A Bond of True Love: Performing Courtship and Betrothal in Gower's "Cinkante Balades" and Spenser's "Amoretti," in Light of Christine de Pizan's "Cent Balades."

Author/Editor
Burke, Linda.

Title
A Bond of True Love: Performing Courtship and Betrothal in Gower's "Cinkante Balades" and Spenser's "Amoretti," in Light of Christine de Pizan's "Cent Balades."

Published
Burke, Linda. "A Bond of True Love: Performing Courtship and Betrothal in Gower's 'Cinkante Balades' and Spenser's 'Amoretti,' in Light of Christine de Pizan's 'Cent Balades'." In Albrecht Classen, ed., Communication, Translation, and Community in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period: New Cultural-Historical and Literary Perspectives (Berlin, de Gruyter, 2022). Pp. 461–90.

Review
Burke's essay offers a comparative analysis of Gower's "Cinkante balades" and Spenser's "Amoretti" in order to show the extent to which they share similar narrative arcs which "engage the reader with a dramatic fiction of a man and a woman progressing over time, through verbal interplay, to a joyful commitment by both partners, a 'lien/bond' of love that is equally shared between them" (461). This essay is an ambitious undertaking, given its consideration of the entire "Amoretti" and the marriage poems in the CB (Balades 1-5 and 44-51). Burke argues that the poets' similar approaches to their lyric sequences stem from similar marital experiences and foreground the role of communication between partners in a relationship rather than the more traditional introspective voice and focus of other lyrics on the same topic, an issue that also speaks to their interest in their respective political contexts and communities. Burke begins by addressing the inspiration for and possible source of the narrative unity of Gower's sequence in Christine de Pizan's "Cent balades" and in the Song of Songs. Burke then turns to careful close readings of courtship and betrothal in Gower's and Spenser's respective lyric sequences. The essay closes by arguing such a comparison suggests "the late medieval ideal of marriage was carried over with little change to become the English Protestant ideal of a chaste and Christlike married love that did not exclude the joys of intimacy" (588) and that these poets both "explicitly embrace their sovereign and their nation within the bond of mutual love that is celebrated in the sequence" (489). [BWG. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1]

Date
2022

Gower Subjects
Cinkante Balades
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Influence and Later Allusion