4 100 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 Genius introduces the story of Virginia in Book 7 of the CA with the words "rihtwisnesse and lecherie / Acorden noght in compaignie / With him that hath the lawe on honde" (7.5125-27). Hoffman suggests that Gower is here paraphrasing Ovid's Metamorphoses 2.846-47: "Non bene convenient nec in una sede morantur / Maiestas et amor" (Majesty and love do not get along well together, nor do they dwell in the same place) (qtd on 127). Ovid's point that erotic passion and majestic dignity are incompatible is made in connection with Jove's advances on Europa. Since Ovid's proverb was "perhaps more frequently quoted in the Middle Ages than any other lines of the famous 'Ovidius ethicus,'" Gower's conscious borrowing is "scarcely surprising" (128). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hoffman, Richard L Published Hoffman, Richard L. "An Ovidian Allusion in Gower." American Notes and Queries 6 (1968), pp. 127-128. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource An Ovidian Allusion in Gower Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1968 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Ganim traces a history of popular movements described as anarchic in later medieval literature, with particular focus on political writings; he extends this trend into twentieth-century medievalisms. For Ganim, this trend is more dialectic than a direct lineage; he is particularly interested in links between apocalypticism and anarchy. The piece opens with a history of the intellectual and indeed theological underpinnings of this connection, tracing the thought of Joachim of Fiore into Franciscan spirituality. Ganim builds on James Dean's work in "The World Grown Old," identifying a "fundamentally pessimistic and entropic view of the world [that] permeates a spectrum of genres" (75). From this foundation, then, Ganim moves to exploring how English writers engage this worldview, beginning with Chaucer and Gower; he notes not only the small, potentially direct moments in which Chaucer engages with the 1381 Rising but also traces the themes of apocalypse, chaos, and popular revolt into works such as the "Knight's Tale." As he turns to Gower, Ganim focuses on the "Visio Anglie" of the "Vox Clamantis": he suggests that both writers present not just moments of crisis, but also everyday life as itself anarchic in more mundane ways. Ganim traces this mundane anarchy to patterns of social anxiety in the late fourteenth century as well as to a growing concern about personal taboos in confessional manuals. From there, he outlines some of the afterlives of this connection between anarchy and the Middle Ages in later medievalisms, ranging from the Sex Pistols to "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," with a particularly nuanced reading of William Morris's "News from Nowhere" and "The Dream of John Ball." By way of conclusion, he returns to medieval literature, tracking ideals of collective action in the miracles recounted in John Lydgate's "Miracles of St. Edmund." [KMcS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ganim, John. Published Ganim, John. "Anarchy in the UK: Chaos and Community in Late Medieval Political Writings." In Later Middle English Literature, Materiality, and Culture: Essays in Honor of James M. Dean, ed. Brian Gastle and Erick Kelemen (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2018), pp. 71-89. 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 Anarchy in the UK: Chaos and Community in Late Medieval Political Writings. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Brief biography; includes claim that Gower is descendent of Sir John Scot. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Weever, John. Published Weever, John. Ancient Funeral Monuments within the United Monarchies of Great Britain. London: Thomas Harper, 1631, p. 270. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ancient Funeral Monuments within the United Monarchies of Great Britain. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1631 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Robins, William Randolph Published Robins, William Randolph. "Ancient Romance and Medieval Literary Genres: Apollonius of Tyre." PhD thesis, Princeton University, 1995. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review ["The story of Apollonius of Tyre is the only ancient romance that was known to the medieval West, where it was remarkably popular. Its narrative principle of random contingency served to differentiate it from dominant narrative assumptions in western medieval literature. Without the context of the Greek romances, medieval readers understood the story's provocative randomness in terms of other generic categories, and thus the way various late antique and medieval cultures reponded differently to this same story provides clues about the operations of several distinct literary systems." Chapter 4 treats the OE version; chapter 5 contrasts Antonio Pucci's Apollonio di Tiro with Boccaccio's use of the story in the Filocolo. "Chapter 6 argues that in John Gower's Confessio Amantis the story of Apollonius stages a confrontation between two temporal logics of narrative -- romance and exemplum -- which governs the poem's engagement with its readers." [JGN 15.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ancient Romance and Medieval Literary Genres: Apollonius of Tyre Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review A.G. Rigg cites Gower at least once on almost every page in his survey of the role and status of Anglo-Latin during the last half of the fourteenth century, focusing on the Ricardian era in particular. "In this period," he writes, "we begin to see clearly the trends that would later lead to both the demise of Latin as a medium for creative writing and its protection as a unique manifestation of classical civilization" (p. 122). His essay is an engaging supplement both to his own "History of Anglo-Latin Literature (1066-1422)" and to J. A. Burrow's "Ricardian Poetry," as he describes how Latin writers were like or unlike contemporary writers in English, using the features that Burrow defined as characteristic of the Ricardian age. Along the way, he makes many useful observations about how Gower was like or unlike other contemporary writers in Latin. To use a small example, Gower's use of the enclitic "que" for "et," which stands out so prominently for those more accustomed to classical Latin, is, Riggs asserts, entirely typical of his age (p. 133); and on a larger matter, he notes that the most typical subject matter of late 14th-century Latin poetry is "historical" (as opposed to classical, Biblical, or devotional), the only exceptions being a few of Gower's own short poems. In the last part of his essay, he juxtaposes three different examples of such historical writing, Thomas Barry's "Battle of Otterburn" (a straightforward factual account in verse), Gower's CrT (in which the poet "has entirely manipulated history for his poetic and political agenda," p. 138), and the "Visio" in Book 1 of VC, "the most striking example of the use of contemporary history . . . for literary purposes" (pp. 138-39), presenting a vision that "more than any other dream-vision I know, mirrors the common experience of a bad dream" (p. 139). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rigg, A. G. Published Minnis, A. J., Charlotte Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. "Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J.A. Burrow." Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. 121-41. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Cronica Tripertita 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 Anglo-Latin in the Ricardian Age. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Vising, Johan. Published Vising, Johan. Anglo-Norman Language and Literature. London: Oxford University Press, 1923. 111 pp. Gower Subject Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Mirour de l'Omme Cinkante Balades Traité pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Review Vising describes the "External History" and "Character" of the Anglo-Norman language, and outlines the history of its literature, with an extensive catalog of works written in Anglo-Norman. Along the way he cites examples from "Mirour de l'Omme" of Gower's awareness of the "internal decay" of the language (27), refers to morphological confusion of "u" and "o" and of "u" and "ui" in Gower's works as identified by Alfred Tanneberger in 1910 (29), and describes MO as the "last considerable representative" of AN literature (39). In his catalog of fourteenth-century AN literature, Vising includes brief descriptions of "Cinkante Balades," MO, and "Traité pour Essampler les Amants Marietz" (72-73; items 360, 369-70) and, in a general discussion of AN versification, attributes Gower's "exceptional" combination of "adherence to English rhythm with the French syllabic system" to him being a "learned man," who "had spent considerable time in Paris" (82)--the latter, an incorrect assertion. [MA. 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 Anglo-Norman Language and Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1923 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 name is "the last name on the roll of Anglo-Norman writers" (360). Even though his language and versification are influenced by continental French, Gower's French works can be said to have provided a "magnificent" (357) end to Anglo-Norman literature. Despite the praise, Legge dedicates only a couple of pages to the MO (consisting mostly of summary). Her discussion of the Traitie and the CB is a little longer and involves more close-reading. Legge dates the Traitie to just before Gower's marriage in 1398 and the CB to sometime after Henry IV's accession in 1399. The latter were written for the court. In each text Gower's versification is "freer than continental writers in making grammar give way before the requirement of metre and rhyme, [and] he has more feeling for rhythm and a tendency to write in iambics" (360). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Legge, M. Dominica Published Legge, M. Dominica. "Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background." Oxford: Clarendon, 1963 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Cinkante Balades Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Clarendon, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1963 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review After Speght's edition of Chaucer appeared in 1598, Francis Thynne produced a volume of criticism, or "Animadversions" the following year. A brief portion of Thynne's volume touches on the Gower biography (18-22). Thynne doesn't believe that Gower, in Speght's words, calls Chaucer "a worthie Poet" and that he makes him "the Iudge of his workes." Gower's also was not from Stittenham in Yorkshire. Likewise, the effigy on Gower's tomb wears a chaplet of roses and not a garland of ivy and roses. Lastly, Thynne casts doubt on the idea that Chaucer and Gower were of the Inner Temple and were thus trained in law. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Thynne, Francis Published Thynne, Francis. "Animaduersions vppon the Annotacions and Corrections of some imperfections of impressiones on Chaucer's workes." Early Early Text Society . London: Trübner, 1875 Gower Subject Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Animaduersions vppon the Annotacions and Corrections of some imperfections of impressiones on Chaucer's workes Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Trübner, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1875 [1598] Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation analyzes the function of animal speakers in political poetry by William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Gower, and it claims that late fourteenth-century poets describe the marginalized voices of emerging politicians by using animal expressions and noises. These writers invent a playful yet earnest poetics of acknowledgment in comparing politicians' calls to animal cries. In unveiling novel interpretations of Langland's mouse, Chaucer's goose, and Gower's jay, I argue that the speeches of animals contribute to significant strains within several late fourteenth-century poems, which remain obscure if the reader ignores the signal contribution of the animal. Finally, I study the use of animal speech in the Lancastrian poem, "Richard the Redeless," to understand the ways in which the anti-Ricardian regime appropriated this malleable animal imagery to pursue its own political agenda." [JGN 33.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fulton, Sharon Published Fulton, Sharon. "Animal Speech and Political Utterance: Articulating the Controversies of Late Fourteenth-Century England in Non-Human Voices." PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2012. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Animal Speech and Political Utterance: Articulating the Controversies of Late Fourteenth-Century England in Non-Human Voices. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review For Gower, the Subject Index lists ninety-nine items, cited by number; on Gower-Chaucer connections and mutual influences, with annotations and some book reviews. Author/Editor Author/Editor Bowers, Bege K., ed. Allen, Mark, ed. Published Bowers, Bege K., and Mark Allen, eds. Annotated Chaucer Bibliography, 1986-1996. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. Gower Subject Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference 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 Annotated Chaucer Bibliography, 1986-1996. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review For Gower, the Subject Index lists 169 items, cited by number; on Gower-Chaucer connections and mutual influences, with annotations and some book reviews. Author/Editor Author/Editor Allen, Mark, ed. Amsel, Stephanie, ed. Published Allen, Mark, and Stephanie Amsel, eds. Annotated Chaucer Bibliography, 1997-2010. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2016. 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 Annotated Chaucer Bibliography, 1997-2010. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Includes translation of Cinkante Balades 21, 30, and two stanzas of 48. [RFY1981]. Published British Quarterly Review 27 (1858): 3-36. Gower Subject Cinkante Balades Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Anonymous review of Pauli (1857), Cox (1850), and Balades and Other Poems (1818). Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1858 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review A comparison of Shakespeare's "Pericles" V, I, 42-220 and the parallel passage from the CA (VIII, 1629-1746), to the effect that Gower's poem shown to be a close but not the sole source of the play. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Scott, William D. Published Scott, William D. "Another 'Heroical Devise' in 'Pericles'." Shakespeare Quarterly 20 (1969): 91-95. 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 Another "Heroical Devise" in "Pericles." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1969 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Watson notes that "examples of counseling women . . . abound in the Confessio Amantis" and that "it should not surprise us that a number of powerful women owned copies of Gower's poem" (160). One of these (as Kate D. Harris discovered in 1993) was Jacquetta of Luxembourg, widow of John, Duke of Bedford, wife of Richard Woodville, and mother-in-law to Edward IV. Harris pointed to Jacquetta's signature and motto three times inscribed in the margins (see plates in Watson at 163-64) as evidence that she owned, and apparently read at least in part, Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 307. Watson speculates on when and why Jacquetta inscribed the manuscript. A signature at the foot of a column on fol. 141r that includes a dramatic shift of fortune suggests to Watson the fall of the Lancastrians and the rise of the Yorkists, and prompts her to muse: "It may have been at this moment of uncertainty that Jacquetta marked [this] passage in the Confessio Amantis" (165).] [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Watson, Sarah Wilma. Published Watson, Sarah Wilma. "Another Woman Reader of John Gower's Confessio Amantis: Jacquetta of Luxembourg and Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 307." Journal of the Early Book Society 21 (2018): 159-70. ISSN 1525-6790 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 Another Woman Reader of John Gower's "Confessio Amantis": Jacquetta of Luxembourg and Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 307. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In "Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature," Roger Ladd traces representations of merchants in later medieval English literature, "from the antimercantilism of William Langland's 'Piers Plowman' to the promercantile charity of the York Mercers' 'Last Judgement'" (157). Ladd is interested in the peculiar "ideological dialectic" of medieval merchants, "caught between the demands of their commerce and the church's skepticism of their financial practice" (20). The introductory chapter surveys some of the medieval and modern debates over the roles of merchants within communities, and grounds those theoretical debates in nods to historical mercantile figures such as Nicholas Brembre. Subsequent chapters are devoted to "Piers Plowman" (Chapter 2), Chaucer (Chapter 4), early fifteenth-century texts such as "The Book of Margery Kempe," "The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye," and the "Tale of Beryn" (Chapter 5), and the York Cycle (Chapter 6). Of particular interest to Gowerians is Ladd's third chapter, "The Mirour de l'Omme and Gower's London Merchants," in which Ladd suggests the poem is a kind of apologia for merchants. Ladd posits that "the poem's direct engagement with merchants' point of view suggests that Gower at least prepared for the possibility that merchants would read his poem" (50). The strength of Ladd's analysis stems from his interrogation of mercantile diction in the poem suggesting an audience that would "understand the business register" (54) at work, so to speak. For example, Ladd astutely examines Gower's use of terms such as "bargaign" or "essier" to foreground his critique of the merchants, and Ladd supports his analysis with deft references to documentary evidence in guild records and legal documents where such terms are used contemporaneously in the mercantile community. While these close readings are illuminating and crafty (pun intended), Ladd misses an opportunity to apply the import of such an argument to our understanding Gower's possible audiences. As Gower scholarship becomes more and more interested in the multilingual-nature of Gower's works, and of Gower's cultural environment, such studies can only further our understanding of who may have been reading Gower's non-English writings. While Ladd mentions briefly such debates over Gower's readership (and medieval readerly practices generally), his perceptive textual analysis would appear to have greater import on that issue than is covered. [BWG. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ladd, Roger A Published Ladd, Roger A. "Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature." New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 ISBN 978-0-230-62043-8 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Palgrave Macmillan, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Goolden discusses Antiochus's riddle about his incestuous relationship with his daughter. The riddle occurs in Shakespeare, in Gower, and in the medieval Latin prose romance "Apollonius of Tyre." Goolden suggests that the key to solving the riddle is to notice that the secret marriage between father and daughter creates complex "in-law" relationships. For instance, Antiochus becomes his "wife's son" because he is taking the place of the man who should be his son-in-law. Gower, according to Goolden, copies a slightly corrupted version of the riddle, but whether he is aware of its deeper meaning is unclear. Shakespeare changes the subject of the riddle from Antiochus to the daughter and renders the riddle more easily comprehensible. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Goolden, P Published Goolden, P. "Antiochus's Riddle in Gower and Shakespeare." Review of English Studies n.s. 6 (1955), pp. 245-251. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Antiochus's Riddle in Gower and Shakespeare Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1955 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Arguing that the "study of the apocalyptic in the English literature of the late fourteenth cannot boil down simply to the tracing of sources or to historicist (New and otherwise) readings of contemporary texts and artifacts," Hackbarth instead explores "the ways in which apocalyptic comes to be known" (6). He assesses several broad, perhaps incommensurate "centers of meaning--mortality, authority, confession, and textual permanence" (1)--and dedicates a chapter to each. Late-fourteenth-century English literary works--Gower's "Confessio Amantis," Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," Langland's "Piers Plowman," "Pearl," and "Cleannesse"--are among the many works Hackbarth considers, but he addresses them impressionistically, providing insights but little sustained analysis or convincing evidence about the works themselves. Remarking on the evils of Division in Gower's Prologue to his "Confessio Amantis," 957-1062, for example, Hackbarth claims generally, that "terms laid out by Gower are as apocalyptic as it gets" (62), but he establishes no clear connections when he associates Gower's discussion with Papal Schism (60) and Lollardy (63). Gower introduces his concern for a stylistic "middle weie" (Prologue, 17), Hackbarth tells us, "to make sure that readers stay interested enough to continue the chain of information into the future" (191), a strategy that Hackbarth associates, rather loosely, with apocalyptic authors. Hackbarth acknowledges that Gower's "middel weie" recalls both Horace and Augustine, but only after asserting, tendentiously, that "The very incorporation of multiple sources within a text promotes apocalypticism" (184). Moreover, "Meaning is fragile in an apocalyptic environment" (195), Hackbarth tells us, and "Apocalypticism demands that readers be vigilant and discerning," both offered as evidence of a "climate of apocalyptic concern with texts" (196) in late-medieval (and somewhat earlier) England. Further, "The apocalyptic sense prevalent in the period proves to be connected to literacy itself" (202), so that in Gower's Prologue "Writing . . . is something done out of a sense of duty, something that is done quite purposefully, yet something that requires experimentation, trying-out." This "contradiction," as Hackbarth labels it, is embodied in "Any Christian apocalypticism (particularly as it must be defined by a certainty in an end of daily life and aware that 'time shall be no more')" (213). Stringing together--and recurrently leaping among--literary experimentation, literacy, readerly engagement, multiple sources, lust and lore, vernacular writing, meaning itself, and a sense of an ending, Hackbarth seems to find the apocalyptic everywhere. Surprisingly, he does not mention Frank Kermode's landmark study of Christian apocalypticism and literature, "The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction" (1967). [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hackbarth, Steven A Published Hackbarth, Steven A. Apocalyptic Mentalities in Late-Medieval England. Ph.D. Dissertation. Marquette University, 2014. ii, 245 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International 76.04(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/411/. