John Gower's Rhetoric: Classical Authority, Biblical Ethos, and Renaissance Receptions

When reading a single-author monograph, it is increasingly rare these days to come away with a clear picture of the writer under discussion. This is not necessarily a bad thing—many valuable and even revelatory moments can happen in such books. Questions can be asked, new contexts can be proposed, new theories applied. But we have been so trained to unpack, to excavate, and to read deeply that it is not until coming to a book like John Gower's Rhetoric that one realizes how all these efforts seldom give us a coherent sense of the author being discussed. Now, some readers might say this is a fundamentally good thing, and that to offer a unified idea of the subject of a work is to impose streamlining structure instead of embracing complexity. To these critics, I would offer Georgiana Donavin's exemplary work as to how satisfying and how illuminating such an approach can be. This is a book written for Gowerians by a prime scholar in the field, one who is eminently well versed in criticism spanning the entire range of Gower's corpus. Rather than setting up one work (or one language) as her primary focus, Donavin traverses all three major poems—the Confessio, the Mirour, the Vox—with enviable ease and equal attention. In fact, the spectacular reading of the Mirour, one of the best currently available, makes this book an instant necessity on its merits alone. Nor does Donavin stint on the “minor” texts. She addresses a wide range of sources and analogues for rhetorical study and brings together disparate readings from manuscripts and linguistic analysis. Readers may find themselves in the position of wondering simply how she can manage it all. And manage it she does, with confidence and clear-eyed focus. It is a remarkable feat.In part this is possible because she knows precisely what she wants to say. The picture she gives of Gower, across an introduction and seven chapters, is of an author who is masterful in his approach to language: masterful in that his rhetorical and poetic style work together to establish a clear argument about how language can and should signify in the world, and masterful in that he controls this effect at all times and in all languages. This is not a Gower who is hesitant or uncertain, but one who knows what he is doing on the level of individual episodes in his poems as well as in their larger structure and purpose. He is argumentative, assertive, and skillful—and often unexpected, which adds to the pleasure of Donavin's reading. Moreover, even though Donavin discusses differences between Gower's three major works, there is a definite sense of cohesion throughout his career. Circumstances around his writing might change dramatically, but his focus and aims do not. Even in the Confessio, which Donavin sees as something of a cautionary tale about language use and its ends, Gower nevertheless moves through the same waters as his earlier poems. The result is a sweeping narrative, accomplished through a series of new and genuinely exciting frameworks, that allows readers (or at least this reader) to come away from the monograph with the dizzying sense of seeing an author they think they know well in an entirely new way.The freshness of this picture comes from two perspectives Donavin has discussed elsewhere in her scholarship, and which take center stage here: 1) Gower as embodying a writerly persona perched equally between two other Johns: John the Baptist and John the Evangelist; and 2) his focus on a Marian rhetorical practice that is deeply feminine and which explains a great deal about his preoccupations, particularly with incest, in his work. These are preceded by a helpful introduction providing an amazingly complete bibliography as to the state of Gower Studies, and a chapter examining the rhetorical contexts (Augustinian, Aristotelian, Ciceronian) informing Gower's literary contexts. In these, Donavin describes how the idea of the word—or, more appropriately, the Word—can tend toward either incarnate truth of the divine or mystification and deceit. Moreover, her argument makes a clear case for the valuable role of the passions within rhetoric, which is something Gower Studies tends to shy away from more than it should. The real fireworks come in her second and third chapters, the first on the Johannine persona and the second on Marian rhetoric. Each presents a compelling lens through which to see Gower's works, and each favors devotional contexts over the more familiar political arguments and debates. This is a turn we are starting to see glimmers of elsewhere in Gower Studies, but this book is unswerving in (re)establishing devotional discourses as central to Gower's approach.The chapter on Gower's connection to the two Biblical figures who share his name divides them into two complementary structures: the first, embodied in the Baptist, focuses on this John as a figure associated with preaching and a sermon form that engages the affect of shame in its listeners. Specifically, it is in John the Baptist that Donavin locates the initial seeds of Gower's overt use of incest narratives to signify the sin of turning away from the promise of holy union with God. Gower sees this as a widespread problem, and he embodies it in the connections the Baptist shares with the Holy Family though Elizabeth's connection with the Virgin. The Virgin exemplifies a mystical union with the divine and thereby exemplifies the aim of transcending one's earthly condition to become a vessel for the Incarnate Word. The Baptist's association with her extends this quality into something that can be transmitted through preaching (rather than conceiving) divine truth, and for Donavin, John's sermonizing voice is threaded throughout the Mirour in particular. She offers a show-stopping reading of passages that align Gower's critique of sin with the Baptist's preaching, and she makes an extremely strong case for seeing incest, which might otherwise be a fairly specific sexual vice, as a wider touchstone for the perils faced when one is lured back into the stew of human concerns rather than being elevated through humility and virtue into something greater. (This has implications for how we read the Mirour but also the Apollonius narrative that dominates Book 8 of the Confessio as well, as she quite rightly demonstrates.) Donavin then turns her attention from the Baptist to the Evangelist, who becomes totemic for the insights of revelatory prophecy and the dread of an apocalyptic future. