Wards and Widows: "Troilus and Criseyde" and New Documents on Chaucer's Life.
- Author/Editor
- Sobecki, Sebastian.
- Title
- Wards and Widows: "Troilus and Criseyde" and New Documents on Chaucer's Life.
- Published
- Sobecki, Sebastian. "Wards and Widows: 'Troilus and Criseyde' and New Documents on Chaucer's Life." English Literary History 86 (2019): 413-40.
- 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.]
- Date
- 2019
- Gower Subjects
- Biography of Gower