Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
652
result(s) for
"Gower, John"
Sort by:
Amoral Gower
Drawing on a combination of queer and feminist theory, ethical criticism, and psychoanalytic, historicist, and textual criticism, Diane Watt focuses on the language, sex, and politics in Gower’s writing. She demonstrates that Gower engaged in the sort of critical thinking more commonly associated with Chaucer and William Langland and contributes to modern debates about the ethics of criticism.
eBook
Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship
The prescience of medieval English authors has long been a source of fascination to readers. Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship draws attention to the ways that misinterpreted, proleptically added, or dubiously attributed prognostications influenced the reputations of famed Middle English authors. It illuminates the creative ways in which William Langland, John Gower, and Geoffrey Chaucer engaged with prophecy to cultivate their own identities and to speak to the problems of their age.
Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship examines the prophetic reputations of these well-known medieval authors whose fame made them especially subject to nationalist appropriation. Kimberly Fonzo explains that retrospectively co-opting the prophetic voices of canonical authors aids those looking to excuse or endorse key events of national history by implying that they were destined to happen. She challenges the reputations of Langland, Gower, and Chaucer as prophets of the Protestant Reformation, Richard II’s deposition, and secular Humanism, respectively.
This intellectual and critical assessment of medieval authors and their works successfully makes the case that prophecy emerged and recurred as an important theme in medieval authorial self-representations.
eBook
Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention
In this book, Steele Nowlin examines the process of poetic invention as it is conceptualized and expressed in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) and John Gower (ca. 1330-1408). Specifically, it examines how these two poets present invention as an affective force, a process characterized by emergence and potentiality, and one that has a corollary in affect-that is, a kind of force or sensation distinct from emotion, characterized as an \"intensity\" that precedes what is only later cognitively understood and expressed as feeling or emotion, and that is typically described in a critical vocabulary of movement, emergence, and becoming. Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention thus formulates a definition of affect that differs from most work in the recent \"turn to affect\" in medieval studies, focusing not on the representation of emotion or desire, or efforts to engage medieval alterity, but on the movement and emergence that precede emotional experience. It likewise argues for a broader understanding of invention in late medieval literature beyond analyses of rhetorical poetics and authorial politics by recuperating the dynamism and sense of potential that characterize inventional activity. Finally, its close readings of Chaucer's and Gower's poetry provide new insights into how these poets represent invention in order to engage the pervasive social and cultural discourses their poetry addresses.
eBook
\Profitable\ Gower: Commonplacing and the Early Modern Confessio Amantis
Ensley discusses how readers responded to the sixteenth-century editions of Gower's Confessio Amantis, and demonstrates the continued vitality of this text even as its print presence declined. Certainly, the multilingual Catholic Gower seems an unlikely source for Early Modern readers interested in refining an English Protestant identity. However, readers' responses to the Confessio reveal that the medieval poet's work - though relatively absent from the early print marketplace - was not entirely distanced from Early Modern reading habits. Indeed, as we will see, many of Gower's Early Modern readers engaged in a practice of humanist commonplacing that was used for medieval and classical authors alike. Both Chaucer and Gower were read for their \"profit\" and \"sententiae.\"
Journal Article
Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising
Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising examines the transmission of Greco-Roman and European literature into English during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, while literacy was burgeoning among men and women from the nonruling classes. This dissemination offered a radically democratizing potential for accessing, interpreting, and deploying learned texts. Focusing primarily on an overlooked sector of Chaucer’s and Gower’s early readership, namely, the upper strata of nonruling urban classes, Lynn Arner argues that Chaucer’s and Gower’s writings engaged in elaborate processes of constructing cultural expertise. These writings helped define gradations of cultural authority, determining who could contribute to the production of legitimate knowledge and granting certain socioeconomic groups political leverage in the wake of the English Rising of 1381. Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising simultaneously examines Chaucer’s and Gower’s negotiations—often articulated at the site of gender—over poetics and over the roles that vernacular poetry should play in the late medieval English social formation. This study investigates how Chaucer’s and Gower’s texts positioned poetry to become a powerful participant in processes of social control.
eBook
John Gower’s Alchemical Afterlife in Elias Ashmole’s Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652)
In the Theatrum chemicum Britannicum (1652), Elias Ashmole interprets John Gower as Geoffrey Chaucer’s alchemical mentor. This paper argues that Ashmole’s reading of Gower as an alchemical master and adept connects to Gower’s literary tradition as well as the alchemical tradition of the seventeenth century. Further clues to Ashmole’s reading can be linked to his sixteenth-century literary sources, which depict Gower as Chaucer’s literary mentor. This paper also considers Gower’s depiction of alchemy in Book IV of the Confessio amantis, particularly how Ashmole was drawn to its moral role, while also drawing upon Thomas Norton’s depiction of the moral alchemist in the Ordinall of Alchemy and Book V of the Confessio amantis. The resulting insights reveal the ways in which Gower’s alchemy was received by early modern readers in literary and alchemical traditions as well as the impact of his alchemical afterlife in the early modern period.
Journal Article
Venus' Owne Clerk
Venus' Owne Clerk: Chaucer's Debt to the \"Confessio Amantis\" will appeal to all those who value a bit of integration of Chaucer and Gower studies. It develops the unusual theme that the Canterbury Tales were signally influenced by John Gower's Confessio Amantis, resulting in a set-up which is entirely different from the one announced in the General Prologue. Lindeboom seeks to show that this results from Gower's call, at the end of his first redaction of the Confessio, for a work similar to his - a testament of love. Much of the argument centres upon the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner, who are shown to follow Gower's lead by both engaging in confessing to all the Seven Deadly Sins while preaching a typically fourteenth-century sermon at the same time. While not beyond speculation at times, the author offers his readers a well-documented and tantalizing glimpse of Chaucer turning away from his original concept for the Canterbury Tales and realigning them along lines far closer to Gower.
eBook