<i>John Gower’s Rhetoric: Classical Authority, Biblical Ethos, and Renaissance Receptions</i>, by Georgiana Donavin

Unlike his more famous contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343–1400), who often mentions rhetoric only to disavow or parody it, John Gower (1330–1408) directly champions the value of rhetoric in his most famous work, the Confessio Amantis, and engages with it deeply and explicitly across the works he wrote in his four-decade career, including three compendious poetic works of many thousands of lines—the Old French Mirour de l’Omme, the Latin Vox Clamantis, and the Middle English Confessio Amantis—as well as shorter Latin and Old French lyrics and occasional poems. Georgiana Donavin’s ambitious study takes on the entirety of Gower’s career through the lens of his rhetorical theory and practice.Donavin’s task is made more complex by the evolving conceptions of and uses of rhetoric in the late fourteenth century. The humanistic revival of Aristotle, Quintilian, and Cicero’s revised rhetorical corpora had taken full root in Italy but was only slowly penetrating northwestern Europe. Gower’s use of rhetoric demonstrates his proficiency in the well-entrenched medieval prescriptive technical tradition deriving from Cicero’s De inventione and the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium as much as his interest in the more theoretical Aristotelian thought in the Rhetoric, recovered in the translation projects of the thirteenth century and disseminated in works like Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum. Donavin’s study attempts to reassess the intellectual heft of Gower’s rhetoric with a comprehensive consideration of his entire oeuvre across three languages. This project is informed by the outpouring of Gower scholarship in the twenty-first century as well as by the expansion of medieval rhetorical history in that same period by authors like Rita Copeland (2021) and Marjorie Curry Woods (2010), whose work has greatly improved the accuracy, if not the scope, of twentieth-century landmark histories of rhetoric such as those by George Kennedy (1980/1999) and James Murphy (1974).John Gower’s Rhetoric falls neatly into two halves: chapters 1–3 explore Gower’s explicit engagement with rhetoric on an ethical and theoretical basis, while chapters 4–6 turn to what Donavin calls rhetorical exploration and to Gower’s engagement with distinctively medieval forms. The concluding “coda” examines the subsequent use of Gower as a source and authority on rhetoric both in manuscript annotations and in his reception among early modern English poets, particularly Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare.Donavin argues for the centrality of rhetoric to Gower’s thought and poetry; his political self-positioning when addressing monarchs, courtiers, or “the people” makes extensive use of Ciceronian “instruments of proof” (21). At the same time, Gower shows an Aristotelian approach to rhetoric as a “psychology of discourse” and, as such, an instrument for marshaling emotions to “operate upon the human will to induce a motion toward reason and right belief” (22). Chapter 1 discusses Gower’s explicit views on the value and proper orientation of rhetoric in relation to the classical inheritance. Here, Gower breaks with mainstream medieval thought in elevating rhetoric above logic (following Brunetto Latini and Giles of Rome) (32–39)—rhetoric belongs to the realm of belief, links the will with reason, and invests language with a spiritual power that is alchemical and incarnational (51–55). At the same time, he rehearses an Augustinian tradition of associating plain style with masculinity and honesty. In linking the “plain style” with the mystical power of the “W/word,” Donavin argues, he plots a “middle way” “between magical language and scientific inquiry, between Catholic exegesis on the liberal arts and secular approaches to public oratory, between the plainest discourse and the reiterative figures of speech that loop audiences back to the truth” (77). Though he does not uniformly use a plain style, Gower favors it for direct instruction explicitly in the lecture on rhetoric in book 7 of the Confessio Amantis, a mirror for princes modeled on the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum (60). In his explicit discussions of rhetoric, Donavin argues, he consistently links “sweetness”—a style that pleases with its figures and ornaments—with the name “Tullius” and “directness”—honesty, “virile” rigor, and plain style—with the name “Cicero” (66–67, 76).In chapters 2 and 3, Donavin explores Gower’s use of biblical personae in developing his voice and moral authority. Chapter 2 explores the deployment of a “Johannine ethos” (80), a combination of the modus praedicandi of John the Baptist and the modus prophetarum of John the Evangelist (conflated in the Middle Ages with John of Patmos). In this way, by connecting rhetoric with preaching and prophecy, he develops a “complex and multi-layered biblical ethos” designed to call king and kingdom to moral correction (79–81). In this chapter, Donavin also mines the connections between satire and rhetoric, between topical reference and timeless moral instruction, between Ovid and the Bible, as she takes the reader through repeated motifs and the construction of Gower’s voice across major works in different languages. Here, she develops again the importance of repetition as one of Gower’s master tropes and incest as both a target of his opprobrium and a figure for other kinds of sin and vice.Chapter 3 develops the unifying ideas of prophetic authority, moral persuasion, and sexual purity in a discussion of what Donavin, adapting a phrase from the late Robin Hass Birky (2004), calls “Marian rhetoric” (143–44). For Gower, Mary represents a rhetorical ideal of truth and modesty, embodying the perfect plain style; his multilingual poetics allows him to synthesize two associations with the pleine: unadorned (and thus clean, direct, and honest) but also full (from the Latin plenus), as the vessel filled with the Word of God (145). Donavin expertly connects Gower’s Marian rhetoric not only with medieval rhetoric handbooks but also with images of Mary that emphasize her rhetorical connections found in visual art and liturgical texts. These represent her as the vessel for the incarnation of the Word, as an advocate for sinners in the court of heaven, and as a patroness of the liberal arts—the reproductions of these visual images contribute to the value of this book (165). In the Confession Amantis, the power of Marian rhetoric is demonstrated by Peronelle and Thaise, women whose speeches represent ideals of humility and chastity and illustrate techniques of repetition and simplicity; thus, they demonstrate the capacity of Marian rhetoric to move listeners emotionally and rationally, to resolve conflicts, and to heal relationships (167).Beginning with chapter 4, Donavin shifts focus from an examination of theory and ethos to “rhetorical experimentation” (191). Chapter 4 brings a “sustained inquiry into Gower’s deep fascination with letters as a composition tool” to modes of medieval textuality prominent in Gower’s corpus: Ovid’s Heroides (a staple of elementary education), legal training, and didactic verse on the language arts like those of Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Chapter 5 elaborates this work with an examination of the political and artistic significance of the Trentham Manuscript, a collection that brought together for Henry IV’s ascension Gower’s own experimentation with epistolary forms with musical and lyrical French traditions and the formal obligations of the coronation liturgy. Chapter 6 turns to Gower’s rhetorical afterlife in two places: first, glosses and commentaries on manuscripts of his work and, second, his influence on Jonson and Shakespeare and on literary primers from the Renaissance that seem to value his use of repetition both as a literary device and as a method of moral instruction.This is not a narrow book with one tenaciously belabored idea; it is a multifaceted and exploratory work and in this way reflects the nature of the multilingual, multigenre-spanning author in the Middle Ages. The through line is afforded by the career of Gower himself. Few works have treated every part of the poet’s oeuvre in such depth. This study demonstrates a vigorous interdisciplinarity, combining deep rhetorical learning with a facility in art history, musicology, and fine-grained literary analysis. John Gower’s Rhetoric makes use of both innovative criticism and traditional scholarship. Donavin’s discussion of blindness and prophecy in chapter 2 is informed by work on impairment as figuration in disability studies, and discussions of “hermaphroditic bodies” in chapter 3 are informed by cutting-edge medieval scholarship about sexually marginalized and transgender people. At the same time, Donavin makes new contributions to more traditional literary history, connecting Gower to Jonson, Shakespeare, John Milton, and other traditionally canonical English authors in novel ways.Primarily a work of literary scholarship, John Gower’s Rhetoric will be of the highest value to Middle English scholars interested in Gower. Medievalists and historians of postclassical rhetoric alike will profit from its treatment of Gower's extensive and self-reflective integration of rhetoric as both poetic method and subject. At a time when language training in humanistic study is being attenuated by institutional disinvestment, John Gower’s Rhetoric testifies to the critical depth and scholarly breadth that linguistic expertise enables. In her preface, Donavin describes this book as the product of several decades of teaching, learning, writing, and thinking; this magisterial achievement demonstrates the scholarly riches that can be found in slow scholarship.