The Middle English Lyrics in Their European Context.
- Author/Editor
- Whitehead, Christiania.
- Title
- The Middle English Lyrics in Their European Context.
- Published
- Whitehead, Christiania. "The Middle English Lyrics in Their European Context." In Raluca Radulescu and Sif Rikhardsdottir, eds. The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature. Milton: Routledge, 2022. Pp. 332-44.
- Review
- In this survey, Whitehead describes Middle English lyrics before Chaucer, emphasizes his innovative uses of French courtly "formes fixes" in English, and assesses interactions among courtly, religious, and liturgical material in ME lyrics generally. Her brief comments on Gower (336-37) have a small place in her account: she treats him (along with Hoccleve, Lydgate, and, at somewhat greater length, Charles d'Orléans) as one of Chaucer's "Successors" (334) in his use of "formes fixes"--the ballade in "Cinkante Balades" and "Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz". Like Chaucer, Whitehead observes, Gower "draws extensively" on his French predecessors, "transposing lines from their poems into his own oeuvre," but unlike Chaucer, "whose reworkings tend to stay broadly within the ideological [courtly] parameters of his models," Gower uses his ballade sequences "to mount a wholesale attack on the immorality of 'amour courtois,' condemn extra-marital liaisons, and celebrate the goodness of love within marriage" (336), quoting from CB 49 as an example. Whitehead tentatively attributes Gower's "return to French" (as opposed to Chaucer's use of English? Gower's own English in "Confessio Amantis"?) to, perhaps, "disillusionment with the Ricardian court . . . and his increasing interest in the political claims of Henry of Lancaster," but opts instead for agreeing with R. F. Yeager (2005) that Gower was motivated to "compete with" Chaucer and his French contemporaries. Further, Whitehead comments "[w]here Chaucer had written ballades in elegant triptychs, Gower . . . set them to work on an altogether larger scale." [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1]
- Date
- 2022
- Gower Subjects
- Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Cinkante
Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz