Looking for Richard: Finding "Moral Gower" in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 92.

Author/Editor
Batkie, Stephanie L/

Title
Looking for Richard: Finding "Moral Gower" in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 92.

Published
Batkie, Stephanie L. "Looking for Richard: Finding "Moral Gower" in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 92." In Martha Driver, Derek Pearsall, and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books. Publications of the John Gower Society, no. 14. Rochester, NY: Brewer, 2020. Pp. 33-53.

Review
Batkie locates "moral Gower" in the version of the poet's verse chronicle "Cronica Tripertita" found in MS Hatton 92, rather than (or in addition to) in Chaucer's reference in "Troilus and Criseyde" 5.1856. The only extant manuscript version of CrT found unattached to the "Vox Clamantis," the Hatton CrT is accompanied "compilationally" by various kinds of moral materials--axioms, proverbs, fables, parables, exempla, etc.--and Gower's poem is presented in a way that it "resonates with the strongly exemplaric and moralizing agenda of the collection as a whole" (36). Marginal references to Gower and to the VC near the opening of the Hatton CrT--marginalia added to the text in a sixteenth-century hand as Batkie observes--are occasion to explore the exemplarity of CrT for readers aware of the absent-but-present VC. Batkie then concentrates on the prologues and openings of the Hatton CrT and the CrT found in All Souls 98 (Macaulay's base text), showing that Hatton "re-ordered pieces of the opening of the text" (48) in ways that "favors exemplarity over chronicle" (49), in effect, emphasizing a moral Gower rather than a political one, even when the VC is not present. Her arguments are complicated, involving attention to several instances of "ghostly" (37) absent presence, to temporal slipperiness, and to negotiations "between the permanent and the ephemeral, between what remains behind and what disappears in time" (43). Such concerns, she maintains, define "the parameters by which Gower understands his chronicle form" (44), casting "history as exemplarity," a "relationship" which the "scribes and readers of MS Hatton 92 take . . . to heart and capitalize on" (45), bringing the CrT "in line with the other texts of the manuscript," perhaps compelling similar readings of the other, shorter Latin poems by Gower in the manuscript, and perhaps "preempt[ing] some readings of Gower's work even as it opens up others" (52). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]

Date
2020

Gower Subjects
Manuscripts and Textual Studies
Cronica Tripertita
Vox Clamantis
Minor Latin Poetry