Contextualising Gower: Texts, Books, Heritage

Essays illuminating Gower's work, the transmission and reception of Gowerian manuscripts and early printings, and his afterlife in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The fourteenth-century English poet John Gower was acutely aware of the value of words and books in the making of heritage. Judging from the record he left behind - in manuscript and in stone - he focused considerable effort in his later years on shaping how subsequent generations would remember him. The contributors to this volume take Gower's consciousness of posterity's judgment as a starting point for essays on a compelling range of topics: Gower's thoughts on the sublime, his views on peace, his idealisation of marriage, his responses to antecedents ranging from Ovid's love poetry to the pastoral handbook tradition, and his engagements with contemporaries as diverse as Deschamps and Wyclif. Meanwhile, fresh discoveries about manuscripts and early printing history illuminate how posterity actually began to judge the poet.