Gower in Context(s): Scribal, Linguistic, Literary and Socio-historical Readings ed. by Laura Filardo-Llamas, Brian Gastle and Marta Gutiérrez Rodríguez (review)

Gower in Context(s): Scribal, Linguistic, Literary and Socio-historical readings contains a diverse collection of essays that consider the circumstances of the production and reception of John Gower’s literary works, as well as the social, historical, and linguistic contexts that inform readings of his Confessio Amantis and Vox Clamantis. This volume brings together a variety of methodologies that help to uncover the heterogeneity of readings presented by Gower’s texts and it concentrates more broadly on the effect of context on textual meaning. From Ruen-chuan Ma’s essay, “Vernacular Accessus: Text and Gloss in Gower’s Confessio Amantis and Christine de Pizan’s Épître Othéa,” which recognizes the value of manuscript, textual, scribal, and comparative literary studies in analyses of the Confessio, to Emily Houlik-Ritchey’s “Rewriting Difference: ‘Saracens’ in John Gower and Juan de Cuenca,” which uses linguistic analysis to place Gower’s text in conversation with its prose Castilian translation, Gower in Context(s) broadly aims “to transcend traditional contextual boundaries of space and language” (12).

The first section of the volume concentrates on studies of the manuscripts containing Gower’s writings. The contexts of manuscript production, reception, and transmission help authors determine the relationship between Gower’s work and other literatures, such as Christine de Pizan’s. Ruen-chuan Ma’s essay engages with medieval literary theory and, in particular, Latinate practices such as the use of the exemplum and the accessus ad auctores to suggest the theorization of the potential of vernacular literature in the works of Gower and Pizan. Tamara Pérez-Fernández’s essay, “The Margins in the Iberian Manuscripts of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Language, Authority and Readership,” compares manuscripts containing Iberian translations of the Confessio with traditional presentations in English manuscripts to raise questions about the resistance to Latin despite Gower’s bilingualism in the text as well as the manipulation of marginal annotations that scribes must have been exposed to in the process of transmission. The final essay in this section is Rosemarie McGerr’s “Gower’s Confessio and the Nova Statuta Angliae: Royal Lessons in English Law,” which explores the frames of reference intended for readers in both the Confessio and Edward II’s deposition of the Nova statuta Angliae. McGerr develops links between these texts that extend beyond the “mirror for princes” genre. Their use of romance narrative and religious exemplum also represent the king’s legal obligations to the English coronation oath and, as McGerr demonstrates, both texts show a deep engagement with discourses of law circulating increasingly in the fourteenth century.

The following section privileges the social and historical contexts that shape readings of Gower’s Confessio and specifically yokes contemporary political discourse and thought to Gower’s ideas of love and virtue. The essays here enrich understandings of central themes in the Confessio by introducing a range of historical material on lay and clerical law, medieval conceptions of authority, and Anglo-Castilian political and parliamentary relationships. Jerome Mandel examines Gower’s “Tale of Florent” against Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale, arguing that unlike Chaucer, Gower diminishes political, social, religious, and ethical authorities as key to legal negotiations and places emphasis on moral principle and commitment. In “Controlling the Uncontrollable: Love and Fortune in Book I of the Confessio Amantis,” Misty Schieberle finds connections between Gower’s poem and Guillaume de Machaut’s Jugement dou Roi de Behaigne, Confort d’Ami, and Remède de Fortune in the anti-Boethian view that the lover can and must adopt virtuous behaviors to gain control over the influence of Fortune. Schieberle explores the ways in which both authors instrumentalize change by manipulating the relationship between love and fortune that was so commonly exploited in medieval literary discourse. Katie Peebles’ essay, “Arguing from Foreign Grounds: John Gower’s...