Nobility and Chivalry.
- Author/Editor
- Green, David.
- Title
- Nobility and Chivalry.
- Published
- Green, David. "Nobility and Chivalry." In Historians on John Gower. Ed. Stephen H. Rigby, with Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 141-65.
- Review
- Green gauges Gower's attitudes toward late-medieval English aristocratic actions and ideals. He describes socio-economic events that disturbed the traditional social hierarchy of the time, efforts to bolster that hierarchy, and Gower's reactions to the events and outcomes, comparing them recurrently with those of his literary contemporaries. He finds Gower's views on the aristocracy to be complex, ambiguous, and, at times, inconsistent. Summarizing the upheavals that followed from the Black Death and the French wars, Green comments that in "Mirour de l'Omme" Gower "decried revolt" even while he "shared the rebels disappointment with the impotence of the aristocracy" (147). In light of the development of a professional military and the subsequent reshaping of chivalry and its "cultural currency" (151), Green observes a "number of tensions in Gower's writing" (152). The poet, for example, cautions knights against seeking fame, but urges them to seek honor; his poems include a "range of views" on the "legitimacy of war," while his attitudes towards love in chivalry are "somewhat fluid" (159); his "position with regard to crusading, as with broader knightly duties, is not unambiguous" (161). The poet "abhorred violence for the most part," Green says, but he also praised those who "took up arms for the right reasons and with an awareness of the need of restraint" (164). Green discerns no "single, simplistic perspective on the subjects of chivalry and nobility" in Gower's works, but observes "a general direction of moral travel" (165) toward necessary but unspecific reform. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1]
- Date
- 2019
- Gower Subjects
- Backgrounds and General Criticism
Biography of Gower