John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception ed. by Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R.F. Yeager (review)

The essays in this volume originated as papers delivered at the John Gower Society’s second International Congress held at the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain in 2011. Gower scholarship has been on the rise, and there are a number of conference-related essay collections of interest to scholars and students, but this volume, as well as the Congress that occasioned it, breaks new ground by exploring the connection between England and Iberia in the late Middle Ages, specifically in regards to Gower’s work. As the Introduction states, Gower’s Confessio Amantis is the first vernacular English poem translated into another vernacular language, and it was translated into two, Portuguese and Castilian, by Robert Payn in 1430 and by Juan de Cuenca, who translated Payn’s prose translation. The editors remark, ‘Not until the early seventeenth century did the Confessio have a competitor’ (1). While some of this volume’s truly excellent contributions are more about Gower’s English and his England, in this review of nineteen chapters I will focus on the Iberian-themed contributions, since this theme makes the volume stand out and presents new opportunities for research and teaching.

The first section of the volume, on manuscripts, includes work by Alastair J. Minnis and Barbara A. Shailor, as well as two chapters on the Portuguese and Castilian manuscripts. In ‘Castilian Script in the Iberian Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis,’ Mauricio Herrero Jiménez, with Tamara Pérez-Fernández and Marta María Gutiérrez Rodríguez, describes the scripts in Madrid, Real Biblioteca MS II-3088 and Madrid, El Escorial MS g-II-19. Jiménez notes evidence of strong cultural contact and bilingualism in the fifteenth century—for example, the Portuguese manuscript produced in 1430 over a mere forty days later acquired a Castilian table of contents. The inclusion of a recipe for soap suggests the Portuguese manuscript traveled to a Castilian owner in Andalusia, where such soaps were produced. Some added writing exercises suggest the growth of literacy skills among nobility and also indicate the private use of this manuscript; it was not a presentation copy. Turning to the Castilian manuscript, Jiménez notes that it is all written in the same hand by the same scribe, yet originally came from two different manuscripts, brought together possibly in the early sixteenth century. It is not simply a matter of joining two manuscripts at a midpoint but rather quires in different places brought together with care. This curious and irregular formation points to the interest in Gower among the nobility of Castile.

Though the Portuguese manuscript was not originally intended for royalty, in ‘Provenance Interlacing in Spanish Royal Book-Collecting and the Case of the Confessio Amantis (RB MS II-3088),’ María Luisa López-Vidriero Arbelló tracks down the Portuguese manuscript’s travels and eventual placement in the libraries of Spanish kings. By discovering the importance of a shelfmark and book bindings, she determined that the book was owned by Luis de Castilla (c. 1540–1618) and then acquired and brought to Valladolid by Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, first count of Gondomar (1567–1626) and an ambassador to England during the reign of James I. It was interesting serendipity that the Congress in Valladolid occasioned the research for the manuscript’s provenance, and it was traced back to Valladolid.

The second section of the volume concentrates on English-Iberian relations. In ‘The English Literature of Nájera (1367) from Battlefield Dispatch to the Poets,’ David R. Carlson points out that verse propaganda produced from state-supplied documents was not an innovation of Lancastrian England and Gower’s Cronica tripertita (1400), but can be seen in the earlier fourteenth century in English-Iberian relations pertaining to the Battle of Nájera, in which combined English and...