Abstract
This chapter argues that both Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower looked to barbarian history as a source for narrative and a mirror for their own times. Gower’s sweeping prologue to the Confessio Amantis uses both the biblical prophecy of the four empires in the book of Daniel and the historian Otto of Freising to portray a complex tableau where the Roman Empire , the fourth of Daniel’s four realms, is indefinitively extended, but also subject to diminution and decay. The chapter concludes by comparing how Gower explores the post-Carolingian history of the Lombard emperors to Chaucer’s sourcing of an earlier Lombard era, of Paul the Deacon, in constructing the Mediterranean tableau of “The Man of Law’s Tale,” whose barbarian history extends from Eastern princesses to Anglo-Saxon converts.
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Notes
Elliot Kendall, “Saving History: Gower’s Apocalypse and the New Arion,” John Gower: Trilingual Poet, Language, Translation, and Tradition, ed. Elizabeth Dutton, John Hines, and R. F. Yeager (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer), p. 47.
John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980).
See Bruce Harbert, “Lessons from the Great Clerk: Ovid and John Gower,” Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 84, for a discussion of how Gower conflates the Ovid and Daniel passages. It must be remembered that Ovid, although not like Vergil or the Bible in being aggressively future-oriented, has his own historical progression from the era of gods to that of men. Edward Peter Nolan speaks of one model of Ovidian time as “reality as entropic” which matches very well with the historical theories of Otto of Freising.
See Edward Peter Nolan, Now through a Glass Darkly Specular Images of Being and Knowing from Virgil to Chaucer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), p. 36.
Adriaan H. Bredero’s Chirstendom and Christianity in the Middle Ages (Grand Rapids: Eermanns, 1994), p. 65, gives a good summary of four empires theory.
Lynn Arner, Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Poverty of the Populace after 1381 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), pp. 91–92.
Frank Kermode, The Sense of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), and
Frank Kermode, The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change (New York: Viking, 1975).
James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire (New York: Macmillan, 1889), p. 179.
Björn K. U. Weller, Henry III of England and the Staufen Empire, 1216–1272 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), p. 19.
Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 94. With regard to Shakespeare, it is interesting that a play so conscious of “the king’s two bodies” has one body for two queens. I am grateful to Leatrice Gilbert Fountain for suggestions on this point.
Alfred Thomas, A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 89–93.
Sylvia Federico, New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 179.
William Shakespeare, Richard II, ed. Anthony P. Dawson and Paul Edward Yachnin (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 240.
Thomas, A Blessed Shore, p. 89.
See Camden, Remains, p. 127.
Otto of Freising, The Two Cities, p. 345.
See Stuart Gillespie, Shakespeare’s Books (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 197.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1987), p. 147.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, tr. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 240–241.
Arner, Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising, p. 90. For Benjamin, see Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 249.
Benjamin, “These on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1999), p. 249.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 270.
See Ronald Albert Steckling, “Godfrey of Viterbo as historian and political theorist,” Dissertation (University of Wisconsin-Madison , 1958).
George Gillespie Fox, The Mediaeval Sciences in the Work of John Gower (New York: Haskell House, 1966), p. 110.
R. F. Yeager, John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion (Cambridge: Brewer 1990), p. 145. The phrase “ultimate source” is taken from Killis Campbell, cited in chapter 4.
Geoffrey Barrowclough, The Crucible of Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press 1978), p. 56.
Ibid., p. 101.
Barbara H. Rosenwein, “The Family Politics of Berengar I, King of Italy (888–924),” Speculum, 71:2 (April, 1996), pp. 247–289.
Malte Urban, Fragments: Past and Present of Chaucer and Gower (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 124.
Ibid., p. 102. See also P. J. Jones, The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
Craig Bertolet, “ ‘The slyeste of alle’: The Lombard Problem in John Gower’s London,” John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts, ed. Malte Urban (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009), pp. 197–218.
Otto of Freising, The Two Cities, p. xv.
Arner, Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising, p. 93.
See The Gothic History of Jordanes, tr. Charles Christopher Mierow (New York: Columbia University Press, 1915), p. 58.
T. Matthew N. McCabe notes that Gower feared that statements of his “could have been misconstrued as Lollard sympathizing.” See McCabe, Gower’s Vulgar Tongue: Ovid, Lay Religion, and English Poetry in the Confessio Amantis (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), p. 92.
Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute or Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting for? (London: Verso, 2001).
Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, tr. Ray Brassier (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
See R. M. Correale, “Chaucer’s Manuscripts of Nicholas Trevet’s Les Cronicles,” Chaucer Review, 25 (1991), pp. 238–265.
William Walter Skeat, A Student’s Pastime (New York: Macmillan, 1896), p. 66.
Kemp Malone, “Anglo-Saxon: A Semantic Study,” The Review of English Studies, 5:18 (April 1929), pp. 173–185.
See J. R. R. Tolkien, E. V. Gordon, and Norman Davis, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight(New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 1. On the Trojan myth
see Richard Waswo, “Our Ancestors, the Trojans: Inventing Cultural Identity in the Middle Ages,” Exemplaria, 7:22 (1995).
Chaucer, The Man of Law’s Tale, line 1125, Riverside Edition, p. 103. In Sir Gawain, Lombardy is in general grafted onto Trojan origins much the same way Paul the Deacon and Otto of Freising differently graft the Lombards into the decline, development, and transformation of the Roman Empire. That Chaucer himself has a sense of his ultimate source as historical here is fortified by the argument of
Larry D. Benson, ed. The Riverside Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003). Benson notes [870], that “olde Roman geestes” could not refer to the Gesta Romanorum itself.
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© 2013 Nicholas Birns
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Birns, N. (2013). Chaucer, Gower, and Barbarian History: “The Man of Law’s Tale” and the Prologue to Gower’s Confessio Amantis. In: Barbarian Memory: The Legacy of Early Medieval History in Early Modern Literature. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364562_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364562_2
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