Exemplary Cases: Marriage as Legal Principle in Gower’s Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz

Although Gower’s engagement with sermons and penitentials is well established, this article demonstrates that legal theory was also central to Gower’s moral narratives. This reading of Gower’s Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz shows the similarities between exemplary narrative and legal logic, and suggests that the formulations of both common and canon law are crucial to Gower’s ethics. The Traitié identifies marriage as both an exemplary instance of legal principles and the material instantiation of the principles of law, reflecting the logic of both secular and ecclesiastical medieval legal treatises and indicating that marital and legal theory were mutually constitutive in late medieval culture.