In Praise of European Peace: Gower's Verse Epistle in Thynne's 1532 Edition of Chaucer's "Workes."

Author/Editor
Kobayashi, Yoshiko.

Title
In Praise of European Peace: Gower's Verse Epistle in Thynne's 1532 Edition of Chaucer's "Workes."

Published
Kobayashi, Yoshiko. "In Praise of European Peace: Gower's Verse Epistle in Thynne's 1532 Edition of Chaucer's Workes." 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. 231-46.

Review
Kobayashi clarifies the Tudor reception of Gower, arguing that William Thynne included Gower's "In Praise of Peace"--and identified as Gower's--in his edition of Chaucer's "Workes" (1532) at least in part because the poem expressed the humanist ideal of universal peace as "cherished and promulgated by Erasmus and his English friends" (246), a circle that included Thynne's putative collaborator Brian Tuke, Richard Pace, Thomas More, and William Leland. In the two decades preceding Thynne's edition in 1532--the same publication year as Thomas Berthelette's edition of "Confessio Amantis", with its own humanist presentation, as Kobayashi notes--European peace was promoted as a stay against the expansionism of the Ottoman Turks, and Anglo-French peace was as crucial to such efforts in the early sixteenth century as it was when Gower penned PP more than 100 years earlier (for dating, see David Watt's essay in this volume). Kobayashi identifies parallels between the poem and various humanist orations and letters of the time--Erasmus' own letter to Henry VIII celebrating the Treaty of London, "[a]lso known as the Treaty of Universal Peace" (238), and Richard Pace's published oration on the Treaty which shares mirror-for-princes motifs, themes, and imagery with Gower's poem. Letters written by More--who, with Tuke, negotiated a truce between England, France and the Holy Roman Empire "in the late 1520s" (243)--"testify to the powerful influence that the ideal of universal peace," Kobayashi observes, and a "vestige of that humanist ideal can be discerned" as late as Leland's 1546 poem on the Peace of Campe (244). Leland may well have been directly influenced, Kobayashi argues, by Pace's oration, and he certainly admired Gower's poem, as Kobayashi shows. He knew Berthelette, whom he believed to have had a hand in Thynne's edition, a likely possibility, "given the fact that [Berthelette] lent to Godfray [Thynne's publisher] the woodcut border used on the title page" of Thynne's Chaucer (234).We have no direct evidence of why Thynne included Gower's "In Praise of Peace" in Chaucer's "Workes," but Kobayashi makes clear that Gower, as the "author of an English 'laudation pacis'," is "transformed into a humanist 'orator'" (246) when Thynne first prints the poem, seemingly as an expression of the humanist ideal. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]

Date
2020

Gower Subjects
In Praise of Peace
Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations