John Gower in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books.
- Author/Editor
- Driver, Martha, Derek Pearsall, and R. F. Yeager, eds.
- Title
- John Gower in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books.
- Published
- Driver, Martha, Derek Pearsall, and R. F. Yeager, eds. Publications of the John Gower Society, no. 14. Rochester, NY: Brewer, 2020. xvii, 303 pp.; 19 illus. ISBN 9781843843539.
- Review
- This volume is comprised of fourteen essays selected by the editors from the papers presented at the joint meeting held at Durham University, 2017, of the Fifteenth Biennial Conference of the Early Book Society and the IV International Congress of the John Gower Society. Each essay is a revised and expanded version of the "briefer, orally delivered" version, transformed into a "print-worthy" chapter of "value and distinction" (2), and summarized by the editors. Together, the editors tell us in their Introduction (1-10), the essays "showcase fertile diversity," offer substantially new research, and promise to stimulate "further collaborative study" by "scholars of Gower's poetry and book history" (10). Several of the essays are, as the editors put it, "granular examinations" (8): Batkie and Nafde both focus on a single manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 92); Watt, on British Library, Additional MS 39495; and Gastle, on a single copy of a print edition (the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill copy of Caxton's "Confessio Amantis"). Others target wider concerns: Scase shows how Gower's regular meter can be seen to account for the consistency of scribal presentation of his English language. Boffey explores the idea of authorship in early printings of Gower and their paratexts, and Kobayashi addresses Tudor humanism as a feature of Gower's reception. Gerber, Pérez-Fernandez, and Echard also attend to paratextual matters--what they show and what they can tell us. Epstein and Taylor consider the thematic-political issue of sovereignty or lordship and its implications for the dating of Gower's poetry and his revisions. Connolly challenges Macaulay's excision of an excellent lyric from Gower's corpus, and Edwards shows that Macaulay's edition monumentalized the poet, but not the editor. The volume includes a substantial bibliography of primary and secondary sources (pp. 263-88) and a comprehensive index (pp. 289-303). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]
- Date
- 2020
- Gower Subjects
- BackgroundS and General Criticism
Manuscripts and Textual Studies
Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations