A State above All Other: The Recensions of "Confessio Amantis" and the Anthropology of Sovereignty.

Author/Editor
Epstein, Robert.

Title
A State above All Other: The Recensions of "Confessio Amantis" and the Anthropology of Sovereignty.

Published
Epstein, Robert. "A State above All Other: The Recensions of Confessio Amantis and the Anthropology of Sovereignty." 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. 55-70.

Review
Epstein opens his essay by pointing out that Gowerians have widely accepted that changes made between the first and third recensions of CA (a putative second recension being discredited) reflect changes in Gower's view of royal authority from absolutist (Ricardian) to constitutionalist (Lancastrian). He questions neither the recensions nor their sequencing, but argues that their differences "might best be understood not as the conflict between absolutism and constitutionalism, but rather as the tension between 'divine' and 'sacred' [elsewhere 'sacral'] kingship" (61), a distinction he derives from the combined studies of anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and David Graeber, "On Kings" (2017). Sacral kingship, according to Sahlins and Graeber in Epstein's summation, is "the original principle of kingship in all societies," characterized by an understanding of the king as "meta-human" rather than "god-like," distinguished by the "key-concept" of the "stranger-king" (59), and sacralized through ritual in order to maintain the king's separateness from his people while "containing the power of the king." Further, the sovereignty of the king and the sovereignty of the people "share an ontogeny" (60) producing an ongoing tension, sometimes manifest in carnivalesque versions of regicide. After explaining Sahlins and Graeber's theory of kingship as an "anthropological phenomenon" (58) in this way, Epstein applies it to portions of CA, reading the exempla of Book 7, for example, as concerned with the limiting of kingship: "not about the power of the king but rather about the containment of the latent claims of divine kingship" (64), and, to take another example, observing that Henry, even in the third recension (Prologue and end of Book 8), is "not . . . a prospective king," but a figure of "divinely ordained knighthood that can restrict the power of the king" (67). When Richard is "banished from the third recension," as Epstein puts it, he is replaced not by Henry, but by an "'Engelond' that emerges in the imaginative absence of Richard II"--a "corporate resistance to royal authority, sacral in reaction to claims of divinity, emerging as sovereign statehood" (68), and, just possibly, a "modern moment--the supplanting of a sacral king by the state apparatus originally invented to contain him" (70). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]

Date
2020

Gower Subjects
Confessio Amantis
Manuscripts and Textual Studies