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this takes her into the territory of the Vox, and she dwells on how that poem lingers over the question of sight, as eyes both see into the (terrifying) distance and weep for the succor of baptismal comfort. This attention to evangelizing vision carries even more weight when placed alongside Gower's laments for his failing eyesight. Balanced in this way between heaven and earth, Gower's persona offers a blend of these two masculine voices and embodies the poetic aims of the poems within the intersection of their influence.This masculine approach is then modified almost immediately, as the next chapter turns to the Virgin and her special embodiment of the divine Word. Mary becomes another model of rhetorical excellence, whose feminine voice effects more meaningful change than either of the Johns who surround her. In a particularly insightful reading, Donavin discusses how John of Garland turns to the plenitude of Mary as something that is both full (the Latin plenus) but also direct (the Middle English plein), drawing on the pun to describe the rhetorical power of language that is not “naked” or simple, but rather replete and Incarnational (p. 146). This gives us a useful purchase on Gower's famous “middle way” that allows Donavin to contrast the simple and fruitful language of Mary with how the characterization of Sin in the Mirour multiplies with Death in a quagmire of lust and deceit, dooming mankind. Her analysis carefully and clearly connects sinful speech with allegorized sin and Marian rhetoric with allegorical virtue. The implications are drawn out in readings of the “Tale of the Three Questions” and of Thaise in the “Tale of Apollonius,” both of which center feminine speech as a model of language carrying the possibility of transcendent, divine embodiment that spreads outward, rhetorically, from the speaker. Here, as in the preceding chapter, Donavin offers an angle on these texts that feels genuinely new and evocative, and there are many places scholars will find to build on what she offers. One gets the sense of a re-orientation within these poems that cries out (so to speak) for additional attention.The intersection of these two claims—the way Gower's approach to language negotiates between the masculine Johannine and feminine Marian rhetoric —gives the book its initial shape, depicting a decisive poet very much in command of what his work can and should do. It is the strength of this unifying sense of purpose that makes the second half of the book feel slightly disconnected from the first. The later chapters argue that Gower's language is heavily inflected by his use of repetition, primarily on a rhetorical level with figures like anaphora, scisis onotomon, and polysyndeton. (Donavin does not wade into the debates around Gower's well-acknowledged tendency for quotation and authorial revoicing. It would have been nice to see her perspective on this question.) These arguments come out most in a coda discussing how Early Modern authors and manuscript readers associated Gower with this repetitive quality in particular, but seeds are sown earlier as well. Donavin offers a reading of a particular copy of the Confessio (Newberry MS 35.5) and of Gower's stage presence in Pericles, arguing that for later readers, Gower “embodies repetitio” (p. 390). The strongest connection to the earlier chapters comes in how she sees Gower reclaiming repetition from magical incantations and deception, turning it instead into rhetorical virtue, and in how later readers emphasized this in their handling of his material pages and in the staged version of his authorial voice. Some of the arguments here are less convincing than they could be. Claims that the scribe of the Newberry manuscript used darker ink to highlight moments of rhetorical repetition are difficult to see from the images provided, and it is perhaps equally as possible that this represents either a pen change or simply an unsteady ink flow (p. 357). Other passages in the manuscript seem to also lighten and darken in online images, but in moments where repetition isn't present. Similarly, readers might find alternative arguments about the presence of sounded (or muted) musicality in the Trentham manuscript, particularly as we think about the larger picture of Gower's tendency to borrow both lines and forms from other sources. A chapter on Mary's ability to form a linguistic hortus conclusus offers Donavin an opportunity to engage with both the Traitié and the Cinkante Balades—a welcome addition to the book—and also allows her to make a compelling argument for how Venus in the Confessio and Fortune in the Mirour become distracting and sinful alternatives to the miraculous enclosure offered by Marian rhetoric. But a chapter on epistolary forms feels like more of a break than it could be, perhaps because this is the material where readers might expect a stronger theorization of political discourses. The ties to the exciting devotional framing are less evident here.The book itself is a mammoth effort. Its 393 pages offer new translations of poems, provide readings of scribal culture and textual transmission, respond with clarity and generosity to an astounding array of work in the field (she really has read everything, and almost everything finds a place in her arguments), and present new approaches to Gower's work that are revelations in themselves. To this end, it is striking that many of the qualities Donavin sees in Gower are those she herself embodies. This book feels both plenus and plein, replete and complete. Likewise, the Gower that emerges is a poet who contains multitudes in that he unifies his concerns into a singular vision of the nature of virtuous language. And this is language he attempts to embody—and in Donavin's reading very much succeeds at embodying—to its fullest extent. In the end, I think we are left with two things: first, that readers’ responses to this book will depend largely upon how much they enjoy meeting the masterful Gower Donavin presents in it, and second, how powerful it can be when a scholar writes of something she herself displays so beautifully.