Reading Chaucer in New College, Oxford, in the 1630s: The Commendatory Verses of Francis Kynaston's :Troili et Creseidæ."
- Author/Editor
- Knox, Philip
Poole, William
Griffith, Mark
- Title
- Reading Chaucer in New College, Oxford, in the 1630s: The Commendatory Verses of Francis Kynaston's :Troili et Creseidæ."
- Published
- Knox, Philip, William Poole, and Mark Griffith. "Reading Chaucer in New College, Oxford, in the 1630s: The Commendatory Verses of Francis Kynaston's ' Troili et Creseidæ'." Medium Aevum 85.1 (2016): 33-58.
- Review
- Knox, Poole, and Griffith's carefully written article asserts that the commendatory verses appended to Francis Kynaston's seventeenth-century Latin translation of Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" reveal an academic circle of scholars associated with New College, Oxford, who had a passion for Middle English literature in general and the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, in particular. Examination of the verses proceeds from those which praise Kynaston for rendering Chaucer's presumably rustic poetry into the international language of Latin and therefore both improving it and making it widely available before moving on to several verses which "exonerate" Chaucer of his primitive language, while still praising Kynaston's adaptation (49). The authors conclude that Kynaston's "Troilus" is "an important record of a moment in English literary history when language change was rendering Chaucer's work ever more remote even as the idea of his originary status remained strong" so that "Chaucer's English could be more intelligible to the English when rendered in a language other than English" (50). Of particular interest to Gower scholars are several notes about the language of Francis James, whose verses are written in an imitation of Middle English. James describes Chaucer as an "orpyd knight" (l. 8, p. 46) which Knox et al. identify as a phrase not from Chaucer, but from Book III of the "Confessio Amantis" which also contains the "co-occurrence of the rhyme-words 'lond' and 'hond'" (46). Additionally, James uses the "form -end of 'clepend'" (48) in his verse, which also appears to be a borrowing from Gower. Since Knox identifies James as the author of another imitation of Middle English verse in a commendatory poem for an English translation of "Leucippe and Clitophon," which reveals that "Middle English literature was imaginatively associated with the exotic prose romances of the ancient world" (45) for James, just as it was for Shakespeare in "Pericles," it seems possible that this particular member of the academic circle around Kynaston had an enthusiasm for Gower's Middle English, even if mediated through Spenser and Shakespeare. Further exploration the "narrow but rich seam of evidence" (34) of these verses might offer hints about early modern Oxford readers' engagements with Gower as well as Chaucer. [NG. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1]
- Date
- 2016
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion
Language and Word Studies