Gower’s “bokes of Latin”: Language, Politics, and Poetry

Gower’s ‘‘bokes of Latin’’: Language, Politics, and Poetry Siân Echard University of British Columbia THE HEAD of John Gower’s effigy in Southwark Cathedral rests on three books, their titles presented to the viewer as Speculum Meditantis , Vox Clamantis, and Confessio Amantis. While Gower’s three major works are in three different languages—French, Latin, and English— Latin here inflects the final presentation of John Gower’s oeuvre. Many would argue that Gower would approve; a more bookish poet could not be imagined, and to be litteratus in Gower’s day still meant to be Latinate . But Gower himself was highly conscious of his trilinguality. In the colophon Quia vnusquisque, which appears at the end of over twenty Confessio manuscripts, as well as at the end of five manuscripts of the Vox,1 the account of Gower’s books stresses the language in which each was composed. While there are some variations in the descriptions of the contents of each work, the sequence and emphasis are always the same: ‘‘First he published a book in French’’ (the Speculum, or Mirour de l’Omme); ‘‘The second book was written in Latin verses’’ (the Vox); and ‘‘This third book, which was made up in English . . .’’2 The structure of the Quia vnusquisque suggests two ideas. One is that Gower is a master of three tongues; the second, that he was evolving toward the use of English. 1 And possibly in more—there are quite a few manuscripts which now lack final folios. For a complete discussion of the treatment of the end matter, see my ‘‘Last Words: Latin at the End of the Confessio Amantis,’’ in Interstices: Studies in Late Middle English and Anglo-Latin Texts in Honour of A. G. Rigg, ed. Linne R. Mooney and Richard Firth Green (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). 2 John Gower, The English Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay (Oxford: Early English Text Society, 1901), 2 vols.: ‘‘Primus liber Gallico sermone editus . . .’’; ‘‘Secundus enim liber sermone latino metrice compositus . . .’’; ‘‘Tercius iste liber . . . Anglico sermone conficitur . . . ,’’ ii. 479–80. This is the third recension version of the colophon. For more on the differences between the different recensions with respect to the colophon , see below. 123 ................. 10286$ $CH4 11-01-10 13:53:22 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER This medieval version of Gower’s progress through the languages offers no overt evaluation, but I will argue that when Gower’s practice and his politics become tangled up with the assumptions underlying current discussions of vernacularity,3 we become limited in our ability to understand how he works through his own relationship to language throughout his poetic career. In particular, the politicization of the vernaculars —the casting of vernacular languages as challengers to the hegemonic authority of Latin—4 characterizes Latin in such a way as to predetermine our response to Gower’s Latin writing. Sarah Stanbury has described this trend in recent Middle English criticism as a tendency to ‘‘romance the vernacular,’’5 arguing that the association commonly 3 There is a wealth of recent scholarship on the relationship between Latin and the vernacular in medieval England. Some of this work appears in the notes below. I take the opportunity here to refer to some important critics who are not directly addressed later: these would include Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the ‘‘Aeneid’’ from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and the edited collection Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); John H. Fisher, ‘‘A Language Policy for Lancastrian England,’’ PMLA 107.5 (1992): 1168–80; David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Two collections are also central to current views on these relationships: The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), and David Wallace, ed., Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge...

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