On John Gower: Essays at the Millenium (review)

For the past two decades or more, R. F. Yeager has served as the impresario of John Gower studies, sponsoring panels at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo each year (from which the essays in this collection have been selected) and culminating in the highly successful conference of the John Gower Society in London in 2008 to mark the 600th anniversary of Gower's death. No one who heard the readings sponsored by the conference in Southwerk Cathedral, the site of Gower's tomb, by Terry Jones of Gower's English poetry or Ardis Butterfield of Gower's French poetry, could avoid a new sense of the power and beauty of Gower's lines. The essays in this volume, and in the other occasional volumes published over the years, edited by Yeager, have meanwhile made a consistent and articulate case for Gower's literary and intellectual importance. Yeager has choreographed a wide range of approaches and interpretations in the previous collections of essays. The essays in this volume might be seen as somewhat narrower in their focus on political and philosophical themes, but that would only to be to say that they represent a consensus on how we should read Gower and how we should place him in his historical setting.

A number of the essays in fact quite explicitly focus on the importance of place and region in Gower. Stephen Kruger studies "Gower's Mediterranean" as a site where mercantilism and Christian values are tested against each other, complicating the contrast between Christianity and its rival religions, especially Judaism. Concentrating on the Confessio, Kruger suggests that some tales, such as that of Constance, suggest a negotiation of a Christian mercantilism that points forward to the next few centuries. If the reality of Kruger's Mediterranean is one of conflict and disruption, Winthrop Wetherbee, in "Rome, Troy and Culture in the Confessio Amantis," suggests that culture is an almost cosmopolitan ideal. Rome is the center of Gower's world, argues Wetherbee, not for religious reasons, but because it is a model of "wise government" and "stable institutions" (p. 24). Trojan society, and the chivalry that emerges from it, is represented as inherently unstable. Craig E. Bertolet takes us back to London with its "Fraud, Division and Lies" which both Gower and the London authorities regard as threats to civic governance. London civic records and Gower's works express anxiety about threatening speech, political sedition, and deceptive trading practices. The ideal of common profit is an economic as well as a social ideal for Gower, requiring regulation and self-regulation by the community and its members.

A second group of essays explores the interplay between the literary and the political in Gower. Yoshiko Kobayashi traces the role of pity as a constituent of kingship and justice, interestingly pointing out some of the contradictions that emerge, such as the resemblance of the execution of Wat Tyler in the Vox Clamantis to the figure of the angry tyrant reviled in the opening of the poem. The Confessio Amantis, suggests Kobayashi, includes tales that complicate the political ideals of the Mirour de l'Omme. Joyce Coleman insists on the primacy of the first recension of the Confessio Amantis, with its famous scene of Richard II meeting Gower on the Thames. Coleman suggests that the Confessio, along with Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and Clanvowe's Book of Cupid, may reflect a competitive commission by Richard and Queen Anne to celebrate the theme of the Flower and the Leaf. The twenty-first century emphasis on Gower's later Lancastrian sympathies should not obscure the poem's original Ricardian context. Eve Salisbury points to similar ironies in Vox Clamantis, employing René Girard's notions of violence and sacrifice to striking effect, especially in the almost sacrificial death of Wat Tyler and the poet's own symbolic sacrifice in the fragmented self-identification of the riddle in Book I. Like the poet...