests. Traitié, since it does not use the envoy, is likely to be the earlier of Gower's two collections, probably dating from about 1390; and pointing to its affinities with CA – its similar use of Latin glosses, its use of ten of the same narratives as CA, its appearance within MSS of CA – Yeager argues that it was originally written for inclusion with CA, probably in the original Ricardian version. He thus has little patience with the notion that the work was meant as a wedding gift for Agnes Groundolf, pointing out that, with her Flemish name, there is little reason to suppose that she would have been the recipient of a composition in French. CB is more difficult to date precisely. In the only surviving copy it is preceded by a dedication to Henry IV, already king. That MS cannot, however, be the original presentation copy, Yeager points out, because of its lack of decoration and because of the diversity of its contents, lacking any single unifying theme. He offers some speculations on how the MS might have been assembled. More importantly, the separation of the existing copy from the original composition of its contents allows him to suggest that CB might have been first presented to Henry early in the 1390's, when interest in the ballade was at its highest, and even perhaps in 1393, when Gower is known to have received from Henry his collar of SS; and it also allows him to infer that the work might well have circulated beyond its royal patron. For in the last part of his essay, Yeager argues that neither collection should be viewed as intended for any particular reader but as addressed instead to contemporary poets, as Gower took up the challenge to demonstrate his mastery of the new form and responded with a strong statement of his own views on the morality of love, and to posterity, as part of the same attempt to secure his future reputation that is evident in the poet's colophon and in the design of his tomb. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 24.2] 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 John Gower's Audience: The Ballades Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Penn State University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Williams, Tara Nicole Published Williams, Tara Nicole. "Inventing womanhood in late medieval literature." PhD thesis, Rutgers The State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick, 2004. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review "This dissertation uncovers the origins of the word womanhood in the fourteenth-century works of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. It then traces the evolution of the term and concept through the fifteenth century, combining philology with feminist readings. Although many feminist medieval projects have analyzed female characters, the underlying idea of womanliness has received little attention. I argue that post-plague social and economic shifts created a linguistic gap: new ideas about women's roles necessitated new vocabulary. Chaucer invents several terms to address this gap, including femininity and wifehood, but womanhood becomes particularly significant and its meanings evolve through various late medieval texts. Womanhood does consistently involve two issues: whether it is primarily interior or exterior (and, by extension, whom it includes or excludes) and whether it restricts or enables feminine forms of power. . . . While Chaucer focuses on its internal virtues, Gower imagines womanhood as embodied and performed; Chapter Three explores his divergent usage in the Confessio Amantis. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Inventing womanhood in late medieval literature Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Among the other genres of which it partakes, Rytting argues, Confessio Amantis can also be read as a marriage or conduct manual on the model of T"he Goodman of Paris," "he Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry,"and Christine de Pizan's "he Three Virtues." In presenting its ideal of a good marriage, it may be addressed specifically to Richard II, but it also certainly intended for a wider sphere, and its marital advice is continuous with its political concerns since for Gower "good government begins with self-government; [and] private morality leads to public morality" (115). The exploration of marriage takes place outside of the formal framework of the poem since so many of the most relevant tales arise only incidentally to the discussion of the Seven Deadly Sins, but the pattern that these stories create is nonetheless "carefully arranged" (116) in order to demonstrate the qualities of both good and bad spouses. The five important qualities of a good spouse, Rytting finds, are "honesty, compassion, mutual counsel, fidelity, and appropriate displays of affection" (118). Rytting discusses how these qualities are exemplified in the positive examples of "Florent," "Mundus and Paulina," "Constance," and "Tobias and Sara," and in the negative examples of "Iphis," "Albinus and Rosemund," "Tereus," and "Orestes." The final tale of the poem, "Apollonius of Tyre," summarizes the preceding lesions by providing examples of each of the qualities of a good spouse. It arises, moreover, out of the discussion of incest, which might be seen as the "direct opposite of marriage" since it is "a type of love that by church law cannot end in matrimony" (116). Following the tale, Venus cures Amans of his love which, "while not incestuous in any narrow sense, is unlikely to lead to marriage because of Amans' age, impotence, and failure to attract the interest of his beloved " (117). Her action stands in contrast to her intervention of behalf of the lover's plea in the tale of "Pygmalion." Implicit in this contrast "is the message that fruitful love (love with marriage potential) should be developed, while unfruitful love (love without marriage potential) should be avoided" (ibid.). As a marriage manual or conduct book, CA differs from the other well-known examples in that it is evidently addressed to men as well as women, and while the expected obedience of the wife is not absent from the poem, the qualities of a good spouse that Gower extols are expected of both spouses and they are reciprocal. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 22.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rytting, Jenny Rebecca Published Rytting, Jenny Rebecca. "In Search of the Perfect Spouse: John Gower's Confessio Amantis as a Marriage Manual." Dalhousie Review 82 (2002), pp. 113-126. ISSN 0011-5827 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 In Search of the Perfect Spouse: John Gower's Confessio Amantis as a Marriage Manual Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Crowley, James Patrick Published Crowley, James Patrick. "Imagining and transmitting medieval literary authority: William Langland to Ezra Pound." PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1999. Open access at http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqm&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:9959736 (accessed January 22, 2023). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review "This study considers the nature of medieval literary authority, and the ways in which it has been constructed in several important medieval and non-medieval texts and contexts. Most of the editorial and critical work with medieval manuscripts has operated under the assumption of a single, static, and non-historicized authority behind each text, but literary authority is always potentially diffuse. Works we currently know in more than one version receive the majority of attention here, because they show in a very tangible way the results of dynamic interaction among authors, audiences, and other agents of literary production and consumption. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 and transmitting medieval literary authority: William Langland to Ezra Pound Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân Published Echard, Siân. "House Arrest: Modern Archives, Medieval Manuscripts." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000), pp. 185-210. ISSN 1082-9636 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review Echard's essay is not concerned with Gower directly nor even with the scribes who produced the manuscripts of his works, but instead with our own engagement with and response to Gower and how these are mediated by the conditions in which his manuscripts are now housed and preserved. Drawing upon her own experiences with a wide range of libraries but focusing in particular on two copies of "Confessio Amantis" (Columbia University, MS Plimpton 265 and Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M690), she offers a number of loosely connected observations on "how archival practices and archival encounters structure and control our reading of medieval books and the texts that they contain" (p. 186). Gower is an ideal object for exploring the paradoxes of preservation, for as Echard points out, his manuscripts are often valued either for their ornate production or for the author's association with Chaucer by those who have little interest in reading his text. She places the present conditions of preservation of medieval books in contrast both to the use to which these manuscripts were put by their original owners and also to the habits and interests of the antiquarians and collectors who acquired many of the most important of the manuscripts that are now found on the west side of the Atlantic. Were it not for the collectors and their archivist descendants, she acknowledges, many fewer copies would be available to us now, yet the conditions imposed by the necessity of preservation make our modern encounter with medieval books entirely different in nature from that of their owners, who both used them in the best sense of the word and also often abused them. Nowadays "one worships at the altar of the manuscript; one does not doodle on it" (p. 189). In a historical aside, Echard traces the mixed motives of the antiquarians who replaced the owner-readers, including "nostalgia, competition, and the commodification of culture" (p. 194) as well as, in some instances, a genuine interest in history and in preserving the past. Even the efforts of the collectors are now effaced, however, as manuscripts are kept apart from the rooms in which they are read and are offered to readers individually, in isolation from the collection of which they were made a part. Each of us who has experienced a frisson in the presence of one of these ancient books will understand Echard's remarks on how our reverence amounts to a kind of fetishization, complete with the creation of a priesthood (ourselves) with unique rights of access to the sacred objects. She gives some consideration to the ways in which librarians can impose their own assumptions about the value of a book: in foliation, for instance, privileging either the text itself, the original material form, or the present material form (the prevalent modern practice); or giving greater attention to the illustration than to the text. And in looking to the future, she contemplates a final paradox: that the digitization of an increasing number of manuscripts may make them more widely available in one sense while perhaps also resulting in greater restriction of access to the actual physical book. Echard has no single conclusion to offer but instead simply requires us to think about our own assumptions and practices in a way that we might not have before. Her essay is provocative and often entertaining. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1.] 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 House Arrest: Modern Archives, Medieval Manuscripts Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Arner offers a detailed explication of the image of Nebuchadnezzar's statue in the CA Prologue, which she sees functioning as part of Gower's address to those readers in "the upper strata of urban non-ruling groups"--the more prosperous shopkeepers, artisans, and craftsmen--who "had participated in or who had sympathized with the English Rising of 1381" in order to win them over to the ideology of the ruling class and to break their identification with the lower ranks of society (239). The statue represents history as predetermined. "The inevitability of this development ratifies the social order and social relations" of Gower's time and "positions medieval men and women as helpless object of great forces" (243) which have also operated over a vast expanse of time, implying that "political action is futile" and encouraging "resignation and accommodation" (244). CA nonetheless "addresses readers as having agency," but it "works to direct this agency to-ward specific ends" (245). The statue also suggests that Gower's England stands at the end of time. "Therefore, movement into the future holds little in store but further decline," and "the only hope for the continuation of Gower's society lies in the stabilizing measures offered by conservative groups" (246). The statue offers an image of society itself, with each component representing a different rank. The lowest order - the statue's feet - is the most unstable and threatens the survival of society as a whole. The statue thus suggests the need for control and repression of the lowest ranks. By placing late medieval England at the end of time, it also positions it outside of time, and paradoxically, while affirming that current social conditions are the result of an inevitable process, it also affirms the irrelevance of history to the present in order to delegitimate claims for relief based upon a history of oppression. "The erasure of the history of subordinate groups" (249) is also evident in the summary of history that accompanies the statue, which is all about the rulers rather than the ruled, suggesting that "subordinate groups . . . were irrelevant" (250). The identification of each class with a particular material "argues for an essentialist understanding of the social order" which therefore "cannot be changed" (251). Finally, "by conceptualizing rank and, by extension, interest apart from ongoing political struggles, the poem discourages readers from rearticulating their wants and needs in relation to a shifting ideological climate" (252). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 22.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Arner, Lynn Published Arner, Lynn. "History Lessons from the End of Time: Gower and the English Rising of 1381." Clio 31 (2002), pp. 237-255. ISSN 0884-2043 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 History Lessons from the End of Time: Gower and the English Rising of 1381 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Fischer offers one of the most detailed comparisons of the two most frequently compared passages in Chaucer's and Gower's poems. She draws a general distinction between what she labels the "baroque" style of WB and the "classical style" of Gower's Confessor, borrowing her terms from H.H. Meier. The former she describes as "emotive, committed, excited" and the latter as "calm, detached, orderly;" and she analyzes the specific stylistic features in which this general difference is manifested. Gower uses longer and more complex sentences, he uses more parataxis and makes more use of the passive voice, his vocabulary is less familiar and more specialized, and he uses fewer exclamations, fewer intensifying words and expressions, less anacoluthon, and less alliteration, in general reflecting rationality and design rather than emotion and impulsiveness. He also uses less direct speech, and his version is less dramatic, less suspenseful, and more prosaic and matter-of-fact. The WB's style reflects her direct involvement in her story, while the Confessor is less interested in the characters than in the moral of the tale. Fischer acknowledges that WBT represents the differences between Chaucer and Gower at their greatest extreme. Her examination of the Clerk's Tale reveals a style closer to the Confessor's than to WB's, and thus range and variety themselves must be considered a characteristic of Chaucer's style. The Confessor's style, however, is identical to Gower's, for their purposes in telling their tales are the same; and echoing Schmitz (1974), though she does not cite him, Fischer concludes that Gower's style is a consciously chosen attempt to match "form" and "content" and to reflect the reason and harmony that he teaches in the orderliness and harmoniousness of his poem. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fischer, Olga C.M. Published Fischer, Olga C.M.. "Gower's Tale of Florent and Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale: A Stylistic Comparison." English Studies 66 (1985), pp. 205-225. ISSN 0013-838X Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Tale of Florent and Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale: A Stylistic Comparison Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower derived his tale of "Geta and Amphitrion" (CA 2.2459-95) from the "Geta" of Vitalis of Blois, a widely circulated twelfth-century Latin comedy roughly contemporary with the "Comedia Babionis," from which Gower drew his tale of "Babio and Croceus" (5.4808-62), and the "Pamphilus," borrowings from which have been detected in both MO and VC. The roles of the male characters have been altered in Gower's version, however. Either he knew the source only indirectly or, more likely, he indulged in a playful misreading in which Amphitrion usurps the role of Jupiter, Geta usurps the role of his former master, and the priestly narrator himself supplants his esteemed auctor in this intentionally garbled imitation, all illustrating the sin with which Gower's exemplum is ostensibly concerned. Both Paul Olson (1986) and Roy J. Pearcy, "The Genre of Chaucer's Fabliau-Tales," in Leigh A. Arrathoon, ed., Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction (Rochester, Michigan: Solaris Press, 1986), p. 372, cite Gower's use of the "Comedia Babionis" in a discussion of the influence of the Latin comediae on Chaucer's fabliaux. Pearcy identifies a fourteenth-century English MS in which "Pamphilus," "Babio," and "Geta" all appear together, and notes that Chaucer too refers to the "Pamphilus" in his "Tale of Melibee," 1555 ff. See also Macaulay's note, "Complete Works," I: 429. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wright, Stephen K. Published Wright, Stephen K.. "Gower's Geta and the Sin of Supplantation." Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 87 (1986), pp. 211-217. ISSN 0028-3754 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Geta and the Sin of Supplantation Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Grady asks us to consider Gower's account in the original Prologue of CA of his chance encounter with Richard II as they were both being rowed upon the river as a fiction constructed by the author both to flatter the king and to aggrandize his own relation with him. The passage has its roots, Grady notes, in several earlier texts: first, as Yeager and Astell observe, in the account of Arion in Book IV of the Fasti that Gower alludes to again at the end of the Prologue; but also in the historical record of another less happy encounter on the river between Richard and Archbishop Courtenay in March, 1385, which ended with Richard drawing his sword and chasing the Archbishop from his boat; in Gower's own advice on controlling his angry impulses in his epistle to the king in Book VI of VC; in the image of the rudderless ship in the VC Prologue; and in the episode in 1381 when Richard set out to meet the rebels on his barge and then changed his mind before disembarking, angering the rebels and provoking their invasion of the city. Each of these is rewritten in the CA Prologue in a "recuperative gesture designed to rescue the king from an already established reputation for irascibility and violence of temper" (4), showing the king at peace, at leisure, and in control both of himself and of his kingdom, and replacing the rebels with the image of the loyal poet. Grady's essay is a particular pleasure to read. Along the way, he draws upon the appealing picture of playwright and queen in the movie "Shakespeare in Love" in order to argue that our wish to believe in the truth of the river meeting derives from our own fondest fantasies about the relation between poet and patron; and he pauses several times to comment in choral fashion, in passages printed in italics, on his own New Historicist methodology and on the tactics that he uses to disarm objections to his argument. (The only tactic that he doesn't comment on is the most disarming one of all, which is this metacommentary.) "Shakespeare in Love" is self-consciously fiction, of course, and Gower's Prologue still only presumably so. One has to pause, moreover, over the ease with which Grady equates "historicizing" a passage with rendering it historically suspect: that it serves all the purposes that Grady describes does not prove that the event in question did not take place, unless nothing ever happens as one wishes. By a different reading, the historical record of the earlier encounter between the Archbishop and the king makes Gower's account of a river meeting all the more plausible. Grady does force us to reconsider our understanding of this passage, however, and if not to dismiss it, at least to give more thought both to why it is included and to the way in which the event is represented in Gower's poem. [PN; Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 22.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Grady, Frank Published Grady, Frank. "Gower's Boat, Richard's Barge, and the True Story of the Confessio Amantis: Text and Gloss." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44 (2002), pp. 1-15. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Boat, Richard's Barge, and the True Story of the Confessio Amantis: Text and Gloss Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Gower's Lancastrian Affinity: The Iberian Connection." Viator 35 (2004), pp. 483-515. ISSN 0083-5897 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review If the place of "Confessio Amantis" in literary history were not already secure, the poem would still be notable as the first work of English literature to be translated into a contemporary vernacular. Both Portuguese and Castilian translations survive (the latter based on the former). Yeager surveys what is known about the origin and circulation of these, based on the evidence contained in the two MSS and on what is known and can be deduced from the historical record about the two named translators, the one named scribe, their patrons, and the circles in which the latter moved; and nowhere else is this information presented in so complete or so engaging a form as in this essay. Yeager gives central importance to Queen Philippa of Portugal (daughter of John of Gaunt), both for the origin of the Portuguese translation and for a likely role in the production of the Castilian translation for her sister, Queen Catherine of Castile; and he cites the long tradition of learning among the members of the House of Lancaster in support of the inferred literary interests of the two women. He also argues that they may have known of CA and even have had copies of the completed portions of the unfinished poem when they left England for Iberia in 1386. He also considers other possible routes by which CA might have reached the peninsula, however, including others in the 1386 entourage and the connections – social, political, and commercial – that resulted from John of Gaunt's marriage to Costanza of Castile in 1371. One effect of this union was the strengthening of ties between England and Portugal, including a treaty in 1372 that recognized John and Costanza's claim to the Castilian throne. The community of English merchants in Lisbon and Porto grew considerably, and Robert Payn, the Portuguese translator, may have had his origin there. The two surviving MSS suggest that Gower's readership on the peninsula, as in England, extended well beyond the royal family. Gower's anti-authoritarian stance and his advocacy of "comun profit? would have been quite congenial in the political climate of both countries during the first half of the fifteenth century. The production of the two translations is also consistent with other contemporary literary activity, including a multitude of other translations and the composition of such works as the Libro de buen amor. The royal connection remains of central importance in the explanation of the circulation of CA in Iberia, Yeager concludes, but there is also much more to say about the many others who may have played a role, about the tastes to which the work appealed, and about the needs that it supplied, as Yeager so admirably reveals. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 24.1] 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 Lancastrian Affinity: The Iberian Connection Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Moll, Richard J. Published Moll, Richard J.. "Gower's Cronica Tripertita and the Latin Glosses to Hardyng's Chronicle." Journal of the Early Book Society 7 (2004), pp. 153-158. ISSN 1525-6790 Gower Subject Cronica Tripertita Influence and Later Allusion Review Three rubrics in the unpublished MS of the first version of the English metrical Chronicle of John Hardyng, completed sometime in the 1450's, cite Gower's Cronica Tripertita as a source, and two of these include 7- and 8-line passages of verse based directly upon Gower's poem. Moll notes the changes in the text due both to scribal confusion and to Hardyng's somewhat greater sympathy for Richard. He points out the importance of these passages as evidence that Cronica Tripertita was known well outside of the small circle of Gower's original readers in the decades after his death, and that it evidently circulated alone, detached from Vox Clamantis. He also notes that "In several places, Macaulay quotes the second version of Hardyng's Chronicle [which had appeared in print, but which lacks these three glosses], apparently as an independent witness to corroborate details in the Cronica. Given his knowledge of the text, however, it is more likely that Hardyng derives these details from Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Cronica Tripertita and the Latin Glosses to Hardyng's Chronicle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân Published Echard, Siân. "Gower's 'bokes of Latin': Language, Politics, and Poetry." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 25 (2003), pp. 123-156. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Vox Clamantis Cronica Tripertita Review Currently fashionable attempts to "romance the vernacular," Echard writes, borrowing an expression from Sarah Stanbury, together with the prevalent characterization of Latin as an "authoritative monolith," tend to imply that "Latin does not have its own complexities, an implication which makes it difficult to read Latin as subtly--or even as politically--as we might read other languages" (124 n.). Echard challenges these and several other assumptions about the relations among the languages in late medieval England in her examination of Gower's use of Latin in VC and TC in light of Gower's own comments about language in these and in his other works. With regard to VC and TC, she argues that rather than expressing Gower's inherently conservative political agenda, Gower's choice of Latin for his two most historically oriented works "is far more complex, and more fraught with poetic uncertainties, than it has traditionally been understood to be" (130). VC contains recurring references to language, in the poet's references to the difficulties of his own speaking in Book 1, in the numerous references to the "speech which is not speech of the peasants" (134), and in the denunciations of the misuse of public rhetoric in the allusions to Wat Tyler and John Ball. The latter, combined with the poet's anxieties about his own discourse, lead to "an awareness of the perils inherent in Latin as well as the vernacular" (137). In the books that follow the opening vision, "Gower points many of the criticisms of the estates . . . in terms of the misuse and misapplication of both language and learning, and the ease with which people can be misled by educated abusers of both the spoken and written word" (139). His suspicions extend to "untrustworthy poets or, at best, unscrupulous people who take advantage of poetic words; for indeed, it seems that any wrought speech is necessarily anathema, and contrary to God's desire" (143). His comments here are echoed in MO, which in lines 14665-76 suggests that "Latin is particularly subject to misuse precisely because it carries the flavor of clerkly authority and the appeal to scholarly pride" (143), and in his often quoted praise of plain speech in Book 7 of CA. "The topos is not unusual, but Gower's almost obsessive return to it, no matter when or in what language he writes, is striking, as is his tendency to be both confident and pessimistic about plain truth's ability to be made manifest" (145). Gower's shift to English in CA might suggest that "Gower finds both his poetic voice, and unproblematic access to truth, in the voice and forms of the common folk" (145), but in fact Gower remains no less concerned about the evasive nature of language, as evidenced by his comments in the Prologue on the commons. In each of his works, therefore, Gower reveals his "deep uncertainty about the relationship between his poetic tongue(s) and the truth" (148), a concern that certainly does not exclude Latin. Echard concludes with a consideration of Gower's additions and revisions to VC and CA, including his rewriting of the account of his works in the colophon to CA. She points to Gower's "lifelong habit of aggregating, as well as revising, his texts" and his "constant--almost obsessive--desire to revisit his poetic mission" (154). In this repeated effort, "Rather than moving toward any kind of simple resolution of the dilemmas inherent in poetic speech, it seems Gower might in fact have recognized that his own multilingual, multiversioned oeuvre was in the end the closest approach he could make to truth, if her were not simply to fall silent and pray" (ibid.). "The progression from the Vox to the Confessio," she concludes, "and through the various revisions of each of these works, is not an evolution, if that means a discarding of outdated language or modes. It is, instead, an accumulation, in response to the recognition that England is a complex political space, requiring of its poet an equally complex poetic voice. Gower's head rests on three books, not one, and Latin remained with England's poet to his dying day, and beyond it" (156). It is no small part of the value of this essay that it contains, in its notes, a valuable survey of the on-going discussion of the issue of vernacularity in late medieval England. And as a bonus, Echard also provides her own excellent verse translations for each of the passages that she quotes from VC. One has to wonder how much Gower's reputation might improve in the sadly monolinguistic culture that has succeeded his if we could induce her to complete the translation of the entire poem. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 23.1.] 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 'bokes of Latin': Language, Politics, and Poetry Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Mitchell, J. Allan Published Mitchell, J. Allan. "Gower for Example: Confessio Amantis and the Ethics of Exemplarity." Exemplaria 16 (2004), pp. 203-234. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review The "Confessio Amantis" is a "profoundly inclusive but indeterminate poem," Mitchell claims; it is "comprehensive" but not "coherent"(205). It contains a vast diversity of tales and lessons, but it resists reduction to single consistent ethical or moral argument; it contains the materials for a moral lesson, but not the lesson itself. But rather than being a failure, either on Gower's or on Genius' part, this diversity is a reflection of the type of ethical instruction that the poem offers, in which Amans or the reader must actively participate in the choice of the moral lessons that are applicable to his or her own case. Mitchell chooses as his examples of the poem's "incoherencies" not the instances in which Genius' moralization seems to have little to do with the tale that he has just told but instead the conflicts that arise among the different tales and their moral lessons. The lesson of "Pygmaleon," for instance, on the effectiveness of speech in bringing about love's rewards (with its distant echoes of the statements in the Prologue on man's responsibility for his own fate) seems to be inconsistent with the lesson of "Jupiter's Two Tuns," which echoes instead the opening lines of Book 1 on the caprices of love's fortunes. The tale of "Phebus and Daphne," in which Daphne is turned into a tree because of Phebus' impatience, seems to offer advice on conduct that is directly contrary to that suggested by "Demephon and Phillis," in which Phillis becomes a tree because of Demephon's neglect. But Gregory long ago advised that the message must be modified according to the listener: "The slothful are to be admonished in one way, the hasty in another" (quoted on p. 227). Each lesson is valid under particular circumstances, and the proper course of conduct may also lie in discovering a mean. The comprehensiveness of the poem thus places a burden upon the listener or reader to discover the most relevant application. "In the strongest sense, the poem remains to be invented through reader response" (221), and the proper test of the poem itself "is not whether the text is formally coherent or logical, but whether it can stimulate a practical ethical response" (218 n.) As Mitchell puts it in his conclusion: "What evidence Amans finds useful and appropriate to his own case of unrequited love is for him to invent--not "ex nihilo," but in the old rhetorical sense, out of the myriad possibilities he has been proffered in the form of moral exempla on various topics. Exempla, as much as instantiating conventional morality, are therefore in a sense on a quest for practical precepts that practitioners have not yet formulated, or at the very least supply moral guidance which, as I've argued, one can affirm, refine, or deny. Gower's Amans, like any other practitioner, is thereby invited to explore sundry stories (e.g. about fortune and free-will, haste and hesitancy) in order to, as it were, triangulate a present, proportional response that m[a]y not be reducible to any single precedent. The technique has a strong theoretical basis in that there is no universal and invariable abstract form of the good according to which every moral act can be automatically judged apart from contingent circumstances. As Aristotle said and the 'Confessio Amantis' emphatically affirms, 'the good is not something common which corresponds to a single Idea.' The good is instead perforce instantiated in a multiplicity of ethical practices. . . . Moral cases, as Aquinas elaborates in his exposition of Aristotle's Ethics, themselves tend to be 'infinitely diversified.' It is therefore necessary to acquire a sense of the diversity and to cultivate the discretion that enables one to judge cases as they arise. Readerly circumspection, rather than textual coherence, becomes crucial" (233). This is a challenging and thought-provoking essay, for what it says or implies about Amans' role, Genius' role, and the nature of the teaching in the poem, and for the way in which it deals both with those who seek the meaning of the poem in a single ethical or philosophical proposition and with those who throw up their hands and proclaim that whatever argument the poem proposes is undermined within the poem itself. It is also pleasingly well written. Mitchell has a book on "Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower" forthcoming from Brewer in October. We should look forward to it. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society 23.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower for Example: Confessio Amantis and the Ethics of Exemplarity Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Bratcher, James T. Published Bratcher, James T.. "Gower and Child, No. 45, 'King John and the Bishop'." Notes and Queries 246.48 (2001), pp. 14-15. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review Noting that no source for Gower's tale of "The Three Questions" has ever been identified, Bratcher points to the ballad of "King John and the Bishop" (Child, no. 45) as a possible analogue. The characters in the ballad are different (King John and the "Bishop of Canterbury") and the riddles differ too, but in both tales, the king is motivated by envy, he grants a similar period of time before the answers are required, and "a dependent relative of inferior standing, prompted by love and loyalty" (14) steps forward to provide the answers. In the ballad, it is the bishop's half-brother, a shepherd, whose answers are more clever than wise but which nonetheless finally win him a stipend from the king as well as a pardon for the bishop. A check of Sargent and Kittredge's edition of Child reveals that there are actually two versions of this ballad extant. Both their notes and the references in Bratcher lead to a number of other tales that are structurally similar to Gower's, but as Macaulay points out in his note (Works 2.478), the closest known analogue for the riddles themselves remains MO 12601-12. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 21.1] 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 Child, No. 45, 'King John and the Bishop' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Bratcher, James T. Published Bratcher, James T.. "Function of the Jeweled Bridle in Gower's 'Tale of Rosiphelee'." Chaucer Review 40 (2005), pp. 107-110. ISSN 0009-2002 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review Bratcher contrasts Gower's "Rosiphelee to the 13th-century French "Lai du Trot," which, he asserts, despite the many differences, "in some form . . . must have contributed" to Gower's tale, for these are the only two known versions of the medieval "purgatory of cruel beauties" in which a lone woman is punished for her neglect of love. The differences between the two reflect Gower's "deliberate reworking" of the earlier tale. The most significant of these is the attribution to the woman in the vision of a richly decorated bridle as a token of her (unhappily too tardy) submission to love. The introduction of the horse's headgear makes possible a pun on the ME word for bridle (< OE brīdel) and that for bridal (< "bride-ale," the custom of drinking in celebration of a wedding) in the woman's admonition to the heroine, "To godd, ma Dame, I you betake, / And warneth alle for mi sake,/ Of love that thei ben noght ydel, / And bidd hem thenke upon mi brydel" (CA 4.1431-34). The pun, judging from the citations in both OED and MED, appears to be completely plausible, though the spelling of the two words remains distinct and Gower nowhere else uses "bridale" in the marital sense (but cf. the "Cook's Tale," CT I.4375). As far as I can tell, it has gone unnoticed, and it is more significant than Bratcher realizes, for however subtle, it introduces the only allusion in the tale to marriage as the goal of one's submission to love (Bratcher's summary is incorrect in this regard), and it thus anticipates Genius' counsel, in the passage that immediately follows, that "thilke love is wel at ese, / Which set is upon mariage" (4.1476-77). As Bratcher notes, a complete edition of the "Lai du Trot" by Glyn S. Burgess and Leslie C. Brook is available at http://www.liv.ac.uk/sml/los/narrativelays.pdf. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 25.1]. 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 Function of the Jeweled Bridle in Gower's 'Tale of Rosiphelee' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Penn State University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bowers uses entente and the distinction that Chaucer and Gower create among different "narratological levels" as a way of exploring some key differences between Confessio Amantis and The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer never introduces himself except as a companion on the pilgrimage, though a more distinctively authorial voice does emerge in the Retraction, and we are constantly aware of the possibility that "Chaucer the poet" and "Chaucer the character" are not the same. The lack of any explicit statement, together with the fact that the poem remains unfinished, leaves the author's precise entente unclear, presumably deliberately. Gower introduces himself as poet in the Prologue, composing CA at Richard's behest, and introduces his character as lover only in Book 1. The explicit addition of another "level" "actually simplifies, rather than complicates, the project" (32), since it makes authorial entente clear. In WBPT, Chaucer introduces a third voice whose motives are different from those of both the poet and "Chaucer the character," and it is from such disjunctions that irony results. There is no such distinction, however, between Genius and the Gower of the Prologue, both of whom advocate reason for the purpose of restoring harmony to the world. WB's rejection of reason is analogous to the breakdown of order that occurs in the first fragment of CT, and therein lies the largest difference that Brower finds between the Gower's and Chaucer's poems. The two authors take "opposite views of remembrance" (36). Gower seeks to reform the present with lessons from the past: he moves from disorder to order by way of moderation and reason, and ends with certainty and optimism in his poem's epilogue. Chaucer moves from order to disorder by way of Pride (the storytelling contest) and division. There is no closure but only a retraction in which Chaucer finally turns his attention to the salvation of his soul. "He is just beginning what Gower has just ended. And this retraction is part of the reason why Chaucer's work is canonical and Gower's is not" (38). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 22.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bowers, Robert Published Bowers, Robert. "Frame is the Thing: Gower and Chaucer and Narrative Entente." In Geardagum 19 (1998), pp. 31-39. ISSN 1933-8724 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Frame is the Thing: Gower and Chaucer and Narrative Entente Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Perhaps the most ambitious book on Gower ever written. In it, Yeager provides a wealth of insight into each of Gower's major works in his attempt to define Gower's "poetic," the assumptions about language and poetry that give coherency to his writing. His first chapter, "Stylistics," deals with the poet's attitudes towards language and his craft. Gower had a deep concern for language, Yeager asserts, citing as evidence his care for the correctness of his texts. And his comments on poetry, particularly in the opening lines of CA, reveal both a consciousness of style in relation to audience, and a strong sense of the poet's duty both to his country and to his language, echoing similar statements by Gower's admired models, Virgil and Ovid. Gower took both responsibilities quite seriously, and what appears most conventional about his verse -- his choice of English, his use of octosyllables, and the unvarying regularity of his meter and his rhyme -- Yeager attributes to his conscious attempt to create a poetic language that was adequate to his highest moral concerns. Yeager describes Gower's metrical practice in particular as a novelty and experiment, a conscious response to the metrical discord of his English predecessors and an attempt to set new standards for the language. The remainder of the chapter demonstrates that metrical regularity alone did not inhibit Gower in any important way. Yeager examines the poet's manipulation of pace and tone, his ability to create different "voices" for his two principals, and his use of alliteration, rhyme, and punning, illustrating at the same time both Gower's consciousness of language itself and his great skill in linking sound and sense. The second chapter, "Gower's Lines," extends the discussion of Gower's use of language to his relation with and attitude towards his predecessors, focusing on VC, MO, CB, and Traitié. The model for Gower's construction of his verse, Yeager maintains, is provided by his use of extracts from Latin authors in VC, following the example of the late classical cento. Giving the best available account of the manner in which VC was composed, Yeager rejects the notion of Gower as mere plagiarist, and describes him as an innovative experimenter with cento technique who consciously adopted the poetry of the classical past into a new context and for a different purpose. This technique of the cento is reflected in the "patchwork" construction of both MO and CA, and more importantly, in the self-conscious way in which Gower adopts borrowed language in each of his other poems. In MO, CB, and Traitié, the sources are not classical, but the French love poetry of Gower's immediate predecessors, particularly the Roman de la Rose. In the indelicacy of his language and the amorality of his presentation of love, Jean de Meun would have represented to Gower the abandonment of all of the moral responsibility that Gower felt was incumbent on the poet. His response was to adopt the vocabulary but to reject the ethos, and to turn the language of love poetry to higher ends. In MO, his strategy is reflected in the poem's structure: Yeager describes MO as an "anatomy of desire" set within "an envelope of amorous address," speaking to all lovers in the opening lines, but turning to the Virgin at the end, as the poet/narrator finally achieves his true calling (anticipating also Yeager's account of the structure of CA). In CB and Traitié, Gower's borrowing of the verse form and vocabulary of courtly poetry is more palpable, but his rejection of its values is all the more direct, as he "rehabilitates" the language of love in order to celebrate chaste marriage. Chapter three, "Transformations," focuses on Gower's adoption of narrative material in CA. Beginning with some of Gower's characteristic habits as a storyteller -- his use of "pointing," his rare use of visual imagery, and the ways in which he depicts a character's inner thought -- Yeager emphasizes both the deliberateness of effect and the "moral resonance" that Gower achieves with sometimes limited resources. He takes particular issue with C.S. Lewis, who found Gower little interested in his characters' mental processes, and points out how frequently and effectively Gower uses action to reveal cognition, especially in the case of Amans. Turning to broader issues in Gower's use of story material, Yeager classifies the exempla of CA into five different types according to the degree of transformation from the source and the positive or negative way in which the tale serves the announced moral lesson. He then gives a close reading of "Albinus and Rosemund" and "Tereus," illustrating how the poet, by his excisions and additions, has shaped the stories to the purposes of his frame, and how he has made them both psychologically and artistically more satisfying than the versions he found in his sources. In chapter four, "Exceptions Prove the Rule," Yeager confronts the portions of CA that have traditionally posed the greatest difficulties for readers: the discussion of Labor in Book 4; the lengthy account of the religions of the world in Book 5; the treatment of Sorcery in Book 6; the whole of Book 7; and the focus in Book 8 on the sin of incest. In each case, he attempts to show how these departures from the expected pattern of the confession conform to, and help define more clearly, Gower's overall plan for his poem. Yeager is at his best in explicating the poem in this chapter: his analyses of these sections and his explanations of their place in the context of CA as a whole are insightful and in large part original. Certain themes recur in his discussion: Gower's urgency to place his treatment of love in a broader moral context; his concern for the proper use of language, especially in poetry; his "adversarial rewriting" of the literature of the past, including, again, RR; and structurally, the anticipation in these sections of the poem's epilogue and conclusion. In the last chapter, "Arion's Final Song," Yeager strives to define precisely how Gower's plan for CA gave coherency to the diversity of materials that he assembled in his poem. The key, he argues, is to be found in the figure of Arion that Gower introduces at the end of his Prologue, the poet whose "lusti melodie" was capable of bringing peace and harmony to all creation and among all classes of men. Gower thought of himself as that Arion, Yeager maintains. The fictional story of the lover Amans is his "lusti melodie." It is also, however, the story of the narrator's growth in wisdom, and at the end, having rejected the foolishness of his love, this narrator "Amans/Gower," now bearing particular resemblance to the poet himself, offers his own prayer for peace in the epilogue, and also retells the story of his conversion in this poem so that we may follow his course and help bring about the harmony that he prays for. This course leads him by way of a redefinition of love, to include more than mere romantic passion, and also by way of a discussion of the roots of political harmony in Book 7. In each respect in which Gower has broadened the discussion of love, he has surpassed the ethical limits of the traditional love allegory even while imitating its form. CA is thus "a love poem designed to outgrow itself" (p. 265), and also another attempt to reform the language of the poetic tradition from which it springs. This summary can hardly do justice to the sophistication of Yeager's argument, or to the success with which he has woven together the diverse elements of CA into a whole and embraced Gower's different poems within a coherent vision. Portions of Yeager's analysis will already be familiar to readers of Fisher, Peck, et al., particularly his attempt to use Gower's social doctrine as the basis for the unity of Gower's work, but Yeager's discussion is richer, more detailed, and more sensitive to the complexity of Gower's verse than that of most of his predecessors. Yeager has provided a provocative new view of Gower as a poet, and because of his detailed familiarity with his subject and the sharpness of his eye, there is something of value on nearly every page, even for those who are not persuaded by his central thesis. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 10.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "John Gower's Poetic: The Search for a New Arion." Publications of the John Gower Society, 2 . Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Backgrounds and General Criticism Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Cinkante Balades Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower's Poetic: The Search for a New Arion. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D. S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Santano Moreno offers important new evidence on the dates of both the surviving Castilian translation of CA by Juan de Cuenca and the lost Portuguese translation of Robert Payn on which it was based. It has been assumed that the Portuguese version was done during the reign of João I (1385-1433), who was married to Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt (ob. 1413). Santano Moreno finds, however, that the Spanish translator's rendering of Gower's "an hundred pounds" (CA 5.2719) as "seys çientas coronas" corresponds almost precisely to the rate of exchange fixed by decree during the first years of João's successor, King Duarte (1433-38), who was also well known for his own literary activity. Such a date is not inconsistent with what is known about the life of Robert Payn. Duarte is also known to have corresponded with his cousin Juan II of Castile about their common interests in literature, accounting for the subseqeunt transmission of the work into Spain. Santano Moreno cites Juan de Cuenca's reference to himself as a "vesjno de la çibdad de Huete" to demonstrate that the Castilian translation could not have been done before 1428, the year in which Huete first received a royal charter. He also provides a new date for the single surviving manuscript: where it has been believed until now that was written between 1400 and 1450, Santano Moreno maintains on the basis of the watermarks and the hand that it must date from the last decades of the fifteenth century. In the course of his argument, Santano Moreno summarizes most that has previously been written about the two translations, and he provides a bibliography. His essay is now the best place to begin for anyone interested in the transmission of Gower's work outside of England. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 10.2] [This article also appears as "Some Observations on the Dates and Circumstances of the Fifteenth-Century Portuguese and Castilian Translations of John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." SELIM 1 (1991): 106-22.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Santano Moreno, Bernardo Published Santano Moreno, Bernardo. "The Fifteenth-Century Portuguese and Castilian Translations of John Gower, 'Confessio Amantis'." Manuscripta 35 (1991), pp. 23-34. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Fifteenth-Century Portuguese and Castilian Translations of John Gower, 'Confessio Amantis' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Hatton's examination of Gower's alterations of the tales he borrowed from Ovid in Book 3 provides a succinct demonstration of the ironic mode of reading and interpreting CA. Three premises are evident in his study. Genius, "a personification of man's natural urge to reproduce his species, . . . represents a carnal force" (p. 257), and is thus neither a proper confessor nor a reliable guide to the meaning of his own tales. Amans himself is deeply in need of spiritual correction, guilty of "lecherous designs" (p. 262) and "inordinate concupiscence" (p. 263). The tales offer the needed correction, but in a way unperceived by both Genius and Amans: some of the tales Genius manages to get right, but in most, he either twists the story to support an invalid lesson, or ignores the traditional moralization. In both cases, the readers can supply the true meaning from their own previous familiarity with the tales. Applying these premises to Book 3, Hatton comes up with some rather new readings for a number of tales, and discovers a previously undetected pattern to Gower's, if not Genius', instruction. To summarize only the high points of his argument: In "Canace and Machaire," Genius alters Ovid in his attempt to excuse the children's incest. In fact, they and their father are equally to be blamed: the tale illustrates the two components of the "sensate" part of the human personality, concupiscence and irascibility, and shows how the indulgence in lechery leads to a surrender to wrath, exactly as has happened in Amans. The baby adds an allegorical dimension: born of a surrender to concupiscence that parallels that of Adam and Eve, the baby is "expelled into a wilderness by the anger of the father" (p. 264), and becomes subject to the natural law that leads to death. In "Tiresias and the Snakes," Genius tells only half of the tale found in Ovid: juxtaposed to "Canace and Machaire," the parting of the snakes suggests a disturbance of the balance between irascibility and concupiscence, with its tragic consequences. In being transformed from a man into a woman, moreover, Tiresias is changed from a spiritual to a sensual being. "Jupiter, Juno, and Tiresias" is also allegorical. Jupiter equals human reason, and Juno sensuality. In deciding against Juno, Tiresias aligns himself with reason. "In revenge sensuality may blind him physically, but his spiritual nature gives him a higher kind of sight" (p. 266). (Hatton actually misrepresents Gower's version here, and overlooks some significant departures from Ovid.) The following tales illustrate the disastrous consequences of surrender to the passions, while Diogenes, like Socrates earlier, provides an example of control of the passions for Amans to follow. "Pyramus and Thisbe" illustrates the dangers of self-destructiveness that attend a surrender to the passions. Genius' alterations emphasize the irrationality of the lovers and their service to Venus and Cupid, and thus their similarity to Amans. And in "Phoebus and Daphne," the alterations support the traditional moralization of the tale as a confrontation between concupiscence and virtue in which virtue is both preserved and rewarded, but Genius misses the point, attributing Phoebus' lack of success to Fortune. In sum, Genius' lessons on wrath are sound enough, but the principal lesson that emerges from these tales, undetected by the confessor, is that as long as Amans remains a servant of concupiscence and of Venus, he cannot hope to escape wrath or to act in a reasonable way. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 10.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hatton, Thomas J. Published Hatton, Thomas J.. "John Gower's Use of Ovid in Book III of the Confessio Amantis." Mediaevalia 13 (1989), pp. 257-274. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower's Use of Ovid in Book III of the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In CA 4.234-43, under the rubric "Lachesse," Gower tells the story of how Robert Grosseteste lost seven years' worth of work on a magical head of brass because of a single moment of neglect. Macaulay's note to the tale mentions just one analogue (for which he does not provide the date), and notes that similar magical powers were attributed to Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus. Breeze provides a great deal more information about the appearance of tales of talking heads, made of brass and other materials, during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The earliest version he cites is from William of Malmesbury, who attributes the magical head to Pope Sylvester II. Other analogues are found in French, Italian, and Spanish, and Breeze collects a number of interesting allusions from Welsh authors. The head is attributed in these stories to Virgil, to Albertus Magnus, and to Stephen of Tours, among several others; the tradition linking it to Roger Bacon seems to have been particularly viable, but only from the mid-sixteenth century on. Among the versions that Breeze describes, Gower's seems to be the earliest to attribute the head to Grosseteste (the analogue Macaulay cites was written c. 1502), and also the first in which the head is destroyed because of the owner's own neglect. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 10.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Breeze, Andrew Published Breeze, Andrew. "Roger Bacon's Head of Brass." Trivium 23 (1988), pp. 35-50. 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 Roger Bacon's Head of Brass Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Chaucer had two sources for Man of Law's Tale, Gower's tale of Constance, and Gower's source, the version of the story in Trevet's "Chronicles." Most earlier studies (notably Block's) have simply assumed that Trevet was Chaucer's principal source, and have credited Gower only with a few small details that Trevet does not provide. A fairer consideration of the three texts side by side not only restores some of the importance of Gower's version, but also yields a very different picture of how Chaucer set about composing MLT. The basic story, of course, is identical in all three versions. In his choice of details, Chaucer can often be found turning from one source to the other, suggesting that he had MS copies of each before him as he worked. The most general difference between Gower's version and Trevet's is that Gower's is much shorter and more carefully focused: it is Gower who first raises Constance herself above the background of the chronicle account of her life, and who first emphasizes the pathos of the story. Gower also found a way of sharpening the focus of each episode, and of providing a memorable image or picture where Trevet was scattered or diffuse. In all these respects Chaucer consistently followed Gower's model, and it appears that both in the way that he visualized the story and in his general strategy for presenting it, it was Gower's tale rather than Trevet's that Chaucer chose to retell. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter Published Nicholson, Peter. "The Man of Law's Tale: What Chaucer Really Owed to Gower." Chaucer Review 23 (1991), pp. 163-181. ISSN 0009-2002 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Man of Law's Tale: What Chaucer Really Owed to Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Penn State University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Dingley examines the survival of the story of Philomel in medieval and Renaissance English literature, particularly the attempts to reconcile the Ovidian tradition of Philomel's rape and transformation with another tradition, deriving from Provençal verse, in which the nightingale is the harbinger of spring and the wakening of love. Chaucer, in "Legend of Good Women," omits the transformations of Ovid's version, and thus eliminates the association between Philomel and the nightingale, which elsewhere in his work is linked to love and springtime. Gower is the first author that Dingley has found who faces the inconsistency directly and tries to achieve some sort of reconciliation. Gower downplays the vindictive roles of both Philomel and Procne in order to shift all of the blame onto Tereus; and in portraying Philomel as a virtuous victim, he invents an entirely original reason for her silence in winter and her joyful song in spring (CA 5.5985-88): ashamed and unable to hide while the trees are bare, she is joyful that her sorrow is hidden when the leaves return--a paradox that according to the poet recalls the mixed joy and pain of love. Gower ``seems here to be infiltrating elements of the courtly tradition of the nightingale as harbinger of love in order to counterbalance and temper the morally bare conclusion of the Ovidian narrative'' (p. 80). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dingley, R. J. Published Dingley, R. J.. "The Misfortunes of Philomel." Parergon 4 (1986), pp. 73-86. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Misfortunes of Philomel Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review John Fisher dated Gower's CB to the early 1370's, as part of his argument on Gower's participation in the London Pui. If he is correct, CB contains the earliest surviving examples of rhyme royal by an English poet. Dean, like Macaulay, holds out for a later date, and presents a small number of evident imitations of Chaucer from ``In Praise of Peace'' and the ``Supplication'' in CA 8.2217-2300 (but not from Traitié or CB) to argue that Gower's use of rhyme royal in both French and English was based on Chaucer's. The bulk of his essay is an examination of Gower's use of the stanza form in these four poems, with frequent comparison to Chaucer. Unlike Chaucer, who adopted the rhyme royal stanza for narrative verse in such poems as T&C and 2NT, Gower used rhyme royal only for his monitory ``IPP'' and in his philosophically oriented love-lyrics. In CB, Gower adopts (much more straightforwardly than Chaucer) both his imagery and his narrator from his French predecessors. He also reveals the ``universalizing, philosophical tendency'' that comes to fruition in CA. The two poems that Dean examines closely reveal Gower's effective use of enjambement and the concluding couplet, and his skillful use of the stanza form to articulate his argument. Traitié demonstrates a similar degree of skill, but is less interesting poetically than CB. Its main interest derives from the juxtaposition of the treatise form and its moralizing glosses with the depiction of the lover's experience in the secular lyrics. The strengths of ``IPP'' are much like those of Chaucer's similar moral balades, and the rhyme royal stanza lends dignity, high seriousness, and elegance. The ``Supplication,'' finally, is Gower's ``most `Chaucerian' moment,'' deftly blending natural, colloquial language with classical allusion, all within the artifice of the stanza form, and manipulating both caesura and enjambement to give individuality and credibility to the traditional complaint. Dean's essay is a valuable discussion of verse that is rarely examined closely; his argument is marred, however, by some troubling mistranslations of Gower's French. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dean, James Published Dean, James. "Gower, Chaucer, and Rhyme Royal." Studies in Philology 88 (1991), pp. 251-275. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Chaucer, and Rhyme Royal Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Examines the frame narrative of Confession Amantis as the confrontation of two very different aesthetics, that of the poetry of fin' amors, which provides the language with which Amans' experience is depicted, and that of the "ethical poetic" which provides the underlying structure to Gower's poem. The courtly love lyrics, the allegorical love narratives, and the dits amoureux set the extremes of love in an atemporal poetic stasis which offers an endless possibility of fulfillment, and deal evasively with any hint of change or the passing of time that might pose a threat to the endlessness of youth. Even the dits amoureux are more lyric than narrative, and when old age is invoked, as it is by both Machaut and Froissart in poems often mentioned as models for CA, it does not have the finality that it does for Amans, and does not undermine the poet's commitment to his love. There are numerous echoes of this earlier verse in the portrayal of Amans, and the same poetry allows the largely non-narrative nature of Gower's frame. Like his predecessors, moreover, Amans is allowed to ignore the logical implications of the cruelty of Fortune and of Love to his pursuit. The reader is thus encouraged to read the poem as a traditional dit amoureux, and also therefore to think of Amans as young. The revelation of Amans' old age closes the poem abruptly by revealing his unfitness for courtly love. Gower invokes here the view of old age found in two very different sources: that of classical and post-classical Latin poetry, where old age is a time of physical, particularly sexual, debility, and that of Raison in Jean de Meun's portion of RR, who argues that old age can lead the lover from the follies and instabilities of youth into virtue. The ending also places Amans directly in the world of change and time, Fortune, Nature, and Christian morality that the poetry of fin' amors seeks to deny. The collapse of the frame narrative, and of Amans' self-deception, is also a revelation of the deception that has been practiced on the reader. It makes of the frame narrative itself a figure of worldly instability and deception, and implicitly reduces all poetry of courtly love to mere delusion. Even Gower's naming of himself at the end, which would have reminded the audience of the poet's own old age, and which recalls the statement on the poet's "feigning to be a lover" in an early rubric, constitutes a comment on the fictive and delusive nature of all such narrative. Gower appropriates the aesthetic of his predecessors, therefore, in order to to subvert it, and uses the frame of his poem as another exemplum of the misleading nature of all experience in an unstable world. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Zeeman, Nicolette Published Zeeman, Nicolette. "The Verse of Courtly Love in the Framing Narrative of the Confessio Amantis." Medium AEvum 60 (1991), pp. 222-240. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Verse of Courtly Love in the Framing Narrative of the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Discusses the depiction of the three major characters in Chaucer's ("Legend of Good Women"), Gower's ("Confessio Amantis") and Ovid's ("Metamorphoses")versions of the legend of Philomela. Gower preserves the favorable description of Tereus at the beginning of the tale, while Chaucer emphasizes his villainy. Despite opening the way for the "tragedy" of his transformation, however, Gower shows less sympathy for Tereus than he does for other characters overcome by love, and gives less attention to his psychology. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Oka, Saburo Published Oka, Saburo. "Characterization by Ovid, Gower and Chaucer of the Tereus-Procne-Philomela Story." Thought Currents in English Literature (Aoyama Gakuin University) 64 (1991), pp. 1-15. 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 Characterization by Ovid, Gower and Chaucer of the Tereus-Procne-Philomela Story Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review A detailed comparison of Chaucer's ("Legend of Good Women"), Gower's ("Confessio Amantis"), and Ovid's ("Metamorphoses") versions of the story of Philomela, including lengthy excerpts from all three texts. Each differs in arrangement and emphasis. In the scope of the plot, Gower follows Ovid more closely than Chaucer does, though like Chaucer, his central theme is the falseness of men, and where Ovid focuses on the three characters equally, Gower focuses on the two female characters, and Chaucer focuses on Philomela alone. Gower imagines the place and situation of Procne's request to Tereus more fully than the other two, but says less about the site where the rape was committed. Like Chaucer, he introduces direct discourse in the report of Philomela's cries. He gives more attention than the other versions to Tereus' homecoming and to the false story of Philomela's death, and adds the long passage of her prayer. He also gives the longest account of Procne's receipt and reading of Philomela's weaving. He preserves more of the women's revenge than Chaucer does, and all of the metamorphoses which Chaucer omits. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Oka, Saburo Published Oka, Saburo. "Chaucer's Transformation of 'The Legend of Philomela' in The Legend of Good Women." Thought Currents in English Literature (Aoyama Gakuin University) 63 (1990), pp. 79-109. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer's Transformation of 'The Legend of Philomela' in The Legend of Good Women Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Olsson, Kurt Published Olsson, Kurt. "John Gower and the Structures of Conversion: A Reading of the Confessio Amantis." Publications of the John Gower Society, 4 . Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Readers of JGN should be alerted that the copywriter who produced the advertising for this important new book seems to have read only the final chapter, and does not even come close to giving an accurate idea of its real contents. Olsson offers here a broad and detailed account of the structure of CA, in two different senses: first the relationship among the many components of its form, and second, its thematic structure, as Gower develops his argument from the Prologue to the conclusion. Olsson's most original contribution concerns the structure in the former sense. He describes the poem as a dialogue of several different voices: the narrator (e.g. in the Prologue); the "poet" of the Latin verses that mark the divisions in the text; the single-minded moralist of the Latin marginal glosses; Amans; and Genius, who himself speaks more than a single voice as he attempts to serve more than one master. None of these "voices" speaks for Gower himself: their interaction, however, provides the opportunity to raise questions, to consider problems, to elaborate "distinctiones," and to weigh alternative views which are finally reconciled only at the very end. In its assembling of a diversity of materials for a single purpose, Olsson invokes the model of the "compilatio," but in its posing of questions and its withholding of its resolution, the literary form that it most closely resembles, he argues, is the "demande." The conflicts and inconsistencies in the poem, particularly in Genius' discourse, have long been an obstacle, of course, for those who expected to find in CA no more than a versified sermon on the Seven Deadly Sins. Attempts to reconcile the great variety of views in the poem into a single coherent doctrine have given way more recently to the study of the poem's diversity. Both Winthrop Wetherbee and Alastair Minnis, for instance, have examined the creative tension between the Latin and vernacular portions of the text, in a collection reviewed in JGN 11.1. Olsson's is the most thorough and the most insightful study in the same genre. But while he finds a greater number of discordant voices in the poem than any previous critic, he attributes a more calculated purpose and a more specific end to the dialogue; and where Wetherbee, for instance, concludes on the poem's moral indeterminacy, for Olsson the uncertainty is all Genius', and is just a device to lead the reader through the process of discovering a moral truth. In a series of twenty short chapters, Olsson outlines the components of the structure as he finds them, and then proceeds to analyze the poem section by section to show how the argument proceeds. The themes that he traces -- nature, reason, grace -- and his account of how they are developed are familiar from his two long previously published essays on CA (see JGN 1.1, and 9.2), and as is usual of Olsson's writing, his account is too rich and too detailed to offer an adequate summary here. Some of the high points may be noted briefly: The Prologue, he argues, not only introduces some of the topoi of the poem, but also prepares the form that Gower adopts, for instance by emphasizing the uncertainty of wisdom and knowledge in this world. In Book 1, the disorders or the world are focussed upon love. The discussion of the "Sins of the Senses" raises the question of whether humans are compelled to love; in the rest of Book 1, the "jus naturae" is invoked to weigh the relation between compulsion and consent, both in Amans' behavior and in that of the characters in the tales. Book 2 presents positive examples of characters guided by "kinde" in Constance and in Constantine, though the excessive generosity of the latter raises the need for a guide beyond mere "kinde." Books 3 and 4 examines kinde further by distinguishing among grades of gentilesse, the highest form of which can only be attained through reason. In Book 5, the analogy to Midas shows Amans' love to be avaricious; the excursus on religions reveals it to be a form of fantasy akin to idolatry; and the tales, meanwhile, depict a world of vitiated nature urgently in need of grace. Book 6 contrasts the need for grace with Amans' hope and trust in Fortune; and Amans' need to grasp his own true likeness leads him, through his fantasy, to a "regio dissimilitudinis" instead. Book 7 presents the education that is the key to knowing oneself, the ability that Amans so sorely lacks, and it comes back to the question of choice, placing man in a field of causes that affect his moral decisions. It then frames the values that will be used to judge Amans' abandonment of both choice and reason in the final book. Book 8 begins with a statement of the need to restrain natural law with clear implications for Amans. At the end of the book, the categories of nature, reason, and grace are finally applied to Amans directly, and Gower uses Amans' old age as the means to articulate the need to understand one's own nature. Amans' recovery of his knowledge of himself allows him to review his life from a new perspective, and provides an analogy to England, which has also forgotten its true history. Most of these lessons emerge, of course, without the confessor's awareness: Olsson aligns himself with those who see Genius as an inadequate moral teacher, but in finding him merely indiscriminate, he does not join those who find that he actively leads Amans into sin. Olsson's argument also puts him firmly in the camp of those who find Amans guilty of an offense that puts him in need of moral correction: despite his very different view of the structure of the poem, his account of Amans' fantasy and self-delusion is very much like that offered by Peck. Also like Peck, he evaluates each tale as a moral exemplum addressed specifically to Amans' behavior and situation, and his thematic argument depends upon Amans' conversion to the morally correct stance that the poem advocates at the end. Despite the novelty of his views of the poem's structure, therefore, and even in contrast to them, this is in some ways a very traditional reading of the poem. But it is certainly among the best thought out and most thoroughly argued, and the thematic argument is solidly buttressed with evidence from outside the text. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] 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 John Gower and the Structures of Conversion: A Reading of the Confessio Amantis. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D. S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review MacAdam invokes Gower's CA as a point of comparison for his examination of a Spanish American novel, the Tres tristes tigres of Guillermo Cabrera Infante, first published in 1967. There is no suggestion of direct influence, but Gower provides a model for some of the procedures and forms that Cabrera Infante both adopts and parodies, including the flexibility of structure, the use of narrative for a didactic purpose, and the dialogue in the form of a confession that leads to the restoration of identity of the penitent, a conclusion that MacAdam compares to the conventional restoration of identity in the romance form. There is more on Cabrera Infante than on Gower here -- the critique that is offered is heavily indebted to Bakhtin -- but MacAdam gives an interesting perspective on some of the formal aspects of CA that are still being debated by Gower scholars. In Spanish. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor MacAdam, Alfred J. Published MacAdam, Alfred J.. "Confessio Amantis." Revista Iberoamericana 57 (1991), pp. 203-213. 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 Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This book presents the story of Apollonius in an Early West Saxon normalized text in parallel with the Late West Saxon version, and also contains the Middle English version in Confession Amantis. The three texts are footnoted, and the Early West Saxon version and Gower's version are equipped with glossary. In English. [Noted by Masayoshi Ito. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kobayashi, Eichi Published Kobayashi, Eichi. "The Story of Apollonius of Tyre in Old and Middle English." Tokyo: Sansyusya, 1991 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Story of Apollonius of Tyre in Old and Middle English. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Sansyusya, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review As her title indicates, Copeland's study is concerned with the relation between medieval translation and the traditional systems of rhetoric and hermeneutics, as they were inherited from classical authors and redefined during the Middle Ages; and with the ways in which vernacular translations appropriated some of the "cultural privilege" of the Latin academic discourse that shaped and informed it. Her opening chapters trace the interaction between rhetoric and hermeneutics as discursive constructs during the late classical and medieval periods; she then examines the vernacular translations of Ovid, Martianus Capella, and Boethius, which grow out of the Latin exegetical tradition but which reveal varying sorts of relationship to the source text. Her final chapter, on "Translation as rhetorical invention," treats Chaucer's Prologue to Legend of Good Women and Gower's Confessio Amantis. CA represents the furthest extreme of the development she describes: Gower adopts the exegetical structure of its predecessors, but that structure becomes so dominant that it accentuates the differences between Gower's text and its sources (hence CA is rarely examined as a "translation"). Gower's debt to the exegetical tradition includes his two "prologues," the marginal commentary, the ordinatio of the text, and the figure of Genius, who functions as a projection of the author, "a disguise for the author's auto-exegesis" -- all of which provide an interpretive framework within which the tales are to be read, and to which they are subordinated. The structure that dominates -- the principal means by which Gower reshapes his inherited material to his own moral purpose -- is the compilatio, with its accompanying divisio and ordinatio. Gower's use of divisio is evident not just in the classification according to the Seven Deadly Sins but also in the structure of Book 7; this book, a survey of human knowledge with emphasis on ethics, provides a hermeneutical key to the entire CA, integrating the poem on several levels while it shifts the thematic focus from the individual sinner to the need for common profit. But while divisio provides both a hermeneutical procedure and an epistemological system, it also used in CA to describe the discord and fragmentation of society, of history, and of language. Gower's own use of the vernacular is implicated, of course, in the fragmentation of language; while Latin culture seeks to contain disorder by an aritificial transcending of time and place, CA provides its own example of the divisioun that it condemns. But Gower adopts the ordering apparatus of divisio textus as a way of healing this divisioun, turning a hermeneutical tool into a form of ethical action, in so doing reconceiving the function of academic discourse and augmenting the value of the vernacular as a vehicle for social reform. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Copeland, Rita Published Copeland, Rita. "Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts." Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literatures, 11 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cambridge University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bertolet surveys the development of the story of Lucretia from its earliest surviving classical versions, in Livy and Ovid, through its most important medieval retellings to its appearance in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and Gower's Confession Amntis. The medieval versions, beginning with Jerome and Augustine, show an increasing interest in the predicament of Lucretia and a preoccupation with the individual soul, and a corresponding lack of interest in the social dimensions of the story, including the role of the family of the victim and the overthrow of the tyranny and oppression represented by the rape. Chaucer too focuses on the personal rather than the public aspect of the story. Gower, however, returns to the emphases of Livy's version, giving central importance to the two male characters, Aruns and Brutus; denouncing Aruns' betrayal of both civic and social responsibility, and of both kingship and kinship; and casting the story as a struggle between a willful tyrant and the power of the people. Aruns exemplifies the central sin of "division"; Brutus exemplifies the love of family and of nation as a unitive principle. Brutus' role as reformer resembles that which Gower assumes for himself, as spokesman of the voice of the people seeking restoration of order and of peace. And Aruns' fate constitutes a warning to the king of the dangers of popular revolt, a warning that went unheeded as Richard suffered the same fate as Aruns when the future Henry IV assumed the role of Brutus. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bertolet, Craig E Published Bertolet, Craig E. "From Revenge to Reform: The Changing Face of 'Lucrece' and Its Meaning in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Philological Quarterly 70 (1991), pp. 403-421. 