"Profitable" Gower: Commonplacing and the Early Modern "Confessio Amantis."
- Author/Editor
- Ensley, Mimi.
- Title
- "Profitable" Gower: Commonplacing and the Early Modern "Confessio Amantis."
- Published
- Ensley, Mimi. "'Profitable' Gower: Commonplacing and the Early Modern Confessio Amantis." Journal of English and Germanic Philology 121 (2022): 202-26; 3 illus.
- Review
- Ensley's essay is a very useful addition to Gower-reception studies, drawing together analyses of paratextual features of Berthelette's editions of the "Confessio Amantis" (and Caxton's, more briefly), Gower's place in commonplace books of the sixteenth century (particularly that of Richard Hill), and readers' marks in thirty-one copies of Caxton's and Berthelette's editions of CA. She focuses on how sixteenth-century readers "extracted" (a word she uses throughout) proverbs, sententiae, and other commonplace materials from the CA, and how Berthelette's prefatory letter, lay-out, and table of contents encouraged such extraction by emphasizing Gower's role as a "conduit for the poets, historians and philosophers of the past" while deemphasizing the poet's "own voice" and the dialogic frame narrative of the CA (211). Ensley aligns this emphasis with Renaissance humanism, situating her study appropriately among those by Daniel Wakelin on late-medieval and early modern humanism, Siân Echard on Gower's pre-texts and proverbs, Joseph Stadolnik on excerpting Gower, R. F. Yeager on Ben Jonson's uses of Gower in his "Grammar" and on Gower and the cento tradition, and others. Ensley's discussions of sixteenth-century habits of commonplace extraction are similarly situated and supported via authoritative studies by Mary Thomas Crane, Adam Smyth, and others on the motivations and practices of keeping commonplace books; her data, in turn, corroborate aspects of these studies by showing how--an extended example here--Richard Hill extracted portions of the CA for his commonplace book (Oxford, Balliol College, MS 354) and modified them (inserting new lines with new rhymes) to deemphasize or eliminate Gower's dialogic frame, perhaps responding to Berthelette's presentation or perhaps following an impulse similar to that of Jonson when in his "Grammar" he draws extracts from Gower in order to free "the medieval poet's language" (214) from history and the negative associations of pre-Reformation baggage. When she turns to her detailed commentary on readers' marks (marginal comments, underscoring, manicules, etc., reproducing three illustrative facsimile pages) in her corpus of printed copies, Ensley does not explain how she selected them, whether by ease of access or by density of marginalia--if the latter, it would thin her argument somewhat--but she clearly aligns the marginalia with extraction and commonplacing, helping us to see how readers' jottings connect with humanism, how they are characteristic of sixteenth-century reading, and how they reflect early modern attitudes towards medieval texts, including the CA--maybe even especially the CA. It may be a step too far, although an enticing one, when Ensley suggests in her conclusion that Gower's "works may have been so ripe for . . . extractive commonplacing strategies, because Gower himself used them in his own writing" (225, citing Yeager on Gower and the cento tradition). Given the care with which Ensley situates her argument and uses her data, the point is provocative and plausible, but comparative analysis of Renaissance readers' extractive uses of other medieval writers would be helpful if we are to agree that Gower was especially "ripe" for extraction because he was an extractor himself. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2]
- Date
- 2022
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion
Facsimles, Editions, and Translations