The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower

Ana Saez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, R.F. Yeager

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317043027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower reviews the most current scholarship on the late medieval poet and opens doors purposefully to research areas of the future. It is divided into three parts. The first part, "Working theories: medieval and modern, " is devoted to the main theoretical aspects that frame Gower's work, ranging from his use of medieval law, rhetoric, theology, and religious attitudes, to approaches incorporating gender and queer studies. The second part, "Things and places: material cultures, " examines the cultural locations of the author, not only from geographical and political perspectives, or in scientific and economic context, but also in the transmission of his poetry through the materiality of the text and its reception. "Polyvocality: text and language, " the third part, focuses on Gower's trilingualism, his approach to history, and narratological and intertextual aspects of his works. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower is an essential resource for scholars and students of Gower and of Middle English literature, history, and culture generally.

Part I

Working theories: medieval and modern

1 Gower and theory: old books, new matters

Jonathan Hsy

Insofar as conceptual frameworks are always changing, “theory” in Gowerian scholarship never means one thing. Nonetheless, critical approaches to Gower can be broadly traced as a set of “waves” that address shifting intellectual concerns. Three major theoretical trends will be discussed in this section: an initial focus on the role of ethics in the poet’s work, a turn to interpretive analysis informed by modern identity-based politics, and an increase in scholarship that explores the author’s varied linguistic and socioeconomic milieu. These general developments are not presented as unified schools of thought but rather as hints of the wide range of critical methods that Gower’s oeuvre has invited.

In the later twentieth century, Gowerian scholarly interest in the relationship between literature and ethics marked the emergence of the first major works in the field that expressly announced themselves as theoretical. Studies in this vein include Alastair J. Minnis’ foundational Medieval Theory of Authorship, which unpacks scholastic models of authorship in the Middle Ages and explores their implications for vernacular literary writers; and J. Allan Mitchell’s Ethics and Exemplary Narrative, a study that examines how Gower uses narratives to pose and explore complex ethical problems.¹ Scholarship on Gowerian ethics has over time expanded to include other systems of thought such as legal theory. In John Gower and the Limits of the Law, for instance, Conrad van Dijk puts Gower’s flexible use of the exemplum in conversation with abstract modes of thinking such as the legal case study.² Studies of Gowerian ethics are varied, but what these approaches often share is an effort to historicize how the poet appropriates past narratives to frame moral or political concerns. Moreover, such scholars tend to be most interested in tracing how the medieval poet uses old stories to think about ethical issues in his own time and place – whether Gower’s cultural environment is understood as a courtly or literary milieu, a religious context, or a legal setting.

Scholarship influenced by modern identity-based modes of analysis (such as feminist, queer, or postcolonial perspectives) became increasingly prominent just as the twenty-first century began – a trend participating in a “cultural turn” in literary analysis more broadly. In these sorts of studies, the analysis focuses not so much on tracing or historicizing abstract systems of ethics per se but rather on exploring what modern-day cultural perspectives might bring to our understanding of Gower’s work. In her groundbreaking Amoral Gower: Language, Sex, and Politics, Diane Watt counter-intuitively reads against the grain of Gower’s longstanding “moral” reputation, showing how his work offers open-ended narratives that invite sympathetic and nuanced readings of social phenomena such as transgender identities, female homosexuality, and incest.³ Engaging Gower’s work with feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic theory as well as historicist and ethical criticism, Watt posits that Gower – an author who has long been perceived as moralistic and socially conservative – can actually be read as a conflicted and divided poet; playful disjunctions between Latin and English passages that purport to supply the moral lesson for stories throughout the Confessio “actually [invite] multiple interpretations” of the narratives and allow for “complex, often contradictory, and sometimes ‘perverse’ (mis)readings.”⁴ Generally speaking, Watt’s analysis develops from the fact that the Confessio narratives often resist easy correspondence to their stated morals, and her analysis reveals how Gower takes varying and often sympathetic stances on certain kinds of sexual sins rather than universally condemning them. We can never know if Gower actively encouraged such ethical gaps (as Watt suggests) or if he just silently allowed them in his work, but this speculative approach to the Confessio nevertheless makes the medieval poet’s work available to present-day readers in provocative new ways.

One outcome of the increasing prominence of contemporary critical theory in Gower studies is the emergence of teaching-oriented scholarship that uses Gower to extend politically urgent and culturally relevant conversations into the classroom. Mitchell, for instance, remarks in an essay on teaching the Confessio that “Gower’s radically eclectic and encyclopedic poem [is] fraught…with multiplicity, potentiality, becoming,” and “Gower’s work stands apart from corrupting routines and rationalizations of its own time – and ours.”⁵ Steven Kruger has further maintained that Gower can play a crucial role in courses on “medieval gender and sexuality or on nation and (post)coloniality,” with recent postcolonial and queer methodologies framing Gower’s relevance for conversations about cultural hybridity, identity, sexuality and social relations, (trans)nationalism, and periodization.⁶ In these teaching-related domains of scholarship, the writing of Gower serves as a critical tool for helping present-day students grapple with difficult, controversial, or complex ideas.

In the second decade of the twentieth century, Gower scholarship witnessed a renewed critical assessment of the poet’s historical contexts – but rather than focusing on systems of ethics per se, recent scholars gravitated toward questions of language use, literary aesthetics, and the influence of material culture. Eleanor Johnson’s elegant Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages offers attentive close readings of texts by Gower and other late medieval writers, tracing how rhetorical and formal features of their works seek to model and enact ethical transformations in the reader (medieval or modern).⁷ Sociolinguistic theory has informed the work of Tim William Machan, Mary Catherine Davidson, and Jonathan Hsy, who all put Gowerian multilingualism in conversation with aspects of contemporary discussions about language use and modern-day polyglot contexts.⁸ Machan uses modern sociolinguistic theory to trace how Gower’s language use strategically adapts to his intended audience and formal constraints of the particular language he is using (English, French, or Latin); Davidson shows how Gower’s work and subsequent literary reception is implicated in establishing the perceived norms of a present-day Anglophone (English-speaking) academy; and Hsy offers a comparative historical approach, asking how Gower’s multilingual identity and literary positioning might compare with the practices and experiences of modern-day polyglot writers.

Attentive historicist scholarship of Brian Gastle, Roger Ladd, and Craig Bertolet has helped to more fully contextualize how trade and commerce shape Gower’s writing, and these scholars tend to augment their close readings with interpretive insights from economic history as well as medieval and modern socioeconomic theory.⁹ In the work of such scholars, attention is given not only to unpacking Gower’s historical attitudes towards trade and commerce (or those who practice such activities), but also to showing how medieval literature affords new understandings of commerce and economics as a whole. Given the sheer range of scholarly methods that Gower studies currently engages, it would be difficult to identify an interpretive approach to Gower that cannot claim some debt to critical theory. Scholarship that historicizes Gower or seeks to understand his work in his own time inevitably speaks to concerns in the present – and critical theory, in all its variety, proves an important tool for framing interpretive conversations.

Regarding theory

This initial survey of critical methods suggests how Gower’s literary and social contexts can be brought into conversation with varied modes of contemporary criticism, and the remaining sections of this chapter seek to theorize theory: to think more critically about what theory is and what theory does. As strange as it seems, “thinking about thinking” has long been a key part of modern Gowerian literary criticism. Although modern scholarship on Gower might not have called itself “theoretical” in its earliest stages, it did follow the seminal work of John H. Fisher by framing Gower as a moral philosopher; Fisher’s historical and biographical study develops Chaucer’s famous epithet of “moral Gower” to consider Gower’s abiding interests in ethical concerns across his entire literary career.¹⁰ In a useful characterization of Gower’s oeuvre, Winthrop Wetherbee notes that Gower’s “three major works, the Anglo-Norman Mirour de l’Omme, the Latin Vox Clamantis, and his English masterpiece, the Confessio Amantis [each] reviews the estates of society” through its own perspective on a broad conceptual level, and Gower’s corpus as a whole “make[s] plain that he wanted his poetry to matter as social criticism.”¹¹ To restate Wetherbee’s observation slightly differently, Gower tends to invest in grand intellectual thought experiments – and the poet’s writing consequently anticipates what we would now call socially engaged critical theory. In his major works, literature serves as Gower’s venue to express (and to challenge) large-scale ideas about how the world operates and how it could be reformed.

Bringing critical theory and contemporary frames of reference in conversation with medieval poetry might initially seem jarring or even anachronistic, but a mindful engagement with contemporary critical theory can be a way of respecting the medieval author’s own sensibilities. Gower – much like any number of his present-day readers – clearly valued forms of urgent ethical critique that operated hand in hand with careful acts of literary interpretation. Gower, like his modern critics, is often concerned with thinking about what theory is for and what it actually achieves.

It is both fortunate and appropriate for this discussion that Gower explicitly positions himself as a theorist at a key moment in his final major work. In a lengthy academic excursus in Book 7 of the Confessio, Gower meditates on the distinctions between intellectual categories he calls “Theorique” and “Practique” and his ensuing discussion (as will be shown below) anticipates modern discussions on the relationship between theory and practice.¹² In its broadest sense the Middle English term “Theorique” first denotes abstract systems of thought – which can also be broken down further into various divisions of knowledge. For Gower, “Theorique” is “the ferste” branch or category of philosophy,¹³ the “seconde” branch is “Rhetorique,”¹⁴ and the “last science of the thre” is called “Practique,”¹⁵ a term that refers to academic disciplines that require systemic enumeration (such as geometry and arithmetic). It is not the aim in this chapter to trace the specific contours of all these divisions (i.e., the manifold taxonomies or branches of learning to which different domains of thought are assigned). Rather, this discussion considers theory on its highest level of abstraction. How does Gower discursively frame theory as theory, and why does his framing actually matter for modern acts of literary analysis?

The Middle English “Theorique” and the modern English theory eventually came into the language via medieval Latin and Old ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: Gower scholarship then and now
• Part I: Working theories: medieval and modern
• Part II: Things and places: material cultures
• Part III: Polyvocality: text and language
• Bibliography
• Index