The Mirour de l'Omme (The Mirror of Mankind) is an encyclopedia of moral topics, including a vivid allegory of the Seven Deadly Sins. Author John Gower (1330-1408) was a poet, personal friend of Chaucer, and the most prominent member of his literary circle.
Gower's use of the persona, the figure of the writer implicated in the text, is the main theme of this book. While it traces the development of Gower's voice through his major works, it concentrates on the dialogue of Amans and Genius in the Confessio Amantis. It argues that Gower negotiates problems of politics and problems of love by means of an analogy between political ethics and the rules of fin amour; Amans and Genius are both drawn from and occupied with amatory and ethical traditions, and their discourse produces a series of attempts to find a coherent and rational union of lover and ruler. The volume also argues that Gower's goal is poetic as well as political: through the personae, Gower's readers experience the pains and pleasures of erotic and social love. Gower's personae voice potential responses to exemplary experience, prompting readers to feel and to judge, and moving them to become better lovers and better rulers. Gower's analogy between fin amour and politics brings the affects of the lover to the action of government, and suggests for both love and rule the moderation that brings peace and joy. Matthew W. Irvin is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Chair of the Medieval Studies Program at Sewanee.
The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature: Value and Economy in Late Medieval England explores the vital and under-examined role that gender plays in the conceptualization of money and value in a period that precedes and shapes what we now recognize as the discipline of political economy. Through readings of a range of late Middle English texts, this book demonstrates the ways in which gender ideology provided a vocabulary for articulating fears and fantasies about money and value in the late Middle Ages. These ideas inform beliefs about money and value in the West, particularly in realms that are often seen as outside the sphere of economy, such as friendship, love and poetry. Exploring the gender of money helps us to better understand late medieval notions of economy, and to recognize the ways in which gender ideology continues to haunt our understanding of money and value, albeit often in occluded ways.
The Book of Apollonius was first published in 1936. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. No other English translation of this famous thirteenth-century Spanish narrative poem is available, in either poetry or prose. The present translators have put it into a form that reproduces most faithfully the quaint and naïve quality of the original Libro de Apolonio, the story of which appears in Book Eight of John Gower's Confessio Amantis and in Shakespeare's Pericles. The reader who is not a specialist in medieval or Spanish literature will find here a lush uncensored tale of mad adventure. If he will give himself up to the spell of its child-like spirit, he will find himself led on through such "faery lands forlorn" as the untrammeled imagination has immemorially loved to create. The story parades before him storms, shipwrecks, kidnappings, pirates, supposed deaths, miraculous escapes and survivals. Beginning in a theme that runs through dramatic literature from Oedipus Rex through The Cenci to The Barretts of Wimpole Street, the plot reveals the misfortunes that furiously pursue Apollonius, king of Tyre, after he tries to woo the daughter of King Antiochus away from her father. Forced to flee for his life, Apollonius plunges from adventure to adventure, until incredible reunions and transports of joy bring the tale to a conventional happy ending. The translators' Introduction gives an account of the use of the Apollonius material in Old French, Provençal, Anglo-Saxon, German, and other literatures, as well as tracing the history of the poem from its source in a lost Greek romance.
Despite the persistence and popularity of addressing the theme of eating in Paradise Lost, the tradition of Adam and Eve’s sin as one of gluttony—and the evidence for Milton’s adaptation of this tradition—has been either unnoticed or suppressed. Emily Stelzer provides the first book-length work on the philosophical significance of gluttony in this poem, arguing that a complex understanding of gluttony and of ideal, grateful, and gracious eating informs the content of Milton’s writing. Working with contextual material in the fields of physiology, philosophy, theology, and literature and building on recent scholarship on Milton’s experience of and knowledge about matter and the body, Stelzer draws connections between Milton’s work and both underexamined textual influences (including, for example, Gower’s Confessio Amantis) and well-recognized ones (such as Augustine’s City of God and Galen’s On the Natural Faculties).
Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace explores the complex intersection between the geographic, material, and ideological marketplaces through the lens of religious belief and practice. By examining the religiously motivated markets and marketplace practices in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, Scotland, and Wales, the volume presents religious praxis as a driving force in the formulation and everyday workings of the social and economic markets. Within the volume, the authors address first spiritual markets and marketplaces, discussing the intersection of Puritan and Protestant Ethics with the market economy. The second part addresses material marketplaces, including the marriage market, commercial trade markets, and the post-Reformation Catholic black market. In the third part of the volume, the chapters focus specifically on publication markets and books, including manuscripts and commonplace books, as well as printed volumes and pamphlets. Finally, the volume concludes with an examination of the literary marketplace, with analyses of plays and poems which engage with and depict both spiritual and material markets. Taken as a whole, this collection posits that the "modern" conception of a division between religion and the socioeconomic marketplace was a largely fictional construct, and the chapters demonstrate the depth to which both were integrated in early modern life.
This study examines two great poems of the later medieval period, the Latin philosophical epic, Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus (1181-3), and John Gower's English poem, the Confessio Amantis (1390-3). James Simpson locates these works in a cultural context dominated by two kinds of literary humanism, in which the concept of self is centered in the intellect and the imagination respectively, and shows the very different modes of thought that lie behind their conceptions of selfhood and education.
Confessio Amantis, the principal work in English by John Gower, friend of Chaucer, by whom he was influenced, has always been read as a conventional poem about the seven deadly sins. Here, paying particular attention to the poem's language and style, Peck gives a brilliant new reinterpretation which not only illuminates the poem's elegant beauty but provides a profound moral purpose as well. Gower's Confessio, according to Peck, is a restatement of late fourteenth-century ideas of good and bad behavior, and is designed to illuminate and reshape the minds and hearts of men. Peck sees the concepts of "kingship"--the governance of souls as well as kingdoms--and "common profit"--the mutual enhancement of such kingdoms--as the poem's unifying ideas. Peck's discussion further shows how the various tales hold together and support the poem's loose plot and the poet's strongly moral intention.
The complete text of John Gower's poem is a three-volume edition, including all Latin components-with translations-of this bilingual text and extensive glosses, bibliography and explanatory notes. Volume 1 contains the Prologue and Books 1 and 8, in effect the overall structure of Gower's poem.