Mirour de L'Omme

Mirour de L'Omme
Author: John Gower
Publisher: Michigan State University Press
Total Pages: 456
Release: 1992
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN:

The Mirour de l'Omme (The Mirror of Mankind) is an encyclopedia of moral topics, including a vivid allegory of the Seven Deadly Sins. Author John Gower (1330-1408) was a poet, personal friend of Chaucer, and the most prominent member of his literary circle.

The Poetic Voices of John Gower

The Poetic Voices of John Gower
Author: Matthew W. Irvin
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2014
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1843843390

Gower's use of the persona, the figure of the writer implicated in the text, is the main theme of this book. While it traces the development of Gower's voice through his major works, it concentrates on the dialogue of Amans and Genius in the Confessio Amantis. It argues that Gower negotiates problems of politics and problems of love by means of an analogy between political ethics and the rules of fin amour; Amans and Genius are both drawn from and occupied with amatory and ethical traditions, and their discourse produces a series of attempts to find a coherent and rational union of lover and ruler. The volume also argues that Gower's goal is poetic as well as political: through the personae, Gower's readers experience the pains and pleasures of erotic and social love. Gower's personae voice potential responses to exemplary experience, prompting readers to feel and to judge, and moving them to become better lovers and better rulers. Gower's analogy between fin amour and politics brings the affects of the lover to the action of government, and suggests for both love and rule the moderation that brings peace and joy. Matthew W. Irvin is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Chair of the Medieval Studies Program at Sewanee.

Amoral Gower

Amoral Gower
Author: Diane Watt
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2003
Genre: Courtly love in literature
ISBN: 9781452905914

The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature

The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature
Author: Diane Cady
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030262618

The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature: Value and Economy in Late Medieval England explores the vital and under-examined role that gender plays in the conceptualization of money and value in a period that precedes and shapes what we now recognize as the discipline of political economy. Through readings of a range of late Middle English texts, this book demonstrates the ways in which gender ideology provided a vocabulary for articulating fears and fantasies about money and value in the late Middle Ages. These ideas inform beliefs about money and value in the West, particularly in realms that are often seen as outside the sphere of economy, such as friendship, love and poetry. Exploring the gender of money helps us to better understand late medieval notions of economy, and to recognize the ways in which gender ideology continues to haunt our understanding of money and value, albeit often in occluded ways.

Gluttony and Gratitude

Gluttony and Gratitude
Author: Emily E. Stelzer
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2020-08-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0271089830

Despite the persistence and popularity of addressing the theme of eating in Paradise Lost, the tradition of Adam and Eve’s sin as one of gluttony—and the evidence for Milton’s adaptation of this tradition—has been either unnoticed or suppressed. Emily Stelzer provides the first book-length work on the philosophical significance of gluttony in this poem, arguing that a complex understanding of gluttony and of ideal, grateful, and gracious eating informs the content of Milton’s writing. Working with contextual material in the fields of physiology, philosophy, theology, and literature and building on recent scholarship on Milton’s experience of and knowledge about matter and the body, Stelzer draws connections between Milton’s work and both underexamined textual influences (including, for example, Gower’s Confessio Amantis) and well-recognized ones (such as Augustine’s City of God and Galen’s On the Natural Faculties).

Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry

Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry
Author: James Simpson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2005-10-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521021111

This study examines two great poems of the later medieval period, the Latin philosophical epic, Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus (1181-3), and John Gower's English poem, the Confessio Amantis (1390-3). James Simpson locates these works in a cultural context dominated by two kinds of literary humanism, in which the concept of self is centered in the intellect and the imagination respectively, and shows the very different modes of thought that lie behind their conceptions of selfhood and education.

Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace

Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace
Author: Kristin M.S. Bezio
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2021-11-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000487695

Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace explores the complex intersection between the geographic, material, and ideological marketplaces through the lens of religious belief and practice. By examining the religiously motivated markets and marketplace practices in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, Scotland, and Wales, the volume presents religious praxis as a driving force in the formulation and everyday workings of the social and economic markets. Within the volume, the authors address first spiritual markets and marketplaces, discussing the intersection of Puritan and Protestant Ethics with the market economy. The second part addresses material marketplaces, including the marriage market, commercial trade markets, and the post-Reformation Catholic black market. In the third part of the volume, the chapters focus specifically on publication markets and books, including manuscripts and commonplace books, as well as printed volumes and pamphlets. Finally, the volume concludes with an examination of the literary marketplace, with analyses of plays and poems which engage with and depict both spiritual and material markets. Taken as a whole, this collection posits that the "modern" conception of a division between religion and the socioeconomic marketplace was a largely fictional construct, and the chapters demonstrate the depth to which both were integrated in early modern life.

Kingship & Common Profit in Gower's Confessio Amantis

Kingship & Common Profit in Gower's Confessio Amantis
Author: Russell A. Peck
Publisher:
Total Pages: 240
Release: 1978
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

Confessio Amantis, the principal work in English by John Gower, friend of Chaucer, by whom he was influenced, has always been read as a conventional poem about the seven deadly sins. Here, paying particular attention to the poem's language and style, Peck gives a brilliant new reinterpretation which not only illuminates the poem's elegant beauty but provides a profound moral purpose as well. Gower's Confessio, according to Peck, is a restatement of late fourteenth-cen­tury ideas of good and bad behavior, and is designed to illuminate and re­shape the minds and hearts of men. Peck sees the concepts of "kingship"--the governance of souls as well as king­doms--and "common profit"--the mutual enhancement of such king­doms--as the poem's unifying ideas. Peck's discussion further shows how the various tales hold together and support the poem's loose plot and the poet's strongly moral intention.

The Monstrous New Art

The Monstrous New Art
Author: Anna Zayaruznaya
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2015-04-02
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1316194655

Late medieval motet texts are brimming with chimeras, centaurs and other strange creatures. In The Monstrous New Art, Anna Zayaruznaya explores the musical ramifications of this menagerie in the works of composers Guillaume de Machaut, Philippe de Vitry, and their contemporaries. Aligning the larger forms of motets with the broad sacred and secular themes of their texts, Zayaruznaya shows how monstrous or hybrid exempla are musically sculpted by rhythmic and textural means. These divisive musical procedures point to the contradictory aspects not only of explicitly monstrous bodies, but of such apparently unified entities as the body politic, the courtly lady, and the Holy Trinity. Zayaruznaya casts a new light on medieval modes of musical representation, with profound implications for broader disciplinary narratives about the history of text-music relations, the emergence of musical unity, and the ontology of the musical work.