'Min herte is growen into ston': Ethics and Activity in John Gower's Confessio Amantis
- Author/Editor
- Fox, Hilary E
- Title
- 'Min herte is growen into ston': Ethics and Activity in John Gower's Confessio Amantis
- Published
- Fox, Hilary E. "'Min herte is growen into ston': Ethics and Activity in John Gower's Confessio Amantis." Comitatus 36 (2005), pp. 15-40. ISSN 0069-6412
- Review
- Fox "seeks to elucidate Gower's reception not only of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics (as Latinized by Grosseteste and adapted by Trevisa) but also of the moralizations on Ovidian texts, and to analyze how these traditions influence the goals of the Confessio." For Fox, "Genius employs the 'Tale of Medusa' to mirror the paralysis, impaired will, and confused desires of Amans, and uses it to argue for an ethical agenda that is practical, rather than theoretical in nature." She finds the tale "sourced in the moralizing commentaries on the Metamorphoses and the exempla of thirteenth-century sermons;" in Gower's hands, however, the tale becomes "an Aristotelian practical ethic to emphasize the importance of productive, directed action and the role of individual agency in that action." [RFY. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 26.1]
- Date
- 2005
- Gower Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
- Confessio Amantis