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 From Revenge to Reform: The Changing Face of 'Lucrece' and Its Meaning in Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Part I of Archibald's book is a study of the sources and circulation of the Latin "Historia Apollonii" and its medieval and Renaissance retellings, including chapters on "Problems in the Plot" and "Genre, Reception and Popularity" in which she offers some comparative comments on the post-classical treatments of the story. Part II presents an edition of version "RA" of the "Historia," with an English translation and a selection of alternative readings from version "RB." There are also two long appendices: the first lists 43 surviving retellings of the Historia, both Latin and vernacular, in chronological order, with a selected bibliography and some comment on each, including, of course, both the Old English version and Gower's, and concluding with Shakespeare's "Pericles." The second presents 37 allusions to the story from other texts from the same period, including Chaucer's reference (probably to Gower's version) in Man of Law's Prologue. Archibald assembles a great deal of material here, and the principal value of her book will be to have gathered together so much in a single place. A large part of her discussion, particularly of the "Historia" itself, is based very heavily on the work of others, and most serious readers will want to depend less on Archibald and more on the earlier scholars whose works she catalogues in her notes. Similarly, the text of the "Historia" that she presents is of little independent value: it is a highly eclectic version, based heavily on the edition of Kortekaas but evidently freely revised, and without any textual notes whatever; there is no indication, moreover, of how the alternative readings from version "RB" were selected, or of how many were left out. Archibald's real interest is not the "Historia" itself but its later influence. She has a great deal to say about recurring themes and motifs, and about the common problems faced by later retellers, for instance the difficulties that medieval writers had in interpreting obsolete customs. There is much that is interesting and informative here. She has less to say, however, about individual retellings, and while she demonstrates the importance of considering each separate text with reference to the tradition from which it draws, she has left a great deal of room for the specialist's study of these later versions. In this regard, her treatment of Gower appears to be typical. While she treats it in contrast to the other surviving versions, she makes no effort to deal with the problem of Gower's exact sources. The "RA" version of the "Historia" that she reprints, first of all, is not the one that Gower used; and the question of which surviving copy of version "RB" is most like the text he did use never comes up. She also has little to say about the relation between the "Historia" and the source that Gower himself cites, in Godfrey of Viterbo's "Pantheon." Nor does she provide a full account of Gower's alterations: her comments on Gower's reshaping of the tale are limited to the areas that she has identified as "Problems in the Plot," and she makes no real attempt to account for Gower's conception of the tale or of the relation between its narrative and its "lesson." All of these questions are raised, of course, by her own discussion. Readers of Gower, especially those unfamiliar with the background of the tale, will find a great deal that is useful in Archibald's book (and they will want to keep the excellent endpiece map of Apollonius' voyages near at hand). But it is still only a starting point for the serious study of the tale, which is the longest and in some ways the most important in Confessio Amantis. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Archibald, Elizabeth Published Archibald, Elizabeth. "Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations." Cambridge: Brewer, 1991 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 Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Despite all of the interest in Gower during the last ten years, it is a safe bet that there are few who have gotten through the entire MO in Anglo-Norman, and in fact the poem is much less often considered by itself, as a whole, than it is as a compendium of allegorical and moralistic commonplaces which are extracted and cited in the study of other medieval authors. A translation into modern English is welcome, therefore, both to allow more efficient location of relevant passages but also to make it easier to get a sense of the entire poem. Wilson's translation was first done as a dissertation at the University of Miami in 1970, and it has been available to interested readers on demand from University Microfilms. It appears now in a revised version, with a preface, an introduction (somewhat shortened from the original, and still based almost entirely on Macaulay), some fifteen pages of notes supplementing Macaulay's, a more up-to-date bibliography, and a brief introductory encomium by R.F. Yeager. Wilson's prose is dry but usually to the point. To give some flavor, here are the three stanzas beginning at line 5125, introducing the discussion of Sloth: "To tell you now directly of Sloth, with whom the World intermarried, she gave birth to five daughters. Their disposition is such that they will never be worked in field or vineyard, nor will they be given up to the ordained prayers as they are commanded by sacred law. Rather they seek ease everywhere, and Somnolence, you should know, is the first of this brood. / 5137 Of Somnolence so much I can tell you: whoever is her proper offspring does his work by sleeping. If he has a bed he sleeps in it; if not, according to his mood, he seeks his entertainment elsewhere. But neither from request nor from coaxing does he labor but rather, as if heavy with sleep, both eyes closed, he dreams deeply and lies as if half dead, since he is buried in Sloth. / 5149 Somnolence lives in ease when she can sleep without objection on a soft couch enclosed by a curtain, where neither her subject nor her servant dares awaken her from any profit or damage; for then in ease she reposes and thinks of everything that will most please her delight. But if she must get up for any period of time, it seems to her a very bad thing until she can go back to her bed." The goal here is clearly to make the contents more accessible for readers with shaky medieval French; Wilson makes no attempt, and will do very little, to heighten appreciation of MO as a poem. Those who have worked with the University Microfilms version may also wonder if the translation can be relied upon. and it is a pleasure to report that the revised version by and large can, and that it is worth setting aside the old version for a copy of the new one. The original version contains some alarming mistranslations; the second stanza of the passage quoted, for instance, contains two errors in the older version which rather severely throw off the sense. A check of a much longer passage in the same section of the poem reveals that all of the obvious errors have been removed, and that there are other revisions as well at the rate of one for about every three lines, involving punctuation, word order, word choice, and substituting "you" for "thou," in each case an improvement. It is not clear, however, who should be given credit for the extensive corrections. Though Wilson, in his preface, thanks a number of people for their help in preparing the revision, the work of Nancy Wilson Van Baak, who is credited on the title page, is not otherwise acknowledged or described. The book is nicely printed and presented, though clearly with economy in mind (thus the line numbers are set within the block of text, as in the passage quoted above). A page header with the name of the virtue or vice being described would have been useful in orientating the reader; an index, too, would have been quite helpful, given the uses to which the poem is usually put. And one small but significant flaw in the layout would have been very easy to fix: though Wilson alludes to the loss of leaves at the beginning of the manuscript in his introduction, the first page of the translation contains no notice of the gap, and gives every indication that it is the actual beginning of the poem. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wilson, William Burton, trans. Van Baak, Nancy Wilson, rev. trans. Published Wilson, William Burton, trans. and Van Baak, Nancy Wilson, rev. trans.. "Mirour de l'omme (The Mirror of Mankind), by John Gower." Medieval Texts and Studies, 5 . East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1992 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations 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 Mirour de l'omme (The Mirror of Mankind), by John Gower. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Colleagues Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The surviving fifteenth-century Spanish prose translation of CA has suffered a fate quite similar to that of the English poem on which it is ultimately based (by way of a no longer extant Portuguese intermediary): despite its historical importance as the first major instance of the translation of a work of English vernacular literature into a foreign tongue, it was largely ignored until a revival of interest in the twentieth century. In the case of the Spanish version, that revival seems to be in progress at this moment. Santano Moreno's essay is for the most part a review of a new edition of the Spanish translation by Manual Alvar and Elena Alvar, eds., "Confesión del amante: Traducción de Juan de Cuenca (s. XV)" (Madrid: Anejos del Boletín de la Real Academia, 1990), which replaces that of Birch-Hirschfield, first published in 1909 and now almost unavailable. Santano Moreno offers several corrections to the account of Gower's life in the introduction, and adds some information on the dates and circumstances of both the Portuguese and Spanish translations, some of which is also contained in his own earlier essay (1991). He also points out some errors in the editors' transcription of the translation. The greatest value of this essay, however, may simply be to bring English and American readers up-to-date on Spanish scholarship on this important work. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Santano Moreno, Bernardo Published Santano Moreno, Bernardo. "Reflexiones en torno a la presencia de Confessio Amantis de John Gower en la península Ibérica." Fifteenth-Century Studies 19 (1992), pp. 147-164. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reflexiones en torno a la presencia de Confessio Amantis de John Gower en la península Ibérica Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Iwasaki considers constructions such as the following one, chosen almost at random from among the many examples that he cites: "Bot al the Marche of thoccident / Governeth under his empire, / As he that was hol lord and Sire CA Prol. 720-22). Iwasaki provides a table showing the number of examples of each of the different variations on this structure (that/which/the which; different antecedent pronouns) in both Chaucer and Gower, and discusses some of the constraints on choice among the different possibilities. Gower uses the structure more frequently than Chaucer. Only rarely does it suggest comparison ("like one that") or mean "in the capacity or role of one that" as one might expect from modern English; it is usually, as Macaulay suggests (English Works 1.469), and as the example cited illustrates, the equivalent of a modern English participial phrase ("being lord and Sire"), and most often implies a causal relation to the main clause. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Iwasaki, Haruo Published Iwasaki, Haruo. "The Expression 'as he which' in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Geibun-Kenkyu Journal of Arts and Letters 58 (1990), pp. 231-40. ISSN 0435-1630 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 Expression 'as he which' in Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The Latin verses are one of the least well known portions of Confessio Amantis, in large part because of the difficulties that they can pose; through the success of their translations, Echard and Fanger have also demonstrated the importance of these verses to the understanding of Gower's work. Their book presents all 70 Latin epigrams from CA as found in Macaulay's edition, with an facing-page English verse translation and notes on problems of interpretation and on the relation between the Latin verses and Gower's English text. The Preface by A.G. Rigg treats "Gower's Place in Anglo-Latin Literature" and his "Meter and Language." It is brief but well informed: the first part surveys English Latin writing of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and will be very useful to those who are more familiar with literature in English. His notes on the language are limited to what is idiosyncratic to Gower, but will be of help to anyone trying to deal with these verses on his or her own. The translators' introduction is concerned with the importance of what they refer to as the "machinery" of the poem, with the stylistic quality of the Latin verses, and with their relation to the English text. Their comments on the importance of word-play and ambiguity in the verses are an essential supplement to their translations. The value of the translations themselves is revealed by comparing them to the many less successful and occasionally inept attempts that have appeared in the published commentary on CA, which Echard and Fanger are gracious enough not to cite. This book is no mere crib, however: the translators have renounced mere prose translations in favor of their own verse renderings, which, though often strikingly successful both as translations and as poetry, raise some questions regarding the intended audience. The translators justify their choice in their introduction: through verse, they claim, they are better able to preserve the poetic effects, such as the functional ambiguity and paranomasia, of the original, and also to reflect the liveliness and merit of verse that is often thought of as dull. The second justification is certainly consistent with one of the expressed purposes of this book, which is to heighten appreciation of the poet. Prose has its advantages too, however, one being that it makes it easier to retrace the translators' steps back into the Latin, where the real interest of all serious readers must lie; and despite their claim, there are certainly adequate means in prose to describe if not to imitate the effects that they refer to. To give one example, which is not offered as typical, but which illustrates both some of the merits of this book and also the need to keep the Latin original close by, Echard and Fanger render the familiar opening epigram of Book 1 of CA in this way: "Created love to Nature's law subdues / This orb, and causes beasts to share one mind. / For love appears to rule this world as prince, / Whose help by all is needed, rich and poor. / In combat Love and Fortune equal are: / As snares for mankind both revolve blind wheels. / Sick health, vexed rest is love, a warlike peace, / A wound most sweet, fair ill, a pious fault." There is much to commend here, and line 6 in particular is probably the best that can be done with an awkward and difficult passage. A helpful note comments on Gower's "naturatus amor," easing whatever reservations there might be about "created love." Line 2, however, contains a problem: the original reads "et vnanimes concitat esse feras." Which is direct object and which is object complement is not clear. Others, such as Kurt Olsson (1992:27; see JGN 9.2) have taken it the other way around, reading "and incites everyone alike to be wild"; while Winthrop Wetherbee (1991:7; see JGN 11.1), sees a functional ambiguity. Atypically, Echard and Fanger provide no note, and one cannot be sure whether they rejected the alternate reading or simply did not consider it. And in the last two lines, they have silently altered the order of the designations of love, evidently for the sake of meter; in addition to making the translation less useful as a gloss, the translators have also altered the emphasis, however slightly. Some of their other translations are even freer, but the many inevitable quibbles over the most precise choice of word do not outweigh the service that Echard and Fanger have performed in making the most mysterious portion of the poem suddenly so much more accessible, and in so attractive a form. And while future commentators will probably want to work up their own translations, we will all still owe a debt to Echard and Fanger for confronting Gower's Latin verse as a whole and for the many solutions to particular difficulties that they offer. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 2.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân, trans., Fanger, Clare, trans. Published Echard, Siân, trans., and Fanger, Clare, trans.. "The Latin Verses in the Confessio Amantis: An Annotated Translation." Medieval Texts and Studies, 7 . East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1991 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Latin Verses in the Confessio Amantis: An Annotated Translation. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Colleagues Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Gower's emphasis on remembrance is as evident as his preoccupation with division," Chandler asserts; in fact, remembrance or memory provides the means of overcoming division -- within the self, within the kingdom -- and also the motif that unifies diverse materials of the poem. "For Gower, disunity corresponds to failure." Amans' love is not so much evil as irrational, and an instance of disunity or division: he is in conflict with himself -- his will is in conflict with his reason -- because of his infatuation, and because of this division he is unable to recognize and experience until the very end of the poem the deeper love governed by reason and charity. The progress towards the restoration of his reason and the reuniting of his divided self requires three types of remembering: that of the confession, most obviously; that contained in the tales, a "more socially oriented type of remembrance," offering the memory of the successes and failures of others; and "spiritual memory," which awakens in Amans the type of love governed by charity and good will in the poem's conclusion. These three types of memory correspond to the three major parts of the poem's structure: the frame; the body; and the beginning and the end. The confession, in which the first type of memory is contained, is "more the skeleton than the focus" of CA, since it occupies fewer lines than the tales, and Amans frequently has nothing to confess. He does reveal, however, that he has allowed his imagination to supplant his reason. Genius tries to reactivate Amans' memory as a way of strengthening his wisdom and his prudence; and unlike the moment of transformation when Amans sees himself in the mirror, the reinforcement of the habit of remembering works cumulatively upon his behavior, and helps make that transformation permanent. The tales themselves, the second and most prevalent type of remembering in the poem, contain frequent references to memory, and they are typically followed by exhortations and promises to remember. "The tales provide Amans with examples by which he can remember patterns of behavior to emulate or avoid," and they serve a dual purpose: to help unify Amans so that he can govern his own nature, and to help him regain his consciousness of social conventions so that he can function constructively within his community. Some, like "Apollonius of Tyre," also teach the value of a good memory. "Spiritual memory," the third type, becomes dominant in the poem's conclusion, when John Gower the author steps forward as a Christian rather than lover and citizen, beseeching that "in thilke place / wher resteth love and alle pes / Oure joie mai ben endeles" (8.3170-72). Taking issue with Hugh White's more pessimistic analysis of the conclusion (1988; see JGN IX, no. 1), Chandler argues the compatibility of the different ideals -- of earthly love, Christian love, and Reason -- that are offered in the end, and the success of Amans' "healing." The failure of Amans' love is not a condemnation of earthly love generally; Genius attempts to lead Amans to a different type of love, governed by Reason, represented by Apollonius. Venus' banishment of Amans from love once his reason is restored is suspect, since she represents a type of love that Genius himself has rejected, and does not exclude Amans from a higher form of love. "Learning how to unify reason and love comes from remembering the eternal perspective, but White places divine and earthly love in opposition, while Gower united them by subordinating the latter to the former." The "spiritual memory" that recalls divine love surpasses the other forms of memory, but it also encompasses them, and thus provides not just the conclusion but also the binding together of the other elements of the poem. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Chandler, Katherine R. Published Chandler, Katherine R.. "Memory and Unity in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Philological Quarterly 71 (1992), pp. 15-30. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Memory and Unity in Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The exemplar of incest in Confessio Amantis is provided by Venus and Cupid; key tales demonstrate the destruction that follows incest or the union with God that follows the transcendance of incestuous passion. Incest is used by Gower as a "microcosmic symbol of society's decay"; Amans is led by Genius to reject the incestuous model of Venus and Cupid. [JGN 12.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Donavin, Georgiana Published Donavin, Georgiana. "The meaning of incest in the 'Confessio Amantis'." PhD thesis, University of Oregon, 1992. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The meaning of incest in the 'Confessio Amantis' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The "Bedford Psalter-Hours" (British Library MS Add. 42131; after 1414) contains a program of 290 portrait illustrations in the initials marking divisions in the text. Many of these can be identified with contemporaries: there are three portraits of Chaucer (two of which Wright ascribes to the same master that did the well-known Chaucer portrait in B.L. MS Harl. 4866, Hoccleve's Regement of Princes), three of Hoccleve, and ten of Gower, more than of any other single figure, and quite unusually, the work of more than a single artist. In all ten (all of which are reproduced in this essay), Gower is portrayed as a balding, bearded, and modestly dressed old man, resembling the senex amans whose illustration appears in some MSS of CA. The "unifying motif" of the Gower illustrations is the poet's "moral authority," according to Wright, who associates the particular texts chosen for Gower's portrait with his reputation as a moralist, with his blindness, and with various aspects of his works. Wright gives greatest attention to the first portrait, which appears with the text "Voce mea domine clamavi" of Psalm 141 (142), immediately suggesting Gower's Vox Clamantis. On the opposite page, at the opening of Psalm 142 (143), appears a portrait of Richard II. Wright argues that the juxtaposition was planned: "At the most elementary level Gower represents good and Richard evil. Both are alike in despair: Gower appears at a psalm which is an appeal to a Lord who does not heed his prayers and Richard II illustrates the psalm of a soul in torment, a sinner who is facing eternal damnation." Richard is depicted as youthful in this portrait, resembling the image of the king in the Wilton Diptych. Wright uses Gower's absolving of the young king in his first version of VC to explain the anomaly, and she also suggests that VC may have influenced the portrayal of a youthful, redeemable king and the inclusion of John the Baptist as the king's sponsor in the Wilton Diptych, which she dates shortly before the Bedford psalter, c. 1413. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wright, Sylvia Published Wright, Sylvia. "The Author Portraits in the Bedford Psalter-Hours: Gower, Chaucer and Hoccleve." British Library Journal 18.2 (1992), pp. 190-201. 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 Author Portraits in the Bedford Psalter-Hours: Gower, Chaucer and Hoccleve Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This is part two of a longer essay comparing Chaucer's and Gower's versions of the same tales; the citation was taken fron the International Medieval Bibllography, which does not give the location of part 1, however, or any indication whether there is a part 3. The portion cited here discusses the tales of Virginia, Phebus, Nebuchadnezzar, Thisbe, and Medea in Canterbury Tales and Legend of Good Women and in Confessio Amantis, with some reference to Chaucer's and Gower's sources. The emphasis in on Chaucer's version; the comparison is limited to isolated observations on language and imagery leading to no general conclusion; and the essay as a whole is a lesson for all of us on the risks one takes when writing in a language that is not one's own. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Tanaka, Minoru Published Tanaka, Minoru. "A Comparison of Chaucer's and Gower's English Expressions (2)." Bulletin of the Daito Bunka University 27 (1989), pp. 143-160. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Comparison of Chaucer's and Gower's English Expressions (2) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In Vox Clamantis 4.601-2, Gower describes the visits of Genius to the nuns of the cloister: "Sit licet in capa furrata, dum docet ipse, / Nuda tamen valde iura ministrat eis" (trans. Stockton, p. 180: "Although he may be in a fur-lined cape while he is giving instructions, he nevertheless ministers his naked authority to them forcefully"). The "capa furrata" refers to the "fur-lined gown of an educated layman or cleric," according to Ronnick, and echoes other examples of the deceptiveness of attire in VC. The "nuda iura," while obviously referring to the method of Genius' instruction, also recalls an actual legal term found in both Justinian and Bracton, referring to ownership by mere possession rather than by right. But hasn't Ronnick missed another anatomical pun in the "furred cape"? The very next line describes the nuns as being "stoned" without being injured; on this passage, see Stockton's note, p. 420. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ronnick, Michele Valerie Published Ronnick, Michele Valerie. "Capa Furrata and Nuda Iura: Vox Clamantis, 4.601-2." Notes and Queries 237 (1992), pp. 444-445. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Capa Furrata and Nuda Iura: Vox Clamantis, 4.601-2 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower is given more than six pages (286-93) in Rigg's new survey, compared to the one-sentence than he gets in the epilogue to F.J.E. Raby's History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages (2 vols., 1934). The importance of this new book, however, lies neither in the prominence that it gives to Gower, nor even in what Rigg has to say about Gower's works, but in the company in which Gower appears here. The six-page account is mostly summary, of VC, TC, and the shorter Latin poems, with some pertinent critical comment and some description of the Latin passages in CA as well. But who other than Rigg would have thought of declaring that VC is "the first substantial Anglo-Latin work in unrhymed elegiac couplets since Henry of Avranches," and where else but here can one turn to find out who Henry of Avranches was, and what he wrote? Rigg surveys over one hundred named authors in this book, most of whom are entirely neglected in all conventional accounts of "English literature," plus an uncounted number of anonymous writers. For each, the description is necessarily brief, but well illustrated with excerpts, and alert both to the special qualities of each author and to his or her place in the literature of the time. The arrangement is chronological, and each chapter begins with a brief but useful account of the political and literary context of the period. What is most remarkable about all this is the sense of a history that Riggs is able to create, in contrast to the isolation in which so many writers in English seem to have worked during most of this time. And not only does Gower's Latin writing appear much less of an anomaly, but one begins to notice parallels to Gower's work in Rigg's account of some of his predecessors, suggesting whole new areas of research for future scholars for whom Rigg's book will be an indispensable vade mecum. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rigg, A. G. Published Rigg, A. G.. "A History of Anglo-Latin Literature 1066-1422." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Minor Latin Poetry Cronica Tripertita Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A History of Anglo-Latin Literature 1066-1422. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cambridge University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Concerned less with Gower than with Shakespeare. The "Gower" that Shakespeare creates as choral figure and presenter in "Pericles" is tritely moral, reductive, mechanistic, and consistently inadequate to what richness remains to the plot in the play, and in one sense he is a vast misrepresentation both of Gower as author and Gower/Genius the narrator of "Apollonius of Tyre." However, he merely anticipates the stance of some of the characters, including Pericles, before the many enigmas in the play. He also stands in for Shakespeare himself, as the confession of authorial limitations of the playwright who did not fully control the texts of his plays and who could not control the effects of live performance, but also as a claim to "authorial mystification and elevation," the "authorial medium through which eternal truth speaks" (p. 376), despite his own limitations. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lynch, Stephen J. Published Lynch, Stephen J.. "The Authority of Gower in Shakespeare's Pericles." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 361-378. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Authority of Gower in Shakespeare's Pericles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Considers two parallels between Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes and Book 7 of CA: Hoccleve's inclusion of his long, autobiographical prologue to the actual didactic treatise, which Blyth compares to the juxtaposition of Book 7 with the dialogue between Amans and Genius; and Hoccleve's version of the story that Gower told of Lycurgus. His goal is to reveal differences rather than Gower's influence; Hoccleve is less idealistic than Gower, he concludes, and his "ear is often much closer to the ground, closer to the world of daily social and political abuse and deception, than I think Gower's ever is" (p. 358). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Blyth, Charles R. Published Blyth, Charles R.. "Thomas Hoccleve's Other Master." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 349-359. 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 Thomas Hoccleve's Other Master Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Assesses Vox Clamantis, particularly Gower's depiction of the Peasants' Revolt in the visio of Book 1. The peasants attacked the most learned men in the city and tried to destroy knowledge; they themselves spoke in the voices of beasts; and they overthrew history in their attempt to establish a new social order. The visio which describes them, however, is a most learned poem, written in "ostentatiously bookish" cento, with a strong sense of its own debt to tradition and of the historical antecedents of the events that it describes. These intriguing contrasts in "modes of knowledge" which Galloway sets out become the occasion for him to consider, among other topics, Gower's view of his own role as a man of learning. Gower had every reason to feel personally threatened by the peasants. Unlike some others, however, his professional rank derived not from his position in the church or from his family connections, but simply from his knowledge. In his allegory of the downfall of civic professionals in VC 1.961-70, he defends the professionalization of knowledge in the London of his time. In referring to himself, however, he denies any link to professional or institutional traditions, and he presents the learning that is at the heart of his poetic vocation as conferred upon him, by Sophia or by the "comun vois," even when it is most clearly the product of his own labors with his sources. He also depicts his knowledge as a state of exile, making an unusual if not unique use of imagery drawn from Ovid. The role that he claimed allowed him to address as equals men who were socially far superior to him, such as Archbishop Arundel, to whom he presented a copy of VC. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew Published Galloway, Andrew. "Gower in His Most Learned Role and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 329-347. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower in His Most Learned Role and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review A valuable appreciation of MO within the context of the tradition from which it stems. Gower's colophon suggests that the work is best viewed as an example of devotional literature. Gower's choice of language may reflect an attempt to place his work in that tradition, since Anglo-Norman treatises on devotion evidently remained popular until the very end of the century. Within this tradition, MO is also not unusual for its bulk. The composition of vast formal treatises that were devotional rather than didactic in motivation seems to have been a fourteenth-century phenomenon, but there is no exact parallel for the choice of elements one finds in MO. One of the sources that Gower cites in the first part of the poem, the highly popular Meditationes wrongly attributed to St. Bernard, though very different in form, suggests the sense of "meditation" reflected in Speculum Meditantis, one of the Latin titles of Gower's poem, and it provides the rationale for self-exploration and a turning inward as a means of approaching God that provides the basis for the structure of MO. That turning inward occurs most clearly in the last part of the poem, recounting the life of the Virgin and of Christ, many details of which appear to have been borrowed from works in the devotional tradition. This inward shift, Bestul concludes, has parallels in Chaucer's work and elsewhere; and it "seems to articulate what appears to be a growing conviction in the fourteenth century that what was most needful was a private moral reform based upon individual self-examination, a reform which would hinge upon reflection and contemplation both as necessary activities and as sources of contemplation" (p. 323). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bestul, Thomas H. Published Bestul, Thomas H.. "Gower's Mirour de l'Omme and the Meditative Tradition." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 307-328. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Mirour de l'Omme and the Meditative Tradition Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Offers a more detailed description of Caxton's and Berthelette's editions of CA to supplement the accounts of Macaulay and of Pearsall (in Minnis' Responses and Reassessments, 1983). Many of his more valuable comments derive from his familiarity with the printers' other output; he points out, for instance, that Caxton's account of Gower is far less glowing than his remarks on other poets, and that though he placed Gower in a triad with Chaucer and Lydgate, he had evidently been influenced by Lydgate to consider him a lesser luminary. Caxton also made less effort than he could have to discover the facts of Gower's biography, and his edition of CA is printed more carelessly than was his norm. Berthelette's edition is less well known; Blake therefore reprints the complete texts of his dedication to Henry VIII and his address to the reader, and discusses the attitudes towards Gower and towards Caxton that they reveal. For both printers, who did so much to shape Gower's reputation, Blake concludes, Gower remained in the shadow of Chaucer, and was judged more a moralist than a poet. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Blake, N. F. Published Blake, N. F.. "Early Printed Editions of Confessio Amantis." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 289-306. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Early Printed Editions of Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Attempts to rescue Gower from a century's worth of comparison of his prosody to Chaucer's by distinguishing two different modes of versification, each with different goals. Gower's, he claims, is a "bookish" prosody, a "rhetoric of writing," meant for reading silently, quickly, and for long periods of time (as confirmed by Gower's own statements at the beginning of the Prologue), "a prosody cunningly adapted for the rapid but pleasant reading of many stories" (p. 260). The "unit of sense" of such a prosody is the verse paragraph, not the individual line; there is little opportunity, therefore, for attention to particular words or particular poetic effects. At the same time, Gower has no reason to adopt the "fictions of voice and the rhythms of speech" that are characteristic of Chaucer and Langland. The examples that Gaylord cites (which he prints free of Macaulay's editorial punctuation) demonstrate how different from speech Gower's prosody is, yet how it produces a forward moving narrative slowed only by deft rhetorical patterning at significant moments. As a more complete demonstration of how their prosody suits their different purposes, he gives a detailed comparison of Gower's tale of Florent to Chaucer's WBT: the first "is handled as a narrative with almost no conversation and no debate, moving unerringly to the demonstration that virtuous gentilesse will bring good fortune in life and love," and the second "is handled as an exemplum whose end has already been telegraphed in the Prologue, and whose every ethical point along the way is problematized, made the occasion for personal digression and argumentative emphasis" (p. 267). He concludes with a briefer discussion of "Apollonius of Tyre," again emphasizing the suitability of the prosody to the type of exemplary narrative that Gower constructs. Gaylord's analysis is based all but exclusively on Gower's tales; what is missing is any distinction between Gower's narrative style and the prosody of the dialogue between Amans and Genius in the frame, portions of which possess some of the qualities that Gaylord denies to CA altogether. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gaylord, Alan T. Published Gaylord, Alan T.. "'After the Forme of my Writynge': Gower's Bookish Prosody." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 257-288. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'After the Forme of my Writynge': Gower's Bookish Prosody Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This essay is not concerned, as might be expected from the title, either with Gower's lyrics or with Petrarch's, but instead draws a broader comparison between CA as a whole and Petrarch's own definition of his life and career as contained in his "Letter to Posterity." Despite the great differences in form between these two works, Wood asserts that their general aims are the same: the denunciation of the vanity of youthful pleasure, and the diminution of all earthly rewards as compared to heavenly. More specific details reinforce the impression of a common heritage: similar imagery to describe the departure from love, similar addresses to posterity, and similar modesty topoi. Petrarch's letter ends inconclusively, however, while he is still in a restless state of wandering. To account for this and some other differences in CA, Wood turns to Augustine's Confessions, with its case history of the author's own life and its movement from restlessness to rest. Rather than being merely reductive, Wood concludes, the similarities to these two earlier works suggest some of the ways in which Gower tried to create something different and better, following precisely Petrarch's counsel on a poet's use of his sources. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wood, Chauncey Published Wood, Chauncey. "Petrarchanism in the Confessio Amantis." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 239-256. 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 Petrarchanism in the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, A. S. G. Published Edwards, A. S. G.. "Gower's Women in the Confessio." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 223-237. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Takes issue with the prevailing critical orthodoxy that Gower showed particular compassion for his female characters. Beginning with the four virtuous women of Amans' final vision, and proceeding with a comparison between Gower's and Chaucer's treatment of some of the same figures -- Thisbe, Constance, Lucrece, Virginia, Phyllis, Medea -- he demonstrates that Gower's male characters receive greater attention to their feelings and greater sympathy for their suffering, that the women's feelings tend to be deflected or marginalized, that the women's situation is subordinated to that of the men around them, and that Gower's women in general tend to be defined by the way in which they affect the lives of men. Rather than being hostile to women, Edwards concludes, Gower simply appears to have felt that they were less significant than men. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] 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 Women in the Confessio Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Concerned with Gower's reading of Ovid. From epistle 11 of Ovid's "Heroides," written by Canace and ending with an allusion to the blood-stained letter in her lap, Gower has extracted a straightforward narrative, replacing ordo artificialis with ordo naturalis. Gower refuses to condemn the children's incest, though he is not unaware of the traditional medieval judgment that their love was unnatural. Instead he chooses to emphasize the "naturalness of the unnatural," in his manner of telling, in his attribution to Canace of a letter echoing the most conventional courtly rhetoric of love, and in the image of the child bathing in his mother's blood with which the tale concludes. This image, though not in Ovid's version, is nonetheless based on Ovid, as the literal child replaces the metaphorical child, Canace's blood-stained letter, as the victim of Eolus' wrath. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Spearing, A. C. Published Spearing, A. C.. "Canace and Machaire." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 211-221. 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 Canace and Machaire Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Shoaf, R. A. Published Shoaf, R. A.. "'Tho love made him an hard eschange' and 'With false brocage hath take usure': Narcissus and Echo in the Confessio Amantis." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 197-207. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review Analyzes two of Gower's tales as examples of Gower's typically "determinate" reading -- setting out prescriptively the meaning of the stories he retells from Ovid -- in contrast to the "indeterminate" reading more typical of Chaucer. The way in which Gower has chosen to read Ovid is informed, in Shoaf's account, by Freud. In the key lines that Shoaf cites, Gower reveals his "understanding of the economy of eros and thanatos in the human psyche" (p. 201), mixing classical and Christian notions in order to condemn Narcissus for his presumptuous refusal to give his love and Echo for her avaricious procuration. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] 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 'Tho love made him an hard eschange' and 'With false brocage hath take usure': Narcissus and Echo in the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Considers the complexity of structure of the CA. Simpson begins with Gower's frequent use of "enformacioun" and the related verb "enforme," which, he suggests, have more than the neutral modern sense, suggesting not just a body of knowledge but also its active effect upon the recipient, senses related to medieval philosophical ideas of "form." Imitating God's "forming" the elements and the soul of man according to a divine exemplar, the instruction in the poem will bring Amans' soul to self-knowledge and to its ideal "form." In Simpson's account, however, the process of instruction is not direct, but proceeds by way of the particular "form" of the poem, in which Genius is one participant in a dialogue among different faculties, representing the imagination or ingenium that mediates between will and reason. As such, he too is in need of "enformacioun," as he grows, during the course of the dialogue, into his proper function. Simpson surveys some familiar material here. He re-examines Genius' ancestry to demonstrate his width of sympathies, from rational to irrational; and he uses Book 3, one of the most problematic for Genius' role, as the source of examples for his analysis. At the beginning of the book, Genius' moral authority is questionable, as he seems to think rather like Pandarus, more interested in success in love than with rational control of sexual appetite. By the end of the book, however, under the prompting of Amans' questions, he moves towards conformity with reason, and shows through his tales "that personal ethics cannot be grounded on natural law alone; instead, the formation of a personal ethics demands a placing of the self within the human constraints which govern relationships in society more broadly. An ethics, that is, demands a politics" (p. 183). This is the central thematic message of the poem, according to Simpson; and the stories in the poem "are not only about the control of the will by reason, but they effect that very control in their listener Amans" (p. 185), as "Gower represents the naturally regenerative powers of the soul interacting with each other, bringing the will back into its proper mediation with, or conformity with the reason" (p. 187). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Simpson, James Published Simpson, James. "Genius's 'Enformacioun' in Book III of the Confessio Amantis." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 159-195. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Genius's 'Enformacioun' in Book III of the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Farnham, Anthony E. Published Farnham, Anthony E.. "Statement and Search in the Confessio Amantis." Mediaevalia 13 (1993), pp. 141-158. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Offers a view of the moral structure of the poem. Borrowing his terms from Dorothy Sayers, and invoking a contrast to Dante, he describes Gower's career as a movement from the poetry of statement to that of search, from "positive certainty of moral assertion" to the "attempt to struggle with whatever it is in human experience that denies such knowledge and resists its expression" (p. 142). His example of the poetry of search is, of course, CA. He examines how at the opening of Book 1 a multiplicity of voices -- the marginal commentator, the elegiac verse writer, Amans, Genius, who himself becomes at least two voices, the priest/narrator of the tales and the confessor who comments on them -- replaces the unity of statement of the Prologue, and how the clash of view that results "engages both the poem and its readers in an ever-widening search for active clarity of moral vision" (p. 146). He illustrates the effect with the first three tales of Book 3: he distinguishes five different interpretations of the tale of "Canace and Machaire" within the text itself; and he compares Gower's version of "Phebus and Cornide" to its four best-known predecessors to show how their conflicting moral interpretations are present as part of the background to Genius' telling of the story. This method of comparing different moral perspectives remains consistent throughout CA except in the history of religions section in Book 5, and in Book 7, which "seems to return to poetry of statement partly for the purpose of demonstrating that statement is at this point unable to further the search of the poem" (p. 152). In Book 8, the final tale, of "Apollonius of Tyre," is itself fittingly a story of search, and of "recovery of both love and order in life" (p. 154). Amans himself is not able to imitate Apollonius, and CA is thus a record of his failure, though not a failure itself, a brilliant evocation of "human experience groping blindly toward lasting vision" (p. 155). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] 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 Statement and Search in the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Adopts a sober view of the morality of CA. Following Fisher and Porter, Cooper sees Gower as preoccupied with disorder, both in society and in the individual. One of the major images that he counterposes to disorder in CA is that of balance, particularly as represented in the two pans of the scale which, when equal, are also stable. Gower expresses this concept not only in his specific allusions to weighing and to scales but also rhetorically, in his use of what Cooper calls "parison," the "balancing" of units of similar length and similar syntactic function. Gower's use of the device in CA is far more frequent than in his French or Latin works, perhaps because of the nature of the language, perhaps because of the possibilities afford by the four-stress line and Gower's use of couplets rather than stanzas. But it is also, she asserts, related to the dominant thematic concerns of the poem, and she goes on to provide literally dozens of examples in which Gower uses the device in thematically significant contexts. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cooper, Helen Published Cooper, Helen. "'Peised Evene in the Balance': A Thematic and Rhetorical Topos in the Confessio Amantis." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 113-139. 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 'Peised Evene in the Balance': A Thematic and Rhetorical Topos in the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review examines CB and CA from the perspective of French medieval love poetry, and finds in both cases that Gower's work is oversimplified when it is viewed merely as a rejection of fin' amor. The French poetry that Gower drew upon itself was more complex, more self-reflexive and self-critical, than such a judgment implies, he argues. But Gower's work too is also rich and complex. Calin offers a brief examination of CB, emphasizing its diversity of theme and its attempt to reconcile fin' amor and marriage, pointing out where Gower adheres to and departs from the conventions of his French predecessors. He also emphasizes the Frenchness of CA, and sees Gower as the "disciple" of Jean de Meun, Machaut, and Froissart, adopting rather than repudiating the "French courtly vision" in his complex, sophisticated and above all humorous way of treating questions of love. Calin gives a lengthy discussion of the comic potential generated by the juxtaposition of the penitential with the erotic, by the use (and misuse) of exempla, and by the contradictions inherent in the figures of Genius and Amans, giving particular attention to the ending of the poem. Like his most important French predecessors and also like his friend Chaucer, he concludes, Gower "emphasizes discrepancies," and creates a "comic masterpiece" which sums up "two centuries of courtly debate on man, woman, and desire" (p. 109). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Calin, William Published Calin, William. "John Gower's Continuity in the Tradition of French Fin' Amor." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 91-111. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Cinkante Balades Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower's Continuity in the Tradition of French Fin' Amor Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review A detailed examination of both Chaucer's and Gower's allusions to stories of King Arthur in an attempt to discover which texts they had read and to define their attitude toward Arthurian romance. Neither poet gives much more than brief allusion to Arthurian figures, and their references seem often to be based on no more than general knowledge of Arthurian tales. Gower, moreover, if he drew his tale of Florent from an Arthurian source, removed all reference to Arthur in his retelling. Kennedy's work of detection is thus all the more impressive. Chaucer was less interested in Arthurian literature than Gower, Kennedy concludes, though he knew Geoffrey of Monmouth, some version of the Tristan story, and either the cyclic or non-cyclic Lancelot en prose. Gower's taste was somewhat more old-fashioned: he knew more about Gawain than Chaucer evidently did; he knew more about Tristan, though it is still not possible to establish which work he drew upon; and in addition to the Lancelot en prose, he seems to have known more of the Vulgate Cycle, including at very least La Mort Le Roi Artu. He also seems to have taken these stories more seriously than Chaucer did. In using them as sources of moral lessons, his attitude toward the characters he mentions is usually disapproving, but he includes Arthur himself among the Nine Worthies, and his preference for a heroic conception of the king, Kennedy suggests, may explain his excision of Arthur from the tale of Florent, in all analogues of which Arthur plays a less than heroic role. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kennedy, Edward Donald Published Kennedy, Edward Donald. "Gower, Chaucer, and French Prose Arthurian Romance." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 55-90. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Chaucer, and French Prose Arthurian Romance Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Ferster, Judith Published Ferster, Judith. "O Political Gower." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 33-53. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Review Takes a sophisticated approach to the questions of Gower's politics and his poetry. Citing the diversity of labels that have been attached to Gower's political views by modern scholars, she points out the difficulties posed by the rapidly shifting political winds of Gower's time, and she also distinguishes between modern attitudes towards absolute monarchy and those of Gower, who lived at a time when monarchy was the only form of government available. She is able nonetheless to find evidence of Gower's judgment of the king -- in which he is subservient, but also to some degree subversive -- in his treatment of the related issues of the king's need for advice and the people's role in government. She chooses most of her examples from Book 7 of CA. The very inclusion of this book in light of contemporary discussion of the behavior of the king must be seen as an attempt to comment on contemporary events, she argues. In the tales she examines, she finds evidence of Gower heightening the contemporary reference and commenting directly on both the king and his counselors. The final source of wise counsel for Gower is evidently the people themselves, not the vulgar mob whom he denounces in the first book of VC, but the vox populi when it speaks as a unified and unanimous voice. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] 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 O Political Gower Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Offers a new attempt to explain the evident change in Gower's opinion of Richard II that is reflected in his revisions in CA. He focuses on the period 1390-91, the time when Gower revised the epilogue to his poem if the marginal reference to "anno quarto decimo Regis Ricardi" at 8.2973 is correct; and he finds evidence of Richard's growing "absolutism" and of his "quasi-autocratic approach to government" in his struggles with Parliament over their respective authority, in his reappointment to office of men loyal to him who had been dismissed by the Appellants, and in his display of the badge of the White Hart at the Smithfield tournament of October, 1390, in violation of the spirit of the Ordinance of 1390 restricting the use of livery (though this Ordinance specifically excluded the king). He does not explain why Gower, having become so disillusioned with the king, did not remove the dedication to the king in the Prologue until two years later, the "yer sextenthe of kyng Richard" (Prol. 25), the date that most scholars, following Fisher, have cited for Gower's change of feeling. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stow, George Published Stow, George. ""Richard II in John Gower's Confessio Amantis: Some Historical Perspectives."." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 3-31. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Richard II in John Gower's Confessio Amantis: Some Historical Perspectives." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review According to Roberts, Eliot's lines near the end of Movement I of the "East Coker" section of the Four Quartets, "I am here / or there or elsewhere," may echo CA Prol. 9, "Whan we ben dede and elleswhere;" if so, the allusion to Gower's passage helps clarify Eliot's use of "elsewhere" as a reference to a state beyond death. Roberts admits, though, that there is no way to certain that the evocation of Gower was deliberate. Indeed. He might have added that Eliot might not have needed Gower to suggest such a use for "elsewhere," and that without certainty that that was what Eliot really meant, there is really no evidence that Eliot had Gower in mind at all. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Roberts, F. X. Published Roberts, F. X.. "A Source for T.S. Eliot's Use of 'Elsewhere' in East Coker'." ANQ: American Notes and Queries 6 (1993), pp. 24-25. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Source for T.S. Eliot's Use of 'Elsewhere' in East Coker' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Peck addresses himself boldly and learnedly to one of the central concerns of recent criticism of CA. He begins by steering his way through modern notions of irony and textuality to settle on a definition that is traditional in implication, but adapted to the structure of the poem: "Irony, as I use the term, concerns itself with authorial intention, voicing, and the positioning of each voice, whether designated (Amans, Genius, Venus) or implied (author, source, ethical commonplace), in relation to the other" (p. 208). According to Wayne Booth, irony may be either "stable" and reconstructable, or "unstable" and indeterminate. The irony in CA appears to be stable, Peck notes; "that is, we have little difficulty determining the larger intention of the poet, for he is careful to explain his purpose in the Prologue and in the first section of Book I. Moreover, he adds Latin epigrams and marginal glosses to guide the reader as the poem progresses, and includes expository materials, especially in Book VII and the conclusion to Book VIII, which reiterate his basic goals" (p. 209). But if it is stable, it is not necessarily simple. In the main body of the poem, Gower creates a dialogue between two "unstable" figures, the comic, besotted Amans, trapped in the self-deception of his willful passion, and his confessor Genius, who doggedly but simplemindedly makes an appeal to Amans' non-existent reason. Amans' errors of judgment and self-perception are relatively easy to detect. Genius poses greater challenges: a "master at reduction" (p. 212), his simplified stories and simpleminded moralizations leave abundant room for, and indeed urgently require the exercise of, the reader's own ingenuity in the search for a stabilized meaning. Peck illustrates his argument with examples from the opening of Book 4, with Amans' first confession and Genius' first exempla on the sin of Sloth. Peck relentlessly problematizes the text, discovering inconsistencies in Amans' self-presentation and unanswered questions arising from individual tales and from their juxtaposition. He reaches forward and backward in the text in his search for the unspoken implications of Genius' lessons; at the same time, he offers a useful and cautious discussion of the dangers of reaching too far outside the text, allowing the traditional judgment of Aeneas contained in the commentaries on Virgil and Ovid to apply where it is consistent with Genius' purpose, arguing against the relevance of similar traditional sources regarding Ulysses, and allowing the traditional medieval interpretation of Pygmalion to enter in in a way that Genius does not intend. Peck's conclusion has as much to do with the complexity of Genius' role as it does with Gower's use of irony: "Genius resides at the crux of must issues of irony in the Confessio. Readings of the poem will usually be just as sound as they are subtle in dealing with the complexities of Genius' role. Too often he gets pigeonholed by one allegorical reading or another. Such placements may yield readings which seem stable if the premises of the commentators are accepted. But they must be seen as partial readings at best (p. 224). These partial readings, he implies, are all relevant, and place all of the burden on the reader to discover Gower's meaning. The irony of the structure of the poem that Peck implies but does not articulate is that such simple lessons should yield such great complexity, yet that from so much complexity Gower's purpose may nevertheless be ascertained. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A. Published Peck, Russell A.. "The Problematics of Irony in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Mediaevalia 15 (1993), pp. 207-229. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Problematics of Irony in Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review According to Donavin's analysis, incest is not merely the worst example of sexual desire unrestrained by law and reason in CA; it provides the basis for the moral structure of the entire poem, in two aspects. As represented in Venus and Cupid, first of all, it defines the moral failings of all who imitate Venus by serving her in the "court of Love." But as in common medieval interpretations of the Song of Songs and of Mary's relationship with Christ, it is also a figure for the transcendance of passion and for the soul's desire for union with God. During the course of the poem, Amans is brought from his more literal imitation of Venus' incestuous passion to a repudiation of the court of love and to an appreciation of the figurative, redemptive union which Venus and Cupid parody. Genius leads the way for Amans by means of his own deepening understanding of the meaning of incest in the tales in which it appears. These tales appear throughout CA. In "Canace and Machaire," Genius' obfuscation of the real issues in his attempts to excuse Canace and to evoke pity for her reveal the incompleteness of his moral development at this stage of the poem. In citing her lyrical complaint to Machaire, he mistakenly believes that the echoes of the practices of love's court ennoble their incestuous passion; in fact, they reveal the moral degeneration which is the prelude to the social chaos of the tale's conclusion. The tale offers a warning to Amans that his own pursuit of his lady is immoral. Incest is manifested in more sublimated form in the tale of "Orestes," in which the hero's lawless sexual violence against his mother is provoked by the gods and leads to social breakdown in a different form; and in "Constance," in which the two mothers-in-law are led to destructive violence by their jealous incestuous affection for their sons. "Constance" also reflects the redemptive aspect of incest in the heroine's relation with her father, in which incestuous passion is transcended, and which is transformed at the end of the tale into a "figure for the soul's arrival in heaven." The tale of Peronelle and the "Three Questions" also uses the incestuous overtones of the father's relation with his daughter as an allegory for the soul's merging with the divine. Both positive and negative aspects of incest culminate in the final tale of the poem, "Apollonius of Tyre." In Antiochus, literal incest is revealed most clearly to be a form of tyranny, both in the father's rule over his daughter, and more personally, in passion's rule over reason. Apollonius illustrates the conquest of both forms, in his escape from Antiochus and in his control of his feelings for his daughter. The final redemptive moment in the tale, moreover, is his reunion with Thaise, in which the potentially incestuous relation becomes the vehicle for Apollonius' spiritual emancipation. The tale provides the model for Amans' rejection of Venus' tyranny and his turning towards contemplation of God in the poem's conclusion. This summary hardly does justice to Donavin's case, which is presented both earnestly and with considerable subtlety. Her argument in general classes her among those who find that the purpose of the confession is to lead Amans away from his love, and in her allusions, for instance, to Amans' "complicity in incest" and his "overwhelming, ruinous lust" (p. 6), and to his "mental degeneration" (p. 38), we have some of the strongest statements in all of published Gower criticism of the notion that Amans' love for his lady is by its very nature wrong. Others have drawn a connection between the tales of literal incest in the poem; Donavin's most original contribution is to see the non-literal possibilities of the tales in which incest is only implicit. This is precisely, however, where her argument seems most strained. She must labor to prove that some of her examples even belong in a discussion of incest at all. Concerning Constance's first mother-in-law, for example, she writes, trying to compensate for Gower's inexplicitness on the matter: "The mother's motivation for murder is fear that some of the privileges of her 'astat' shall be transferred to Constance. And what shall be the main privilege of Constance's new 'astat' but the advantage of being the Sultan's consort, his sexual partner?" (p. 44); and on the next page, only the analogy of the first mother-in-law provides any explanation of the motivation of the second. Her treatment of Orestes' vengeance on his mother as a subminated act of incest instead of righteous wrath requires even greater distortion. To use Peronelle as a positive example of incest transformed, on the other hand, Donavin must not only read her relationship with her father overly subtly, but she constructs an allegory in which Alphonse, Peronelle's husband, stands in both for Jesus and for sinful mankind. What is missing in her discussion of this tale and those of Constance and Apollonius, and in her restriction to so small a number of tales from so long a poem, is sufficient recognition of the importance Gower gives to virtuous marriage, both as a goal for the lover and as an antidote to sin. For those who feel that the purpose of the confession, until the final scene, is to lead Amans to a more virtuous practice of love rather than to a renunciation of love altogether, neither the pattern that she draws nor her treatment of individual tales will be altogether compelling. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Donavin, Georgiana Published Donavin, Georgiana. "Incest Narratives and the Structure of Gower's Confessio Amantis." ELS Monograph Series, 56 . Victoria, BC: Englsig Literary Studies, 1993 ISBN 0920604641 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 Incest Narratives and the Structure of Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Englsig Literary Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Book 7 of Confessio Amantis begins as an account of Aristotle's education of Alexander, and it concludes with the lesson on Chastity and with negative examples of lecherous rulers. "Gower's book of statecraft thus ends up offering an art of love as a manual of advice for rulers and in the process conflates sexual regulation and political rule" (428). Gower's strategy derives from a long tradition of criticism of Richard II and his counselors that "persistently focused on its alleged transgressive sexual practices" (423-24), culminating "in a politically motivated allegation of sodomy that sought to substantiate Richard's unfitness to rule and to justify Henry IV's usurpation of the throne" (424). Hanrahan begins with a discussion of the broad and often imprecise meanings of both "sodomy" and "unnatural" in contemporary texts, simultaneously designating that which was considered unspeakable and also a wide range of non-sexual acts. Gower reflects contemporary anxieties over the king's counselors both in VC Book 6 and in the CA Prologue, and in changing the dedication of CA to Henry of Derby, Gower appealed to an exemplary figure of good counsel. In Book 7, the discussion of chastity begins with the claim that lust effeminizes a man, echoing directly one of the charges that was laid against Richard and his court, for instance in Walsingham; and Genius' use of Sardanapalus, who finally lost his throne, as his example anticipates the later justification of Richard's deposition for the same cause. Though Gower never mentions sodomy by name, the allegation nonetheless "haunts" his poem (436), as it does the other texts that assert that lechery can lead men to become like women, and in his lessons in Book 7, "Gower creates a nexus of unnatural crimes that enmeshes his advice with implicit warnings against sodomitical practices" (437) . The implicit criticism of Richard extends to the linkage that Gower draws between Alexander and Richard as recipients of Aristotle's advice, for "born in treason and lust," as Genius demonstrates in his tale of Nectanabus in Book 6, "Alexander springs from the unnatural desires that Genius seeks to warn rulers against" (441). Hanrahan emphasizes the punishment of unnaturalness in the tales of "Lucrece," "Virginia," and "Tobias and Sara." The latter tale also anticipates Amans' "rejection of the sin against nature" in the poem's conclusion (443). Reformed, he has a vision of the court of Cupid dressed in the "newe guise of Beawme" (8.2970), a clear reference to the court of Richard II that identifies the king with ostentatiousness of dress and the pursuit of pleasure, the same "lecherous and luxurious practices that have transformed past rulers into effeminate men. Gower thus ends up offering his advice from the position of a reformed sodomite, and he effectively implicates the king as a sodomite in two ways: by offering negative examples of unnatural rulers for Richard's edification, and by providing his reformed persona as a model for the king to emulate" (445). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 22.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hanrahan, Michael Published Hanrahan, Michael. "Speaking of Sodomy: Gower's Advice to Princes in the Confessio Amantis." Exemplaria 14 (2002), pp. 423-446. 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 Speaking of Sodomy: Gower's Advice to Princes in the Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Duffell documents much more fully his claim that Chaucer's model was Italian rather than French, and he also makes some rather more specific claims about Gower. He includes examples from CB under three of the types in his classification of ten-syllable lines (F, G, and H; pp. 279-82), none of which was used by medieval French poets. (This time, stresses are marked in boldface.) On the basis of the presumed early date of CB, he states that "it is probable that Gower was experimenting with this line in French at the same time as his friend Chaucer was doing so in English, in the late 1370s" (p. 279); and though he notes that Gower also employs iambic pentameters in English in IPP, he attributes Gower's use of all three verse types to an Italian model, claiming that one variant in particular "proves that Gower is here imitating an endecasillabo in French and not a Chaucerian pentameter" (p. 280). He thus refers in his conclusion to Chaucer's and Gower's "common interest in Italian versification" (p. 284). His earlier essay leads one to believe that Gower's line emerged as a direct consequence of the nature of his language. The more recent essay attributes to Gower a previously unknown familiarity with Italian, despite also observing that Chaucer's knowledge of Italian made him quite unusual for a fourteenth-century Englishman (p. 271). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 19.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Duffell, Martin J. Published Duffell, Martin J.. "'The Craft So Long to Lerne': Chaucer's Invention of the Iambic Pentameter." Chaucer Review 34.3 (2000), pp. 269-288. ISSN 0009-2002 Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Cinkante Balades Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'The Craft So Long to Lerne': Chaucer's Invention of the Iambic Pentameter Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Penn State University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Quejigo, Grande Javier, Francisco Santano Moreno, Bernardo Published Quejigo, Grande and Javier, Francisco and Santano Moreno, Bernardo. "The Love Debate Tradition in the Reception of Gower's Confessio Amantis in the Iberian Peninsula." Disputatio 5 (2002), pp. 103-126. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Review The authors address the appearance of CA in Portuguese and Castilian--the unique instance of the translation of an English poem into either language in the Middle Ages--by demonstrating how the Confessio fits into the tradition of works intended for the education of the nobility in the Iberian peninsula in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. They use as their principal points of comparison the Arcipreste de Hita's Libro de Buen Amor and Don Juan Manuel's Conde Lucanor. The external evidence that all three works responded to the same educational and cultural need is the presence of both Spanish texts in the library of King Duarte of Portugal, who also owned the only surviving copy of the Portuguese translation of the Confessio. The internal evidence consists of the similarities in form and theme and in their assimilation of Latin and vernacular models for educational purposes. All three make use of narration within a frame. The Libro de Buen Amor consists of a dialogue between a dejected lover and Amor into which the author has inserted a series of exempla and discussions of moral topics. Many of the exempla are drawn from Ovidian sources, and they are typically preceded by a passage of doctrinal exposition and followed by a brief moral explanation, as in the Confessio, and they include both positive examples and exempla ex contrario, the procedure that Gower follows in presenting Amans as guilty of the wrong sort of love in his poem's conclusion. The exempla in El Libro de Buen Amor are more evenly balanced between the disputants than in CA, however. In its use of the confession frame CA is closer to the Conde Lucanor, which also incorporates moral exempla but within a question and answer structure that is more typical of works intended for the education of nobles. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 23.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Love Debate Tradition in the Reception of Gower's Confessio Amantis in the Iberian Peninsula Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "In the later Middle Ages, a wide variety of writers and readers collected texts, assisted by developments in manuscript production and the emergence of compilatio as an intellectual category. In turn, these collections influenced writers as aesthetic models and as vehicles for the circulation of texts. . . . . I argue for the miscellany's aesthetic importance as the essential material condition of vernacular literature before the introduction of printing. . . . Chapter 3 reads Gower's Confessio Amantis as an attempt to redress the fragile miscellaneity of the human body. Gower eventually came to rely on the collection of his own work in manuscript as a monumental substitute for his own body." [JGN 23.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Shuffelton, George Gordon Published Shuffelton, George Gordon. "The miscellany and the monument: Collecting in Chaucer, Gower, and Langland." PhD thesis, Yale University, 2002. 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 miscellany and the monument: Collecting in Chaucer, Gower, and Langland Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Reading Gower's tale of "Ceix and Alceone" alongside its analogue in Ovid (Metamorphoses, Book 11), Machaut ("Le Dit de la Fonteinne Amoureuse"), and Chaucer (BD), Krummel finds two key alterations. First, where the three earlier versions all have Ceix himself speak to Alceone in her dream, Gower has "Ithecus" and "Panthasas" provide her with a re-enactment of the storm and of the sinking of Ceix's ship. Krummel describes what Alceone observes in her dream as an "audible mime," and she places it in the context of the history of silent mimetic performance in the Middle Ages. Because of this performance, Rummel also asserts, Alceone is given a more active role, acting upon what she sees and less under the direct control of Ceix and his instructions, which is part of "Gower's more general subversion of the patriarchal and hegemonic script" (506) also evident in Gower's greater care to have the dream appear in response to Alceone's direct request for information about her husband. In combination, she concludes, Alceone's agency and the vision itself, which steers away from any overtly religious comment even though it is directly concerned with death, perform their own act of "silent speaking,"for they require us to read the poem "without the filtering distortions of a clerical prism"(498). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 21.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Krummel, Miriamne Ara Published Krummel, Miriamne Ara. "The Tale of Ceïx and Alceone: Alceone's Agency and Gower's 'Audible Mime'." Exemplaria 13 (2001), pp. 497-528. ISSN 1041-2573 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Tale of Ceïx and Alceone: Alceone's Agency and Gower's 'Audible Mime' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Maney Publishing, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Masciandaro, Nicola Published Masciandaro, Nicola. "The voice of the hammer: Work in medieval English literature (John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer)." PhD thesis, Yale University, 2002. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review "This dissertation investigates Middle English representations of work. Most previous scholarship has approached medieval work through autonomous disciplinary channels. I examine several kinds of evidence for late medieval attitudes toward work in the context of both socioeconomic conditions and intellectual traditions. . . . Chapter 2 examines three accounts of the history of work--the history of masonry contained in the Cooke MS (British Museum, Add. MS. 23198), John Gower's history of work in Book 4 of the Confessio Amantis, and Chaucer's Former Age--in order to show how the history of work was a site of ideological contest." [JGN 23.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The voice of the hammer: Work in medieval English literature (John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The five scattered episodes in which Ulysses' story appears do not follow the usual chronology of his legend, but their arrangement is coherent, and taken together, they represent a pilgrimage of the soul struggling between reason and passion that parallels in some ways the journey of Amans. Despite Ulysses' reputation as a rhetorician (cf. CA 7.1560) Gower suppresses all of his direct speech until the final episode in which he appears, when he forgives Telegonus after being mortally wounded (6.1747-48). His first use of speech completes the pattern of similarity to the story of Nebuchadnezzar in this tale, and suggests that in forgiving his son he undergoes a transformation from a lower state to a higher one, repudiating his previous disobedience and preparing himself for grace. "Gower has transformed the ancient pagan hero into a medieval Christian one." [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gittes, Katherine S. Published Gittes, Katherine S.. "Ulysses in Gower's Confessio Amantis: The Christian Soul as Silent Rhetorician." ELN 24 (1986), pp. 7-14. 