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

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 over twenty Confessio manuscripts, as well as at the end of five manuscripts of the Vox,¹ the account of Gower's books stresses the language in which each was composed. While there are some variations in the descriptions of the contents of each work, the sequence and emphasis are always the same: “First he published a book in French” (the Speculum, or Mirour de l'Omme); “The second book was written in Latin verses” (the Vox); and “This third book, which was made up in English …”² The structure of the Quia vnusquisque suggests two ideas. One is that Gower is a master of three tongues; the second, that he was evolving toward the use of English.

This medieval version of Gower's progress through the languages offers no overt evaluation, but I will argue that when Gower's practice and his politics become tangled up with the assumptions underlying current discussions of vernacularity,³ we become limited in our ability to understand how he works through his own relationship to language throughout his poetic career. In particular, the politicization of the vernaculars—the casting of vernacular languages as challengers to the hegemonic authority of Latin—⁴ characterizes Latin in such a way as to predetermine our response to Gower's Latin writing. Sarah Stanbury has described this trend in recent Middle English criticism as a tendency to “romance the vernacular,”⁵ arguing that the association commonly made between English and various forms of resistance is at least in part a fiction born of our own nostalgic desire, a wish to see the medieval English vernacular as “a democratizing and rebellious vox populi.”⁶ Yet in the Vox clamantis, a work whose language and subject matter have both tended to relegate it to the periphery in assessments of Gower's work, Gower claims to speak for the vox populi even as he decries the 1381 rebellion—and he makes that claim in Latin. In what follows, I explore Gower's stance toward language in the Vox, and I touch as well on another of Gower's Latin political pieces, the Cronica tripertita. Throughout this essay, I map Gower's deployment of his Latinity in these texts over a landscape of the poet's persistent attention to tongues throughout his works. I intend to show that common concerns about speech in all three of Gower's languages both challenge the idea that Gower finds Latin an easy refuge from political or poetic uncertainty,⁷ and militate against the conclusion that Gower finally found his poetic voice in English.⁸ He found a voice in that language—his strongest and most enduring voice—but all tongues remained for him simultaneously tantalizing and suspect, to the very end of his poetic career.

The evolutionary narrative that is often generated about Gower's English is more a partial one than completely unreasonable, however. The Quia vnusquisque is not the only part of the manuscript apparatus to suggest the idea that French and Latin were stepping-stones on the way towards Gower's fulfilment of his poetic destiny through the English vernacular—and it is not merely a modern preoccupation with vernacularity that has crowned Gower's English efforts as his supreme work. Two Confessio manuscripts and four manuscripts of the Vox⁹ include a poem apparently sent to Gower in praise of his work by “a certain philosopher,” the Eneidos Bucolis:

To Virgil, for his Georgic lays,
Bucolics, Eneidos, the praise
Of schools is due; and the wreath
That poets' tribe his works bequeath.
So Virgil's honour's claimed at Rome,
While, Gower, you weave gifts at home
Of little books for Englishmen—
Your threefold song within the ken
Of all. Virgil's Latin verse
Italic letters must rehearse;
But French, then Latin stirred your tongue,
That, last and best, in English sung.
He pipes vain things to Roman ears—
A pagan muse is his—but here
Your work illumines Christendom:
In heaven's realm your praise is won.(10)

This paradoxical piece asserts in Latin that the key aspect of Gower's poetic identity is his mastery of English. This poem is evidently contemporary with Gower, but it shares with modern readings of the poet's progress a triumphalist appraisal of Gower's adoption of English verse. The poet of the Eneidos Bucolis manages to have his cake and eat it too, as he compares Gower to Virgil—a comparison any medieval poet would desire—while also managing to denigrate the medieval schoolmen for whom Virgil was still the poetic touchstone. Gower's Englishness becomes even more important in the next few generations after his death, as can be seen, for example, in Thomas Berthelette's address to Henry VIII at the opening of his 1532 edition of Gower's Confessio Amantis. Berthelette commends Gower for avoiding those excesses of foreign coining which were fashionable at the time,¹¹ and urges readers to have recourse instead to Gower's (English) language:

yet that ought not to be a president to vs / to heape them in / where as nedeth not / and where as we haue all redy wordes approued and receyued / of the same effecte and strength. The whiche if any man wante / let hym resorte to this worthy olde wryter John Gower / that shall as a lanterne gyue hym lyghte to wryte counnyngly / and to garnysshe his sentencis in our vulgar tonge.¹²

For medieval, early modern, and modern readers alike, then, Latin (or Latinate learning) is seen as elite and limited. Thus far it seems possible to agree that Gower's English poetry is understood to represent a broadening, an evolution, but in fact arguments based in language are easily tangled, and our own assumptions about the status of Latin and English tend, in the case of a poet such as Gower, to produce overlapping and confused narratives about the relationship between poetry and politics.

While the author of the Eneidos Bucolis may see the progression through the tongues to English as unproblematic, my purpose in this essay is rather to read Gower's deployment of Latinity in his earlier work as part of his anxiety about his poetic voice and its political dimensions—an anxiety he kept throughout his poetic career. In order to explore that anxiety, I focus on one of Gower's most overtly political poems, the Vox clamantis, concentrating on the political uses of Latin and of the vernacular in Gower's depiction of the turmoil of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Berthelette's praise of Gower opposes the poet to then-current fashion, so that in his presentation Gower's English is enlisted in the service of cultural conservatism. Modern criticism of the Vox, however, shows that Gower's own political position is often signalled for modern readers not by his Englishness, but rather by his Latinity—because Latin is both the language of Gower's poetry against the Peasants' Revolt, and the means by which, whatever his subject, Gower asserts his own auctoritas, his right to speak. Thus Latin is understood to be socially and poetically conservative.¹³ Yet Latin is the language in which Gower's political commentary is most pointed—and that commentary is directed against social elites as well as against the peasantry.¹⁴ Latin is also, I have argued elsewhere, an element that complicates rather than simplifies the poet's presentation of his own authority in the Confessio.¹⁵ For Gower, language itself is a means by which he effects a mimesis of the political uncertainties of his age. It is also potentially, but always uncertainly, a means by which he might influence the political realm.¹⁶ This inextricable linkage of language with politics means that Gower's politics and his poetry are, in a very real sense, the same thing—and neither is a simple thing. In what follows, then, I want to suggest that the alignment of Latinity with Gower's conservative reaction to the Peasants' Revolt is far more complex, and more fraught with poetic uncertainties, than it has traditionally been understood to be.

The first book of the Vox—the nightmarish dream vision of the peasants turned beasts marching on an allegorized London—is the part of the work which attracts most critical attention today, but the poem as a whole consists of over 10,000 lines of Latin verse (in unrhymed elegiac couplets), arranged now into seven books.¹⁷ The work begins by juxtaposing the incoherent, animalistic speech of the rabble of the 1381 revolt with the vatic Latin voice of “the one crying” (John Gower as John the Baptist and also John of Patmos)—a move that seems clearly to be, and has been read to be, the deployment of Latinity against the social and political insurgencies which are also colored as vernacular.¹⁸ Certainly language is at issue from the outset: in the Prologue to the Vox, Gower introduces the idea of tongues almost immediately:¹⁹

If my frail breast but held a stronger voice—
And had I many mouths with many tongues—
The evils of this time are yet too much:
I still could not tell out the whole of them.(20)

The idea of multiple mouths with multiple tongues almost begs to be read as a nod to Gower's own sense of the linguistic variety of his age—one which is not necessarily desirable, as the image of the Tower of Babel, a foundational image in both the Vox and the Confessio, suggests.²¹ But I want first to take up the declaration of impotence in these lines. The narrative voice declares its inability to speak more than once in the Prologue and first book of the Vox. This is not merely a conventional modesty topos. Instead, it is the speaker's response to the horrors of the revolt to fall silent, to lose his ability to communicate at all (while paradoxically retaining the ability to write about it, at least after the fact, in impeccable Latin …). With Steven Justice, I think that the Vox is in part about finding out how to be, not just the Voice of One Crying, but also the Voice of the People: but this is a fraught, uncomfortable, and ultimately uncertain search.

The speaker tells us that, like others, he fled to the forest from the rabble. There he loses the possibility of authentic speech, as words become a trap:

And when at times I almost dared to speak,
I'd fear the traps that always laid in wait;
And looking at the ground, I'd speak few words.
And when my fate compelled me talk to one
I met, I'd pass vain time in fawning speech.
A soft response would often turn back wrath,
And safety then was found in pleasing words;
And often when I tried to speak my will,
My tongue lay dormant, chilled with icy fear.
In order that my speech should not complain,
I kept my tongue restrained from daily ills;
And often though I longed to speak my mind,
I feared my foes, and stilled my tongue again.(22)

This frozen tongue is all that is available to the speaker, in face of the deceptive and bestial tongues all around him. Later, he says “I would have made my plaint in words, but bowels / Filled with grief, refused, and then allowed no words.”²³ This is one of many passages in the Vox that is a pastiche of Ovidian reference. R. F. Yeager has shown that what Macaulay unkindly called “schoolboy plagiarism”²⁴ is in fact a deliberate reworking of such references, perhaps using the technique of cento verse,²⁵ and one might argue that the speaker's recourse to such resources of style and reference here simultaneously illustrates his personal muteness and his position of privileged access to words. This kind of doubleness—genuine anxiety with an equal conviction of access to authority—is what complicates for me the picture of Gower's stance toward his own poetic language.

The speaker's representation of his inability to speak of the ills of his time is presented in marked contrast to the speech which is not speech of the peasants. In the first part of the dream vision, the speaker recounts seeing the mobs in the forms of various animals, converging on the city. The mob is characterized over and over again as a source of noise without sense, without true speech. Here, for example, is the description of that part of the crowd which the speaker sees as dogs:

If anyone might hear them then, or feel
The trembling world, by voices there amazed,
Then he might say that no realm ever heard
With ears an ululating howl like theirs.
And when the baying of the hounds went down
To Satan's ears, then hell in this new sound
Rejoiced; and Cerberus, Gehenna's cur,
Gave ear, and raged with joy at what he heard.(26)

When the mobs reach London, the famous passages follow in which Wat Tyler is portrayed as a jackdaw—“Graculus vnus erat edoctus in arte loquendi”;²⁷ that is, educated in the art of public speaking. John Ball, too, is shown to be (mis)applying a certain kind of learning: “Ball the prophet teaches them, himself / Malignant spirit's pupil; he's their school.”²⁸ The mob is reduced to bestial grunting, and Gower vents a great deal of poetic spleen in representing their noise. He first associates them with monstrosity: “Often they cried out with monstrous voice / And thundered different sounds in different ways.”²⁹ A series of animal comparisons follow immediately, beginning with the domestic beasts (to whom the agrarian peasants might seem naturally to be linked):

Some bray in bestial tones, like asses do,
And some with bovine mooing fill the air.
Some let forth the horrid grunts of swine,
And all the earth must shudder at the sound.(30)

Next comes a mix of animals wild and domestic, a bewildering hodgepodge which includes as well the insect world:

The foaming boar, enraged, makes great tumult,
The boar-pig shrieks its own part of the din;
The city's air's oppressed by savage barks,
And frantic voice of dogs, discordant, flies.
The fox yelps, hungry; the sly wolf on high
Keeps shouting loud and calling to its mates.
No less does garrulous gander strike the ear
With sound; with sudden sorrow trenches shake:
Wasps buzz and buzz, their noise is horrible,
And none can count their swarms; and all as one
They raise a cry that's like to lion's roar,
That hairy beast, and all that's bad, grows worse.(31)

The frightful sound fills the world, threatening the spread of cacophony and chaos to other realms:

Rude clang, reverberate sound, and savage brawl—
No voice before was terrible as this.
The rocks resound with murmur and the air
Repeats; and Echo takes up the reply.
The heavy uproar with its din afrights
The neighbouring lands, which fear the ills to come.(32)

The striking thing about this passage is not, I would argue, the admittedly heavy-handed comparison of the rabble to animal. Rather, it is the astonishing variety of the vocabulary of sound. These twenty-three lines contain a dozen different words for sound, and a dozen different verbs for making sound. Justice suggests that in enclosing the rabble's speech in Latin, Gower “erases any trace of verbal performance on the part of the rebels,”³³ thus showing the inappropriateness of their entry into political discourse. That may well be what Gower is trying to do; and the varied diction to which I have referred is of course in part a matter of poetic pyrotechnics, pyrotechnics which are part of Gower's staking his claim to the public air (another word that is repeated several times in the descriptions of the peasants). But when the varied noise of the rebels is placed in the context of the fear that even many tongues are not enough to speak the ills of the time (the Prologue), and in the context of the speaker's own loss of voice in the forest, and in the context of the references to the deceptiveness of the taught oratorical words of Tyler and Ball, then it seems clear there are tensions here which are not readily assimilated by being wrapped in the master tongue. Aers points out that in Gower's rendition of Tyler and Ball, it is clear that they have learned their (limited) verbal performances from the structures with which Gower is identified³⁴—but that is precisely the problem for Gower. The jangling jay may be a pet of the elite, but it has acquired an ability to speak, and that ability cannot, as Gower points out, be kept in a cage.³⁵ Indeed, the anxieties about misapplied speech lead me to the rest of the Vox, and to an awareness of the pitfalls inherent in Latin as well as in the vernacular. Anne Hudson quotes a Lollard tract which argues against the idea that English books are necessarily heretical:

many men wolen seie that ther is moche eresie in Englische bookis, and therfore no man schulde haue Goddis lawe in Englische. And I seie be the same skile ther schulde no man haue Goddis lawe in bookis of Latyn, for ther is moche heresie in bookis of Latyn, more than in Englisch bookis.³⁶

Heresy is not the issue for Gower in the Vox, but the analogy demonstrates that Latin as well as the vernaculars could be suspect, whether in the religious, political, or poetic spheres. For his part, Gower both defends and undermines his “bokes of Latyn” in the rest of the Vox, and the love-hate relationship with words—all words—is a prime link between the work's two parts.

The second book of the Vox, it has often been pointed out,³⁷ has the appearance of a new beginning: the speaker invokes aid, refers to his illness, warns off ill-intentioned readers, and makes other moves repeated later in the opening of the Confessio Amantis. The last lines of the invocation refer specifically to the speaker's textuality:

The words hereafter speak not my own cares,
I carry them as herald, one well-taught.
From varied blooms the honey's gathered in,
And shells are caught from many varied shores—
So thus this work's the work of many mouths,
And many visions too produce this book.
My songs are fortified by men of old,
I wrote my words to their examples' form.
This volume shall be called the Voice of One
Crying: for it brings news of grievous things.(38)

Familiar medieval images of reading and writing are used here—the bees, the shells—and what the English translation does not show is that Gower uses lego for “collect,” well aware of its specifically textual valence. There are oral images here, too: the multiple mouths that the voice of Book I feared would be insufficient to the task; the image of the messenger (nuncius) and his news (noui); the characteristic combination of the textual volumen with the carmina of verse. I am particularly interested in the repetition of ideas of learning: the speaker presents himself as well-taught, and he is taught both by the voices of the people and by the well-taught men of old.

For all the original disjunction between Book I and the rest of the Vox, this cluster of ideas shows how well the first part, even if composed later, fits both the anxieties and the sense of mission expressed in the rest of the work. For Gower points many of the criticisms in the estates satire section of the Vox in terms of the misuse and misapplication of both language and learning, and the ease with which people can be misled by educated abusers of both the spoken and the written word. The negative effects include a mixing of rank and form, as for example in Book VII, where “The clerks are turned to rabble, and the mob / Disputes the things of God in clerkly form.”³⁹ This remark sounds like Gower's later concerns about Lollardy, characteristically expressed in classed terms in the Prologue to the Confessio:

And so to speke upon this branche,
Which proud Envie hath mad to springe,
Of Scisme, causeth forto bringe
This new Secte of Lollardie,
And also many an heresie
Among the clerkes in hemselve.
It were betre dike and delve
And stonde upon the ryhte feith,
Than knowe al that the bible seith
And erre as somme clerkes do.(40)

But part of the point is here that clerks are getting it wrong, are misbehaving; and the concern in the Vox, too, is as much with those faulty doctors as it is with peasants who refuse to concentrate on “diking and delving.”⁴¹

To be sure, the same kind of undisciplined vernacular tongues represented in Book I recur in the description of urban characters such as Fraud and Susurrus (Whisperer, Tale-Bearer), and a contempt for oral, vernacular gabbling is clear—Whisperer, for example, is the cause for another excursus on that troublesome tongue:

While Whisper roams the city, gossiping,
He spreads out scandals, harming many men.
The man who talks too much harms others, like
A second plague, and strikes like whirlwind strikes.
But since a wicked tongue brings every ill,
I'll try to speak of what its powers are.
The tongue stirs strife, strife wars, and wars stir men;
Men stir swords, swords schisms, schisms, death;
The tongue roots rulers from their realms, burns down
Estates; the tongue sends people from their homes.
The tongue dissolves the marriage bond, and makes
Of one, as made by God, unhappy two.(42)

Similarities between this passage and anti-feminist commonplaces about gossiping women help to explain what is going on here, but the real concern for much of the estates satire of the Vox seems to be in the misapplication of learned speech, and the terms are such as not only to rebuke the clergy (and lawyers and judges and rich men and Richard's advisers), but also to complicate considerably Gower's own sense of his poetic mission. The clergy ought to speak the word of God—a divine speech whose effects are wholesome—but in chapter after chapter, the speaker reproves clergy (including in this category all learned men) who do not speak when or as they should.

Gower's friars, like Chaucer's, can “glose” to get what they want (though they do it in Latin), and at first their faults are spoken in that vox populi which Gower claims for his own and which is, it turns out, also God's:

The people's voice is harmony with God's,
And must in doubtful times be heard with awe;
Thus common parlance teaches me to speak,
There's no newfangledness in what I say.
The Pharisees now climb to Moses' seat,
And scribes scribe dogmas: actions take they none.(43)

The repeated claim, here and elsewhere in the Vox, to speak with the voice of the people, seems to me to be more than a reclaiming of the right to speak (for or instead of the people) in the political sphere. While the proverb from which Gower borrows this idea is in Latin rather than in a vernacular, this is nevertheless the realm of traditional wisdom rather than classical reference.⁴⁴ The insistence in the passage above that there is nothing new in what the speaker says, and the avoidance of, for instance, Ovid at this point, needs to be heard in the context of frequently repeated concerns about the ill effects of misapplied learning, and even more particularly, of misused poetic words. Consider, for example, this section on the Hypocrite, from Book IV:

Many such there are who color words;
Who stuff our ears with aureate-sounding speech,
Their words burst forth with leaves, but there's no fruit;
Sweet talk is all, to move the innocent.
God's temple shuts them out, for it abhors
The ornaments of words, and flees such gauds.
The texts of poets, overgilt with paint,
Are spoke with golden tongue; but yet beware:
It is the simple word which merits trust,
But duplex word, sans God, attempts the mind.
God despises eloquence, when polished
Wrappings—honey'd words—hide bile.
Who makes good words, but acts for ill, does sin;
For moral deeds should follow moral words.
Who frequents learning, he, with polished words,
Sows subtle scandals under colored speech.(45)

Here we do not simply have false orators or deceitful lawyers or self-interested counsellors or undisciplined peasants; here we have untrustworthy poets or, at best, unscrupulous people who take advantage of poetic words; for indeed, it seems that any wrought speech is necessarily anathema, and contrary to God's desire.⁴⁶

The distrust of ornate speech is a topos of long standing, and one that Gower uses as well in both his first and his last vernacular. In the Mirour de l'Omme, Gower uses the example of the chastisement of Jerome, in a way that suggests that Latin is particularly subject to misuse precisely because it carries the flavor of clerkly authority and the appeal to scholarly pride:

Who has knowledge of clergy,
There's no doubt he'll glorify
Himself, pronouncing gorgeous speech
Instead of suiting words to teach
And say what suits the soul's good,
For himself and other's food.
And in Jerome the proof's overt,
For Tully's thought he sought, to learn
To speak more beautifully; but God
Rebuked his learning's vanity.(47)

The misuse of learning is not confined to scholars such as Jerome; elsehere in the Mirour, Temptation's representations to Man are described in this way:

But one who heard Temptation's words—
How sweetly flattering she urged
Through the honey of her speech—
He'd say that never since his birth
Had such a boaster of such worth,
Of such a school, been heard; parole
More sweet than harp or than citole.(48)

Temptation's speech is here aligned to the schools and to poetry both—an alignment that continues throughout the work, as both unscrupulous clerics and storytellers are condemned.⁴⁹ And in the Confessio, too, Gower's discussion of rhetoric is preoccupied with the extent to which the learned manipulation of words can hide the truth:

In Ston and gras vertu ther is,
Bot yit the bokes tellen this,
That word above alle erthli thinges
Is vertuous in his doinges,
Wher so it be to evele or goode.
For if the wordes semen goode
And ben wel spoke at mannes Ere,
Whan that ther is no trouthe there,
Thei don fulofte gret deceipte;
For whan the word to the conceipte
Descordeth in so double a wise,
Such Rethorique is to despise
In every place, and forto drede.(50)

This section of the Confessio both praises “pleine” speech and records how often it is trumped by rhetorical display—even as the Latin verse which begins the section repeats the Augustinian notion that the plain truth is self-evident and pleasing: “Fair words at first are pleasing in a speech / But in the end what pleases is the truth.”⁵¹ The topos is not unusual,⁵² but Gower's almost obsessive return to it, no matter when or in what language he writes, is striking, as is his tendency to be at once confident and pessimistic about the plain truth's ability to be made manifest. The recurrence of this complex attitude across his major works indicates that Gower's shift to English did not quell his anxieties about speech in general, nor about his own speech in particular.

At the opening of the Vox, Gower makes a Latinate appeal to his Muse: “My Muse, add shape to Latin things recalled, / And mistress, teach me words to fit your book.”⁵³ By the time of the Confessio, the poet has shifted the modesty topos so that it now aligns him with the simple folk: “Thus I, which am a burel clerk, / Purpose forto wryte a bok …”⁵⁴ It is tempting to conclude that the poetic voice has abandoned both the Latin language and the Latinate literate culture of the Vox in order to become the “burel” vernacular writer of the Confessio—that Gower finds both his poetic voice, and unproblematic access to the truth, in the voice and forms of the common folk. Even if Gower seems to be giving us permission to romanticize the vernacular here, however, this is a temptation that should be resisted. Gower continues to worry about the common folk whose voice he apparently assumes, in both the Latin and English portions of the Confessio. See, for example, the Latin verses that introduce the section in the Prologue on the commons:

When regal law subdues the common folk,
They rest, and meek as lambs they take their load.
But if they lift their heads, and if the law
Lets go its reins, as their own will demands,
The common folk will like the Tigris be.
Both fire and water pity lack in rule,
But still more violent is the people's wrath.(55)

The metaphor of a river breaking its banks is repeated in the English lines that follow:

Now forto speke of the comune,
It is to drede of that fortune
Which hath befalle in sondri londes:
Bot often for defalte of bondes
Al sodeinliche, er it be wist,
A Tonne, whanne his lye arist,
Tobrekth and renneth al aboute,
Which elles scholde noght gon oute …(56)

In other words, Gower has not suddenly become John Ball. But there is another reason to complicate Gower's own claims about his turn to simple English, and it can be seen in the passage on the Hypocrite discussed above. That passage shows that the poetic voice rejects aurea verba while still within the privileged sphere of Latinate culture. Thus this Latinate display undermines its own grounds long before Gower claims to be a “burel clerk.” And the class identification suggested here needs to be placed against the similar condemnation of honeyed speech in the Mirour, for the Anglo-Norman vernacular has a different class valence than does the English of the Confessio: while English has come to have upper-class appeal (Gower's protestations about simplicity notwithstanding), it also always carries with it the ability to be understood by a broader social spectrum. French, on the other hand, is by Gower's day more limited, being the language (or one of the languages) of the court, the upper classes, and the legal profession.⁵⁷ In using it, Gower signals his membership in yet another group—he belongs to the schools and to the gentry—and yet the concern over speech remains the same. In French, too, then, Gower both claims the right to speak and interrogates and condemns his own tribe(s).

Of course, the poetic voice of the Vox asserts, again and again, its truth, its desire simply to set forth a vision, according to divine command. This is, after all, what St. John did. But it is hard to do so when the truest form of relation to God's will is, in fact, shown to be silence:

Add faith, true faith, which without sight or sound
Believes, and hopes: this is the way, the life,
And salvation. Where reason cannot grasp,
Nor mind can know, faith offers arguments.
What true faith seeks to do, it must achieve,
Believe it possible, it will be so.
The tongue is stilled, mouth shut, mind fails, and ears
Won't hear; there's nothing here but faith alone.(58)

This is another place in the Vox where Gower shifts away from classical reference, and it is significant that the borrowings here are biblical, considering the doubts about poetic speech which I have been discussing. Here the Augustinian notion of the absolute power of truth renders the traditional avenues of persuasion—the eyes and ears—irrelevant.⁵⁹ A poet addresses eyes and ears, and elsewhere in the Vox the poetic voice appears confident of its ability to ventriloquize the vox populi to good effect, but can it also ventriloquize the absolute truth? Or is the question, can that truth be spoken at all? The problem, of course, is that the sense of mission—to be the prophet, the public poet, the counsellor to the king, the maker of culture, to collect just a few of the epithets modern critics have given him—is at odds with Gower's deep uncertainty about the relationship between his poetic tongue(s) and the truth. Despite his caricaturing of vernacular speech in Book I of the Vox, I do not think that Gower exempts Latin from the uncertainties inherent in tongues. If Latin is no more stable than the vernacular(s)—or to express it somewhat differently, if Latin is no more able than any other tongue to reflect the ever-changing “truth” that is England at the end of the fourteenth century—then what is left? In the uncertain political and social climate in which Gower writes, how does a poet keep pace with the truth?

Perhaps he does so by giving up: the Confessio Amantis closes with Venus presenting the newly identified John Gower with his “Peire of Bedes blake as Sable,”⁶⁰ and the author then takes his leave of “makyng”—of books of love, he says, but perhaps of books entirely—and turns to prayer. Is this the recommended silence? Certainly there are gestures, at the beginning and at the end of Gower's poetic career, which suggest the ephemeral nature of language. In the memento mori that occupies a good bit of the last book of the Vox, the speaker tabulates the losses to death, including the loss of speech: “Say once he knew all kinds of tongues—when death / Makes mute his tongue, why then, he's profitless.”⁶¹ And at the end of his life, Gower turns again to Latin to express the impotence of all tongues, this time inflected explicitly as written, in the poem “Quicquid homo scribat.” This short piece renders the failure of transcribed tongues (here through the failure of the poet's eyes):

Whatever man may write, it's Nature writes the end;
Who like a shadow flees, nor fleeing, comes again.
She's dealt my end to me; I'm blind; and nevermore
And nowhere will I write—for though my will remains,
My power's gone, and all I long for, she denies.(62)

In the end, all tongues fail—but a reader cannot help noticing that Gower's silence, his abandoning of “makyng,” comes at the end of a poetic career that includes the almost 30,000 lines of the Mirour, the more than 10,000 lines of the Vox, and the over 34,000 lines of the Confessio. As Gower himself says at the beginning of the Confessio, these “bokes duelle,” books that Venus at the end aligns with “vertu moral.”⁶³

Notes

1. And possibly in more—there are quite a few manuscripts which now lack final folios. For a complete discussion of the treatment of the end matter, see my “Last Words: Latin at the End of the Confessio Amantis,” in Interstices: Studies in Late Middle English and Anglo-Latin Texts in Honour of A. G. Rigg, ed. Linne R. Mooney and Richard Firth Green (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003).

2. John Gower, The English Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay (Oxford: Early English Text Society, 1901), 2 vols.: “Primus liber Gallico sermone editus …”; “Secundus enim liber sermone latino metrice compositus …”; “Tercius iste liber … Anglico sermone conficitur …,” ii. 479-80. This is the third recension version of the colophon. For more on the differences between the different recensions with respect to the colophon, see below.

3. There is a wealth of recent scholarship on the relationship between Latin and the vernacular in medieval England. Some of this work appears in the notes below. I take the opportunity here to refer to some important critics who are not directly addressed later: these would include Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the “Aeneid” from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and the edited collection Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); John H. Fisher, “A Language Policy for Lancastrian England,” PMLA 107.5 (1992): 1168-80; David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Two collections are also central to current views on these relationships: The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280-1520, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), and David Wallace, ed., Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Particularly relevant in the latter are Christopher Baswell, “Latinitas,” pp. 122-51; Christopher Cannon, “Monastic productions,” pp. 316-48; John V. Fleming, “The friars and medieval English literature,” pp. 349-75; David Aers, “Vox populi and the literature of 1381,” pp. 432-53; David Lawton, “Englishing the Bible, 1066-1549,” pp. 454-82; Steven Justice, “Lollardy,” 662-89; as well as David Wallace's introductions to each section, with their frequent emphasis on the changing nature of “Englishing.” See the references to Stanbury, below, for a discussion of the implications of CHMEL's focus on “Englishing.”

4. I am thinking of arguments such as Ruth Evans's when she points out that English, today “a language of world domination,” in the Middle Ages had to confront Latin as “the chief instrument of political power.” “Like their modern postcolonial counterparts,” Evans writes, “medieval vernacular writers found ways to evade the all-encompassing authority of the colonial language”; “Historicizing Postcolonial Criticism,” in The Idea of the Vernacular, pp. 366 and 368. This essay is part of a collection which seeks to lay out the medieval evidence for the “changing, uneasy, and complex status of vernacular writing” (p. xiv); my point is that this attempt to create “a literary history centred on the theme of the vernacular” (p. xvi), when travelling in tandem with the characterization of Latin as an authoritative monolith, tends to imply that Latin does not have its own complexities, an implication which makes it difficult to read Latin as subtly—or indeed as politically—as we might read other languages.

5. Sarah Stanbury, “Vernacular Nostalgia and The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44.1 (2002): 99. It should be noted (as Stanbury recognizes) that a major innovation in CHMEL is its insistence on Britain's multilingual nature, however the relationship between those languages is portrayed. I admire CHMEL very much—agreeing with Stanbury's remark that the romantic “fiction” of the vernacular in the collection is “compelling and often persuasive,” 102.

6. Stanbury, “Vernacular Nostalgia,” 97. It is important to note that there are readers of the rise of the vernacular who have been careful to recognize the complex political and social affiliations of the vernacular. Alison Cornish points out that while translation from Latin to vernacular (in this case Italian), broadens access and valorizes the vernacular, it is nevertheless the case that “The ocean of translations produced in Italy and France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was no democratic initiative to educate the masses; they were intended, rather, to accommodate a linguistic handicap of the prominent and well-to-do”; her analysis of Guido Cavalcanti's “Donna me prega” points out that “putting Latin thought into the vernacular does not necessarily make things easier” (“A Lady Asks: The Gender of Vulgarization in Late Medieval Italy,” PMLA 115.2 (2000): 166, 174). In the English context, Fiona Somerset notes that “the legitimation of some kinds and contexts of written English tended to suppress or delegitimate others,” Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 10; she cites Nicholas Watson's seminal piece on Arundel's Constitutions: “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel's ‘Constitutions’ of 1409,” Speculum 70.4 (1995): 822-64.

7. Many sympathetic readers of Gower argue that Latin is understood by the poet as a more stable language than the vernaculars. Derek Pearsall, for example, writes of the Latin in the Confessio that it may be intended to “contain or encase the potentially volatile nature of the English”; “Gower's Latin in the Confessio Amantis,” in Latin and Vernacular: Studies in Late-Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989), p. 22. In “Learning to Speak in Tongues: Writing Poetry for a Trilingual Culture,” in Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange, ed. R. F. Yeager (Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 1991), Yeager argues that Latin, the “higher” tongue for Gower, is present in the Confessio as part of an attempt to “lend authority and sophistication” to the English poetry, p. 122. Winthrop Wetherbee's “Latin Structure and Vernacular Space: Gower, Chaucer and the Boethian Tradition,” however, argues that Gower's complex use of Latin in the Confessio Amantis “[makes] explicit and central the confrontation between traditional Latin auctoritas and a vernacular with its own claims to meaning”; Chaucer and Gower, p. 10. I discuss the elusiveness of the Latin in the Confessio at more length in “With Carmen's Help: Latin Authorities in Gower's Confessio Amantis,” SP 95.1 (1998): 1-40.

8. Gower's critical reception is traced in the first chapter of John H. Fisher's John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New York: New York University Press, 1964), and by Derek Pearsall in “The Gower Tradition,” in Gower's Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1983), pp. 179-97; both conclude that Gower's Chaucerian epithet—“moral Gower”—is largely responsible for his critical neglect from the eighteenth century on. The reception both Fisher and Pearsall trace is almost exclusively of Gower's English work, doubtless because the linking of Gower with Chaucer which took place almost immediately after the poet's death firmly entrenched Gower in the developing story of the founding of the English literary tradition. While Fisher stresses the “singlemindedness” of Gower's interests and even argues that “In a very real sense, Gower's three major poems are one continuous work,” he nevertheless casts that connection in evolutionary terms: “The three works progress from the description of the origin of sin and the nature of the vices and virtues at the beginning of the Mirour de l'omme, through consideration of social law and order in the discussion of the estates in the Mirour and Vox clamantis, to a final synthesis of royal responsibility and Empedoclean love in the Confessio Amantis,” John Gower, pp. 135, 136-37. More recently, R. F. Yeager sees Gower figuring himself as a new, English Arion: “The goal of universal peace can be furthered by a poetry of appropriately convincing characters and fictions, expressed in a vernacular of increasing stature and availability for presenting serious subjects”; the evolution implied here is not necessarily aesthetic, however, as Gower's choice of English is characterized as a political one—“Targeting the court of the young King Richard … the aging moralist may very well have felt he had a final opportunity to strike a righteous blow”; John Gower's Poetic: The Search for a New Arion (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1990), pp. 241, 262.

9. These are Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 3 and London, British Library MS Harley 3869; and Oxford, All Soul's College MS 98; Glasgow, Glasgow University Library MS Hunter 59 (T. 2.17); and London, British Library MSS Cotton Tiberius A.iv, and Harley 6291.

10. Eneidos Bucolis que Georgica metra perhennis
    Virgilio laudis serta dedere scolis;
    Hiis tribus ille libris prefertur honore poetis,
    Romaque precipuis laudibus instat eis.
    Gower, sicque tuis tribus est dotata libellis
    Anglia, morigeris quo tua scripta seris.
    Illeque Latinis tantum sua metra loquelis
    Scripsit, vt Italicis sint recolenda notis;
    Te tua set trinis tria scribere carmina linguis
    Constat, vt inde viris sit scola lata magis:
    Gallica lingua prius, Latina secunda, set ortus
    Lingua tui pocius Anglica complet opus.
    Ille quidem vanis Romanas obstupet aures,
    Ludit et in studiis musa pagana suis;
    Set tua Cristicolis fulget scriptura renatis,
    Quo tibi celicolis laud sit habenda locis.

    The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899-1902), vol. 4, p. 361. Macaulay suggests, vol. 4, p. 419, that the author might have been Ralph Strode—the same “philosophical Strode” to whom Chaucer directed the Troilus. This and all translations of Latin and French are my own; my goal throughout has been to suggest something of the flavor of Gower's metre and rhyme, and there are times when I have chosen to sacrifice strict literalness in this pursuit. I am most grateful to Claire Fanger, whose advice on both the translations and the argument of this essay have been, as usual, invaluable.

11. See Tim William Machan, “Thomas Berthelette and Gower's Confessio,” SAC 18 (1996): 149.

12. Thomas Berthelette, Jo Gower de confessione Amantis (London, 1532), aa.iii.

13. For versions of this kind of reading of the Vox, see the notes to Aers and Justice below, as well as the comments about current views of the vernacular above. Aers has also argued that the tensions, contradictions, and conflicting political and philosophical positions in the Vox and in the Confessio Amantis are not manifestations of a subtle and coherent moral / political vision; he describes Gower's methods in these works as “a paratactic mode which seals off units from each other and facilitates the propagation of conflicting positions whose conflicts are left unattended, unnoticed.” (David Aers, “Reflections on Gower as ‘Sapiens in Ethics and Politics’, in Re-Visioning Gower, ed. R. F. Yeager [Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998], p. 199. Aers is challenging such recent readings of Gower as those found in James Simpson, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus and John Gower's Confessio Amantis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); his title is of course also a reference to Alastair Minnis's “John Gower, Sapiens in Ethics and Politics,” MÆ 49:2 (1980): 207-29, and perhaps by implication as well “‘Moral Gower’ and Medieval Literary Theory,” in Gower's Confessio Amantis, pp. 50-78.

