John Gower--Love of Words and Words of Love.
- Author/Editor
- Peters, Harry.
- Title
- John Gower--Love of Words and Words of Love.
- Published
- Peters, Harry. "John Gower--Love of Words and Words of Love." In Words of Love and Love of Words in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Albrecht Classen (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008), pp. 439-60
- Review
- The first of two sections is devoted to Gower's "Love of Words," as evidenced by his copious production in three languages, and his contribution to "evolving English" as a sophisticated medium of expression (442). "The greatest example [of wordplay] . . . is the 'Confessio Amantis'," with its "disjunctions" built into a layered structure of Latin glosses, confessional dialogue, and exempla illustrating sins against love (441, 443). Peters draws from Foucault's confession theory to explicate the dialogue between Genius and Amans as a "parrhesia" or truth-telling on both sides, leading to "greater self-knowledge" on the part of "the confessing subject." In a "clear parallel," the poem itself--with its "tensions" calling for "judgment" on the part of the reader--"becomes Genius, the confessor, and the reader becomes Amans, or Everyman, in order to prompt greater self-knowledge" (443). To understand Gower's "Words of Love" (the title of the second section), Peters--per Foucault--argues that we must line them up against the "competing discourses" on love that were current in the late fourteenth century (446). First--following Duby--he cites the "lay model," which defined marriage as an arrangement for protecting landed property, while condoning male promiscuity/adultery (446-48). Its alternative, the "ecclesiastical model," accepted marriage only "as a lesser evil to control sexuality" (449), with the wife submissive to her husband. However--per D'Avray et al.--devout discourse by the late fourteenth century increasingly extolled married love, as it "model[s] the affective relationship between the individual soul and God" (449). The "Cinkante balades," considered by Peters as Gower's definitive expression on love (444), affirms the third of these discourses, while rejecting the first, and eliding the second (456). Ballad 49 presents the poet's "supreme" statement on love between spouses as divinely inspired, and a model of "'droite courtasie' toward all women" (457). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1]
- Date
- 2008
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Cinkante Balades
Language and Word Studies