John Gower Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Siân Echard

Critical Essay by Siân Echard

SOURCE: Echard, Siân. “Gower's “bokes of Latin”: Language, Politics, and Poetry.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 25 (2003): 123-56.

In the following excerpt, Echard maintains that Gower's use of Latin in his Vox Clamantis and other works represents an integral part of the poet's expression of complex political ideas in a verse medium.

The head of John Gower's effigy in Southwark Cathedral rests on three books, their titles presented to the viewer as Speculum Meditantis, Vox Clamantis, and Confessio Amantis. While Gower's three major works are in three different languages—French, Latin, and English—Latin here inflects the final presentation of John Gower's oeuvre. Many would argue that Gower would approve; a more bookish poet could not be imagined, and to be litteratus in Gower's day still meant to be Latinate. But Gower himself was highly conscious of his trilinguality. In the colophon Quia vnusquisque, which appears at the end of...
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