Incarnational Making in "Vox Clamantis" II.
- Author/Editor
- Batkie, Stephanie L.
Irvin, Matthew W.
- Title
- Incarnational Making in "Vox Clamantis" II.
- Published
- Batkie, Stephanie L. and Matthew W. Irvin. "Incarnational Making in 'Vox Clamantis' II." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 35-56.
- Review
- This essay examines the treatment of "poetic making" in VC Book II, with particular attention to the way in which such making is related to "the relationship between the human artistic and the divine Creator" (35). Through a series of careful textual readings that surely spring from their work on a forthcoming translation of the VC, Batkie and Irvin argue that "Gower's poetics, while grounded in Aristotelian rationality, are Christological in their making, a poetics of Incarnation" (36). Human creativity is best exercised not as a matter of invention, but of "ornamentation" or "thickening," a process that allows the artist "to participate directly in Christian 'cultus'" (42-45). As Batkie and Irvin sum up the analogy lying behind their analysis: "For God it is the fundamentally historical work of creation and redemption, in which God overcomes even the diversity between himself and creatures to enter and orient human history. For the human, participation in that 'opus' is 'cultus,' the praise that ornaments the historical 'opus,' and which develops out of the 'sensus' which God created in the human being specifically to flame into love and develop that 'cultus.' While that 'sensus' would require no other stimulation in Eden than consciousness of creation, in this fallen world, Gower sees poetry as the stimulation to that 'sensus,' and thus the production of 'cultus': in praise, but also in the critique of wickedness, which occupies much of the rest of" VC (56). [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1]
- Date
- 2020
- Gower Subjects
- Vox Clamantis