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2018 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

9. The Need for Economy: Poetic Identity and Trade in Gower’s Confessio Amantis

verfasst von : Brian Gastle

Erschienen in: Money, Commerce, and Economics in Late Medieval English Literature

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

This chapter interrogates the Trump of Death scene in Book I of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, to show how the pilgrims of that tale are defined not by their religious affiliation, nor their age, but by their economic status, which is juxtaposed with the King’s nobility (or prosperity) in order to define that regal authority. The chapter compares the use of economic issues in the tale to the narrator’s use of such rhetoric in his own dealings with Richard II in the so-called patronage scene in the Prologue to the Ricardian recensions of the poem. In this scene, Gower constructs his own poetic identity vis-à-vis language similar to what we see in the Trump of Death construction of regal authority.

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Vorheriges Kapitel My Purse and My Person: “The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse” and the Gender of Money

Nächstes Kapitel “Money Earned; Money Won”: The Problem of Labor Pricing in Gower’s “Tale of the King and the Steward’s Wife”

See, for example, Hines et al. (2004) and Coleman (2017) for discussions of the memorial elements, including literary memorial elements, of Gower’s tomb.

All references to the Confessio Amantis, including subsequent translations of the Latin glosses in the Confessio, are from Gower (2000–13) and will hereafter be cited by line number. First and second recension references will be marked by an asterisk. For discussions of differences, both scribal and thematic, between the recensions, see especially Nicholson (1984) as well as Mahoney (1998).

See, for example, Robertson’s discussion of the “trope of poet as accused laborer” (2002, 117).

J. L. Bolton notes, for example, the rise in English economic power at the end of the fourteenth century as “English industry had recaptured the home market” in the cloth trade, a recovery after the plague that dipped slightly in the early fifteenth century, only to rebound even more strongly after the 1420s (1980, 292). This resurgence of the cloth trade would serve as the groundwork for much of the subsequent rise in English military power.

MED prīs s.v. 1. (a) Monetary or exchange value, price; payment, amount, sum.

For discussions of the notion of English national identity in the Middle ages, see the collected essays in Lavezzo, ed. (2004).

MED. realte (s.v.[1]) 1. (a) Royal status, power, or prerogative; royal state; (b) power, authority analogous to a king’s. realte (s.v.[2]) 1. Reality.

All Chaucer (1987) references will be cited hereafter by fragment and line number.

While often couched in the rhetoric of Romance, this common phrase in Chaucer also functions as a “site of moral meaning and hierarchical power” (Duprey 2014, 55).

The education of princes is a motif running throughout much of Gower’s poetry but especially in the end of the Confessio. For an overview of criticism on this topic, as well as a discussion of the text’s relationship with the monarchs of Gower’s England, see Peck (2004).

On the legal aspects of Gower’s poetic persona, see also Irvin (2014, 14–27), and for an overview of legal influences in Gower’s works see van Dijk (2017).

Yeager discusses the polyphonous nature of text and gloss in the Confessio, calling the glossarial voice the voice of an “unnamed ‘other’ reader” (1987, 262).

For a broader discussion of the possibility of patronage in the period, see Green (1980).

For a summary the debates surrounding the veracity of the barge scene, see Grady (2002). It was common for water taxis to take citizens of London between the environs of London, Southwark, and Westminster.

For a discussion of Gower’s use of the term “business” elsewhere in the Confessio see Sadlek (2004, 190–200).

See, for example, Bertolet (2007), as well as Ladd (2010, 49–76).

Bertolet, Craig E. 2007. “Fraud, Division, and Lies: John Gower and London.” In On John Gower: Essays at the Millenium. Ed. R. F. Yeager. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 43–70.

Bolton, J. L. 1980. The Medieval English Economy. London: Dent.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. 1987. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry Benson. 3rd ed. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Coleman, Joyce. 2017. “Illuminations in Gower’s Manuscripts.” In The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower. Ed. Ana Saez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager. New York: Routledge, 117–31.

Duprey, Annalese. 2014. “‘Lo, Pitee Renneth Soone in Gentil Herte’: Pity as Moral and Sexual Persuasion in Chaucer.” Essays in Medieval Studies 30, no. 1: 55–66.CrossRef

Farber, Lianna. 2006. An Anatomy of Trade in Medieval Writing: Value, Consent, and Community. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univertsity Press.

Fisher, John. 1964. John Gower, Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer. New York: New York University Press.

Galloway, Andrew. 2002. “Literature of 1388 and the Politics of Pity in Gower’s Confessio Amantis.” In Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England. Ed. Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 67–104.

Galloway, Andrew. 2009. “The Economy of Need in Late Medieval English Literature.” Viator 40: 309–31.CrossRef

Gastle, Brian. 2010. “Gower’s Business: Artistic Production of Cultural Capital and the Tale of Florent.” In John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, & Tradition. Ed. Elisabeth Dutton, John Hines, and R. F. Yeager. Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 182– 95.

Gower, John. 2000–2013. Confessio Amantis. Ed. Russell A. Peck, Latin and Trans. by Andrew Galloway. 3 vols. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications.

Grady, Frank. 2002. “Gower’s Boat, Richard’s Barge, and the True Story of the Confessio Amantis: Text and Gloss.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44: 1–15.

Green, Richard Firth. 1980. Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Hines, John, Nathalie Cohen, and Simon Roffy. 2004. “‘Iohannes Gower, Armiger, Poeta’: Records and Memorials of His Life and Death.” In A Companion to Gower. Ed. Siân Echard. Cambridge, England: Brewer, 23–41.

Irvin, Matthew. 2014. The Poetic Voices of John Gower: Politics and Personae in the “Confessio Amantis.” Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.

Johnson, Kelly S. 2007. The Fear of Beggars: Stewardship and Poverty in Christian Ethics. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.

Ladd, Roger. 2010. Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature. New York: Palgrave.CrossRef

Lavezzo, Kathy, ed. 2004. Imagining a Medieval English Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Mahoney, Dhira B. 1998. “Gower’s Two Prologues to Confessio Amantis.”| In Re-visioning Gower. Ed. R. F. Yeager. Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 17–37.

Masciandaro, Nicola. 2007. The Voice of the Hammer. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Nicholson, Peter. 1984. “Gower’s Revisions in the Confessio Amantis.” Chaucer Review 19: 123–43.

Nicholson, Peter. 2005. Love and Ethics in Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRef

Peck, Russell A. 1978. Kingship and Common Profit in Gower’s ‘Confessio Amantis’. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Peck, Russell A. 2004. “The Politics and Psychology of Governance in Gower: Ideas of Kingship and Real Kings.” In A Companion to Gower. Ed. Siân Echard. Cambridge: Brewer, 215–38.

Robertson, Kellie. 2002. “Laboring in the God of Love’s Garden: Chaucer’s Prologue to the Legend of Good Women.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24: 115–47.CrossRef

Sadlek, Gregory M. 2004. Idleness Working: The Discourse of Love’s Labor from Ovid Through Chaucer and Gower. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press.

Van Dijk, Conrad. 2017. “John Gower and the Law: Legal Theory and Practice.” In The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower. Ed. Ana Saez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager. New York: Routledge, 75–87.

Yeager, R. F. 1987. “English, Latin, and the Text as ‘Other’: The Page as Sign in the Work of John Gower.” Text 3: 251–67.

Yeager, R. F. 2015. “John Gower’s Poetry and the ‘Lawyerly Habit of Mind.’” In Theorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England. Ed. Andreea D. Boboc. Leiden: Brill, 71–93.CrossRef

Titel: The Need for Economy: Poetic Identity and Trade in Gower’s Confessio Amantis
verfasst von: Brian Gastle
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Buch: Money, Commerce, and Economics in Late Medieval English Literature
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-71899-6

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-71900-9

Copyright-Jahr: 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71900-9_9

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