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Foreword, Georgiana Donavin, Eve Salisbury

Accessus

Foreword for Accessus volume 6, issue 1.

Gower As Data: Exploring The Application Of Machine Learning To Gower’S Middle English Corpus, Kara L. Mcshane, Alvin Grissom Ii

Accessus

Distant reading, a digital humanities method in wide use, involves processing and analyzing a large amount of text through computer programs. In treating texts as data, these methods can highlight trends in diction, themes, and linguistic patterns that individual readers may miss or critical traditions may obscure. Though several scholars have undertaken projects using topic models and text mining on Middle English texts, the nonstandard orthography of Middle English makes this process more challenging than for our counterparts in later literature.

This collaborative project uses Gower’s Confessio Amantis as a small, fixed corpus for analysis. We employ natural language processing …

Dark Money: Gower, Echo, And 'Blinde Avarice', Craig E. Bertolet

Accessus

Gower’s poetic works show a consistent concern with the darkness and deceit associated with Avarice, the sin mostly associated with commercial transactions. In the Confessio, he calls Avarice blind. This blindness seems to work both ways. Avarice blinds humans to their humanity because it causes them to cheat and steal from others. Avarice also blinds the victims of the greedy since the greedy resort to deception in order to gain what they want. In the Confessio, Genius tells the tale of Echo as an example of the practices that he calls usury but who works as an amalgam …

Foreword, Georgiana Donavin, Eve Salisbury

Accessus

This is the Foreword to Accessus 5.1

Foreword, Georgiana Donavin, Eve Salisbury

Accessus

This foreword by Georgiana Donavin and Eve Salisbury introduces Accessus volume 3, issue 2 to readers of the journal.

Foreword, Georgiana Donavin, Eve Salisbury

Accessus

In this Foreword, the editors summarize the articles published in Accessus 3.1 and offer conclusions about their importance for Gower Studies and contemporary medical practice.

Foreword, Georgiana Donavin, Eve Salisbury

Accessus

Co-editors Georgiana Donavin and Eve Salisbury welcome readers to Accessus 2.2.

“For It Acordeth Noght To Kinde”: Remediating Gower’S Confessio Amantis In Machinima, Sarah L. Higley

Accessus

Visual adaptation of a medieval text, as tempting as it is in film of any kind, is never an easy conversion, and all the more so if the original is as formally structured as John Gower’s Confessio Amantis. This essay examines the philosophy and difficulties of making a “medieval motion picture” (animated and narrated by the author) reflect the message of three of Gower’s tales (“The Travelers and the Angel,” “Canace and Machaire,” “Florent”) as well as the multimedia properties of the manuscripts that house them, their illuminations beckoning us into colorful virtual worlds. In referencing theories of adaptation, …

Preface, Georgiana Donavin, Eve Salisbury

Accessus

Co-editors Georgiana Donavin and Eve Salisbury are delighted to feature the work of medievalist and machinimatographer Sarah L. Higley in this issue of Accessus. In a machinima production that debuted during the Third International Congress of the John Gower Society at the University of Rochester (30 June through 3 July, 2014), Higley refashions three tales from the Confessio Amantis for her film The Lover's Confession. In this issue of Accessus, we present the film and Higley's commentary on the intersections between her creative work with machinima and scholarly issues surrounding "The Tale of the Travelers and the …

Preface, Georgiana Donavin, Eve Salisbury

Accessus

Co-editors Georgiana Donavin and Eve Salisbury thank the readers of Accessus for an enthusiastic reception of the first issue and summarize the contents of this second issue. The second issue showcases opportunities inherent in online publishing, such as the ability to produce extended commentaries and offer video streams. Robert J. Meindl's "Semper Venalis: Gower's Avaricious Lawyers" and Linda Marie Zaerr's "How the Axe Falls: A Retrospective on Thirty-five Years of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Performance," respectively, realize these possibilities in online publishing while adding substantially and insightfully to our knowledge of important fourteenth-century poems from England.

Blind Advocacy: Blind Readers, Disability Theory, And Accessing John Gower, Jonathan Hsy

Accessus

Toward the end of his life, medieval poet John Gower (d. 1408) composed Latin poetry about his own progressive blindness, and later nineteenth-century Blind readers appropriated Gower’s work as part of a platform to advocate for changed perceptions and opportunities for the blind and other people with disabilities. In this essay, I approach nineteenth-century narrative compilations of blind lives (which include Gower’s) as transformative acts of literary historiography. These compilers not only appropriate the medieval blind poet to advance their own social and political ends, but they also create a new disability-centered approach to the entire Western artistic tradition. I …

Introduction, Georgiana Donavin, Eve Salisbury

Accessus

This Introduction by co-editors Georgiana Donavin and Eve Salisbury celebrates the publication of the first issue of Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media, a biannual publication of The Gower Project. The Introduction provides a short history of The Gower Project and explains the scope of Accessus: an e-journal dedicated to articles composed in electronic formats on Western European literature written before 1660. This first issue is dedicated to scholarship on the fourteenth-century English poet John Gower, who inspired the Project and this journal. For a decade The Gower Project has supported exciting new interpretations of …