Gower, Grosseteste, and "De lucis scrutinio."

Author/Editor
Yeager, R. F.

Title
Gower, Grosseteste, and "De lucis scrutinio."

Published
Yeager, R. F. "Gower, Grosseteste, and 'De lucis scrutinio'." In Richard Firth Green and R. F. Yeager, eds. "Of latine and of othire lare": Essays in Honour of David R. Carlson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2022). Pp. 139-56.

Review
In this essay, Yeager gauges the degree to which Gower "might . . . have been influenced by the ideas" of Robert Grosseteste (140), concluding that various "scraps" of evidence "taken together, argue for a noteworthy familiarity on Gower's part with Grosseteste's works" (156). Yeager is persuasive even though these "scraps" are indeed few on the ground: one overt reference (to the "gret clerc Grossteste" and the failure or destruction of a prophetic brazen head in the ten-line exemplum against "Lachesse," the first branch of Sloth, in CA Book IV, 234ff.) and more subtle echoes of Grosseteste's "Hexaëmeron" underlying Gower's "De lucis scrutinio," a complaint/prayer in Yeager's discussion. The scarcity encourages Yeager to clarify Grosseteste's importance in late-medieval English anti-clerical polemics as well as in philosophy and science, helping the critic to explain why Gower may not have referred to Grosseteste more often or more clearly. Yeager's argument--in over-simplified form--is that Gower's recurrent complaints against the clergy share much with Grosseteste's writing but that Grosseteste's (inaccurate) reputation as an excommunicate deterred Gower from closer identification or more frequent references. This may be why, Yeager suggests, Gower presents Grosseteste as a scientist only ("Astrologus") in his Latin gloss to the exemplum against sloth, and, along with some early modern analogues to the brass-head, helps Yeager to explain the juxtaposition of the exemplum and the similarly brief exemplum of "The Five Foolish Virgins" that follows it--the two "reflect and inform each other" (144) insofar as they both center on a crucial choice to follow the light, as it were, with the success of wise virgins in lighting their lamps left pointedly unmentioned as is Grosseteste's choice of pastoral care over science. More subtly, Yeager argues, when Gower labels "De lucis" a "tractatus" he "seems to echo incipits and/or explicits in the majority of extant manuscripts of Grosseteste's own 'De luce'" (156, and see 152), and, more importantly, there are deep similarities to Grosseteste's "metaphysics of light" (155) in Gower's short poem, as well as several other points of thematic and structural similarity with Grosseteste's "Hexaëmeron." Yeager's discussions of these resonances are too complex to summarize briefly here--this is very much not the kind of source-hunting that seeks only to locate verbal parallels which Yeager recently criticized elsewhere (see "John Gower's Use of the 'Ovide moralisé': A Reconsideration," 2022, p. 61). He ranges widely in late-medieval English understanding of Grosseteste, (pseudo)science, and, especially, ecclesiastical polemics to scaffold and reinforce much of his argument, referring recurrently to the Lollards and to Wyclif. Indeed, observing parallels among Grosseteste, Wyclif, and Gower, Yeager seems to promise a companion piece to the one under review, stating that the "degree to which Gower knew Wyclif's writings in general is a subject for another essay" (148). If such another essay is planned (or in progress), it will likely reinforce Yeager's successful representation here of Gower as a deeply informed, subtle, but cautious reader (and writer) of matters that pertain to the ecclesiastical polemics of his age. One note--a quibble: Yeager says that in "De lucis" Gower "hints . . . at a particular alternative form of the mass" (152), without offering any support that I can find. Perhaps this will find its way into an essay on Gower and Wyclif. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1]

Date
2022

Gower Subjects
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Minor Latin Poetry
Confessio Amantis