A Different Kind of Book for Richard's Sake: MS Bodley 581 as Ethical Handbook.
- Author/Editor
- Breen, Katharine.
- Title
- A Different Kind of Book for Richard's Sake: MS Bodley 581 as Ethical Handbook.
- Published
- Breen, Katharine. "A Different Kind of Book for Richard's Sake: MS Bodley 581 as Ethical Handbook." Chaucer Review 45 (2010): 119-68.
- Review
- Breen's trope on Gower's line in her title notwithstanding, her study of MS Bodley 581--a geomancy produced for Richard, but "like Gower's dedication of the 'Confessio Amantis' [which she assumes was in fact presented to the king] it was in all likelihood a failed gift" (123), because the manuscript shows no signs that Richard opened it--her essay has very little to do with Gower. Rather, it focusses on "Piers Plowman" and the "Secretum Secretorum." She notes that Gower "groups geomancy with sorcery but does not condemn it outright" (140); that although Bodley 581 "is not literary in any traditional sense of the term, it does occupy some of the same cultural terrain" as "Piers Plowman" and "the more courtly works of Chaucer and Gower . . . . In the 'Confessio Amantis,' Genius introduces geomancy and proscribes it at the same time, describing its practice and mythical origins even as he warns against it" (159). Breen sees the compiler of Bodley 581 seeking "solutions for many of the problems of morality and readership addressed by Chaucer, Gower, and Langland--although by different experimental means" (160). By creating a book capable of being read without formal instruction, the Bodley 581 compiler in effect envisions Richard as representative of "the emergent reading public of late fourteenth-century England" (160), a readership that of course was Gower's as well. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1]
- Date
- 2010
- Gower Subjects
- Manuscripts and Textual Studies
Confessio Amantis