Images.
- Author/Editor
- Brown, Peter.
- Title
- Images.
- Published
- Brown, Peter. "Images." In Peter Brown, ed. A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c. 1350-c. 1500. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Pp. 307-21.
- Review
- Brown identifies the topic of his essay as "the way in which the use of literary images in secular writing becomes embroiled in the [late-medieval] controversy over religious images," particularly how the "radical ideas promoted by the Lollard followers of . . . John Wyclif" (308) are reflected or refracted in Gower's 'Vox Clamantis' and in the portrait of Chaucer found in manuscripts of Thomas Hoccleve's "Regiment of Princes." Brown finds engagements with the controversy by each author to be "contradictory" (312): both "ostensibly adopt and articulate one position (different in each case), [while] their literary practice points in another direction" (318). Gower's contradiction, Brown argues, lies in the clash between the poet's stated, though restrained, opposition to religious images in VC II.10--at points, "remarkably similar" in attitude to the Lollard "A tretyse of ymagis" in London, British Library, MS Additional 24202--and his depictions in Book I of the rebels of 1381 where "where images of his own sprout and flourish in abundance as if from some 'Vox clematis'" (311). Brown acknowledges that the "customary explanation" for the vehement imagery in Book I is that it was written after the 1381 Uprising--Books II-VII, written before--but he goes on to suggest that the "sharper and fuller perceptiveness" (311) inherent in the dream-vision genre evokes a kind of reflective interiority in Book I--not inconsistent with contemplative meditation--by which Gower "abrogated to himself the creation and control of elaborate, awe-inspiring, vivid representations of a world turned upside-down" that both is, and is not, consistent with his "Lollard-leaning view on the functions of images" later in the work (312). The image of the Cross, Brown argues, complicates Gower's treatment of images, as does the dedication of VC to Archbishop Thomas Arundel, enemy of the Lollards. Similar intricate contradictions, Brown shows, haunt Hoccleve's use of the Chaucer portrait as an "image designed to stir reading (or listening) memories" (313), "analogous to the use of images in religious meditation" (314). Neither writer is a "crypto-Lollard" (312) in Brown's analysis, but each rejected images while deploying them, struggling "to reconcile the imperatives of their social existence (as producers of literature within a network of patron, audience and political faction) with the often contradictory and uncomfortable priorities that develop as a consequence of reflective writing" (318). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2]
- Date
- 2009
- Gower Subjects
- Vox Clamantis
Style, Rhetoric, and Veersification