Fathers and Daughters in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Authority, Family, State, and Wriging by María Bullón-Ferńandez (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER (as Roger Warre). Despite these glimpses, our understanding of the Cook is not made more complete by the additional information; instead, the additional details entice us to ask more questions. Although Braswell introduces this fragmentation as an aspect of storytelling that Chaucer must have learned from reading legal texts and documents, the cases she cites could have easily been circulating as common gossip or tavern news. Moreover, if Chaucer did glean his information from codices of legal documents, I wonder if he encountered texts so frustratingly incomplete. It seems imprudent to impose our own frustrations with lost documents onto fourteenth-century readers. In short, Braswell shows that sometimes the law provides a source for Chaucer’s poetics, a way of writing and reading that has been previously delineated but whose debt to legal techniques and sources has been underacknowledged . Braswell’s plausible readings of Chaucer’s texts would be strengthened, however, by more systematic and heavily theorized discussions of medieval law and legal protocol. Candace Barrington Central Connecticut State University Marı́a Bullón-Fernández. Fathers and Daughters in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Authority, Family, State, and Wriging. Publications of the John Gower Society. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000. Pp. viii, 241. $90.00. In Fathers and Daughters in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Authority, Family, State and Writing, Marı́a Bullón-Fernández draws our attention both to the remarkably large number of father-daughter relationships highlighted in the Confessio Amantis, and to the variety of ways in which these relationships are presented. Bullón-Fernández suggests that this focus allows Gower to consider the role and limits of patriarchal authority in fourteenth-century England, and that his examination of authority is not confined to familial relationships. One of Bullón-Fernández’s major points is that Gower’s critique extends to explore how legitimate and illegitimate authority is configured in other discursive arenas. As she argues, Gower’s tales of father-daughter relationships also ‘‘become vehicles for the examination of other relationships of authority such as that 356 ................. 10286$ CH15 11-01-10 13:54:54 PS REVIEWS between king and subjects, as most of his fathers are kings or some type of governor, and that between an artist and his work, and, more specifically, between a literary author and his text’’ (p. 2). As BullónFerna ́ndez goes on to assert, in the Confessio Amantis Gower views patriarchal authority as abusing its power in father-daughter relationships when incest occurs, just as the king is ‘‘infringing on his subject’s private rights’’ (p. 2), and the author who attempts ‘‘to impose a one-sided interpretation on his work, trying to prevent it from producing meanings beyond its control’’ (p. 2), abuses his power. However, Gower’s attempts to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate uses of authority are troubled by the theme of incest that runs throughout his text. Ultimately, Bullón-Fernández asserts, Gower’s considerations of both the taboo’s foundational role in establishing patriarchal authority, as well as the incessant violations (threatened and real) of that taboo in his own text, leads him to recognize ‘‘the inherent transgressive nature of such authority’’ (p. 215). The book’s first chapter, ‘‘Fathers and Daughters: Defining Authority ,’’ lays out this ambitious project, and includes a fine overview of the ‘‘post-structuralist’’ (p. 5) methodology Bullón-Fernández employs throughout the book. Thus her examination of the incest taboo’s foundational nature and transgressive pull in father-daughter relationships is informed not only by medieval thinkers such as Aquinas and Augustine , but also by more contemporary critics like Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and Claude Levi-Strauss. The chapter also discusses fourteenthcentury and contemporary notions of authority as manifested in the political relationship between king and subject, and the literary relationship between author and text. These discussions engage profitably with contemporary criticism, but at times Bullón-Fernández’s sudden shifts in discursive field and critical idiom—for example, from familial to political relationships, from feminist psychoanalytic to new historicist approaches —underline the differences, rather than the congruities, between how authority is configured in the familial, political, and...