John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition ed. by Elisabeth Dutton with John Hines and R. F. Yeager (review)

In July 2008 the John Gower Society held its first international conference exclusively devoted to the Middle English poet, “1408–2008: The Age of Gower,” at Queen Mary, University of London. John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition is a collection of invited essays by scholars who presented at the conference. The generally high quality of the essays, their large number (a total of twenty-five plus the Introduction), and their variety attest to the maturity of Gower studies. Gower’s trilingualism—he wrote major works in Middle English, French, and Latin—is a focus of the book, but its main editor, Elizabeth Dutton, explains that the volume tries “to avoid the ghettoization of Gower’s French and Latin works, and to encourage comparison between them and the Confessio Amantis” (p. 1). In order to do so, the essays are organized by theme (there are six of them) rather than by language.

The first thematic unit, “Gower at Source,” includes only one essay, Jean-Pascal Pouzet’s “Southwark Gower: Augustinian Agencies in Gower’s Manuscripts and Texts—Some Prolegomena.” Pouzet explores Gower’s Augustinian connections in two ways: he writes about the books Gower probably found at the Augustinian priory of St. Mary Overey in Southwark, books that have likely been sources for his works, and he considers how Gower’s own works were circulated among the Augustinians. The next two essays, Ethan Knapp’s “The Place of Egypt in Gower’s Confessio Amantis” and Carolyn P. Collette’s “Topical and Tropological Gower: Invoking Armenia in the Confessio Amantis,” are grouped under the second thematic heading: “Gower Looking East.” Both essays are a welcome shift from Gower scholars’ primary focus on the West in his work. Knapp considers the theological questions that underlie Gower’s interest in Egypt, while Collette argues that Armenia interested Gower because of its liminal position between the Christian and the Muslim worlds.

Five essays are grouped under the heading “Prophecy, Politics and Apocalypse.” In “Saving History: Gower’s Apocalyptic and the New Arion,” Eliott Kendall examines Vox Clamantis and the Prologue to Confessio Amantis through the lens of medieval apocalyptic notions. To Kendall the Confessio’s apocalypticism acknowledges that while historical forces are strong, they are not inexorable and can therefore be influenced through human agency. Robert R. Edwards’s “Gower’s Poetics of the Literal” argues that Gower’s choice in both Vox and Confessio of the “plein” style is much more than a stylistic choice; it is an effort to deconstruct the layers of meaning that obscure the ideological underpinnings of language in order to critique such ideologies. In “Romance, Popular Style, and the Confessio Amantis: Conflict or Evasion?” George Shuffelton sees Gower’s mixing of generic conventions in his tale (from high to low, Latin to romance) as an attempt to attract a broad readership. Nigel Saul’s “John Gower: Prophet or Turncoat?” reviews and challenges the interpretations that have led numerous scholars to critique Gower’s change of allegiance from Richard II to Henry IV; to Saul this change was prompted by Richard’s own failure to live up to Gower’s ideas about proper kingship and governance. In a sense, it was Richard, not Gower, who changed. In “The Parliamentary Source of Gower’s Cronica Tripertita and Incommensurable Styles,” David R. Carlson undertakes a close comparison between Gower’s poem and the parliamentary record of Richard II’s deposition, proving convincingly that the record was one of his main sources. He also links what he calls this “official verse panegyric of the Lancastrian advent” (p. 110) to Gower’s remuneration by King Henry IV.

“John Gower’s Legal Advocacy and ‘In Praise of Peace,’” by Candace Barrington, is the first of six essays grouped under the title “Science, Law and Economy.” Barrington considers another Gowerian poem...