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 Gastle's essay offers a close view of the unusual features of one copy of William Caxton's 1483 "Confessio Amantis"--the copy held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Incunabula 532.5. Gastle summarizes the ownership history of the volume, describes its "distinctive features" (203), particularly its binding and readers' marks, and explores it as "a unique window into fifteenth-century politics and culture" (204). The volume is one of "handful" of extant examples of "original Caxton bindings" (203; in 1961, William Wells identified eight; see 203n9), and the materials used to reinforce this binding include four pieces of a papal indulgence which together "constitute almost the entirety" (204) of the indulgence printed by Caxton in 1481. Commissioned by papal nuncio Giovanni dei Gigli, this indulgence survives in only four known copies (all found in bindings), although Caxton printed another indulgence commissioned by Gigli in 1489. Other information about Gigli, especially the fact that the nuncio wrote a Latin epithalamium "in celebration of the engagement of Henry VII to Elizabeth of York" (206), enables Gastle to align, tentatively, the "business relationship between Caxton and Giovanni" with their shared "desire to promote literary history in England" (207). Other binding fragments include "one damaged and worn leaf" (207) on which are found two "mysterious cut-out images" (217) that "seem to have originated in Caxton's shop." The posture and gesture of one figure suggests that it is "lecturing or stating something declaratively," Gastle says, and he posits that "[i]f the figure was meant to represent a character" in the CA, Genius "would be the likely candidate" (209), even though how and why the leaf ended up in the volume's binding is unclear. Gastle treats several signatures--John Crofton, John Kynaston, Thomas Genway (?), and John Leche--found in the volume with cautious speculation, and he discusses judiciously its seven-line quotation of the opening lines of the "The Nutbrown Maid," clarifying the popularity of the early Tudor poem, and editing the lines against the reconstructed version of the poem published by William A Ringler, Jr. The lines are found in the UNC volume in the context of the CA version of the "Tale of Constance," leading Gastle to comment on possible relations between the poem and the Tale, both concerned with female adversity. Finally, Gastle quotes the two lines in Spanish found in the volume, connecting their reference to the port town of Bermeo in the Bay of Biscay with Spanish/English trade before the onset of the Anglo-Spanish War (1585) and with the translations of CA into Portuguese and Spanish. Detailed, and informed, Gastle's essay closes with the hope that "future scholarship may explore the possibilities" (217) raised here. They are rich possibilities, clearly illustrated in a series of five figures. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gastle, Brian W. Published Gastle, Brian W. "A Caxton Confessio: Readers and Users from Westminster to Chapel Hill." In Martha Driver, Derek Pearsall, and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books. Publications of the John Gower Society, no. 14. Rochester, NY: Brewer, 2020. Pp. 201-17. 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 A Caxton "Confessio": Readers and Users from Westminster to Chapel Hill. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Boffey sets out to situate Thomas Berthelette's 1532 "Confessio Amantis" in the "landscape of authorial promotion" (221) of early English printing, concentrating especially on the paratextual materials of the printing of English poetry. She surveys the "options" available "to an early printer who wanted to foreground an author as a distinctive presence" (222)--title pages, prefatory material, woodcuts--observing, however, that in the "design of books containing the works of English poets . . . these practices were employed somewhat sporadically" (223), especially in cases of "substantial, well-known works" by Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, which printers felt, perhaps, "needed no introduction" because these venerable works "evidently had a reputation of their own in which authorship was somehow rolled up without needing to be explicit" (224). By the 1520s, however, "living" poets "were beginning to be treated rather differently" (224-25), with works by Skelton, for example, being "'branded'" (Boffey's emphasis) "with variations on a generic scholar woodcut," and the names of other writers featuring much more prominently. Analogous "interesting billing" (225) of authorship accompanies early sixteenth-century printings of works by Stephen Hawes, Alexander Barclay, and William Neville, Boffey tells us, as she exemplifies these practices and the "interest in authorship and agency discernible" (in Barclay and Robert Copland), an interest that "appears to have been part of a more general concern with textual matters, a concern evident in Berthelette's prefatory discussion" in his CA (227). Boffey comments on the little-discussed "Castell of Pleasure" by William Neville, printed by both Henry Pepwell (1518) and Wynken de Worde (1530), focusing on the frame to the dream vision in which there is a dialogue between "Thauctour" and "lymprimeur," who is identified in the frame as Robert Copwell--"intermittently a printer himself [who] also translated and edited a number of works for other printers." The dialogue pertains to "the topic of literary composition" (226), as Boffey puts it, and to the need for the author to defend his work as a gentle pastime. These and other detailed analyses enable Boffey to argue that attention to texts and authors in "large-scale testimonials to an interest in English verse" such as Berthelette's CA (and Thynne's "Workes" of Chaucer) is "not new" in 1532 but a development out of the interests of "networks" of "personnel involved in the printing of English works of poetry." Such agents worked together to compete with "continental printings" of vernacular and classical authors (229), and their interests in making English poets available "involved them in considering the changing forms of the language and the different states in which the texts had survived." Further, their "reading and researches brought [the] poets to the fore as authors, to be prominently named, celebrated, and sometimes pictured in printed forms" (220). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Boffey, Julia. Published Boffey, Julia. "English Poets in Print: Advertising Authorship from Caxton to Berthelette." In Martha Driver, Derek Pearsall, and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower in Manuscripts and Early Printed BookFas. Publications of the John Gower Society, no. 14. Rochester, NY: Brewer, 2020. Pp. 219-30. 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 English Poets in Print: Advertising Authorship from Caxton to Berthe. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Kobayashi clarifies the Tudor reception of Gower, arguing that William Thynne included Gower's "In Praise of Peace"--and identified as Gower's--in his edition of Chaucer's "Workes" (1532) at least in part because the poem expressed the humanist ideal of universal peace as "cherished and promulgated by Erasmus and his English friends" (246), a circle that included Thynne's putative collaborator Brian Tuke, Richard Pace, Thomas More, and William Leland. In the two decades preceding Thynne's edition in 1532--the same publication year as Thomas Berthelette's edition of "Confessio Amantis", with its own humanist presentation, as Kobayashi notes--European peace was promoted as a stay against the expansionism of the Ottoman Turks, and Anglo-French peace was as crucial to such efforts in the early sixteenth century as it was when Gower penned PP more than 100 years earlier (for dating, see David Watt's essay in this volume). Kobayashi identifies parallels between the poem and various humanist orations and letters of the time--Erasmus' own letter to Henry VIII celebrating the Treaty of London, "[a]lso known as the Treaty of Universal Peace" (238), and Richard Pace's published oration on the Treaty which shares mirror-for-princes motifs, themes, and imagery with Gower's poem. Letters written by More--who, with Tuke, negotiated a truce between England, France and the Holy Roman Empire "in the late 1520s" (243)--"testify to the powerful influence that the ideal of universal peace," Kobayashi observes, and a "vestige of that humanist ideal can be discerned" as late as Leland's 1546 poem on the Peace of Campe (244). Leland may well have been directly influenced, Kobayashi argues, by Pace's oration, and he certainly admired Gower's poem, as Kobayashi shows. He knew Berthelette, whom he believed to have had a hand in Thynne's edition, a likely possibility, "given the fact that [Berthelette] lent to Godfray [Thynne's publisher] the woodcut border used on the title page" of Thynne's Chaucer (234).We have no direct evidence of why Thynne included Gower's "In Praise of Peace" in Chaucer's "Workes," but Kobayashi makes clear that Gower, as the "author of an English 'laudation pacis'," is "transformed into a humanist 'orator'" (246) when Thynne first prints the poem, seemingly as an expression of the humanist ideal. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kobayashi, Yoshiko. Published Kobayashi, Yoshiko. "In Praise of European Peace: Gower's Verse Epistle in Thynne's 1532 Edition of Chaucer's Workes." In Martha Driver, Derek Pearsall, and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books. Publications of the John Gower Society, no. 14. Rochester, NY: Brewer, 2020. Pp. 231-46. Gower Subject In Praise of Peace Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource In Praise of European Peace: Gower's Verse Epistle in Thynne's 1532 Edition of Chaucer's "Workes." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gowerians need no introduction to G. C, Macaulay's four-volume edition of Gower's works, but most know little about the man who produced it. Edwards remedies this to the extent possible by combining an account of Macaulay's academic and scholarly life with appreciative commentary on the "character and intellect" that his edition reveals and the "motive and method" (248) that underlie it, particularly the two volumes dedicated to the "Confessio Amantis." Edwards expresses justified chagrin that, despite the wide range and importance of Macaulay's accomplishments (detailed by Edwards), his death was "marked by a single obituary" and he "does not appear in either the "Dictionary of National Biography" or the "Oxford Dictionary of National Biography" (247). Extensive sleuthing enables Edwards to compile a brisk narrative of Macaulay's family, education, teaching, and scholarly activities, all of it punctuated by noteworthy, sometimes surprising, information. Turning to Macaulay's Gower edition, Edwards makes clear that, although Macaulay discovered the unique manuscript of "Mirour de l'Omme," it was editing the CA that was his driving interest. Edwards focuses on the nature and significant challenges of editing the work, commending Macaulay's location and descriptions of manuscripts of CA--his "remarkable feat of enumerative bibliography"--and the importance of his understanding "that a description of a manuscript in an edition serves a different purpose from a catalogue description" (254). Although Macaulay uses the term "recensions" (Edwards clarifies as "broad textual groupings," 255) in categorizing the forty-two CA manuscripts that he identified, some of his remarks seem to presage, Edwards suggests, more recent arguments about the "limitations of recension as an editorial method" (258). Even though his collations are not exhaustive, Macaulay was an accurate transcriber; he was a "conservative editor," but his edition "is not a critical edition as the term is now generally understood" (259). Edwards identifies and helpfully corrects misunderstandings by scholars of Macaulay's claims, while clarifying that the "textual authority" of the edition "has remained largely unchallenged" (260). This section of the essay is uncharacteristically bumpy, perhaps due to a light editorial hand or hasty revision. For example, footnotes 37 and 43 are confused (in reversed ibid order), and Peter Nicholson is referred to five times in three pages (257-59) by first name and surname as if previously unmentioned--reprimanded for misrepresenting Macaulay and then praised as the "most astute of Gower's textual critics" (257) and "one of the most searching of Macaulay's critics" (259). Edwards closes on an upbeat, identifying two positive reviews from 1901 and 1902 of Macaulay's edition, "previously unremarked by Gower scholarship" (260), both by the poet and literary critic Edward Thomas. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, A. S. G. Published Edwards, A. S. G. "George Campbell Macaulay and the Clarendon Edition of Gower." In Martha Driver, Derek Pearsall, and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books. Publications of the John Gower Society, no. 14. Rochester, NY: Brewer, 2020. Pp. 247-61. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Manuscripts and Textual Studies 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 George Campbell Macaulay and the Clarendon Edition of Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Meindl begins by asserting that Gower in Book V of the VC reconfigures the estates of fourteenth-century English society to include clergy, commons, and governing class. He presents a clear outline of these groups early in the essay as a helpful guide for the reader, before demonstrating the changes Gower makes in the commons, starting with Gower's definition of "milites" to include the gentry rather than just knights, following suit with each category. He asserts that Gower's critique of romantic love in respect to "milites" has everything to do with the gentry's inability to produce male heirs. Meindl closely analyzes passages from Book V to demonstrate Gower's critiques of each part of the commons. When Gower moves his critique to merchants, Meindl assures us the "urbs" to which he refers is indeed London, and further points out that this location is most appropriate for Gower's critique, given its content--usurious dealings, profiting at the expense of others' losses, ruinous loans, etc. In Meindl's view, Gower also addresses the agricultural crisis in this section. As Gower closes Book V, he reveals an awareness of "the danger of renewing ancient political quarrels," which Gower assuages through his reminder that "salvation, not terrestrial power and prosperity, is the goal of human existence, which, when conducted in the spirit of Christian love, can transpire in the spirit of peace most conducive to the achievement of that goal." [JGS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Meindl, Robert J. Published Meindl, Robert J. "The Community of the Realm: Gower's Account of the Commons in Book V of the 'Vox Clamantis,." Accessus 6 (2020): n.p. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Community of the Realm: Gower's Account of the Commons in Book V of the "Vox Clamantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Chewning, Susannah Mary, ed. Published Chewning, Susannah Mary, ed. Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society, no. XIII. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Review This collection of fifteen essays is offered as a tribute to the remarkable career of R. F. Yeager. As the editor suggests, "[w]ithout R. F. Yeager's influence, Gower studies simply would not exist as it currently does within Medieval Studies, and the field would be lessened by that absence" (2). The collection is organized into five sections: TEXT (A.S.G. Edwards, "Edward Thomas on Gower;" Derek Pearsall, "The Sutherland Fragment of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis';" Stephanie L. Batkie and Matthew W. Irvin, "Incarnational Making in 'Vox Clamantis' II"); GENDER (Russell A. Peck, "Patriarchy, Family, and Law in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis';" Peter Nicholson, "Gower's Ballades for Women;" Martha W. Driver, "John Gower and the Artists of M. 126"); TIME (Andrew Galloway, "Gower in Striped Sleeves: 'Mirour de l'Omme' as Gower's Early Humanism;" David A. Roberts, "What's in a Name: History, Genre, and Political Speech in Gower's 'Cronica Tripertita';" William Rogers, "Studies in Gower's Age: Ciceronian Echoes in 'Confessio Amantis'"); SPIRIT (Natalie Grinnell, "Gower's Light: The Ecology of 'De Lucis Scrutinio';" Michael P. Kuczynski, "Gower, Chaucer and the 'Treuth of Prestehode';" Roger A. Ladd, "'To Hear an Old Man Sing': Apollonius, Pericles and the Age of Gower") and INTERSECTIONS (Brian W. Gastle, "The Constraints of Justice and Gower's 'Lawyerly Habit of Mind';" Richard Firth Green, "A Poet at Work: John Gower's Revisions to the 'Tale of Rosiphilee'"), concluding with the editor's "Personal Tribute to R. F. Yeager" and a full Bibliography of R. F. Yeager's writings [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] 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 Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This essay examines two reviews of G. C. Macaulay's Clarendon Press edition of "The Complete Works of John Gower" written by the poet Edward Thomas. Edwards provides both a reprinting of these two reviews, making them available for other Gower scholars, as well as an illuminating commentary on them. The first review, "Chaucer's Mate," presents a comparison of Gower's CA with Chaucer. As Edwards comments, this review is marked by the usual preference for Chaucer within this pairing, but it also goes out of its way to "articulate the intrinsic qualities of Gower as a poet and to see such qualities as positive ones" (12). The second review, "The Poet of Southwark," concerns only the fourth volume of Macaulay's edition, that containing the Latin works. Here, as Edwards points out, the method shifts to a more historical framework, leading Thomas to both make an early comparison between Gower and Langland and also to castigate Gower as a poet "lacking in courage" as Thomas reads the VC as a timid refusal to join with the forces of "reformation," siding rather with a "superficial and shameful" order (13). As Edwards further comments: "There is an obvious proleptic irony in Thomas' sense of Gower's predicament. The moral dilemma he believes confronted 'timid' Gower was one he was to face himself in a very different way when he chose to fight in the First World War; he died there on the battlefield in 1917" (13). [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, A. S. G. Published Edwards, A. S. G. "Edward Thomas on Gower." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 11-20. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Edward Thomas on Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This essay gives us a bit of detective work concerning the "Sutherland fragment," a fragment known only from a photocopy of a single leaf held by the Huntington Library. As Pearsall says, the leaf was listed in the catalogue of a collection of manuscripts purchased by Henry Huntington from the library of the Duke of Sutherland in 1917. Sometime in the 1960s the Huntington Library realized that the leaf itself was not contained in the collection and requested a photocopy, which was provided. Pearsall's essay is an attempt to reconstruct the background of this surviving photocopy, namely "[what] it consists of, what manuscript it is possibly from, why it was not sent with the original collection of manuscripts, where the original leaf is now, and what part it may have played in recent sales activity" (21). Pearsall's tentative conclusions are as follows: "There was once, and may still be, a single leaf that had belonged to a manuscript of good quality of the fifteenth century, first quarter. All that now exists, so far as we know is a photocopy of that original leaf, made from a microfilm which was deposited, perhaps for a limited period, in the National Library of Scotland. Where that original leaf is now is a puzzle: perhaps in a desk-drawer or other infrequently visited repository in the National Library or in the residence of the Duke of Sutherland at Mertoun; perhaps irretrievably lost or destroyed; perhaps deposited in some distant bank vault, the property of a rich collector of medieval manuscripts and fragments" (30-31). Pearsall also appends an edition of the text of this fragment as an appendix. [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek. Published Pearsall, Derek. "The Sutherland Fragment of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 21-34. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Sutherland Fragment of Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This essay examines the treatment of "poetic making" in VC Book II, with particular attention to the way in which such making is related to "the relationship between the human artistic and the divine Creator" (35). Through a series of careful textual readings that surely spring from their work on a forthcoming translation of the VC, Batkie and Irvin argue that "Gower's poetics, while grounded in Aristotelian rationality, are Christological in their making, a poetics of Incarnation" (36). Human creativity is best exercised not as a matter of invention, but of "ornamentation" or "thickening," a process that allows the artist "to participate directly in Christian 'cultus'" (42-45). As Batkie and Irvin sum up the analogy lying behind their analysis: "For God it is the fundamentally historical work of creation and redemption, in which God overcomes even the diversity between himself and creatures to enter and orient human history. For the human, participation in that 'opus' is 'cultus,' the praise that ornaments the historical 'opus,' and which develops out of the 'sensus' which God created in the human being specifically to flame into love and develop that 'cultus.' While that 'sensus' would require no other stimulation in Eden than consciousness of creation, in this fallen world, Gower sees poetry as the stimulation to that 'sensus,' and thus the production of 'cultus': in praise, but also in the critique of wickedness, which occupies much of the rest of" VC (56). [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Batkie, Stephanie L. Irvin, Matthew W. Published Batkie, Stephanie L. and Matthew W. Irvin. "Incarnational Making in 'Vox Clamantis' II." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 35-56. 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 Incarnational Making in "Vox Clamantis" II. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Given the frequent attention paid in previous criticism to Gower's depiction of father-daughter relations, Peck chooses to focus his attention in this essay on Gower's portrayal of father-son relationships, beginning with what he calls "the dramatic presence of the father-son trope for the whole of the 'Confessio,' namely the relationship of Genius and Amans" (61). His analysis then focuses on three tales: the "Tale of the False Bachelor" (CA II.2510-781); "The Tale of Canace and Machaire" (CA III.143-360); and "The Tale of Constance" (CA II.587-1598). In his account, each of these narratives concern battles between the heart and the intellect, split priorities necessitated by the fact that, in Peck's formulation, "Genius, as priestly confessor, serves two masters: the pagan goddess Venus and the Christian Trinity . . ." (61). From these materials, Peck argues that: "In his 'Confessio Amantis,' John Gower may not be revolutionary in his critique of patriarchy and familial relationships under patriarchal jurisdiction, but no fourteenth-century English writer is more aware of and articulate about the limitations of patriarchal behavior in the practices of his own day" (59). [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A. Published Peck, Russell A. "Patriarchy, Family, and Law in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 59-78. 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 Patriarchy, Family, and Law in Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Nicholson's essay examines the five poems from the "Cinkante Balades" in which Gower writes through a female persona (numbers 41-44 and 46). Nicholson begins by noting how common it was to adopt a voice differing in gender from that of the poet, citing the examples of Machaut, Deschamps, Froissart, Granson, and the anonymous "chansonnier" of University of Pennsylvania MS Codex 902 who all wrote poems voiced as women, as well as that of Christine de Pizan, who "left more than 100 poems in the voice of a man" (82). Nicholson argues that Gower's use of this voicing is distinctive in that Gower includes several poems in which the women complain "not just that her lover has left her nor even merely that his promises were false, but that he has had multiple loves of which she was only one," and, moreover, that Gower treats this failing "more as a moral than as an emotional issue" and that he does so by drawing the language of moral condemnation less from the shared tradition reflected in Machaut "et al" than from his own discourse of moral condemnation in the MO and CA (84-85). He concludes by arguing that "[t]hese women are no less earnest than the spokesperson for moral reform in 'Mirour de l'Omme,' but they have much better reason to be, and Gower perhaps even realized that, in placing them in a setting in which the speaker has so personal a stake, the language that he uses has a much more powerful claim upon our attention than it does in 'Mirour,' and the ethic that it supports is for that reason all the more compelling" (97). [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter. Published Nicholson, Peter. "Gower's Ballades for Women." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 79-97. Gower Subject Cinkante Balades 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 Ballades for Women. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Driver argues that, unlike other surviving illustrations of the CA, the illuminations of Morgan M. 126 ". . . do not act precisely as guides to Gower's meaning. Rather, they perform alternative readings or elaborate imaginatively on the stories they introduce" (99). Further, she suggests that "these pictures are consciously used to highlight some of Gower's own oddities in the text and to focus the reader's attention that are sometimes otherwise overlooked; for example, Gower's absolute fearlessness in addressing subject matter (none of Chaucer's prim pussyfooting around the story of Canace, for example) and the surreal transformation, often drawn from Ovid and other sources, of certain of Gower's characters." (99). Thus, rather than emphasizing the "moral" aspects of Gower's tales, "the artists embellish, even celebrate the more unsavory, taboo, or violent aspects of Gower's narrative" (100). Driver pursues this reading both through a fascinating exegesis of several of the images in M. 126 as well as a comparison of these images with a similar program of illustrations in the Rosenbach Lydgate. [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Driver, Martha. Published Driver, Martha. "John Gower and the Artists of M. 126." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 99-115. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower and the Artists of M. 126. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Galloway argues here for the importance of humanism in the MO in a triple sense, with Gower's text demonstrating: 1) "a central focus on human affairs and human responsibility for shaping their circumstances and consequences"; 2) "a use of some ancient sources as means to bolster its secular and social ethics;" and, lastly, 3) "a continual attention to contemporary London and Westminster institutions and practices, especially mercantile practices and parliament" (122). Most crucially, Galloway suggests that Gower is distinctive in presenting himself through a striking quasi-clerical identity. As he describes it, "[Gower] is learned, he is courtly, he is worldly; but he is also a reader of ancient texts for purposes that fit neither the traditional social nor vocational contexts around him. It is in this sense, I think, that he forges an identity most suited to the new world of 'humanist' England and Europe, which features 'studia humanitatis' but also makes that the basis for a novel vocational and intellectual identity, appropriating and transforming received intellectual and social positions by viewing them as if from a remove" (123). Galloway substantiates these claims through a detailed reconsideration of Gower's use of Seneca in the MO, arguing both that Seneca is referenced much more frequently that has hitherto been acknowledged, but also that Gower engages these citations with great energy and creativity in order to bring them to bear on the particular social disruptions of the contemporary world of London. [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew. Published Galloway, Andrew. "Gower in Striped Sleeves: 'Mirour de l'Omme' as Gower's Early Humanism." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 119-34. Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower in Striped Sleeves: "Mirour de l'Omme" as Gower's Early Humanism. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review David Roberts here reads Gower's "Cronica Tripertita" as part of the long tradition of historical writing that culminated in the eventual definition of England "in terms resembling the modern nation-state" (135). Roberts reads the CrT as a striking diversion from earlier chronicles, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth's "Historia Regum Britanniae," in its willingness to name names and engage in much more direct criticism of contemporary political actors. Moreover, he suggests that, as a poet, Gower is interested in exposing the tradition of discretion as itself being a longstanding literary trope. As Roberts concludes, "[p]erhaps the greatest triumph of 'Cronica' is Gower's ability to combine his sensitivity as a poet with his role as a historian to produce a verse chronicle that maintains the veracity of the events while calling into question the poetic conventions that were driving contemporary chroniclers towards a preference for prose" (142). [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Roberts, David A. Published Roberts, David A. "What's in a Name: History, Genre, and Political Speech in Gower's Cronica Tripertita." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 135-42. Gower Subject Cronica Tripertita Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource What's in a Name: History, Genre, and Political Speech in Gower's "Cronica Tripertita." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This essay uses both the tools of source study and the modern insights of disability studies to return to the much-discussed question of the significance of Gower's representation of himself as an old man at the end of the CA. Rogers follows R. F. Yeager and others in emphasizing that the roots of this image of age lay in Gower's own very real ailments as an old man. Further, Rogers argues that it is Cicero, rather than Gower's more frequent sources such as Ovid and Aristotle, who lies behind Gower's depiction of old age as a turn away from passions but, emphatically, not a turn away from the possibility of political action. Indeed, as Rogers shows in a reading of the brief narrative "The Trump of Death," an acknowledgement of the universality of aging may be a necessary component in the creation of a virtuous political community, a corrective to the erratic passions of youth embodied in the young Richard II and the celebration of a wisdom and humility that comes only at the end of life. [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rogers, William. Published Rogers, William. "Studies in Gower's Age: Ciceronian Echoes in Confessio Amantis." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 143-58. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Studies in Gower's Age: Ciceronian Echoes in "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Grinnell uses this little studied poem, written towards the end of Gower's career, to argue that "Gower's light is penetrative, both physically and morally, highlighting the nature of medieval optical theory and evoking an ecology of light somewhat in concord with contemporary radiation theory" (161). Grinnell begins by evoking the contradictory nature of light in medieval thought, characterized physically at times as extra-transmissional and at times as intra-missional, and riven also in ethical thought between an association with the dangerous carnality of the senses and a contradictory association with the scriptural identification of light and God himself. Similarly, Grinnell reads Gower's poem as one far removed from his earlier stance of visionary revelation in the "Vox Clamantis." In this short lyric, Gower is no prophet, but an individual contemplating the interplay of shadow and light both in the fallen world and in his own existence, ending the poem with a prayer for a single candle to light his way. [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Grinnell, Natalie. Published Grinnell, Natalie. "Gower's Light: The Ecology of 'De Lucis Scrutinio'." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 161-71. Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Light: The Ecology of "De Lucis Scrutinio." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This essay examines the "conversation" between Gower and Chaucer's ideas of the priesthood (174). Both poets share a disregard for the fraternal orders, focusing instead on the figures of Genius and the Parson, "both of them secular priests," who are described "almost exclusively in terms of their relationships with the lay people in their care, whom they shrive and teach with integrity" (175). Kuczynski takes issue with readings that have suggested that the priesthood of Genius is meant to be seen as limited or marred by his connection to Venus or his role as a household chaplain in her court, arguing instead that his devotion to his office and the sharpness of his corrections of Amans are meant to present him as an example of "the hard work of good priests" (185). As such, Genius is an ideal image, representing Gower's belief that "if priests would only return to an ideal ministry based in the example of Christ and his apostles, their office and Holy Church herself will not have to undergo extreme reinvention" (188). [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kuczynski, Michael P. Published Kuczynski, Michael P. "Gower, Chaucer and the 'Treuth of Prestehode'." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 173-88. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Chaucer and the "Treuth of Prestehode." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Roger Ladd's essay reconsiders the use of Gower in Shakespeare's "Pericles" and "asks not only why the later playwright might have been interested in the Apollonius story, but also why Gower's version of it within the larger context of the ending of 'Confessio Amantis' might have been particularly relevant for adaptation into a play in the early seventeenth century" (190). Ladd begins with a careful review of the relevant evidence concerning Gower's age at the completion of the CA and then turns to "Pericles," arguing that whatever ambiguities exist about the accuracy of Gower's own self-depiction as an aged man, the play consistently uses Gower to give voice to strong oppositions between youth and age. Ladd concludes by arguing that the final chorus in "Pericles" functions in a way that is strikingly similar to Gower's self-revelation at the end of the CA: "the final chorus ultimately performs a similar function to the revelation of Gower's identity as Amans in 'Confessio'--both break a love-story framework to assert a degree of moral certainty--Gower-Amans' realization that he is too old for such things, and Gower the chorus' assertion that virtue and vice can be rewarded and punished appropriately" (199). This moral may fall short in the end, but the structural parallel provides some evidence of the depth of Shakespeare's engagement with Gower and his understanding of the place of the Apollonius tale within the CA as a whole. [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ladd, Roger A. Published Ladd, Roger A. "'To Hear an Old Man Sing': Apollonius, Pericles and the Age of Gower." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 189-200. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "To Hear an Old Man Sing": Apollonius, Pericles and the Age of Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This essay examines one particular aspect of what R.F. Yeager has called Gower's "lawyerly habit of mind," namely his views on "the appropriate purpose and use of incarceration" (204-205). Gastle argues that "Gower's treatment of imprisonment in the 'Carmen Super Multiplici Viciorum Pestilencia,' the 'Traitié Selonc les Auctours pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz,' and 'Confessio Amantis,' taken together, reveal both a belief (or a desire to believe) in the inherent justice of imprisonment when used for appropriate purposes (such as punishment for serious failures of fidelity or loyalty) and an anxiety concerning inappropriate use of imprisonment, an anxiety that may possibly have its roots in his own brushes with the threat of prison" (205). Gastle points out that, even given the paucity of life records for Gower, two records do survive that address legal disputes of the sort for which Gower's involvement could potentially have led to his own incarceration. Within the poetry, Gastle finds a persistent "association of incarceration with carnal transgression" (213), but also finds a tension in these representations between moments at which incarceration is presented as a just punishment and other moments (such as the story of Philomela) where incarceration is an expression of the unjust use of power. Such a tension derives, Gastle suggests, from "Gower's fraught position: he is both a man concerned with upholding law who can see law as the basis of a just world, and a man who, at the least, had to consider the possibility of being imprisoned himself for a matter of debt, a situation which he could not be expected to consider as just" (215). [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gastle, Brian W. Published Gastle, Brian W. "The Constraints of Justice and Gower's 'Lawyerly Habit of Mind'." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 203-216. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Minor Latin Poetry 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 Constraints of Justice and Gower's "Lawyerly Habit of Mind." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Green's essay digs into Gower's process of revision, looking at the successive versions of lines depicting a procession of beautiful ladies seen by Rosiphilee, as these lines are altered in Macaulay's three recensions of the CA. C. S. Lewis had drawn attention to the revision of these lines in his "The Allegory of Love," citing the line in its third recension form as evidence for Gower's aesthetically demanding revisions of his own work. Green finds this account unpersuasive, and tracks a more complex path. Green argues that the revision from first to second recension was made in order to produce a couplet that would be more resistant to scribal error. This revision however, creating the couplet, "The beaute of here faye face / There mai non erÞly Þing deface," produced its own difficulty, as the lines in this form might easily seem to suggest that these ladies were fairies, the belief in which, as Green has argued in his "Elf Queens and Holy Friars," had been the subject of a systematic and hostile ecclesiastical campaign. Green thus reads the subsequent revision, that of Macaulay's "third recension," ("The beaute faye upon her face / Non erthly thing it may desface") as Gower's attempt to make it "clear that it is fairy beauty, not the fairies themselves, that is at issue" (225). In tracing Gower's careful negotiation of the language of fairies and fairyland, Green concludes that these revisions demonstrate that "Gower was far readier than Chaucer to respond to the imaginative appeal of fairyland, even as he paid lip-service to the conventional morality of those clerics who were determined to render it impotent" (226). [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Green, Richard Firth. Published Green, Richard Firth. "A Poet at Work: John Gower's Revisions to the 'Tale of Rosiphilee'." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 217-226. 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 A Poet at Work: John Gower's Revisions to the "Tale of Rosiphilee." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Georgiana Donavin argues that in Gower's CA "[rhetoric's] sphere is governed by the almighty Word, imbuing verbal magic with divine creative force and modeling a benevolent speech act to which rhetoric can aspire." She contrasts Gower's tales in Book VI with "a benevolent rhetoric of enchantment" found in Book VII. Gower's rhetoric relies on the Augustinian concept of the Word, which is invested with "divine influence" and has the "ultimate suasive influence." Donavin asserts that "[The Word] is at once the basis of all incantations and the channel for Christian purpose in rhetoric." She then surveys Gower's "complex characterizations of magicians" throughout CA, beginning with the particularly negative portraits in Book VI. But then in Book VII, she claims "Genius moves toward a more positive view of verbal magic by connecting spells and 'carectes' to the holy and inventive Word" and he rejects the models put forth in Book VI. "It is the supernatural W/word that becomes the cornerstone of Gower's definition of rhetoric," Donavin continues, and "The mystical W/word, necessary for all incantations, render the magical Christological." Repetition is key for Gower and "has the potential to enact an 'imitatio Christi'." Finally, Donavin concludes, "In Gower's rhetoric lecture in Book VII of the CA, the Word casts a spell and is God's spell, potentially reinventing the truth for every speaker and transforming the mind of anyone who has an ear." [JGS. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Donavin, Georgiana. Published Donavin, Georgiana. "John Gower's Magical Rhetoric." Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media, 6.2 (2020): n.p. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower's Magical Rhetoric. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Levelt begins his note by correcting the misattribution to Gower in Marcus Boxhorn's "Chronijck van Zeelandt" (1644) of Chaucer's lines from the description of the Merchant (General Prologue 1.273-77) and, tracking variants in Boxhorn's quotation of the lines, identifies the second-hand source of the quotation as an octavo edition of John Selden's "Mare clausum" (STC 22176) owned by Boxhorn. Levelt then goes on to explain that details of Boxhorn's brief biography of Gower which accompanies his misattribution apparently derives from John Bale's "Scriptorum illustrium majoris Britanniae . . . Catalogus," indicating, Levelt shows, that Boxhorn "somehow skipped to the wrong page" and followed Bale's mistaken claim that Gower died in 1402. Despite their interest in English history and literature, Boxhorn and others of his "learned circle" (16) in the seventeenth-century Dutch Low Countries, Levelt concludes, had only limited, secondhand acquaintance with Gower and Chaucer. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Levelt, Sjoerd. Published Levelt, Sjoerd. "Marcus Boxhorn's Misattribution of Verses from Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' to John Gower." Notes and Queries 67 [265], no.1 (2020): 14-16. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Marcus Boxhorn's Misattribution of Verses from Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' to John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Parsons takes up ll. 782-95, the list of names of the rebels-turned-beasts in Book I of the Vox Clamantis. His conclusion offers perhaps the best summary of his thoroughly learned article: "Reading the Visio's list of names against medieval naming conventions allows a number of significant points to emerge, in relation both to the text and to the norms on which it draws. In the first place, it shows that the sequence does not need to be treated as a suspension of Gower's allegory since his catalogue calls on the stock of names commonly given to medieval beasts. It also offers evidence against the tenacious view that medieval onomastics separated human from non-human creatures, as the text muddies rather than clarifies this putative divide. Taking a slightly wider view, Gower's use of these names also brings into view some of the mechanics of animal naming in the period, revealing a complex understanding of naming and its implications. In reaching for these terms while dissolving the rioters into an indistinguishable mob, Gower seems to be utilizing their 'general singular' qualities: they allow him to strip the rebels of personhood and specificity at a stroke, simply because they carry out such a process automatically. Alongside these details, however, Gower also gives us access to a further aspect of medieval animal naming, one worth raising as a final point. His inclusion of these sixteen names in this context demonstrates what sorts of anthroponym was deemed appropriate for non-human beings. The names he cites carry strong social overtones. After all, it is not for nothing that the names have invariably been read as 'plebeian': there is abundant proof of their association with the peasantry, even at a purely stereotypical level. As a result, Gower's selection of names indicates that not just any human name could be transferred to beasts. When medieval people applied human names to animals around them, they reached for names that were customarily associated with the lower social classes. This fact further suggests why the names should prove so attractive to Gower. They already express many of the same judgments formulated by his allegory, being founded on the same sense that peasants are subhuman 'ab ovo' that runs through his text. While the 'Visio' shows that the boundary between human and animal was more porous than is sometimes admitted, it also makes clear that this was a limited confusion, and that the points at which the two categories converged were themselves directed by political factors" (397-98). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Parsons, Ben. Published Parsons, Ben. "'Watte vocat': Human and Animal Naming in Gower's 'Visio Anglie'." JEGP 119 (2020): 380-98. 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 "Watte vocat": Human and Animal Naming in Gower's "Visio Anglie'." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Through analyzing Elias Ashmole's annotations of Gower's text, Curtis Runstedler suggests that Elias Ashmole "argues for a hermetic reading of Gower's story of Jason and the Golden Fleece in Book V of the Confessio Amantis." Even though Runstedler admits that Gower was likely not a practicing alchemist, he details Ashmole's belief that Gower was, including Ashmole's evidence for such assertions. In particular, Runstedler investigates Ashmole's annotations of Jason and the Golden Fleece, asserting "there is genuine evidence for reading the story as an alchemical allegory, and moreover it connects to the Renaissance tradition of reading classical stories as alchemical as well as Genius's view of alchemy as an ideal form of human labor in Book IV of the 'Confessio Amantis'." He analyses Ashmole's alchemical reading of Jason and the Golden Fleece, demonstrating the hermetic aspects of the tale and providing insights into how Gower's tale may have been valued for its alchemical aspects in early modern England. Runstedler first discusses Ashmole's "Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum" and alchemy in Book IV of CA, concluding that Ashmole's annotations "reveal that Gower's alchemy was still valued, and moreover, he was considered a true adept." He compares the alchemical passages of Book IV of CA and Ashmole's annotations, asserting that there is enough evidence to read, like Ashmole, the tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece as hermetic. Reading this story as alchemical is part of a humanist tradition in late medieval and early modern period. Runstedler then proceeds to analyze the tale for alchemical implications, particularly in the character of Medea. He posits that reading the tale as an alchemical allegory presents the Golden Fleece as the Philosopher's Stone, and "Ashmole's reading of Gower's version is also noteworthy since he validates alchemical success with Jason's discovery of the Stone, yet it also provides a moral warning against alchemists in the 'Confessio Amantis'." Runstedler concludes, Ashmole "enhances the value of English alchemy and its literature for his audience. Ashmole suggests a reading where the Philosopher's Stone can be attained, if only for the alchemist to lose everything to his vices." [JGS. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Runstedler, Curtis. Published Runstedler, Curtis. "Transmuting John Gower: Elias Ashmole's Hermetic Reading of Gower's Jason and the Golden Fleece." Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media, 6.2 (2020): n.p. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Transmuting John Gower: Elias Ashmole's Hermetic Reading of Gower's Jason and the Golden Fleece. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Building on his 2017 edition of "Le Bone Florence of Rome," Stavsky argues that this Middle English romance--and many others like it, including Gower's "Tale of Constance" in the Confessio Amantis--tones down the Orientalist pro-Crusades outlook found in its French source. In this essay, he uses the argument to help set up an analysis that counterpoises the pro-Christian "identitarian conception of virtue" (51) of Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale" with a view of Muslims in the "Parson's Tale" "which prioritizes self-inspection and reform over warfare" (53); the latter perspective, Stavsky tells us, is also found in Gower's Tale and in "Le Bone Florence." "Florence" and Chaucer's Tale figure most prominently in the essay, although Stavsky also addresses the Middle English "Octavian romances" (37) and differences between English and French anthologies of the "Octavian-Florence cycle" (39) as well as Gower. He leans recurrently--and perhaps most heavily in his brief discussion of Gower--on the evidence of the ethnic labeling of non-Christian peoples and individuals, identifying what Middle English translators do differently than their French predecessors and as a result reduce their orientalism, as Stavsky sees it. In the case of Gower, Stavsky resists Emily Houlik-Ritchey's argument (in "Rewriting Difference: 'Saracens' in John Gower and Juan de Cuenca," 2017) that Gower uses "Sarazine" for the Sultan's mother in order to justify Crusade-like "retaliation against her descendants," as Stavsky puts it. To the contrary, Stavsky observes, Gower uses "Sarazine" only twice (the instance in the Tale and one in an accompanying Latin gloss ["Sarazenos" at 2.1084]), while equivalent terms occur in the Constance story of Nicholas Trivet's "Chronicles," Gower's source, in "no fewer than a dozen instances." Stavsky cites only one instance from Trivet (and a complete list would be useful): the phrase "Terre Seinte encontre les Sarasins," for which Gower offers no equivalent whatsoever in his adaptation, lessening the orientalism, Stavsky implies. Elsewhere, Gower tends to use "Barbarie" instead, a "rather vague designation that could be anywhere outside of Christendom," Stavsky maintains, and nowhere presented by Gower as "grounds for a new Crusade." Closing his one-page assessment of Gower's Tale, Stavsky describes it as an "exemplum against detraction that is designed to cure its addressee," citing Carol Jamison's 2012 essay "John Gower's Shaping of 'The Tale of Constance' as an Exemplum contra of Envy" (37). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stavsky, Jonathan. Published Stavsky, Jonathan. "Translating the Near East in the 'Man of Law's Tale' and Its Analogues." Chaucer Review 55.1 (2020): 32–54. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Translating the Near East in the "Man of Law's Tale" and Its Analogues. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Caitlin G. Watt argues that Gower demonstrates that the confessional mode in "Confessio Amantis" is inadequate "to address such traumas as sexual violence" and that he calls for "a more egalitarian ethics of listening" (273). Using "the confessional discourse of feminist narrative anti-rape politics" (273), Watt considers the intersections of Gower's "Tale of Lucrece" with #MeToo movement insofar as confession may correct the social order and heal the one confessing. She attends to the numerous examples of sexual assault in CA, exploring how survivors are vulnerable to "public and legal patterns of counteraccusation" when they speak (274). Watt turns to the "Tale of Lucrece," which she claims "best illustrates Gower's representation of the pain of confession," adding that Gower's particular version of this tale focuses on the physicality involved (275). She claims Gower's narrative suggests a kind of voyeurism as a source of narrative pleasure--pain at the expense of Lucrece for the reader's entertainment--which parallels modern media's treatment of rape survivors and their narratives. Gower, however, takes us into the private experiences of Lucrece's rape, attempting to lead us through a reading that stresses her innocence; yet, as Watt explains, the confessors in Gower's tale "fail to alleviate her pain and succeed only in using her body to achieve revenge" (278). By the end of CA, though, Amans's swoon ends his suffering--a mercy not afforded to Lucrece and other rape victims in Gower's tales (and of course in the world). Watt concludes that the type of change sought by movements such as #MeToo cannot be achieved by confessional discourse alone: "It will require careful, self-reflective listening, and perhaps also new ways of reading the texts, medieval and modern, that have shaped the way we understand sexual violence" (280). [JGS. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Watt, Caitlin G Published Watt, Caitlin G. "The Speaking Wound: Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and the Ethics of Listening in the #metoo Era." postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 11 (2020): 272-81. 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 Speaking Wound: Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and the Ethics of Listening in the #metoo Era. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Fitzgerald frames her essay with Polonius's precepts from Shakespeare's "Hamlet," suggesting, "Shakespeare is drawing on an older, vernacular tradition and practice of masculine advice poetry"--"an obscure body of conduct poetry concerned with the performance of masculinity" (108). Fitzgerald focuses on couplets that "perform masculine authority in multiple modes" (109), and in so doing must navigate the tension between homosocial elements of masculinity and the excesses that would have been decried in what Vance Smith has called "arts of possession." The "later medieval masculine social self" is revealed in the content, performance, production, circulation, and form of this poetry. "Masculinity," Fitzgerald argues, "becomes a commodity to trade" (110). She calls attention to their "fungible nature" as they draw men together in networks of exchange. Beginning with couplets from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108, Fitzgerald traces iterations of them using the "Index of Middle English Verse"; she includes a useful chart that helps to illustrate the poetic body generated by these connected couplets. The interchangeability of these couplets is key--hence the use of the term "fungible couplets"--and results from a "mercantile discourse and ethics" that is "entirely masculine" and that seems to be particular to the middle class (115). They often employ the "performative voice of father advising son," which leads Fitzgerald to discuss particular examples wherein we find these voices appropriating authority in the copying of the couplets. Chaucer is appropriated in the Carthusian MS (British Library MS Add. 37049), and Gower in Hill's manuscript (Oxford, Balliol College, MS 354). The act of copying might itself be considered a performance of masculine authority wherein the copyist takes on the voice of masculine authority. Hill, for example, copies tales from "Confessio Amantis" but neglects to include their allegorical frame: "Yet, at the end of each tale, Genius's voice still survives in a few lines, often addressing the now-absent Amans as 'my son' and underscoring the moral and ethical lesson of the tale" (124). Fitzgerald returns to Shakespeare to conclude, suggesting that Shakespeare does not mock Polonius through the precepts he spouts but rather in so doing displays "the ways that masculinity and masculine authority are a performance, and to recognize the contradictions and anxieties of masculinity itself in his own age and the age preceding him" (125). [JS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fitzgerald, Christina M. Published Exemplaria 32 (2020): 107-29. 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 Copying Couplets: Performing Masculinity in Middle English Moral Poetry. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article offers a helpful comparison of literary condemnations of bribery by John Gower, William Langland, and others with what can be known about real cases of bribery from laws against it, actual prosecutions under the laws, and contemporary letters (chiefly the Pastons') showing the attitudes of litigants toward the need for bribery to achieve success in their cases. For Gowerians, the part on "Moral Arguments against Bribery" includes the passage from the "Confessio Amantis" where the chaplain of Venus tells Amans about the court of Lady Avarice with her servant Covoitise and his procurers Falswitnesse and Perjurie. Hole also describes how "Mirour de l'Omme" includes Lady Avarice's daughter Covetousness who bribes jurors and judges with silver and gold. In another passage, Gower accuses judges of being influenced by a letter from a great lord to go against justice. In "Different Forms of Bribery" Hole tells how in "Mirour de l'Homme" [sic] Gower described sheriffs being bribed to manipulate trials; he also said sheriffs might take money from both sides in a trial. Jurors were reported to be influenced by corrupt foremen. However, Hole expresses doubt whether Gower's claim to know a false juror who supported himself and his household from bribes was literally true or only an exemplum. Hole then moves on to real-life cases, and concludes from these that there "could be some truth" in Gower's claim that there were people who could make a living off bribery. Bribery arose because some legal personnel were underpaid--citing Gower's contempt for apprentice lawyers who learned to take their "hound's reward"--and because, pragmatically, many litigants felt bribery was unavoidable to compete against rivals who used it. [JL. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hole, Jennifer. Published Parergon 37 (2020): 113-31. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Expediency Versus Ethics: The Problem of Bribery in Late Medieval England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Sobecki's 2017 "Speculum" essay, "A Southwark Tale: Gower, the Poll Tax of 1381, and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales," introduced, among other documents, a plea of account submitted by John Gower in Easter Term of 1396 against Thomas Forester and John Gay (TNA, CP40/541, m. 46f.). This note introduces a new Gower life record related to that 1396 plea: a second plea of account by Gower against Forester and Gay from Trinity Term 1396, in which Gower again attempts to compel Gay and Forester. The note includes a transcription and translation of this newly discovered plea. [BWG. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sobecki, Sebatian. Published Medium Ævum 89.2 (2020): 381-82. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A New Life Record for John Gower, 1396. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review McCabe's fundamental argument in this essay is that Gower asserted himself as a major national poet, self-consciously positioned and proclaimed, sometime around 1390 in Latin "metatextual" materials that accompany the "Confessio Amantis," and anticipated in related materials found earlier in Gowerian texts and manuscripts. The argument is an extension of McCabe's previous, lengthier discussions of Gower's use of English in the CA, with increased emphasis on the poet's "extraclergial" lay didacticism through which he addressed and cultivated a broad public audience as well as patrons. For the earlier discussions, see McCabe's 2010 University of Toronto dissertation and his 2011 "Gower's Vulgar Tongue" (JGN 31.2), the latter duly cited in this essay. Presented in the "Oxford Handbook of Chaucer" (chapter 30), McCabe's essay is framed by aspects of Gower/Chaucer relations: opening with discussion of how the poets' "bids for a quasi-Petrarchan position as national author are mutually dependent . . . [and] also contestative" (564) and closing with suggestions that Chaucer's "Retraction" was deeply influenced by Gower's "combining of an earnest, Christian public address with the poetic resources of elite European culture as the twin bases of the new edifice, English poetry" (574). Chaucer aside, the center of the essay is close readings of "various authorial signatures found in the [Gower] manuscripts," particularly "the poems 'Quam cinxere', 'Explicit iste liber', 'Eneidos bucolis', the . . . corpus-sealing [prose] colophon 'Quia vnusquisque'," and the Gower-as-archer illustration found in several early manuscripts of "Vox Clamantis," discussing them as evidence of Gower's "self-positioning" relative "to an English public . . . [and] individual patrons" which serves as "the main platform for his self-presentation as an elite author" (564). In McCabe's readings, for example, "Explicit iste liber" marks England as Gower's "literary field" while "Quam cinxere" declares that his works "have already become the property of the nation" and "makes explicit Gower's claim to have gained a Chaucer-like national stature as an author" (565). "Quia vnusquisque" raises the topic of Gower's "didactic mission" in his three major works and makes this mission "the very grounds of Gower's claim to literary celebrity" (566). McCabe tells us that such didacticism "unmistakeably plays a central role in Gower's self-promotion as an author," made even clearer in "Eneidos bucolis," which like the triple headrest on Gower's tomb, presents the three works as a trilogy that with their Christian moral seriousness and English accessibility outdoes even Virgil's works: "English is privileged as the tongue of origin and consummation alike" in "Eneidos," even though the poem's "argument is promulgated in the traditional language of intellectual authority, Latin." That final qualification or concern (and several others along the way, including the question of the authorship of "Eneidos," the Christian seriousness of CA, and more) give us all cause to pause, McCabe acknowledges, but he insists that as an "embodiment of a species of vernacular theology," the "metatextual packaging" of Gower's works has "important implications for Gower's audience's taste, at least insofar as that taste was anticipated and cultivated by Gower and the collaborators and scribes responsible for promoting his works" (567). Later, and more pointedly, McCabe declares that "'Eneidos bucolis' valorizes not only public access but, specifically, the access to truth which the mother tongue grants to English Christians" (573). Switching gears somewhat, McCabe explores Gower's appeals to and for both elite and popular audiences, acknowledging his "self-identification with the social elite" (569) and his seemingly contradictory speaking as a "vox populi." For McCabe, this is made possible by a kind of anticlericalism that supports and gains rhetorical authority through an "extraclergial stance" which offers the "extraclergial wisdom" (573) of a poetic, lay theology of grace. Tracing these threads in Gower's works (including the Gower-as-archer illustrations that accompany VC), McCabe returns to "Eneidos," but only after having deduced that Gower claims "authority for himself . . . [in a] manner in which he . . . presupposes a considerable degree of lay solidarity and in turn effects a quite substantial extension of agency to the laity," inviting his audience to practice "public criticism" and "equipping such readers for this practice" (572), even on theological topics. In CA and "In Praise of Peace," McCabe says, English "emerges as a tongue whose chief resources for expressing theological truth reside . . . in intimacy, polysemy, and affect," although "this is not the place to examine either work in detail." He cites "In Praise of Peace," 337–57 and CA II.3187–497 as instances where "Gower juxtaposes natural human 'pite' and divine 'grace' in ways that frequently assign the natural passion a salvific function" and then refers us to his own "Gower's Vulgar Tongue" for "many similar moves" (573) that emphasize pious affect rather than clerical instruction. Before closing with comments on how Gower's "ostentatious piety" is likely to have influenced Chaucer's "Retraction," McCabe declares that "Gower's ability to push the boundaries of vernacular cultural mediation even as he reshapes the resources of an elite European poetry gave his poetry a quality not found in contemporary writings, and this distinction may explain the success of his poetry during his lifetime, as well as why, by 1390, he should have felt justified in claiming to have achieved the standing of a nationally significant author" (574). In addition to Chaucer, the "contemporary writings" McCabe's refers to here include "Piers Plowman," Langland's "alliterative imitators" (568), Usk, Clanvowe, "The Prickynge of Love," "Pore Caitif," and more, so his arguments are widely grounded. Similarly, his references to other critics range widely, although he does not mention Michael P. Kuczynski's "Gower's Virgil" (2007) which also discusses "Eneidos" and its Christian "outdoing" of Virgil in the poem without resolving the question of its authorship. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor McCabe, T. Matthew N. Published McCabe, T. Matthew N. "Vernacular Authorship and Public Poetry: John Gower." In Suzanne Conklin Akbari and James Simpson, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 563-79. Unrestricted access at https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199582655.013.38; accessed September 18, 2022. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Minor Latin Poetry Vox Clamantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Vernacular Authorship and Public Poetry: John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Smith states as his goal in the essay "to bring paleography and book history into the realm of linguistic enquiry, as part of a reimagined philology." He builds upon Michael Samuels' 1963 argument that an "incipient standard English" could be discovered in a sequence of late Middle English spelling-patterns, of which Samuels identified several "types." Smith points to "types" other than those cited by Samuels, in copies of John Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and Nicholas Love's "Mirror of the Life of Christ." He argues that manuscripts containing these and other similar texts, which were also transmitted in distinctive forms of handwriting and in like codicological contexts, were products of identifiable communities of practice, and that the correlation of spelling and handwriting such manuscripts manifest represent "expressive" usages, characteristic of particular kinds of discourse. These unique usages Smith labels "scriptae," noting that they seem to "function as markers of difference and belonging, and be involved in the creation of identities at different levels of social organisation" (quoting Mark Sebba [2009]). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Smith, Jeremy. Published Smith, Jeremy. "On Scriptae: Correlating Spelling and Script in Late Middle English." Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 80 (2020): 13–27. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource On Scriptae: Correlating Spelling and Script in Late Middle English. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "The book argues," Jeremy Smith says at the outset, "that correlations between textual form and textual function are of very considerable interest not only to scholars working within the paradigm of historical pragmatics but also, more generally, to literary scholars, would-be editors, book historians and indeed those interested in issues of cultural change more generally" (29). For the "Confessio Amantis," he focuses on differences between the language of the important manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 3 and the language of M. L. Samuels's "Type III" that pervades late-fourteenth-century manuscripts. Some of the language idiosyncrasies, which may well be Gower's own, appear in later manuscripts but are muted in Berthelette's early prints. These also embody an evolving punctuation practice (between the 1532 and 1554 editions) that "would seem to reflect a more directive approach to the text, guiding readers in pragmatic terms more insistently towards the interpretation of Gower's verse" (150). [TWM. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Smith, Jeremy J. Published Smith, Jeremy J. Transforming Early English: The Reinvention of Early English and Older Scots. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Manuscripts and Textual Studies Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Transforming Early English: The Reinvention of Early English and Older Scots. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Compared to Shakespeare's other plays, "Pericles" displays "[an especially close] adherence to its sources," thus "making evaluation of tradition and innovation one of its central themes." Per Velez, the audience of "Pericles" is called upon "to reevaluate assumptions about their own world, especially regarding the distribution of prestige and power," and to favorably consider innovation (142). When Shakespeare does deviate from his source, he does so strategically, changing the name of the hero from Gower's Apollonius to Pericles as Plutarch's Pericles engaged with the lower classes of ancient Athens (143). Personifying literary "auctoritas," the character Gower sets an example by modernizing the style of his verse from the archaic diction of his opening Chorus to "the loose pentameter common to Shakespeare's other characters" in the Epilogue that closes the play (145). Social hierarchy is subtly interrogated throughout. Pericles owes his life to the fisher folk who provide him with the suit of armor that enables him to win his bride, even as the fishermen are heard to "complain about the rich" in terms that echo a Jacobean peasant uprising (146). Pericles promises to reward them for their service, but he never does, calling into question the "hegemonic ideologies" that support his high position (146). Deviating from his source in "Confessio Amantis," Shakespeare has Pericles stay home after his family is reunited, allowing "a mob of commoners" to mete out justice to his daughter's foster parents, thus indirectly supporting a popular check on the divine right of kings. Per Velez, "the theatre is a place where those silenced by convention are heard," albeit with a distancing designed to elude the Jacobean censors (148-49). Even the traditional figure of "moral Gower" "serves to . . . reexamine assumptions, let go of the past, and adopt new conventions to meet the future" (149). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Velez, Megan. Published Velez, Megan. "Adherence and Deviation: Pericles's Slow Progress toward Social Change." The Journal of the Wooden O 20 (2020): 142-50. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Adherence and Deviation: Pericles's Slow Progress toward Social Change. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Murchison asks "it is worth considering whether textually constructed audiences were simply approached with more flexibility in medieval literary contexts" (499). She suggests this issue would have mattered more for didactic texts and entertainment texts, which then frames how she will divide the remainder of her essay. Murchison first examines the "ars predicandi" beginning with Gregory the Great's "Pastoral Care." She later notes Alan de Lille's assertion that "both approach and subject matter should match the needs of one's actual audience" (502). She goes on to examine other examples in this genre before then moving into didactic works with narrower audiences. Speaking to religious guides, Murchison observes stark specificity in guides intended for one audience as opposed to another, but then she adds that "we cannot conclude from these examples alone that medieval writers and audiences were comfortable with such diversity" (505). She then examines the "Ancrene Wisse" and its constructed audience as well as the opportunities some texts would take to add constructed audiences. Shifting her attention to the "ars poetica," Murchison describes a similar expected diversity of audiences for poetic texts. In particular, she looks at Gower's textually constructed audience in the "Confessio Amantis." Murchison details the history of the poem with its initial constructed audience being Richard II then changing to Henry IV, concluding, "A deliberate act of adaptation such as this one suggests that writers of more secular texts, much like the writers of sermons, were attuned to the importance of audiences" (512). This change, however, does not lead Gower to change his other implied audiences, which, Murchison suggests, reflects his understanding of the diversity of audiences. [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Murchison, Krista A. Published Murchison, Krista A. "Is the Audience Dead Too? Textually Constructed Audiences and Differentiated Learning in Medieval England." Modern Language Review 115, no. 3 (2020), pp. 497-517. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Is the Audience Dead Too? Textually Constructed Audiences and Differentiated Learning in Medieval England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Thomas's primary focus is cultural--asserting a claim for the powerful influence of the Bohemian court on that of Richard II, brought about by his wife Anne--and unsurprisingly literature finds a central place in his discussion. Chaucer and the "Gawain"-Poet, per his title, occupy most of his interest (Langland is mentioned once, on p. 20), he devotes a portion of chapter 2 to Gower, denoting him, along with Richard Maidstone, "another Ricardian writer who appears to have partaken of [the] spirit of poet-patron familiarity" (44), based on the meeting of Richard and Gower on the Thames, described in Ricardian manuscripts of the "Confessio Amantis." Thomas recognizes the lack of evidence that this happened, but configures it as a "fiction of engagement," borrowing a term from Deborah McGrady. He largely follows the claim of Linda Burke ("Bohemian Gower"--see online Gower bibliography), that Queen Anne inspired the CA, and he goes on to assert independently that "Anne of Bohemia is probably the real-life inspiration for the two pivotal figures of Venus and Alceste in Gower's 'Confessio' and Chaucer's 'Legend'" (46). Anne's presence in the works of the two poets differs, however: for Chaucer, Anne/Alceste is "a mediatrix or intercessor between the contrite poet and the irate God of Love" while "Gower's Venus/Anne, by contrast, [is] the source of moral authority at a court riotously led by Youth (an allegorical designation for the youthful Richard II in the mid-1380s). In her role as the clear-sighted and realistic assessor of Gower as too old to be a member of her court of Love, Venus resembles Anne's role as the sensible and restraining consort of Richard's waywardness" and the rosary she gives Amans/Gower in Book VIII "recalls Anne's reputation as a pious queen" (47). No evidence is offered for any of this, nor for the claim (203) that "Poets like Chaucer and Gower who placed self-interest above factional loyalty were more likely to survive and prosper under the new regime [i.e., Henry IV] than those whose allegiance bound them to the old order." [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Thomas, Alfred. Published Thomas, Alfred. The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture: Literature and Art in the Age of Chaucer and the "Gawain" Poet. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2020. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture: Literature and Art in the Age of Chaucer and the "Gawain" Poet. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Gillhammer, Cosima Clara Published Gillhammer, Cosima Clara. An Edition of Oxford, Trinity College, MS 29. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Oxford, 2020. 2 vols.: xi, 335; i, 329; 51 illus. Dissertation Abstracts International C82.02(E). Abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Fully accessible via https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c3244a71-a6fa-4646-aeb3-9902e055a290. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Review Gillhammer opens her two-volume dissertation with clear claims and an ambitious goal: "Oxford, Trinity College, MS 29 (T) contains a unique Old Testament history which has so far only been known to a very small number of experts. T is an unusual and eccentric text; it is a compilation of reworked extracts from a wide range of sources, forming a history of the world beginning with the creation of man and breaking off incompletely at the time of Hannibal . . . . [T]here "has never been a complete description or a comprehensive analysis of this text--a lack which the present thesis and edition seek to remedy" (1). She succeeds in remedying this lack, editing the text itself (without notes) in her second volume (although she calls it an "appendix"). Volume 1 is a comprehensive Introduction, with paleographical and codicological descriptions of the manuscript and analysis of its sources (including Gower's "Confessio Amantis"); discussion of "broader contextual questions such as authorship and authority, intended audience and use, as well as the evidence for a compiler-scribe"; assessment of "T in the context of related medieval genres, such as universal histories, encyclopedias, and florilegia"; and investigation of "the linguistic evidence, and traces the manuscript's origin based on a dialectal analysis" (3). Gowerians will be particularly interested in Gillhammer's discussion of the use of Gower's "Nebuchadnezzar's Dream" in the manuscript--the only section of CA excerpted in in the manuscript in verse--and more than twenty briefer excerpts from CA given in prose (see especially pp. 43-49 and 154-59 of volume 1). [MA] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource An Edition of Oxford, Trinity College, MS 29. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article, published posthumously, primarily presents a reading of the overall structure and approach of "Fortunes Stabilnes," Charles d'Orléans' framed poetic collection in English, which Burrow generally refers to as the "English Book of Love." Burrow compares Charles' framing dream of Age to the 'Confessio Amantis,' and contrasts Amans' ultimate abandonment of love to Charles' abandonment of it, which in "Fortunes Stabilnes" he later reverses. The focus is largely on the collection's movement through its framing dreams, with some discussion of those dreams' possible use of English models. This is where Gower comes in--Burrow presents a detailed comparison of Venus' healing of Amans' love wound to Charles' presentation of himself retreating to the castle of "No Care" ("Nonchaloir") with his heart wrapped in black (25). The comparison continues with Burrow's discussion of Charles' second dream, which "like the first (and like Gower's), mysteriously heralds a change of life" (26), though unlike Gower's it involves returning to a poetic persona as a lover. Burrow notes that this dream is not paralleled in the French version of the collection, and calls it "so much wilder than the first" (26), suggesting some differences in the poet's approach when composing in English vs. French. Burrow suggests that "Charles may have conceived the first and last parts of his book as forming a kind of diptych, representing two of the main sorrows that a lover might suffer: separation from a mistress who is kind, or proximity to one who is not" (32). He concludes by speculating that Charles walked away from the English version of the collection without a strong conclusion, upon being freed from captivity (33). Overall, this article presents an interesting overview of the structure of "Fortunes Stabilnes," suggesting ways in which English models might be tied to the dream structure. While its primary focus is (and should be) Charles d'Orléans, it does provide a valuable perspective on Gower's fifteenth-century influence. [RAL. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burrow, John. Published Burrow, John. "The Two Dreams of Charles d'Orleans and of His English Book.' In R. D. Perry and Mary-Jo Arn, eds. Charles d'Orleans' English Aesthetic: The Form, Poetics, and Style of Fortunes Stabilnes (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 2020), pp. 22–33. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Two Dreams of Charles d'Orleans and of His English Book. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Attending little to Gower and his works, Davis's book explores interwoven complexities of inheritance, succession, moral legacy, and literary patrimony in the late medieval and early modern imaginary. It covers a wide range of poetry, prose, and drama by Chaucer, Lydgate, Hoccleve, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Bunyan, along with less-studied works such as the Latin "Ordo de Ysaac et Rebecca," the "Tale of Gamelyn," and the genealogies and Great Picture of Anne Clifford. Tension between inheritance and emergent commercialism is Davis's focus in chapter six where he addresses, primarily, Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale" (with brief mention of Gower's Constance narrative) and Shakespeare's 'Merchant of Venice.' In this context, Davis discusses Gower's depiction of fraud ("Triche") in the international wool trade ("Mirour de l'Omme," 25237-55 and 25369-80) as straightforward "conservative estates satire" and "flat condemnation" (237-38), contrasting it with the "much more innovative" (235) and complicated "Libelle of Englyshe Polycye" and the "[v]ery nearly trenchantly paradoxical" (239) "Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep" by Lydgate. For Davis, MO stands as representative of the "complaints . . . found in innumerable sermons and homilies produced throughout the Middle Ages" (234), a depiction of trade as "alien entity within traditional medieval culture" (247), and, lacking paradox or tension, it seems, not quite premodern. Elsewhere in the book, Gower is mentioned only twice in passing: the poet presents Henry as conqueror by force in "Cronica Tripertita" (103n17) and, at a moment in "H. aquile," the poet offers a "paradoxical formulation [that] balances competing intuitions of change and continuity" (109), perhaps a bit premodern after all. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Davis, Alex. Published Davis, Alex. Imagining Inheritance from Chaucer to Shakespeare. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. [xiii], 297 pp.; 11 b&w illus. Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme Cronica Tripertita Minor Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Imagining Inheritance from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This informative chapter discusses scholars' access to medieval British manuscripts from the time of their production to the present (2020), taking one manuscript, British Library, Cotton MS. Tiberius A. IV, a collection of John Gower's Latin poems, as a focal point for current access but at times extending further to discuss access in more general terms. For experienced scholars, the description of how one gains access to manuscripts in the British Library won't have added much to their knowledge. The interesting part comes as Prescott and Echard discuss how collections came into the British Library, why the Library changed the shelfmarks, for some while they retained the previous collectors' shelfmarks for others like the Royal and Cotton collections, and how the holdings of medieval charters, printed books, etc. cause some confusion in the shelfmarks seemingly duplicated when we use contracted forms. Prescott's insider knowledge of the workings behind the circulation desk at the British Library both before and after its move to St. Pancras enables them to explain how and why the Library came to classify some manuscripts as "Select" while others seemingly just as important remain ordinary. They also describe how decisions about the handling, display and conservation of manuscripts were made by different Keepers of Manuscripts. Prescott's insider glimpses into how and where the manuscripts are kept in storage and fetched when we request them, and explanations for the historical classifications by which the Library decided which to protect during the two world wars and which could be kept at the Library are also interesting. Echard then picks up the story to describe how modern scholars access manuscripts other than "in person," through photographs, facsimiles, microfilm and (now) digital imagery on line. Her frustrations as a North American scholar, on the west coast at that, pinpoint the difficulties of access for those not based close to the collections. Branching out to look more widely at the manuscripts of Gower's works held in libraries other than the British Library, she reviews which sorts of libraries have had the resources to digitize their manuscripts, and points out the pressures on libraries and archives to digitize not only English medieval manuscripts with which we are interested but also modern collections, which are much more numerous. This last year (2023-4), the ransomware attack on the British Library's IT system has only exacerbated these frustrations, even for scholars closer to the British Library than Echard. All in all, this is a wonderfully informative article focussed on a manuscript of Gower's non-English works but teaching us much more about the issues of access, both historically and at present, that we all face when studying medieval manuscripts. [LM. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân. Prescott, Andrew. Published Echard, Siân and Andrew Prescott. "Charming the Snake: Accessing and Disciplining the Medieval Manuscript," in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval British Manuscripts, ed. Orieta Da Rold and Elaine Treharne (Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 237-66. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charming the Snake: Accessing and Disciplining the Medieval Manuscript. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In the Acknowledgements that accompany his essay (p. 59), Hsy points out that "This chapter also appears in a modified and expanded form in Jonathan Hsy, "Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature" (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 27–57," a volume reviewed in JGN 32.2. The "modifications," if any, are imperceptible. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hsy, Jonathan. Published Hsy, Jonathan. "At Home and in the 'Countour-Hous': Chaucer's Polyglot Dwellings." In Suzanna Conklin Akbari and James Simpson, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 43–62. 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 At Home and in the "Countour-Hous": Chaucer's Polyglot Dwellings. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Rogers offers first an introduction to John Gower's "Tale of Constance" (Confessio Amantis Book II) from the perspective of Disability Studies before then presenting an edition of the tale, footnoted with special attention toward moments of impairment and/or disability. After providing a brief synopsis of both CA as a whole and then the tale itself, Rogers makes the claim that the tale "is ultimately about sight and perception" (304). Rogers calls our attention to Gower's emphasis on listening and hearing in the tale, reminding us that Envy--the section of the CA from which this tale is taken--is a sin that stems from sight. As Rogers nicely puts it, "no one truly sees Constance, besides those who attempt to destroy her, those who are physically blind, or those who die or are separated from her as a result of her friendship and love" (304). It is this emphasis on sight, then, and those moments in the tale to which Rogers directs readers who may be interested in disability and impairment. He reminds us, however, that blindness in the tale is a condition that requires intervention--whether medical or spiritual. Rogers concludes, "For Gower's text, as for Chaucer's, the fiction of the normal body is just that" (305). [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rogers, Will, ed. and intro. Published Rogers, Will, ed. and intro. "Tale of Constance," In Medieval Disability Sourcebook: Western Europe, ed. Cameron Hunt McNabb (New York: Punctum, 2020), pp. 304-12. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Tale of Constance. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Stone provides a brief history and chronology of the process of medieval manuscript acquisitions at Wadham College and an overview of the current catalogues of the College's collection. Of the eight medieval manuscripts catalogued here, one--MS 13--contains Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and "Traitié" (catalogued at 472–476). The manuscript is from England, perhaps Chester, and dates to c. 1470. The manuscript is paper, and its foliation is ii + 446 + ii, where fol. ii is a vellum flyleaf; fols 447–448 are post-medieval endleaves. Stone notes two scribes, both writing in a late mixed cursive hand: Scribe A can be localised to Derbyshire and Scribe B to the Staffordshire-Derbyshire border (475). They originally wrote consecutively but a later misbinding led to Scribe A's hand at 1-169v, 273-288v, and Scribe B's hand at 170-272v, 289-446v. Gower's CA runs from fols. 1–442r. Macaulay places MS 13 in his third recension of the text, stating that it derived from Bodleian, MS Fairfax 3. Stone notes "significant confusion in the prologue regardless of binding errors" (473). The Traitié follows on fols. 442v-446v. Stone then describes the manuscript's collation, textual decoration and presentation, additions, binding, and provenance. It contains authorial marginalia in Latin. Additions are in both English and Latin, including chronicle entries, a list of Chester sheriffs and mayors, "a long note regarding the composition of Gower's 'Confessio' . . . copied in a s. xv/xvi hand" (474) which references Richard II's reign and the work's dedication to Henry, musical notation, and individual alphabet letters and doodles. [RM. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stone, Zachary E. Published Stone, Zachary E. "Descriptive Catalogue of Eight Medieval Manuscripts from Wadham College, Oxford." The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 21 (2020): 445-76. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Descriptive Catalogue of Eight Medieval Manuscripts from Wadham College, Oxford. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review As her title indicates, Burke argues that Gower's "Cinkante Balades" was written following a model established by Christine de Pizan in her "Cent Balades." "This discovery is important for Christine studies, as it affirms an example of her influence on the world stage beginning as early as 1398, when her 'Cent Balades' must have already been known to readers in France, as well as carried to England (in a manuscript that has not survived) by John Montague, Earl of Salisbury" (172). "For Gower studies," she states, "this discovery of filiation is a game-changer" (172). Her argument rests on two points: dates of 1398 for the "Cent Balades" (so that Salisbury could bring them with him from France to England) and 1399 for the "Cinkante Balades"; and that Christine's and Gower's works share a "common plan" (177)--"almost exactly the same blueprint" (178). She takes both works as inspired by love, and reads "Cinkante Balades" I-IV as "a personal tribute to their author's happy proposal of marriage and his joy at the acceptance of his bride" (182), finding in IIII* "anaphora that rings forth the constancy of joyful love" (183), relating it to the Song of Songs (184). She concludes, "Although Gower's collection in no way surpassed the youthful genius of Christine in her 'Cent balades,' he created a worthy tribute to her legacy of moral lyrics composed in many voices, but united in diversity by the theme of love" (184). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burke, Linda. Published In Genèses et filiations dans l'oeuvre de Christine de Pizan, ed. Dominique Demartini and Claire le Ninan (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021), pp. 171-84. Gower Subject Cinkante Balades Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Personal as Political. John Gower's "Cinkante balades" as English Response to the "Cent balades" of Christine de Pizan. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article makes a fairly complicated case for the relationship between the traditionalist ideologies of Gower and the 1381 rebels, focusing on Gower's use of Ovid in his description of the revolt. Starting from the observation of a "near-consensus that Gower's use of Ovidian myths and elegy disconnects Gower from the rebels" (34), Ni argues that Gower actually shares with the rebels and idealization of the past. She notes the apocalypticism implied by the rebels' reliance on the eschatological fantasy of the Domesday Book, and contrasts that to the more visionary apocalyptism of "Gower's narrative of metamorphosis" (37). This leads Ni to attribute to Gower "a flexible view of history that stood in stark contrast to the rebels' romanticization of the past" (38). By adapting Ovid, whom Gower associates with change, she shows how verse "can be made to suit different historical settings" (39). This malleable quality of poetry, which can be borrowed, adapted, and changed for different purposes, then contrasts to the way the rebels hoped to use the Domesday book as an inviolable record that "cannot be changed" (39). Ni goes on to examine the use of monstrous imagery from Ovid, such as the role of Hecuba, the Calydonian boar, or a storm at sea. With Hecuba, for example, Gower alludes to her transformation from a human form in "Metamorphosis" 13, with the transformations of the rebels in his vision; this potentially "changes the rebels into transformed victims and righteous avengers" (41). Ni does not argue that this potential sympathy with the rebels adds up to redemption for them, but that they might not have been completely in the wrong. Similarly, with the Calydonian boar, by associating the boar with Wat Tyler, "Ovid's layered allusions to the death of Hector enrich Gower's references to the murder of Wat Tyler" (42). This allusion then gives Tyler some heroic qualities, while still retaining the image of his ultimate defeat. Ni further argues that Gower's use of Ovid allows Gower to "acknowledge. . . the 'collective guilt' of society" (46), and contrast the "Edenic and the Apocalyptic" (47). Through Gower's use of the Phaeton story here, so that the image of the chariot ultimately bridges the gap between beginnings and endings. In the end, Ni argues that Gower is combining three methods: distancing himself from the rebels' use of the past, shifting perspectives to cycle through alternative visions of history to address "collective guilt" (53), and blurring the distinction between the Edenic and Apocalyptic to deny the possibility of returning to the past. He concludes that "These techniques cannot reveal their significance unless the rebels' tactic of "making Britain great again" is read against Gower's affirmation of historical flexibility" (53). Overall Ni offers a fairly complicated argument (to which this brief summary probably has not done justice), depending on close readings of the "Visio" against a portion of its Ovidian allusions. It treads a careful line by suggesting Gower's limited sympathy with the rebels, given that most readers see his position on the rebels as more negative, but makes a provocative case overall. Certainly any reader concerned with Gower's interaction with Ovid should find this interesting. [RAL. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ni, Yun. Published Chaucer Review 56 (2021): 33-53. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Between History and Prophecy: Ovidian Metamorphoses and the 1381 Revolt in Gower's "Visio Anglie." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Weiskott's project lacks neither ambition nor targets. As he sets it out in the Preface, "The goal is to think of English metrical traditions as themselves unfolding historical times, whose experiences initially bore no relation to the later historical accretions through which we inevitably conceptualize English poetics today, such as the canonization of Chaucer, the dominance of pentameter, the usurpation by English of the social and intellectual spaces of Latin, Enlightenment historiography, nationalism, the institution of English departments, and free verse" (xviii). To encompass all this, he identifies four "Ages": of Prophecy, Alliterative Meter, Tetrameter, and Pentameter. The first, as he says, "represents a genre" (197), the other three metrical traditions, and he argues for mapping all four across the literature of his chosen three hundred years as a fresh approach to marking the passage of time. Weiskott identifies Langland (who perfected alliterative verse) and Chaucer (who invented English pentameter) as "the two most prominent fourteenth-century English poets" (4), but he allows occasional spaces for Gower scattered throughout, primarily (and not surprisingly) in chapter 10, "Chaucer's English Metrical Phonology: Tetrameter to Pentameter." Weiskott avers that the Age of Tetrameter began in the thirteenth century, "under influence from French octosyllables and Latin accentual-syllabic tetrameter" (163), and in the fourteenth "appeared as the best alternative to alliterative meter for serious compositions" (74); hence Gower used it for the "Confessio," and Chaucer for the "Book of the Duchess," "Hous of Fame," and "Romaunt of the Rose." In this their practices followed "Francien preference": early on, "Chaucer deployed his French- and Italian-derived English verse forms according to French metrical decorum. (Gower observed the same decorum throughout his career, across English and French: tetrameter/octosyllables for the narrative "Confessio Amantis" and "Mirour de l'Omme," pentameter/decasyllables for the lyric "Cinkante Balades," "Confessio" 8.2217-300, "In Praise of Peace," and "Traitié pour les amantz marietz")" (175-76). Several of Weiskott's most interesting observations concerning Gower occur in the notes. Of particular interest in this regard is the comment (247-48, n. 13) that three lyric styles that he, following Martin Duffell, identifies as exclusively Chaucerian and Italian, Gower also employs in the "Cinkante Balades." Similarly: pentameter being for Weiskott the badge of modernity, he would on metrical grounds "expand" claims for Chaucer's modernity made (for other reasons) by A. C. Spearing "to cover Gower, Clanvowe, Walton" and several others (253, n. 49); and (251, n. 52) he reflects on uses of "poete/poetical/poesie/poetrie" in Chaucer and Gower, in whose work the first two don't appear, and the second pair, with the exception of Venus' reference to Chaucer, alludes "exclusively to Ovid." His final Gower-related observation is to Quixley's fifteenth-century translation of the "Traitié" into Yorkshire English, arguing, following Yeager, that its unique production outside of the London ambit (albeit with probable Augustinian connections with St. Mary Overye) underscores how localized the work of Chaucer, Gower, and the rest were (183-84). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Cinkante Balades In Praise of Peace Traitié pour les amantz marietz Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Garrison's essay begins with a summary of the recent exploration of personal rape narratives that have led us to question our assumptions about the safety and civility of Western society. She suggests Gower's "Confessio Amantis" as a potential tool to use in transforming Western rape culture because it "highlights sexual violence against women as a central cultural injustice and presents rape narratives as a potentially powerful force for social and political change" (123). Gower's poem brings to light the social destruction that results from "the masculine chivalric ideal" that nearly always comes at the price of women's suffering. Garrison focuses on three of the stories in the CA: "Mundus and Paulina," "Tarquin and Lucrece," and "Tereus and Philomena." Garrison notes that "Gower reveals that the language of courtly love is a culturally sanctioned version of the language of rape" (124). He does this through Genius's warnings about the dangers of courtly love through tales concerning rape, and, despite what other critics have argued, Garrison contends that Gower is not trivializing experiences of rape but instead showing them as acts of violence against communities. Discussing the tale of "Mundus and Paulina," she demonstrates how the community's response to Paulina's rape creates a sort of solidarity--the "English social unity" for which he calls in his Prologue (126). Gower achieves this through his focus on Paulina's suffering, which also works to unite the Christian community. In the legend of Lucrece, Garrison writes, "Gower focuses on the power of Lucrece as a storyteller who exposes the social dangers of powerful men who fail to control their own desires" (130). She suggests Gower's moral for the tale is that powerful men should not rape their subjects. After demonstrating the through-lines in the CA of the rape of women and invasions of cities, Garrison adds, "Gower highlights how the rape of Lucrece has significance that extends well beyond one woman's body" (133). Garrison concludes this section of her essay: "Gower suggests that rape and political tyranny are inextricably intertwined" (134-35). Finally, Garrison turns to Gower's tale of "Philomena and Tereus," in which he "most clearly articulates the power of women's personal rape narratives" (135). Garrison posits the languages of courtly love and rape blur in this tale. She writes, "Philomena's narrative, written both on and by Philomena, consistently highlights the intersections of rape and courtly love in defining the chivalric subject" (138). Rape and courtly love become synonymous. Garrison concludes her essay by highlighting the transformative social power of rape narratives: "As uncomfortable a truth as it may be, personal rape narratives are an art. As an art form, they only have power insofar as they inspire their readers to change themselves" (141). [JGS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Garrison, Jennifer. Published Garrison, Jennifer. "Transforming Community: Women's Rape Narratives and Gower's Confessio Amantis." Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 57, no. 1 (2021): 121-41. 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 Transforming Community: Women's Rape Narratives and Gower's Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review One of the brightest signs of growing interest in Gower is the recent attention to the manuscripts of his work: their fascinating political valences, their luxurious design, their position in current discussions about certain London scribes and canon formation in the book worlds of London and beyond. Those lines of investigation now have a splendid and solid foundation in Pearsall's and Mooney's Catalogue. The forty-nine surviving manuscripts and six fragments of the "Confessio Amantis" are fully described in entries that meet and regularly exceed contemporary practice in their sheer fullness of detail. As the Foreword notes, the project began in 1978 (xiii), with significant early work by Jeremy Griffiths and Kate Harris. Four decades on, the Catalogue benefits from recent work on the CA to update the heroic labors of George C. Macaulay now a century old. Macaulay's brief manuscript descriptions are in some cases markedly less complete than in others (also true for his collations), and he did not see nine CA manuscripts in Middle English now known to scholars. That inconsistency has now been rectified. In this Catalogue manuscript contents are described with lacunae fully annotated and additions listed; illustrations and decorations are discussed at length. Physical description in general is extensive, offering information on scribal hands, page design, and punctuation. Substantial discussions of provenance are the rule, not the exception: for London, British Library, MS Harley 3490 the discussion of provenance extends over five pages (105-109), and that example is not the exception. In many places consultations with A. I. Doyle, Kathleen Scott, and other scholars have enriched the entries. Current scholarship is well-enough represented that the Works Cited alone is worth the attention of Gowerians. The appendices include an authoritative summary list of the manuscripts, Macaulay's sigla, and an overview of Gower's shorter poems in Latin often added to the end of the CA, along with poems not attributed to Gower that appear in CA manuscripts. The French poem "Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz" also finds its way into the third appendix, a bit surprising but helpful, since one or more of three short Latin poems seem to attach themselves to this "ballade" collection in several early manuscripts. A small gathering of color plates offers glimpses of the two standard miniatures (the Dream of Nebuchadnezzar and the Confession) and the two main layouts in what Pearsall has called the "London style" for the poem in the first decades of its public life. The Catalogue does not include the two Iberian translations of the CA; the editors note that these manuscripts have been well-discussed recently. Nor does it include the nine independent manuscripts of "Vox clamantis," the Trentham anthology (London, British Library, MS Add. 59495), or the sole copy of the "Mirour de l'Omme" (Cambridge, University Library, MS Add. 3035). We can turn to other sources for the latter two, but a full contemporary description of the VC manuscripts remains an important and incomplete task. In all other respects this long-awaited treasure-house fulfills its promise. [JF. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek and Linne Mooney, eds. Published Pearsall, Derek and Linne Mooney, eds. A Descriptive Catalogue of the English Manuscripts of John Gower's Confessio Amantis. Publications of the John Gower Society, XV. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2021. xx; 385 pp. ISBN 978-1-84384-613-0. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Confessio Amantis Minor Latin Poetry Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Descriptive Catalogue of the English Manuscripts of John Gower's Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review CA V.1283, in the "Tale of Proserpina," reads: "And lerne forto weve and spinne." Ceres, her mother, has hidden her away in a secret chamber below Mt. Aetna, to protect her virginity. Following Venus to pick flowers while her mother was away, Proserpina is spotted by Pluto and ravished. Neither the detail of the chamber below Aetna nor that of weaving/spinning occurs in the "Metamorphoses" proper, but rather both are in Gower's main source, the "Ovidius moralizatus." Berchorius' own source for his mention of weaving/spinning, however, not being in Ovid's version, has eluded discovery. Sharp locates it in Claudian's "De raptu Proserpinae" ("a foundational text in the medieval curriculum," [163]), Book I, ll. 244-53, citing the passage as "the narrative building block from which Berchorius could have drawn for his own moralization of Ovid" (164). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sharp. David. Published Sharp, David. "Gower's 'Ovidian' Source for Line V.1283 of the Confessio Amantis." Notes and Queries 66 (2021): 162-64. 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 "Ovidian" Source for Line V.1283 of the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Weiskott, Eric. "John Gower and 'John of Bridlington': An Unnoticed Borrowing." Notes and Queries 68.2 (2021): 160-62. Gower Subject Cronica Tripertita Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Review Weiskott asserts that a line cited by Lawrence Warner ("Latin Verses by John Gower and 'John of Bridlington' in a Piers Plowman Manuscript [BL 35287]," N&Q 55 [2008]: 127-31)--"Tristia post leta. post tristial sepe quieta"--as the opening line of the "Cronica Tripertita" part III is borrowed from Bridlington's prophecy (160). Weiskott opines that Gower knew and used John Erghome's Latin commentary on Bridlington, and suggests some of the structure of the "Cronica" may be based on Bridlington, noting as well that both Gower and Erghome had connections with Austin priories. He calls for "further source study and renewed attention to those aspects of Gower's Latin poetry that reflect his immersion in the difficult and explosively popular genre of insular political prophecy" (162). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower and "John of Bridlington": An Unnoticed Borrowing. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gillhammer examines manuscripts in which "leaves containing a specific text are incorporated into a different manuscript than the one for which they were originally intended, thus being put to use in a new manuscript without rewriting or palimpsesting." Oxford, Trinity College MS 29, a paper MS compiled and written by a single scribe ca. 1482, borrows from print and MS sources to compose a history of the world from the creation to Hannibal. It is in prose, except for fols. 189r-192v, which contain "Confessio Amantis" Pro. ll. 567-1088, "Nebuchadnezzar's Dream," in verse. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gillhammer, Cosima Clara. Published Gillhammer, Cosima Clara. "A Recycled Extract from Gower's Confessio Amantis in Oxford, Trinity College, MS 29." Notes and Queries 68.1 (2021): 12-18. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Recycled Extract from Gower's "Confessio Amantis" in Oxford, Trinity College, MS 29. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article has two foci: first, Balestrini reviews the circumstances in which late fourteenth-century English poetry developed and how authors like Chaucer and Gower would, within the next two centuries, become canonized and recognized as founders of English literature. Second, she examines the ways these authors contributed to make this period distinctive, not only through their usage of the vernacular but also with the construction of a public voice and the erection of literature as vehicle to create a sense of belonging to a cultural community. [AS-H. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Balestrini, María Cristina. Published Balestrini, María Cristina. "Los escritores ricardianos y la consolidación de la literatura en inglés medio." De Medio Aevo 10.1, 15 (2021): 169-79. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Los escritores ricardianos y la consolidación de la literatura en inglés medio. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Only two of Shakespeare's plays refer to a source by its author's name: John Gower in "Pericles" (co-authored perhaps with George Wilkins), and Geoffrey Chaucer in "The Two Noble Kinsmen" (with John Fletcher). Both of these tributes are "exceptional" and much remarked on. Bauer and Zirker believe "it makes sense to go a step further" and call these poets Shakespeare's "medieval co-authors" (218). Per Bauer and Zirker, co-authorship could be "diachronic" as well as "contemporaneous," with a long-dead "creative partner[] in the present" shedding light on the "poetics of co-authorship" in these (probably) both co-authored plays (218-19). In the first section, "'Our imagination': Gower and the Audience as Co-Authors of Pericles," the authors explain how Gower as a choric character moves his theater audience through "a process from [hearing] the monologic 'song'[1.0.1] . . . to [co-creating] 'our play' at the end (Epilogue 18)," by calling on the help of "our imagination" (4.4.3), per editor Gossett an "inclusive plural" that should not be emended to "your" (219-220). The playwright(s) participates as "the anonymous agent" who makes the ancient story "for itself perform" (3.0.53) in the minds of the audience (221). By choosing a co-author so distant in time, Shakespeare was able to "de-present" as well as to present the "monstrous lust" of the incest theme, much as Gower's Genius does by explaining the practice as necessary in the time of Adam and Eve, but not in the time of Christ (p. 226; Epilogue 2). By contrast, Chaucer is addressed in the Prologue of "The Two Noble Kinsmen" as the father of the play, but in a spirit of rivalry and fear (229). In parallel fashion, the imprisoned Arcite and Palamon descend from harmonious flights of imagination, to deadly competition for Emelye, who viewed from afar, becomes their mutual brainchild (233). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bauer, Matthias. Zirker, Angelika. Published Bauer, Matthias, and Angelika Zirker. "Shakespeare's Medieval Co-Authors."In Lukas Rösli and Stefanie Gropper, ed. In Search of the Culprit: Aspects of Medieval Authorship. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2021. Pp. 217-38. 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 Shakespeare's Medieval Co-Authors. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review David Carlson presents the first full-length study of Gower as a Latin poet, and more importantly, as the greatest of Anglo-Latin poets of the fourteenth century. This accomplished and wide-ranging volume offers studies of Gower's Latin poetry and its formal properties. It also offers new editions and translations of five short poems outside the Latin verses of "Confessio Amantis." The book is a substantive and authoritative contribution to literary history, both the history of Anglo-Latin verse and of the cultural contexts through which Latin poets reflected on their practice. To read and assimilate this book is thus to encounter a wider sense of fourteenth-century literary consciousness than what might be afforded by a standard history of vernacular English poetry. While the book is founded on enormous learning, it is by no means a survey: it is rather a re-exploration of a well-known period from a decisively different (and equally valid) perspective. Carlson advances an important argument about Gower's Latin poetry: it was "fundamentally not classical" (11) nor archaizing, but rather placed itself in a contemporary cultural and literary environment. His Latin poetry was "informed by and indebted to contemporary Anglo-Latin poetry for the metrical fabric of his writing" (12). Gower's formal choices make better sense from a synchronic perspective. Most significant is Gower's search for a metrical plain style, neither demotic nor hyper-sophisticated, that was suitable to public poetry. The chapters cover Gower's earliest Latin poetry, the "invention of Anglo-Latin public poetry," his contribution to estates satire, his historiography of 1381 and his prosody, and his late Latin style. The poems newly edited and translated are "Epitaphium Edwardi tercii" (1377), the John Ball verses (c. 1395), the Blackfriars Council verses (c. 1382), "Ecce dolet Anglia" (c. 1360-75), and "Epilogus Apocalipsium" (c. 1376-8). There are two appendices on versification. [RC. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R. Published Carlson, David R. Gower and Anglo-Latin Verse. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2021. xi, 345 pp. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Cronica Tripertita Minor Latin Poetry Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Anglo-Latin Verse. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "The argument of this essay," Cooper states (50), "is that repetition should be included among the family resemblances that trigger the imaginative response that signals 'romance,' even for works that might otherwise fall outside its boundaries, or at least to push those boundaries beyond what one might think available; and that one of the most striking of those repetitions is multiple sea voyages." In "The Voyage of St. Brendan," Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale," and Gower's Tale of Apollonius (with a glance at Shakespeare's "Pericles" in the closing pages), Cooper assembles three texts to argue that, although they are not universally accepted as romances, they share features that ought indeed so classify them. She looks carefully at the sea journeys of Brendan and his monks, Chaucer's Custance, and Gower's Constance, along with both poets' source in Nicholas Trevet's "Chronicle," finding in them all a "sense of divine control behind the sea voyages of the various saints' lives and romances" (54) that for her marks these narratives as of a type. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cooper, Helen. Published Cooper, Helen. "Romance Repetitions and the Sea: Brendan, Constance, Apollonius." In A. S. G. Edwards, ed., Medieval Romance, Arthurian Literature: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Archibald (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2021). Pp. 46-60. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Romance Repetitions and the Sea: Brendan, Constance, Apollonius. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In effect, Scala's answer to her titular question is, "yes, through Gower." As she points out, critics have been divided on whether or not Chaucer knew Livy directly, or only came to Livy through later, medieval sources. Focusing upon the role of Virginia's mother (Virginius's wife) and upon the false charges about Virginia's legal status in "The Physician's Tale," Scala argues that Chaucer follows Gower's precedent (in his "Tale of Virginia" CA 7.5131-5306) of focusing upon Virginia's legitimacy. Following Livy far more closely than other medieval retellings (such as the "Roman de la Rose" or Boccaccio's "De mulieribus claris"), Chaucer's version reflects Gower's focus upon assuring the reader that Virginia is Virginius' legitimate child, and "in making such assurances in nearly the same terms Gower used in his earlier 'Confessio Amantis,' Chaucer reveals how he knew his Livy through this contemporary English source" (258). [BWG. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Scala, Elizabeth Published Scala, Elizabeth. "Did Chaucer Know Livy?" Notes and Queries 68 [266] (2021): 255-58. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusions 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 Did Chaucer Know Livy? Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Offers pedagogical strategies for confronting "literary representations of sexual violence" in a range of medieval romances and novelle within story collections, including Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" and "Franklin's Tale," and works by Malory, Bocaccio, Gower, and Marguerite de Navarre. Provides "reading approaches, discussion prompts, assignments, and critical contexts" intended to "to position students as critical co-investigators." Gower receives the slightest attention--less than a full paragraph on Thaise in "Apollonius" (pp. 42-43). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Torres, Sara V. McNamara, Roberta F. Published Torres, Sara V., and Rebecca F. McNamara. "Female Consent and Affective Resistance in Romance: Medieval Pedagogy and #MeToo." New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession 2.1 (2021): 34-49. Open access at https://escholarship.org/uc/ncs_pedagogyandprofession. 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 Female Consent and Affective Resistance in Romance: Medieval Pedagogy and #MeToo. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Provides an edition of "Cinkante Balades," with line-by-line English translation, an Introduction, and Notes, available as a downloadable PDF. Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter, ed. and trans. Published John Gower Society website:<br />https://johngower.org/john-gowers-cinkante-balades/<br />Accessed 22 February 2024 Gower Subject Cinkante Balades Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Title A name given to the resource John Gower's Cinkante Balades. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Richard Hill was a merchant active in London in the early years of the Reformation. His book is Oxford, Balliol College MS 354, "an extensive and varied collection of texts, relating to medicine, household management, business interests, and the practices of Christian religion" along with fourteen tales from the "Confessio Amantis" (32). In four of these--what Harper calls "The Poor Leper" (i.e., "Dives and Pauper"), "Adrian and Bardus," "Constantine and Sylvester," and "King Midas"--Harper identifies "an ongoing discussion regarding the precise value of charity for religious purposes," a virtue she associates with Catholicism (32). Hill purposely altered what he excerpted in various ways (e.g., removing the framing conversation of Genius and Amans) with the intent, Harper argues, "of using these texts for spiritual guidance" (33). Specifically, Hill was a rich man seeking to secure a heavenly afterlife through acts of charity, the theme Harper finds running throughout Gower's tales, suggesting their interest to Hill. However, "during the time that Hill's book was written, charity and other 'good works' were starting to become disassociated from salvation." Thus, "while the majority" of the CA tales here "suggest that he saw the value of using charity as a means of preparing for death, they do not present an unambiguously orthodox Catholic position, but rather an idiosyncratic take on a centuries-old problem that was a mainstay of traditional Catholicism" (43). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Harper, Alison. Published Harper, Alison. "The Merchant Richard Hill and His Book: Using 'Confessio Amantis' Tales to Negotiate the Spiritual Marketplace in Henrician London." In Kristin M.S. Bezio and Scott Oldenburg, eds. Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021). Pp. 32-49. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion 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 Merchant Richard Hill and His Book: Using "Confessio Amantis" Tales to Negotiate the Spiritual Marketplace in Henrician London Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Irvin's explication of Gower's Latin verse that opens "Confessio Amantis" (Prologue i, 1-6) discloses a great deal about the poet's attitude toward English (versus Latin in particular) and his use of the language in the poem at large. Irvin opens by clarifying that "Gower was a man interested in memory" (251), citing his gifts to St. Mary Overie and discussing in some detail his memorial tomb which, Irvin argues, Gower "expected to be 'read' by multilingual readers, both the 'public' and the canons [of St. Mary], the coterie of remembrancers" (253). But the Latin verse that opens CA is Irvin's real target here, and it is perhaps best to quote his thesis in full: "By examining one of Gower's Latin verses from the "Confessio Amantis," a verse that deals, through a riddle, with the relationship between English and Latin, I shall argue that the difference in tongues articulates differences between memory and history and stands in a central place in Gower's understanding of poetic form and intention. Moreover, I suggest that Gower's use of English in the 'CA' is itself a linguistic riddle to be solved, one hidden by how we remember Gower in the history of specifically 'English' letters" (254). The Latin verse includes references to Hengist, Brutus, and Carmentis before echoing one of the apocryphal Proverbs of Alfred (concerning the boneless tongue), all of which Irvin examines carefully in the process of answering a question that he poses: "How does one remember (in) English?" (254). Negotiating a rich congeries of contexts and critical and theoretical perspectives--most extensively Ovid's "Fasti" 1 as the source of Gower's reference to Carmentis; Aristotelian and nominalist understandings of interpretation; the perceived stability of Latin grammar versus English variability; Walter Benjamin on translation; Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace on Hengist's English language and treachery; differences between "translatio studii" and "causal" history; and proverbs as "translatable knowledge" (265)--Irvin concludes that, for Gower, "the English of the 'Confessio' always exists between Latin and French: it tears the French music from love poetry, and it deprives Latin of its grammar. It is not a language to be remembered but a language in which the memory of the 'original' languages always lurk[s], a literary language that 'comes after' in history. While English is a language in which 'fewe men endite' [few men write] (CA Prol.22), that is, few use English for 'literary' purposes, it is for that reason a perfect language for a critical approach to law and love: it involves the game of remembering source texts, the strenuous lexical exercise of considering what Latin and French terms certain English words represent--and it is for a coterie: not Latinate monks, like those at St. Mary's, but a specifically English readership, the 'fewe' who can use the craft of English to interpret the discourses of erotics and politics" (275). N.B.: Irvin emphasizes via italics that, in Gower's Latin verse, Hengist's tongue sings ("canit") "in the present tense" (265), a notable correction to translations that use the past tense in this instance. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Irvin, Matthew W. Published Irvin, Matthew W. "Hengist's Tongue: Remembering (Old) English in John Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Sharon M. Rowley, ed. Writers, Editors and Exemplars in Medieval English Texts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Pp. 251-79. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Minor Latin Poetry Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Hengist's Tongue: Remembering (Old) English in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Mooney, Linne Published Mooney, Linne. "The Production of Trinity College, Cambridge MS R.3.2 Revisited." Journal of the Early Book Society 24 (2021): 1-25. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amants Review Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.2 is one of the manuscripts of the "Confessio Amantis" on which Ian Doyle and Malcolm Parkes based their conclusions in their foundational study, "The Production of Copies of the 'Canterbury Tales' and the 'Confessio Amantis' in the Early Fifteenth Century." Mooney's concern is to show that it and Princeton, University Library, Taylor Collection, MS 5 (olim Philipps 8192) are column-for-column copies, being produced more or less simultaneously by five scribes, the lead scribe being "D" (so designated by Doyle and Parkes), whom Estelle Stubbs has identified as John Marchaunt, Clerk of the City of London working at the Guildhall (2-3)--and "most likely . . . Marchaunt was the supervisor of the work" (16). Taylor MS 5, Mooney posits, the more deluxe of the two MS, was the exemplar for Trinity ("the second-best manuscript"), and "it looks as though Marchaunt was originally doling out . . . quires" (15) from Taylor to the other scribes (primarily A and C) even as Taylor was being copied from another exemplar by Marchaunt. These three scribes--D, A, and C--had a "common workplace," which Mooney, extrapolating from Stubbs' identification of D as Marchaunt, argues "seems likely to have been the London Guildhall" (17). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Production of Trinity College, Cambridge MS R.3.2 Revisited. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek. Published Pearsall, Derek. "Early Revision in the Text of Gower's Confessio Amantis." Journal of the Early Book Society 24 (2021): 247-61. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Criticism Review [For a response to this essay, see Peter Nicholson, "Gower's Early Revisions Revisited," JEBS 25.] Pearsall seeks to identify the earliest form of the "Confessio Amantis," based on manuscript evidence of authorial changes that led G. C. Macaulay to posit the familiar "three recensions" theory. Pearsall looks at passages from seven manuscripts (using Macaulay's sigils, S, Δ, Ad, T, B, Ʌ, p2) that he terms the "Huntington group" (251), named for S, the oldest among them--San Marino, CA, Huntington Library MS EL 26 A 17. All of these are "second recension" manuscripts, according to Macaulay, in part because they have additions and/or changes complimentary to Henry IV. "Attempts to date different versions of the 'Confessio' in relation to real historical circumstances, such as those made by Macaulay," Pearsall asserts, "lead only to confusion, and should in any case be disentangled from the discussion of manuscript affiliations" (249). Scrutinizing the various alterations differentiating these MSS from Macaulay's "first recension" MSS, Pearsall concludes that "the manuscripts of the Huntington group . . . must have been part of the original form of the poem, or at least the earliest surviving form" (258)--in direct disagreement with Macaulay. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Early Revision in the Text of Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This chapter pertains to Shakespeare's "Pericles," but with a pervasive emphasis on Gower's "Confessio Amantis" Book VIII as foundational not only to the tale of Apollonius/Pericles retold in the play, but also to the centrality of old age and "infirmities" in the character of Shakespeare's choric Gower (1.0.2-3). Rogers uses the term "prosthesis" metaphorically, as a visual or verbal "supplement" that fills the "gaps" in a portrayal (105 et passim; "Pericles" 4.4.8). Both Gower-characters, in the CA and in "Pericles," personify the "prosthetic role of old age . . . [as] debility . . . [but also] as an additive to power and authority" with wisdom to impart (104-5). In parallel fashion, both Gowers deploy a fusty old tale to serve their present-day audience as a "restorative" capable of bringing "new life" and "ethical healing" (106; also 114-16, 118-19). Shakespeare's Gower is himself a "prosthetic" figure, as his narrative voice fills in the missing pieces of the story and supplements the dumb shows (111, 117). Rogers asserts the "central position" of the Gower-persona's "surprise appearance at the end of Book VIII [as an old man]" to "moments of revision within Shakespeare's own text." In this famous scene in the CA, Venus presents the poet-persona with a mirror in which he sees his ravaged face through "myn hertes yhe" (8.2824), as he evocatively describes, and thus is cured of his love (116). Just as the earlier Gower must rely on his inward eye "as a prosthesis to his powers of sight," so Shakespeare's Gower must call upon the devices of the theater and the imagination of the audience (3.0.58) as a "crutch" to help them "see" the story (122-23). The wisdom personified in both figures is the "confession of impairments and debility, all of which serve as the staff for the old man" (124). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rogers, Will. Published Rogers, Will. "Playing Prosthesis and Revising the Past: Gower's Supplemental Role." Chapter 4 in Will Rogers, Writing Old Age and Impairments in Late Medieval England (Leeds, UK: Arc Humanities Press, 2021). Pp. 103-24. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Playing Prosthesis and Revising the Past: Gower's Supplemental Role. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Strohm challenges literary periodization in this essay, particularly the medieval/early modern divide, asking more generally whether a literary work can be modern not only by being "progressive" in its own time but by "reach[ing] beyond itself--to achieve modernity according to 'subsequent' standards" (194; original emphasis). Strohm's test case is Chaucer, who was recognized as up-to-date, Strohm argues, by Robert Greene in his "Greenes Vision" (1592/94), where fictionalized versions of Chaucer and Gower engage in a debate about literature and a tale-telling contest. Greene, Strohm tells us, "credits Chaucer's [Bahktinian] polyphonic style and mixed vocalities without condescension and as totally deserving of contemporary (that is, Early Modern) respect" (201)--an example, it seems, of achieving modernity according to a subsequent standard. Greene's Gower, Strohm points out, is associated instead with a strain of "stylistic and moralistic conservatism within Early Modern practice" but not one that matches standards of being progressive or polyphonic. The fact that Greene's persona prefers Gower's tale to Chaucer's is paradoxical, Strohm tells us, noting that Greene's praise of Chaucer is thereby "achieved under a sign of negation . . . the mechanism of negation identified by Freud, in which a difficult or problematic truth maybe uttered, on the condition of an accompanying nullification or disavowal" (203n2). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Strohm, Paul. Published Strohm, Paul. "Chaucer and the Streams of Parnassus." In Jonathan Fruoco, ed. Polyphony and the Modern. New York: Routledge, 2021. Pp. 192-205. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer and the Streams of Parnassus. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In Chapter 2, Hadfield considers the "Visio Anglie" ("Vox Clamantis" Book I) together with "Piers Plowman" (essentially A-Text) and Chaucer's tales of the Knight, Miller, and Reeve, concentrating on the latter two. Not surprisingly, he concludes a discussion--which he recognizes is "designed for readers who are not specialists in medieval language" (109, n. 1)--this way: "While Langland opted for the peasants, Gower sided with the nobility. The urban-dwelling Chaucer would seem to have situated himself somewhere in between" (109). An historian, Hadfield is consequently concerned to present the social environments described in each selection. Gower, here, comes across as one who knows agriculture, as a Kentish landowner (106), and hence the nature of peasant labor. Indeed, his description of medieval three-estate structure, is somewhat nuanced. He represents Gower's anger at the revolting peasants as derived from a concern for social stability ("Throughout the poem Gower reminds his readers that one of the worst aspects of the rebellion is its attempt to subvert the proper social order" [106]), yet also calling attention to rather mournful lines (in Rigg's translation) on the appearance of abandoned, and hence unproductive, fields (106). On the other hand, "in making the case Gower was surely being conspicuously reactionary and deliberately eliding the distinction made in English law that separated the free and the unfree, asserting the need for a noble class to control society as in other European countries. Like Chaucer and Langland his class-based politics were not founded on an obvious external reality--at least, not one that currently existed--but an ideologically-driven ideal" (109). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hadfield, Andrew. Published Hadfield, Andrew. Literature and Class: From the Peasants' Revolt to the French Revolution. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Biography of Gower Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Literature and Class: From the Peasants' Revolt to the French Revolution. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Hurley's Chapter 4, entitled "Becoming England: The Northumbrian Conversion in Trevet, Gower, and Chaucer," centers around the "Man of Law's Tale" and Chaucer; Trevet and Gower present "versions" that demonstrate "an emerging engagement--beyond Chaucer himself--with the Pre-Conquest past during the fourteenth century" (125), thereby helping Hurley find answers to her question driving the chapter: "By examining the translation effects that appear in the 'Man of Law's Tale,' we can begin to see how imagined textual communities are affected by post-Conquest translation. How does a new English vernacular change the composition of such textual communities?" (127) Her answer, found by juxtaposing Trevet's, Gower's, and Chaucer's narratives, is a unifying idea of "an emerging sense of Engelond" (128) discernible through their differences. Per her book's title, Hurley's discussion of Trevet's Constance and Chaucer's Custance highlights the ability to speak languages other than her native (Roman) Latin, pointing out the cultural "homogenization" implicit in giving her speech in vernaculars--in contrast to Hermengyld who, in both Trevet's and Gower's tales, is allowed to register herself as Saxon via linguistic code-switching (139). Gower, Hurley notes, eludes the complexities involved in moving a heroine through several linguistic environments by keeping Constance "profoundly silent" (137): indeed, because "language (like translation) is . . . a means to an end" for Gower, readers are given only the results of Constance's speaking, both to the Saxons and to the Syrian merchants, not her words themselves (138). It is a technique which--in a way--brings Gower closer to Trevet than to Chaucer (139). It is perhaps worth noting that (131, n. 25) Hurley takes her texts of both Trevet and Gower from Correale and Hamel, "Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales." [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hurley, Mary Kate. Published Hurley, Mary Kate. Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2021. Pp. 125-50. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This wide-ranging article discusses how medical lore on the pneuma/spiritus (the bodily spirit or spirits) became an established theme and plot device, both in medieval European romance, and in personal accounts of profound religious experience. Among the many examples is a paragraph on Gower's "Tale of Apollonius" (99). Saunders begins with a highly complex discussion of the spirits according to Galen, Avicenna's "Canon of Medicine," and European translations of these authorities. Within the heart, in synchrony with the breath, the spirits were formed of mingled air and blood to animate the three-part soul, including the emotions, which were "dramatically written on the body through the flight of breath" (88). In grief or sorrow, the vital spirits withdrew into the heart, bringing cold to the body, as "reflected in pallor or swooning . . . unconsciousness or even death" (91-92). Saunders proceeds to discuss the medically accurate depictions of lovesickness evidenced by death-like swoons in the "Roman de la Rose," the "Parliament of Fouls," several Middle English romances, and especially "Troilus and Criseyde" (93-96). Most relevant to the discussion on Gower, the retreat of spirits might result in a death-like state from which the patient could be revived by a skilled physician. As examples, Saunders discusses the restoration of a seemingly dead lady in Marie de France's "Eliduc," the ancient novel "Apollonius," and Gower's "Tale of Apollonius." In educated medical detail, Gower describes how the physician Cerymon restored the latent spark of life by remedies including the warming of the lady's breast, causing her heart to "flacke and bete" (VIII.1195; qtd. p. 99). To conclude her study, Saunders discusses how the bodily spirits mediated intense religious or visionary experience, e.g., in Richard Rolle's "Incendium Amoris," the Middle English "Pearl," and the "Book of Margery Kempe," with bodily expression that included the swoon (100-05). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Saunders, Corinne. Published Saunders, Corinne. "From Romance to Vision: The Life of Breath in Medieval Literary Texts." In David Fuller, Corinne Saunders, and Jane McNaughton, eds. The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture and Medicine: Classical to Contemporary (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 87-109. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource From Romance to Vision: The Life of Breath in Medieval Literary Texts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Rather surprisingly, given the number of manuscripts of Gower's work, he receives scant mention here--perhaps because those who copied his poems were fully employed? It is interesting to read that "Scribe D" (Doyle and Parkes' identification and terminology), named John Marchaunt by Linne Mooney and Estelle Stubbs, "worked alongside Hoccleve himself on the Trinity Gower," i.e., Cambridge, Trinity College R.3.2 (101, and see also 132), an unexpected emphasis given how small Hoccleve's stint was in that manuscript. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. Published Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021 Gower Subject 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 Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In his dissertation Brent offers a "sustained reading" of Trevet's 'Cronicles' "as a text in its own right, with its own strategies of language and form, and its own historical context," locating the 'Cronicles' among early fourteenth-century "Plantagenet efforts" to respond to "contemporary political uncertainty" and reflecting "methods of conceptualizing and articulating the nation in religious terms" (iii). In chapter three, Brent assesses Trevet's narrative of Constance as central to the formal and thematic unity of the 'Cronicles.' He argues sensibly that the Constance narrative should be read within the entirety of the 'Cronicles,' not isolated or synopsized for the sake of comparison with Gower's and Chaucer's stories of Constance. The length, placement, and resonances of Trevet's Constance account in the context of the larger work, Brent argues, compel us to understand it as a rich expression of "the idea that [Constance's] motherhood allows England, through its royal blood, to bring about its own salvation" (163), an idea, he shows then at some length, that was useful in Plantagenet "crusading politics," (245) and valuable as an example of more pervasive late-medieval thinking about history. Chaucer is mentioned much more often than Gower in Brent's treatment of Constance, largely because critical tradition has, he shows, skewed attention to concerns that privilege the "Man of Law's Tale." In at least one instance, however, Brent suggests that study of Trevet might usefully prompt attention to an "underexplored aspect of source study among Chaucerians and critics of Gower, i.e., Trevet's "legal diction" (174).] [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Brent, Jonathan Lawrence. Published Brent, Jonathan Lawrence. "World History in the Tumultuous 1330s: A Study of Nicholas Trevet's Anglo-Norman 'Cronicles.'" Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Toronto, 2021. Dissertation Abstracts International A83.01(E). Full text accessible at https://utoronto.scholaris.ca/home. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource World History in the Tumultuous 1330s: A Study of Nicholas Trevet's Anglo-Norman "Cronicles." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bullón-Fernández's essay is another response to the previous essays in this issue of "Accessus." She begins by acknowledging the (then) recent Omicron variant of Covid at the end of 2021 that was thwarting the hope for the end of the pandemic. Thinking of the "fast-moving cycle of hope and despair" that was part and parcel of the pandemic, Bullón-Fernández asks whether we can find hope and healing in John Gower's work. She suggests, "The essays reveal that Gower's hope is not naïve and that the healing is not always or unambiguously successful; it is just 'ynowh.'" Bullón-Fernández then tracks the intersections of the work of Salisbury, McShane, Runstedler, and Bychowski, suggesting these essays advocate for poetry's ability to heal the community. She asserts that Rogers's and Grinnell's start from positions of doubt in the hope the CA expresses. Bullón-Fernández sees all six essays recognizing "the 'Confessio' does not offer easy answers or remedies to sickness." She turns to the end of the poem, offering a brief close reading to show Gower's recognition of the multiple afflictions of earthly love. She concludes, "A sense of peace and hope comes from accepting that the cure will likely make us feel just 'hol ynowh'." [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bullón-Fernández, María. Published Bullón-Fernández, María. "'Hol ynowh.'" Accessus 7, no. 1 (2022): n.p. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Hol ynowh." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bychowski opens with a call for hope and healing in the present with the alarming number of anti-transgender laws that had been proposed in the early months of 2021 in the United States. She then details the potential experiences and struggles that face transgender children, asking how we can offer them prayers to uplift them. Bychowski explains how such questions have brought her back to John Gower, particularly the Confessio Amantis, in which she sees " the imagined lives (and deaths) of transgender children, Iphis and Narcissus." Referring to her other work on transgender lives in Gower, Bychowski discusses the dysphoria of hope. She asserts, "If the 'Confessio Amantis' is a confession of love, I argue, one might see it also as a speaking-together prompted by parental love, a discourse between vertical and horizontal identities, like and unlike, generation and generation, the contingently known and the yet unknown." But then she adds the dimension of "queerly slanted love" that crosses identifications and temporalities, which she seems to use as her entrance into the close readings that follow. Reading these stories, Bychowski seizes the opportunity to advocate for trans affirming laws and healthcare. She explains how Gower is "a poet-parent of transgender children" by including them in the narratives that make up the CA. He uses these characters' identities as they existed in the past of his sources, but Gower, too, modifies them to fit his own age. This brings Bychowski to speculate about what experiences Gower might have had with transgender folx and to reference Bruce Holsinger's "A Burnable Book" that includes the transgender woman, Eleanor Rykener. Bychowski then examines the different conclusions that Gower brings to his two trans children: Iphis and Narcissus. She explains how the situations differ for the trans feminine character (Narcissus) versus the trans masculine character (Iphis), noting that both are affected by patriarchal sexism. Bychowski concludes that Gower, through these characters in his tales, offers us a mirror to reflect on and to question our laws, healthcare, and society. She then ends with this beautiful line that drives home the importance of such work in our field (and others): "Again, we may find the spirit of our beloveds blossoming in yet unborn generations, in unpredictable queer times and queer worlds, in unimaginable likeness and strangeness, in work and promises unfinished." [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bychowksi, Gabrielle M. W. Published Bychowksi, Gabrielle M. W. "The Unfinished Hope of Gower's Transgender Children." Accessus 7, no. 1 (2022): n.p. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Unfinished Hope of Gower's Transgender Children. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Per his title, Edwards tracks owners and records of sale for manuscripts of the CA, primarily from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also citing, as earliest, documents of sale from 1413, and 1545 (180), and frequently following sales and owners into the twentieth century. The article, which clearly will stand as a cornerstone of investigation into these matters, is entirely names and dates, one after another, and hence impossible to summarize. Edwards is refreshingly content to present this information without theoretical speculation, taking its value qua information for granted. Notable are the footnotes, which in addition to broad-ranging and sometimes obscure--thus quite valuable--bibliography are several suggested additions to provenance of specific manuscripts as stated in Derek Pearsall and Linne R. Mooney, A Descriptive Catalogue of the English Manuscripts of John Gower's Confessio Amantis (2021). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, A. S. G. Published Edwards, A. S. G. "The Ownership and Sale of Manuscripts of John Gower's Confessio Amantis in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries." The Library 23 (2022): 180-90. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Ownership and Sale of Manuscripts of John Gower's "Confessio Amantis" in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Fonzo's is a book with a mission. She contends that for reasons specific to each, the works of Langland, Gower, and Chaucer have been mis-read, largely through what she terms "retrospective prophecy": that is, a tendency to mistake "hindsight for insight," leading to claims "that a text anticipated a future historical event or movement, especially insofar as they may perpetuate myths of an always-improving historical timeline" (8). In order to correct this, her "book undertakes the excavation of the critical traditions of reading Langland, Gower, and Chaucer as prophetic in order to recover the complex and creative prophetic personae that they themselves sought to cultivate, often in defiance of rather than compliance with the discourse of political prophecy" (11)." She addresses Gower in chapter three, "Henry IV and the Ex Post Facto Construction of a Prophetic John Gower," pp. 70-103. Her reading of Gower is that he "actively adopted" political prophecies, whereas Langland "teasingly invoked and ridiculed them . . . and Chaucer avoided them entirely" (6). Fonzo's final paragraph conveniently sums up both chapter and book: "Despite the fact that no conclusive manuscript evidence supports the idea that Gower predicted Richard II's fall from power, the poet has remained a prophet in contemporary criticism for a cluster of interrelated reasons. First, both Gower and the Lancastrians were promoting this perception of the poet. Second, Gower's prophetic reputation has a cumulative effect. For instance [Malcolm] Parkes has based his perceptions of when Gower altered the 'Vox' upon [G. C.] Macaulay's interpretations of when Gower revised the 'Confessio.' Third, there remain very few editions of Gower's works, and the most prominent of those that do exist have been edited by people championing the perspective of a prophetic Gower. Fourth, the nature of Richard II's rule is still debated among historians, largely because we cannot tell which parts of history have been obscured by Lancastrian propaganda. Gower is often conscribed into this debate as either a witness to Richard's tyranny or an opportunistic traitor and foil for the supposedly loyal Ricardian poet, Chaucer. Fifth, the 'red herring' recension of the 'Confessio' that Gower happened to have originally dedicated to both Richard and Henry has served as a source of confusion for later scholars attempting to understand the circumstances surrounding its composition. Sixth, because Gower's works are either not in English or prohibitively long, they are rarely granted a prominent place on the syllabi of most English courses. Those who study and teach Gower's works cannot make the case for his importance solely from canonical relevance. Gower is important, much criticism tells us, because he had an uncanny talent for diagnosing problems in his country's general populace and leadership. Finally, audiences of any period rarely expect authors to be as crafty as Gower appears to have been in his prophetic self-fashioning. Gower's efforts to depict himself as a sage authority have cemented his reputation as a keen political observer but overshadowed his other literary accomplishments" (103). It is suggested that alongside Fonzo's book three essays by Peter Nicholson could be profitably read: "Gower's Revisions in the Confessio Amantis" ("Chaucer Review"19 [1984]; "The Dedications of Gower's Confessio Amantis" ("Mediaevalia" 10 [1984]; and "Poet and Scribe in the Manuscripts of Gower's Confessio Amantis" in Derek Pearsall, ed., "Manuscripts and Texts: Editorial Problems in Later Middle English Literature" (1987). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fonzo, Kimberly. Published Fonzo, Kimberly. Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual 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 Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Fredell's essay serves as a response to the previous essays in this issue of "Accessus." He frames his response by suggesting "Amans's love complaint is not some hackneyed convention of medieval poetry, but a passionate testimony to terrible pain." Fredell points out how the end of the "Confessio Amantis" is a rupture and an exile--that Amans/Gower has been removed from the realm of love, that his body itself is a sign of exile. He goes on to explain how the realm of love from which Gower has been removed displays the Bohemian fashions made popular by Richard II's first queen, Anne of Bohemia. Finally, he concludes Gower in the CA "confronts the struggle to move forward" and acknowledges that healing is not the end of loss. Loss continues as part of the ghosts of trauma. [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fredell, Joel. Published Fredell, Joel. "Gower in Exile." Accessus 7, no. 1 (2022): n.p. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower in Exile. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Grinnell opens her essay with the COVID-19 pandemic in the foreground, advocating for poetry as a healing narrative community. She admits that Gower might be a surprising choice of poet to turn to for levity, but Grinnell contends "that the 'Confessio' does indeed create a space for narrative healing within the acknowledgement of mortality." Grinnell applies the work of Dan P. McAdams on the narrative identity of the self to the CA, claiming that it is applicable due to the way in which Amans constructs himself through stories and personal confession. Grinnell offers close readings that examine how laughter works in the tales, concluding, though, that the CA ultimately fails to produce humor that creates spontaneous joy and laughter. Turning to Book VIII, Grinnell suggests Venus's laughter as a turning point for relief for Amans from the pains of love. She argues, "This ending, in fact, which so compellingly thrusts the narrator away from his obsession and finally restores his reason, is happy in the sense that the character is finally freed from the painful desires of the flesh which have so tormented him." By the end of the poem, Grinnell claims, Amans has achieved a narrative identity that McAdams argues is the foundation to forming the self. She concludes, "[Amans] is healed not just by the removal of love's arrow, but also by becoming both poet and poetry." [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Grinnell, Natalie. Published Grinnell, Natalie. "Writing into Hope: Laughter, Sadness, and Healing in John Gower's Confessio Amantis" Accessus 7, no. 1 (2022): n.p. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Writing into Hope: Laughter, Sadness, and Healing in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Hines reads Gower's "The Jew and the Pagan" in dialogue with Chaucer's "Prioress's Tale" in order to "see how intersections of justice and pity are formed by processes of identity and identification--who can and cannot feel pity, who can and cannot be identified with (132). She claims Gower's and Chaucer's tales in dealing with pity and violent justice "belong to an emergent 'structure of feeling' in fourteenth-century England" (132), using Raymond Williams's term. To elucidate her use of Williams's term, Hines discusses emergent affective experience, and then notes that such structures of feeling are located in language change. To apply this to the late fourteenth century Middle English lexicon, Hines details the uses of the word "pitee"--particularly in Gower and Chaucer's works where violent justice and pity intersect along anti-Semitic lines. She suggests "we can see [Gower and Chaucer] exploring the social, ethical, and religious complexities of the juncture between pity and justice in the processes of identity and identification" (133). Turning to Gower's "The Jew and the Pagan," Hines establishes Gower's use of pity in Book VII of "Confessio Amantis," assessing how he "identifies pity as incarnational" (134). Hines explains that, in this context, "The Jew and the Pagan" is "an example of and warning against misguided attachment to justice without mercy" (134). Quoting lines 3330-35, Hines asserts that Gower includes an extended gloss on Matthew 5:7 but changes it in one critical way by suggesting that those who show pity deserve pity. She continues, then, to demonstrate how Gower frames the foes of those who serve pity, naming two significant consequences for such an intersection of pity and justice. For Hines, "The real danger in Gower's tale, however, is that pitilessness becomes an 'essential' part of Jewish identity," (136), which of course then means that, by the tale's logic, the violent justice the Jew receives is somehow deserved. While agreeing with R. F. Yeager's assertion that "decision serves as the foundational marker of Jewishness for Gower in this tale," Hines adds that Gower's descriptions of such decision and the feelings that motivate it "ground Jewish difference in bodily difference and essentialize Jewish 'perversity' in ways that directly tie into medieval antisemitic narratives" (136). Hines presents a useful close reading of the tale to illustrate her argument, then, before shifting her discussion to the "Prioress's Tale." The comparison hinges upon Gower's and Chaucer's shared use of the verb "deserve"--the desert being pity in Gower and evil in Chaucer. Hines suggests Chaucer's tale "reflects the structure we saw in Gower that the pitying deserve violent justice" (138). In Chaucer's tale, the one pitying is the mother searching for her slain son, framing her as being persecuted despite being part of the Christian majority of the tale. Hines then discusses the critical discourse surrounding the Prioress vis-à-vis her portrait in the "General Prologue" compared to the tale she tells. She concludes "pity often falls into patterns of maintaining the self and the same" (139); furthermore, "for Chaucer and Gower, 'not-Jewish' resolves in an identity that is able to feel and embody pity and that merits violent justice through its pity" (139). [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hines, Jessica. Published Hines, Jessica. "'The pitous pite deserveth': Justice, Violence, and Pity in the "Prioress's Tale" and 'The Jew and the Pagan'" Exemplaria 34, no. 2 (2022), pp. 130-47. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "The pitous pite deserveth": Justice, Violence, and Pity in the "Prioress's Tale" and "The Jew and the Pagan." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review McShane opens with a discussion of the role of storytelling as narrative medicine, expanding this idea to include narrating as a way of making sense of events. Then, beginning her discussion of Gower in particular, McShane argues, "Gower gives us models in which interpersonal violence is a community concern and accountability requires community intervention." McShane focuses her study on the "Tale of Mundus and Paulina" and "Tale of Lucrece": "Social healing in both tales begins with believing women and ends with the community's demand for accountability--a model that is still aspirational, not realized, in our own moment." McShane succinctly points to the first connection between these two tales--that "women are believed and trusted"--before delving into the text. She provides thorough close readings of both tales to show how the community surrounding these women trust and believe what they are saying about the sexual assault they have faced. McShane notes a crucial difference between the tales, however, in that Paulina controls her narrative whereas Lucrece, by and large, does not, which could leave us to conclude, as McShane writes, "Lucrece's own resolution is, at best, only partial." Continuing her analysis, McShane demonstrates how personal harm becomes social and political harm. From this harm, then, and the accountability that the community seeks, we see structural change. As McShane nicely puts, speaking to "The Tale of Lucrece," "When those in authority are themselves responsible for social rupture, Gower suggests, structural change is necessary." For the "Tale of Mundus and Paulina," we instead see good leadership initiating change. McShane concludes by returning to her assertion that Gower's tales can still tell us a lot about our own society's issues--that he "offers flashes of healing possibility in narrative and other potential ways of being in community." [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor McShane, Kara. Published McShane, Kara. "Healing, Accountability, and Community in Gower's Confessio Amantis" Accessus 7, no. 1 (2022): n.p. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Healing, Accountability, and Community in Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This essay is part of a special issue of "Chaucer Review" that reports newly discovered legal records that pertain to Geoffrey Chaucer, Cecily Chaumpaigne, and the mention of "raptus," and explores the implications and new pathways marked by these records. The essay itself advocates the use of archival research in historical and literary research, particularly legal records found in The National Archives of the UK; it includes a section describing not-before-noticed--relatively minor--records that pertain to Chaucer, Gower, John Skelton, and Sir Thomas Malory, as well as records that pertain to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. The brief sub-section on Gower (pp. 513-15) describes two new life-records. The first (TNA, C 52/4/5/7 [Kent]) is a writ in the "Brevia" files that accompany Court of Common Plea rolls; it supplements a previously known record of Gower's action against Walter Cook concerning a contract to build a house in Aldyngton, or Aldington. The "contents of the writ are largely the same as that recorded on the plea roll," but it provides a "far more accurate time frame" for the action (the writ was issued October 16, 1381) and "two names endorsed on the writ, John Petyt and John Roger," which may offer "new leads" in helping to examine Gower's "presence in Aldyngton at this time" (514). The second new Gowerian life-record (TNA CP 52/5/1/1/7 [Norfolk]) pertains to "Gower's 1399 debt dispute with William and Denise Fisher in Norfolk" and, like the first example, gives only "fragments of new information": evidence that Gower was "personally present in Westminster" sometime during the week of October 12, 1399, and, again, the names of two men involved, Edmund Nevyll and John Davy, who in this instance stood surety that Gower "would prosecute the action" (514-15) against the Fishers. Roger and Prescott recognize that the records they discuss are not nearly as significant as those that pertain to Chaucer and Chaumpaigne, but, importantly, exemplify how even minor records, as they accumulate, "provide new insight" into literary lives and the "national and local events" that shaped these lives. Their Gower records are tidbits, but most welcome nevertheless. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Roger, Euan. Prescott, Andrew. Published Roger, Euan, and Andrew Prescott. "The Archival Iceberg: New Sources for Literary Life-Records." Chaucer Review 57, no. 4 (2022): 498-526 Gower Subject Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Archival Iceberg: New Sources for Literary Life-Records. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Rogers focuses on "The Travelers and the Angel" from Gower's "Confessio Amantis," suggesting that it is fittingly in Book II of the poem as it deals with the struggle of envy. Using the work of Sianne Ngai--"ugly feelings"--Rogers argues "Envy is not simply a vehicle for decay of the world and community, but also a way to point out how the commons have been fleeced, as public and communal support becomes privatized and income inequity worsens." Rogers explains how envy might be used by us, channeling Gower, to question the increasingly failing social safety net and the growing corporate welfare of twenty-first century life. He then walks us through how he sees Ngai's work applying to Gower, particularly in regard to animal metaphors with a nod to Gower's "Vox Clamantis." Rogers then returns to "The Travelers and the Angel," arguing that "healing for the then-contemporary audience is as much about diagnosis as it is about cure itself." He then adds that, for him, healing in CA is incomplete and that the poem is permeated with a kind of pessimism before turning to claim that "What often seems negative or pessimistic in the 'Confessio' instead signals where healing can begin." Envy, Rogers suggests, is a vehicle to prompt discussion to then prompt healing. Here, Rogers offers his close reading of "The Travelers and the Angel" to illustrate how envy might work productively in the process he has outlined. He concludes that the tale suggests the cure for hurt is not to hurt others, but he also admits that this is not apparently easy. Rogers then returns his analysis to engaging the more recent past and present politics and political discourse of the United States. He offers a model in which envy might "help highlight and address problems which are not seen as harmful in Gower's text," and continues, "Envy, rightly positioned, might be central to healing and hope, a fact unvoiced in the 'Confessio Amantis'." Rogers concludes that envy, like trauma, has its use in our society because, as Gower demonstrates, it might lead us to healing. [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor RogersCon, Will. Published Rogers, Will. "The Price We Pay for Envy: A Political and Social 'Maladie'." Accessus 7, no. 1 (2022): n.p. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Price We Pay for Envy: A Political and Social "Maladie." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Runstedler focuses on the "exempla" in "Confessio Amantis" in his essay, arguing they "are also sources of metaphorical healing in the text, functioning as what I have termed 'textual healing,' that is, the medicinal aspects of the text (knowledge, understanding, moral instruction) that helps remedy Amans back to full health." Such "textual healing," too, is connected to the act of confession, he adds. Runstedler suggests that the reader may succeed where Amans fails, but also notes that this process is "ultimately successful because it offers Amans and the reader the opportunity for introspection, self-improvement, and consequently a healthier mind." He later adds that the "exempla" offer a means of education that then becomes a way to heal, which, he argues, is because the CA functions as a "consolation" poem. Runstedler offers close readings of the "Tale of Jason and Medea" and the "Tale of Apollonius of Tyre" to illustrate textual healing at work in Gower's poem. He then discusses Shakespeare's and Wilkin's "Pericles," too, perhaps to demonstrate Gower's readers' understanding of this concept, analyzing how the character Gower functions within this paradigm of textual healing. [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Runstedler, Curtis Published Runstedler, Curtis. "The Consolation of Exempla: Gower's Sources of Hope and 'Textual Healing' in the 'Confessio Amantis'." Accessus 7, no. 1 (2022): n.p. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Consolation of Exempla: Gower's Sources of Hope and 'Textual Healing' in the" Confessio Amantis" Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Salisbury's essay focuses on the debate of whether the brain or the heart functioned as the principal organ of the body for Gower and his works. She asserts, "This is the medical controversy that factors into Gower's use of 'herte-thoght' and his understanding of the effects of heart disease in bodies both individual and sociopolitical." Salisbury surveys the medical literature of the later Middle Ages, the medical philosophy of which she believes Gower was likely at least familiar, especially the Aristotelian idea of the heart's function in the body politic. Focusing on Book VII of the "Confessio Amantis," Salisbury shows how "Genius identifies the heart as the body's principal organ in its capacity to govern the other organs and their functions, most importantly the cognitive aspect of the brain he describes as 'reson.'" She focuses on Gower's use of "herte-thoght" or "herte's thoght" to demonstrate Gower's belief in the symbiotic relationship of emotion and cognition, which is how she sees the poem attempting to rectify Amans's own feelings and thoughts. Salisbury points to the "Tale of Diogenes and Alexander" in Book III, noting "In a tale designed to assuage Amans's inner turmoil and thwarted desire to acquire his lady's love, however, the story becomes a way to illustrate the presumptions of an insatiable conqueror and the devastating realities of imperial conquest." Salisbury provides a thorough close reading of the tale to support this conclusion before turning attention to a diagram of the heart-brain connection from Geraldus de Hardywyck's "Epitomata seu Reparationes totius philosophiae naturalis Aristotelis." She suggests this diagram creates "the impression of the [heart's] dominance," pointing out that in this diagram all of the other senses, too, are routed through the heart. Finally, addressing anger as heart disease, particularly in the "Mirour de l'Omme," Salisbury concludes, "anger is not a mere allegorical figure in this context, but rather a literal description of a disease with the potential to kill the body and damage the soul. If we extend the analogy offered by Henri de Mondeville in his surgical treatise cited earlier, these symptoms are as applicable to the body politic as surely as they are to individual human bodies." [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Salisbury, Eve. Published Salisbury, Eve. "Gower's 'Herte-Thought': Thinking, Feeling, Healing." Accessus 7, no. 1 (2022): n.p. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Language and Word Studies Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's "Herte-Thought": Thinking, Feeling, Healing. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yeager's major goals in this essay are "to reconsider claims which for many years have been cited as the best evidence for Gower's knowledge and use of the 'Ovide moralisé'" (64) and, more generally, to clarify the "pitfalls of source studies concentrated on just one or two texts" (62). He successfully accomplishes both by revisiting Conrad Mainzer's discussion (1972) of Gower's knowledge and use of Ovidian texts, particularly Gower's dependence upon medieval moralizations of the "Metamorphoses"--the anonymous "Ovide moralisé" and Pierre Bersuire's "Ovidius moralizatus." Before launching his own evidence, Yeager is careful to point out that Mainzer was "aware that his work constituted 'possibilities,' for him more or less credible ones" (52; Yeager's emphasis), while later critics often have taken his suggestions as more proven than plausible--oversimplification for the sake of certainty perhaps. So, while effectively eroding much of Mainzer's arguments concerning the "Ovide," Yeager is advising caution in using them rather than dispensing with them. Yet the erosion is effective; at times, devastating. Yeager marshals evidence drawn from availability (or lack) of manuscripts of the "Ovide" and analogous texts, to stylistic evidence based on Gower's habits of diction, rhyme, and meter, to stronger parallels between Gower's texts and others besides the "Ovide," especially Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess" and "Legend of Good Women," and even details of Gower's biography, education, and aspects of his "poet's imagination" (64). The upshot is to encourage source studies that do much more than simply "match the words" (61) of two texts, but rather explore networks of personal, poetic, and cultural sway that constitute literary influence. Indeed, after undermining a number of Mainzer's specific details of the influence on Gower of the "Ovide," Yeager offers several more complex "possibilities" (my emphasis this time) of the influence, matters of "elisional style" (66 and 67) and narrative technique. Throughout his essay, Yeager combines cautious, fine-grained, close analyses of details (focused on four tales of the "Confessio Amantis"--"Pyramus and Thisbe," "Theseus and Ariadne," "Phebus and Daphne," and "Phrixas and Helle"), but then broadens them out to wider concerns. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Published Yeager, R. F. "John Gower's Use of the Ovide moralisé: A Reconsideration." In Catherine Gaullier-Bourgasses and Marylène Possamaï-Pérez, eds. Réécritures et adaptations de l'Ovide moralisé (xivᵉ--xviiᵉ siècle). Turnhout: Brepols, 2022. Pp. 51-67. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 the "Ovide moralisé": A Reconsideration. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review From Behrend's abstract: "This dissertation examines the pervasive presence of Latin in later medieval English literature: the Latin glosses and quotations, the Latinate vocabulary, the code-switching between Latin and vernacular languages, and the translations between them that make up many Middle English literary works. I argue that, whereas the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries are usually understood to mark a great surge in English-language literary production, this literature in fact imagines itself to be formed in relation to Latin rather than in place of or as distinct from it . . . . I show that Latin and vernacular fundamentally co-constitute several of the Middle English works most circulated by medieval readers and most studied by modern scholars, including John Gower's Confessio Amantis, William Langland's Piers Plowman, Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, and John Lydgate's Life of Our Lady. . . . I argue that Gower, Langland, Love, and Lydgate turn to the form of translation because it promises ethical solutions to the animating problems of their respective projects. Following an opening consideration of Geoffrey Chaucer's fictional framing of Troilus and Criseyde as translatio studii, chapter one explores how the simultaneity of Latin and English 'versions' in Gower's Confessio contributes to a bilingual historiography that comprehends the contingency of historical change." Subsequent chapters treat works by Langland, Love, and Lydgate, identifying in them and in CA a "shared ambivalence toward institutional and purportedly unmediated languages alike--a bilingual ethics and aesthetics as relevant today, in view of anglophone hegemony and monolingual nationalism, as in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries." [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Behrend, Megan. Published Behrend, Megan. "The Latinity of Middle English Literature: Form, Translation, and Vernacularization." Ph. D. Dissertation. University of Michigan, 2022. Restricted access; abstract available at https://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/174649 (accessed January 27, 2023). 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 The Latinity of Middle English Literature: Form, Translation, and Vernacularization. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Sharp, Joseph Ethan Blaine. Published Sharp, Joseph Ethan Blaine. "Definitions and Depictions of Rhetorical Practice in Medieval English Fürstenspiegel." PhD. Dissertation. University of Louisville, 2022. Open access at https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd/3849 (accessed January 28, 2023). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Vox Claamantis Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Review From Sharp's abstract: "After establishing the relevance of the "Fürstenspiegel" as a rhetorical genre in Chapter One, the dissertation provides three cases studies on John of Salisbury, John Gower, and John Lydgate that demonstrate how the rhetorical theories communicated in their "Fürstenspiegel" were responsive to particular cultural moments and resonated with contemporary political practices. Chapter Two analyzes how John of Salisbury positions rhetorical knowledge as necessary for the development of higher-order learning in the individual and compares the interpretive and inventive practices that John advocates in the "Metalogicon" and "Policraticus" with emerging methodologies for determining the truth of testimony and contingent situations in contemporary English jurisprudence. Chapter Three explores how John Gower's elevation of rhetoric to an epistemological category [especially in CA, Book VII, and VC Book I) establishes a political paradigm in which a sovereign's rhetorical efficacy is measured against his habituation to virtue, a paradigm that is challenged by Richard II's attempt to canonize Edward II. Finally, Chapter Four traces the development of rhetoric as a legitimated discipline within the king's household and details how John Lydgate leverages the professionalization of rhetoric to create a political system in which rhetorical intervention is achieved through rhetorical stylistics. In Chapter Five, the dissertation concludes by explaining how these case studies affect the field of medieval rhetorical historiography." [MA. eJGN 42.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Definitions and Depictions of Rhetorical Practice in Medieval English "Fürstenspiegel." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This essay could be read profitably as a companion-piece to Bennett's earlier work on the latter years of Richard II's kingship ("John Gower, Squire of Kent, the Peasants' Revolt, and the 'Visio Anglie'," Chaucer Review 2018; "Gower, Richard II, and Henry IV," "Historians on Gower" 2019), with his monograph "Richard II and the Revolution of 1399" (1999) as general background; and see Bennett, "Shades of Gower: Latin Texts and Social Contexts" (2022). Here, using chronicle accounts extensively, Bennett develops a positive portrait of Cobham's role from the advent of the crisis, arguing for the latter's justified distrust of Richard, and attributes to a warm relationship with Cobham Gower's detailed knowledge of events that subsequently produced his negative views of the king. Perhaps most significant for Gower scholars is Bennett's reading of the "Cronica Tripertita" as initially three separate poems later combined into one, each section reflecting a different stage in Gower's evolving attitude toward Richard. The first poem was composed "almost certainly . . . close to the events it described"--i.e., 1387-88 (44); the second later in 1388-89 (44-45); and the third in September 1397, when "Gower took up his 'weeping pen' to "report Gloucester's murder, Arundel's execution, and Warwick's banishment" (50). These, variously revised, became the CrT as we know it after the accession of Henry IV, in 1399. Bennett also reads as parallel these shifts in the CrT and the development of the Ricardian/Henrician versions of the "Confessio Amantis" (48-49). N.B.: p. 49, fn. 79, read: "BL, Cotton Ch. IV.27," not "Harl." [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bennett, Michael. Published Bennett, Michael. "'Defenders of truth': Lord Cobham, John Gower, and the Political Crisis of 1387-88." In Jessica A. Lutkin and J.S. Hamilton, eds. Creativity, Contradictions, and Commemoration in the Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of Nigel Saul. Woodbridge, Suff.: Boydell Press, 2022. Pp. 35-52. Gower Subject Cronica Tripertita Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Defenders of truth": Lord Cobham, John Gower, and the Political Crisis of 1387-88. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bennett's essay deals, per its title, with Gower's "social contexts"--that is, "Gower and his milieu at a key stage in his life and literary career, namely between the late 1360s and the early 1380s, when he assumed a position in landed society" (101). The essay has two parts. In the first, Bennett focuses particularly on two sets of documents: those related to the land transaction known as "the Septvauns affair," which ultimately brought the manor at Aldington into Gower's hands, but not before significant legal embroilment, and an embarrassing forced appearance before parliament for judgment; and a descriptive, primarily genealogical roll written in the 1380s ("possibly" by Gower [111]), which describes in some detail the fortunes of the Northwood family, close neighbors of Gower's at Aldington. Following the roll, Bennett traces the well-connected Northwoods through the generations, showing that Gower crossed paths with several members at different points, most significantly perhaps in 1366, when rents from Horton manor, near Canterbury, and properties in Southwark, were granted to Gower by a Northwood heir (107)--suggesting a family connection of some sort, though the roll provides no evidence for this (110). Bennett captures the interrelations of Kentish landed families, turning up names of importance at various points in Gower's life: Sir Arnold Savage, Sir John Cobham, third Lord Cobham, the Grandison family, and a "cousin from Savoy, Sir Otho de Graunson," the poet (112), well known to Chaucer and probably Gower as well. In the latter portion, Bennett discusses conditions in Kent in the 1360s, when the county served Edward III as a launching point for his army into France--an army in which, Bennett speculates, Gower may have participated "in some capacity" (114). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bennett, Michael. Published Bennett, Michael. "Shades of Gower: Latin Texts and Social Contexts." In Richard Firth Green and R. F. Yeager, eds. "Of latine and of othire lare": Essays in Honour of David R. Carlson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2022). Pp. 101-19. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Shades of Gower: Latin Texts and Social Contexts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Burke's essay offers a comparative analysis of Gower's "Cinkante balades" and Spenser's "Amoretti" in order to show the extent to which they share similar narrative arcs which "engage the reader with a dramatic fiction of a man and a woman progressing over time, through verbal interplay, to a joyful commitment by both partners, a 'lien/bond' of love that is equally shared between them" (461). This essay is an ambitious undertaking, given its consideration of the entire "Amoretti" and the marriage poems in the CB (Balades 1-5 and 44-51). Burke argues that the poets' similar approaches to their lyric sequences stem from similar marital experiences and foreground the role of communication between partners in a relationship rather than the more traditional introspective voice and focus of other lyrics on the same topic, an issue that also speaks to their interest in their respective political contexts and communities. Burke begins by addressing the inspiration for and possible source of the narrative unity of Gower's sequence in Christine de Pizan's "Cent balades" and in the Song of Songs. Burke then turns to careful close readings of courtship and betrothal in Gower's and Spenser's respective lyric sequences. The essay closes by arguing such a comparison suggests "the late medieval ideal of marriage was carried over with little change to become the English Protestant ideal of a chaste and Christlike married love that did not exclude the joys of intimacy" (588) and that these poets both "explicitly embrace their sovereign and their nation within the bond of mutual love that is celebrated in the sequence" (489). [BWG. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burke, Linda. Published Burke, Linda. "A Bond of True Love: Performing Courtship and Betrothal in Gower's 'Cinkante Balades' and Spenser's 'Amoretti,' in Light of Christine de Pizan's 'Cent Balades'." In Albrecht Classen, ed., Communication, Translation, and Community in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period: New Cultural-Historical and Literary Perspectives (Berlin, de Gruyter, 2022). Pp. 461–90. Gower Subject Cinkante Balades Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Bond of True Love: Performing Courtship and Betrothal in Gower's "Cinkante Balades" and Spenser's "Amoretti," in Light of Christine de Pizan's "Cent Balades." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article is not exclusively about Gower, but it asks important questions about how the shifting role of women in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England is reflected in the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and Thomas Malory. Elmes argues that there was "a profound cultural shift in women's visibility and significance" (136), and that these authors now had to address a female audience that could affect their literary reputation. She associates this need to address female readers primarily with a secular audience with an increasing interest in social rather than religious status (136), and notes that with this changing audience, poets engaging in translation or adaption would have had good reason to alter their often misogynist sources (137). In particular, the inclusion of sequences featuring female friendships represents for Elmes a significant way for these authors to update their adapted stories for this growing new audience, and break from a misogynist tradition. She looks closely at a number of adapted narratives by all three of her target authors. Elmes provides a detailed reading of the "Tale of Albinus and Rosemund" (Confessio Amantis I.2459-2680), adapted from Paul the Deacon's eighth-century "Historia Langobardorum." Her primary focus is the introduction of the character Glodeside, expanded from the source, where she appears merely as "dressing maid" (146). Elmes notes that Gower's version is vague about Glodeside's identity (a maid, not necessarily Rosemund's personal servant), thus emphasizing Rosemund's great trust in Glodeside, and their less hierarchal relationship. She suggests that their relationship is implied to be "long-term and close" (147). She also notes that because of Gower's contextualization of this story around Albinus' pride, the culpability for the women involved in his murder is reduced: "Gower does not comment on the women's actions being treacherous" (148), as does his source. (One might question, however, whether he really needs to, as nearly every character in the story meets their doom through their pride.) For Elmes, Gower like Chaucer or Malory adapted these stories in a way that would be less troubling to a female audience; she also notes that since none of these authors was actually writing for female patrons (148), these choices indicate a genuine cultural shift, and not just an obsequious author trying to please a patron. Her conclusions about how audiences had apparently changed by the late fourteenth century to expect to see women interact with each other and receive authorial sympathy are well-supported and open up important questions about the role of women in the literary audiences of the later Middle Ages. [RAL. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Elmes, Melissa Ridley. Published Elmes, Melissa Ridley. "Female Friendship in Late Medieval English Literature: Cultural Translation in Chaucer, Gower, and Malory." In Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala, eds. Women's Friendship in Medieval Literature (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022). Pp. 135–54. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Female Friendship in Late Medieval English Literature: Cultural Translation in Chaucer, Gower, and Malory. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Fredell seeks a new approach to what he terms "a longstanding puzzle"--the Henrician and Ricardian forms of the poem. He calls for a reconsideration of Macaulay's three recensions, proposing a notion of multiple competing approaches presenting Gower's work in a relatively short period of time at the turn of the fifteenth century, and he offers instead of recensions what he terms a "late state" model as a way to explain, and date, the variations in manuscripts of the "Confessio Amantis." Crucial to his argument is New York, Morgan Library MS M.690, "associated with Ricardian 'Confessio's" (200), which he considers possibly the first "Confessio" (220). However, because crucial folios are missing from its beginning and end (loci of tell-tale dedications, etc.) Fredell judges the question ultimately "insoluable"--while suggesting, nonetheless, the possibility that the excision of the front and read folios, where sections complimentary to Richard might have been found, was intentional (220-21). In support of his argument for an early date for Morgan M. 690, Fredell provides a thoughtful and exacting discussion of London styles for decorative borders after 1400, and argues for strong similarities between Morgan M. 690 and the group of manuscripts containing the work of "Scribe D" (so named by Doyle and Parkes 1978), recently claimed by Linne Mooney and Estelle Stubbs to be John Marchaunt of the Guildhall. Fredell is careful not to argue past his evidence, refraining from stating categorically that Morgan M. 690 was the earliest surviving Ricardian "Confessio." His argument does considerably complicate our thinking around the recension model by replacing a multi-decade chronology over the presumed time of completion of the "Confessio," drawing it into the Lancastrian usurpation and Henry IV's early reign. [RAL. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fredell, Joel. Published Fredell, Joel. "The First Emergence of the Ricardian 'Confessio': Morgan M. 690." In Margaret Connolly, Holly James-Maddocks, and Derek Pearsall, eds. Scribal Cultures in Late Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Linne R. Mooney (Woodbridge, Suff.: Boydell Press for York Medieval Press, 2022). Pp. 200-21. 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 First Emergence of the Ricardian "Confessio": Morgan M. 690. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Green offers a fresh take on an old chestnut, the "quarrel" between Chaucer and Gower, seeing their interaction not as a "battle of the books," but rather as Chaucer's "way of establishing a rival claim to the use of Ovidian material" (98). Green probes "a group of tales in the 'Confessio' ["Geta and Amphitrion," "Vulcan, Mars, and Venus," "Babio and Croceus," "Hercules and Faunus"] that have been taken to represent Gower's own attempts at treating fabliauesque material to see what they can tell us about his attitude to the genre, and how it might diverge from Chaucer's" (83). In the process he examines two fabliau-like schoolroom Latin plays, Vitalis of Blois' "Geta and the Comedia Babionis," that Gower must have read as a boy and re-worked into the CA as moral exempla. Gower, he concludes, "could never have brought himself to render either of them straight;" he "thoroughly disapproved of the schoolboy humor of these Latin comedies" (89)--and hence, Green posits, also of Chaucer's tales of the Miller and the Reeve, each of which Gower parodied in, respectively, his "Babio and Croceus" and "Hercules and Faunus"--"the influence having flowed from Chaucer to Gower" (95). Gower's response shows him turning to Ovid, "sanitizing" away (97) the disreputable bits, and offering these fabliau-like exempla as a better model for Chaucer to follow. Chaucer's response is the "Man of Law's Prologue," and the "Manciple's Tale," which latter "perhaps we should read . . . as Chaucer's answer to the "Tale of Hercules and Faunus" (99). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Green, Richard Firth. Published Green, Richard Firth. "John Gower and Chaucer's Fabliau." In Richard Firth Green and R. F. Yeager, eds. "Of latine and of othire lare": Essays in Honour of David R. Carlson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2022). Pp. 82-100. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower and Chaucer's Fabliaux. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Irvin subjects Gower's discussion of lollardy which, along with sections on Pride, Lust, and Avarice, comprises one of the four parts of the "Carmen," to intense and careful scrutiny. He takes as his point of departure the many lines "imported" into the "Carmen" from the "Vox Clamantis." While ticking off the several ways Gower's critiques of the church correspond to Wyclif's, Irvin also dismisses the similarities as essentially superficial (121-22). Unlike Wyclif, Gower assigns importance to the rituals and instruction of the church as a form of praxis (135), or "cultus," in Irvin's terms (126-27). For Gower, Irvin argues, unwavering faith--"the seeking of Christ not in knowledge but in prayer" (132)--ranks well above theological understanding, as God's "intentio" is beyond the reach of men (134-36). The essay is unusually rich in its uncovering and application of biblical passages that undergird Gower's polemic. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Irvin, Matthew W. Published Irvin, Matthew W. "The Vox Revoiced in Gower's 'Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilencia'." In Richard Firth Green and R. F. Yeager, eds. "Of latine and of othire lare": Essays in Honour of David R. Carlson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2022). Pp. 120-38. Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry Vox Clamantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Vox Revoiced in Gower's "Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilencia." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article examines the inflectional system of adjectives in Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve, all of them careful metrists. Focusing in particular on the adjectives "high" and "sly," the essay argues that while Chaucer and Gower generally observe the inflection of weak adjectives, a presumptively regular and even rigid system in general was breaking down for these words in particular. The essay posits a phonological explanation--i. e., that a schwa in the adjectival inflection was more likely to disappear after a high front /i/. [TWM. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Putter, Ad. Published Putter, Ad. "Linguistic Change and Metre: The Demise of Adjectival Inflections and the Scansion of 'High' and 'Sly' in Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve." English Language and Linguistics 26 (2022): 471-85. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Linguistic Change and Metre: The Demise of Adjectival Inflections and the Scansion of 'High' and 'Sly' in Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In chapter 27 of Paul Strohm's "Middle English," Kellie Robertson discusses the role of authorship and the labor of writing in the fourteenth century, specifically with regard to Chaucer, and what Robertson calls the "paradigmatic social space of non-work" (457) of pilgrimage in the "Canterbury Tales." In contrast to this space, Robertson argues that John Gower creates a "third space" (448) outside of the space of labor for the poet, a space represented by the well-known image of the author as archer aiming his arrows at the world in the "Vox Clamantis." According to Robertson, "the space of writing for Gower is a disembodied and hence unregulatable one" which is also "precarious" (448). This positioning of the concept of the work of the poet in Gower is notably different from the usual positioning of his poetic voice as either prophet or scold, and while the focus of the chapter is Chaucer, the liminal space Robertson claims for Gower is intriguing and provocative. [NG. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Robertson, Kellie. Published Robertson, Kellie. "Authorial Work." In Paul Strohm, ed. Middle English. Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Pp. 441-58. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Authorial Work. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Scase "investigates the question of whether and in what ways visible language contributed to identity formation in the past by making a case study of visible English c. 700-1500, when literate practice was predominantly in Latin and all texts were--save for the final few decades--produced individually by hand" (3-4). By "visible language" she means writing, and her conclusion is that indeed writing helped shape English identities, albeit not uniformly. Gower enters by way of manuscripts of the "Confessio Amantis," which provide important instances of a discernible and unique scribal practice--literatim copying. As Scase notes, "I have dealt with the so-called literatim scribes of John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' elsewhere, and I will therefore simply summarise that work here" (314). [For the discussion she mentions, see "John Gower's Scribes and Literatim Copying," In Martha Driver, Derek Pearsall, and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books. Publications of the John Gower Society, no. 14. Rochester, NY: Brewer, 2020. Pp. 13-31.] "The so-called literatim scribes of the 'Confessio'," she contends, "modified the practice of the scribes of accentual verse in order to maintain the strict syllable count and iambic metre of Gower's lines rather than out of respect for Gower's idiosyncratic dialect as has been previously suggested" (314). This group of scribes included "Scribe Delta," who worked on Trevisa's translation of Higden's "Polychronicon," the so-called "Trevisa-Gower scribe" who copied Tokyo, Senshu UL, 1, (and whose hand is also discernible in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 902 [347]), and Scribe D, "now thought by many to be John Marchaunt" (346), of the London Guildhall, which may have been "a centre for this activity" (347). Scribes Delta and D have very similar hands, and were perhaps in competition, the former specializing in "Polychronicon" MSS and the latter in "Confessio"s (347). Possibly as well these scribes "facilitated exchange and cross-fertilisation between these projects" (348). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Scase, Wendy. Published Scase, Wendy. Visible English: Graphic Culture, Scribal Practice, and Identity, c. 700-1550. Turnhout: Brepols, 2022. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Visible English: Graphic Culture, Scribal Practice, and Identity, c. 700-1550. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Weiskott is among Gower's most careful modern readers, and one of a still smaller number who pay attention to the poet's metrics, no less in Latin than in Middle English. His consideration of Gower's oxymora in "Est amor in glosa" harnesses both capabilities for a clear, and fructive, purpose. By plotting (275) precisely what and where Gower borrowed from the "Vox Clamantis" (as is generally recognized), and also from "De planctu Naturae" (not so often), Weiskott illuminates Gower's originality, the difficult challenge he set himself in this expression of late Latin poetic stylistics (As Weiskott observes, "'Est amor in glosa' tries out three different varieties of Latin love poetry and excels at all three" [277]), and in the process arrives at both an explanation of the poem's machinery, that subtly comments "on literary language itself" (276), and a sensitive appreciation of its "distinctive mouthfeel or sensation on the tongue": "lovely and formidable" (276) . . . its juxtaposition of love and death also forms a poignant comment on Gower's self-presentation . . . as 'old in years' ['vetus annorum'] (277)." [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Weiskott, Eric. "On the Oxymora in John Gower's 'Est amor in glosa'." Notes and Queries 69 (2022): 273-77. Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource On the Oxymora in John Gower's "Est amor in glosa." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Weiskott pegs the date of "Ecce patet tensus" at "c. 1400," envisioning "with our 'heart's eye' an aged Gower receding none too comfortably into the penumbra of advancing blindness" (281). He thus strikes a cautious middle ground between those viewing the poem as earlier work (Fisher, Rigg, Carlson--though the latter also finds a later date acceptable) and those preferring late composition (Yeager, Sobecki). Dating a poem lacking any historical reference is tricky work, yielding at best speculative results. Significantly, Weiskott separates "Ecce patet tensus" from "Est amor in glosa," with which it appears in London, British Library MS Additional 59495 (olim Trentham)--a decision putting him again in good company, but one that also further complicates his endeavor. In order to arrive at "some slight incentive to regard 'Ecce patet tensus' as a poem of c. 1400" (281), Weiskott contextualizes it with more readily datable manuscripts (for Add. 59495 is itself not fixedly dated), Oxford, All Souls College MS 98, British Library Cotton Tiberius A.iv, and works: "Henrici quarti primus," the "Epistle to Arundel," "Quicquid homo scribat," and the "Vox Clamantis," which shares many lines with "Ecce patet tensus." [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Weiskott, Eric. "The Date and Style of John Gower's 'Ecce patet tensus'." Notes and Queries 69 (2022): 277-81. Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Date and Style of John Gower's "Ecce patet tensus." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Weiskott looks at revisions made to Gower's brief poem through two lenses (or three, if one accepts lived history as a viewing point): Deluze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome and Julie Singer's of lyric prosthesis. The poem has three versions, identified by their incipits: "Henrici quarti primus," "Henrici regis annis," and "Quicquid homo scribat," which Weiskott prefers to use. David R. Carlson ("Rhyme Distribution") observed what he called "cumulative revision" at work in these versions, i.e., lines from the first and second turn up in the third, while others from both are excluded. (The order of composition is established by noted regnal years 1 [1399-1400] and 2 [1400-1401] of Henry IV for the first two, and no notation on--presumably--the third and latest.) The practice "bespeaks a rhizomatic approach to revision, an ability to hold three texts in the mind at one time (if we are not to imagine Gower consulting his own manuscripts), and a multidirectional understanding of the literary work" (548). Weiskott finds an image of "Gower's self-organization" in this approach (549), and applying Singer's notion of "lyric prosthesis" argues that "Quicquid" "explicitly offers to compensate for its author's deficient body" (549). There follows a careful, detailed analysis of how--and why--Gower assembled his three versions (549-52). Most interesting are Weiskott's speculations that the three revisions show Gower coming to terms with his disability: "Gower's prosthetic poem . . . overwrites Nature's imposition of closure, reframing the "end ('finem')" . . . of sight and a writing career as a starting point for writing" (551). Extrapolating from this view of rhizomatic composition, Weiskott identifies a phrase ("curua senectus") as common to "Quicquid," the "Epistola to Arundel," "Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilencia," and uses a description of Gower as a rhizomatical writer as further evidence in support of R. F. Yeager's theory that "Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilencia" was the text offered to Thomas Arundel by Gower in 1397 (553). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Weiskott, Eric. "Cumulative Revision in John Gower's 'Quicquid Homo Scribat'." English Studies 103 (2022): 547-54. Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry 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 Cumulative Revision in John Gower's "Quicquid Homo Scribat." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Weiskott argues that six late, quatrain-length Latin poems--"Ad mundum mitto" (the "Archer poem"), "Quam cinxere freta" (linked to "Eneados, bucolis," about which he asks "Can this poem . . . possibly be serious?" [780]), "Explicit iste liber," "H. aquile pullus," "Armigeri scutum" (for his tomb), "Quam bonitas, pietas" (for his wife's tomb, recorded as Gower's by Bale, but not found elsewhere)--are all definitely Gower's and should be read as a group: "They all form a set. They are in Latin, either hexameters or hexameters + pentameter ('elegiac couplets') or two hexameters followed by an elegiac couplet. All employ internal rhyme ('leonine' lines)" (777) and they are all "jingly poems" (777). They show Gower mastering the craft of the quatrain, and "comment on the vastness of his life in poetry" (778). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Weiskott, Eric. "Gower's Quatrains: Language, Rhyme, Occasion." English Studies 103 (2022): 777-86. Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Quatrains: Language, Rhyme, Occasion. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In this essay, Yeager gauges the degree to which Gower "might . . . have been influenced by the ideas" of Robert Grosseteste (140), concluding that various "scraps" of evidence "taken together, argue for a noteworthy familiarity on Gower's part with Grosseteste's works" (156). Yeager is persuasive even though these "scraps" are indeed few on the ground: one overt reference (to the "gret clerc Grossteste" and the failure or destruction of a prophetic brazen head in the ten-line exemplum against "Lachesse," the first branch of Sloth, in CA Book IV, 234ff.) and more subtle echoes of Grosseteste's "Hexaëmeron" underlying Gower's "De lucis scrutinio," a complaint/prayer in Yeager's discussion. The scarcity encourages Yeager to clarify Grosseteste's importance in late-medieval English anti-clerical polemics as well as in philosophy and science, helping the critic to explain why Gower may not have referred to Grosseteste more often or more clearly. Yeager's argument--in over-simplified form--is that Gower's recurrent complaints against the clergy share much with Grosseteste's writing but that Grosseteste's (inaccurate) reputation as an excommunicate deterred Gower from closer identification or more frequent references. This may be why, Yeager suggests, Gower presents Grosseteste as a scientist only ("Astrologus") in his Latin gloss to the exemplum against sloth, and, along with some early modern analogues to the brass-head, helps Yeager to explain the juxtaposition of the exemplum and the similarly brief exemplum of "The Five Foolish Virgins" that follows it--the two "reflect and inform each other" (144) insofar as they both center on a crucial choice to follow the light, as it were, with the success of wise virgins in lighting their lamps left pointedly unmentioned as is Grosseteste's choice of pastoral care over science. More subtly, Yeager argues, when Gower labels "De lucis" a "tractatus" he "seems to echo incipits and/or explicits in the majority of extant manuscripts of Grosseteste's own 'De luce'" (156, and see 152), and, more importantly, there are deep similarities to Grosseteste's "metaphysics of light" (155) in Gower's short poem, as well as several other points of thematic and structural similarity with Grosseteste's "Hexaëmeron." Yeager's discussions of these resonances are too complex to summarize briefly here--this is very much not the kind of source-hunting that seeks only to locate verbal parallels which Yeager recently criticized elsewhere (see "John Gower's Use of the 'Ovide moralisé': A Reconsideration," 2022, p. 61). He ranges widely in late-medieval English understanding of Grosseteste, (pseudo)science, and, especially, ecclesiastical polemics to scaffold and reinforce much of his argument, referring recurrently to the Lollards and to Wyclif. Indeed, observing parallels among Grosseteste, Wyclif, and Gower, Yeager seems to promise a companion piece to the one under review, stating that the "degree to which Gower knew Wyclif's writings in general is a subject for another essay" (148). If such another essay is planned (or in progress), it will likely reinforce Yeager's successful representation here of Gower as a deeply informed, subtle, but cautious reader (and writer) of matters that pertain to the ecclesiastical polemics of his age. One note--a quibble: Yeager says that in "De lucis" Gower "hints . . . at a particular alternative form of the mass" (152), without offering any support that I can find. Perhaps this will find its way into an essay on Gower and Wyclif. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R. F. "Gower, Grosseteste, and 'De lucis scrutinio'." In Richard Firth Green and R. F. Yeager, eds. "Of latine and of othire lare": Essays in Honour of David R. Carlson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2022). Pp. 139-56. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Minor Latin Poetry Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Grosseteste, and "De lucis scrutinio." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholason, Peter, ed. and trans. Published John Gower Society website: https://johngower.org/john-gowers-traitie/ Accessed 22 February 2024 Gower Subject Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Facsimiles, Editions and Translations Review Provides an edition of "Traitié Selonc Les Auctours Pour Essampler Les Amantz Marietz," with line-by-line English translation, an Introduction, and Notes, available as a downloadable PDF. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Title A name given to the resource John Gower's Traitié. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Ensley's essay is a very useful addition to Gower-reception studies, drawing together analyses of paratextual features of Berthelette's editions of the "Confessio Amantis" (and Caxton's, more briefly), Gower's place in commonplace books of the sixteenth century (particularly that of Richard Hill), and readers' marks in thirty-one copies of Caxton's and Berthelette's editions of CA. She focuses on how sixteenth-century readers "extracted" (a word she uses throughout) proverbs, sententiae, and other commonplace materials from the CA, and how Berthelette's prefatory letter, lay-out, and table of contents encouraged such extraction by emphasizing Gower's role as a "conduit for the poets, historians and philosophers of the past" while deemphasizing the poet's "own voice" and the dialogic frame narrative of the CA (211). Ensley aligns this emphasis with Renaissance humanism, situating her study appropriately among those by Daniel Wakelin on late-medieval and early modern humanism, Siân Echard on Gower's pre-texts and proverbs, Joseph Stadolnik on excerpting Gower, R. F. Yeager on Ben Jonson's uses of Gower in his "Grammar" and on Gower and the cento tradition, and others. Ensley's discussions of sixteenth-century habits of commonplace extraction are similarly situated and supported via authoritative studies by Mary Thomas Crane, Adam Smyth, and others on the motivations and practices of keeping commonplace books; her data, in turn, corroborate aspects of these studies by showing how--an extended example here--Richard Hill extracted portions of the CA for his commonplace book (Oxford, Balliol College, MS 354) and modified them (inserting new lines with new rhymes) to deemphasize or eliminate Gower's dialogic frame, perhaps responding to Berthelette's presentation or perhaps following an impulse similar to that of Jonson when in his "Grammar" he draws extracts from Gower in order to free "the medieval poet's language" (214) from history and the negative associations of pre-Reformation baggage. When she turns to her detailed commentary on readers' marks (marginal comments, underscoring, manicules, etc., reproducing three illustrative facsimile pages) in her corpus of printed copies, Ensley does not explain how she selected them, whether by ease of access or by density of marginalia--if the latter, it would thin her argument somewhat--but she clearly aligns the marginalia with extraction and commonplacing, helping us to see how readers' jottings connect with humanism, how they are characteristic of sixteenth-century reading, and how they reflect early modern attitudes towards medieval texts, including the CA--maybe even especially the CA. It may be a step too far, although an enticing one, when Ensley suggests in her conclusion that Gower's "works may have been so ripe for . . . extractive commonplacing strategies, because Gower himself used them in his own writing" (225, citing Yeager on Gower and the cento tradition). Given the care with which Ensley situates her argument and uses her data, the point is provocative and plausible, but comparative analysis of Renaissance readers' extractive uses of other medieval writers would be helpful if we are to agree that Gower was especially "ripe" for extraction because he was an extractor himself. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ensley, Mimi. Published Ensley, Mimi. "'Profitable' Gower: Commonplacing and the Early Modern Confessio Amantis." Journal of English and Germanic Philology 121 (2022): 202-26; 3 illus. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Facsimles, Editions, and Translations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Profitable" Gower: Commonplacing and the Early Modern "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022