1 100 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 Examines Gower's pronunciation by comparing his rhymes with those of Chaucer, and the language of both poets with London documents and the Middle English bible. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Fahrenberg, K. Published Fahrenberg, K. "Zur Sprache der Confessio Amantis." Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 89 (1892): 389-412. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Zur Sprache der Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1892 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Describes a manuscript not mentioned by Macaulay in his "Complete Works of John Gower." [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Förster, M. Published Förster, M. "Zur mittelenglische Handschriftenkunde." Archiv für das Studien der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 110 (1903): 103. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Zur mittelenglische Handschriftenkunde. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1903 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Demonstrates that the Spanish Confision del Amante was actually based on a Portuguese translation of CA. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Pietsch, K. Published Pietsch, K. "Zur Frage nach der Portugiesischen Übersetzung von Gowers Confessio Amantis." Manly Anniversary Studies in Language and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923, pp. 323-27. 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 Zur Frage nach der Portugiesischen Übersetzung von Gowers Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1923 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Textual critique of Birch-Hirschfeld edition (1909) of the late-medieval Spanish translation of CA; broadens speculations about the Portuguese original of the Spanish text. [RFY1981]. Published Pietsch, Karl. "Zum Text der Confision del Amante por Joan Goer." Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 46 (1926): 428-44. 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 Zum Text der Confision del Amante por Joan Goer. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1926 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Argues strongly, on textual evidence, that Gower did not use as a source of CB the version of the "Partanope" which R. Wülker (1889) mentions, since Gower's poem was written perhaps a century earlier. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Kölbing, C. Published Kölbing, C. "Zu Partanope of Blois." Englische Studien 14 (1890): 435-37. Gower Subject Cinkante Balades Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Zu Partanope of Blois. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1890 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Notes that Gower uses "Partanope of Blois" as a source for CB 43. Prints English version of "Partanope" from two manuscripts. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Wülker, R. Published Wülker, R. "Zu Partanope of Blois." Anglia: Zeitschrift fur Englische Philologie 12 (1889): pp. 607-20. Gower Subject Cinkante Balades Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Zu Partanope of Blois. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1889 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Tiete, Georg. Published Tiete, Georg. Zu John Gowers Confessio Amantis. Dissertation. University of Breslau, 1889. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Review A lexicon, generally following OED format, viz. word, definition, example. Citations are keyed to Pauli's 1857 edition of CA. Words selected for study are intended to be those Gower was first to use in English; thus, as one might expect from the date of the study, there are some inaccuracies brought to light by more recent scholarship. [RFY1981]. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Zu John Gowers Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1889 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Fisher surveys fourteenth-century beliefs about the status of the aristocracy. After reading Wyclif and Langland in the light of Roman and Augustinian views of social hierarchy and government, Fisher observes that what Gower adds to the picture is the concept of the "common good." Its importance for the subject of aristocracy is demonstrated by Ewart Lewis, who writes, "The emphasis which medieval writers placed upon the superiority of common good to private good was a response to the real medieval problem of persuading arrogant individualism to give way to community consciousness" (147). Gower connects the common good with a common law for all. Since equality before the law is consonant with Roman and Christian tenets of the natural equality of all men, such a position speaks of Gower's "conservative moralism" (148). Yet Fisher adds that in promoting equality Gower reveals a kind of ideological blind-spot, for "just as Wyclif did not intend that his arguments for ecclesiastical socialism should alter the position or prerogatives of the secular aristocracy, and Langland could perceive the uselessness of hereditary aristocrats and still regret their being pushed around by the rising middle class, so Gower argued for law and justice without ever realizing that these very agencies would help destroy the social hierarchy he took so completely for granted" (148). Both in the VC and the CA Gower's argument for the importance of law places a great burden on the king to obey the law and administer it responsibly. As a result, Gower pays less attention to the aristocracy, being "content merely to take the existence of the nobility for granted" (150). Fisher's piece ends with an analysis of Pearl, where we witness "a heavenly state of equality impossible of attainment in mortal society" (152), and with the final observation that whereas Wyclif and Pearl apply a different standard to the organization of divine and temporal society, Langland and Gower are willing to use the same standard for both. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fisher, John H Published Fisher, John H. "Wyclif, Langland, Gower, and the Pearl Poet on the Subject of Aristocracy." In Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor Albert Croll Baugh. Ed. Leach, MacEdward. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1961, pp. 139-157. 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 Wyclif, Langland, Gower, and the Pearl Poet on the Subject of Aristocracy Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available U of Pennsylvania P, 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 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 Smith offers an analysis of the "fourteenth-century historical imaginary" as it works itself out in the versions of the "Custance legend" (195)--primarily Chaucer's, but she also acknowledges those of John Gower and Nicholas Trevet, largely as counterpoints to Chaucer. Smith suggests that the narrator's various interjections foregrounding questions of history and tale transmission may represent "real sites of debate about belief and the role of literary narrative in belief about the past" (197). Hence her shift to an overview of the tale's representation of the "Anglo-Saxon" past, with quick examinations of Trevet's and Gower's versions before contrasting them to Chaucer's. Without directly engaging with the complex critical history of the supposition, she invokes the idea of the CA being commissioned by Richard II--drawing the conclusion that whether we believe the story or not, it suggests the significance of early historical material to English identity, "a bok for Engelondes sake" (199). She suggests that "early history was tied undeniably to the present" for Gower (200), before briefly discussing late fourteenth-century uses of early English figures like Edward the Confessor (and presumably Custance) to frame a national self-image, grounded in an England prior to the Hundred Years' War. Drawing on language from Chaucer's "Complaint to His Purse" as an approach to the historical contextualization of English kingship, Smith then argues that the use of Custance in the "Man of Law's Tale" similarly sets up an ideal justifying power "by right of her lineage and by right of her virtue and merit" (202). Here she addresses Gower and Chaucer together in their relationships with Richard II and Henry IV who, she presumes, had similar interests in early English history. Her focus then returns to consider the Man of Law's interjections more specifically. She suggests an important difference between Chaucer's and Gower's versions of the story. Gower and Trevet both "offer plausible explanations" for the points the Man of Law questions: e.g., the believability of details (like why Custance wasn't murdered at her wedding in Syria) (203). This, Smith argues, positions the "Man of Law's Tale" as overtly rhetorical in its adaptation of its sources, which in turn allows Chaucer to push his reader toward a particular model of reading. In Chaucer's hands, Custance thus becomes "an interpretive tool" (205), as well as a narrative character. Ultimately, then, Gower serves largely as a foil for Chaucer in this reading. Smith works throughout the article with the fanciful idea of Chaucer performing the tale "even to his friend Gower" (197) somewhat invoking the old idea of a conflict between the poets around this tale without necessarily engaging with it in depth. This occasionally leads to fanciful moments: "If we then imagine Gower as a target audience in a highly self-conscious tale, parts of it then must be read in the spirit of a literary romp" (208-9). Certainly her various points along the way make more sense than not, but one cannot help but have the feeling that Smith is reading into Gower and Chaucer's relationship in a way that may not be fully grounded. Her sense of Chaucer's motivations in his adaptation of Gower can be very conjectural. [RAL. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Smith, Kathleen. Published Smith, Kathleen. "Writing, Rewriting, and Disrupting the Anglo-Saxon Past in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale." In Jay Paul Gates and Brian O'Camb, eds. Remembering the Medieval Present: Generative Uses of England's Pre-Conquest Past, 10th to 15th Centuries (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019), pp. 195-214 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 Writing, Rewriting, and Disrupting the Anglo-Saxon Past in Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale." 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 Leff, Amanda M Published Leff, Amanda M. "Writing, Gender, and Power in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Exemplaria 20 (2008), pp. 28-47. ISSN 1041-2573 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review "The Confessio like [Chaucer's] Wife of Bath's Prologue explores the role of texts in gendered power negotiations," Leff writes (29). "Gower probes the tensions between authoritative literate women and the social norms that constantly threaten to suppress or control them. Men in power attempt to contain female expression, and women in turn appropriate writing to challenge the dominant social order and assert their own authority. By revealing the potential subversiveness of women's writing, Gower's Confessio generates the cultural anxiety that it simultaneously reflects" (31). Araxarathen provides the negative example: the epitaph on her and Iphis's tomb "permanently rewrites Araxarathen in Iphis' terms" and thus "enforces women's subordinate, voiceless place in society" (33). Four other women in the poem use writing somewhat more successfully, "to respond to a threat by a male authority figure. Philomela writes in response to her rape and mutilation at the hands of Tereus; Canace writes in reaction to her abandonment by her brother and the abuse of her father; Arcestrate writes to affirm her choice of mate and to reject the suitors that her father selects for her; Thaise employs her knowledge of books to escape forced prostitution. In all these cases, gender plays a key role in the power struggle in which the women engage: they employ writing to counteract familiar, physical, or social limitations linked to their gender. Rather than accepting their subordination, the women take up their pens and their books to contest the status quo, and they are able to re-negotiate their positions in social networks by means of their literacy . . . . Despite their ability to act in commanding ways, however, Gower's women do not seriously challenge the gender norms perpetuated by the Confessio Amantis and medieval English society. Indeed, their exercises in power typically affirm rather than negate traditional gender roles . . . . Gower's women . . . do not subvert the social hierarchy, but simply seek more favorable positions within it. In the end, their authoritative acts of writing do less to promote the advancement of women than to reinforce the transformative power of writing itself" (43). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Writing, Gender, and Power in Gower's Confessio Amantis. 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 Review "This dissertation explores attitudes toward literary form in fourteenth-century London's trilingual culture and what it means to package science, politics, and social upheaval as literature. John Gower, the author of substantial poems in the three languages of his day treating topics as varied as clerical greed, aristocratic vice, rebellion, astronomy, and alchemy, writes at the intersection of literature, history, and science. Though called a historian and a compiler, Gower was foremost a poet whose political, cultural, and scientific writings grew out of his sense of poetry as a whole built from smaller pieces. Division was a force Gower feared, yet exploited. Though Gower critiques the broken political body, most famously in his treatment of the 1381 Rebellion but also throughout his many writings on politics, division could also signify marvelous design. To Gower, the music of the mythical harper Arion is not pure magic but a technical product of 'mesure,' a word signifying notes organized in a pattern. Similarly, the stars of the zodiac are divided into signs, and alchemy, though it transforms diverse metals, requires divided elements before it can unite them through an elaborate process of refinement. Gower examines the sciences' negotiation between division and harmony as a way of articulating his own poetic project. Division is a theme throughout his corpus, physically rendered by the metaphor of the body--be it zodiacal, alchemical, political, bestial, incestuous, or verbal--and thus the body's valences are multiplied by examining its parts as well as its whole structure. Division is not always something to be feared; it can be a way to know an object more fully by examining its detailed composition. Broadly speaking, the chapters investigate Gower's poetic experiment with parts and wholes. Chapters One and Two explore the parts and wholes of language. Meaningful play in rhyme words can underscore words within words and differences in words that appear the same. Syllabic play, meanwhile, allows a poet to build words from pieces. Chapter Three investigates Gower's attitude toward alchemy, the process of converting base metals to gold, or multiplicity to singularity. While Gower lauds this science, he is aware of language's limitations in engaging in this process; words generate more words, and translations lose the secrets of older texts composed in other languages. In Chapter Two I discussed the bodies of the 1381 rebels, allegorized as beasts with hybrid forms, while Chapter Four explores processes of change in composite bodies, including the zodiac man, Nebuchadnezzar's Statue of Precious Metals, and the Greek pantheon as an anatomical man. Chapter Five contrasts Chaucer's and Gower's literary presentation of astronomy; Chaucer's 'House of Fame' seeks authority in literature, while Gower's praise of science is for its own sake. Gower's treatise is given a literary spin in the manner in which Gower writes of the constellations as objects that operate as couplets, both of which engage in meaningful repetition and productive duality. Chapter Six treats linguistic composite bodies through the theme of incest in riddles as developed in Gower's 'Mirour de l'Omme' and 'Confessio Amantis.' Author/Editor Author/Editor Zarins, Kimberly Published Zarins, Kimberly. "Writing the literary zodiac: Division, unity, and power in John Gower's poetics." PhD thesis, Cornell University, 2009. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification 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 Writing the literary zodiac: Division, unity, and power in John Gower's poetics 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 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 Nicholson, Peter. Published Nicholson, Peter. "Writing the 'Cinkante Balades'." 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. 306-28. Gower Subject Cinkante Balades Confessio Amantis Review This essay discusses CB within the rich tradition of late medieval French ballades (especially the collections and numbered sequences) of Machaut, de Granson, the anonymous Pennsylvania chansonnier, and more. "Gower's relation to the tradition is complex. While he clearly adopted many of the most recognizable conventions of form, diction, and theme . . . the work also has some distinctive qualities that set it apart from every earlier collection of 'balades'" (307). The most original feature of the CB may be its near-ubiquitous use of the envoy, a short stanza concluding the ballade which addresses the poem "from one person to another . . . What is perhaps most unique about that communication is that in 35 of these 48 poems, it takes place explicitly in writing" (314-15)--hence, the title of the essay. This use of direct address has an intriguing variety of effects, for example: the lover may write what he doesn't dare to say in person (318), and/or "re-enact" as well as describe the futility of his verbal appeal (321). As a dramatic device, the envoy promotes "our awareness of the addressee" (321), thus recording a relationship (happy or otherwise), rather than the usual complaint of a lover in isolation (321-24). An exception to the pattern is the highly original "Balade" 46, where the woman persona muses on her silent pleasure at hearing her beloved praised by others, with no suggestion that her intimate thoughts were meant to be shared (319). The final ballade, addressed to the Virgin Mary, resembles the ending of the CA in moving the sequence beyond earthly love, while not rejecting it (325). [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 Writing the "Cinkante Balades." 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 Grinnell opens her essay with the COVID-19 pandemic in the foreground, advocating for poetry as a healing narrative community. She admits that Gower might be a surprising choice of poet to turn to for levity, but Grinnell contends "that the 'Confessio' does indeed create a space for narrative healing within the acknowledgement of mortality." Grinnell applies the work of Dan P. McAdams on the narrative identity of the self to the CA, claiming that it is applicable due to the way in which Amans constructs himself through stories and personal confession. Grinnell offers close readings that examine how laughter works in the tales, concluding, though, that the CA ultimately fails to produce humor that creates spontaneous joy and laughter. Turning to Book VIII, Grinnell suggests Venus's laughter as a turning point for relief for Amans from the pains of love. She argues, "This ending, in fact, which so compellingly thrusts the narrator away from his obsession and finally restores his reason, is happy in the sense that the character is finally freed from the painful desires of the flesh which have so tormented him." By the end of the poem, Grinnell claims, Amans has achieved a narrative identity that McAdams argues is the foundation to forming the self. She concludes, "[Amans] is healed not just by the removal of love's arrow, but also by becoming both poet and poetry." [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Grinnell, Natalie. Published Grinnell, Natalie. "Writing into Hope: Laughter, Sadness, and Healing in John Gower's Confessio Amantis" Accessus 7, no. 1 (2022): n.p. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Writing into Hope: Laughter, Sadness, and Healing in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Justice, Steven. Published Justice, Stephen. "Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381." Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994 Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Review Justice includes a very brief discussion of Gower's allegorical vision of the Peasants' Revolt in Book 1 of VC in this subtle and often fascinating study of the ways in which the rebellion was represented in the writings both of its participants and of those who either were or sympathized with its victims. Gower, of course, figures among the latter. Having appropriated for himself the voice of the "people" in composing what are now Books 2-7 of VC, Gower faced a popular uprising that both undermined his claim and threatened to absorb him. In order to protect both his project as poet and his carefully constructed political stance, he added the visio in Book 1, which is most notable for its submersion of the voice of the rebels in the braying and bellowing of the animals into which Gower imagines them transformed. "The rising forced Gower anxiously to disassociate his 'voice crying out' from the voices that cried out in June; by declaring himself a proxy for all those the rebels attacked and by prefacing the rest of the poem with his experience of rebel violence, he was able to assert that he did indeed speak in the common voice -- of its victims" (p. 213). Justice interprets Chaucer's only reference to the rising as an even more artful evasion. Elaborating on a suggestion first made by Ian Bishop, he reads the chase scene in NPT as a direct parody of the visio in VC, accessible, however, only to the small group of readers in the poets' immediate circle who would recognize the subtlest taunting at Gower's expense. Chaucer's only direct engagement with the revolt thus shows him "dispelling and forgetting its threat in the minutely textual encoding of a coterie joke" (pp. 230-31). