The Constraints of Justice and Gower's "Lawyerly Habit of Mind."

Author/Editor
Gastle, Brian W.

Title
The Constraints of Justice and Gower's "Lawyerly Habit of Mind."

Published
Gastle, Brian W. "The Constraints of Justice and Gower's 'Lawyerly Habit of Mind'." 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. 203-216.

Review
This essay examines one particular aspect of what R.F. Yeager has called Gower's "lawyerly habit of mind," namely his views on "the appropriate purpose and use of incarceration" (204-205). Gastle argues that "Gower's treatment of imprisonment in the 'Carmen Super Multiplici Viciorum Pestilencia,' the 'Traitié Selonc les Auctours pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz,' and 'Confessio Amantis,' taken together, reveal both a belief (or a desire to believe) in the inherent justice of imprisonment when used for appropriate purposes (such as punishment for serious failures of fidelity or loyalty) and an anxiety concerning inappropriate use of imprisonment, an anxiety that may possibly have its roots in his own brushes with the threat of prison" (205). Gastle points out that, even given the paucity of life records for Gower, two records do survive that address legal disputes of the sort for which Gower's involvement could potentially have led to his own incarceration. Within the poetry, Gastle finds a persistent "association of incarceration with carnal transgression" (213), but also finds a tension in these representations between moments at which incarceration is presented as a just punishment and other moments (such as the story of Philomela) where incarceration is an expression of the unjust use of power. Such a tension derives, Gastle suggests, from "Gower's fraught position: he is both a man concerned with upholding law who can see law as the basis of a just world, and a man who, at the least, had to consider the possibility of being imprisoned himself for a matter of debt, a situation which he could not be expected to consider as just" (215). [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1]

Date
2020

Gower Subjects
Confessio Amantis
Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz
Minor Latin Poetry
Biography of Gower