Gower's "So nyh the weder thei wol love" ("Confessio Amantis," 5, 7048).

Author/Editor
Sayers, William.

Title
Gower's "So nyh the weder thei wol love" ("Confessio Amantis," 5, 7048).

Published
Sayers, William. "Gower's 'So nyh the weder thei wol love' (Confessio Amantis, 5, 7048)." ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 28 (2015): 135-39.

Review
Readers who enjoy deep dives into etymology or nautical diction will take pleasure in Sayers' essay on lexical and technical backgrounds to Gower's use in "Confessio Amantis" V.7048 of "love," meaning "luff." His study is brief, but rich: after describing appropriate data and commentary in dictionaries and editions, Sayers proposes that "the Old Norse lexeme 'úfr' [a kind of sail-pin] is the ultimate source of 'luff' and congeners" (137), tracing the word through unattested French forms to attested "le lof," and surmising that nautical "[t]echnological evolutions, now difficult to trace, must have accompanied this refocus in vocabulary" before and after the word appeared in Gower. Gower's usage occurs as a metaphor in the context of commentary on the sacrilegious exchange of a love token in church. Sayers translates and explains the lines as follows: "'So close to the wind do they [i.e., the lovers] luff that it is as if to say, she shall not forget that I have obtained this token of her.' Gower's church-going lovers are engaged in close sailing, not 'dangerously' in the sense of exposing their suits to disaster [as usually explained], but in an expeditious manner, trying to win advantage from difficult circumstances--the headwind of church protocol, the coolness of the lady" (138). Sayers missed Alexandra Hennessy Olsen's 1986 comments on the punning of "luff" and "love" in this context, perhaps because "John Gower Newsletter" bibliographers missed it too--until this issue. See Olsen, "The Literary Impact of the Pun in Middle English Literature." In Geardagum: Essays on Old and Middle English 7 (1986): 17-36. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]

Date
2015

Gower Subjects
Language and Word Studies
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Confessio Amantis