One might think of this volume as a continuation of Stephen H. Rigby's earlier collection, Historians on Chaucer: The "General Prologue" to the Canterbury Tales, edited with the assistance of Alastair Minnis. [1] As with that earlier collection, Rigby pairs with a scholar of literature--this time, Siân Echard--to prompt a group of historians to assess the life and work of writers who have heretofore largely been the provenance of literary critics. The goal, Rigby and Echard explain, is that "by examining the ideological frameworks which were available to Gower and his contemporaries, by determining the social, religious and political issues which his works tackled, and by ascertaining the assumptions and expectations of his original audience," the assembled essays will help "modern readers to arrive at a greater appreciation of the meanings of [Gower's] texts" (xxi). To this end, one might imagine that Gower is an even better candidate for exploration than Chaucer, as we tend to think of Chaucer commenting on politics or controversial religious and social matters in an oblique way, whereas Gower tends to approach them directly; the difference between the ways that Chaucer and Gower handle the Peasants Revolt of 1381 is especially telling in this regard. In any event, these essays by historians are meant to work in tandem with--rather than as a substitute for--literary criticism, aiming "to offer new information, perspectives and analyses which will help to widen our appreciation of the significance of, and pleasures provided by, Gower's text" (xxiii). On that score, one can count this volume a success.
One of the primary reasons for that success is the initial essay in this collection and its related material, although one might call it a miniature book, in that more than the first fifth of the entire work belongs to Martha Carlin. This disparity, though, is as it should be, because she gives us what amounts to an entirely new biography of Gower in "Gower's Life" (22-109). Rather than lead readers astray, I should note that this biography is not a narrative life, nothing like Paul Strohm's or Marion Turner's recent biographies of Geoffrey Chaucer. [2] This is biography as a historian writes it, a litany of specifics; one is best served if one is already deeply familiar with the legal language of property acquisition and exchange in late-medieval England. Carlin's biography of Gower, nevertheless, is essential reading for scholars of the poet. Carlin provides us with a wealth of new insights and overturns various long-held scholarly assumptions, great and small. One of the major insights comes from her discussion of property transactions and Gower's income, which leads her to point out that "Gower would have been far from unusual if he did, in fact, lend money at interest," a possibility that her analysis presents as a strong likelihood (44). Related to Gower's money management by virtue of his will, Carlin's second major intervention is a reassessment of Gower's marriage to Agnes. Carlin writes:
Depictions of Agnes as a poor, uneducated, immigrant caregiver from the back alleys or even the bordellos of Southwark do not accord in any way with the woman with the English surname--perhaps a widow or heiress with property--with whom Gower looked forward to wedded life in Est Amor...or with the spouse whom the wealthy, status-conscious poet with the rank of esquire made his principal heir, executrix of his testament and administratrix of his goods" (85).
To these major revisions of how we understand Gower's life, one might add a number of smaller, more pointed corrections or revelations: Gower was not directly descended from Sir Robert Gower, though he was probably in some way related, and he was connected with another Kentish gentry family, the Northwodes, of whom his mother or "another female ancestor" may have been a member (30); if Richard II really did commission Gower to write the Confessio Amantis as Gower says, then that meeting must have occurred "on (or about) 10 June 1385" (53); Gower's revision of the dedication of theConfessio Amantis to Henry Bolingbroke must have occurred before Henry gave him a livery collar, not after, as has often been assumed (55); Gower's property at Southwark was not held by him as a corrody for life, "but as an ordinary sub-tenant, and...he paid rent for it to an intervening lay tenant, not to the prior or priory" (58); finally, Gower's tomb was not originally located in the north aisle of Southwark Cathedral where it stands today (94). In addition to these clarifications, Carlin makes a case for continued investigation into the original source of Gower's wealth, which is "unknown" (40), and into the medieval ownership of the Trentham manuscript (89). Clearly, the essay alone is incredibly informative, but as a bonus it is accompanied by a preceding "Chronology of John Gower's Life Records" (3-21) and an appendix that contains four of those life records (110-20), including translations of the lawsuit Feriby v. Gower and Gower's Testament. Carlin's essay also includes maps of locations associated with Gower, pictures of his tomb and portraits, and tables that detail Gower's investment properties and rents, his annual income, his known movements throughout his life, as well as short biographies for all the known individuals that appear in his life records. All in all, a remarkable wealth of information.
With Carlin's stunning achievement covered, I will review the rest of the essays more quickly. The volume is divided into six parts of unequal size. Part one, "Gower's Life and Works," contains Carlin's essay and related material, already discussed, and Stephen H. Rigby's "Gower's Works" (121-138). Rigby's essay provides a useful summary of all three of Gower's Major works--the French Mirour de l'Omme, the Latin Vox Clamantis, and the English Confessio Amantis--and surveys the discussion surrounding the date of composition and manuscript situation (much more briefly) for each; Rigby also provides us with a discussion of Gower's writings in Latin following the 1399 usurpation of Richard II.
Part two, "Gower and Lay Society" begins with David Green's "Nobility and Chivalry" (141-165). Green finds that Gower's works promote "the need to reform the chivalrous while at the same time maintaining their social standing," which results "in a number of tensions" (152), and that these tensions are the product of the changing nature of the nobility both in relation to the conditions of the Hundred Years War as well as the changing status of the gentry and the peasants at home, not to mention the failure of the nobility to prevent the Peasants' Revolt. That latter issue becomes the central focus of Mark Bailey's "The Peasants and the Great Revolt" (167-190), which looks at the changing conditions of peasant labor in the wake of the Black Death and the attempt at control that was the labor legislation in the years leading up to the Peasants' Revolt; Bailey finds that Gower's dismissal of peasant complaints and exhortation to the nobility to control the lower classes make him "a social conservative even by the standards of his own age" (190). James Davis's "Towns and Trade" (191-212) turns to Gower's supposed conservative feelings towards merchants and argues that we understand this less as a function of a generalized outrage at the rise of mercantilism and instead place it in more local contexts and discussions--here focusing on the London of the 1370s as Gower writes the Mirour de l'Omme--as "providing an interpretation of popular anxieties about fraud, price, and the common good," the former two a response to the Good Parliament of 1376 and the changes resulting from the Black Death respectively, and the latter embodied in the reformist agenda of London mayor John Northampton (197). Anthony Musson's "Men of Law" (213-239) begins with a survey of what that appellation means in Gower's time as well as the old question of what if any official legal training Gower had, concluding that "there is, as yet, no unequivocal evidence which definitively confirms his status as a lawyer," before providing an overview of Gower's criticisms about the abuses of the legal system (226).
The opening essay of part three, "Gower and the Church," is David Lepine's "The Papacy, Secular Clergy and Lollardy" (243-269). Lepine's essay could have profitably been three essays and it moves through its concerns at a brisk pace, leaving one wanting more on some topics: the Schism, for instance, gets a lone paragraph (262). The concern that ties Lepine's essay together, though, is whether Gower's anticlericalism was traditional, or in any way radical or part of a "new anticlericalism." Lepine finally judges that Gower's own radicalism was confined to two issues: the temporal claims of the papacy and the warlike behaviour of senior clergy (266). Focusing on the Mirour de l'Omme and the Vox Clamantis, Martin Heale's "Monastic Life" (272-289) handles Gower's paradoxical stance where a "hostile assessment of contemporary monastic life" is combined with "his personal support for the religious order in practice" and finds that there is "little in Gower's work that appears to have been drawn directly from close observation of monastic practices" and that he relies instead on conventional complaints about the failure to live up to monastic ideals (274-275). Such conventional criticism is even more clearly on display in Jens Röhrkasten's "The Friars" (291-320), which as a result spends a great deal of time on William St. Amour and Richard FitzRalph, culminating with the view that even though "no other author of medieval estates satire seems to have collected such a vast quantity of antifraternal material" Gower's conclusion remains the conventional one: the four orders were once good but they have lost their way (314).
Part four, "Gower and Gender," is divided between Katherine J. Lewis's "Women and Power" (323-350)--apart from Carlin's biography, the only essay by a woman in the volume--and Christopher Fletcher's "Masculinity" (351-378). Lewis notes the way that Gower's representation of women changes as he moves from the Mirour and Vox to theConfessio Amantis, pointing out that the latter work presents "far more complex and rounded" female characters (324). Rather than explore the status of women at the time Gower wrote the Confessio, which would be in keeping with the modus operandi of the other essays in the volume, Lewis uses this insight about female characterization to posit "how the Confessio Amantis spoke to female readers," especially considering "the active role that such women could play in contemporary politics," not only in the immediate context of Gower's life, but throughout the fifteenth century, including readers like Elizabeth Woodville and Margaret Beaufort (324). Lewis's essay serves as a reminder that these female readers were powerful members of the nobility, trained to rule or manage estates alongside husbands, and so not only would the prominent female characters appeal to them, but so would Gower's advice about governance. Fletcher's essay retains the focus on the Confessio Amantis, using a "textometric" methodology (357)--that is, one that attends to "lexicon and the use of words, the methodology of the German Begriffsgeschichte and the French testométrie school (354)--to trace the way that Gower envisions "a common moral enterprise," a "project" that "entail[s] the formation of a certain kind of subject who is usually male" and how Gower theorizes concepts like honor and revenge in order to attempt to regulate the behavior of that masculine subject (352).
Part five, "Gower and Politics," is the second-longest section and is comprised of two lengthy and complex essays, Stephen H. Rigby's "Political Theory" (381-424) and Michael Bennett's "Gower, Richard II and Henry IV" (425-488). Rigby is concerned with the bridge between political theory and practice, the role that political ideas play in political life, and especially the way that Gower understands "kingship, which, naturally, was to be a central issue when he came to address the events of 1399" (386). As Rigby shows, Gower believes that the personal virtue of the ruler is the best safeguard against tyranny, even if there is some ambiguity about what practically could be done about tyrants, which results in an intellectual stance in which the deposition of Richard II could be characterized as "the workings of divine providence" (424). Gower's relationship to Richard II and Henry IV is once again the subject of Bennett's essay, which examines the way that Gower's "social circle and political connections" influenced his position on the shifting politics of Richard II's reign (425). Bennett's essay is especially useful for understanding how Gower's Kentish connections influence his political vision, for instance his valorization of the Black Prince or the advice of the Epistola ad regem appended to the Vox Clamantis. While these sentiments resulted in disillusionment with Richard and sympathy for Henry--which Bennett finds best expressed in the changing dedication to the Confessio Amantis and the Cronica Tripertita--Bennett cautions us that "hostility to Richard and his regime in the late 1390s cannot be equated with Lancastrian sentiment" (485).
The volume's sixth and final part, "Gower and Cosmography," contains only one essay, Seb Falk's "Natural Sciences" (491-525). Falk's essay uncovers the sources important to Gower's understanding of natural philosophy, astronomy and astrology in particular, and shows that Gower has read widely through some rather esoteric material, though his citations are not to be trusted, even as Falk ultimately concludes that "Gower's science is part of an education in morality" (524).
There are some real strengths to this volume, including, to this reader's mind, Carlin's essay, the fascinating work with reception being done by Lewis, and the incredibly helpful discussion of politics in all of part five, especially Rigby's survey of the medieval political theory on which Gower is drawing and Bennett's focus on Gower's Kentish ties. Indeed, the whole collection gives readers that essential thing that history provides for literature in general: context. As Bailey's essay points out (188-89), scholars of Gower in particular appreciate just how important historical context is in understanding Gower's work. [3]
There are, however, some issues with the volume. It is shocking and disappointing, in 2020, to see only two women included in a collection; that the essays by Carlin and Lewis are some of the most exciting in the volume, moreover, is a reminder that inclusivity strengthens one's work. This lack of inclusion is compounded by the fact that there are only a few junior scholars in the collection. One imagines that the collection could have easily been organized differently.
Also on the level of conceptualization of the volume as a whole, there are a few things missing that could have been profitably explored. The Hundred Years War appears in several essays, but one focused on it and the ties between England and the continent would have been illuminating, especially given the focus that issue is now receiving in literary studies. Relatedly, Gower's call for crusade in In Praise of Peace, among other things, suggests that an essay or essays elucidating his relationship to Islam and Judaism would have been useful.
There are some small editorial errors scattered throughout the volume--a period has made its way into superscript number 285 on page 106; Jane Robert's essay in Medium Aevum 80 was not published in 20111, as page 135 has it; in footnote 44 of Musson's essay, Elliot Kendall's name is misspelled. One final issue, not for the editors but for the publisher and their manufacturer: the glue binding the book together does not hold well and several pages came loose from just turning them; this should not happen with any book, but it is especially annoying with one of this size and at this price.
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Notes:
1. Stephen H. Rigby, with the assistance of Alastair J. Minnis, Historians on Chaucer: The 'General Prologue' to the Canterbury Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
2. Paul Strohm, Chaucer's Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury (New York: Penguin, 2014); Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
3. For a particularly persuasive articulation of this point, likewise cited by Bailey, see R. F. Yeager, John Gower's Poetic: The Search for a New Arion (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990).