Birdsong, Love, and the House of Lancaster: Gower Reforms Chaucer.
- Author/Editor
- Bahr, Arthur.
- Title
- Birdsong, Love, and the House of Lancaster: Gower Reforms Chaucer.
- Published
- In Chaucer and the Subversion of Form, ed. Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 165-81
- Review
- Bahr's question in this essay is "Does knowledge of a manuscript's patron or circumstances of production . . . close off and thus subvert its potentialities as an aesthetic form?" (165). Versions of this question have preoccupied Bahr for some years. (See, e.g., "Reading Codicological Form in John Gower's Trentham Manuscript" [2011]; "Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London" [2013].) Here again his focus is London, British Library, MS Additional 59495 (olim Trentham), more specifically how the "tension between the synchronic and the diachronic [sharpens] when we consider the allusive intertextuality of many of Trentham's texts" (166). The manuscript-as-object, Bahr argues, "was always bound to exceed" whatever were Gower's "intentions when he began compiling Trentham." Or, as he puts it more broadly a little further on: "manuscript studies as a discipline" should not prize "historically discrete and verifiable data points" exclusively, but recognize that manuscripts' "vitality depends upon continued reading and creative reinterpretations" (166). To demonstrate this method, Bahr roves freely throughout the contents of the manuscript, comparing elements with, and surfacing allusions to, the "Book of the Duchess," "Parlement of Foules," and "Inferno" 5, 127-42 (Paolo and Francesca). He reads, at the same time, a variety of ways the manuscript, produced after the usurpation and seemingly intended as a gift to Henry IV, also contains nuanced--and not negative--backward glances at the reign of Richard II. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.]
- Date
- 2018
- Gower Subjects
- Manuscripts and Textual Studies