John Gower and the Limits of the Law by Conrad van Dijk (review)

Conrad van Dijk’s John Gower and the Limits of the Law demonstrates persuasively that law is at the heart of Gower’s poetic undertaking and brings to John Gower’s poetry an engagement with law that is historically and theoretically informed. This book explores how legal reasoning and discourse inform Gower’s narrative art, particularly in the uneasy narrative form of the “judicial exemplum,” which Gower uses to explore contemporary controversies about topics such as nascent international law, the relationship between royal and legal authority, and the connection between private vengeance and official legal process. Although it focuses on the Confessio Amantis, this book treats all of Gower’s works, including the Mirour de l’omme, Vox clamantis, the Balades, the Traitié, and Cronica tripertita. Van Dijk finds in Gower’s writings a prudentialist legal and political ethos that does not precisely fit with some of the prevailing judgments about Gower that have grown out of critical debates of his works. For Van Dijk, Gower was neither a rigoristic moralizer who refused to see the moral incoherence of his own stories, nor a ludic postmodern writer who sought to expose the rhetorical aporias of self-contradictory exempla. Van Dijk’s diachronic methodology offers an approach that works beyond “the opposing poles of openness and dogmatism, or of imaginative freedom and didacticism” (69)—a refreshing move in historicist criticism about Gower. It is a method that yields clear and nuanced insights into the author’s works.

So who is Van Dijk’s Gower? Generally speaking, Van Dijk meticulously avoids speculative biography, but nevertheless reviews evidence of Gower’s connections to the legal profession and his knowledge of its practices. In doing so, he observes that the question of whether or not Gower was a lawyer is ultimately irrelevant when writing about the poet’s engagement with the law, on the grounds that being a lawyer does not mean that one will write about law and not being a lawyer does not mean that one cannot.

Van Dijk understands Gower’s primary vocation as being a poet and a storyteller, but one whose work depends on the law as an interstitial discourse, a “hinge” between political, ethical, moral, learned, amatory, and religious discourses. The very act of confession named in the title Confessio Amantis links all of these discourses through that of the law. Van Dijk’s Gower is a storyteller before he is a lawyer, and as such, seeks out exempla that test the limits of straightforward legal reasoning. Chapter 1, “The Exemplum and the Legal Case,” reevaluates the distinction between the genres of the exemplum and the case by considering foundational texts of the period, including rhetorical handbooks; exemplum collections; and major texts of canon, civil, and common law. The exemplum in rhetorical and legal texts is “not principally didactic or dogmatic” but part of a “larger culture of dialogue and dispute” (16). The exemplum posits a principle that motivates the narrative while the case raises difficult, even casuistical questions, but both narrative forms animate legal and literary texts, from the “love-questions” of romance to the difficult causae in Gratian’s Decretum. In Van Dijk’s view, the distinction between example and case is overdrawn. Cases take on an exemplary value insofar as they dramatize the power of the law in action and provide narrative closure. The authority of the law is therefore predicated on the constant exploration of its limits, the difficult cases that do not offer clear-cut solution, but that cast light on the good will that animates justice. Van Dijk argues that Gower’s use of the judicial exemplum is intentionally indeterminate and unsettled precisely so that readers are required to exercise their own judgment. Establishing the parameters and capabilities of the judicial exemplum in this way, Van Dijk uses it to unravel the generic messiness of other works, such as The Seven Sages of Rome, the Gesta Romanorum, and Chaucer’s Summoner...