Amans the Memorious.

Author/Editor
Yeager, R. F.

Title
Amans the Memorious.

Published
In Later Middle English Literature, Materiality, and Culture: Essays in Honor of James M. Dean, ed. Brian Gastle and Erick Kelemen (Lanham, MD: University of Delaware Press, 2018), pp. 91-103.

Review
As the title and its allusion to Jorge Luis Borges's short story "Funes the Memorious" makes clear, R.F. Yeager's essay takes as its focus the notion of memory and recollection, moving from the "Funes" to Boethius's "Consolatio" and Maximianus's "Elegies." Throughout, Yeager demonstrates how each of these texts—"Consolatio," "Confessio," "Elegies," and "Funes"--"have at their core the problem of time." (94) Whether the prodigious memory of Funes, the quest for eternity in Boethius, or the "steady lamentation" (94) of Maximianus's complaints of age-related impotence, these examples help clarify how Amans, a figure characterized by his lack of memory, is nevertheless a construct who reflects some of Gower's thinking about time. Yeager discusses the origins of the CA and its origin in a moment of time--in an apparently chance encounter between Gower and Richard II on the Thames--and the choice to write the CA in Middle English speak to Gower's "growing thoughtfulness about the nature and urgencies of time." (95) Contextualizing the CA as a book that, at least in its Ricardian recension, has this watery origin, Yeager then describes some of the beginning characteristics of the CA that encode the value of time and, specifically, the past in the "Prologue," including the "mutability of time" in the discussion of old books and the images from Nebuchadnezzar's Dream. What these elements suggest, then, according to Yeager, is an urge to confession and repentance in the present and to avoid pain and embrace peace by knowing the past, in light of the future which is ever approaching. The essay concludes by returning to "Funes" and reading Borges's short story alongside CA in order to parse out the importance of the "now" in Gower's conceptions of history, the past, and time. Remarking that Funes and his memory are ultimately about stasis and death, Yeager demonstrates that Amans's forgetting is not static, but about the "memory in process." Remembering, Yeager reminds the reader, is, for Gower, a moral act, a call in the now for repentance. [WR. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.]

Date
2018

Gower Subjects
Confessio Amantis