The Weight of Experience: John Gower and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.
- Author/Editor
- Anderson, Joel D.
- Title
- The Weight of Experience: John Gower and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.
- Published
- Anderson, Joel D. "The Weight of Experience: John Gower and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381." In Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages: Politics, Performativity and Reception from Literature to Music, ed. Katherine W. Jager (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Pp. 23-47.
- Review
- Anderson's subject is the so-called "Visio Anglie," Book I of the "Vox Clamantis" in most known manuscripts. He closes his essay this way: "For his dreamer, the presence of the moment is visceral and physical. In spite of its profoundly dark tone, Gower still sees the 'Vox' as a source of light . . . . The ideal reader is one who can use the work as a mirror for deep meditation and self-reflection. Gower's greatest fear seems to be the person who absorbs nothing, remembers nothing, and projects his desires and will onto the world" (43). Drawn together here are the several strands of a complex argument in which Anderson portrays Gower as a shocked witness of the revolt who in the "Visio" "speaks as a moralist who wants to explicate, advise, and teach . . . to elucidate what the events signified" (24). For Gower, this meant an appeal to "sensory perception and its manifold claims to experience" (25) as an entry to understanding, and interpreting, the events as "signa." Anderson cites medieval theories of sense perception that merge visual and tactile experience, along with contemporary understanding of memory to argue that Gower's pastiche of Latin quotation in the "Visio" is a careful assertion through literary form of historical consciousness for his intended audience ("literate nobles searching for interpretive models to give meaning to their own perceptions and experiences of the revolt" [26])--a technique that comes with a moral edge. On the one hand, a knowledge of the past enacted by recognizing and comprehending the Latin demands remembrance, reflection, and moral assessment. This Gower hopes for his target readers, as a tool to enable "the learned and literate political elites whose own sins and moral lapses had, in the poet's eyes, helped to precipitate the revolt" (42). For these, some form of penitence, modelled by the dreamer, is in order. On the other side, in contrast, are the transformed peasants, who, as Anderson's examinations of their inhuman sounds and blind obedience to the Jackdaw's commands are to show, "are monstrous on account of their inability to properly absorb, and relate to, past and present experience . . . to weigh the ramifications of their actions" (36). Anderson's essay is ambitious in its wide-reaching multifocality, but in the main convincing, and offers several fresh approaches to Gower's "Visio." [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1]
- Date
- 2019
- Gower Subjects
- Vox Clamantis