John Gower's Use of the "Ovide moralisé": A Reconsideration.
- Author/Editor
- Yeager, R. F.
- Title
- John Gower's Use of the "Ovide moralisé": A Reconsideration.
- Published
- Yeager, R. F. "John Gower's Use of the Ovide moralisé: A Reconsideration." In Catherine Gaullier-Bourgasses and Marylène Possamaï-Pérez, eds. Réécritures et adaptations de l'Ovide moralisé (xivᵉ—xviiᵉ siècle). Turnhout: Brepols, 2022. Pp. 51-67.
- Review
- Yeager's major goals in this essay are "to reconsider claims which for many years have been cited as the best evidence for Gower's knowledge and use of the 'Ovide moralisé'" (64) and, more generally, to clarify the "pitfalls of source studies concentrated on just one or two texts" (62). He successfully accomplishes both by revisiting Conrad Mainzer's discussion (1972) of Gower's knowledge and use of Ovidian texts, particularly Gower's dependence upon medieval moralizations of the "Metamorphoses"--the anonymous "Ovide moralisé" and Pierre Bersuire's "Ovidius moralizatus." Before launching his own evidence, Yeager is careful to point out that Mainzer was "aware that his work constituted 'possibilities,' for him more or less credible ones" (52; Yeager's emphasis), while later critics often have taken his suggestions as more proven than plausible--oversimplification for the sake of certainty perhaps. So, while effectively eroding much of Mainzer's arguments concerning the "Ovide," Yeager is advising caution in using them rather than dispensing with them. Yet the erosion is effective; at times, devastating. Yeager marshals evidence drawn from availability (or lack) of manuscripts of the "Ovide" and analogous texts, to stylistic evidence based on Gower's habits of diction, rhyme, and meter, to stronger parallels between Gower's texts and others besides the "Ovide," especially Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess" and "Legend of Good Women," and even details of Gower's biography, education, and aspects of his "poet's imagination" (64). The upshot is to encourage source studies that do much more than simply "match the words" (61) of two texts, but rather explore networks of personal, poetic, and cultural sway that constitute literary influence. Indeed, after undermining a number of Mainzer's specific details of the influence on Gower of the "Ovide," Yeager offers several more complex "possibilities" (my emphasis this time) of the influence, matters of "elisional style" (66 and 67) and narrative technique. Throughout his essay, Yeager combines cautious, fine-grained, close analyses of details (focused on four tales of the "Confessio Amantis"--"Pyramus and Thisbe," "Theseus and Ariadne," "Phebus and Daphne," and "Phrixas and Helle"), but then broadens them out to wider concerns. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.]
- Date
- 2022
- Gower Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Confessio Amantis