The Poetic Voices of John Gower: Politics and Personae in the Confessio Amantis by Matthew W. Irvin (review)

Matthew W. Irvin’s sustained analysis of John Gower’s poetic personae across his three major works is admirable in its ambition. Irvin’s study addresses a broad range of topics and loci classici of Gowerian scholarship, including the satire of social estates in the French Mirour de l’Omme; the Visio Anglie (allegorical account of the Peasants’ Revolt) in the Latin Vox Clamantis; and significant discussion of key tales within the bilingual English/Latin Confessio Amantis: those of Florent, Constance, and Apollonius of Tyre. The discussion of the Confessio exhibits a sustained interest in the fictive personae of Amans and Genius, and Irvin nicely traces Gower’s perpetual toggling between clerical and lay (aristocratic and amatory) modes of interpretation across his major works.

Irvin is to be commended for setting out to discuss all three of Gower’s major works along with a macrolevel discussion of the entire Confessio from the Prologue through the Conclusion in Book VIII. Irvin’s close readings are informative throughout, but due to the book’s wide scope, some of the more local arguments can become challenging to navigate. Nonetheless, the sections within each chapter are well marked, with the majority of the Confessio chapters structured around useful key themes. Chapter 3 discusses “Amorous Persons,” Chapter 4 considers “Pity and the Feminine,” Chapter 5 examines “Labor and Art,” Chapter 6 addresses “Alienation and Virtue,” and Chapter 7 considers “Love of Kings.” At times the minutiae of the assorted topics throughout the Confessio discussion can veer from the book’s announced focus on the functions of Gowerian personae, but given the careful and insightful aspects of so many of the close readings, the reader’s patience is certainly rewarded.

The Introduction frames a dual approach to Gowerian personae, considering the concept of the persona in terms of making (art and literary craft) and doing (acting, moral decisions, and behaving in the real world). As Irvin states, the “relationship of prudence and art, of actio and factio, depends on Gower’s situating himself as both actor and maker in a realm of contingency” (p. 4, emphasis Irvin’s). Some of the most useful and compelling facets of this study are the moments when Irvin expounds upon the legal and theatrical social contexts for Gower’s performing persona. Mindful of Gower’s debt to late medieval English legal culture, Irvin wisely observes that “Gower is not speaking as a ‘human subject,’ but as a person defined by his action within a regulated social system” (p. 4). In a discussion showing how Gower’s “multivalent term” pité evokes Augustine’s famous expression of pity for the fictive Dido, Irvin suggests multifaceted layers to Gowerian rhetorical performance (pp. 115–18). In the brief Conclusion, Irvin deftly exposes the poet’s shift to rime royal stanzas as “a beautiful piece of artifice,” a courtly metaperformance that achieves ironically distancing effects (p. 283).

As much as Irvin’s study deserves credit for such informative close readings, some aspects of the book could have been reframed or more clearly reworked to lend the entire volume a tighter conceptual coherence. For instance, the book usefully draws comparisons to Chaucerian analogues through Gower’s tales of Florent in Chapter 3 and Constance in Chapter 4 (these discussions, as any Middle English scholar might expect, evoke the Wife of Bath’s Tale and Man of Law’s Tale, respectively), but it is not entirely clear why Chaucerian intertexts would be so crucial in these particular chapters and not elsewhere in this study. For instance, the Confessio’s dual treatment of love and “prudence” frames Irvin’s study of how “the discourse and the practice of noble love [affects] the prudence of rulers and their advisors in public action” (p. 1). Given this clear opening gambit, I found it curious...