9 100 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 Fisher pointed out (1964, pp. 68-69 and 342 n. 8) that Gower's "0 Recolende" seems to contain, in its promise of Henry's continuing fame, a reference to the king's grant of two pipes of Gascony wine in November 1399, and that it also seems to anticipate his composition of the "Cronica Tripertita." Carlson examines the same passage in closer detail, including both the earlier and later versions of "0 Recolende," explicating Gower's play on words more fully and pointing to several verbal similarities between this poem and the final eight lines of CrT, suggesting that the former "appears to incorporate an initial formulation of matter that Gower was to rework in the latter" (380). He concludes that Henry's grant to Gower preceded the poet's composition of both "0 Recolende" and CrT. In his citation of the passage from CrT, Carlson uses the version found only in the Glasgow MS (G) which in his 2007 essay he suggests was written after 1405. In this essay, however, he dates the composition of this conclusion to February 1400 (381). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R Published Carlson, David R. "Gower 'pia bita bibit' and Henry IV in 1399 November." English Studies 89 (2008), pp. 377-84. ISSN 0013-838X Gower Subject Cronica Tripertita Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower 'pia bita bibit' and Henry IV in 1399 November. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Campbell, John. Published Biographia Britannica, Or, the Lives of the Most eminent Persons Who Have flourished in Great Britain and Ireland From the earliest Ages, Down to the present Time: Collected from the best Authorities, both Printed and Manuscript, And digested in the Manner of Mr Bayle's Historical and Critical Dictionary. London: Printed for W. Innys, W. Meadows, J. Walthoe, T. Cox, A. Ward, J. and P. Knapton, T. Osborne, S. Birt, D. Browne, T. Longman and T. Shewell, H. Whitridge, R. Hett, C. Hitch, T. Astley, S. Austen, C. Davis, R. Manby and H.S. Cox, C. Bathurst, J. and R. Tonson and S. Draper, J. Robinson, J. Hinton, J. and J. Rivington, and M. Cooper, 1747-1766. 6 vols. in 7, continuously paginated. Volume 4: 2242-51. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Backgrounds and General Criticism Review This biography of Gower--signed only "E," but see N.B. below--digests, substantially extends, and at times critiques or corrects information and opinions found in works by John Leland, John Bale, John Stow, John Pits, Thomas Fuller, and others, acknowledging, quoting from, and responding to them in side-bar citations, augmented by lengthy footnotes that supply social, literary, and bibliographical background and context. It is a remarkable achievement, not easily absorbed or summarized, but well worth attention as a valuable snapshot of eighteenth-century knowledge and opinions of Gower. The main entry, for example, considers the question of Gower's presumed change of allegiance from Richard to Henry, summarizing comments of some who "blame [Gower] exceedingly for his conduct in this respect," and asserting instead that it "may be, and indeed is, much more like to be the truth, that our author was ever averse to King Richard's administration, in consequence of his [Gower's] steady attachment to Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester" (2244-45). Many of Gower's shorter works--his "little discourses on religious and moral subjects," we are told--need to be "drawn out of the dust and cobwebs" and "ensured against oblivion by the press" for their historical value and their moral sentiment (2247-48). Together, the "joint endeavors" of Gower and Chaucer made it possible that "there came to be such a thing as English poetry" (2250). Individual notes offer perspectives on heraldry and Gower's putative status as a knight (Note A); extensive information about his tomb and its inscriptions, including quotations (H); and several conjectural possibilities concerning the poet's ancestry, progeny, and the implications of his Lancastrian collar "of SS" and connections with Henry IV (I). Note B describes aspects of Gower-Chaucer relations and quotes the poets' references to each other--Chaucer's reference to "moral Gower" in Troilus and Criseyde 5.1856-59 and Venus's greeting to Chaucer in CA 8.*2941-57, each with modern translation. Note D dilates further on Gower's possible opinions of Richard II and historical assessments of those opinions. Notes E and G include extensive lists of Gower's minor works, with manuscript references and commentary on Gower's political views; E prints a full version of "In Praise of Peace" from John Urry's 1721 edition of Chaucer's works. In note C, which pertains to Gower's major works, discussion of the Speculum Meditantis (i.e., Mirour de l'Omme) is misleading: "two copies" are "in the Bodleian Library . . . written in French, in ten books," with citation of manuscripts "NE. F.8,9" and of "Fairfax 3." I have been unable to identify the first shelfmark (although it suggests shelving by geography), and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 3, does not include the poem, although its colophon (f. 194r) describes the work as being in French and in ten parts, information also found in other Gowerian colophons. Note C quotes the headnote and opening line of Gower's Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz, erroneously, as the "title at large" of MO, conflating the two works. Continuing, note C describes Vox Clamantis as "a kind of chronicle or history of the insurrection . . . in the reign of Richard II," with references to several manuscripts in Oxford libraries, and others "more frequent in private hands." The note prints VC Book I, chapter xi, 783-830 (no source-manuscript given)--to my knowledge, the first printing of any portion of the poem. The passage is given in Latin only, we are told apologetically, because translation "would be very difficult if not impossible." Note C also quotes, with translation, the "title at large" of VC as found in Tiberius A.IV.1 of the Cotton collection ("a very correct manuscript"), then goes on to describe one of the Oxford manuscripts--All Souls MS 98, here cited as "MS. Oxon. in Coll. Omn. Animarum, 26"--as a "fairer and more beautiful manuscript," from which the epistle to Archbishop Arundel is quoted as evidence that this version is a "kind of second edition when [Gower] joined to it some other historical pieces, and being written as himself says, when he was old and blind, might very probably be one of the last things he ever penned, or rather dictated" (p. 2244). Note C continues with brief comments on the Caxton edition of the Confessio Amantis and Thomas Berthelette's editions of the poem, with no accompanying discussion of manuscripts. A side-bar reference to a "curious account" in the William Caxton entry earlier in the Biographia [see volume 2, pp. 1240-4, note O] leads us to a discussion of Caxton's title-page to CA and the CA Prologues in Caxton and in Berthelette that explores historical and textual aspects of the Prologues and dedications of these printed editions--preceded by commentary that corrects or at least addresses several emphases in earlier biographical accounts of Gower. Returning to note C of the main Gower entry, we find CA described as a "kind of poetical system of Morality, interspersed with weighty sentences, excellent maxims, and shrewd sayings; but far the greatest part [is] composed of pleasant stories happily introduced as instances or examples in support of the virtuous doctrine delivered." In support of the main-entry assertion that Gower's works reflect deep learning and probity as "monuments of the progress of good sense thro' former ages" (p. 2246), note F prints CA, Book VII, 3945-60 in Middle English, and translates into modern poetry the entire Tale of the Courtiers and the Fool (VII, 3945-4026), offering it as an example of Gower's sensible advice to Richard II and evidence that Gower "knew the force of example and commonly illustrated his precepts by having recourse to antient or modern history" (2248). Note K comprises quotations that illustrate Gower's early modern reception: selections from Berthelette, George Puttenham, Sir Philip Sidney, and Henry Peacham. The main entry concludes by explaining that "it was a point of duty to render so much justice to John Gower, whose memory has been too much neglected by some and too hastily injured by others . . . . And it is from a consciousness of this, that we have not spared either industry or labour, to set, as we hope we have done, this article in a proper light." N.B. In the Preface to the second volume of the second edition of the Biographia Britannica (5 vols., 1778-93), p. viii, Andrew Kippis explains that entries in the Biographia signed "E" (as is the one about Gower and the one about Chaucer) were contributed by "Dr. Campbell," whom Kippis later identifies (p. 423, note B) as the author of The Political Survey of Britain (1774), i.e., Dr. John Campbell (1708-1775). Kippis also says that entries signed "G" (as is the Caxton entry mentioned above) were contributed by William Oldys. [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 Gower [John]. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1747-1766 1778-1793, 2d ed. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review At heart, Carlson's essay is a close reading of some key passages from Gower and Chaucer in comparison to their sources: CA 4.3063-64, the brief description of the storm in the tale of "Ceix and Alceone," in contrast to the much longer passage in Ovid's "Metamorphoses" 11.474-572; VC 1.1593-2012, another description of a storm, in comparison to the same passage in Ovid; VC 1.1623-38, which incorporates five lines from a different passage in Met., 1.264-82; Gower's "Ceix and Alceone" in comparison to Chaucer's account in "The Book of the Duchess," which omits the final transformation that Gower retains; and VC 1.1231-32, in which Gower atypically turns to Vergil (Aeneid 4.173), in comparison to "House of Fame" 713-20, in which Chaucer atypically turns to Ovid instead (Met. 12.43-46). Carlson's discussion is informed by his own deep immersion in the Latin texts, so that he is able to describe, for instance, how Gower's borrowings from Ovid in VC are selected not just for their imagery but as evocations of the broader context in which they occur, and his comments are illuminating. He frames his analysis within an argument on Gower's efforts to outdo both Ovid and Chaucer, whom he viewed as rivals, as well as an effort to outdo his own earlier youthful work. Thus the briefer account of the storm represents Gower's correction of Ovid's excess, and the comparison to Chaucer betrays an underlying jealousy: "Though Gower was senior, perhaps by as much as a generation, Chaucer arrived earlier as an English poet," Carlson concludes. "Greater, prior success for Chaucer's English writings--evidently widely copied, by contrast with Gower's earliest efforts--may also have engendered a degree of disapprobation in Gower for the younger, less serious, but better-received English writer. Gower's more thoroughly informed Ovidian usage in the "Visio Anglie" represents the superiority of his learning, by contrast with the boy Chaucer. The still more thorough command of Ovidianism, still more subtly expressed, in the final "Confessio amantis" reuse of the Ceyx and Alcione matter--where the Chaucerian ineptitude seems to have offended Gower ('Ther mai no worldes joie laste' topping 'To lytel while oure blysse lasteth')--represents Gower's greater seriousness and knowledge, by comparison with the own, younger self that had engaged thoroughly with the same Ovid, and in the learned language itself, for the "Visio Anglie" section of 1381" (952). [PN. Copyright John Gower Society eJGN 34.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R Published Carlson, David R. "Gower Agonistes and Chaucer on Ovid (and Virgil)." Modern Language Review 109 (2014), pp. 931-52. ISSN 0026-7937 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Agonistes and Chaucer on Ovid (and Virgil) 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 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 Bertolet compares treatments of fraud in three Canterbury tales with selections from Gower's Latin and French poems: the Miller's account of Nicholas's lie about a second Nowell's flood is juxtaposed with Gower's account of the Whisperer in "Vox Clamantis"(trans. Stockton, 216-19); the Reeve's characterization of Symkin as a cheater is studied next to a condensed criticism of fraud in the "Vox" (Stockton 214-16); and the Cook's Prologue and Tale is seen in the light of Gower's account of fraud in the "Mirour de l'Omme" (trans. Wilson, 330-49). These texts, together with summaries of actual contemporaneous cases tried before the court of the mayor and aldermen, testify to "a suspicion of commerce shared by writers and many ordinary Londoners" (137) in the period. [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bertolet, Craig E Published Bertolet, Craig E. "Gower and 'The Canterbury Tales': The Enticement to Fraud." In Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Ed. Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011, pp. 136-42. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and 'The Canterbury Tales': The Enticement to Fraud 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 Donavin's efficient essay describes the "groundwork" (p. 56) she laid for her students as essential preparation for a month-long unit on tales of sexual abuse from the "Confessio Amantis" (Lucrece, Philomena, Cornix, and Calistona) in an upper-division undergraduate course for English majors and Gender Studies students. Sensitive to the #MeToo movement and Take Back the Night activities, this groundwork includes trigger warnings, rules for student discussions, and a rich and nuanced set of perspectives on medieval gender issues drawn from recent critical scholarship and serving as a guide or index of parameters for such a unit. Donavin's summary of student responses indicates that the unit was very successful. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Donavin, Georgiana Published Donavin, Georgiana. "Gower and #MeToo." Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 30.1 (2023): 53-61. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and #MeToo. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review David Carlson presents the first full-length study of Gower as a Latin poet, and more importantly, as the greatest of Anglo-Latin poets of the fourteenth century. This accomplished and wide-ranging volume offers studies of Gower's Latin poetry and its formal properties. It also offers new editions and translations of five short poems outside the Latin verses of "Confessio Amantis." The book is a substantive and authoritative contribution to literary history, both the history of Anglo-Latin verse and of the cultural contexts through which Latin poets reflected on their practice. To read and assimilate this book is thus to encounter a wider sense of fourteenth-century literary consciousness than what might be afforded by a standard history of vernacular English poetry. While the book is founded on enormous learning, it is by no means a survey: it is rather a re-exploration of a well-known period from a decisively different (and equally valid) perspective. Carlson advances an important argument about Gower's Latin poetry: it was "fundamentally not classical" (11) nor archaizing, but rather placed itself in a contemporary cultural and literary environment. His Latin poetry was "informed by and indebted to contemporary Anglo-Latin poetry for the metrical fabric of his writing" (12). Gower's formal choices make better sense from a synchronic perspective. Most significant is Gower's search for a metrical plain style, neither demotic nor hyper-sophisticated, that was suitable to public poetry. The chapters cover Gower's earliest Latin poetry, the "invention of Anglo-Latin public poetry," his contribution to estates satire, his historiography of 1381 and his prosody, and his late Latin style. The poems newly edited and translated are "Epitaphium Edwardi tercii" (1377), the John Ball verses (c. 1395), the Blackfriars Council verses (c. 1382), "Ecce dolet Anglia" (c. 1360-75), and "Epilogus Apocalipsium" (c. 1376-8). There are two appendices on versification. [RC. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R. Published Carlson, David R. Gower and Anglo-Latin Verse. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2021. xi, 345 pp. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Cronica Tripertita Minor Latin Poetry Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Anglo-Latin Verse. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review On the occasion of the library of the University of North Carolina acquiring its millionth volume, a 1483 folio edition of Gower's CA printed by William Caxton, Wells writes a critical appreciation of both the poet and the printer. By Caxton's time Gower's fame was well established, as shown from the translation of his work into Spanish and Portuguese. Wells remarks on the range of Gower's reading "in the ancient and contemporary classics of his age" (9). Despite his extensive borrowing, Gower preserves a sense of order, not only by the achievement of a plain style, but also by making the image of the lover seeking his ideal representative of the good man "striving towards order" (9). The second half of Wells' piece provides an appraisal of Caxton's career. Wells suggests that Caxton's criteria for each book that he chose to print were that it was "1) long established in reputation or very popular, 2) well written, 3) instructive, and 4) if the subject permitted, delightful" (10). Wells ends with a brief description of Caxton's edition, including its marginalia and binding. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wells, William Published Wells, William. "Gower and Caxton." South Atlantic Bulletin 27.1 (1961), pp. 9-10. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Caxton Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1961 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The Biblical version of the story of Jephte and his daughter, Yeager notes, contains little register of emotion--a bare reference to the father rending his garments, which in context might indicate either his horror or his grief--and the loss that is foregrounded is less that of her life than that of her inability ever to bear children. Yeager examines the brief allusion to the story, as an analogue to Virginia's plight, in Chaucer's 'Physician's Tale' and both Gower's retelling of the story in the CA and the accompanying illustration in Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.126 in order to define the very different sense of both loss and pain in the medieval versions. Chaucer's is made problematic by the possibly conflicting purposes of the Physician and the poet, but the description of the two characters' reactions in the key scene reveals an interest in their pain and suffering as "worthy of exploration" (51) in themselves, and consistent with that purpose, Virginia's evocation of her predecessor highlights both her innocence and her powerlessness, as she is not given the period of reprieve in order to bewail her loss. Gower's too has two narrators, Genius and the poet. For Genius, it is a tale of sloth in love, and he makes little more of the daughter's feelings than the biblical account. In her plea for time in order to "bewepe / Hir maidenhood, which sche to kepe / So longe hath had and noght beset / Wherof hir lusti youthe is let" (CA IV.1565-68), he finds an appeal to a "peculiarly modern-seeming, existential angst" for which he invokes Kafka as a model: "Jephte's daughter's tragedy in Gower's hands share elements with Gregor Samsa's: following the best social code, she has preserved her virginity as her years mounted toward a marriage and motherhood that, suddenly and irrationally, are snatched beyond her reach, leaving her body transmogrified and her self without purpose" (53). In their separate reactions to what the father must do in the lines that follow, each also "raises unavoidable questions about the purposes, if any, of suffering, in a universe that may or may not be just" (54). The illustration in the Pierpont Morgan manuscript is equally alert to the "larger, polyvalent exploration of suffering, both overt and suppressed" of Gower's tale and the "emotional complexity" of the father's situation (55). Both Chaucer and Gower thus demonstrate a keen understanding of suffering that goes beyond mere bodily pain. Their works, Yeager concludes, "manifest a developing social awareness of the emotional as a broad landscape, dim as yet but noticeably broadening, and deepening to account for complexity of feelings irrelevant to questions of sin and salvation yet too intense, and too universally present, to be left any longer unexplored in art" (57). [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Gower and Chaucer on Pain and Suffering: Jephte's Daughter in the Bible, the 'Physician's Tale' and the Confessio Amantis." In Knowledge and Pain. Ed. Cohen, Esther, and Toker, Leona, and Consonni, Manuela, and Dror, Otniel E. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012, pp. 43-62. ISBN 9789042035829 Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Chaucer on Pain and Suffering: Jephte's Daughter in the Bible, the 'Physician's Tale' and the Confessio Amantis. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rodopi, 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 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 McKinley opens her essay by surveying the paucity of Ovidian references and allusions in Middle English poetry, apart from works by Gower and Chaucer, describing the pair as the "most Ovidian of the Middle English poets" and setting out to explore the "nature of the two poets' relative Ovidianisms." For both, Ovid "was the classical poet par excellence" (198), although their emphases differ, McKinley tells us initially, offering a familiar, even traditional summary: "If for Gower Ovid is useful in constructing an ideal world--a coherent, but highly stratified mundus of political, ethical and theological dimensions--for Chaucer Ovid is useful in exploring the larger, often open-ended, moral and ethical questions one should ask while making one's way through a rather less clearly delineated world" (198-99). For most of her essay, however, McKinley steers in a somewhat different direction, focusing on instances where, she argues, Gower and Chaucer use a range of Ovidian sources in diverse, even "startling" (230) ways. She offers four extended examples; Gower's incorporation of lines from Ovid into his own Latin in VC Book 1, comparison of Gower's and Chaucer's versions of the Pyramus and Thisbe stories in CA Book 5 and "The Legend of Good Women," their versions of Theseus/Ariadne material in the same works, and Chaucer's adaptation of Ovid in his "Manciple's Tale," with a nod to Gower's version in CA Book 3. Throughout, McKinley emphasizes the work that Ovid does for Gower and Chaucer even when they use Latin school texts, translations, and moralizations as their sources, often in complicated combinations, modified by the overarching contexts of the poets' medieval larger narratives. In VC 1.2021–50, Gower cherry picks ten lines directly from Ovid and uses them so that "Ovid is made a proponent of the virtues of self-mastery," of "ratio" over "amor," in a "startling reversal" of the Roman poet's original (206). In the cases of the Thisbe/Pyramus and the Ariadne/Theseus accounts, McKinley's comparisons lead her to observe how and where the medieval poets adjust the Ovidian materials to fit their own concerns: Gower, the "principles of self-restraint and oath-keeping" (230); Chaucer, the ironic, even comic or bathetic potential of love tragedy. The modification of Ovidian details and emphases in the "Manciple's Tale" and its juxtaposition with the "Parson's Tale," McKinley argues, "opens up a new vein of exploration in the poem: the analysis of intention in relation to sin." In this instance, Chaucer is more the moralizing poet than is Gower, and so a particularly surprising example, it seems, of the "extraordinary creativity" of the poets' in their "'glosynge' of Ovid" (230). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor McKinley, Kathryn L. Published In Ovid in the Middle Ages, ed. James G. Clark, Frank Thomas Coulson, and Kathryn L. McKinley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 197-230. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Chaucer: Readings of Ovid in Late Medieval England. 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 Review Gower and Chaucer have long been cited in tandem as foundational English poets. Gastle reviews the documentation on their personal acquaintanceship (296-98), treating skeptically the inference that they quarreled (300). Much scholarship surrounds the major narratives they held in common--the "Loathly Lady," Constance, and the rapist Tereus (298-302), with their potential for "gendered readings" (301). Common themes are reviewed, especially the world in decay (302) and the need to advise their king, especially on peacemaking (304). Both were "champions of the vernacular" as authoritative (305), and both explored the potential of "multiple narrative voices" including women's (305-06). Both were pioneers in English versification, a potential area for digital analysis (306). Gower especially imbued the voices of women with "Arion's restorative music" (307). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gasyle, Brian. Published Gastle, Brian. "Gower and Chaucer." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 296-311. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Biography of Gower Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Chaucer. 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 Author/Editor Author/Editor Bratcher, James T. Published Bratcher, James T.. "Gower and Child, No. 45, 'King John and the Bishop'." Notes and Queries 246.48 (2001), pp. 14-15. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review Noting that no source for Gower's tale of "The Three Questions" has ever been identified, Bratcher points to the ballad of "King John and the Bishop" (Child, no. 45) as a possible analogue. The characters in the ballad are different (King John and the "Bishop of Canterbury") and the riddles differ too, but in both tales, the king is motivated by envy, he grants a similar period of time before the answers are required, and "a dependent relative of inferior standing, prompted by love and loyalty" (14) steps forward to provide the answers. In the ballad, it is the bishop's half-brother, a shepherd, whose answers are more clever than wise but which nonetheless finally win him a stipend from the king as well as a pardon for the bishop. A check of Sargent and Kittredge's edition of Child reveals that there are actually two versions of this ballad extant. Both their notes and the references in Bratcher lead to a number of other tales that are structurally similar to Gower's, but as Macaulay points out in his note (Works 2.478), the closest known analogue for the riddles themselves remains MO 12601-12. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 21.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Child, No. 45, 'King John and the Bishop' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bullón-Fernández explicates the two foundational traditions in scholarship on Gower and gender, one claiming he is notably respectful to women, especially in the CA (22-23), and one finding women characters as misogynistically portrayed and marginalized to the "larger" concerns of men (23). Among her many examples of scholarship engaged with this complexity, Bullón-Fernández notes how rape in the CA is always the fault of the male (24), yet somehow gendered "effeminat" (25-26). She describes the manuscripts of the CA apparently commissioned by women and reflecting their influence (29), before calling for more research on the much less woman-friendly French and Latin poems (32-33). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bullón-Fernández, María. Published Bullón-Fernández, María. "Gower and Gender." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 21-36. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Gender. 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 Author/Editor Author/Editor Bland, D. S. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Sources, Analogues, and LIterary Relations Review Attempts to reassess Gower's importance to English letters, particularly in relation to Chaucer. [RFY1981] Published Bland, D. S. "Gower and His Critics." Journal of South-West Essex Technical College and School of Art 2 (December, 1948): 198-202. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and His Critics. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1948 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Kiefer, Lauren Kathleen Published Kiefer, Lauren Kathleen. "Gower and Literary Tradition: Jean de Meun, Ovid, and the 'Confessio Amantis'." PhD thesis, Cornell, 1997. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review "This project attempts to alert the reader to John Gower's literariness. I argue that in the Confessio Amantis, Gower deliberatedly turns away from the straightforward didacticism of his earlier works and of the Middle English penitential tradition, and adopts instead the narrative strategies of poets such as Jean de Meun and Ovid. I also link Gower's literary complexity in the Confessio with the work's secular concerns, arguing that Gower's growing awareness of the complex social problems surrounding him led him to abandon the didactic stance of his early works. "Chapter One outlines Gower's progression from the rigid structures and spiritual emphasis of his earlier major works to the complexity and secular emphasis of the Confessio Amantis. In particular, I examine Gower's revisions in the Vox Clamantis as evidence of his growing social and political concerns, and show how the first chapter of the Confessio deliberately rejects the medieval penitential manual's paradign of divine justice, prefer¬ring instead a paradigm of personal responsibility. "Chapter Two outlines the poetic strategies which Gower borrows from Jean de Meun. In particular, this chapter explores the way Jean and Gower turn the traditional function of the exemplum on its head, by using the form to impugn the credibility of the narrator. While traditional exemplum narrators choose and revise stories for clarity and appropriateness, Jean's and Gower's narrators make choices and revisions which merely reflect their own limitations. "While Chapters One and Two examine isolated tales within the Confessio, Chapter Three discusses the way several tales interact with each other. Gower's Ulysses tales -- "Ulysses and the Sirens," "Ulysses and Penelope," "Nauplus and Ulysses," "Achilles and Deidamia," and "Ulysses and Telegonus" -- place him in dialogue with both Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Trojan historiographical tradition. I show how Gower deliberately rejects the didactic tendency of medieval historiography in favor of the more elusive poetic strategies of the epic and romance traditions, just as he rejected the didacticism of the penitential and exemplum traditions in favor of Jean's elusive structures." [JGN 14.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Literary Tradition: Jean de Meun, Ovid, and the 'Confessio Amantis' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Keifer, Lauren. Published Keifer, Lauren, "Gower and Literary Tradition: Jean de Meun, Ovid, and the 'Confessio Amantis.'" Ph.D. Dissertation. Cornell University, 1994. Dissertation Abstracts International 55, no 4 (1995): 1946A. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review "This project attempts to alert the reader to John Gower's literariness. In the 'Confessio Amantis,' Gower deliberately turns away from the straightforward didacticism of his earlier works and of the Middle English penitential tradition, and adopts instead the narrative strategies of poets such as Jean de Meun and Ovid. Gower's literary complexity in the 'Confessio' links with the work's secular concerns, demonstrating Gower's growing awareness of the complex social problems surrounding him and leading him to abandon the didactic stance of his early works. Chapter One outlines Gower's progression from the rigid structures and spiritual emphasis of his earlier major works to the complexity and secular emphasis of the "Confessio Amantis." Gower's revisions of the 'Vox Clamantis' offer evidence of his growing social and political concerns, and show how the first chapter of the 'Confessio' deliberately rejects the medieval penitential manual's paradigm of divine justice, preferring instead a paradigm of personal responsibility. Chapter Two outlines the poetic strategies which Gower borrows from Jean de Meun. In particular, this chapter explores the way Jean and Gower turn the traditional function of the exemplum on its head, by using the form to impugn the credibility of the narrator. While traditional exemplum narrators choose and revise stories for clarity and appropriateness, Jean's and Gower's narrators make choices and revisions which merely reflect their own limitations. While Chapters One and Two examine isolated tales within the 'Confessio,' Chapter Three discusses the way several tales interact with each other. Gower's Ulysses tales--'Ulysses and the Sirens,' 'Ulysses and Penelope,' 'Nauplus and Ulysses,' 'Achilles and Deidamia,' and 'Ulysses and Telegonus'--place him in dialogue with both Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' and the Trojan historiographical tradition. I show how Gower deliberately rejects the didactic tendency of medieval historiography in favor of the more elusive poetic strategies of the epic and romance traditions, just as he rejected the didacticism of the penitential and exemplum traditions in favor of Jean's elusive structures." [eJGN 43.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Literary Tradition: Jean de Meun, Ovid, and the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 acknowledges that Gower's decision to write in three languages may be perceived as "a timid hedging of bets on posterior fame, a safe but unspectacular investment" (5), but he argues that "there is a logic in Gower's progress through the languages which reflects the age, as always, with great fidelity" (5). For instance, the morally didactic MO comes in "a long tradition of serious, practical, admonitory writing in Anglo-French" (5). Accordingly, Pearsall suggests that in the MO Gower "places a moral grid over the map of human experience and reads it through that" (8). Truth, for Gower, is a castle under siege, "whose walls are crumbling and showing fissures. It is his duty, not to make daring exploratory forays into the hinterland of experience, but to shore up these fragments against the world's ruin" (8). The same is true for the VC, for when Gower asserts the moral responsibility of man in the face of the forces of Fortune and Nature, "nothing better illustrates the meaninglessness of experience, in the medieval scheme, in comparison with moral truth" (8-9). Gower's "savage Roman obscenity of wit" (9) in this work further suggests something of "the imaginative and verbal licence which Latin provided, when the simple innocence of the laity was not in danger of being corrupted" (9). The most interesting part of the VC, for Pearsall, is Book 1. Pearsall writes: "The Revolt certainly disturbed Gower, but it was a godsend to him as a fulfillment of his prophecies and as a way of getting his poem off to an explosive start" (10). In comparison with Gower's French and Latin works, the CA is "a relaxation from these strenuous moral endeavours … In this poem Gower found, as if by chance, his natural vocation as a polished and fluent verse narrator, and it is this story-teller's gift which is our chief delight in reading Gower, and his chief claim on our attention" (5-6). The bulk of Pearsall's chapter on Gower is therefore dedicated to proving the greatness of the CA, where Gower writes "out of imaginative sympathy and not out of admonitory purpose" (6). Much here is borrowed from Pearsall's previous article, "Gower's Narrative Art" (1966), although often with different nuances and emphases. For instance, more attention is given to Gower's excision of the reference to Chaucer, and Pearsall dwells a little longer on Gower's "verbal artistry" (21). Generally, though, all the same points are made, and Pearsall's conclusion repeats his earlier findings: "The Confessio, however, does in the end become something more than a programme, for it passes beyond prescription to a 'civilization of the heart', in which fine feeling, humane sensitivity and 'gentillesse' take over the role of conscience as the source of virtuous action. Sin is made to seem not so much deadly as stupid and low" (17). Pearsall's brief volume also refers sporadically to some of the minor works, and it includes a chronology of important dates in Gower's life as well as a select bibliography of the more important secondary literature on Gower. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek Published Pearsall, Derek. "Gower and Lydgate." Harlow, Essex . London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1969 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism In Praise of Peace Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Vox Clamantis Cinkante Balades Cronica Tripertita Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Lydgate Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Longmans, Green & Co., Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1969 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 Cooper's analysis begins with the famous surprise ending to the CA, where Amans is curtly informed that he is old and unfit for love: "in ending his story collection like this, Gower is being true to the deep roots of the form in ways we do not normally think about. Ideas of mortality, the end of life, and the ends of storytelling are closely linked. Ends can be spatial or temporal," or synonymous with the "final cause," the aim or purpose of an action (92). In the latter sense, the end or purpose of a story may be found in its ending, for example: "The Apocalypse is the necessary conclusion to the volume that opened with Creation" (94). Although this "end" may include a moral, Cooper's discussion--ranging expertly from "Gilgamesh" to Gower--explains how the universal "end" of storytelling is to hold our common mortality at bay, at least in fantasy, yet somehow accommodate the reality that even the longest of story collections--like every human life--must end, must die. The final story of the CA--while ending happily--in that same happy ending artfully affirms mortality as the end of storytelling: "The echo of St. Paul's mystical experience [at Apollonius of Tyre, CA VIII.1898-99] suggests that the story is moving even beyond the world of time . . . the audience . . . mortal like Gower . . . when his tales come to their end, can share in his hope of joy on the other side of apocalypse, the end of the world, the end of the story" (106-07). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Cooper, Helen. Published Cooper, Helen. "Gower and Mortality: The Ends of Storytelling." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 91-107. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Mortality: The Ends of Storytelling. 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 Author/Editor Author/Editor Bullón-Fernández, María Published Bullón-Fernández, María. "Gower and Ovid: Pygmalion and the (Dis)illusion of the Word." In Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee. Ed. Galloway, Andrew and Yeager, R.F. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009, pp. 363-80. ISBN 9780802099174 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review Pointing out that Gower's "Tale of Pygmalion" (CA IV.37-450) is the only re-telling of Ovid's "Metamorphoses" X.238-97 by a Middle English author, Bullón-Fernández argues that "Gower shares with Ovid a similarly paradoxical view: fundamentally, the Ovidian desire for language to create reality, and the simultaneous awareness of the impossibility of its fulfillment" (364). She traces the major sources, in addition to Ovid, that Gower likely considered in producing his version--"Roman de la Rose," Petrus Berchorius' "Ovidius moralizatus"--to illustrate both the common agency of Venus' power in bringing the statue to life, and also the steady shift from Ovid's "active" Pygmalion, who prominently engages with his creation tactily (so much so, indeed, that we often fail to notice that animation comes via prayer) to a more verbal version in the "Roman" ("Jean's Pygmalion is articulate and seems a better love poet than sculptor," [368]), to an identification in Berchorius of Pygmalion with "preachers who sculpt souls, especially the souls of holy women" (369), and finally to the CA, in which "it . . . seems that it is solely Pygmalion's prayer, his appropriate use of words, which leads Venus, or love more generally, to reward him" (372). Bullón-Fernández points out that CA IV is concerned with Sloth, and that the Pygmalion story offers a counter-example to the sub-sin of Pusillanimity (which she defines as "a lack of courage to use words" [371]), i.e., because Pygmalion continually prays, sending up a never-ending stream of words until "Venus of hire grace herde" (IV.419). Thus, to a hasty reader the word in the CA might appear independently powerful, and encourage interpretations of the tale as Gower's vision of his own poetic art. Berchorius strengthens this reading, to a point, since the connection of Pygmalion with preachers in the "Ovidius moralizatus" gives Gower precedent to link Genius with Pygmalion, and consequently his labor to bring Amans to a better life with the vivification of the sculpture (369). But Bullón-Fernández argues against this, by underscoring the irony inherent in Genius' role as priest of Venus, and also by calling attention to the interchangeability of Venus and Fortune in the tale. While Genius strives to represent the word as responsible for the statue's animation, Gower (like Ovid, mutatis mutandis) on the contrary emphasizes the intervention of Fortune, a goddess arbitrary by nature. Genius' preferred lesson offers "the fantasy of fulfillment of desire" and is "only half the story . . . . Genius allows Gower to express his desire for control, his desire to shape others, evoking the Ovidan melancholic desire for a power that he does not have. At the same time, we can also see in the "Confessio" an Ovidian distancing from that desire and an awareness of the impossibility of its fulfillment. At the end of the poem, Gower becomes the disillusioned lover and the disillusioned writer who in recognizing his lack of amorous power also recognizes the limits of the power he has through writing" (375-76). [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 Gower and Ovid: Pygmalion and the (Dis)illusion of the Word. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Toronto Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 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 In the CA Book 7, Gower produced the first treatise on rhetoric in the English language. Zarins highlights Gower's profound ambivalence toward rhetoric a gift from God to man alone (37), but also contrived, "unnatural" (37) and prone to abusive purposes, even goading to war (41). On rhetoric as a civilizing force, Gower appeals to Cicero, Horace, and the irenic harpist Arion (38-40). His use of rhetorical figures is skillfully varied across languages (42-47). The social classes, as well as women, have their special rhetorical gifts, to be used for good or ill (47-49), just as eloquence in general may be used or abused (49-50). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Zarins, Kim. Published Zarins, Kim. "Gower and Rhetoric." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 37-55. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Rhetoric. 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 In Japanese. This article presents a prosodic analysis of the rhyme-royal stanzas contained in the "Supplication of Amans" in CA 8.2217-2300 and "In Praise of Peace," with frequent comparison to Chaucer's use of the same stanza form in "Parliament of Fowls," "Troilus and Criseyde," and four tales in the "Canterbury Tales." According to Ito, Gower's rhyme royal is markedly different from Chaucer's in the following respects. First, whereas rhyme royal in Chaucer's poems is freed from the formal constraints of the French ballade to such an extent that it is transformed into a flexible vehicle for verse narrative, Gower's rhyme royal retains close resemblance to the ballade form due to its tendency to form a "tern," or a ballade-like set of three stanzas. Second, unlike Chaucer, who makes effective use of run-on lines and run-on stanzas to create a sense of onward movement, Gower treats the rhyme-royal stanza as a self-contained unit whose integrity is marked by a strong break at its end. Third, while the Chaucerian stanza often conveys a strong sense of a couplet through the end-stopped fifth line, Gower prefers a pause before the seventh line, thus making it resemble the final line of the ballade stanza that functions as a refrain. On the basis of these observations, Ito refutes the widely held assumption about Chaucer's influence on Gower's prosody, arguing instead that Gower's skillful use of rhyme royal in his English poems stems from his own experiments in French balladry in CB and "Traitié." [Yoshiko Kobayashi; rev. MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ito, Masayoshi Published Ito, Masayoshi. "Gower and Rime Royal." Bulletin of College of General Education, Tohoku University 12 (1971), pp. 47-65 [ISSN 0287-8844]. English version available in Ito's John Gower, The Medieval Poet (Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1976), pp. 101-18. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Cinkante Balades In Praise of Peace Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Rime Royal Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Compared to the MO and VC, the CA is a "different kind of visionary text" due to its engagement with romance (281). The dual purpose of the CA--pleasure and instruction--is reinforced by "inset tales" combining the narrative "memes" (281) of the genre with a "moral" and "exemplary" purpose (282-84). The shock of an "otherworldly encounter" (285) may dramatize a character's free choice (285), while "transformation" and "enchantment" may be "life-inspiring" or "devastating" (286). The "testing of virtue" provides a model for social reintegration (287-88). The conventional subject of love (281) is combined with a searching analysis of the emotional experiences and "agency" of women (288-89). These elements are melded in the capstone romance Apollonius of Tyre (289-92). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Saunders, Corinne. Published Saunders, Corinne. "Gower and Romance." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 281-95. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Romance. 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 The Middle English word "science," used frequently by Gower, means "learning," a concept that includes "advancements in empirical thought" (172). In this expansive overview, Peck reveals the omnipresence, for Gower, of medieval cognitive theory: how the three-lobed brain records sense impressions, then interprets them through intellect and memory, and how this theory leads to an understanding of individual perspective as the gateway to science (172, 174, 178). Thus, science may be true or false, and used or abused (173-75). Recurrently, Peck explains the often-ambiguous exempla of the CA as exercises in the cognitive labor necessary to discover right choices for a confusing world (175, 178-79, 182, 186, 187). Gower's scientific thought rests on the "triangle" of Aristotelian empiricism, Islamic science of cognition, and Christian Platonic idealism (175-76). The CA follows Boethius's DCP in its process of individual therapy through confession and dialogue (176-77). In his exempla, Gower presented men and women of science mostly sympathetically (179-80), especially Daniel, whose analytical method he honored by imitation (180-82). In CA Book VII, he followed Aristotle's anatomy of the sciences, as channeled by Brunetto Latini and the "Secreta Secretorum," with an emphasis on the ethical component of each (182-84), e.g., "Armonie" in music as paradigm for the "common profit" (184). Melding all these themes together, the CA concludes with "the science of selfhood" (187) as key to healing through "memory . . . emotion . . . cognition . . . [and] confession," especially important for the man who would be king (187-88). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A. Published Peck, Russell A. "Gower and Science." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 172-96. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Science. 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 Hoeniger argues for appreciation of Shakespeare's "Pericles" as an experiment in placing drama in tension with story-telling, one that succeeds better on the stage than on the page, and one that casts the Chorus, John Gower, as a moralistic, episodic story-teller whose style functions as a foil to Shakespeare's own dramaturgy. In passing, Hoeniger mentions that Shakespeare used Gower's "Tale of Apollonius of Tyre" from "Confessio Amantis" as a source, citing it once, and asserting the "singular subservience" of Shakespeare's play to the "order of Gower's narrative and his characters" (465). Hoeniger does not engage the intertextual relations of the two works at any length, but concentrates on the "quaint, archaizing, moralizing lines" (463) of the Chorus and on the episodic nature of the story "unsuited to dramatic adaptation" (478) in order to argue that "Pericles" is startlingly innovative and very effective on stage because the Chorus' style is counterpointed by Shakespeare's. Acknowledging traditional concerns with collaboration, revision, and/or First-Quarto memorial reconstruction in "Pericles" studies, Hoeniger attributes at least some of the well-known unevenness of the play to the "impression" that the Chorus "controls the presentation of the whole play" (464) while this impression, Hoeniger maintains, actually serves Shakespeare's dramatic effectiveness through contrast. Hoeniger's argument recurrently depends upon impressions, those of Shakespeare's audience who, for example, "must have been bemused by the naïve simplicity of Gower's outlook and art" (474), and his own, as when rhymes "turn . . . conventional morals into tags that Gower would wish us to remember, tags that strike us as naive in their simplicity and patness, as do his own" (469). Hoeniger turns to Chaucer when seeking precedent for Shakespeare's depiction of "grossly inferior" (478) art in his play, citing "The Tale of Sir Thopas" for comparison and describing Chaucer's burlesque of tail-rhyme romance. The comparison, unfortunately, reinforces an impression Hoeniger himself creates (although not stating it directly): that Shakespeare may have thought similarly little of Gower's own art--an impression countered in, for example, Richard Hillman's "Shakespeare's Gower and Gower's Shakespeare" (eJGN 38.1) and Bart van Es's "Late Shakespeare and the Middle Ages" (eJGN 38.2). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hoeniger, F. David. Published Hoeniger, F. David. "Gower and Shakespeare in 'Pericles'." Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982): 461-79. 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 Gower and Shakespeare in "Pericles." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Although the bible lists only sons as offspring of Adam and Eve, it also mentions "other progeny," number unspecified. In Book VIII of the CA, Gower names two daughters of Eve as Calmana and Delbora "as the sister-wives of Cain and Abel, respectively." Glaeske examines "Gower's use of Calmana and Delbora within the wider contexts of Middle English literature and medieval literature" in order to show "which other traditions concerning the daughters of Eve were known by a Middle English audience, where Gower accords with these traditions, and where he contradicts them, and might have used other traditions." Glaeske traces the variants of the Eve's daughters narratives through diverse sources, including Greek, Armenian, Georgian, and Old Church Slavonic, as well as the Latin "Vita Adae et Evae," Pseudo-Philo's "Biblical Antiquities," "The Book of Jubilees," "The Cave of Treasures," "The Combat of Adam and Eve with Satan," and "The Book of the Bee." Among Middle English texts including mention of the Adamic offspring, Glaeske reports on the "Middle English Genesis and Exodus," "The Historye of the Patriarks," "The Middle English Paraphrase of the Old Testament," three prose versions of the "Life of Adam and Eve," a Middle English version of the stanzaic "Canticum de Creatione," the "incomplete Auckinleck Couplets," and the "Cursor Mundi." Of these, "besides the 'Confessio Amantis,' the only Middle English texts to name Calmana and Delbora as the daughters of Eve are 'The Historye of the Patriarks' and the 'Cursor Mundi'" (164). There are differences even in these accounts: "'The Historye,' however, does not tell us which sister married with brother; instead, this is noted by 'Cursor Mundi' and 'Confessio Amantis'" (165). "Outside of vernacular versions of the Latin 'Vita Adae et Evae,' the names Calmana and Delbora are recorded within several medieval chronicles, both from the Continent and from England. Middle High German metrical chronicles record both names, as does the 'Weltchronik' of Heinrich von München and the prose chronicle of Jean de Preis. Among the Middle English chronicles their names appear both in the 'Polychronicon' of Ranulph Higden and the English translation made by John Trevisa, as well as the 'Chronica majora' of Matthew of Paris and the 'Eulogium historiarum.' Many of these texts cite their source as Methodius, and Trevisa translated a tract ascribed to him, which does mention the two sisters, but all of these chronicles are largely indebted to the late twelfth-century 'Historia Scholastica' of Peter Comestor, and it is there where we find the earliest mention of Calmana and Delbora as the twin sisters of Cain and Abel" (169). Glaeske concludes that 1) "Gower's use of Calmana and Delbora as the daughters of Eve seems to derive either directly from the 'Historia scholastica' of Peter Comestor, or indirectly from other Middle English texts that use it as source material. Gower does not appear to have known any of the texts of the secondary Adam literature" (169); 2) "Gower's designation of Delbora as the inventor of weaving remains puzzling" (170); 3) "Since Gower appears not to have derived this designation [i.e., weaving] from contemporary Middle English texts, it suggests that he knew other traditions concerning the two sisters, possibly from other insular texts" (170). [RFY. Copyright The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Glaeske, Keith Published Glaeske, Keith. "Gower and the Daughters of Eve." SELIM: Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature 19 (2014), pp. 161-74. ISSN 1132-631X Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and the Daughters of Eve 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 Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Examines Gower's views of the ancient world and epic poetry in "Confessio Amantis," finding them complex and "in [their] implications remarkably bleak" (165). Benoît de Sainte-Maure's 12th-c. "Roman de Troie" was a major influence on Gower, by way of its content and its implied critique of ancient heroism. Gower adapts episodes from the "Roman" in the CA, such as the voyage of the Argonauts and the story of Jason and Medea. Whereas Genius's treatment of such material can be "myopic" (168)--for example, his muted criticism of Jason's betrayal of Medea--Gower himself displays "more sophisticated probing" (169). Genius valorizes chivalry and aggression in war and love, notably in the Tale of Aeneas and Dido in Book IV, a view that Gower qualifies. Like Benoît, Gower "shows markedly little interest in the classical gods and goddesses" (173). Genius, however, emphasizes Mars and his influence in stories of "epic-chivalric violence" (177), such as the "Tale of Ulysses and Telegonus." [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wetherbee, Winthrop. Published Wetherbee, Winthrop. "Gower and the Epic Past." 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. 165-79. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and the Epic Past. 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 The value of history, as expressed by Gower, has been the subject of evolving views (253). Traditional criticism sees moral instruction, as voiced by the poet role-playing a prophet in the major Latin poems (253-54). Apocalyptic decay is affirmed, yet human choice may do much to counteract it (254-256). Currently, "(new) historicist" criticism sees Gower's history more as a trove of "competing temporalities and modes of experience" (257). Larger historical precedent is fused with personal experience in the unfolding present, as when Gower recycles the voices of Ovid's suffering heroines in the first-person "Visio" (257). Historical exempla may have no clear lesson, forcing the reader to "triangulate" for meaning (258-59). Affect theory promises insight into individual "engagements with an always partly imagined past" (261). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nowlin, Steele. Published Nowlin, Steele. "Gower and the Forms of History." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 253-65. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and the Forms of History. 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 Green takes up the problem of the purpose of Book VII often raised by readers of the 'Confessio' (including Tamara O'Callaghan, M.A. Manzalaoui, Elizabeth Porter, Seb Falk, and--obliquely--Siân Echard), and argues vigorously that we are in fact the problem, not Gower's text: "It is precisely in the alienness of the material that we perceive of as dull in which me might attempt instead to see medieval textual productions of the once-live objects that informed medieval subjectivities; it is in the boring that we might gain insight into the fundamental differences between our own modes of being and theirs" (138). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Green, William. Published Green, William. "Gower and the Heavens: the 'Dull' and the Divine in 'Confessio Amantis'." In William Green, Daniel Helbert, and Noëlle Phillips, eds. Textual Traditions and Medieval Literary Culture: Essays in Honour of Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2025), pp. 133-51. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and the Heavens: the "Dull" and the Divine in "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2025 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In this article Kreg Segall focuses exclusively on Gower's choric role in "Pericles." His Gower here is Shakespeare's Gower. Segall argues that in the play Gower is "highly aware of his textual status" (248) which is "marginal-yet-mediating" (248). Segall explores the ways this textual awareness, sometimes evident in moments when Gower distances himself from the story, conveys an uneasiness about the incest theme that "underscores the prime anxiety of the play--the fear of becoming too intimate" (249). Throughout the play Gower tries "to redefine his choric position away from paternal author-figure" (250). Unlike Antiochus, whose incestuous desire seeks complete control of his daughter, Gower, who sometimes appears as author/father of the text, at times also appears to release this role and "drop the responsibility for narrative coherence onto the actors and the audience" (252). Gower, in other words, distances himself from Antiochus by distancing himself from his text. Pericles in turn learns to negotiate intimacy with his daughter in non-incestuous ways through his relationship with his retainer Helicanus. The article also draws a compelling parallel between releasing authorial control over a text and death or "Gower's desire to die away at the appropriate time" (261), as Segall puts it. While an in-depth analysis of the ways in which Shakespeare's Gower echoes writer John Gower's own authorial explorations may have been, understandably, beyond the scope of the article, one wishes Segall had gestured toward such echoes. [MB-F. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Segall, Kreg. Published Explorations in Renaissance Culture 34 (2008): 248-68. 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 Gower and the Incestuous Father: The Intimate Author in "Pericles." 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 Cornelius offers a crisp and cogent review of scholarship on Gower's "Visio Anglie" and advances a compelling argument about its ideological significance. He identifies three major strands of scholarly activity on the poem that Gower wrote about the Rising of 1381 and inserted as the first book of the "Vox Clamantis." One strand has focused on the "ideological work" that the poem performs in its account of the insurgency; another has advanced and refined our understanding of Gower's use of his biblical and classical sources; and a third has exploration of the literary indecorum of Gower's "vertiginous dream vision": its mishmash of sources and allusion, including vernacular elements; and its "surrealistic shifts in character, setting, and generic mode" (23-4). Cornelius builds on all three strands of scholarship and seeks to integrate them in ideological framework. It suggests, in relation to the third strand, not only how the "aggressively dehumanizing" presentation of the rebels served to delegitimise their grievances and demands but also how the "transgressions of literary decorum" express, "at the level of prosody, the offense committed by English labourers who forced their way into the homes and into the thoughts of their social superiors in June of 1381" (24). In relation to the second strand, he shows how "the storehouse of Latin poetry . . . figures in Gower's poem as the mental equipment necessary for a proper understanding of contemporary events" (24), privileging again the educated elite. It also "delivers a deeper mythography of power," in which the insurrection and its defeat are given added cultural resonance and set in a larger providential history (29). Drawing the threads together, Cornelius incorporates Andrew Galloway's insight that, in the last analysis, the poem is not about the rebels and their outrages but about "the moral condition of the dreamer-speaker" (27). The study ends by offering a subtler sense of the poem's ideological work. The poem not only delegitimises the political agency of the serfs and the lower orders generally but also excludes them, as lacking reason, from the moral community. The poem likewise seeks to reduce the force of the insurrection: from a revolt of the commons, to animal hordes, to tempest and storm, the rising is "shrunk into a matter of the governing class's conscience." For Gower, "it follows that the governing classes must be educated, encouraged, and supported, and even prodded toward correct living" (44). [MJB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 37.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Cornelius, Ian. Published Cornelius, Ian, "Gower and the Peasants' Revolt." Representations 131 (2015): 22-51. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Minor Latin Poetry Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and the Peasants' Revolt. 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 Hsy starts off by reviewing three important "waves" in recent theoretical scholarship on Gower: the role of "ethics . . . modern identity-based politics, and an increase in scholarship that explores the author's varied linguistic and socioeconomic milieu" (10). He proceeds to discuss earlier theoretical approaches as well as Gower himself as a practitioner of literary "theorique" (12), including the fruitful potential of multilingual "divisioun" (14). In the longest section, "Gower's Corpus," Hsy shows how the poet anticipates "radical crip theory" (15) by pushing his debilitated body into stark and thematically charged "visibility" (15), as somewhat surprisingly discussed by a fifteenth century scribe (18). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hsy, Jonathan. Published Hsy, Jonathan. "Gower and Theory: Old Books, New Matters." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 9-20. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower and Theory: Old Books, New Matters. 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 The Second International Congress of the John Gower Society at Valladolid in 2011 prompts Bowden to suggest two areas for future Gower scholarship. The first concerns the possibility that Gower himself might have made an undocumented trip to Spain before undertaking to write CA. Citing the ease with which Margery Kempe was able to visit Santiago de Compostella (rather later), Bowden also points out how descriptions of sea voyages in CA seem to be more closely based on real experience than that in VC, and she notes that while in Spain, Gower could have come into contact with Juan Ruiz's 'Libro de Buen Amor,' with its suggestive invocation of the Seven Deadly Sins and its use of the story of Nebuchadnezzar (both much more briefly than in Gower). Bowden also suggests that the movement of proverbs across linguistic boundaries during the Middle Ages and Gower's own use of the same proverb in more than one of his languages might provide another fruitful ground for further research. [eJGN 34.1 PN] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bowden, Betsy Published Bowden, Betsy. "Gower and. . . Pilgrimage? 'Pamphilus?' Proverbs? Some Promising Preguntas Raised but Far from Answered at Valladolid." John Gower Newsletter 33.2 (2014), pp. 6-13. ISSN 1051-3493 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 Gower and. . . Pilgrimage? 'Pamphilus?' Proverbs? Some Promising Preguntas Raised but Far from Answered at Valladolid 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 Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The authors provide a distant reading via digital humanities which they claim provides a fresh perspective on a familiar text, and argue for the potentially productive readings made possible by putting texts through such computationally assisted analysis. [JGS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor McShane, Kara L., and Alvin Grissom II. Published McShane, Kara L. McShane, and Alvin Grissom II. "Gower as Data: Exploring the Application of Machine Learning to Gower's Middle English Corpus." Accessus 5.2 (2019): n.p. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis In Praise of Peace Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower as Data: Exploring the Application of Machine Learning to Gower's Middle English Corpus. 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 Gower doesn't seem to have made a secret in CA either of his debility or of his old age. In both versions of the Prologue, he refers to his lingering illness, and in the revelation in the mirror at the end, he depicts himself as a withered old man. But Levine would have us dig Gower's true feelings about himself out of more subtle clues in the text of the main body of the poem. CA is, he asserts, "among other things, the long, bad dream of a sick old man" (p. 89). It is evidently important to his argument that it be a dream rather than some other form of covert self-revelation, for he labors to assimilate the poem to the genre of the dream vision though Gower neglects to say precisely that his narrator ever falls asleep. Among the passages that Levine finds most revealing are the several scattered allusions to blindness in the poem, which he interprets in view of the poet's more specific references to his loss of sight in the prefatory epistle of VC, not noting that some ten years passes between the composition of CA and the VC dedication. When Amans, seeing his wrinkled face in the mirror, declares that "Mi will was tho to se nomore" (8.2831), Levine finds not a turning away from the glass but an allusion to the poet's literal inability to see of considerable dramatic irony. Blindness was associated in Gower's mind with castration, he asserts. He finds other evidence of the poet's fear of impotence in his consciousness of the world's decay, and evidence of his fear of "reification" in the recurring image of the key. The great length of Book 5, finally, is due to the link between greed and sexuality, but also to the association of Avarice with old age. It is not a pretty picture. For a contrast to this pathological view, and for a consideration of some of the many passages that Levine does not refer to (such as the vision of the company of old lovers at 8.2666 ff.), that suggest a broader range of feeling about old age than he is willing to allow, one should return to J.A. Burrow's discussion of the ending of CA in his 1983 essay in Responses and Reassessments or more briefly in The Ages of Man (1988). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Levine, Robert Published Levine, Robert. "Gower as Gerontion. Oneiric Autobiography in the Confessio Amantis." Mediaevistik 5 (1992), pp. 79-94. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower as Gerontion. Oneiric Autobiography in the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Koff observes that in the CA "Gower's reformist voice has disappeared, . . . as has any vehement intervention into the moral or social values of the tales Genius tells" (84). Instead, Gower has introduced "'measured measures' of a storytelling discourse that promises social harmony by asking its readers to participate in the evaluation of values at a certain narrative distance" (83). His "ongoing, unruffled voice . . . is, for him, a perfect mode for breaking not the surface of a text but the concepts the text speaks" (84). In short, Gower "values form that works against itself," thereby creating "the intellectual space in which moral and social problems can be brought to readers" (84). This, in Koff's view, effectively makes Gower more accessible to students. For example, Gower's tale of Tereus and Progne, unlike its counterparts in Ovid and Chaucer's "Legend of Philomela", "removes a narrator's volatile response to his own work within that work itself" (85). Gower's teller is not present "in prepossessing ways" (85); in other words, he "deconstructs our expectations from the beginning" (87). By contrast, Chaucer in the "Legend of Good Women" already "assumes answers to questions not yet asked" (89). Koff sees as one possible explanation for this difference "something of the anxiety of influence that Gower's presence, which has yet to be valued by us, may have awakened in his friend" (90). While "teaching Gower clearly requires setting his work in the literary circles of his own day," in this essay Koff argues that in those circles Gower "may have led rather than followed" (90). [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Koff, Leonard Published Koff, Leonard. "Gower before Chaucer: Teaching Narrative and Ethics in 'The Tale of Tereus'." In Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Ed. Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011, pp. 83-90. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower before Chaucer: Teaching Narrative and Ethics in 'The Tale of Tereus' 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 In his review in JGN 22.1 (2003) of Echard's 2001 essay "Dialogues and Monologues: Manuscript Representations of the Conversation in the Confessio Amantis," Peter Nicholson observed the critic's "long-term study of the effect of MS design and layout upon reading and reception." That long-term study is extended here once again, by Echard's examinations of representations of conversation in William Caxton and Thomas Berthelette's editions as well as those found in various manuscripts, and by her lengthier analysis of how manuscripts and early printed editions of CA represent--or obscure--Gower's "multilingual enterprise" (181), particularly the "unique . . . insistence on the integral role of Latin to his English enterprise" (185) evident in the Latin glosses and commentary of CA. Generally, Echard argues, "features of Gower's oeuvre were often muted, redirected, or lost entirely, when the poet's work encountered the strictures and expectations of early print" (171), attributing these fall-offs to the limited flexibility of early print or to the printer's goals in promoting English. As Echard shows, the bi-lingulism and tri-lingualism of some Gower manuscripts is overt, even emphasized, in a "whole range of ways"--rubrication, placement of glosses, location in compilations, prefaces and colophons, etc.--and "Gower's original audience, immersed in manuscript culture, was primed to navigate these meaningful 'ordinationes'." Limitations in early print technology (single fonts and difficulties in two-color printing, for example) contributed to the "visual-linguistic flattening in Caxton's design" (181), while Berthelette, promoting Gower as an "English" poet, rearranged the opening of CA and, in effect, "diffuses its bilingual claim" (184). The "dialogic design" of CA--the conversational exchange between Amans and Genius--is graphically evident in print layout as well as in the manuscripts, but Caxton's table of contents "serves to frame" the work "as a collection of stories rather than as a dialogue" (186), reshaping its fundamental structure and in doing so muting aspects of Amans' character. Berthelette's table forecasts for the reader "not just . . . a collection of stories" . . . but an . . . encyclopedia," and it "reflects print's more radical reshaping of Gower's end matter" (187), again deemphasizing Gower's multilingualism in favor of English only. Media alter messages, and early print "could not compete with the complexity and beauty of a medieval manuscript page" (188), Echard argues, and she supports her discussion neatly with five reproductions of pages from the manuscripts and books. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân. Published Echard, Siân. "Gower between Manuscript and Print." In Martha Driver, Derek Pearsall, and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books. Publications of the John Gower Society, no. 14. Rochester, NY: Brewer, 2020. Pp. 169-88. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis 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 Gower between Manuscript and Print. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Mitchell, J. Allan Published Mitchell, J. Allan. "Gower for Example: Confessio Amantis and the Ethics of Exemplarity." Exemplaria 16 (2004), pp. 203-234. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review The "Confessio Amantis" is a "profoundly inclusive but indeterminate poem," Mitchell claims; it is "comprehensive" but not "coherent"(205). It contains a vast diversity of tales and lessons, but it resists reduction to single consistent ethical or moral argument; it contains the materials for a moral lesson, but not the lesson itself. But rather than being a failure, either on Gower's or on Genius' part, this diversity is a reflection of the type of ethical instruction that the poem offers, in which Amans or the reader must actively participate in the choice of the moral lessons that are applicable to his or her own case. Mitchell chooses as his examples of the poem's "incoherencies" not the instances in which Genius' moralization seems to have little to do with the tale that he has just told but instead the conflicts that arise among the different tales and their moral lessons. The lesson of "Pygmaleon," for instance, on the effectiveness of speech in bringing about love's rewards (with its distant echoes of the statements in the Prologue on man's responsibility for his own fate) seems to be inconsistent with the lesson of "Jupiter's Two Tuns," which echoes instead the opening lines of Book 1 on the caprices of love's fortunes. The tale of "Phebus and Daphne," in which Daphne is turned into a tree because of Phebus' impatience, seems to offer advice on conduct that is directly contrary to that suggested by "Demephon and Phillis," in which Phillis becomes a tree because of Demephon's neglect. But Gregory long ago advised that the message must be modified according to the listener: "The slothful are to be admonished in one way, the hasty in another" (quoted on p. 227). Each lesson is valid under particular circumstances, and the proper course of conduct may also lie in discovering a mean. The comprehensiveness of the poem thus places a burden upon the listener or reader to discover the most relevant application. "In the strongest sense, the poem remains to be invented through reader response" (221), and the proper test of the poem itself "is not whether the text is formally coherent or logical, but whether it can stimulate a practical ethical response" (218 n.) As Mitchell puts it in his conclusion: "What evidence Amans finds useful and appropriate to his own case of unrequited love is for him to invent--not "ex nihilo," but in the old rhetorical sense, out of the myriad possibilities he has been proffered in the form of moral exempla on various topics. Exempla, as much as instantiating conventional morality, are therefore in a sense on a quest for practical precepts that practitioners have not yet formulated, or at the very least supply moral guidance which, as I've argued, one can affirm, refine, or deny. Gower's Amans, like any other practitioner, is thereby invited to explore sundry stories (e.g. about fortune and free-will, haste and hesitancy) in order to, as it were, triangulate a present, proportional response that m[a]y not be reducible to any single precedent. The technique has a strong theoretical basis in that there is no universal and invariable abstract form of the good according to which every moral act can be automatically judged apart from contingent circumstances. As Aristotle said and the 'Confessio Amantis' emphatically affirms, 'the good is not something common which corresponds to a single Idea.' The good is instead perforce instantiated in a multiplicity of ethical practices. . . . Moral cases, as Aquinas elaborates in his exposition of Aristotle's Ethics, themselves tend to be 'infinitely diversified.' It is therefore necessary to acquire a sense of the diversity and to cultivate the discretion that enables one to judge cases as they arise. Readerly circumspection, rather than textual coherence, becomes crucial" (233). This is a challenging and thought-provoking essay, for what it says or implies about Amans' role, Genius' role, and the nature of the teaching in the poem, and for the way in which it deals both with those who seek the meaning of the poem in a single ethical or philosophical proposition and with those who throw up their hands and proclaim that whatever argument the poem proposes is undermined within the poem itself. It is also pleasingly well written. Mitchell has a book on "Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower" forthcoming from Brewer in October. We should look forward to it. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society 23.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower for Example: Confessio Amantis and the Ethics of Exemplarity Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Nafde identifies the features of Oxford, Bodleian MS Hatton 51 that derive from its printed exemplar, William Caxton's 1483 edition of the "Confessio Amantis" (STC 12142), exemplifying the interrelations of manuscript and print production in the late fifteenth century. While it is generally recognized that printers sought to imitate the look of manuscript pages, Nafde shows that the imitation could and did run the other way, at times very precisely. She identifies small errors that are obvious blunders in Caxton but reproduced in Hatton nonetheless, and discusses at greater length larger features such as Caxton's innovative table of contents and his Prologue, both reproduced by the Hatton scribe carefully. The table of contents includes locational folio numbers which necessitated that the scribe imitate Caxton's foliation throughout--an unusual feature in manuscripts. In reproducing Caxton's Prologue, Nafde tells us, the Hatton scribe appropriates one of the printer's "primary marketing techniques" (196)--his first-person claim of originality and uniqueness--which the scribe paradoxically reproduces without clarification, eliding the differences between printer and scribe. Tellingly, the scribe altered very few details of Caxton's presentation--slight adjustments to foliation for accuracy--and these alterations actually make the manuscript seem to "outdo its print exemplar" (194), Nafde asserts, in using features of early print. However, the scribe "also took advantage of the possibilities afforded by manuscript production," when he rubricated and decorated as he went along instead of awaiting post-print "hand-finishing" (198) as Caxton's technology required. In these ways, the Hatton manuscript exemplifies that "scribal practices were not just co-existing with print but being altered by it." The scribe, she tells us, "reproduced the look of the printed page . . . in order to bring the styles and practices of print to his manuscript" (190) in "an amalgamation of manuscript and print practices" . . . . that blurs the distinctions between the two forms of books, [and] tak[es] advantage of the shifting market for books" (200). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nafde, Aditi. Published Nafde, Aditi. "Gower from Print to Manuscript: Copying Caxton in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 51." In Martha Driver, Derek Pearsall, and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books. Publications of the John Gower Society, no. 14. Rochester, NY: Brewer, 2020. Pp. 189-200. 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 Gower from Print to Manuscript: Copying Caxton in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 51. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This special issue of ES: Revista de Filologia Inglesa 33.1 (2010) contains ten papers from the Second International Congress of the John Gower Society in Valladolid, Spain in July 2011, each, as the editors explain in their introduction, situating Gower's work in one of the contexts relevant to its interpretation. [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Filardo-Llamas, Laura, Brian Gastle, Marta Gutiérrez Rodríguez, and Ana Saez-Hidalgo, eds. Published Filardo-Llamas, Laura, Brian Gastle, Marta Gutiérrez Rodríguez, and Ana Saez-Hidalgo, eds. "Gower in Context(s): Scribal, Linguistic, Literary and Socio-historical Readings." ES: Revista de Filologia Inglesa , 33 (1). Valladolid: Universidad, 2012 ISBN 9788484487258 ISSN 0210-9689 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 Gower in Context(s): Scribal, Linguistic, Literary and Socio-historical Readings Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Universidad, 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 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 It has long been accepted that the two fifteenth-century Iberian manuscripts of the CA--one in Portuguese and one a Castilian translation based on the Portuguese--were associated with John of Gaunt's daughters Philippa and Catherine, who were married to the kings of Portugal and Castile. This essay explores what we know and what we can reasonably conjecture about the path these manuscripts followed from their creation in some kind of courtly context, to intermediate owners of humanistic leaning, to the safe haven of royal libraries. The presence of the Castilian MS in the Library of El Escorial is first attested in 1576 in a catalog listing it among the donations by Philip II, whose goal was to create a world-class national library and center of learning. The king very likely received the book from the scholarly Hieronymite friar Juan de Huete, whom he had appointed as the first prior of the Escorial (331-37). In Philip's royal library, the Spanish CA was classified not as fiction or "fabula," but as a work of "filosofía" along with other mirrors for princes and didactic works (338-39). The Portuguese manuscript, owned since the early nineteenth century by the Royal Library in Madrid, can be traced along a circuitous path to the library of Luis de Castilla (d. 1618), a book collector whose library included works of "law, classics, history, and regiments of princes, all of them typically humanistic readings" (342). On the death of Castilla, it was acquired by the polymath Count of Gondomar, long-serving ambassador to the court of James II. Left to his descendants, the volume went next to the Royal Library. Throughout its travels, the Iberian CA "seems to have been continually valued for its moral advice" and especially its regimen for princes (344). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Saez-Hidalgo, Ana. Published Sáez-Hidalgo, Ana. "Gower in Early Modern Spanish Libraries: The Missing Link." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 329-44. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower in Early Modern Spanish Libraries: The Missing Link. 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 Fredell's essay serves as a response to the previous essays in this issue of "Accessus." He frames his response by suggesting "Amans's love complaint is not some hackneyed convention of medieval poetry, but a passionate testimony to terrible pain." Fredell points out how the end of the "Confessio Amantis" is a rupture and an exile--that Amans/Gower has been removed from the realm of love, that his body itself is a sign of exile. He goes on to explain how the realm of love from which Gower has been removed displays the Bohemian fashions made popular by Richard II's first queen, Anne of Bohemia. Finally, he concludes Gower in the CA "confronts the struggle to move forward" and acknowledges that healing is not the end of loss. Loss continues as part of the ghosts of trauma. [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fredell, Joel. Published Fredell, Joel. "Gower in Exile." Accessus 7, no. 1 (2022): n.p. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower in Exile. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Assesses Vox Clamantis, particularly Gower's depiction of the Peasants' Revolt in the visio of Book 1. The peasants attacked the most learned men in the city and tried to destroy knowledge; they themselves spoke in the voices of beasts; and they overthrew history in their attempt to establish a new social order. The visio which describes them, however, is a most learned poem, written in "ostentatiously bookish" cento, with a strong sense of its own debt to tradition and of the historical antecedents of the events that it describes. These intriguing contrasts in "modes of knowledge" which Galloway sets out become the occasion for him to consider, among other topics, Gower's view of his own role as a man of learning. Gower had every reason to feel personally threatened by the peasants. Unlike some others, however, his professional rank derived not from his position in the church or from his family connections, but simply from his knowledge. In his allegory of the downfall of civic professionals in VC 1.961-70, he defends the professionalization of knowledge in the London of his time. In referring to himself, however, he denies any link to professional or institutional traditions, and he presents the learning that is at the heart of his poetic vocation as conferred upon him, by Sophia or by the "comun vois," even when it is most clearly the product of his own labors with his sources. He also depicts his knowledge as a state of exile, making an unusual if not unique use of imagery drawn from Ovid. The role that he claimed allowed him to address as equals men who were socially far superior to him, such as Archbishop Arundel, to whom he presented a copy of VC. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew Published Galloway, Andrew. "Gower in His Most Learned Role and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 329-347. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower in His Most Learned Role and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Looks at Gower's reception through his publication history, from Caxton, through Berthelette, Todd, Morley, Pauli, and Macaulay, down to Peck, with a glance at the Roxburghe Club editions and at the editions of selected tales intended for use in the classroom. (Missing, however, both here and in the bibliography on p. 272, is any reference to Macaulay's 1903 edition of selections for "young students," who Macaulay evidently felt wouldn't be too put out either by the Latin glosses and epigrams or by thorn and yogh.) Echard skillfully traces the impact on Gower's reputation not only of the critical commentary included in each edition but also of such matters as typography, layout, and apparatus. She notes that on the whole, Gower has been hurt more than helped by those who have brought his works to print, and while not suggesting that there can be any perfect edition, she has high praise for Peck's. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân Published Echard, Siân. "Gower in Print." In A Companion to Gower. Ed. Echard, Siân. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004, pp. 115-35. Gower Subject 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 Gower in Print 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 2004 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 Building on his experience in the 1980s of publishing with seven students a series of essays in a volume called "John Gower's Literary Transformations in the 'Confessio Amantis'" (University Press of America, 1982), Beidler here describes a more recent venture of a like kind, the preparation with a dozen graduate students of a volume to which he and these students each contribute an essay. Like the early book, this publication treats Gower's transformation of his sources, in this instance specifically of a tale in Nicholas Trevet's "Chronicle" into the story of Constance in the "Confessio." The essay assignments are arranged according to 13 episodes "or plot elements" identified in Trevet's account; to guide students, Beidler presents his essay as a model which each student then follows in analyzing her or his particular plot element. The resulting collection became a web publication posted in April, 2006 as http://www.wcu.edu/johngower/scholarship/beidler/index.html. Beidler offers his rationale for such undertakings: "where I got to teach a graduate seminar, I tried to plan at least one activity that got my students directly involved in a joint project that could, if all went well, lead to a conference presentation or to a publication" (202); offering a course that includes the CA "provides an opportunity not only to teach the work of a fine medieval writer but also to help fledgling graduate students." [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Beidler, Peter G Published Beidler, Peter G. "Gower in Seminar: The 'Confessio Amantis' as Publishing Opportunity for Graduate Students." In Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Ed. Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011, pp. 202-08. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower in Seminar: The 'Confessio Amantis' as Publishing Opportunity for Graduate Students 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 Galloway argues here for the importance of humanism in the MO in a triple sense, with Gower's text demonstrating: 1) "a central focus on human affairs and human responsibility for shaping their circumstances and consequences"; 2) "a use of some ancient sources as means to bolster its secular and social ethics;" and, lastly, 3) "a continual attention to contemporary London and Westminster institutions and practices, especially mercantile practices and parliament" (122). Most crucially, Galloway suggests that Gower is distinctive in presenting himself through a striking quasi-clerical identity. As he describes it, "[Gower] is learned, he is courtly, he is worldly; but he is also a reader of ancient texts for purposes that fit neither the traditional social nor vocational contexts around him. It is in this sense, I think, that he forges an identity most suited to the new world of 'humanist' England and Europe, which features 'studia humanitatis' but also makes that the basis for a novel vocational and intellectual identity, appropriating and transforming received intellectual and social positions by viewing them as if from a remove" (123). Galloway substantiates these claims through a detailed reconsideration of Gower's use of Seneca in the MO, arguing both that Seneca is referenced much more frequently that has hitherto been acknowledged, but also that Gower engages these citations with great energy and creativity in order to bring them to bear on the particular social disruptions of the contemporary world of London. [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew. Published Galloway, Andrew. "Gower in Striped Sleeves: 'Mirour de l'Omme' as Gower's Early Humanism." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 119-34. Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower in Striped Sleeves: "Mirour de l'Omme" as Gower's Early Humanism. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In spite of the difficulties of teaching "the basics of the literary canon" (180) at two-year institutions, McKinney argues, "Gower's works may provide community college instructors an excellent opportunity to present a deeply realized, potentially engaging lesson" (181). She shows, in particular, how Gower's "Tale of Philomene and Tereus" in combination with Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale" (both included in the "Norton Anthology"), "can illustrate the concept of thematic variance among authors and give students a layered perspective on the political culture of gender relations in the late medieval period" (181). These texts are particularly relevant to community college students: "The need to assign responsibility for, deal with the consequences of, and cope with guilt over types of relationship events similar to, if milder than, those discussed in the 'Tale of Philomene and Tereus' is a need all too familiar for many community college students" (181). McKinney then offers helpful suggestions on approaching these subjects and offers sample lessons on each of these selections, and then on both together. The last, comparative lesson allows "speculative discussion," with references to the texts, of subjects like the following (186-87): 1) the male voice representing women's issues and women's voices; 2) sexuality: shame and reputation; 3) sexual aggression; 4) women's responses to domestic violence; 5) the marital-reproductive contract; 6) the threat of the female voice. [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor McKinney, Carole Lynn Published McKinney, Carole Lynn. "Gower in the Community College Curriculum." In Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Ed. Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011, pp. 180-87. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower in the Community College Curriculum 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 Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, A. S. G. Published Edwards, A. S. G.. "Gower in the Delamere Chaucer Manuscript." In The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector: Essays in Honour of Toshiyuki Takamiya. Ed. Matsuda, Takami and Linenthal, Richard A. and Scahill, John. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004, pp. 81-86. ISBN 1843840200 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review The former Delamere MS (now Takamiya MS 32) is one of the very few copies of CT still in private hands. It is also one of the rare MSS in which Chaucer's and Gower's works appear together (Edwards lists only 5 others), and of those that contains excerpts from CA, Takamiya has the largest selection, including 5 tales at the beginning and a sixth ("Nebuchadnezzar") at the end. Edwards skillfully disentangles the complicated history of the book. Though by the same scribe, the three gatherings containing the Gower excerpts were not originally part of the CT MS with which they are presently bound, and may once have been part of a much larger book. The order and formatting of the selections suggest that they were done in two phases. The tale of Nebuchadnezzar, finally, which immediately follows the conclusion of CT, may, Edwards suggests, have been "conceived as some kind of quire filler" (85). This essay (along with that of Derek Pearsall, summarized below) appears in a magnificently produced new festschrift in honor of the present owner of this MS, Professor Toshiyuki Takamiya of Keio University. Forty of our most distinguished medievalists here offer 39 essays in worthy tribute to Professor Takamiya's labors as a collector and his contributions to the study of medieval English literature, including his work on Chaucer, Malory, Hilton, and Gower. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 24.1.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower in the Delamere Chaucer Manuscript 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 2004 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 Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F Published Yeager, R. F. "Gower in Winter: Last Poems." In The Medieval Python: The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones. Ed. Yeager, R. F and Takamiya, Toshiyuki. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 87-103. ISBN 9780230112674 Gower Subject Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Minor Latin Poetry Review Yeager questions an earlier reading of Gower's work, a commonly held perception regarding the poet's revelation at the end of CA that he--or Amans/"John Gower"--is an old man. Though a literary "masterstroke" (to borrow C. S. Lewis' term), this admission could strain credibility, for in 1386--"the usually accepted date . . . for the completion of the Confessio" (90)--the poet would only have been in his mid-40s or mid-50s. Yeager here asks "at what age" Gower could "have begun to speak of himself as old" and still be taken seriously (91). Even as early as 1380 he was beginning to develop for himself the literary persona of a man of "great age." The reference to age then, and again in CA, however, could "have been intended, and understood, altogether differently from how we commonly assess it nowadays: not . . . as doddering incapacity . . . but rather as achieved sagacity" (92). It is through the wisdom of age that Gower could aspire to offer advice to his "patron," the 19-year-old Richard II. Of course the effect of emphasizing that orientation, as Yeager remarks, may be "to play down . . . the framing fiction of love . . . and to configure Gower's poem as primarily political" (92). Alternatively, however, one may argue that the work's political power rests upon Gower's capacity to speak in not just one, but two languages, those of a mature wisdom and, as initially more appealing to a youthful king, of love. The conflict between these two languages is sustained through the work. It is reflected in Amans' "Debat and gret perplexete" near the end (VIII. 2190), and though it appears finally to be resolved when he or "John Gower" walks away, seemingly cured of his love sickness and ready to "act his age," it lives on in the poet's later "self-portraitures," specifically in several short Latin poems that he wrote at about the time he married Agnes Groundolf, in 1398. In "Est amor," he thus applies to himself the oxymora of love he had treated negatively earlier in his career, intimating, Yeager suggests, "a degree of inner turmoil seldom associated with our carefully, fostered image of the old, moralist poet" (93). "Ecce patet sensus," Yeager further remarks, "is similarly anguished": in Gower's words, "O human nature, which always has war within itself, / Of body and soul, both seeking the same authority." This poem sustains that conflict and still comes "to a perfectly plausible, though rather tortured, conclusion" (94). But by the end of his career, Yeager notes, Gower has evidently moved beyond this question, perhaps having found in marriage, as he himself suggests, a "rule of morality / Which makes it sacred in the world for those who are to be saved" (93). Now in several late poems (1400-02)--one an epistle dedicating the VC and CrT to Archbishop Arundel, and another, "Quicquid homo scribat," a short poem appended to those works--the aged Gower focuses on aspects of his physical decline. Again these allusions form a literary device, one that here allows the poet to excuse himself from further comment on the conflict now emerging because of questionable actions undertaken by his new king, Henry IV. Yeager suggestively concludes that the poet's "simple plea to 'love each other'. . . is strikingly anti-Lancastrian (albeit not un-Gowerian), but it could easily emanate, not incongruously, from the pen of a deeply religious and reflective older man recently wed, who was beginning to think differently about the new state faction" (97). [Kurt Olsson. Copyright JGN 31.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower in Winter: Last Poems. 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 2012 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 Carlson offers both a new account of the textual relations among the five surviving copies of the "Cronica Tripertita" and some provocative new proposals concerning the process of its revision. By 1400 or shortly thereafter, Gower had probably lost his sight, Carlson points out, and would thus have been unable to proofread each new MS as it was copied, but he remained alert, Carlson presumes, to the political events of his time, and intervened to update and correct the text in key passages. The surviving MSS are thus characterized by both increasing scribal corruption and a series of "new and improved authorial readings" (212). The bulk of this essay consists of an examination of the variations among these copies, distinguishing between those that are scribal and the more substantive ones that are more likely attributed to the poet. From these--and without regard to the separate textual history of VC, but equally without regard to the evidence of erasure and correction and the activities of the separate scribes enumerated by Macaulay (Works 4.lix-Ixxi) and Parkes, "Patterns of Scribal Activity" (see Carlson's note 9 on 213-14)--he constructs a new stemma (214), in which he argues that Hatton 92 (Macaulay's H3), though "poor [and] carelessly written" (219), nonetheless "represents [along with Harley 6291, Macaulay's H] the earliest state of the text in evidence" (221). H also contains, however, a unique passage at 1.55-56 that alters the characterization of Northumberland in a way that suggests knowledge of his implication in the attempts to overthrow Henry in 1403 and 1405 (as Macaulay hints in his note, 4.405). Such a revision must be authorial, Carlson implies (217), though if it was, Gower seems to have forgotten about it when he came to make other changes in the text (218-19). The other two most significant revisions suggest to Carlson an alteration in Gower's view of Henry that corresponds to the shift in his attitude towards Richard that many have detected in the revisions of CA. The first includes a small alteration in 3.479 that appears only in C, S, and G that mitigates somewhat the characterization of the chronicle of Richard's reign (222). The second is a fuller revision of the entire conclusion to the poem in which the former line occurs (3.478-89) that appears only in G, which allows that Richard "had once been a good king, at the beginning of his reign" (218); which describes the poem itself now not just as chronicle of Richard's reign but as a "mirror of the world"; and which transforms a judgment of Richard into a warning for all kings, that "the chronicle of any king's reign will becomposed by the king himself, in his own conduct, such as it will unfold in the course of a reign" (210). Carlson detects here "an incipient withdrawal of support, implicit, by attenuation of praise" (ibid.), and he proposes that the most likely cause of Gower's change of heart in this, his final revision of the poem (233), was Henty's execution of Richard Scrope, Archbishop of York, in June of 1405 (234-36). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R Published Carlson, David R. "Gower on Henry IV's Rule: The Endings of the 'Cronica Tripertita' and Its Texts." Tradiio 62 (2007), pp. 207-36. ISSN 0362-1529 Gower Subject Biography of Gower Cronica Tripertita Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower on Henry IV's Rule: The Endings of the 'Cronica Tripertita' and Its Texts. 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 Urban advocates for renewed attention to how we edit Gower's "Confessio Amantis," suggesting that "queer editing" would permit the numerous extant manuscripts to exist simultaneously without privileging one over another: "'Confessio Amantis' and its manuscript corpus actively encourage the co-existence of heterogeneous voices and identities, a co-existence that in turn leads to an urge to reproduce the text in ways that allow for this heterogeneity to inform our encounters with the text" (304). To discuss how to accomplish such editing, Urban engages the concept of queer temporalities, particularly as espoused in the work of Elizabeth Freeman, Carolyn Dinshaw, and Jack Halberstam. Urban suggests that the different manuscripts of Gower's CA witness different temporal moments and that "Gower's poem 'itself' contains these kinds of time frame and temporal systems" (305; emphasis original). These queer temporalities present "the potential to produce unusual encounters with Gower's poem" (305). Urban posits that only when combined do all of the extant manuscripts of the CA create the whole poem (306). He nonetheless acknowledges that the majority of variances are isolated to the poem's prologue. Thus, Urban focuses on the frame narrative of the CA. Focusing on the gloss in the prologue of MS Ashmole 35, Urban explores what queer editing could mean for the CA--in particular its prologue. In this manuscript's iteration of the CA, Urban identifies "aberrant witnesses"--inconsistencies in glosses both Latin and Middle English--in MS Ashmole 35. "The poem's multi-temporal identity facilitates the development of a series of queer temporalities as the poem progresses, in which the past and/or the future disrupt the present, and the present disrupts both the past and the future" (308). He claims this "instability" makes the poem seem "positively queer" (310). Following his discussion of these inconsistencies in Ashmole 35, Urban concludes by restating his claim of the heterogeneity of the CA and its ability to produce multiple meanings. He then advocates for an editorial approach that "emphasizes variants and heterogeneity" (315), which he suggests we may accomplish in the digital sphere. [JS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Urban, Malte. Published Urban, Malte. "Gower Out of Time and Place." postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 9 (2018), 303-17. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies 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 Gower Out of Time and Place. 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 This issue of Accessus is made up of shorter essays focusing on various works of John Gower. These essays were developed from conference presentations on panels sponsored by The Gower Project or The John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in 2018-19 and at the Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association in 2019. "Accessus" editors note in their introduction that "Authors were invited to submit moderately expanded versions of their presentations (along with bibliography and footnotes) for conversion into the more durable and transmittable form that electronic publication offers." Given the format, in place of the full summaries normally provided for each essay, a brief synopsis is supplied. Search for "Accessus 5.2 (2019)" [without the quotation marks]. Published "Gower Shorts." Accessus 5.2 (2019): n.p. Author/Editor Author/Editor Salisbury, Eve, and Georgiana Donavin. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Shorts. 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 Noting that "at least twenty-five of Gower's tales [in the "Confessio Amantis"] can be traced, directly or indirectly, to the 'Metamorphoses'," and "several others are drawn, wholly or in part, from the 'Fasti,' the 'Heroides,' and the 'Ars amatoria'" (172), Wetherbee frames an analysis of Gower's use of those stories by considering in broad terms how the poet deals with Ovid's irony. Gower's own framework--his apparatus of Latin marginalia and head verses, combined with the English text--"produces a continual tension," and "the net effect is finally to make clear how fully Gower shares Ovid's vision of a world rendered chronically unstable by ill-governed human desire" (173). Thus, "if Genius at times appears comically obtuse in seeking to wrestle an Ovidian tale into yielding the moral he needs, it is often possible to hear in the tone of phrasing of his lesson a hint, such as Ovid himself frequently gives, that such a judgment may be beside the point, that a Narcissus, a Canace or Anaxarete, even a Medea, is better viewed with sympathetic understanding" (173). Wetherbee then models an approach that respects this influence by analyzing one of these stories, the tale of Narcissus. Further remarking that "Gower's appropriation of Ovidian fable has affinities with Chaucer's, Wetherbee suggests that here students may "draw comparisons between the two, separate and apart from the more common comparisons of narrative idiosyncrasies" 174). A case in point is how "the comic ineptitude of Genius, so often a foil to Ovidian sympathy, can remind us of the narrator of Chaucer's 'Book of the Duchess,' the grumpy insomniac who whiles away a sleepless night reading a tale from Ovid's 'Metamorphoses'" (174). Such examples open an approach, a range of questions and a resource that can help others in the teaching of the "Confessio." In addition to pointing briefly to a few other Ovidian examples from the poem, Wetherbee finally considers two episodes in the "Confessio" that are based upon the "Achilleid" of Statius. These, the poet's "only direct engagements with non-Ovidian classical poetry" (177), he adapts in turn "to his Ovidian concern with aggressive desire" (178). [Kurt Olsson. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 31.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wetherbee, Winthrop Published Wetherbee, Winthrop. "Gower Teaching Ovid and the Classics." In Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Ed. Yeager, R. F., and Gastle, Brian W. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011, pp. 172-79. ISBN 9781603290999 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Teaching Ovid and the Classics 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 Admitting that his endeavor "at first looks unpromising," Axton proceeds to consider ways in which Chaucer may have influenced Gower. His argument includes commentary on their common sources, especially Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and French poetry, as well as their mutual involvement in the "tangles of the law" (22), characterizing the poetic relationship of the two men as "mutual attraction and responsiveness" (23), considering their "rivalry" as well as their interdependencies. Axton observes that Chaucer preceded Gower in finding "an English voice" and in "cultivating a sophisticated attitude towards both his reader and his subject matter" (24), especially when writing about love. Specific bits of diction and imagery are found earlier in Chaucer than in Gower, Axton avers, and Chaucer's first-person pose as an "outsider" in love may have inspired Gower, particularly in CA, to create a "mild and complaining, deferential, courtly" voice, different from the more familiar "admonitory voice of moral authority" found in Gower's earlier poetry and returning in the voice of Venus in Book 8 of CA. While raising these suggestions, Axton comments at length on Chaucer's uses of and attitudes toward Gower, particularly those evident in the Prologue to the Man of Law's Tale and in Manciple's Tale--evidence of Gower influence on Chaucer, rather than the reverse which his title implies. [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Axton, Richard Published Axton, Richard. "Gower--Chaucer's Heir?" In Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer. Ed. Morse, Ruth and Windeatt, Barry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 21-38. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower--Chaucer's Heir? 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 1990 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 Gower engaged with "business . . . merchants and trade" all across his corpus, but especially in the extended estates satire of the MO (158). Gower's economics are interwoven with his politics, as seen in his reference to the wool trade in "In Praise of Peace" (161-62). His critique of the estates is aimed at achieving social harmony through a hierarchical system that includes fair trade (162-63). In exempla using exchange terminology more broadly, Gower highlights the "moral risks" involved (163-64), such as "love" seeking its own advantage (165-66), and even defines his own poetry as a kind of merchandise (164). He referenced the economy of London in detail (164-65), as he wrote "specific and well-informed attacks" on mercantile abuses by the trade guilds and others (165). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ladd, Roger A. Published Ladd, Roger A. "Gower, Business, and Economy." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 158-71. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) In Praise of Peace Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Business, and Economy. 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 This essay examines the "conversation" between Gower and Chaucer's ideas of the priesthood (174). Both poets share a disregard for the fraternal orders, focusing instead on the figures of Genius and the Parson, "both of them secular priests," who are described "almost exclusively in terms of their relationships with the lay people in their care, whom they shrive and teach with integrity" (175). Kuczynski takes issue with readings that have suggested that the priesthood of Genius is meant to be seen as limited or marred by his connection to Venus or his role as a household chaplain in her court, arguing instead that his devotion to his office and the sharpness of his corrections of Amans are meant to present him as an example of "the hard work of good priests" (185). As such, Genius is an ideal image, representing Gower's belief that "if priests would only return to an ideal ministry based in the example of Christ and his apostles, their office and Holy Church herself will not have to undergo extreme reinvention" (188). [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kuczynski, Michael P. Published Kuczynski, Michael P. "Gower, Chaucer and the 'Treuth of Prestehode'." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 173-88. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Chaucer and the "Treuth of Prestehode." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Many Gowerians were first introduced to Robert Greene's 1594 Greenes Vision, with its presentation of a fictionalized debate between Gower and Chaucer, by Helen Cooper's delightful essay in Echard's Companion to Gower (see JGN 24, no. 1). Dimmick pursues the analysis of Greene's work in greater depth. From his own abstract: "The guest appearances by Chaucer and Gower in Greenes Vision reflect a fifteenth- and sixteenth-century tradition of paired citation; here they represent rival literary values and styles, exploited by Greene in a complex and playful mock-repentance. While Greene claims to be moving away from a licentious, Chaucerian comedy, he is really expanding his range to incorporate the farcical vein of the recently published anonymous Cobler of Canterburie, and the tale offered by Gower as a corrective to the former follies of Greene's pen in fact closely resembles his earlier romances. Within the vision the authority of both the poets is dismissed when King Solomon appears to reject every study except Theology; what appears to be a dramatic conversion from folly to wisdom is in fact a much more playful and unstable piece in which all claims to literary authority come to look suspect." Despite the wildly inaccurate portrayal of Gower in this rivalry and the lack of any evidence of any actual stylistic influence on the tale that Greene attributes to him, Dimmick suggests that the entire presentation is based on a "genuine critical engagement" with the issues of morality and authority that are posed in both Chaucer's and Gower's works. [PN. COpyright The John Gower Society. JGN 26.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dimmick, Jeremy Published Dimmick, Jeremy. "Gower, Chaucer and the Art of Repentance in Robert Greene's Vision." Review of English Studies 57 (2006), pp. 456-73. ISSN 0034-6551 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 Gower, Chaucer and the Art of Repentance in Robert Greene's Vision 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 Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review A detailed examination of both Chaucer's and Gower's allusions to stories of King Arthur in an attempt to discover which texts they had read and to define their attitude toward Arthurian romance. Neither poet gives much more than brief allusion to Arthurian figures, and their references seem often to be based on no more than general knowledge of Arthurian tales. Gower, moreover, if he drew his tale of Florent from an Arthurian source, removed all reference to Arthur in his retelling. Kennedy's work of detection is thus all the more impressive. Chaucer was less interested in Arthurian literature than Gower, Kennedy concludes, though he knew Geoffrey of Monmouth, some version of the Tristan story, and either the cyclic or non-cyclic Lancelot en prose. Gower's taste was somewhat more old-fashioned: he knew more about Gawain than Chaucer evidently did; he knew more about Tristan, though it is still not possible to establish which work he drew upon; and in addition to the Lancelot en prose, he seems to have known more of the Vulgate Cycle, including at very least La Mort Le Roi Artu. He also seems to have taken these stories more seriously than Chaucer did. In using them as sources of moral lessons, his attitude toward the characters he mentions is usually disapproving, but he includes Arthur himself among the Nine Worthies, and his preference for a heroic conception of the king, Kennedy suggests, may explain his excision of Arthur from the tale of Florent, in all analogues of which Arthur plays a less than heroic role. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kennedy, Edward Donald Published Kennedy, Edward Donald. "Gower, Chaucer, and French Prose Arthurian Romance." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 55-90. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Chaucer, and French Prose Arthurian Romance Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Examines Gower's use of rhyme royal in both French and English works: in "In Praise of Peace," "Cinkante Balades," "Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz," and the "supplicacioun" from CA, concluding that whereas Gower learned from Chaucer's explorations in rhyme royal, he contributed something special in Ricardian poetics though his unique experiments in French forms and in philosophical love poetry. [JGN 10.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dean, James Published Dean, James. "Gower, Chaucer, and Rhyme Royal." Studies in Philology 88.3 (1991), pp. 251-75. Gower Subject In Praise of Peace Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Cinkante Balades Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Chaucer, and Rhyme Royal Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review John Fisher dated Gower's CB to the early 1370's, as part of his argument on Gower's participation in the London Pui. If he is correct, CB contains the earliest surviving examples of rhyme royal by an English poet. Dean, like Macaulay, holds out for a later date, and presents a small number of evident imitations of Chaucer from ``In Praise of Peace'' and the ``Supplication'' in CA 8.2217-2300 (but not from Traitié or CB) to argue that Gower's use of rhyme royal in both French and English was based on Chaucer's. The bulk of his essay is an examination of Gower's use of the stanza form in these four poems, with frequent comparison to Chaucer. Unlike Chaucer, who adopted the rhyme royal stanza for narrative verse in such poems as T&C and 2NT, Gower used rhyme royal only for his monitory ``IPP'' and in his philosophically oriented love-lyrics. In CB, Gower adopts (much more straightforwardly than Chaucer) both his imagery and his narrator from his French predecessors. He also reveals the ``universalizing, philosophical tendency'' that comes to fruition in CA. The two poems that Dean examines closely reveal Gower's effective use of enjambement and the concluding couplet, and his skillful use of the stanza form to articulate his argument. Traitié demonstrates a similar degree of skill, but is less interesting poetically than CB. Its main interest derives from the juxtaposition of the treatise form and its moralizing glosses with the depiction of the lover's experience in the secular lyrics. The strengths of ``IPP'' are much like those of Chaucer's similar moral balades, and the rhyme royal stanza lends dignity, high seriousness, and elegance. The ``Supplication,'' finally, is Gower's ``most `Chaucerian' moment,'' deftly blending natural, colloquial language with classical allusion, all within the artifice of the stanza form, and manipulating both caesura and enjambement to give individuality and credibility to the traditional complaint. Dean's essay is a valuable discussion of verse that is rarely examined closely; his argument is marred, however, by some troubling mistranslations of Gower's French. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dean, James Published Dean, James. "Gower, Chaucer, and Rhyme Royal." Studies in Philology 88 (1991), pp. 251-275. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Chaucer, and Rhyme Royal Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Considers both the textual and the manuscript evidence for Chaucer's and Gower's knowledge of the works of Virgil, who is often mentioned alongside Ovid as one of the most important classical influences in the late Middle Ages. In their retellings of the story of Dido and Aeneas, which Schmitz uses as his primary example, both poets adopt Ovid's view of Dido's misfortune, rather than Virgil's view of Aeneas' heroic calling. Gower shows no familiarity at all with Virgil's version, a lack of knowledge confirmed by his references to Virgil elsewhere in CA. Chaucer mentions Virgil more knowledgeably but remains equally bound to Ovid's version of the story, and may even have drawn his Virgilian material from a later French historical romance rather than from the original. The absence of direct knowledge of Virgil is consistent, Schmitz notes, with what others have observed about the lack of books in late medieval England, and suggests the need for care in our references to "classical influences" in fourteenth-century poetry. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Schmitz, Gotz Published Schmitz, Gotz. "Gower, Chaucer, and the Classics: Back to the Textual Evidence." In 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. 95-111. 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 Gower, Chaucer, and the Classics: Back to the Textual Evidence 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 In this essay, Yeager gauges the degree to which Gower "might . . . have been influenced by the ideas" of Robert Grosseteste (140), concluding that various "scraps" of evidence "taken together, argue for a noteworthy familiarity on Gower's part with Grosseteste's works" (156). Yeager is persuasive even though these "scraps" are indeed few on the ground: one overt reference (to the "gret clerc Grossteste" and the failure or destruction of a prophetic brazen head in the ten-line exemplum against "Lachesse," the first branch of Sloth, in CA Book IV, 234ff.) and more subtle echoes of Grosseteste's "Hexaëmeron" underlying Gower's "De lucis scrutinio," a complaint/prayer in Yeager's discussion. The scarcity encourages Yeager to clarify Grosseteste's importance in late-medieval English anti-clerical polemics as well as in philosophy and science, helping the critic to explain why Gower may not have referred to Grosseteste more often or more clearly. Yeager's argument--in over-simplified form--is that Gower's recurrent complaints against the clergy share much with Grosseteste's writing but that Grosseteste's (inaccurate) reputation as an excommunicate deterred Gower from closer identification or more frequent references. This may be why, Yeager suggests, Gower presents Grosseteste as a scientist only ("Astrologus") in his Latin gloss to the exemplum against sloth, and, along with some early modern analogues to the brass-head, helps Yeager to explain the juxtaposition of the exemplum and the similarly brief exemplum of "The Five Foolish Virgins" that follows it--the two "reflect and inform each other" (144) insofar as they both center on a crucial choice to follow the light, as it were, with the success of wise virgins in lighting their lamps left pointedly unmentioned as is Grosseteste's choice of pastoral care over science. More subtly, Yeager argues, when Gower labels "De lucis" a "tractatus" he "seems to echo incipits and/or explicits in the majority of extant manuscripts of Grosseteste's own 'De luce'" (156, and see 152), and, more importantly, there are deep similarities to Grosseteste's "metaphysics of light" (155) in Gower's short poem, as well as several other points of thematic and structural similarity with Grosseteste's "Hexaëmeron." Yeager's discussions of these resonances are too complex to summarize briefly here--this is very much not the kind of source-hunting that seeks only to locate verbal parallels which Yeager recently criticized elsewhere (see "John Gower's Use of the 'Ovide moralisé': A Reconsideration," 2022, p. 61). He ranges widely in late-medieval English understanding of Grosseteste, (pseudo)science, and, especially, ecclesiastical polemics to scaffold and reinforce much of his argument, referring recurrently to the Lollards and to Wyclif. Indeed, observing parallels among Grosseteste, Wyclif, and Gower, Yeager seems to promise a companion piece to the one under review, stating that the "degree to which Gower knew Wyclif's writings in general is a subject for another essay" (148). If such another essay is planned (or in progress), it will likely reinforce Yeager's successful representation here of Gower as a deeply informed, subtle, but cautious reader (and writer) of matters that pertain to the ecclesiastical polemics of his age. One note--a quibble: Yeager says that in "De lucis" Gower "hints . . . at a particular alternative form of the mass" (152), without offering any support that I can find. Perhaps this will find its way into an essay on Gower and Wyclif. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R. F. "Gower, Grosseteste, and 'De lucis scrutinio'." In Richard Firth Green and R. F. Yeager, eds. "Of latine and of othire lare": Essays in Honour of David R. Carlson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2022). Pp. 139-56. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Minor Latin Poetry Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Grosseteste, and "De lucis scrutinio." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yeager summarizes here in compact form what little is known of Spenser's relationship with a poet not often included among his sources. Spenser himself never mentions Gower's name, and the evidence that he knew Gower's work is only circumstantial: at least three printed editions of Confession Amantis were available at the end of the sixteenth century, three surviving MSS are known to have been owned by Spenser's friends, and there are direct references to Gower by both Gabriel Harvey and "E.K." Yeager identifies several ways in which Gower might have provided a model for Spenser. Like Spenser, Gower was a poet of moral and of social reform; and CA resembles Faerie Queene both in conception, as a collection of moral exempla, and in execution, created by an imaginative reshaping of his sources. There are also a number of specific passages in FQ for which sources in Gower's writing have been suggested, mostly from CA, but also the procession of the Seven Deadly Sins in FQ 1, which may be based on a passage in MO. In some cases Gower is the most likely source; in others Yeager points out that there are alternate or common sources in other works that Spenser is known to have used. The list of passages that he cites does not include the episode of Amavia and Mordant discussed by Arnold Sanders ("Ruddymane and Canace, Lost and Found: Spenser's Reception of Gower's Confessio Amantis 3 and Chaucer's Squire's Tale"), whose essay should now be added to the bibliography with which Yeager's article concludes. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Gower, John." In The Spenser Encyclopedia. Ed. Hamilton, A. C., and others. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990, pp. 337-338. 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 Gower, John Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Toronto Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 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 Gillespie's dictionary entry outlines the reception of Gower's "Confessio Amantis" in sixteenth-century England, citing CA as "one of the great achievements of fourteenth-century poetry" and listing comments by Sidney, Richard Greene, Spenser, Jonson, and Puttenham (159). He quotes Book VIII.1700-38 of Caxton's 1554 edition of the CA Apollonius tale as corresponding to the "recognition scene" in "Pericles" 5.1, and mentions a few other correspondences that critics have identified between CA and Shakespeare's plays and poems. But the focus here is "Pericles." Gillespie reports that Shakespeare combined the "main outline" of Gower's Apollonius plot with the version of Lawrence Twine, and that the "most striking difference" between the poem and the play "may be the figure of Gower himself as Chorus," generally synopsizing critical opinion supported by citation of some eighteen studies. He does, however, propose an additional, undeveloped observation: that "the limpidity of the Gower story and its affinities with the saint's life narrative" (162) may have influenced more than just the plot of "Pericles." [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gillespie, Stuart. Published Gillespie, Stuart. "Gower, John, (c. 1330-1408), Poet." In Shakespeare's Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare Sources. 2d ed. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). pp. 159-63. First edition published in 2001 by Athlone Press. 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 Gower, John, (c. 1330-1408), Poet. 