R F Yeager - Böcker

In recent years, Gower's reputation has begun to evolve. Scholars and critics have opened his books once more to discover there a talent worthy of respect, rather than something to be viewed as tedious or dull. Recently it has seemed easier to understand Chaucer's good will toward the moral friend and fellow author into whose tutelary watchfulness he commended Troilus and Criseyde-and easier to assess the positive value Chaucer's adjective must have borne. The thirteen essays included here all represent a fresh approach, an effort by North American and European scholars to offer a representative sample of the many diverse directions taken by Gower studies today. The essays demonstrate the life still present in Gower's work and serve as both an excellent introduction and update on the state of Gower scholarship.

In recent years, Gower's reputation has begun to evolve. Scholars and critics have opened his books once more to discover there a talent worthy of respect, rather than something to be viewed as tedious or dull. Recently it has seemed easier to understand Chaucer's good will toward the moral friend and fellow author into whose tutelary watchfulness he commended Troilus and Criseyde-and easier to assess the positive value Chaucer's adjective must have borne. The thirteen essays included here all represent a fresh approach, an effort by North American and European scholars to offer a representative sample of the many diverse directions taken by Gower studies today. The essays demonstrate the life still present in Gower's work and serve as both an excellent introduction and update on the state of Gower scholarship.

It would not be an exaggeration to observe that in the last two decades Gower studies have developed in response to a widening appreciation of his poetry. On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium represents the third volume of essays originating from sessions of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan. The contributions here and in the previous volumes provide insight into the shifts and trends in Gower studies over time. This collection offers a vibrant and fresh view of the field of Gower studies today, making it and its companion volumes an essential set for Gower scholars.

It would not be an exaggeration to observe that in the last two decades Gower studies have developed in response to a widening appreciation of his poetry. On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium represents the third volume of essays originating from sessions of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan. The contributions here and in the previous volumes provide insight into the shifts and trends in Gower studies over time. This collection offers a vibrant and fresh view of the field of Gower studies today, making it and its companion volumes an essential set for Gower scholars.

John Gower is distinct among medieval English poets in composing extensively in all three of late medieval England’s major languages: Middle English, Latin, and Anglo-Norman French. Moreover, Gower is unique in Western medieval poetry and music as the only native Englishman proven to have composed Anglo-French poems in the “fixed forms” genres of the balade, rondeau, and virelai, the verse forms in France most commonly set to music between the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. This edition presents both sets of Gower’s late fourteenth-century balades in their original Anglo-French verse alongside modern English translations: Traitié selonc les auctours pour essampler les amantz marietz, or “Treatise Following the Authorities as an Example for Married Lovers,” a staunch defense of married love comprising eighteen balades in rhyme royal; and his Cinkante Balades, or “Fifty Balades,” Gower’s title for a sequence of fifty-four balades addressing themes of loyalty, temptation, separation, and reconciliation in love.

A poet who wrote fluently in Middle English, Anglo-French, and Latin, John Gower typifies the English Middle Ages. His economical and sober style, the topics he addressed—marriage, love, chivalry, social class, law, and religious faith—and the depth and breadth of his references to earlier literature, myth, and folktale made his work attractive not only to contemporaries such as Chaucer but also to later poets such as Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Gower is increasingly acknowledged as a poet whose texts offer unique opportunities to teachers wishing to introduce their students to the riches of medieval literature and culture.The essays in part 1, “Materials,” review the available editions and translations of Gower’s works, compile useful electronic resources for teaching, and discuss the sources and analogues and critical work on his canon. In part 2, “Approaches,” contributors make recommendations for teaching the historical context of Gower’s writing, involving topics from estates theory and law to confession and medicine; for examining his language and rhetoric in the classroom, including reading his work aloud; and for studying his works in various theoretical and comparative ways, with a special focus on his relation to classical as well as other Middle English authors. A final section considers the various classroom contexts in which Gower is taught, from community college to graduate school.

Essays shedding fresh and significant light on Gower's poetry, major and minor, as it was received, read, and re-produced in England and in Iberia from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries.John Gower's great poem, the Confessio Amantis, was the first work of English literature translated into any European language. Occasioned by the existence in Spain of fifteenth-century Portuguese and Spanish manuscripts ofthe Confessio, the nineteen essays brought together here represent new and original approaches to Gower's role in Anglo-Iberian literary relations. They include major studies of the palaeography of the Iberian manuscripts;of the ownership history of the Portuguese Confessio manuscript; of the glosses of Gowerian manuscripts; and of the manuscript of the Yale Confessio Amantis. Other essays situate the translations amidst Anglo-Spanish relations generally in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; examine possible Spanish influences on Gower's writing; and speculate on possible providers of the Confessio to Philippa, daughter of John of Gaunt and queenof Portugal. Further chapters broaden the scope of the volume. Amongst other topics, they look at Gower's use of Virgilian/Dantean models; classical gestures in the Castilian translation; Gower's conscious contrasting of epic ideals and courtly romance; nuances of material goods and the idea of "the good" in the Confessio; Marxian aesthetics, Balzac, and Gowerian narrative in late medieval trading culture between England and Iberia; reading the Confessio through the lens of gift exchange; literary form in Gower's later Latin poems; Gower and Alain Chartier as international initiators of a new "public poetry"; and the modern sales history of manuscript and earlyprinted copies of the Confessio, and what it reveals about literary trends.Ana Sáez Hidalgo is Associate Professor at the University of Valladolid, Spain; R.F. Yeager is Professor of English and World Languagesand chair of the department at the University of West Florida.Contributors: María Bullón-Fernández, David R. Carlson, Siân Echard, A.S.G. Edwards, Robert R. Edwards, Tiago Viúla de Faria, Andrew Galloway, Fernando Galván, Marta María Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Mauricio Herrero Jiménez, Ethan Knapp, Roger A. Ladd, Alberto Lázaro, María Luisa López-Vidriero Abelló, Matthew McCabe, Alastair J. Minnis, Clara Pascual-Argente, Tamara Para A. Shailor, Winthrop Wetherbee

New essays on aspects of Gower's poetry, viewed through the lens of the self and beyond.The topics of "selfhood" and "otherness" lie at the heart of these new assessments of John Gower's poetry. The first part of the book, on knowing the self and others, focuses on cognition, brain functions, imagination, and the internal and external factors that affect one's sense of being, from sensation and inner emotive effects within body parts to cosmic perspectives, morality, and theology as voiced by language and storytelling. The second, on the essence of strangers, explores the interconnections of sensation and aesthetics; it also considers kinds of social dysfunction, whether through racial or gender conflict, or religious and political warfare.The final part of the booklooks at social ethics and ethical poets, reassessing two of Gower's perpetual concerns: honest government and honest craft. It considers Gower as a constitutional thinker, whether in terms of law, judicial corruption, or a society of businessmen who would rewrite ethics in terms of business models. It concludes with an examination of the Confessio in the culture of Portugal and Spain.Russell Peck is the John Hall Deane Professor of English at the University of Rochester: R. F. Yeager is Professor of English at the University of West Florida.Contributors: Stephanie L. Batkie, Helen Cooper, Brian W. Gastle, Matthew Giancarlo, Matthew W. Irvin, Yoshiko Kobayashi, Robert J. Meindl, Peter Nicholson, Maura Nolan, Gabrielle Parkin, Russell A. Peck, Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Larry Scanlon, Karla Taylor, Kim Zarins, R.F. Yeager,

Essays considering the relationship between Gower's texts and the physical ways in which they were first manifested.The media in which Gower's works were first transmitted, whether in print of manuscript form, are of vital importance to an understanding of both the poet and his audience. However, in comparison with those of his contemporary Chaucer, they have been relatively little studied.This volume represents a major collaboration between specialist scholars in manuscript and book history, and experts in Gower more generally, breaking new ground in approaching Gower through first-hand study of his publications in manuscript and print. Its chapters consider such matters as manuscript and book illumination, provenance, variant texts and editions, scribes, and printers, looking at how, and to what degree, the materiality of the vellum, paper, ink and binding illuminates - and even implicates - the poet and his poetry.MARTHA DRIVER is Distinguished Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at Pace University; the late DEREK PEARSALL was Gurney Professor of English Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University; R.F. YEAGER Is Professor of English and Foreign Languages, Emeritus, University of West Florida.Contributors: Stephanie L. Batkie, Julia Boffey, Margaret Connolly, Siân Echard, A.S.G. Edwards, Robert Epstein, Brian W. Gastle, Amanda J. Gerber, Yoshiko Kobayashi, Aditi Nafde, Tamara Peréz-Fernández, Wendy Scase, Karla Taylor, David Watt.