Alchemical Language: Latin and the Vernacular in the Poetry of Thomas Norton and John Gower.
- Author/Editor
- Hadbawnik, David.
- Title
- Alchemical Language: Latin and the Vernacular in the Poetry of Thomas Norton and John Gower.
- Published
- Hadbawnik, David. "Alchemical Language: Latin and the Vernacular in the Poetry of Thomas Norton and John Gower." 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. 201-33.
- Review
- Hadbawnik seeks to show that "poets deploy the pose of the 'master' guarding--but also offering to reveal--the professional secret as way to spur readers to discover higher truths in vernacular poems. Language can be alchemically transformed if readers work hard enough, devote themselves, and never rely completely on the vernacular but trust the poet to guide them in finding the perfect 'mixture' between classical and vernacular tongues. Poets writing in the English vernacular use the alchemical anecdote as a challenge--more generously, an invitation--to readers to participate in the project of language development in pursuit of higher truths. To achieve full understanding of such truths, poets imply, readers should not be satisfied with one tongue, but must allow poets to guide them in seeking the right mixture, via strategies such as language games and the code-switching inherent in macaronic texts" (202). Gower, who for Hadbawnik is "invested in the alchemical trope," "seems to position Latin alongside the vernacular in order to think through the poet's--and by extension, the reader's--relationship to language. For Gower, the alchemical anecdote offers hope working through Latin to achieve an understanding of deep hermetic truths in . . . the vernacular" (203). Thus he finds similarities between Norton and Gower: "the Latin in 'Confessio Amantis' contributes to a complex game of audience-shaping, enacting restrictions and tensions not unlike those noted in 'The Ordinal of Alchemy' . . . the frequent Latin belies an 'anxiety' about access to hidden knowledge that reflects a similar tension in alchemical texts such as Norton's" (216). Gower's work seems to "implicitly--and at times explicitly"--"map onto" what Hadbawnik calls "the professional secret of the alchemical anecdote" (217). The demands placed upon readers by Gower's shifts from Latin (prose and verse) to English and back again challenges in the same way that alchemical texts at once promise secret knowledge and yet withhold it. Hence Hadbawnik's claim that for Gower "alchemy [is] a sort of arch-metaphor for the vernacular poetic project" (219).] [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1]
- Date
- 2019
- Gower Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Language and Word Studies
Confessio Amantis