Sex in the Medieval City

Amoral Gower: Language, Sex, and Politics. Diane Watt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. xviii + 219 pp.

John Gower never really recovered from Geoffrey Chaucer's double-edged tribute to him as "moral Gower." Scholarship has taken up Chaucer's ambiguous description of his contemporary and translated it into "conservative Gower," in spite of Gower's political critique of late-fourteenth-century England and Richard II and, more puzzling, in spite of the incoherent vision of Gower's most famous work, the Confessio Amantis (Confession of Amans, the Lover). Even where Gower's work seems positively queer, that queerness never disrupts the prevailing longing in his work for social order, unity, and hierarchy. Diane Watt's new study proposes something much more interesting: a Gower who invites multiple, perverse misreadings of his text and who ultimately leaves the ethical and political issues he raises unresolved. The indeterminacy of Gower's text has long been acknowledged, but Watt's project aims at situating that indeterminacy front and center, making it, in effect, the point of the poem. Bringing a variety of theories to her project, including queer and feminist ones, Watt argues that "the poem destabilizes accepted categories of gender and sex, and . . . this has a profound impact on Gower's treatment of ethics and politics, as well as language, rhetoric, and knowledge and power" (xii). In her title, and in the book as a whole, Watt claims an "amorality" for Gower that consists not in a lack of morality but in a poetics that invites interpretive risks, variant readings, and even perverse misreadings.

The book is neatly divided into three arenas of the queer: language, sex, and politics. For the Middle Ages, language was already profoundly implicated with gender and sexuality. Alan of Lille's twelfth-century Complaint of Nature, for example, insists on the relationship between rhetorical vices and sexual perversity (sometimes to humorous effect). Watt contextualizes Gower's foray into queer rhetoric in the contested linguistic field of late-fourteenth-century England, where the vernacular was taking its place alongside Latin and French but where its disruptive potential was also being registered. Watt demonstrates how Gower incorporates Latin into his English text to replicate the linguistic instability of his time but, more important, to put into play the sexual perversity that was also associated with linguistic perversity.

In her second chapter Watt zeroes in on the conflation of rhetoric and sexual degeneracy, specifically the way in which heterosexual masculinity in the Middle Ages was "closely tied to patrilineage and genealogy," including literary influence (41). Gower's own medieval variety of "homosexual panic" is located in the association of eloquence with effeminacy, sodomy, and moral degeneracy and in the historical resonance of these rhetorical effects with the court of Richard II. Watt demonstrates Gower's particular anxieties of influence and his endeavor to achieve a "virile rhetorical style" (60). Her appeal to the association of rhetoric and sodomy or effeminacy, while legitimate, is only tenuously established in the text. Unlike Dante, who explicitly linked the two in the figure of Brunetto Latini in his Inferno, Gower does not link them, making Watt's case more dependent on historical context than on textual evidence.

In the book's second section, "Sex," the queerness of Gower really emerges. Nested in the Confessio Amantis are some curious stories of cross-dressing and what Watt calls "transgressive genders" (63). Watt shows how Gower studiously avoids the subject of sodomy even as he explores male and female gender transgressions, putting them and leaving them in play, so to speak. Although I would like to be persuaded by Watt's reading of a more radical Gower, I wonder if the few stories in which these transgressions occur are enough to support it. Watt also maintains that the framing relationships between the figures of Amans and Genius and Amans and Cupid are homoerotic. In the case of Cupid, this...