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Background 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 Apocalyptic Mentalities in Late-Medieval England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Part I of Archibald's book is a study of the sources and circulation of the Latin "Historia Apollonii" and its medieval and Renaissance retellings, including chapters on "Problems in the Plot" and "Genre, Reception and Popularity" in which she offers some comparative comments on the post-classical treatments of the story. Part II presents an edition of version "RA" of the "Historia," with an English translation and a selection of alternative readings from version "RB." There are also two long appendices: the first lists 43 surviving retellings of the Historia, both Latin and vernacular, in chronological order, with a selected bibliography and some comment on each, including, of course, both the Old English version and Gower's, and concluding with Shakespeare's "Pericles." The second presents 37 allusions to the story from other texts from the same period, including Chaucer's reference (probably to Gower's version) in Man of Law's Prologue. Archibald assembles a great deal of material here, and the principal value of her book will be to have gathered together so much in a single place. A large part of her discussion, particularly of the "Historia" itself, is based very heavily on the work of others, and most serious readers will want to depend less on Archibald and more on the earlier scholars whose works she catalogues in her notes. Similarly, the text of the "Historia" that she presents is of little independent value: it is a highly eclectic version, based heavily on the edition of Kortekaas but evidently freely revised, and without any textual notes whatever; there is no indication, moreover, of how the alternative readings from version "RB" were selected, or of how many were left out. Archibald's real interest is not the "Historia" itself but its later influence. She has a great deal to say about recurring themes and motifs, and about the common problems faced by later retellers, for instance the difficulties that medieval writers had in interpreting obsolete customs. There is much that is interesting and informative here. She has less to say, however, about individual retellings, and while she demonstrates the importance of considering each separate text with reference to the tradition from which it draws, she has left a great deal of room for the specialist's study of these later versions. In this regard, her treatment of Gower appears to be typical. While she treats it in contrast to the other surviving versions, she makes no effort to deal with the problem of Gower's exact sources. The "RA" version of the "Historia" that she reprints, first of all, is not the one that Gower used; and the question of which surviving copy of version "RB" is most like the text he did use never comes up. She also has little to say about the relation between the "Historia" and the source that Gower himself cites, in Godfrey of Viterbo's "Pantheon." Nor does she provide a full account of Gower's alterations: her comments on Gower's reshaping of the tale are limited to the areas that she has identified as "Problems in the Plot," and she makes no real attempt to account for Gower's conception of the tale or of the relation between its narrative and its "lesson." All of these questions are raised, of course, by her own discussion. Readers of Gower, especially those unfamiliar with the background of the tale, will find a great deal that is useful in Archibald's book (and they will want to keep the excellent endpiece map of Apollonius' voyages near at hand). But it is still only a starting point for the serious study of the tale, which is the longest and in some ways the most important in Confessio Amantis. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Archibald, Elizabeth Published Archibald, Elizabeth. "Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations." Cambridge: Brewer, 1991 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Texts in Spanish, introduction and notes in English; text of selection from Confision based on MS. Escorial G.II.19. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Deyermond, A. D., ed. Published Deyermond, A. D., ed. Apollonius of Tyre: Two Fifteenth-Century Prose Romances: Hystoria de Apolonio and Confisyón del Amante, Apolonyo de Tyro. Exeter Hispanic Texts, 6. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1973. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Apollonius of Tyre: Two Fifteenth-Century Prose Romances: Hystoria de Apolonio and Confisyón del Amante, Apolonyo de Tyro. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1973 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower's Tale of Apollonius of Tyre (CA, Book VIII) is based on Geoffrey of Viterbo's "Pantheon," the "Gesta Romanorum version, and a third unidentified source. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Singer, Samuel. Published Singer, Samuel. Apollonius von Tyrus: Untersuchungen über das Fortleben des antiken Romans in späteren Zeiten. Halle: Niemeyer, 1895, pp. 177-89. 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 Apollonius von Tyrus: Untersuchungen über das Fortleben des antiken Romans in späteren Zeiten. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1895 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 new, updated edition of the influential initial volume in the MLA's "Approaches to Teaching" series is welcome and timely, particularly given all the changes that have taken place, technologically and in the demography of our classrooms, since 1980, when the first edition appeared. If one seeks evidence in the new edition of increased recognition of the importance of Gower's works to the instruction of his contemporary, however, the results are very thin. Only Martha Driver, in her essay on "Multimedia Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's Middle English Texts" (187), acknowledges assigning her students to read any portion of the CA (the "Tale of Florent"). R.F. Yeager's 1991 collection of essays entitled "Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange" is cited by the editors in their discussion of "Materials" (13), but Gower himself is not listed among the "all-important [primary] texts" for students to consult on page 6. The inclusion of "Florent" in Kolve and Olsen's Norton Critical Edition of selections from the "Canterbury Tales" is noted on page 4. Michael Calabrese, however, in his essay on teaching the "Man of Law's Tale," gives more attention to the "jab" at Gower in MLP (p. 84) than he does to Gower's version of the tale of Constance (mentioned only alongside Trivet's in a note, p. 87). The other three references hardly give any greater prominence to Gower. Roger Ladd cites Gower's and Langland's use of exchange and "chevisance" in his discussion of the possibility of satire in Chaucer's portrait of the Merchant (74); Michelle Warren notes Gower's appearance among the listeners in Ford Madox Brown's painting of "Chaucer at the Court of Edward III" (114); and Alex Mueller claims that the subtitle of the online Chaucer blog, "Take That, Gower!," offers a "model of interaction" for his own students.] [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Travis, Peter W., and Frank Grady, eds. Published Travis, Peter W., and Frank Grady, eds. "Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales'." New York: Modern Language Association, 2014 ISBN 9781603291408 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review After their brief introduction, the editors divide this book into two major parts. The first, "Materials," contains three essays (Peck, Nicholson, and Gastle) on Gowerian texts for teaching, the critical tradition, and online resources. The second, longer part, "Approaches," contains twenty-two essays and is subdivided into five sections: 1) Historical Approaches and Context (Pearsall, Lightsey, Peck, Palmer, and Boboc), 2) Language, Literature, and Rhetoric (Coleman, Donavin, Koff, Echard, Yeager, and Kelemen), 3) Theoretical Approaches (Mitchell, Bullón-Fernández, and Kruger), 4) Comparative Approaches (Bertolet, Dean, Yeager, and Wetherbee), and 5) Specific Class-Room Contexts (McKinney, Chewning, Passmore, and Beidler). The work ends with notes on the contributors, a list of scholars and teachers whose responses to a survey on the teaching of Gower helped frame the contents of this volume, an inclusive list of works cited in these collected essays, and an index. In describing available teaching resources and examining a wide range of approaches to teaching Gower, this volume will prove useful to both instructors newly interested, and/or already practticed, in teacing the poet. [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W., eds Published Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W., eds. "Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower." New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011 ISBN 9781603290999 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 Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Peebles maintains that while he may simply have been following his source, Gower's choice to set his "Tale of the Three Questions" in Spain establishes a direct connection to issues arising out of debates concerning England's engagement with Spain during the late 1380s, when she presumes the story to have been written. Much of the essay is concerned with England's relation with Spain, beginning with Edward I's marriage to the sister of Alfonso X in 1254. More immediately relevant is John of Gaunt's involvement with the Spanish succession, which, Peebles points out, "began and ended with marriages" (106). The costs and even the necessity of England's Iberian engagement was the subject of repeated and fractious parliamentary debate, which Gower also addresses through the tale, offering a model less for the king than for those who would advise him. "The pointed advice that the tale offers is that members of a court should avoid direct challenge or pacifying acquiescence in favor of calming voices expressing an insistent logic that the king can accept. . . . Gower is using the Spanish setting of the tale to gain leverage for advisors not, perhaps, possessing great innate power [in their relationship with the king]. . . . He imagines and communicates a situation in which the strategy works, and that imaginative power offers a way to reframe the Spanish political situation and domestic politics in a way that suggests a more acceptable set of choices: intermarriage, alliance, and realignment instead of the absolutism of either conquest or avoidance. Thus, the Spanish setting of the 'Tale of the Three Questions' both reframes the political argument over Lancastrian Castilian engagements and models a role for counsel in domestic concerns" (110). [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Peebles, Katie Published Peebles, Katie. "Arguing from Foreign Grounds: John Gower's Leveraging of Spain in English Politics." ES: Revista de Filología Inglesa 33.1 (2012), pp. 97-113. ISSN 0210-9689 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 Arguing from Foreign Grounds: John Gower's Leveraging of Spain in English Politics Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Echard's book is an extended answer to a question she asks on page 17: "what does it mean to reproduce a medieval author (or text) in 'his own shape and likeness'?" Gower figures in chapter 3, "Autocratic Antiquaries: Gower on Gower"--in this case, George Granville Leveson-Gower, (1786-1861), who produced the Roxburghe Club edition of British Library MS 59495 (olim Trentham), on John Gower the poet (97-98). Echard uses the Roxburghe edition, and to a lesser degree that of G. C. Macaulay, to center a thorough history of Gower's translation from manuscript to print--a history that covers editions by Caxton, Berthelette, and the most modern (e.g., Russell Peck's student edition based on Macaulay). In the process she makes a number of vital points directly responsible for how Gower has been understood for five centuries. She notes that "as soon as he enters the age of print, Gower's status as a multilingual poet disappears" (99), and illustrates how the process begins with Caxton and Berthelette (100-102), although Gower's tomb, with its three volumes, kept the multilingualism prominent into the nineteenth century, lending him "a monumentalism as much literal as literary" (102). Proceeding chronologically, Echard discusses Elizabeth Cooper, John Henry Todd (whose 1810 selective edition included an engraving of the tomb), and--especially--the Roxburghe edition in important detail, clarifying that Leveson-Gower had a handwritten copy made of the manuscript, and this--not the manuscript--was the copy-text for his 1818 edition (117). A major concern of Echard's throughout is "the facsimile impulse," linked "to the emphasis on the physical object over its textual content" (118). Leveson-Gower, Echard makes clear, saw the manuscript as a totem of the family and social class the Roxburghe Club members represented--and in that sense the poet, too (122). The chapter concludes with the four-volume edition of Macaulay who, by dividing Gower's work into separate volumes by language, reflects "the same tendency to concentrate on Gower's English . . . traced in this chapter from the fifteenth century onward" (123). Macaulay's decisions impacted how Gower has been seen in modern times in another way, perhaps more important: "It was Macaulay who divided the manuscripts of the 'Confessio' into three recensions, based on the degree to which they had shifted from Ricardian to Henrician sympathies, and it was Macaulay who decided that the Henrician version should be considered Gower's last word" (124). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân, Published Echard, Siân, "Aristocratic Antiquaries: Gower on Gower." In Siân Echard, ed. Printing the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 97-205. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translation Manuscripts and Textual Studies Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Aristocratic Antiquaries: Gower on Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Kant and Goethe distinguish allegory from symbol by associating allegory with rational abstraction and symbol with the attempt to grasp the divine. By applying this understanding of allegory to the allegorical works in the period when Aristotle dominated philosophical thought, we can correlate the development of allegorical literature to the development of Aristotelian thought. The analysis suggests that the allegorists studied were grappling with the problem of how to wrest a description of the divine from philosophical language, a problem which, as Derrida observes, involves moving beyond "the limits of philosophy." The early optimism of the Chartrian philosophers about the ability of universals to assist the mind in understanding the divine is reflected in the 'De planctu naturae.' In 'Floire et Blancheflor' and Guillaume de Lorris' section of the 'Roman de la Rose' we find an increasing skepticism about the divinity of rational processes of abstraction. Jean de Meun's section of the 'Roman de la Rose' anatomizes the absolute failure of philosophical reason to express the divine. In the 'Confessio Amantis,' Gower argues that the teachings of Aristotle provide a rational model for governing the state. In Book II of Spenser's 'Faerie Queene,' Guyon is presented as a reader of allegorical emblems who must learn to ground his interpretations in natural forms. In Book III, Spenser attempts to use imagination to overcome the limits of reason. Ultimately, however, he reformulates the doctrine of the 'golden chain' from a rational cosmological doctrine to an ethical doctrine in which golden chains represent interpersonal relationships, rather than cosmological bonds. In the 'Mutabilitie Cantos,' Spenser explores the manner in which the divine perspective is achieved by understanding the moral limitations of the rational principles governing nature." [eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Heise, William Earnshaw. Published Heise, William Earnshaw. "Aristotle and the Allegorical Aesthetic: Poetry and the Limits of Philosophy from Alan of Lille to Edmund Spenser." Ph.D. Diss. University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana 1996. DAI 57(11): 4725. 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 Aristotle and the Allegorical Aesthetic: Poetry and the Limits of Philosophy from Alan of Lille to Edmund Spenser. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Presents Gower's tales as evolving from a conscious blend of "Aristotelian ethics (as reiterated by Brunetto Latini and Giles of Rome)" which based moral knowledge on observation and exemplum theory which "stressed the importance of particulars in human understanding through the (medieval) imagination. [PN. Copyright the John Gower Society. JGN 3.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Runacres, Charles Published Runacres, Charles. "Art and Ethics in the Exempla of Confessio Amantis." In Gower's Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments. Ed. Minnis, A. J. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1983, pp. 106-134. ISBN 085991142X Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Art and Ethics in the Exempla of Confessio Amantis. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D.S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1983 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In this appreciative, even personal. essay, Yeager praises "Cinkante Balades" as "very fine art" and "finely crafted" (179), commending Gower's "very subtle work requiring poetic control and significant psychological acumen" (189). Yeager imagines a counterfactual "what-if" for English literary history, claiming that, had Gower chosen to write CB in English rather than in French, his "reputation would be far the better, and the history of English would have been written differently" (179) because CB is a "true poetic sequence" that uses "a lyric form to tell a story"--something not attempted in poetry in English until Philip Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella," two hundred years later. Yeager situates the writing of CB historically, showing that it was modeled on the very popular "Livre du Cent Ballades," analogous to Christine de Pizan's "Cent Ballades" in this respect, and influenced by Guillaume de Machaut's "Voir Dit" in others. The bulk of Yeager's essay, however, describes the aesthetic riches of CB--stanzaic structuring, narrative plotting, characterization, imagery, and manipulation of clichés--illustrated in large portion through close reading of two of the ballades, XLVI and XXXII, both of which show that "Gower's psychological insight is dead-on" (190), Yeager tells us, particularly in their subtle, delicate expression of the lovers' complex emotions and, in the Petrarchan mode, their anxious attitudes toward sexual relations. Speaking of XLVI in particular, Yeager says "This is poetry for grown-ups" (188); more generally, CB was written by a poet of superb skills and "artistic intelligence" (191), who, according to Yeager, "was never the prude modern critics have made him out to be" (186). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R. F. "Art for Art's Sake: Aesthetic Decisions in John Gower's "Cinkante Balades." In Essays on Aesthetics and Medieval Literature in Honor of Howell Chickering, ed. John M. Hill, Bonnie Wheeler, and R. F. Yeager. (Toronto: PIMS, 2014), pp. 179-93. Gower Subject Cinkante Balades 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 Art for Art's Sake: Aesthetic Decisions in John Gower's "Cinkante Balades." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Amans' identification of himself as "John Gower" at the end of CA is "a powerfully unsettling manoeuvre" that "heavily qualifies our ability to regard author, narrator, and lover as either stable or distinct categories," Butterfield writes (80). Gower also plays with the identity of the author in the "outer frame" of the work, including the Latin verse and glosses and the rubrics and illustrations on the page. "The multiple articulations of Gower in Confessio Amantis present John Gower as Latin, English, auctor, commentator, narrator, and amans, with several of these voicings occurring simultaneously on any one page" (82). Butterfield situates Gower's interrogation of the nature of authorship within the context of similar investigations occurring in the manuscript tradition of French vernacular works of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. She compares the revelation of Amans' identity and age, together with the famous problem of whether to represent Amans as a young lover or as an old man in the illustration that appears at or near the beginning of Book 1, to the "intricate web of confusion that Jean [de Meun] throws over his role as author [of the Roman de la Rose]" (84). But "while Jean is revealing a difference between two distinct authors, the Confessio explores this distinction within the tighter frame of a 'single' author. The doubt that grows in our minds as we watch Amans's face growing old is a kind of compressed version of that which we experience in the Rose: the doubleness involved in a single author choosing, with deceptive clarity, to lay bare his mechanism of pretence" (84). She cites Gui de Mori's compilation of a composite RR and a manuscript of Le Roman de Fauvel as examples of explorations of "the idea of authorship as coterminous with the sense of a work as a whole, and hence, with the work's physical length" (87) and of how "the author-figure was transformed into an agent of control over the material form of the book" (88) several decades before the better known example of Machaut. She also considers the ways in which fourteenth-century vernacular authors such as Machaut, Froissart, and the anonymous compiler of the Trésor Amoureux refer to their own roles in the prologues and rubrics to their works. She draws several conclusions regarding Gower. His speaker markers, first of all, "are very much part of a developing tradition in French of giving dramatic voice to the different elements of a first-person narrative," but since they are in Latin rather than in English, "Gower does not explore the power of the rubric to create a growing recognition of the vernacular author in the vernacular" (93-94). "Gower's decision to add a Latin layer to his own authorial compilation," moreover, "ranks as rare and distinctive even in the broader context of European vernacular writing" (94). "Like Machaut and Froissart before him, Gower makes use, not only of the Prologue, but also of the form of the explanatory rubric, to announce himself as author" (95). He extends these with the Latin prose and verse that usually follow the "Explicit." "Here, Gower is named three times in a final flourish, in which his principal works are named, catalogued, and described. Gower, the author, thus gains articulation through a wide variety of locations on the page. . . . Gower appears to be experimenting with different locations for authorship. . . . [and] there seems to be a desire to investigate the possibilities of meaning in these various sites" (95-96). "Gower emerges from this study of French precedents," finally, "as remarkably, perhaps unexpectedly, original. . . . Gower's use of Latin, far from being a sign of conservatism in any simple sense, seems rather a strikingly distinctive means of investigating the complex guises under which authorship was emerging in the books of vernacular writers. It is possible to understand it, in other words, not merely as a means of affirming his auctoritas, of lending gravity and cultural seriousness to his writing, but rather as a voice in a much larger dialogue, embracing vernacular as well as Latin, in which authorship is newly figured" (96). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 23.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Butterfield, Ardis Published Butterfield, Ardis. "Articulating the Author: Gower and the French Vernacular Codex." Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003), pp. 80-96. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Articulating the Author: Gower and the French Vernacular Codex Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review John Milton, in the pamphlet "An Apology Against a Pamphlet Call'd A Modest Confutation of the Animadversions upon the Remonstrant against Smectymnuus" (1642), quotes a lengthy passage from Gower's story of "Constantine and Sylvester" (Book 2 of the CA) as proof that "great riches in the Church are the baits of pride & ambition" (101). In the process Milton also suggests that he will "allege a reputed divine authority, as ancient as Constantine" (101). Jochums argues from a survey of Milton's other prose works that this must be a reference to Sulpicius Severus, a patristic writer who made similar points about the effects of riches on the Church. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Jochums, Milford C Published Jochums, Milford C. "As Ancient as Constantine." Studies in English Literature 4.1 (1964), pp. 101-107. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource As Ancient as Constantine Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1964 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review A broad-ranging discussion of Gower's notions of gentilesse, rich both in detail and in implication that resist brief summary. Gentilesse is treated in Book 4 under the rubric of "Idleness," the last of the five branches of Sloth. Olsson analyzes Genius' discussion in three parts, corresponding to three different medieval senses of otium: "idleness" proper, for which Genius offers the questionable remedy of "busyness in love"; "recreation," the rest that allows a person to return to work (the treatment of chivalry and gentilesse); and "leisure," the condition necessary for profitable study (the lists of discoverers and inventors). The middle section adopts the courtly mode of the demande to match its courtly subject. Genius typically argues more than one side of the issue, but he finally creates a hierarchy of worth of the various kinds of gentilesse, ranging from "sotie of love," to the practice to chivalry, to "honeste love," to "vertu moral," which embraces all of the other virtues commended in the poem. While this discussion has both a centrality and a thematic importance that correspond to Virgil's comments on love in Purg. 17-18, it does not bring about any immediate change in either Amans or Genius. Amans remains the captive of his hope and his imagination, which reason is unable to impress or alter, and thus follows the example of Pygmaleon. Genius' imagination is of a different sort: like Ulysses, who in Gower's portrayal is unable to hold to one purpose for very long, he is quick to generate images, but also quick to forget them, and unable to forge any resolution from the many conflicting ideas that he speaks for. Olsson's comments here are an important contribution to the discussion of Gower's characterization of Genius and of Genius' "dual role," serving either Venus or God according to the demands of the moment. In Book 4, Genius remains torn between his two masters and their different notions of gentilesse. The priest of Venus gives us to stone-turned-to-flesh of Pygmaleon's statue and the flesh-turned-to-stone of Araxarathen as the "type" and "antitype" of the beloved, each a projection of self-serving male desire. The priest of God understands the gentilesse of Amans' own mistress and corrects his misapprehension of her, and in Book 5, he offers an "antitype" in his own characterization of his mistress Venus. Genius himself is a personified "demande," Olsson concludes; in speaking for conflicting values, he makes CA as a whole a form of "recreation" like the discussion of gentilesse, and forces our participation in the creation of a resolution. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Olsson, Kurt Published Olsson, Kurt. "Aspects of Gentilesse is John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Books III-V." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 225-73. 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 Aspects of Gentilesse is John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Books III-V Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Shows that Gower's inclusion of sorcery and witchcraft as aspects of gluttony in Book 6 of the Confessio Amantis is far from anomalous or mistaken, as it is often considered; rather, Gower was working within a tradition traceable to the gospels and throughout the penitential works derived from the Somme le Roi in which gluttony and witchcraft were linked as "sins of the mouth." [PN. Copyright the John Gower Society. JGN 3.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Aspects of Gluttony in Chaucer and Gower." Studies in Philology 81 (1984), pp. 42-55. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Aspects of Gluttony in Chaucer and Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Modifying nature, keeping one's natural instincts under reason's control, and learning to love properly is a duty which Genius tries to teach Amans in John Gower's CA. The conflict between man's kinde, a word Gower uses to denote passionate love, and his reason, is a common theme in medieval literature. To Gower, marriage offers man the perfect reconciliation between the dueling forces of kinde and reason, and throughout the tales in the CA he proposes 'honeste love,' a reciprocal live which 'dar schewen the visage / In alle places openly,' as the remedy to what ails man and society (IV.1478-79). This dissertation explores how Gower uses the aspects of love in the CA--the notions of kinde and reason in the sphere of love; 'honeste love' in the Marriages Tales of the Four Wives; passionate and excessive live in the Forsaken Women's tales; and Amans' lovesickness--to emphasize and to illustrate his beliefs that reason must rule man in all things, including his natural instincts to love. Gower firmly believes each man or woman is responsible for his or her behavior and accountable for his or her love decisions, whether reasonable or foolish. That he maintains this perspective for woman as well as man is notable and admirable, especially since he employs anti-feminist rhetoric in the MO and VC. In the CA he is partial neither to man nor woman, and although it appears his sympathies lie with women, it is rather that he views woman as man's equal; if he is responsible for his love actions, then so is she. Gower's unique pro-woman voice in the CA proves this point: man cannot blame woman, and woman cannot blame man. In Gower there are no excuses for unrestrained and foolish behavior, although he recognizes that it is often difficult to restrain passion. Gower's Genius is a perfect Gowerian storyteller for in his moral tales lies the predicament facing all men--whether to follow his passionate nature, kinde, or his reasoning capabilities, his wise voice within." Directed by Robert R. Raymo. [JGN 17.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bakalian, Ellen Shaw Published Bakalian, Ellen Shaw. "Aspects of love in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis.'." PhD thesis, New York University, 1998. 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 Aspects of love in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis.' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Bakalian, Ellen Shaw Published Bakalian, Ellen Shaw. "Aspects of Love in John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Studies in Medieval History and Culture. . New York: Routledge, 2004 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review "Modifying nature, keeping one's natural instincts under reason's control, and learning to love properly is a duty which Genius tries to teach Amans in John Gower's Confessio Amantis," Bakalian begins (xvii), and she explores Gower's presentation of this theme in four chapters. In the first, she outlines the background to Gower's depiction of the struggle between Nature and Reason, and she uses the tales of "Albinus and Rosemund" and "Pyramus and Thisbe" as illustrations of two types of loss of reason and their consequences. Chapter two takes up the tales of the four virtuous wives who appear in the Company of Lovers in Amans' vision in Book 8, Penelope, Lucrece, Alceste, and Alceone. In each, the husbands and wives "enjoy a mutual and reciprocal love, and in their marriages reason tempers sexual passion; hence their worlds exude peace and harmony" (xviii). In chapter three, Bakalian examines for contrast the tales of Deianira, Medea, Dido, Phyllis, and Ariadne, who love imprudently (in three of the five cases outside of marriage), and who suffer the consequences. Ruled by kinde rather than reason, they "live in a world ruled by discordia, revenge, destruction, and death" (xix). The final chapter examines lovesickness as an example of the loss of reason and compares Amans' condition to that described in medieval medical handbooks and to the lovesickness depicted by Chaucer and Ovid. If the emphasis on reason as the proper guide of conduct in CA is not new, there are few studies that undertake to explain as patiently or in as great detail how Gower incorporates this principle into the structure of his exempla. In emphasizing the moral lessons of the individual tales, moreover, Bakalian's study is a valuable reminder of how much the poem has to say about conduct in love that is not encompassed within Amans' abandonment of love (or is it abandonment by love?) in the poem's conclusion. Her principal method is close reading, and she displays a particular sensitivity to the emotional impact of Gower's sometimes spare lines, particularly in the poet's depiction of conjugal tenderness and happy married love. She also displays a particular alertness to the moral choices faced by the women in the tales, and in fact one begins to suspect, as one considers the tales that she has chosen as her examples and the way in which she focuses on the female characters in each, that this book either evolved from or was evolving towards a study of Gower's depiction of women. One of Bakalian's principal recurring themes is the moral responsibility that women bear for their own decisions. As she summarizes this aspect of her discussion in her conclusion: "Gower's poetry often defies the feminist theory which places woman as victim and man as perpetrator. In the Confessio he is neither partial to man nor woman, and although it appears his sympathies lie with women, it is rather that he views woman as man's equal; if he is responsible for his actions, then so is she. Gower's unique insistence upon equality in the Confessio proves this point: man cannot blame woman, and woman cannot blame man" (153). The chapter in which the theme of woman's moral responsibility emerges most strongly is the third, and this is also the chapter that may give most pause to some readers. Deianira, Dido, and Phyllis are usually not blamed for the fact that their lovers left them, but Bakalian wants us to believe that they were the victims of their own lack of prudence as much as they were of their lovers' deceit and that their abandonment is also the appropriate consequence of their remaining unmarried. These are new readings that deserve consideration, but I doubt that all will be convinced, especially since the explicit moral lesson in each case is directed elsewhere. Ariadne's fault is even harder to find since she is married, as is Medea, whose principal "crime" occurs only at the end of the tale, and it is condemned neither by Genius nor by the gods. There is other evidence of strain as Bakalian makes her argument. Her treatment of "Albinus and Rosemund" is perhaps a best attempt to deal with a very problematic exemplum, but I think that she simply misreads the tale of Penelope and Ulysses in Book 4. She is not alone here, but instead of a condemnation of Ulysses' sloth, doesn't the tale instead commend his ability to fulfill his duties both in war and at home, in contrast to the preceding example of Eneas? Though this is a small book, moreover (159 pages of text, plus notes and introduction), Bakalian betrays a wish to incorporate everything that she has read, with the result that she doesn't always take a clear stand on some general issues of direct relevance to her case. She never faces the ambiguities of Nature's role in CA, for instance, at times offering moral guidance and at times needing to be restrained by Reason. She also never gives a clear statement of Genius' role, throwing up her hands on the question in note 79 to page 115, and then on pages 129-30, declaring even less helpfully: "[Genius] may be the priest of Venus, but he is also the voice of rational judgments, advocating the use of reason as man's best defense against foolish love errors, and recommending married love over amorous pursuits without a marriage license. Gower's Genius is a character in whom pagan, Christian and Gowerian philosophies meet, yet he is not a reliable authority figure." And in chapter 4, the extensive discussion of the symptoms and treatment of lovesickness (drawn in large part from Mary Wack's very useful compilation) proves more instructive on Troilus (for the way in which his condition transcends the merely medical) than it does for Amans. Hard questions still remain. If Amans cannot help being in love (because of Nature), then how is he himself to blame? His love is unreasonable, Bakalian insists, but the only real evidence that she cites is that it is unreciprocated, another fact for which Amans himself is hardly responsible. He is old, but his age only becomes relevant in the conclusion, where it serves not as proof of his foolishness but as the means of his release: he is "cured," Bakalian acknowledges, not by his own reason but by another external force beyond his control. The questions I raise here remain some of the largest unresolved issues in our reading of the poem, and it doesn't strengthen Bakalian's case, either on the precise role of reason in CA or on the nature of a woman's choices, that she skirts them. She does, however, have some interesting new perspectives on the particular tales that she considers that might eventually be incorporated within a more general understanding of the poem. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 23.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Aspects of Love in John Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Routledge, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In the Acknowledgements that accompany his essay (p. 59), Hsy points out that "This chapter also appears in a modified and expanded form in Jonathan Hsy, "Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature" (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 27–57," a volume reviewed in JGN 32.2. The "modifications," if any, are imperceptible. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hsy, Jonathan. Published Hsy, Jonathan. "At Home and in the 'Countour-Hous': Chaucer's Polyglot Dwellings." In Suzanna Conklin Akbari and James Simpson, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 43–62. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource At Home and in the "Countour-Hous": Chaucer's Polyglot Dwellings. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Galván analyzes the "historical, political, and dynastic conditions that linked England to Iberia during the fourteenth-century" (103-4). He reviews England's unsuccessful pursuit of an alliance with Castile during the Hundred Years' War; France's alliance with Aragón; the Black Prince's service alongside Pedro the Cruel and others at the Battle of Nájera; Chaucer's treatment of these matters in the "Monk's Tale;" John of Gaunt's marriage to Constanza of Castile; and the deterioration of relations between Castile and France due to Gaunt's success. He discusses the Castilian chronicler, López de Ayala, who served as a diplomat. López fought at the Battle of Nájera, initially on the side of Pedro the Cruel, and was held prisoner briefly by the Black Prince. One of López's works may have influenced Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" and, like Philippa of Lancaster's possible involvement with the Portuguese and Castilian translations of the "Confessio Amantis," suggests lively English and Iberian cultural connections. [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galván, Fernando. Published Galván, Fernando. "At the Nájera Crossroads (1367): Anglo-Iberian Encounters in the Late Fourteenth Century." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. 103-17. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism 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 At the Nájera Crossroads (1367): Anglo-Iberian Encounters in the Late Fourteenth Century. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Swenson's chapter works to bridge animal studies and disability studies, two theoretical approaches that are often seen as at odds, given the historical conflation between the disabled body and the animal body as a means to discriminate against disabled bodies--that is, both have often been read as below acceptable norms of full humanity. Swenson reads a similar logic at work in Gower's "Vox Clamantis," particularly the "Visio Anglie," where hierarchies of human value assume the conflation of nobility and ability, most especially in the "Visio"'s presentation of peasants as "beasts irrational." Careful attention to Gower's conflation of these categories, then, points to the needs to attend to nonlinguistic bodies differently. For Gower, the natural order encodes also human hierarchies, along with that of human over animal. Only nobility are fully human in Gower's reckoning, with the commons introduced as "uncounted monsters" even before any physical transformation occurs. The "Visio" oscillates between human and animal, a feature typical of many representations of individuals with cognitive disabilities. Yet in calling readers to behold the peasants/animals who seek acceptance of their humanity, Gower introduces the possibility that this representation may shock readers into seeing new ways of being. Though the "Visio"'s animals are, with one exception, nonlinguistic, it is clear to the narrator that their din means something, and thus his attempts to listen (as well as the reader's) makes space for alternative embodied rhetorics. Thus, Swenson argues, despite Gower's conservative views and class allegiances, the "Visio" provides a perhaps surprising model for both disability and animal studies. [KMcS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Swenson, Haylie. Published In Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World, ed. Richard H. Godden et al. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 163-80. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Attending to "Beasts Irrational" in Gower's "Visio Anglie." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Hanna traces connections/influences of Augustinian houses on literary production in the thirteenth through early sixteenth centuries. He notes Gower's tenancy at St. Mary Overy in Southwark, and that "a copy of Gower's 'Cronica tripartita' appears in the extensive late fifteenth-century library catalogue from Leicester, perhaps another case of transmission by ordinal channels" (34-35).] [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hanna, Ralph. Published Hanna, Ralph. "Augustinian Canons and Middle English Literature." In The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, ed. A.S.G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie, and Ralph Hanna (London: British Library, 2000), pp. 27-42. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Cronica Tripertita Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Augustinian Canons and Middle English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Pouzet, Jean-Pascal Published Pouzet, Jean-Pascal. "Augustinian Canons and Their Insular French Books in Medieval England: Towards an Assessment." In Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c. 1100-c.1500. Ed. Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn and Collette, Carolyn and Kowaleski, Maryanne and Mooney, Linne R and Putter, Ad and Trotter, David. York: York Medieval Press, 2009, pp. 266-77. ISBN 9781903153277 Gower Subject Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review A prolegomenon to a larger study, this essay suggests "the extent to which Insular French books await more systematic investigation, if one attempts to sketch a literary geography of Augustinian agencies" (276). Notably, Pouzet cites the reproduction and dissemination of manuscripts of Langtoft ("regarded as production by a fellow canon") by Yorkshire Augustinian houses along "a route of circulation possibly running east (from Bridlington Priory . . .) to west--and such collaborative dissemination with the order is conceivable for other works as well, in Yorkshire and elsewhere" (276). The possibility has special relevance for Gowerians, as Pouzet remarks: "The situation is further enriched if we consider--in the light of John Gower's association with the Augustinian priory at Southwark--that the whole of the first booklet of London, British Library, MS Harley 3490, the 'Rede/Boarstall' manuscript of the Confessio Amantis, is a fifteenth-century copy of Edmund of Abingdon's Speculum Religiosorum, written by the same scribe as the subsequent Gower article," i.e., BL MS Stowe 951. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2] 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 Augustinian Canons and Their Insular French Books in Medieval England: Towards an Assessment. