Gower’s Vulgar Tongue: Ovid, Lay Religion, and English Poetry in the Confessio Amantis by T. Matthew N. McCabe (review)

Those who enjoy close readings of long narrative Middle English poetry and interpretations based on comparisons with related texts will appreciate this book. Claiming several points of originality in his hermeneutic efforts, McCabe explains that his reading of John Gower’s fourteenth-century poem the Confessio Amantis yields “the rhetorical significance of English vernacularity” (p.1), links between Ovidian models and Gower’s theological intent, a repositioning of the Confessio’s narrator as lay and extraclerical, and a new construct of public poetry, a category that, in McCabe’s estimation, has been “inert” since Anne Middleton’s celebrated 1978 essay about it (p. 3). McCabe deftly weaves these various strands through his reading, showing excellent control of the Confessio’s narrative as well as of Gower’s entire corpus. While this reviewer might wish for further distance from the dissertation that was this book’s source and for a stronger linguistic, theoretical, or historical paradigm that could frame the analysis, Gower’s Vulgar Tongue is a commendable first book.

Chapter One follows a line of thought initiated by Winthrop Wetherbee, showing Ovid’s influence on Gower’s vernacular expression. McCabe persuasively points to the connections between the Metamorphoses and the many transformations that take place in the Confessio Amantis’s tales of sins against love. Moreover, like the flux and destruction inherent in the Metamorphoses’ rendering of creation, McCabe observes, Gower’s compilation of various and contrasting literary genres in the Confessio shows a preoccupation with mutability. Gower offers a more positive rendering of metamorphoses, however, by participating in the tradition of moralized readings, and he produces a new authoritative voice by appropriating Ovid’s status as the great poet of the aristocracy and of “lesser” and “belated” topics (p. 46). Aiming to reexamine the level of authority given to the Confessio’s Ovidian narrator, Chapter Two evaluates the poem’s treatments of theological topics and shows that, compared to Gower’s poems in Anglo-Latin and Anglo-Norman, the Confessio offers simpler advice in a lay narrative voice appealing to lay experience—and therefore participates in late medieval trends in lay theology. In other words, Gower’s employment of Ovid does not reflect advanced learning and clericalism but instead a strategy for sanctioning moral teachings that a wide readership might digest. As McCabe contends in Chapter Three, for the Confessio’s tales, Gower broke away from Latin and French composition in order to reach a larger audience through “the intimate power available in the mother tongue” (p. 101). Articulating the lessons on salvation, nature, and grace delivered by the mother tongue, Chapter Four discusses Gower’s Christian domestication of Ovidian myth, and Chapter Five bears on the providential outcomes and public instruction apparent in the final story of “Apollonius of Tyre” and in the failure of Amans’s confession to prepare him for Venus’s court. The Conclusion expresses the hope that the foregoing analysis has shifted the definition of medieval public poetry to include theological, lay, and amatory discourses.

Throughout the book, McCabe writes compellingly and conscientiously, taking pains before and after each chapter to summarize and interlink main points. As a result, Gower’s Vulgar Tongue is remarkably cohesive, especially considering the various avenues of McCabe’s interpretation. Even so, because of potential contradictions and a tendency to qualify others’ opinions rather than focus on his own, McCabe’s stance is not always clear. For instance, he claims that morals arise easily and “naturally” from Gower’s rewriting of Ovid’s tales (pp. 60–61) but must dedicate Chapter Four to the meaning of “natural” and spend several pages teasing out the moral of various tales. Additionally, McCabe aims to present Gower as a lay writer operating outside of clerical practices and yet depending on the clerical practice of glossing Ovid. Even if arguments such as these are not actually contradictory—since McCabe...