"Inglorious Glosses?
- Author/Editor
- Minnis, Alastair J.
- Title
- "Inglorious Glosses?
- Published
- Minnis, Alastair J. "Inglorious Glosses?" In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014). Pp. 51-75.
- Review
- Minnis contests assessments of Gower's Latin glosses to "Confessio Amantis" as dull and pedantic. He distinguishes between medieval textual glosses that merely clarify the grammar of a base text and others that comment on its sense or meaning. Some of Gower's glosses in CA "merely restate, and thereby emphasize [the poem's] lore" (60). Others, by contrast, "explain sense and sentence" (61). Gower's Latin glosses on Venus's retreat from Amans in Book VIII and on the Pygmalion story in Book IV, while typically "reductionist" (66), also complicate their vernacular narratives: concerning old age and concupiscence, in the first instance; and, in the second, the initially homosexual lovemaking of Iphis and Ianthe that is rendered heterosexual by Ianthe's transformation, during the exemplum introduced by Gower's retelling of Pygmalion. Throughout his Latin glosses to CA, Gower develops the sophisticated persona of an authority who resolves conflicting themes in his English poem, such as desire and reason.] [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2]
- Date
- 2014
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Manuscripts and Textual Studies