Barbarian Memory: The Legacy of Early Medieval History in Early Modern Literature.
- Author/Editor
- Buirns, Nicholas.
- Title
- Barbarian Memory: The Legacy of Early Medieval History in Early Modern Literature.
- Published
- Birns, Nicholas. Barbarian Memory: The Legacy of Early Medieval History in Early Modern Literature. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 44-59.
- Review
- In the chapter entitled "Chaucer, Gower, and Barbarian History: 'The Man of Law's Tale' and the Prologue to Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'," Birns argues, as part of his wider set of claims about uses of late antique European history by medieval and Renaissance writers, that Gower and Chaucer both drew on "barbarian history" as source material and as "a mirror for their own times" (44): Chaucer using Paul the Deacon in his "Man of Law's Tale," and Gower using Otto of Freising to extend into the near past the four-empire image from the book of Daniel in the Prologue to the Confessio Amantis. Birns claims that "It is likely that Otto's 'Chronica sive Historia de duabus civitatibus' was the principal source for the historical portions" (44) of the Prologue to CA, although the claim is largely unsubstantiated, relying on a rather loose connection between 5.19 of Otto's "Historia" and lines 739–45 of Gower's Prologue, and partially undercut by Birns's observation that the poetic account by Godfrey of Viterbo (who Gower cites in his tale of Apollonius) may well be an alternative source. Birns's comments on the "translatio" of Rome as the Holy Roman Empire in Gower's time and place are more apt, as are his observations about Gower's moral anxieties concerning the "way history was going" (52) in his own time and about the "pastness of the past" (54), but they are undercut by obscurity: "beneath Gower's recuperative veneer there is an entropic dynamism-within-decay that cannot keep history boxed in one direction" (48). Similar problems haunt Birns's discussion of Chaucer's tale, although his efforts to avoid a simplistic view of history are commendable as he pursues a nuanced "historical consciousness" of medieval and Renaissance writers who were influenced by earlier historiography. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1]
- Date
- 2013
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amanti
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations