Lydgate's Literary History: Chaucer, Gower, and Canacee

Author/Editor
Nolan, Maura

Title
Lydgate's Literary History: Chaucer, Gower, and Canacee

Published
Nolan, Maura. "Lydgate's Literary History: Chaucer, Gower, and Canacee." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005), pp. 59-92.

Review
Lydgate greatly expanded the story of Canacee that Laurent de Premierfait inserted into his translation of Boccaccio's "De Casibus virorum illustrium" when he translated Laurent's work in his "Fall of Princes," and his English rendering contains clear evidence of his consciousness of and his debt to both Gower's and Chaucer's very different representations of the heroine in Book III of "Confessio Amantis" and in "Man of Law's Tale." With this as her starting point, Nolan investigates the conflicting genres, discourses, and views of Fortune that Lydgate has drawn upon and set into opposition in his tale. Gower is a "lurking presence” throughout Book I of Lydgate’s poem (62). In his version of the story, Gower accentuates the pathos of the heroine’s plight, an example that Lydgate follows despite the moral bearings of his own work, particularly as he adopted the image of the baby bathing in his mother’s blood. But in shifting the emphasis from the narrative back to the letter that Canacee writes, Lydgate also excises most of Gower’s concern with the force of “kynde” together with his interest in the philosophical and moral issues that it poses and his inquiry into the causes of the heroine’s predicament. Lydgate thus sets into bold opposition “didactic exemplarity and amorous complaint” (67), and “while the reader of the 'Confessio Amantis' is gradually being led through a complex process of education, in which he or she is asked to ponder some very fine points of moral theology (the role of “kynde,” for example), the reader of the 'Fall of Princes' is merely stymied by the apparent contradiction between the logic of virtue that guides the enterprise as a whole (sin causes falls) and the affective principle of pity that the story of Canacee so insistently enforces” (68). In the rest of this rich and challenging essay, Nolan explores the significance to the "Fall of Princes" as a whole of the “incoherencies and incompatibilities” (78) that Lydgate creates. Let one passage stand both for the scope of her argument and the nature of her conclusions: “These two notions of Fortune (the idea of a remediable negative force and an efficacious poetry versus the fearsome thought of arbitrary contingency and the uselessness of speech) are the twin poles between which Lydgate suspends the Canacee story. Jumbled together in this episode we find precisely these opposing epistemologies, the former a model in which the world is saturated with a single meaning and the latter a paradigm that evacuates the human world of all significance and silences all speech. History is both subject to logic--available to hermeneutics--and utterly excessive and irrational at the same time. Lydgate knows this, in the sense that he knows that his sources fundamentally conflict--that Ovid, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Gower each propose a different solution to the basic problem of finding meaning in history. His instinctive response to these conflicts--a response utterly characteristic of him--is to seek some kind of synthesis. Ultimately, Canacee and her son represent ideal subjects for the kind of ‘vernacular philosophy’ that permeates the 'Fall of Princes,' precisely because they expose the structural contradictions at work in the historical models for human life in the world that Lydgate inherited from his predecessors” (88). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 25.2.]

Date
2005

Gower Subjects
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Confessio Amantis
Influence and Later Allusion