"The most excellent creatures are not ever born perfect": Early Modern Attitudes to Middle English.
- Author/Editor
- Cooper, Helen.
- Title
- "The most excellent creatures are not ever born perfect": Early Modern Attitudes to Middle English.
- Published
- Cooper, Helen. "'The most excellent creatures are not ever born perfect': Early Modern Attitudes to Middle English." In Imagining Medieval English: Language Structures and Theories, 500-1500. Ed. Tim William Machan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. 241-60.
- Review
- Alongside Chaucer, and to a lesser degree Lydgate, Gower figures as a touchstone in Cooper's essay, their poetry first recognized in the earlier sixteenth century as "rare late medieval exceptions to the predominant papist norm" (244), their rough, "native" English simultaneously judged preferable to imported "ynkehorne termes" and (quoting Thomas Wilson) "the habit of returning travelers to 'pouder their talke with ouersea language'" (246). By the 1590s, however, Gower's language, and Chaucer's and Lydgate's, was seen as in need of "improvement"--largely the vocabulary adopted from humanism, one result of which being that while the quality of Gower's versification was devalued, the morals of his matter retained esteem. Notably, Cooper concludes with Ben Jonson's "English Grammar" (1623/1640), pointing out "Not least interestingly, [Jonson] takes a high proportion of his examples of the language from Gower and Chaucer, in a practical confirmation of the belief that it was with them that the language had moved from its initial barbarism to achieve excellence" (257). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1]
- Date
- 2016
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion
Language and Word Studies
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification