Historians on John Gower.
- Author/Editor
- Rigby, Stephen H., ed., with Siân Echard.
- Title
- Historians on John Gower.
- Published
- Rigby, Stephen H., ed., with Siân Echard. Historians on John Gower. Publications of the John Gower Society. Volume XII. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019. ISBN 97818433845379.
- Review
- Rigby, Echard, and a team of twelve contributors explore Gower's "artistic refraction of contemporary affairs" (xxii), reading his poetry "in the context of his life [and] . . . the intellectual culture of the social, religious, and political controversies of his day" (xxiii), particularly the upheavals that hit England most directly: plague, the Uprising of 1381, Lollardy, the challenges of the Lords Appellant, and the deposition of Richard II. The tradition of estates satire and the framework of political ideology are recurrent concerns, as are relations with contemporary poets, especially Chaucer and Langland, and the relative chronology of Gower's works, his revisions of them, and contemporary events. The fourteen essays (plus a calendar of life records) are informed by consistent awareness of parallels between Gower's works, on the one hand, and chronicles and documentary records on the other, accompanied by careful attention to previous scholarship, judicious cross-referencing between the essays, a comprehensive index, and illustrative figures in color and black and white. The John Gower that emerges from the essays is not an unfamiliar one--a traditionalist moral poet--but one that is more nuanced and more ambivalent in his outlooks, perhaps, than is usually observed. His trilingualism is more taken for granted than directly explored, with sustained attention to "Mirour de l'Omme," "Vox Clamantis," "Cronica Tripertia," and the "minor" poems as well as "Confessio Amantis," the long-time favorite of critics. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1]
- Date
- 2019
- Gower Subjects
- Backgrounds and General Criticism