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 As Nicholson points out in a prefatory note (185), his essay responds to Derek Pearsall, "Early Revision in the Text of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,'" JEBS 24, continuing a conversation interrupted by Pearsall's death. "The question before us," Nicholson notes, "is whether the passages in Books 5, 6, and 7 that distinguish MSS S [San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS EL 26.A.17] and P [Princeton University, Firestone Library, Robert H. Taylor Collection, Medieval MS 5] were in Gower's earliest manuscript and later deleted, as Derek Pearsall has proposed, or later additions to as text more like that of A [Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902], as Macaulay presumed" (187). Nicholson comes down on the Macaulay side: ". . . every indication that we find either in the text or in the manuscripts does point to the same conclusion: that Gower revised his poem by making short, selective additions to what was still a fluid portion of the text, and that as Macaulay believed, the shortest of the surviving versions is thus the earliest" (196). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter. Published Nicholson, Peter. "Gower's Early Revisions Revisited." Journal of the Early Book Society 25 (2022): 185-99. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Early Revisions Revisited. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Allen-Goss charts the history of the Philomela narrative from its classical origins, in which the woven tapestry she uses to betray Tereus's crime is the central story. She examines how the tapestry and weaving more generally are conflated with women's speech, suggesting that "the textile is a form of 'écriture feminine,' woman's art, which writes back against the patriarchal narrative of violence" (81). Medieval readers would have been "textile-conscious" and thus she argues that "as weaving, Philomela's testimony offers crucial new possibilities for the interpretation of rape testimony, offering a model concentrated upon recuperative expression for the rape survivor rather than a performative or exploitable 'breaking of silence'" (83). In Gower's version of this tale, she concludes, "the display of rhetorical skill and erudition . . . works to discredit Philomela's emotional testimony amongst the very group of readers with the greatest social and legal capital: Latin-literate men" (84). Allen-Goss offers insightful close readings of Gower's text in support of this claim before then moving into an analysis of Chaucer's version of the tale. She focuses on Philomela's weaving during her imprisonment and how the rough, coarse material she weaves mirrors Philomela's state of being in the tale. Furthermore, this larger-scale tapestry, weaving, and memory all interplay to produce a lasting and communal form of testimony. [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Allen-Goss, Lucy M. Published Allen-Goss, Lucy M. "Dismembered Memories: Philomela in Chaucer and Gower." Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature, edited by Sarah Baechle, Carissa M. Harris, and Elizaveta Strakhov. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022. Pp. 80-96. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Dismembered Memories: Philomela in Chaucer and Gower Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bentick explores the conceptualization of vernacular English poetry depicting alchemy during the medieval and early modern period, arguing that alchemy's mystical reputation lingers because "its literature is not only read by . . . those who have the chemical acumen to decipher its operations, but it is also read by . . . interested readers who would not have the faintest idea how to [interpret the art]" (2). In Chapter 2 he claims that Gower's understanding of alchemy was influenced by the ideologies of late medieval alchemists such as Roger Bacon and pseudo-Ramon Lull (64). In his analysis of "Mirour de l'omme," "Vox Clamantis," and the "Confessio Amantis," Bentick further suggests that Gower's image of alchemy is "rooted in ideas of the microcosm/macrocosm and inextricably linked to social improvement" (64). According to Bentick, the CA in particular "sits in a tradition that sees a template for social reform in the transformative power of the alchemical promise" (16). For Gower, human sin is entangled with the mutability of the sublunary world, and both division and change emerge as symptomatic of this postlapsarian decline (67). In Gower's time, successful and noble alchemists are of a bygone era, and "it is the degenerated wits of his age that abuse the 'trewe' science of alchemy with their ignorance and fraudulence" (73). As Bentick puts it, "Gower was interested in how alchemists could rid the world of impurities and imprint something more noble onto raw materials," which he links to the notion of humankind as microcosm (76). Despite its failings in contemporary times, however, "alchemy proves to Gower that if people were as intellectually busy as those who preceded him, then the world could be improved" (82). Bentick concludes that "Gower did not think himself up to the task of understanding alchemy and yet his belief in the possibility of doing so gave him [ . . . ] hope in the possibility of reform" (169), which in turn helped to popularize vernacular poems about alchemy among lay communities in the late medieval and early modern period. [CR. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bentick, Eoin. Published Bentick, Eoin. Literatures of Alchemy in Medieval and Early Modern England. Rochester, NY : D.S. Brewer, 2022. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Mirour de l'Omme Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Literatures of Alchemy in Medieval and Early Modern England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Unlike many, Donavin's title helpfully outlines her areas of concern, and argument. Rhetoric--figures, modes and impact of instruction of "artes dictaminis" especially--has ever been a primary focus, and here she brings her extensive knowledge to bear on Gower's work, devoting the first chapter to "Gower's 'Rhethorique'," chapter four to "Epistles and Rhetorical Experimentation, Part I: Contexts and Practices," and five to "Epistles and Rhetorical Experimentation, Part II: Music and Letters in the Trentham Manuscript." "Biblical ethos" takes two broad forms: 1) a back-and-forth identification of "John" in the "Vox Clamantis" and Amans/Gower in the "Confessio" variously with John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, primarily in chapter two ("My Name is John. Biblical Ethos and Apocalyptic Narrative"), although this remains a major source of interpretation throughout, particularly guiding her reading of the VC Book I ("Visio Anglie") and the denouement of CA Book VIII; and 2) a claim for Gower's "unusual" devotion to the Virgin, traced through the "Mirour de l'Omme" and the CA (chapter three: "'Virgo bona dicendi perita.' The Good Maiden Speaking Well," and chapter six, "The 'hortus conclusus' in Gower's Poems"). A "coda"--"Renaissance Receptions of Gower's 'Repetitio'"--brings a detailed look at Chicago, Newberry Library, MS 33.5 and Jonson's "English Grammar," complementing the final section of chapter three which offers remarks on the character Marina in Shakespeare's "Pericles," and fulfilling the title's promise of "Renaissance Receptions." [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Donavin, Georgiana. Published Donavin, Georgiana. John Gower's Rhetoric: Classical Authority, Biblical Ethos, and Renaissance Receptions. Turnhout: Brepols, 2022. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Mirour de l'Omme Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower's Rhetoric: Classical Authority, Biblical Ethos, and Renaissance Receptions. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân. Published Echard, Siân. "John Gower." In Raluca Radulescu and Sif Rikhardsdottir, eds. The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature. New York: Routledge, 2022. Pp. 289-99. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Minor Latin Poetry Language and Word Studies Review Echard opens her introduction to Gower's poetry with comments on the Portuguese and Castilian translations of the "Confessio Amantis" as evidence that "the English poet found an interested audience" (289) abroad in Europe, remarking in her conclusion that "he would, I imagine, have been glad" that the CA "made it across the sea" (297). Taken out of context in this way, Echard's remark is unremarkable, but she continues more resoundingly in her closing: "A trilingual poet who aspires to match the authors of old requires an international and transhistorical audience, but Gower seems profoundly aware that exchanges of all sorts could have negative effects . . . . [H]is work is threaded through with exchanges between past and present, between authors old and new, and between lands and peoples. He is self-consciously England's poet; he is equally self-consciously one who can speak to the larger world, however ambivalent he may be about the mechanisms of exchange" (297). Throughout her essay, Echard focuses on Gower's ambitious trilinguality, and on his uses of English and Englishness in CA in relation to the prestige of French and, especially, Latin. She broadens these out to analysis of thematic and formal concerns with localization and expansion, particularity and generality--to "the idea that [in CA] apparent marginalization of English comes from, or intersects with, a tension between the local and the universal" (291). The complex coherence of Echard's demonstration is difficult to describe briefly, so I offer sample insights from her rich variety instead. She clarifies how the "particularly localised" Ricardian version of the CA Prologue capitalizes on the generalizing implications of London as "newe Troye," and how the Henrician version--offered as a book for England--frames the universalizing "exemplary narratives with an explicitly English location," each version bracketing Gower's tales in English with complementary Latin (292-93). Although it is only in some copies of CA, Echard shows us that "Quam cinxere freta" presents Gower as "England's own poet," "exemplifies the productive tension between universality and particularity," and reflects "Gowerian anxiety" about assured posterity (293). For Echard, the Tale of Constance "is a negotiation of English and Roman identities" that "invokes an explicitly English past" (294), while the tales of Constance and of Apollonius together, "at the beginning and end" of CA, "use overseas travel to work through issues relating to identity, to the intersection of the particular, localised origin with a world of contact and exchange" (295). In light of these (and others) of Echard's observations, I have little doubt that Gower would have been glad that CA made it across the sea--and also glad to have Siân Echard as a reader. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Knox contends, sweepingly, that the "Roman de la Rose" was responsible for "modernizing" poetry in England: introducing would-be writers from "aristocratic communities" (36) like Chaucer, Gower, the author of "Gawain"--even Langland--to a sophisticated form of satire, new attitudes toward sexual desire and Latin literature, to the concept, in fact, of being a poet in the Classical tradition. He makes much of the "Valentine" poems written by Chaucer, Gower, and Oton de Graunson, suggesting that they formed a "network of literary interactions" (64) to produce them. With a nod to its roots in the "'Chartrian' allegories," Knox contends that the "Confessio Amantis" came about via the "Rose": "It was in the 'Rose' that [Gower] found a way of combining a love narrative with an encyclopaedic (or anti-encyclopaedic) discussion of myth, history, and philosophy, with an examination of nature and desire at its core" (115). "Gower . . . exemplifies the importance of the 'Rose' for making available a heightened literary mode of learned philosophical or cosmological poetry. He reveals what is disturbing or threatening about how the 'Rose' has intervened in this tradition, but also what is enabling" (116). As evidence Knox provides a close reading of one tale, "Iphis and Iante," from Book IV (118-20); he argues further that in combination Amans-Gower's withdrawal from love at the end of the CA, the balades of the "Traitié pour les Amantz Marietz," and the sentiments expressed in the Latin poem "Est amor" represent a kind of "implicit 'erotic pseudo-autobiography'" (122) that is also a response to ideas found in the "Rose." Subsequently Knox suggests that the satire of the "Mirour de l'Omme" and the Latin verses accompanying the "archer portrait" found in three manuscripts of the "Vox Clamantis" echo "Jean de Meun's infamous 'apology' in the 'Rose'" and give proof of Gower's "self-fashioning in the image of a satirist" and "his own authorial ambition" (170-71). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Knox, Philip. Published Knox, Philip. The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues and Literary Relations Confession Amantis Mirour de l'Omme Vox Clamantis Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz Minor Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Peck's survey of the role(s) of Alexander in the "Confessio Amantis" identifies the many places where Alexander appears in CA and explores "the emperor's figural prominence" (223) in the work. Most often he focuses on the limitations of the ruler's knowledge and the ultimate futility of his conquests, suggesting implications of this characterization for the ruling class in Gower's day, specifically the Black Prince, Richard II, and Henry of Derby. Peck discusses Alexander's role in Nebuchadnezzer's dream in the Prologue of CA, two references to the emperor in Book 2, the tales of "Diogenes and Alexander" and of "Alexander and the Pirate" in Book 3, and two more references in Book 5. The "Tale of Nectanabus," with Alexander's unwitting killing of his father, Peck argues, is juxtaposed against the preceding father-son tale in "Ulysses and Telegonus" in Book 6 and he presents the large presence of Alexander in Book 7--with "fifteen citations of his name" amidst the concerns for the education of a king--as something of a crescendo in the CA overall. Deliberately on Gower's part, Peck tells us, Alexander is not mentioned in Book 8, where "Alexander's story is replaced by that of Apollonius of Tyre, a king who is basically different from all that Alexander stands for" (234), one who "provides the antidote to Alexander's kind of rule which leads to tyranny and oppression rather than enlightenment" (235). In the "ennobling spirit" of Apollonius's virtuous actions, idealized kingship, and peace, Peck concludes, Gower "would send forth his book, in hope that for generations to come it might keep his voice and vision alive," observing that in the Explicit to the Lancastrian recension of the CA, he sends it specifically to Henry Bolingbroke, Count of Derby (236). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A. Published Peck, Russell A. "Alexander the Great: A Study of Legitimacy, Futility, and the Problem of Getting Home Safely in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." In Valerie B. Johnson and Kara L. McShane, eds. Negotiating Boundaries in Medieval Literature and Culture: Essays on Marginality, Difference, and Reading Practices in Honor of Thomas Hahn. Boston: De Gruyter; Medieval Institute Publications, 2022. Pp. 223-37. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alexander the Great: A Study of Legitimacy, Futility, and the Problem of Getting Home Safely in Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Salisbury explores "a kinship between the art of writing and the art of healing" (1), crediting as her model Rita Charon's theory of "narrative medicine, which teaches how to engage a text both by observing its representation of physical symptoms and by listening closely to the stories told by patients in practice, and, in this case, by some of the most innovative and perceptive English poets and prose writers of the late Middle Ages" (2). The book addresses Chaucer (chapter 1), Gower and Langland (chapter 2), Lydgate and Hoccleve (chapter 3), the Thornton manuscript (chapter 4), and "Women Healers" (chapter 5). Salisbury terms Gower and Langland "therapeutic writers," composing the "Confessio Amantis" and "Piers Plowman" "at a pivotal historical moment beset by recurrent outbreaks of the plague" (49). Gower, she argues, understood the plague "as a marker of the species of social disruption (or dis-ease) that affects the equanimity of the body politic as well as the humoral balance of the body human" (50)--entities which Salisbury sees as integrally connected no less than the body is connected to the soul (56-61). Somewhat surprisingly, she reads Amans as a "young man" in need of (less surprisingly) "healing," whose cure is "storytelling and dialogue" (51). The organization of the CA around the seven sins constitutes a "moralization of medicine" that, by prompting self-reflection and reform, leads to better health for the individual and society both (esp. 76-78). In this sense, Genius, as a priest, is also recognizable as a physician (61-63). The effect is carried forward by medically specialized terminology and references throughout, i.e., to "physicians and surgeons, or empirics, to medicine and medical practice, maladies of the psychophysiological body, as well as a variety of medicaments--gemstones, plants, and organic substances--used as remedies" (53). Noting that, following Aristotle, most fourteenth-century thinkers (Gower included) located the soul in the heart, Salisbury finds the "Tale of Constantine and Sylvester" (CA II. 3187-3496) representative of how narrative medicine (along with a little "holy medicine"--full body immersion baptism) can cure a disease (leprosy) with both physical and moral dimensions (67-72); later in CA Book VIII. 1151-1271), in the recovery of Apollonius' wife from apparent death by the physician Cerymon, she finds another--perhaps clearer--presentation of Gower's close attention to medical issues (72-74). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Salisbury, Eve. Published Salisbury, Eve. Narrating Medicine in Middle English Poetry: Poets, Practitioners, and the Plague. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Backgroud and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Narrating Medicine in Middle English Poetry: Poets, Practitioners, and the Plague. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Schieberle, Misty. Published Schieberle, Misty. "Gower's Aristotelian Legacy: Reading Responsibility in the Confessio Amantis and the Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod." In Valerie B. Johnson and Kara L. McShane, eds. Negotiating Boundaries in Medieval Literature and Culture: Essays on Marginality, Difference, and Reading Practices in Honor of Thomas Hahn. Boston: De Gruyter; Medieval Institute Publications, 2022. Pp. 305-22. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review Schieberle sets the agenda for her essay briskly: "I outline some of Gower's key Aristotelian views, trace their legacy, and argue that they influence a unique fifteenth-century adaptation of Christine de Pizan's 'Epistre Othea'"--"The Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod"--that "was copied by Anthony Babyngton into a collection that includes lessons in heraldry, hunting terms in French and English, genealogies of English kings, and other arguably educational material. The Gowerian features that I identify lay the groundwork for understanding the "Bibell" translator's work as a consciously framed Aristotelian reading of Christine's "Othea" shaped by the English literary trends of his day" (305). Specifically, Schieberle tells us, Gower's assertion of the Aristotelian mean at the opening of the "Confessio Amantis" (Prologue, 17-21), his concern with the "middle weie" between "social obligations and personal moral decisions" (307), and his notions of fate, fortune, and the figure of Atropos indicate that moral agency is effective in negotiating the "external controls over human lives" (308). Schieberle shows that "wise, prudent behavior . . . can forestall fate" (312) in tales such as that of "Rosiphele" and, in subtler ways, that of Jephthah's daughter. She argues that these concerns are also entailed ironically in Amans's "misunderstanding of what it means to be morally alert and active." evident in his thoughts on Atropos and destiny (CA 4.2754-70) that include a relevant "joke" on Troilus's comic inactivity in Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" (312). Schieberle then traces similar concerns with determinism and Atropos in Lydgate's "Troy Book" and in Babyngton's "Lytle Bibell" to argue that the latter is not only an adaptation/translation of Pizan's "Epistre Othea" but also part of a growing tradition in English in which human responsibility balances fateful influences in the shaping of events and outcomes, with the potential to defer even death. Schieberle presents Gower as "the forefather of a literary movement that transforms English views of Fortune, fate, and virtue" (307) without arguing that he is the ultimate or only source of these ideas. She carefully acknowledges that Gower does not fail "to acknowledge that man's power over his future has limits" (308), citing the "Tale of Two Coffers," but she emphasizes the predominant importance of prudent moral responsibility in CA. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Aristotelian Legacy: Reading Responsibility in the "Confessio Amantis" and the "Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Sharp examines Gower's approach in Book VII of the "Confessio Amantis" in terms of "deliberative rhetoric" (257 and passim), examining Gower's incorporation of a rhetorical understanding into the counselling purpose of that section of the poem. Sharp argues that "Gower's positioning of his discussion of rhetoric within the genre of the mirror for princes, or Fürstenspiegel, suggests that he understood rhetoric as an inherently political practice and that the knowledge contained under the category of rhetoric was instrumental for the governance of a kingdom" (257). He contextualizes this alongside medieval adaptations of Aristotelian rhetorical understanding, and the broader genre of "the offering and acceptance of counsel between lord and vassal" (258), arguing that "Gower depicts rhetoric as a hierarchical system specifically adapted for the monarchy in its melding of rhetorical practice with Aristotelian virtue ethics. Thus, his 'Confessio Amantis' represents an important and overlooked contribution to medieval rhetoric" (258). Sharp foregrounds "how Gower accounts for the ambiguity, contingency, and sensibility of language within his theory of deliberative rhetoric" (259), making a case to identify that theory of rhetoric in terms of Gower's practice in Book VII. Sharp engages significantly with Gower's rhetorical understanding of late medieval approaches to Aristotelian ethics, such as Latini and Aquinas (260), arguing that the exempla featured by works like the CA are analogous to the "habituation" to virtue called for by Aristotle (261). Sharp further notes the association of sensory desire with the vices Gower critiques throughout the CA, to associate Gower's rhetoric in Book 7 to the need to manage speech and language (265). Sharp argues that Gower thus relates the moral goals of Fürstenspiegel to the rhetorical goals of his verse, ultimately focusing on an endorsement of "chasteté" (266). Gower's retelling of the Lucrece story illustrates a sovereign's potential use of language interactions to create the possibility of "deliberation and political intervention" (267), tying details of the narrative to figures in the story with power negotiating ambiguity and contingency for "individual or common profit" (267), and overall makes a reasonable case for the rhetorical complexity of this portion of Gower's poem. [RAL. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sharp, Joseph. Published Sharp, Joseph. "Rhetoric and Chastity: Gower's Depiction of Rhetorical Practice in the Lucrece Myth." Journal for the History of Rhetoric 25, no. 3 (November 2022): 257–78. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Rhetoric and Chastity: Gower's Depiction of Rhetorical Practice in the Lucrece Myth. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Strakov's argument is that poets on both sides of the Channel (Jean de la Mote, Philippe de Vitry, Jean Campion, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Eustache Deschamps, Charles d'Orléans, Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, even Lydgate) shared what she terms "formes fixes discourse" (17), all seeing in their various approaches to poetic form a means to reify "Francophone culture"--implicit in her title, "Continental England"--in the divisive period of the Hundred Years' War. Shared form allowed for what she terms "reparative translation," permitting "canon-building as the bulwark against war-time cultural fragmentation" (18). Whether working in English or French (or Latin), these poets looked to lyric form "to redraw, or blur, or sometimes even erase lines of regionalist division in an aspiration to restore unity to newly politically fragmented Francophone culture" (48). Clearly there were differences in how this thinking could be applied, over the decades that the war continued: Gower, whom she discusses in the first half of chapter four, focusing on London, British Library, MS Additional 59495 (olim Trentham), explored and rejected the possibility of finding a "perfit language" to speak wisdom to Lancastrian sovereigns. For Gower, Strakhov argues, "multilingualism fails as a mode of address," requiring "some other mode" (138-39). Gower turns to two elements of "formes fixes discourse," classical allusion, and the exemplum: "Gower . . . presenting a newly troubled world in which multilingualism has run amok, falls back on Vitry's position: well-known exempla offer a bedrock of cultural knowledge, on which the shifting sands of multilingualism can securely rest. Pan-European knowledge of discrete forms are the true 'perfit langage,' fully understood because it is already known" (147). Strakhov also discusses Quixley's English translation of the "Traitié pour les amantz marietz," arguing that the translation "fuses Gower's French and Latin together because, left by themselves, neither is fully sufficient in representing the exemplum's meaning. He thus presents an English text that solves multilingualism's failures by means of judicious interlingual translation practice seeking to repair the fragmentation engendered by Gower's original" (145). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Strakhov, Elizaveta. Published Strakhov, Elizaveta. Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Years' War. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Traitié pour Essamplar les Amantz Marietz Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Years' War. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In this survey, Whitehead describes Middle English lyrics before Chaucer, emphasizes his innovative uses of French courtly "formes fixes" in English, and assesses interactions among courtly, religious, and liturgical material in ME lyrics generally. Her brief comments on Gower (336-37) have a small place in her account: she treats him (along with Hoccleve, Lydgate, and, at somewhat greater length, Charles d'Orléans) as one of Chaucer's "Successors" (334) in his use of "formes fixes"--the ballade in "Cinkante Balades" and "Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz". Like Chaucer, Whitehead observes, Gower "draws extensively" on his French predecessors, "transposing lines from their poems into his own oeuvre," but unlike Chaucer, "whose reworkings tend to stay broadly within the ideological [courtly] parameters of his models," Gower uses his ballade sequences "to mount a wholesale attack on the immorality of 'amour courtois,' condemn extra-marital liaisons, and celebrate the goodness of love within marriage" (336), quoting from CB 49 as an example. Whitehead tentatively attributes Gower's "return to French" (as opposed to Chaucer's use of English? Gower's own English in "Confessio Amantis"?) to, perhaps, "disillusionment with the Ricardian court . . . and his increasing interest in the political claims of Henry of Lancaster," but opts instead for agreeing with R. F. Yeager (2005) that Gower was motivated to "compete with" Chaucer and his French contemporaries. Further, Whitehead comments "[w]here Chaucer had written ballades in elegant triptychs, Gower . . . set them to work on an altogether larger scale." [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Whitehead, Christiania. Published Whitehead, Christiania. "The Middle English Lyrics in Their European Context." In Raluca Radulescu and Sif Rikhardsdottir, eds. The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature. Milton: Routledge, 2022. Pp. 332-44. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Cinkante Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Middle English Lyrics in Their European Context. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Excerpts copied in miscellanies occupy a significant place in the literary culture of late-medieval England. This dissertation surveys manuscripts excerpting Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales,' Rolle's 'Commentary on the Song of Songs,' Lydgate's 'Fall of Princes,' and Gower's 'Confessio amantis.' These manuscripts display a fifteenth-century attitude to authorship that re-shapes modern assumptions about canon formation and the laureation of Chaucer, whose works were often attributed to Lydgate and re-framed to be read through the lens of his poetry. This fifteenth-century 'culture of the excerpt' shaped both the composition and reception of canonical Middle English texts, many of which may have been read more often partially than as complete works, with a preference for morally or spiritually instructive excerpts." [eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Adams, Abigail Marie. Published Adams, Abigail Marie "Putting Together the Pieces: Excerpts from Rolle, Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate in Fifteenth-Century Miscellanies." Ph.D. Dissertation. The University of Texas at Austin, 2022. DAI-A 84.06 (E). Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Putting Together the Pieces: Excerpts from Rolle, Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate in Fifteenth-Century Miscellanies. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation argues that the vernacular literature of late medieval England contributes importantly to the theorizing of psychological subjectivity and that this theorizing is connected fundamentally with the history of shame. Forms of Shame thus establishes an interpretive context for Middle English literature drawn from medieval theories of emotion. It describes and analyzes the ways in which the topic of shame was addressed, conceived, and critiqued prominently in sophisticated literary works by three late-medieval English authors--John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Thomas Hoccleve. Shame, the preeminent emotion of self-assessment, and its literary representation are enduring concerns for all of these authors. Shame acts as a diachronic intertextual thread linking these authors and their intellectual influences. The dialogues that they produce offer rich and subtle analyses of shame, ever shifting in their functions and their responses to cultural paradigms and to each other. The study argues, further, that the authors operate within a discursive matrix of shame that includes idealized norms of at least three broadly delineated emotional communities: ecclesiastic, chivalric, courtly. A theoretical understanding of shame--a problematic and protean feeling, uneasily categorized--remains largely unresolved at the end of the fourteenth century. The authors respond by embedding a discourse of shame within narrative representation in order to interrogate, test, and better understand the possibilities of shame within human experience. Moments of shame and narrative conflict caused by differences in its formulation heighten the awareness of self for a character or reader, reshaping the subjectivity of both agents in the process." [eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Chelis, Theodore. Published Chelis, Theodore. "Forms of Shame: Gower, Chaucer, Hoccleve." Ph.D. Dissertation. Pennsylvania State University, 2022. Abstract available at https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/22564tbc126. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Forms of Shame: Gower, Chaucer, Hoccleve. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bower's examination of the discourse of medical recipes in Middle English focuses on the aesthetic features of the texts along with their practical value and placebo effects. Her clarifications of the aesthetics of these texts--their "poetic" and "playful" features rather than their "practical" ones (p. 22 and throughout)--depend upon comparison with better-known texts, including a portion of Gower's "Tale of Medea" (Confessio Amantis, Book V, 3957ff.) where Medea labors to renew the youth of Eson, Jason's aged father. Bowers' close reading of the episode acknowledges Gower's dependence on Ovid's "Metamorphoses" 7 as source, neatly summarizes the passage, and emphasizes how "Gower's lexical choices . . . seem designed to soften (or at least nuance) Medea's associations in classical and medieval writing with witchcraft and sorcery" (155) and how through protraction and repetition he "edges his representation towards parody, teasing readers with the possibility that Medea's impressive and protracted performance might not have any healing effects at all" (157). Bower suggests that Gower may have been echoing contemporaneous medical "recipes" (157) and that modern response to the labored efforts of Gower's Medea may reflect Pierre Bourdieu's notion that "the timing and duration of an action is [integral] to our interpretation of it" (160). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bower, Hannah. Published Bower, Hannah. Middle English Recipes and Literary Play, 1375–1500. Oxford English Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Middle English Recipes and Literary Play, 1375–1500. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In this carefully argued essay, Sarah Friedman takes on the question of sexual violence against women in which she juxtaposes Chaucer's Physician's telling of the tale of Virginia with Gower's Confessor's telling of the Tale of Lucretia to unveil the "intersubjective nature of suffering" (65). In a more broadly cast reading than is typical of those who address the raping of women in medieval literature, Friedman focuses on the decentering of "the psychological effects of violence brought to the female body" (65) and the use of the violated female body "to facilitate communal healing and positive political change" (65). While at first glance it is difficult to see any connection between the violence done to Virginia and that done to Lucretia OR even the shame/blame that drives each woman to her death (the former by beheading, the latter by suicide), there are points of convergence that illuminate each tale, nonetheless. Especially jarring at first is a seemingly sympathetic take on an illness medieval physicians took very seriously, i.e. lovesickness or "amor heroes" and its effects on the two lascivious and rapacious men in these tales, Appius [sic] and Tarquin. The "inborn suffering" thought to be "love" (at least in Andreas Capellanus's "De Amore") changes Appius's "herte and mood" (l. 126), making him a "victim of Virginia's beauty even though he is the one plotting to capture her" (67). In Gower's tale, Cupid's "fyri dart" robs "Tarquin" [i.e., Aruns, his son, in the CA] of his reason, and he suffers a "blinde maladie to which no cure of surgerie can helpe" (VII, 4852-57). This is a component of intersubjective suffering that infects these male bodies with an illness that is both physical and moral, not theirs alone, but rather a malady of the community at large. Friedman's use of "contagion" in her title is a reference to the bubonic plague raging in the historical background, acknowledged by Chaucer when he uses the term "sovereyn pestilence" (l. 91) as a metaphor for the "diseased" (emphasis mine) betrayal of Virginia's innocence. For Gower, this is a contagion in need of purgation afforded by confession, which like bloodletting, brings the body/soul back into a state of homeostasis. While much attention appears to be focused on the suffering of these two men in Friedman's discussion, the women do come back into the conversation, especially in relation to the impact their dead bodies have on their respective communities. As in the theological discourses underpinning medieval notions of sexual violence against women, which the author builds into her argument along with selected medical authorities, "Chaucer and Gower set up links between sexual violence and illness to forge a connection between the tragedy of rape and positive forms of community formation and healing" (70). That said, the dead bodies of two women still lurk in the background. [ES. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Friedman, Sarah. Published Friedman, Sarah. "Contagion, Sexual Violence, and Communal Healing in Chaucer's 'The Physician's Tale' and Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." Essays in Medieval Studies 37 (2022): 65-80. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Contagion, Sexual Violence, and Communal Healing in Chaucer's "The Physician's Tale" and Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Sharma refers sparingly to Gower in this study, although he does cite the "Tale of Apollonius" several times in his reading of "The Man of Law's Prologue and Tale." Differences among Gower's, Trevet's and Chaucer's versions of the Constance narrative help Sharma to show how the entanglement of the Man of Law in the motif of incest even as he seeks to detach his narrative from it exemplifies "the Chaucerian principle of unintended consequences" (110) which rebound on the narrator, who "actually seems to enjoy the oppressions" Custance endures (113). More generally, Sharma gives something of a new twist to the dismissiveness of the traditional label of Gower as "moral." Asserting that he has "no desire to insist on any stark opposition between Chaucer as ludic ironist and Gower as didactic moralist," Sharma makes clear that Chaucer is no less moral than Gower, although he finds the latter to be more pessimistic than his fellow poet. When setting out to clarify Chaucer's use of paradox, Sharma briefly contrasts it with Langland's use of enigma and then explores "some significant points of diffraction" between the CT and the "Confessio Amantis," regarding both "as sustained meditations on the nature of love" (24). In a swift description of hierarchical, analogical love in the CA, Sharma tells us the poem "supplies us with a double perspective on love: On the one hand, 'sub specie aeternitatis' love is an element subordinated within God's providential regulation of the cosmos; on the other hand, ' for mortals, love is a force that can never be internally regulated. Love may submit to the authority of divine reason, but it rebels against the authority of human reason. Human existence in the 'Confessio,' at least after a fantasmatic golden age, is thus inherently disordered" (27). Chaucer, Sharma tells us in the following paragraph, "finds a radically different way to articulate order, disorder, and love" in the CT, where "reality . . . is hierarchical and anti-hierarchical at the same time." Gower sees only a "metaphysical abyss" between "divine necessity" and "human contingency," while, in Chaucer, "God strictly determines us to be absolutely free" (28) and the poet's "charitable hermeneutic" (30) serves as a bridge across the abyss Sharma sees in Gower. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sharma, Manish. Published Sharma, Manish. The Logic of Love in "The Canterbury Tales." Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2022. x, 395 pp. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Logic of Love in "The Canterbury Tales." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Weiskott, Eric. "The Occasion of John Gower's 'Unanimes Esse.'" Notes and Queries, 69 [267], no. 3 (2022): 192–96. Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry Biography of Gower Review "Of John Gower's very last writings, almost all of them in Latin verse and politically inflected," Weiskott writes, "the ten-line 'Unanimes esse' is least immediately explicable" (192)--by biographical or political elements, he means. He finds an "unique" tripartite structure to the poem (194), which he believes (following Sebastian Sobecki's claimed identification of the poet's hand in London, British Library Cotton Tiberius A. iv) "Gower himself copied" (194), establishing a date no later than the "mid-1400s" (194, sic), and--obviously--before Gower went fully blind. Weiskott argues that "Unanimes esse" "plausibly reflects the fearful atmosphere surrounding 'De heretico comburendo' and the burning of William Sawtrey in 1401" (195). Lollardy, in short, coupled with fear of another uprising of the commons, motivated "Unanimes esse," making it "a post-script to the 'Carmen super multiplici victorum pestilencia'" (195). Weiskott supports this claim with careful identification of "self-borrowing" between the two poems, although he carefully notes that "the words are not distinctive" and Gower was unlikely to have had them in mind, or a manuscript copy of the "Carmen super" to hand, when writing "Unanimes esse" (196). But reading the two together allows recognition of a "subtle note of disapprobation or at least apprehension directed toward Arundel" in both poems, which possibly explains "why 'Unanimes esse' stays so uncharacteristically coy about its real-world references" (196). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Occasion of John Gower's "Unanimes Esse." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Likely composed contemporaneously with Gower's making of his will in 1408, "Dicunt Scripture" "exhorts its reader, but in effect the poet himself, to make premortem preparations for worldly goods and for [sic] soul" (196). Weiskott determines a two-part, balanced structure, in which "the moment of death arrives precisely at the line-break between the two stanzaic quatrains" (196). Manuscript marginal notes cited by Macaulay in his edition identify the target of the poem as unscrupulous executors. Weiskott argues instead that, while Gower's larger purpose near the end of his life is always self-memorializing, here it means not merely "not to entrust one's memory wholly to friends who live on" (197), but rather more seriously, represents Gower's genuine struggle to reconcile being "both wealthy and devout" (198). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Weiskott, Eric. "The Subject of John Gower's 'Dicunt Scripture'." Notes and Queries, 69 [267], no. 3 (2022): 196–98. Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Subject of John Gower's "Dicunt Scripture." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Blatt uses "data" to study "hundreds of English wills written between 1400 and 1499 to evaluate descriptive trends employed by book owners of the late Middle Ages that clarify how they conceptualized miscellanies" (683). One will, that of Elizabeth Childrey Kyngeston Findern (d. 1463), records the potential passing of her "boke called Gower" to her son Thomas, an ardent Lancastrian supporter who lost his head after the battle of Hexham in 1464 (685). Blatt considers, without entirely resolving, whether the "boke called Gower" might be the miscellany now known as the Findern manuscript, which contains "excerpts from John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' alongside some of Chaucer's short poems and works by Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, and others" (683). Blatt suggests as possibilities for the description in the will (which she prints in full, as Appendix A, 696-97) that the "boke called Gower" could indeed be a multitext manuscript and mark the first documentary appearance of the Findern manuscript. It is also possible that the "boke called Gower" represents only a fascicle that was, after its distribution following Kyngeston's death, added to and bound with others to fashion the multitext Findern manuscript" (694). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Blatt, Heather. Published Blatt, Heather. "Describing Miscellanies in Late Medieval English Wills." The Huntington Library Quarterly 85 (2022): 683-704. 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 Describing Miscellanies in Late Medieval English Wills. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Helena Znojemská deftly unravels the complex interplay of gender dynamics, transforming the 'loathly lady' motif from a mere narrative device into a profound commentary on power, transformation, and identity. Znojemská argues that the motif functions to interrogate and destabilize traditional gender roles and power dynamics before re-instating the status quo, even if this is not sustainable. In medieval literature, gender structures are often portrayed as rigid and hierarchical, with women typically positioned within a framework of submission, subservience, or objectification. However, texts like "The Tale of Florent," "The Wife of Bath's Tale," and "The Wedding of Dame Ragnelle" complicate these binaries by featuring women who challenge traditional gender roles through transformative encounters. These stories offer a nuanced exploration of how gender and power are intertwined, reflecting both societal expectations and the potential for female autonomy within the constraints of medieval norms. Znojemská's interpretation of gender structures highlights the ways in which the 'loathly lady' figure in medieval literature serves as both a challenge to and a negotiation of traditional gender norms. Her ability to draw connections between the texts offers a cohesive analysis that reveals recurring themes of transformation, agency, and subversion of gender norms. Additionally, Znojemská's interdisciplinary approach, blending literary analysis with gender theory, enriches academic discussion by providing fresh insights into how these texts interrogate medieval social structures. As academic discourse surrounding the 'loathly lady' figure remains limited, this analysis of the complex implications of gender roles within the text is a valuable contribution to existing scholarship while offering the potential for further discussion. [CM. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Znojemská, Helena. Published Znojemská, Helena. "Loathly Ladies' Lessons: Negotiating Structures of Gender in 'The Tale of Florent,' 'The Wife of Bath's Tale,' and 'The Wedding of Dame Ragnelle.'"Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philologica (2022): 21-37. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Loathly Ladies' Lessons: Negotiating Structures of Gender in "The Tale of Florent," "The Wife of Bath's Tale," and "The Wedding of Dame Ragnelle." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yee's study draws on modern approaches to dealing with traumatic grief, particularly those of Judith Lewis Herman (1992) and Rita Charon (2006), using them to reconsider "the genre of three fourteenth-century Middle English dream visions, reframing them as illness narrative. Examining John Gower's "Confessio Amantis," "Pearl," and Chaucer's "Book of Duchess," it asks: What is at stake when we rethink these canonical poems as stories about health and illness?" (ix). "At stake" here is not the dream vision genre at large--where the staging of grief is neither a necessary nor intrinsic concern--but what can be learned from and about the three poems when the analytical discourse is psychological grief therapy rather than philosophical consolation or confessional absolution. Yee's approach is fruitful, yielding some broad generalizations as well as particular observations about the poems. She analyzes the protagonists of the works as patients and their interlocutors as doctors, assessing the role of narrative in treating traumatic grief, "imaginative sympathy" (ix) as a therapeutic device, and the "success or failure" (x) of the therapy depicted. A general concern is "Christian confession as a medieval model that reflects key tenets of illness narratives and modern therapy" (26), evidence for Yee that confession is "a premodern basis for talk therapy" (30), despite significant differences between the etiologies of forgiving sin and curing illness, differences which Yee attributes to underlying differences between medieval and modern understandings of cognition. More particularly, Yee's readings of the individual poems find or reveal some surprising, provocative emphases. Reading the frame of CA as Amans' "pathography" (passim), she finds Genius to be an "inattentive physician, one who is too set upon a standard course of treatment to listen to the needs of his patient," while Amans, in his responses to Genius, "shows more awareness and initiative than previous scholarship has allowed" (50). The revelation late in the CA that Amans is the elderly John Gower, Yee argues, also reveals the deeper truth that the protagonist suffers, not only from lovesickness (here a form of grief), but also from memory disruption and dissociation. At the end of the CA, Venus leads Amans to enact "an experiential pedagogy, one that is more interactive than Genius' more traditional, sermonizing didacticism" (111), allowing Amans to "face the truth of his forgotten identity" (115), experience an "inverted rebirth" (124), and ultimately, produce the pathography that Yee finds in the CA itself. The confessional/therapeutic frame of CA is Yee's primary focus, rather than individual tales, but she integrates her discussion of the Tale of Constantine and Sylvester, an examination previously published in South Atlantic Review (2015). In Yee's readings, the "Pearl"-maiden is even less successful than is Genius as a therapist; Chaucer's dreamer in BD, more successful than either. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yee, Pamela M. Published Yee, Pamela M. "Words of the Wounded: Traumatic Grief and Narrative Therapy in Middle English Dream Visions." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Rochester, 2022. Dissertation Abstracts International 84.04(E). Fully available online via https://urresearch.rochester.edu/. 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 Words of the Wounded: Traumatic Grief and Narrative Therapy in Middle English Dream Visions. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Runstedler's book addresses at length five samples "of the moral uses of alchemy in Middle English poetry" (4), focusing on the "exemplarity" of these samples: the alchemical passage in Gower's "Confessio Amantis," Book IV, 2457-2632; Chaucer's "Canon's Yeoman's Prologue and Tale"; an alchemical version of John Lydgate's poem "The Churl and the Bird" in British Library, Harley MS 2407; and two anonymous fifteenth-century alchemical "dialogues/recipes between Merlin and Morienus and between Albertus Magnus and the Queen of Elves" (5). To provide context and to narrow his field of inquiry, he uses later English alchemical texts by George Ripley, Thomas Norton, and Elias Ashmole to shape his readings of his focal texts. He also briefly surveys philosophical and scientific backgrounds to alchemy in Greek, Arabic, and Latin texts, with even briefer comments on alchemy in "The Roman de la Rose" and Dante's "Inferno." This is a wide panorama with alchemy firmly in its center. But the focus is on the five sample works and how--or, more accurately, that--each of their authors "used alchemical examples for moral reflection or as cautionary tales against covetousness and unethical practice," "revealing," Runstedler tells us, the "interconnectedness" of the five, and the "exemplary role" (14) of alchemy, which was "used in different exemplary ways within diverse literary contexts"; "more importantly, such exemplary readings present complex treatments of the subject" (195). Runstedler gives Gower's "alchemical exegesis," as he labels it recurrently, pride of place among the works he discusses: it "launches," he tells us, "the literary pattern of alchemy being appropriated within an exemplary framework" in late medieval vernacular English literature (6 and 65), which helps "to establish the notion of alchemical narratives as exemplary in Middle English poetry" (83). N.B. The volume is a somewhat revised and reformatted version of Runstedler's 2018 Durham University dissertation; some readers may find the .pdf format of the dissertation (available at http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/12593/; accessed 4/1/2023) easier to use than the Palgrave e-book. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Runstedler, Curtis Published Runstedler, Curtis. Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature. The New Middle Ages. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. xii, 205 pp. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Donavin's efficient essay describes the "groundwork" (p. 56) she laid for her students as essential preparation for a month-long unit on tales of sexual abuse from the "Confessio Amantis" (Lucrece, Philomena, Cornix, and Calistona) in an upper-division undergraduate course for English majors and Gender Studies students. Sensitive to the #MeToo movement and Take Back the Night activities, this groundwork includes trigger warnings, rules for student discussions, and a rich and nuanced set of perspectives on medieval gender issues drawn from recent critical scholarship and serving as a guide or index of parameters for such a unit. Donavin's summary of student responses indicates that the unit was very successful. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Donavin, Georgiana Published Donavin, Georgiana. "Gower and #MeToo." Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 30.1 (2023): 53-61. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and #MeToo. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Jamie C. Fumo investigates the "Cleanness" poet's treatment of salt, arguing "the poet capitalizes on salt's status as a vexed and unstable signifier in medieval cultural discourse" (142). Fumo begins her article by first tracing the "predominantly favorable cultural coding of salt in the Bible" before engaging "Cleanness." She uses Derrida's concept of "hostipitality"--a portmanteau of hostility and hospitality--to analyze the tension present in Lot's Wife's domestic tasks. Fumo claims, "Lot's wife . . . not only 'sins in salt' by ignoring her husband's stipulation about their guests' dietary requirements, but she also upends the episode's one absolute culinary requirement deriving from Genesis 19: neither she nor anyone makes any bread at all, at least as far as we are told" (146). Fumo effectively demonstrates the poem's reappropriation of salt's significance; she calls this a "queering of salt," adding that such queering challenges 'the moral coherence of Lot's wife herself as exemplum" (147). Fumo continues to explain the cultural and historical significance of salt from culinary uses to social markers in order to situate Lot's wife and her eventual transformation. Of special interest to Gowerians, Fumo offers some comments on Gower's "Tale of Lichaon" from Book VII of the "Confessio Amantis." She claims Gower's version of this tale (in comparison to Ovid's) focuses "on hospitality, as befits a lesson on proper governance, while also intensifying his source's cannibalistic theme" (154). This discussion then leads Fumo to address commensality within hospitality. From this perspective, she offers explanations for why indeed Lot's Wife is turned into salt--what potential culinary/hospitality transgressions named in the poem might suggest. Fumo concludes Lot's Wife in "Cleanness" shows the need for, "radical humility of acknowledging one's capacity to be tested, tasted, and perhaps devoured. To partake of such wisdom not only nourishes the body social in the here and now but maximizes one's chances of being a diner, not a dish, at the final, most exclusive feast" (157). [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fumo, Jamie C. Published Fumo, Jamie C. "Eating Well/Well Eaten: Lot's Wife's Folly and the Wisdom of Salt in 'Cleanness.'" Exemplaria 30.2 (2023): 141-62. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Eating Well/Well Eaten: Lot's Wife's Folly and the Wisdom of Salt in "Cleanness." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Drawing particularly on, but not confining herself to, "Neighbor Theory" as advanced by Kenneth Reinhard and George Edmondson, and grounded by the ontology of Emmanuel Levinas, Houlik-Ritchey sets out to sketch the "imaginations of Iberia within romance" (23). She arranges her book into three "clusters," one devoted to versions of Fierabras, one to Floire and Blancheflor, and the third, to "De-Networking Iberia and England in the Constance story" (167-208). Gower's version of the last figures as the centerpiece of the third cluster, which should be read keeping in mind Houlik-Ritchey's goal, to bring together "disparate texts to foreground attention to the contrapuntal or uneven dimensions of their relationality, analyzing the dissonance that emerges within their affinities" (29-30). The "Tale of Constance" interests her not only because it was translated into Portuguese and Castilian, but also because it "is the most illuminating in terms of Iberia's comparability with Northumbrian England" (169). Following Edmondson, she sees the two places as "neighbor[ing] one another" (174): that is, they reflect each other even in their differences, which are extreme--but also in their similarities. Gower's Northumbria begins as "a place of fellowship" (176) while Iberia (where Constance is almost raped) exemplifies "qualities of solitary, self-serving interest, taken at the expense of others" (177). Yet Houlik-Ritchey finds resemblances one to the other: there is a near-rape in Northumberland, there is murder, and once again Constance is set adrift by her mother-in-law, in the boat that took her from Syria, and this time to Spain. Ultimately Houlik-Ritchey offers "a rigorous interrogation of the religious and geopolitical logic that ushers in both English-Roman alliance [i.e., through Moris] and Christian hegemony throughout the Mediterranean and North Atlantic" (178), which she sees as the fulcrum of Gower's endeavor. For her the changes brought to Gower's text in the Portuguese and Castilian translations, which "reimagine" (195) both Northumbria and Iberia, bears this out. She rightly makes much of the marriages of John of Gaunt's daughters to the kings of Portugal and Castile (180-87, with attention to the "Man of Law's Tale') as defining the world of the fifteenth-century translators as different "geopolitically" from Gower's. Theirs reflects Iberian cultural centrality, recognizing Islamic communalities and the Portuguese and Castilian courts as power centers, Houlik-Ritchey argues via a keen analysis of both translations. This in her view diminishes the Anglo-Roman, Christian "Weltanschauung" Gower's version projects. "In spite, then, of the tale's [i.e., Gower's] resounding resolution of alliance and empire, Iberia elucidates what routes and alliances do not result, precisely because others were being forged instead" (208). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Houlik-Ritchey, Emily. Published Houlik-Ritchey, Emily. Imagining Iberia in English and Castilian Medieval Romance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations 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 Imagining Iberia in English and Castilian Medieval Romance. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review ". . . there is no doubt that John Gower knew S[peculum] S[tultorum] directly and intimately" (cxl). Mann cites the "Tale of Adrian and Bardus" from the "Confessio Amantis" (V. 4937-5162) as taken directly from Nigel, "the only major divergence from SS [being] the omission of the lion, which may have been due to the desire for brevity, but it is also possible that Gower was (like me) puzzled by the idea of a lion climbing a rope" (cxli). In Appendix D (N.B.: not C, as cited p. cxl), Mann keys Nigel's lines borrowed into the "Vox Clamantis" to loci in what is a major edition (although some of the Book and line references in Appendix D require emendation). This will become the standard edition of "Speculum Stultorum," and is a welcome advance on Thomas Wright, ed., "Anglo-Latin Satirical Poets and Epigrammatists of the Twelfth Century," 2 vols. (Rolls Series, 1872), who gave no line numbers, and on the edition of the "Speculum" of Robert Raymo and J. H. Mozley. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Mann, Jill, ed. and trans. Published Mann, Jill, ed. and trans. Nigel of Longchamp: Speculum Stultorum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2023). Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations 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 Nigel of Longchamp: Speculum Stultorum. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In this essay McShane and Gastle--guest editors of this issue of SMART dedicated to teaching Gower's works--contextualize Gower pedagogy, describe useful Gowerian resources available online and in popular anthologies, and provide summary introductions to the four essays that the issue includes. The editors touch on recent trends in pedagogy ("topics such as gender, identity, and class"), comment on Gower's reception and on relations with Chaucer and other contemporaries, and clarify why Gower is "not taught more widely today," arguing that he should be, because "Gower's works offer a surprising amount of material to address . . . marginalized topics" (7-8), and because his multilingualism is appropriate in our current global politics and particularly useful in helping students to "deal with . . . the practices of medieval reading--which counts upon a dialogue between the text and marginal commentary" (9). This essay, and the four it introduces, address undergraduate study only and the "Confessio Amantis" almost exclusively, but McShane and Gastle make their case for presenting "new perspectives and possibilities for teaching Gower's works" (13). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor McShane, Kara L. Gastle, Brian W. Published McShane, Kara L. and Brian W. Gastle. "Introduction: Why Teach Gower's Works?" Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 30.1 (2023): 7-16. 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 Introduction: Why Teach Gower's Works? Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review McShane here reflects on her success in using the Prologue of the "Confessio Amantis" as the lead text in an undergraduate course for majors on protest poetry in late-medieval England, describing how students considered Gower's text in relation to other medieval texts on the syllabus and to modern ideas of protest poetry. A significant portion of the essay reports student reflections on a performance component of the course in which they read Gower's poetry aloud, collaborate to produce a recording, and engage with features of pronunciation, style, meaning, and the nature of protest and power. Course goals and reading schedule are offered in Appendix A; Appendix B describes an oral-recitation assignment that includes staged revisions. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor McShane, Kara L Published McShane, Kara L. "John Gower as Protest Poet?" Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 30.1 (2023): 31-43. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower as Protest Poet? Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Stoyanoff's admonition to teach fewer texts and teach them more deeply is well-taken, and he describes his experiences with teaching Gower's "Tale of Virgil's Mirror" from Book V of the "Confessio Amantis" in order to accomplish depth of analysis by using Actor-Network Theory (ANT), drawn from the sociological approach of Bruno Latour and others. The description derives from Stoyanoff's undergraduate course designed for majors, and it summarizes student discussions of the animate and inanimate actors in the tale, their networks, and their resulting collectives. Brief as it is, Stoyanoff's essay encourages slow, close reading, but the concepts and terms from ANT are not explained at length, so that instructors unfamiliar with ANT will do well to read as a companion essay his earlier, more theoretical study, "Covetousness in Book 5 of "Confessio Amantis": A Medieval Precursor to Neoliberalism," Accessus 4.2 (2018): Article 2. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stoyanoff, Jeffrey G. Published Stoyanoff, Jeffrey G. "Confessio Amantis" in the Undergraduate Classroom: Using Actor-Network Theory to Teach Less Text More." Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 30.1 (2023): 45-52. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Confessio Amantis" in the Undergraduate Classroom: Using Actor-Network Theory to Teach Less Text More. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "In the 'Physician's Tale'," Bartlett argues, "Chaucer presents a legal case that functions solely as a ruse to enable sexual assault" (259). Her focus is thus almost entirely on Chaucer, drawing parallels between Chaucer's tale and the "raptus" charge in legal documents relating to Cecily Chaumpaigne brought forward by Euan Roger and Sebastian Sobecki, responding to Roger's and Sobecki's revelation. Bartlett offers a succinct explanation of medieval "raptus" before exclaiming that Roger's and Sobecki's findings are "not a set of new facts, but new documents" (260). She, in essence, counters the reactions of medievalists who thought Chaucer exonerated: "these documents and the 'big reveal' in which we learned about them are illuminated by the very lessons of the "Physician's Tale" imparts about gendered labor, sexual assault, and discursive power--who holds that power, and what happens when that power is challenged" (260). In making her case, Bartlett examines other versions of this tale, explaining that in Gower's CA, "the focus is . . . overtly political" (264). She continues to examine the tale, offering close readings to support her case. Gower's version of the tale is used a few times in contrast to Chaucer's, namely to show the alterations Chaucer makes in what Bartlett presents as a blatant attempt to excuse sexual assault. [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bartlett, Robyn A. Published Bartlett, Robyn A. "On Chaucer, Raptus, and the Physician's Tale." Exemplaria 35, no. 4 (2023): 259-83. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource On Chaucer, Raptus, and the "Physician's Tale." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In this brief encyclopedia entry Echard outlines Gower's life and briskly describes his works. She summarizes the structuring principles and some details of "Mirour de l'Omme," "Vox Clamantis," and "Confessio Amantis," citing Gower's other works where they align with these three by language--French, Latin, and English--emphasizing his trilinguality. Echard also observes some of Gower's connections with Chaucer, mentions editions of Gower's works, and cross-lists a variety of biographical and literary sub-topics, such as "Henry of Derby," "Ballade," "Frame-tale Narration," etc. Gower is mentioned recurrently elsewhere in this "Encyclopedia," largely in passing, but carefully listed in the comprehensive index. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân. Published Echard, Siân. "Gower, John." In Richard G. Newhauser, gen. ed. The Chaucer Encyclopedia. 4 vols.; continuous pagination. The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2023. Vol. II, pp. 832-35. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Biography of Gower Language and Word Studies Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, John. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Fredell, Joel. Published Fredell, Joel. Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis. The New Middle Ages. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. xvi, 324 pp. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Minor Latin Poetry Manuscripts and Textual Studies Biography of Gower Review Fredell's "Fictions of Witness" studies the manuscripts of the "Confessio Amantis"--the Latin as well as the English portions, along with their layouts, marginalia, illustrations, and accompanying texts--and interprets how the presentation reflects not only the supervision and production of the manuscripts, but the political conditions and intentions to which these manuscripts bear witness. Fredell discusses the dates of the manuscripts--an important issue throughout his study--against the events and chronology of Lancastrian usurpation and the subsequent transfer of power from Henry IV to Henry V. "Since the earliest surviving manuscripts of the 'Confessio' may date from after the deposition of Richard," Fredell tells us, "we must consider the effects of Lancastrian patronage and ideology for all elements of the poem, Ricardian and Henrician" (129). Fredell negotiates, but does not wholly resolve, several important uncertainties covered by the qualifying phrase "'may' date from after the deposition" (my emphasis added here), though he goes on later to offer what he calls "a clear timeline of development and popularity" for the "public 'Confessio'," treating Henrician material first and linking it with "Lancastrian aspirations," but also with "Gower's three-pronged claims to laureate status in the early days of Henry IV." In Fredell's timeline the Ricardian version, as we have it in the manuscripts, dates from after the Henrician version--after "Henry IV began succumbing to a series of health crises" in 1405 (261)--and reflects the preferences of a Guildhall group of scribes (John Marchaunt foremost among them) who set the poem "in a distant Ricardian love court rather than among the immediacies of Henry's political problems" (262) as part of a larger program of promoting English literature by Gower, Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate. Fredell later complicates the notion of a simple distinction between Ricardian and Henrician versions of CA by arguing that some portions of the work (e.g., the "Parliament of Exemplary Lovers," 8.2440ff.), usually assumed to be "Ricardian" originals are more likely to have been written by Gower at or about the same time as he produced the "Henrician" revision--"that the whole great poem we have . . . may be the product of . . . the late 1390s and after" (267), labelled by Fredell the "late-state model" (263), a phrase that seems to conjoin historical, thematic, and textual concerns uncomfortably, and one used to call into question whether the poem ever circulated in a form that preceded it (279). Extracted from "Fictions of Witness" in this way, my reduction of Fredell's timeline does an injustice to the breadth of his study, which integrates aspects of Gower's life and death, wide-ranging events and trends in English political history, and numerous questions of codicology and manuscript study. The textual history of the CA is not the fundamental concern here, but Fredell criticizes G. C. Macaulay's three-recension theory at length (following Peter Nicholson and Derek Pearsall) as it underlies so much traditional (and inferential) understanding of Gower's political views--which Fredell largely anchors, instead, in interpretations of Gower's brief poems and marginalia that frame and/or accompany the body of CA (and VC) in manuscripts. These interpretations support Fredell's somewhat fuzzy idea of Gower's "laureate status"--the term here associated with John Fisher's grouping of four Gower poems as "laureate"--leaving unclear what this "status" may have entailed in the very early Lancastrian court (as do other studies; but see Robert J. Meyer-Lee, "Poets and Power" [2007] on Lydgate's importance in the application and understanding of the term, a caution against applying it too early in the fifteenth century). Fredell's timeline, however, does make clear that the extant "Confessios" (a plural he uses recurrently, sometimes confusingly: 2 versions? three recensions? forty-nine manuscripts?) are, for him, propaganda for this court rather than prophecy of Richard's demise, as some followers of the Macaulay theory would have it. Fredell bases his most detailed dating of the CA manuscripts on examination of illustrations and layout (a discussion lavishly accompanied by more than 100 color reproductions of pages and details), relying heavily on Kathleen L. Scott's "Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390–1490" (1996). He includes cautions about overly specific dates and dating techniques generally but, it must be said, he treats dates less cautiously at times--posing dates, qualifying them, and then reprising them or generally taking them for granted when pursuing his political readings and structuring his timeline. His provocative title prompts a need to understand how literary works pose, or can be posed, as "artifacts" of, or as "fictional witnesses" to (both are used throughout), particular political outlooks or attitudes, so dating is important to the entire study--more precise dating, perhaps, than is possible when based on approximations from manuscript illustrations reinforced by thematic interpretation. Nevertheless, this intricate study offers fresh, provocative assessments of the manuscripts and why they were produced when they were, informed by capacious knowledge, generally thorough attention to relevant scholarship, and sensitivity to historical context. It is a big task, one well worth doing, and one that might have been done better with tighter editing and proofing--better overall organization, more sharply defined terminology, less repetition, fewer rhetorical questions, unheeded qualifications, and more careful attention to relatively minor issues of execution, such as gaffs in layout, e.g., pp. 54 and 151; "Arial" for Arion(?), p. 75; residual mark-up, e.g., "'GowerAIGower'" and "MarchauntAIMarchaunt," p. 220; bolded "and," p. 160; LGW for LGM abbreviating Scott's work on several occasions, e.g., 184n26, 220n16, 221n17, and 244n52; etc.[MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Fictions of Witness in the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article explores how legal issues and language make an impact on the "Mirour de l'Omme." In particular, Ni examines Gower's handling of property rights and ownership in terms of the medieval doctrine of "enfeoffment to use" (87 and passim). She starts with the familiar case of the much-discussed Aldington Septvauns property (87), but focuses less on questions of Gower's possible legal misbehavior than on how the legal language of property use and ownership then appears in the MO. Ni draws on Michael Bennett's recent analysis of that case (87, n. 6) to agree that the distinction between ownership and use implied by the mechanism of "enfeoffment to use" goes far to help resolve the problems in the land case, and then to argue that "this legal device could have found its way into the poem" (88). In particular, Ni promises "to illuminate the poet's humanistic accentuation of free will and intentionality, that is, Man's control of himself and his choice between spiritual and material property in the face of demonic influences" (88). Ni initially seeks to show "how Gower recasts enfeoffment to use as a metaphor for Man's Fall" (88), via a detailed explanation of how "enfeoffment to use" works as a legal device separating ownership of land per se from the right to make use of it (89-92). Ni then pivots to seeing this principle of land ownership as a model for Man's status is the MO, owning worldly property but being owned in a sense by the devil (93). To support this reading, Ni digs into the terms "use" and "saisine" (possession) in the Anglo-French legal register and the MO, along with the term "demure" (residence) (93-94). Analyzing Gower's wording in his discussion of Man, Ni notes that "Gower does not say that Sin and Death take 'seisine,' or 'possession,' of man; rather, he says that they take demure, or 'residence,' in him. The rights of residence and use must be separated from the rights of ownership" (94). Ni also notes that "in the MO, almost all of the uses of 'use' and 'saisine' are negative, with an emphasis on the impossibility of fully owning anything in the postlapsarian world" (97). She extends this distinction to address details of Man's relationship to the World in the "devils' parliament" (98). Ni concludes that only enfeoffment to use would explain the balance of use and ownership represented there (99). Thus, "for Man . . . having the 'contractual' right to enjoy the world does not mean having the 'property right' to own the world. The World, in contrast, can easily transform the 'contractual right' (rights 'in personam') to hold Man's soul to his use into the devils' property right (rights 'in rem') to fully claim his soul" (99). Finally, Ni "demonstrates that the 'Mirour' explores the tension between legalism, defined as 'strict adherence to the letter rather than the spirit of law,' and humanism, defined broadly as belief in the legibility of God and the constructive powers of human nature" (88), arguing in this final section that this legal distinction does not necessarily function as a totalistic reading of the poem; she suggests that Gower's treatment of the soul's use and ownership ultimately support a notion of Gower's "humanism" (104), which she contrasts to a modern sense of the term. Ni concludes that Gower's legal focus here reinforces his moral and didactic (humanist) focus, particularly in terms of the need to own one's soul. [RAL. Copyright, John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ni, Yun. Published Ni, Yun. "Enfeoffment to Use, Legalism, and Humanism in Gower's 'Mirour de l'Omme'." JEGP 122, no. 1 (2023): 86-106. Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Enfeoffment to Use, Legalism, and Humanism in Gower's "Mirour de l'Omme." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In this note, Weiskott's shows how Valerius Maximus's "De factis et dictis memorabilibus" 1.7.5 can be seen as a source for the ending of Gower's "Cultor in Ecclesia," adducing the poet's familiarity with "De factis" (based on Macaulay's notes to four passages in the "Confessio Amantis"), exploring bits of common language and imagery, citing the "popularity" of Valerius's work "in premodern European literary culture," and claiming that the "author of the surreal, classicizing, prophetic dream vision 'Visio Anglie' had every reason to be hunting around 'De factis dictis memorabilibus' 1.7, on dreams" (463). Acknowledging that the "borrowing is not an open-and-shut case" (462), Weiskott pushes his evidence further and suggests that "the Valerius passage accounts for the unreal, ethereal quality of the closing image of Gower's Cultor" (463). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Weiskott, Eric. "Dreaming of Cicero in John Gower's 'Cultor in Ecclesia'." ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 36.4 (2023): 462–63. Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Dreaming of Cicero in John Gower's "Cultor in Ecclesia." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Weiskott's essay casts many lines in many ponds, making summarization difficult. Setting out "to demonstrate that 'O deus immense' can illuminate Gower's attitudes to poetry, his rebarbative late Latin poetic style, the shape of his career, his position in literary and political culture late in life, and the broader political moment of those years," as well as offering "new evidence for the influence of 'O deus immense' on one of his own subsequent compositions" (209)--i.e., the "Cronica Tripertita"--he scarcely has space, even in forty-one pages, to do full justice to all of them. The topic that holds his attention longest is making a case that Gower saw himself as "vatic" poet (235), consciously casting himself in the role of a prophet (esp. 235-44), with some similarities to John of Bridlington. Lack of firm dates for many of the poems Weiskott discusses makes this case difficult: it's hard to claim foresight if a poem is written after the fact. The essay does, however, offer a strong argument for reading the shorter, late Latin poems with greater care and attention. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Weiskott, Eric . "'Loquela gravis iuvat': Gower's 'O deus immense' and the Place of Poetry, 1398–1400." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 45 (2023): 205-46 . Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Loquela gravis iuvat": Gower's "O deus immense" and the Place of Poetry, 1398–1400. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review With characteristic depth of detail and good humor, Yeager offers a chronological description of the formulation and development of the John Gower Society (JGS), tracing its origins to a conversation in 1980 and identifying--almost year by year--how and when its phases and projects were planned and realized, leading up to the Society's fifth International Congress, scheduled for 2022 (although delayed by COVID until 2023, after this essay was written). Seemingly based on the minutes of the JGS meetings and the programs of its conferences--as well as Yeager's own capacious memory--the essay makes clear the Society's history, mentioning individual scholars (a list too long to include here) and affiliated organizations (again, too many to list) through whom and by which the Society has blossomed. Dues rates, membership numbers, lists of publications, accounts of individual meetings, launchings of newsletters, bibliographies, and websites may sound dry, but here they are definitely not. Leavened and spiced with Pete Beidler's comic poem about how to pronounce "Gower," prospective plans (later dropped) for a JGS T-shirt, the "insurmountable bureaucratic twaddling of the MLA" (61), exciting future prospects, and much more, this history of the JGS comes to life, lacking only, perhaps, a clear account of Yeager's own foundational, central, and ongoing contributions. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R. F. "A Brief History of the John Gower Society." New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession 4, no. 1 (2023): 57-67. Open access at https://escholarship.org/uc/ncs_pedagogyandprofession/. ISSN: 2766-1768. Gower Subject Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Brief History of the John Gower Society. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In the "Confessio Amantis," Grinnell argues, "violence against children, specifically male children, . . . turns in upon itself, circling back to damage the murderous parents," yielding "a self-annihilation that consistently destroys attempts to build an ordered, fertile familial structure in imitation of the ordered kingdom of God." Per Nicholas Orme's assertion that in the Middle Ages the relationship of parent to child reflected "that of king to subject and God to humanity" (5), this has consequences: "familial violence produces political violence as an unstable kingdom is disrupted by the blood of dead children" (1). Grinnell draws evidence from three tales primarily: "Canace and Machaire," "Jason and Medea," and "Tereus" (with a brief, important analysis of "Phrixus and Helle," [6]). All three build out from representation of child-birth in some--sometimes metaphoric, always horrific--form, in which the female protagonists, despite their responsibility for their children's death, are not condemned by Gower--rather, "Gower . . . concentrates on the male character's responsibility for provoking the violence" (5)--a failure of importance, as Grinnell sees it, since males govern in Gower's society, and the "young" lover Amans will become the aged "John Gower," incapable of "procreation" except through poetic tale-telling (or retelling). Such linkages, which Grinnell renders with dizzying, albeit convincing, evidence from sources including Ovid and the "Roman de la Rose," lead to her conclusion: "Nature, as Gower points out in the Prologue to the 'Confessio,' is unnatural, fallen, subject to time and death. [It is a "world turned upsidedown" (6).] Therefore, in the 'Confessio Amantis,' all births are deaths, and all children are murdered by their parents when they pass on original sin, until the work culminates in the death of the narrator and the birth of the author, both his father and his son" (9). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Grinnell, Natalie. Published Grinnell, Natalie. "[H]e which can no pite know": Murdered Children in the "Confessio Amantis." Investigo 1 (2023): 1-13. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "[H]e which can no pite know": Murdered Children in the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Images of "Gower" as an archer taking aim on a round target, probably representing the world, as the accompanying verses ("Ad mundum mitto mea iacula") imply, appear in three manuscripts: San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS HM 150; London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A. iv; and Glasgow, University of Glasgow Library, MS Hunter 59. Usually the images are interpreted as representing jointly Gower's moral stance and his desire for (in David Carlson's words, as quoted by Mitchell [291] "auto-epitaphery"). Mitchell, however, argues that "the portrait can be seen as forming a striking silhouette of an elementary trigonometric diagram associated with the venerable practice of Ptolemaic astronomical computation, depicting bow (arcus), string (corda), and arrow (sagitta), all of them foundational mathematical terms" (291). That Gower directed the design Mitchell has no doubt: "Gower likely commissioned them during his long retirement at St. Mary Overeys in Southwark, coordinating image production by scribes and limners there or nearby in the city" (293). This certainty allows Mitchell grounds to see the Archer figure as "in outer space," as if Gower were presenting himself as a "new and as-yet unidentified constellation" (295). Gower's "affectionate account of 'Geometrie' and 'Astronomie' in the seventh book of 'Confessio Amantis'" (296) show that he "comprehends the special importance of geometrical figures to astronomy" (297)--and probably his solid knowledge of Ptolemy's "Almagest" and "chord theory" as presented by, among others, Gerbert of Aurillac (298-304). Gower, Mitchell concludes, would have intended two things by his portraits: 1) to reflect "on the wider intellectual cultures of his day" while simultaneously "tending to his image as a poet" in an act of "visual self-fashioning" and 2) to utilize the "formal and rhetorical significance of arc, chord, and sagitta" to triangulate "ethics, rhetoric, and mathematics"--what Mitchell deems the confluence of "scientia" and "conscientia" (312). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Mitchell, J. Allan. Published Mitchell, J. Allan. "John Gower Illustrated: The Archer Images, Astronomical Science, and Poetic Identity." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 53 (2023): 287-321. 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 John Gower Illustrated: The Archer Images, Astronomical Science, and Poetic Identity. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The nominal question asked by Ndiaye springs from the character Gower's lines "Lords and ladies in their lives / Have read it for restoratives" ("Pericles" 1.0.7–8), the "it" being John Gower's own narrative of Apollonius in CA VIII. This "leads [her] to wonder: what 'restoratives' exactly does 'Pericles' have in store for us, when 'us' is (as it always was and will be) diverse, Black, and Brown?" (12). Appropriately, Ndiaye's focus is on the play (which, it is fair to say, she finds blindly racist), not on the poet who inspired it; hence Gower the poet figures only briefly, by way of establishing how colors--red, white, and black--appear in the "Confessio," and hence are transferred into the "Pericles" text. Ndiaye notes that when Apollonius "is stranded, naked and destitute, on the shores of Pentapolis, 'His colour, which whilom was whyt, / Was thanne of water fade and pale'" (CA VIII. 636-37; at p.13). Citing "critical whiteness studies" (13) scholarship, Ndiaye argues that "Gower depicts Apollonius as particularly white (with all the privileges attendant to whiteness in potentia) at the peak of dispossession, and whiteness might read here as a promise of compensation. While such a reading may not have been the one Gower had in mind, it may very well have informed Shakespeare and Wilkins's early modern reception of those lines" (13). She also identifies Gower's use of red and white to suggest emotional states (love, e.g.), quoting CA VIII. 845-50 and 1908-11, and black to flag negatives, e.g., Apollonius' depression in his ship's "derke" hold--though the attempt to extend the pejorative color language to mourning clothes and widows' weeds (14) is anachronistic, at the very least. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Ndiaye concludes that: "The question is not whether 'Pericles' has anything restorative in store for Black, Brown, and diverse twenty-first century audiences, but, rather, how scholarship that unearths all the toxic layers of plays like 'Pericles'-- such as early modern critical race and critical whiteness scholarship--might constitute a resource for theatre-makers who want to produce that play in an informed restorative manner" (23). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ndiaye, Noémie. Published Ndiaye, Noémie. "'Read it for restoratives': "Pericles" and the Romance of Whiteness." Early Theatre: A Journal Associated with the Records of Early English Drama 26 (2023): 11-27. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion 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 "Read it for restoratives": "Pericles" and the Romance of Whiteness. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Weiskott's article isn't easily summarized, as it represents a kind of "magnum opus" on Gower's shortish (104 lines) Latin poem, "O deus immense," in order to argue strongly for a reassessment of its importance in the canon of Gower's works. In the process he covers the difficulties of dating its composition (sometime between 1398 and 1400); whether or not its subject was kings in general or Richard II exclusively (he goes back and forth, but more or less favors Richard: see pp. 221, 227, 246); Gower's quarrying of it (very sharply observed) to insert variously elsewhere (226-27); and its (justified) claim to belonging among the "public, monitory, prophetic, and enigmatic" (244) poems of the early years of the Lancastrian usurpation--"Richard the Redeless," and "Bede's Prophecy" in particular, the latter introduced here by Weiskott. He concludes: "Gower supposed that writing enigmatic, prophetic, monitory verses 'ad regem' on behalf of a recalcitrant, inarticulate public was a difficult, noble, and urgent political task, and he was not alone in so supposing. Gower had long harbored those views individually, dispersed throughout metaliterary and purple passages in his trilingual trilogy. In "O deus immense" Gower encapsulates the poet's task with unwonted concision and self-reflexive panache." [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Weiskott, Eric. "'Loquela gravis iuvat': Gower's "O deus immense" and the Place of Poetry, 1398-1400," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 45 (2023): 205-46 Gower Subject Minor Latin Poetry 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 "Loquela gravis iuvat": Gower's "O deus immense" and the Place of Poetry, 1398-1400." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Weiskott identifies a dual-purposed pun on "Aquilonica" as referencing both "aquilo" (Henry IV's nickname) and "aquila" ("north," i.e., Ravenspur where he landed to begin his conquest of England) in the couplet (Cronica Tripertita 3. 142-43): "Vela petunt portum quem sors prope contulit ortum; Vt dux concepit, Aquilonica littora cepit." ["To fated eastern port by sail they hasten forth; The duke, as he had planned, made landfall in the North."] (319). "The allusive, compressed effect of the double hidden reference in 'aquilonica' argued for in the present note was entirely in keeping with the allusive, compressed style of Gower's composition" (320). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Weiskott, Eric. "The Eagle Has Landed: A Prophetic Pun in John Gower's 'Cronica tripertita'." ANQ: American Notes and Queries 36 (2023): 319-20. Gower Subject Cronica Tripertita 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 The Eagle Has Landed: A Prophetic Pun in John Gower's "Cronica tripertita." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The essay constitutes a reply to Ad Putter's "Linguistic Change and Metre: The Demise of Adjectival Inflections and the Scansion of 'high' and 'sly' in Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve" (English Language and Linguistics 26 (2022): 471–85), which argued that while Gower and Chaucer typically did not often deviate from the grammatical principles of final -e as an adjectival inflection, the examples of "high" and "sly" in their poetry demonstrate the vulnerability of final -e when following vowels. In Putter's view, these words therefore provide examples of the gradual loss of adjectival inflections in English. Weiskott counters Putter's linguistic analysis by noting a long-acknowledged metrical subrule specifying that "the inflectional -e of weak adjectives regularly drops out of metre before a word with aft stress" (54). Putter draws on thirty-one uses of "high" and "sly" in Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve's works: twenty-eight of these, Weiskott argues, are accounted for according to this subrule. He identifies a metrical rather than grammatical reason for the alternating use or omission of final -e, which is that its usage is determined by the metrical shape of the next word in the line. Weiskott concludes, contra Putter, that "Chaucer and Gower, in their high-minded and traditionalist way, treat 'high' and 'sly' as metrically equivalent to any other monosyllabic adjective" (55). [RM. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Weiskott, Eric. Published Weiskott, Eric. "Linguistic Change and Metre: A Reply." Notes and Queries 268 (2023): 54-55. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Linguistic Change and Metre: A Reply. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yeager's essay--part of a two-number special issue of "The Chaucer Review" that commemorates Derek Pearsall's many achievements in Middle English studies--fittingly describes Pearsall's most significant contributions to Gower scholarship. As Yeager makes clear, Pearsall twice received the John Gower Society's prestigious John Hurt Fisher Prize for these contributions--the first ever awarded in 1991 and then, most recently (with Linne Mooney), in 2023, the year after Pearsall's death at age 90. Yeager's survey covers more than fifty years, starting with Pearsall's landmark article in PMLA (1966), "Gower's Narrative Art," and running through his definitive "A Descriptive Catalogue of the English Manuscripts of John Gower's Confessio Amantis" (with Mooney; 2022). Along the way, Yeager rightly (and courteously) acknowledges Pearsall's general lack of attention to Gower's work other than the CA and his interest in the frame and narrative techniques of CA rather than its poetic style. Yeager identifies and exemplifies Pearsall's early appreciation of Gower's humor and humane sensibility and appreciates Pearsall's "great gift as a literary critic" in finding in CA the "large truth in the particular," thereby pointing "the path forward for a generation of modern scholarly readers" (488-89). Comparative analysis, Yeager shows, is fundamental to Pearsall's critical sensibility: "striking off Gower, Langland, Lydgate, and Chaucer, one or another against the other" (483), with similar "illustrative comparison" deployed when Pearsall discloses Gower's "purposive, rhetorical forays" (488) by juxtaposing Gower's tales and Ovidian sources. Yeager's comments on Pearsall's work with Gower manuscripts are equally complimentary and just. Several examples: he characterizes Pearsall's "Manuscripts and Illustrations of Gower's Works" (2004) as still the "handiest go-to resource for short questions of location, dating, or shelfmark," and tells us that Pearsall's essay on the Wollaton Hall Gower manuscript (2010) contains "perhaps the most instructive exposition extant of the creative and technical processes underlying the production of late medieval literary manuscripts" (491). More than forty years in the making, the "Descriptive Catalogue" "provides information in unprecedented quantity, quality, and variety, in a format readily accessible and uniform" (492). These and many other words of praise--appropriate and expected in a commemorative essay--distill Pearsall's sensitive, sensible, and above all, useful Gowerian work, crucial in the development of Gower studies. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R. F. "Derek Pearsall and John Gower." Chaucer Review 58, nos. 3-4 (2023): 481-93. 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 Derek Pearsall and John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Alder and Strohm explore the complexities of medieval understandings and experiences of time, clearly and succinctly addressing various notions of time and related topics (e.g., aging, time-keeping, planetary motion, eternity, the end of time) as reflected in medieval material objects as well as philosophy and literature. In a section on "Timescapes" the authors examine time as a theme and device in works by Julian of Norwich, Margery of Kempe, and Thomas Usk. Gower and his works are considered, more briefly, in three separate sections. One on "Allegorical Time" addresses Lachesis in "Confessio Amantis," Book 4, and the "erroneous sense of time as recoverable" (138) entailed in "borwe" at 4.8-10. The second, on "The Ages of Humankind," includes remarks on the "incompatibility" of old age and idealized love in CA and observes where Gower uses "nature-based analogies" (179) to distinguish between youth and age in the Latin opening of CA, Book 8, and, in "Henrici Quarti primus," to keep a "degree of philosophical distance from the malady [blindness] caused by old age" (181). In their closing section, "The End of Time," Adler and Strohm observe Gower's eschatological concern with time in Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the Prologue of CA, with its emphasis on decline and destruction derived from the Book of Daniel and exegetical tradition. Notably, this last concern is accompanied by a full-page, full-color reproduction of Nebuchadnezzar dreaming of the statue mentioned in Daniel and presented here as similar to Dante's "Old Man of Crete" (198). The illustration reproduces London, British Library, MS 3869, fol. 51. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Adler, Gillian. Strohm, Paul. Published Adler, Gillian, and Paul Strohm. Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life. Medieval Lives. London: Reaktion, 2023. 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 Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life. Medieval Lives. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Constituting chapter 17 in the volume, this addresses the question "how do women 'mean' in these literary contexts [Chaucer and Gower as "pan-European" poets engaged with multi-lingual sources]" (342). The plan of the article indicates its extremely ambitious range: "[it] reviews Chaucer's key poetic works and genres ("The Canterbury Tales," "Troilus and Criseyde," and the three major dream visions) and Gower's major works (the "Confessio Amantis," "Vox Clamantis," "Mirour de l'Omme," and "Cinkante Balades"), and concludes with a comparative analysis of major female figures that both Chaucer and Gower portray (Dido, Medea, Constance, the 'loathly lady,' and Alcyone)" (342). Common to both poets is a "discourse [that] depicts women and femininity as subordinated to masculine hermeneutic needs" through a focus on "women's meaning in ethical terms," a meaning that is generally reductive, seeing femininity . . . in binary terms as 'good'/'bad'" (343). While Gower is famously known as "moral," Chaucer is equally concerned with morals and ethics (354), albeit more "play[fully]" than Gower (369). In VC and MO Gower adhered to the simplistic archetype of women as temptresses (VC) (356-57), or framed them as Eve or Mary (MO) (358-59). In the CA, where almost every story exemplifies a Deadly Sin, he tends to erase "the voices and agency" of women characters, compared to their sources (356). In CB, women speakers are reduced to already-established "signifiers" such as the woman betrayed (357-58). Per Bridges, only Gower's Medea is a "more complex construction" than her counterpart in Chaucer, as her varied life choices can't always be explained in terms of "conventional femininity and its morals" (363). By contrast, Chaucer truncated the story of Medea in his "Legend of Good Women," reducing her life journey to exemplify the innocent woman abandoned (362). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bridges, Venetia. Published Bridges, Venetia. "Chaucer and Gower." In Corinne Saunders and Diane Watt, eds. Women and Medieval Literary Culture from the Early Middle Ages to the Fifteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. 342-376. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Vox Clamantis Mirour de l'Omme Cinkante Balades Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer and Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Cowdery is aware that the six writers he chooses to study here--Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Skelton, Wyatt--"have been received as the early foundation of a high-prestige English literary tradition" (13), and he seeks an original approach to them via the twin elements of his title, "matter" and "making." While the latter is clear enough--it's the writing--the former takes several shapes, i.e., "this book will follow Aristotle in arguing that 'literary matter' is . . . a relative term . . .that designates whatever a given text was understood to be made of" (6), i.e., its "source," one might say. Cowdery argues that "late medieval and early modern court poets followed the same basic procedure" when composing: "(1) the use of pre-existing matter and (2) the remaking of that matter into some new form" (10-11). He applies these definitions to Gower in chapter 2, "Gower and the Crying Voice" (52-82). Gower's habit was to work from the rhetorical figures "figura," "distinction" ("figura" expanded), and "exemplum," all of which are described and illustrated (61-64); Gower's purpose is to "draw out of these materials a set of structural principles, which then serve as the framework for an allegorical and exegetical elaboration upon some moral truth" (64). As many have noted, Gower's exegeses don't always cohere rationally, locus to locus, and so, Cowdery argues, Gower "pursues feeling alongside thought," seeking "to foster an affective connection between the reader and the text": "the voice of a literary character who cries out for mercy" (67). This voice has a special claim on the power of God (69) and is well exemplified in the "Tale of Constantine and Sylvester"--but although "the crying voice" is "a very powerful ethical tool," it too doesn't always seem to work (70-72). Such inconsistencies can be read as allegories, Cowdery asserts, reading the "Tale of Tereus" as just such an allegory critical of Richard II: a superimposition of a "microcosm of erotic greed onto the macrocosm of economic and social greed" (73). For Cowdery, the tale (which he discusses at length) is akin to political protest: "Philomela's woven cry for pity becomes an act of protest speech, and Procne's plot for personal revenge is reimagined as the lead-up to a putsch" (75). But "Tereus" also makes his point, that the matter of the tale can be remade to "allow us to hear the voices of those we cannot hear in our day-to-day lives" (76), as exemplified by Philomela's weaving; and its making "around those voices" (77) is evident throughout his work. Gower's position as himself/as poet at the conclusion of the CA presents the same crying, petitioning stance to Henry (78), Cowdery says--though perhaps here mixing up monarchs and poems, Richard with Henry, the CA with "In Praise of Peace"? Gower did not attempt to "reinvent his materials," Cowdery concludes, "but to draw out what is notable from within them" (82), thereby making something new. Despite several slips of fact (i.e., Gower was not "granted a right to live within the priory precincts of St. Mary Overie"--rather, he sub-let a house there; the priory had no "active scriptorium"; there is no evidence that Gower "once had been a lawyer" [57-58]; the confusion of monarchs, as noted above), and the difficulty of stretching a single thesis to fit six disparate poets across two centuries, Cowdery on Gower provokes thought. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cowdery, Taylor. Published Cowdery, Taylor. Matter and Making in Early English Poetry: Literary Production from Chaucer to Sidney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis In Praise of Peace Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Matter and Making in Early English Poetry: Literary Production from Chaucer to Sidney. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower features in chapter 4, "Monsters and Shapeshifters: The Hybrid Body in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'" (123-153). Gasse's interest in the CA is subordinate to her larger set of claims regarding the essential "hybridity" of the human body, an entity ever capable of transformation, especially via age and/or disability. She considers the tales of "Florent," focusing on the "loathly lady" figure (125-26), "Cambises" in Book VII, who flays a judge, covers a chair with his skin, and makes his son succeed him in office, and sit upon the chair (127), "Albinus and Rosemund" (127-28), which reveals "the monstrous presence of Gurmond" (128), and "the most disturbing alteration of the human form," the "murder of Itys by his mother Procne" (129), in the "Tale of Tereus," "a horror story on multiple levels" (129). Gasse touches briefly upon the tales of Pygmalion, Medusa, the Minotaur, Sirens, centaurs ("the male counterpart to the hybrid female body of the Siren" [133]), leading to very brief commentary on the "Wedding of Pirithous" and "Education of Achilles" (134-35). There follows a sketch of "the Hybrid Masculine Body," covering tales that lead to the conclusion that: "Characters such as Hercules, Nessus, Achelons, and Nectanabus suggest the strengths and the limits of the sexualized and aggressive male body. Unlike the neutered Nebuchadnezzar the ox who is deprived of this aspect of his manhood, these four are all powerful men driven by animalistic heterosexual desire to compete with other males even to the point of violence over the right to mate with a female" (139). Sections on "the Hybrid Gendered Body," the "Hybrid Feminine Body," and the "Hybrid Disabled Body: Tiresias" follow, leading to the conclusion that "Much of Gower's treatment of the malleable human form is to be expected for a late fourteenth-century English text . . . variations on the human body--the aged body, the female body, the prepubescent body, the peasant body, the clerical body, the body missing some of its functioning parts, the body in which the animal is too prominent, the heterosexually impotent body, the body reduced to a small pile of ash and bone, the body made inanimate object, made food, made excrement--are all indicators of cultural anxiety and disability of one sort or another as hybrid examples of the reduced human form" (152). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gasse, Rosanne P. Published Gasse, Rosanne P. Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England. Cham, Switz.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yeager's contribution to the "Oxford History of Poetry in English" bids to establish a new status for Gower in English literary history: that of a ground-breaker; a metrical, formal, and stylistic innovator. Covering a wide range of information about Gower's works and traditional topics in Gower criticism--Gower's trilingualism, his poetic ambitions, his sources, and the relative chronology of his works--Yeager weaves them together with particular emphasis on what he calls "a broad strain of experimentalism that runs throughout" Gower's works in all three languages (441), most evident in cross-fertilizations across language boundaries. Early on, Yeager cites "'Eneidos bucolis'" and the three-volume, three-language head-rest of Gower's tomb effigy as evidence that his "sense of a poetic self took Virgil's example as an inspiration" and "his decision to write extensively--and continually--in French, Latin, and Middle English" (440-41). "[D]iscoveries made writing verse in one language," Yeager maintains, "at times carried over influentially into his work in others," and this essay is--to put it over-simply--a description of those carry-overs from Gower's French and Latin poetry into his "Confessio Amantis." After a brief acknowledgement of the uncertainties of dating Gower's works and manuscripts (recurrent sub-topics), Yeager launches his assessment of "Mirour de l'Omme" (in French, "written in the 1370s or somewhat earlier") as "an ambitious enterprise, particularly if it was indeed Gower's initial poetic project" (441). The length of the MO, its intricate, twelve-line stanzas, and the regularity of its meter are Yeager's concerns here as they anticipate "Gower's future poetics" in the "Vox Clamantis" and the "Confessio Amantis," particularly his habitually "smooth flowing verse" (442), achieved via willingness "to subordinate both syntax and grammar" in the French prosody of the MO and similar manipulations of English in CA. Yeager adds that the "inward turn" (442) of the MO, "moving from allegory to social criticism to intense self-scrutiny"--"altogether unprecedented in late medieval literature"--anticipates Gower's unusual combinations of genres elsewhere, his "formal iconoclasm" (443). Formal concerns are also Yeager's targets in his discussion of Gower's two other French works, "Traitié" and "Cinkante Balades." Yeager argues for dating "Traité" rather earlier than usual (see n12), and suggests persuasively that, as in the CA (which may have been composed or revised at or about the same time), marginal Latin glosses enact "dialogic argument as a means to examine ideas" (444). In the "Traitié," the argument is "unfolded one balade at a time"--an "entirely original conception apparently unique to Gower" (443). The early dating of the "Traitié" also enables Yeager to extend Martin Duffell's argument (1996) about Gower's hendecasyllables and to suggest that "Gower, rather than Chaucer, may have invented iambic pentameter--albeit in French" (444). In turn, the CB is, for Yeager, a "true sequence, each poem building upon the next to supply information about events, and particularly character, both of the male lover and the lady he addresses," anticipating Philip Sidney's "Astrophil and Stella" by two hundred years and prompting Yeager to speculation: "Had Gower elected to write the 'Cinkante Balades' in English, his subsequent reputation would have been very different" (445). The CB influenced the characterization of Amans in CA, Yeager tells us, the vocabularies of the poems are similar at points, and, as with the "Traitié," "resonances" of the CB "are detectable in Gower's English prosody" (446). Turning to Gower's Latin works, Yeager sidesteps "Cronica Tripertita" because it is too late to influence CA (although it may have affected "In Praise of Peace"), and goes on to treat the "Vox Clamantis" as innovative in two respects: the dream vision of the "Visio Anglie" and the plain style of the VC at large. For Yeager, the "Visio" opens as a traditional dream vision, but "quickly transforms into a harrowing nightmare unmatched in English literature, save only, perhaps, by the 'Nighttown' section of James Joyce's 'Ulysses." (446). The plain style of VC---its "unrhymed elegiac distichs" (Yeager here following A. G. Rigg, 1992)--"had little contemporary precedent in England," even though Langland was trying something similar in English when seeking to reach a "discernable audience" through a middle style. Moreover, the plain style of VC contrasts sharply with the "highly artificial scholastic verse" of medieval Latin poetry and, "probably of greater importance" to Gower, it was a means whereby he "positioned himself with Virgil and Ovid" (447). The "thoughtful, innovative poetics" of Gower's "remoulding" of classical poetry occupies Yeager briefly while he revisits his earlier (1989) assessment of classical "cento" in VC, where Gower borrowed lines from classical sources and recontextualized them to produce new meanings in his own poems--techniques that are, like the others mentioned above, "replicated in Gower's Middle English work, if in somewhat different garb" (448). The CA is not, of course, a wholly Middle English text at all: "Gower envisioned it as a work in two languages, English and Latin" (449). Its Latin prose glosses produce, as they do in the "Traitié," a "bilingual polyvocality" which provides Gower with an "alternative 'voice', unidentifiably sourced in the text but specifically non-authorial with which to usher the reader into, and engage with, the vernacular poetry" (449). Moreover, the CA includes poetic passages in Latin (the Latin in "Traitié" is prose), and the labor Gower expends on them, for Yeager, "suggests additional aesthetic ambition." Structurally, "most of the Latin verses" included in CA, Yeager tells us, "mark stages" in Amans' confession, but they also "introduce ideas, and . . . images that will arise in the English many lines later" (450) and at greater length, producing poetic effects that Yeager exemplifies: characterization, "deliberated irony," and punning--"enriching and thickening the English, albeit in riddling--even Donnean--fashion." Explicating interactions between several passages of English verse in CA and Latin ones, Yeager demonstrates that Latin recurrently introduces or interjects "playfulness" into his poem without diminishing its seriousness of purpose, i.e., the "socio-political concerns" that run throughout MO, VC, and CA; the "basic strategy and socially ameliorative purpose that remain the same in all three poems" (452); and the differing, though purposive, targeting of their audiences. The final movement of Yeager's essay is a detailed survey of the resonances of Gower's French prosody in his CA: the use of exemplary tales as in MO, albeit with "greater sophistication" in CA; the "mutual crossover" in his "handling of rhyme" in CA and CB, essentially "monosyllabic, or simple bi-syllables" (453); the "near-absolute regularity of metre" in CA that has "no English counterpart" but does in French poetry by Machaut, Deschamps, and Gower himself; and--Latin here as well as French--the virtuosity with which Gower sustains congruency of "grammar, syntax, [and] precise word selection" over long stretches to carry "extended thoughts smoothly over many lines, notwithstanding the shortness of the four-beat couplet that renders this task demanding." In short, Gower's "mastery of the verse-paragraph is nonpareil" (454), a claim that Yeager substantiates through explication of several passages in which he identifies Gower's "mellifluousness," "aural imagery" and "arresting vividness" (455). Maintaining that "the accentual pattern of conventional English speech over thousands of lines is a control Gower alone achieves," Yeager exclaims that "Chaucer seldom matches it; Hoccleve and Lydgate, never" (454). Yeager's enthusiasm for Gower's cross-fertilizing innovations and poetic style may well put to rest the generations-old canard that Gower is a pedestrian poet (search "dull" in the John Gower Bibliography Online for too many examples). Whether or not Yeager's essay cements a new, more positive orthodoxy of Gower as an experimentalist remains to be seen, but its evidence, arguments, authority, and placement in the Oxford History give it a good chance to do so. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R. F. "John Gower." In Helen Cooper and Robert R. Edwards, eds. The Oxford History of Poetry in English. Volume 2. Medieval Poetry: 1100-1400 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 440-56. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Mirour de l'Omme Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Cinkante Balades In Praise of Peace Cronica Tripertita Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Minor Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation analyses the political, confessional, and psychological frames of John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' (c. 1390-93). This dissertation proposes an integrated understanding of the poem's frames, in which both the confessional and psychological frames respond to the political one that Gower presents in the poem's Prologue. By moving the discussion of politics to a setting of unrequited courtly love and then establishing a need for the failed lover to confess (his sins against love), Gower creates complex layers of meaning. Each of this dissertation's chapters examines Gower and the 'Confessio' in a different context. The first two chapters provide a broader perspective on the external factors that influence Gower's writing. Chapter 1 examines Gower's self-establishment as a figure of authority writing in the vernacular to lay a foundation for the meticulous production of his texts. Chapter 2 examines the English political situation that led Gower to write the 'Confessio,' in particular politics of 1380s and how they are represented in the poem, as well as Gower's position as a public poet. The 'Confessio' is a response to the division Gower sees corrupting both the nation and its people; this chapter thus sheds light on how the poet moves from the body politic to the individual. Chapter 3 includes an overview of confession as a practice in the late Middle Ages and compares medieval manuals for penitents and theological treatises on confession to the portrayal of the lover's confession in the poem. This chapter establishes that confession is not just a listing of sins but an examination of the penitent's conscience and that both the penitent and the priest learn from the confessional process. Chapter 4 studies the frame characters, the lover and the priest (i.e., Amans and Genius), and how they represent the mental faculties of Will and Wit in Gower's scheme of the psyche. Highlighting their development as the confession progresses, the chapter shows how these characters come to represent the model of the readers' education. Finally, Chapter 5 delves into the perceived 'incongruities' of the poem, particularly those in Book VIII, and suggests a reading that reconciles its seeming disparate frames under one unified voice." [eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Castilho Ribeiro Santos, Paulo Eduardo. Published Castilho Ribeiro Santos, Paulo Eduardo. "Public Poetry and the Psychology of Confession in John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Ottawa, 2024. Fully accessible via https://ruor.uottawa.ca/items/13093764-63a8-4da8-8dce-3461f50409e8. 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 Public Poetry and the Psychology of Confession in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This translation of the "Confessio Amantis" finally brings to the contemporary English reader a complete version of Gower's poem in Modern English verse. The only prior translation of the CA was Terence Tiller's 1963 Penguin edition, which summarized as much as it versified the poem. The enormity of translating the entire CA perhaps caused many others to think less about a subsequent book's portability and more about its parkability. However, Carter and Gastle's is a manageable single volume with a clear and friendly two-column format per page. Their translation tries to keep Gower's octosyllabic line, if not his rhyme or word order, to achieve "clarity and contemporary presentation over form" (xxx). The elegance of their translation captures the poet's inventiveness, profundity, and occasional grumpiness. Footnotes contain Andrew Galloway's translations of the Latin rubrics as well as explanatory notes for lines or passages. Three Appendices appear at the back: Appendix A contains the Ricardian Recensions (the main text uses the Third Recension); Appendix B is a glossary of names and their locations in the poem; Appendix C lists the sources and analogues of the CA. This book will cast a long shadow, especially when enjoyed by a sunny window. [CEB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gastle, Brian, trans. Carter, Catherine, trans. Published Gastle, Brian, and Catherine Carter, ed. and trans. The Lover's Confession: A Translation of John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2024. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Lover's Confession: A Translation of John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower's "Tale of Apollonius" is central to Vincent's analysis of baroque "excess" in Shakespeare's "Pericles." (FYI: To understand Vincent's argument on "baroco," a syllogism, you will need to consult his article "Baroco: The Logic of English Baroque Poetics," MLQ 80.3 [Sept. 2019]: 233-59, and any academic background you may have in formal logic, as the author never provides an example of a baroco syllogism.) Vincent begins by noting the recent deficiency of studies on Shakespeare and the early modern artistic movement known as the "baroque." He locates the origin of the term in the "Scholastic syllogism called Baroco" (33) that was decried by early moderns, e.g. Montaigne, as linked to "excessive complexity and artificiality." Likewise, early modern authors disparaged the typical plot of a medieval romance as absurdly convoluted, piling "adventures upon adventures" (34). Nonetheless, paradoxically, these "baroque" effects were attractive to seventeenth-century poets, including Shakespeare, who based his "Pericles" on (in Vincent's view) Gower's notably "excess[ive]" (36) "Tale of Apollonius" in the "Confessio Amantis," Book VIII. While lacking in organic symmetry and unity, "baroque" literary works were unified by theme (37), a unity supplied by Shakespeare's choric Gower, as he navigates the audience through examples of sinful excess in love, to the equally extreme, but morally pure love ultimately achieved by Pericles and his wife and daughter (40). The paradigm for Shakespeare's "allegory of excess," per Vincent, is found in Gower's epigraph to the "Tale of Apollonius": "Omnibus est communis amor, set et immoderatos/Qui facit excessus, non reputatur amans." The alternative to such "immoderate excesses" in love is the rightly directed, "moderate excess" exemplified by Apollonius, Pericles, and Southwell's "Mary Magdalene" (38-40). Other baroque effects anticipated in "Apollonius," and recurring in "Pericles," are the hero's melancholy (related to Christian patience), and an over-the-top, miraculous conclusion to the story (41-44). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Vincent, Robert Hudson. Published Vincent, Robert Hudson. "The Excesses of Romance: Shakespeare's Pericles and the Baroque." The Shakespearean International Yearbook, 20: Special Section, "Pericles, Prince of Tyre," ed. Tom Bishop et al. New York: Routledge, 2024: 32-49. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Excesses of Romance: Shakespeare's "Pericles" and the Baroque. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Willes' is a spirited account of the rich and often revolutionary history of Southwark, from its Roman antecedents up to modernity. Rather than approach such a complicated history chronologically, Willes organizes the book thematically, with chapters on such topics as London Bridge (Chapter 2: London Bridge is Falling Down) to the demographic breadth of residents over the years (Ch 7: A Mixed Community) to its importance in England's history as a center for health care and medicine (Chapter 10: Medical Matters) to its contribution to London's, and England's, financial security (Chapter 12: A Center for Commerce). But for all of its sprawling breadth, "Liberty over London Bridge" is grounded by two complementary areas of focus: the stories of individual people and families of Southwark (which greatly contributes to the book's liveliness) and the central role the Cathedral (from its establishment as St. Mary Overies, then as St. Saviour, and now Southwark Cathedral) played in the borough's history. It is mainly in the context of the Cathedral that Willes evokes Gower, primarily in Chapter 4: On the Road to Canterbury, which begins with a description of Gower's Tomb. The chapter spends little time on the Cathedral, or Southwark generally, in the context of pilgrimage, instead focusing on the borough's significance as reflected in its two most important medieval authors: Gower and Chaucer. "Liberty over London Bridge" appears to be targeting a more popular audience, and Willes focuses on summarizing Gower's life (including his will and his marriage to Groundolf) and the content of Gower's three major works, since they are represented in the tomb, and then similarly summarizes Gower's life and works, with special attention to Southwark's Tabard Inn in the "Canterbury Tales." [BWG. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Willes, Margaret. Published Willes, Margaret. Liberty over London Bridge: A History of the People of Southwark. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2024. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Liberty over London Bridge: A History of the People of Southwark. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yeager begins by observing several scholarly comments on composition, style and the place of marriage in thought, philosophy and poetry--all written about Spenser but which equally could apply to Gower. Yeager's argument throughout this essay is that there are parallels between Gower and Spenser's work which have hitherto been neglected, perhaps unsurprisingly given that Spenser only refers to Gower once, and Gower has only relatively recently been studied in earnest in modern scholarship. Nevertheless, Gower's CA would have been readily available to Spenser, whether in manuscript form--"manuscripts in general were ordinary and available to the Elizabethans" (76), Yeager notes, and there were likely more manuscripts of the CA in the sixteenth century than the forty-nine whole witnesses extant today--or in print, in the three printed editions by Caxton and Berthelette. Given Spenser's reputation for being widely read, it is unlikely that he would not have encountered Gower, and indeed Rosemond Tuve established that Spenser may have had access to the CA based on the signature "Spenserus" next to lines from Ovid in a fifteenth-century CA manuscript. Yeager then traces possible references and allusions in "The Faerie Queene" to the CA, while acknowledging that Spenser could have drawn on other similar texts and traditions. The hypocritical priest Archimago in FQ, Book I, has traditionally been linked with Faus Semblant in the "Roman de la Rose," but could also be connected with Falssemblant in Book II of the CA and throughout the "Mirour de l'Omme." This Gowerian link is strengthened by figures (Archimago and Falssemblant) that Spenser and Gower both present as emblems of Envy. Yeager further suggests that the story of Paridell and Hellenore in Book III of FQ parallels Gower's version in Book V of the CA. Yeager concludes by considering why Spenser, typically an avid name-dropper, may have consciously avoided referring to Gower. Spenser was keenly aware of his literary reputation and afterlife, and may not have wished to associate his name with Gower's Catholicism. Gower was also not as authoritative a name for Spenser to invoke as Chaucer, who had emerged as the "Father" of English poetry. [RM. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R. F. "Absence Is Presence: The Confessio Amantis and The Faerie Queene." Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual 38 (2024): 73-87. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Absence Is Presence: "The Confessio Amantis" and "The Faerie Queene." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article concerns the bedchamber scene in Shakespeare's "Cymbeline" 2.2, specifically Innogen's reading the "Tale of Tereus" (2.2.45) just before she falls asleep and Giacomo emerges from a trunk to spy on her. The Ovidian story describes a rape, and Giacomo's action is a kind of rape although physical touching does not occur. Boecker addresses two previous deficiencies in scholarship on Innogen's reading: the exclusive focus on the rapist mind of Giacomo, at the expense of Innogen's mind in the act of reading, reducing her to a passive victim (416); and the assumption that Innogen's book must be Ovid's "Metamorphoses" (418). For Shakespeare and his audience, Boecker argues, the "Tale of Tereus" included a tradition of English Ovidiana where Procne and Philomela also figure prominently, and which offer insight into the consciousness of Innogen, her active "non-conformism" (417), and the early modern women poets who embraced the tale (418-19). Thus, Innogen's book is better understood as an "amalgam" of Ovid and four English intertexts: Chaucer, Gower, George Gascoigne, and George Pettie (419). Gower's "Tale of Tereus" is told as an exemplum against "ravine," a violent branch of avarice including rape (422). In its equal focus on Procne and Philomela, Gower's version provided Innogen with a model of female "agency" against oppression by the male (422). Tereus mutilates Philomela only after she has threatened to tell the world of his crime (423). Not only does Procne carry out a gruesome revenge on Tereus, but even as a bird she continues to broadcast his perfidy (423). Gower's version also invokes the political theory of Giles of Rome whereby a virtuous monarch is like a faithful husband. This resonates with Innogen's insight that if Posthumus is unfaithful to her, which as a faithful wife she does not believe, he has also "forgot Britain" (424). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Boecker, Bettina. Published Boecker, Bettina. "'The Tale of Tereus' and the Story of Procne: Innogen's Bedside Reading." Shakespeare 20.3 (2024): 415-32. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "The Tale of Tereus" and the Story of Procne: Innogen's Bedside Reading. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Dwyer, Seamus. Published Dwyer, Seamus. "Bastard Hands: Fifteenth-Century Scripts and the Processes of Medieval Making." Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 118.3 (2024): 315–47. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Review Dwyer investigates scribal use of "bastard" as a descriptor for, among other things, script types (e.g., "bastard anglicana"), examining for comparison other "made/crafted" objects--"swords, saddles, wine, food recipes" (315) to which "bastard" was applied, objects made from "intermingled parts that achieve specific utilitarian ends" (325). He concludes that like these, script was considered a commodity, and that "bastard" as applied to script meant an adjudication of high and low styles, mixing "calligraphic features" with less formal script, suited to individual customers--"a process of making that purposefully intermingles elements of efficiency and restraint with elements of care and refinement that yield an elevated yet accessible commodity" (328). Dwyer uses manuscripts of the "Confessio Amantis" ("a manifestly bastard thing," 329), focusing first on the "anglicana formata" of "Scribe D" (Doyle and Parkes' identification and terminology) in Oxford, Christ College 148 [sic] (337, typo for Christ Church) to illustrate and support his argument that "combining lofty matters with 'lusty' ones, and Latin with vernacular, produces a bastard textual object: one that is plainly accessible yet elevated" (333.) He thus connects Gower's "middel weie" with scribal practice: "poetry more solidly with bookmaking" (334). He next examines the hand of Cambridge, St. John's College B.12, "a rare example of an early fifteenth-century 'Confessio' potentially produced outside of London" (341), finding there a "bastard" script that "participates dynamically in the bastard project of Gower's poetry" (344)--i.e., because Gower's subject is Love, at once divine and corporeal. Ultimately, Dwyer draws the conclusion that "literary readings are enhanced by analyzing script. Likewise, commonly used scripts can be shown to have surprising literary qualities that are illuminated in certain poetic milieux" (346). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] 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 Bastard Hands: Fifteenth-Century Scripts and the Processes of Medieval Making. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The title refers to a cluster of essays in this issue of "Speculum," devoted to re-assessing the identification of Adam Pinkhurst as "Adam Scriveyn," by Linne Mooney in 2004. Kerby-Fulton provides a brief introduction, and hers is the first essay in the cluster. Because Mooney's still-controversial essay began with an earlier study by A. I. Doyle and Malcolm Parkes of multiple scribal hands in a manuscript of the "Confessio Amantis," one of whom (Doyle and Parkes' "Scribe B") Mooney judged to be Pinkhurst, all of the essays in the cluster touch upon scribes copying Gower's work to one degree or another, although the Gower portion of these essays receives very little attention. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1. For brief treatment of each essay in the cluster, search for Speculum 99.3 in the Search by Character-String box] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. Published Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. "Communities of Practice: New Methodological Approaches to Adam Pinkhurst and Chaucer's Earliest Scribes." Speculum 99.3 (2024): 664-804. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Communities of Practice: New Methodological Approaches to Adam Pinkhurst and Chaucer's Earliest Scribes. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Kerby-Fulton's essay serves as an introduction to a cluster of essays, commenting on each of the essays to come. Thus she mentions, rather than discusses, Scribe B's "brief stint" in Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.2, and Doyle and Parkes' Scribe D (the "warhorse of Gower copying") and Scribe E, whom Doyle and Parkes concluded was Thomas Hoccleve. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. Published Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. "Adam Pinkhurst and the Baffled Jury: Assessing Scribal Identifications within the Margin of Error." Speculum 99.3 (2024): 664-87. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Adam Pinkhurst and the Baffled Jury: Assessing Scribal Identifications within the Margin of Error. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review As his title suggests, Horobin's essay concerns methodology; no mention of Gower. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Horobin, Simon. Published Horobin, Simon. "Identifying Scribal Hands: Principles and Problems." Speculum 99.3 (2024): 688-96. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Identifying Scribal Hands: Principles and Problems. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Mooney discusses comparatively some distinctive letter forms in MSS Hengwrt and Ellesmere of the "Canterbury Tales," and in Trinity College R.3.2, the "Confessio Amantis," choosing for illustration a section of fol. 9ra of the latter to support an observation that "the spaces between lines in the Gower are more similar to the oath [of Adam Pinkhurst in the London Common Paper] than in the other two (702). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Mooney, Linne R. Published Mooney, Linne R. "Reexamining the Evidence Regarding Adam Pinkhurst, Scrivener." Speculum 99.3 (2024): 697-712. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reexamining the Evidence Regarding Adam Pinkhurst, Scrivener. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Da Rold's concern is to describe the training culture that produced scribal techniques, and to make a case for the use of scribal idiosyncrasies, or "quirks," as helpful in identifying hands, manuscript to manuscript. Her brief mention of Trinity College MS R.3.2, "Confessio Amantis," focuses on Hoccleve's slight contribution "in mixed script" (728). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Da Rold, Orietta. Published Da Rold, Orietta. "Medieval Clerical Culture: The Sociology of Scripts and the Significance of Scribal Quirks." Speculum 99.3 (2024): 713-43. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Medieval Clerical Culture: The Sociology of Scripts and the Significance of Scribal Quirks. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review O'Byrne's study is of the Anglo-Irish scribe Nicholas Bellewe (1423-74), who signed his work, irrefutably establishing identity. Bellewe isn't known to have copied MSS of Gower (whom O'Byrne does not mention) but he did produce both legal and literary documents using the different hands appropriate to each type. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor O'Byrne, Theresa. Published O'Byrne, Theresa. "Bilingual, Bitextual Bellewe: A Case Study of Paleographical Code-Switching in Late Medieval English-Controlled Ireland. Speculum 99.3 (2024): 744-61. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bilingual, Bitextual Bellewe: A Case Study of Paleographical Code-Switching in Late Medieval English-Controlled Ireland. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Smith's essay, while arguably the most technical in this cluster of "Speculum" essays, is also of foremost importance. Citing conclusions drawn in his many earlier publications addressing the language of "Confessio" manuscripts, Smith points out the continuity of distinctively "Gowerian" spelling and its close association with scribes "B," "D," and "Delta" (Doyle and Parkes' terminology), close enough to posit a unique "scripta"--"a prototypical usage 'characteristic of particular discourses and transmitted through the activities of particular communities of practice'" (778). Special attention is paid to MSS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Fairfax 3, San Marino CA, Huntington Library EL 26 A.17 (olim Stafford). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Smith, Jeremy J. Published Smith, Jeremy J. "On 'Standard' Written English in the Later Middle Ages." Speculum 99.3 (2024): 762-79. 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 On "Standard" Written English in the Later Middle Ages. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Sobecki's essay is "a response" to the others in this cluster of Speculum essays--hence its concerns on arguments. pro and con, with Adam Pinkhurst as Chaucer's "Adam scriveyn" (Sobecki is not convinced), and so are largely extraneous to Gower. He does reprint Linne Mooney's Fig. 2, the portion of Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.2 fol. 9ra (791), and comments interestingly that this manuscript "has clear Westminster connections" and may point to a circle of Westminster scribes, with scribes A, B (if not Pinkhurst), and D perhaps belonging to Anglicana-specialized clerks working in Westminster Hall, that is, Chancery, Exchequer, the central law courts" (804). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sobecki, Sebastian. Published Sobecki, Sebastian. "Quo vadis, Adam Pinkhurst? Scripts, Scribes, and the Limits of Paleography: A Response Essay." Speculum 99.3 (2024): 780-804. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Quo vadis, Adam Pinkhurst? Scripts, Scribes, and the Limits of Paleography: A Response Essay. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Perry seeks to establish "a new way of understanding the English literary tradition by focusing on the essential role that coteries played in the tradition's beginning and maintenance" (4). By the "tradition" he means Chaucer, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Dunbar, Roos, Skelton, Surrey and Wyatt. It's a big-name list, especially when each move chronologically forward also mandates discussion of those left out, like Gower (in Perry's view, due to Lydgate [152]), and attendant "coteries"--"a sociological term denoting a gathering of like-minded individuals of the same class, actual historical persons in relation with one another . . .that also depend upon a rhetorical pose involving distinct literary features" (8). How can one recognize a coterie? "There are two general means by which a literary work may signal its involvement in a coterie: specific forms of allusion and a particular way of using proper names" (9). Gower, unsurprisingly, thus figures early as a prominent--perhaps the most prominent--member of "Chaucer's London coterie" which included Thomas Usk until his execution, and possibly the Oxford philosopher-turned-lawyer, Ralph Strode. Gower is the one Chaucer names (in "Troilus and Criseyde") who also names Chaucer in return (Venus' request to Gower to greet Chaucer when they meet, in CA 8 (38-49), establishing coterie connection, and (incidentally) dismissing the idea of a quarrel between the two. Identifying allusions, Perry concedes, is "a necessarily more speculative enterprise" than name-checking (49). By way of examples he cites the Man of Law's "humorous" criticism of Gower's "incest tales" (42-43, 49-52), (which he reads as indicative of the two poets' "jovial competitiveness" [51]). Thereafter, in chapter 2, Gower appears to have been of small importance for Hoccleve and is mentioned sporadically, e.g., when Hoccleve is "didactic," he's "Gowerian" (113). In chapter 4, however, Perry presents Lydgate as "indebted to John Gower, especially the latter's form of political poetry and its pacifism" (126), and "a model of the poet as political commentator and advisor to princes, an exemplary poetic voice aimed at enhancing the common good" (127). Part of this admiration devolved from Gower's pacifism: "Lydgate tries to ensure that Gower's pacifism gets a fair hearing, even if Gower the man is silenced" (127); and "one finds Lydgate appropriating French culture to speak back to his English patrons, including Chaucer's family, in the form of Gowerian critique" (127). Perry sees Lydgate identifying with Gower as a poet writing for a Lancastrian king, just as did Lydgate (142-43), who borrowed techniques of address from "In Praise of Peace" that allowed him to envision a "double mode of address" (148), "a means to praise the Lancastrian nobility while simultaneously critiquing their actions" (144). Nonetheless, Lydgate's "double mode" differs from Gower's, "inverting" it: "Gower's dual address speaks for a class" of which he was a member, while "Lydgate's [speaks] for a coterie" (149). Yet while he borrows so extensively from Gower, Lydgate never mentions him, thereby bolstering "Chaucer's position in literary history while diminishing Gower's" (152). In chapter 5, discussing Dunbar's "Lament for the Makars," Perry notes that Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate are named together, distributing "the praise afforded to one of the three to the other two as well" (183). Skelton connects the three again in "The Garlande of Laurell," speaking with each in turn, beginning with Gower, whom he praises for "garnishing" the English language (188-89). With the poets of "Tottel's Miscellany"--Surrey and Wyatt--in chapter 6, "the need to bolster Chaucer's reputation by providing him with the attendant figures of Gower and Lydgate is no longer acute, and Chaucer begins to stand for the foundation of the English literary tradition as such. It is at this moment . . . that the Chaucerian tradition has become the English literary tradition" (198). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Perry, R. D. Published Perry. R. D. Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition: From Chaucer to Spenser. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition: From Chaucer to Spenser. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Ronan's book is remarkable in several ways, not least because it begins by explaining his interest in "addiction literature" as having grown from his own decade-long experience as a drug addict, now recovered. Following a substantial introduction, "Premodern Addiction and Addiction," the book has six chapters: 2, "Modern Addiction Discourse," 3, "Modern Addiction Literature," 4, "Premodern Discursive and Didactic Texts," 5, "Addicted to Love in Premodern Literature," 6, "Anthropomorphised Beasts and Bestial Men." In chapter 4 (133-84), Ronan traces the idea of addiction as considered by Plato, Aristotle, Prudentius, Boethius, and Thomas Aquinas. In chapter 5 (185-244)--following an unexpected opening referencing Robert Palmer, the Chambers Brothers, and Smokey Robinson--he takes up love (quoting Jacalyn Duffin) as "burning desire, lust, and rest-of-your-life, self-obliterating adoration" (186), the kind of love, in other words, found in Ovid's "Remedia Amoris" (Ronan compares Ovid's advice to "modern addiction recovery discourses" [191]), Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" (a "diseased" Troilus presents "the common narrative traits of modern Addiction Literature: initial hubris, a progressive and chronic loss of agency, ignored negatives, and the need for intervention" [195]), and Gower's Confessio Amantis," where "the frame narrative . . . represents one of the most significant, sustained and wide-ranging examples of Middle English poetic engagements with the issues of impaired personal behavioural agency" (210). Ronan thus pays particular attention to the frame, something that he asserts "Macauly" [sic, throughout] got wrong (215-17), because it is in the frame that readers encounter Amans, whose "addiction to love" justifies the process of the poem. Ronan concurs with C. S. Lewis that the CA "tells the story of the death of love" (215) and this for Ronan amounts to a glad--if complicated--ending, since "love" in Amans' terms amounts to addiction, its death in Ronan's parlance recovery and "renovation" (217). Yet what Amans relinquishes at the poem's conclusion is only a kind of love, not love itself, which has many positive aspects: love of family, of community, of God. Thus, "love in the 'Confessio' is never depicted in a wholly negative light, but it is depicted as possessing a capacity for being misused. The behaviour of Amans is not in need of intervention and correction because he is a lover, but because he loves futilely and out of measure of reason" (221). For Ronan, recovery narrative unlocks the secret of the CA's structure, which seen from this viewpoint, he asserts, is fully coherent. Even the many tales told by Genius, some of them seemingly conflicting, fit, because Genius recognizes the need to be "slyh / To hem which hath the need on honed" (8.2064-65), that is, to distract while the cure settles in. (In this Genius channels Ovid's advice in the "Remedia" [236-40]). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ronan, Mark. Published Ronan, Mark. Addiction Literature's Past and Present. Cham, Switz.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. 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 Addiction Literature's Past and Present. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This concise essay argues that Gower's version of the Constance story (CA 2.587–1598) "contains a covert progression of the controversies concerning Constance's marital relationship with King Allee" (510). The first controversy identified is Constance's legitimacy to be Allee's queen. Wu suggests that in Gower's version of the tale--more so than in Chaucer's or Trevet's--Allee's support of Constance as an appropriate choice for the monarchy "portrays Britain as a tolerant and inclusive nation by creating a resolute, far-sighted, and fortunate king" (512). The second controversy focuses upon Constance's loyalty to Allee, or the narrative ambiguity surrounding her loyalty. Constance's journeys become replete with opportunity for infidelity, and, as Wu suggests, not all of these moments are explicitly refuted, such as the years Constance spends with Arcennus. Again, Wu proposes, the focus turns to Allee's morality as he recognizes his own role in propelling Constance towards those possible infidelities. And finally, the third controversy is characterized by Constance's "political impact" (514), the possible renegotiation of political alliances and alteration of national sovereignty. This controversy is assuaged by Allee's deft political maneuverings and the results in the production of an heir, Maurice, suggesting "an optimistic view of the political marriage as a lucrative political scheme planned by King Allee himself" (515). Ultimately, for Wu, "Gower's poetics in this tale features a romantic and empathetic image of the king, which is associated with the contemporary discourses around King Richard II" (515). [BWG. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wu, Xiaoling. Published Wu, Xiaoling. "'Worldes Faierie': The Narrative Controversies over Constance in 'Confessio Amantis.'" ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 37.4 (2024): 510–18. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Worldes Faierie": The Narrative Controversies over Constance in "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review From Dwyer's abstract: "I argue in this dissertation that scripts are media that serve literary interpretation. . . . Chapter 1 finds that scribes heavily relied on artful, creative, and often rhetorically powerful language to communicate about scripts to the broader world. . . . Chapter 2 focuses on one example of the figurative language scribes use to label and think about script: the term 'bastard,' . . . find[ing] that 'bastard scripts' are those which exhibit the careful combination of 'high' calligraphic features with 'low' cursive ones that can be read for particular literary effects. Analyzing the variously rendered 'bastard scripts' of the early manuscripts of John Gower's "Confessio Amantis," Chapter 2 ultimately finds that the different ways scribes 'bastardized' scripts uncover a medieval 'bastard poetics,' aided by the poem's own 'bastard' combination of 'high' Latin verse with 'low' English couplets. . . . Chapter 3 investigates how scripts can portray the affective stances their literary texts assume, more specifically intimacy. Focusing on secretary, a script imported to England from French-speaking territories of Europe, I examine its uses in three case studies: a manuscript of Guillaume de Machaut's multi-form poem "Le livre dou Voir Dit," John Gower's ballade sequence the "Traitié," and several early manuscripts of Christine de Pizan. Chapter 3 finds that secretary, in both French and Anglo-French contexts, when it triangulates with language (French) and form (epistolary lyrics or prose), facilitates what I call 'secretarial reading,' wherein the reader is encouraged by the apparent simplicity of secretary's cursive aspects to recognize and engage with intimacy in the texts at the level of content, genre, or the author's literary persona. . . . Chapter 4 argues for the possibilities of script as a facilitator for reading in a continuous process. It focuses on a single case study, an early fifteenth-century manuscript of "Piers Plowman," copied by an apparently 'amateur' scribe, Thomas Tilot. Tilot's script starts out as a highly formal textualis, but slowly decreases in calligraphic effort until it fully becomes a rapid cursive. This calligraphic diminuendo epitomizes scribal 'amateurishness' through its disinterest in absolute uniformity and consistency, which I argue offers a visual reading of the many moments of upheaval, destabilization, and narrative unraveling in "Piers Plowman" itself. Chapter 4 ultimately offers a method of close reading medieval texts that takes script more fully into account alongside lexis, diction, and meter, concretizing this dissertation's arguments about the interpretive power scripts hold for literature." Chapter 2 is evidently a version of Dwyer's "Bastard Hands: Fifteenth-Century Scripts and the Processes of Medieval Making." Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 118, no. 3 (2024): 315–47. [eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dwyer, Seamus Published Dwyer, Seamus. "Scripts and Literature in the Manuscripts of England and France, 1370-1425." Ph.D. Dissertation. Yale University, 2024. Dissertation Abstracts International A86.01(E). Abstract accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Scripts and Literature in the Manuscripts of England and France, 1370-1425. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Stern explores how literary depictions of sound "animate marginalized characters when their voices fail," treating silence in Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde," laughter in "Le Roman de Silence," crying in the "Book of Margery Kempe," and music in both Gower's "Tale of Apollonius of Tyre" ("Confessio Amantis," Book 8) and the "Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri" (HA). She tells us that "[e]ven when voice proves to be impossible for myriad reasons, these early literary works showcase marginalized characters that can temporarily rebel, refute, and resist through their authors' orchestration of what I refer to as 'sonic expressions' or the ability to express through sound" (xiv). In Stern's discussion of Gower's tale and its antecedent (Chapter 4), notions of music, literary voice, prosodic patterning, and the auditory imagination of reading and listening audiences complicate and perhaps muddy her concept of "sonic expressions," hazarding confusion, even dissonance. For example, the HA and Gower's Tale "are textual objects that are not sounded objects in a traditional sense. Still, they feature abundant music, performance, and song representations that beg us to consider how these textual features differ from conventional modes of communication, such as voice. In this sense, the text can be both unsounded and musical in its representations of what we might redefine as 'music'" (167). A "reader's engagement," Stern tells us, can "bring to life" the "musical engagements" of the Apollonius accounts because their "vibrational affect takes effect, pulsating from text to reader and back to text again," and "offer[s] ethics to counteract the inherent limitations of the story," especially when readers "attun[e] their thinking ears to the sonic features of the text" (170). Specifically, if we attend "to the sounds that derive from Thaise's/Tarsia's character's musical abilities, we, as readers, can begin to hear not the interpretation of the female voice but a form of musical expression that pulsates from the descriptions of her performances" and helps to "generate a more ethical approach" to these accounts (171). I'm not sure how it is generated by these concerns with sound, but Stern's ethical approach is briskly feminist so that, for example, "Gower's version eclipses the HA's in terms of its delivery of female agency . . . . Gower's rendition is a win for all women" (188). A bit later, Stern tells us that the ending of the HA "resonates with my feminist wishes" (193), while "Gower elects to spend the final pages of his 'Apollonius' story silencing, erasing, and 'fixing' the canonical tradition brought forth by musicality: female agency" (195). At the close of her discussion, Stern states: "Thus, I conclude that these two versions of the Apollonius story should be read thematically for their musical presentations, for to do so is to read Thaise's/Tarsia's character anew. No longer an empty signifier of the female voice, Thaise's/Tarsia's musical performances can be read as detectable and persistent. In imagining Thaise's/Tarsia's melodies, the song's sound can be heard, even in the face of oppressive editing practices. This is the most feminist reading one can make of a textual tradition that offers so little room for women to express themselves" (200-01). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stern, Kortney, Published Stern, Kortney, "Sonic Interventions: Silence, Sound, and Melody in Medieval Literature." Ph.D. Dissertation. Indiana University, 2024. Dissertation Abstracts International A86.02(E). xi, 227 pp. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sonic Interventions: Silence, Sound, and Melody in Medieval Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Batkie is concerned to identify Gower as a unique kind of history-writer, in whose work the structuring and affect ('ordinatio' and 'ductus,' in her terms here) "of the poetic line become entangled with resistance to political desire, and they generate a field in which an obverse aesthetic takes over from chronological distance or propagandistic control--the two other modes we often find structuring narrative histories" (113). For examples of these latter approaches she discusses, respectively, Thomas Walsingham's "Monasterii St. Albani" --at length--Richard Maidstone's "Concordia." Leveraging the affective power of anaphora particularly (with all its Ovidian overtones), Gower, Batkie argues, draws attention to real events while also underscoring the uncertainty inherent in living through them: "In the 'Visio,' Gower's vision is intentionally fragmented, illuminating not a stable political landscape but one that is--and always has been--unreliable" (132). For Batkie, uncertainty (unreliability) of this kind should be invoked more often in regard to Gower, "particularly as we consider the ways in which he imagines his historical narrative of the past contributing to and shaping the political present" (132). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Batkie, Stephanie L. Published Batkie, Stephanie L. "Gower's Allusive Forms: Anaphora and Political Desire in the 'Visio Anglie'." In William Green, Daniel Helbert, and Noëlle Phillips, ed. Textual Traditions and Medieval Literary Culture: Essays in Honour of Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2025). Pp. 108-32. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Allusive Forms: Anaphora and Political Desire in the "Visio Anglie." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2025 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Green takes up the problem of the purpose of Book VII often raised by readers of the 'Confessio' (including Tamara O'Callaghan, M.A. Manzalaoui, Elizabeth Porter, Seb Falk, and--obliquely--Siân Echard), and argues vigorously that we are in fact the problem, not Gower's text: "It is precisely in the alienness of the material that we perceive of as dull in which me might attempt instead to see medieval textual productions of the once-live objects that informed medieval subjectivities; it is in the boring that we might gain insight into the fundamental differences between our own modes of being and theirs" (138). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Green, William. Published Green, William. "Gower and the Heavens: the 'Dull' and the Divine in 'Confessio Amantis'." In William Green, Daniel Helbert, and Noëlle Phillips, eds. Textual Traditions and Medieval Literary Culture: Essays in Honour of Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2025), pp. 133-51. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and the Heavens: the "Dull" and the Divine in "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2025 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review McGregor approaches Gower's "Tale of Rosiphelee" by contextualizing and rethinking its most striking visual image: the figure of the abject revenant "horse knave" ("Confessio Amantis" 4.1399), sporting an array of halters around her waist, as she and her lean, ill-kept, hobbling black horse, trail a group of elegant women mounted on "amblende hors . . . / That were al whyte, fatte and grete" (4.1309-10). The woman explains her reduced state to Rosiphelee as punishment for resisting before turning late to love, a partial redemption marked by the horse's bridle of gold and precious stones. The overt lesson of this encounter is to submit to Venus's "betre reule" (4.1264) in good time and thereby outwit contingency and misfortune. McGregor finds in the image a social dimension that extends beyond the injunction for women to love, with the promise of marriage and maternity. The key to it is the identification of the horse and rider as effectively one body under the control represented by the bridle. McGregor turns to contemporary manuals for keeping horses to establish that the composite rider and horse suffer from "myskeping"--a term that denotes inadequate care or mistreatment, apart from the ordinary dangers and injury that animals face. Such neglect, she observes, is roundly condemned in the literature and the culture at large. In this way, she suggests that the corollary to subjection, obedience, and domestication (symbolized by the bridle) is an ethic of care and nurture (symbolized by the halter). McGregor notes earlier that Gower diverges from his likely source, the thirteenth-century "Lai du Trot," by creating a story populated only by women. The "horse knave" inhabits the lower rung of this mysterious, uncanny female world, oppressed by the labor signified by the "twenty score / Of horse haltres and mo" (4.1356-57). In positing an alternative space of care and nurture, Gower's poem does not, therefore, eliminate the prospect of neglect. McGregor argues, "The maiden and her horse have submitted to the strictures of haltering, yet the domestic agreement is violated and both reap abuse rather than nurture (128). [RRE. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor McGregor, Francine. Published McGregor, Francine. "Bridling at Halters: Equine Bodies and Double Binds in John Gower's 'Tale of Rosiphelee.'" The Chaucer Review 60.1 (2025): 108-29. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bridling at Halters: Equine Bodies and Double Binds in John Gower's "Tale of Rosiphelee." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2025 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Watt describes the making of Earl Gower's Roxburghe Club edition of London, British Library MS 59495, olim Trentham, "one of nine books printed by club members in 1818" (162), a manuscript on the library shelves of his father, the Marquis of Stafford, at Trentham Hall. The Earl used a transcription made by Henry Stachey in 1764 for the printer's copy (152), but corrected the proofs from the manuscript itself (156). The Roxburghe Club edition prints the Latin and French poetry, but deliberately leaves out the one Middle English poem in the manuscript, "In Praise of Peace," an omission explained by Earl Gower that this had been previously edited "in Urry's edition of Chaucer's works" (154). Oddly, Watt suggests that the Club members would have thought the character Gower in Shakespeare's "Henry IV, Part 2" was the poet: "Roxburghe Club members might nonetheless have enjoyed making the more subtle connection between the Trentham Manuscript's (now London, British Library MS ADD.59495) ostensible dedication to Henry IV and Gower's cameo appearance in "Henry IV, Part 2" (though it is not entirely clear what they might have thought of Gower's refusal to dine with Falstaff in Act 2, Scene 1" (163-64). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Published Watt, David. "A Knight at the Roxburghe (Club): George Granville Sutherland-Leveson-Gower and the Textual Transmission of 'Balades and Other Poems by John Gower.'" In William Green, Daniel Helbert, and Noëlle Phillips, eds. Textual Traditions and Medieval Literary Culture: Essays in Honour of Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2025), pp. 152-65. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Knight at the Roxburghe (Club): George Granville Sutherland-Leveson-Gower and the Textual Transmission of "Balades and Other Poems by John Gower." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2025 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 neatly expresses the broad outlines of his perspective on Gower's "discontent" with Ovid in the final paragraph of this essay: "the disquieting problem I believe Gower discovered in his last years with Ovid as an aesthetic model was posterity . . . . [A]s a poet of continuing transformation, and earth-bound love, Ovid fell short of that Petrarchan high seriousness that promised permanence. Virgil, alone, possessed that" (107). However, like Ovid, Yeager explains earlier, Gower "had problems with" Virgil, in Gower's case with both the "tyrannical imperialism" (103) of the "Aeneid" and the "military adventurism" (106) of Aeneas, helping Yeager to explain why Virgils' direct influence on Gower was slight, and why the Virgil we find in the "Confessio Amantis" is a magician and a failed lover, not a poet; Aeneas, a betrayer rather than a hero--both based in romance rather than epic, and both, perhaps, influenced by Augustine's critique of Virgil in his "Confessions" and "De civitate Dei." Gower well knew of Virgil's enduring status and wanted such "posterity" (95) for himself, a goal he was, perhaps, introduced to by Chaucer, Yeager suggests, and a topic likely to have been discussed among those in "Gower's circle"--Chaucer, Ralph Strode, and others (102n47)--especially as purveyed by Petrarch. Previously, Ovid had provided Gower with a wide range of narratives of transformation and love--topics Gower took up early in his "Visio Anglie" and in CA (c. 1381-82)--especially those that posed "hopeful aspiration" implicit in "continual . . . potentially ameliorative change." Over time, however (both Gower's age and "Richard's darkening rule" played roles here, Yeager observes) Gower's "outlook changed" (94) and a "new ambition" developed: he grew concerned to establish a poetic legacy of the sort articulated by Petrarch. Yeager is careful to make clear that "no evidence has surfaced yet of Gower's reading of any work of Petrarch's," but he makes it equally clear that a new idea of authorship was coalescing in England at the very late fourteenth century--a preoccupation with "posterity, a concept concerned with the life of letters that Petrarch re-invented, framing poetic immortality solidly around Virgil" (95). Yeager shows that Gower "moves away from Ovid" (98) in his late works (1390s and after), examining closely the nuances (and authorship questions) of "Quam quincere," "Eneidos bucolis," and "Quia unusquisque" as "fruits of conversation within Gower's circle" (102) and the result of a "Petrarchan gaze" (99), tinged with "clear distrust, even a detestation, of the worldly pretensions of imperium" (103) that Gower associated with Virgil. Throughout this essay, Yeager's own gaze is on Ovid but it widens out to include significant engagement with Virgil and Petrarch, along with Chaucer, Strode, and even Langland and Lydgate, offering a wide-ranging exploration of changes in Gower's poetic outlook, a rumination rich in details, nuances, sidelights, implications for chronology, and provocative questions, many of the latter left hanging, tantalizingly, for future consideration, even though some of them already have been addressed in studies not mentioned by Yeager. See, for example, T. Matthew N. McCabe's "Vernacular Authorship and Public Poetry: John Gower" (2020). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R. F. "Gower's Ovidian Aesthetics and Its Discontents." In William Green, Daniel Herbert, and Noelle Phillips, eds. Textual Traditions and Medieval Literary Culture: Essays in Honour of Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2025), pp. 89-107. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Later Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Ovidian Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2025 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Coleman, Joyce. Published John Gower Society website:<br />https://johngower.org/coleman-miniatures/<br />Accessed 22 February 2024 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Maanuscripts and Textual Studies Review Coleman's "chart and accompanying excel file reflects a compilation of known Dream of Nebuchadnezzar and Confession miniatures in extant copies of Gower's Confessio Amantis. For a fuller discussion of these miniatures, and of illuminations in Gower manuscripts generally, see "Illuminations in Gower Manuscripts," in The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower, edited by Ana Saez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R.F. Yeager, Routledge, 2017, pp. 117-131. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource n.d. Title A name given to the resource Dream of Nebuchadnezzar and Confession Miniatures in Gower's Confessio Amantis. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Drawing on the theory of Jean-Luc Nancy, Batkie argues that "Gower's persistent use of audio-centric language and wordplay argues for a poetics of attention and openness . . . the openness and uncertainty of the ear" (37). While hearing is involuntary, listening is active, "temporal," and "open to the other" (32), as the listener must attend in expectation as a vocal utterance unfurls over time. Aurality calls into question the credibility of the speaker as well as the credulity of the listener; Gower values credulity as necessary to learning, even though it may lead to error (36). The VC reechoes with aural approaches, especially the homonymic punning uniquely suited to connect related concepts and allow, where appropriate, for multiple interpretations. Having recently co-translated the VC, Batkie explicates a series of sample passages: by playing on "sensus" (understanding) and "census" (accounting [of money]), Gower underscores how greedy prelates equate wealth with wisdom, while slighting the poor. The poet's riddle on his name has several meaningful solutions. The goddess Fortune--object of misplaced popular credulity--is described in grammatically ambiguous language well suited to convey her deceptive quality (37-44). For Gower, the attentive credulity of the listener is a necessary step to faith, to apprehending "the polysemy of the divine" (45). In new translation, the dual nature of the baby Jesus is harmonized in homonymic wordplay: "That he presses Mary's breast expresses true man; / A new star exposed expresses that he is God" (46-47, VC II.413-14). Although Gower's prophetic voice may sometimes sound in weeping, his vocal appeal to active faith is nonetheless resistant to despair (34, 48-49). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Batkie, Stephanie. Published Batkie, Stephanie. "The Sound of My Voice: Aurality and Credible Faith in the 'Vox Clamantis'." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 32-49. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Sound of My Voice: Aurality and Credible Faith in the "Vox Clamantis."