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of California Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Expands upon Ernst Curtius's topos of the "mundus inversus," aided by Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of the carnivalesque and textual dialogism, to explore the how "modulating inversions" result in "playful multiplicity" in "medieval texts drawn from various European traditions," often generated through "irony, antithesis and paradox" (from Sabadash's abstract), and here assessed in fifteenth-century German carnival plays; the "Narrenliteratur" (primarily Sebastian Brant); the twelfth-century Latin "Ysengrimus"; the Old French "Roman de Renard"; Wittenwiler's fifteenth-century German "Ring"; Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." Sabadash's discussion of Gower (pp. 141-71) passes quickly over VC as an apocalyptic "vision of universal disorder" (142), while she identifies in more detail a variety of themes and structural techniques of inversion, duplicity, and disorder in CA. Despite earlier critics' efforts to find unity in a movement from courtly to Christian love in the poem, the "teasing incongruities" of CA, Sabadash tells us, "playfully upset all attempts to establish a coherent meaning"; "its multifarious tales ultimately fail to offer a consistent morality and offer instead, like the 'Roman de la Rose,' a complex mirror in which is reflected the many faces of love" (162). To close her discussion, she explores the ambiguities and ambivalences of the character of Genius in both CA and VC, concluding that the CA "demonstrates the capacity of the 'upside-down' topos to invert and interrogate itself." [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sabadash, Deborah Margaret. Published Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Toronto, 1993. Dissertation Abstracts International 55 (1994): 561A. Full-text accessible at ProQuest Dissertations and Theses; accessed February 3, 2023. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis 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 Worlds Upside-down: Inversive Structures in Late Medieval Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In his dissertation Brent offers a "sustained reading" of Trevet's 'Cronicles' "as a text in its own right, with its own strategies of language and form, and its own historical context," locating the 'Cronicles' among early fourteenth-century "Plantagenet efforts" to respond to "contemporary political uncertainty" and reflecting "methods of conceptualizing and articulating the nation in religious terms" (iii). In chapter three, Brent assesses Trevet's narrative of Constance as central to the formal and thematic unity of the 'Cronicles.' He argues sensibly that the Constance narrative should be read within the entirety of the 'Cronicles,' not isolated or synopsized for the sake of comparison with Gower's and Chaucer's stories of Constance. The length, placement, and resonances of Trevet's Constance account in the context of the larger work, Brent argues, compel us to understand it as a rich expression of "the idea that [Constance's] motherhood allows England, through its royal blood, to bring about its own salvation" (163), an idea, he shows then at some length, that was useful in Plantagenet "crusading politics," (245) and valuable as an example of more pervasive late-medieval thinking about history. Chaucer is mentioned much more often than Gower in Brent's treatment of Constance, largely because critical tradition has, he shows, skewed attention to concerns that privilege the "Man of Law's Tale." In at least one instance, however, Brent suggests that study of Trevet might usefully prompt attention to an "underexplored aspect of source study among Chaucerians and critics of Gower, i.e., Trevet's "legal diction" (174).] [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Brent, Jonathan Lawrence. Published Brent, Jonathan Lawrence. "World History in the Tumultuous 1330s: A Study of Nicholas Trevet's Anglo-Norman 'Cronicles.'" Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Toronto, 2021. Dissertation Abstracts International A83.01(E). Full text accessible at https://utoronto.scholaris.ca/home. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource World History in the Tumultuous 1330s: A Study of Nicholas Trevet's Anglo-Norman "Cronicles." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This thesis investigates a particular discourse which conflated ideas of male sexuality and work. It argues that, although this lexical and conceptual elision was not new to the late-medieval period, it was invested with new significance in the particular social and economic climate of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century London. In particular the labour shortages, effected by the demographic crises of earlier fourteenth century, generated a moral fashion for discussions about work as a force for social cohesion. Despite the relevance of women's work to the contemporary economy, social and economic regeneration was often considered to be a male responsibility. In the capital, a particular commission was given to male householders to keep the peace and regulate labour, rendering men's domestic lives central to the administration of social and economic order. This thesis is organized around five major authors of the period--William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Usk, John Gower and Thomas Hoccleve--and considers how their works engaged with this discursive tradition. A strong difference is discerned between the work of Chaucer and that of his near contemporaries. The literary efforts of Langland, Usk, Gower and Hoccleve are demonstrably more anxious about the condition of society and, in their different ways, they represent narrators who are at odds with the systems of masculine ethics they propose. In contrast, Chaucer's narrators are not so central to his poetry and they exist comfortably along side a plurality of other speakers, a plurality which is unchallenged by a unifying moral code. In particular 'The Canterbury Tales' celebrates male enterprise and play in a way which demonstrates an acceptance of contemporary social challenges. At the same time, the characters of Troilus and the Canon's Yeoman are portraits of interior anxiety which operate as a commentary on contemporary moral concerns about male responsibilities." Author/Editor Author/Editor Davis, Isabel Melanie. Published Davis, Isabel Melanie. Work, Sexuality and Urban Domestic Living: Masculinity and Literature, c 1360- c 1420. Ph.D. Dissertation. The University of York, 2002. Dissertation Abstracts International C67.02. Abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. 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 Work, Sexuality and Urban Domestic Living: Masculinity and Literature, c 1360- c 1420. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yee's study draws on modern approaches to dealing with traumatic grief, particularly those of Judith Lewis Herman (1992) and Rita Charon (2006), using them to reconsider "the genre of three fourteenth-century Middle English dream visions, reframing them as illness narrative. Examining John Gower's "Confessio Amantis," "Pearl," and Chaucer's "Book of Duchess," it asks: What is at stake when we rethink these canonical poems as stories about health and illness?" (ix). "At stake" here is not the dream vision genre at large--where the staging of grief is neither a necessary nor intrinsic concern--but what can be learned from and about the three poems when the analytical discourse is psychological grief therapy rather than philosophical consolation or confessional absolution. Yee's approach is fruitful, yielding some broad generalizations as well as particular observations about the poems. She analyzes the protagonists of the works as patients and their interlocutors as doctors, assessing the role of narrative in treating traumatic grief, "imaginative sympathy" (ix) as a therapeutic device, and the "success or failure" (x) of the therapy depicted. A general concern is "Christian confession as a medieval model that reflects key tenets of illness narratives and modern therapy" (26), evidence for Yee that confession is "a premodern basis for talk therapy" (30), despite significant differences between the etiologies of forgiving sin and curing illness, differences which Yee attributes to underlying differences between medieval and modern understandings of cognition. More particularly, Yee's readings of the individual poems find or reveal some surprising, provocative emphases. Reading the frame of CA as Amans' "pathography" (passim), she finds Genius to be an "inattentive physician, one who is too set upon a standard course of treatment to listen to the needs of his patient," while Amans, in his responses to Genius, "shows more awareness and initiative than previous scholarship has allowed" (50). The revelation late in the CA that Amans is the elderly John Gower, Yee argues, also reveals the deeper truth that the protagonist suffers, not only from lovesickness (here a form of grief), but also from memory disruption and dissociation. At the end of the CA, Venus leads Amans to enact "an experiential pedagogy, one that is more interactive than Genius' more traditional, sermonizing didacticism" (111), allowing Amans to "face the truth of his forgotten identity" (115), experience an "inverted rebirth" (124), and ultimately, produce the pathography that Yee finds in the CA itself. The confessional/therapeutic frame of CA is Yee's primary focus, rather than individual tales, but she integrates her discussion of the Tale of Constantine and Sylvester, an examination previously published in South Atlantic Review (2015). In Yee's readings, the "Pearl"-maiden is even less successful than is Genius as a therapist; Chaucer's dreamer in BD, more successful than either. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yee, Pamela M. Published Yee, Pamela M. "Words of the Wounded: Traumatic Grief and Narrative Therapy in Middle English Dream Visions." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Rochester, 2022. Dissertation Abstracts International 84.04(E). Fully available online via https://urresearch.rochester.edu/. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Words of the Wounded: Traumatic Grief and Narrative Therapy in Middle English Dream Visions. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Itô claims to have located 2,356 examples of wordplay in MO (combining "adnominatio," "traductio," and "significatio"), discussing a large number of "interesting examples" here as "the visible peak of an iceberg" (252). He clarifies his categories and, by means of extensive examples, shows how in Gower "often uses wordplay to sharpen the semantic or conceptual contrast, aiming at logical clarity and satirical poignancy" (268-69). At times, Itô tells us, Gower repeats "the same word or cognate forms," evidently "pleasing and persuasive" to his audience, while at others, he uses wordplay to heighten "lyrical or emotive scenes." Wordplay in MO is often concentrated in rhyme position and, in some instances, capitalizes "contracted on forms peculiar to French (e.g., 'dire-d'Ire')" (269). [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Itô, Masayoshi. Published Itô, Masayoshi. "Wordplay in Mirour de l'Omme." In Itô's "John Gower, The Medieval Poet" (Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1976), pp. 250-271. Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) 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 Wordplay in Mirour de l'Omme. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1976 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In the CA, Gower is more limited in his English than in his Latin poetry; thus, he produces fewer puns in CA than elsewhere. Reprinted with slight revision in John Gower: The Medieval Poet (Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1976), pp. 232-49. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Ito, Masayoshi. Published Ito, Masayoshi. "Wordplay in Confessio Amantis." Shiron 13 (1973): 1-18. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Wordplay in Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1973 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Driver makes two claims in her essay: 1) that the "visual representation [of women] in [Pierpont Morgan Library] MS M.126] . . . argues for active female engagement. In example after example, women are shown as central characters in the action as well as being the main speakers in many of Gower's texts). The majority of illuminations in MS M.126 emphasize female agency and intelligence, qualities that still appeal to women readers of Gower's instructive tales" (71-72) and 2) that "in such a book, a queen might see her own reflection. Given the visual evidence provided by MS M.126, the script, the iconography, and the suggestive scribal inscriptions decorating the ascenders and descenders, I strongly suspect it was made for a woman in the circles of Edward IV, most probably for the beautiful Elizabeth Woodville" (107). In support of her arguments she offers ample evidence; includes 15 figures. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Driver, Martha W Published Driver, Martha W. "Women Readers and Pierpont Morgan MS M. 126." In John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts. Ed. Urban, Malte. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009, pp. 71-109. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Women Readers and Pierpont Morgan MS M. 126 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 "The Introduction begins by taking note of John Gower's unusually sympathetic attitude toward women in the 'Confessio Amantis.' It poses the question: was Gower unique in taking such a favorable approach to women, or does he belong to a profeminist current in the didactic literature of the later Middle Ages? The dissertation proposes to focus on one group of texts which were certainly known to Gower, i.e., the popular manuals of religious instruction, particularly Frere Laurent's 'Somme le Roi' and its derivatives. Chapter Two examines the attitude toward women in the religious manuals, with the purpose of discovering whether these treatises contributed to the sexual attitudes of the 'Confessio Amantis.' It is determined that the approach to women in the manuals is very sympathetic. Women are directly addressed as the fellow Christians and spiritual equals of men; the devout soul is regarded as feminine, and feminine traits are presented as admirable qualities of the Christian life; the Virgin Mary is explicitly described as the most exemplary human being who ever lived, and other examples of good women receive respectful attention; matrimony and marital sex are held in great esteem, and ascetic disgust for the body is held at a minimum. Although the existence of bad women is recognized by the manuals, these characters are regarded as examples of sins to avoid and not as typical representatives of women as a class. Chapter Three examines the approach to women in the 'Confessio Amantis' and determines that it has been extensively influenced by the mutual tradition. For every sympathetic view of women in the manuals, significant parallels are discovered in the Confessio.' In addition, the chapter presents extended analyses of four Gowerian short stories, showing in each case how the poet made skillful use of various sources and presented a more favorable view of women than any source. Chapter Four continues by examining one of the finest stories in the 'Confessio,' 'The Tale of King, Wine, Woman, and Truth.' Chapter Five concludes that there is indeed a profeminist current in the didactic lieterature of the later Middle Ages as represented by the manuals and Gower, and it proposes suggestions for further research." [eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burke,Linda Barney. Published Burke, Linda Barney. Women in the Medieval Manuals of Religious Instruction and John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Ph.D. Diss. Columbia University. Dissertation Abstracts International 42.12 (1982): 5114A. 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 Women in the Medieval Manuals of Religious Instruction and John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." 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 While Gower "does nothing to call attention to his literary treatment of women in the Confessio" (239), it is clear that the work's sensitivity and compassion for the limitations of human nature is in part the result of "the almost total absence of negative female stereotypes and antifeminist propaganda in the Confessio" (239). Gower's positive treatment is especially evident in three narratives of women who are traditionally seen as "less than exemplary" (241), namely Xanthippe, Medea, and Anaxarathen. First of all, while the MO tells us only that Xanthippe was angry and contentious with her husband Socrates, the CA provides "some motivation for the wife's foul humor" (241). Gower also does not personify "Cheste" as a woman, and he removes the references to "clubbing or punishing of wives" (242). In context, then, the story serves as an example of a particular sin rather than as an accusation of women in general. Gower's Medea, inherited from Benoît de Sainte-Maure and Guido delle Colonne, has also been transformed. She does not dress up to impress Jason on his arrival (an action condemned by Guido), nor does she scheme with a duenna to seduce Jason in the duplicitous way Benoît describes it. However, while Gower is more sympathetic to young people as they fall in love, he does not idealize Medea's character: "While Medea is innocent and appealing when she first falls in love, something goes wrong with her as the story progresses. At the same time, the sincerity of Jason's initial love serves to emphasize his later weakness and treachery" (247). Since Gower's tale exemplifies "the abuse and misdirection of normal human sexuality" (248), the moral of the story is directed "at both men and women, eliminating antifeminist elements from the story" (248). Finally, in the tale of "Iphis and Araxarathen," the characters' social positions are reversed, and Araxarathen is now a maiden of lowly origins who is no longer described as haughty, and who has a legitimate reason for refusing the love of Iphis. In the end, "Gower's innovation is to divide the responsibility for the disaster [of Iphis' suicide] between the two characters, instead of reproducing a simplistic exemplum of female coldness" (250). Why did Gower alter his opinions of women from those expressed in the MO and the VC? The answer is that in the CA Gower changes his style from strict moral allegory and social satire to a "middel weie" between lust and lore, where his main subject is love, including its positive qualities. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burke, Linda Barney Published Burke, Linda Barney. "Women in John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Mediaevalia 3 (1977), pp. 239-259. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Women in John Gower's Confessio Amantis 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 Lewis's essay contributes to ongoing efforts to rewrite women into English literary history, exploring Gower's depictions of women in "Confessio Amantis" and female reception of the poem and related works. "Mirour de l'Omme" and "Vox Clamantis," Lewis tells us, offer "essentially one-dimensional illustrations" of aspects of "patriarchal or misogynistic discourse" (324), while women in CA are often "intelligent, astute and active in their own and others' interests" (327). Lewis aligns several female characters in CA (Petronella, Thais, and various queens, including Medea) with St. Katherine of Alexandria, the popular cult of whom Lewis documented in a book-length study published in 2000. St. Katherine's popularity enables Lewis to aver that female readers of CA "would have spotted the similarities between her virtues and intelligence" (331) and those of Gower's characters. Lewis attends particularly to how Gower's characters may have appealed to women of elite status, particularly Jacquetta of Luxembourg, Elizabeth Woodville, and Margaret Beaufort--women "who played a role in later medieval English politics" (350) and whose literary interests have been well documented through their ownership of or associations with manuscripts of CA and similar texts. In this way, Lewis includes CA in a "wider 'syllabus' of political and courtly instruction owned by high status women" (346) of the fifteenth century. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lewis, Katherine J. Published Lewis, Katherine J. "Women and Power." In Historians on John Gower. Ed. Stephen H. Rigby, with Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 323-50. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and LIterary Relations Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) 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 Women and Power. 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 The selections in this extraordinarily useful anthology, all in modern English translation, range chronologically from Aristotle to Christine de Pizan, and are divided into eight chapters, "The Roots of Antifeminist Tradition," "The Church Fathers," "The Legacy of the Church Fathers," "The Satirical Tradition in Medieval Latin," "Antifeminist Tales," "Vernacular Adaptations in the Later Middle Ages," "The Wife of Bath," "Responses to Antifeminism," and "A Woman defends Women." The second to last chapter includes (pp. 248-49) a brief excerpt from CA (7.4239-4307, translated in modern English prose), in which Genius argues, contrary to a long tradition that is manifested elsewhere in the anthology, that the man is to blame rather than the woman when he allows himself to be distracted by her beauty. The headnote to the selection suggests that the emphasis on personal responsibility reflected in this passage provides a main theme for the entire poem. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Blamires, Alcuin. Karen Pratt, and C. W. Marx, eds. Published Blamires, Alcuin. Karen Pratt, and C. W. Marx, eds. "Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts." Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Clarendon Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 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 Echard addresses the Latin apparatus of CA that was evidently of Gower's own composition: the glosses in their various forms (the speaker markers, the identification of sources, and the prose summaries of the tales and discursive passages) and the elegiac couplets that are interspersed throughout. She identifies and contests two assumptions that underlie most recent commentary on these portions of the poem: that the Latin passages by their very nature constitute a hegemonic and authoritative discourse, and that glosses, whether marginal or otherwise, always successfully functioned to control the interpretation of the associated text. In CA, she argues, the Latin portions alone offer a variety of voices, contrasting in form, in accessibility, in function, and in reliability, and therefore cannot offer a single stable point of reference, especially on the meaning of the English. "Far from invoking authority," she claims, "Gower's Latin problematizes the question of authority in the Confessio by presenting a reader with several competing authoritative voices, Latin and vernacular, none of which seems capable of taming the text" (p. 7). Or as she puts it elsewhere, "The language of authority exposes the limitations of authority" (p. 27). She illustrates her point with passages from the poem in which different portions of the Latin apparatus collide either with one another or with the English text, including the opening of the dramatic frame, where the assertions of veracity based on real experience in the English and in the Latin verses are undercut by the marginal assertion that the whole thing is a fiction, and the tales of Florent, Albinus and Rosemund, Constance, and Narcissus, in each of which, for different reasons, it is difficult to locate a single interpretive center. Echard extends her argument to include a consideration of the ways in which the Latin apparatus is presented in the MSS of CA, and it is not among the smallest merits of her essay that she offers the most complete available description of the variety of ways in which scribes and editors arranged the Latin and English texts on the page, including four plates as illustrations, two each from Bodleian MSS Fairfax 3 and Bodley 294. Each different arrangement constitutes a different interpretation of the relationship among the different parts and of their relative authority, she argues. The variety of presentations multiplies the interpretive possibilities of the text, and constitutes a confirmation of the instability that appears to have been part of Gower's own intention in juxtaposing so many different voices. This is an essay that deserves to be read in its entirety, both for the author's specific observations and for the suggestiveness of her analysis. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 17.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân Published Echard, Siân. "With Carmen's Help: Latin Authorities in the Confessio Amantis." Studies in Philology 95 (1998), pp. 1-40. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource With Carmen's Help: Latin Authorities in the Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Hume, Cathy Published Hume, Cathy. "Why did Gower Write the Traitié?" In John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition. Ed. Dutton, Elisabeth, and Hines, John, and Yeager, R.F. Cambridge: Brewer, 2010, pp. 263-75. Gower Subject Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz Review Agreeing with others' recent rejection of the once-general theory that Gower wrote the Traitié as a wedding present for his wife, or as "a clever virtuoso French reworking of the Confessio" (266) to which it is attached in many manuscripts, Hume finds a clue to Gower's motivation in the balades' focus on adultery. "What is most striking, in my view," she notes, "is that [the Traitié] "shows signs of being addressed to a reader (or readers) who is (or are) already engaged in adultery" (267). Indeed, "there are several indications that the point at issue is not embarking on adultery but carrying on with it, failing to repent of it, or failing to stop when warned" (267). Another clue Hume pursues is "the poem's [i.e., the Traitié's] preoccupation with kings" (269). Observing that the Mirour de l'Omme also names many kings, she finds "striking similarities" with the treatment of David there and in the Traitié balade XIV (268), including God's punishment on the adulterous ruler and his people, bringing the former low and suffering upon the latter (269-70). She then examines a theory first proposed by Gardiner Stillwell in 1948 that perhaps Gower intended Edward III and Alice Perrers as his targets, countering the problem of so early a composition date as October 1376-June 1377, when Edward died, with the assertion that no hard evidence exists to pinpoint when Gower wrote the Traitié (273). The choice of French, then, "would be readily explained by [it] being the dominant language of Edward's court" 274). But there are other possibilities too. "Another . . . is that the intended addressee is John of Gaunt, the other notorious royal adulterer of the period"--a suggestion she credits in a note to "Mark Ormrod . . . in conversation" (274). If reforming either of these "royal" adulterers was Gower's purpose, then "the envoy, the prefatory French prose and the concluding Latin [are] all a way of deflecting our attention from the daring agenda and addressee of the original poem" (275). "If so," she asks further, "the reason for this smokescreen would be Gower's desire to give his elegant (if rather hectoring) ballade sequence a longer life once its original purpose had been superseded: events moved on, whether or not Gower ever delivered the poem to either Edward or Gaunt, and the poem could no longer stand on its own" (275). The answer to such questions, Hume concludes, is beyond us, but we can at least "reject Gower's claim that it [the Traitié] was originally composed with 'tout le monde' ('all the world') in mind" (275).] [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 Why did Gower Write the Traitié? 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 Review This article includes analysis of Gower the choric character in Shakespeare's "Pericles, Prince of Tyre." It does not discuss the works of Gower the poet. Famously disparaged by Ben Jonson as "a mouldy tale," "Pericles" serves Oesterlen, quoting Judith Butler, as a kind of test case for examining "the reciprocity of language and the body [that] is so creatively explored in [Shakespeare's] romances" (41). The "rich strangeness" of the romances is "more visionary than metaphysical," as the embodied experience of characters and audience is transformed into a vehicle of revelation. In "Pericles," Shakespeare (with his coauthors) created a new genre, the "dramatic narrative," in a "'mouldy tale' forever prone to all kinds of textual and bodily returns" (41). She sees the character of Gower as especially suited to personify the transcendental via the corporeal, as he returns, phoenix-like, from the "mould" of death to introduce a drama of "spectacular bodily and textual 'restorations'" (36, alluding to the "restorative" power claimed by Gower for his storytelling at "Pericles," choric Prologue 8). Mould-y indeed, the play creates "the mold" for something new, a melding of "narrative and drama," as the dead poet reappears at intervals to narrate past actions not enacted on the stage and set the scene to follow. Throughout this play, Oesterlen argues, the near-miraculous regeneration of the human body will be accomplished in close communion with a renewal of speech and text (37), as demonstrated by "outmoded" yet "re-creative" poetic style of Gower the character. Through sight and sound, the ancient tale is transfigured as "a play that matters [pun intended]" (38). Similarly, the "paradox" of the queen's restoration to life "is framed by the similarly anachronistic presence of Gower as narrator. This play "delays the need for explanation long enough to let the performance dominate the desire to know [as Pericles states]: "we do our longing stay/To hear the rest untold" (V.3.83-84, p. 41). Spoken by Gower, the final lines of the play sustain the theme of revival: "New joy wait on you! Here our play has ending" (Epilogue 18). This "ending" will not be permanent, however, as "the protean body of texts stays behind, promising 'new joy' with every new performance" (41). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Oesterlen, Eve-Marie. Published Oesterlen, Eve-Marie. "Why Bodies Matter in Mouldy Tales: Material (Re)Turns in 'Pericles, Prince of Tyre'." The Upstart Crow 24 (2004): 36-44. 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 Why Bodies Matter in Mouldy Tales: Material (Re)Turns in "Pericles, Prince of Tyre." 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 The brief entry on Gower in Hicks's compilation synopsizes Gower's life and works, emphasizing his conventionality and social criticism. Hicks cites John H. Fisher's "John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer" (1965) for further information, and quotes briefly from G. L. Harriss's Introduction to "Henry V: The Practice of Kingship" (1985) where Gower is referred to as being, among Ricardian poets, the "most representative" of the middle stratum of society. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hicks, Michael A. Published Hicks, Michael A. Who's Who in Late Medieval England, 1272–1485. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 1991. Pp. 178–80. Gower Subject Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Who's Who in Late Medieval England, 1272–1485. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Jones, Terry Yeager, R.F Dolan, Terry Fletcher, Alan Dor, Juliette Published Jones, Terry and Yeager, R.F and Dolan, Terry and Fletcher, Alan and Dor, Juliette. "Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery." London: Methuen, 2003 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Biography of Gower Manuscripts and Textual Studies Review It wasn't Gower, readers of JGN will be relieved to know, and it is not giving too much away to reveal that the culprit is Thomas Arundel, the fiery Archbishop of Canterbury who, on being restored to his post with Henry IV's accession, relentlessly pursued not just Henry's enemies but his own as well, especially those who challenged either his authority over the church or its doctrine, as he himself defined it. (Arundel is perhaps best remembered for introducing the public burning of heretics to England.) Chaucer had placed himself in peril with the harsh anticlericalism of his depictions of the Monk, Pardoner, Friar, and Summoner and by daring, moreover, to present his criticism of the church in English, which would allow its dissemination beyond the community of the church itself. His attempts to appease Arundel--his "ABC," ParsT and the "Retraction"--proved inadequate, and so he was dispatched, in a manner that we will never be able to reconstruct in detail because of the care with which his murderers were able to cover their tracks, to the point of leaving no official record of his disappearance. Wait just a second, some will say. But the objections to this explanation of Chaucer's death are almost too obvious to list. The use of the lack of evidence of the crime as proof of the skill and high position of the perpetrators is a staple of all conspiracy theories (including those involving weapons of mass destruction), and as a method of argument it proves no less slippery here. Because of the very nature of their case, moreover, the authors are forced to rely on unanswered--and perhaps unanswerable--questions as much as on hard facts. In accounting for Chaucer's whereabouts following the Merciless Parliament, for instance, they write: "Did Chaucer pay a visit to Philippa's people in 1388? Did he meet Matilda Nemeg, or some of her relatives there? Did Philippa go along--and not come back? . . . The usual assumption is that she died. But where? If she died in England, where is she buried? And if she died in Hainault--perhaps nobody has been looking in the right places?" (311). On the other hand, they seem very confident of their ability to divine the thoughts of Thomas Arundel, especially as he read and pondered CT ("Beneath the fun and banter of Chaucer's pilgrims, the great prelate would have smelt the burning fire of dissidence;" 377). And in their treatment of such things as the Troilus frontispiece and the "ABC," some are going to feel that they have made a very selective use of the available evidence. So do the authors prove their case? Obviously not, and they admit it, repeatedly. Chaucer might have died in his bed or fallen off a ladder (see, inter alia, pp. 6 and 359). But the value of a book like this lies not in what it makes us believe but in what it makes us question, and the truth, which is much more obvious as a result of this study, is that we know astonishingly little about Chaucer's life after Henry's accession, and that fact, together with the absence of so much as a will, is in itself extremely puzzling, as writers before Who Murdered Chaucer? have already observed. The explanation that is offered here, suspicious because of its very preciseness, is actually no less plausible in its details than the imaginative descriptions of Chaucer's final days that have been offered by some of Chaucer's biographers, who want to believe only the best about everyone concerned, and that should cause us to doubt anything that we have ever read or assumed about the end of Chaucer's life. And despite its irritations, if this book makes us a little more cautious about taking an easy view of such matters as Chaucer's role in the political events of his lifetime, of his audience and the circulation of his works, of the state of his MSS when he died, of the date of his death, or of the consequences of Henry's usurpation on the intellectual life of the time--all subjects that the authors treat at length during the course of their discussion--then it will have served a very valuable purpose. John Gower appears frequently as a background figure to the drama that the authors describe. His revision and rededication of CA and VC--"in what resembles either a paroxysm of prudence, or just plain fear" (273)--and his composition of TC are cited, of course, as evidence of the constraints that were suddenly imposed upon writers with the change of regime (271-73); and the authors give very close attention to the passages in which Gower describes how his works came to be composed in order to demonstrate that the revisions did occur this late and not because of some earlier disenchantment with Richard (97-103). (The reviewer is cited several times in support of their argument in this section.) Elsewhere, Gower is cited as evidence of Chaucer's reputation (3), in support of the view that both he and Chaucer expected their works to be read by the aristocracy (26-28, 34), and as evidence of Richard's encouragement of composition in English (35-36). The survival of early MSS of his works (231, 239, 244-45), of his will (276), and of his elaborate tomb (285) are all cited in contrast to the fate that befell Chaucer. The authors also cite passages from both VC (67) and MO (216) as examples of the pervasiveness of Wycliffite ideas in late fourteenth-century writing in order to demonstrate the contrast between the intellectual openness of Richard's reign and the shutting down of debate that occurred during Henry's. In that regard, they provoke a question that is perhaps typical of the issues that ought to be raised by their argument as a whole. After 1399, Gower indeed tried hard to be "Henry IV's Ideal Poet," as the authors put it (171), rewriting the history of Richard's reign in order to justify Henry's usurpation. But the villain of the piece--the one who gets the blame for exterminating Chaucer--is not Henry but Thomas Arundel; and at the same time that Gower was kissing up to Henry, he presented the archbishop with a copy of VC with a very flattering new dedication (Works 4.1-2) but without any revision of the passage--so Wycliffite in tone--in which he criticizes the church and its officers and calls upon them to reform. True, he was writing in Latin, not English, but wouldn't Arundel thus have been more likely to see the work? And if Chaucer was in such peril for his depiction of the Pardoner, how did Gower, who was no more a member of the church than Chaucer was and whose condemnation was both more palpable and more severe, remain safe from Arundel's wrath? Or does VC, seen from this different angle, perhaps indicate that the archbishop wasn't quite as thin-skinned as the authors make him out to be? [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 23.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Methuen, 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 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 David Roberts here reads Gower's "Cronica Tripertita" as part of the long tradition of historical writing that culminated in the eventual definition of England "in terms resembling the modern nation-state" (135). Roberts reads the CrT as a striking diversion from earlier chronicles, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth's "Historia Regum Britanniae," in its willingness to name names and engage in much more direct criticism of contemporary political actors. Moreover, he suggests that, as a poet, Gower is interested in exposing the tradition of discretion as itself being a longstanding literary trope. As Roberts concludes, "[p]erhaps the greatest triumph of 'Cronica' is Gower's ability to combine his sensitivity as a poet with his role as a historian to produce a verse chronicle that maintains the veracity of the events while calling into question the poetic conventions that were driving contemporary chroniclers towards a preference for prose" (142). [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Roberts, David A. Published Roberts, David A. "What's in a Name: History, Genre, and Political Speech in Gower's Cronica Tripertita." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 135-42. Gower Subject Cronica Tripertita Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource What's in a Name: History, Genre, and Political Speech in Gower's "Cronica Tripertita." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Brief biography and assessment; reduced from "Cambridge History of English Literature" (1908). [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Crawford, Jack R. Published Crawford, Jack R. What to Read in English Literature. New York: Putnam, 1928, pp. 27-28, 33, 35, 109. 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 What to Read in English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1928 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Taylor argues that Gower's "The Tale of the Two Coffers" (CA 5.2273-2390) engages at least two concerns that underlie much of the "Confessio Amantis" and possibly underlie its revision: ethical choice and the relation of outward signs to inner reality--what Taylor calls "referential integrity" (78). She contrasts the tale with analogous accounts in Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice" and Boccaccio's "Decameron" to show that Gower's stark plot poses "a nonsensical parody of ethical choice" (78) and that its two externally identical casks with differing contents present the "hapless courtiers" (80) with a pair of signs that are impossible to distinguish rationally. Mention of fortune in Gower's account and the "shadowy evocation of grace" (78) help to raise questions about the king's test as well as the courtiers' choice, and enable Taylor to align details of the tale with Wycliffite arguments about the apprehension of truth, material possession, and their relations with secular dominium, or lordship. She suggests that "the work of the tale is to figure out how Gower's understanding of kingly authority and just rule differs from the emergent [and politically dangerous] Wycliffite discourse of dominium" (84) in which only "unknowable grace" (85) makes it possible to recognize and thereby choose to follow true dominium. Further, the "tense equipoise of sympathy and critique--toward both courtiers and king--registers an uneasiness with partisanship of any kind, especially when it comes to claims of grace-based right to rule" (85-86). The tale, Taylor tells us, "pointedly implicates Richard" (86) and is concerned with issues that "later became the backbone of the case against Richard's tyranny," even though the terms the tale "uses to explore them are almost pointedly non-partisan" (87). Nevertheless, the "discomfort" the tale "registers with the exercise of dominion" enables Taylor to posit an innovative "explanation of the Henrician revisions" to the CA: "the possibility that the revised recension ending [of CA] articulates not so much a vision of ideal dominium as an uneasy "ex post facto" philosophical justification of Gower's shift in allegiance" from Richard to Henry (87-88). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Taylor, Karla. Published Taylor, Karla. "What Lies Beneath." 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. 71-88. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource What Lies Beneath. 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 Sargent seeks to determine "how we can use the evidence of numbers of surviving manuscripts as a way to deduce information about what was being made available to read in English from the end of the fourteenth century to the early sixteenth (205). His speculations have relevance for Gower studies, as the sixty-three manuscripts of Gower's Confessio Amantis, as Sargent counts them ("fifty-three originally complete copies, ten extracted tales or groups of tales, plus one manuscript each of a Portuguese and a Castilian Spanish translation of the complete work and one manuscript containing a Latin abridgement of the tale of Constance" [206]), make Gower's poem the fifth most common Middle English work in manuscript, behind the Wycliffite bible (250+ MSS), Brut (181 MSS), Prick of Conscience (123 MSS), Canterbury Tales (81 MSS). More specifically, Sargent notes a distribution pattern that "shows a rising rate of production for a period of a quarter- to a half-century, followed by a leveling off when some form of 'market saturation' was achieved" (243). The CA, Sargent finds, mirrors this conclusion exactly: "the book-length text most commonly produced by scribes participating in the early fifteenth century London book trade in vernacular manuscripts was John Gower's Confessio Amantis. Two manuscripts of the complete text are datable paleographically to the end of the fourteenth century, Huntington Library MS E126.A.17 and Bodleian MS Fairfax 3; one is datable to the beginning of the fifteenth century, Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 67; a further twenty-six manuscripts are datable to the first quarter of the fifteenth century, fourteen to the second quarter, seven to the third quarter, one to the final quarter of the century, and two to the sixteenth century. One manuscript of the first half of the fifteenth century, Bodleian MS Rawlinson D.358, contains a Latin abridgement of the story of Constance based on both the Latin and English of Gower's text; four manuscripts of extracts can be dated to the second half of the century, one to the last quarter, and two to the early sixteenth century. The overall pattern shows that the Confessio Amantis was particularly popular in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, but dropped off gradually over the rest of the century" (235-36). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sargent, Michael G Published Sargent, Michael G. "What Do These Numbers Mean? A Textual Critic's Observations on Some Patterns of Middle English Manuscript Transmission." In Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England. Ed. Connolly, Margaret and Mooney, Linne R. [York]: York Medieval Press, 2008, pp. 205-44. ISBN 9781903153246 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource What Do These Numbers Mean? A Textual Critic's Observations on Some Patterns of Middle English Manuscript Transmission Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available York Medieval Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 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 Japanese; no English abstract. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Oiji, Takero. Published Oiji, Takero. "Wat Tyler's Rebellion and English Literature." In Takero Oiji, ed. Chaucer to sono shuhen [Chaucer and His Contemporary Poets] (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1968), chapter 12. Reprinted in 14 seiki no eibungaku, IV (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1976), chapter 2. 