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 Ulysses in Gower's Confessio Amantis: The Christian Soul as Silent Rhetorician Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Jones, Terry Yeager, R.F Dolan, Terry Fletcher, Alan Dor, Juliette Published Jones, Terry and Yeager, R.F and Dolan, Terry and Fletcher, Alan and Dor, Juliette. "Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery." London: Methuen, 2003 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Biography of Gower Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review It wasn't Gower, readers of JGN will be relieved to know, and it is not giving too much away to reveal that the culprit is Thomas Arundel, the fiery Archbishop of Canterbury who, on being restored to his post with Henry IV's accession, relentlessly pursued not just Henry's enemies but his own as well, especially those who challenged either his authority over the church or its doctrine, as he himself defined it. (Arundel is perhaps best remembered for introducing the public burning of heretics to England.) Chaucer had placed himself in peril with the harsh anticlericalism of his depictions of the Monk, Pardoner, Friar, and Summoner and by daring, moreover, to present his criticism of the church in English, which would allow its dissemination beyond the community of the church itself. His attempts to appease Arundel--his "ABC," ParsT and the "Retraction"--proved inadequate, and so he was dispatched, in a manner that we will never be able to reconstruct in detail because of the care with which his murderers were able to cover their tracks, to the point of leaving no official record of his disappearance. Wait just a second, some will say. But the objections to this explanation of Chaucer's death are almost too obvious to list. The use of the lack of evidence of the crime as proof of the skill and high position of the perpetrators is a staple of all conspiracy theories (including those involving weapons of mass destruction), and as a method of argument it proves no less slippery here. Because of the very nature of their case, moreover, the authors are forced to rely on unanswered--and perhaps unanswerable--questions as much as on hard facts. In accounting for Chaucer's whereabouts following the Merciless Parliament, for instance, they write: "Did Chaucer pay a visit to Philippa's people in 1388? Did he meet Matilda Nemeg, or some of her relatives there? Did Philippa go along--and not come back? . . . The usual assumption is that she died. But where? If she died in England, where is she buried? And if she died in Hainault--perhaps nobody has been looking in the right places?" (311). On the other hand, they seem very confident of their ability to divine the thoughts of Thomas Arundel, especially as he read and pondered CT ("Beneath the fun and banter of Chaucer's pilgrims, the great prelate would have smelt the burning fire of dissidence;" 377). And in their treatment of such things as the Troilus frontispiece and the "ABC," some are going to feel that they have made a very selective use of the available evidence. So do the authors prove their case? Obviously not, and they admit it, repeatedly. Chaucer might have died in his bed or fallen off a ladder (see, inter alia, pp. 6 and 359). But the value of a book like this lies not in what it makes us believe but in what it makes us question, and the truth, which is much more obvious as a result of this study, is that we know astonishingly little about Chaucer's life after Henry's accession, and that fact, together with the absence of so much as a will, is in itself extremely puzzling, as writers before Who Murdered Chaucer? have already observed. The explanation that is offered here, suspicious because of its very preciseness, is actually no less plausible in its details than the imaginative descriptions of Chaucer's final days that have been offered by some of Chaucer's biographers, who want to believe only the best about everyone concerned, and that should cause us to doubt anything that we have ever read or assumed about the end of Chaucer's life. And despite its irritations, if this book makes us a little more cautious about taking an easy view of such matters as Chaucer's role in the political events of his lifetime, of his audience and the circulation of his works, of the state of his MSS when he died, of the date of his death, or of the consequences of Henry's usurpation on the intellectual life of the time--all subjects that the authors treat at length during the course of their discussion--then it will have served a very valuable purpose. John Gower appears frequently as a background figure to the drama that the authors describe. His revision and rededication of CA and VC--"in what resembles either a paroxysm of prudence, or just plain fear" (273)--and his composition of TC are cited, of course, as evidence of the constraints that were suddenly imposed upon writers with the change of regime (271-73); and the authors give very close attention to the passages in which Gower describes how his works came to be composed in order to demonstrate that the revisions did occur this late and not because of some earlier disenchantment with Richard (97-103). (The reviewer is cited several times in support of their argument in this section.) Elsewhere, Gower is cited as evidence of Chaucer's reputation (3), in support of the view that both he and Chaucer expected their works to be read by the aristocracy (26-28, 34), and as evidence of Richard's encouragement of composition in English (35-36). The survival of early MSS of his works (231, 239, 244-45), of his will (276), and of his elaborate tomb (285) are all cited in contrast to the fate that befell Chaucer. The authors also cite passages from both VC (67) and MO (216) as examples of the pervasiveness of Wycliffite ideas in late fourteenth-century writing in order to demonstrate the contrast between the intellectual openness of Richard's reign and the shutting down of debate that occurred during Henry's. In that regard, they provoke a question that is perhaps typical of the issues that ought to be raised by their argument as a whole. After 1399, Gower indeed tried hard to be "Henry IV's Ideal Poet," as the authors put it (171), rewriting the history of Richard's reign in order to justify Henry's usurpation. But the villain of the piece--the one who gets the blame for exterminating Chaucer--is not Henry but Thomas Arundel; and at the same time that Gower was kissing up to Henry, he presented the archbishop with a copy of VC with a very flattering new dedication (Works 4.1-2) but without any revision of the passage--so Wycliffite in tone--in which he criticizes the church and its officers and calls upon them to reform. True, he was writing in Latin, not English, but wouldn't Arundel thus have been more likely to see the work? And if Chaucer was in such peril for his depiction of the Pardoner, how did Gower, who was no more a member of the church than Chaucer was and whose condemnation was both more palpable and more severe, remain safe from Arundel's wrath? Or does VC, seen from this different angle, perhaps indicate that the archbishop wasn't quite as thin-skinned as the authors make him out to be? [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 23.2] 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 Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Methuen, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Aguirre considers Gower's tale of Florent within his discussion of the relation between the English analogues of Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale and Celtic myths of sovereignty from which some scholars believe that these tales derive. Aguirre argues for a closer connection than has been traditionally recognized, and he sees a continuity, with transformation, between the numinous, extra-rational woman who grants territorial sovereignty in the Celtic tales and the fairy-like woman who makes an unreasonable demand for sovereignty in marriage in the later versions. He suggests further transformation of the figure of the woman in SGGK and later literature. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Aguirre, Manuel Published Aguirre, Manuel. "The Riddle of Sovereignty." Modern Language Review 88 (1993), pp. 273-82. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Riddle of Sovereignty Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Scala, Elizabeth Doreen Published Scala, Elizabeth Doreen. "Absent Narratives: Medieval Literature and Textual Repression." PhD thesis, Harvard, 1994. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review "Absent Narratives argues for the structural centrality of missing stories -- those implied, alluded to, or fragmented -- in medieval narrative. Chapters devoted to Chaucer, Gower, Malory, and the Gawain-poet discuss the manifestations and operations of the untold in terms of repression and its attendant parapraxes. By engaging the structure of these works at a level of narrative excess -- that is, precisely where critical commentary breaks down (or is markedly absent itself) -- Absent Narratives formulates a theory of how texts "speak" out of what they "hide." Employing a postructuralist model of repression in order to describe the effect of the untold and unspoken upon narratives, Absent Narratives theorizes a 'textual unconscious' in medieval narrative and manuscript culture." [JGN 15.1] 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 Absent Narratives: Medieval Literature and Textual Repression Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "My dissertation . . . examines the literary preoccupation with amorous infidelity that flourished during the 1380's. This decade was, not coincidentally, a period that witnessed a heightened interest in treason law. By contextualizing the literary trope that links treason and love, I demonstrate how the political concerns of Chaucer, Gower and Usk are displaced and restated in another discursive register. . . . Gower's Confessio Amantis urges rulers to avoid tyranny and false counsel by shunning lechery. The Confessio thus offers an art of love as a manual of advice for rulers: by depicting deviant forms of love as treason, the poem links sexual regulation and good governance. In the Confessio, Amans' sexual reform serves as an example for Richard II to emulate. This seemingly innocuous example ultimately aligns Gower's poem with the rhetoric of subversion that alleged the transgressive sexual practices of Richard's court. Given the political environment in which these texts were written, treason in love acquires a referentiality that exceeds its literary locus. By historicizing the literary trope, I show how these writers' treatments of amorous infidelity situate their texts in the unstable and treacherous world of Ricardian politics." [JGN 15.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hanrahan, Michael Published Hanrahan, Michael. "Traitors and Lovers: The Politics of Love in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, Gower's Confessio Amantis and Usk's Testament of Love." PhD thesis, Indiana University, 1995. 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 Traitors and Lovers: The Politics of Love in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, Gower's Confessio Amantis and Usk's Testament of Love Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Gawain-poet's vernacular poetry embodies concerns with interpretation, modification of verse forms and knowledge of register and the associational pull of sound patterns. . . . Used for sense-making and sensuality, sound-patterning is both an interpretive element and a given of end-rhyme and alliterative verse. Sound-echo interactions in poetry influence connotation and, hence, denotation. Comparative and contrastive groupings generated by underlying or site-specific referential sound-patterns create sonotations: sound-cued patterns of denotative interaction and accumulations of connotation. . . . My interpretive, comparative, sound-pattern analyses of rhyme and alliteration are focused upon prominently patterned sound in relation to specific words (chapter two), characters (chapter three), settings (chapter four) or an entire poem [Pearl] (chapter five)." [JGN 15.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bormann, Sally Published Bormann, Sally. "End-rhyme and Alliteration Sonotations in Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the 'Gawain'-poet." PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1994. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource End-rhyme and Alliteration Sonotations in Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the 'Gawain'-poet Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation demonstrates that a number of economic, social, and political elements came together in the late fourteenth century to provide a moment in English literature where London acquired a significant cultural presence in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer and his contemporaries. . . . Using the market values of the city, Langland's Piers Plowman becomes as much an exploration of the value of the soul as it is a quest for the soul's redemption. As a result, Langland's poem critiques more than just the moral aspects of his society but the economic and social elements as well. Gower's Confessio Amantis concerns the role of truth in human society; many of the tales show that characters who seek truth prosper, while those who do not perish." [JGN 15.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bertolet, Craig E Published Bertolet, Craig E. "The Rise of London Literature: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Poetics of the City in Late Medieval English Poetry." Ph.D. dissertation. Pennsylvania State University, 1995. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Rise of London Literature: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Poetics of the City in Late Medieval English Poetry Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Vasta, Edward Published Vasta, Edward. "Chaucer, Gower, and the Unknown Minstrel: The Literary Liberation of the Loathly Lady." Exemplaria 7 (1995), pp. 395-418. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review Vasta submits the three best-known ME versions of the "loathly lady" story -- Gower's tale of Florent, Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale," and "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell" -- to an analysis in terms of Bakhtin's notions of the confrontational and liberating powers of the grotesque and the "carnivalesque." By the standards that these terms imply, Gower's and to a lesser degree Chaucer's versions both fall short. By the time of the three English romances, the loathly lady had already been severely marginalized from her earlier status as part of the official culture. Unlike her Greek and Celtic counterparts, she bears no sovereignty of her own, but must win a male-bestowed sovereignty in order to regain her place in the culture from which she has been excluded. The renewal she offers, moreover, is merely personal rather than natural or cultural. In this last respect, however, the implications of individual renewal progressively widen in the three ME versions, finally reaching something like the cultural renewal of her earlier manifestations in "Dame Ragnell." The means for both her confrontation with official culture and the renewal that she gives is provided by grotesquerie and laughter, which "turns the usual, officially dominated world upside down and inside out." Gower's tale of Florent would seem to have least patience with the notion of the grotesque, humorlessly employing the loathly lady in service of a straightforward moral on obedience and patience that is endorsed by and sustains the official culture. The "aura of official culture ideology and power" is maintained in the tale by the heavy emphasis on contracts and legal obligation. In the conclusion to the tale, Florent's circumstances are improved, but there is no transformation in his character, much less in the society in which he moves, since all takes place in private. The loathliness of the hag, moreover, itself has no carnivalesque or redemptive function, but is merely the effect of her stepmother's antipathy. Chaucer's ideology is equally conventional and equally supportive of the ruling culture status quo, and it is placed even more obviously in the center of the tale, in the loathly lady's address to her new husband. The husband in Chaucer's version, however, faced with a more complex choice than in Gower's, is enlightened to an "anti-official ideology" in his active recognition of the woman's sovereignty. Assigning the tale to WB gives universality to the loathly lady's claims, but WB's own claim to authority is restricted and contained by the humor with which Chaucer treats her for her deviation from official cultural standards. In neither Gower's nor Chaucer's tale is official culture transformed to incorporate the previously marginalized individual. Such liberation and renewal do occur in "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell." In this poem, which Vasta labels a "carnivalesque romance," the loathly lady much more clearly matches Bakhtin's definition of the "grotesque," both in appearance and in function; and in her cheerful and fearless lack of regard for convention and social restraint, she offers the "perfect example of Bakhtin's carnival spirit." The laughter in the tale, moreover, is equally at the expense of the lady herself and the seriousness with which the official culture of the court attempts to maintain its dignity. With the removal of the mask of her loathliness and Gawain's surrender of authority and freedom, the entire court is transformed: the previously sober Gawain become less respective of convention, Ragnell fills the previously gloomy court with play, and she reconciles Arthur with her brother Gromer. The romance ends with the narrator's prayer for his own release from prison, in which he repeatedly draws upon the language of rebirth, in both respects echoing the redemptive structure of the poem as a whole. "Unlike Chaucer and Gower, who show the power of the official culture confronting wrongdoers, this romancer shows the official culture's power as the wrongdoer, and the victims of the wrongful power as not only correcting the court but as renewing and perpetuating it." [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer, Gower, and the Unknown Minstrel: The Literary Liberation of the Loathly Lady Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In SumT III.2196, the lord tells the friar, "Ye been the salt of the erthe and the savour." Modern editors have customarily cited Matthew 5:13 as Chaucer's source, but neither "savour" nor the Latin sapor occurs either in the Vulgate or in any of the English translations that Chaucer might have known. The actual source, Hanks suggests, was VC 3.1997-98: "Hii sunt sal terre, quo nos condimur in orbe,/ Absque sapore suo vix salietur homo;" and Chaucer, recollecting Gower, was the first to use the collocation "salt and savour" in English. Hanks goes on to suggest, logically but more intriguingly, that the first use of "savour" in a translation of the gospels, in the Geneva Bible of 1560, was due to a translator's recollection of the earthy passage in SumT. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hanks, D. Thomas, Jr. Published Hanks, D. Thomas, Jr.. "'Savour,' Chaucer's 'Summoner's Tale,' and Matthew 5:13." English Language Notes 31 (1994), pp. 25-29. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'Savour,' Chaucer's 'Summoner's Tale,' and Matthew 5:13 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Grady, Frank Published Grady, Frank. "The Lancastrian Gower and the Limits of Exemplarity." Speculum 70 (1995), pp. 552-75. Gower Subject In Praise of Peace Review Gower's longer poems, MO, VC, and CA, have frequently been studied with reference to the political events of the poet's time, especially the turbulent last decade of the reign of Richard II when VC and CA both apparently underwent substantial revision. Grady looks at a different work, the poem that Macaulay entitled "In Praise of Peace," in the context of a different era, the equally turbulent first years of the reign of Henry IV; and he finds that, rather than being an "inert, if elegant, piece of Lancastrian propaganda" as commonly thought, the poem actually betrays the "anxieties of its historical moment": that it reflects, more consciously than has ever been recognized, the incoherencies of the "legitimating discourse" that defended the rights of a conqueror and usurper to the throne, and also, in the subtlety of its strategy, the difficulties inherent in giving advice to a king. Gower opens his poem with a straightfaced echo of the rhetoric of the official Lancastrian justification of the usurpation, but his ostensible project, the advocacy of peace, is obviously difficult to reconcile with the necessity of defending Henry's use force to assert his right to the throne. The problems become evident when Gower resorts to his favorite technique of historical analogy: the exempla that he chooses must be forced to fit the context (as we can see by comparing them to the same stories in CA), and still fail to fully support his point. He begins his argument, for instance, by apparently offering a choice between Solomon's course and Alexander's. Each must be so beset by qualifications, however, that neither offers a clear model for Henry (the implications of the comparison to Alexander, in fact, seem particularly dangerous at this time), nor does either support the complex balancing of wisdom and the need for war that Gower finally advocates in lines 64-70. For the alert reader, the poet raises more questions here about Henry's rule and about the possibility of reconciling wisdom and conquest than he chooses to answer: rather than exploring the contradictions, both in the position he adopts and in his method, Gower merely plunges on. The later example of Constantine (lines 337-57) is even more contrived, for there are conflicting legends of his conversion, and Constantine thus offers no clear distinction between the "law of grace and pity" and "the law of right." But Gower selects what is necessary for his point, just as he selects, and omits a great deal, in the portrait that he chooses to paint of Henry, in order to draw the analogy between his king and Constantine. "We might atttribute this strategy to the triumph of hope over experience or, given the genre, advice over history," Brady writes. "But I would suggest that it is precisely Gower's twenty-five years' hard experience as a poet writing to kings about kingship that makes him simultaneously so conventional in his praises and so subtle in his exasperation. For that is what I take 'In Praise of Peace' to be, in the end -- a poem of exasperation and a valediction to the mirror-for-princes genre, in which Gower's great fidelity to the genre's formal demands and deep grasp of its philosophical premises produce a text that is always on the verge of revealing the intractable paradoxes of that form and the incoherence (or tendentiousness) of that philosophy. 'In Praise of Peace' is a kind of fugitive art, constantly fleeing from the contradictions that it is incessantly uncovering." [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Lancastrian Gower and the Limits of Exemplarity Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Kiefer, Lauren Kathleen Published Kiefer, Lauren Kathleen. "Gower and Literary Tradition: Jean de Meun, Ovid, and the 'Confessio Amantis'." PhD thesis, Cornell, 1997. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review "This project attempts to alert the reader to John Gower's literariness. I argue that in the Confessio Amantis, Gower deliberatedly 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. I also link Gower's literary complexity in the Confessio with the work's secular concerns, arguing that Gower's growing awareness of the complex social problems surrounding him led 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. In particular, I examine Gower's revisions in the Vox Clamantis as evidence of his growing social and political concerns, and show how the first chapter of the Confessio deliberately rejects the medieval penitential manual's paradign of divine justice, prefer¬ring 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." [JGN 14.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower 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 1997 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "The penitential fictions that frame Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women" and Gower's "Confessio Amantis" ostensibly measure each poet's fidelity to the amorous ideology codified in courtly literature, but the real object of the poems' critique is the courtly code itself. This critique complicates the operation of the poems' framed narratives as simply moralized exempla; instead, they offer the reader a challenge in independent ethical interpretation. . . . In the Confessio Amantis, allegorical figures borrowed from orthodox scholastic cosmography masquerade as presiding deities of the conventional 'Court of Love' to engage Gower's protagonist is a penitential dialogue, with the covert purpose of challenging his amorous obsession. Gower's exemplary tales often supersede or contradict their stated amorous significations, serving instead as rich aesthetic reworkings of the poem's theological and political themes." [JGN 14.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gould, Cynthia Marie Published Gould, Cynthia Marie. "Penitential Fictions, the Trial of Courtly Love, and the Emancipation of Story in the 'Legend of Good Women' and the 'Confessio Amantis'." PhD thesis, Northwestern University, 1994. 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 Penitential Fictions, the Trial of Courtly Love, and the Emancipation of Story in the 'Legend of Good Women' and the 'Confessio Amantis' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Scanlon, Larry Published Scanlon, Larry. "Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition." Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature (20). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review For Scanlon authority and power occur in opposition. His subject is the exemplum, which he defines as "a narrative enactment of cultural authority" (p. 34). He traces the inter-related histories of auctoritas and the exemplum from classical times up to Chaucer, who provides the focus of his study. Just as the church had earlier appropriated the exemplum form from its pagan predecessors in order to establish its own auctoritas, Scanlon argues, Chaucer and other contemporary writers appropriated the exemplum anew in order to assert the authority of vernacular poetry in face of that of the church. His reading of Chaucer, emphasizing the poet's engagement with the problem of his own authority, is detailed and complex, and needs to be examined to be appreciated. Scanlon treats Gower in his second to last chapter (pp. 245-97), before turning to his conclusion on "The Chaucerian Tradition in the fifteenth century." He has less to say about Gower's use of the exemplum form precisely than he does about the theoretical issues that the form raises. He describes CA as "a sustained meditation on the contingencies of cultural authority" (p. 267). He attributes to Gower just as much self-consciousness about his role as he does to Chaucer, but describes him as having a very different agenda: more explicitly anticlerical, Gower places lay political authority (rather than the poet's) over that of the church, while also arguing for the interdependence of the prince and poetry. In Scanlon's words, "To the extent moral disorder characterizes the Church, it demonstrates the need for the sort of order provided by the king. But to the extent such disorder also affects kingship, it demonstrates the indispensability of the moral correction that comes from the poet" (p. 249). Scanlon finds a point by point development of this argument in his examination of CA. In the Prologue and Books 1 and 2, "Gower is expecially concerned to demonstrate the necessity of lay authority by means of anti-clerical critique. But he is just as concerned to demonstrate the irreducibly double nature of such authority, the interdependence between poet and prince, and the extent to which the prince's authority is discursively constructed" (pp. 249-50). The Prologue juxtaposes the moral bankruptcy of the Church with Gower's call for a "new Arion," both set within his presentation of his poem to the king. Book 1 introduces Genius, who embodies Gower's "middel weie," hovering "uncertainly between the clerical and the lay" (p. 256). Key tales in Books 1 and 2 explore the discursive nature of all authority. The tale of Boniface sets the pope -- who usurps not only the papacy but also (literally) the voice of God and also temporal authority -- against the virtuous king who restores order to the church. The tale of Constantine with which that tale is paired not only "foregrounds Christianity's dependence on material reality" (p. 266) in its conclusion, but also defines an important aspect of kingship in Constantine's conversion. When Constantine beholds the mothers and their children, "it is as if monarchical power, in its supreme amorality, stimulates from its possessor an irresistable need for moral order," demonstrating "monarchy's inherently self-regulating character, the paradoxical but inevitable logic whereby absolute prerogative produces its own self-generated restraint" (p. 265). In Books 3 through 6, Gower distinguishes this view of monarchy from the chivalric view of lay authority with a critique of the values embodied in romance, focusing particularly on the delusions of fin' amors in tales such as "Canace and Machaire," "Pyramus and Thisbe," and "Orestes," while offering a "demystified" view of the claims of chivalry in his discussion of "Prouesse" in Book 4. In the final tale of Book 6, he offers another version of the self-regulating nature of the monarch's power. Alexander's arbitrary act of shoving Nectanabus off the tower ironically fulfills the prophecy that provokes it; it also corrects the arbitrariness of the act by which Alexander was originally conceived. Divine authority works obliquely through Alexander's action. "By pushing the oblique relation between divine authority and temporal power to the extreme, Gower is able to authorize lay power precisely in its transgressive coerciveness. For it is precisely the self-regulating structure of that transgressiveness that Gower takes as divine authorization. Lay power is by its very nature contingent and incomplete. But for Gower its continual reassertions of it contingency and incompletion produce a self-regulation that is continually able to point beyond that incompletion" (pp. 281-82). This tale opens the way for Book 7, which emphasizes the need for secular rule -- "Monarchy inevitably produces social order, because it is the only form order can take" (p. 291) -- and the unbreakable link between power and self-restraint. One form of that self-restraint, of course, is chastity, the last of the kingly virtues that Gower discusses, which replaces fin' amors with an ideal of behavior that recalls that imposed on the clergy and thus constitutes a sanctification of lay authority. Gower's engagement with political issues, he concludes, was no less important to the poets that followed in the next century than was Chaucer's reappropriation of the clerical tradition. There is more. Scanlon has a great deal to say about many other issues both theoretical and practical that come up along the way (see, for instance, his speculation on Derrida's debt to St. Paul on p. 51). But his discussion is also firmly grounded in some of the most traditional questions of Chaucer and Gower scholarship. In one sense, his reading of Gower puts him in a long line of critics who have emphasized Gower's political views, but he brings an entirely different perspective from earlier commentators. And while he attempts to overcome the antithesis between morality and poetry that lies, as he observes, at the base of most comparisons between Chaucer and Gower, he also sees important differences between these two poets, which he defines in a new and very different light. This is a challenging work, and well worth close study. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN14.2] 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 Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cambridge University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Bullón-Fernández, María Published Bullón-Fernández, María. "Confining the Daughter: Gower's 'Tale of Canace and Machaire' and the Politics of the Body." Essays in Medieval Studies: Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association 11 (1994), pp. 75-85. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Bullón-Fernández offers not just one but several provocative new ways of reading Gower's already well-read story of Canace and Machaire. Invoking a feminist model of patriarchal society and of the power relations between fathers and daughters, she opposes Eolus' attempts to confine Canace (repeatedly alluded to in the tale) with Canace's two gestures of independence: her choice of her own lover (albeit her brother), which signifies "her father's loss of control over her body" (p. 77); and her composition of her letter, in which she "tries to define her life in her own terms" (p. 77), an attempt that is quickly thwarted. Parallels are drawn in the tale between her two acts of creation, her letter and her child; between her tears and the ink; and thus between writing and her body. The horrific scene of the baby bathing in his mother's blood, Bullón-Fernández observes, paradoxically blends an image of parturition with one of death, echoing the paradoxes of Canace's letter. The multiple parallels in the tale "suggest that Canace's death represents not only Eolus' assertion of his control over Canace's body, but also his desire to terminate a narrative . . . over which he himself had lost authorial control" (p. 79). That Eolus' attempt to control Canace is incestuous in origin is suggested by the attribution of his wrath to Melancholy, the "typical lover's sickness" in the Middle Ages, from which Amans himself suffers because of his unfulfilled desire. Eolus' desire to have control of his daughter's body provides a better explanation of his wrath -- and of Gower's evident sympathy for his victims -- than does the immorality of the children's union. It also refers the issue of patriarchal control to that of kingship, continuing the analogy between home and kingdom that runs throughout CA. In both cases absolute power must necessarily be restrained, and "Canace's tragic death highlights the sterility and self-destructiveness of any type of absolute patriarchal authority that . . . denies the subordinate body a certain degree of independence" (p. 76). Bullón-Fernández' essay appears with nine others in a special issue of Essays in Medieval Studies entitled Figures of Speech: The Body in Medieval Art, History, and Literature, edited by Allen J. Frantzen and David A. Robertson. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 14.2] 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 Confining the Daughter: Gower's 'Tale of Canace and Machaire' and the Politics of the Body Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Santano Moreno's study of the Spanish translation of CA (a revised version of his doctoral thesis of 1989) appeared in the same year as Alvar's edition of the text; the author records the appearance of the edition in a note on page 45, inserted after his book had already gone to press. Manuel Alvar's long introduction to that edition and the present book thus constitute two independent, and in some respects complementary, studies of the same material. Santano Moreno's book is divided into seven chapters. The first treats the dating of the Portuguese and Spanish translations, and presents in greater detail the same evidence that appears in the author's essays (nearly identical, and both in English) in Manuscripta 35 (1991):23-34 (see JGN 10, no. 2) and in Selim 1 (1991):106-22 (see JGN 13, no. 1). His conclusions, that the Portuguese translation was completed between 1433 and 1438, that the Spanish translation was done before 1454, and that the surviving MS must be dated after 1487 and perhaps as late as the early years of the 16th century, are argued persuasively, they constitute a significant revision of previously held views, and they are the final word until some better evidence is found. The remaining six chapters are devoted to the differences between the Spanish and English texts, arranged by type: two chapters on "Omissions that do not substantially modify the meaning," and one each on "Omissions that modify the meaning, and censorship of an ethical and religious nature," "Additions and transformations," "Additions that modify the meaning for ethical or religious reasons," and "Idiomatic and cultural correspondences" between the two texts. The division between changes that affect the sense and those that don't appears somewhat arbitrary: it is a bit surpris¬ing, for instance, to find the omission of the Latin epigrams included in the first chapter, among differences that "do not substantially modify the meaning." (In this section, the author might also have considered the state of the English MS from which the original translator worked, moreover, as Alvar does in his treatment of the epigrams, and as Santano himself does is his discussion of the accidental omission of 4.1813-2233.) The chapter headings are thus somewhat misleading; what we really have here is a catalog of differences between the Spanish and English texts that affect the sense in different ways. As such, Santano Moreno's study provides the complement to Alvar's: where Alvar studies equivalencies, Santano emphasizes differences; where Alvar emphasizes translation, Santano treats the Spanish version as a re-creation of the English text, citing other instances in which medieval authors altered the stories that they found in their "sources." The analogy between Gower's retelling of Ovid, say, and Juan de Cuenca's version of CA is perhaps not exact, but the author finds enough differences to make his comparison interesting. The very act of translating Gower's verse into prose results in many of the omissions that Santano lists, for the Spanish text leaves out most of the expressions we ordinarily dismiss as "fillers" for the sake of meter or rhyme. Another consequence, however, is that the Spanish version is much less colloquial than Gower's; most of the examples that Santano cites in this respect come from the dialogue portions of the poem, and reflect some of the differences from the more formal style of most of the tales. The Spanish version is also less ornamental rhetorically, and here we might consider whether style is a part of meaning: one gets little sense from the Spanish of Gower's more stirring passages of description, or of Amans' more assertive and emotional defenses of his love. The translator was also evidently less interested in the psychology of the lover than in questions of morality. He is rather more modest than Gower in his references to sexual desire, and to complement his many small omissions, he has made a number of additions as well, sometimes only of a single word, but emphasizing such things as God's grace, God's will, God's intervention in human affairs, the sacraments, conversion, the doctrines of the church, the need for penitence, and the destiny that awaits the unrepentant sinner, and generally heightening the praise of virtue and the condemnation of vice. Santano Moreno also notes, as evidence of the translators' own learning, some passages in which they have corrected Gower's citations from the Bible and restored his story to a form more like the source; and in his last chapter, on "idiomatic and cultural correspondences," he treats some of the differences in behavior and imagery that reflect that translators' adaptation for a different nation of readers. His general conclusion, however, is that despite all the differences between the texts, in emphasizing the moral instruction in the poem the translators have remained consistent with Gower's own purposes. Santano Moreno's own characterization of Gower as a sober moralist seems to lie behind some of his judgments of which changes alter the sense and which do not. Some will feel, however, that he has been too conservative, and that in out-Gowering Gower, the translators have removed much of what makes CA more interesting than a mere work of moral instruction could possibly be. Both this book and Alvar's edition will be nearly impossible to obtain in the United States. Readers who wish a copy of Santano Moreno's may write to the Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Extremadura; C/ Pizarro, 8; 10071 Cáceres; Spain. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 14.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Santano Moreno, Bernardo Published Santano Moreno, Bernardo. "Estudio sobre Confessio Amantis de John Gower y su versión Castellana, Confisyon del Amante de Juan de Cuenca." Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura, 1990 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Estudio sobre Confessio Amantis de John Gower y su versión Castellana, Confisyon del Amante de Juan de Cuenca. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Universidad de Extremadura, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A. Published Peck, Russell A.. "The Phenomenology of Make Believe in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Studies in Philology 91 (1994), pp. 250-69. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Peck examines the dialogue between Genius and Amans in terms of medieval phenomenology -- most generally, the speculation about the relation between the outer world and the images formed thereof in the mind, and about the ways in which the mind understands what it does not see -- as reflected in such authors as Chaucer and Langland as well as Boethius, Hugh of St. Victor, and late medieval English mystics. By this analysis, Genius' tales are images presented for Amans' contemplation, fictions designed to provide access to the truth, while Amans' perceptions and interpretations are shaped by his pre-existing fantasy, another sort of fiction that interferes with the search for truth. At issue also are different kinds of love: for the English mystics, love provided the only means to move beyond phenomena directly to their source, but Amans' naturatus amor merely creates desires that distort all his perceptions. Peck examines the "eyes and ears" passage in Book 1, the discussion of Falssemblant and Supplantation near the end of Book 2, and the discussion of Sorcery in Book 6 in order to show how perception and misperception -- expecially that governed by desire -- and the relation between exterior and interior phenomena are treated as moral issues in Genius' lessons, and how Genius attempts to reorder Amans by providing him with new images, the proper significance of which Amans stubbornly resists. Like the victims of Nectanabus' sorcery, Amans is not the victim of deceit exempt by his own choice. At the end of the poem, the poet sets aside his own Nectanabus-like role -- as creator of images-- at the same time that Amans becomes the supplicant for the welfare of England: "Knowing that he cannot effect change in his audience (only they can do that), he dramatizes instead a change from naturatus amor to caritas within himself, and takes another name -- John Gower" (p. 267). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 14.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Phenomenology of Make Believe in Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Owen offers his "notes" as extensions of some of the findings of Masayoshi Ito (1976) and R.F. Yeager (1990), who have been among the few to give attention to this neglected aspect of Gower's verse. Within "prosody" Owen embraces Gower's use of rhyme and his use of run-on lines, and also some instances of verbal repetition. In his discussion of rhyme, he focuses on rime riche and on what Ito calls "quasi rime riche" and Owen "identicals," that is, the use of identical syllables at the end of successive lines if not necessarily identical final words. He finds the use of rhyme in MO to be mainly decorative, despite, or perhaps because of, the use of only two rhyme sounds in each twelve-line stanza, a technical feat that recalls the difficult rhyme patterns of some of Gower's French predecessors. He gives several examples to demonstrate that in the couplets of CA, on the other hand, rhyme is frequently used to enhance the sense as well as the liveliness and colloquialism of the dialogue between Genius and Amans. Owen uses the introductory lines in Books 1, 5, and 8 to demonstrate the effectiveness of Gower's use of enjambement. He concludes with a comparison of the two different versions of Gower's final prayer: though the first is marked by a greater number of enhanced rhymes than the second, "I think there can be no question as to the improvement of the passage" (pp. 410-11). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 14.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Owen, Charles A., Jr. Published Owen, Charles A., Jr.. "Notes on Gower's Prosody." Chaucer Review 28 (1994), pp. 405-13. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Notes on Gower's Prosody Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Calin, William Published Calin, William. "The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England." Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994 Gower Subject Cinkante Balades Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Review Calin includes a chapter on Gower (pp. 371-98) in this lengthy and detailed survey of the relation of late medieval English literature to its continental French and Anglo-Norman predecessors. Most of the chapter has already appeared in nearly identical form as an essay in the special Gower issue of Mediaevalia in 1993. There, Calin surveyed "John Gower's Continuity in the Tradition of French Fin' Amor," using CB and CA to show how the richness and complexity of Gower's work is oversimplified in seeing it simply as a rejection of earlier French ideals of love. The present chapter includes a discussion of MO, also emphasizing both its debt to its French predecessors and its own inherent richness. Calin is anxious to defend the poem from the charge that as a moral work, it is inherently mediocre and dull. He sees it first of all as a satire, and considers two of its principal achievements Gower's creation of a suitable persona and his choice of the style in which the entire poem is conducted: where CA is "a masterpiece of the plain style," MO is "a master¬piece of the flowing, passionately lofty register of the vernacular literature of ideas" (p. 373). The poem is structured not just by its external frame but by the dominant metaphor of combat -- between virtue and vice, reason and passion, light and darkness, God and Satan -- and by patterns of antithetical imagery: evil and Satan are depicted in the demonic and bestial, in rot, corruption, and decomposition, in poison, and in lies and illusion, all of which are countered by the imagery used in the depiction of the virtues. Ethically, Gower counsels the domination of reason over passion and of hard work and liberality over sloth, but the poem ends with the telling of the story of Mary and Jesus, the persona's own act of penance in an effort to gain his own salvation, and the poet's final answer to the problem of evil in the individual and in society. In the drama of salvation, the individual to be saved, the "Omme" of the title, like the implied author, is a male; the adversaries and "adjuvants" are all female: "phenomenologically, the Self is a man and is passively subject to onslaught or to succour, to being dragged down or pulled up, by woman as the Other" (p. 379), until finally turning to the greatest mother of all at the end. The devil is in the details, as we have been reminded so often recently: Calin gets the rhyme scheme of MO wrong (p. 372), he confuses Anthony Farnham with Winthrop Wetherbee (p. 388), and in his survey of Gower's sources for CA (p. 387), he casually overstates the poet's dependance on French rather than Latin sources. The virtual absence of notes, in this paragraph and throughout the entire chapter, makes it difficult to assess whether Calin has achieved some new insight through his own research or is merely carelessly misrepresenting the labors of his predecessors. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 14.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Toronto Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Zaerr traces the shifting meanings of sloth and fine amour and the shifting relationship between Genius and Amans throughout Book 4. "Amans is led, though he has not requested it or realized he needed it, along a very complex and at times paradoxical path to an understanding of a love completely different from that he had sought." Directed by Miceal Vaughan. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Zaerr, Linda Marie Published Zaerr, Linda Marie. "The Dynamics of Sloth: Fin Amour and Divine Mercy in John Gower's Confessio Amantis." PhD thesis, University of Washington, 1986. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Dynamics of Sloth: Fin Amour and Divine Mercy in John Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yeager studies the poet's "art of allusion" through a close reading of the first 466 lines of Book 6 of CA. "Interweaving material drawn from various sources," he concludes, "Gower creates a intricately-textured poetry designed to portray the evils of drunkenness on three levels simultaneously: as social problem (love-drunkenness), as moral problem (drunkenness as sin, as loss of reason, etc.), and finally as spiritual problem of the highest kind (thirst of the soul for 'living water' which ends all thirst by faith and grace)" (p. 211). The conjunction of the amatory and the moral senses is part of the basic thematic pattern of CA; in this passage, however, using the equation between love and wine, Gower is particularly successful in linking "gluttonous intoxication" with the effects of love, both in Genius' discourse and in Amans' description of his own loss of reason. Like the drunkard, Amans is less satisfied the more he "drinks" of his rapturous vision of his lady, and what he really needs is a "reles" (6.253) from his driving need rather than more "wine." The spiritual dimension is introduced more subtly, first through Amans' allusions to "paradise" and the suggestion of higher objects of love; then in his unwitting allusion to the living well of John 4:1-15 in 6.276-91. The imagery of this passage is echoed in the allusion to Philippians 4:7 in "Jupiter's Two Tuns," and in a more complex way in the tale of "Bacchus in the Desert," which links "thirst" to "grace" with allusions to John 4:19-24, Genesis 22:12-13, and Apoc. 22:1 and 17. Gower has made two important additions to his source in this tale, Bacchus' prayer, and the reference to Bacchus as Jupiter's son, which creates a parallel to Christ and God the Father that informs the Biblical allusions in the tale. The link between Jupiter and God and between Bacchus and Christ is also found in another context in Ovide Moralise', which may explain Gower's substitution of "Bacchus" for the less familiar name "Liber" used by Hyginus. Here and elsewhere, according to Yeager, Gower invokes the familar "Christianization" of classical narrative of Ovide Moralise' as an "allegorical back-up" to the web of allusion that he has created in his own poetry. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "John Gower and the Uses of Allusion." Res Publica Litterarum 7 (1984), pp. 201-13. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower and the Uses of Allusion Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The mixture of English and Latin on the MS pages of CA results, according to Yeager, in the creation of three different "voices" requiring our attention in the poem: that of the fiction, the story of Amans and Genius and the exempla, in English; that of the Latin verses that divide up the text; and that of the Latin prose marginalia. The second voice, Yeager argues, serves some of the same functions as the links in CT, but is peculiarly without a speaker: "no character, no fictive or even omniscient narrator, speaks these Latin lines; they appear as devices only, looking ahead for us to the unfolding of the larger narrative in English, providing a glimpse of what will be said and done" (p. 259). In their relation to the English text, "they insist upon reminding us of the textuality of the experience, of its unreality, of its craftedness" (p. 259); thus the engagement between "self" and "other" in reading CA becomes an engagement with the text itself. At the same time, the verses allow "entry in to the fictional world of the frame and exempla an authoritative, directing presence which is also authorial. By reminding us continually that the fiction is text, neither self-productive nor uncrafted, the Latin verses bring us back to the source of such crafting" (p. 260). The third voice, of the marginalia, provide a gloss to the poem, "referring to the events from a third-person point of view" (p. 261) and "directing the act of comprehension" (p. 262). Such glosses are presented as the work of an "unnamed 'other' reader" (p. 262), and there is no good precedent for Gower's decision to compose such glosses for his own text. The device recalls Derrida's discussion of the "doubled" text, and suggests Gower's consciousness of the page itself as "sign." As illustrations of the layout of a typical MS page, Yeager includes reproductions of three pages from Yale University MS Osborn fa. 1, a "third recension" copy of the early 15th century unknown to both Macaulay and Fisher. Though differing in orthography and layout, the text appears to be quite close to Fairfax. We should hope to learn more about it from the forthcoming Catalog of the Manuscripts of the Works of John Gower. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "English, Latin, and the Text as 'Other': the Page as Sign in the Work of John Gower." Text 3 (1987), pp. 251-67. 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 English, Latin, and the Text as 'Other': the Page as Sign in the Work of John Gower Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review White takes issue with a long list of earlier critics who have maintained that Amans' love is "unnatural," either because of his age or because of his implicit impotence. The questions White raises are important for the understanding of Gower's view of Nature as well as for our judgment of Amans. White points to Solomon's presence in the Court of Love (8.2691-96) as evidence that elderly love may be in accord with Nature, even when potency is in doubt. Several other passages indicate that Nature is not to be equated with physical powers, as many have implied, but is instead the susceptibility to love, the urge to sexual activity that operates at all ages and may be irresistible even in those whose powers have declined. Rather than a beneficent and orderly force to which man should properly submit, therefore, Nature may prevent man from conforming to the "natural" requirements of his age, and in other contexts can even be conducive to evil. Amans' love is all too "natural," White concludes, but Amans himself is perhaps not to be blamed. For "Gower does not seem to see the universe as a place considerately arranged so that the man of goodwill shall move reasonably smoothly towards salvation; rather he sees it as a battleground on which man in his weakness must face adversaries immensely superior to him and by no means wholeheartedly committed to his spiritual good" (p. 321). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor White, Hugh Published White, Hugh. "The Naturalness of Amans' Love in Confessio Amantis." Medium AEvum 56 (1987), pp. 316-22. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Naturalness of Amans' Love in Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The revised passages in the prologue and epilogue to recensions 'two' and 'three' of CA contain no specific evidence of Gower's repudiation of King Richard. There is no good reason why Gower should have become disenchanted with the king in 1392 or 1393, and even less reason why, given his disenchantment, he should have transferred his allegiance to Richard's cousin Henry. The new dedication in the later versions, therefore, was not a political event but simply a natural tribute to a patron; and only after 1399 did CA, like VC, take on the marks of Gower's adherence to the Lancastrians for which the poet is now so well remembered." [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter Published Nicholson, Peter. "The Dedications of Gower's Confessio Amantis." Mediaevalia 10 (1984), pp. 159-80. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Dedications of Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Book 4, Levin notes, devotes an unusually large number of lines to Amans' discourse on his love and his notions of "gentilesse." What his speeches reveal, she argues, is a condition of "suspended imaginative desire" based on his direct appropriation of the forms and vocabulary of the courtly lyric, a state that protects him from "aggressive sexuality" but that also insulates him from any fruitful communion with his lady. "Amans lives a lyric, condemning himself to desire without plot or ending. Yet throughout Book 4 he attempts a paradox: he seeks a text which would both eliminate narrative action and enable him to find himself miraculously gratified by his lady's favor, a lyric of love granted" (p. 117). His condition is manifested in several different ways. His attempt to create a narrative, in his reference to the story of Moses and the magic ring, reveals instead his "ambivalence toward his own desire and his underlying wish to forget aggressive sexuality" (p. 118). The series of vignettes with which he describes his courting, all in the present tense, contains no "advancing narrative" but shows "his dislocation from any real attempt to gain gratification from his lady" (p. 119). It also reveals his idea of "gentilesse," which is based more on courtly decorum and correct behavior than on virtuous character. And his borrowing from Ovid in 4.1210-17 "celebrates the condition of desire rather than his lady as the object of desire" (p. 119). The two principal works that he turns to for models for his behavior are RR and T&C, which "offer to Amans the notion that he may in some unspecified way conflate his imaginative experience as lyric persona with the narrative romance to attain the static lyric situation of love fulfilled for which he claims to long" (p. 122). In adopting imagery from RR, however, he "adapts its text to avoid its narrative" (p. 122), and in imitating Troilus, he "adopts a literary antecedant which does not inspire assertive love but instead gives him a precedent for his passivity" (p. 125). "Thus Gower shows how the forms of courtly poetry, however beautiful, betray Amans" (p. 126), and only gradually throughout the remainder of CA does Genius help Amans escape his trap by teaching him the broader and more important connotations of "gentilesse." [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Levin, Rozalyn Published Levin, Rozalyn. "The Passive Poet: Amans as Narrator in Book 4 of the Confessio Amantis." Essays in Medieval Studies: Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association 3 (1986), pp. 114-30. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Passive Poet: Amans as Narrator in Book 4 of the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed