The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature.

Author/Editor
Knox, Philip.

Title
The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature.

Published
Knox, Philip. The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Review
Knox contends, sweepingly, that the "Roman de la Rose" was responsible for "modernizing" poetry in England: introducing would-be writers from "aristocratic communities" (36) like Chaucer, Gower, the author of "Gawain"--even Langland--to a sophisticated form of satire, new attitudes toward sexual desire and Latin literature, to the concept, in fact, of being a poet in the Classical tradition. He makes much of the "Valentine" poems written by Chaucer, Gower, and Oton de Graunson, suggesting that they formed a "network of literary interactions" (64) to produce them. With a nod to its roots in the "'Chartrian' allegories," Knox contends that the "Confessio Amantis" came about via the "Rose": "It was in the 'Rose' that [Gower] found a way of combining a love narrative with an encyclopaedic (or anti-encyclopaedic) discussion of myth, history, and philosophy, with an examination of nature and desire at its core" (115). "Gower . . . exemplifies the importance of the 'Rose' for making available a heightened literary mode of learned philosophical or cosmological poetry. He reveals what is disturbing or threatening about how the 'Rose' has intervened in this tradition, but also what is enabling" (116). As evidence Knox provides a close reading of one tale, "Iphis and Iante," from Book IV (118-20); he argues further that in combination Amans-Gower's withdrawal from love at the end of the CA, the balades of the "Traitié pour les Amantz Marietz," and the sentiments expressed in the Latin poem "Est amor" represent a kind of "implicit 'erotic pseudo-autobiography'" (122) that is also a response to ideas found in the "Rose." Subsequently Knox suggests that the satire of the "Mirour de l'Omme" and the Latin verses accompanying the "archer portrait" found in three manuscripts of the "Vox Clamantis" echo "Jean de Meun's infamous 'apology' in the 'Rose'" and give proof of Gower's "self-fashioning in the image of a satirist" and "his own authorial ambition" (170-71). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1]

Date
2022

Gower Subjects
Sources, Analogues and Literary Relations
Confession Amantis
Mirour de l'Omme
Vox Clamantis
Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz
Minor Latin Poetry