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available York Medieval Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gillen seeks to '"illuminiate continuities and disjunctions between early Protestant drama and the commercial drama of William Shakespeare's stage" (172), in order to show that early modern drama is both '"reformed" and '"reforming." Her example of Protestant drama are the biblical plays of John Bale, whose 1544 "Epistle Exhortatory of an English Christian" vigorously condemned public theater; "Pericles" (crediting acts 1 and 2 to George Wilkins and 3-5 to Shakespeare) provides the commercial theatre test case. In each she focuses on the narrator figure: Baleus Prolocutor, and Gower. '"Gower's shifting role and his changing relation to dramatic action . . . are not merely indications of Shakespeare's stylistic preferences but are also reflective of Shakespeare's attempt to articulate the mimetic power and social role of public theater in light of antitheatrical objections" (174). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gillen, Katherine A. Published Gillen, Katherine A. "Authorial Anxieties and Theatrical Instability: John Bale's Biblical Plays and Shakespeare and Wilkins's Pericles." In James D. Maddock and Kathryn R. McPherson, eds. Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2014), pp. 171-93. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Authorial Anxieties and Theatrical Instability: John Bale's Biblical Plays and Shakespeare and Wilkins's "Pericles." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Cites recent arguments (promulgated by Peter Nicholson) concerning the role of scribes in the creation of what Macaulay identified as stages of revision in the MSS of CA, in his discussion of the tendency of modern editors to resist or reject theories of authorial revision of Middle English works that were accepted by preceding generations of scholars. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek Published Pearsall, Derek. "Authorial Revision in Some Late-Medieval English Texts." In Crux and Controversy in Middle English Textual Criticism. Ed. Minnis, A. J. and Brewer, Charlotte. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992, pp. 39-48. 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 Authorial Revision in Some Late-Medieval English Texts Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D. S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Hanna makes a contribution to the discussion of the literary relation between Gower and Chaucer during the course of his essay on the text of Chaucer's "Truth." Brusendorff (1925:204) first pointed out the resemblance between line 2 and the refrain of one version of Chaucer's poem and CA 5.7739-41, and concluded that Chaucer had probably borrowed from Gower. Pace and David, in their edition of The Minor Poems for the Variorum Chaucer (1982:60), suggested that Gower was alluding to Chaucer's poem instead, indicating that the version in question was thus already well known. Hanna points out that Brusendorff evidently supposed Gower to use "fre" in 5.7741 in the modern sense of "free, independent," and that since he uses it to mean "generous, liberal" instead, the purported resemblance to Chaucer's refrain ("And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede" in the new Riverside Chaucer) disappears. The remaining similarity between the two passages can be attributed to independent allusion to the same Latin proverb, and Hanna concludes that there is no evidence that either poet influenced the other. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 7.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hanna, Ralph III Published Hanna, Ralph III. "Authorial Versions, Rolling Revision, Scribal Error? Or, the Truth about Truth." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 10 (1988), pp. 23-40. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Authorial Versions, Rolling Revision, Scribal Error? Or, the Truth about Truth Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In chapter 27 of Paul Strohm's "Middle English," Kellie Robertson discusses the role of authorship and the labor of writing in the fourteenth century, specifically with regard to Chaucer, and what Robertson calls the "paradigmatic social space of non-work" (457) of pilgrimage in the "Canterbury Tales." In contrast to this space, Robertson argues that John Gower creates a "third space" (448) outside of the space of labor for the poet, a space represented by the well-known image of the author as archer aiming his arrows at the world in the "Vox Clamantis." According to Robertson, "the space of writing for Gower is a disembodied and hence unregulatable one" which is also "precarious" (448). This positioning of the concept of the work of the poet in Gower is notably different from the usual positioning of his poetic voice as either prophet or scold, and while the focus of the chapter is Chaucer, the liminal space Robertson claims for Gower is intriguing and provocative. [NG. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Robertson, Kellie. Published Robertson, Kellie. "Authorial Work." In Paul Strohm, ed. Middle English. Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Pp. 441-58. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Authorial Work. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Minnis is concerned with the sort of authority that derives from authorship as viewed by scholastic commentators in the late Middle Ages. "Can one be an author and be in love?" he asks, as he examines how vernacular poets sought validation in auctoritas while writing about love and the effects of love. Gower is one of several authors he examines, along with Juan Ruiz, the anonymous author of the commentary on "Les Echecs Amoureux," the participants in the querelle de la Rose, and commentators on Dante (including the poet himself). Gower imitated one of the formal devices that had been used to create auctoritas in earlier writers when he attached an "extrinsic prologue," dealing with wisdom generally, to the beginning of his work. He also provided his poem with its own commentary, in the form of Latin marginal glosses, which distinguish between the poet and the persona who is the victim of love, and which adopt a strict and consistently moral view of the characters in the tales. Rather than an opposition between the glosses and the English text, Minnis prefers to speak of an "interpretive distance": the English poem offers an abundance of genuine "lore," while the gloss sometimes only anticipates ethical views made clearer somewhat later, and "consolidates" the moral views of the English text. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 14.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Minnis, Alastair J. Published Minnis, Alastair J.. "Authors in Love: The Exegesis of Late-Medieval Love-Poets." In The Uses of Manuscripts in Literary Studies: Essays in Memory of Judson Boyce Allen. Ed. Morse, Charlotte Cook and Doob, Penelope Reed and Woods, Majorie Curry. Studies in Medieval Culture (31). Kalamazoo: Western Michgan University, 1992, pp. 161-89. 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 Authors in Love: The Exegesis of Late-Medieval Love-Poets Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michgan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Edwards argues that "modern scholarship has focused on the historical foundations of medieval authorship in exegesis and pedagogy," both of which "show how texts and authors were framed externally within a dynamic literary culture in the high and late Middle Ages. Authorship functioned internally as well, as a condition of literary meaning that complements the conditions of intelligibility within Latin and vernacular literary systems. To understand the internal dynamic of authorship, we need to supplement exegesis and pedagogy with an understanding of imitation and resistance. Imitation traditionally forms character and style from canonical models, and it provides a means to compose equivalents to canonical models by reproducing, rewriting, and reimagining them. At the same time, it generates an impossible demand for authorship--an original copy that remains subordinate to its source. For this reason, resistance emerges as the necessary correlate of imitation. In late-medieval England, John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer, poets recognized as authors by their contemporaries and by each other, demonstrate the productive reciprocity of imitation and resistance. Gower builds an edifice of authorship around his works and poetic career yet writes himself out of his most ambitious literary project at the end of the "Confessio Amantis" and then refuses his own dismissal in a sequence of minor works. Chaucer punctuates his repeated gestures toward authorship with equally insistent denials and omissions. These occasions for refusing authorship are by no means identical, but they point toward and alternative history of authorship that recognizes its contingency and continual renegotiation." [RRE/RFY. Copyright John Gower Society eJGN 34.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, Robert R Published Edwards, Robert R. "Authorship, Imitation, and Refusal in Late Medieval England." Swiss Papers In English Language and Literature: SPELL 25 (2011): 51-73. ISSN 0743-7226 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Authorship, Imitation, and Refusal in Late Medieval England Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, Robert R Published Edwards, Robert R. "Authorship, Imitation, and Refusal in Late-Medieval England." Swiss Papers In English Language and Literature: SPELL 25 (2011), pp. 51-73. ISSN 0743-7226 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Vox Clamantis In Praise of Peace Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Review For Edwards, "John Gower is arguably the paradigmatic author in late-medieval England" (57). He seeks to defend this claim via a replacement, and hence a redefinition, of the relevant critical terminology. Rather than adopting the standard dichotomy of the past thirty years, of "exegesis and pedagogy" and the attempt to align authorship in the Middle Ages with "the influence of Latin traditions on European vernaculars" (52), Edwards proposes "a second set of terms--imitation and refusal--to complement exegesis and pedagogy as sources for describing medieval authorship" (52). By the former, Edwards intends a practice of "reproducing, revising, and reimagining canonical sources" with the ultimate goal of producing "an original copy that rivals yet remains subordinate to its models." (53) The contradiction inherent in this framing of purpose necessitates "refusal . . . a literary strategy that relocates authorship within a new set of terms, as a possibility strategically denied in favor of other possibilities of invention. Refusal thus repositions authors and their works with respect to literary canons, institutions, and tradition. As a gesture of difference, it also points toward the stakes of authorship in the domains of society, politics, and culture" (53). Edwards' strong claim for Gower rests upon his view, developed here in outline, that the Latin prose commentaries found in the Confessio Amantis, whether copied in the margin or into the column of text, represent Gower's adaptation of the commentary tradition by transforming its essential neutrality into interrogation. Such positioning allows Gower a form of authorial space throughout; his staged withdrawal from the poem's fiction--Amans then "John Gower," then John Gower who put pen and ink to parchment--is precisely the refusal necessary to establish authorial status. This occurs, Edwards points out, when Gower self-consciously emulates himself in his later works. On a lesser scale, the balade sequences, the minor Latin poems, and "In Praise of Peace," replicate the French-Latin-English "cursus" of his earlier, larger M), VC, and CA--the three big books, in other words, on which the head of Gower's tomb effigy rests, looking for all the world like a classical "auctor" (62-63). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 32.2] 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 Authorship, Imitation, and Refusal in Late-Medieval England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Matthews here surveys "autobiographical fragments or moments . . . [that] appear to be performances of self" (27) in works of select fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English poets, gauging their "truth value" to be generally unreliable (39) but asking more broadly "what can be said about the ways in which such writers might have entwined life-writing into their larger literary projects?" (29). Before turning very briefly to Gower, Matthews usefully observes A. C. Spearing's distinction (2012) between "autography" and autobiography, glances at conventionalized uses of first-person pronouns in works of the early fourteenth-century writers, and explains why Chaucer's performances of self in "Book of the Duchess," "House of Fame," "Legend of Good Women," and "Canterbury Tales"--with the possible exception of his Retractions--are "difficult to label" as autobiographical because of the poet's playful ironic self-deprecation: the "Chaucerian self is clearly embodied in his work, but his self-presentations can rarely be taken at face value" (32). Matthews then turns to Gower (for two paragraphs only) for evidence that "inserting a version of oneself into literary works was by this time a viable poetic strategy." He mentions Gower's use of his own name in "Confessis Amantis," observes that Amans/Gower's "abjecting himself" to Venus is similar to Chaucer's self-abjection to the god of Love in the Prologue to "The Legend of Good Women," and points out that "There is little to be gleaned about the real Gower's autobiography from these passages." Matthews then sidesteps a more complex engagement with Gower and autobiography: "So far as autobiography is concerned, [Gower] critics have been more interested in what goes on at the beginning of the 'Confessio,' and the claim made there that the work was commissioned by King Richard himself" (33). Moving on immediately from this statement to discuss fifteenth-century poetry, Matthews neither cites the interested critics he mentions nor assesses the truth value of Gower's account of meeting Richard on the Thames in the first recension of the poem--perhaps because there is no easy or obvious way of establishing that the scene is historical or fictional, apart from the discovery of at-present-unknown documentary evidence. Is this an instance of genuine autobiography, maybe the first in English? Does it make any difference? How does Gower's revision/elimination of the scene affect his presentation of self elsewhere in the poem? As he proceeds, Matthews effectively shows that Hoccleve and Lydgate--like Chaucer (along with W. G. Sebald, Marcel Proust, and Karl Ove Knausgaard)--combine fact and fiction for rich thematic and stylistic effects in their various presentations of self. Gower's scene on the Thames might well be investigated in this light too. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Matthews, David. Published Matthews, David. "Autobiographical Selves in the Poetry of Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate." In Adam Smyth, ed. A History of English Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 27–40. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis 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 Autobiographical Selves in the Poetry of Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Ward sets out to show that neither Gower's inclusion of the "Religions of the World" section nor his discussion of rape and virginity in Book V, on Avarice, are digressions, as G.C. Macaulay (and many others) have believed, but rather that his "repudiations of Venus and rape in a discussion of avarice are appropriate and, indeed, necessary to his purpose in the "Confessio Amantis." The identification of avarice and fornication as idolatry in the Apostle Paul's warning to the Colossians and to the Ephesians . . . not only explains Genius's disavowal of the non-Christian gods, but is also essential both to the expansion of rapine to rape and the praise of virginity in contrast to Venus's lechery in book 5 of the 'Confessio Amantis'" (404). In a manner unique to the CA ("No other penitential work . . . links avarice, idolatry, and fornication together in such a sustained manner"), Gower "expands avarice from its limited definition as the desire to covet gold" which "ultimately leads the reader to understand idolatry as a practice that consists of treating gold, a lover, or a god as an idol. This progression works out the connection Paul makes in . . . Ephesians and Colossians: that fornicators and the avaricious are idolaters" (405). Ward asserts that in Paul's view, fornication, "with rape as the ultimate illicit act of sexual violation, is also revealed to be a rapacious form of avarice" (406). Gower presents Amans as "a sincere, even naïve, lover who respects the individual autonomy of his lady and her virtue"--in short, the opposite of the idolatrous, avaricious fornicator bent on "taking away another's possession or virtue" (406)--i.e., how Gower moves from avarice-inspired rapine to rape. Ward demonstrates the capaciousness of Gower's view of avarice by considering its social/legal damage (406-9), the profound social rot of adultery (409-11), the linkages of avarice with the Pauline conception of idolatry (411-14), and "Rape as stealing virtue and the debate about Venus" (414-22). Ward concludes that "by linking discussions of avarice, idolatry, and fornication in book 5, Gower relates the legal realities of "raptus" to penitential discourse. During a time of such great change in attitudes about the good and goods, Gower reiterates Paul's condemnation of the avaricious and fornicators to distinguish them from the legitimate lovers who engage in "kinde" love within the bounds of reason and virtue. Furthermore, he elucidates the dangers that avarice poses to communal flourishing and one's relationship with God" (422). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ward, Jessica. Published Ward, Jessica. "Avarice, Idolatry, and Fornication: The Connection between Genius's Discussions about Religion and Virginity in Book 5 of John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Studies in Philology 116 (2019): 401-22. 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 Avarice, Idolatry, and Fornication: The Connection between Genius's Discussions about Religion and Virginity in Book 5 of John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In the chapter entitled "Chaucer, Gower, and Barbarian History: 'The Man of Law's Tale' and the Prologue to Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'," Birns argues, as part of his wider set of claims about uses of late antique European history by medieval and Renaissance writers, that Gower and Chaucer both drew on "barbarian history" as source material and as "a mirror for their own times" (44): Chaucer using Paul the Deacon in his "Man of Law's Tale," and Gower using Otto of Freising to extend into the near past the four-empire image from the book of Daniel in the Prologue to the Confessio Amantis. Birns claims that "It is likely that Otto's 'Chronica sive Historia de duabus civitatibus' was the principal source for the historical portions" (44) of the Prologue to CA, although the claim is largely unsubstantiated, relying on a rather loose connection between 5.19 of Otto's "Historia" and lines 739–45 of Gower's Prologue, and partially undercut by Birns's observation that the poetic account by Godfrey of Viterbo (who Gower cites in his tale of Apollonius) may well be an alternative source. Birns's comments on the "translatio" of Rome as the Holy Roman Empire in Gower's time and place are more apt, as are his observations about Gower's moral anxieties concerning the "way history was going" (52) in his own time and about the "pastness of the past" (54), but they are undercut by obscurity: "beneath Gower's recuperative veneer there is an entropic dynamism-within-decay that cannot keep history boxed in one direction" (48). Similar problems haunt Birns's discussion of Chaucer's tale, although his efforts to avoid a simplistic view of history are commendable as he pursues a nuanced "historical consciousness" of medieval and Renaissance writers who were influenced by earlier historiography. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Buirns, Nicholas. Published Birns, Nicholas. Barbarian Memory: The Legacy of Early Medieval History in Early Modern Literature. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 44-59. Gower Subject Confessio Amanti 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 Barbarian Memory: The Legacy of Early Medieval History in Early Modern Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review For Sklar, Book V of Gower's "Confessio"--focusing on the sin of avarice--is foundational to the complexities of Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice." First, how do we interpret the conflicted figure of Bassanio, who is both a spendthrift courting an heiress for her money, and "a romantic hero . . . capable of inspiring love" (500)? The contradiction is resolved in Bassanio's comparison of his beloved to the "golden fleece," making this the only Shakespeare play that refers to Jason and his quest. In the medieval mythographic tradition, Jason is both "admired for his valor," and condemned as a deceiver in love, just as Bassanio wins the lady, but breaks his word never to part with her ring (501). Book V of CA, which was known to Shakespeare, is a network of prototypes for the characters and themes of "The Merchant." Gower presents "two versions of the casket motif . . . [with] striking thematic and verbal parallels" to the play, as Genius's instruction on the arbitrary fortunes of love--"every mon mot take his chance" (2260), is followed by Portia's "You must take your chance" (II.1.44). For both poets, this "chance" may not reward the most deserving (503). A larger theme of Book V is "covetousness in love . . . a confusion in the mind of the lover between true emotion and love of money" (504-05). This "confusion" explains not only the mercenary goal of Bassanio's courtship, but the tendency of most Venetians to describe their deepest affections in monetary terms, not limited to Shylock's outcry "My daughter! My ducats!" (505). In CA, Jason's sin of avarice in love is perjury, a defective oath, a stratagem endemic to the culture of self-interest in Shakespeare's Venice (also his England?), and exposing the "double nature" of Bassanio (506-07). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sklar, Elizabeth S. Published Texas Studies in Language and Literature 18.3 (Fall 1976): 500-09. 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 Bassanio's Golden Fleece. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1976 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Yandell focusses on a rarely discussed tale, that of "Ahab and Micaiah" from Book VII, as an illustration of how Gower's use of Biblical tales in the CA "could blur the lines between court poet and prophetic advisor, and between secular and spiritual courts," offering him "opportunities for subversion" both to support the king's decisions . . . and challenge the justice behind his actions (without exposing himself to treasonous punishments)" (153). Noting that the story was infrequently mentioned in medieval texts, Yandell concludes that Gower included it for a purpose: "in part as a way of showing that the decisions of a proper ruler, like God, are always justified, even in situations where the method of achieving justice might be questionable" and also to show that rulers in need of advice should seek "good answers only in those willing to come forward and speak boldly" (160). For "the reigning Richard II and Henry IV, [that figure] is Gower himself" (160). Thus the tale is "subversive on many levels," as is the CA itself, which "provides public support of Richard and Henry as a way of helping to ensure patronage from the throne, but at the same time it has the power to reach a wide audience with a message that questions the dangerous aspects of policies from the throne" (164). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yandell, Stephen. Published Yandell, Stephen. "Bearers of Punishment and Reward: Ahab's Prophets in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." Enarratio: Publications of the Medieval Association of the Midwest 16 (2009): 153-65. 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 Bearers of Punishment and Reward: Ahab's Prophets in Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Mitchell, J. Allan. Published Mitchell, J. Allan. Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 249 pp.; 11 color illus. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Mirour de l'Omme Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Language and Word Studies Review Mitchell's volume is a study of the physical, social, and ethical issues of parturition and early development in medieval England, showing how these issues can be seen to underlie and inform modern concerns. Attentive to philosophical, psychological, and sociological formulations, with recurrent attention to differences between "ontogenesis" and "ontology" (and cosmogony and cosmology; see below), Mitchell contemplates the messiness involved in the culturally complex, never-quite-completed processes that produce what he calls "emergent creatureliness" (xxvi)--becoming human--as they are evident in, contiguous with, analogous to, or complicated by cross-species coexistence, environmental interactions, and cosmological speculations. The goal of his book, he tells us, is "to identify residual and emergent ideas of becoming where humanity is and remains at risk" (xxx). This is heady stuff. Mitchell connects modern theorizing about materialism, ethics, subject-object relations, tool-using, actor networks, and speculative realism with discussion of medieval philosophical texts, comportment books, and material objects, along with analyses of various literary works--Usk's "Testament of Love" and Chaucer's "Treatise on the Astrolabe," "Sir Thopas," and the Franklin's table "dormant"; portions of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and "Piers Plowman"; selections from Lydgate, John Russell's "Boke of Nurture," and more. Generally, Mitchell cites Gower to clarify medieval ideas, quoting, for example, the "Confessio Amantis" IV.2487-90 for its connection of alchemy and embryology (77), and briefly commenting on "Mirour de l'Omme" 107-19 in passing (140 and 145) when discussing gluttony and culinary transformation as concerns underlying medieval dining practice and etiquette, and as factors--even actors--in human acculturation. More expansively--and more crucial to Mitchell's entire enterprise--when explaining medieval human-as-micro, universe-as-macro analogies, Mitchell reads portions of CA as adumbration of modern ecological and cosmogenic concerns. In his section called "Little Worlds," Mitchell disrupts oversimplified notions of medieval analogical thinking, and uses portions of the Prologue to CA (913-44, 954-58, 970-90) to argue that, for Gower, universal disorder is a "postlapsarian one of human becoming" (41) but less anthropocentric than "egocentric and epigenetic, where creatures of all kinds are deeply enmeshed." This is an example, Mitchell tells us, of what "Timothy Morton calls ecological thought" (42), "owing to the strength of the contingent bonds between upper and lower elements" that Gower describes. Indeed, Gower "highlights the ligatures, joints, and connective tissues of the organized whole" and thereby exposes a "transhuman 'condicioun'" (43) that both echoes Macrobius and (mentioning Bruno Latour) anticipates modern philosophical analyses that seek "to compose commonalities without a pregiven harmony." The "embryological" cosmogony of Book VII of the CA is even more clearly "prescient" than the cosmology of the Prologue, Mitchell argues, insofar as it emphasizes elemental germination as "the world comes into being" (44). Mitchell surveys the world as egg in the classical and medieval imaginary from Aristotle and Lucretius to Bernardus Silvestris (with a nifty sidelight on Ovid as, etymologically, a cracker of eggs, "ova"), emphasizing ways in which the image depicts a "total picture of the universe that is never a finished totality but is rather composed of fluctuating intensities and heterogeneous extensities" (52). He follows this survey with close explication of Gower's brief, powerful discussion of "Ylem" (7.214-22)--the poet's English neologism for Greek "hyle"--as a "significant sequence of thought" insofar as it "posits a [kind of] matter that antecedes and exceeds formal causation" and is "tantamount to assuming something like a two-seed theory" of the universe coming into being "against Aristotle's single seed." Playing on "form" and "enform," Mitchell explains, Gower is "at once informed by his studies and formed from the same material substrate he is studying," and aided by Kellie Robertson's exploration of form/matter distinctions in medieval poetic metaphors ("Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto," 2010), Mitchell concludes that "All of this is surely meant to suggest that poetic matter, like the primordial matter of which [Gower] is speaking, is as polysemous as it is pluripotent" (53). As if this weren't enough, Mitchell goes on to explain that mid-twentieth century physicists, George Gamow and Ralph Alpher, "poached" Gower's term"--'ylem'--"to describe the volatile nucleogenesis immediately following the big bang," and, in commemoration, used it to relabel a celebratory bottle of Cointreau as Ylem, "Now on display in the Smithsonian National and Space Museum" (54; and see full-color plate 4 and its caption). For Mitchell, Gower's cosmogony, primordial causation, cosmic eggs, poaching, a bottle of spirits, and modern theoretical physics come together in rich ways to encourage us to wonder "is it not worth putting the medieval sciences in dialogue with modern physics and philosophy more generally?" (54). His implied answer is, of course, yes--in many ways a powerful justification for reading his provocative volume. [MA. 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 Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Attempts to define "beginning the board" as it would have been understood in fourteenth-century England; concludes that it means "heading the table of honor," based on contexts in various works, including CA, VIII, 414. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cook, Albert S. Published Cook, Albert S. "Beginning the Board in Prussia." Journal of English and Germanic Philology 13 (1914): 375-88. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Beginning the Board in Prussia. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1914 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 gets a brief discussion (pp. 89-90) in this survey of nearly 200 examples (short and long) of "framing fictions" in Middle English. CA is listed with other "dream-vision analogues," poems which contain the structural features of dream visions but in which no "break in consciousness" occurs. The preliminaries in Book 1 of CA constitute an "adventure motif" that is conventional in such poems, but unlike the shorter examples, the "framing fiction" is not clearly marked off from the "core" of Amans' dialogue with Genius. Gower's manipulation of convention is also evident in his use of the "framing fiction" in the third-person tale of Rosiphelee. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Davidoff, Judith M. Published Davidoff, Judith M.. "Beginning Well: Framing Fictions in Late Middle English Poetry." Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988 ISBN 0838632084 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 Beginning Well: Framing Fictions in Late Middle English Poetry. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The "frame" of CA, Stoyanoff argues, consists of both the Prologue and the scene in which Amans is finally confronted by Venus in Book VIII and is revealed to be an old man. With this revelation, both Amans and the reader are forced to reassess what they have learned during the course of the confession and to extract the wisdom that has been presented in the guise of lessons on love. The Prologue prepares both the theme of mutability that is most powerfully manifested in Gower's old age and the question of the relation between love and wisdom. Gower appears to be optimistic about the potential of wisdom as an antidote to the instability of the world (Prol. 66-67), but then, as he shifts to the main body of the poem, to give love power even over the wise. But Stoyanoff argues that the Prologue also offers the reader several warnings against deception, and the end reveals that Gower has been able to fool both himself--into believing that he is a young man--and the reader, who accepts his self-characterization, not realizing that the whole confession is a sham. Venus, in the way in which she asks Gower to state his name, reveals that she sees him for what he is all along, and she forces him not just to self-knowledge but to reflection: "old John Gower is instructed to remember how he individually became old--to use the knowledge of a lived life. This directive implies wisdom is gained in this way. The experiences that old John Gower has had through his life merit reflection; in fact, that is what "Confessio" expresses to its reader through the revelatory moment--the need for reflection on the experience of reading the poem" (57). "The revelatory moment of the poem, then, not only reveals Amans as Gower, but it also moves the reader to contemplate what she has read in light of the revelation that it is wisdom for which she should read, not love" (60). In sum, "[Gower's] poetic conceit that wisdom is too weighty and that love is more common has resulted in a dangerous, harmful way of reading that neglects both the body and society. With the revelatory moment, however, Gower remedies the effects of misguided reading by modeling the right way to read. The wisdom of 'Confessio Amantis' lies in its imposition of a reading process through its circular framing. The mutable content of the poem from wisdom to love and back to wisdom leads the reader to a con-structive reading process that acknowledges 'ernest,' game, and the 'middel weie' for which Gower aims (Prol. 17). Wisdom is found in what is read, yes, but wisdom, 'Confessio Amantis' shows its reader, is more often found in how something is read" (61). Stoyanoff's essay is provocative, but one wonders how he would explain the effect of the marginal note at 1.59 ("fingens se auctor esse Amantem . . .") in shaping the reader's response to the "deception" of the confession. It is also regrettable that the constraints of space don't allow him to explore in precisely what ways the interpretation of any portion of the poem might differ in retrospect from how it is perceived before reading the conclusion. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stoyanoff, Jeffrey G Published Stoyanoff, Jeffrey G. "Beginnings and Endings: Narrative Framing in 'Confessio Amantis'." South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015), pp. 52-64. ISSN 0277-335X 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 Beginnings and Endings: Narrative Framing in 'Confessio Amantis' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gertz examines the Prologue to the Confessio Amantis in order to demonstrate the ways Gower's entire poem reinvigorates allegorical modes of interpretation. Though clearly invoking this time-honored interpretive mode, the poem consistently resists standard, stultifying modes of allegorical interpretation. For example, readers are alerted to the fact that default modes of interpreting allegory are insufficient when Amans' identity as "John Gower" is not revealed until the end of the poem. Enigmas such as this encourage attentive readers to pause and puzzle, eventually prompting them "to return to the beginning, to see if [this] new knowledge changes the allegory in decisive ways" (335). This metaliterary concern with teaching readers to read at multiple levels, Gertz argues, revitalizes the process of reading and interpreting allegory. This technique is illustrated with close readings of the Nebuchadnezzar and Arion passages bracketing the Prologue's fifth section. Not only do these two passages illustrate two modes of reading and interpretation, but they rehearse the tensions between 'translation studii' and 'translatio imperii,' between diachronic and synchronic modes of interpretation, between unity and division. Cumulatively, these tensions allow Gower to create "living metaphors throughout his poem," and thereby to renew allegory (349). [CB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gertz, SunHee Kim Published Gertz, SunHee Kim. "Beginnings Without End: The Prologue to John Gower's Confessio Amantis." In Life in Language: Studies in Honour of Wolfgang Kühlwein. Ed. Schuth, Andreas S. and Weber, Jean Jacques. Trier: WVT, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2005, pp. 329-52. ISBN 9783884767467 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 Beginnings Without End: The Prologue to John Gower's Confessio Amantis. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available WVT, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review No Gower material included. [RFY1981; rev. MA]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Gnerlich, Robert. Published Gnerlich, Robert. Bemerkungen Über den Vers-bau der Anglonormannen. Ph.D. dissertation. Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität Strassburg, 1889. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bemerkungen Über den Vers-bau der Anglonormannen. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1889 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review A total of 32 of the 118 quotations with which Jonson illustrated his "English Grammar" are drawn from CA, 6 more than from Chaucer and far more than from any other source. That number is itself an indication of Gower's standing in the early seventeenth century. Yeager examines Jonson's work more closely in order to assess some of the reasons for that esteem. Gower appears in Jonson in the company of some illustrious names: Chaucer, Lydgate, Fox, Jewell, Norton, More, Lambert, Ascham, Cheke, Lord Berners, and the King James Bible (pp. 229-30). The quotations, Yeager suggests, are chosen to illustrate and to advance a certain notion of style, privileging a plain vernacular. Thus Chaucer is represented by the "lower range of his poetic voice" (p. 231); and Gower appears even plainer, and seems to have been a better example of Jonson's ideal style than any of the other authors from whom he quotes. Jonson almost certainly knew CA from one of Berthelette's editions rather than from Caxton's, and may have been influenced in his view of Gower by the emphasis on editorial and linguistic correctness in Berthelette's letter to his readers, and by the printer's praise of the poet's "olde englishe wordes and vulgars" in the dedication to Henry VIII (p. 233). Berthelette's praise of CA's "potential to effect moral improvement" (p. 234) also no doubt appealed to the humanist in Jonson, and justified the poet's appearance in the company of Ascham and the Bible. The perception of Gower as a proto-humanist may also have been aided by Berthelette's account of Gower's sources, which resembles the range of writers that Jonson himself drew upon for his Grammar, and by his Latinity, emphasized in Berthelette's printing of the Latin verses and prose glosses in the same column as the English text. Jonson gave considerable attention to the models he drew upon, Yeager argues, because of the circumstances under which the Grammar as we know it was composed, late in his life, after the loss of a considerable body of his work in a fire in 1623, and "when so much of posterity's assessment must have seemed to him to teeter in the balance" (p. 237). For the conception of the Grammar itself, Jonson was heavily indebted to de la Ramée ("Ramus"), whose own work is studded with examples from the most illustrious Latin authors. Jonson's choice of the twelve English authors that he cites indicates that he held them in equivalent esteem. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 17.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Ben Jonson's English Grammar and John Gower's Reception in the Seventeenth Century." In The Endless Knot: Essays on Old and Middle English In Honor of Marie Boroff. Ed. Tavormina, M. Teresa and Yeager, R.F.. Cambridge: Brewer, 1995, pp. 227-239. ISBN 0859914801 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ben Jonson's English Grammar and John Gower's Reception in the Seventeenth Century. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This article makes a fairly complicated case for the relationship between the traditionalist ideologies of Gower and the 1381 rebels, focusing on Gower's use of Ovid in his description of the revolt. Starting from the observation of a "near-consensus that Gower's use of Ovidian myths and elegy disconnects Gower from the rebels" (34), Ni argues that Gower actually shares with the rebels and idealization of the past. She notes the apocalypticism implied by the rebels' reliance on the eschatological fantasy of the Domesday Book, and contrasts that to the more visionary apocalyptism of "Gower's narrative of metamorphosis" (37). This leads Ni to attribute to Gower "a flexible view of history that stood in stark contrast to the rebels' romanticization of the past" (38). By adapting Ovid, whom Gower associates with change, she shows how verse "can be made to suit different historical settings" (39). This malleable quality of poetry, which can be borrowed, adapted, and changed for different purposes, then contrasts to the way the rebels hoped to use the Domesday book as an inviolable record that "cannot be changed" (39). Ni goes on to examine the use of monstrous imagery from Ovid, such as the role of Hecuba, the Calydonian boar, or a storm at sea. With Hecuba, for example, Gower alludes to her transformation from a human form in "Metamorphosis" 13, with the transformations of the rebels in his vision; this potentially "changes the rebels into transformed victims and righteous avengers" (41). Ni does not argue that this potential sympathy with the rebels adds up to redemption for them, but that they might not have been completely in the wrong. Similarly, with the Calydonian boar, by associating the boar with Wat Tyler, "Ovid's layered allusions to the death of Hector enrich Gower's references to the murder of Wat Tyler" (42). This allusion then gives Tyler some heroic qualities, while still retaining the image of his ultimate defeat. Ni further argues that Gower's use of Ovid allows Gower to "acknowledge. . . the 'collective guilt' of society" (46), and contrast the "Edenic and the Apocalyptic" (47). Through Gower's use of the Phaeton story here, so that the image of the chariot ultimately bridges the gap between beginnings and endings. In the end, Ni argues that Gower is combining three methods: distancing himself from the rebels' use of the past, shifting perspectives to cycle through alternative visions of history to address "collective guilt" (53), and blurring the distinction between the Edenic and Apocalyptic to deny the possibility of returning to the past. He concludes that "These techniques cannot reveal their significance unless the rebels' tactic of "making Britain great again" is read against Gower's affirmation of historical flexibility" (53). Overall Ni offers a fairly complicated argument (to which this brief summary probably has not done justice), depending on close readings of the "Visio" against a portion of its Ovidian allusions. It treads a careful line by suggesting Gower's limited sympathy with the rebels, given that most readers see his position on the rebels as more negative, but makes a provocative case overall. Certainly any reader concerned with Gower's interaction with Ovid should find this interesting. [RAL. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ni, Yun. Published Chaucer Review 56 (2021): 33-53. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Between History and Prophecy: Ovidian Metamorphoses and the 1381 Revolt in Gower's "Visio Anglie." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Pearsall's concern is the "comparative neglect of vernacular text illustration by art historians" and the attention paid by literary scholars primarily to the relation of words to image, "as if the significance of the image began and ended in its fidelity to the text" (197). Here he presses instead for "more consideration to be given to two other factors: the importance of the idea of the book (rather than the text) in the choice and disposition of illustrations; and the possibility that pictures may have their own significance, deriving from their own historical apparatus of visual convention, that may go beyond or against the grain of or contradict or have nothing to do with the texts they illustrate" (197). Often, illustrators had constraints put upon them by supervisors--an example being Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902, a manuscript of Gower's "Confessio Amantis," where "clearly written in the margin of fol. 8 beside where the picture is now: Hie fiat confessor/ sedens & confessus coram se genufiectendo" (197). Pearsall for the most part takes examples from manuscripts of Chaucer's works, but concludes with further discussion of Bodley MS 902, in particular the confession miniature which portrays Amans as an old man, in company with Genius. This shows, Pearsall argues, that "someone, whether the artist or the person who gave him his instructions, had evidently read enough of the poem to know of this startling dramatic revelation [i.e., that Amans is old] and chose the literal truth rather than the literary subterfuge which drives the narrative of the poem. It is fidelity to the text of an extraordinary kind, fidelity to the text which actually gives the game away, and ruinously anticipates the moment upon which the poem depends for its moral impact. It is a very odd picture, and unique" (206). Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 307, fol. 9 has the same picture, "but this is reversed copy of the Bodley picture and therefore not an independently idiosyncratic choice but a mere production economy" (206). [RFY. Copyright, John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek. "Beyond Fidelity: The Illustration of Late Medieval English Literary Texts." In Marlene Villalobos Hennessey, ed. Tributes to Kathleen L. Scott: English Medieval Manuscripts: Readers, Makers and Illuminators. London: Miller, 2009. Pp. 197-220. Published Pearsall, Derek. Gower Subject Background and General Criticism Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confession Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Beyond Fidelity: The Illustration of Late Medieval English Literary Texts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Art historians pay less attention to illustrations in literary manuscripts than they do to those in religious texts--psalters, books of hours, bibles, etc. Literary scholars, on the other hand, pay significant attention, but generally focus on connecting the illustration to the text, as an aid to interpretation. Pearsall argues "for more consideration to be given to . . . the importance of the idea of the book (rather than the text) in the choice and disposition of illustrations; and the possibility that pictures may have their own significance deriving from their own historical apparatus of visual convention, that may go beyond or against the grain of or contradict or have nothing to do with the texts they illustrate" (197). Illustrators' instructions, sometimes verbal, sometimes sketched out or written in margins (as in the case of "Confessio Amantis" MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902), and often copying generic models, need to be considered (198). The supervisor, the scribe, nor the illustrator may have read the text; illustrations may have been included "to heighten the value of the book as a salable product and an object of prestige to the owner" (198). Various illustrated manuscripts of Chaucerian texts provide most of Pearsall's examples. Pearsall devotes pp. 205-07 primarily to two "pictures that Gower himself seems to have stipulated as the pictorial program for the poem": Amans confessing his sins against Love to Genius, and the Dream of Nebuchadnezzar. "So what we have in the 'Confessio' is an authorial program of illustration designed to articulate the moral and formal design of the poem" (206). His examples are taken from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 294 and various versions of Nebuchadnezzar noted by Gareth Spriggs (q.v.). MS Bodley 902, with its white-bearded Amans, is exceptional, in that it "gives the game away" (206). Pearsall notes that the same picture appears in Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 307, though this "is a reversed copy of the Bodley picture, and therefore not an independently idiosyncratic choice but a mere production economy" (206). In his closing remarks, Pearsall comments without elaborating that "pictures may, as in certain manuscripts of the 'Confessio Amantis,' insist on a programmatic reading of a text which the text itself may not seem to carry through" (208). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek. Published Pearsall, Derek. "Beyond Fidelity: The Illustration of Late Medieval Literary Texts." In Tributes to Kathleen L. Scott: English Medieval Manuscripts: Readers, Makers, Illuminators (London: Harvey Miller, 2009), pp. 197-208. 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 Beyond Fidelity: The Illustration of Late Medieval Literary Texts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation offers a history of sexual violence in late-medieval England by tracking the associative patterns that structure the experience and production of sexual violence in contexts as varied as the legal regulation of marriage and raptus, the erotics of hagiography, the ethicizing work of instructional treatises, and the gendering of political communities and ecstatic experience. In attending to this associative network, this project unsettles the weight of raptus, a medieval legal term that includes rape but also encompasses non-sexual abduction and consensual elopement, as the paradigmatic framework for a historical understanding of sexual violence. . . . Texts considered range from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries and include Geoffrey Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale and the Tale of Melibee, Gower's Tale of Florent, Margery Kempe's The Book of Margery Kempe, the anchoritic text Holy Maidenhood, Reginald Pecock's Folewer to the Donet, Richard Rolle's Form of Perfect Living and the Life of St. Elisabeth of Spalbeck." Directed by Mark Miller. Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, Suzanne M Published Edwards, Suzanne M. "Beyond raptus: Pedagogies and fantasies of sexual violence in late-medieval England." PhD thesis, The University of Chicago, 2006. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Beyond raptus: Pedagogies and fantasies of sexual violence in late-medieval England Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Phelan argues that the existence of a concordance of the CA will have a major impact on the study of Gower, if used appropriately. He suggests that "there is a strain of the unconscious in the diction of the ancient masters which goes beyond rhetorical principles; and critics need now to proceed beyond the concordance to the construction of a personal literary thesaurus – an idiosyncratic arrangement of the words of an author's language based on the careful consideration of the frequency and kinds of association" (461). On the basis of psychological and structuralist principles, Phelan maintains that the words which recur most frequently within a narrative "must form a network of associations which define in an existential way the central theme of the story" (464). The test case for this theory is the story of Florent in Book 1 of the CA. By means of a series of tables and calculations, Phelan arrives at a number of "first-level words" (467) that separate Gower's version from Chaucer's, both thematically and plot-wise. Gower's key terms are "covenant," "strengthe, "trowthe" and "schape," each of which receives detailed explication. In their totality these words reveal that the underlying trajectory of the narrative is one that "describes the development of the animus or masculine psyche" (476). In the end, then, "the semantic structure parallels and embraces the mythic structure" (472). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Phelan, Walter S Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Published Phelan, Walter S. "Beyond the Concordance: Semantic and Mythic Structures in Gower's Tale of Florent." Neophilologus 61 (1977), pp. 461-79. Dublin Core The Dublin 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 1977 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Beyond the Concordance: Semantic and Mythic Structures in Gower's Tale of Florent Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Reid, Lindsay Ann. Published Reid, Lindsay Ann. Bibliofictions: Ovidian Heroines and the Tudor Book. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Toronto, 2009. vii, 284 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A74.08(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Review Reid's dissertation "explores how the mythological heroines from Ovid's 'Heroides' and 'Metamorphoses' were catalogued, conflated, reconceived, and recontextualized in vernacular literature; in so doing, it joins considerations of voice, authority, and gender with reflections on Tudor technologies of textual reproduction and ideas about the book" (ii). One of Reid's recurrent concerns is how Gower's "Confessio Amantis"--along with works by Chaucer and Lydgate--influenced Tudor understandings of and approaches to Ovidian texts and, more generally, ideas about books as material and conceptual objects. In particular, for Reid, the CA presents the "putative authors" of the "Heroides" as "sources of tangible, historical documents, and the complaints of a number of mythological heroines are likewise posited as written, circulating texts. 'Heroides' 1, 2, 7, and 11 are redacted and worked into Gower's narratives about Penelope, Phyllis, Dido, and Canace, and Gower digressively adapts 'Heroides' 13, the epistle of the 'lusti wif" of 'The worthi king Protheselai' ([Laodamia] 4.1906, 1901), in the midst of a story about Ulysses." Laodamia's epistle serves as Reid's "representative example of the cameo appearances that the 'Heroides' often make in Middle English literature" (152), arguing that in CA "we sense that Gower's Laodamia is not merely, 'like' Ovid's Laodamia, a letter-writing character. Rather, as his description of the letter and its contents confirms, Gower's Laodamia is in the process of writing and sending 'Heroides' 13" (153), and exemplifying how "an aura of assumed materiality and historicity as well as an exterior layer of narrative context" (156) was carried into Tudor understanding of Ovidian epistles. [MA] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bibliofictions: Ovidian Heroines and the Tudor Book. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review On Chaucer-Gower relations. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Ritson, Joseph. Published Ritson, Joseph. Bibliographia Poetica: A Catalogue of English Poets of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Centuries with a Short Account of Their Works. London: G. & W. Nichol, 1803, pp, 24-25 Gower Subject Biography of Gower Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bibliographia Poetica: A Catalogue of English Poets of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Centuries with a Short Account of Their Works. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1803 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review On Gower-Chaucer connections and mutual influences. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Crawford, William R. Published Crawford, William R. Bibliography of Chaucer, 1954-63. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967, pp. 7, 32, 45, 46, 111. 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 Bibliography of Chaucer, 1954-63. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1967 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Watt, Robert. Published Watt, Robert. Bibliotecha Britannica: A General Index to British and Foreign Literature. Edinburgh: A. Constable, 1824, p. 430q. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Biography of Gower Review Brief entry on Gower's life and CA, mentioning Caxton's edition (1483) and three by Berthelette (1532, 1544 [apparently now lost or an error], and 1544. [RFY1981]. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bibliotecha Britannica: A General Index to British and Foreign Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1824 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Brief biographical sketch of Gower. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Tanner, Thomas. Published Tanner, Thomas. Bibliotecha Britannico-Hibernica. London: Society for the Promotion of Letters, pp. 335-37 Gower Subject Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bibliotecha Britannico-Hibernica. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1748 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Dibdin, Thomas Frognall. Published Dibdin, Thomas Frognall. Bibliotheca Spenceriana: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century and of Many Valuable First Editions in the Library of George John, Lord Spencer. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, 1814-23, IV, 266. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Review Describes a copy of Caxton's edition of CA (1483), reprinting Caxton's full title and colophon, and referring the reader to Dibdin's Typographical Antiquities (1816, I, 177-85). Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bibliotheca Spenceriana: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century and of Many Valuable First Editions in the Library of George John, Lord Spencer. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1814-1823 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 Warren takes an ecocritical approach, seeking "a full exploration of how and why birds mattered in a range of poetic texts from across the Middle Ages"(3), those texts being "The Seafarer," Exeter Book riddles, "The Owl and the Nightingale," "The Parlement of Foules," and the "Confessio Amantis." The latter occupies chapter 5, "Birds' Form: Enabling Desire and Identities in 'Confessio Amantis'" (179-217). His professed concerns lie less with examining birds as emblems or metaphors--the more usual approach to the subject--than with demonstrating that "the sources available to us insist on a more complex history, in which the multitude of native birds observable in England's habitats registered meaningfully in human experiences" (5)--particularly and pointedly in Gower's eyes. Warren finds the "Tale of Tereus" (CA V. 5551-6047) apt ground to illustrate a kind of "hybridity" that he identifies as a characteristically Gowerian gesture, in which birds and humans evince commingled aetiologies, sharply observed: "Ovid's Philomela merely flies to the forest . . . but Gower's is an overtly named species whose habitat, seasonal habits, mellifluous song and elusive nature are described at length" (215). Essentially, following part way Diane Watt and Hugh White, Warren reads the moral lessons of the CA as ambiguous, and building upon those arguments finds in "Tereus" and the poem generally evidence to identify a middle space between simply animal and simply human, one "suggestive and revealing, not simply derogatory and detestable" (202). Ultimately, "Gower's avian-human conformations most overtly demonstrate that medieval conceptions of, and interactions with, the natural world could engage the nonhuman in human interests in ways that accentuate the desirable or necessary presence of the nonhuman" (222). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Warren, Michael J. Published Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2018. 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 Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bahr's question in this essay is "Does knowledge of a manuscript's patron or circumstances of production . . . close off and thus subvert its potentialities as an aesthetic form?" (165). Versions of this question have preoccupied Bahr for some years. (See, e.g., "Reading Codicological Form in John Gower's Trentham Manuscript" [2011]; "Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London" [2013].) Here again his focus is London, British Library, MS Additional 59495 (olim Trentham), more specifically how the "tension between the synchronic and the diachronic [sharpens] when we consider the allusive intertextuality of many of Trentham's texts" (166). The manuscript-as-object, Bahr argues, "was always bound to exceed" whatever were Gower's "intentions when he began compiling Trentham." Or, as he puts it more broadly a little further on: "manuscript studies as a discipline" should not prize "historically discrete and verifiable data points" exclusively, but recognize that manuscripts' "vitality depends upon continued reading and creative reinterpretations" (166). To demonstrate this method, Bahr roves freely throughout the contents of the manuscript, comparing elements with, and surfacing allusions to, the "Book of the Duchess," "Parlement of Foules," and "Inferno" 5, 127-42 (Paolo and Francesca). He reads, at the same time, a variety of ways the manuscript, produced after the usurpation and seemingly intended as a gift to Henry IV, also contains nuanced--and not negative--backward glances at the reign of Richard II. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bahr, Arthur. Published In Chaucer and the Subversion of Form, ed. Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 165-81 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 Birdsong, Love, and the House of Lancaster: Gower Reforms Chaucer. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Spies' overview of the state of Gower scholarship came out nearly simultaneously with Macaulay's magisterial edition of Gower's works, and there is indeed significant overlap between the two scholars' work. Spies first traces the history of Gower's reception, from the initially favorable praise of Gower (and his inclusion in a literary triumvirate with Chaucer and Lydgate) to the increasingly more critical stance of later criticism. Despite Spies' fairly exhaustive summary he believes there must be many more references to Gower yet undiscovered (170). He also mentions some newly found allusions that illustrate, for example, that more research might be done to link Gower's work to particular families (e.g., the Bohun family) that kept his MSS as valued heirlooms (171, 178-79). Spies turns briefly to the Castilian and Portuguese translations (171) and to the biographies of Gower (he finds Reinhold Pauli's best), before stating the need for an edition of all the references and allusions to Gower in later authors. He then brings his own list of references up to date before focusing primarily on the work of Pauli, Meyer, and Macaulay. He argues (contra Meyer) that each recension of the CA had its origin prior to 1399 when Richard II was deposed (175-77) and that Gower was not spineless or self-serving in relation to the king. In fact, Gower was not afraid to be critical because he held his country in more esteem than his king ("Das vaterland stand unserem dichter höher als die person des königs"; 178). Spies also dedicates some pages to Gower's French and Latin works. Among other things, he suggests that the MO should actually be given its Latin title, since that is how Gower referred to it, and he criticizes Macaulay's lack of rigour in collating MSS of the Traitie (180). After a mention of Gower's shorter English poems, Spies' article turns to the editions of the CA. He criticizes Reinhold Pauli for his eclectic editorial choices and he finds Henry Morley guilty both for following Pauli's text unscrupulously and for being too populist (when Gower will never be very popular). Next follow brief summations of collections that include individual narratives from the CA (183-84), of collations (like Easton's inadequate Readings in Gower), and of relevant 19th century scholarship (particularly source studies). Most of the remaining pages of Spies' articles are taken up by a descriptive catalogue of CA MSS and some final reflections on the differences between the three recensions. Spies argues that Gower generally oversaw later changes and he notes that the MSS in group A should be split in two sections since a number of them show significant similarities with the B and Stafford version. Although Gower's alterations are generally light, Spies does believe that the scholarly world would benefit from another edition of a good base text to accompany Macaulay's admirable work. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Spies, Heinrich Published Spies, Heinrich. "Bisherige Ergebnisse und Weitere Aufgaben der Gower-Forschung." Englische Studien 28 (1900), pp. 163-208. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations In Praise of Peace Vox Clamantis Biography of Gower Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Manuscripts and Textual Studies Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bisherige Ergebnisse und Weitere Aufgaben der Gower-Forschung Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1900 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Byrd describes four instances in early English literature where the phrase "blanche fever," or a variant, occurs--Gower's CA VI.39, Chaucer's TC 1.916; "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale "41, and William Caxton's translation of Raoul le Févre, "The History of Jason." Setting out to explore the "importance of blanche fever and its relation to courtly love" (57), Byrd does not distinguish blanche fever ("fevers whyte" in "Cuckoo") from other forms or stages of love sickness, and he tallies familiar symptoms of chills (sometimes alternating with high temperatures), sleeplessness, thirst, loss of reason, and growing pale. He mentions that the English phrase derives from French usage (pp. 57 and 63), and aligns blanche fever with another term associated with love-sickness--"access" or "accesse"--observing that the two have "the same symptoms," that they "are obviously related," and that "poets used the two terms interchangeably to refer to love-sickness in the courtly love system" (62). He also equates blanche fever with "the grene sekeness" without discussing the latter phrase, treating them as a single disease which "like any sickness . . . has definite symptoms" (64), once again leaving blanche fever indistinct. Byrd does observe that "Gower's thirstiness," which characterizes blanche fever in CA VI.236-43, is "caused by Love-Drunkenness, a vice which belongs to Gluttony" (59), the topic of Book VI. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Byrd, David G. Published Byrd, David G. "Blanche Fever: The Grene Sekeness." Ball State University Forum 19.3 (1978): 56-64. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Blanche Fever: The Grene Sekeness. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1978 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Hsy writes: "Toward the end of his life, medieval poet John Gower (d. 1408) composed Latin poetry about his own progressive blindness, and later nineteenth-century Blind readers appropriated Gower's work as part of a platform to advocate for changed perceptions and opportunities for the blind and other people with disabilities. In this essay, I approach nineteenth-century narrative compilations of blind lives (which include Gower's) as transformative acts of literary historiography. These compilers not only appropriate the medieval blind poet to advance their own social and political ends, but they also create a new disability-centered approach to the entire Western artistic tradition. I furthermore argue that Gower's own poetry, when taken seriously as the writing of a self-identified blind poet, adopts highly innovative formal and rhetorical strategies for representing visual impairment, and his writing anticipates aspects of modern disability activism and critical theory. The essay ends by considering the discourses of present-day online venues that seek to make Gower's work more accessible to blind and low vision readers. Such websites invite a more careful consideration of the activist-oriented mode of Gower's blindness poetry and his work as a whole, and these online venues profoundly reorient how we think about the social construction of Blind identity and heterogeneous modes of access in our digital age." [JGN 33.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hsy, Jonathan Published Hsy, Jonathan. "Blind Advocacy: Blind Readers, Disability Theory and Accessing John Gower." Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media 1.1 (2013), n. p. Article 2. Gower Subject Biography of Gower 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 Blind Advocacy: Blind Readers, Disability Theory and Accessing John Gower Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Discusses how animals were used in association with sins in MO; discussion of cats, horses, the expression "blind Bayard"; links Aristotle being ridden with the "Tale of Rosiphelee" in CA.[RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rowland, Beryl. Published Rowland, Beryl. Blind Beasts: Chaucer's Animal World. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1971, pp. 19, 68, 118, 128, 131. Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Blind Beasts: Chaucer's Animal World. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Pearman writes: "Much scholarship on Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' has focused on the poem's assertion that poetic narration, represented by Amans' ongoing confession, has the ability to restore the fragmentary natures of social and spiritual bodies. Surprisingly, the role that the (dis)abled body plays in the poem's struggle with fragmentation and integration has been ignored. By focusing on the poem's representation of blindness in the tales of Medusa and Constance, I will demonstrate that the formal structure and thematic explorations of the 'Confessio,' in fact, rely upon the (dis)abled body and its inextricable relationship to narration. Indeed, it is Amans' disabling illness that inaugurates the poem and provides Gower with the vehicle through which to critique the fractured body politic of fourteenth-century England, and it is only through the act of narration that both bodies may be "cured." Using modern and medieval disability scholarship, this paper will posit that the poem's reliance on a topos of disability that creates a "problem" that the poem must then attempt to unify. In particular, the poem fixates on blindness, linking physical and metaphorical blindness to sin, and thus division, and its cure to unification. In the 'Confessio,' this cure is contingent upon the act of confession, of providing a story that unifies the "trouble" of the deviant body. As a result, Gower asserts the poet as the rememberer and re-memberer of bodies spiritual, social, and physical." [JGN 33.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearman, Tony Vandeventer Published Pearman, Tony Vandeventer. "Blindness, Confession, and Re-membering Gower's Confessio." Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media 1.1 (2013), n.p. Article 3. 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 Blindness, Confession, and Re-membering Gower's Confessio Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This essay describes Gower's exploration of the links between practices of medicine and confession, especially in the like roles played by the physician and priestly confessor and the linkage of cures through storytelling. The connection between physical and spiritual healing is not new with Gower. As early as the beginning of the eleventh century, an influential book by Burchard of Worms introduced questions confessors might ask penitents; the book was entitled "Corrector, or Physician." The parallel in question-asking is suggestive of Venus's telling Amans she can apply no medicine if he does not describe his love "maladie," his "Sor," specifically in a conventionally confessional framework, to her priest. Palmer describes the connection at length, and where the relationship might be particularly suggestive in the classroom is in the stories of the CA: "Genius's [spiritual and physical] healing has taken place through storytelling" (58), Palmer argues, and it would be helpful to understand, perhaps through a single, well-chosen example, how this might have worked. Palmer takes his epigraph from John Arderne's fourteenth-century medical treatise, "It behooves a physician to know how to tell delightful and instructive tales that make patients laugh" (33) holds special promise; if Genius's, unlike Arderne's, are not for the most part designed to "make patients laugh," however, in what sense might they produce a genuinely curative effect? [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Palmer, James M Published Palmer, James M. "Bodily and Spiritual Healing through Conversation and Storytelling: Genius as Physician and Confessor in the 'Confessio Amantis'." In Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Ed. Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W. NewYork: Modern Language Association of America, 2011, pp. 53-58. ISBN 9781603290999 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 Bodily and Spiritual Healing through Conversation and Storytelling: Genius as Physician and Confessor in the 'Confessio Amantis' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Modern Language Association of America, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Discusses illuminations (miniatures, framing techniques, bar-borders, colored initials, etc.) of MSS. Bodley 294, 693, and 902 of the CA, connecting them with other examples from Scherre and his school. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Spriggs, Gareth M. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Published Spriggs, Gareth M. "Bodleian Manuscripts, Illuminated by Herman Scherre and his School: I. Manuscripts of John Gower's Cofessio Amantis." Bodleian Library Record 7 (1964): 193-99. Dublin Core The Dublin 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 1964 Title A name given to the resource Bodleian Manuscripts, Illuminated by Herman Scherre and his School: I. Manuscripts of John 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 Cherniss' chapter on CA (pp. 99-118) is for the most part a reprint of his essay on "The Allegorical Figures in Gower's Confessio Amantis," Res Publica Litterarum, 1 (1978), 7-20. In the earlier essay Cherniss outlined the roles of Venus, Nature, and Reason in the poem and gave particular attention to the difficulties posed by Genius, especially to what he saw as his shifting relationship to Venus in Books 7 and 8. He also presented his view of the ending of the poem as "arbitrary and unsatisfactory," creating an ad hoc resolution for a particular old man rather than a final reconciliation of the forces the various allegorical figures represent, and requiring the acquiescence of Nature and Venus, thus contradicting the doctrine of individual responsibility expressed in the Prologue. The expanded version adds a discussion of the poem as a "Boethian Apocalypse," emphasizing the elements that link it to and make it different from the other medieval poems that make up a single tradition deriving from the De Consolatione Philosophiae. Cherniss points out how Venus and Genius share the role of Boethian authority figure and he describes Amans as a "prototypical Boethian narrator" whose consciousness is the focus of the poem. Gower's innovation (as noted by Lewis) was the transfer of the confession from the goddess of the vision to the visionary narrator himself. Gower's poem is more static than most works in the genre, however, because of the difficulty of marking the progress of the argument and the development of the narrator's consciousness within the confession frame, which is weakened by the many long tales and by the long expository sections. A problem of a different sort is created by the Prologue. "The decorum of the Boethian Apocalypse demands that the reader experience the visionary process of enlightenment along with the narrator," but the Prologue reveals not only the problem but also the solution before the poem has even begun, and Gower's attempt to start again at the opening of Book 1 is at best clumsy. Readers of CA will also want to look at Cherniss' chapters on DCP, De Planctu Naturae, RR, PF, Pearl, BD, The Kingis Quair, and The Testament of Cresseid. Previewed in JGN, 5, no. 2. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cherniss, Michael D. Published Cherniss, Michael D.. "Boethian Apocalypse: Studies in Middle English Vision Poetry." Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1987 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Boethian Apocalypse: Studies in Middle English Vision Poetry Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pilgrim Books, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Burke begins with the evidence that CA and Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women" originated with the same commission, from Anne of Bohemia, first wife of Richard II. Machaut's "Jugement dou roi de Navarre" is a recognized "paradigm" for LGW, and Burke sees CA as well both as a "creative reworking of the 'Navarre'" (195) and as a poem heavily marked by Anne's influence. The evidence for Anne's role is found not just in the similarity to LGW. She is not mentioned explicitly, but Burke notes that contemporary allusions to female patrons were "more likely to be coded" (196). The clearest allusion to Anne occurs in VIII.2470-75, beginning "The newe guise of Beauwme was there, / With sondri thinges wel devised." The "thinges" Burke takes as a possible reference to Machaut's "dits," noting that three of Anne's own relatives served as patrons to Machaut, and also that two others were both patrons of and putative collaborators with Froissart and that her family also included several other women who were prominent in the cultivation of the arts. Anne stepped into the same role upon her arrival in England, Burke suggests, quickly learning English, as evidenced by not only Chaucer's dedication of LGW but also Clanvowe's in his "Book of Cupid." Anne's presence in CA is felt in the prominence given to exemplary women, beginning with the reference to "Carmentis" in the Latin verses that head the Prologue and including the many tales of women who were virtuous in love and those who serve as examples of wise "wifely counsel." (Burke also detects an interesting "topical edge" in the "Tale of Albinus and Rosemund," which "implicitly recalls" the death of Anne's grandfather, John of Bohemia, at the hands of her late father-in-law, the Black Prince, at the battle of Crécy.) In their choice of many similar examples, Gower and Machaut both engage with the tradition of clerical misogyny, but in ways that reveal important differences between CA and "Navarre." Machaut, in defending his own earlier work, gives voice to the views that his poem finally opposes, while Gower merely takes women's virtues for granted, and unlike both Machaut and Chaucer, has no need to depict himself as defending women only "in deference to an authority beyond his control" (205). And where Machaut's poem ends with a judgment against the poet and the imposition of a penance in the form of new poems, Gower's persona is released from his subjection to love and reverts to his earlier style of writing. In doing so, he leaves writing of love to "him which hath of love his make" (*VIII.3078), suggesting that "yes, the 'Confessio' was originally created as a love poem to honor the great love between [Richard and Anne]. Beyond that, Gower expressed his expectation that further 'songes' and 'seyinges,' literary creations, will arise from their royal partnership" (207). [PN. Copyright. John Gower Society, eJGN 37.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Burke, Linda. Published Burke, Linda. "Bohemian Gower: 'Confessio Amantis,' Queen Anne, and Machaut's Judgment Poems." In R. Barton Palmer and Burt Kimmelman, eds. Machaut's Legacy: The Judgment Poetry Tradition in the Later Middle Ages and Beyond. Ed. R. Barton Palmer and Burt Kimmelman. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), p. 192-216. 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 Bohemian Gower: "Confessio Amantis," Queen Anne, and Machaut's Judgment Poems. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Many of us," Simpson opines, "are the living heirs of Protestant anxiety regarding work and waste. We find it difficult to recover the charisma of idleness of any kind, be it religious or aristocratic" (p. 259). From such sectarian social anxiety he is particularly exercised in the rescue of "Wasted, idle reading" (p. 260): "My larger claim is that late medieval, pre-Reformation textual practice in not driven by a need to define and expel cultural waste; on the contrary, idle reading is an essential part of a cultural economy. More specifically, "otium" and idle reading are an essential part of a psychic economy" (p. 260). Simpson chooses to analyze Book IV (devoted to Sloth) of the Confessio Amantis to make his case, "since Amans' literary education in that book looks like nothing so much as a plain waste of time idly frittered. The text as a whole, further, seems unworried about idling away in archives of old texts" (p. 261). Subjecting Book IV to a rigorous reading, Simpson follows Amans along a path that, he argues, illustrates how easily "a literary education" can "feed the psyche's capacity for delusive satisfactions" (p. 284). He concludes by noting that there are [punctuation sic] "various ways in which Gower recognises the value of otium: there are some states of soul that cannot be broached directly, and that require homeopathic therapy that pretends to feed pathological desire even as it begins the cure. And that homeopathic psychic treatment involves a cultural commitment to idle, apparently wasted reading: like many other Middle English works that recycle prior texts, the Confessio demonstrates no desire to define books and libraries as waste. It offers instead a model of recreative relaxedness among many books; books will respond creatively to big questions, but only if we allow them to do their own work on us . . . . The recycling of old texts in the Confessio is less a matter of humble obeisance to older, higher literary authority, and more a matter of understanding how texts and traditions are creatively recycled through the complex operations of idle reading" (p. 284). [RFY. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Simpson, James Published Simpson, James. "Bonjour Paresse: Literary Waste and Recycling in Book 4 of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." Proceedings of the British Academy 151 (2007), pp. 257-84. 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 Bonjour Paresse: Literary Waste and Recycling in Book 4 of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower's name is cited frequently in this volume, the contributors to which provide a detailed and comprehensive survey of what is known about the many facets of manuscript production during the important time when Gower's and Chaucer's works first circulated. Among the more significant references: Kathleen Scott (in her essay on "Design, decoration, and illustration," pp. 31-64) discusses the illuminated MSS of CA in relation to other contemporary works (p. 33). Gower and Lydgate are the "two most illustrated of contemporary writers" (p. 39). The most common format in their works was the "column" miniature, which she illustrates with a reproduction of a page from Egerton 1991 (p. 36). Kate Harris ("Patrons, buyers and owners: the evidence for ownership, and the role of book owners in book production and the book trade," pp. 163-200) uses coats of arms as sure evidence of the commissioning of MSS, and cites four copies of CA in which the arms of the original owners are wholly or partially preserved (p. 168). She also cites another copy of CA in her discussion of the difficulty of using later ownership as evidence of provenance (p. 170). Carol M. Meale ("Patrons, Buyers and Owners: Book Production and Social Status," pp. 201-38) describes a previously unknown record of a charge brought in 1413 against a London stationer for removing nine books from the library of the late King Henry IV with the connivance of his "custodem librorum," and for retaining them "ad magnam decepcionem" of Henry V. Among the books mentioned is "unum alium librum vocat [sic] Gower." The document is important for the apparent reference to a palace "librarian" at so early a date, as Meale points out, but also because this is the first record we have of any direct connection between Henry V and a MS of Gower. The language of the MS is not specified, but Meale rather boldly identifies it "in all likelihood" as the Huntington Library copy of CA (p. 203). And A.S.G. Edwards and Derek Pearsall ("The Manuscripts of the Major English Poetic Texts," pp. 257-78) repeatedly cite what has been learned from the examination of individual MSS of Gower's works, in the chapter that has most to do with the cirumstances in which these copies were produced. CA is one of the works they believe was already being disseminated in some organized way before the end of the fourteenth century, "apparently under the author's supervision" (p. 258); the basis for their claim is not clear since there are no surviving copies from that period. They later attribute the consistency of format and the fineness of presentation of so many fifteenth-century copies of CA (in contrast, for instance, to the MSS of CrT and PP) to the availability of carefully prepared exemplars, rather than to the mode of production as some have supposed, and they endorse Doyle and Parkes' view (1978) of a largely "bespoke" trade, loosely organized by stationers and booksellers in reponse to particular orders from customers (pp. 260-61).] [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Griffiths, Jeremy, and Derek Pearsall, eds. Published Griffiths, Jeremy, and Derek Pearsall, eds. "Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375-1475." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 ISBN 0521257360 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 Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375-1475. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cambridge University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review One of the more intriguing recent developments in the study of the text of CA was the unexpected reappearance a couple of years ago of one of the seventeen missing leaves of the "Stafford" MS (Huntington Library Ellesmere 26.A.17). First announced in Quaritch catalog 1270 (pp. 37-40, including a color photograph of the recto), the leaf was acquired by Professor Toshiyuki Takamiya of Keio University, and Takamiya and Edwards have now provided a fuller description of the leaf, including a transcription. The sixth of the MS's missing leaves, it originally stood between ff. 68 and 69 of the present pagination, and contained lines 2351-2530 of Book 4. It has been cropped on the inner edge and at the bottom for use in the binding of a smaller book, with the result that about a quarter to a third of each line of text is now missing in the first column of the recto, a few letters are lost in about half the lines in the second column of the verso, and ten lines of text have been cut away at the bottom of each column. Whatever Latin marginalia there might have been have also disappeared. The leaf has also suffered some wearing and abrasion, particularly on the verso, so that several words are now rather indistinct. On the whole, though, it is exactly what one expects of Stafford: a clean, nearly error-free text that follows almost letter for letter that of the Fairfax MS which served as Macaulay's base. I'm sorry to have to note, in that regard, that Edwards' and Takamiya's transcription contains a few errors: 2360 e MS boe; 2362 vv. 4 experetuata MS [p]erpetuata (the authors have mistaken the descender of an f in the preceding line for an abbreviation stroke); 2370 whilome MS whilom; 2396 Than MS Cham; 2408 Pantules MS Pantulf; ffrigidisses MS ffrigidilles; 2420 physique MS physique; 2439 ons MS ous; 2440 labourerer MS labourrer; 2443 mankind MS mankinde; 2444 boke MS bokes; 2449 metal MS metall; 2461 eke MS ek; 2485 Author/Editor Author/Editor Quaritch, Bernard Published Quaritch, Bernard. "Bookhands of the Middle Ages: VI. Medieval Manuscripts: Leaves and Binding Fragments." : Bernard Quaritch, Ltd., 2000 Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bookhands of the Middle Ages: VI. Medieval Manuscripts: Leaves and Binding Fragments Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Bernard Quaritch, Ltd., Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Novak takes as her starting point what has "often been remarked, that typically for the Ricardian period in which he lived, John Gower's poetic style is essentially public, in the sense that it is written on behalf of what he calls the people, for their moral edification, their 'common profit,' and usually in the form of direct address to the nation as a whole or class by class" (311). Examples are drawn from the MO and the VC Books II-VII, to illustrate Gower's early employment of "vox populi, vox dei" is in a sense unqualified--but this, Novak argues, shifts dramatically with the Revolt of 1381, as evidenced by his presentation of the peasants turned into brutes, incapable of human language. This leads her to conclude that: "When Gower speaks with the voice of the people, he means people like himself: educated, owning land, namely the rising middle estates, who are worthy of counseling and passing judgment on the upper end of the hierarchy. He does not credit serfs and artisans with speaking in God's own voice, and there is no reason to believe that anyone in his time understood the proverb to include them" (322). For Novak, this exclusion of the lowest classes extends to Gower's denial to them of human speech: "Gower believes in the power of language to repair the ills of society, to compose peace. However, just as God denies wealth and freedom to the peasant class for the common good--because someone must work the land--Gower deprives them of language, which would prove too dangerous in their mouths" (322). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Novak, Sarah. Published Novak, Sarah. "Braying Peasants and the Poet as Prophet: Gower and the People in the Vox Clamantis." Études Anglaises 66 (2013): 311-22. ISSN 0014-195X. Rpt. in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 279-85. ISBN 9781410332592. Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Vox Clamantis 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 Braying Peasants and the Poet as Prophet: Gower and the People in the "Vox Clamantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Simpson, James Published Simpson, James. "Breaking the Vacuum: Ricardian and Henrician Ovidianism." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29 (1999), pp. 325-355. ISSN 1082-9636 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review Simpson's agenda in this ambitious essay is re-open the question of the distinction between the "Renaissance" or Early Modern period and the later Middle Ages. He argues that two characteristics that are said to set off Early Modern writing---a "historical consciousness" and awareness of historical difference and a consciousness of the self as unstable and open to construction---are actually fully present in English Ovidian poetry of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. His secondary purpose is to demonstrate that Early Modern poets such as Wyatt and Surrey were constrained by their discursive environment from the full measure of rediscovered historical consciousness with which they have been credited. Ovid is given a large place in his analysis as a model both for the use of history and for the poetic manipulation of the self, while Petrarch's role as groundbreaker is correspondingly diminished. The two poets that Simpson uses to represent the period around 1390 are of course Chaucer, represented principally in his argument by his "Complaint unto Pity," and in the portion of the essay that interests us the most, John Gower and CA. Simpson's comments on CA draw upon his discussion is his earlier Sciences and the Self (see JGN 15, no. 2, pp. 11-15), but they offer a subtler reading of Gower's debt to Ovid and of his use of the voices of Amans and Genius and they have a great deal more to say about the way in which Gower's historical consciousness is manifested in the poem. The CA is "driven," he claims, "by an Ovidian deflection, even neutralization of history, just as it reveals the conditions in which history and politics can be reactivated and reformed by the elegiac experience" (p. 333). The opening invokes the beginning of the "Amores," in which Cupid commands that Ovid abandon his historical subject and write about his own pain in love: after attacking the division of the contemporary political world, the narrator of CA finds himself in Book 1 subject to the command of Cupid and required to confess as a demonstration of his truthful service. "If the confession should reconfirm Amans' integrity as a faithful subject to Cupid, however, the rest of the poem can only confirm the impossibility of psychic integration under the tyrannical regime of Cupid. Amans can only speak from, and deepen, the fissures of a self already divided" (p. 335). His "self-division" is also a "division from the political and historical world" and "an alienation from history and historical meaning" (p. 336). Neither Amans nor Genius, through most of the poem, are able to assemble any of the multiple historical incidents that are offered as exempla into any coherent narrative, and thus the CA, "like the Amores, is driven by the iterative force of desire, which seeks refuge from the relentlessness of history by fragmenting it" (p. 337). Genius also functions, however, as the means by which Amans' world and the world of history on which he has turned his back are reintegrated. (Simpson has some interesting comments on the similarity between Genius' and Pandarus' roles here, who both instruct in the art of love and offer remedies against its inevitable delusions, like the praeceptor amoris of the "Ars amatoria" and "Remedium amoris.") The turning point occurs at the opening of Book 7, when Genius, producing stories from "the treasury of the imagination" (p. 339), is suddenly governed by "rational desire, and not by sexual desire alone" (ibid.). Book 7 is dominated by the tale of Lucrece, which exposes "the political motives and consequences of cupidinous rapacity. . . . [Aruns'] sexual and military activities . . . become indistinguishable. The world of elegy has been brought into direct contact and identity with the political world that it replicates. There can be no escape from politics, since the psyche itself constitutes a 'political' arena" (ibid.). Genius' very telling of the tale, however, "affirms the possibility of psychic reintegration, whereby the imagination, personified by Genius, operates as a mediator between abstract reasoning and sensual desire. The very possibility of the Lucrece story, told as an exemplum against tyranny in sexual and political practice, itself testifies to the possibility of an imaginative remembrance of stories that is not driven by concupiscent desire; an alternative, fully ethical and political exercise of the imagination is possible. The poem as a whole is a fable of the psyche, in which the relations of the soul mirror the ideal practice of (Gowerian) politics, whereby the abstract principle of the law, the king, has commerce with the body politic by the mediation of counselors (or Parliament) capable of imaginative apprehension. The poem does register the capacity to escape from to escape from Cupid's jurisdiction, and to return to the political discourse of the prologue. The return to the public world is, however, profoundly reformist" (p. 340). None of these possibilities, Simpson suggests, particularly the critique of absolutism, was possible under the much more oppressive discursive conditions of the 1530's and 1540's. This is not an essay that is adequately represented in an abstract, and it well deserves to be considered in its entirety. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 19.1] 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 Breaking the Vacuum: Ricardian and Henrician Ovidianism. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review 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 List of works; friend of Chaucer; "moral" Gower. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Beers, Henry A. Published Beers, Henry A. Brief History of English and American Literature. New York: Eaton and Mains, 1897, pp. 38, 41, 44, 49. 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 Brief History of English and American Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1897 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Brief description of Gower's tomb. [RFY1981; rev. MA]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Aubrey, John. Clark, Andrew, ed. Published Aubrey, John. Brief Lives, Chiefly of Contemporaries, Set Down Between the Years 1669-96. Edited by Andrew Clark. Oxford: Clarendon, 1898, I, 271 Gower Subject Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Brief Lives, Chiefly of Contemporaries, Set Down Between the Years 1669-96. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1898 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Stoyanoff, Jeffery G. Published Stoyanoff, Jeffery G. Bringing Frames into Focus: Reading Middle English Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation. Duquesne University, 2015. viii, 163 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A77/01(E). Fully accessible via https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/ and via ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Review In his dissertation, Stoyanoff exemplifies how Middle English writers use "generically-situated framing devices to play with readers' expectations and to open up their texts for a number of possible interpretations" (iv). He focuses on three types of framing device to show how they "control the presentation of the text while implicitly recognizing that such ornamentation cannot, ultimately, control interpretation": "the circular frame in John Gower's compilation, 'Confessio Amantis'; the episodic, memory-based frame of contemplative writing in Margery Kempe's 'Book'; and the narratorial frame accomplished through narratorial tags in 'The Romaunce of Sir Beves of Hamtoun" (v). For a published a version of Stoyanoff's discussion of Gower's "frame," see his "Beginnings and Endings: Narrative Framing in 'Confessio Amantis'." South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015), pp. 52-64. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bringing Frames into Focus: Reading Middle English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Brief biography of Gower and assessment of his works; modern artist's conception of a portrait of Gower, perhaps based upon manuscript illustrations.[RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Kunitz, Stanley, ed. Haycraft, Howard, ed. Published Kunitz, Stanley, and Howard Haycraft, eds. British Authors Before 1900, A Biographical Dictionary. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1952, pp. 129-31. Gower Subject Biography of Gower 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 British Authors Before 1900, A Biographical Dictionary. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1952 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Holloway surveys the knowledge and circulation of Latini's work in England during the late Middle Ages. She notes the existence of an Italian MS of c. 1425 (now B.L. Add. 39844) containing the Secretum Secretorum with interpolations from Il Tesoro, following closely the pattern of Gower's adaptation of both works in Book 7 of CA and suggesting that Gower had access to an earlier MS with the same arrangement, contrary to the usual assumption that Gower himself was responsible for the juxtaposition (though we might also expect that Gower's MS would have presented the French version of Latini's work rather than the Italian). The reference to Holloway's essay was provided by John M. Crafton, "Chaucer's Treasure Text: The Influence of Brunetto Latini on Chaucer's Developing Narrative Technique," Medieval Perspectives 4-5 (1989-90): 25-41. Crafton refers to Gower's use of Latini's Livres du Tresor as evidence for the availability of the work to Chaucer, citing Holloway and James J. Murphy's 1961 essay on Gower's discussion of rhetoric. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Holloway, Julia Bolton Published Holloway, Julia Bolton. "Brunetto Latini and England." Manuscripta 31 (1987), pp. 11-21. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Brunetto Latini and England Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation investigates how, in the wake of the English Rising of 1381, John Gower's Confessio Amantis addressed the highest ranks of non-ruling urban groups, ranks which produced numerous rebels. Using a methodology in dialogue with British Cultural Studies, this project argues that the Confessio worked to reshape the consciousness of readers from these strata, proposing to alter the ways in which they conceptualized their agency, interests, allies, and overall identities. This is the first study of the Confessio to examine an early readership from non-ruling groups or to consider readers who had participated in or sympathized with the uprising. Chapter One challenges claims that only ruling groups comprised the poem's earliest readership and explains that the upper strata of non-ruling urban groups (roughly, middle-rank guild members, including prosperous retailers and artisans) were in the Confessio's audiences from 1390 to 1425. This chapter examines studies of early Confessio manuscripts and their circulation but focuses primarily on the access of the upper strata of non-ruling urban groups to literacy and on their consumption of texts. Chapter Two argues that the Confessio's rendition of Nebuchadnezzar's dream represents history as a homogeneous mass and as a teleological progression into ruin. Through these contradictory models, the Confessio proposed to alter the terms in which readers understood how history happens, experienced their relation to the past and future, conceptualized their agency and identities, and understood their connections to the uprising and to insurrection in general. The third chapter argues that, through the grace of higher powers, the protagonist undergoes a rite of passage, improving his understanding, morality, and spirituality. The poem offers readers a similar gift, through its learned, textual tradition. The Confessio thus distinguishes informed men from the masses, thereby policing debates about England's problems, while fostering identifications between readers and higher ranks and encouraging contempt for lower ranks. Chapter Four holds that the Confessio's claims about popular insurrection echo the Vox Clamantis. However, the poems' overall approaches to the uprising differ radically, as their strategies were shaped by disparities between England's political terrain in 1381 and in the years immediately thereafter. Author/Editor Author/Editor Arner, Lynn Patricia Published Arner, Lynn Patricia. "Burying the Dead: John Gower and English Rising of 1381." PhD thesis, University of Rochester, 2000. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Burying the Dead: John Gower and English Rising of 1381. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Dissertation Abstracts International, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Edwards considers modern sale prices of manuscripts and Caxton's 1483 edition of "Confessio Amantis" as evidence for "the acumen of individual collectors or book dealers" and "the relationship . . . between commercial value and cultural and/or academic significance" (281) of the CA. Of fifty-odd manuscripts, fifteen have been sold or offered since the late nineteenth century. Huntington Library MS EL 26. A. 17 and Folger Shakespeare Library MS SM 1 were purchased en bloc and had no specified prices. Only one is in a British Library: Bodleian Library MS Lyell 31. Pierpont Morgan Library MS M 126, one of two that "include a full cycle of miniatures" (282), now lacking nine, was purchased in 1902 for £1,727. The rarity of Caxton's edition--only seven complete copies survive--and his "mystique … as the father of English printing" (285), enhanced its sale prices: an imperfect copy sold in 1981 for £22,000. The essay concludes with two appendices, listing sales of CA manuscripts and of Caxton's "Gower" since c.1900. [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, A. S. G. Published Edwards, A. S. G. "Buying Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' in Modern Times." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. 279-90. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Buying Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' in Modern Times. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review From Driscoll's abstract: "'By The Will of the King' demonstrates how Ricardian poetry was shaped by and responded to the conflict between majestic and political rhetoric that crystallized in the politically turbulent years culminating in the Second Barons' War (1258-1265). By placing Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' in dialogue with this political tradition, I demonstrate how narrative became a site of conflict between vertical, cosmic descriptions of power and horizontal realities of power, a conflict from which the contours of a civic habit of mind began to emerge . . . . By looking at the narrative practice of Gower and Chaucer through the lens of thirteenth-century political innovation, I extend and fill in [the] depiction of a nascent political imaginary. Each poet responds to the new political circumstances in their own way. Gower, placing the political community at the center of Book VII of the 'Confessio,' rigorously reworks the mirror for princes genre into a schematic analysis of political power. For Chaucer, political rhetoric becomes visible at the moment that the traditional majestic rhetoric of kingship collapses. 'The Canterbury Tales,' as such, restages the conflict of the thirteenth century in aesthetic terms--giving form to the crisis of authority. Ultimately, Ricardian poetry exposes and works through an anxiety of sovereignty; it registers the limits of a majestic paradigm of kingship; and reshaping narrative, aesthetic, and hermeneutic practice, it conjures a new political imaginary capable of speaking to and for a community which had emerged during the reign of Henry III." Author/Editor Author/Editor Driscoll, William D. Published Driscoll, William D. "By the Will of the King: Majestic and Political Rhetoric in Ricardian Poetry." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Oregon, 2017. iii, 335 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A78.09 (2018): n.p. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses and at https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/items/06271349-f5bb-46a9-8b3e-7c25df952afb. 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 By the Will of the King: Majestic and Political Rhetoric in Ricardian Poetry. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Calling" embraces both "summoning" (or "vocation") and "naming," not only in Modern English but also in Middle English (by way of the verb "clepen") and in the Latin "vocare," as used, for instance, in the Vulgate in 1 Corinthians 7:20, the ultimate source for many of the passages that Davis discusses: "Unusquisque in qua vocatione vocatus est, in ea permaneat." Davis explores the notion of "calling" in four late fourteenth-century texts ("Piers Plowman," "Vox Clamantis," "House of Fame," and the "Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale"), countering, along the way, Weber's oversimplification of pre-Lutheran notions of "calling," especially with regard to significance of activity in the world and the possibility of salvation for those in secular life. "Instead of earthly names and estates being naturalized, fixed, and God-given, or alternatively, alien and anathema to God, God temporarily suffers imperfect human 'callings' at the same time that he issues his own call. Thus, although human and divine 'callings' are not identical, they are also not necessarily distinguishable and in fact often coincide; as such, the characters within these poems, and sometimes the poems themselves, do not always disambiguate them" (55). Davis's analysis expands to include discussion of "use" vs. "possession" and "precept" vs. "counsel," and it perhaps offers its richest insight into WB and PP, especially where she draws parallels between the Wife and Langland's Will. Her discussion of VC centers on the narrator's role in Book I. Taking issue with those who, conflating poet and narrator, blame Gower for the disturbing allegorical depiction of the revolting peasants as animals in the vision in Book I, Davis emphasizes how "the poem reframes its invective as self-scrutiny" (80). Wisdom, exercising a role similar to that of Conscience in PP C XXI, "alerts the narrator to the call to redemption and does achieve his contrition, which is signaled by his kneeling. This call forces two related recognitions on the part of the narrator: first, that the revolt and storm are divine instruments and, second, that the target of God's displeasure is the narrator himself, who, despite having fled the terrors of revolt, has internalized and carries it within: he is the revolt. . . . In recognition of his own sinfulness, Gower's narrator evacuates the cavities of his heart. This thorough cardiac examination enables him to hear, on or over the wind, the divine voice to which Wisdom has already alerted him. Once the storm has subsided, . . . the narrator kneels in thanks . . . . The narrator's contrition and prayers, which culminate in this act of kneeling, are the turning point around which the whole poem pivots. . . . His own crying to God and God's answering call produce an antiphonal that emerges from, rather than being antithetical to, the tumult of other calls, which together constitute the revolt" (79-81). Elsewhere, Davis describes both the narrator's loss of his own voice and Gower's well-known use of the words of other poets as acts of "kenosis," in imitation of Christ's setting aside of his divinity upon assuming human form, as described by Paul in Philippians 2:5-11 (85-88). She concludes by setting side by side the ending of VC and the close of Alain de Lille's "Anticlaudianus" (91-97), illustrating "a commitment [in Gower's, Langland's, and Chaucer's work] . . . to imagine--although perpetually defer--the spiritual recoverability of the imperfect life" (97). This subtle and wide-ranging essay deserves to be read in full. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.2]. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 257-79. Author/Editor Author/Editor Davis, Isabel Published Davis, Isabel. "Calling: Langland, Gower, and Chaucer on Saint Paul." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 34 (2012), pp. 53-97. ISSN 0190-2407 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Calling: Langland, Gower, and Chaucer on Saint Paul. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Detaied, handy reference for biographical materials, discussions of works, and relations with Chaucer. Author/Editor Author/Editor Ward, A. W., ed. Waller, M. A., ed. Published Ward, A. W., and M. A. Waller, eds. Cambridge History of English Literature. 15 vols. New York: Putnam, 1908, II, 153-78, 183, 185, 188, 199, 209, 225, 240, 244, 256, 259, 276, 277, 287, 297, 475. 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 Cambridge History of English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1908 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Concerned with Gower's reading of Ovid. From epistle 11 of Ovid's "Heroides," written by Canace and ending with an allusion to the blood-stained letter in her lap, Gower has extracted a straightforward narrative, replacing ordo artificialis with ordo naturalis. Gower refuses to condemn the children's incest, though he is not unaware of the traditional medieval judgment that their love was unnatural. Instead he chooses to emphasize the "naturalness of the unnatural," in his manner of telling, in his attribution to Canace of a letter echoing the most conventional courtly rhetoric of love, and in the image of the child bathing in his mother's blood with which the tale concludes. This image, though not in Ovid's version, is nonetheless based on Ovid, as the literal child replaces the metaphorical child, Canace's blood-stained letter, as the victim of Eolus' wrath. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Spearing, A. C. Published Spearing, A. C.. "Canace and Machaire." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 211-221. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Canace and Machaire Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation traces the emergence of three landmarks of the Renaissance English canon--an author (John Donne), a genre (the English Sonnet), and a work (The Tempest). The canonical represents not only positive content, but also the exclusion of an unstable material context. Responding to recent developments in textual criticism, attribution study, and theories of canon formation, the thesis draws on the work of Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva to show how canonicity (the preference for a given text, author or word over another in a given context) involves ritual pollution and purification. Much of what was later considered impure or corrupting was deeply woven into the early modern experience of texts now generally read in cleaned-up, anachronistically coherent versions. Chapter 3 argues that 'The Tempest' radically revises, then supplants earlier and more popular versions of the story of Apollonius of Tyre, such as 'Pericles.' Critical hostility to 'Pericles' and adulation of 'The Tempest' have precluded full consideration of the canonical play's debt to the Apollonius tradition, the most widespread and obvious repository of The Tempest's romance motifs and the proximate source of its Virgilian echoes. Reversing the earlier myth's perspective to make the tyrant the hero, Prospero derives his authority and cruelty from the father-kings in the Apollonius tradition and his choric, pseudo-Christian epilogue from Gower's frame narrative in the 'Confessio Amantis'." Includes discussion of how Shakespeare's Miranda echoes "the daughter of the King of Pentapolis" (143) of CA. Author/Editor Author/Editor Johnson, Nathaniel Paul. Published Johnson, Nathaniel Paul.  Canonicity and Identity: Mythologies of English Renaissance Writing. Ph.D. Dissertation. Cornell University, 1997. vi, 204 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A58.04. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Canonicity and Identity: Mythologies of English Renaissance Writing. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Chaucer's poetry is pervaded by his deep concerns for contemporary political and social issues; he is dismayed by the materialism and loss of spiritual values of his contemporaries; and he hopes through his writing to bring about a transformation in the commonwealth. The themes are familiar, but Olson is writing about Chaucer, not about Gower; and though Gower is cited only peripherally, the subtlety and clarity of Olson's argument may prompt a renewed look at what has become one of the chestnuts of Gower criticism. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Olson, Paul A. Published Olson, Paul A.. "Canterbury Tales and the Good Society." Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Canterbury Tales and the Good Society Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Princeton University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book NonPeerReviewed