"Defenders of truth": Lord Cobham, John Gower, and the Political Crisis of 1387-88.
- Author/Editor
- Bennett, Michael.
- Title
- "Defenders of truth": Lord Cobham, John Gower, and the Political Crisis of 1387-88.
- Published
- Bennett, Michael. "'Defenders of truth': Lord Cobham, John Gower, and the Political Crisis of 1387-88." In Jessica A. Lutkin and J.S. Hamilton, eds. Creativity, Contradictions, and Commemoration in the Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of Nigel Saul. Woodbridge, Suff.: Boydell Press, 2022. Pp. 35-52.
- Review
- This essay could be read profitably as a companion-piece to Bennett's earlier work on the latter years of Richard II's kingship ("John Gower, Squire of Kent, the Peasants' Revolt, and the 'Visio Anglie'," Chaucer Review 2018; "Gower, Richard II, and Henry IV," "Historians on Gower" 2019), with his monograph "Richard II and the Revolution of 1399" (1999) as general background; and see Bennett, "Shades of Gower: Latin Texts and Social Contexts" (2022). Here, using chronicle accounts extensively, Bennett develops a positive portrait of Cobham's role from the advent of the crisis, arguing for the latter's justified distrust of Richard, and attributes to a warm relationship with Cobham Gower's detailed knowledge of events that subsequently produced his negative views of the king. Perhaps most significant for Gower scholars is Bennett's reading of the "Cronica Tripertita" as initially three separate poems later combined into one, each section reflecting a different stage in Gower's evolving attitude toward Richard. The first poem was composed "almost certainly . . . close to the events it described"--i.e., 1387-88 (44); the second later in 1388-89 (44-45); and the third in September 1397, when "Gower took up his 'weeping pen' to "report Gloucester's murder, Arundel's execution, and Warwick's banishment" (50). These, variously revised, became the CrT as we know it after the accession of Henry IV, in 1399. Bennett also reads as parallel these shifts in the CrT and the development of the Ricardian/Henrician versions of the "Confessio Amantis" (48-49). N.B.: p. 49, fn. 79, read: "BL, Cotton Ch. IV.27," not "Harl." [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1]
- Date
- 2022
- Gower Subjects
- Cronica Tripertita