Enfeoffment to Use, Legalism, and Humanism in Gower's "Mirour de l'Omme."

Author/Editor
Ni, Yun.

Title
Enfeoffment to Use, Legalism, and Humanism in Gower's "Mirour de l'Omme."

Published
Ni, Yun. "Enfeoffment to Use, Legalism, and Humanism in Gower's 'Mirour de l'Omme'." JEGP 122, no. 1 (2023): 86-106.

Review
This article explores how legal issues and language make an impact on the "Mirour de l'Omme." In particular, Ni examines Gower's handling of property rights and ownership in terms of the medieval doctrine of "enfeoffment to use" (87 and passim). She starts with the familiar case of the much-discussed Aldington Septvauns property (87), but focuses less on questions of Gower's possible legal misbehavior than on how the legal language of property use and ownership then appears in the MO. Ni draws on Michael Bennett's recent analysis of that case (87, n. 6) to agree that the distinction between ownership and use implied by the mechanism of "enfeoffment to use" goes far to help resolve the problems in the land case, and then to argue that "this legal device could have found its way into the poem" (88). In particular, Ni promises "to illuminate the poet's humanistic accentuation of free will and intentionality, that is, Man's control of himself and his choice between spiritual and material property in the face of demonic influences" (88). Ni initially seeks to show "how Gower recasts enfeoffment to use as a metaphor for Man's Fall" (88), via a detailed explanation of how "enfeoffment to use" works as a legal device separating ownership of land per se from the right to make use of it (89-92). Ni then pivots to seeing this principle of land ownership as a model for Man's status is the MO, owning worldly property but being owned in a sense by the devil (93). To support this reading, Ni digs into the terms "use" and "saisine" (possession) in the Anglo-French legal register and the MO, along with the term "demure" (residence) (93-94). Analyzing Gower's wording in his discussion of Man, Ni notes that "Gower does not say that Sin and Death take 'seisine,' or 'possession,' of man; rather, he says that they take demure, or 'residence,' in him. The rights of residence and use must be separated from the rights of ownership" (94). Ni also notes that "in the MO, almost all of the uses of 'use' and 'saisine' are negative, with an emphasis on the impossibility of fully owning anything in the postlapsarian world" (97). She extends this distinction to address details of Man's relationship to the World in the "devils' parliament" (98). Ni concludes that only enfeoffment to use would explain the balance of use and ownership represented there (99). Thus, "for Man . . . having the 'contractual' right to enjoy the world does not mean having the 'property right' to own the world. The World, in contrast, can easily transform the 'contractual right' (rights 'in personam') to hold Man's soul to his use into the devils' property right (rights 'in rem') to fully claim his soul" (99). Finally, Ni "demonstrates that the 'Mirour' explores the tension between legalism, defined as 'strict adherence to the letter rather than the spirit of law,' and humanism, defined broadly as belief in the legibility of God and the constructive powers of human nature" (88), arguing in this final section that this legal distinction does not necessarily function as a totalistic reading of the poem; she suggests that Gower's treatment of the soul's use and ownership ultimately support a notion of Gower's "humanism" (104), which she contrasts to a modern sense of the term. Ni concludes that Gower's legal focus here reinforces his moral and didactic (humanist) focus, particularly in terms of the need to own one's soul. [RAL. Copyright, John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1]

Date
2023

Gower Subjects
Mirour de l'Omme
Language and Word Studies
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Biography of Gower