The Study of Classical Authors: From the Twelfth Century to ca. 1450.
- Author/Editor
- Gillespie, Vincent.
- Title
- The Study of Classical Authors: From the Twelfth Century to ca. 1450.
- Published
- Gillespie, Vincent. "The Study of Classical Authors: From the Twelfth Century to ca. 1450." In Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson, eds. Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 145-235.
- Review
- Gillespie's essay is a learned tour-de-force, with essential information on the how the classics were assimilated. Gower figures as a satirical poet: "Later vernacular writers like John Gower, described by a contemporary as 'satirus poeta' (Works, ed. Macaulay, III, p. 479), and Geoffrey Chaucer reveal clear indebtedness to medieval communal and estates satire, even when they explore, expand or explode its imaginative horizons" (228). In the end, Gillespie comments, it may be the poets who most successfully absorbed and put to use the classics: "Mussato, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio all struggled to define and articulate a 'humanist' (and increasingly 'vernacular') conception of what it was to be a poet. Chaucer, Gower and Langland all reflect in their different ways on the theory and praxis of their art. Their reading and writing interpenetrated in their thinking about poetry. For all of them, poetic theory was a theology of real poetic experience. It may be, therefore, that many of the most subtle and sustained responses to the strategies and aspirations of classical writers came not in the academic commentary tradition--whose hermeneutic horizons were often circumscribed--but in the original compositions provoked and inspired by reading the texts made available through that tradition. 'Imitatio' is, after all, the sincerest form of flattery" (235). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.2]
- Date
- 2005
- Gower Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations