The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English.
- Author/Editor
- Treharne, Elaine, ed.
Walker, Greg, ed.
Green, William Green, assistant ed.
- Title
- The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English.
- Published
- Treharne, Elaine, and Greg Walker, with the assistance of William Green, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
- Review
- Like so many reference works being produced in the past few decades, the volume contains a number of signed chapters on different point of focus around its broad topic. There are seven overall sections: I) Literary Production, II) Literary Consumption, III) Literature, Clerical and Lay, IV) Literary Realities, V) Complex Identities, VI) Literary Place, Space, and Time, and VII) Literary Journeys. Each contains five signed chapters, in addition to a prologue by Treharne ("Speaking of the Medieval") and an Epilogue by Walker ("When did the 'Medieval' End"). Most Gower scholars will be unsurprised to learn that Gower lags well behind mentions of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and even John Lydgate. Indeed, many of the references to Gower (and also to these other poets) are as part of the following lists of "usual suspects:" "Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate" (27, 112); "Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate" (29, 64, 589, 728); "Chaucer, Gower, and Langland" (61, 80); "Langland, Gower, Chaucer and Hoccleve" (489); "Chaucer, Langland, Gower, and Lydgate" (542), or just "Chaucer and Gower" (587). More detailed discussions of or allusions to Gower appear in several chapters, however. In "The Professionalization of Writing," Simon Horobin uses the "Trinity Gower" as an example of sorting out the different scribal hands in a "Confessio Amantis" manuscript and other contemporary texts (59-65). Similarly, Siân Echard, in "Insular Romance," goes into a brief discussion of Gower's trilingual oeuvre (162-63), and in "Writing Heresy, and the Anticlerical Muse," Mishtooni Bose goes into some detail about the participation of the "Vox Clamantis" in anticlerical tropes concerning land ownership (284) and use of a prophetic tone (291-92). Alison Wiggins includes Gower and his background in her discussion of London in "London Poets" (541-42); Ralph Hanna refers to him as a "gentryman" (127), and Stephen Kelly mentions his depiction of the 1380 rebels as "braying monsters" (371). [RAL. Copyright. John Gower Newsletter. eJGN 43.1]
- Date
- 2010
- Gower Subjects
- Background and General Criticism
Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference