, reader and copyist. Chaucer’s contemporary poets certainly belong to the earliest documented audience of his works, and there have been new developments in this field, too. The trilingual poet John Gower (d. 1408), a leading English writer, appears to
‘And gret wel Chaucer whan ye mete’
Chaucer’s Earliest Readers, Addressees and Audiences
Sebastian Sobecki
Unhap, Misadventure, Infortune
Chaucer’s Vocabulary of Mischance
Helen Cooper
him, and invents a handful more as well, and this wide vocabulary for random events is deployed with marked care and subtlety. Of other contemporary Middle English poets, only John Gower shows a comparable habit of referring to Fortune, but he rarely
In Appreciation of Metrical Abnormality
Headless Lines and Initial Inversion in Chaucer
Ad Putter
so did Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower. None of the octosyllabic verses in Gower’s Confessio Amantis is truncated, 4 and I have also found no headless lines in the 375 pentameter lines of Gower’s poem ‘In Praise of Peace’. 5 Trochaic inversion
Blanche, Two Chaucers and the Stanley Family
Rethinking the Reception of The Book of the Duchess
Simon Meecham-Jones
secured the canon of his major works and their attachment to himself with a care only less remarkable for being less obtrusive than that of his friend John Gower, who went to the length of adding a Latin colophon at the end of his Confessio Amantis in
‘Tu Numeris Elementa Ligas’
The Consolation of Nature’s Numbers in Parlement of Foulys
C.W.R.D. Moseley
Vulgari Eloquentia and in the Convivio. 22 John Gower uses number patterns he expected his readers to know. 23 The Gawain-poet is a master of patterned form. 24 Form, pattern, number and proportion reveal serious meaning, 25 and the signals of the
String Theory and ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’
Where Is Constancy?
William A. Quinn
‘lecherous’ early career (X, 1086)? Is Chaucer rebuking John Gower for inclusion of the story of Canacee in The Confessio Amantis (only to have the Squire begin this scandalous tale)? 9 Is the Man of Law’s and/or Chaucer’s confusion of the (loser magpies
The Pardoner’s Passing and How It Matters
Gender, Relics and Speech Acts
Alex da Costa
edn (New York: Routledge, 1990; repr. 2007), vii–xxxvi, here xxiii. 18 Ibid., xxiv. 19 All line references are to The English Works of John Gower , ed. G. Macaulay (Oxford, 1900). 20 Gilte Legende: Vol. I , Early English Text Society, O.S. 327, ed