Aspects Of Love In John Gowers Confessio Amantis

Download or read book Aspects of Love in John Gower's Confessio Amantis written by Ellen S. Bakalian and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03-15 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the tales in the Confessio Amantis, John Gower proposes that reciprocal love is the remedy to what ails man and society. This book explores how Gower uses the aspects of love in the Confessio-the notions of kinde, or passionate love, and reason in the sphere of love; honeste love in the Marriage Tales of the Four Wives; passionate and excessive love in the Forsaken Women's tales; and Amans's lovesickness. In her thorough examination of Gower's work, Ellen S. Bakalian shows how Gower emphasizes and illustrates a belief that reason must rule man in all things, including his natural instincts to love.

Download or read book Confessio Amantis of John Gower written by John Gower and published by . This book was released on 1857 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Historians on John Gower written by Stephen Rigby and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2019 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The late fourteenth century was the age of the Black Death, the Peasants' Revolt, the Hundred Years War, the deposition of Richard II, the papal schism and the emergence of the heretical doctrines of John Wyclif and the Lollards. These social, political and religious crises and conflicts were addressed not only by preachers and by those involved in public affairs but also by poets, including Chaucer and Langland. Above all, though, it is in the verse of John Gower that we find the most direct engagement with contemporary events. Yet, surprisingly, few historians have examined Gower's responses to these events or have studied the broader moral and philosophical outlook which he used to make sense of them. Here, a number of eminent medievalists seek to demonstrate what historians can add to our understanding of Gower's poetry and his ideas about society (the nobility and chivalry, the peasants and the 1381 revolt, urban life and the law), the Church (the clergy, papacy, Lollardy, monasticism, and the friars) gender (masculinity and women and power), politics (political theory and the deposition of Richard II) and science and astronomy. The book also offers an important reassessment of Gower's biography based on newly-discovered primary sources. STEPHEN RIGBY is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Social and Economic History at the University of Manchester; SIAN ECHARD is Professor of English, University of British Columbia. Contributors: Mark Bailey, Michael Bennett, Martha Carlin, James Davis, Seb Falk, Christopher Fletcher, David Green, David Lepine, Martin Heale, Katherine Lewis, Anthony Musson, Stephen Rigby, Jens Röhrkasten.

Download or read book Confessio Amantis, Volume 3 written by John Gower and published by Medieval Institute Publications. This book was released on 2005-04-01 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The complete text of John Gower's Confessio Amantis is a 3-volume edition, including all Latin components - with translations - of this bilingual poem and extensive glosses, bibliography, and explanatory notes. Volume 3 contains Books 5, 6, and 7, which follow another kind of development as Gower shifts from romance banter and formulaic confession to philosophical inquiry.

Download or read book The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower written by Ana Saez-Hidalgo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-31 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book John Gower and the Limits of the Law written by Conrad van Dijk and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2013 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the ways in which Gower's poetry engages with contemporary law and legal questions. It has long been thought that John Gower was probably a lawyer before turning to poetry, and this study reveals his active engagement with contemporary legal debates; they include constitutional questions, jurisdictional issues, private vengeance, jurisprudential concepts (such as equity and the rigor iuris), and aspects of criminal law. The author argues that the Confessio Amantis in particular demonstrates Gower's uncertainty about how to reconcile the ideal of a just law with alternative modes of justice, such as self-help, royal discretion, and divine will. The book also examines the parallel development of the exemplum and casus in medieval literature. Exempla frequently create a sense of narrative closure by means of some form of punishment, or as Gower would put it, "vengeance". How then do we set Gower's reputation as a sympathetic writer alongside his frequent desire forclosure and punishment? What are the limits of exemplarity and law? These questions are answered by reading Gower in relation to the volatile politics of the Ricardian period, and in comparison with the poetic concerns of contemporary writers such as Chaucer and Langland. In so doing, the book provides a searching introduction to the intersection between literature and law in the late fourteenth century. Dr. Conrad van Dijk is Assistant Professor of English at Concordia University College of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada).

Download or read book Gower's Vulgar Tongue written by T. Matthew N. McCabe and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2011 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did Gower choose to write his most famous poem in English? New insights into his purpose and the context and tradition of the poem are presented here. After establishing his reputation as a literary author by means of his French and Latin verse, Gower came to recognize the possibilities which English held for serious poetry only in the 1380s. This book gives sustained attentionto the implications of this language choice for the form, readership, religious position, and lay authority of his best-known work, the Confessio Amantis.The author argues that in all of his moral-political-theological writings, Gower's stance as a satirist and publicist is more markedly lay, and more rhetorically momentous for reasons associated with this lay status, than is generally thought. But during the 1380s, the conditions for writing lay public poetry in English made the Confessio a truly remarkable feat, for Gower and for English poetry. Notwithstanding the poem's formal debt to aristocratic literature and the evident elitism of its earliest known readership, the Confessio imagines a broader and more popular audience than do the Vox and the Mirour, modulating its author's vision into a comparatively muted register by appropriating the oblique strategies ofOvidian myth, Ovidian art of love, affective devotional writing, and romance. The resulting "public poetry" is at once subtly accommodated to the conditions for writing in English and profoundly significant for the development ofthe English poetic tradition. T. Matthew N. McCabe is Assistant Professor of English at Ambrose University College (Calgary).