Gower's Vulgar Tongue

Gower's striking use of English in his best-known work, the Confessio Amantis, is the main focus of this study, which brings fresh perspectives drawn from late medieval lay religion and from vernacularity. The author argues that throughout his writings, whether in English, French or Latin, Gower's stance as a satirist and publicist is more markedly lay, and more rhetorically momentous for reasons associated with this lay character, than has been previously thought. Yet the conditions for writing lay public poetry during the 1380s in English made the Confessio a truly remarkable feat, both for Gower himself and for English poetry more generally. Looking particularly at Gower's rich debt to Ovid, this book investigates how he fashions from myth, ars amatoria, devotional writing, and romance a brand of public poetry that is at once subtly accommodated to the conditions of writing in English and profoundly significant for the development of the English poetic tradition.