Medieval Ovid: Frame Narrative and Political Allegory.
- Author/Editor
- Gerber, Amanda J.
- Title
- Medieval Ovid: Frame Narrative and Political Allegory.
- Published
- Gerber, Amanda J. Medieval Ovid: Frame Narrative and Political Allegory. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 102-33.
- Review
- In Chapter 5, "Overlapping Mythologies: The Political Afterlives of Frame Narratives in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and Lydgate's 'Fall of Princes'," Gerber argues that "Gower and Lydgate deviated from the allegorical approaches to which scholars tend to connect them" (102). For Gerber, the key is discernible in the "collacatio," that is how any given borrowed narrative "proceeds beyond the embedded myth's conclusion in Ovid's text" (105). For Gower as for Lydgate, this results in "increasingly diverse types of lore for progressively blended political demographics" (106). A salient point for Gerber is how "collacatio" becomes a means of giving advice to princes who, like Richard II, tend to be isolated and vulnerable to bad advice from self-interested counsellors. She treats the tales of Iphis and Ianthe, Ulysses, and especially Apollonius as prime examples first, of the method, and second (with special reference to Apollonius, who never loses touch with the "comun vois" of the people [114]), as case studies for, respectively, the lover/ruler in isolation (Iphis) and socially (properly) engaged (Ulysses and Apollonius). "Warning against the vitiating effects of power, Gower and Lydgate both emphasize the dangers of tyrannical self-interest that detracts from the "bonum commune," but they also interweave solutions to these problems, breaking the cycle of endless "de casibus" narratives with characters such as Apollonius and Canace" (127). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society, eJGN 44.2]
- Date
- 2015
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations