22 100 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 Hanna makes a contribution to the discussion of the literary relation between Gower and Chaucer during the course of his essay on the text of Chaucer's "Truth." Brusendorff (1925:204) first pointed out the resemblance between line 2 and the refrain of one version of Chaucer's poem and CA 5.7739-41, and concluded that Chaucer had probably borrowed from Gower. Pace and David, in their edition of The Minor Poems for the Variorum Chaucer (1982:60), suggested that Gower was alluding to Chaucer's poem instead, indicating that the version in question was thus already well known. Hanna points out that Brusendorff evidently supposed Gower to use "fre" in 5.7741 in the modern sense of "free, independent," and that since he uses it to mean "generous, liberal" instead, the purported resemblance to Chaucer's refrain ("And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede" in the new Riverside Chaucer) disappears. The remaining similarity between the two passages can be attributed to independent allusion to the same Latin proverb, and Hanna concludes that there is no evidence that either poet influenced the other. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hanna, Ralph III Published Hanna, Ralph III. "Authorial Versions, Rolling Revision, Scribal Error? Or, the Truth about Truth." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 10 (1988), pp. 23-40. 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 Authorial Versions, Rolling Revision, Scribal Error? Or, the Truth about Truth Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Fowler announces that his purpose is to treat the history of literary forms rather than contents; and with regard to specific works, he writes, "I have tried to explain how best to approach each writer: what obstacles to avoid, what allowances to make, what pleasures to expect" (p. vii). His two terse paragraphs on Gower demonstrate the clarity and freshness of observation of the book as a whole, and also some of the limitations of treating so many works in a single short volume: In CA, he writes, "a lover's confession to love's priest Genius, the natural self, constitutes a minutely developed allegorical frame, in which relatively undetailed, beautifully shaped tales are inserted as examples clarifying the deadly sins of love. In effect the tales survey a broad range of human experience in a rational, systematizing way, such that they almost anticipate the method of the Renaissance. Gower was a great intellectual, and his masterpiece communicates an impressive vision. It is a moving, terrible vision, of life as threatened by irresistible and irrational impulses. By the end of his life-long confession Gower's lover has become too old: 'the thing is torned into "was" . . .' (viii.2435). The individual tales, drawn from Ovid or the romances, are triumphs of refacimento, the art of stylish re-presentation. "Gower had the gift of selecting just what formed a spare, classic unity, logical rather than allegorical in coherence. Even his neat tetrameters (four-stressed lines) are balanced, divided into equal halves. . . . Although he wrote with moral fervour, 'moral Gower' was our first major poet of formal elegance in narrative-- superior, in this regard, even to Chaucer." (P. 12.) Review by Martin Dodsworth in TLS, April 8-14 l988, p. 382. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fowler, Alastair Published Fowler, Alastair. "A History of English Literature: Forms and Kinds from the Middle Ages to the Present." Oxford: Blackwell, 1987 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 A History of English Literature: Forms and Kinds from the Middle Ages to the Present. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Blackwell, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Cubie distinguishes three different motifs that contribute historically to the medieval understanding of caritas, and finds the predominant motif in CA is neither agape nor eros but the fulfillment of God's law. Directed by Christian P. Zacher. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor McMackin Cubie, Genevieve Published McMackin Cubie, Genevieve. "The Meaning of Caritas in John Gower's Confessio Amantis." PhD thesis, Ohio State University, 1987. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Meaning of Caritas in John Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Lawton compares Gower's confession frame, in which the "lust" of storytelling is harmoniously integrated into the penitential design, with Chaucer's opposition of the "demands of penance and play" (p. 17) as part of his discussion of the function of Parson's Tale. He also contrasts Gower's and Chaucer's use of their respective narrators (pp. 20-21). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lawton, David Published Lawton, David. "Chaucer's Two Ways: The Pilgrimage Frame of The Canterbury Tales." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 (1987), pp. 3-40. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer's Two Ways: The Pilgrimage Frame of The Canterbury Tales Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Smallwood cites some dozen examples of brief digressions in the tales in CA in contrast to the longer, more substantial digressions that occur near the beginnings of several tales by Chaucer (pp. 440- 41). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Smallwood, T.M. Published Smallwood, T.M.. ""Chaucer's Distinctive Digressions."." Studies in Philology 82 (1985), pp. 437-49. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Chaucer's Distinctive Digressions." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review After a number of tales in Book 4 concerned with the passage into adulthood, one of the major themes of CA, Amans makes his single attempt at self-assertion in his declaration of his refusal to kill for love (4.1648 ff.), citing the example of Achilles laying down his arms for Polixena based on Benoit de Sainte- Maure (4.1693-1701). Genius responds with three tales rebuking Amans' budding independence, and concludes with the tale of "Achilles' Education" drawn from Statius (4.1963 ff.), presenting Genius' somewhat different idea of the mature life. In Book 5 Genius makes two further mentions of Achilles, presenting the story of Deidamia from Statius (5.2961 ff.), and completing the story of Polixena begun by Amans (5.7591-96), expressing his own disapproval of Achilles in correction of his pupil. Genius' ideal is the heroic warrior-lover described by Statius, and using Achilles as his example he "urges Amans to grow up perfectly in an imperfect world" (pp. 135-36). Amans is more aware of the impossibility of such an ideal, and he turns to Benoit and to romance as an expression of accommodation to the realities of the world and of human behavior. Genius' attempt to educate Amans becomes increasingly irrelevant: the self-contradictions in his ideal become more evident in the two stories of Achilles in Book 5, and Aristotle's education of Alexander in reason and logic in Book 7 turns out even less successfully. Books 4 and 5 thus mark an important turning point in the poem; and in Book 8, once Genius has faded into the background, Amans' real education is completed in his vision of the Company of Lovers, with its examples of "those who try to live as best they can in this flawed world" (pp. 143-44). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Zambreno, Mary Frances Published Zambreno, Mary Frances. "Gower's Confessio Amantis IV, 1963-2013: The Education of Achilles." Essays in Medieval Studies: Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association 3 (1986), pp. 131-48. 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's Confessio Amantis IV, 1963-2013: The Education of Achilles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yeager attempts the difficult task of discerning Gower's and Chaucer's attitudes towards peace and warfare on the basis of their writings. In Gower he finds a change in attitude between the poet's earliest and his final works, which he attributes in part to a reaction to the changing English fortunes in the war with France. In MO Gower argues the justness of Edward III's prosecution of the war. The very nature of his argument betrays Gower's legal training and reflects the influence of Isidore and Gratian, who emphasized in their justification of war the nature of the provocation. In VC and CA one detects the growing feeling that all wars "are more about money than about justice' (p. 104), placing greater emphasis on the motives of the warrior than on the wickedness of the enemy, and Gower's criticism of war in his later poems is accompanied by a greater emphasis on peace, in both cases reflecting the influence of Augustine. Augustine's influence is particularly evident in Gower's last English poem, "In Praise of Peace." In CA, while the dialogue between Amans and Genius in Book 3 reflects "a profound division in Gower's own heart" (p. 105), greater weight is given to the Confessor's advocacy of mercy and charity, and indeed CA as a whole seems to treat "not courtly love but love of order, and the peace which comes when discord is halted and right relations restored" (p. 107). Discerning Chaucer's attitude is more difficult: Yeager assembles what we know of the poet's biography, the opinions of those closest to him, the attitudes expressed in "Melibee" and "Sir Thopas," the effect of the juxtaposition of these two tales, and verbal similarities between passages that Chaucer added to "Melibee" emphasizing mercy and forgiveness and the words in his own Retraction, to conclude that Chaucer too was a man of peace, more instinctually than Gower but perhaps also more deeply and more thoroughly. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1]. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 163-77. Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. ""Pax Poetica: On the Pacifism of Chaucer and Gower."." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 (1987), pp. 97-121. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis 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 "Pax Poetica: On the Pacifism of Chaucer and Gower." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review A comparison between Chaucer's "Physician's Tale" and Gower's "Virginia," in Japanese; not seen by JGN. The reference is taken from "An Annotated Chaucer Bibliography: 1985" by Lorraine Y. Baird-Lange and Bege K. Bowers, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 9 (1987), item 184. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kanno, Masahiko Published Kanno, Masahiko. "Chaucer no The Physician's Tale - Ruiwa tono Hikaku" ("The Physician's Tale - Comparison with its Analogue")." Studies in Foreign Languages and Literatures (Aichi University of Education) 21 (1985), pp. 47-58. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer no The Physician's Tale - Ruiwa tono Hikaku" ("The Physician's Tale - Comparison with its Analogue") Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower is not given a major part in Howard's new biography of Chaucer, but the scattered references touch on a number of details in both the personal and literary relationship between the two poets. Partly because of the lack of any other more suitable candidate, Howard suggests that the older Gower was Chaucer's most likely "mentor" during Chaucer's twenties (pp. 162-63). Chaucer's earliest ballades in particular may have been written under Gower's influence, and like Gower's, may have been intended for oral delivery before the merchant "Puy" (pp. 267-68). Gower was well behind his pupil, however, in not yet having begun to write in English (pp. 162- 63, 225). And with HF, "Chaucer's way of writing turns away from Gower's," in part because of his encounter with Italian literature and in part because a poet in his thirties will leave behind the mentors of his youth (p. 255). Their acquaintance continued, but by the time of the dedication of T&C they had "parted company artistically: Gower was still writing medieval complaint with its explicit moralizing, and he disapproved of Chaucer's satire, with its ironic stance" (p. 373), and there is "some irony, surely" in Chaucer's reference to his "sententious and avuncular" friend as "moral Gower" (p. 420). "There is not a question that the two poets were sharing ideas and tales" as Gower began his work on CA and Chaucer commenced LGW and CT (p. 418). MLT was influenced by Gower's "Constance," which Chaucer had seen in draft (p. 419). But in ML Intro Chaucer continues the teasing of his friend: Gower had apparently admonished Chaucer for his inclusion of MilT and RvT, and ML thus condemns Gower for telling dirty stories of his own (p. 420; also p. 438). And though there is no evidence that they quarreled (p. 420), their friendship seems "not to have been resumed with intensity after 1388" (p. 497). Howard artfully weaves together the documentary evidence for Chaucer's life with what is known about the historical backdrop, particularly about the events in which Chaucer is known to have been involved, and the attitudes and interests that he infers from Chaucer's works; and the portrait that emerges of Chaucer's life and times is rich and detailed. Howard will no doubt be criticized for the lack of evidence for some of his speculations (including some of what he has to say about Chaucer's relationship with Gower) and for the excessively biographical interpretation of some of Chaucer's works: is it necessary to believe, for instance, that the Merchant's views of marriage somehow echo Chaucer's? Much of Howard's view of Chaucer's "times," of course, is seen as through Chaucer's eyes; and since Chaucer was close to several members of the royal family, much of the story is concerned with their public and private lives and with the warfare, diplomacy and marriage negotiations in which Chaucer had some part. But Chaucer had little to say about a great many broader social and political movements during his century. It is interesting to speculate how different a backdrop would be drawn, and how different a view of the "times" would emerge, in a similar biography of Gower. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Howard, Donald R. Published Howard, Donald R.. "Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World." New York: Dutton, 1987 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations 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 Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Dutton, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In expressing his distaste for "unkynde abhomynaciouns" in his introduction, ML distinguishes his tale from stories like "Apollonius of Tyre." The distinction results in a peculiar distortion of the Apollonius story, in which the brief episode of incest at the beginning is overshadowed by the lengthy account of the power of "kynde" in the adventures of the hero. It also draws attention to a feature of the traditional Constance story that ML suppresses, the father's incestuous desire for his daughter which both motivates the ensuing action and gives sense to the many variations of parent-child relations throughout the tale. MLT is marked by this attempt to suppress that which ML finds repugnant but also by the repeated reassertion of the incest theme in subtle but ironic ways. Gower's version exhibits no such preoccupation. Unlike ML, Gower directly links his "Constance" to his "Apollonius": in addition to the remarkable similarities in plot, he emphasizes in both the power of "kinde love" that draws father to daughter at the end, and he uses almost the same words to describe the two reunions (CA 2.1381-82; 8.1707-8). Like Chaucer, Gower was probably aware of the incest motive in the traditional Constance story, but he kept Trivet's version of the opening since incest was to be a central theme in both "Apollonius" and Book 8 of CA. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Goodall, Peter Published Goodall, Peter. "'Unkynde abhomynaciouns' in Chaucer and Gower." Parergon 5 (1987), pp. 94-102. 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 'Unkynde abhomynaciouns' in Chaucer and Gower Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Burnley considers Gower along with Chaucer and Usk in his discussion of the knowledge of traditional Latin rhetoric by London poets of the end of the 14th century. Murphy (1962) drew heavily on Gower for his argument that there was no viable rhetorical tradition during Chaucer's and Gower's time. He was most vigorously opposed by Schmitz (1974), who insisted that Gower was not as ignorant as Murphy claimed, but that he deliberately rejected the rhetoric of ornament, which he associated with falsehood and deception, in favor of a "plain" rhetoric rooted in "trouthe" and "honestete" that directly reflected the moral concerns of his poem. Burnley takes a middle-of-the-road view. He decides that the three London poets "may have known something of the teaching of the rhetorics and the artes poeticae" (p. 291), but that they had not studied them systematically and their concepts of rhetoric and style were less technical and influenced by more general sources. Like Schmitz (whom he does not cite), he finds that there is "an implied moral significance" in the contrast that Gower (like Chaucer) draws between rhetorical ornament and plainness and honesty, but he attributes his use of "colour" and "peynte" in this context not to a conscious choice of a different rhetorical ideal but to "habitual expression which has been part of the common core of vocabulary for long enough to have shifted its sense" (p. 285). He concludes that Gower was less well-informed about traditional rhetoric than Chaucer was. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burnley, J.D. Published Burnley, J.D.. "Chaucer, Usk, and Geoffrey of Vinsauf." Neophilologus 69 (1985), pp. 284-93. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer, Usk, and Geoffrey of Vinsauf Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review ["Human to animal shape-shifting is one of the most universal cultural motifs, appearing in the literature, mythology and sculpture of virtually every people on earth. For all that the theme of metamorphosis denotes the possibility of voluntary fluidity, it also delineates the reality of separation and definition. . . . This thesis examines the nature and use of metamorphosis in four texts. John Gower's Confessio Amantis uses Ovidian stories as a means of discussing the nature and stability of human hierarchies. Social violations bring about physical transformations, which cause humans to lose their place in the Great Chain of Being." Other works considered are Chaucer's KnT, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the Middle Welsh Math vab Mathonwy. "In short, human-to-animal metamorphosis focuses on the limits of humans as social animals, as users of metaphor and as creative beings." [JGN 15.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Schutz, Andrea K. Published Schutz, Andrea K.. "Theriomorphic Shape-Shifting: An experimental reading of identity and metamorphosis in selected medieval British texts." PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1995. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Theriomorphic Shape-Shifting: An experimental reading of identity and metamorphosis in selected medieval British texts Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Robins, William Randolph Published Robins, William Randolph. "Ancient Romance and Medieval Literary Genres: Apollonius of Tyre." PhD thesis, Princeton University, 1995. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review ["The story of Apollonius of Tyre is the only ancient romance that was known to the medieval West, where it was remarkably popular. Its narrative principle of random contingency served to differentiate it from dominant narrative assumptions in western medieval literature. Without the context of the Greek romances, medieval readers understood the story's provocative randomness in terms of other generic categories, and thus the way various late antique and medieval cultures reponded differently to this same story provides clues about the operations of several distinct literary systems." Chapter 4 treats the OE version; chapter 5 contrasts Antonio Pucci's Apollonio di Tiro with Boccaccio's use of the story in the Filocolo. "Chapter 6 argues that in John Gower's Confessio Amantis the story of Apollonius stages a confrontation between two temporal logics of narrative -- romance and exemplum -- which governs the poem's engagement with its readers." [JGN 15.2] 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 Ancient Romance and Medieval Literary Genres: Apollonius of Tyre Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Bullón-Fernández, María Published Bullón-Fernández, María. "Fathers and Daughters in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis': Authority, Politics, and Gender in late medieval England." EngD thesis, Cornell University, 1995. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review ["This dissertation argues that in the Confessio Amantis John Gower uses the father-daughter relationship as the model on which he explores and raises complex social, political, and gender issues in connection with the definition and uses of paternal, kingly, and artistic authority. "Chapter One, 'Fathers and Daughters: Defining Authority,' discusses the methodological approach. I combine a feminist perspective, employing Judith Butler's theories on gender performativity and on the incest taboo, as well as Lynda Boose on the structure of father-daughter relationships, with a socio-historical perspective, drawing on David Aers' and Lee Patterson's studies on politics and literature in fourteenth-century England. In Chapter Two, 'Daughters and Father Figures: The "Tale of Albinus and Rosemund," "The Tale of the False Bachelor," and "Pygmaleon and the Statue,"' I examine three tales which problematize the structural resemblance underlying husband-wife and father-daughter relationships in the context of politics, in the case of the first two tales, and artistic creation, in the story of Pygmalion. Chapter Three, 'Liminal Daughters: The "Tale of Canace and Machaire," the "Tale of Virginia," and the "Tale of Leucothoe,"' studies three tales in which the daughters are the focal point for Genius' articulation of the father's anxiety over the control of their daughters' sexuality, thus highlighting the limits of the fathers' authority over them. As these fathers are crucial political figures, Gower also examines the limits of political authority. "In Chapter Four, '"Bot what maiden hire esposaile Wol tarie . . .": The "Tale of Rosiphelee" and the "Tale of Jepte,"' I analyze the ways in which social ideology regulates the daughter's sexuality, not so much through the fathers, but by different means -- even through the authority of a narrator/auctor like Genius. Chapter Five, 'Redeeming Daughters: The "Tale of the Three Questions," the "Tale of Constance," and "Apollonius of Tyre,"' centers on three tales in which the father-daughter relationships work in the interests of society and of the political system. Gower's focus on daughters generates an effective metaphor for political relations in fourteenth-century England." [JGN 15.2] 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 Fathers and Daughters in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis': Authority, Politics, and Gender in late medieval England Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review ["In the three and a half decades since the publication of Ariès's seminal work, Centuries of Childhood, our understanding of Western European medieval notions of right relations between parents and children has changed significantly. . . . In the context of the post-Ariès vision of medieval attitudes toward parents and children, this dissertation examines the works of three English poets of the late fourteenth century, Chaucer, Gower, and the Pearl-poet. . . . All three poets, while presenting relations between parents and children that reflect with some degree of realism contemporary assumptions about familial bonds, also idealize children, often associating them with the miraculous. In Pearl such idealization takes its grandest form, as the poet places the death of a child in the context of Christian Resurrection. In the Confessio Amantis Gower's strongest tales include scenes of anagnorisis, in which children restore parents to new life. In the works of Chaucer, the poet employs the idealized child in the widest variety of contexts; miracles range from a small act of generosity to an instance of Christian transcendance. As the dissertation demonstrates, each of the three poets presents, against a background of real relations between parents and children in this world, a vision of the child, in his or her rejection of such sublunary concerns, triumphant." [JGN 15.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bauer, Kate A. Published Bauer, Kate A.. "The Portrayal of Parents and Children in the Works of Chaucer, Gower, and the Pearl-poet." PhD thesis, New York University, 1995. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Portrayal of Parents and Children in the Works of Chaucer, Gower, and the Pearl-poet Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The Anticlaudianus is not the usual point of reference for studies of CA, and vice versa. The originality of the juxtaposition is one measure of the provocativeness and occasional brilliance of Simpson's vigorous and ambitious new study, which offers radically novel readings of both poems at the same time that it draws them together in an intriguing exploration of the nature of the humanist poetics of the Middle Ages. It is not possible here to summarize Simpson's entire argument, particularly on the Anticlaudianus. Readers will find what Simpson himself disarmingly labels a "preposterous solution" to the problems posed by the form of Alain's poem (which involves taking the two major sections into which it falls in reverse order) that renders the poem considerably more subtle, but that needs to be considered and evaluated by those more familiar with Alain's text. With reference to CA, Simpson's main points can be summarized as follows: (1) The entire poem must be conceived as a psychological allegory between two faculties of the same soul, Amans representing the Will (or alternatively Desire), and Genius Imagination. Simpson means this quite seriously: in chapter 8 he even describes the tales that make up the bulk of the dialogue as being summoned forth by Amans' Imagination from his memory of his own previous reading. The way in which Imagination serves the Will and is originally called forth by the Will explains many of Genius' most obvious limitations, particularly his encouragement of Amans' passion. (In support of his argument, Simpson cites particularly egregious examples of Genius' "pedagogy"; and as a source for Genius' voice in the poem, Simpson invokes the Ovidian praeceptor amoris of the Ars and the Remedia.) But though Genius serves Desire, he is not limited by Desire. During the course of the poem he invokes images and "information" that bring about both his and Amans' psychic restoration, and true to his function as Imagination, he finally serves successfully as a bridge between Will and Reason. (2) Like Anticlaudianus, the poem offers a program of instruction in the medieval "sciences" which gives priority to politics as the point of mediation between ethics and cosmology as well as a model for ethical "self-rule." Genius thus becomes increasingly rational as he moves from instruction on love to the citation of examples from the political domain, and as shown in Simpson'a analyses of the second half of Book 3 and of Book 7, politics serves as the vehicle for drawing Amans himself to greater personal knowledge and therefore greater self-control. (3) The form of the poem is thus a mirror of the formation of the soul. Simpson uses the multiple senses of ME "informacioun" as the model for his (and Gower's) conception of poetic form: in the process of transmitting "information" or knowledge (particularly on the proper hierarchy of the sciences), the poet "informs" or gives shape to his poem, and also "informs," both educates and gives "form" to, his reader. (4) Again as in Anticlaudianus, the actual protagonist of the poem is the reader himself. (The male pronouns are used advisedly; neither poet seems to have given much thought to female readers.) Since there is no stable authority figure in CA, the reader must participate in the construction of the meaning, and the process of "formation" with which the poem is concerned is not so much represented in Amans as it is enacted in the reader. Each of these proposals could be, and should be, the subject of considerable serious discussion. To take only the first: it is one thing to say that Anticlaudianus, in which one character is called "Ratio" and another "Fronesis" or "Prudentia," is a psychological allegory, and another to make the same claim of a poem in which the major characters are called "Genius" and "Amans." What is our standard for the validity of such a reading? Simpson's argument relies on his analysis of the multiple senses of "information" in chapter 1 and on his observations on the shortcomings of some of Genius' lessons. But does the opening scene of the poem, in which Amans prays to Venus and Venus then summons Genius to hear Amans' confession, really depict something so simple as the evocation of Imagination by the "concupiscent will" (p. 254)? As justification for the notion that Amans represents Will or Desire, Simpson quotes no less than three separate times the same passage in Book 4 in which Amans asks Genius for instruction in the craft of love (pp. 135, 150-51, 178) as if it were the defining moment in their relation. There are an abundance of other equally significant passages, however, that cannot easily be subsumed under so limited a notion of Amans' role. It is difficult to think of "Will," for instance, as being the site of the conflict between Wit and Will that Amans describes in Book 3 (see Simpson, p. 179-80). It is difficult to see how the faculty of Will can also be characterized as a senex amans who is subject to delusion (see Simpson, p. 160). And it is even harder to conceive of Desire responding to Genius' inquiry whether he has even been guilty of Rapine by saying, in one of the more striking passages of the dialogue, "Certes, fader, no; / For I mi ladi love so" (5.5532-33). If Amans is perhaps alternately the faculty of Will and a more fully constituted human subject engaged in a "confession," why is it necessary to consider him a faculty at all? If Amans is not merely a faculty, moreover, there is no need for believing Genius to be one. Simpson's argument on the deficiencies of Genius' instruction amounts to little more than the observation that his lessons (particularly at the beginning of a book) do not contain everything that he teaches by the end. There is thus a progression to his instruction, as we might expect from any teacher. The reduction of the poem to a psychological allegory may solve some problems, but it certainly introduces a considerable number of others. Simpson's insistence on the pervasiveness of the allegory helps justify his attempt to align CA with the Anticlaudianus, and it also underlies his argument on the reader's participation in the construction of meaning. It is not essential, however, to his argument on the poem's theme. His invocation of the centrality of the "science" of politics (which owes much, as he acknowledges, to Porter's essay in Minnis' Responses and Reassessments [1983]), offers a useful mediation between the Lewis-Bennett-Minnis school on the one hand and the Coffman-Fisher-Peck school on the other. (He rejects entirely the argument that the poem teaches Amans to transcend human love, represented by a large group of critics, most recently by Olsson [1992].) His reading is considerably more nuanced than Porter's is, moreover: it includes a recognition of the need to reserve a place for human desire both in the person and in the polis, and it attributes to Gower at the end a mixture of optimism over the possibility of reconciliation and integration, both in the soul and in the state, and some skepticism about the actual perfectability of real humans. His comparison of Gower's work to Alain de Lille's is particularly instructive in this very regard. The formal similarities go only so far. More interesting are the contrasts Simpson finds, for they do more to help place Gower as a poet of his own time. Where Alain is aligned with Plato and Vergil, Gower's sympathies are with Aristotle and Ovid. Alain is epic, elitist, and absolutist, calling for submission to a higher power; Gower is elegiac, consensual, constitutionalist, calling for reconciliation and mutual restraint, both personally and politically. The Gower that he presents is a more complex and more humane poet than we have become accustomed to in recent criticism. And if Simpson's argument on the reader's role and on the presentation of the "sciences" in the poem carries weight, then Gower is also much more sophisticated a poet than we imagined. His case deserves our close attention. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Simpson, James Published Simpson, James. "Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus and John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 25 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 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 Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus and John Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cambridge University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Olsson's consideration of issues of "intimacy" and "love" leads not only to a substantial redefinition of what is at stake in Amans' confession but also to some interesting observations on the differences between medieval and modern expectations about privacy and personal relations. He focuses his discussion on the contrast between Amans and the four faithful wives of his concluding vision in Book 8: Penelope, Alceone, Alceste, and Lucrece. The comparison is obviously not favorable to Amans. Amans feels that his singleminded devotion to his lady is sufficient justification for his expectation of a "reward" and for his claims to intimacy with her. The fantasies that he conjures up when deprived of her real company indicate that he understands intimacy only in terms of sexual possession, as a desire to control which denies the woman any decision or choice, and which thus makes real intimacy impossible. His attempts to satisfy his passion have little to do with genuine love. The four wives illustrate a different conception both of self and of marital relations. They are distinguished from not only from Amans, but also from the younger lovers that precede them in Amans' vision, by their faithfulness, of course, but also by the maturity of their relationships and by their stable memory of their experience, the faculty that underlies and enables their strength of character. In MO, Gower reflects a common medieval ambivalence about the desirability of friendship and equality in marriage and the need for a hierarchy. In the ideal marriage, however, the virtues of each partner obviate whatever conflict might be implied in the choice. There is the risk, of course, that the woman's virtue might be defined simply in terms of her acceptance of her subordination, but Gower attributes to his ideal wives virtues that go beyond those required by a hierarchical marriage. That their virtues are associated with their waiting faithfully at home, moreover, places them at the nexus of the values that Gower associates with "home" in CA. Most notably, Amans is depicted as returning "home" with the recovery of his reason and his true sense of self at the very end of the poem, when he comes closest to understanding and practicing the virtues that the wives represent. As he recovers his memory, he becomes conscious of his age, and of the totality of human experience in which he participates. Home becomes for him not the place of forcible and immediate satisfaction but instead the place from which, by true understanding of oneself, one becomes truly qualified for intimacy with others. Where a modern places priority upon privacy, Gower valorizes openness instead, through confession and through the discovery of oneness with other human beings. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Olsson, Kurt Published Olsson, Kurt. "Love, Intimacy, and Gower." Chaucer Review 30 (1995), pp. 71-100. ISSN 0009-2002 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Love, Intimacy, and Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Penn State University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Kiefer, Lauren Published Kiefer, Lauren. ""My Family First: Draft-Dodging Parents in the Confessio Amantis."." Essays in Medieval Studies: Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association 12 (1995), pp. 55-68. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review For Gower, Kiefer argues, one of the central images of the unravelling of human bonds due to division and loss of love is the disruption of marriage and family. She focuses first on three tales of Ulysses, emphasizing how Gower has depicted in them the threat to family ties posed by mindless militarism. In "Nauplus and Ulysses," Ulysses always thinks of family first: "he dodges the draft out of love for his wife, but succumbs to the draft out of love for his child" (p. 57). By placing Nauplus in the traditional role of his son Palamedes, moreover, Gower has replaced the confrontation of two tricksters with a confrontation between two loving fathers. Gower's audience would have known that Ulysses was later responsible for the death of Palamedes. The tale of "Namplus and the Greeks" demonstrates that Nauplus/Namplus is just as devoted to his son as Ulysses is, but war turns his love to hatred, just as in the former tale it makes "the same loving father willing to jeopardize the life of another man's son" (p. 59). In "Achilles and Deidamia," Ulysses, drafted by a ruse, gets to draft Achilles with a ruse of his own. Gower emphasizes again the toll that war exacts on three different families, Thetis', Lichomede's, and that of Achilles and Deidamia, who is the real victim of Ulysses' guile. These three tales take place within a series of tales in Books 3, 4, and 5 in which families are placed at risk by outside pressures. In Book 3, "Canace and Machaire" places greatest emphasis on the need for parental devotion, and "Orestes" offers another demonstration of the threat to the family posed by war. In Book 4, Genius offers a series of tales in which love is opposed to militarism. Later in the book, when he attempts to link love and war via chivalry, he is successfully opposed by Amans, and the tale he offers, "Nauplus and Ulysses," shows the praise of military valor to be merely meaningless bluster. Book 5 offers several stories of families destroyed or abandoned, notably "Jason and Medea," "Theseus and Ariadne," and "Tereus." "We can trace a rough progression from tales of perverted devotion to family in Confessio Book Three, to discussion of the militarism which perverts it in Confessio Book Four, to an emphasis on the victims of the perversion -- women and children -- in Confessio Book Five. In all three books, however, Gower repeatedly privileges an individual's bonds to spouse and children over any other -- over the demands of heroic destiny, chivalric glory, or societal convention" (p. 65). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.2] 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 "My Family First: Draft-Dodging Parents in the Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Holloway surveys the knowledge and circulation of Latini's work in England during the late Middle Ages. She notes the existence of an Italian MS of c. 1425 (now B.L. Add. 39844) containing the Secretum Secretorum with interpolations from Il Tesoro, following closely the pattern of Gower's adaptation of both works in Book 7 of CA and suggesting that Gower had access to an earlier MS with the same arrangement, contrary to the usual assumption that Gower himself was responsible for the juxtaposition (though we might also expect that Gower's MS would have presented the French version of Latini's work rather than the Italian). The reference to Holloway's essay was provided by John M. Crafton, "Chaucer's Treasure Text: The Influence of Brunetto Latini on Chaucer's Developing Narrative Technique," Medieval Perspectives 4-5 (1989-90): 25-41. Crafton refers to Gower's use of Latini's Livres du Tresor as evidence for the availability of the work to Chaucer, citing Holloway and James J. Murphy's 1961 essay on Gower's discussion of rhetoric. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Holloway, Julia Bolton Published Holloway, Julia Bolton. "Brunetto Latini and England." Manuscripta 31 (1987), pp. 11-21. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations 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 Brunetto Latini and England Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Galloway is interested in the importance of gratitude to late medieval notions of religious faith and particularly of social relations. For contrast, he begins with the early medieval concept of gift-giving as a way for a ruler to earn both loyalty and praise. With the thirteenth century, he detects a shift from the benefit to the giver to the obligation of gratitudo, itself a scholastic coinage which for Aquinas embraces "religious reverence, familial and social loyalty, and more casual obligations" in one continuum (p. 369). Aquinas' "careful ranking of relationships of servility and lordship" implies a "kind of idealization of the system of feudalism." Vincent of Beauvais defines a duty to repay benefits with interest, "a direct use of the ethic in support of a profit economy," and gives a fuller description of the evils of ingratitude. The discussion of Gratitude is especially prominent in 14th-century England. In his Summa praedicantium, Bromyard discusses Ingratitude as a subspecies of Avarice, and describes it as a violation of the natural order. The latter notion finds special resonance in ME, in which both "kynde" and "unkynde" carry a double meaning linking the natural with the moral. "By blending nature with reciprocation, Middle English 'kyndenesse' shifts religious and social bonds away from hierarchy and towards affinity, and the exploitation of these lexical possibilities may easily be aligned with the many distinctive late medieval forms of community or corporate identity in which reciprocation and close affinity or ideas of such affinity cohere" (p. 374). Ricardian writers in particular pass beyond aristocratic emphasis on real kinship and religious writers' emphasis on humans' debt to God to a wider concept of reciprocal social duties. Gower, in MO, treats Ingratitude in the tradition of Bromyard. "Unlike Bromyard, however, Gower is led to a close consideration of the interaction of different social groups or levels rather than any religious obligation" (p. 376). Galloway also notes that Gower's conclusion to the discussion of Ingratitude in MO (6673-85) seems to be "informed by the double meaning of Middle English 'unkynde,' even though the pun cannot directly emerge in the French" (p. 377). In CA, however, "kyndeness" does not provide "a simple key to social unity and morality" (p. 377). The tale of "Adrian and Bardus" "emphasizes the inevitability, the 'naturalness,' of social differences rather than any naturalness in the workings of gratitude. . . . The principal of gratitude finally invoked is the only hope for harmony between the disparate social realms of country, city, and court that Gower contemplates, but this principle is imposed by imperial fiat" (p. 378). Langland makes "perhaps the most ambitious effort to stretch this idea to contain a vast and diverse English community" (p. 379). Galloway emphasizes the neglected implications of Gratitude in Langland's use of "Kynde," and concludes that "in his willingness to pursue the 'natural' or 'given' bases of communities of exchange broadly considered, [Langland] manages to present in 'kyndenesse' a capacious notion of cultural identity that depends neither on authoritarianism (like that of Gower's Emperor) nor even on the unity of the institutional church" (p. 381). Galloway's general conclusion notes the "varying concepts of community" implicit in the different writers' discussions of Gratitude. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew Published Galloway, Andrew. "The Making of a Social Ethic in Late-Medieval England: From Gratitudo to 'Kyndenesse'." Journal of the History of Ideas 55 (1994), pp. 365-83. Gower Subject Language and Word 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 The Making of a Social Ethic in Late-Medieval England: From Gratitudo to 'Kyndenesse' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This very brief article considers CA and T&C as illustrations of the "code of love." "The lover must know how to speak of love; . . . The lover and his lady most know how to compose poems and letters, to sing, to dance; . . ." etc. In CA, one discovers the requirements of this code by finding the opposites of the vices that Genius condemns. Not only do the two poems share this code, but they both depict an unhappy love, and both also end in a somewhat unexpected fashion: in CA, contrary to the confessor's recommendations of patience and hope, Venus banishes Amans from the domain of courtly love literature by identifying him as the aging John Gower, bringing the poet into the text in flesh and blood as Chaucer does in his "Retraction." Crépin concludes with a note of disagreement with Katherine Heinrich's argument (in The Myths of Love [1990]), that medieval writers drew upon classical story exclusively for tales of amorous folly. There is too much variety in the interpretation of classical heroes and heroines in medieval poems, and Gower himself is able to use these characters as illustrations of Christian truths. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Crépin, André Published Crépin, André. "Le Code Amoureux d'après la Confessio Amantis de Gower et le Troilus de Chaucer." In La 'Fin'Amor' dans la culture féodale. Actes du colloque du Centre d'Etudes Médiévales de l'Université de Picardie Jules Verne; Amiens, mars 1991. Ed. UNSPECIFIED. Greifswald: Reineke, 1994, pp. 67-72. 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 Le Code Amoureux d'après la Confessio Amantis de Gower et le Troilus de Chaucer Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Reineke, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "The rightness of relations is a major theme in late medieval literature. The criteria for rightness include the identity of wills, the doctrine of submission, and the imitatio Dei. The identity of wills refers to the sharing of goals and desires shared by two persons in a hierarchical relationship (king and subject, master and servant, husband and wife, et cetera). The doctrine of submission establishes obedience as a prerequisite for authority. The imitatio Dei urges likeness to Christ as the foundation for rightness. These three criteria emerged from the junctures of feudal, commercial, and Christian ideologies." Gower is one of the authors Charnley considers to illustrate the appearance of these themes, along with Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, the Pearl-poet, DeGuileville, and Langland." [JGN 16.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Charnley, Susan Christina De Long Published Charnley, Susan Christina De Long. "'I wol nat serve . . .': Authority and Submission in late medieval English literature." Ph.D. dissertation. Michigan State University, 1996. 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 'I wol nat serve . . .': Authority and Submission in late medieval English literature Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower doesn't seem to have made a secret in CA either of his debility or of his old age. In both versions of the Prologue, he refers to his lingering illness, and in the revelation in the mirror at the end, he depicts himself as a withered old man. But Levine would have us dig Gower's true feelings about himself out of more subtle clues in the text of the main body of the poem. CA is, he asserts, "among other things, the long, bad dream of a sick old man" (p. 89). It is evidently important to his argument that it be a dream rather than some other form of covert self-revelation, for he labors to assimilate the poem to the genre of the dream vision though Gower neglects to say precisely that his narrator ever falls asleep. Among the passages that Levine finds most revealing are the several scattered allusions to blindness in the poem, which he interprets in view of the poet's more specific references to his loss of sight in the prefatory epistle of VC, not noting that some ten years passes between the composition of CA and the VC dedication. When Amans, seeing his wrinkled face in the mirror, declares that "Mi will was tho to se nomore" (8.2831), Levine finds not a turning away from the glass but an allusion to the poet's literal inability to see of considerable dramatic irony. Blindness was associated in Gower's mind with castration, he asserts. He finds other evidence of the poet's fear of impotence in his consciousness of the world's decay, and evidence of his fear of "reification" in the recurring image of the key. The great length of Book 5, finally, is due to the link between greed and sexuality, but also to the association of Avarice with old age. It is not a pretty picture. For a contrast to this pathological view, and for a consideration of some of the many passages that Levine does not refer to (such as the vision of the company of old lovers at 8.2666 ff.), that suggest a broader range of feeling about old age than he is willing to allow, one should return to J.A. Burrow's discussion of the ending of CA in his 1983 essay in Responses and Reassessments or more briefly in The Ages of Man (1988). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Levine, Robert Published Levine, Robert. "Gower as Gerontion. Oneiric Autobiography in the Confessio Amantis." Mediaevistik 5 (1992), pp. 79-94. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower as Gerontion. Oneiric Autobiography in the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Justice, Steven. Published Justice, Stephen. "Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381." Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994 Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Review Justice includes a very brief discussion of Gower's allegorical vision of the Peasants' Revolt in Book 1 of VC in this subtle and often fascinating study of the ways in which the rebellion was represented in the writings both of its participants and of those who either were or sympathized with its victims. Gower, of course, figures among the latter. Having appropriated for himself the voice of the "people" in composing what are now Books 2-7 of VC, Gower faced a popular uprising that both undermined his claim and threatened to absorb him. In order to protect both his project as poet and his carefully constructed political stance, he added the visio in Book 1, which is most notable for its submersion of the voice of the rebels in the braying and bellowing of the animals into which Gower imagines them transformed. "The rising forced Gower anxiously to disassociate his 'voice crying out' from the voices that cried out in June; by declaring himself a proxy for all those the rebels attacked and by prefacing the rest of the poem with his experience of rebel violence, he was able to assert that he did indeed speak in the common voice -- of its victims" (p. 213). Justice interprets Chaucer's only reference to the rising as an even more artful evasion. Elaborating on a suggestion first made by Ian Bishop, he reads the chase scene in NPT as a direct parody of the visio in VC, accessible, however, only to the small group of readers in the poets' immediate circle who would recognize the subtlest taunting at Gower's expense. Chaucer's only direct engagement with the revolt thus shows him "dispelling and forgetting its threat in the minutely textual encoding of a coterie joke" (pp. 230-31). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.1] 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 Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of California Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Fourteen of the surviving MSS of CA contain an illustration of Amans kneeling before his Confessor. In three others, the scribes have left a blank space for the inclusion of a miniature in the same places where this illustration normally appears. In most of the illustrations, Amans is depicted as a young man; in three of them he is noticeably old. J.A. Burrow has already discussed the implications of the figure's apparent age and of the revelation in the illustration of that which is not revealed in the text until the very end. Garbáty is more concerned with the illustrators' and the readers' perception of the identity or distinctness of Amans and the historical author. Conventions of medieval painting make it impossible for us to be certain whether any of these illustrations is intended as portraiture, he observes, but the collar of SS that Amans wears in the miniature in Bodley Fairfax 3 is clearly meant to suggest an identification between the illustrated figure (who is also depicted as old) and the poet Gower. More evidence of such identification is provided, Garbáty argues, in the fact that most of the illustrations show Amans wearing a long gown or robe similar to the one worn by Gower's tomb effigy, and that in twelve of the fourteen he is attired in red or pink, matching the scarlet of the gown in a 1719 description of the tomb. The illustrators' attempts to identify Amans with Gower's appearance in effigy suggest to Garbáty that Gower's earliest readers did not make a critical differentiation between the author and his fictional persona. This argument depends to some extent upon an unusually late date for the Fairfax MS, after Gower's death (see note 13), so that it too may be considered as derivative of the tomb effigy. The only evidence Garbáty presents is the unlikelihood that Gower would have been depicted with a collar of SS while Richard II was still alive. Many, possibly including Gower, did wear such a collar during Richard's lifetime, but even if they did not, the illustration by no means excludes the normal dating of c. 1400. Both paleographers and textual scholars will have trouble with Grabáty's proposal of a later date, and if it is not correct, then there needs to be some explanation other than the tomb effigy alone for the habit of depicting Amans/Gower in red in these illustrations. Garbáty includes in his essay a black and white reproduction and a description of each of the fourteen surviving Confessor illustrations. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Garbáty, Thomas J. Published Garbáty, Thomas J.. "A Description of the Confession Miniatures for Gower's Confessio Amantis with Special Reference to the Illustrator's Role as Reader and Critic." Mediaevalia 19 (1996), pp. 319-43. Gower Subject Biography of Gower 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 Description of the Confession Miniatures for Gower's Confessio Amantis with Special Reference to the Illustrator's Role as Reader and Critic Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Ferster, Judith Published Ferster, Judith. "Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England." Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Review Ferster's chapter on Gower, in this new study of the Fürstenspiegel tradition in the late Middle Ages, is a lengthened version of the essay entitled "O Political Gower" that appeared in the 1993 special issue of Mediaevalia (reviewed in JGN 13, no. 2, pp. 9-10). Her Mediaevalia piece focussed on the ways in which Gower embedded commentary on contemporary issues in the "Mirror for Princes" in Book 7 of CA. Mixing some subtle rereadings with a sharp alertness to context, she found beneath the poet's obvious deference to the king some pointed advice, particularly on the very subject of advice itself: "The key to [Richard's] success," Gower suggests, according to Ferster, "is not his choice among aristocratic advisors, but his willingness to bend to hear the complaints of the commoners" (Mediaevalia 16 [1993):41). Ferster broadens her analysis in this lengthened version by giving more attention to the language of CA, demonstrating both that Gower's deference is more marked in his English poem than it is in either MO or VC, and also that the language that he uses in describing petitions to kings echoes the idiom of contemporary political discourse. She also comments at greater length on what she sees as Gower's representation of the voice of the gentry in contemporary disputes. Finally, she adds a completely new discussion of a group of tales in Book 7 -- "Diogenes and Aristippus," "Tarquin and Aruns," and "Ahab and Micaiah" -- that, in the paradoxes they raise, seem to bring into question what she calls the "hermeneutics of counsel" and to suggest, before offering an alternative in attention to the vox populi, the futility of a king's dependence upon his own counsellors. The inclusion of her discussion of Gower within the frame of her broader study also allows Ferster to place Book 7 much more persuasively within the tradition of the "advice for princes" from which it derives. The two main themes of Ferster's book are the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in any situation in which a poet or author presumes to advise his king, and the ways in which each of the various works that make up the Fürstenspiegel tradition, beginning with the Secretum Secretorum, can be found to contain a specific contemporary agenda beneath the gestures of deference and the overt endorsement of the monarch's power that are inevitable to the genre. In England in particular, she argues, the principal of the community's right to impose limitations on the king was embodied in Magna Carta, and discussion of the reciprocal relations between monarch and subjects was often phrased in terms of the right to give and the duty to follow advice. By the fourteenth century there was an active community of political discourse, with different groups staking out their rights to advise the king, and several obvious and well known instances in which either the king himself was deposed or his powers limited. The dangers of opposing the king were nonetheless very real, and the trope of the king's need for good advice provided a justification for what might otherwise be taken as a presumption upon the king's power, while the genre of the manual of advice, offered in presumed deference to the king, could be the safest means for offering critical, if necessarily indirect, comment on policies of special importance to the author. Ferster includes chapters on James Yonge's 1422 English translation of the Secretum Secretorum, on Chaucer's Tale of Melibee, and on Hoccleve's Regement of Princes as well as on CA, and she concludes with a brief consideration of Machiavelli's The Prince. She sets the Melibee in the context of the Appellants' crisis, and argues that both the lapses in Prudence's judgment and Melibee's inability to put her advice into practice represent Chaucer's attempt to deconstruct the ideology of advice by which the Appellants justified their impositions upon Richard's authority. Hoccleve, she argues, mixes his endorsement of the legitimacy of the Lancastrian line with pointed criticism of Prince Henry and discussion of some of the most divisive issues of the last years of his father's reign. Each of these readings, like her comments on Book 7 of CA, raises particular problems, both in Ferster's techniques as a reader and in her interpretation of the contemporary political setting; in the former regard, her emphasis upon the apparently deliberate self-contradictions in both CA and the Melibee depends upon an expectation of a formal and thematic consistency in a work of this sort and of this period that is perhaps unreasonably high. The great merit of her book is that by juxtaposing these works and asking the same sorts of questions about them, she has removed the mask of the authors' self-presentation to their patrons and opened up the whole tradition of the advice to the king to a more critical and more revealing view; and in response to the doctrine that there is no possibility of escape from contemporary ideology, she has convincingly demonstrated the presence of a multitude of dissenting voices, however covert some may be, in the political discourse of late medieval England. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Pennsylvania Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Wurtele summarizes Gower's tale of Florent along with "The Marriage of Sir Gawaine" and "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell" in his discussion of the background to WB's alterations of the traditional tale. While Gower has evidently deliberately removed the tale from its Arthurian setting, and his version is more restrained, more skillful, and of greater psychological insight than its "cruder" predecessors, he preserves the notion of "charity as an antidote to an act of malice" by "sharpen[ing] the importance of love and fair-dealing" in the conclusion to the tale (p.53). WB, on the other hand, willfully distorts both the motifs and the emphasis of the earlier tales, and in the final scene, corrupts the "relatively benign dilemma" of the traditional versions "into something little short of vicious" (pp. 56-57). In one way, the result is to heighten the irrationality of the tale, but in another, to create a different sort of realism. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wurtele, Douglas J. Published Wurtele, Douglas J.. "Chaucer's Wife of Bath and Her Distorted Arthurian Motifs." Arthurian Interpretations 2 (1987), pp. 47-61. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer's Wife of Bath and Her Distorted Arthurian Motifs Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Although most criticism of the Confessio Amantis acknowledges the Latin texts as Gower's work, studies of specific tales in the work, like its treatment in studies of medieval genres like confession, dream vision and exemplum, generally privilege the Middle English narrative. Investigation into the dynamic interaction of text and apparatus, however, reveals in Gower's project a complex exploitation and modification of medieval scholastic and literary traditions. It also illuminates Gower's artful cultivation of ambiguity throughout the work. The reciprocal influence of Latin and Middle English texts permeates the Confessio, and thereby highlights the importance of the issue of auctoritas and its sentence. "This study relies on manuscript research, evidence of scholastic commentary traditions, an investigation of literary genre, and close reading of portions of the work to argue for a re-appraisal of the Confessio Amantis. Based on interpretations that acknowledge the interaction of all of its constituent parts, it demonstrates Gower's keen sensitivity to the relationship between form and content in literature. His sophisticated manipulation of that relationship governs this dissertation's attention to the texts in the authoritative language and the ways in which they affect, and are affected by, the Middle English narrative. Acknowledging the importance of Gower's dependence on medieval literary traditions, this dissertation discovers in the Confessio Amantis evidence of his success in the creation of 'some new thing.'" Directed by Tim William Machan. Abstract provided by the author. [JGN 16.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Batchelor, Patricia Published Batchelor, Patricia. "Unjustified Margins: Vernacular Innovations and Latin Tradition in Gower's Confessio Amantis." PhD thesis, Marquette University, 1996. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations 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 Unjustified Margins: Vernacular Innovations and Latin Tradition in Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review These are all mere quibbles, however; there is nothing so mysterious about the concordance that it cannot be figured out with the actual text in hand. This is an extremely useful volume, and a major contribution to Gower scholarship. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.2] This new concordance to Gower's writing in French is the seventeenth in the series of "Medieval Texts and Studies" formerly published by Colleagues Press, now identified as "Colleagues Books" in their new home at Michigan State University Press, the same series that brought us Echard and Fanger's invaluable translation of The Latin Verses in the Confessio Amantis and William Burton Wilson's translation of MO (see JGN 12, no. 1). In addition to the verse text of MO, it includes the prose section headings and the table of contents to the poem; the Cinkante Balades along with its prose dedication and its marginalia; and the Traitié with its brief prose preface -- in short, everything but the Latin verse and rubrics in the first volume of Macaulay's edition of Gower's works. All, including a selection of variant readings, is included in a single alphabetical list of 900 pages, without the miscellaneous supplementary indexes that occupy more than a quarter of the pages in Pickles and Dawson's concordance to Gower's English works (JGN 7, no. 1). Every word is indexed except for 226 forms listed on pages viii-ix: mostly pronouns, forms of être and avoir, prepositions, and a few adverbs and conjunctions (including the most common of the omitted forms, et). Unlike Tatlock and Kennedy's Chaucer concordance, which groups all forms of each word and all variant spellings together under a single lemma (the modern English spelling), the present concordance, like Pickles and Dawson's, is arranged strictly by spelling: each form (celeste, celestes) is entered separately, as is each variant spelling (coard, couard). The result poses much less inconvenience that it does in the concordance to the English works, however, because the spelling in Gower's French works is so much more regular. Variants like the coard/couard pair just cited (each appears in Gower's writing twice) are very difficult to find, for the vast majority of words are spelled in only a single way. As a consequence, the different inflected forms of a word are also almost always grouped closely together in the alphabetical list. The only real disadvantage to the strict spelling arrangement is that homonyms are all listed together: thus in the space of a few pages the concordance mingles the forms of three different words beginning with mu- (an adjective meaning "mute," a noun meaning "cage" with its derivatives, and a verb meaning "to move, to change, to moult" with its derivatives); the entry for noun groups together the noun meaning "name" and the negative particle "not;" and the entry for nue contains both the feminine form of the adjective "nude" and the noun meaning "cloud, sky, heaven." In all these respects, wherever any possibility of confusion might exist, the perfect complement to the concordance is provided by Macaulay's glossary, which performs all the tasks that the concordance does not: it scrupulously lists every word in Gower's French vocabulary with all of its variant spellings in a single entry; it provides cross-reference entries for spellings that are separated alphabetically from the main entry for each word; it provides a generous listing of inflected forms; and it distinguishes homonyms. The concordance performs all of the work that the glossary does not, providing, in its listing of every instance of every form, the basis for examining both contexts and frequency. Together, these are the only two tools one needs for a complete study of the vocabulary of the French vocabulary of the poet. Macaulay himself probably wished often that a concordance of precisely this sort had been available to him. But now that Macaulay has done his work so well, why is the concordance so important to the rest of us? For those whose principal interest is linguistic, the question answers itself: not only is it indispensable for the study of Gower's language, but as far as the reviewer is aware, it is the only available concordance for any body of French writing, let alone Anglo-Norman, from the entire fourteenth century. But even for those who leave the language study to others, this volume will have many uses. Only the most obvious convenience is that it provides a thematic index both to Gower's vast moralizing poem and to his lyrics, each with its different connection to CA, and a far more reliable way of locating relevant treatment of important topics than Macaulay's glossary does. All of us are also faced with the difficulties of translating the poem. Even Gower's use of apparently familiar words can sometimes be puzzling, and a list of other examples is often much more helpful than a glossary can be. (For the reviewer, this is the most common reason for turning to Pickles and Dawson.) The interest in semantics extends beyond the French works themselves. How can one do a thorough examination of Gower's multiple and often ambiguous uses of "grace" in CA, for instance, without also considering the different uses of the same word in MO and CB? (When we have a concordance to the Latin works, our tools for the study of his vocabulary will be complete.) Or to take a matter of a completely different sort, how many times does Gower's own name appear in the MSS of his works? The concordance provides three entries, one of which, since it appears in only a single MS of the Traitié, is not referenced in Macaulay's glossary. The usefulness of a work such as this is limited only by the imagination of the user, and its very existence can serve to generate questions that one might not have thought of before. For all these reasons, it is inconceivable that it not be made accessible to everyone with a serious interest in the poet, and if not in our personal collections, it certainly merits a place on the library shelf. When we fill out our purchase recommendations for the librarian, we might also remember the desirability of encouraging the publication of other scholarly reference works of this sort in the future. The volume is very handsomely printed, and is in fact much more readable than Pickles and Dawson, with only 56 lines per column instead of the 78 of the latter. There are no headwords on the page, but the editors have included a lemma at the top of each column, either in the form "prelat (25)," listing the number of occurrences, at the beginning of each entry, or "prelat -- continued" when the entry extends from one column to the next; and one quickly becomes accustomed to fixing one's eye on the top of the right hand column of the recto as one flips through the pages. The lemmata might have been printed in a bolder face than the rest of the text, but again one becomes used to the editor's presentation. The most significant lapse in the book is that the "prose headings" that mark the divisions in the text of MO are cited only by a sequence number that has been assigned by the editors, not by the number of the adjacent line of text. These sequence numbers appear neither in the MS nor in Macaulay's edition, and when there are no other references, the citation can only be found with considerable guessing and searching (e.g. artifice and artifices, which occur only in prose headings "113" and "114"). The verse lines in MO are cited by preceding prose heading plus line number (e.g. "MO 3:210"), in which case the heading number is both unhelpful and unnecessary. The editors might have done better to find a way of relying on verse number alone. The only other criticism to make concerns the "Guide to the Concordance" at the beginning. Only one of the six examples cited for illustration (the last) corresponds to an actual entry in the concordance; two give mistaken forms of the abbreviation used to identify Gower's different works, and one (the second) gives a mistaken explanation of its line number references. The account of what sorts of variant readings are included is incomplete and imprecise, and does not explain such entries as "TRa 1hdG:1" (found under "gower"). Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F West, Mark Hinson, Robin L Hollifield, Adrienne Published Yeager, R.F and West, Mark and Hinson, Robin L and Hollifield, Adrienne (assisting). "A Concordance to the French Poetry and Prose of John Gower." Medieval Texts and Studies, 17 . East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997 Gower Subject Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Concordance to the French Poetry and Prose of John Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Michigan State University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Tinkle, Theresa Lynn Published Tinkle, Theresa Lynn. "Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics, and English Poetry." Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Chapter 7 of this important new study is devoted to CA. Tinkle places herself among those who have discerned in Gower's poem a formal and thematic multiplicity that deliberately juxtaposes a variety of interpretive perspectives without offering a precise resolution among them. By placing the lover's complaint within a penitential frame, Gower emphasizes both the similarities and the differences between amatory and pastoral discourses, and "accentuates the heterogeneity apparent in late medieval discussions of sexuality" (p. 179). On pages 180-83 Tinkle gives a good brief statement of an increasingly common view of Gower's strategy in deploying Amans, a glossator, and the author of the Latin epigrams alongside Genius, who himself adopts different positions according to need and circumstance. Rather than seeing Genius himself as merely inept, she points out that precedent both for his shifting moral standards and for his occasional reductiveness can be found among other medieval mythographers. CA differs from its predecessors in the commentary tradition by its greater valorisation of narrative and by Gower's foregrounding of the disjunction between narrative and Genius' interpretation, which forces a recognition of the limitations of the conventional authoritative tradition of moralizing commentaries. The disparity between tale and lesson offers another instance of the "multiplication of authorities and voices" in the poem, which "forcefully argues against the possibility of any single, unquestionably authoritative model of interpretation" (p. 182). Tinkle's principal interest is in Gower's use of the tradition of mythographic hermeneutics within this frame. She traces two general patterns. In the first, conventional medieval mythography is given a certain limited authority. Amans, the conventional literary lover, has deified his own desires by projecting them onto the figures of Venus and Cupid; guilty of idolatry, he "has fallen into the pseudo-pagan error of divinizing natural forces and humans" (p. 179). "Genius corrects him by means of familiar mythographic explanations that demystify sexuality and its supposedly divine representatives" (pp. 179-80), most explicitly in Book 5, where he offers a conventional historical explanation of Venus and Cupid, and in Book 7, where he turns to astrology to disclose their natural origins. Rational, Christian arguments against ancient pagan religion are used as a way of counteracting the neo-paganism of a medieval lover. But consistent with his refusal to grant final authoritative status to any discourse, Gower also declines to privilege any single mythographic explanation, instead deliberately juxtaposing irreconcilable ways of understanding ancient myths in such a way as to encourage meditation on the relations among them, and to reveal them as the products of separate, interested, individual points of view. His challenge to the authority of the astrological explanation in Book 7 is particularly clear, in the shifting role that Genius attributes to Nectanabus, first of all, and in the conflicts he describes among astrologers, divines, and philosophers over the potency of the will. Genius argues both the irresistibility of the law of nature and the need for reason to govern the flesh, but his statements on the supposed priority of reason turn out to be equivocal and suggest the "predetermined failure of self-governance" (p. 192). His notion of natural law has numerous ambiguities too, represented in the many different manifestation of Venus (p. 190). Gower thus depicts both astrology and natural law as "products of historical human activity," and like Chaucer, Gower "makes visible the culturally invisible ideological bent of science and nature" (p. 189). Even in the final scene, of Amans' "healing," Gower "develops a poetry of figurative ambiguities rather than an argument" (p. 193). "With Venus and Cupid," Tinkle concludes, "Gower exploits the multiplicity of traditions -- literary amatory conventions, historicizing and astrologizing hermeneutics, natural law -- so as to remake their meanings. . . . Within the poem, all the diverse traditions form an integrated whole, within which each convention, each discourse, each perspective enters into endlessly fascinating interplay with the others. The poem does not offer a single meaning but, rather, engaging invitations to reflect on the perspectives that create meaning and on the discourses that construct sexualities. We can of course resist the poem and select a single discourse (penitential, for instance) through which to read it. To the extent that humans tend to be uncomfortable with unresolved ambiguities, the text certainly invites this readerly activity. We might nevertheless choose simply to respect Gower's design, which calls into question the relationships between human wisdom and cosmic orders, between mind and body, between theological and scientific perspectives, without advancing the sure answers of a hegemonic discourse." The value of Tinkle's work for the study of Gower extends far beyond this challenging interpretation of CA. The opening chapters of her book contain a brilliant survey of the medieval mythographic tradition, in which she argues against the pervasive, naively historicist reading of such authors as Augustine, Fulgentius, Isidore, Alberic, and Bersuire in search of "transparent, immediately accessible meanings" (p. 211) that can be used for the explication of other, more "belletristic" texts; and against the corollary and equally common procedure of "torturing all medieval discourses until they confess the same truth" (p. 43). One must read her analyses for the evidence she presents that each of these authors "advances specific ideologies of sexuality" (p. 31), and that "there is no universal value, mythographic or ecclesiastical, to which we can refer for a fixed understanding of all medieval Venuses and Cupids" (p. 43). She disposes forever (one hopes) of the notion that all medieval authors recognized just two Venuses, the concupiscent one and the charitable one; and in dismissing the entire notion of a fixed value for either Venus or Cupid, she forces our attention upon individual texts. One discovers some unexpected sources for some of the ideas that show up in CA (see, for instance, her discussion of Fulgentius on page 56); but more importantly, Tinkle has opened up the study of the poem with her insistence that each author makes his own contribution to the medieval discussion of sexuality. Gower too can be allowed to have his own views on morality and sexuality, even if they are not precisely like Augustine's, and even if they are not quite as indeterminate as Tinkle herself asserts. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.2] 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 Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics, and English Poetry Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Stanford University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yoshimuri, who has previously studied the color expressions in T&C and PP, here catalogues every reference to color in CA, and discusses Gower's use of color words, contrasting Gower's usage to Chaucer's in CT. His essay is divided into several sections, discussing in turn the frequency of color words (divided between chromatic and achromatic), "descriptive color expressions" (such as "the colour of the reyni Mone"), contrastive color expressions, repetitive color expressions ("rody and red"), color similes, the use of color symbolism, and the special case of "derk" and "liht." The results are not entirely predictable, and there is some interesting insight on almost every page, either on the contrast between Chaucer's and Gower's practice (Chaucer, not surprisingly, had a far larger vocabulary for color than Gower did, and also used far more figurative expressions; Gower's favorite color word was "green," while Chaucer's was "white"), on the limitations imposed by Middle English (and the evident lack of a word for either "pink" or "orange," for example), or on the semantic field of ordinary color expressions, including the words they are ordinarily used to modify and their metaphorical suggestiveness. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yoshimuri, Koji Published Yoshimuri, Koji. "Color Expressions in Gower's Confessio Amantis." The Review of Inquiry and Research (Kansai University of Foreign Studies, Osaka, Japan) 50 (1989), pp. 13-35. 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 Color Expressions in Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989-07. Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Astell views the "Canterbury Tales" within the tradition of the medieval compilation, not just sharing formal qualities with Dante's "Commedia" and Gower's CA but engaging in direct dialogue with them on issues of common concern. She discerns two patterns underlying the structure of CT: the soul's journey through the seven celestial spheres, as described by Macrobius, beginning with the Saturnine KnT and reaching the lowest point in the sublunary realm of Fragment VI; and the commonplace tripartite division of knowledge into the theoretical, the verbal or rhetorical, and the practical. The latter, of course, is also found as the ordering principle of Book 7 of CA, no mere coincidence in Astell's view, as Chaucer borrows from, and argues with, the philosophical scheme of his contemporary. The three divisions of philosophy occur in CT in a chiastic pattern: "Theorique" is represented in fragments I-II and IX, "Rhetorique" in fragments III-IV-V and VII; and "Practic" in fragments VI and X. Astell relies heavily on the ordering of tales in the Ellesmere MS, and also on the formal apparatus of this copy, with its learned apparatus (which she compares to Gower's incorporation of Latin marginalia in CA), suggesting the poem's clerkly origin and its adherence to the conventions of the compilatio. Though she refers frequently to Gower's works (particularly to Book 7 of CA), this is much more a book about Chaucer than it is about Gower. For her discussion of Gower she relies heavily on our standard authorities: Fisher, Coleman, and Strohm on Chaucer's and Gower's common audience; Minnis and Manzalaoui on Gower as a compiler of received knowledge; and Porter, Yeager, and Simpson on the centrality of Book 7 of CA, on its relation to the Prologue, and on Gower's emphasis on ethics and politics. Her conclusions on the relations among Chaucer, Gower, and Dante tend not to be too surprising: Chaucer tends to be "focused on the present rather than on the ancient past [as Gower is] or on the paradisaical afterlife [as is Dante]" (p. 84); Chaucer is more sceptical and more questioning of closed systems of knowledge than Dante is; and where Gower focuses rather narrowly on ethics and politics and the fashioning of a philosopher-king, Chaucer's view is broader, encompassing moral theology too, and directed to the fashioning of a humble Christian penitent. Astell's book finds its place in Gower criticism as the most complete attempt to date to link Gower to Chaucer in such a way as to suggest his importance to his more famous contemporary. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Astell, Ann W Published Astell, Ann W. "Chaucer and the Universe of Learning." Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer and the Universe of Learning Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cornell University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Olsen's book is an attempt to apply modern linguistic and structuralist techniques to the study of CA in order to heighten the modern reader's appreciation for Gower's "literary artistry." Each chapter takes a different approach to the work, and Olsen makes only a modest effort to link them. In chapter 1, "Reading the Confessio Amantis: The Analogue of Dante's Vita Nuova," she uses VN in an attempt to define the genre of Gower's poem. Both works use both the vernacular and Latin, and both prose and verse; each uses a similar comic protagonist, who must be distinguished from the author; each is about love; each uses an encounter with the god of love to explore the nature of religious love; each refers in some way to the "Book of Memory," etc. In each case, the similarity helps explain what modern readers might find peculiar about Gower's poem. Chapter 2, "The Grammar of the Confessio Amantis," uses "grammar" in the Todorovian sense, but instead of examining the structure of individual tales, Olsen discusses the CA as a whole, and investigates the uses of various sorts of "juncture" (the Latin epigrams, and the change from one speaker to another) to create "narremes" in the poem, taking most of her examples from Books 7 and 8. Chapter 3, "Puns and the Language of Poetry in the Confessio Amantis," is an expanded version of an essay that originally appeared in In Geardagum 7 (1986), 17-36 (see JGN 6, no. 2). A pun links two different meanings (one of which may be suggested by only a similarity rather than an identicality of form), each of which is somehow appropriate to the context. When the juxtaposition is unexpected the result is often merely humorous, but in the more meaningful examples, the fact of linkage (which might draw attention to contrast as well as similarity) is itself significant, and the very equation of the two meanings it itself meaningful to the poem. Chapter 4, "Linguistics and Literary Structure: Metonymy and the Confessio Amantis," extends the discussion to rhyming puns, "rime équivoque," or as it is more usually called, "rime riche." Olsen considers several different types of "rime équivoque," concentrating on "Apollonius of Tyre." Where others might see merely a play on the inherent paradoxes of language or a way of creating rhetorical effect or parallelism, Olsen emphasizes a semantic equivalence between the rhyming words that alludes to thematic associations created by the narrative itself. Chapter 5, "Type-Scenes and the Structure of Narrative: The Sea Voyages in the Tale of Appolinus," is a revised version of the paper first published in the 1987 festschrift for Milman Parry (see JGN 7, no. 2). Olsen shows how Gower adopted a paradigm that descends ultimately from Anglo-Saxon oral poetry in describing the eleven separate voyages of Apollonius, and how he inverts the usual pattern in the voyages of Thaise and Taliart. In chapter 6, "'Of Storial Thyng': The Relationship of the Tales of Gower and Chaucer Reconsidered," she dismisses the biographical speculation that marks so much of the discussion of the relation between the two poets. She discusses instead how they shared the same "metalinguistic consciousness," and how the works of each provide a context for the other, using as her examples their "pliant" treatment of heroines borrowed from classical writers. Where their artistry differs, she concludes, "it is basically a matter of taste" which poet's works one prefers (p. 98). This is obviously a difficult book to summarize, and also to assess. Though any effort to update the criticism of Gower is salutary, the application of critical techniques can also be performed mechanically, sometimes at the expense of a close reading of the text. In chapter 1, for instance, not everyone will be persuaded that the long list of similarities between CA and VN constitute the definition of a "genre." Nor will everyone accept all of the conclusions that Olsen reaches, for instance that the (very different) mixture of languages and forms in VN "reminds us that we need to read the Latin commentary in the Confessio as part of the work" (p. 7; compare the essay by Derek Pearsall, below) or that the comparison to VN really solves the problems posed by Gower's Prologue and Book 7. Similarly, Olsen's identification of the "narremes" in Book 8, while leading to interesting remarks on the relation between Apollonius and Amans, also leads her to dismiss the closing prayer as a "marginal incident" (p. 22); how many readers have insisted on the basis of content that it is central instead? Her discussions of theory are not always as helpful as they might be. In chapter 4, for instance, she establishes a linkage between the "conventional" and the "metonymic" and between the "rhetorical" and the "metaphorical" that is confusing if not completely arbitrary, to this reader at least. It doesn't help that many of the examples of "rime équivoque" that she discusses as "metonymic" are meaningful only because they reinforce a metaphorical sense of one of the words involved. Some of her insights (e.g. her observation that the virtues in Book 7 derive more from a courtly than from a theological tradition, pp. 28-31), are not dependent upon the method she is following, and others, such as her comparison of the denunciation of Venus and the problems posed by VN, chapter 25 (p. 10), are submerged among a mass of much less interesting observations. Whatever its limitations, there is much that is worth considering in this volume. It is also worth pointing out that this is the first book-length critical study of Gower by a single author to appear since 1978, and only the fourth such study devoted to the Confessio Amantis alone, ever. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Olsen, Alexandra Hennessey Published Olsen, Alexandra Hennessey. ""Betwene Ernest and Game": The Literary Artistry of the Confessio Amantis." American University Studies, Series IV: English Language and Literature, 110 . New York: Peter Lang, 1990 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 "Betwene Ernest and Game": The Literary Artistry of the Confessio Amantis. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Peter Lang, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower's tale of "Canace and Machaire" includes a passage describing their sharing a bedchamber (CA 3.148-53) that was added by the poet. Commentators on the tale have implied that the proximity of the children somehow excused them from their sin. But Gower has added a similar passage to his tale of "Apollonius of Tyre" (8.291) which hardly constitutes a justification for Antiochus' rape of his daughter. Tales in several other exemplum collections illustrate the potentially harmful results of family members having a common bed. Most are concerned with parents and their children, but John Mirk contains a specific warning against children above the age of seven lying together. Shaw concludes that the shared bed in "Canace and Machaire" is an "admonitory device," offering a warning for parents, rather than "a means of eliciting sympathy" for the children. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Shaw, Judith Davis Published Shaw, Judith Davis. "The Role of the Shared Bed in John Gower's Tales of Incest [sic]." ELN 26 (1989), pp. 4-7. 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 Role of the Shared Bed in John Gower's Tales of Incest [sic] Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Sanderlin summarizes what can be inferred about the relation between Chaucer's documented life and the political events of the last decade and a half of the fourteenth century, and refers to Gower in the context of a discussion of the change of dynasty in 1399: "John Gower, of course, had some years earlier cut his ties with Richard and was dedicating his works to Henry. Whether this was from his dislike of Lollards (who were tolerated in Richard's court and who had nailed their 'Twelve Conclusions' to the door of Westminster Hall in 1395) or from some other reason apparently is a subject for dispute but little information" (p. 181). The only support cited is Fisher (1964:121-24), who is rather more cautious about Gower "cutting his ties" with the king, and who makes no mention of the Lollards; there is evidently some chronological uncertainty here, moreover, since the change of dedication on which Gower's putative change in sentiment is based is usually dated to 1393. The real value of Sanderlin's essay lies elsewhere, in its account of how circumspectly Chaucer acted during the political crises of the time, with its implication of how imprudent and unlikely it would have been for a commoner to meddle directly in the friction between Richard and his lords. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sanderlin, S. Published Sanderlin, S.. "Chaucer and Ricardian Politics." Chaucer Review 22 (1988), pp. 171-84. ISSN 0009-2002 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 Chaucer and Ricardian Politics Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This Annotated Index is in the form of notes and annotations to the text of Gower's poem, arranged in order by book and line number. Every significant reference to a particular passage or tale in the modern commentary on the poem is given an entry, and when there is more than a single comment on any passage, the entries are arranged chronologically. Each entry includes a brief summary. Thus it is possible to locate quickly all of the important commentary on a particular passage, and also to see how the commentary has developed over time; and though the summaries are necessarily brief, the Index will have many of the same uses as a variorum commentary or the notes to a fully annotated edition of the poem. Approximately 330 books and articles that have appeared since the publication of Macaulay's edition in 1900-1901 are indexed, plus 27 editions of excerpts or selections from the poem. Of these, more than 100 are listed in no other Gower bibliography, and thus the 'List of Works Cited' is the most complete available listing of the published criticism of the Confessio Amantis. The index is preceded by an introduction surveying general issues in the commentary on the poem during the twentieth century. The work is intended for the use of scholars who wish to have quick access to the most important and relevant criticism, but also for all readers of the Confessio, who must otherwise rely on the notes in Macaulay's by now antiquated edition. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter Published Nicholson, Peter. "An Annotated Index to the Commentary on John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies. (62). Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, 1989 Gower Subject 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 An Annotated Index to the Commentary on John Gower's Confessio Amantis. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Mieszkowski surveys allusions to Criseyde in Latin, French, Italian, and English literature from Benoit to Henryson in order to demonstrate that long before Shakespeare, indeed from her very first appearance in medieval literature, Criseyde was used as an example of fickleness and inconstancy. Shakespeare's portrayal, therefore, can be traced to Criseyde's traditional representation, and is not due merely to a 16th-century misreading of Henryson as several influential scholars have proposed. Such a view of Criseyde, moreover, was already well known to Chaucer's audience, Mieszkowski claims, and would have helped shape their reaction to Chaucer's T&C. Gower provides important evidence for her thesis. His reference to Troilus and Criseyde in MO 5253-55, which makes no comment on either character, demonstrates that the story was already well-known before the appearance of Chaucer's poem. (His allusion to a "geste" suggests that there was a contemporary song about the characters, which Boccaccio also refers to in the Decameron.) The reference in VC 6.1325-28, also antedating Chaucer, demonstrates Criseyde's reputation was already fixed. There is no perceptible difference in Gower's view of Criseyde in the five references in CA, which postdates T&C. That in 5.7597-7602 is preceded by a reference to Achilles' love for Polixena, which is also described by both Benoit and Guido, and thus "illustrates how automatically Chaucer's contemporaries associated his version with the traditional Criseyde stories" (p. 101). The allusion to Troilus and Diomedes in CB 20.19-24 is also linked to earlier Troy material. In content it is consistent with all of Gower's other references, and is not datable on the basis of this allusion simply because Gower's view of Criseyde was evidently not altered by his reading of Chaucer's poem. The scope of her argument does not allow Mieszkowski to consider more of the implications of her conclusions with reference to Gower. It is a pleasure, for instance, to discover that Gower's references to Troilus and Criseyde in CA are something other than merely trivializations or misreadings of T&C, as has often been claimed. On the other hand, she does not address some of the problems that MO and VC have posed for others. Gower's spelling of Criseyde's name with a "C" rather than a "B" (as it appears in both Benoit and Guido) has suggested to some that the references in MO and VC are also based on Chaucer (but cf. Fisher, 1964:234), raising serious problems in the chronology of these works. Mieszkowski has no comment on the controversy or on how Gower might have gotten the spelling. Her evidence for the dating of MO (from Kittredge, 1909) is also a bit out of date. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Mieszkowski, Gretchen Published Mieszkowski, Gretchen. "The Reputation of Criseyde 1155-1500." Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences Transactions 43 (1971), pp. 71-153. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Cinkante Balades Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Reputation of Criseyde 1155-1500 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In 1982, M.L. Samuels and Jeremy Smith published an essay on "The Language of Gower" (NM 82:295-304) in which they demonstrated that the orthography of the two principal manuscripts of CA contain features that can be localized in NW Kent and SW Suffolk, precisely the areas in which the poet and his family were known to have owned property. Their article was not only an important contribution to Gower studies, but also an impressive confirmation of the dialectological methods that had been pioneered by the editors of the new Linguistic Atlas of Late Middle English. Much had already been written about the new methodology, which is based on scribal orthography rather than on underlying phonological forms or the language of the author, but at the time, the body of data on which Samuels and Smith depended was available only to the small circle of scholars working in Glasgow and Edinburgh. That data has now been published in impressive form, and though the new atlas makes no specific reference to Gower, it would be inappropriate to leave unacknowledged here one of the great monuments of Middle English scholarship of our time, and a work that will no doubt have profound impact on Gower studies in the years to come. The atlas is a daunting production. The first of the four large volumes includes a general introduction, providing the most complete statement of the assumptions under which the editors worked, an index of sources, and a series of "dot maps" showing the distribution of specific forms; volume two contains enlarged "item maps," plotting the different forms of the same item; volume three contains linguistic profiles of each county; and volume four is a "county dictionary," indexing the distribution of localizable forms. This is not a tool for a novice, and some of us will need considerable help before we understand all of the implications of this material. A new essay on the language of CA by Jeremy Smith is promised in the forthcoming "Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts of the Works of John Gower" (see JGN 2, no. 1), which will no doubt tell us more about how all this data may be used. It may also resolve one question that troubles the reviewer: since the working assumption of the atlas researchers is that scribes copied by "translating" texts into their own orthography, what is the implication of the fact that the language of the two earliest Gower manuscripts is evidently the poet's, and that these manuscripts, by different scribe, are "in all respects except their actual handwriting, as good as autograph copies" (Samuels and Smith, 1982:304)? [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor McIntosh, Angus Samuels, M.L. Benskin, Michael Published McIntosh, Angus and Samuels, M.L. and Benskin, Michael. "A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English." Aberdeen: University Press, 1986 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 A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Krochalis surveys what can be determined about book ownership and reading among the members of the royal family at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries, then gives closer attention to the books owned and borrowed by Henry V, concluding that "in a circle of collectors, Henry V stands out as a reader of books" (p. 70). Henry is not known to have owned or read any of Gower's works, alas, and there is no known connection between Henry and any Gower MSS. Gower does figure, however, in Krochalis' account of the other members of Henry's family. She notes that two surviving MSS of CA are thought to have been owned by Henry's brothers Humphrey and Thomas (pp. 55, 57). She recounts the story of the commissioning of CA in her discussion of Richard II (p. 59), and of the change of dedication in her comments on Henry's father (p. 55). She also lists several of Gower's other works with reference to Henry IV. She mistakenly states that VC was dedicated to Henry IV to the same year as the rededication of CA. But she suggests that the Cinkante Balades, which are also dedicated to Henry IV, might date from the period of the negotiations for Henry's remarriage in 1401 or later, and that the choice of French might thus be due to his prospective marriage to Joan of Navarre (p. 55 and note 31). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Krochalis, Jeanne E. Published Krochalis, Jeanne E.. "The Books and Reading of Henry V and His Circle." Chaucer Review 23 (1988), pp. 50-77. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Vox Clamantis Cinkante Balades Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Books and Reading of Henry V and His Circle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The summary of this item has been provided by Professor Ito: "The second edition of the book (1980), revised and supplemented." [JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ito, Masayoshi Published Ito, Masayoshi. "A Japanese Translation of the "Confessio Amantis"." Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin Press, 1988 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 Japanese Translation of the "Confessio Amantis". Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Shinozaki Shorin Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In Japanese. The summary of this item has been provided by Professor Ito: "A translation of the Latin text edited by H. Oesterley (Berlin, 1872); supposedly, this work originated in thirteenth-century England, and was used by Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve; it also contains old versions of Guy of Warrick and Roberd of Cisyle. The translation comprises 200 tales -- the canonical 181 and 19 supplementary tales -- together with commentary and motif-index." [JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ito, Masayoshi Published Ito, Masayoshi. "A Japanese Translation of the Gesta Romanorum." Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin Press, 1988 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations 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 A Japanese Translation of the Gesta Romanorum. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Shinozaki Shorin Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In Japanese. The summary of this item has been provided by Professor Ito: "A comparative analysis of 'Virgil's Mirror' and 'The King and the Steward's Wife' with their French originals (the SATF text of Les Sept Sages de Rome). Remarkable is Gower's skill of adaptation. In either case, he metamorphoses the mortally neutral tale into an exemplum against 'coveitise' by a black-and-white characterization, a vivid representation of the mind and acts of evil-doers, and an emphasis on the retributive justice shown to them." [JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ito, Masayoshi Published Ito, Masayoshi. "The Use of The Seven Sages of Rome in the Confessio Amantis." Studies in Medieval English Language and Literature (Japan Society for Medieval English Studies) 3 (1988), pp. 101-12. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Use of The Seven Sages of Rome in the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gwin assembles the evidence that Gower knew and made use of De Consolatione Philosophiae, and then traces its influence on the themes and structure of CA. Boethius provides the model for the dialogue between Amans and his confessor, and Amans' rejection of courtly love for "the soul's union with the mind of God" is a version of the Neoplatonic journey in DCP. Directed by Thomas L. Wright. [JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gwin, Mary Metz Published Gwin, Mary Metz. "'Homward a softe pas': The Boethian model in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." PhD thesis, Auburn, 1987. 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 'Homward a softe pas': The Boethian model in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Examines Gower's use of rhyme royal in both French and English works: in "In Praise of Peace," "Cinkante Balades," "Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz," and the "supplicacioun" from CA, concluding that whereas Gower learned from Chaucer's explorations in rhyme royal, he contributed something special in Ricardian poetics though his unique experiments in French forms and in philosophical love poetry. [JGN 10.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dean, James Published Dean, James. "Gower, Chaucer, and Rhyme Royal." Studies in Philology 88.3 (1991), pp. 251-75. Gower Subject In Praise of Peace Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Cinkante Balades Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Chaucer, and Rhyme Royal Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This study argues that the late medieval English poets consistently distinguish Venus and Cupid from each other: Venus represents nonverbal sexual desire and activity, while Cupid is in charge of the "refined" language in which noble lovers express their desire. . . . Chapter 4 posits that John Gower in the Confessio Amantis offers a corrective, demystifying account of the gods' pagan origins." Directed by Henry Ansgar Kelly. [JGN 10.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Tinkle, Theresa Lynn Published Tinkle, Theresa Lynn. "Cupid and Venus, Chaucer and Company." PhD thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1989. 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 Cupid and Venus, Chaucer and Company Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Hudson considers Gower alongside of Chaucer, Trevisa, and Langland in her chapter on "The Context of Vernacular Wycliffism," in this detailed and in many respects eye-opening new survey of the growth and influence of the Lollard movement (pp. 408-11). Gower seems to have had little knowledge of the details of Wycliffe's doctrine, she concludes, though he criticizes Lollardy in CA (Prol. and Book 5) and in the later Carmen super Multiplici Viciorum Pestilencia for the threat it poses to the unity of the faith. She also perceives a modification of Gower's own criticism of the church between Book 3 of VC and the composition of CA. The former contains some substantial anticlerical satire; in CA, however, Gower has evidently become more circumspect, and the passages on the failings of the church are "muted" and relatively short. ronically, Gower later dedicated a copy of VC to Archbishop Arundel, who as the scourge of the Lollards came to take even such criticism of the church as Gower offers as exceptionable; and as Macaulay noted, despite his own defense of orthodoxy, Gower seems to come very close to advocating the Wycliffite doctrine of dominion. Hudson's entire book is of interest as background to Gower, if only because the richness of her survey makes clear how far removed the poet was from the actual theological issues of the time. See also the detailed review by David C. Fowler, SAC 12 (1990): 296-305. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 10.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hudson, Anne Published Hudson, Anne. "The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History." Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Vox Clamantis Minor Latin Poetry Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Clarendon Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Ovid, Livy, and Chaucer are the most frequently mentioned sources for Shakespeare's "Rape of Lucrece," and only two details in his poem have been traced to Gower's version in CA. Hillman finds a number of other detailed recollections of Gower's text, but finds even more compelling similarities in the general handling of two key scenes, the rape itself and Lucrece's suicide, and in the treatment of the two main characters. Both Shakespeare and Gower develop the contrast between Lucrece's innocence and the villain's guile on the evening of the rape, a scene neglected in the other sources, and give more than usual attention to the villain's motivation and state of mind. Both also treat Lucrece with greater sympathy and dignity than the other authors, and raise her to a genuinely tragic stature. Gower's version is "more engagingly human, more complex, and more powerful" than the other versions Shakespeare knew, and contributes more to our understanding of both the moral and the dramatic emphases of Shakespeare's poem. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 10.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hillman, Richard Published Hillman, Richard. "Gower's Lucrece: A New Old Source for The Rape of Lucrece." Chaucer Review 24 (1990), pp. 263-70. 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 Gower's Lucrece: A New Old Source for The Rape of Lucrece Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In a manuscript note on a late draft of "Sailing to Byzantium," Yeats wrote that he "had just finished a poem in which a poet of the Middle Ages besought the saints 'in the holy fire' to send their ecstasy" (Davies, p. 34). Davies deduces that the poet Yeats had in mind was John Gower, not exactly as he is best known to readers of JGN, but the figure that Shakespeare created as the choric "presenter" of Pericles. Davies advances similarities in situation between Yeats' narrator and Shakespeare's poet -- both are old men, transmitting an ancient tradition to a younger audience -- and cites verbal parallels that suggest even more strongly that Yeats recalled the prologue to Shakespeare's play at some point during the composition of his poem. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 10.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Davies, Neville Published Davies, Neville. "Old Gower's Voyage to Byzantium." In KM 80: A Birthday Album for Kenneth Muir, Tuesday, 5 May, 1987. Ed. UNSPECIFIED. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1987, pp. 34-35. 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 Old Gower's Voyage to Byzantium Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Liverpool University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Aers sets out to assess "some major literary representations of the 'third estate'" (335) and consider how these representations reflect and foster ideological assumptions about class. In his analysis, both Langland and Chaucer interrogate traditional social hierarchy, although in different ways, while Gower (in Book 1 of VC) and Walsingham affirm it and, in doing so, reflect and promote the common late-medieval reaction to the Uprising of 1381 (Peasants' Revolt). Gower's depictions of lower-class people as bestial and anarchic, Aers asserts, indicate his "unselfreflexive, violent hatred" of these people "whose actions are seen to be conflicting with the traditional ideal of the social order" (345); like Walsingham's, Gower's social view is "unreflective, dogmatic, and appallingly self-righteousness" (347). [MA; Cited in JGN 10.1, without an abstract]. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 154-63. Author/Editor Author/Editor Aers, David Published Aers, David. "Representations of the 'Third Estate': Social Conflict and its Milieu around 1381." Southern Review (Australia) 16 (1983), pp. 335-49. 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 Representations of the 'Third Estate': Social Conflict and its Milieu around 1381. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1983 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Zieman, Katherine Grace Published Zieman, Katherine Grace. "Reading and Singing: Liturgy, Literacy, and Literature in Late Medieval England." PhD thesis, University of California at Berkeley, 1997. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Review "This study shows liturgy's intimate connection with changes in definitions of literate status, the articulation of the components of literate skills, and the production of vernacular literature in late medieval England. The fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries witnessed a considerable growth in liturgical benefactions. This upsurge in liturgical activity affected ecclesiastical institutions, their personnel, patrons and clientele. Both cleric and lay might be motivated to produce or consume liturgy through various desires related to piety, education, charity, or display. The variety of motivations, in fact, combined with the multiplication of contexts for performance, led to the unmooring of literate skills associated with the singing and reading of liturgical texts from the traditional context of the choral community. The resulting fluidity of definitions -- both of the skills required for adequate performance of the liturgy and of the spiritual and ethical value of those skills -- is manifested in the decontextualized collocation 'reading and singing.' "The first chapter charts the development and social implications of the collocation 'reading and singing' in elementary educational practices (generally known as the 'song school'). The second examines the fluidity of the term literatus in relation to liturgical and devotional performance. The third describes lay and clerical strategies for investing in the liturgy and the ethical dilemmas this commodification produced. "The final two chapters show how vernacular literature emerges from the foment of activity surrounding 'reading and singing.' Langland's Piers Plowman depicts a vernacular maker inhabiting the boundary between cleric and lay, justifying his literary activity as a socially useful labor that synthesizes fragmented clerical discourses while foregrounding ethical questions about their appropriate use, questions he increasingly associated with the 'reading and singing' repertoire. In his Vox Clamantis, Gower derives his performative authority from the vernacular concept of the 'voice of prayer' in order to divorce his project from the liturgical pretensions of the participants of 1381 rebellion. Chaucer takes up the issue of voice in House of Fame and The Miller's Tale, turning it into a poetic principle that imputes to the vernacular the authoritative rationality generally restricted to Latin litteras. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading and Singing: Liturgy, Literacy, and Literature in Late Medieval England Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor O'Callaghan, Tamara Faith Published O'Callaghan, Tamara Faith. "Love Imagery in Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, John Gower's Confessio Amantis, and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde." PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1995. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review "This thesis examines the imagery of love as it is depicted in three medieval versions of the story of Troy. The result is an attempt to determine to what extent Benoit, Gower, and Chaucer use love motifs and language to distinguish between the gendered experiences of the passion and to what extent love, as it is expressed by the various characters of both sexes, is considered to be the motivational force behind the events at Troy. . . . "In his Confessio Amantis, John Gower restructures the story of Troy around other tales of love and kingship which exemplify the same sin. By presenting the history of Troy out of sequence, by eliminating some of the traditional imagery and language, and by developing his own unique set of images and vocabulary, he effectively disassociates the love episodes from the war narrative. The love stories of Jason and Medea and of Paris and Helen become exempla of the sin of avarice, connected not so much by parallels in plot, but by similarities in the love experience of the main characters. . . . Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Love Imagery in Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, John Gower's Confessio Amantis, and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Lipton, Emma Published Lipton, Emma. "Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature." Ph.D. dissertation. Duke University, 1998. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Review "This dissertation explores the ways in which changing religious, political and social conditions interacted with literary tradition to transform the meaning of marriage in the literature of the later Middle Ages. Since the twelfth century, Latin monastic writings built on the exegetical tradition of the Song of Songs, envisioning mystical marriage to Christ as an allegory for the monastic contemplative life. In many vernacular works of the late Middle Ages, however, spiritual marriage was appropriated in the service of validating earthly marriage, thus blurring the boundaries between celibacy, the distinguishing feature of the clergy, and marriage, the sexual marker of lay status. This validation of marriage practices as spiritual can be linked to the growth of lay piety, which found an extreme expression in the increasingly visible Lollard heretics who made marriage part of their attack on clerical celibacy. As a uniquely lay sacrament which could legally be performed without the participation of the clergy, marriage also played a complex role in contemporary disputes over the sacraments, and the theological history of the development of the sacramental model of marriage provided crucial vocabulary for literature promoting the spirituality of marriage. Late Medieval English literature also appropriated the tradition of fin amors, the literary expression of aristocratic honor and identity, and transformed it into a validation of marriage and a medium for expressing bourgeois ideology. This generic appropriation can be linked to changes in the social structure of late medieval England, when the growth of the middle strata of society made the three estates model, traditionally used as a means of describing medieval society, an increasingly less accurate representation. My readings reveal that marriage was a particular preoccupation in the literature authored by and directed to these middle sections of society who were in search of a social identity and legitimizing ideology because they found in marriage a medium for appropriating clerical and aristocratic cultures and transforming them into a means of constructing bourgeois ideology. Individual chapters feature Chaucer's 'Franklin's Tale,' Gower's 'Traitié Pour Essampler Les Amants Marietz,' the 'Mary Plays from the N-Town Cycle' and The Book of Margery Kempe. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Barrington, Candace Published Barrington, Candace. "John Gower, the Confessio Amantis, and the Rhetoric of Omission." PhD thesis, Duke University, 1998. Gower Subject In Praise of Peace Vox Clamantis Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Review "My dissertation uses John Gower's widely-circulated trilogy to illuminate the role of legal discourse in the developing vernacular literatures of late-fourteenth-century England. By looking beyond the veneer of flatness and conventionality, which has often misled his twentieth-century readers, I demonstrate how Gower's poetry textualizes literary and cultural struggles in Ricardian England, where his social position was particularly vexed. Though not firmly ensconced in the aristocracy, as a man-of-law he belonged to that group of gentry serving the landholding classes and those whose interests were intimately tied to the hegemonic ideals. His role as the nobility's advocate shapes his major works: the Anglo-Norman Mirour de l'Homme, the Latin Vox Clamantis, and the English Confessio Amantis and In Praise of Peace. A careful examination of these poems reveals them to be a fascinating marketplace of competing voices, which Gower attempts to regulate using the principles of legal rhetoric. So effective is his regulation that critics have often assumed that the dominant voice both controls the poems' hermeneutics and eliminates all discord. By examining his social location, his legal career, and the literary traditions informing his major Anglo-Norman, Latin and English poems, I argue that his control is not absolute. Instead, the poems inadvertently expose the frailty of the aristocratic ideology they seek to defend. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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, the Confessio Amantis, and the Rhetoric of Omission Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Achorn, John Howard Published Achorn, John Howard. "A study of 'Apollonius of Tyre': Three English Adaptations of an Ancient Greek Romance." PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1998. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review "This thesis involves three English versions of Apollonius of Tyre: the Old English translation (OE) of the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri (HA), John Gower's version (CA) in the Confessio Amantis, and Shakespeare's Pericles. I discuss the social climate surrounding the production of each work and then concentrate on the tale's restorative property, particularly as it relates to gender issues. "Because HA represents the 'architext' of all subsequent versions, my Introduction fo-cuses on it. I compare HA to five extant Greek romances of an earlier period to ascertain what features they share, and to determine what distinguishes HA. HA's affiliation with hagiography proves especially instructive. The story's Providential motif is the source of the story's restorative power. However, along with this motif comes the potential for subversive content. This thesis examines the extent to which each text handles these seemingly divergent aims. "OE contains additional Christian resonances. As a result, the Providential motif becomes more evident. However, OE also retains the emphasis HA places on female rights, and therefore proves subversive of the norm. In contrast, Gower's text seeks to restore a Golden Age, one saturated in patristic ideals. The Providential motif is elaborate, but since CA seeks to reclaim past order, the subversive element gets quelled. Shakespeare revitalizes it. He gives voice to orthodoxy by means of his choric figure, but also raises questions about the ade-quacy of this figure and insists upon the value of femininity. "In the final analysis, all three versions prove restorative. CA offers hope by giving a clear message about the truth of Providence: despite the vagaries of fortune, Appolinus's life has meaning in the end. OE and Pericles have a restorative effect, too, only these works achieve this effect in a different way. Both contain Providential overtones, but more importantly, by presenting a liberal view towards women's rights and by projecting current institu-tions as harmful to the welfare of a nation, both inspire a healthy rejection of patriarchal norms. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to 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 study of 'Apollonius of Tyre': Three English Adaptations of an Ancient Greek Romance Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Summers, Joanna Published Summers, Joanna. "Gower's Vox Clamantis and Usk's Testament of Love." Medium AEvum 68 (1999), pp. 55-62. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Influence and Later Allusion Review Summers' essay begins a bit oddly, with the claim that the usual view among those who have commented is that Gower's call for Chaucer to write his own "testament of love" (CA 8.2955*) reflects his "amusement or disdain" for the poem of Thomas Usk of the same name. At least three of the four sources that she cites make no such claim. (I have not seen the fourth, an essay by David Carlson in the Leyerle festschrift of 1993.) The bulk of this short piece, however, is not about Gower's attitude towards Usk but about Usk's towards Gower. Skeat and others have suggested that the "Shippe of Traveyle" episode in Book 1 of the "Testament" reflects Usk's hearing or reading of the C-text of Piers Plowman. Summers proposes that there is greater similarity to the allegory in Book 1 of the Vox Clamantis, both in the structure of the episode and in some interesting if not exact verbal parallels. In her summary, "both texts present a narrator who foolishly leaves home to become lost in a forest; witnesses the rampages of domestic animals, like swine, who have turned wild; is rescued by a ship, but then is subject to a treacherous storm; and is finally driven to an island" (p. 57). In the Testament, the allegory refers to Usk's experiences in the trial of Northampton, and Usk may have been inspired by Gower's later comparison of a lawsuit to a voyage in rough seas (VC 6.474-80). Summers wishes to suggest that these allusions might have been recognized and that Usk might thus deliberately have cloaked himself in the conservative and royalist sympathies of poet of the earliest versions of VC. She also suggests that the "Margarete" that Usk discovers on the island at the end of his voyage and that he pledges to serve faithfully represents King Richard, an identification that she supports by pointing out that the island in Gower's vision is very clearly Britain. In the immediately following essay in the same issue of Medium AEvum, Lucy Lewis argues that Usk's "Margarete" is to be identified instead as Margaret Berkeley, wife of Sir Thomas Berkeley, well-known as a patron of Trevisa. [PN. Copyright John Gower Society. JGN 18.2]. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 195-200. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all 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 Vox Clamantis and Usk's Testament of Love Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This study of T&C, which we ought to have noticed here somewhat sooner, is notable for its use of VC to create what Wood openly calls a "Gowerian" reading of Chaucer's poem (pp. 168-69). The passages from VC that he draws upon most heavily are the opening chapters of Book 5, on love and knighthood; Book 6, chapter 12, on the king; the indictment of contemporary England in Book 7, chapter 24; and the general treatment of free will and fortune in Books 1 and 2. Citing the dedication of T&C to "moral Gower" and the likelihood of extensive personal contacts between the two men, he argues that Chaucer could not have presented the poem to Gower if it contained a view of love radically different from the dedicatee's. He concludes that T&C, like VC, is a condemnation of illicit passion, particularly among the nobility; that like VC, it was written at least in part in response to the grave social and political disturbances of the 1370's; and that "the issues of love, freedom, marriage, and loyalty in Old Troy [in T&C] are essentially the same as those treated by John Gower in his poem Vox Clamantis about the New Troy" (p. 165). Wood refers to CA only in passing, and then implying it advances the same straightforward view of love as VC; he gives short shrift to the suggestions that Gower's reading of T&C might have inspired the more complex and more sophisticated treatment of love in CA. On at least one small point Wood may be corrected: the many references to blind ness in a poem dedicated to Gower are merely coincidental, for the Dedicatory Epistle to VC that Wood cites as evidence of Gower's blind ness (p. 162) was only added after 1399. Reviews by Ian Bishop, SAC, 7 (1985), 270-72; and A.V.C. Schmidt, Medium AEvum, 55 (1986), 135-37). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wood, Chauncey Published Wood, Chauncey. "The Elements of Chaucer's Troilus." Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Elements of Chaucer's Troilus. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Duke University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review CA is one of four works Lynch considers (along with Alain de Lille's "De Planctu Naturae," the "Roman de la Rose," and Danet's "Purgatorio") as examples of the "philosophical vision" of the late MiddleAges, a sub-genre of the dream vision deriving from Boethius' DCP. Her introduction and her first two chapters supply the historical and theoretical background: "The paradigmatic structure of the literary vision," she argues, "echoed central epistemological structures in scholastic philosophy." This epistemology was rooted in the problem of reconciling scriptural and scientific authority, and in the neces sity of accounting for man's ability to apprehend divine truth from earthly experience. It gave rise to a faculty psychology according to which man was led from perception by way of Imagination and Reason to the understanding of spiritual truths. The vision poem had as one its its purposes the defense of this epistemology. The plot of these poems is typically the visionary's spiritual journey towards truth, passing from literal image to figural and absolute meanings; the characters that accompany and instruct him typically stand for the facul ties by which higher levels of understanding are achieved; and one of the insights that he typically receives concerns the relation between his corporeal and spiritual natures. Like the other poems that Lynch discusses, CA is concerned with the narrator's spiritual growth; and following the model of Gower's predecessors, Amans' principal guide, his confessor Genius, is an embodiment of one of his faculties, his Imagination or ingenium. One of Genius' principal functions is to provide tales and images for Amans' consideration, but since he is not capable of performing the functions reserved to Reason, he is frequently unable to draw the proper moral lesson from his tales. His incompetency is thus a meaningful part of the epistemological design, and is emphasized by his comic misinterpretations and the many discrepancies between the tales and the moral truth they contain. Genius himself is capable of growth, particularly after his confrontation with the contradictions between classical and divine teaching in Book 5, and in Book 7 he instructs Amans on how the world can be a speculum in which he may finally come to understand divine love. The dialogue with Genius, however, is necessarily inconclusive; the real conclusion comes with another vision (8.2440 ff.) which ends with the ascendancy of Reason that the genre demands and with Amans' abandonment of his earthly love for that other love "that stant of charite confermed" (8.3165). Lynch's work is outstanding in many respects: in the connections she draws between medieval poetry and philosophy; in her account of the relation between form and meaning in the vision; in her explanation for the endurance of the vision form; and in her ability to provide an explanation of dream psychology that is consistent with the prevailing epistemology of the time. She writes lucidly and convincingly, and while carefully maintaining the thread of her argument she is sensitive to the many differences in the works that she examines. Her description of CA is a significant attempt to account for the form of the poem and offers a number of important insights: her discussion of the use of images and "pointing" in the poem seems especially promising. Her chapter is too brief, however, to consider all of the problems that her interpretation raises. She will give comfort to those who believe that Amans' love is portrayed as sinful at the beginning of the poem, and that he is brought to a virtuous renunciation at the end. These, however, are the presuppositions, rather than the conclusions, of her attempt to place CA within the genre she has defined. And for a key part of her analysis -- her assertion that Genius' lessons become more complete and more adequate as the poem proceeds -- she depends entirely on James Foster's unpublished dissertation on "The Influence of Medieval Mythography on John Gower's Confessio Amantis." There are other ways of viewing Amans' condition, of understanding Genius' role, and of interpreting his lessons, all of which are at the center of current critical discussion of the poem. If Lynch's assumptions about CA are correct, then she provides the clearest account so far of the ancestry of Gower's design and of the implications of his form; if they are not, then Gower's debt to the tradition that she describes so persuasively is rather more complex and more problematic than she allows. [PN. Copyright the John Gower Society. JGN 8.1] N.B. This study is based on Lynch's dissertation, "The Medieval Dream-Vision: A Study in Genre Structure and Meaning." University of Virginia, 1982; Dissertation Abstracts International 43 (1983): 3314A. Author/Editor Author/Editor Lynch, Kathryn L. Published Lynch, Kathryn L.. "The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form." Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988 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 High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Stanford University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review On pp. 88-100, Koff cites Gower a number of times in his desciption of Chaucer's relation with his audience as part of his general argument on the way in which Chaucer's poetry creates its own community of understanding. Chaucer's choice of English, like Gower's, may be part of an attempt to incorporate his English readers into a broader international community of letters. Gower's account of the commissioning of CA may reveal the impetus behind LGW as well; and Chaucer's only political commentary, in the F Prologue of LGW, reflects similar concerns revealed in all of Gower's works. Chaucer's interest in edification may be more oblique than Gower's but is just as real: both share a sense of the importance of books, and the well-known T&C frontispiece showing Chaucer reading his work to the court suggests an attempt to give instruction to young King Richard that echoes Gower's in CA. All of Koff's citations of CA are taken from the Prologue and epilogue; consequently he has little directly to say about Gower and the art of storytelling. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Koff, Leonard Michael Published Koff, Leonard Michael. "Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling." Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988 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 Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of California Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Staley, Lynn Published Staley, Lynn. "Gower, Richard II, Henry of Derby, and the Business of Making Culture." Speculum 75 (2000), pp. 68-96. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review There are two unequal parts to this lengthy essay. The first, and shorter, considers the ways in which CA, "The Legend of Good Women," and Clanvowe's "Boke of Cupid" address issues of royal prerogatives and power. Since Gower's dedication of his poem records his relation with the king most explicitly (Chaucer's and Clanvowe's are encoded in their relations with the god of Love), he gets the least amount of attention of the three. Staley argues, however, that all three were engaged in a conversation with Richard that was possible in the mid-1380's but that would have been impossible after the Merciless Parliament of 1388. The second part considers the circumstances of Gower's revision of the dedication, when "Gower attempted to salvage a poem whose original conditions were no longer apparent" (p. 79). Staley gives more than merely passing regard to the events in the early 1390's that have been cited in the past to justify his change of view of the king, particularly to the quarrel with London in 1392. But the greatest amount of attention (indeed more than half this essay) is reserved for the role of John of Gaunt during this period and for his possible influence on the literary culture of the time. Staley cites Gaunt's longtime interest in acquiring a throne that he might pass on to his son, his care for improving Henry's position while retaining the good will of the king, his sponsorship of Henry's expeditions on the continent, and his efforts to acquire the prestige associated with his own court; and then points out the reversal of expectations that he must have suffered because of a series of unexpected events in 1394. Much of what Staley offers is speculative but closely enough grounded in documented fact to be interesting and at times intriguing. The consequences for Gower are disappointingly slight, however, and Staley's conclusion, expressed in an interrogative, can be quoted in full: "Are Gower's changes to the 'Confessio' a sign, possibly of dissatisfaction with Richard, but also of Gaunt's subtle co-opting of a poet's allegiance? To dedicate a poem about the state of England to Henry of Derby in 1392-93 served as one more indication of his status as protector of those virtues of ethical self-government that were memorialized in the poem itself and perhaps of a 'court' (even a virtual one) whose reality demanded an utterance that only a man with Gower's reputation for integrity could supply" (p. 96). The reviewer is cited in note 25 on page 78 as expressing in a series of essays published between 1984 and 1987 a view of the textual history of CA that Staley rejects, and so is perhaps not in the best position to offer an objective judgment of the merits of her argument. A few things do jump out, though. First, though she concedes that Gower finished CA in 1390 (p. 78), her entire discussion of the dedication is based on the assumption that it was written in 1385 or 1386, suggesting that she believes, somewhat implausibly, that Gower would have written the dedication first and then maintained it, despite its inappropriateness at the time of the poem's completion. Somewhat more seriously, when she states (on p. 71), that the F Prologue to LGW was written "at about the same time as the 'Confessio'," she allows us to infer that she believes that the entire poem was finished before 1388. Since all of her comments about the dedication depend upon its precise historical setting, the date is obviously not a small matter. Regarding the revisions in the text: despite the subtlety with which she reads between the lines of every other text that she considers, she refuses to see anything at all problematic about the dates contained in the margins of the revised passages in the Prologue and Book 8 in some MSS, and gives an account of Gower's rewriting that is pleasingly simple and straightforward and that may be correct, but that appears to be adopted more because of its convenience than because of a careful consideration of the complexities of the early textual history of the poem. One also has to wonder about her characterization of the "Confessio" as a whole. On page 70, she speaks of it as "a poem about the education of a prince," and on page 79 she appears to place the entire poem in the "Mirror for Princes" genre. Such a designation helps justify her attention to the dedication, but it also suggests that a more inclusive view of the poem's contents might make her entire argument somewhat less compelling. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 19.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Richard II, Henry of Derby, and the Business of Making Culture Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Not all will be per-suaded, but Bullón-Fernández has worked strenuously to build her case, and we can take it as a token of the maturity of Gower studies that these are the types of issues that we are now discussing. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1] Father-daughter relationships occupy a prominent place in CA, Bullón-Fernández observes, and she discusses eleven particularly significant examples, including the two longest and most complex tales in the poem, "Constance" and "Apollonius of Tyre," and one of the most problematic, "Canace and Machaire." She sets out the broad lines of her argument in her first chapter. Gower uses the relationship between father and child, she asserts, as a device for exploring issues of power and authority not only in a family context but also in the political and textual realms. All three of these are informed by the same dynamics--the male authority figure appears to negotiate between the desire for an absolute control over the female subordinate figure and the constraints imposed by social forces (pp. 3-4). She thus treats incest not merely as a sin in a moral or religious sense but as an offense against society: the father, who has absolute authority over his daughter, is expected to use this authority to pass her on to somebody else, and his refusal to do so is a rejection of the patriarchal order from which his authority derives. The king's authority was also on occasion figured as that of a fa-ther towards his child, and the king's failure to recognize the limits on his authority, in his usurpation of their property rights, for instance, can thus be seen as an analogous disruption of patriarchal order. Bullón-Fernández draws heavily from the critics (notable among them Judith Butler) who have discussed the discursive nature of the incest taboo and the relation between the law of exogamy (which requires marriage outside the family) and the construction of patriarchal society, and who have explored the contradictions in the role attributed to the father in the system in which a female is the object of exchange and in the taboo that both creates and suppresses incestuous desire. Gower too explores the "gaps and fissures" (an expression that recurs several times in this book) inherent in patriarchal ideology. He is particularly concerned to mark the limits of the father's authority, and thus also the ruler's, pointedly directly his criticism to his own king, Richard II. Gower also uses the incest motive as a way of exploring his own role as author, imposing his authority on the narratives that he creates in his attempt to control their interpretation. He models the relation between artist and his creation as incestuous in the tale of Pygmaleon. Gower places Genius in the role of authority in the poem, and then he challenges that authority through Amans, through the multiplicity of Latin voices in the text of the poem, and through the contradictions in Genius' own lessons; thus "Gower's examination of the notion of incest, of absolute control over something or someone created by oneself, reveals his anxiety about his relationship with his own creation, the text, about his desire to have his text mirror his own will and his own meaning, unambiguously" (p. 37). The subsequent chapters offer very close readings of groups of related tales. There is space here to mention only some of the high points of Bullón-Fernández's argument. In chapter two she examines three tales in which incest hovers as a possibility but is averted, though the way in which the fathers and daughters carry out their roles also problematizes the patriarchal order within which incest is displaced. "Apollonius of Tyre" raises the largest number of issues. Bullón-Fernández reads the tale through Derrida's account (in his discussion of Rousseau) of the simultaneous origin of incest, society, and language. Apollonius and Thaise avert incest through their use of language while Antiochus' relation with his daughter takes place without language. Genius thus portrays incestuous desire as precultural, but Antiochus' behavior, including his use of a riddle to hide his sin, suggests nonetheless that incest is fundamentally discursive in origin. The tale shows the mutually reinforcing character of the ideologies that shape the power structures in family and nation and takes an optimistic view of the consequences of properly fulfilling one's role, but it also raises questions about Apollonius' construction of his self that reveal the instability of the notion of authority upon which patriarchy is itself constructed. In "The Three Questions," Peronelle's ostensible role as an example of humility on the model of Mary is at odds with the very active role that she plays, skillfully using language to assist her father and to achieve her own ambition of marrying a king. "The tale shows the potential both for female power and for the disruption of the system of exchange" (p. 68), but Peronelle's "potentially subversive empowerment through words ultimately works to sustain and repeat the accepted structures of kinship" (p. 74). In "Constance," the heroine performs her public duty and complies with the demands of the system of exchange at the expense of her own individuality, but only to an extent: her refusal to identify herself upon her arrival in both England and Rome indicates Genius' attempt to attribute to her a significant degree of both individuality and agency. With regard to her relation with her father, "her silences . . . suggest that she has a desire (an unspeakable desire) which, nevertheless, she controls" (p. 79). They thus also "contribute to the delimit and construct a domain of the unspeakable. The unspeakable is the refusal to 'communicate' in Lévi-Strauss's sense, that is, both the refusal to speak and the refusal to comply with the laws of exchange" (p. 82). Upon the death of her husband Alle, Constance is finally able to reaffirm her bond with her father. Genius does not conceal the incestuous implications of their reunion as she provides her father, for instance, with an heir and "he thus implies that daughters have a natural desire for their fathers that social laws, and particularly the incest taboo, have the function of repressing" (p. 86). In the portion of her analysis that has already appeared in print (see JGN 17, no. 1, pp 14-15), Bullón-Fernández argues that Constance's relation with her father is also meant to figure the relationship between the church and political authority. The church (represented in Constance) is made subordinate to and dependent upon lay masculine power, but in such a way as to undermine the royal pretensions of absolutism. Chapter three examines two tales, "The False Bachelor" and "Albinus and Rosemund," in which the roles of men and women are more sharply differentiated--the women, indeed, are merely passive objects of exchange--but in which the roles of the father and the husband are too easily interchanged as the woman is passed from one to the other, suggesting a fundamental flaw in the system of exchange. In "The False Bachelor," the way in which the emperor's son wins the hand of the sultan's daughter is made akin to the supplantation by which he loses her. Both tales also link male identity to chivalry and demonstrate some fundamental weaknesses of chivalric ideology. In "The False Bachelor" the constructedness of chivalric identity allows it so easily to be stolen by another knight, while in "Albinus and Rosemund," Albinus' boast, so integral a part of the chivalric accomplishment by which he wins Rosemund, proves to be inconsistent with his responsibilities as king and results in his undoing. In chapter four, Bullón-Fernández takes up "Leucothoe," "Virginia," and "Canace and Machaire," three tales in which the father slays his daughter. In the first two of these, the father's control of his daughter is tyrannically usurped by another male, but the father responds with his own tyrannical abuse of his daughter. Her virginity is thus merely a site for the exploration of the limits of authority in the private and public realms. Sexual desire is linked to the violation of private property, and Genius suggests that power, like sexual desire, is natural and inevitable but that it can and should be controlled. The political implications are clearest in "Virginia," in which the superior authority is a king rather than a god and in which justice is finally enacted by the "commune." "Virginia" also makes clear the analogy between the father's violation and the king's as he impinges upon his daughter's private rights out of a misplaced sense of possession. Such a relation is also explicit in "Canace and Machaire," in which the king and the father are the same. (This discussion has also previously appeared in print; see JGN 14, no. 2, pp. 6-7). Bullón-Fernández note that Eolus' anger has an incestuous character, being motivated less by his daughter's sin than by his loss of control over her body. His denial of the independence of his daughter serves as a metaphor for the abuse of authority in the public sphere, and it is equally self-destructive. Genius sympathizes with Canace because she is both procreator and also literary creator, as the author of her verse epistle to her brother. He is thus moved to condemn Eolus though he is silent about the fathers' abuse of their daughters in the two other similar tales. Genius' attempt to control the meaning of his stories puts him too in the position of fatherly authority, and the inconsistencies in his sympathies under-mine his attempts to establish the proper limits of that authority. In her fifth and final chapter, Bullón-Fernández examines the implications of Genius' fatherly role more closely. In "Rosiphelee," she argues, the heroine's vision reveals the discursive nature of courtly love ideology, and Genius replaces the father in compelling the daughter to sub-mit to the law of exogamy and to supply an heir. In "Jephthah's Daughter" he more clearly abuses his power as he overlooks the violence of the father and unfairly places blame on the daughter herself for dying still a virgin. Genius identifies with Pygmalion, finally, in the tale of the same name, as both he and the sculptor exercise the creative power primarily through their use of words. His identification leaves him "blind to the structures of authority and the incestuous implications involved in artistic creation" (p. 212), as evidenced by his omission of the allusions to the incestuous relationship between Pygmalion's grandson and his daughter found in both Ovid and Jean de Meun. "As a kind of father to his tales," moreover, "he himself is implicated in the relations of power that he tries to delimit in other tales, and, therefore, he himself is bound to transgress those limits" (ibid.). By his use of the figure of Genius, Gower explores his own desire to control the text. Like Jean de Meun, he refuses to impose a single authorial voice upon the poem. "The incestuous connotations in their versions of the myth [of Pygmalion]," however, "hint at their ambivalence, even anxiety, towards their own authority. These connotations remind us that the notion that a work of art will mirror its author's desire, the author's fantasy of absolute control over its meaning, is, ultimately, a problematic, even if irresistible, Pymalionesque fantasy" (pp. 214-15). This is obviously a challenging study, both because of the breadth of its concerns and because of the subtlety of some aspects of its argument. It is sure to have greatest appeal to those who share the author's theoretical interests. Those who read closely with one eye on the poem, however, are bound to find themselves raising some questions about some of Bullón-Fernández's readings. To take only a couple of examples: It is one thing to suggest that there is an analogy to be drawn between the supplantation that Genius identifies (and condemns) in "The False Bachelor" and the replacement of the sultan by his designated son-in-law in the same tale, and quite another to imply that there is little or no difference between the two actions. The tale seems designed, in fact, to draw the distinction between the legitimate and illegitimate means of winning the Sultan's daughter in marriage. In emphasizing the constructedness of chivalric identity in the tale, moreover, Bullón-Fernández passes over the fact that the plot is resolved by the decision of the emperor's son to reveal his true name just before he dies. She similarly elides the moral and immoral as Genius defines it in her discussion of "Albinus and Rosemund," treating Albinus' boasting as a constitutive part of his chivalric identity rather than as a violation of it. There may be little difference between a good knight and a bad knight from our point of view, but such differences are very carefully labeled in the poem. In her discussion of Apollonius' loving his daughter "kindely" before he recognizes her (pp. 58-59), Bullón-Fernández sees an ambiguity that allows her to argue that the prohibition of incest is shown in the tale to be verbally constructed rather than pre-verbal. Genius' (and Gower's) point, however, is surely the opposite: the line "yit he wiste nevere why" (8.1707) draws a distinction between "kinde" knowledge and rational knowledge in this episode just as as it does in the similar scene in the tale of Constance in which Alle is drawn to his son (2.1381-82), a passage that Bullón-Fernández does not refer to. She also stretches a bit when she suggests that Gower uses the examples of fathers abusing their daughters as a way of commenting on the political abuses of Richard II. The analogy that she draws (on pages 31, 33, 132-33, 136, 163 and 165) is based upon criticisms of the king's abuse of his subjects' property rights which did not occur, she admits when she first raises the issue on page 21, until 1397, long after the passages in question were com-posed. These, and many other similar quibbles, are the types of disagreements that one ought to expect in a study as dense and as ambitious as this one is. There are two more general issues that arise, however. One concerns the basis that we use for determining when a cigar is not merely a cigar. Bullón-Fernández would have us see the political and textual implications of the representations of incest in the poem. How do we know, however, that these should be read as something other than what they are offered as, as exam-ples in a lengthy disquisition on sexual ethics? There is no easy answer, but unfortu-nately for Bullón-Fernández's argument, there is less evidence in the poem itself for the implications that she draws than there is in other texts, some of which are very modern. Even the singling out of incest is problematic. She uses the association between tyranny and rape in "Athemas and Demophon" (she might also have cited Nero) as a justification for seeing political issues in questions of sexual laws, but then is the rape and mutilation of Philomela any less fraught with issues of abuse and power? Is there a real reason why victims of incest should be set apart from all the other examples of women who are abused in the Confessio? And if not, then the analogy starts to become very general indeed. The other major issue concerns Gower's role in these issues. Bullón-Fernández would have us see CA not merely as a chapter in the history of the western discursive construction of patriarchy and sexuality but rather as a sustained critique of that construction. She insistently distinguishes between Genius' position and Gower's in order to create a space from which Gower himself may share the views and concerns of twentieth-century theorists. This is the most difficult part of her case because in order to accept it, we have to accept virtually everything in her argument that precedes. Author/Editor Author/Editor Bullón-Fernández, María Published Bullón-Fernández, María. "Fathers and Daughters in Gower's Confessio Amantis: Authority, Family, State, and Writing." Publications of the John Gower Society, 5 . Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000 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 Fathers and Daughters in Gower's Confessio Amantis: Authority, Family, State, and Writing. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D. S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Chapter 5 of Aers' study, "Reflections on Gower as 'Sapiens in Ethics and Politics'," was originally published in 1998 in R.F. Yeager's Re-Visioning Gower, and it was reviewed in JGN 18, no. 1, p. 17. A bit more briefly: Aers attacks Gower's reputation as a coherent moral philosopher by laying out some of the more obvious contradictions in his thought. Gower's advocacy of evangelical pacifism in VC Books 3 and 6, for instance, cannot be reconciled with the "unironic celebration of aristocratic violence" in his advice to the young King Richard to follow the example of his father (p. 107). Such a contradiction, Aers points out, was encouraged by the medieval church, where it had become "normalized and internalized" (p. 110). It is also allowed by the structure of VC, in which "the units . . . are paratactically sealed off from each other rather than brought into dialogue. . . . [VC's] paratactic mode becomes a powerful impediment to moral inquiry, to sustained critical reflection on the difficulties that are raised. The mode protects the poet from having to confront sharp contradictions in his ethics, let alone from having to explore their sources in the traditions he inherits and the culture he inhabits" (p. 110; his italics). The same sort of failure can be found in CA, in which the poet condemns the church for the degeneracy of its practices and for the mystification of its claims of spiritual authority yet upholds the church against the Wycliffites whose criticism he echoes. "Are we being invited to cultivate ironic reflections on the grounds of all doctrine, on the grounds of all claims to unfeigned, uninvented authority in matters concerning the divine?" (p. 117). No, Aers concludes; to a "paratactic mode" corresponds a "paratactic moralism" (p. 118). This provocative essay now stands in the company of chapters on Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain-poet, and Wyclif. Each of these Aers situates among the competing discourses on faith, ethics, and the nature of the church in late fourteenth-century England, when Wyclif and his followers raised questions about orthodox institutions and practices that prompted an increasing rigidity of doctrine and an increasing harshness of both ecclesiastical and secular attempts to control public discourse on theological topics. In such an atmosphere, each author inevitably takes stands with both doctrinal and politi-cal implications. One of Aers' principal themes, indeed, is that the doctrinal is political, not only because of the increasing involvement of secular institutions in ecclesiastical matters but also because of the common understanding on all sides of these debates that "faith" was not a purely personal commitment but membership and participation in the congregation of the faithful. The preference of some modern readers to imagine faith apart from the institutions in which it is embodied provides the opening for Aers' examination of Chaucer. He considers the implications of Griselda's unquestioning obedience of Walter in the context of contemporary discussions of faith and ethics, and he places it in contrast to the very different notions of obedience to authority embodied in the Second Nun's Tale. He also examines Chaucer's references to the sacraments. The absence of any allusion to the eucharist, even in the description of the Parson, suggests that Chau-cer's depiction of the church would have been congenial to his Wycliffite acquaintances even though Chaucer makes no pronouncement in favor of Wyclif's cause. The Gawain-poet comes off as rather breezy and superficial in his treatment of issues of faith and eth-ics in Aers' discussion. The heroic figure in Aers' study is Langland, who wrestles in a profound act of faith with the very issues that Aers examines, but who is not exempt from falling into his own contradictions, particularly on social issues, as Aers observes. Aers also finds a deep contradiction in Wyclif's notions of Christian discipleship, particularly for the laity, which he attributes to the theologian's own class interests and to his nationalistic politics. There is much more in these chapters than these few comments reveal, and Aers argues his case with both learning and conviction. The reason for offering even the briefest summary of the other portions of the book here is to give some indication of how Gower comes off by comparison to his contemporaries in Aers' hands, now that the chapter on Gower appears in its proper company. And in that context one has to feel that Aers has simply taken Gower considerably less seriously than he has the others. The contradiction in VC is an easy target, and if Gower does not carve out a sufficiently sophisticated position on church reform, it is also true that the structure of the church is not a central issue in CA. CA is centrally concerned, however, with issues of faith and ethics. In Genius, it gives us a priest who has duties both to God and to a sometimes tyrannical God of Love, and who must therefore mediate between them. In Book 7, moreover, Genius offers a lengthy discussion of the duties owed to secular authority (including unjust authority) and to God. Much of the poem can be read as a lengthy meditation on the sources of moral authority, raising questions that Gower did not reflect on to the same extent in his two earlier long works. Anyone deeply familiar with CA will find repeated echoes of the issues that Gower addresses in the chapters in Aers' book that are not concerned with Gower, and it is a bit of a disappointment to see the poem treated so superficially when its turn finally comes. Aers has a point to make about Gower, but it is a small one, and there is room for much larger. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Aers, David Published Aers, David. "Faith, Ethics and Church: Writing in England, 1360-1409." Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000 ISBN 0-85991-561-1 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Faith, Ethics and Church: Writing in England, 1360-1409 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D.S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Shaw proposes that "coise" (CA 1.1734) = "thing;" and that it is a feminine form of OF coi, quoi, "what," which is used as a substantive to mean "thing" in MO 1781. She also cites Gower's use of "what" to mean "thing" or "person" in CA 1.1676; and concludes that "the unusual diction of this passage argues forcefully for a French source for the 'Tale of Florent'." Shaw provides no other examples, however, of the creation of a feminine noun by the addition of non-etymological -se to a masculine noun, much less to a pronoun (the very lack of gender of which is implied in her own translation), and the pages she cites from Einhorn's Old French: A Concise Handbook do not offer any help. Previewed in JGN 3, no. 2. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Shaw, Judith Davis Published Shaw, Judith Davis. "Etymology of the Middle English 'Coise'." ELN 22.4 (1985), pp. 11-13. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Etymology of the Middle English 'Coise' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985-06. Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Mitchell has an ambitious triple agenda in this engaging study: redeeming medieval morality generally from the charge that it is merely prescriptive and authoritarian (an accusation most often voiced by those who also find it inherently suspect); to offer a poetic of exemplary literature that transcends the assumption that narrative is inevitably hostile to moral principle; and to demonstrate the centrality, and also the consciousness of the potential complexity, both of exemplary rhetoric and of moral practice in Gower and Chaucer. Mitchell's central propositions are first that narrative is necessary to give meaning to moral principle, and that in an exemplum there is therefore a "reciprocal movement between narrativity and normativity" (17); and second, that reception is integral to the exemplary process: that exempla by their very nature are addressed to the reader's future action. For that reason, they must be applied to particular circumstances, and they are thus open to a diversity of responses. "The end of exemplary rhetoric is not to find a determinate moralization or thematic closure," Mitchell declares, "but to discover how to live a moral life" (13-14). He lays out the background to his analysis in his first two chapters. In chapter 1, "Reading for the Moral: Controversies and Trajectories," he responds to what he sees as the modern misreading of medieval exemplary rhetoric, and he cites both medieval and modern theorists in defense of his pragmatic emphasis on reader choice and on moral practice. In chapter 2, "Rhetorical Reason: Cases, Conscience, and Circumstances," he traces the ancestry of the case-based rhetoric of the exempla to its roots in Aristotelian thought, and he cites other medieval examples of a similar flexibility in the application of moral principle, for instance the emphasis laid in the confessional manuals on examining closely the circumstances both of the sinner and of the sin. The remainder of his book explores the adoption of the rhetoric of exemplarity in works of poetry, in two chapters on Gower and three on Chaucer. The first of the chapters on Gower, "Gower for Example: Confessio Amantis and the Measure of the Case," has already appeared, in somewhat revised form and with a slightly different title, as an article in Exemplaria (see JGN 23, no. 2). In it, Mitchell argues that the poem is "comprehensive" but not "coherent": that in its vastness, it offers a wide array of lessons on moral practices in love that are sometimes confusing and even contradictory, and the burden is thus placed upon every reader, as it is upon Amans, to discover the application of each lesson that is most relevant to his own behavior. Genius participates in that effort by the way in which he adapts his lessons to the practices of lovers; Amans participates, for instance, in the way in which he rejects the lessons that seem to have no application whatever to his case. "The exemplary array constitutes something like a horizon of possible outcomes, a taxonomy of cases, a repertoire useful for orienting the moral subject without predetermining final ethical positions in practice" (59). In the end, therefore, "Amans himself must reach his own judgement, find the measure, make meaning – by moving in and among contrastive exempla representing cases in extremis – if he is to figure out what it is good for him to do with his love" (58). Similarly (to borrow a formulation from the next chapter), whatever good the poem itself achieves "will occur outside the poem in the conscience of the reader" (65): "Gower's is an art that provokes the audience to proceed without the promise of coherence. To adapt what has become a favorite medieval motto: Gower provokes us to doubt, so that by doubting we come to questioning, whereby we might arrive at answers. The moral mean-ing rests as much on what readers do as on what the text means" (66). In that next chapter, "All that is Written for our Doctrine: Proof, Remembrance, Conscience," Mitchell first situates his argument with reference to recent discussions of Gower's poetical "authority," which he notes need to be "reconceptualized to include the potentialities of reader response" (63). He then goes on to discuss some of the problems inherent in the key terms of Gower's "ethical poetic" (66). Both "remembrance" and "evidence" occur repeatedly in the poem, and as the exempla themselves demonstrate, each can be either incomplete or misleading. The solution for Gower, Mitchell argues, resides in the notion of "conscience," which in the poet's "ethical empiricism" (78) still bears the burden of moral judgment. When he comes to Chaucer, in his last three chapters, Mitchell is obviously less concerned with dispelling the poet's reputation for moral sententiousness than he is in Gower's case. He argues instead the very importance of the ethical dimension of Chaucer's work and of the poet's engagement with, rather than dismissal of, the impact of his tales upon the ethical choices of his readers. After surveying the pervasiveness of the exemplary mode in CT, including but certainly not limited to such instances as 2NT and Mel, he focuses on what he calls the "problematic cases" (84) – the tales of the Wife of Bath, Friar, Summoner, Pardoner, and Clerk – in order to examine how Chaucer both explores and exemplifies exemplary practice. The Wife of Bath confronts the antifeminist exempla of her husband's book of "wicked wives" with an exemplary rhetoric of her own that is grounded in a literalist hermeneutic, drawn from her own experience. "By trading on the inherent flexibility of the rhetoric[,] the Wife of Bath effectively reminds us that exempla are amenable to diverse applications. An applied ethics, exemplary morality exists to be reinvented in practice" (93). The Friar, Summoner, and Pardoner are each shown abusing exemplary morality for personal and private ends, and each is also guilty of the sins that he preaches against (and in the first two cases, attributes to another). As studies in the abuse of exemplary rhetoric, each reaffirms rather than undermines the value of exemplary instruction since we perceive their faults ironically by means of their own exempla. "Chaucer creates figures who become . . . their own best worst examples" (111). "At last, these pilgrims are 'bad' only because their exempla are 'good'" (110). In that respect, Mitchell suggests, the Pardoner's performance – in which he himself serves as exemplum – may be more effective than the Parson's. ClT, finally, problematizes exemplary instruction by offering too many, often conflicting, moral lessons. The necessity of choosing a single moral for the tale, Mitchell argues, is itself a moral decision. The tale itself is thus a "parable of exemplarity" (129): in forcing us to choose one reading to the exclusion of others, "the tale draws its audience to a pointed recognition of what is at stake, in the face of the dilemma, every time moral application is sought in the futurity of decision" (ibid.). The tale's "undecidability" is thus "a call to responsibility" (130). Mitchell is both subtle and refreshingly iconoclastic, and even if one does not accept every detail of his readings, he offers a persuasive demonstration of a rich range of possibilities in what might all too easily be seen as a limited and transparent form. Much of what he says has implications reaching far beyond Chaucer and Gower, and his examination of CA opens up some interesting new ways of seeing the work. [PN Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 24.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Mitchell, J. Allan Published Mitchell, J. Allan. "Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower." Chaucer Studies Series (33). Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, Limited, 2004 ISBN 1843840197 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Boydell & Brewer, Limited, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Siân Echard's essay is concerned with the relationship between the design of the MSS of CA and what it can imply about the reception and reading of Gower's work. Echard focuses on four MSS, including two deluxe copies, British Library, MS Harley 7184 (Macaulay's H3) and MS Egerton 1991 (E), and two plainer copies, London, College of Arms, MS Arundel 45 (Ar) and Cambridge, St. John's College, MS B.12 (J). In her comparison, she considers such elements as the hierarchy of script, the use of capitals, the color and placement of the Latin verses and glosses, the number and placement of speaker markers, the appearance of other marginal indications of textual divisions, and the use of borders and miniatures. In considering the effects of each of these on how the poem was read, she asks some of the same questions that Richard Emmerson poses in his recent essay in SAC (see JGN 19, no. 1, pp. 5-8), but she takes into account a far wider variety of features and she is also far more conscious of the uniqueness of each copy. She is consequently rather less dogmatic in her conclusions and hypothesizes a wider variety of ways in which these copies might have been used by their earliest readers. In the more ornate copies, appearance seems to be given much more importance than assisting the reader either in understanding or in finding her place in the text, while some at least of the plainer copies seem to be better suited for actual reading. The possibility of public reading by professional "prelectors" (using Joyce Coleman's term) as opposed to purely private reading complicates the matter and makes it more difficult to draw any hard and fast conclusions about the intended purpose, particularly of the more richly decorated copies. Echard also points to features that give greater or lesser attention to the Latin portions of the text and different relative weight to the stories and the frame, but her conclusion is appropriately open-ended. "The manuscripts," she writes, "may be telling us a great deal that we have not yet heard about the reading of Gower's poem" (p. 72). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân Published Echard, Siân. "Designs for Reading: Some Manuscripts of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." Trivium 31 (1999), pp. 59-72. 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 Designs for Reading: Some Manuscripts of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower's brief tale of Dante's rebuke of a flatterer (CA *7.2329-37), while unique in its emphasis on the power of flattery, appears to combine elements from two different previously existing anecdotes, one (as told by Petrarch, usually cited as Gower's source) recounting Dante's reply to Cangrande regarding which servant is more pleasing, playing upon the similarity between the lord and the fool that he has rewarded, and another, originally told of Marco Lombardo (see Purg. XVI), invoking a difference in material rewards and addressing the rebuke to the fool himself. Sarantino surveys and reprints the most important surviving examples of each tradition (almost all Italian), noting the several points at which they intersect. Because of the difficulty of explaining Gower's access to any of these written texts, the most economical and therefore most likely explanation of Gower's immediate source, she concludes, is an oral tradition in which the elements of the two anecdotes had already been combined, and while it requires some adjustment in our understanding of the dating of the "second recension," she proposes that one possible conduit for the oral tradition was the party of Henry of Derby, who passed through northern Italy on his return from Jerusalem in 1393. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 25.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Tarantino, Elisabetta Published Tarantino, Elisabetta. "The Dante Anecdote in Gower's Confessio Amantis, Book VII." Chaucer Review 39.4 (2005), pp. 420-435. ISSN 0009-2002 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Dante Anecdote in Gower's Confessio Amantis, Book VII Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Penn State University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Lochrie, Karma Published Lochrie, Karma. "Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy." Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999 ISBN 0812234731 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Lochrie's discussion of CA – headed "Confessio Amantis and the Limits of Heterosexuality" – is the final section of her book on the uses of secrecy in the Middle Ages and stands as the conclusion of her final chapter on "Sodomy and Other Female Perversions." Both book and chapter pursue very broad agendas. For an overview of the book's complex argument see the review by Sarah Beckwith in SAC 22 (2000): 503-7. The chapter is primarily concerned with the construction of gender and sexuality both in the Middle Ages and in our own time, particularly of normative heterosexuality and its perceived opposites. Lochrie works to expose the incoherence of western heteronormative ideologies, and this is where Gower fits in. She makes the most of the many disjunctions between narrative and morality that others have detected in CA in order to argue the instability of the entire framework upon which the poem's morality is based. In particular, she focuses on the contradictions in Gower's ideology of the "natural" and the "unnatural," with what she sees as the consequent regular eruption of the perverse into what is presented as normative natural love. The contradictions begin, of course, with the opening epigram of Book 1 and continue in Genius' attempts to label and categorize the incestuous relations of Canace and Machaire and of Antiochus and his daughter. The category of the natural itself is revealed to be "incoherent, contradictory, and discontinuous," she concludes (p. 209) – she evidently does not consider "paradoxical" – and a token of the incoherencies of Gower's ideology as a whole. She examines particular examples: in Book 4, the tales of sloth in love result in a reversal of gender roles which is corrected to some extent in the tale of Pygmaleon, but not before they have also produced a denial of Genius' oft repeated declarations of the irresistible force of love. In the same book, Iphis and Iante's relationship renders the role of Nature even more confusing than the tales of incest do, and in Book 5, "Achilles and Deidamia," in which Achilles impregnates Deidamia while still posing as a girl and is restored to his proper masculinity only by the call to arm himself for battle, further problematizes normative gender roles. Other tales in Book 5 trivialize crimes against women. The disjunction between tale and morality, she finds, is also reflected in the poem's conclusion, where Amans' forced abandonment of love renders virtually pointless all of the previous instruction. The description of the division of the world in the Prologue – modeled as it is upon divisions inherent in Nature – suggests, moreover, the impossibility of the moral stability that Amans is told to seek as Venus dismisses him at the end. In conclusion, she writes, "The confusion of natural categories throughout the work and the misfitting of theological categories of sins to the subject of courtly love point to problems in both, regardless of Gower's intentions. . . . Heterosexual love in its idealized form as courtly love both contains the perverse and is already perverted into those 'unnatural' forms that nature seems to permit, including incest, same-sex love, rape, and self-love. The bland moralizing that glosses over these blatant perversions of medieval gender and sexual ideology only calls attention to the problem. . . . What is useful is the way in which Genius's instruction exposes the perverse within the normative and the very instability of the normative itself" (223). But "For all its perversions, Gower's text is not finally subversive" (224). "The perversion that is heterosexual, courtly love as it has been codified in the Confessio clearly serves the narrative of masculine chivalric heroism . . . . Because the perverse functions to authorize vital cultural myths and ideals, such as those of love and masculine heroine, it is not only implicated in those ideals but it is essential to them" (earlier on the same page). [PN. Copyright by the John Gower Society. JGN 20.2] 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 Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Pennsylvania Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Unlike Gower's other poems, the moralizing in CA is presented not as a direct address to the reader but dramatically, in the dialogue between Genius and Amans. This fictional dialogue is as important to the moral and imaginative dimensions of the poem as the pilgrimage that serves as the setting for CT. Amans' presence allowed Gower to shift the emphasis from purely abstract moralizing to the difficulties of an individual sinner's real experience. The poem thus presents a genuine exploration of the relationship between general moral truth and the realities of human endeavor. An examination of Book 1 provides a demonstration of Gower's method, in particular of Amans' importance as the object of Genius' lessons. As the first book of the poem it also provides a summary of the essential points in Gower's complex and sympathetic doctrine of human love.[PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter Published Nicholson, Peter. "'Confession' in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Studia Neophilologica 58 (1986), pp. 193-204. ISSN 0039-3274 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 'Confession' in Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Routledge, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Chaucer's poetry is pervaded by his deep concerns for contemporary political and social issues; he is dismayed by the materialism and loss of spiritual values of his contemporaries; and he hopes through his writing to bring about a transformation in the commonwealth. The themes are familiar, but Olson is writing about Chaucer, not about Gower; and though Gower is cited only peripherally, the subtlety and clarity of Olson's argument may prompt a renewed look at what has become one of the chestnuts of Gower criticism. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Olson, Paul A. Published Olson, Paul A.. "Canterbury Tales and the Good Society." Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986 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 Canterbury Tales and the Good Society Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Princeton University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This essay actually has little to say about Gower but it is included here because it shows up as pertaining to Gower in the periodical indexes, e.g. MLA's. It appears in this issue of CL as one of a group of essays on "Teaching Medieval Women." In teaching MLT, Rose uses the comparison to Trevet's version, which she considers Chaucer's "primary" source (157), in order to uncover how Chaucer has constructed his version of the story. What she finds is that Chaucer's principal alterations are all "gender- and power-related" (159) and that "Chaucer has systematically disempowered his heroine 'Custance,' and made her more 'feminized' (here read 'passive') and more reliant upon the power of God for her authority and her worldly fortune" (158). In the main part of her essay she demonstrates the validity of this reading by examining selected excerpts from MLT and from Trevet, taken from her own forthcoming edition of the early fifteenth-century English prose translation of his work. Gower is thus very much on the periphery. Rose assumes that Chaucer used Gower's version too, but "the changes Chaucer made to Trevet highlighted in this essay as sites of feminist inquiry about how the poet writes about a Christian woman overcoming a pagan world are not in Gower's work" (173). When she does suggest to her students an examination of Gower's version, she describes it as "streamlined and straightforward" where Chaucer's is "rhetorically complex," and as shaped by Gower's intention to provide an exemplum on Envy (160; also 173). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 20.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rose, Christine M. Published Rose, Christine M.. "Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale: Teaching Through the Sources." College Literature 28 (2001), pp. 155-77. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale: Teaching Through the Sources Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available West Chester University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review One of the more intriguing recent developments in the study of the text of CA was the unexpected reappearance a couple of years ago of one of the seventeen missing leaves of the "Stafford" MS (Huntington Library Ellesmere 26.A.17). First announced in Quaritch catalog 1270 (pp. 37-40, including a color photograph of the recto), the leaf was acquired by Professor Toshiyuki Takamiya of Keio University, and Takamiya and Edwards have now provided a fuller description of the leaf, including a transcription. The sixth of the MS's missing leaves, it originally stood between ff. 68 and 69 of the present pagination, and contained lines 2351-2530 of Book 4. It has been cropped on the inner edge and at the bottom for use in the binding of a smaller book, with the result that about a quarter to a third of each line of text is now missing in the first column of the recto, a few letters are lost in about half the lines in the second column of the verso, and ten lines of text have been cut away at the bottom of each column. Whatever Latin marginalia there might have been have also disappeared. The leaf has also suffered some wearing and abrasion, particularly on the verso, so that several words are now rather indistinct. On the whole, though, it is exactly what one expects of Stafford: a clean, nearly error-free text that follows almost letter for letter that of the Fairfax MS which served as Macaulay's base. I'm sorry to have to note, in that regard, that Edwards' and Takamiya's transcription contains a few errors: 2360 e MS boe; 2362 vv. 4 experetuata MS [p]erpetuata (the authors have mistaken the descender of an f in the preceding line for an abbreviation stroke); 2370 whilome MS whilom; 2396 Than MS Cham; 2408 Pantules MS Pantulf; ffrigidisses MS ffrigidilles; 2420 physique MS physique; 2439 ons MS ous; 2440 labourerer MS labourrer; 2443 mankind MS mankinde; 2444 boke MS bokes; 2449 metal MS metall; 2461 eke MS ek; 2485 Author/Editor Author/Editor Quaritch, Bernard Published Quaritch, Bernard. "Bookhands of the Middle Ages: VI. Medieval Manuscripts: Leaves and Binding Fragments." : Bernard Quaritch, Ltd., 2000 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 Bookhands of the Middle Ages: VI. Medieval Manuscripts: Leaves and Binding Fragments Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Bernard Quaritch, Ltd., Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "During the final decades of the fourteenth century in England, as Lollards attempted to disseminate theological materials to the masses and rebellious peasants appropriated polemics for their own designs, the role of vernacular literature became a matter of paramount importance. This dissertation argues that Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales in part as a reaction to John Gower's conservative conception of vernacular literature in Confessio Amantis. I contend that Gower, who throughout his career aligned himself with the interests of society's empowered, attempted to create a vernacular work meant only for the elite. His text reaffirms the legitimacy of the social order by creating a fictional situation in which submission to an authority, Genius, makes one hale. Throughout the Confessio, Gower maintains that society will flourish only when people know their place. Gower's work, which relies on the exegetical tradition, attempts to preclude interpretive variety, for such variety, the poet realized, could prove dangerous to the status quo. I propose that Chaucer, in contrast, anticipates that a diverse audience might access his work and, therefore, creates a text encouraging interpretive autonomy. . . ." [JGN 24.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Behrman, Mary Davy Published Behrman, Mary Davy. "Chaucer, Gower and the vox populi: Interpretation and the common profit in the 'Canterbury Tales' and 'Confessio Amantis'." PhD thesis, Emory University, 2004. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer, Gower and the vox populi: Interpretation and the common profit in the 'Canterbury Tales' and 'Confessio Amantis' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available UMI, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation investigates how, in the wake of the English Rising of 1381, John Gower's Confessio Amantis addressed the highest ranks of non-ruling urban groups, ranks which produced numerous rebels. Using a methodology in dialogue with British Cultural Studies, this project argues that the Confessio worked to reshape the consciousness of readers from these strata, proposing to alter the ways in which they conceptualized their agency, interests, allies, and overall identities. This is the first study of the Confessio to examine an early readership from non-ruling groups or to consider readers who had participated in or sympathized with the uprising. Chapter One challenges claims that only ruling groups comprised the poem's earliest readership and explains that the upper strata of non-ruling urban groups (roughly, middle-rank guild members, including prosperous retailers and artisans) were in the Confessio's audiences from 1390 to 1425. This chapter examines studies of early Confessio manuscripts and their circulation but focuses primarily on the access of the upper strata of non-ruling urban groups to literacy and on their consumption of texts. Chapter Two argues that the Confessio's rendition of Nebuchadnezzar's dream represents history as a homogeneous mass and as a teleological progression into ruin. Through these contradictory models, the Confessio proposed to alter the terms in which readers understood how history happens, experienced their relation to the past and future, conceptualized their agency and identities, and understood their connections to the uprising and to insurrection in general. The third chapter argues that, through the grace of higher powers, the protagonist undergoes a rite of passage, improving his understanding, morality, and spirituality. The poem offers readers a similar gift, through its learned, textual tradition. The Confessio thus distinguishes informed men from the masses, thereby policing debates about England's problems, while fostering identifications between readers and higher ranks and encouraging contempt for lower ranks. Chapter Four holds that the Confessio's claims about popular insurrection echo the Vox Clamantis. However, the poems' overall approaches to the uprising differ radically, as their strategies were shaped by disparities between England's political terrain in 1381 and in the years immediately thereafter. Author/Editor Author/Editor Arner, Lynn Patricia Published Arner, Lynn Patricia. "Burying the Dead: John Gower and English Rising of 1381." PhD thesis, University of Rochester, 2000. 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 Burying the Dead: John Gower and English Rising of 1381. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Dissertation Abstracts International, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Cherniss' chapter on CA (pp. 99-118) is for the most part a reprint of his essay on "The Allegorical Figures in Gower's Confessio Amantis," Res Publica Litterarum, 1 (1978), 7-20. In the earlier essay Cherniss outlined the roles of Venus, Nature, and Reason in the poem and gave particular attention to the difficulties posed by Genius, especially to what he saw as his shifting relationship to Venus in Books 7 and 8. He also presented his view of the ending of the poem as "arbitrary and unsatisfactory," creating an ad hoc resolution for a particular old man rather than a final reconciliation of the forces the various allegorical figures represent, and requiring the acquiescence of Nature and Venus, thus contradicting the doctrine of individual responsibility expressed in the Prologue. The expanded version adds a discussion of the poem as a "Boethian Apocalypse," emphasizing the elements that link it to and make it different from the other medieval poems that make up a single tradition deriving from the De Consolatione Philosophiae. Cherniss points out how Venus and Genius share the role of Boethian authority figure and he describes Amans as a "prototypical Boethian narrator" whose consciousness is the focus of the poem. Gower's innovation (as noted by Lewis) was the transfer of the confession from the goddess of the vision to the visionary narrator himself. Gower's poem is more static than most works in the genre, however, because of the difficulty of marking the progress of the argument and the development of the narrator's consciousness within the confession frame, which is weakened by the many long tales and by the long expository sections. A problem of a different sort is created by the Prologue. "The decorum of the Boethian Apocalypse demands that the reader experience the visionary process of enlightenment along with the narrator," but the Prologue reveals not only the problem but also the solution before the poem has even begun, and Gower's attempt to start again at the opening of Book 1 is at best clumsy. Readers of CA will also want to look at Cherniss' chapters on DCP, De Planctu Naturae, RR, PF, Pearl, BD, The Kingis Quair, and The Testament of Cresseid. Previewed in JGN, 5, no. 2. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cherniss, Michael D. Published Cherniss, Michael D.. "Boethian Apocalypse: Studies in Middle English Vision Poetry." Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1987 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 Boethian Apocalypse: Studies in Middle English Vision Poetry Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pilgrim Books, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Bakalian, Ellen Shaw Published Bakalian, Ellen Shaw. "Aspects of Love in John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Studies in Medieval History and Culture. . New York: Routledge, 2004 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review "Modifying nature, keeping one's natural instincts under reason's control, and learning to love properly is a duty which Genius tries to teach Amans in John Gower's Confessio Amantis," Bakalian begins (xvii), and she explores Gower's presentation of this theme in four chapters. In the first, she outlines the background to Gower's depiction of the struggle between Nature and Reason, and she uses the tales of "Albinus and Rosemund" and "Pyramus and Thisbe" as illustrations of two types of loss of reason and their consequences. Chapter two takes up the tales of the four virtuous wives who appear in the Company of Lovers in Amans' vision in Book 8, Penelope, Lucrece, Alceste, and Alceone. In each, the husbands and wives "enjoy a mutual and reciprocal love, and in their marriages reason tempers sexual passion; hence their worlds exude peace and harmony" (xviii). In chapter three, Bakalian examines for contrast the tales of Deianira, Medea, Dido, Phyllis, and Ariadne, who love imprudently (in three of the five cases outside of marriage), and who suffer the consequences. Ruled by kinde rather than reason, they "live in a world ruled by discordia, revenge, destruction, and death" (xix). The final chapter examines lovesickness as an example of the loss of reason and compares Amans' condition to that described in medieval medical handbooks and to the lovesickness depicted by Chaucer and Ovid. If the emphasis on reason as the proper guide of conduct in CA is not new, there are few studies that undertake to explain as patiently or in as great detail how Gower incorporates this principle into the structure of his exempla. In emphasizing the moral lessons of the individual tales, moreover, Bakalian's study is a valuable reminder of how much the poem has to say about conduct in love that is not encompassed within Amans' abandonment of love (or is it abandonment by love?) in the poem's conclusion. Her principal method is close reading, and she displays a particular sensitivity to the emotional impact of Gower's sometimes spare lines, particularly in the poet's depiction of conjugal tenderness and happy married love. She also displays a particular alertness to the moral choices faced by the women in the tales, and in fact one begins to suspect, as one considers the tales that she has chosen as her examples and the way in which she focuses on the female characters in each, that this book either evolved from or was evolving towards a study of Gower's depiction of women. One of Bakalian's principal recurring themes is the moral responsibility that women bear for their own decisions. As she summarizes this aspect of her discussion in her conclusion: "Gower's poetry often defies the feminist theory which places woman as victim and man as perpetrator. In the Confessio he is neither partial to man nor woman, and although it appears his sympathies lie with women, it is rather that he views woman as man's equal; if he is responsible for his actions, then so is she. Gower's unique insistence upon equality in the Confessio proves this point: man cannot blame woman, and woman cannot blame man" (153). The chapter in which the theme of woman's moral responsibility emerges most strongly is the third, and this is also the chapter that may give most pause to some readers. Deianira, Dido, and Phyllis are usually not blamed for the fact that their lovers left them, but Bakalian wants us to believe that they were the victims of their own lack of prudence as much as they were of their lovers' deceit and that their abandonment is also the appropriate consequence of their remaining unmarried. These are new readings that deserve consideration, but I doubt that all will be convinced, especially since the explicit moral lesson in each case is directed elsewhere. Ariadne's fault is even harder to find since she is married, as is Medea, whose principal "crime" occurs only at the end of the tale, and it is condemned neither by Genius nor by the gods. There is other evidence of strain as Bakalian makes her argument. Her treatment of "Albinus and Rosemund" is perhaps a best attempt to deal with a very problematic exemplum, but I think that she simply misreads the tale of Penelope and Ulysses in Book 4. She is not alone here, but instead of a condemnation of Ulysses' sloth, doesn't the tale instead commend his ability to fulfill his duties both in war and at home, in contrast to the preceding example of Eneas? Though this is a small book, moreover (159 pages of text, plus notes and introduction), Bakalian betrays a wish to incorporate everything that she has read, with the result that she doesn't always take a clear stand on some general issues of direct relevance to her case. She never faces the ambiguities of Nature's role in CA, for instance, at times offering moral guidance and at times needing to be restrained by Reason. She also never gives a clear statement of Genius' role, throwing up her hands on the question in note 79 to page 115, and then on pages 129-30, declaring even less helpfully: "[Genius] may be the priest of Venus, but he is also the voice of rational judgments, advocating the use of reason as man's best defense against foolish love errors, and recommending married love over amorous pursuits without a marriage license. Gower's Genius is a character in whom pagan, Christian and Gowerian philosophies meet, yet he is not a reliable authority figure." And in chapter 4, the extensive discussion of the symptoms and treatment of lovesickness (drawn in large part from Mary Wack's very useful compilation) proves more instructive on Troilus (for the way in which his condition transcends the merely medical) than it does for Amans. Hard questions still remain. If Amans cannot help being in love (because of Nature), then how is he himself to blame? His love is unreasonable, Bakalian insists, but the only real evidence that she cites is that it is unreciprocated, another fact for which Amans himself is hardly responsible. He is old, but his age only becomes relevant in the conclusion, where it serves not as proof of his foolishness but as the means of his release: he is "cured," Bakalian acknowledges, not by his own reason but by another external force beyond his control. The questions I raise here remain some of the largest unresolved issues in our reading of the poem, and it doesn't strengthen Bakalian's case, either on the precise role of reason in CA or on the nature of a woman's choices, that she skirts them. She does, however, have some interesting new perspectives on the particular tales that she considers that might eventually be incorporated within a more general understanding of the poem. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 23.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Aspects of Love in John Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Routledge, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Amans' identification of himself as "John Gower" at the end of CA is "a powerfully unsettling manoeuvre" that "heavily qualifies our ability to regard author, narrator, and lover as either stable or distinct categories," Butterfield writes (80). Gower also plays with the identity of the author in the "outer frame" of the work, including the Latin verse and glosses and the rubrics and illustrations on the page. "The multiple articulations of Gower in Confessio Amantis present John Gower as Latin, English, auctor, commentator, narrator, and amans, with several of these voicings occurring simultaneously on any one page" (82). Butterfield situates Gower's interrogation of the nature of authorship within the context of similar investigations occurring in the manuscript tradition of French vernacular works of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. She compares the revelation of Amans' identity and age, together with the famous problem of whether to represent Amans as a young lover or as an old man in the illustration that appears at or near the beginning of Book 1, to the "intricate web of confusion that Jean [de Meun] throws over his role as author [of the Roman de la Rose]" (84). But "while Jean is revealing a difference between two distinct authors, the Confessio explores this distinction within the tighter frame of a 'single' author. The doubt that grows in our minds as we watch Amans's face growing old is a kind of compressed version of that which we experience in the Rose: the doubleness involved in a single author choosing, with deceptive clarity, to lay bare his mechanism of pretence" (84). She cites Gui de Mori's compilation of a composite RR and a manuscript of Le Roman de Fauvel as examples of explorations of "the idea of authorship as coterminous with the sense of a work as a whole, and hence, with the work's physical length" (87) and of how "the author-figure was transformed into an agent of control over the material form of the book" (88) several decades before the better known example of Machaut. She also considers the ways in which fourteenth-century vernacular authors such as Machaut, Froissart, and the anonymous compiler of the Trésor Amoureux refer to their own roles in the prologues and rubrics to their works. She draws several conclusions regarding Gower. His speaker markers, first of all, "are very much part of a developing tradition in French of giving dramatic voice to the different elements of a first-person narrative," but since they are in Latin rather than in English, "Gower does not explore the power of the rubric to create a growing recognition of the vernacular author in the vernacular" (93-94). "Gower's decision to add a Latin layer to his own authorial compilation," moreover, "ranks as rare and distinctive even in the broader context of European vernacular writing" (94). "Like Machaut and Froissart before him, Gower makes use, not only of the Prologue, but also of the form of the explanatory rubric, to announce himself as author" (95). He extends these with the Latin prose and verse that usually follow the "Explicit." "Here, Gower is named three times in a final flourish, in which his principal works are named, catalogued, and described. Gower, the author, thus gains articulation through a wide variety of locations on the page. . . . Gower appears to be experimenting with different locations for authorship. . . . [and] there seems to be a desire to investigate the possibilities of meaning in these various sites" (95-96). "Gower emerges from this study of French precedents," finally, "as remarkably, perhaps unexpectedly, original. . . . Gower's use of Latin, far from being a sign of conservatism in any simple sense, seems rather a strikingly distinctive means of investigating the complex guises under which authorship was emerging in the books of vernacular writers. It is possible to understand it, in other words, not merely as a means of affirming his auctoritas, of lending gravity and cultural seriousness to his writing, but rather as a voice in a much larger dialogue, embracing vernacular as well as Latin, in which authorship is newly figured" (96). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 23.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Butterfield, Ardis Published Butterfield, Ardis. "Articulating the Author: Gower and the French Vernacular Codex." Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003), pp. 80-96. 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 Articulating the Author: Gower and the French Vernacular Codex Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Burrow does not give a detailed account of CA in this book, referring instead to his own earlier essay in Minnis' Responses and Reassessments (1983), but his remarks on Gower's debt to earlier writers, on the uniqueness of his treatment of Amans' old age, and on his later influence are worth reading again in the context of his general treatment of the "ages of man" in medieval literature. "More than any other medieval poem known to me," he writes, "Confessio Amantis conveys what it must feel like to be 'senex amans' which is much the same as what it feels like to be any other sort of lover" (pp. 160-61). Burrow also adds another text to the list of Gower's sources, the fourteenth-century French poem Les Douze Mois figurez, to which he attributes Amans' comparison of the stages of his life to the twelve months of the year, CA 8.2837- 41. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burrow, J.A. Published Burrow, J.A.. "Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought." Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986 ISBN 0198117558 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 Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Clarendon Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book NonPeerReviewed