Masculinity.
- Author/Editor
- Fletcher, Christopher.
- Title
- Masculinity.
- Published
- Fletcher, Christopher. "Masculinity." In Historians on John Gower. Ed. Stephen H. Rigby, with Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 351-78.
- Review
- Explaining that questions of Richard II's status as a boy and as a man were central to politics of late-medieval England, Fletcher assesses Gower's views on related political concerns through examination of his diction. Using computer analysis (textométrie) of Gower's masculine lexicon ("man," "manly," "manhood," etc.), Fletcher explores Gower's emphases in light of wider Middle English usage and then examines nuances of the denotations and connotations of the terms (especially "manhood") in Book I of "Confessio Amantis" and in the "Tale of Horestes," locating it in the structural "trajectory" (371) of Book III. Mining the narratives of Book I, Fletcher shows that Gower asserts "the superiority of moral virtue over the social dictates of manhood" (369), and although Gower does not link the "Tale of Horestes" to Richard's struggles in the 1380s, it "could have," Fletcher says, "provided Gower with a means of defending Richard in the last two years of his reign" (374). Revisions to CA and especially the "Cronica Tripertita," Fletcher argues, attribute Richard's deposition to his lack of the "fundamental qualities of manhood" (376)--moral vigor and justice--but they leave unclear how Gower's approved "kind of manhood . . . might be applied to concrete social and political practice" (378). Fletcher concludes that the "complexity" of the "framing structures" of CA and the "sheer variety" of its narrative materials enabled Gower both "to support and to condemn precisely the same line of action" (378). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1]
- Date
- 2019
- Gower Subjects
- Biography of Gower
Language and Word Studies
Confessio Amantis