"In Praise of Peace" in Late Medieval England.
- Author/Editor
- Torres, Sara V.
- Title
- "In Praise of Peace" in Late Medieval England.
- Published
- Torres, Sara V. "'In Praise of Peace' in Late Medieval England." In Joanna Bellis and Laura Slater, eds. Representing War and Violence 1250-1600 (Woodbridge, Suff.: Boydell & Brewer, 2016), pp. 95-115.
- Review
- Peace is a complicated concept--an analogically rich intertwining of theological, eschatological goals, political and social ideals, and personal, psychological aims. Whether humans can ever achieve peace and preserve it, as Sara Torres shows, is an anxious concern of much late-medieval English literature and much of Gower's writing in particular. Torres addresses violence, temptation, contention, and anger as they threaten peace in a number of ways in "Mirour de l'Omme," "Vox Clamantis," "Confessio Amantis," "Cronica Tripertita," and "In Praise of Peace"--along with works by Chaucer ("Manciple's Tale" and the Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women"), Maidstone's "Concordia," "Richard the Redelees," "Mum and the Sothsegger," "The Book of Virtues and Vices," and more. Her focus, however, is on the "paradox of violent peace" (97) in the reign of Richard II, when peace is "silence forcibly effected, constrained speech". . . a "euphemism rather than a virtue" (96), a cowering before the royal wrath which is really no peace at all, and a thread in Gower's writing that Torres uses to trace Gower's transfer of loyalty from Richard to Henry. Paralleling this transfer, Torres argues, "is a corollary change in Gower's . . . emphasis on persistent anxiety about poetic vocality--Gower's Vox Clamantis--to problems of princely reception and discernment. Similarly, the silencing effect of violence shifts from the dangers of the riotous commons to the dangers of princely duplicity and rage." In the VC, "the king's steady rule counteracts the mob violence of the Rising of 1381," but by the end of the 1390's--in response to the "king's eruptive, vengeful treatment of Lords Appellant after a dissimulative period of false peace"--Gower characterizes "Richard as an unjust king whose wrathful nature endangers the realm" in both CrT and PP, and compares "Richard's misguided, tyrannical and destructive actions unfavorably to those of the lawful and peace-seeking Henry Bolingbroke." Wrath is anatomized as simultaneously personal, political, and moral in MO and in Book 3 of CA, and the latter emphasizes "the fundamental role of counsel in the performance of just rule" and "expose[s] the commensurate penitential and political language of violence in its critiques of both affective anger and war" (98). Near the end of his career, the poet "turns Richard's self-fashioned banner of peace-maker against him, [so that] the king who had so assiduously promoted a policy of peace towards France and cultivated an image of absolutist monarchical power is condemned by the poet as an enemy of peace itself" (98-99). Such sweeping concerns compel Torres to some selective focus (omitting discussion of large portions of MO and in CA to treat Wrath only) and some necessary generalizations. Yet her reading is provocative, stirring and, at times, disturbing--nowhere more so than in her conclusion where she reminds us that Henry's usurpation was itself violent, that his legacy includes the "pursuit of war in France," and that "peace remains intrinsically relational and dependent on forms of representational or embodied violence" (115). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.2]
- Date
- 2017
- Gower Subjects
- Backgrounds and General Criticism
In Praise of Peace
Cronica Tripertita