Gower's imaginative French poetry is now available in a new edition with facing page translation, annotations, and introduction. Gower's Traitie employs the French poetic form of balade, typically used for courtly verses, to avow instead the virtues of loving marriage, characteristic of Gower's signature moralizing. His Cinkante Balades confront the tradition of the French Livre de Cent Balades, by describing the feelings of a young man towards his lady, but eventually offering a praise of love insofar as it is subject to reason and morality. Together the two works offer an excellent introduction to the Anglo-Norman works of Gower and are perfect for classroom use.
Recent research has emphasised the importance of insular French in medieval English culture alongside English and Latin; for a period of some four hundred years, French (variously labelled the French of England, Anglo-Norman, Anglo-French, and Insular French) rivalled these two languages. The essays here focus on linguistic adaptation and translation in this new multilingual England, where John Gower wrote in Latin while his contemporary Chaucer could break new ground in English.
In Fragments and Assemblages, Arthur Bahr expands the ways in which we interpret medieval manuscripts, examining the formal characteristics of both physical manuscripts and literary works. Specifically, Bahr argues that manuscript compilations from fourteenth-century London reward interpretation as both assemblages and fragments: as meaningfully constructed objects whose forms and textual contents shed light on the city’s literary, social, and political cultures, but also as artifacts whose physical fragmentation invites forms of literary criticism that were unintended by their medieval makers. Such compilations are not simply repositories of data to be used for the reconstruction of the distant past; their physical forms reward literary and aesthetic analysis in their own right. The compilations analyzed reflect the full vibrancy of fourteenth-century London’s literary cultures: the multilingual codices of Edwardian civil servant Andrew Horn and Ricardian poet John Gower, the famous Auchinleck manuscript of texts in Middle English, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. By reading these compilations as both formal shapes and historical occurrences, Bahr uncovers neglected literary histories specific to the time and place of their production. The book offers a less empiricist way of interpreting the relationship between textual and physical form that will be of interest to a wide range of literary critics and manuscript scholars.
This Bibliography assembles annotation of collections and criticism of lyrics of religious and secular love, carols and songs, and rhymes of everyday life. The Middle English lyrics and short poems form a varied group that ranges over most aspects of life to include lyrics of religious and secular love, carols and songs, and mundane rhymes of everyday life. Thus there are expressionsof devotion, ethereal or earthly, theological expositions, and knowledge needed for life. The poems are disparate and generally anonymous, and their survival owes much to chance. The bibliography assembles neutral annotation of collections and criticism of the works, arranged chronologically to show the course of criticism and the growing appreciation of these poems and all they can tell us. The introduction considers these matters, problems of definitionof the genre, and the isolable lyrics, and seeks to reconcile some first impressions of the poems, as disparate and slight, with the rewards of close study. ROSEMARY GREENTREE is currently Visiting Research Fellow, Dept of English, University of Adelaide.
The Long Fifteenth Century is intended as a companion volume to Douglas Gray's ground-breaking Oxford Book of Late Medieval Verse and Prose and incorporates a bibliography of his published writings. Gray's anthology revolutionized critical appreciation of English and Scottish literature of the `long fifteenth century' from the death of Chaucer to the Reformation, but the literature of the period as a whole remains much under-read, undervalued, and under-studied. The contributors to this volume, all leading scholars in the field, bring to the fore the power of underrated writers, restore to the period writings often attributed to other centuries, open up new possibilities in neglected genres, offer radical rereadings of some more familiar works, and demonstrate how closely the literature of the period is bound up with political and social conditions. Written in honour of Douglas Gray, to mark his long and distinguished tenure of the J.R.R. Tolkein Professorship of English Literature and Language at Oxford university, the 15 essays in this volume portray the long fifteenth century as a major period of literature in its own right. They provide a comprehensive survey of fifteenth-century literature in print, from the morality play to the ballad, verse forms to prose romances, including Chaucer, Lydgate, Skelton, and Hoccleve, along with essays on the Middle French Poets and Scottish writings of the period.
These essays demonstrate John Gower's mastery of the three languages of medieval England - Latin, French and English. They examine the cultural re-definitions which his translations of literary traditions and languages achieved.
This book explores the intersection of the Hundred Years' War and the production of vernacular literature in France and England. Reviewing a range of prominent works that address the war, including those by Deschamps, Christine de Pizan, Gower, Langland, and Chaucer, as well as anonymous texts and the records of Joan of Arc's trial, Inscribing the Hundred Years' War In French and English Cultures demonstrates the ways in which late-medieval authors responded to the immediate sociopolitical pressures and participated in the debates about the war.
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.
The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. This first volume, and fourth to appear in the series, covers the years c.800-1558, and surveys the reception and transformation of classical literary culture in England from the Anglo-Saxon period up to the Henrician era. Chapters on the classics in the medieval curriculum, the trivium and quadrivium, medieval libraries, and medieval mythography provide context for medieval reception. The reception of specific classical authors and traditions is represented in chapters on Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, the matter of Troy, Boethius, moral philosophy, historiography, biblical epics, English learning in the twelfth century, and the role of antiquity in medieval alliterative poetry. The medieval section includes coverage of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, while the part of the volume dedicated to the later period explores early English humanism, humanist education, and libraries in the Henrician era, and includes chapters that focus on the classicism of Skelton, Douglas, Wyatt, and Surrey.
