"Translatio Imperii" and Gower's "Confessio Amantis."
- Author/Editor
- Speed, Diane.
- Title
- "Translatio Imperii" and Gower's "Confessio Amantis."
- Published
- Medieval Translator / Traduire au Moyen Âge 14 (2018): 379-93.
- Review
- Speed offers in this essay a clear and flexible commentary on CA that might well find its way into a critical anthology intended for collegiate use. She treats CA in as an example of the "counter-Virgilian tradition" (381) of the "translatio imperii" from Troy to London (by way of Rome), and she contrasts the heroic-epic destiny in Virgil's "Aeneid" with the emphasis on "human decision-making" (390) in works about Troy by Ovid, Guido delle Colonne, Benoît de Sainte-Maure, and Gower. The Virgilian / "counter-Virgilian" distinction is not new, nor are the lineaments of the transmission of the story summarized here, but, after noting Gower's concern with Troy in "Vox Clamantis" and "Cronica Tripertita," Speed sharpens awareness of the fundamental importance of Trojan material for the CA, thematically and structurally, charting the twenty Trojan narratives of the work and their sources (none of them directly Virgilian), observing that the twenty "represent over one-fifth of the tales by volume" of the work, along with additional "brief exemplary allusions in the frame story" (385) and other allusions and references. This demonstration of the quantity of Trojan material in CA is matched by the quality of Speed's discussions of selected paired Trojan tales and paired Trojan characters, showing, for example, that the content of the "second and second-last" of Gower's Trojan tales ("The Trojan Horse" and "Paris and Helen," both from Benoît) "self-evidently frames the legendary context for all the others, and their positioning arguably constructs an unavoidable discursive significance for all" (385). Speed does not say that focus on Trojan political "treachery and folly" (387) obviates the penitential concerns of Gower's frame narrative--hypocrisy in the Horse narrative or sacrilege when Paris and Helen meet in a temple--but that "counter-Virgilian" politics are never far away from the personal concerns, layering and analogizing political and penitential themes. In similar fashion, the "prominence" of Achilles and Ulysses, as opposed to Aeneas, in CA "works against any possibility of glamourizing Troy" or Virgil's hero (388) while keeping in focus the importance of the legend of Troy as a political antecedent to Gower's contemporary London. Moreover, the original Prologue to the CA and its revised version, Speed shows, as well as its original and revised conclusions, combine poetic and political awareness, evincing the importance of the "myth of Troy" for Gower and for English poetry as well as for the nation of England--"translatio studii et imperii" (392). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.]
- Date
- 2018
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations