Selling Satire: Gower, Chaucer, and the End of the Estates.
- Author/Editor
- Ladd, Roger A.
- Title
- Selling Satire: Gower, Chaucer, and the End of the Estates.
- Published
- Ladd, Roger A. "Selling Satire: Gower, Chaucer, and the End of the Estates." In Geoffrey Chaucer. Ed. James M. Dean. Critical Insights Series. Ipswich, Mass.: Salem Press, 2017. Pp. 81-96.
- Review
- Ladd begins with the observation that "Estates satire . . . becomes relatively rare in the fifteenth century" (81), which he attributes chiefly to "the expansion of the available reading audience" (i.e., wealthy mercantile readers in English) and the consequent failure of the triadic social model to address concerns exterior to the antiquated "socioeconomic stereotypes" (81). Gower and Chaucer, recognizing that obsolescence, redirect their attention toward critiquing "what people do, rather than who they are imagined to be" (81), even as they adapt the extant estates format in organizing their poetry. This is more true of Gower, in the "Mirour de l'Omme" and "Vox " in particular, than of Chaucer; in the "Confessio Amantis," however, he like Chaucer in the "Canterbury Tales" "relegate[s] focused estates satire to an introductory role in their overall structure" (86). For Ladd, what brought Gower and Chaucer to realize the diminished literary value of estates satire was the shift in readers, away from aristocrats and clericals to merchants--a shift made apparent by recent work of Linne Mooney, Simon Horobin, and Estelle Stubbs tying the manuscripts to scribes affiliated with the Guildhall, and presumably commensurate customers (84-87). Lest they offend these readers with a format that proceeds "downward in social status" (86), they invent individual strategies for avoiding friction. "Gower's response is largely to avoid direct representations of a mercantile elite altogether" (88). As an example, Ladd cites the "Tale of Echo" in Book V, offering expectation of a critique of usury, as it comes under the heading of Avarice, "but Genius in the frame has shifted the focus of avarice from desire for money to desire of other things" (88). Gower is able to employ the vocabulary of commerce in the mythological tale (and in others, such as "Medea"), and criticize "brocours" and fraudulent weights and measures, within that fantasy context, thereby pointing fingers at no one directly. "Gower separates [the travel and luxury associated with the mercantile elite]," rendering moral judgment "by transposing these qualities to a mythological story," while dodging his reader's sense of identity and "open[ing] them up for effective critique" (90). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1]
- Date
- 2017
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations