The Difficulties of Dating Gower's Works

Given Gower's explicit references to historical events such as the papal schism, the Great Revolt of 1381 and the deposition of Richard II, historians and literary scholars have inevitably sought to relate his poetry to the religious, social and political conflicts and controversies of his day. Yet, a major difficulty in adopting this historical approach to Gower's works is the uncertainty which persists about the chronology of their composition. Some of Gower's poems can be dated with precision. For instance, his Carmen Super Multiplici Viciorum Pestilencia, which sets out the ‘manifold plague of vices’, including heresy, pride, lust, perjury and greed, from which England was supposedly suffering, explicitly states that it was written in the twentieth year of Richard II's reign, i.e. 1396–97 (pr. 8; ll. 312–3). Similarly, in alternative versions of Quicquid Homo Scribat (In Fine) in which Gower takes leave of writing in old age, he refers to himself as having gone blind in the first or second year of Henry IV's reign (ll. 1–8), i.e. in 1399–1400 or 1400–01, with the work presumably dating shortly after this date. However, if a marginal note in a manuscript of Presul Ouile Regis is to be believed, this poem's account of the misfortunes striking the kingdom can be linked to the great comet visible across Europe in 1402 which was widely interpreted as an omen of disaster. As Yeager points out, Gower's blindness does not, despite the poet's claims to the contrary, seem to have stopped him from writing and his complaints may have been a ‘conscious pose for literary purposes’ rather than an accurate reflection of his ability to work

Other works by Gower offer a less specific indication of their date of composition, as in the prose headings to three of the four manuscripts of O Deus Immense which claim that the poem's warnings about the need for kings to take good counsel, obey the law and win the love of his subjects (ll. 7, 9–18, 58, 65–6) were written whilst Richard II was still alive. Sometimes, biographical details in the poems can help with their dating, assuming, of course, that the first-person voice within the text can be equated with that of Gower himself.

‘Absolutist’ versus ‘Constitutionalist’ Gower

At one time, partly due to the influence of K. B. McFarlane's work on the English nobility, studies of late medieval English political life tended to focus on the private concerns, personal connections and individual interests of the king, magnates and gentry and, above all, on competition for patronage. As a result, the role of ideas and values as causes of political action was often neglected, even though McFarlane himself warned against seeing medieval political choices as being entirely venal in their motivation. More recently, however, historians have emphasised the significance of ideas and values within late medieval politics and have turned their attention to the political language of the period. Following Quentin Skinner's view of normative language as constituting one of the ‘determinants’ of political action, ‘new constitutionalist’ historians such as Christine Carpenter, Edward Powell and John Watts have presented the political principles which were available in late medieval England as being one of the determinants of the range of actions that was available to political agents, not least by constraining their freedom of manoeuvre in their attempts to justify themselves and to win the support of others. In the words of Laura Slater, political thought should be seen as ‘a motivating force or explanatory principle for political action, and as a determining influence on its outcome’. As Michael Bennett said, despite the central part played by the Lancastrian and other magnate affinities in bringing about the deposition of Richard II, if we are to understand the ‘revolution’ of 1399, it is also ‘necessary to take seriously the role of ideas’. Here both abstract theory, including the Aristotelian definition of tyranny, as well as more everyday assumptions about the relationship between the king and the political community, such as the belief that the monarch's will was limited by the common law and by his subjects’ property rights, were key factors in generating opposition to Richard II. This renewed focus on the role of ideas in political life has led historians to study not only the language found in factional manifestos, parliamentary petitions and mirrors for princes but also that which was used in political songs and – of particular importance in our context – in public poetry and imaginative literature.

It is a commonplace of modern criticism that a fruitful way of understanding medieval literary texts is to consider the ways in which they engage with the social hierarchies, institutions, conventions, behaviours and ideologies of their day. As Janet Coleman put it, relatively few works of fourteenth-century literature ‘were meant merely to entertain but were intended to instruct, exhort and, ultimately, to inspire readers to criticize and eventually to reform social practice, by which was meant the behaviour of church officials and the politically and economically powerful’. As Helen Barr argues, literary language is neither independent of reality nor a passive reflection of it, but is itself a form of social practice or behaviour. Both old and new historicist approaches have been extremely influential amongst scholars of medieval literature, particularly those working on Geoffrey Chaucer. Yet, in many ways, the works of John Gower are even more readily open to historicist readings than are those of Chaucer, against which Gower's verse is so often compared or judged. After all, whilst Chaucer tended to engage with the social, political and religious controversies of the day obliquely or in an allegorical form, Gower explicitly addressed the conflicts which divided his contemporaries. If Chaucer's ‘Knight's Tale’ provides us with a mirror for princes in the guise of a roman antique about Duke Theseus of Athens, then Book VII of Gower's Confessio Amantis directly sets out the virtues needed in a king. Whilst Chaucer's ‘Miller's Tale’ is often read as a peasants’ revolt in literary form, with the Miller's bawdy fabliau being pitted against the hierarchical world-view of the ‘Knight's Tale’ which precedes it, Book I of Gower's Vox Clamantis offers us a detailed response to the events of the actual Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Thus, although it would be a mistake to take Gower's works as merely straightforward reportage, it remains crucial to acknowledge how Gower addressed the issues of his day. Because Gower's work includes such overt political and social commentary, an understanding of the period in which his work was rooted is particularly important. The aim of this volume is to enable a group of historians to bring their specialist expertise to bear on Gower's poetry and to show what a detailed knowledge of England in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries can add to our understanding of his work.