Some Poets' Tours of Medieval London: Varieties of Literary Urban Experience.
- Author/Editor
- Benson, C. David.
- Title
- Some Poets' Tours of Medieval London: Varieties of Literary Urban Experience.
- Published
- Benson, C. David. "Some Poets' Tours of Medieval London: Varieties of Literary Urban Experience." Essays in Medieval Studies 24 (2007): 1-20.
- Review
- Benson's set of late-medieval poetic "tours" through London consists of appreciative commentary about William FitzStephen's Latin "Description of London," Gower's "Visio" (Book 1) of "Vox Clamantis," Chaucer's "Cook's Tale," Hoccleve's "Regiment of Princes" and "La Male Regle, Lydgate's "King Henry VI's Triumphal Entry," and the anonymous "London Lickpenny." Accompanied by various maps and details of maps from modern reconstructions of the medieval city (and Gower's tomb in color), Benson's essay reads something like the voice-over for a documentary about medieval London, helping to bring the city to life, as it were. Comments about the lives and London experiences of the authors juxtapose details from their works that depict medieval London's topography and sociology, although Gower's allegory in the "Visio" gives "little sense of the city's geography," and the countryside around London is only a "frightening bolt-hole into which the narrator flees in terror" (7) rather than an opportunity, as it is for FitzStephen, to describe various forms of recreation. When Gower compares the Tower of London to a ship riding out a storm it is "[p]erhaps as part of a hallucination" (7), while, for example, Chaucer's reference to Newgate in the "Cook's Tale" recalls "the London practice of parading with mocking music to and from prison and the pillory those guilty of civic misbehavior" (10). These and other contrasting examples—and there are many more—seem to privilege realism over representationalism, although Benson does emphasize the discursive variety that the "theme of London" generates among medieval English writers, closing with a call for "more scholarly attention" to the theme "than it has yet received." [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2]
- Date
- 2007
- Gower Subjects
- Vox Clamantis