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 Wat Tyler's Rebellion and English Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1968 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Contrary to the image offered by post-usurpation chroniclers and perpetuated by uncritical modern historians, Richard II's reign was consistent with the portrait of the ideal king offered by contemporary political theorists, for whom there was no inconsistency between absolute rule and the public welfare, as long as the king acted for the common good rather than for his own personal advantage. So does Jones argue in this impressively documented essay. Thus Richard's displays of magnificence manifest not his personal vanity but his assertion of his rightful role as king, fully justified even by religious writers, and his pursuit of Gloucester and Arundel beginning in 1397 reflects impartial justice rather than personal revenge. Jones includes Chaucer's "Melibee" among the works from which Richard might have learned how to govern, providing, as it does, a model for the seeking of counsel, for the choice of advisors according to their ability rather than their rank (one of the sore points with Richard's uncles), for his pursuit of peace (with France), for the role of women (such as Queen Anne) as intercessors, and for the use of the "semblant of wrath," which may be the source for the charge that Richard had a quick temper, in contrast the many recorded instances in which he exercised a calming influence instead. Gower figures in this essay, of course, as one of those who not only helped to justify Henry's usurpation but who also sought to "chang[e] the nation's collective memory about Richard" (27) by altering the historical record to make it appear that the post-usurpation attacks on Richard's rule and character actually emerged from events early in his reign. In Gower's case, this amounted to rewriting his comments on the youthful Richard and his advisors in the "Vox Clamantis." The reference to his "sors" (Stockton: "destiny") in VC VI.572 indicates, Jones states, that the entire revised passage "must have been written after the usurpation, but modified to make it look as if it had been written earlier" (28). Similarly, Gower revised the dedication of the "Confessio Amantis" to make it appear that he had presented the poem to Henry in 1393. In this case, he gives himself away by his reference to "Henry of Lancaster," a title that Henry could not have borne until 1397, in Prol. 87, as Gower in effect concedes in the marginal gloss at Prol 28, which states that the book was presented "domino suo domino Henrico de Lancastria tunc Derbeie Comiti." The "Cronica Tripertita" Jones dismisses as "mendacious and disgraceful" (13), and he cites it among those perpetuating the "lie" that Richard refused to seek the counsel of older men. Jones published an abbreviated summary of his essay in "Richard II: Royal Villain or Victim of Spin," The Times, 4 October 2008. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Jones, Terry Published Jones, Terry. "Was Richard II A Tyrant? Richard's Use of the Books of Rules for Princes." Fourteenth Century England 5 (2008), pp. 130-60. ISSN 1471-3020 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Vox Clamantis Cronica Tripertita 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 Was Richard II A Tyrant? Richard's Use of the Books of Rules for Princes 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 Review Quotes Speght (1598) who says that Chaucer and Gower were both students at the Inner Temple, but then reviews Francis Thynne's objections (1598) to the claim, offering no further discussion about Gower. [RFY1981; rev, MA]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Rickert, Edith. Published Rickert, Edith. "Was Chaucer a Student as the Inner Temple?" The Manly Anniversary Studies in Language and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923, pp. 20-31. 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 Was Chaucer a Student at the Inner Temple? Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1926 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Sobecki's position on "Troilus" argued here is that Chaucer's wardship of Edmund Staplegate and the Cecily Chaumpagne case impacts his poem's subject, which "fictionalizes questions of widowhood, wardship, and marriage, binding together Chaucer and the character of the go-between Pandarus through their shared social roles as guardians and matchmakers" (413). He "introduces four previously unknown documents: a contemporary legal challenge involving Staplegate from 1377; a new Chaucer life-record from 1382 connected to the Staplegate wardship; the earliest record, from 1381, showing Gower active in London; and the 1411 will of [Richard] Forster, Chaucer's lawyer in 1378" (413-14) when Chaucer went abroad. Sobecki suggests that Forster and Gower became Chaucer's lawyers to handle the murky issues surrounding the "valuable heir" Staplegate (423), Forster to handle London matters and Gower "probably appointed to maintain Chaucer's affairs outside of London, including any fallout from the Staplegate wardship in Kent" (425). In support, he provides a new document (National Archives, CP 40/82, m. 232f) showing that Gower "sued three men from Newington in Kent for debt in Easter term, 1381" (425). The document also indicates Gower was then in residence, perhaps only temporarily, in London, since as Michael Bennett has shown, in the 1380s Gower was primarily in Kent (426). Sobecki transcribes and translates the Common Pleas document on 436-37. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sobecki, Sebastian. Published Sobecki, Sebastian. "Wards and Widows: 'Troilus and Criseyde' and New Documents on Chaucer's Life." English Literary History 86 (2019): 413-40. 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 Wards and Widows: "Troilus and Criseyde" and New Documents on Chaucer's Life. 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 Lowe cites Gower's comments on the war in CA 3 and VC 3 and 7 (pp. 175-77) in his discussion of fourteenth-century precedents for the humanist and post-Reformation critique of the notion of a "just war" and the advocacy of peace as most beneficial to the commonwealth. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lowe, Ben Published Lowe, Ben. "War and Commonwealth in Mid-Tudor England." Sixteenth Century Journal 21 (1990), pp. 171-191. ISSN 0361-0160 Gower Subject Vox Clamantis 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 War and Commonwealth in Mid-Tudor England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In Book 4 of the VC, Gower admonishes the good monk "to preserve his traditionally simple, though hard and austere, way of life" (82). The passage represents "a characteristic plagiarism" (82) on Gower's part, for the lines are borrowed from an anonymous collection of penitential verses dating from the early thirteenth century. To show the indebtedness, Raymo quotes lines 495-506 and 511-14 of VC 4 alongside the original and italicizes the similarities. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Raymo, Robert R Published Raymo, Robert R. "Vox Clamantis, IV, 12." Modern Language Notes 71.2 (1956), pp. 82-83. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Vox Clamantis, IV, 12 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1956 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower was a friend of Chaucer; list of works. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Frahne, Karl H. Published Frahne, Karl H. Von Chaucer bis Shaw: Eine Einfuhrung in die Literatur Englands. Hamburg: J. P. Toth, 1947, pp. 25, 29, 31. 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 Von Chaucer bis Shaw: Eine Einfuhrung in die Literatur Englands. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1947 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 1927, Karl Brunner recognized the CA as a source for Ben Jonson's "Volpone," an attribution disregarded by subsequent editors. Friedenreich believes that Brunner was right in pointing to a story from Book 5 of the CA where a greedy steward panders his wife to the king. In Volpone, too, sleeping with a young woman is proposed as a medical remedy, and a number of verbal parallels between the two accounts are quite striking. Other connections between the two works include references to avarice and jealousy, two themes of Gower's Book 5. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Friedenreich, Kenneth Published Friedenreich, Kenneth. "Volpone and the Confessio Amantis." South Central Bulletin 37 (1977), pp. 147-150. 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 Volpone and the Confessio Amantis 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 Irvin's article reviews the iterations of Gower's author-persona, finding a "voice . . . who is sometimes a narrator, and sometimes not" (237), and includes both Genius and Amans. For the CA, foundational traditions label Genius inconsistent, with the priest of love and moral instructor at odds (237), even wildly conflicted (245), while other critics find his moral voice both Christian and "coherent" (238-40, 244, 246). In a variation on the latter view, the CA gives voice to a real dialogue, but with Amans reconciled to Genius's instruction by the end of the poem (242). The poet spoke out as preacher-prophet in VC, assuming the more modest persona of philosopher in the Prologue to the CA (241), and a woman's voice in some "Balades" (247). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 37.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Irvin, Matthew W. Published Irvin, Matthew W. "Voices and Narrators." 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. 237-52. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification 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 Voices and Narrators. 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 Sierra, Juan David. Published Sierra, Juan David. "Voice and Meaning: Writing Authority in Late Medieval England and Iberia." Ph. D. Dissertation. Cornell University, 2011. Open access at https://hdl.handle.net/1813/30761 (accessed January 28, 2023). Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Review From Sierra's abstract: "My dissertation tells the story of how the separation of voice and meaning in discursive structures became bound up with legitimating the fifteenth-century conquest of non-Christian lands. This is because the possibility of extending secular dominion into lands outside traditional legitimating practices necessitated a new rethinking of the use and discourse of authority. At the center of this change in meaning and voice were the Iberian translations of John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' that joined two different modalities of questioning the presentation of authority through writing: a Castilian approach, which disassociated the experience of reading from the verisimilitude of narration, and an English one, which undermined the possibility of speech to communicate truth. This synthesis justified colonialism because it gave sovereigns the means to speak with authority in a place outside universal language and law. The Iberian and English traditions which influenced Gower's translation into Portuguese, therefore, support the idea that there was a growing disconnect between the power of their ideas and the ways in which they were conveyed . . . . They made . . . spaces which proved that signs could divorce their social uses from their ability to signify while still retaining their ability to change the world. These spaces, in being taken up by the Portuguese translations of Gower's 'Confessio,' helped Europe fashion a concept of sovereignty applicable outside the boundaries of Western discourse." [MA. eJGN 42.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Voice and Meaning: Writing Authority in Late Medieval England and Iberia. 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 Scase "investigates the question of whether and in what ways visible language contributed to identity formation in the past by making a case study of visible English c. 700-1500, when literate practice was predominantly in Latin and all texts were--save for the final few decades--produced individually by hand" (3-4). By "visible language" she means writing, and her conclusion is that indeed writing helped shape English identities, albeit not uniformly. Gower enters by way of manuscripts of the "Confessio Amantis," which provide important instances of a discernible and unique scribal practice--literatim copying. As Scase notes, "I have dealt with the so-called literatim scribes of John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' elsewhere, and I will therefore simply summarise that work here" (314). [For the discussion she mentions, see "John Gower's Scribes and Literatim Copying," In Martha Driver, Derek Pearsall, and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books. Publications of the John Gower Society, no. 14. Rochester, NY: Brewer, 2020. Pp. 13-31.] "The so-called literatim scribes of the 'Confessio'," she contends, "modified the practice of the scribes of accentual verse in order to maintain the strict syllable count and iambic metre of Gower's lines rather than out of respect for Gower's idiosyncratic dialect as has been previously suggested" (314). This group of scribes included "Scribe Delta," who worked on Trevisa's translation of Higden's "Polychronicon," the so-called "Trevisa-Gower scribe" who copied Tokyo, Senshu UL, 1, (and whose hand is also discernible in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 902 [347]), and Scribe D, "now thought by many to be John Marchaunt" (346), of the London Guildhall, which may have been "a centre for this activity" (347). Scribes Delta and D have very similar hands, and were perhaps in competition, the former specializing in "Polychronicon" MSS and the latter in "Confessio"s (347). Possibly as well these scribes "facilitated exchange and cross-fertilisation between these projects" (348). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Scase, Wendy. Published Scase, Wendy. Visible English: Graphic Culture, Scribal Practice, and Identity, c. 700-1550. Turnhout: Brepols, 2022. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Visible English: Graphic Culture, Scribal Practice, and Identity, c. 700-1550. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Zarins focuses her analysis on how Gower retells the stories of "two Ovidian villains who are known for their depravity" (141), Polyphemus in "The Tale of Acis and Galatea," and Tereus the rapist who mutilates his victim. "Gower writes sympathetically about them (141), treating their stories "without irony," that is, devoid of the heavy foreshadowing that in Ovid's telling, makes them evil from the start: " . . . throughout Gower's "Confessio," monsters are not born, but made" (143). The lonely Polyphemus is assailed by envy of the happy lovers Acis and Galatea, but only when he surrenders to his sinful urge--by burying the lovers in a landslide--is he named as a "giant," a monster (144). Tereus is declared an evil freak of nature both in Ovid and Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women," while Gower goes out of his way to portray the future rapist as a loving husband until the moment of his choosing to act on a criminal desire (152). In many other tales, Genius illustrates how "conversion" to evil is possible for anyone, thus providing a cautionary example for Amans in his spiritual struggle--and of course for the reader as well. The reader's sympathy with Gower's villains is based not on guilty identification, as is sometimes alleged, but on a sense of our common humanity and free will. Zarins notes: "Gower's greatest villains are unsettling because they started out happy, hopeful, and ordinary, and in Gower's sympathetic retelling, one can imagine an alternate ending in which they remain so" (155). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 36.2]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Zarins, Kim. Published Zarins, Kim. "Violence without Warning: Sympathetic Villains and Gower's Crafting of Ovidian Narrative." 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. 141-55. 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 Violence without Warning: Sympathetic Villains and Gower's Crafting of Ovidian Narrative. 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 Reads the passages describing the deaths of Wat Tyler, of Simon Sudbury, and of the Flemish victims of the mob in VC 1 both through the echoes of the earlier works from which Gower has borrowed, in the manner of "cento," key lines and passages, and through theories of sacrificial violence derived from René Girard and Nancy Jay. That Tyler should be seen as a fitting sacrifice is not a surprise; that Sudbury is is a bit more surprising; but Gower displays considerable sympathy for the Flemings. "Gower emphasizes the spectacle of carnage surely to shock those in his ecclesiastical audience into reflection upon the events of the moment. . . . In the events of Tower Hill, the mock altar upon which the archbishop yielded up his spirit, these readers would surely see the implications of the execution of one of their own. Certainly these Latin readers would infer the meaning of unburied corpses lying about as silent witness to all the souls that had gone unsaved, to all the prayers that had been left unspoken. Certainly these Latin readers would be reminded of the mob violence that had a habit of repeating itself during Holy Week; surely they would see the need to wash their hands or accept responsibility for their own actions" (135-36). The poet's identification of himself in the riddling passage at the beginning of Book 1 represents Gower's own self-sacrifice: "In a brilliant move of self-conscious submission, the poet presents himself to the critical axe of his ecclesiastical audience. By enacting his own death in a symbolic sacrifice and taking on the mantle of John, the poet gains the authority of the sacred; at the moment that that transformation occurs he empowers the poem to speak for itself" (138). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 27.1]. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 200-10. Author/Editor Author/Editor Salisbury, Eve Published Salisbury, Eve. "Violence and the Sacrificial Poet: Gower, the Vox, and the Critics." In On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium. Ed. Yeager, R.F. Studies in Medieval Culture (46). Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2007, pp. 124-43. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Violence and the Sacrificial Poet: Gower, the Vox, and the Critics Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Medieval Institute, 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 Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This dissertation argues that late medieval English literature was often forced to define itself against and around the problem of flattery, a notion which was used to encapsulate a wide range of cultural and linguistic corruptions. Flattery presented itself both as a practice--an often necessary means of speaking to patrons and rulers--and as a discourse, a conventional set of complaints about the evils of flattery found in many political, religious, and literary texts. This study examines the intersections between these two modes, as poets and flatterers use warnings against flattery to legitimize its practice, and explores how flattery was used as a figure for usurpation, rhetoric, and interpretation. By examining key texts and contexts from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, I show that the rhetorical paradoxes of flattery were essential to the medieval understanding of selfhood and literary language. My first chapter examines the genre of advice manuals known as mirrors for princes, and shows how John Gower's Confessio Amantis reformulated their discourse of flattery into a literary language addressed to Richard II, who was widely criticized for his susceptibility to flatterers." Other chapters consider Langland's Piers Plowman and the anonymous Mum and the Sothsegger; Chaucer's Melibee, Merchant's Tale, and Nun's Priest's Tale; and Hoccleve's La Male Regle and The Regiment of Princes. Directed by Seth Lerer. Author/Editor Author/Editor Walling, Amanda Published Walling, Amanda. "Vicious praise: Flattery in late medieval English politics and poetry." PhD thesis, Stanford University, 2007. 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 Vicious praise: Flattery in late medieval English politics and poetry 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 Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Refers to F. J. Child's study of Gower (1867) to disagree with him that Chaucer's language was more archaic than Gower's; refers to Alexander Ellis (1871) to disagree; quotes John Spiers (1951) to show that Gower was a sophisticated reader, master of three languages, and created in a "highly developed English speech." [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Southworth, James G. Published Southworth, James G. Verses of Cadence: An Introduction to the Prosody of Chaucer and His Followers. Oxford: Blackwell, 1954, pp. 17-18, 19, 22, 50, 91. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Verses of Cadence: An Introduction to the Prosody of Chaucer and His Followers. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1954 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 uses Goliardic puns in his Latin; Gower is a social critic, like Langland, and uses satire for that purpose; discussion of VC, "Cronica Tripertita," Prologue to CA, and minor Latin poems. [RFY1981]. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Cronica Tripertita Confessio Amantis Minor Latin Poetry Author/Editor Author/Editor Tucker, Samuel M. Published Tucker, Samuel M. Verse Satire in England Before the Renaissance. Columbia University Studies in English Series II, vol. II, no. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1908, pp. 47, 83-85, 93ff., 98, 100, 144, 182, 197, 221, 223. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Verse Satire in England Before the Renaissance. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1908 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review McCabe's fundamental argument in this essay is that Gower asserted himself as a major national poet, self-consciously positioned and proclaimed, sometime around 1390 in Latin "metatextual" materials that accompany the "Confessio Amantis," and anticipated in related materials found earlier in Gowerian texts and manuscripts. The argument is an extension of McCabe's previous, lengthier discussions of Gower's use of English in the CA, with increased emphasis on the poet's "extraclergial" lay didacticism through which he addressed and cultivated a broad public audience as well as patrons. For the earlier discussions, see McCabe's 2010 University of Toronto dissertation and his 2011 "Gower's Vulgar Tongue" (JGN 31.2), the latter duly cited in this essay. Presented in the "Oxford Handbook of Chaucer" (chapter 30), McCabe's essay is framed by aspects of Gower/Chaucer relations: opening with discussion of how the poets' "bids for a quasi-Petrarchan position as national author are mutually dependent . . . [and] also contestative" (564) and closing with suggestions that Chaucer's "Retraction" was deeply influenced by Gower's "combining of an earnest, Christian public address with the poetic resources of elite European culture as the twin bases of the new edifice, English poetry" (574). Chaucer aside, the center of the essay is close readings of "various authorial signatures found in the [Gower] manuscripts," particularly "the poems 'Quam cinxere', 'Explicit iste liber', 'Eneidos bucolis', the . . . corpus-sealing [prose] colophon 'Quia vnusquisque'," and the Gower-as-archer illustration found in several early manuscripts of "Vox Clamantis," discussing them as evidence of Gower's "self-positioning" relative "to an English public . . . [and] individual patrons" which serves as "the main platform for his self-presentation as an elite author" (564). In McCabe's readings, for example, "Explicit iste liber" marks England as Gower's "literary field" while "Quam cinxere" declares that his works "have already become the property of the nation" and "makes explicit Gower's claim to have gained a Chaucer-like national stature as an author" (565). "Quia vnusquisque" raises the topic of Gower's "didactic mission" in his three major works and makes this mission "the very grounds of Gower's claim to literary celebrity" (566). McCabe tells us that such didacticism "unmistakeably plays a central role in Gower's self-promotion as an author," made even clearer in "Eneidos bucolis," which like the triple headrest on Gower's tomb, presents the three works as a trilogy that with their Christian moral seriousness and English accessibility outdoes even Virgil's works: "English is privileged as the tongue of origin and consummation alike" in "Eneidos," even though the poem's "argument is promulgated in the traditional language of intellectual authority, Latin." That final qualification or concern (and several others along the way, including the question of the authorship of "Eneidos," the Christian seriousness of CA, and more) give us all cause to pause, McCabe acknowledges, but he insists that as an "embodiment of a species of vernacular theology," the "metatextual packaging" of Gower's works has "important implications for Gower's audience's taste, at least insofar as that taste was anticipated and cultivated by Gower and the collaborators and scribes responsible for promoting his works" (567). Later, and more pointedly, McCabe declares that "'Eneidos bucolis' valorizes not only public access but, specifically, the access to truth which the mother tongue grants to English Christians" (573). Switching gears somewhat, McCabe explores Gower's appeals to and for both elite and popular audiences, acknowledging his "self-identification with the social elite" (569) and his seemingly contradictory speaking as a "vox populi." For McCabe, this is made possible by a kind of anticlericalism that supports and gains rhetorical authority through an "extraclergial stance" which offers the "extraclergial wisdom" (573) of a poetic, lay theology of grace. Tracing these threads in Gower's works (including the Gower-as-archer illustrations that accompany VC), McCabe returns to "Eneidos," but only after having deduced that Gower claims "authority for himself . . . [in a] manner in which he . . . presupposes a considerable degree of lay solidarity and in turn effects a quite substantial extension of agency to the laity," inviting his audience to practice "public criticism" and "equipping such readers for this practice" (572), even on theological topics. In CA and "In Praise of Peace," McCabe says, English "emerges as a tongue whose chief resources for expressing theological truth reside . . . in intimacy, polysemy, and affect," although "this is not the place to examine either work in detail." He cites "In Praise of Peace," 337–57 and CA II.3187–497 as instances where "Gower juxtaposes natural human 'pite' and divine 'grace' in ways that frequently assign the natural passion a salvific function" and then refers us to his own "Gower's Vulgar Tongue" for "many similar moves" (573) that emphasize pious affect rather than clerical instruction. Before closing with comments on how Gower's "ostentatious piety" is likely to have influenced Chaucer's "Retraction," McCabe declares that "Gower's ability to push the boundaries of vernacular cultural mediation even as he reshapes the resources of an elite European poetry gave his poetry a quality not found in contemporary writings, and this distinction may explain the success of his poetry during his lifetime, as well as why, by 1390, he should have felt justified in claiming to have achieved the standing of a nationally significant author" (574). In addition to Chaucer, the "contemporary writings" McCabe's refers to here include "Piers Plowman," Langland's "alliterative imitators" (568), Usk, Clanvowe, "The Prickynge of Love," "Pore Caitif," and more, so his arguments are widely grounded. Similarly, his references to other critics range widely, although he does not mention Michael P. Kuczynski's "Gower's Virgil" (2007) which also discusses "Eneidos" and its Christian "outdoing" of Virgil in the poem without resolving the question of its authorship. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor McCabe, T. Matthew N. Published McCabe, T. Matthew N. "Vernacular Authorship and Public Poetry: John Gower." In Suzanne Conklin Akbari and James Simpson, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 563-79. Unrestricted access at https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199582655.013.38; accessed September 18, 2022. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Confessio Amantis Minor Latin Poetry Vox Clamantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Vernacular Authorship and Public Poetry: John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Ma examines the different ways in which Gower and Pisan appropriate the authority of Latin in their respective vernacular works. In the passage on "Letters and Language" (as Macaulay termed it) in Genius' discourse on virtuous labor in CA 4.2633-74, Ma suggests that Gower holds up Latin writing as an exemplum to be imitated by writers in English. "Both Amans and Gower's vernacular readers stand to benefit from acquiring specific skills that Gower emphasizes in his representation of Latin's authority, and both need to transfer the benefits of studying Latin to their respective conditions, which are perceived as having inherent shortcomings that need to be 'confessed' in order to be redressed" (21). Gower adopts this process in his own writing, as he invokes the aid of Carmente (cited as the inventor of "the ferste letters of Latin" in IV.2637) in the Latin epigram that stands at the head of his Prologue. "Carmente symbolizes the transfer of learning from Latin into English, which Gower sees his Confessio as facilitating" (22). But while Gower theorizes the relation between Latinity and the vernacular, Christine enacts it palpably in the construction of her "Épître Othéa," with its fictional goddess figure and the divisions among texte, glose, and allégorie, as she "directly demonstrates the Latinate practices that further the literary capacities of the vernacular" (26). [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ma, Ruen-chuan Published Ma, Ruen-chuan. "Vernacular Accessus: Text and Gloss in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and Christine de Pisan's 'Épître Othéa'." ES: Revista de Filología Inglesa 33.1 (2012), pp. 17-28. ISSN 0210-9689 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 Vernacular Accessus: Text and Gloss in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and Christine de Pisan's 'Épître Othéa' 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 It has been argued that Chaucer tends to rhyme on verbs; uses Gower as an example to show that this is a general trend of Middle (and modern) ages. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Mustanoja, Tauno F. Published Mustanoja, Tauno F. "Verbal Rhyming in Chaucer." Beryl Rowland, ed. Chaucer and Middle English Studies in Honor of Rossell Hope Robbins (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1974), pp. 104-10. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Verbal Rhyming in Chaucer. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1974 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Concludes, partly by reference to MO 15599-600, and CA VI, 1379-81, that Langland's verbal repetition in common in other Middle English poets, including Gower. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Spearing, A. C. Published Spearing, A. C. "Verbal Repetition in Piers Plowman B and C." Journal of English and Germanic Philology 62 (1963): 722-37. 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 Verbal Repetition in Piers Plowman B and C. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1963 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Lindeboom takes up the question of why Chaucer would write the prologues and tales of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner as both confessions of personal sinfulness but "encompassing all of the Seven Deadly Sins" (1). His answer (of 460 pages) can be summarized thus: contrary to John Fisher's guess that Gower and Chaucer were friends, they were in fact rivals, and for a period of "about a year" (i.e., 1390-91) antagonists in a literary "duel," encouraged by the Ricardian court, even perhaps judged by Richard and/or Anne of Bohemia: " . . . coming and going of a brief court entertainment, whose effectuation took close to one year, during which time Chaucer used part of the 'Canterbury Tales' to put Gower in his place" (450). The intricate revisions Lindeboom describes include rewriting/redirecting tales (especially the Parson's along with the Wife's and the Pardoner's), recasting the Man of Law character, his prologue and tale--much of which takes place in CT Group II--and then, once the "court entertainment" was complete with Chaucer the clear winner, much revision was shuffled to return to "business as usual." The "debt" Chaucer owes to Gower, highlighted in the title, is essentially an important element of high seriousness enforced on the CT by the need to counter Gower on his home ground. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lindeboom B. W. Published Lindeboom B. W. Venus' Owne Clerk: Chaucer's Debt to the Confessio Amantis. (Amsterdam: Academic Publishers; Open Humanities Press; Editions Rodopi B.V., 2007). Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Venus' Owne Clerk: Chaucer's Debt to the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review [van Dijk states his purpose in the essay as an "attempt to situate the Tale of Orestes in relation to contemporary cultural attitudes to vengeance, justice, and the (gendered) subject. My aim is not to collapse the historical/literary distinction, but to reveal something about how literature can help us to understand the legal subject in the late fourteenth century" (120-21). Orestes is included in Book III of the CA, the Book of Wrath (1885-2195), where it appears under the sub-section "Homicide"--a location that, given the tale's several threads, has been negatively received by the few readers who have commented on it. van Dijk however argues for its coherence, beginning with the observation that "the conflation of the terms 'murder' and 'vengeance' . . . suggests that we have to think of 'homicide' as a broader concept than merely an extra-legal killing" (122). He focuses on the tale's conclusion, the suicide of Egiona, Orestes' step-sister, noting that taking her own life testifies to her loss of legal personhood, and consequently represents her only avenue to vengeance of any sort. In van Dijk's view her case poses a significant difficulty for Gower, who "naturalizes retribution (even when apparently cruel), because so much of his poetics is based on poetic justice" (134) and Egiona rationally would seem to bear little, if any, guilt in the crimes of the tale. Elsewhere, for example in Book VII, Gower provides a number of stories that illustrate how the cruelty of tyrants and their counsellors receives its proper punishment. In every narrative the final act of poetic justice mirrors the original crime" (134). While Gower "worries that . . . cruel and unusual punishment is unjust," he has always a larger justification on which to call: "exemplary punishment, when it risks cruelty, empties itself of human agency and ascribes all responsibility to God" (136). While registering this as an option often availed upon by Gower, van Dijk nevertheless is less interested in it as an explanation of Gower's thought-processes. His conclusion probes deeper and is thus most provocative: "there are . . . times when Gower seems willing to uphold abstract ideas over personal concerns, law over circumstance, and example over pity. This is perhaps the cost of Gower's keen interest in poetic justice, that the individual must be sacrificed (rather than rehabilitated or excused) for the greater good (the law, the lesson). This will obviously not be a popular conclusion. We like to see Gower as inevitably kind and non-judgmental, perhaps an image of ourselves at our best. Yet Gower also remains a moralist, and sometimes he takes what seem like short-cuts. Egiona's death brings closure 'Thogh that non other man it wolde'." (137). (N.B.: the article contains three flagable errors of fact. Fn. 45 quotes three lines from the "Tale of Jew and the Pagan" VII. *3307-*3309, without the asterisk, Macaulay's indicator of presence in a subset of Ricardian MSS only-and attributes the speech to the Jew, when the speaker is in fact the Pagan. J. Allan Mitchell is cited as "Allan J. Mitchell" throughout, e.g., Fn. 59, Works Cited.) [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.2.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Van Dijk, Conrad Published Van Dijk, Conrad. "Vengeance and the Legal Person: John Gower's 'Tale of Orestes'." In Theorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England. Ed. Boboc, Andreea. Medieval Law and Its Practice . Leiden: Brill, 2015, pp. 119-41. ISBN 9789004284647 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 Vengeance and the Legal Person: John Gower's 'Tale of Orestes' Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brill, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 large part, Bakalian's essay is an extension of her 1998 dissertation and 2004 book-length study, "Aspects of Love in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'," reprising many of her useful generalizations about reason, nature, and female responsibility for their own rational love, and echoing her discussion of the Tale of Alceone in the CA, in which Gower "illustrates a woman who enjoys a marriage of passionate love moderated by reason" (83). Much of what is new here pertains to the "Tale of Rosiphelee" in which the protagonist "uses her reason to turn towards love" (82) and becomes like Alceone, Bakalian claims, insofar as both characters use reason to "change their worlds and achieve their desires" (83). Bakalian's technique is impressionistic appreciation of the "deftness that is Gower's hallmark" (92), underpinned by interpretative commentary and connections with analogous accounts. The "sources for Gower's Rosiphelee tale are various," Bakalian observes, "but Rosiphelee herself is Gower's own creation" (85); she then goes on to find similarities between Gower's protagonist and Chaucer's Man in Black from "Book of the Duchess," his Criseyde (discussed twice), Gower's own Amans, his Rosemund, and the fairy interlocutor of Rosiphelee's tale. Thoughtful solitude characterizes Rosiphelee for Bakalian, and the tale is made "so special" because Rosiphelee "manages to stay focused" and self-aware even when the fairy disappears suddenly, leaving the protagonist to choose to love in a "powerful ending to a romantic tale" (93). Turning to Alceone's tale, Bakalian observes that the protagonist does not speak at all, "yet she speaks through her actions which support Gower's message of truth in marriage." When Alceone's husband departs, "Gower conveys emotion brilliantly in this realistic and intelligible farewell scene" (96) through tears rather than through speech, while Alceone's later "traditional speech actions" are those of a "doting and dutiful wife . . . even in her new shape as a seabird" (97). Such claims--and there are more like it--will raise many pro-feminist eyebrows, but commenting further on several other female characters in CA, Bakalian insists that "Gower eliminates all anti-feminist and anti-matrimonial rhetoric" from the CA and "promotes women and marriage consistently in the poem" (99). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bakalian, Ellen S. Published Bakalian, Ellen S. "Using Reason to Change Their Worlds: The Tale of Rosiphelee and the Tale of Alceone in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis.'" In Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. Standing in the Shadow of the Master? Chaucerian Influences and Interpretations. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010. Pp. 82-112. 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 Using Reason to Change Their Worlds: The Tale of Rosiphelee and the Tale of Alceone in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 thesis examines the depiction of social antagonism in certain texts written in the 1380s and 1390s, in the London area. It focuses on Chaucer, looking at 'Troilus and Criseyde' and the 'Canterbury Tales' alongside other, contemporary texts. These include Thomas Usk's 'Testament of Love,' the guild returns of 1388-89, the letters accusing three London aldermen of betraying the city in 1381, 'St. Erkenwald,' Richard Maidstone's 'Concordia,' and John Gower's 'Vox clamantis.' Most critics have assumed that Chaucer's vision of society, or of social possibility, was benign. Critics writing from diverse perspectives and in various periods, have generally agreed that Chaucer's texts promote an idea of coherence, and that the author was genial and optimistic. In contrast, I argue that Chaucer's texts depict social groups as essentially fragmentary and antagonistic, and offer no hope for social - or personal - redemption. In Troilus and Criseyde, the city, and fellowship, are shown to be debased and self-seeking; equally, the Canterbury 'compaignye' is a destructive, anti-social group. Both of these works challenge an idea of teleology by suggesting that there is no final goal for society, and both refuse to offer a sense of progress or closure." Author/Editor Author/Editor Turner, Marion. Published Turner, Marion. Urban Chaucer: Fragmented Fellowships and Troubled Teleologies in Some Late Fourteenth-Century Texts. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Oxford, 2002. Dissertation Abstracts International C70.03. Abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Urban Chaucer: Fragmented Fellowships and Troubled Teleologies in Some Late Fourteenth-Century Texts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Adds to the bibliography offered in Heinrich Spies, Englische Studien 28 (1900). [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Northrup, C. S. Published Northrup, C. S. Untitled review of Heinrich Spies' survey of Gower studies (1900). Journal of English and Germanic Philology 4 (1901): 118-19. Gower Subject Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Untitled review of Heinrich Spies' survey of Gower studies (1900). Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1901 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Adds manuscripts not mentioned by Macaulay in his edition. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Spies, H. Published Spies, H. Untitled review of G. C., ed. "The Complete Works of John Gower." Englische Studien 32 (1903): 251-75. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Untitled review of G. C., ed. "The Complete Works of John Gower." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1903 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Although most criticism of the Confessio Amantis acknowledges the Latin texts as Gower's work, studies of specific tales in the work, like its treatment in studies of medieval genres like confession, dream vision and exemplum, generally privilege the Middle English narrative. Investigation into the dynamic interaction of text and apparatus, however, reveals in Gower's project a complex exploitation and modification of medieval scholastic and literary traditions. It also illuminates Gower's artful cultivation of ambiguity throughout the work. The reciprocal influence of Latin and Middle English texts permeates the Confessio, and thereby highlights the importance of the issue of auctoritas and its sentence. "This study relies on manuscript research, evidence of scholastic commentary traditions, an investigation of literary genre, and close reading of portions of the work to argue for a re-appraisal of the Confessio Amantis. Based on interpretations that acknowledge the interaction of all of its constituent parts, it demonstrates Gower's keen sensitivity to the relationship between form and content in literature. His sophisticated manipulation of that relationship governs this dissertation's attention to the texts in the authoritative language and the ways in which they affect, and are affected by, the Middle English narrative. Acknowledging the importance of Gower's dependence on medieval literary traditions, this dissertation discovers in the Confessio Amantis evidence of his success in the creation of 'some new thing.'" Directed by Tim William Machan. Abstract provided by the author. [JGN 16.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Batchelor, Patricia Published Batchelor, Patricia. "Unjustified Margins: Vernacular Innovations and Latin Tradition in Gower's Confessio Amantis." PhD thesis, Marquette University, 1996. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Unjustified Margins: Vernacular Innovations and Latin Tradition in Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Fowler's Paris dissertation examines the MO's sources. Fowler focuses on the MO's section on the vices and virtues, and argues that Gower is closest to two thirteenth-century French sommes, the "Mirëour" or "Miraour du Monde" and the "Somme le Roi." Yet since Gower also borrows from the Latin "Summa Virtutum ac Vitiorum" by Gulielmi Peraldi, Fowler posits that Gower uses a now non-extant version of these three closely related texts, one that includes all of Gower's borrowings. Fowler provides a number of tables to shows corresponding passages, including two lengthy appendices: the first lists all the subdivisions of the vices and virtues in the MO and its possible sources; the second prints the MO's sections on Pride and Humility side by side with corresponding passages from the other texts. Fowler also includes a general introduction to Gower's life (borrowed mostly from Macaulay, but strong on possible contradictions in Gower's work) and focuses frequently on larger comparisons between Gower's three major works. She summarizes the essential differences as follows: "Le Mirour de l'Omme se rapproche des ouvrages cycliques et religieux, homélies ou mystères; la Confessio Amantis, des ouvrages encyclopédiques, et la Vox Clamantis, des ouvrages satiriques." (13). Fowler concludes by arguing that Gower is above all a conservator of older authorities (80), and his sources (the French sommes, Jean de Meun, Benoît, etc.) tend to come from the thirteenth century. [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fowler, R. Elfreda Published Fowler, R. Elfreda. "Une Source Française des Poèmes de Gower." Macon: Protat Frères, 1905 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Biography of Gower 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 Une Source Française des Poèmes de Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Protat Frères, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1905 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 Janecek posits that Gower's consistent use of masculine pronouns in "Iphis and Iante" in reference to Iphis creates a "subversive trans narrative that revolts against cisnormative conceptions of transness." Gower's tale "challenges the role of trauma in shaping not only queer identity, but specifically trans identity." Because Gower's tale lacks the trauma present in Ovid's original, we may read this as a trans narrative rather than an erasure of lesbian identity. Janecek differentiates how gender works for Iphis in both versions of the tale: in Ovid's version, gender is a vehicle to act on desire whereas in Gower it operates irrespective of desire. Rather than label characters in a text, queer theory aims "to analyze social and historical forces and cues that encourage queer readings." Janecek argues that the key difference between Ovid's and Gower's depictions of Iphis is reducible to the relationship between identity and body. For Ovid, gender is discovered through the body; for Gower, gender is an internal part of one's nature. In Gower's version, Iphis is not an incomplete man; rather, the transformation that he undergoes confirms his masculine identity. As Janecek puts it, "Gower's Iphis is born a son, accepted as a son, and in the end, his core identity becomes confirmed." Janecek continues then to engage M. W. Bychowski's work on this same tale at some length, referencing definitions from the "Diagnostics and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" as well as Judith Butler's "Undoing Gender." Janecek argues against Bychowski's argument that Iphis needs to exhibit gender dysphoria to be diagnosed as trans and to then achieve any sense of agency, concluding that Gower's tale indeed emphasizes Iphis's agency in expressing his identity as a trans child without trauma. [JGS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Janecek, C. Published Janecek, C. "Undiagnosing Iphis: How the Lack of Trauma in John Gower's 'Iphis And Iante' Reinforces a Subversive Trans Narrative." Accessus 5.1 (2019): n.p. 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 Undiagnosing Iphis: How the Lack of Trauma in John Gower's "Iphis And Iante" Reinforces a Subversive Trans Narrative. 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 Bychowski's focus is on the "Tale of Iphis and Ianthe," in Book IV of the CA, on Sloth. Gower's presentation of Iphis' transformation from a girl dressed as a boy into a man by the God of Love within the "hermeneutic of the seven deadly sins" is, as "medieval disability scholars have demonstrated," predictable, and fully within the accepted approach current in the late Middle Ages, when "religion and medicine were so intertwined as to be inseparable, especially in cases such as the management of sloth, where the symptoms of depression, despair, and sluggishness spanned the categorizes [sic] of physical and spiritual disease." In a three-part essay, Bychowski considers 1) "'Divisioun and Dysphoria' to establish how Gower prefigures the modern social model of transgender as an experience of living in a world full of change and contradiction"; 2) "the particular social forms of 'divisioun' identified as 'Acedia and Depression'" as signaling "Gower's discussion of the sin of sloth that frames the 'Tale of Iphis and Ianthe';" 3) "how Gower's removal of the dysphoric youth's voice and agency in the tale emphasizes the systematic character of suffering caused by a dysphoric Nature (represented by Isis) and a subjugating patriarchal Nature (represented by Eros)." [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 35.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bychowski, M. W Published Bychowski, M. W. "Unconfessing Transgender: Dysphoric Youths and the Medicalization of Madness in John Gower's 'Tale of Iphis and Ianthe'." Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media 3 (2016), 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 Unconfessing Transgender: Dysphoric Youths and the Medicalization of Madness in John Gower's 'Tale of Iphis and Ianthe' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower was dull and bookish, yet therefore representative of his time. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stryienski, Casimir. Published Stryienski, Casimir. "Un Poète d'Autrefois: John Gower." Revue de l'Enseignement des Langues Vivantes 6 (August, 1895): 249-54. 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 Un Poète d'Autrefois: John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1895 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The five scattered episodes in which Ulysses' story appears do not follow the usual chronology of his legend, but their arrangement is coherent, and taken together, they represent a pilgrimage of the soul struggling between reason and passion that parallels in some ways the journey of Amans. Despite Ulysses' reputation as a rhetorician (cf. CA 7.1560) Gower suppresses all of his direct speech until the final episode in which he appears, when he forgives Telegonus after being mortally wounded (6.1747-48). His first use of speech completes the pattern of similarity to the story of Nebuchadnezzar in this tale, and suggests that in forgiving his son he undergoes a transformation from a lower state to a higher one, repudiating his previous disobedience and preparing himself for grace. "Gower has transformed the ancient pagan hero into a medieval Christian one." [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society: JGN 6.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gittes, Katherine S. Published Gittes, Katherine S.. "Ulysses in Gower's Confessio Amantis: The Christian Soul as Silent Rhetorician." ELN 24 (1986), pp. 7-14. 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 Ulysses in Gower's Confessio Amantis: The Christian Soul as Silent Rhetorician Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Primarily concerned with variations in Gower's usage of "the." [[RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Steinhoff, Ernst. Published Steinhoff, Ernst. Über den Gebrauch des Artikels in den Englischen Werken John Gowers mit Berüchsichtigung der Anwendung in Altenenglischen Sowie im Modernen Englischen. Ph.D. dissertation. Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 1916. Heildelberg: Winter, 1916. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Über den Gebrauch des Artikels in den Englischen Werken John Gowers mit Berüchsichtigung der Anwendung in Altenenglischen Sowie im Modernen Englischen. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1916 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 "Moral Balade," attributing it to Burgh. [RFY1981]. Published Förster, Max. Über Benedict Burghs Leben und Werke. Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 101 (1898): 29-64, esp. 50-51. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Über Benedict Burghs Leben und Werke. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1898 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Commentary on editions of CA by Caxton (1483) and Berthelette (1532 and 1554). Augments William Herbert, Typographical Antiquities . . . (1785). [RFY1981]. Published Dibdin, Thomas Frognall. Typographical Antiquities: Or, the History of Printing in England, Scotland, and Ireland. London: J. Murray, 1810-1816, I, 177-85; III, 278, 340. [Alternative title: Typographical Antiquities: Or, the History of Printing in Great Britain]. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Typographical Antiquities: Or, the History of Printing in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1810-1816 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Herbert, William Published Herbert, William. Typographical Antiquities: Or an Historical Account of the Origin and Progress of Printing in Great Britain and Ireland: Containing Memoirs of Our Ancient Printers, and a Register of Books Printed by Them, from the Year MCCCCLXXI to the Year MDC. London: T. Payne and Son, 1785, pp. 45, 419, 456. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Review Comments on the production and distribution histories of Caxton's 1483 edition of CA and Berthelette's two editions (1532 & 1554) of the same. Augmented by Thomas Frognall Dibdin in 1810-1816. [RFY1981]. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Typographical Antiquities: Or an Historical Account of the Origin and Progress of Printing in Great Britain and Ireland: Containing Memoirs of Our Ancient Printers, and a Register of Books Printed by Them, from the Year MCCCCLXXI to the Year MDC. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1785 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Dismisses any direct influence by Gower on Spenser. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Tupper, Frederick. Published Tupper, Frederick. Types of Society in Medieval Literature. New York: Henry Holt, 1926, p. 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 Types of Society in Medieval Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1926 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 glossed texts of "Disticha" reprinted and edited here; relevance to Gower, and Chaucer and Langland, discussed in introduction; apparently the "Disticha" served poets as source for direct and indirect quotation to varying degrees, and differently in different poems; Gower's greatest dependence is in VC. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Hazelton, Richard M. Published Hazelton, Richard M. Two Texts of the "Disticha Catonis" and Its Commentary, with Special Reference to Chaucer, Langland, and Gower. Ph.D. Dissertation. Rutgers University, 1956. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Two Texts of the "Disticha Catonis" and Its Commentary, with Special Reference to Chaucer, Langland, and Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1956 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, 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 Ito, Masayoshi. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review Chaucer and Gower use material from Trivet, indicative of Gower's desire to tell a fluid tale, and Chaucer's fondness for emotional shifting. Original version in Japanese with English abstract. [RFY1981; rev. MA] Published Ito, Masayoshi. "Two Stories of Constance--Chaucer and Gower." Shiron (Tohoku University) 1 (1958): 60-73. English version in Ito's John Gower, The Medieval Poet (Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1976), pp. 25-38. 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 Two Stories of Constance--Chaucer and Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1958 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review One of the two routes to instruction that Westrem describes is Gower's: the allegorical frame, the signposts provides by the sins, the tales drawn from the past, the long digressions, the conscious attempt to mix "lust" with "lore." The other is provided by contemporary "travel" literature, such as "Mandeville's Travels" and a similar, slightly later "Itinerarius" attributed to Johannes Witte de Hese of Utrecht. Westrem's real interest is in the second type. Using both the similarities and the contrasts to Gower's "Confessio Amantis," Westrem demonstrates that Mandeville's work also contains a great deal of "lore," presented in a particularly artful and alluring way, in response to the critical view that holds it to be merely a plagiarized fantasy. He gives particular attention to Mandeville's tolerance and respectfulness towards non-Christian religions, his use of pagans to instruct in proper behavior, his creation of a persona, and his deliberate reshaping of his sources. Witte's work is more fanstastical, but proves the growing importance of travel literature as a means of conveying information and instruction by around 1400. The works of this genre, Westrem concludes, provide an important model for later works of satire in the form of fiction such as "Gulliver's Travels." [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Westrem, Scott D. Published Westrem, Scott D.. "Two Routes to Pleasant Instruction in Late-Fourteenth Century Literature." In The Work of Dissimilitude: Essays from the Sixth Citadel Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Ed. Allen, David G. and White, Robert A.. Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware, 1992, pp. 67-80. 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 Two Routes to Pleasant Instruction in Late-Fourteenth Century Literature Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Delaware, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Ronberg follows C. A. Luttrell (1958) in studying the scribal hand(s) of Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunter V.2.8 (388), which contains the unique "Gest Historiale of the Destruction of Troy," and Manchester, Chetham Library, MS A.7.38 (6696), a copy of the "Confessio Amantis." He makes two points: 1) in which he disagrees with Luttrell, offering "linguistic evidence" that the two hands in the Hunter MS (a cursive and a bookhand) belong to "different scribes"; and 2)--of interest to Gowerians--in which he agrees with Luttrell that the cursive hand of Hunter and that of the Chetham CA are by the same man: "Thomas Chetham, a landowner who lived at Nuthurst in South Lancashire and who copied the texts mentioned above during the first quarter of the sixteenth century" (463). Ronberg argues from linguistic evidence in both cases (where Luttrell was concerned with paleography), and, discussing common dialectical features of the two manuscripts, he shows that their "spelling features, and their proportional distribution" (467) confirm Luttrell's identification of Chetham and the dates of the manuscripts. N.B.: Like Luttrell, Ronberg cites the Chetham manuscript of the CA as A.6.11 rather than A.7.38, following the error in Macaulay. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ronberg, Gert. Published Ronberg, Gert. "Two North-West Midland Manuscripts Revisited." Neophilologus 67 (1983): 463-67. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Two North-West Midland Manuscripts Revisited. 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 Yeager seeks to defend "the generally unrecognized complexity" of Gower's "Traitiė" by drawing attention to "the remarkable polyvalences, the aesthetic and allusive confrontations of his balades, [and] their challenges, inspirational, formal and doctrinal" (p. 259). He focuses on the second ballade in the sequence, one of the six non-narrative poems that envelop the twelve more familiar exempla of failed marriages in numbers 6-17. The first stanza invokes (in line 4) the injunction in Genesis 9:1 to "increase and multiply and fill the earth," as well as (in line 6) Genesis 3:17, "with labor and toil . . . ," but it is structured around a distinction between spirit and flesh from Romans 8:14-16. From the same passage in Paul, Gower adopts the engendering power of the Spirit in order to establish the "paradoxical equivalent inequality" between flesh and spirit, their "commonality" of both purpose and dignity (264-65). The vocabulary that Gower uses deepens the resonance: the juxtaposition of "experience" and "contemplation" (lines 2-3) invokes the Active and Contemplative lives, and thus Christ's words to Martha in Luke 10:38-42; and hanging over the entire stanza is the polyvalence of "amour" (line 1), both physical and spiritual, embodied elsewhere, as in the CA, in the dual roles of Venus. The image of the soul contemplating God in lines 1-2 has a long line of illustrious antecedents. Gower also draws upon Augustine both for the unique properties of the soul and for his insistence upon "a role and a dignity for the body" (269). The larger argument of the "Traitiė" is that marriage "conjoins body and soul. . . . It is this humane wholeness that lies at the heart of the 'Traitiė' balades, prompting a definition of marriage not as legitimate only for offspring, and only if lacking in pleasure, as some austere theologians would have it, but rather as valid and joyful" (270). The value of Yeager's essay lies in its very willingness to take Gower's aims and intentions both as moralist and as poet fully seriously. There are some odd asides--the assertion that Machaut's ballades are "structured narratively" (261), for instance, and that Gower would likely not have written ballades without an envoy after 1390 (268). (Deschamps, Granson, and Christine de Pisan, among others, all continued to write ballades without envoys after that date.) There are also some questions about exactly what some of Gower's lines mean. "Labour" (line 6) probably does not refer to childbirth (as Yeager suggests, p. 265); such a sense does not occur in French, and in Middle English only contextually, and only later, according to the MED; and "providence" (line 8) isn't used as a general synonym for divine agency until much later (p. 263). Lines 8-12 offer more than one difficulty, including the awkward anacoluthon in line 12. Where Yeager has "From the spirit which does this, Providence cannot withhold a subsequent reward. This understanding is greater in the soul. . . . Than in the body engendered in its sons," I would read instead "He who makes provision for the soul cannot fail of subsequent reward. That understanding is greater in the soul . . . Than is the body, engendering its offspring." Gower's ballades contain many similar challenges, and finding the best way of translating them must itself be part of our discussion of the "Traitiė." [PN. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 37.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R. F. Published Yeager, R. F. "Twenty-First Century Gower: The Theology of Marriage in John Gower's 'Traitiė' and the Turn toward French." In Thelma Fenster and Carolyn P. Collette, eds. The French of Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 257-71. Gower Subject Traitie pour Essampler les Amants Marietz 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 Twenty-First Century Gower: The Theology of Marriage in John Gower's "Traitiė" and the Turn toward French. 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 Waen includes a brief comparison with Gower's Vox Clamantis and Cronica Tripertita: "Richard the Redeles shares with [Gower's works] a strong though less statuesque Lancastrianism; the fusion of the beast symbolism and literalism; and the attempt to protect the poem and the poet from official wrath . . . . Yet there are some significant differences between the works, suggesting that the association of Richard the Redeles with the Gowerian chronicle-tradition was not slavish and that it had within it the seeds of a different development within the truth-telling tradition. Compared with Gower's works, Richard the Redeles carries a less insistent burden of raw incident; its indignation is more analytic, less descriptive; it offers flickerings of undeveloped but developable allegory beyond the severe limitations of beast symbolism (notably in the sections relating to the King's household); it offers flickerings of undeveloped but equally developable themes (notably the dangers and the desireability of speaking the truth); lastly, unlike Gower's works, Richard the Redeles is unfinished." [PN. Copyright the John Gower Society. JGN 3.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wawn, Andrew Published Wawn, Andrew. "Truth-Telling and the Tradition of Mum and the Sothsegger." Yearbook of English Studies (1983), pp. 270-287. ISSN 0306-2473 Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Cronica Tripertita 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 Truth-Telling and the Tradition of Mum and the Sothsegger. 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 Gower places himself as character in the CA, to ironic effect; would have disagreed with Troilus' views of the world in "Troilus and Criseyde" IV, 953ff. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Brewer, D. S. Published Brewer, D. S. "Troilus and Criseyde." In W. F. Bolton, ed. The Middle Ages (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1970), pp. 199, 233 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 Troilus and Criseyde. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1970 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Through analyzing Elias Ashmole's annotations of Gower's text, Curtis Runstedler suggests that Elias Ashmole "argues for a hermetic reading of Gower's story of Jason and the Golden Fleece in Book V of the Confessio Amantis." Even though Runstedler admits that Gower was likely not a practicing alchemist, he details Ashmole's belief that Gower was, including Ashmole's evidence for such assertions. In particular, Runstedler investigates Ashmole's annotations of Jason and the Golden Fleece, asserting "there is genuine evidence for reading the story as an alchemical allegory, and moreover it connects to the Renaissance tradition of reading classical stories as alchemical as well as Genius's view of alchemy as an ideal form of human labor in Book IV of the 'Confessio Amantis'." He analyses Ashmole's alchemical reading of Jason and the Golden Fleece, demonstrating the hermetic aspects of the tale and providing insights into how Gower's tale may have been valued for its alchemical aspects in early modern England. Runstedler first discusses Ashmole's "Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum" and alchemy in Book IV of CA, concluding that Ashmole's annotations "reveal that Gower's alchemy was still valued, and moreover, he was considered a true adept." He compares the alchemical passages of Book IV of CA and Ashmole's annotations, asserting that there is enough evidence to read, like Ashmole, the tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece as hermetic. Reading this story as alchemical is part of a humanist tradition in late medieval and early modern period. Runstedler then proceeds to analyze the tale for alchemical implications, particularly in the character of Medea. He posits that reading the tale as an alchemical allegory presents the Golden Fleece as the Philosopher's Stone, and "Ashmole's reading of Gower's version is also noteworthy since he validates alchemical success with Jason's discovery of the Stone, yet it also provides a moral warning against alchemists in the 'Confessio Amantis'." Runstedler concludes, Ashmole "enhances the value of English alchemy and its literature for his audience. Ashmole suggests a reading where the Philosopher's Stone can be attained, if only for the alchemist to lose everything to his vices." [JGS. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Runstedler, Curtis. Published Runstedler, Curtis. "Transmuting John Gower: Elias Ashmole's Hermetic Reading of Gower's Jason and the Golden Fleece." Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media, 6.2 (2020): n.p. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Transmuting John Gower: Elias Ashmole's Hermetic Reading of Gower's Jason and the Golden Fleece. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Hurley's Chapter 4, entitled "Becoming England: The Northumbrian Conversion in Trevet, Gower, and Chaucer," centers around the "Man of Law's Tale" and Chaucer; Trevet and Gower present "versions" that demonstrate "an emerging engagement--beyond Chaucer himself--with the Pre-Conquest past during the fourteenth century" (125), thereby helping Hurley find answers to her question driving the chapter: "By examining the translation effects that appear in the 'Man of Law's Tale,' we can begin to see how imagined textual communities are affected by post-Conquest translation. How does a new English vernacular change the composition of such textual communities?" (127) Her answer, found by juxtaposing Trevet's, Gower's, and Chaucer's narratives, is a unifying idea of "an emerging sense of Engelond" (128) discernible through their differences. Per her book's title, Hurley's discussion of Trevet's Constance and Chaucer's Custance highlights the ability to speak languages other than her native (Roman) Latin, pointing out the cultural "homogenization" implicit in giving her speech in vernaculars--in contrast to Hermengyld who, in both Trevet's and Gower's tales, is allowed to register herself as Saxon via linguistic code-switching (139). Gower, Hurley notes, eludes the complexities involved in moving a heroine through several linguistic environments by keeping Constance "profoundly silent" (137): indeed, because "language (like translation) is . . . a means to an end" for Gower, readers are given only the results of Constance's speaking, both to the Saxons and to the Syrian merchants, not her words themselves (138). It is a technique which--in a way--brings Gower closer to Trevet than to Chaucer (139). It is perhaps worth noting that (131, n. 25) Hurley takes her texts of both Trevet and Gower from Correale and Hamel, "Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales." [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hurley, Mary Kate. Published Hurley, Mary Kate. Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2021. Pp. 125-50. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Bullón-Fernández, María Published Bullón-Fernández, María. "Translating Women, Translating Texts: Gower's 'Tale of Tereus' and the Castilian and Portuguese Translations of the 'Confessio Amantis'." In John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts. Ed. Urban, Malte. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009, pp. 109-32. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Review Noting that no "attempts have been made to analyse the three versions [of the Confessio], the two translations, and Gower's text, simultaneously" (111), Bullón-Fernández selects the "Tale of Tereus" as locus for comparison. The tale, with its focus on arranged marriages and foreign-born queens, is especially apt, since the Iberian translations were probably commissioned by Philippa, Queen of Portugal, and Catherine, Queen of Castile, both daughters of John of Gaunt who arranged their marriages as part of his price for abandoning his claims to the Castilian crown. "Tereus" Gower found in Ovid, but his own version is much altered. "While Ovid raises questions about the exchange of women between men and about the father-daughter bond, Gower is interested in the daughter's identification not only with her father, but more generally with her birth family. More so than Ovid, Gower develops the bond between the sisters, Philomena and Progne, and examines the latter's pull between her husband and her birth family. This reinterpretation of Ovid's story . . . is taken even further by the two Iberian translators (more so by Juan de Cuenca), both of whom comment on the practice of arranged foreign marriages and the question of the wife's identification with her birth family to a greater degree than does Gower, raising questions about the extent to which a daughter changes loyalty when she marries" (112). She concludes "with an analysis of the relation between these translations and the translations of Philippa and Catherine to Portugal and Castile. Reading these three versions of the 'Tale of Tereus' side by side allows us to illuminate the fears and anxieties associated with the 'translation' of actual royal and aristocratic women through marriage to foreign royal and aristocratic men and to raise complex and significant questions about this other process of 'translation'" (112).] [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 Translating Women, Translating Texts: Gower's 'Tale of Tereus' and the Castilian and Portuguese Translations of the 'Confessio Amantis' 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 Building on his 2017 edition of "Le Bone Florence of Rome," Stavsky argues that this Middle English romance--and many others like it, including Gower's "Tale of Constance" in the Confessio Amantis--tones down the Orientalist pro-Crusades outlook found in its French source. In this essay, he uses the argument to help set up an analysis that counterpoises the pro-Christian "identitarian conception of virtue" (51) of Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale" with a view of Muslims in the "Parson's Tale" "which prioritizes self-inspection and reform over warfare" (53); the latter perspective, Stavsky tells us, is also found in Gower's Tale and in "Le Bone Florence." "Florence" and Chaucer's Tale figure most prominently in the essay, although Stavsky also addresses the Middle English "Octavian romances" (37) and differences between English and French anthologies of the "Octavian-Florence cycle" (39) as well as Gower. He leans recurrently--and perhaps most heavily in his brief discussion of Gower--on the evidence of the ethnic labeling of non-Christian peoples and individuals, identifying what Middle English translators do differently than their French predecessors and as a result reduce their orientalism, as Stavsky sees it. In the case of Gower, Stavsky resists Emily Houlik-Ritchey's argument (in "Rewriting Difference: 'Saracens' in John Gower and Juan de Cuenca," 2017) that Gower uses "Sarazine" for the Sultan's mother in order to justify Crusade-like "retaliation against her descendants," as Stavsky puts it. To the contrary, Stavsky observes, Gower uses "Sarazine" only twice (the instance in the Tale and one in an accompanying Latin gloss ["Sarazenos" at 2.1084]), while equivalent terms occur in the Constance story of Nicholas Trivet's "Chronicles," Gower's source, in "no fewer than a dozen instances." Stavsky cites only one instance from Trivet (and a complete list would be useful): the phrase "Terre Seinte encontre les Sarasins," for which Gower offers no equivalent whatsoever in his adaptation, lessening the orientalism, Stavsky implies. Elsewhere, Gower tends to use "Barbarie" instead, a "rather vague designation that could be anywhere outside of Christendom," Stavsky maintains, and nowhere presented by Gower as "grounds for a new Crusade." Closing his one-page assessment of Gower's Tale, Stavsky describes it as an "exemplum against detraction that is designed to cure its addressee," citing Carol Jamison's 2012 essay "John Gower's Shaping of 'The Tale of Constance' as an Exemplum contra of Envy" (37). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stavsky, Jonathan. Published Stavsky, Jonathan. "Translating the Near East in the 'Man of Law's Tale' and Its Analogues." Chaucer Review 55.1 (2020): 32–54. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Translating the Near East in the "Man of Law's Tale" and Its Analogues. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Brenner, Caitlin R. Published Brenner, Caitlin R. Translating Ovid's "Heroides": Three Middle English Collections of Women. Ph.D. Dissertation. Texas A&M University, 2019. vi, 158 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A83.11(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/items/a54ed9ad-791b-44fa-9fc6-810cb25a111c. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Review Brenner's abstract: "This work foregrounds gendered metaphors of translation in three collections of 'good' women's lives adapted and compiled from Ovid's 'Heroides' ('Epistulae Heroidum'): Geoffrey Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women,' John Gower's 'Confessio amantis,' and Osbern Bokenham's 'Legendys of Hooly Wummen.' While these texts remain understudied, I argue that these collections constitute the authors' most overt representations of themselves as English translators. As each poet restrains and restricts the 'heathen' women's complaints during translation, he likewise restrains and restricts the feminized 'heathen' tongue: English. By identifying how these and other early English authors theorized their approach to translation, I demonstrate that metaphors of reproduction, exile, and female writing are replicated in important vernacular works up until the end of the sixteenth century. Chapters examine how the three authors appropriate Ovid's poetic exile, the poets' gendered ventriloquism as a vernacular authorial position, and the texts' engagements with the Catalog of Women genre and its emphasis on feminine reproduction." Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Translating Ovid's "Heroides": Three Middle English Collections of Women. 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 Coleman opens the conclusion of her essay with the "sneaking suspicion that some medievalists . . . would think 'Well, of course, it's obvious that English illumination would be influenced by "Roman de la Rose" iconography'" (192) and, in a way, she's right--but only in a way. In a crisp discussion of the influence of RR miniatures on three images from English illuminated manuscripts, she makes the influence obvious, contributes to audience or reception studies, and, one hopes, provides grounds for further investigations. The three images, treated in "chronological order by manuscript date" are "the confession scene in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 3), the dreamer scene in 'Pearl' (London, British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x), and the 'sermon' scene in the frontispiece to Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde' (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 61)" (177). The essay reproduces all three in color, accompanied by images from RR that are either their sources or strong analogues in one way or another. In the case of the Gower image (Fairfax 3, folio 8r), Coleman shows that the miniature of Amans confessing to Genius combines features of RR miniatures of Nature confessing to Genius and of Amant approaching the Garden of Love, and asks "How might a sophisticated late fourteenth-century English viewer of the Fairfax 3 confession miniature have read the image's recombinant iconography?" In its simplest form, Coleman's answer is that the image would have signaled to the viewer that "if Amans could learn from Genius the proper way to pursue love, access would be granted to the joys it brings" (181). This answer is made more intriguing by Coleman's attention to ways in which it engages "Gower's mixed literary goals" and "mingles political issues . . . with the courtly and the ludic" (183). She sidesteps the question of whether or not Gower was himself the "designer" of the image (but see note 11), commenting on gender issues in the image (no Dame Nature or Lady Idleness), the collar of SS worn by Amans, his apparent age (treated with due caution due to manuscript damage), and the similar miniature of the confession scene found in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 294.The influences of the French scenes are clear and the implications of the Fairfax designer's treatment for viewer response, complex. Coleman's discussions of the influence of RR illuminations on images from "Pearl" and the "Troilus" manuscripts are similarly convincing and, like her treatment of the Gower image, rich in implication for how English miniature designers used RR iconography, and for how viewers are likely to have responded to their designs. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Coleman, Joyce. Published Coleman, Joyce. "Translating Iconography in Gower, 'Pearl,' Chaucer, and the 'Rose.'" In Susanna Fein and David Raybin, eds. Chaucer: Visual Approaches. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016. Pp. 177-94. Gower Subject Confessio Amantic Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations 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 Translating Iconography in Gower, "Pearl," Chaucer, and the "Rose." 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 "The book argues," Jeremy Smith says at the outset, "that correlations between textual form and textual function are of very considerable interest not only to scholars working within the paradigm of historical pragmatics but also, more generally, to literary scholars, would-be editors, book historians and indeed those interested in issues of cultural change more generally" (29). For the "Confessio Amantis," he focuses on differences between the language of the important manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 3 and the language of M. L. Samuels's "Type III" that pervades late-fourteenth-century manuscripts. Some of the language idiosyncrasies, which may well be Gower's own, appear in later manuscripts but are muted in Berthelette's early prints. These also embody an evolving punctuation practice (between the 1532 and 1554 editions) that "would seem to reflect a more directive approach to the text, guiding readers in pragmatic terms more insistently towards the interpretation of Gower's verse" (150). [TWM. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Smith, Jeremy J. Published Smith, Jeremy J. Transforming Early English: The Reinvention of Early English and Older Scots. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Manuscripts and Textual Studies Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Transforming Early English: The Reinvention of Early English and Older Scots. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Garrison's essay begins with a summary of the recent exploration of personal rape narratives that have led us to question our assumptions about the safety and civility of Western society. She suggests Gower's "Confessio Amantis" as a potential tool to use in transforming Western rape culture because it "highlights sexual violence against women as a central cultural injustice and presents rape narratives as a potentially powerful force for social and political change" (123). Gower's poem brings to light the social destruction that results from "the masculine chivalric ideal" that nearly always comes at the price of women's suffering. Garrison focuses on three of the stories in the CA: "Mundus and Paulina," "Tarquin and Lucrece," and "Tereus and Philomena." Garrison notes that "Gower reveals that the language of courtly love is a culturally sanctioned version of the language of rape" (124). He does this through Genius's warnings about the dangers of courtly love through tales concerning rape, and, despite what other critics have argued, Garrison contends that Gower is not trivializing experiences of rape but instead showing them as acts of violence against communities. Discussing the tale of "Mundus and Paulina," she demonstrates how the community's response to Paulina's rape creates a sort of solidarity--the "English social unity" for which he calls in his Prologue (126). Gower achieves this through his focus on Paulina's suffering, which also works to unite the Christian community. In the legend of Lucrece, Garrison writes, "Gower focuses on the power of Lucrece as a storyteller who exposes the social dangers of powerful men who fail to control their own desires" (130). She suggests Gower's moral for the tale is that powerful men should not rape their subjects. After demonstrating the through-lines in the CA of the rape of women and invasions of cities, Garrison adds, "Gower highlights how the rape of Lucrece has significance that extends well beyond one woman's body" (133). Garrison concludes this section of her essay: "Gower suggests that rape and political tyranny are inextricably intertwined" (134-35). Finally, Garrison turns to Gower's tale of "Philomena and Tereus," in which he "most clearly articulates the power of women's personal rape narratives" (135). Garrison posits the languages of courtly love and rape blur in this tale. She writes, "Philomena's narrative, written both on and by Philomena, consistently highlights the intersections of rape and courtly love in defining the chivalric subject" (138). Rape and courtly love become synonymous. Garrison concludes her essay by highlighting the transformative social power of rape narratives: "As uncomfortable a truth as it may be, personal rape narratives are an art. As an art form, they only have power insofar as they inspire their readers to change themselves" (141). [JGS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Garrison, Jennifer. Published Garrison, Jennifer. "Transforming Community: Women's Rape Narratives and Gower's Confessio Amantis." Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 57, no. 1 (2021): 121-41. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Transforming Community: Women's Rape Narratives and Gower's Confessio Amantis. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Discusses references in the MO to Lombard merchants. [RFY1981] Author/Editor Author/Editor Schless, Howard. Published Schless, Howard. "Transformations: Chaucer's Use of Italian." In Derek Brewer, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer. Writers and Their Background (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1975), pp. 195-96 Gower Subject 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 Transformations: Chaucer's Use of Italian. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1975 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Undertakes a detailed, point by point comparison of Gower's and Chaucer's tales--the portrayal of the hero, the nature of his crime, the terms of his quest, his behavior both before and after his marriage, his final choice, and the concluding "disenchantment"--in order to bring to light the authors' separate purposes, and to defend the notion that Gower's tale has a logic and beauty of its own, however different from Chaucer's. The principal difference between the two embraces their moral purpose and their use of transformation: in Beidler's words: "Gower has Genius tell the Tale of Florent as a means of transforming Amans, a character outside the tale, into a man worthy of a good woman's love, while Chaucer, on the other hand, has Alice tell the 'Wife of Bath's Tale' to illustrate how a lusty young knight inside the tale is transformed into a man worthy of a good woman's love. . . . Gower's tale demontrates how a cautious and near-perfect knight does behave in a dangerous and hostile situation, whereas Chaucer's tale shows how an impulsive and most imperfect knight learns how to behave in a far less threatening situation" (pp. 100-101). Gower's is a more straightforward sort of romance, while Chaucer's might be seen as a feminist parody of the traditional romance form. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Beidler, Peter G Published Beidler, Peter G. "Transformations in Gower's Tale of Florent and Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale." In Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. ELS Monograph Series (51). Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1991, pp. 100-114. 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 Transformations in Gower's Tale of Florent and Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available English Literary Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book 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 "My dissertation . . . examines the literary preoccupation with amorous infidelity that flourished during the 1380's. This decade was, not coincidentally, a period that witnessed a heightened interest in treason law. By contextualizing the literary trope that links treason and love, I demonstrate how the political concerns of Chaucer, Gower and Usk are displaced and restated in another discursive register. . . . Gower's Confessio Amantis urges rulers to avoid tyranny and false counsel by shunning lechery. The Confessio thus offers an art of love as a manual of advice for rulers: by depicting deviant forms of love as treason, the poem links sexual regulation and good governance. In the Confessio, Amans' sexual reform serves as an example for Richard II to emulate. This seemingly innocuous example ultimately aligns Gower's poem with the rhetoric of subversion that alleged the transgressive sexual practices of Richard's court. Given the political environment in which these texts were written, treason in love acquires a referentiality that exceeds its literary locus. By historicizing the literary trope, I show how these writers' treatments of amorous infidelity situate their texts in the unstable and treacherous world of Ricardian politics." [JGN 15.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hanrahan, Michael Published Hanrahan, Michael. "Traitors and Lovers: The Politics of Love in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, Gower's Confessio Amantis and Usk's Testament of Love." PhD thesis, Indiana University, 1995. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Traitors and Lovers: The Politics of Love in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, Gower's Confessio Amantis and Usk's Testament of Love Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Cunningham, J. V. Published Cunningham, J. V. Tradition and Poetic Structure: Essays in Literary History and Criticism. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1960, pp. 63, 65-66, 69. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review The CA is a poem of the dream-vision tradition, heavily dependent on the "Roman de la Rose; the "Tale of Rosiphelee" is also a dream vision. [RFY1981] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Tradition and Poetic Structure: Essays in Literary History and Criticism. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1960 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 locus of Hsy's study is London, which he, like David Wallace, Ardis Butterfield, and others of late, casts as a city of many languages, a kind of crucible for "code-switching"--the kind of "shifting between different languages (or identifiable registers of any given language) . . . not only for pragmatic purposes but also for deliberately artistic ends: using different languages to develop distinct expressive registers, to stylize certain types of speech, or to evoke a vivid sense of place" (5-6). London's status as a city of languages rests on its prominence as a commercial hub; hence much of Hsy's focus like many of his examples derives from or connects with merchants and mercantile-driven enterprise (lawyers, guildsmen, the printer William Caxton, Chaucer, with emphasis on his commercial associations through the staple, etc.). In this regard, Hsy's book is a good companion to Craig Bertolet's "Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and the Commercial Practices of Late Fourteenth-Century London" (London: Ashgate, 2013)--a study Hsy acknowledges in a footnote (7-8, n. 12) that was at press simultaneous with his own. Indeed, Hsy and Bertolet discuss many of the same passages, especially from the MO, where Gower's sharpster Triche (Fraud) receives commentary from both, but importantly to different ends. Hsy's concern is invariably linguistic: he wants to show how Gower's (and Chaucer's, Caxton's, etc.) language works, where it comes from, who its target audience might have been: e.g., Hsy concludes a comparison of the Constance story in his second chapter, "Overseas Travel and Languages in Motion," as told by Trevet, Chaucer and Gower, noting that "by transforming Constance's story from a cleric's narrative into a merchant's tale, both poets find a new literary mode that exploits the transitory and fluid potential of language transversal" (73). In his third chapter, "Translingual Identities in John Gower and William Caxton," Hsy brings the poet and his first printer--also a polylingual--together in enlightening ways, as he sees them as similar spirits. He offers, he says, "a sustained assessment of Gower's polyglot persona and Caxton's literary ambitions . . . . Through first-person prologues and autobiographical excurses, Gower and Caxton develop innovative discourses for discussing cross-linguistic exchange and literary production, and each invests a considerable amount of thought into how his own translingualism informs an ever-shifting literary persona" (92). This chapter contains the extended discussion of the merchant section of the MO noted previously, and draws occasional examples from the CA, stressing the interplay of the Latin with the Middle English in both the verses and the commentaries, and helpfully reminding us that the great majority of Gower manuscripts (and none of those thought to devolve from his own likely oversight of an exemplar) are trilingual. Of particular interest also in this chapter is Hsy's close reading of Cinkante Balade XVII, pointing out the multiple valences Gower achieves with the shift from the lover's French to the lady's rejection of his suit in Middle English: "nay" (113). The example in many ways is a good one to stand for Hsy's larger purpose for the book--"to change our views of medieval writing" (209) from monolingual and nationalist to polylingual and transcultural. He writes of "nay": "Gower foregrounds the alterity of the lone English word spoken by a fictive French speaker, and he dramatizes this word's increasing estrangement from its original moment of utterance. Through this ensuing narrative, the poet suggests the corresponding unease an English speaker experiences when acquiring (and using) a second language like French, a tongue that is at once very close to the speaker but perpetually eluding his grasp" (113). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hsy, Jonathan Horng Published Hsy, Jonathan Horng. "Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature." Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013 ISBN 9780814212295 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis 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 Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Ohio State University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Type The nature or genre of the resource 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 Davis focuses on the "post-Black Death commercial environment" (192) of the 1370s in England, summarizing the impact of the plague, the concerns of the Good Parliament of 1376, and the "role of John Northampton, who emerged as the standard bearer of civic complaints in the 1370s" (193), exploring how "some 400 lines" of Gower's "Mirour de l'Omme" offered "a conservative, popular programme for market reform, one in which conventional paradigms were weaved together with some of the pressing issues of his day" (193), particularly "issues of prices, quality, coin and the common good" (198). Gower's "specific iteration of sweet wines," for example (MO 26089–100), engages concerns that underlie the impeachment of three London merchants in the Good Parliament, Davis tells us, and his reference to the twenty-four "soldoiers" ("hirelings" of Fraud; MO 25957–68) connects with the Council of Aldermen, "a body of twenty-four individuals who were facing immense criticism at the time Gower was writing" (205–6). Elsewhere, Davis's claims tend to be general rather than specific, as when he observes that Northampton's "appeal to morality cut across sectional divides just as Gower's had" (208) or when he links the growing trend in London for harsh, public punishment of commercial deception to Gower's "strident language about punishment" (211) of dishonest bakers (MO 26173–96). Nonetheless, Davis marshals a range of details and perspectives that establish a "context for Gower's discussion of trade" (211). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Davis, James. Published Davis, James. "Towns and Trade." In Historians on John Gower. Ed. Stephen H. Rigby, with Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 191-212. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism 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 Towns and Trade. 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 At 41 pages without illustrations, Stone's argument is lengthy, complex, and difficult to summarize succinctly. He offers an attempt in his attached abstract: "This article triangulates John Gower's revisions to the 'Mirour de l'Omme' and 'Vox Clamantis,' William Langland's revisions to 'Piers Plowman,' and English responses to the Western Schism. The Schism forced Gower to rework portions of the 'Mirour' and 'Vox,' and influenced Langland's depiction of the papacy in the B-text of 'Piers.' Recovering Gower's and Langland's representations of the Schism not only brings these two poets into direct dialogue, but it also illuminates an undertheorized set of religious, political, and imaginative discourses centered on the institutional nature and shape of the church . . . . scholars [should] understand these discourses as a loose but recognizable 'vernacular ecclesiology' common to both the poetical works of Langland and Gower as well as [a] much broader spectrum of later medieval literature." As this abstract suggests, in addition to substantial material providing background to the Schism (clearly on the assumption that most know little about it), its most salient points center around dating those passages in the MO, VC, (and incidentally the CA and "In Praise of Peace") and "Piers" which can be thought to address the Schism--not ever easy, since in no case do Gower and Langland confront it directly. For Gowerians, perhaps Stone's most enduring effort is tracing what he argues were parallel arcs of Gower's and Langland's thinking regarding "ecclesiology" (which Stone defines, quoting Paul Avis, as "the comparative, critical, and constructive study of the dominant paradigms of the church's identity" [101]), prompted by the Schism: "By 1377, Gower and Langland had, like many of their contemporaries, had already begun to think about the spiritual, political, and aesthetic consequences of ecclesia" (99). In 1378, the Schism caused Gower to revise the MO and the "A-text" (borrowing from Maria Wickert) of the VC, which "focused on the sins of the Avignonese papacy." With the Schism in 1378, which "c. September 1378-summer 1379" Gower configured "as a monstrous new birth in the 'Mirour'" (94). VC B1 adjusts to critique the chaos during "the torrid first few years of the Schism while B2 registers the situation after Despenser's Crusade" (95). The CA's remarks on the Schism reflect the period "between Despenser's Crusade and the death of Clement VII in 1394" (95); and in "In Praise of Peace" he "exhorts the Henrician regime to support inchoate conciliar efforts to end the Schism" (95). Stone finds Langland's revisions to "Piers" at B.19-20/C.21-22 obeying a similar chronology in pursuit of a remarkably similar reaction to the Schism (95-101). In a coda, he opines about how thinking through an "English ecclesiology" might benefit analyses of late medieval literary work. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stone, Zachary E. Published Stone, Zachary E. "Towards a Vernacular Ecclesiology: Revising the Mirour de l'Omme, Vox Clamantis, and Piers Plowman During the Western Schism." Yearbook of Langland Studies 33 (2019): 69-110. Gower Subject Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Vox Clamantis 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 Towards a Vernacular Ecclesiology: Revising the "Mirour de l'Omme," "Vox Clamantis," and "Piers Plowman" During the Western Schism 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 Knapp's essay is preceded by his own summary, as follows: "This essay seeks to revise our sense of late medieval allegory by examining the representation of crowds and urban space in Hoccleve, Langland, and Gower. I begin by looking at Walter Benjamin's treatment of the flâneur, with a specific eye towards his sense that allegory is born in the hermeneutical challenge of making meaning out of the unknown faces in a city crowd. I then turn to readings of Hoccleve's 'La Male Regle,' Langland's "Piers Plowman," and the initial Visio in Gower's VC to establish both the surprising frequency with which late medieval English allegory turned to depictions of crowds as well as the particular narrative structures generated out of the attempts to represent urban space in these three poets." Knapp offers close readings of Hoccleve (concentrating on his travels through the London streets), Langland (concentrating on his vividly "meaningful crowds," in Benjaminian fashion), and Gower (concentrating on the 1381 rebels' invasion of "New Troy"--a form of "not-London"). Gower's narratives, Knapp finds, "are often organized around an oscillation from urban spaces to extra-urban wilderness and back again" (102). An example is the nautical wanderings of Apollonius in CA Book VIII. But "perhaps the most striking version of this narrative structure occurs in the dream visio that supplies a prologue to Gower's Vox Clamantis" (102). Knapp traces the narrator's flight from the crowd of rebels-turned-animals from city to woods, finding in it three levels of allegorical import--"at least three comments on the significance of 1381 in terms of the city and the crowd. First, the crowd's pursuit suggests that with the boundaries of the city and country loosened by rebellion, the urban mob is free both to enter the city and also to disrupt the Horatian refuge of the countryside. Second, the juridical force of the allegory suggests the downfall of yet another stabilizing urban institution as the court of law…has been swallowed up by sheer rumor. And, lastly, the fast pursuit of these tongues seems a wholly malevolent version of Langland's constant motion; here, the motion of the crowd must stand for…fear of the rapidity with which both the word and fact of rebellion spread from region to region" (105). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 36.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Knapp, Ethan. Published Knapp, Ethan. "Towards a Material Allegory: Allegory and Urban Space in Hoccleve, Langland, and Gower." Exemplaria 27 (2015): 93-109. Gower Subject 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 Towards a Material Allegory: Allegory and Urban Space in Hoccleve, Langland, and Gower. 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 Collette demonstrates that in his allusions to Armenia, Gower was able to draw upon a rich framework of topical reference in the creation of the polysemous CA. On the border between the Christian and Muslim worlds, Armenia tried to remain independent of both. The last king visited England in 1386 following his deposition, and he died in France. Armenia became "known in history and romance as an example of loss and decline" and offered "a cautionary tale for Western Europe on the failure of arms and of profit" (42). Gower evokes this history in a sequence of tales in Book 4 that begins with "Rosiphelee," who is the daughter of an Armenian king. The topicality of the story emerges in the widening of frame in the tales that follows, which are concerned with the value of deeds of arms, particularly in the struggles with the "Tartans" in which Armenia was lost. Another reference occurs in the story of "Pompey and the King of Armenia," in which the king's patient suffering echoes Philippe de Mézière's account of the trials of King Levon, and in which the outcome, the restoration of the king to his throne, matches Philippe's unrealized hopes for the deposed king. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 30.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Collette, Carolyn P Published Collette, Carolyn P. "Topical and Tropological Gower: Invoking Armenia in the Confessio Amantis." In John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition. Ed. Dutton, Elisabeth, and Hines, John, and Yeager, R.F. Cambridge: Brewer, 2010, pp. 35-45. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Topical and Tropological Gower: Invoking Armenia in the Confessio Amantis 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 Review The fourteenth century "possessed a strong sense of the past, a feeling for history and its bearing on the present" (401). What is unique to Chaucer and Gower is that although both "expressed the sentiment that the world had grown old, and while they both tended to cast the passing of time in moral terms, they also relied ultimately on personal sensibility to define the relationship between present and past" (403). Particularly the conclusion to the "Clerk's Tale" and the end of the CA provide moments where Chaucer and Gower "turn away from moralistic, clerical time and toward time as experience rooted in the psyche, what might be termed 'humanistic time'" (403). For Chaucer, the defining virtue of the Golden Age was constancy, precisely the virtue that Griselda embodies. It is the contemporary lack of constancy that the Clerk decries, and so his final lament compares the women of his time to debased coinage. Dean points out that it was ironically gold that caused the downfall of the Saturnian Golden Age. Griselda thus "embodies for the Clerk an ideal, to be invoked in poetry, whose virtue rebukes the present age of 'brassy' arrogance" (406). Gower's CA introduces the "world grown old" theme in its Prologue. Nebuchadnezzar's statue embodies in the shape of man as microcosm "the decline of virtue, specifically love or charity, in the macrocosm" (407). While the tone here is "disengaged and moralistic" (407), Gower also suggests, both in the Prologue and in Book 5's discussion of avarice, that the perfection of the Golden Age is located in man's psyche, in his innate sense of moderation or "mesure." The way back to the harmony of the past is through memory and poetry, a process symbolized by the poet Arion and put into practice through the stories of the CA. Gower makes Amans an emblem of division in love; like the senescent world, Amans is old and feeble. Amans's final encounter with Venus, a moment that is both "amusing and poignant" (411), allows the reader to experience time and its passing in a very personal fashion. In the end, for Chaucer and Gower it is not only that the quest for a clarification of the self leads to a recherche du temps perdu, but also that "the search for lost time leads to important insights about the self" (413). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dean, James Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Published Dean, James. "Time Past and Time Present in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale and Gower's Confessio Amantis." English Literary History 44.3 (1977), pp. 401-418. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1977 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Time Past and Time Present in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale and Gower's Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Callan compares Gower and Chaucer's telling of the tale of "Pyramus and Thisbe." He notes Gower's aptitude for didacticism, and adds, "Gower has a simple mind, unencumbered with subtleties, and it is one of the incidental pleasures of reading the Confessio Amantis to see what surprising lessons he can extract from the most unpromising material" (270). Gower on the whole translates his original closely, "but he is never the slave of it" (271). For instance, he expands the description of Polyphemus' envious emotions and alters Ovid's somewhat abstruse account of Medea's necromancy. Chaucer's adaptation of Ovid is more varied. His rendering of "The Legend of Lucretia" stays so "tediously close" (272) to Ovid that it lacks all spontaneity. On the other hand, when Chaucer works freely with his source he produces more "felicitous re-creations of individuals words and lines" (274) than Gower. In "Pyramus and Thisbe," for instance, Chaucer retains the detail that the walls of the town are made from baked tiles ("coctilibus" in Ovid), and he renders Thisbe's hiding from the lion with the unique verb "darketh" (Ovid has "obscurum"). Chaucer's lines tend to resonate with more powerful echoes, and so Callan concludes that "[d]espite the virtues of Gower's rendering which make it at a first reading more attractive than Chaucer's, there is a strength in the latter which brings us back to his passages more than once, when we are content to let Gower remain a pleasant memory" (276). [CvD] Author/Editor Author/Editor Callan, Norman Published Callan, Norman. "Thyn Owne Book: A Note on Chaucer, Gower and Ovid." Review of English Studies 22 (1946), pp. 269-281. 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 Thyn Owne Book: A Note on Chaucer, Gower and Ovid Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1946 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 Compares the anonymous eleventh-century "Historia Apolloni Regis Tyri," Gower's tale from CA, and Acts I-III of "Pericles," to the effect that all three show different strengths and weaknesses. [RFY1981]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Ito, Masayoshi. Published Ito, Masayoshi. "Three Versions of 'Apollonius of Tyre'." Bulletin of the College of General Education (Tohoku University) 3 (1966): 99-118. Reprinted in Ito's John Gower, The Medieval Poet (Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1976), pp. 60-79. 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 Three Versions of "Apollonius of Tyre," 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 Review Only the third of Sargent's three "notes" pertains to Gower. Sub-titled "Religious Form, Amorous Matter: Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women' and Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'" (pp. 159-80), it compares the two poems as "strikingly similar in many aspects." Sargent's tally of similarities begins with the fact that each work opens with reference to "books of former ages" (160), each "offers a vision in which the narrator is met by the court of the god of Love," each includes reference to the "debate of the flower and the leaf" (161), and each connects the court of its vision with the court of Richard II. This "similar framing device" is matched by a "similar generic motif: the parody of a major form of popular religious literature" (162), i.e., books of saints' lives in Chaucer's poem and a "version of the confessor's manual" (163) in Gower's. "Another similarity" of the two poems, Sargent tells us, "is that both poems exist in more than one recension" (172), positing that the poets may have shared "a common motive for revision": reducing or eliminating Ricardian material, perhaps because "political developments made it wise to obscure" such material (177). Next, Sargent apparently abandons his list of similarities--but only apparently--to consider the putative quarrel between Gower and Chaucer. He cites the references to tales of incest (Canace and Apollonius) in Chaucer's "Man of Law's Prologue" which, traditionally, underlie the idea of a quarrel which Sargent thinks, possibly, should "be interpreted as one friend's joke on another" (180). Earlier in his essay, Sargent had deduced that incest was crucial to Gower's parody of a confessional manual: after summarizing at length his views of the poem's presentation of how and to what extent six of the seven deadly sins and their branches align Christian morality and, parodically, courtly ethos (167-70), Sargent claims that Gower's "use of the format of the confessor's manual" raises a question "which should have been hovering in the consciousness of every medieval reader" of CA: "How can Lechery ever be considered a sin in a religion based on idealized eroticism?" (171). The only answer offered by Genius (and Gower) is incest, Sargent tells us, because incest is unnatural and "the only sin of Lechery that the religion of Cupid could admit" (179). Chaucer's "gentle parody" of Gower's parody, it seems, can "be taken as evidence of similar outlook" (180).] [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sargent, Michael G. Published Sargent, Michael G. "Three Notes on Middle English Poetry and Drama." In Wilfried Haslauer, intro. A Salzburg Miscellany: English and American Studies 1964-1984. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1984. II: 131-80. 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 Three Notes on Middle English Poetry and Drama. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://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 three manuscripts Luttrell refers to in his title are London, British Museum, MS Harley 2250 which includes the unique text of "St Erkenwald"; Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunter V.2.8 (388), of the unique "Gest Historiale of the Destruction of Troy"; and Manchester, Chetham Library, MS A.7.38 (6696), of the "Confessio Amantis." He offers substantial evidence of the "date and localisation" (39) of each and then goes on to describe the implications of this information for understanding the "state of alliterative poetry in the Mersey region in the sixteenth century" (48). Gowerians, however, will be largely interested in his identification of the copyist of both the Chetham manuscript and the cursive portion of Hunter manuscript as Thomas Chetham (c. 1490-1546), grandson of the Thomas Chetham suggested by Macaulay. Luttrell's paleographical evidence establishes that the hand of the two manuscripts is the same, and the same as that of household documents "among the Clowes deeds" (43) in the John Rylands Library. Paper-stock evidence from the Hunter manuscript eliminates consideration of the elder Thomas Chetham because he died before the paper was produced, and a series of rental rolls in the hand of the younger Chetham indicate three datable phases of his hand, enabling Luttrell to specify the copying date of the Chetham "Confessio" as "apparently written between 1533 and 1537" (46), and presumably executed at Nuthurst where the Chethams resided in South Lancashire, Luttrell explains, as is indicated in the signatures at the end of each of the literary manuscripts. N.B.: Throughout, Luttrell cites the Chetham manuscript of the CA as A.6.11 rather than A.7.38, following the error in Macaulay. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Luttrell, C. A. Published Luttrell, C. A. "Three North-West Midland Manuscripts." Neophilologus 42 (1958): 39-50. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Three North-West Midland Manuscripts. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1958