Gower and Anglo-Latin Verse.
- Author/Editor
- Carlson, David R.
- Title
- Gower and Anglo-Latin Verse.
- Published
- Carlson, David R. Gower and Anglo-Latin Verse. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2021. xi, 345 pp.
- Review
- David Carlson presents the first full-length study of Gower as a Latin poet, and more importantly, as the greatest of Anglo-Latin poets of the fourteenth century. This accomplished and wide-ranging volume offers studies of Gower's Latin poetry and its formal properties. It also offers new editions and translations of five short poems outside the Latin verses of "Confessio Amantis." The book is a substantive and authoritative contribution to literary history, both the history of Anglo-Latin verse and of the cultural contexts through which Latin poets reflected on their practice. To read and assimilate this book is thus to encounter a wider sense of fourteenth-century literary consciousness than what might be afforded by a standard history of vernacular English poetry. While the book is founded on enormous learning, it is by no means a survey: it is rather a re-exploration of a well-known period from a decisively different (and equally valid) perspective. Carlson advances an important argument about Gower's Latin poetry: it was "fundamentally not classical" (11) nor archaizing, but rather placed itself in a contemporary cultural and literary environment. His Latin poetry was "informed by and indebted to contemporary Anglo-Latin poetry for the metrical fabric of his writing" (12). Gower's formal choices make better sense from a synchronic perspective. Most significant is Gower's search for a metrical plain style, neither demotic nor hyper-sophisticated, that was suitable to public poetry. The chapters cover Gower's earliest Latin poetry, the "invention of Anglo-Latin public poetry," his contribution to estates satire, his historiography of 1381 and his prosody, and his late Latin style. The poems newly edited and translated are "Epitaphium Edwardi tercii" (1377), the John Ball verses (c. 1395), the Blackfriars Council verses (c. 1382), "Ecce dolet Anglia" (c. 1360-75), and "Epilogus Apocalipsium" (c. 1376-8). There are two appendices on versification. [RC. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1]
- Date
- 2021
- Gower Subjects
- Vox Clamantis
Cronica Tripertita
Minor Latin Poetry
Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations