Historicism after Historicism.
- Author/Editor
- Nolan, Maura.
- Title
- Historicism after Historicism.
- Published
- Nolan, Maura. "Historicism after Historicism." In The Post-Historical Middle Ages. Eds. Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. Pp. 63-85.
- Review
- Nolan's argument is complicated, nuanced, and consequently quite difficult to do it justice in a brief summary. Her focus is "on the relationship of historical thought to literary form as a way of assessing what aspects of historicist discourse and practice remain critically energetic and analytically central to medieval literary study" (63). Working with three examples--Augustine's discovery of a "giant's tooth" in the "City of God," passages from Ovid's "Ars Amatoria," and Gower's image, at the beginning of Book II of the "Vox Clamantis," of his creative process as honey gathered from many flowers, or shells found on the beach, an image taken verbatim from Ovid (70)--she lays out as necessary an understanding of the past observed not merely backwards from the present, nor as if past and present were the same, but as an object of study both itself and in relation to the present as well as part of it. Her description of how this relates to Gower also captures much of her larger argument: "When Gower . . . appropriates Ovid's art, he does so as a way of reflecting on his own poetic practice. Like the Romans who gather shells, extract what's beautiful in them, and transform that extraction into a symbol of power, Gower gathers words from his predecessors, detaches them from their contexts, and forces them to make meaning in a new way. This account of Gower's poetics, as a form of imperialism, wrought under the sign of deference to the very classical "auctores" whose words he has gathered and reused, fundamentally rewrites the standard narrative of Gower's history-writing in the "Vox Clamantis." It has long been thought that the version of the fourteenth century found in the "Vox" is so ideologically driven, so wedded to a conservative vision of medieval society (the hierarchy of the three estates), that it utterly lacks nuance, self-reflection, and the capacity to accept social change . . . . The example of the gathered shells thus illustrates the way in which Gower determinedly sustains a tension between deference to Latin authority (here, Ovid) and the display of poetic skill embodied in the fearless abandon with which he redeploys classical words and images while ruthlessly exploiting both their past and present meanings. The brilliance of this particular display lies in the fact that Gower has chosen a passage from the "Ars Amatoria" whose Ovidian meaning constitutes a critique of its Gowerian use: Ovid deploys the gathering of shells to illustrate the triviality of modern forms of imperial expression, from the color purple to well-groomed ladies. If Gower aligns himself and his own gathering of words with these Roman practices, he must also accept the critique sedimented in the line he has adopted. By doing so, Gower forges a poetic 'middle way'--a practice of engaging the past that treats it with care, but without kid gloves. This middle way is a mode of using the past while allowing it to speak freely: Gower may manipulate Ovid's poetry for his own ends, but he retains the exact wording of Ovid's verse about shells" (81-82). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]
- Date
- 2009
- Gower Subjects
- Vox Clamantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations