Derek Pearsall and John Gower.
- Author/Editor
- Yeager, R. F.
- Title
- Derek Pearsall and John Gower.
- Published
- Yeager, R. F. "Derek Pearsall and John Gower." Chaucer Review 58, nos. 3-4 (2023): 481-93.
- Review
- Yeager's essay--part of a two-number special issue of "The Chaucer Review" that commemorates Derek Pearsall's many achievements in Middle English studies--fittingly describes Pearsall's most significant contributions to Gower scholarship. As Yeager makes clear, Pearsall twice received the John Gower Society's prestigious John Hurt Fisher Prize for these contributions--the first ever awarded in 1991 and then, most recently (with Linne Mooney), in 2023, the year after Pearsall's death at age 90. Yeager's survey covers more than fifty years, starting with Pearsall's landmark article in PMLA (1966), "Gower's Narrative Art," and running through his definitive "A Descriptive Catalogue of the English Manuscripts of John Gower's Confessio Amantis" (with Mooney; 2022). Along the way, Yeager rightly (and courteously) acknowledges Pearsall's general lack of attention to Gower's work other than the CA and his interest in the frame and narrative techniques of CA rather than its poetic style. Yeager identifies and exemplifies Pearsall's early appreciation of Gower's humor and humane sensibility and appreciates Pearsall's "great gift as a literary critic" in finding in CA the "large truth in the particular," thereby pointing "the path forward for a generation of modern scholarly readers" (488-89). Comparative analysis, Yeager shows, is fundamental to Pearsall's critical sensibility: "striking off Gower, Langland, Lydgate, and Chaucer, one or another against the other" (483), with similar "illustrative comparison" deployed when Pearsall discloses Gower's "purposive, rhetorical forays" (488) by juxtaposing Gower's tales and Ovidian sources. Yeager's comments on Pearsall's work with Gower manuscripts are equally complimentary and just. Several examples: he characterizes Pearsall's "Manuscripts and Illustrations of Gower's Works" (2004) as still the "handiest go-to resource for short questions of location, dating, or shelfmark," and tells us that Pearsall's essay on the Wollaton Hall Gower manuscript (2010) contains "perhaps the most instructive exposition extant of the creative and technical processes underlying the production of late medieval literary manuscripts" (491). More than forty years in the making, the "Descriptive Catalogue" "provides information in unprecedented quantity, quality, and variety, in a format readily accessible and uniform" (492). These and many other words of praise--appropriate and expected in a commemorative essay--distill Pearsall's sensitive, sensible, and above all, useful Gowerian work, crucial in the development of Gower studies. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]
- Date
- 2023
- Gower Subjects
- Backgrounds and General Criticism