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Reviewed by:
  • John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts
  • Joel Fredell
Malte Urban, ed. John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. Pp. xii, 242. €60.00; $87.00.

It is a measure of Gower studies today that this excellent volume can come out and not be a gathering of the usual suspects. The list of contributors is distinguished, and graced with scholars who have done substantial work on the poet John Gower; yet this collection contributes to a conversation with a much larger group of voices than we could find even ten years ago, the product of what Diane Watt in her preface to this book calls a “renaissance” in Gower studies (xii). Heady days for a figure burdened for so long by the sobriquet of “moral” poet and still barely taught to undergraduates.

Despite inevitable disjunctions in such a collection, two sets of paired chapters on the Confessio Amantis strike sparks within and across the [End Page 374] volume. Russell Peck and Andrew Galloway have worked together on a recent edition of the Confessio, and their opening essays interact on the image of Gower as a compilator. Peck's essay, “John Gower: Reader, Editor, and Geometrician ‘for Engelondes sake,’ ” positively fizzes with the energy of big ideas. This is one of those essays where some of the action takes place in footnotes to support reader-response theories from Todorov to Bloom to Bleich that assert the Confessio “is essentially an exercise in the phenomenology of reading as cultural therapy” (18); or to argue Gower's place as the “first humanist in English” (20). Consequently this article resists summary, but it does succeed in fusing Gower's fascination with experimental science to Amans's function as an exemplary reader.

Galloway has earned the right to characterize the “dogged dullness” (50) of Gower's glosses after translating them all for his edition with Peck, in “Gower's Confessio Amantis, the Pricke of Conscience, and the History of the Latin Gloss in Early English Literature.” The sheer scope of this title uncovers aspirations at least as large as Peck's, and the essay takes an important step in our halting recovery of Latin glossing in literary manuscripts. Galloway proposes that we see the Latin summaries in the Confessio as the primary text and the English poem as an extended gloss on that dull authority. The two Pricke manuscripts Galloway presents do provide useful parallels, though more context has to accrete through further scholarship before we can get a full sense of Gower's play with polyvocality in the Confessio or his other glossed poems, Cronica Tripertita and Traitié. Still, both Peck and Galloway have much new to say on the Confessio's construction of late medieval reading.

The other pair of essays, by J. Allan Mitchell and Georgiana Donavin, highlights rhetorical structures. “Gower's Confessio Amantis, Natural Morality, and Vernacular Ethics” finds Mitchell arguing that Gower developed an ethical philosophy outside of scholastic models—again, a vernacular response to the traditions of Latin authority—and beyond the familiar mirrors for princes. As Peck begins with geometry, Mitchell begins with Nature tout court, and he sees Gower developing vernacular morality as heightened consciousness that does not require a psychic crossing into the supernatural. Donavin is, like Galloway, more focused on particulars in “Rhetorical Gower: Aristotelianism in the Confessio Amantis's Treatment of ‘Rethorique.’ ” She associates Gower's revision of Aristotelian categories in Book VII of the Confessio with the Commentary [End Page 375] of Giles of Rome on Aristotle's Rhetoric, and proposes a “rhetorical psychomachia” in the dialogue between Genius and Amans that ultimately coalesces into the Gowerian narrator emerging in Book VIII (169).

One other topic, Gower and women, links three essays here. Martha Driver extends an earlier study to argue yet more convincingly in “Women Readers and Pierpont Morgan MS M. 126” that this deluxe Confessio manuscript was written by the scribe Ricardus Franciscus for Elizabeth Woodville, wife of Edward IV. This manuscript has a hugely ambitious, and rare, program of miniatures for the Confessio. Driver points out the striking representations of women in these miniatures as more heroic and dominant than their accompanying males; implicit in this analysis is the...

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