A Concordance to the French Poetry and Prose of John Gower

Introduction

INTRODUCTION THAT THE POET JOHN GOWER was a major literary figure in England at the close ofthe fourteenth century is no longer in question. Scholarly attention paid to him and his work over the past twenty-five years has redeemed Gower from an undeserved obscurity imposed by the preceding two hundred. The facts ofhis life and career are now documented, and recent critical assessment has placed his achievement more accurately alongside Chaucer's, Langland's, and the Gawainpoet 's. The publication of A Concordance to John Gower sConfessio Amantis, edited by J. D. Pickles and J. L. Dawson (Publications ofthe John Gower Society 1 [Cambridge: Brewer, 1987]) made available another essential tool for the study ofGower's writings; and it is in continuation ofthis program that the present volume is tendered. Unique among his contemporaries, all of whom undoubtedly read and used French in some measure, Gower alone has left us a significant body ofverse and prose in Anglo-Norman, the insular dialect of Chaucer's Prioress-the French of "Stratford atte Bowe." By far the greatest quantity of this is contained in the Mirour de I'Omme, an ambitious, moral poem about sin and redemption composed in what was by Gower's time the antique style oftwelve-stanzas associated with the Vers de la Mort ofHelinand de Froidmont. In addition, Gower wrote two sequences of shorter poems, the so-called Cinkante Balades (actually numbering fifty-three, and a fragment), the Traitie pour essampler les amantz marietz (or simply, the Traitie), and a variety of prose headings, introductions, and statements interleaved throughout the Mirour and the manuscripts containing ballade sequences. Ascribing a date, or even an order of composition, to any ofGower's AngloNorman pieces is difficult to do with precision. The Mirour de I'Omme exists in a single manuscript without datable reference, and the ballades-although certain manuscripts contain dedicatory references that help to establish their copying date-are, individually, devoid of historical detail. Early scholars, including Gower's best editor, G. C. Macaulay, considered the Mirour and the ballades more or less youthful work. The analogy ofChaucer's assumed "French period" was often cited for evidence, as well as the conservative poetics of the Mirour, and the amorous tone and concerns of the sequences. These were judged more appropriately the preoccupation of a young man than of a senex, again perhaps with Chaucer in mind. More recent opinion, while maintaining the claim of the Mirour to be Gower's earliest poem, has accepted the probability that Gower continued to write in Anglo-Norman throughout his career, intending, perhaps, to relate language and subject matter for didactic and poetic purposes. In any case, the easy conclusion that the "olde grisel" Gower could not have composed the Cinkante Balades and the Traitie contemporaneously with the Confessio Amantis (to several manuscripts of which the Traitie is attached) is not now supported, especially by emergent studies ofthe English poem, or by comparison with modem readings ofMachaut's quasi-autobiographical Voir Dit, the record ofan aged vi A Concordance To The French Poetry AndProse OfJohn Gower but enamored poet's correspondence with a much younger lady-love. Lacking any evidence, then, that Gower's French represents a dialect employed early and discarded, we are offered in this concordance of his AngloNorman work a unique opportunity to view a poetic language as it was written and read in England until Gower's death in 1408 and beyond. As such, this concordance should prove valuable not only in the reassessment of Gower's own oeuvre and its influence, but also in the continuing study of his great London contemporaries Chaucer, Langland, and (farther afield in space and time) the Gawain poet, Hoccleve, Lydgate, and the Scottish "Chaucerians" Heruyson, Dunbar, and James IV. R. F. Yeager Asheville, North Carolina April 1996 ...