Gower and Chaucer: Readings of Ovid in Late Medieval England.
- Author/Editor
- McKinley, Kathryn L.
- Title
- Gower and Chaucer: Readings of Ovid in Late Medieval England.
- Published
- In Ovid in the Middle Ages, ed. James G. Clark, Frank Thomas Coulson, and Kathryn L. McKinley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 197-230.
- Review
- McKinley opens her essay by surveying the paucity of Ovidian references and allusions in Middle English poetry, apart from works by Gower and Chaucer, describing the pair as the "most Ovidian of the Middle English poets" and setting out to explore the "nature of the two poets' relative Ovidianisms." For both, Ovid "was the classical poet par excellence" (198), although their emphases differ, McKinley tells us initially, offering a familiar, even traditional summary: "If for Gower Ovid is useful in constructing an ideal world--a coherent, but highly stratified mundus of political, ethical and theological dimensions--for Chaucer Ovid is useful in exploring the larger, often open-ended, moral and ethical questions one should ask while making one's way through a rather less clearly delineated world" (198-99). For most of her essay, however, McKinley steers in a somewhat different direction, focusing on instances where, she argues, Gower and Chaucer use a range of Ovidian sources in diverse, even "startling" (230) ways. She offers four extended examples; Gower's incorporation of lines from Ovid into his own Latin in VC Book 1, comparison of Gower's and Chaucer's versions of the Pyramus and Thisbe stories in CA Book 5 and "The Legend of Good Women," their versions of Theseus/Ariadne material in the same works, and Chaucer's adaptation of Ovid in his "Manciple's Tale," with a nod to Gower's version in CA Book 3. Throughout, McKinley emphasizes the work that Ovid does for Gower and Chaucer even when they use Latin school texts, translations, and moralizations as their sources, often in complicated combinations, modified by the overarching contexts of the poets' medieval larger narratives. In VC 1.2021–50, Gower cherry picks ten lines directly from Ovid and uses them so that "Ovid is made a proponent of the virtues of self-mastery," of "ratio" over "amor," in a "startling reversal" of the Roman poet's original (206). In the cases of the Thisbe/Pyramus and the Ariadne/Theseus accounts, McKinley's comparisons lead her to observe how and where the medieval poets adjust the Ovidian materials to fit their own concerns: Gower, the "principles of self-restraint and oath-keeping" (230); Chaucer, the ironic, even comic or bathetic potential of love tragedy. The modification of Ovidian details and emphases in the "Manciple's Tale" and its juxtaposition with the "Parson's Tale," McKinley argues, "opens up a new vein of exploration in the poem: the analysis of intention in relation to sin." In this instance, Chaucer is more the moralizing poet than is Gower, and so a particularly surprising example, it seems, of the "extraordinary creativity" of the poets' in their "'glosynge' of Ovid" (230). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.]
- Date
- 2011
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations