Parergon

Since its foundation in 1984, the International John Gower Society has promoted scholarship on John Gower, a major poet in three languages, and a contemporary and rival of Geoffrey Chaucer. This collection, arising from the Society's third triennial congress in 2014, richly demonstrates the interest of his oeuvre and the intellectual liveliness of Gower studies. Its theme, Others and the Self, moves outwards from Gower's self-awareness as a poet to his representations of otherness. In a short review, it is only possible to offer a sampling of the sixteen papers. In a keynote, Russell Peck expounds medieval ideas of how sense-experience of the world passed into an individual's 'thought-processing intellect' (p. 8), and how Gower's conception of the materiality of cognition informs his description of characters seeking to meddle with the minds of others. In an elegant study, Carla Taylor reflects on the interest in physiognomy—the art of reading faces or masking them—in manuals of statecraft. In the Confessio Amantis, Genius, [End Page 261] Gower's persona, counsels the ruler to maintain a 'good visage', but insists that his word should be 'tokne of that withinne' (p. 78). More generally, he seems to encourage good rulers to sacrifice transparency for effectiveness. In his depiction of domestic tyranny in the Clerk's Tale, Chaucer responds to Gower intertextually. The patient Griselda gives no outward sign of resistance while her husband, with his 'carefully schooled countenance', is as 'ungoverned' in his desires as 'any of Gower's tyrants' (p. 88). Although all the authors are literary scholars, most papers have a strong cross-disciplinary interest, including Larry Scanlon's analysis of Gower's views on incest and R. F. Yeager's exploration of Gower's 'comparatively non-judgmental treatment of Jews' (p. 195). For political historians, Matthew Giancarlo offers a major new statement on Gower as a 'constitutionalist thinker and regiminal writer', presenting him as ever probing 'what constitutes legitimate power, and what necessarily happens when it fails—and how that failure can actually be seen as part of the legitimation of justice and, hence, as a legitimate constraint on the king' (pp. 254–55). To conclude a fascinating collection, Ana Sáez-Hidalgo documents Gower's reception in Portugal and Spain, offering the startling revelation that the Confessio was in 1430 copied in Ceuta, a recently conquered Portuguese enclave in north Africa.