Natural Sciences.
- Author/Editor
- Falk, Seb.
- Title
- Natural Sciences.
- Published
- Falk, Seb. "Natural Sciences." In Historians on John Gower. Ed. Stephen H. Rigby, with Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 491-525.
- Review
- Falk surveys commentary on Gower's knowledge of medieval sciences and magic, particularly astronomy and astrology, accepting traditional arguments that in Book VII of "Confessio Amantis" Gower was widely influenced by "encyclopaedic sources" such as the pseudo-Aristotelian "Secretum secretorum" and Brunetto Latini's "Li Livres dou Tresor," but exploring further Gower's familiarity with "lesser known sources" (491), particularly two texts: the "Benedictum sit nomen Domini," an example of the "broad corpus of Latin writings which may be called Alchandreana" (504), and the "Tractatus Enoch," a text as much concerned with magic as science. Both texts have been previously identified in discussions of Gower's sources, but Falk studies details shared between CA and these texts in order to explore the "true level of Gower's scientific expertise" (514), observing the poet's relative lack of interest in scientific instruments, his relatively precise use of numbers, and his interest in "diagrammatic illustrations," which "may have drawn the poet's eye down" to scientific texts (525). Falk thinks that the "Benedictum" is the source of Gower's lists of stars in CA, but similarities with the "Benedictum" do not allow us to gauge Gower's "theoretical understanding" of lunar mansions, and his "conflation of signs and constellations" indicate that he in part misunderstood his source (515). Gower's use of the "Tractatus Enoch," Falk tells us, helps to explain citations of Nectanabus and Hermes in CA and perhaps indicates Gower's familiarity with "image magic"--a "fashionable genre of learned magic" (521) related to astronomy. Drawing on the "Tractatus" or something like it, Gower "included "elements of both astrology and image magic in his account of astronomy" in CA, but he also distinguished "between the people who practise" these skills, thereby, Falk explains, treading a "reasonably straight and careful path" between valid science and immoral practice (524), while pursuing the goal of educating his readers. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1]
- Date
- 2019
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations