The Occasion of John Gower's "Unanimes Esse."
- Author/Editor
- Weiskott, Eric.
- Title
- The Occasion of John Gower's "Unanimes Esse."
- Published
- Weiskott, Eric. "The Occasion of John Gower's 'Unanimes Esse.'" Notes and Queries, 69 [267], no. 3 (2022): 192–96.
- Review
- "Of John Gower's very last writings, almost all of them in Latin verse and politically inflected," Weiskott writes, "the ten-line 'Unanimes esse' is least immediately explicable" (192)--by biographical or political elements, he means. He finds an "unique" tripartite structure to the poem (194), which he believes (following Sebastian Sobecki's claimed identification of the poet's hand in London, British Library Cotton Tiberius A. iv) "Gower himself copied" (194), establishing a date no later than the "mid-1400s" (194, sic), and—obviously--before Gower went fully blind. Weiskott argues that "Unanimes esse" "plausibly reflects the fearful atmosphere surrounding 'De heretico comburendo' and the burning of William Sawtrey in 1401" (195). Lollardy, in short, coupled with fear of another uprising of the commons, motivated "Unanimes esse," making it "a post-script to the 'Carmen super multiplici victorum pestilencia'" (195). Weiskott supports this claim with careful identification of "self-borrowing" between the two poems, although he carefully notes that "the words are not distinctive" and Gower was unlikely to have had them in mind, or a manuscript copy of the "Carmen super" to hand, when writing "Unanimes esse" (196). But reading the two together allows recognition of a "subtle note of disapprobation or at least apprehension directed toward Arundel" in both poems, which possibly explains "why 'Unanimes esse' stays so uncharacteristically coy about its real-world references" (196). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]
- Date
- 2022
- Gower Subjects
- Minor Latin Poetry
Biography of Gower