Gower's Ballades for Women.
- Author/Editor
- Nicholson, Peter.
- Title
- Gower's Ballades for Women.
- Published
- Nicholson, Peter. "Gower's Ballades for Women." 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. 79-97.
- Review
- Nicholson's essay examines the five poems from the "Cinkante Balades" in which Gower writes through a female persona (numbers 41-44 and 46). Nicholson begins by noting how common it was to adopt a voice differing in gender from that of the poet, citing the examples of Machaut, Deschamps, Froissart, Granson, and the anonymous "chansonnier" of University of Pennsylvania MS Codex 902 who all wrote poems voiced as women, as well as that of Christine de Pizan, who "left more than 100 poems in the voice of a man" (82). Nicholson argues that Gower's use of this voicing is distinctive in that Gower includes several poems in which the women complain "not just that her lover has left her nor even merely that his promises were false, but that he has had multiple loves of which she was only one," and, moreover, that Gower treats this failing "more as a moral than as an emotional issue" and that he does so by drawing the language of moral condemnation less from the shared tradition reflected in Machaut "et al" than from his own discourse of moral condemnation in the MO and CA (84-85). He concludes by arguing that "[t]hese women are no less earnest than the spokesperson for moral reform in 'Mirour de l'Omme,' but they have much better reason to be, and Gower perhaps even realized that, in placing them in a setting in which the speaker has so personal a stake, the language that he uses has a much more powerful claim upon our attention than it does in 'Mirour,' and the ethic that it supports is for that reason all the more compelling" (97). [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1]
- Date
- 2020
- Gower Subjects
- Cinkante Balades
Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis)