Middle English Recipes and Literary Play, 1375–1500.
- Author/Editor
- Bower, Hannah.
- Title
- Middle English Recipes and Literary Play, 1375–1500.
- Published
- Bower, Hannah. Middle English Recipes and Literary Play, 1375–1500. Oxford English Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
- Review
- Bower's examination of the discourse of medical recipes in Middle English focuses on the aesthetic features of the texts along with their practical value and placebo effects. Her clarifications of the aesthetics of these texts--their "poetic" and "playful" features rather than their "practical" ones (p. 22 and throughout)--depend upon comparison with better-known texts, including a portion of Gower's "Tale of Medea" (Confessio Amantis, Book V, 3957ff.) where Medea labors to renew the youth of Eson, Jason's aged father. Bowers' close reading of the episode acknowledges Gower's dependence on Ovid's "Metamorphoses" 7 as source, neatly summarizes the passage, and emphasizes how "Gower's lexical choices . . . seem designed to soften (or at least nuance) Medea's associations in classical and medieval writing with witchcraft and sorcery" (155) and how through protraction and repetition he "edges his representation towards parody, teasing readers with the possibility that Medea's impressive and protracted performance might not have any healing effects at all" (157). Bower suggests that Gower may have been echoing contemporaneous medical "recipes" (157) and that modern response to the labored efforts of Gower's Medea may reflect Pierre Bourdieu's notion that "the timing and duration of an action is [integral] to our interpretation of it" (160). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]
- Date
- 2022
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations