Abstract
This chapter revolves around the Visio Anglie found in Book One of John Gower’s Vox Clamantis. Representing Gower’s poetic response to the Peasants’ Revolt, the Visio features a nightmarish dream vision in which throngs of rogue peasants are transformed first into common beasts and then into hybrid monsters. In contrast to scholars who have emphasized the mediated and detached character of the work, I argue that Gower’s dreamer inhabits a hyper-sensual world in which perception is extremely emotional, physical, and visceral. Images, words, and experiences weigh on the dreamer; they are materially and unforgettably imprinted in his mind and body. An opposing model of sensation and cognition governs the behavior of the monstrous peasants, who live in an ahistorical present in which exemplary words and experiences carry no weight. I suggest that even as the poem becomes more fantastic, allegorical, and abstracted, it also evokes a kind of “deep history” of the rebellion. It is an affective exemplum for England’s nobility to ponder, re-experience, and remember.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
“Nunc quia diuisus meus est a corpore visus...” References to the dedicatory epistle are to The Complete Works of John Gower: The Latin Works, ed. G. C. Macaulay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902). Translations of the Vox are based on The Major Latin Works of John Gower: The Voice of One Crying and The Tripartite Chronicle, trans. Eric W. Stockton (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), with modifications. I have also consulted the verse translations in John Gower: Poems on Contemporary Events: the Visio Anglie (1381) and Cronica tripertita (1400), ed. David R. Carlson and trans. A. G. Rigg (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2011). In addition to the dedicatory epistle, Gower’s late work contains a number of references to his declining vision. See, for example, De lucis scrutinio and Quicquid homo scribat in John Gower: The Minor Latin Works, ed. and trans. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2005), 12–17, 46–49. For commentary, see Jonathan Hsy, “Blind Advocacy: Blind Readers, Disability Theory, and Accessing John Gower,” Accessus 1:1, Article 2 (2013): 1–38. I wish to thank Andrew Galloway and Adin E. Lears for their perceptive comments on earlier versions of this article.
- 2.
“Quod tibi presento scriptum retinere memento, / Vt contempletur super hoc quo mens stimuletur.”
- 3.
While the manuscript tradition and Book One’s prose heading seem to suggest its continuity with the rest of the Vox, David R. Carlson makes a strong case for treating the Visio as a largely distinct and separable work. For the sake of convenience, this essay will refer to “Book One,” but the Visio’s uncertain status in relation to the rest of the Vox should be kept in mind. See David R. Carlson, “Introduction,” in Poems on Contemporary Events, 6–8. Carlson’s arguments and terminology on this matter follow Maria Wickert, Studien zu John Gower (Köln: Kölner Universitäts-Verlag, 1953).
- 4.
Quotations from the Visio Anglie / Book One are taken from Poems on Contemporary Events, ed. Carlson and cited parenthetically by line number.
- 5.
The explanatory notes in Stockton’s The Major Latin Works and Carlson’s Poems on Contemporary Events elucidate these borrowings in impressive detail. On Gower’s use of classical authors, see Maura Nolan, “The Poetics of Catastrophe: Ovidian Allusion in Gower’s Vox Clamantis,” in Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature: Essays in Honour of Jill Mann, ed. Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011), 113–33; Yoshiko Kobayashi, “The Voice of an Exile: From Ovidian Lament to Prophecy in Book I of John Gower’s Vox Clamantis,” in Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee, ed. Andrew Galloway and R. F. Yeager (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 363–80; and Ian Cornelius, “Gower and the Peasants’ Revolt,” Representations 131:1 (Summer 2015): 22–51.
- 6.
“Wat calls, Tom comes to him, and Sim does not loiter behind. Bet and Gib order Hick to come at once.”
- 7.
Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 209–18 at 213. In Justice’s view, Gower added Book One to the Vox in order to rescue his vocation as a public poet. The revolt represented a threat to Gower’s project in Books 2–7, where he claimed to faithfully represent the vox populi.
- 8.
As Siân Echard has argued, scholarly narratives that characterize Gower’s career as an evolution towards English tend to cast, “vernacular languages as challengers to the hegemonic authority of Latin… in such a way as to predetermine our response to Gower’s Latin writing.” Siân Echard, “Gower’s ‘bokes of Latin’: Language, Politics, and Poetry,” SAC 25 (2003): 124. On the associations of embodied, affective, and experiential modes of understanding with vernacular practice, see Sarah McNamer, “Feeling,” in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 241–57.
- 9.
Mary Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 8.
- 10.
See especially Cornelius, “Gower and the Peasants’ Revolt” and Andrew Galloway, “Reassessing Gower’s Dream-Visions,” in John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition, ed. Elisabeth Dutton, et al. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), 288–303.
- 11.
On potential audiences for the Vox, see John H. Fisher, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New York: New York University Press, 1964), 105–06.
- 12.
For an overview, see C. M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 5–28.
- 13.
“Vndique signa crucis in honore Ihesu crucifixi / Mentibus impressa sunt adoranda satis.” References to Books 2–7 of the Vox are to The Latin Works, ed. Macaulay, cited by book and line number.
- 14.
Questions on the religious use of images and their role in spiritual contemplation took on increasing significance in the decades following the appearance of the Vox as Lollards and others condemned religious images as idolatry.
- 15.
References are to Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell Peck, with Latin translations by Andrew Galloway, 3 vols., TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004–13), cited by book and line number.
- 16.
Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 85–107 at 97.
- 17.
Ibid., 100.
- 18.
Ibid., 82.
- 19.
See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 166–67.
- 20.
Arthur Groos, Romancing the Grail: Genre, Science, and Quest in Wolfram’s Parzival (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 149–50.
- 21.
Alan of Lille’s locus amoenus in the Anticlaudianus, for example, contains plants that war against disease. Sensation dominates the experience of the place: “Quicquid depascit oculos uel inhebriat aures, / Seducit gustum, nares suspendit odore, / Demulcet tactum, retinet locus iste locorum.” [That place of places contains everything that feasts the eyes, that intoxicates the ears, that seduces the taste, that catches the nose with aroma, and that calms the touch.] Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus, ed. R. Bossuat (Paris: J. Vrin, 1955), 1.71–74. On Gower’s familiarity with the Anticlaudianus, see James Simpson, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus and John Gower’s Confessio amantis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 20.
- 22.
“Talia cumque videns oculus letatur, et illa / In thalamum cordis ducit ad yma viri; / Auris et auditu cordis suspiria pulsat…”
- 23.
Carruthers, Book of Memory, 44.
- 24.
“Infortunata sed constellacio centrum / Dissoluens rabide tartara misit humo.”
- 25.
Russell Peck, “Introduction,” in Confessio Amantis, vol. 1, 19–23.
- 26.
“En coma sponte riget, tremit et caro…”
- 27.
Walter Clyde Curry, Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences, 2nd ed. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960), 208.
- 28.
“Sompnia pondus habent, hinc est quod mira reuoluam…”
- 29.
See, for example, Prol., 39; Visio, 156, 194, 827, 1006, 1150, 1188.
- 30.
“Quo tam natura quam deus ambo dolent.”
- 31.
“Res michi mira fuit, dum talia prospiciebam, / Et stupor in mente cordis ad yma ruit.”
- 32.
“Casus inauditus stupefactas ponderat aures, / Et venit ad sensus durus ab aure pauor.”
- 33.
See further Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, 83.
- 34.
“Nil valet ad gustum liquor hic, qui corda bibentum / Perforat, et quassat viscera tota simul.”
- 35.
“Semper in interius precordia mortis ymago / Pungit, et vt gladius viscera tota mouet.”
- 36.
“… oculus stupet et dolet auris; / Cor timet et rigide diriguere come.”
- 37.
“Excidit omne decus michi tristi, nulla tuebar / Rura, nec in precio fertilis ortus erat.” Gower adapted these lines from Ovid’s Fasti. See Stockton, Major Latin Works, 362 and Poems on Contemporary Events, ed. Carlson, 214. The motif occurs again later in the poem: “‘O tibi quem presens spectabile non sinit ortus / Cernere, quam melior sors tua sorte mea est!’” (Visio, 1533–34). [O garden, which this present wonder does not allow me to recognize, how much better for you is your fate than mine!].
- 38.
“Vixque michi credens solo quasi vota momento / Millesies varians corde vagante tuli.”
- 39.
“… sic me meminisse procellam / Nosco, quod a mentis non cadet ipsa viis.” These are Ovidian lines that became proverbial. See Stockton, Major Latin Works, 373.
- 40.
“Quicquid in hoc sompno visus et auris habent, / Scribere festines, nam sompnia sepe futurum / Indicium reddunt.”
- 41.
“Scripture veteris capiunt exempla futuri, / Nam dabit experta res magis esse fidem.” See also Confessio Amantis, Prol.1–11 and Romans 15:4.
- 42.
Andrew Galloway, “Gower in His Most Learned Role and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381,” Mediaevalia 16 (1993), 332–33.
- 43.
Not counting references to the Bible, Stockton estimates that roughly thirteen percent of Gower’s poem is borrowed from another source. See Stockton, Major Latin Works, 26–32.
- 44.
Macaulay, “Introduction,” in The Latin Works, xxxii.
- 45.
David R. Carlson, “Introduction,” in Poems on Contemporary Events, 1–12 at 5.
- 46.
“Qui fuerant homines prius innate racionis, / Brutorum species irracionis habent.” For commentary, see Peck, “Introduction,” in Confessio Amantis, vol. 1, 10.
- 47.
“Voluere plura solet animi meditacio stulta, / Que magis impediunt, quam sua vota ferunt.” These lines are taken from Nigel Wireker’s Speculum Stultorum. See Stockton, Major Latin Works, 348.
- 48.
Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, in The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, ed. and trans. R. B. Dobson, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan Press, 1983), 169. See also Anonimalle Chronicle, in The Peasants’ Revolt, 157.
- 49.
Similar behavior is attributed to the dogs (Visio, 379–86) and the hawks (Visio, 530–40).
- 50.
See further David R. Carlson, “Gower’s Beast Allegories in the 1381 Visio Anglie,” Philological Quarterly 87 (2008): 258–62.
- 51.
“Cumque canum strepitus Sathane descendit in aures, / Gaudet et infernus de nouitate soni.”
- 52.
See, for example, Justice, Writing and Rebellion, 208–13; Susan Crane, “The Writing Lesson of 1381,” in Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 208–09; and David Aers, “Vox Populi and the Literature of 1381,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 441–43.
- 53.
“Vox fera, trux vultus, verissima mortis ymago, / Eius in effigiem tanta dedere nouam.”
- 54.
“Iam venit ecce dies, qua rusticitas superabit… / Desinat omnis honor, periat ius…”
- 55.
“Hec erat illa dies, fortem qua debilis… terit.” “Hec erat illa dies, qua preteriisse futuram / Et qui vir sapiens omnis in orbe cupit.”
- 56.
“Hii gradibusque suis iter arripuere gradatim, / Quo sibi non racio velle sed ire iubet.”
- 57.
“mediocres et populares cicius audiunt clamores docencium errores quam veros predicatores.” The Sermons of Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester (1373–1389), ed. Mary Devlin, vol. 2 (London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society, 1954), 455. On Gower and Brinton, see Galloway, “Reassessing Gower’s Dream-Visions,” 299–301. As Adin E. Lears notes, the peasants are “taken in” by Jackdaw’s empty eloquence, which they amplify with their noise. Adin E. Lears, “Noise, Soundplay, and Langland’s Poetics of Lolling in the Time of Wyclif,” SAC 38 (2016): 184–86.
- 58.
Carlson , “Gower’s Beast Allegories,” 262–70 points out that Gower’s repeated emphasis on the peasants’ willful suspension of their reason and humanity in favor of vice implicates the rebels in their own demise and repression.
- 59.
Carruthers, Book of Memory, 14.
- 60.
“Sic fera rusticitas incircumspecta malorum / Incipit, et finem non videt inde suum.”
- 61.
“Dixerat ille, ‘Feri’ ferit ille; ‘Neca,’ necat alter; / ‘Solue nephas,’ soluit: quis neque fata vetat.” Compare similar commands at Visio, 927.
- 62.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Blackfriars edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964–80), 1.79.6. See further Carruthers, Book of Memory, 62.
- 63.
“Cernite que sceleris rusticus arma tulit. / Tundite pectus, fundite fletus, plangite funus, / Cuius inaudita mors perhibetur ita.”
- 64.
“Ecce rudis clangor, sonus altus, fedaque rixa, / Vox ita terribilis non fuit vlla prius.”
- 65.
Scholars have tended to associate Gower’s evocations of experience with his vernacular literature. Outlining Gower’s poetic career, Russell Peck, for example, locates in the transition between the Vox (c. 1382) and the Confessio Amantis (c. 1390) a shift from an audience comprised of Gower’s predictable “learned Latin coterie” to a less predictable everyman, “the Wives of Bath, so to speak, for whom experience may well be the best authority.” Russell Peck, “Introduction,” in Confessio Amantis, vol. 2, 8–9.
- 66.
“Nam dabit experta res magis esse fidem.”
- 67.
“Quos mea terra dedit casus nouitatis adibo, / Nam pius est patrie facta referre labor.”
- 68.
“Attamen a longe prospexi qualiter ipsi / Complexis manibus mutua pacta ferunt.”
- 69.
See Justice, Writing and Rebellion, 98–99; and Cornelius, “Gower and the Peasants’ Revolt,” 41–42.
- 70.
“Cum magis hos vidi, magis hos reor esse timendos.”
- 71.
As Ian Cornelius persuasively argues, the dreamer’s penitential confession in the midst of the storm at the end of Book One models a “self-aware reflexive subject capable of being an addressee of the moral admonishments delivered in the subsequent poem.” The Visio thus serves as preparation for the extended social critique of Books 2–7, which focus most of their ire on the failings of the realm’s elites. See further Cornelius, “Gower and the Peasants’ Revolt,” 27–33 at 31.
- 72.
Fisher, John Gower, 60.
- 73.
Ibid., 100.
- 74.
“In speculo tali de pectore iudiciali / Si videas plane, puto non erit illud inane.”
Bibliography
Aers, David. 1999. Vox Populi and the Literature of 1381. In The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace, 432–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Aquinas, Thomas. 1964–80. Summa Theologiae. Ed. Blackfriars. New York: McGraw Hill.
Biernoff, Suzannah. 2002. Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Brinton, Thomas. 1954. The Sermons of Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester: 1373–1389. Ed. Mary A. Devlin. London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society.
Carlson, David R. 2008. Gower’s Beast Allegories in the 1381 Visio Angliae. Philological Quarterly 87: 257–275.
Carruthers, Mary J. 2008. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2013. The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cornelius, Ian. 2015. Gower and the Peasants’ Revolt. Representations 131 (1): 22–51. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2015.131.1.22.
Crane, Susan. 1992. The Writing Lesson of 1381. In Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context. Ed. Barbara Hanawalt, 201–221. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Curry, Walter Clyde. 1960. Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences. London: Allen & Unwin.
De Lille, Alain. 1955. Anticlaudianus. Ed. Robert Bossuat. Paris: J. Vrin.
Dobson, R.B. 1983. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. London: Macmillan.
Echard, Siân. 2003. Gower’s ‘bokes of Latin’: Language, Politics, and Poetry. Studies in the Age of Chaucer 25: 123–156.
Fisher, John H. 1964. John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer. New York: New York University Press.
Galloway, Andrew. 1993. Gower in His Most Learned Role and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Mediaevalia 16: 329–347.
———. 2010. Reassessing Gower’s Dream-Visions. In John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition, ed. Elisabeth M. Dutton, 288–303. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.
Gower, John. 1902. The Complete Works of John Gower: The Latin Works. Ed. G.C. Macaulay. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 1962. The Major Latin Works of John Gower: The Voice of One Crying and the Tripartite Chronicle. Trans. Eric W. Stockton. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
———. 2005. The Minor Latin Works. Ed. and Trans. Robert F. Yeager. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications.
———. 2004–13. Confessio Amantis. Ed. Russell A. Peck. Trans. Andrew Galloway. 3 vols. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications.
———. 2011. John Gower: Poems on Contemporary Events: The Visio Anglie (1381) and Cronica Tripertita (1400). Ed. David R. Carlson. Trans. A. G. Rigg. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.
Groos, Arthur. 1995. Romancing the Grail: Genre, Science, and Quest in Wolfram’s Parzival. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Hsy, Jonathan. 2013. Blind Advocacy: Blind Readers, Disability Theory, and Accessing John Gower. Accessus 1 (1): Article 2.
Justice, Steven. 1994. Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Kobayashi, Yoshiko. 2009. The Voice of an Exile: From Ovidan Lament to Prophecy in Book I of John Gower’s Vox Clamantis. In Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee, ed. Andrew Galloway and Robert F. Yeager, 343–380. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Lears, Adin E. 2016. Noise, Soundplay, and Langland’s Poetics of Lolling in the Time of Wyclif. Studies in the Age of Chaucer 38: 165–200. https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2016.0005.
McNamer, Sarah. 2007. Feeling. In Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm, 241–257. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nolan, Maura. 2011. The Poetics of Catastrophe: Ovidian Allusion in Gower’s Vox Clamantis. In Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature: Essays in Honour of Jill Mann, ed. Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan, 113–333. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.
Simpson, James. 1995. Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wickert, Maria. 1953. Studien zu John Gower. Köln: Kölner Universitäts-Verlag.
Woolgar, C.M. 2006. The Senses in Late Medieval England. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Anderson, J.D. (2019). The Weight of Experience: John Gower and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. In: Jager, K. (eds) Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18334-9_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18334-9_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-18333-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-18334-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)