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 In this brief encyclopedia entry Echard outlines Gower's life and briskly describes his works. She summarizes the structuring principles and some details of "Mirour de l'Omme," "Vox Clamantis," and "Confessio Amantis," citing Gower's other works where they align with these three by language--French, Latin, and English--emphasizing his trilinguality. Echard also observes some of Gower's connections with Chaucer, mentions editions of Gower's works, and cross-lists a variety of biographical and literary sub-topics, such as "Henry of Derby," "Ballade," "Frame-tale Narration," etc. Gower is mentioned recurrently elsewhere in this "Encyclopedia," largely in passing, but carefully listed in the comprehensive index. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân. Published Echard, Siân. "Gower, John." In Richard G. Newhauser, gen. ed. The Chaucer Encyclopedia. 4 vols.; continuous pagination. The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2023. Vol. II, pp. 832-35. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Biography of Gower Language and Word Studies Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, John. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review One of his nineteen contributions to the ODNB, Gray's biography of Gower opens with mention of Gower's tomb and date of death in 1408, estimating his birth as '"in the 1330s or 1340s," then proceeds to describe Gower's '"Family origins," correcting errors in Caxton's 1483 edition and other early biographies and clarifying the poet's origins in Kent and his connections with Yorkshire. Gray comments on Gower's role in the '"messy affair" of the purchase of the manor of Aldington Septvauns in Kent, and thinks it probable that Gower held '"some legal or civil office," citing evidence from the "Mirour de l'Omme" of his '"good knowledge of legal privileges and terminology." He then moves on to evidence that Gower lived in Southwark, his financial transactions, Lancastrian SS-collar, and late-in-life marriage to Agnes Groundolf (refraining from guessing why). Gray observes that, of Gower's life in the priory of St. Mary Overie, '"virtually nothing is known," and that the '"mysterious incident" involving Thomas Caudre, for whom three Londoners were mainprisors "that he would do or procure no harm to John Gower, remains unexplained: it may refer to a private quarrel, or to some financial dealings, or to some political disagreement." Beginning his description of Gower's "Literary career" Gray explains the difficulty in dating any early lyrical poetry that may reside in the late manuscript of "Cinkante Balades." Summary descriptions of "Mirour de l'Omme," "Vox Clamantis," and "Confessio Amantis ensue, accompanied by appreciative comments, and followed by similar treatments of Gower's short Latin poems, "In Praise of Peace," and "Cronica Tripertita." Throughout, Gray comments on political backgrounds to Gower's works and on relations between his works and Chaucer's. In his final sub-section--'"Last years, death, and reputation"--Gray returns to Gower at St. Mary Overie and Gower's tomb, along with other portraiture of the poet. Gray comments on the central place the CA holds in Gower's reputation, its Iberian translations ('"unusual" for a Middle English poem), and the negative treatment Gower received among nineteenth-century critics, replaced by '"serious study" undertaken after the publication of Macaulay's edition. A brief but useful list of sources closes Gray's account. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gray, Douglas. Published Gray, Douglas. '"Gower, John." In H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 61 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Vol. 23, pp. 125-30. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, John. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Ganim, John M Published Ganim, John M. "Gower, Liminality, and the Politics of Space." Exemplaria 19 (2007), pp. 90-116. ISSN 1041-2573 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Review Ganim has come a long way in his thinking since presenting the germ of this article in a paper entitled "Gower le flâneur" in a Gower Society-sponsored session at the 39th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in 2004. Then Ganim found much to be said for viewing Gower as just such a figure of "flânérie"--a term borrowed from Walter Benjamin which Ganim defines here as "the archetypal modern subject…the modern urban observer" (112). At present juncture, however, his extensive probing of Gower's "liminalities" (N.B., although Ganim himself uses only the singular, the plural seems appropriate, given his apparent effort here to provide examples of borderlines of every sort and kind, from geographic boundaries to instances of mobility qua mobility in Book I of the Vox Clamantis and variously throughout the Confessio Amantis) has led Ganim to the precisely opposite conclusion, that "In many ways, both historically and formally, Benjamin's flâneur is very different than the wandering subject in Gower" (113); and this is because "his [Gower's] perspective is not one of detachment, even allegorical detachment, but an attachment to things as they were and should be once again, an attachment simultaneously nostalgic and utopian" (112). Gower himself, it would seem (N.B.: Ganim regularly uses "Gower" to refer to the poet and to Gower's oeuvre) comes rather close to it: his "predicament nevertheless prefigures the contradictory position of the modern subject, and suggests, in his [i.e., Gower's] obsession with liminality, at least one way of accommodating those contradictions" (113). But Ganim's primary interest lies not in Gower the individual, but rather in deciphering "Gower's largest effort, his search for a unified field theory of his world, one in which the ethical, the social, the rhetorical, the spiritual and the poetic work from the same position towards the same end" (110). Ultimately Gower cannot achieve the cohesion he seeks, however: "The analysis of space in Gower [sic] suggests that the liminal geographies and settings of his works hold contradictions and confusions in suspension, almost symptomatically (rather than intentionally) exposing a gap between the analysis of social [sic] and the personal division that is the initial focus of Gower's complaint and the transcendent and idealized solutions he offers….Reliance on a liminal imaginative geography suggests how complicated, and ultimately compromised, were Gower's efforts to align his ethical, political and poetic agendas into one coherent discourse" (113). While this is hardly an original claim--one can trace its origins to David Aers and Larry Scanlon in the 1990's, at least in so far as Ganim calls attention to the frequent contradiction between Gower's goals and his perception of realpolitik--there is nonetheless great and valuable material here, particularly in its extensive bibliography, and application of au courant discussions of "space" defined very widely indeed. This reader was particularly grateful for the breadth and depth of Ganim's resources. The following editorial issues should be noted, however: pp. 104-105, the translation of Mirour de l'Omme ll. 26497-505 is mis-numbered as ll.26497-508, and the translator mis-cited as "Burton" instead of William Burton Wilson (the full reference to Wilson's translation is correct in the bibliography); and on p. 105 as well, see fn. 8, which would seem to concern Constance C. Relihan's work on Shakespeare's Pericles but instead, to the puzzlement of this reader, cites Sheila Delany's fine article "Geographies of Desire: Orientalism in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women."] [RFY. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 26.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Liminality, and the Politics of Space 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 For Chaucer (or at least, his fictional Man of Law), the sin of incest is unspeakable because "unkynde," that is, unnatural, an "abhominacion" (158). Eschewing such repression, Gower presents a detailed accounting of incest as wholly natural and yet not natural: sibling marriages were necessary for the children of Adam and Eve; natural law does not forbid it, only positive law; siblings Canace and Machaire were drawn to their fatal union by a natural desire--yet the poet proceeds to contradict his own dispassionate analysis, as he excoriates Amon's rape of his sister Tamar as "ayein kinde," thus an object of horror (164, referring to CA VIII.215). Both Chaucer and Gower express an anxiety over incest consistent with the late medieval "tectonic shift" to the ideal of "companionate marriage" as natural and proper (166), but "it is Gower whose poetic is the fuller and more searching" (168). Scanlon discusses "three moments in particular in Lydgate's poetry where he confronts the legacy of Gower in the form of the problem of incest" (172). In the story of Oedipus, Lydgate dwells on the grisly unnatural union of mother and son as it gave rise to the unnatural crime of fratricide, but paradoxically notes the free choice of the brothers to sin (174). Departing from Gower, he darkens the union of Canace and Machaire as "unnatural," even as he appears to celebrate the "meek[ness]" of Canace as she obeys her father's murderous command (177). In the unfinished allegory Reason and Sensuality, the goddess Diana (as moral instructress) advises the protagonist to reject illicit unions, including the unnatural sin of incest (178); his reward will be marriage, uneasily "naturalize[d] . . . as the true consummation of erotic desire" (180). Lydgate has not resolved the contradictions in Gower's conflicted treatment of incest, but the tension may be strategic on his part as it is inherent in the topic. [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Scanlon, Larry. Published Scanlon, Larry. "Gower, Lydgate, and Incest." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 156-82. Gower Subject Confessio Amanti Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Lydgate, and Incest. 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 In the CA, traditions of penitential literature and secular amorous verse, rooted in the classical tradition, come together to provide the shaping structure for the poem. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor McNally, John D. Published McNally, John D. "Gower, Ovid, and the 'Religion' of Courtly Love: The Shaping of the 'Confessio Amantis'." Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1961. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Ovid, and the "Religion" of Courtly Love: The Shaping of the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1961 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bennett's opens with a succinct and accurate summary of what his essay accomplishes: "This chapter reassesses Gower's views on Richard's reign by examining the poet's writings in the context of his background in Kent, his social circle and political connections, the politics of Richard's reign, and contemporary perceptions of his rule. Key issues here are Gower's role as mentor to royalty in his letter to Richard in "Vox Clamantis" ["Epistola ad regem"]; the dating of the critical comments about the king which Gower added to this text; Gower's stance in relation to the cause of the Appellants in 1387-88; the dating and significance of the changes which Gower made to the "Confessio Amantis," particularly the change of the dedication from Richard to Henry; the date[s] of the composition of the three parts of the "Cronica Tripertita," in which Gower wrote an account of Richard's misrule, his tyranny and overthrow; and the misleading nature of modern representations of Gower as a 'Lancastrian propagandist'" (425). Bennett accomplishes all this and more with impressive specificity and detail; he offers clear and subtle descriptions of political events, fresh perspectives on aspects of Gower's life and literature, and persuasive arguments for revising the traditional dating of his works. He clarifies the importance of Gower's affiliations with Sir John Cobham and Arnold Savage and his loyalty to the Lords Appellant; he argues that Gower's works reflect consistent attitudes and studied choices--at least when choice was possible available amidst the shifting loci of political power that held sway during events that led up to and through Richard's deposition. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bennett, Michael. Published Bennett, Michael. "Gower, Richard II and Henry IV." In Historians on John Gower. Ed. Stephen H. Rigby, with Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 425-88. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Biography of Gower Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis 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 Gower, Richard II and Henry IV. 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 Author/Editor Author/Editor Staley, Lynn Published Staley, Lynn. "Gower, Richard II, Henry of Derby, and the Business of Making Culture." Speculum 75 (2000), pp. 68-96. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review There are two unequal parts to this lengthy essay. The first, and shorter, considers the ways in which CA, "The Legend of Good Women," and Clanvowe's "Boke of Cupid" address issues of royal prerogatives and power. Since Gower's dedication of his poem records his relation with the king most explicitly (Chaucer's and Clanvowe's are encoded in their relations with the god of Love), he gets the least amount of attention of the three. Staley argues, however, that all three were engaged in a conversation with Richard that was possible in the mid-1380's but that would have been impossible after the Merciless Parliament of 1388. The second part considers the circumstances of Gower's revision of the dedication, when "Gower attempted to salvage a poem whose original conditions were no longer apparent" (p. 79). Staley gives more than merely passing regard to the events in the early 1390's that have been cited in the past to justify his change of view of the king, particularly to the quarrel with London in 1392. But the greatest amount of attention (indeed more than half this essay) is reserved for the role of John of Gaunt during this period and for his possible influence on the literary culture of the time. Staley cites Gaunt's longtime interest in acquiring a throne that he might pass on to his son, his care for improving Henry's position while retaining the good will of the king, his sponsorship of Henry's expeditions on the continent, and his efforts to acquire the prestige associated with his own court; and then points out the reversal of expectations that he must have suffered because of a series of unexpected events in 1394. Much of what Staley offers is speculative but closely enough grounded in documented fact to be interesting and at times intriguing. The consequences for Gower are disappointingly slight, however, and Staley's conclusion, expressed in an interrogative, can be quoted in full: "Are Gower's changes to the 'Confessio' a sign, possibly of dissatisfaction with Richard, but also of Gaunt's subtle co-opting of a poet's allegiance? To dedicate a poem about the state of England to Henry of Derby in 1392-93 served as one more indication of his status as protector of those virtues of ethical self-government that were memorialized in the poem itself and perhaps of a 'court' (even a virtual one) whose reality demanded an utterance that only a man with Gower's reputation for integrity could supply" (p. 96). The reviewer is cited in note 25 on page 78 as expressing in a series of essays published between 1984 and 1987 a view of the textual history of CA that Staley rejects, and so is perhaps not in the best position to offer an objective judgment of the merits of her argument. A few things do jump out, though. First, though she concedes that Gower finished CA in 1390 (p. 78), her entire discussion of the dedication is based on the assumption that it was written in 1385 or 1386, suggesting that she believes, somewhat implausibly, that Gower would have written the dedication first and then maintained it, despite its inappropriateness at the time of the poem's completion. Somewhat more seriously, when she states (on p. 71), that the F Prologue to LGW was written "at about the same time as the 'Confessio'," she allows us to infer that she believes that the entire poem was finished before 1388. Since all of her comments about the dedication depend upon its precise historical setting, the date is obviously not a small matter. Regarding the revisions in the text: despite the subtlety with which she reads between the lines of every other text that she considers, she refuses to see anything at all problematic about the dates contained in the margins of the revised passages in the Prologue and Book 8 in some MSS, and gives an account of Gower's rewriting that is pleasingly simple and straightforward and that may be correct, but that appears to be adopted more because of its convenience than because of a careful consideration of the complexities of the early textual history of the poem. One also has to wonder about her characterization of the "Confessio" as a whole. On page 70, she speaks of it as "a poem about the education of a prince," and on page 79 she appears to place the entire poem in the "Mirror for Princes" genre. Such a designation helps justify her attention to the dedication, but it also suggests that a more inclusive view of the poem's contents might make her entire argument somewhat less compelling. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 19.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Richard II, Henry of Derby, and the Business of Making Culture Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Miyashita examines the choric role assigned to Gower in Shakespeare's "Pericles" and argues that he differs markedly from other Shakespearean choruses in that he is endowed with a distinct personality. Although Gower describes the primary purpose of his storytelling as to give pleasure to the audience in his opening speech, Shakespeare deliberately preserves his identity as "moral Gower" by having him constantly moralize over the action he presents. Miyashita demonstrates, however, that, instead of providing the audience with "necessary and trustworthy information" (p. 98) as the choruses do in Shakespeare's other plays, Gower's comments only reveal discrepancies between the events unfolding on stage and his evaluation of them. His moralization thus "works antithetically to the audience's reception of the play," but precisely because his moral judgments are proven to be subjective and therefore limited, the audience is given "an opportunity for retrospection" at the end of the play and encouraged to "reconsider" its "true significance" (107). This essay originally appeared in Japanese in The Hokkaido University Annual Report on Cultural Sciences in 2003. See Yayoi Miyashita, "Pericles ni okeru Chorus, Gower no hataraki," Hokkaidō Daigaku Bungaku-bu Kiyō/The Hokkaido University Annual Report on Cultural Sciences110 (July 2003): 113-28. [YK. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Miyashita, Yayoi. Published Miyashita, Yayoi. "Gower, the Chorus, as a Fictional Character in Pericles." Bulletin of the Faculty of Humanities and Human Sciences, Hokkaido University 117 (2005): 89-108. 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 Gower, the Chorus, as a Fictional Character in "Pericles." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Prints (with expurgations of sexual material) from CA Book I, 93-266; "Albinus and Rosemund," Book 1, 2459-2662; "Travellers and the Angel," Book II, 291-372; "Ceix and Alceone," Book IV, 2927-3123; "Jason and Medea," Book V, 3247-4222; and portions of the dialogue between the Lover and his Confessor, Book IV, 1083-1244 and 2771-2926; Book V, 7030-7194. Text reprinted from Reinhold Pauli (1857), but lineated according to Macaulay (1899-1902). [RFY1981; rev. MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor B[ennett], H. S.], intro. Published B[ennett], H. S., intro. Gower: Confessio Amantis: Selections. Cambridge Plain Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower: "Confessio Amantis": Selections. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1927 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower is formally indebted to the confession literature of the late Middle Ages. His impulses are all didactic. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Weber, Edwart. Published Weber, Edwart. Gower: Zur Literarischen Form seiner Dichtung. Bad Homburg: Weber, 1966. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower: Zur Literarischen Form seiner Dichtung. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1966 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân Published Echard, Siân. "Gower's 'bokes of Latin': Language, Politics, and Poetry." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 25 (2003), pp. 123-156. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Vox Clamantis Cronica Tripertita Review Currently fashionable attempts to "romance the vernacular," Echard writes, borrowing an expression from Sarah Stanbury, together with the prevalent characterization of Latin as an "authoritative monolith," tend to imply that "Latin does not have its own complexities, an implication which makes it difficult to read Latin as subtly--or even as politically--as we might read other languages" (124 n.). Echard challenges these and several other assumptions about the relations among the languages in late medieval England in her examination of Gower's use of Latin in VC and TC in light of Gower's own comments about language in these and in his other works. With regard to VC and TC, she argues that rather than expressing Gower's inherently conservative political agenda, Gower's choice of Latin for his two most historically oriented works "is far more complex, and more fraught with poetic uncertainties, than it has traditionally been understood to be" (130). VC contains recurring references to language, in the poet's references to the difficulties of his own speaking in Book 1, in the numerous references to the "speech which is not speech of the peasants" (134), and in the denunciations of the misuse of public rhetoric in the allusions to Wat Tyler and John Ball. The latter, combined with the poet's anxieties about his own discourse, lead to "an awareness of the perils inherent in Latin as well as the vernacular" (137). In the books that follow the opening vision, "Gower points many of the criticisms of the estates . . . in terms of the misuse and misapplication of both language and learning, and the ease with which people can be misled by educated abusers of both the spoken and written word" (139). His suspicions extend to "untrustworthy poets or, at best, unscrupulous people who take advantage of poetic words; for indeed, it seems that any wrought speech is necessarily anathema, and contrary to God's desire" (143). His comments here are echoed in MO, which in lines 14665-76 suggests that "Latin is particularly subject to misuse precisely because it carries the flavor of clerkly authority and the appeal to scholarly pride" (143), and in his often quoted praise of plain speech in Book 7 of CA. "The topos is not unusual, but Gower's almost obsessive return to it, no matter when or in what language he writes, is striking, as is his tendency to be both confident and pessimistic about plain truth's ability to be made manifest" (145). Gower's shift to English in CA might suggest that "Gower finds both his poetic voice, and unproblematic access to truth, in the voice and forms of the common folk" (145), but in fact Gower remains no less concerned about the evasive nature of language, as evidenced by his comments in the Prologue on the commons. In each of his works, therefore, Gower reveals his "deep uncertainty about the relationship between his poetic tongue(s) and the truth" (148), a concern that certainly does not exclude Latin. Echard concludes with a consideration of Gower's additions and revisions to VC and CA, including his rewriting of the account of his works in the colophon to CA. She points to Gower's "lifelong habit of aggregating, as well as revising, his texts" and his "constant--almost obsessive--desire to revisit his poetic mission" (154). In this repeated effort, "Rather than moving toward any kind of simple resolution of the dilemmas inherent in poetic speech, it seems Gower might in fact have recognized that his own multilingual, multiversioned oeuvre was in the end the closest approach he could make to truth, if her were not simply to fall silent and pray" (ibid.). "The progression from the Vox to the Confessio," she concludes, "and through the various revisions of each of these works, is not an evolution, if that means a discarding of outdated language or modes. It is, instead, an accumulation, in response to the recognition that England is a complex political space, requiring of its poet an equally complex poetic voice. Gower's head rests on three books, not one, and Latin remained with England's poet to his dying day, and beyond it" (156). It is no small part of the value of this essay that it contains, in its notes, a valuable survey of the on-going discussion of the issue of vernacularity in late medieval England. And as a bonus, Echard also provides her own excellent verse translations for each of the passages that she quotes from VC. One has to wonder how much Gower's reputation might improve in the sadly monolinguistic culture that has succeeded his if we could induce her to complete the translation of the entire poem. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 23.1.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's 'bokes of Latin': Language, Politics, and Poetry Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Mitchell, J. Allan Published Mitchell, J. Allan. "Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,' Natural Morality, and Vernacular Ethics." In John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts. Ed. Urban, Malte. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009, pp. 135-53. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review "Gower's Confessio Amantis . . . vernacularizes ethics for an emerging English polity," Mitchell contends (137)--meaning by "vernacularizing" not merely that Gower wrote in English, but that he put forward an alternative, pointedly practical (and hence un-scholastic) branch of Aristotelian ethics that more suited his readers and himself. "Gower opens ethics up to the 'sensis communis,' or what the poet thinks should be a common sense educated in the humanities, and he is characteristically rhetorical rather than metaphysical in his orientation toward ethics" (137). He settles ethical choice squarely on the individual: "Gower is especially skeptical of the idea of morality as theophany. God cannot be held responsible, Gower teaches, for ethics remains within the orbit of practical reason rather than inspiration or revelation" (150). Such an ethics is especially suited to narrative exemplification: "The exemplary narrative . . . supplements even as it desublimates the philosophy of natural law, or rather it creates a narrative ethics out of normative ethical theory . . . . The vernacular narratives of the Confessio are meant to make, move, and improve the 'res publica'" (151). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,' Natural Morality, and Vernacular Ethics Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brepols, 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 McGerr introduces a new possible model for the discussion of kingship in Book 7 of the CA. The "Nova Statuta Angliae" ("New Statutes of England") is a compilation based on the Rolls of Parliament beginning with Edward III's first Parliament in 1327. It opens with an account of the deposition of Edward II meant to justify his removal from the throne that emphasizes his violation of the terms of his coronation oath in his failure to uphold the laws protecting the clergy, the nobility, and the commons. This document circulated widely, McGerr notes, among the same audience that might have read the CA (including a copy owned by King Richard himself), and Gower "was certainly familiar" with the text (54). Gower would have found in the account of Edward II's deposition an exemplum on bad kingship of the sort that he himself constructs. He would also have found a model for the emphasis upon the king's duty to uphold the law as a condition of his right to rule that runs through the discussion of kingship in Book VII, several passages of which might well have reminded his readers of Edward II's fate. And finally, McGerr suggests, Gower would have found in this section of the "Nova Statuta" a model of the type of "hybrid discourse" that he himself practices in Book VII: "Both texts interweave discourses of legal argument, romance narrative, mirrors for princes, and religious exemplum in ways that strengthen their representation of the English king's sacred obligation to uphold the laws of the land" (59). [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor McGerr, Rosemarie Published McGerr, Rosemarie. "Gower's 'Confessio' and the 'Nova Statuta Angliae': Royal Lessons in English Law." ES: Revista de Filología Inglesa 33.1 (2012), pp. 45-65. ISSN 0210-9689 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's 'Confessio' and the 'Nova Statuta Angliae': Royal Lessons in English Law 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 In Shakespeare's Pericles, the character Gower describes the incestuous relationship of Antiochus and his daughter as follows: "But custom what they did begin / Was with long use accounted no sin" (1. Cho. 29-30). By an examination of the word "custom" in Shakespeare's other works, Boni demonstrates that Gower's "custom" is used in the sense of "inurement or accustomation" (36). While Gower's lines (adapted from CA 8.345-46) are to some degree proverbial, they also fit well with Shakespeare's use of "custom" elsewhere. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Boni, John Published Boni, John. "Gower's 'Custom' in Pericles: Shakespeare's Hand?" American Notes and Queries 16 (1977), pp. 35-36. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's 'Custom' in Pericles: Shakespeare's Hand? 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 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Ito examines the story of Diogenes and Alexander from Book 3 (1202-1311) of the Confessio Amantis, identifying two separate story-lines combined within it: the "stand in my sun" episode and that of the "servant of my servant." For each of these sources are sought in various works, including Disciplina Claricalis, Gesta Romanorum, Speculum Historiale, and De Vita Moribus Philosophorum. Ito concludes that Gower's tale results from a combination of materials, the relationship of which is difficult to determine with present data and editions. Gower also added and emended much to produce his treatment. Ito argues that source studies carried on carefully can provide much information about how the poet's mind worked. [PN. Copyright the John Gower Society. JGN 3.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ito, Masayoshi Published Ito, Masayoshi. "Gower's 'Diogenes and Alexander' and Its Philosophic-literary Tradition." Poetica: An International Journal of Linguistic-Literary Studies 16 (1983), pp. 66-77. ISSN 0287-1629 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's 'Diogenes and Alexander' and Its Philosophic-literary Tradition. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1983 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The careful evidence and fine-grained arguments of Yeager's essay have the potential to help reshape understanding of "the shifting views and allegiances of Gower, the man" (34), particularly those that pertain to Thomas Arundel, his putative ownership of Oxford, All Souls College, MS 98, the Latin prose heading and the "Epistola" to Arundel that today open the manuscript, Gower's "Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilencia," and Gower's motives, intentions, and timing in composing and revising some of the contents of works included in the manuscript. Yeager opens by questioning the traditional understanding of All Souls MS 98 as a manuscript presented to Arundel and, by extension, evidence of Gower's "fulsome commitment" to Arundel and "ardent support" of Henry's usurpation (14). He reviews and confirms Malcolm Parkes' arguments that the manuscript was not an "authorial product" but "posthumously assembled by scribes" (17), affirming that the "Epistola" was not included in the All Souls MS 98 until nearly a century after Gower's death. Moreover, Yeager shows that the decoration of the manuscript, the "extensive emendations over erasures" in the All Souls version of the "Epistola," and the Latin prose heading or preface together suggest "strongly that the common conception of All Souls MS 98 is mistaken" (19). The emendations, in particular, indicate that the "Epistola" must have existed in two recensions at least, the All Souls version being a revision, prompting Yeager to raise questions about when and for what purpose the pre-revision "Epistola" was composed originally. He looks to the Latin prose preface and contextualizing history for reasons to believe that Gower composed the "Epistola" initially when Arundel was first appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by Richard II, specifically designed to accompany :Viciorum pestilencia," a "new, showcase poem in 1397" (31). Characteristic of the argument in many ways is Yeager's explanation of a revision of an allusion to the Sermon on the Mount in the "Epistola" where, when describing the hiding of candlelight, Gower replaced the familiar and scriptural "sub modio" (under a basket) with "sub cincere" (under ashes), an indication, Yeager maintains, of Gower's new sense of a threat of "auto da fé," prompted by Arundel's "De heretic comburendo" and the "thirteen anti-Lollard Constitutions" of 1407 (25). The All Souls "Epistola," then, is less a "fulsome commitment" to Arundel than a propitiation of the archbishop who in his "second Canterbury tenure" was a "different, more dangerous man" in "different, far more dangerous times" (28), someone whom Gower may have had cause to fear because he had himself criticized the prelacy earlier in his career. Yeager's arguments do not depend wholly upon a single, revised word, of course, but this kind of subtlety characterizes his fresh and provocative way of looking at material in All Souls MS 98, material viewed in relation to the seriatim political climates in which it was produced, revised, and compiled. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Minor Latin Poetry Manuscripts and Textual Studies Published Yeager, R. F. "Gower's 'Epistle to Archbishop Arundel': The Evidence of Oxford, All Souls College, MS 98." In Manuscript and Print in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Professor Julia Boffey. Ed. Tamara Atkin and Jaclyn Rajsic (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 13-34. Dublin Core The Dublin 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 2019 Title A name given to the resource Gower's 'Epistle to Archbishop Arundel': The Evidence of Oxford, All Souls College, MS 98. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bennet, writing in a commemorative volume for C.S. Lewis, notes that Lewis commented surprisingly little on the "ethical scheme" (106) of CA and how the poem fit within the history of the allegory of love, and paid more attention to Gower's poetic craft. Bennet aims to make up for this lack by demonstrating that Gower does not advocate a complete relinquishing of earthly love in favour of divine charity. Gower's Genius is a combination of the two characters of Genius and Nature in the Roman de la Rose (109), and becomes a spokesperson for a chaste love that finds its end in marriage and procreation. This virtuous love is frequently referred to as "honeste" (see the citations on 113-17) and is what provides Amans, and indeed the commonwealth, with true "pes" (peace). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bennett, J. A. W Published Bennett, J. A. W. "Gower's 'Honeste Love.'." In Patterns of Love and Courtesy: Essays in Memory of C. S. Lewis. Ed. Lawlor, John. London: Edward Arnold, 1966, pp. 108-120. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's 'Honeste Love.' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Edward Arnold, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1966 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 When Gower rewrites Nicholas Trivet's story of Constance, one of the details that he changes concerns the baptism of Dame Hermingild. Whereas in Trivet Hermingild is murdered after being baptized, Gower has her killed before she can be baptized. Gower makes this change, according to Dulak, in order to highlight that Hermingild had a "baptism of desire." This fits with the rest of the tale, where Gower also describes baptism by blood, and baptism by water. By illustrating these three types of baptism, Gower shows his "devoutness" and "originality" (369). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dulak, Robert E Published Dulak, Robert E. "Gower's 'Tale of Constance'." Notes and Queries 198 (1953), pp. 368-389. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's 'Tale of Constance' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1953 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 an earlier article (see JGN 21:5), Bratcher pointed out the similarity between Gower's tale of "The Three Questions" (CA 1.3067-3402) and the ballad of "King John and the Bishop" (Child, no. 45). For Gower's use of a young girl instead of a shepherd (as in the ballad) and for a closer analogue to the "dust-to-dust" theme of Gower's first riddle, Bratcher now cites Aarne-Thompson type 875, "The Clever Peasant Girl," particularly as reflected in a version collected near Hanover in the early nineteenth century. In a private correspondence, Bratcher points out that the reference to type 988 in his first footnote should instead be to type 922. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 26.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bratcher, James T. Published Bratcher, James T.. "Gower's 'Tale of Three Questions' and 'The Clever Peasant Girl' Folktale." Notes and Queries 53 (2006), pp. 409-410. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's 'Tale of Three Questions' and 'The Clever Peasant Girl' Folktale. 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 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 Moll shows that in London, British Library MS Lansdowne 204, containing the first version of John Hardyng's "Chronicle" (ca. 1450), "three of the rubrics to the history of Richard II make direct reference to Gower's work, and two of the rubrics quote the text at length" (154). After quoting the passages borrowed from, or dependent on, Gower's CrT, Moll concludes: "We can, therefore, expand the influence of the 'Cronica Tripertita' beyond Gower's immediate London circle to not only Hardyng's rubricator but the northern chronicler himself. In its brief borrowings from Gower's 'Cronica,' the first version of Hardyng's 'Chronicle' not only mollifies the harsh image of Richard II, it also separates Gower's text from the 'Vox Clamantis.' Hardyng does not seem to have used the 'Vox,' and all of the lines that place the 'Cronica' in relation to the 'Vox' have been omitted, thus raising the possibility that Hardyng had access to the 'Cronica' on its own" (157). Hardyng's knowledge and use of the 'Cronica' indicates that "the text continued to circulate long after Gower's circle of friends and associates had died" (157). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Moll, Richard J. Published Moll, Richard J. "Gower's Cronica Tripertita and the Latin Glosses to Hardyng's Chronicle." Journal of the Early Book Society 7 (2004): 153-58. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Croniica Tripertita Vox Clamantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's "Cronica Tripertita" and the Latin Glosses to Hardyng's "Chronicle." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Salisbury's essay focuses on the debate of whether the brain or the heart functioned as the principal organ of the body for Gower and his works. She asserts, "This is the medical controversy that factors into Gower's use of 'herte-thoght' and his understanding of the effects of heart disease in bodies both individual and sociopolitical." Salisbury surveys the medical literature of the later Middle Ages, the medical philosophy of which she believes Gower was likely at least familiar, especially the Aristotelian idea of the heart's function in the body politic. Focusing on Book VII of the "Confessio Amantis," Salisbury shows how "Genius identifies the heart as the body's principal organ in its capacity to govern the other organs and their functions, most importantly the cognitive aspect of the brain he describes as 'reson.'" She focuses on Gower's use of "herte-thoght" or "herte's thoght" to demonstrate Gower's belief in the symbiotic relationship of emotion and cognition, which is how she sees the poem attempting to rectify Amans's own feelings and thoughts. Salisbury points to the "Tale of Diogenes and Alexander" in Book III, noting "In a tale designed to assuage Amans's inner turmoil and thwarted desire to acquire his lady's love, however, the story becomes a way to illustrate the presumptions of an insatiable conqueror and the devastating realities of imperial conquest." Salisbury provides a thorough close reading of the tale to support this conclusion before turning attention to a diagram of the heart-brain connection from Geraldus de Hardywyck's "Epitomata seu Reparationes totius philosophiae naturalis Aristotelis." She suggests this diagram creates "the impression of the [heart's] dominance," pointing out that in this diagram all of the other senses, too, are routed through the heart. Finally, addressing anger as heart disease, particularly in the "Mirour de l'Omme," Salisbury concludes, "anger is not a mere allegorical figure in this context, but rather a literal description of a disease with the potential to kill the body and damage the soul. If we extend the analogy offered by Henri de Mondeville in his surgical treatise cited earlier, these symptoms are as applicable to the body politic as surely as they are to individual human bodies." [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Salisbury, Eve. Published Salisbury, Eve. "Gower's 'Herte-Thought': Thinking, Feeling, Healing." Accessus 7, no. 1 (2022): n.p. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Language and Word Studies Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's "Herte-Thought": Thinking, Feeling, Healing. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review CA V.1283, in the "Tale of Proserpina," reads: "And lerne forto weve and spinne." Ceres, her mother, has hidden her away in a secret chamber below Mt. Aetna, to protect her virginity. Following Venus to pick flowers while her mother was away, Proserpina is spotted by Pluto and ravished. Neither the detail of the chamber below Aetna nor that of weaving/spinning occurs in the "Metamorphoses" proper, but rather both are in Gower's main source, the "Ovidius moralizatus." Berchorius' own source for his mention of weaving/spinning, however, not being in Ovid's version, has eluded discovery. Sharp locates it in Claudian's "De raptu Proserpinae" ("a foundational text in the medieval curriculum," [163]), Book I, ll. 244-53, citing the passage as "the narrative building block from which Berchorius could have drawn for his own moralization of Ovid" (164). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sharp. David. Published Sharp, David. "Gower's 'Ovidian' Source for Line V.1283 of the Confessio Amantis." Notes and Queries 66 (2021): 162-64. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's "Ovidian" Source for Line V.1283 of the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Readers who enjoy deep dives into etymology or nautical diction will take pleasure in Sayers' essay on lexical and technical backgrounds to Gower's use in "Confessio Amantis" V.7048 of "love," meaning "luff." His study is brief, but rich: after describing appropriate data and commentary in dictionaries and editions, Sayers proposes that "the Old Norse lexeme 'úfr' [a kind of sail-pin] is the ultimate source of 'luff' and congeners" (137), tracing the word through unattested French forms to attested "le lof," and surmising that nautical "[t]echnological evolutions, now difficult to trace, must have accompanied this refocus in vocabulary" before and after the word appeared in Gower. Gower's usage occurs as a metaphor in the context of commentary on the sacrilegious exchange of a love token in church. Sayers translates and explains the lines as follows: "'So close to the wind do they [i.e., the lovers] luff that it is as if to say, she shall not forget that I have obtained this token of her.' Gower's church-going lovers are engaged in close sailing, not 'dangerously' in the sense of exposing their suits to disaster [as usually explained], but in an expeditious manner, trying to win advantage from difficult circumstances--the headwind of church protocol, the coolness of the lady" (138). Sayers missed Alexandra Hennessy Olsen's 1986 comments on the punning of "luff" and "love" in this context, perhaps because "John Gower Newsletter" bibliographers missed it too--until this issue. See Olsen, "The Literary Impact of the Pun in Middle English Literature." In Geardagum: Essays on Old and Middle English 7 (1986): 17-36. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sayers, William. Published Sayers, William. "Gower's 'So nyh the weder thei wol love' (Confessio Amantis, 5, 7048)." ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 28 (2015): 135-39. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's "So nyh the weder thei wol love" ("Confessio Amantis," 5, 7048). 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 Author/Editor Author/Editor Meindl, Robert J. Published Meindl, Robert J. "Gower's 'Speculum Iudicis': Judicial Corruption in Book VI of the 'Vox Clamantis'." In Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self. Publications of the John Gower Society XI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 260-82. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review The title phrase "Speculum Iudicis" or "Mirror/Guidebook for Judges" is a take-off on the well-known genre "speculum principis/regis," the "mirror/guidebook for kings" (261 n.4), especially fitting as the judge is a stand-in for the king, who represents God (262). Meindl focuses his analysis on VC VI, Chapters 4 and 5 (VI.249-418), both concerned with the moral failings of English judges. Throughout these chapters, Gower condemns the entire judiciary for allowing "lex" (mere human law) to subvert "ius," the true justice that "lex" is meant to serve (262). Chapter 4 excoriates the judges from their earliest training as eager for bribes, thus making it impossible for the poor to receive justice; instead, justice must be unlocked with a golden key. These judges are willing prey to indirect forms of influence available only to the rich, known as "laboring" and "maintenance"; the royal treasury suffers thereby, while corrupt judges prosper (265-74). Chapter 5 addresses the judges directly, in a series of "commonplaces" borrowed from "De Vita Monachorum" (276): you scheme to steal your neighbors' land; rapacious on earth, you are losing treasure in heaven; you will find yourselves harshly judged and eternally suffering in hell--this last has an interesting parallel passage in the thirteenth century English law book cited by Meindl as "Bracton" (279). As explained by Gower (VC VI.179-80), the only hope for reform of a corrupt judge is the personal forum of his conscience: "Given his [Gower's] insistence everywhere on individual responsibility, we could hardly expect anything else" (280, 281). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's "Speculum Iudicis": Judicial Corruption in Book VI of the "Vox Clamantis." 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 Batkie is concerned to identify Gower as a unique kind of history-writer, in whose work the structuring and affect ('ordinatio' and 'ductus,' in her terms here) "of the poetic line become entangled with resistance to political desire, and they generate a field in which an obverse aesthetic takes over from chronological distance or propagandistic control--the two other modes we often find structuring narrative histories" (113). For examples of these latter approaches she discusses, respectively, Thomas Walsingham's "Monasterii St. Albani" --at length--Richard Maidstone's "Concordia." Leveraging the affective power of anaphora particularly (with all its Ovidian overtones), Gower, Batkie argues, draws attention to real events while also underscoring the uncertainty inherent in living through them: "In the 'Visio,' Gower's vision is intentionally fragmented, illuminating not a stable political landscape but one that is--and always has been--unreliable" (132). For Batkie, uncertainty (unreliability) of this kind should be invoked more often in regard to Gower, "particularly as we consider the ways in which he imagines his historical narrative of the past contributing to and shaping the political present" (132). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Batkie, Stephanie L. Published Batkie, Stephanie L. "Gower's Allusive Forms: Anaphora and Political Desire in the 'Visio Anglie'." In William Green, Daniel Helbert, and Noëlle Phillips, ed. Textual Traditions and Medieval Literary Culture: Essays in Honour of Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2025). Pp. 108-32. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Allusive Forms: Anaphora and Political Desire in the "Visio Anglie." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2025 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The depiction of impotence as an inevitable consequence of old age in the conclusion to the CA is not found in any of Gower's other sources, but derives directly, Carlson argues, from the elegies of Maximianus. More specifically, Carlson traces Gower's "Qui cupit id quod habere nequit, sua tempora perdit. / Est vbi non posse, velle salute caret" (VIII.2376 vv. 1-2) and Venus' paraphrase, "Min herte wolde and I ne may" (VIII. 2412), to Maximianus' "nec quod possum, non voluisse meum est" (4.55), which Carlson translates, somewhat freely, as "my part is not to want what I am incapable of"; and he traces Venus' punning declaration that "The thing is torned into was" (VIII.2435) to Maximianus' "Non sum qui fueram; periit pars maxima nostri" ("I am no more what once I was; the best part of me has perished") (1.3). The largest part of this essay, however, is concerned with introducing Maximianus to modern readers: the little-known contemporary of Boethius whose reflections upon his sexual exploits, successful and unsuccessful, in youth and old age, were included, along with other products of a phallocentric Latin culture, in the medieval school curriculum. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 36.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David Richard. Published Carlson, David Richard. "Gower's Amans and the Currricular Maximianus." Studia Neophilologica 89 (2017): 67-80. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis. Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Amans and the Curricular Maximianus. 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 Author/Editor Author/Editor Schieberle, Misty. Published Schieberle, Misty. "Gower's Aristotelian Legacy: Reading Responsibility in the Confessio Amantis and the Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod." In Valerie B. Johnson and Kara L. McShane, eds. Negotiating Boundaries in Medieval Literature and Culture: Essays on Marginality, Difference, and Reading Practices in Honor of Thomas Hahn. Boston: De Gruyter; Medieval Institute Publications, 2022. Pp. 305-22. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review Schieberle sets the agenda for her essay briskly: "I outline some of Gower's key Aristotelian views, trace their legacy, and argue that they influence a unique fifteenth-century adaptation of Christine de Pizan's 'Epistre Othea'"--"The Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod"--that "was copied by Anthony Babyngton into a collection that includes lessons in heraldry, hunting terms in French and English, genealogies of English kings, and other arguably educational material. The Gowerian features that I identify lay the groundwork for understanding the "Bibell" translator's work as a consciously framed Aristotelian reading of Christine's "Othea" shaped by the English literary trends of his day" (305). Specifically, Schieberle tells us, Gower's assertion of the Aristotelian mean at the opening of the "Confessio Amantis" (Prologue, 17-21), his concern with the "middle weie" between "social obligations and personal moral decisions" (307), and his notions of fate, fortune, and the figure of Atropos indicate that moral agency is effective in negotiating the "external controls over human lives" (308). Schieberle shows that "wise, prudent behavior . . . can forestall fate" (312) in tales such as that of "Rosiphele" and, in subtler ways, that of Jephthah's daughter. She argues that these concerns are also entailed ironically in Amans's "misunderstanding of what it means to be morally alert and active." evident in his thoughts on Atropos and destiny (CA 4.2754-70) that include a relevant "joke" on Troilus's comic inactivity in Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" (312). Schieberle then traces similar concerns with determinism and Atropos in Lydgate's "Troy Book" and in Babyngton's "Lytle Bibell" to argue that the latter is not only an adaptation/translation of Pizan's "Epistre Othea" but also part of a growing tradition in English in which human responsibility balances fateful influences in the shaping of events and outcomes, with the potential to defer even death. Schieberle presents Gower as "the forefather of a literary movement that transforms English views of Fortune, fate, and virtue" (307) without arguing that he is the ultimate or only source of these ideas. She carefully acknowledges that Gower does not fail "to acknowledge that man's power over his future has limits" (308), citing the "Tale of Two Coffers," but she emphasizes the predominant importance of prudent moral responsibility in CA. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Aristotelian Legacy: Reading Responsibility in the "Confessio Amantis" and the "Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Nicholson's essay examines the five poems from the "Cinkante Balades" in which Gower writes through a female persona (numbers 41-44 and 46). Nicholson begins by noting how common it was to adopt a voice differing in gender from that of the poet, citing the examples of Machaut, Deschamps, Froissart, Granson, and the anonymous "chansonnier" of University of Pennsylvania MS Codex 902 who all wrote poems voiced as women, as well as that of Christine de Pizan, who "left more than 100 poems in the voice of a man" (82). Nicholson argues that Gower's use of this voicing is distinctive in that Gower includes several poems in which the women complain "not just that her lover has left her nor even merely that his promises were false, but that he has had multiple loves of which she was only one," and, moreover, that Gower treats this failing "more as a moral than as an emotional issue" and that he does so by drawing the language of moral condemnation less from the shared tradition reflected in Machaut "et al" than from his own discourse of moral condemnation in the MO and CA (84-85). He concludes by arguing that "[t]hese women are no less earnest than the spokesperson for moral reform in 'Mirour de l'Omme,' but they have much better reason to be, and Gower perhaps even realized that, in placing them in a setting in which the speaker has so personal a stake, the language that he uses has a much more powerful claim upon our attention than it does in 'Mirour,' and the ethic that it supports is for that reason all the more compelling" (97). [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter. Published Nicholson, Peter. "Gower's Ballades for Women." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 79-97. Gower Subject Cinkante Balades Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Ballades for Women. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Published Carlson, David R. "Gower's Beast Allegories in the 1391 Visio Anglie." Philological Quarterly 87 (2008), pp. 257-75. ISSN 0031-7977 Review The Visio Anglie that constitutes the first book of "Vox Clamantis" depicts the peasants as beasts in two not entirely consistent senses, Carlson explains. In the vision itself, the dreamer sees not humans but beasts of burden which are then transformed into monstrous versions of themselves. The representation of the peasants as beasts, Carlson points out, was a widespread topos serving to justify their repression and servitude, while in fact also representing the daily conditions under which they lived. The second trope is found in the prose heading to the Visio and in the verse that precedes the beginning of the dream, which Carlson suggests were added after the fact. Here Gower "apologetically mitigates his chief metaphor" (263): the rebels were humans (thus possessed of reason, and capable of making a different choice) who were transformed into beasts under force of their own vice. Carlson traces the roots of this "ethical-judgmental conceit" (269) to Boethius and Ovid, and notes, most importantly, that it serves to undermine the rationalization of feudalism implicit in the depiction of peasants as beasts by nature. "The mitigating change of conceit in the post-festal prose acknowledges the bad faith of the original verse misrepresentation of the rebels as subhuman; but the mitigation cannot eliminate or expunge. The fact remained that the feudal political economy was itself inhumane, treating human beings as unequal, reducing some to non-human status, the status of thingness, for exploitation." In a passage in which Gower gives voice to the rebels' complaints (ll. 693-96), he "acknowledges common humanity and calls oppression by its proper name. . . . Gower's vision-nightmare is an act of aestheticizing political will, properly anaesthetizing too, perhaps: while articulating the justice of the threat that the 1381 Social Revolt posed, willfully also still to deride it and its bestial or bestialized agents" (270-71). [PN. 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/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Gower's Beast Allegories in the 1391 Visio Anglie. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Stadolnik, Joe. Published Stadolnik, Joe. "Gower's Bedside Manner." New Medieval Literatures 17 (2017): 150-74. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review Stadolnik demonstrates through multiple citations from a range of medieval medical writers including Walter of Cantilupe, John of Arderne, Arnald of Villanova, and the penitential author Laurent d'Orléans ("Somme le Roi"), that "Clerical and lay discourses of confession articulated a form of dialogic examination that proceeded as measured and discerning talk of spiritual disease, and was thus akin to the inquisitive method of a skilled doctor" (151). This method incorporated "good and honest tales . . . to provoke laughter, tales of the Bible, and tragedies" that "share equal status as rudiments of useful medical narration" (165). For Stadolnik, it is this connection of medical and Confessional talk that provides Gower with the frame structure of the "Confessio Amantis": "Amans professes to suffer from lovesickness. Venus soon refers him to Genius . . . to confess" (151). Thus, "Amans's lovesickness attracts Venus's concerned--and explicitly medical--attentions" (165). Stadolnik likens Gower to a "confabulator," one who "must inform his practice with a familiar kind of expert discernment, answerable to both literary sensibility and pragmatic, medical savoir-faire. The confabulator must be a deft versifier who can tailor verse forms to the occasion, and employ rhetorical strategies of decoration and amplification to good effect." (167) Gower's frame follows these sightlines but, in order to extend the curative effects of the fiction to his readers, he develops "a genre concept of its own which specifies to readers how to use the text" (169). It is a "genre" Gower adapted from what Stadolnik (quoting Julie Orlemanski) takes as common readerly "habitus" in the Middle Ages, i.e., "florilegia, collections of exempla, and miscellaneous manuscript compilations which invite 'eclectic performances of reading'" (170). Since the confabulator is under no constraint to shape his narrations beyond a moment-to-moment need, and since such disconnected "performances of reading" were what medieval readers were used to, "Readers are invited not to read [the CA] from the beginning to . . . end but to ransack it for the literary experience they want, or need, or both." (171). Presumably this is curative; in any event, "In this way [Gower] recommends himself as a confabulator to princes . . . and for those of his readers who are mere subjects, he encourages a readerly practice that can simulate expertly that eclectic practice of confabulation" (174). Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Bedside Manner. 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 Author/Editor Author/Editor Flannery, Mary C. Published Flannery, Mary C. "Gower's Blushing Bird, Philomela's Transforming Face." postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 8 (2017), 35-50. ISSN 2040-5960; 2040-5979. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Flannery's essay considers "what happens when a blushing human is transformed into an animal" (36). Flannery focuses on Philomela's concern about others' ability to see her shame through her blushing face even after she has undergone her transformation into a nightingale. Flannery argues that Gower's "Tale of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela" (in CA, V) "expands upon the theme of avian transformation in order to show how Philomela's ultimate nightingale form offers her an escape from the social and emotional consequences of her rape." (37) Through such expansion, Philomela is the locus of human and animal emotional experience. Flannery then discusses the depiction of animal emotion and expression in the Middle Ages, demonstrating that animals, particularly birds, may share in the emotional range of humans. Flannery illustrates Philomela's "proleptic birdiness" (40), which blurs her human and animal characteristics before and after her transformation. Gower's tale "realizes the avian potential she already possessed" (40). Metamorphosis for Gower was an opportunity for him to investigate the emotional impact caused by it as much as the ways in which the transformation reflects character. Flannery suggests Philomela's loss of her human face allows her to hide her blush, the social signifier of the rape she has experienced, which prevents her from reliving this trauma when others would see perceive her blushing. Gower's retelling of this myth, Flannery concludes, transforms it into "a story about the relationship between faces (Philomela's human face, Philomela's avian face) and 'face,' that which Philomela has lost so completely that her 'schame . . . mai noght be lassed,' even if no man will now be able to tell (V.5953)" (48). [JS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Blushing Bird, Philomela's Transforming Face. 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 Grady asks us to consider Gower's account in the original Prologue of CA of his chance encounter with Richard II as they were both being rowed upon the river as a fiction constructed by the author both to flatter the king and to aggrandize his own relation with him. The passage has its roots, Grady notes, in several earlier texts: first, as Yeager and Astell observe, in the account of Arion in Book IV of the Fasti that Gower alludes to again at the end of the Prologue; but also in the historical record of another less happy encounter on the river between Richard and Archbishop Courtenay in March, 1385, which ended with Richard drawing his sword and chasing the Archbishop from his boat; in Gower's own advice on controlling his angry impulses in his epistle to the king in Book VI of VC; in the image of the rudderless ship in the VC Prologue; and in the episode in 1381 when Richard set out to meet the rebels on his barge and then changed his mind before disembarking, angering the rebels and provoking their invasion of the city. Each of these is rewritten in the CA Prologue in a "recuperative gesture designed to rescue the king from an already established reputation for irascibility and violence of temper" (4), showing the king at peace, at leisure, and in control both of himself and of his kingdom, and replacing the rebels with the image of the loyal poet. Grady's essay is a particular pleasure to read. Along the way, he draws upon the appealing picture of playwright and queen in the movie "Shakespeare in Love" in order to argue that our wish to believe in the truth of the river meeting derives from our own fondest fantasies about the relation between poet and patron; and he pauses several times to comment in choral fashion, in passages printed in italics, on his own New Historicist methodology and on the tactics that he uses to disarm objections to his argument. (The only tactic that he doesn't comment on is the most disarming one of all, which is this metacommentary.) "Shakespeare in Love" is self-consciously fiction, of course, and Gower's Prologue still only presumably so. One has to pause, moreover, over the ease with which Grady equates "historicizing" a passage with rendering it historically suspect: that it serves all the purposes that Grady describes does not prove that the event in question did not take place, unless nothing ever happens as one wishes. By a different reading, the historical record of the earlier encounter between the Archbishop and the king makes Gower's account of a river meeting all the more plausible. Grady does force us to reconsider our understanding of this passage, however, and if not to dismiss it, at least to give more thought both to why it is included and to the way in which the event is represented in Gower's poem. [PN; Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 22.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Grady, Frank Published Grady, Frank. "Gower's Boat, Richard's Barge, and the True Story of the Confessio Amantis: Text and Gloss." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44 (2002), pp. 1-15. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Boat, Richard's Barge, and the True Story of the Confessio Amantis: Text and Gloss Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gastle finds a "mercantile undercurrent" and a preoccupation with "the artistic production of cultural capital" (183) in Gower's reference to his own "besynesse" in the different versions of the CA Prologue, in the poet's comparison of his own work to that of bees in the accompanying marginal note in some MSS, and in the setting of the first version, with its account of Gower's encounter with Richard II on the Thames, the "economic and political centre" (183) of medieval London. He also sees Gower's tale of Florent as an "education in marital commodification" that is "an extension of the interest in artistic work as labour delineated in the Prologue" (189), an interest that was recognized by Chaucer and extended, not just in WBT, which "plays out its narrator's anxiety regarding trade, women's role in economic activity and, perhaps most importantly, conjugal debt" (190), but also in the portrait of the Wife of Bath herself, whose "body is commodified through her five marriages" (190). Both poets' tales, while adhering in varying degrees to the conventions of romance, represent a late medieval "intrusion of fiscal reality upon courtly ideals" (194). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gastle, Brian Published Gastle, Brian. "Gower's Business: Artistic Production of Cultural Capital and the Tale of Florent." In John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition. Ed. Dutton, Elisabeth, and Hines, John, and Yeager, R.F. Cambridge: Brewer, 2010, pp. 182-95. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Business: Artistic Production of Cultural Capital and the Tale of Florent 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 2010 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 Author/Editor Author/Editor Schueler, Donald G Published Schueler, Donald G. "Gower's Characterization of Genius in the Confessio Amantis." Modern Language Quarterly 33 (1972), pp. 240-256. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review Schueler argues that a proper understanding of the CA (including its literary merit) depends upon the allegorical function of Genius. Whereas many critics see Genius as hopelessly stuck between Christian morality and courtly love, Schueler suggests that he is not the spokesman for courtly love to begin with. The apparent contradiction between God and love is resolved once we recognize that Genius stands for natural procreation and works for a Venus who in turn serves Nature, the "handmaiden of God" (245). In the tradition Gower inherits from Jean de Meun and Alain of Lille, Genius interprets love from the perspective of Christian morality. This also explains the various apparent digressions in the CA: "the priest's most compelling purpose ... is to draw these parallels between the laws governing human passion and those governing other aspects of moral behavior" (248). Genius does not contradict himself, but "contradicts a set of scholarly preconceptions about what allegorical love poetry should be" (248). [CvD] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Characterization of Genius in the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1972 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 For Nowlin, the passage in CA 4.2362-2745 that Macaulay headed "The Uses of Labour" actually consists of three separate "chronicles of invention," detailing "the greatest 'inventions' of human culture" (183), and these chronicles, he argues, "allow Gower to speak to the historical project of the "Confessio" as a whole--that is, the historical project of rewriting narratives of the past in order to help restore a fallen present" (183). Gower reveals his interest in historiography and his awareness that "'history' itself is a discursive construction" (184) throughout his works, but particularly in the "Visio" in VC Book 1 and also elsewhere in CA, where he claims "the form as well as the matter of history" (185). The chronicle form does pose a certain dilemma, however, for while offering instructive examples from the past, it also suggests inevitable decay, contrary to Gower's own purpose, as illustrated in the discussion of "gentilesse" that precedes the passage in Book 4 that Nowlin examines. "This, then, is the problem for Gower the chronicler: How can a poet activate the productive aspects of the chronicle form without reintegrating its potentially corrosive elements?" (188). The answer lies in Gower's imitation of "practices in late medieval English chronicles that embed within a historiographic expression a dramatization of the processes of invention. The productive, imaginative, and ultimately generative work of invention counteracts the corrupting effects of chronicle narratives" (188). The model is provided by Ranulf Higden's "Polychronicon" and Trevisa's translation, which offer a model of "invention" both in their principles of selection and arrangement and in the invitation to the reader to participate in the historiographic process. In Book 4, "Gower carefully works through the conflation of historiography and invention characteristic of the "Polychronicon." There, he locates and enacts a compositional process that works to restore the productive potential of the chronicle form and estrange that form from the movement toward discord demonstrated by the history of 'gentilesse'" (192). The details of Nowlin's account of that process cannot adequately be summarized here. In brief, "Gower begins in the first chronicle of invention by emphasizing the form and labor of historiographic production, then by narrating the simultaneous emergence of poetry and historiography from the chronicle of cultural development" (192). Alchemy seems to offer "an analogue for poetic invention" that might be able to "'invent' a way out of the corrosive chronicle form established in the history of 'gentilesse.' But the opposite turns out to be the case" because of the failure of modern alchemists to match their predecessors (195). "Alchemy represents at once the failure of historiographic narration and productive invention" (196). "The final chronicle in book 4 is something of a restart. It focuses specifically on 'our Marches hiere' (4.2633), that is, the Roman tradition that produced Latin grammar, rhetoric, and ultimately Ovid--and by extension, the 'Confessio Amantis'" (197). The operating principle is "congruite" (4.2646): "the Roman chronicle operates through an appositional, congruous organization that combines the tenets of poetic invention with chronicle form. Gower encodes the process of poetic composition into the structure of the Roman chronicle, replacing chronology with inventional topics. He thereby replaces the temporal discord that characterizes the progression of chronicles with a structural system that, by definition, encourages discovery, choice, and possibility" (198). "Here, then, Gower generates a new kind of English poetry, one that invests the chronicle form with a vitality that would seem to have productive consequences for the invention of both historiography and poetry" (199). In conclusion, "These chronicles reveal Gower's working through the central historical problem for the "Confessio"--the effort to salvage the form of historiography along with its matter, but in a 'newe' way. . . . Adapting a fourteenth-century chronicle practice and applying it to his long poem about love, Gower foregrounds the mechanism of poetic and historiographic composition and transforms the force of codified historical progression into productive poetic creation. His chronicles prompt reflection and investigation, but they also suggest how a massive English poem like the "Confessio" might be imagined as self-sustaining, and capable of becoming a kind of imaginative algorithm for poetic posterity. The labor of an English poet-chronicler, the Confessio itself becomes a new kind of chronicle that invents history rather than a poem that merely uses it" (201). [PN. Copyright. JGN 33.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Nowlin, Steele Published Nowlin, Steele. "Gower's Chronicles of Invention: Historiography and Productive Poetry in Book 4 of the Confessio Amantis." Modern Philology 110 (2012), pp. 182-201. ISSN 0026-8232 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Chronicles of Invention: Historiography and Productive Poetry in Book 4 of the Confessio Amantis 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 From Cressman's abstract: "Examination of the internal structure of John Gower's 'Cinkante Balades' shows their organization to be more complex than previously recognized. The ballades are arranged into nine groups identified by the possession of common themes and internal linking devices. The nine thematic groups are placed within framing ballades dedicating the sequence to Henry IV on his coronation in 1399. From mutual affection to angry separation, the successive thematic groups form a sequence representing the inadequacy of earthly love, 'fin amour,' within a courtly setting. This view is presented within a general philosophical survey of love in which 'fin amour' and 'vrai amour,' brotherly love, are subsumed within 'bon amour,' or divine love . . . . Analysis of the style, form, and larger structural patterns of the 'Balades' shows significant similarities with [French court] lyrics, especially those of Machaut and Froissart. However, the complex thematic arrangement and the philosophical overview of love to be found in the 'Cinkante Balades; are unapproached elsewhere in French or English poetry of the fourteenth century." Author/Editor Author/Editor Cressman, Russell. Published Cressman, Russell. "Gower's Cinkante Balades and French Court Lyrics." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1983. 248 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A44.04 (1983). Full text accessible at ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (restricted); accessed February 21, 2022. 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 Gower's Cinkante Balades and French Court Lyrics. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1983 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 claimed the status of an auctor at CA Prol.4, but exactly how did he engage with classical, pre-Christian "auctores," a major issue for his contemporaries as well? His classical learning was "uneven," often second-hand, and not up to humanistic par (268, 273). The VC is a patchwork of Ovidian passages lifted verbatim, a practice recently defended as "cento" (268-69). He knew well, and skillfully interpreted, the ethical teachings of Aristotle through later works of advice to rulers in the Stoic tradition, including Cicero's "De Officiis" (270-71). He seems not to have known Virgil or Statius (273). It was Ovid, whose works he knew virtually by heart, who inspired "Gower's literary reinvention" (275) and vast original achievement in the CA (274-76). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew. Published Galloway, Andrew. "Gower's Classicizing Vocations." In Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 266-80. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Classicizing Vocations. 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 Two penitential manuals, Handlyng Synne and Myrc's Instructions for Parish Priests are compared to CA in order "to point out the extensive use of penitential material in the poem--too extensive to be ignored." A didactic reading of the poem permits many of the 'digressions' (like Book VII and the extensive courtly elements) to be seen as parts of a consistent whole, the purpose of which is to show that "proper Christian behavior leads to a reasoned, ordered universe." [PN. Copyright the John Gower Society. JGN 4.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kinneavy, Gerald Published Kinneavy, Gerald. "Gower's Confessio Amantis and the Penitentials." Chaucer Review 19 (1984), pp. 144-161. ISSN 0009-2002 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Confessio Amantis and the Penitentials. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Penn State University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed