Abstract
This chapter interrogates the Trump of Death scene in Book I of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, to show how the pilgrims of that tale are defined not by their religious affiliation, nor their age, but by their economic status, which is juxtaposed with the King’s nobility (or prosperity) in order to define that regal authority. The chapter compares the use of economic issues in the tale to the narrator’s use of such rhetoric in his own dealings with Richard II in the so-called patronage scene in the Prologue to the Ricardian recensions of the poem. In this scene, Gower constructs his own poetic identity vis-à-vis language similar to what we see in the Trump of Death construction of regal authority.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
All references to the Confessio Amantis, including subsequent translations of the Latin glosses in the Confessio, are from Gower (2000–13) and will hereafter be cited by line number. First and second recension references will be marked by an asterisk. For discussions of differences, both scribal and thematic, between the recensions, see especially Nicholson (1984) as well as Mahoney (1998).
- 3.
See, for example, Robertson’s discussion of the “trope of poet as accused laborer” (2002, 117).
- 4.
J. L. Bolton notes, for example, the rise in English economic power at the end of the fourteenth century as “English industry had recaptured the home market ” in the cloth trade, a recovery after the plague that dipped slightly in the early fifteenth century, only to rebound even more strongly after the 1420s (1980, 292). This resurgence of the cloth trade would serve as the groundwork for much of the subsequent rise in English military power.
- 5.
MED prīs s.v. 1. (a) Monetary or exchange value, price; payment, amount, sum.
- 6.
For discussions of the notion of English national identity in the Middle ages, see the collected essays in Lavezzo, ed. (2004).
- 7.
MED. realte (s.v.[1]) 1. (a) Royal status, power, or prerogative; royal state; (b) power, authority analogous to a king’s. realte (s.v.[2]) 1. Reality.
- 8.
All Chaucer (1987) references will be cited hereafter by fragment and line number.
- 9.
While often couched in the rhetoric of Romance, this common phrase in Chaucer also functions as a “site of moral meaning and hierarchical power” (Duprey 2014, 55).
- 10.
The education of princes is a motif running throughout much of Gower’s poetry but especially in the end of the Confessio. For an overview of criticism on this topic, as well as a discussion of the text’s relationship with the monarchs of Gower’s England, see Peck (2004).
- 11.
- 12.
Yeager discusses the polyphonous nature of text and gloss in the Confessio, calling the glossarial voice the voice of an “unnamed ‘other’ reader” (1987, 262).
- 13.
For a broader discussion of the possibility of patronage in the period, see Green (1980).
- 14.
For a summary the debates surrounding the veracity of the barge scene, see Grady (2002). It was common for water taxis to take citizens of London between the environs of London, Southwark, and Westminster.
- 15.
For a discussion of Gower’s use of the term “business” elsewhere in the Confessio see Sadlek (2004, 190–200).
- 16.
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Gastle, B. (2018). The Need for Economy: Poetic Identity and Trade in Gower’s Confessio Amantis . In: Bertolet, C., Epstein, R. (eds) Money, Commerce, and Economics in Late Medieval English Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71900-9_9
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