Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Siân Echard (ed.), A Companion to Gower.

2008; Oxford University Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/notesj/gjn194

1471-6941

Alexandra Gillespie,

Medieval Literature and History

A Companion to Gower edited by Siân Echard is the first guide to the field, and a welcome intervention in the study of a poet who—though, as Echard argues in her Introduction, dogged by his association with Chaucer, by the epithet ‘moral Gower’ that Chaucer assigned to him, by centuries of negative critical comparison between his tales and those of Chaucer—nevertheless has a central place in the study of late medieval English literature. The introductory discussion here is even more productive when Echard suggests some other reasons why work on Gower has only now produced a Companion. Nineteenth-century readers may have seen Gower's politics as problematic: the poet was much too ready to shift allegiances from Richard II to Henry IV. But twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers more often stumble over the writer's trilingualism: his composition of Latin and French texts, and the elaborate Latin paratext within which his English Confessio Amantis is embedded and makes best sense. As more and more commentators suggest that medieval literary scholarship needs to shift away from Chaucerian and towards early and trilingual English cultures (see recent work by Hanna, Watson, Cannon, and Wogan-Browne, for instance), a turn towards that turncoat Gower may be overdue. Echard is aware of this. This Companion contains some useful essays on Confessio Amantis on the slightly predictable topics of gender and sexuality (Diane Watt) and kingship (Russell Peck), but an almost equal amount of space is given to the Vox Clamantis and Cronica Tripertita in a chapter by A. G. Rigg and Edward S. Moore, and to the Mirour de l’Omne and Cinkante Balades by R. F. Yeager. Nor is Confessio Amantis divorced from the Latinate or French traditions that inform the style and concerns of all of Gower's writings: these are matters discussed in chapters by John Burrow, Ardis Butterfield, and Winthrop Wetherbee. Such traditions are also shown to lie behind the carefully-contrived ordinatio of many early manuscripts of Confessio. These and slightly messier, later states of Gower's books are described in a chapter by Derek Pearsall that suggests the importance of Gower (and especially the Gower scribes D and Delta) to study of the late medieval commercial book trade. Bibliographical traditions receive further attention in Echard's chapter on the printing of Gower, which is comprehensive and erudite—as is Jeremy J. Smith's assessment of the distinctive dialect of Gower's London English, and the book's first chapter on Gower's life records.