Forms of Writing, Forms of War: England, Scotland, France c. 1300-1450.

Author/Editor
Davies, Daniel.

Title
Forms of Writing, Forms of War: England, Scotland, France c. 1300-1450.

Published
Davies, Daniel. "Forms of Writing, Forms of War: England, Scotland, France c. 1300-1450." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Pennsylvania, 2021. x, 317 pp. Fully accessible at
https://repository.upenn.edu/entities/publication/59a38ac4-5b08-41e6-a701-26a6f3939e86 (accessed August 12, 2025).

Review
Davies "charts a literary history of interlinked English, Scottish, and French conflict from the imperialist policies of Edward I in the late thirteenth century to the murky end of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453)" (vii). Davies observes Gower's "partisan gloss" (119) on the political affiliations of the Papal Schism in Vox Clamantis 2.265-68, and the Visio Anglie figures lightly in a discussion of siege warfare as he describes "the claustrophobic atmosphere of life under siege" (23) in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and the "broader siege mentality of London by considering how Thomas Walsingham and John Gower represent the Uprising of 1381" (35). Invoking Raymond Williams's notion that the "structure of feelings" produces particular forms in given historical moments, Davies is throughout his work concerned with how "form serves as a means to isolate a particular structure of thought engendered by a certain moment in history that enables us to create an account for how these forms change and develop over time." He maintains that "form encompasses the stylistic choices of authors as well as the tactics and strategies that govern the practice of war" (23), and, challenging a variety of "national, linguistic, and disciplinary siloes" (10), explores the thoughts, forms, and expressions of widely ranging works: several by Chaucer, Lawrence Minot's poetry (although Davies questions the attributions), various chronicles (English and Scottish), Giovanni Legnano's 1360 treatise on war, the memorial to the Black Prince in Canterbury Cathedral, and a good deal more--even "the first modern narrative account" of the Hundred Years War, Édouard Perroy's La Guerre de cent ans (1945). This impressive historical, linguistic, and disciplinary variety, however, finds little occasion to discuss that large eddy in the mainstream of the Hundred Years War, the Lancastrian usurpation that so occupies the end of Gower's life and literary career. Davies successfully addresses the inter-imperial complexities of Anglo-Scottish and Anglo-French tensions in the Hundred Years War, but there is still opportunity, it may be hoped, to incorporate intra-Anglo and Anglo-Iberian concerns as well, through consideration of the mentality of war and its forms in Cronica Tripertita, In Praise of Peace, and the revision and Iberian reception of the Confessio Amantis. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.2]

Date
2021

Gower Subjects
Background and General Criticism
Vox Clamantis