The Familia Regis and the Familia Cupidinis.
- Author/Editor
- Green, Richard Firth.
- Title
- The Familia Regis and the Familia Cupidinis.
- Published
- Green, Richard Firth. "The Familia Regis and the Familia Cupidinis." In V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne, eds. English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983), pp. 87-108.
- Review
- Green's essay covers an extraordinary range of literary chronology, from Alanus Capellanus to earl Rivers, tutor to the young Edward IV, and almost everyone in between, on both sides of the Channel. His ostensible purpose is to determine the reality of the "cour amoureuse." Were there any such, and if so, in what style or sense? Ultimately he concludes that "If the courts of love in the late middle ages were indeed little more than a literary embellishment of one side of life in the real court (their plaintiffs court poets, their lawsuits literary debates, their 'billes' actual poems) then it is in the literature itself that we might hope to come closest to the reality" (108). Gower is not one of the "four examples" that constitute his focus, but in the process he cites Gower's treatment of the love court in the "Confessio," connecting it with that of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia (91-92), while noting of the court's appearance in Book VIII that "Gower's view is far from uncritical, of course, and to appreciate the full irony of Venus' rejection of Amans at the end we should recall that it was the accepted duty of the head of a real household to look after old servants" (92). Gower figures one further time, as Green notes that for Gower the "familia Cupidinis" ("family of Cupid") was "not . . . a formal assembly however playfully realized, but as the metaphorical expression of an aspect of courtly society--in this case, its jurisdiction over all forms of polite behaviour" (100). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]
- Date
- 1983
- Gower Subjects
- Backgrounds and General Criticism
Confessio Amantis