John Gower: Others and the Self ed. by Russell A. Peck and R.F. Yeager (review)

Not simply a proceedings volume from the 2014 International Congress of the John Gower Society where Derek Pearsall was astonished by the turnout of younger scholars—'Who are all these people!'—this collection of substantial studies reminds us how far this fourteenth-century author has risen on the literary stock-market since John Fisher's landmark 1965 book needed to advertise him as 'Friend of Chaucer.' This remains a useful conjunction, however, explored by Karla Taylor's 'Reading Faces in Gower and Chaucer.' Abundant, up-to-date bibliographies and footnotes enhance this volume's usefulness, and D.S. Brewer's Caroline Palmer continues to do readers a great favor by allowing footnotes to be printed at the bottoms of pages where they belong.

Russell Peck's 'The Materiality of Cognition in Reading, Staging, and Regulation of Brain and Heart Activities in Gower's Confessio Amantis' leads off by investigating the poet's representation of thought-processes by drawing upon medieval cognitive psychology and then bringing fresh insights to the 'Tale of Canace and Machaire.' His co-editor Robert Yeager in 'Gower's Jews' examines the less gut-level, more cerebral bias in the 'Tale of the Jew and the Pagan.' Matthew Irvin's '"Noght withoute peine": Chastity, Complaint, and Lucrece's Vox Clamantis' typifies the great virtue of these chapters by combining old-fashioned close readings with cutting-edge critical theory.

Helen Cooper's 'Gower and Mortality: The Ends of Storytelling' reminds us that the author was unique in preparing his own tomb effigy, as evidence he thought ahead about old age and death, and examines anew the climactic outing of the Gowerian persona Amans as a geezer unfit as a lover. Starting with T.S. Eliot's view that great simplicity is won only by long effort, Maura Nolan's 'Sensation and the Plain Style in John Gower's Confessio Amantis' associates the poet's age, around sixty when completing his English story collection, with the sensually pleasing simplicity of the work's stylistic economy and its sparing use of imagery.

Our new appreciated 'trilingual' Gower is the subject of essays on his French works by Peter Nicholson's 'Writing the Cinkante Balades' and his major Latin poem by Stephanie Batkie's 'The Sound of My Voice: Aurality and Credible Faith in the Vox Clamantis'—where the poet's blindness qualifies him for disability theory—and Robert Meindl's 'Gower's Speculum Iudicis: Judicial Corruption in Book VI of the Vox Clamantis.'

Though presumably sequestered in St. Mary Overy Priory later in life, Gower remained engaged with royal authority vs. constitutionalism according to Matthew Giancarlo in 'Gower's Governmentality: Revisiting John Gower as a Constitutional Thinker and Regiminal Writer.' Cross-Channel literary agitation to heal the papal schism and end war between England and France becomes the subject of Yoshiko Kobayashi's 'Letters of Old Age: The Advocacy of Peace in the Works of John Gower and Philippe de Mézières.' And the merchandizing of his poetic craft as a material commodity for Richard II and later Henry IV is richly explored in Brian Gastle's '"The Lucre of Marchandie": Poet, Patron, and Payment in Gower's Confessio Amantis' and Gabrielle Parkin's 'Hidden Matter in John Gower's Confessio Amantis.'

Various talking-points have emerged in recent decades and are freshly covered in these essays. Larry Scanlon's 'Gower, Lydgate, and Incest' elaborates upon the view that the poet exposes gendered power dynamics while disturbing the ideals of courtly romance, thus adding nuance to the fifth volume in the series Fathers and Daughters in Gower's 'Confessio Amantis.' In 'Violence without Warning: Sympathetic Villains and Gower's Crafting of Ovidian Narrative,' Kim Zarins returns to the Classical legacy of the sixth volume Gower's Vulgar Tongue: Ovid, Lay Religion, and English Poetry in the 'Confessio...