14. Judith Ferster, for example, remarks that Gower is bolder in his criticisms of the king in Latin than he is in English; see Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), pp. 111-12. There is a long tradition of discussing Gower in terms of the mirror-for-princes tradition, a genre whose roots are in Latin; George R. Coffman made the link in 1945, seeing the poet as a conservative moralist concerned to advise the ruler; see “John Gower in His Most Significant Role,” Elizabethan Studies and Other Essays in Honor of George F. Reynolds, University of Colorado Studies, Series B, II (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1945), pp. 52-61 and “John Gower, Mentor for Royalty: Richard II” PMLA 69.4 (1954): 953-64. See also Maria Wickert, Studien Zu John Gower (Cologne: Cologne University Press, 1953; translated by Robert J. Meindl as Studies in John Gower [Washington: University Press of America, 1981]); Russell H. Peck, Kingship and Common Profit in Gower's Confessio Amantis (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978; Elizabeth Porter, “Gower's Ethical Microcosm and Political Macrocosm,” in Gower's Confessio Amantis, pp. 134-62.

15. In “With Carmen's Help.”

16. The uncertainty is crucial here. Frank Grady has recently suggested that we have rather a lot invested in “the neat binary that counterposes a Gower directly involved with the court, first gratefully receiving the king's commission and then passionately rejecting Richard in the 1390s, with an amusedly detached and apolitical Chaucer, tactfully skirting and deflecting the urgent political issues of the day”; Grady is quite right to urge suspicion of the “neatness” of the contrast (and of our desire for it); “Gower's Boat, Richard's Barge, and the True Story of the Confessio Amantis: Text and Gloss,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44.1 (2002): 11.

17. The last six books contain an estates satire and related material, and these Gower evidently completed first, before the Revolt. For further discussion of the changes made to the form of the Vox, see below.

18. In his discussion of the first book of the Vox, Steven Justice argues that Gower, fashioning himself as a public poet, feared the English-speaking rabble's apparent usurpation of the ground of political contest; Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 209. The Latinate Gower sought to regain his ground by enclosing the English gruntings of the peasants in his own Latin verse, reasserting his own right to speak for the people—a people who are not the rebels. David Aers makes a similar argument: Gower's problem in the Vox, he says, is that the common voice needs to be rendered in Latin and freed from the mother tongue before it becomes possible to transmit safely what it has to say; “Vox populi and the Literature of 1381,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 440. See also Andrew Galloway, “Gower in his Most Learned Role and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381,” Mediaevalia 16 (1993 for 1990). I would point out that the people rehearse many of the same complaints about the various estates in Gower's Anglo-Norman Mirour de l'Omme, as well; for example, Gower prefaces his remarks about bishops in this way: “What's spread around in common's what / I say, and nothing else but that” [Sicomme l'en dist communement, / Ensi dis et noun autrement]; Mirour de l'Omme, Works, vol. 1, lines 19057-58. That is, this is not merely a contest between Latin and English. One could preserve the tenor of Aers's and Justice's arguments by recognizing that the “people” who speak French are not the peasants of the Revolt—they are the rulers and not the mob. It will become clear, however, that I see Gower exploring the dangers inherent in all tongues.

19. Tongues, literal and figurative, are a source of anxiety for Gower throughout his career. In the opening Latin verse to the Confessio Amantis, Gower manifests, in short space, many of the elements of his complex view of language:

    … Let me, in Hengist's tongue, in Brut's isle sung,
    With Carmen's help, tell forth my English verse.
    Far hence the boneless one whose speech grinds bones,
    Far hence be he who reads my verses ill.

    [Qua tamen Engisti lingua canit Insula Bruti
    Anglica Carmente metra iuuante loquar.
    Ossibus ergo carens que conterit ossa loquelis
    Absit, et interpres stet procul oro malus.]

    Text and translation from Siân Echard and Claire Fanger, The Latin Verses in John Gower's Confessio Amantis: An Annotated Translation (East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Books, 1991), p. 3. In these lines Gower both asserts the value and antiquity of the English language and nation—linked to both Saxons and Trojans—while also calling on the help of Carmen, originator of the Latin alphabet, for the writing of his work. The final couplet, with its image of the malevolent tongue of a critic, speaks to the anxiety over uncontrolled speech (vulgar or learned) which dominates the Vox as well.

20. Vox, Prol. 43-46:

    Si vox in fragili michi pectore firmior esset,
    Pluraque cum linguis pluribus ora forent,
    Hec tamen ad presens mala, que sunt temporis huius,
    Non michi possibile dicere cuncta foret.

    Gower is drawing on Ovid's Tristia and Ex Ponto. See the notes in Eric W. Stockton, The Major Latin Works of John Gower: The Voice of One Crying and The Tripartite Chronicle: An Annotated Translation into English With an Introductory Essay on the Author's Non-English Works (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), p. 343.

21. It occurs in the Vox as one of many unfortunate towers: “Turris diuisa linguis Babilonis ad instar” (I.xviii.1763); in the Confessio, it is part of the Prologue's account of the entry of division into the world, lines 1017-25:

    And over that thurgh Senne it com
    That Nembrot such emprise nom,
    Whan he the Tour Babel on heihte
    Let make, as he that wolde feihte
    Ayein the hihe goddes myht,
    Wherof divided anon ryht
    Was the langage in such entente,
    Ther wiste non what other mente,
    So that thei myhten noght procede.

    The Latin gloss to these lines reads: “Qualiter in edificacione turris Babel, quam in dei contemptum Nembrot erexit, lingua prius hebraica in varias linguas celica vindicta diuidebatur.” [How, when Nimrod was raising the tower of Babel, in contempt of God, the originary Hebrew language was divided, through heavenly vengeance, into various tongues]. The designation of Hebrew as “prius” suggests that all other languages since—and this would include Latin—are debased versions of a lost original.

22. Vox I.xvi.1505-16:

    Memet in insidiis semper locuturus habebam,
    Verbaque sum spectans pauca locutus humum:
    Tempora cum blandis absumpsi vanaque verbis,
    Dum mea sors cuiquam cogerat vlla loqui.
    Iram multociens frangit responsio mollis,
    Dulcibus ex verbis tunc fuit ipsa salus;
    Sepeque cum volui conatus verba proferre,
    Torpuerat gelido lingua retenta metu.
    Non meus vt querat noua sermo quosque fatigat,
    Obstitit auspiciis lingua retenta malis;
    Sepe meam mentem volui dixisse, set hosti
    Prodere me timui, linguaque tardat ibi.

    The Ovidian references are to the Fasti and Heroides (and from Tristia both before and after the cited lines; see Stockton, The Major Latin Works, p. 364). A similar, though less overwrought, picture of dumbness in the face of political calamity is repeated at the opening of the second book of the Cronica tripertita:

    O dolor in mente, set prothdolor ore loquente!
    Heuque mee penne, scribam quia facta gehenne!
    Obice singultu, lacrimis pallenteque vultu,
    Vix mea lingua* sonat hec que michi Cronica donat.

    (Cronica II:1-4)

    *Macaulay gives penna as the primary reading, but lingua occurs in three manuscripts, and seems to make more sense here.

    Oh anguish in mind—and yet more I find
    For my speaking mouth;
    And alas for my pen, for deeds of Gehenna
    Are what I must write.
    Choked off by sobs, and with face pale with tears,
    My tongue scarce can sound those things that are found
    In this Chronicle.

23. Vox I.xvi.1579-80: “Verbis planxissem, set viscera plena dolore / Obsistunt, nec eo tempore verba sinunt.”

24. Macaulay, vol. 4, p. xxxii. Macaulay's disapproval of Gower's practice includes a complete dismissal of the poet's Latin style: “Most of the good Latin lines for which Gower has got credit with critics are plagiarisms … the perpetual borrowing of isolated lines or couplets from Ovid, often without regard to their appropriateness or their original meaning, often makes the style, of the first book especially, nearly as bad as it can be” (vol. 4, p. xxxiii).

25. R. F. Yeager, “Did Gower Write Cento?” in John Gower: Recent Readings, ed. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, Mich.: The Medieval Institute, 1989), pp. 114-15.

26. Vox I.v.425-32:

    O tunc si quis eos audisset, quomodo mundus
    Vocibus attonitus hic et vbique fremit,
    Dicere tunc posset similes quod eis vlulatus
    Auribus audiuit nullus ab ante status.
    Cumque canum strepitus Sathane descendit in aures,
    Gaudet et infernus de nouitate soni,
    Cerberus ecce canis baratri custosque gehenne
    Prebuit auditum letus et inde furit.

27. Vox I.ix.681.

28. Vox I.xi.793-94: Balle propheta docet, quem spiritus ante malignus / Edocuit, que sua tunc fuit alta scola.

29. Vox I.xi.797-98: Sepius exclamant monstrorum vocibus altis, / Atque modis variis dant variare tonos.

30. Vox I.xi.799-802:

    Quidam sternutant asinorum more ferino,
    Mugitus quidam personuere boum;
    Quidam porcorum grunnitus horridiores
    Emittunt, que suo murmure terra tremit:

31. Vox I.xi.803-14:

    Frendet aper spumans, magnos facit atque tumultus,
    Et quiritat verres auget et ipse sonos;
    Latratusque ferus vrbis compresserat auras,
    Dumque canum discors vox furibunda volat.
    Vulpis egens vlulat, lupus et versutus in altum
    Conclamat, que suos conuocat ipse pares;
    Nec minus in sonitu concussit garrulus ancer
    Aures, que subito fossa dolore pauent:
    Bombizant vaspe, sonus est horrendus eorum,
    Nullus et examen dinumerare potest:
    Conclamant pariter hirsuti more leonis,
    Omneque fit peius quod fuit ante malum.

32. Vox I.xi.815-20:

    Ecce rudis clangor, sonus altus, fedaque rixa,
    Vox ita terribilis non fuit vlla prius:
    Murmure saxa sonant, sonitum que reuerberat aer,
    Responsumque soni vendicat Eccho sibi:
    Inde fragore grauis strepitus loca proxima terret,
    Quo timet euentum quisquis adire malum.

33. Justice, Writing and Rebellion, p. 213. The general critical opinion as to Gower's aesthetic success in shifting from English to Latin may be measured in part by Justice's argument that Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale is a devastating parody of Gower's desperate poetic crowings in passages such as these, pp. 214-18 (Ann W. Astell has also argued that Chaucer was responding directly to Gower; see “The Peasants' Revolt: Cock-Crow in Gower and Chaucer,” Essays in Medieval Studies 10 (1993): 53-64). In a recent article, however, Joanna Summers has argued that another poet appropriated the visio section of the Vox in order to bolster his own position, arguing that Thomas Usk's Testament of Love consciously alludes to the Vox in its pro-royalist version: “Usk therefore appropriates the discourse of censure from a work clear in its political stance and affiliations”; “Gower's Vox clamantis and Usk's Testament of Love,” MÆ 68.1 (1999): 58.

34. Aers, “Vox populi,” p. 442.

35. After introducing the graculus that is Tyler, the poetic voice remarks that “There's no cage can keep it locked at home [Quem retinere domi nulla catasta potest]”; Vox I.ix.682.

36. Anne Hudson, Lollards and Their Books (London: Hambledon Press, 1985), p. 158.

37. By, among others, Macaulay, Works, vol. 4, p. xxxi; Fisher, John Gower, p. 103, and most recently, by Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, pp. 287-88.

38. Vox II. Prol. 75-84:

    Non tamen ex propriis dicam que verba sequntur,
    Set velut instructus nuncius illa fero.
    Lectus vt est variis florum de germine fauus,
    Lectaque diuerso litore concha venit,
    Sic michi diuersa tribuerunt hoc opus ora,
    Et visus varii sunt michi causa libri:
    Doctorum veterum mea carmina fortificando
    Pluribus exemplis scripta fuisse reor.
    Vox clamantis erit nomenque voluminis huius,
    Quod sibi scripta noui verba doloris habet.

39. Vox VII.iv.233-34: “In vulgum clerus conuertitur, et modo vulgus / In forma cleri disputat acta dei.” The inappropriateness of disputation over the things of God is a concern of the time, as is suggested by Dame Studie's remarks in passus X of the B-version of Piers Plowman: “For alle that wilneth to wite the whyes of God almyghty, / I wolde his eighe were in his ers and his fynger after …”; William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Complete Edition of the B-Text, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London: Dent, 1978), X.124-25. However, while Dame Studie is concerned with the inappropriate application of learning among clerks, she does not seem to fear any social upheaval, instead praising the contrasting simplicity of the unlearned, and expressing more fear about the souls of learned clerks than of peasants: “lewed men and of litel knowyng, / Selden falle thei so foule and so fer in synne / As clerkes of Holy Kirke” X.469-71. I would like to thank an anonymous reader for suggesting the relevance of this passage.

40. Confessio Amantis, Prol. 346-55.

41. Gower's conservative political attitude towards the peasantry can easily lead modern readers to overlook the condemnation of other classes, including the privileged ones, and easy caricatures of his attitude can lead to an inevitable simplification of the project of the Vox. See, for example, David Aers's remarks on Gower on the ploughmen: “this is a persuasion to perceive the world in a certain way, to classify large numbers of fellow human beings in a particular way which in turn legitimates particular ways of treating them, of seeking to control and punish them. In the light of this outlook, the poet's response to the great rising of 1381 is predictable”; Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing 1360-1430 (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 32.

42. Vox V.xvi.883-94:

    Dum Susurro manet et vir linguosus in vrbe,
    Plebis in obprobrium scandala plura mouet;
    Nam linguosus homo reliquos velut altera pestis
    Ledit, et vt turbo sepe repente nocet.
    Set quia lingua mala mundo scelus omne ministrat,
    Que sibi sunt vires dicere tendo graues.
    Lingua mouet lites, lis prelia, prelia plebem,
    Plebs gladios, gladii scismata, scisma necem;
    Extirpat regnis, dat flammis, depopulatur
    Lingua duces, lingua predia, lingua domos:
    Lingua maritorum nexus dissoluet, et vnum
    Quod deus instituit, efficit esse duo.

43. Vox III.xv.1267-72:

    Vox populi cum voce dei concordat, vt ipsa
    In rebus dubiis sit metuenda magis:
    Hec ego que dicam dictum commune docebat,
    Nec mea verba sibi quid nouitatis habent.
    In cathedram Moysi nunc ascendunt Pharisei,
    Et scribe scribunt dogma, nec illud agunt.

44. Aers, “Vox populi,” p. 440. The proverb Vox populi, vox dei is also referred to in the Mirour de l'Omme 12725-26: “Au vois commune est acordant / La vois de dieu …” Ferster notes Gower's apparently shifting attitudes toward the voice of the people in Fictions of Advice, pp. 130-32; her concern is with contemporary ideas about royal government, rather than with the issues of poetic language that I am discussing here.

45. Vox IV.xxii.1065-80:

    Sunt etenim multi tales qui verba colorant,
    Qui pascunt aures, aurea verba sonant,
    Verbis frondescunt, set non est fructus in actu,
    Simplicium mentes dulce loquendo mouent:
    Set templum domini tales excludit, abhorret
    Verborum phaleras, verba polita fugit.
    Scripta poetarum, que sermo pictus inaurat,
    Aurea dicuntur lingua, set illa caue:
    Est simplex verbum fidei bonus vnde meretur,
    Set duplex animo predicat absque deo.
    Despicit eloquia deus omnia, quando polita
    Tecta sub eloquii melle venena fouent:
    Qui bona verba serit, agit et male, turpiter errat,
    Nam post verba solet accio sancta sequi.
    Quod magis alta scola colit, hii sermone polito
    Scandala subtili picta colore serunt.

    Gower is borrowing again here, this time drawing various lines from Peter Riga's Aurora; see Stockton, The Major Latin Works, p. 426.

46. It is a rather pleasing irony that this condemnation of poetic speech is made up of bits and pieces of someone else's poetry.

47. Mirour, lines 14665-76:

    Cil q'ad science du clergie,
    Ne falt point qu'il se glorifie
    En beal parole noncier,
    Ainçois covient qu'il sache et die
    Dont soy et autres edefie
    Au bien de l'alme; et ce trover
    De saint Jerom bon essampler
    Porrons, qant il estudier
    Voloit en la philosophie
    Du Tulle pour le beau parler;
    Mais dieus l'en fesoit chastier,
    Pour ce que vain fuist sa clergie.

48. Mirour, lines 505-12:

    Mais cil qui lors ust bien oï
    Temptacioun come il blandi
    Par la douçour de sa parole,
    Il porroit dire bien de fi
    Que ja n'oïst puisqu'il nasqui
    Un vantparlour de tiele escole:
    Car plus fuist doulce sa parole
    Que n'estoit harpe ne citole.

49. For example, Temptation tells “many delightful stories [mainte delitable geste]” (line 981) at the banquet celebrating the marriage of the World to the seven daughters of Sin, and the lengthy condemnation of the clergy and of lawyers has frequent recourse to reproving their manipulation of their privileged speech.

50. Confessio VII.1545-57.

51. Confessio VII, before line 1507 “Compositi pulcra sermonis verba placere / Principio poterunt, veraque fine placent”; Echard and Fanger, p. 79.

52. Compare, for example, Chaucer's House of Fame, with its progression from the retelling of the Aeneid at the outset, to the vision of the House of Rumour at the end, where the dreamer sees “fals and soth compouned” and “shipmen and pilgrimes, / With scrippes bret-ful of lesinges, / Entremedled with tydynges”; Geoffrey Chaucer, The House of Fame, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), III.2108, 2122-24; I am grateful to an anonymous reader for pointing to this comparison. The appeal in the proem to Book II to “every maner man / That Englissh understonde kan” (II.509-10), along with the Latinate appeals and references throughout the poem, suggest a landscape of concerns similar to those I am exploring in Gower's Latin.

53. Vox, Prol., lines 53-54: “Adde recollectis seriem, mea musa, Latinis, / Daque magistra tuo congrua verba libro.”

54. Confessio, Prol., lines 52-53.

55. Confessio, Prol., before line 499:

    Vulgaris populus regali lege subactus
    Dum iacet, vt mitis agna subibit onus.
    Si caput extollat et lex sua frena relaxet,
    Vt sibi velle iubet, Tigridis instar habet.
    Ignis, aqua dominans duo sunt pietate carentes,
    Ira tamen plebis est violenta magis.

    (Echard and Fanger, p. 11)

56. Confessio, Prol., lines 499-506. Gower is repeating metaphors he used first in the Mirour; cf. lines 26497-503; cf. also Vox V, lines 991-92.

57. For a detailed discussion of Anglo-French in fourteenth-century England, see W. Rothwell, “The Trilingual England of Geoffrey Chaucer,” SAC 16 (1994): especially 56-66. In this study of medieval English records, Rothwell concludes that “Two languages such as Anglo-French and Middle English, being used in one stratum of society on a daily basis by generations of scribes, officials, and scholars, simply cannot be kept apart; the idea that such people could have in their minds neat and tidy pigeonholes for each language is a product of modern, not medieval, thinking,” 66. Latin and English are similarly often combined; Linda Ehrsam Voigts concluded her presidential address on the relationship between Latin and vernacular in medieval English scientific and medical manuscripts by remarking that “We must not bring modern assumptions about the integrity of monolingual texts to these late-fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English writings. If we do, we will fail to understand the bilingual culture that produced nearly half of the scientific and medical manuscripts that survive from this period, and we will overlook the variety of ways in which this bilingual culture exploited the linguistic resources of two languages”; “What's the Word? Bilingualism in Late-Medieval England,” Speculum 71.4 (1996): 823.

58. Vox II.ix.467-74:

    Adde fidem, nam vera fides, quod non videt, audit,
    Credit, sperat, et hec est via, vita, salus.
    Argumenta fides dat rerum que neque sciri
    Nec possunt mente nec racione capi:
    Vera fides quicquid petit impetrat, omne meretur,
    Quicquid possibile creditur ipsa potest.
    Lingua silet, non os loquitur, mens deficit, auris
    Non audit, nichil est hic nisi sola fides.

    For the biblical borrowings, see Stockton, The Major Latin Works, p. 383.

59. The eyes and ears are first on Genius's list, in Book I of the Confessio, as a potential source of sin and deception: Confessio I, before line 289:

    Visus et auditus fragilis sunt ostia mentis,
    Que viciosa manus claudere nulla potest.
    Est ibi larga via, graditur qua cordis ad antrum
    Hostis, et ingrediens fossa talenta rapit.

    The doors of fragile mind, the eye and ear,
    So faulty are, no hand may shut them up.
    That way is broad by which the foeman goes
    Into the heart's cave, grabs the buried gold.

    (Echard and Fanger, p. 19)

60. Confessio VIII.2904.

61. Vox VII.ix.751-52: “Nil sibi quod genera linguarum nouerat olim / Confert, qui muto mortuus ore silet.”

62. In Macaulay, vol. 4, p. 365:

    Quicquid homo scribat, finem natura ministrat,
    Que velut vmbra fugit, nec fugiendo redit;
    Illa michi finem posuit, quo scribere quicquam
    Vlterius nequio, sum quia cecus ego.
    Posse meum transit, quamuis michi velle remansit;
    Amplius vt scribat hoc michi posse negat.

63. Confessio, Prol. 1-3: “Of hem that writen ous tofore / The bokes duelle, and we therfore / Ben tawht of that was write tho”; VIII.2925-27: “Bot go ther vertu moral duelleth, / Wher ben thi bokes, as men telleth, / Whiche of long time thou hast write.”