John Gower.
- Author/Editor
- Echard, Siân.
- Title
- John Gower.
- Published
- Echard, Siân. "John Gower." In Raluca Radulescu and Sif Rikhardsdottir, eds. The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature. New York: Routledge, 2022. Pp. 289-99.
- Review
- Echard opens her introduction to Gower's poetry with comments on the Portuguese and Castilian translations of the "Confessio Amantis" as evidence that "the English poet found an interested audience" (289) abroad in Europe, remarking in her conclusion that "he would, I imagine, have been glad" that the CA "made it across the sea" (297). Taken out of context in this way, Echard's remark is unremarkable, but she continues more resoundingly in her closing: "A trilingual poet who aspires to match the authors of old requires an international and transhistorical audience, but Gower seems profoundly aware that exchanges of all sorts could have negative effects . . . . [H]is work is threaded through with exchanges between past and present, between authors old and new, and between lands and peoples. He is self-consciously England's poet; he is equally self-consciously one who can speak to the larger world, however ambivalent he may be about the mechanisms of exchange" (297). Throughout her essay, Echard focuses on Gower's ambitious trilinguality, and on his uses of English and Englishness in CA in relation to the prestige of French and, especially, Latin. She broadens these out to analysis of thematic and formal concerns with localization and expansion, particularity and generality—to "the idea that [in CA] apparent marginalization of English comes from, or intersects with, a tension between the local and the universal" (291). The complex coherence of Echard's demonstration is difficult to describe briefly, so I offer sample insights from her rich variety instead. She clarifies how the "particularly localised" Ricardian version of the CA Prologue capitalizes on the generalizing implications of London as "newe Troye," and how the Henrician version--offered as a book for England--frames the universalizing "exemplary narratives with an explicitly English location," each version bracketing Gower's tales in English with complementary Latin (292-93). Although it is only in some copies of CA, Echard shows us that "Quam cinxere freta" presents Gower as "England's own poet," "exemplifies the productive tension between universality and particularity," and reflects "Gowerian anxiety" about assured posterity (293). For Echard, the Tale of Constance "is a negotiation of English and Roman identities" that "invokes an explicitly English past" (294), while the tales of Constance and of Apollonius together, "at the beginning and end" of CA, "use overseas travel to work through issues relating to identity, to the intersection of the particular, localised origin with a world of contact and exchange" (295). In light of these (and others) of Echard's observations, I have little doubt that Gower would have been glad that CA made it across the sea--and also glad to have Siân Echard as a reader. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1]
- Date
- 2022
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations
Minor Latin Poetry
Language and Word Studies