European Languages and Societies Commons^™

Gower In Exile, Joel Fredell

Accessus

The articles in Hope and Healing reveal John Gower's interest in an inclusive approach to human suffering, but also a clear-eyed look at its suffering. The experience of Amans in the Confessio Amantis, exiled from the love court of Venus, represents a powerful vision of love-agony as a central form of human suffering, not a cliche of love poetry.

The Price We Pay For Envy: A Political And Social “Maladie”, Will Rogers

Accessus

"The Travelers and the Angel" is a curious exemplum: depicting envy as almost an emotion, it depicts the seemingly hopeless worsening of the world, as the envious care more for others' pain than their own happiness. While the exemplum's moral is undoubtedly true, even for 21st century readers, we might address how Gower's particular framing of envy doesn't account for envy's potential to drive positive change.

The Unfinished Hope Of Gower's Transgender Children, Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski

Accessus

This article examines two of Gower's tales from the Confessio Amantis that deal with trans youths: Iphis and Narcissus. Considering these two tales together, I ask the question: why does one story end with hopeful futurity for the trans masculine youth and the other end with death and the absence of futurity for the trans feminine youth. Connecting these medieval texts to premodern contexts and then with modern contexts, I map the trajectory of centuries long problems facing trans youths. In the end, I conclude that trans youth possess a healthier and more stable future when they receive trans affirming …

Healing, Accountability, And Community In Gower’S Confessio Amantis, Kara L. Mcshane

Accessus

This piece focuses on the Tale of Lucrece and the Tale of Mundus and Paulina in John Gower's Confessio Amantis. I examine how these two quite distinct narratives of sexual assault emphasize key themes in community response to trauma. In these two tales, Gower emphasizes the extent to which interpersonal violence is also social violence; further, community demands for accountability are essential to social healing in both cases. These two models demonstrate the extent to which contemporary society, too, struggles to hold authority accountable and address social wrongs.

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 …

Standing In The Dark: Sloth And Stability, Paralysis And Perseverance In Book Iv Of The Confessio Amantis, Andrea Schutz

Accessus

In Book IV of the Confessio, things happen in the dark – the dark of night, of dreams, of despair, of secrecy, of treachery, of death. The medieval sin of accidia sets the pace for this beautifully constructed book, whose tales link and cross, as in a dance. Dido, Phyllis, the bad, the forgetful, and the obsessive lovers swing like slowing pendulums back to their starting points, and stop still. On the whole, their dance with Amans is a slow and stately pavane of the dead and desperate. This is Gower’s darkest book, though not the most bloody: Sloth is …

Narcissus In Queer Time, Lacey M. Wolfer

Accessus

Queer temporality has been studied in relation to the Middle Ages as a means of questioning the prevailing historiography for other modes of connection to the past, such as embodied or affective. Conversely, the other branch of queer temporality has been primarily interested in how queer lifestyles today disrupt the heteronormative plan laid out by society. Joining these modes, Gower’s revision of Narcissus questions our notions of historiography through showing us an example of a queer, transgender character and his struggles with heteronormative expectations—demonstrating that the medieval is not so disconnected from the modern.

One Voice, Ancient And Resigned, Will Rogers

Accessus

While we know, or at least can imagine, what Gower looked like in his old age, it is hard to imagine or hear his voice. And yet, given what we know about his old age and visual impairments, his voice necessarily was important to his old age and continuing revisions of his texts. In this article, I attempt to reconstruct from some of his later poetry what that voice might have sounded like, at least in-text, and piece together how later authors heard that voice of old age.

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 …

Undiagnosing Iphis: How The Lack Of Trauma In John Gower’S “Iphis And Iante” Reinforces A Subversive Trans Narrative, C Janecek

Accessus

Trauma has long played a role in queer narratives, including Ovid’s “Iphis and Ianthe”, which many scholars have interpreted as reinforcing heteronormativity through Iphis’s transformation into a man in order to marry Ianthe. However, I argue that John Gower’s rendition of this tale reframes Iphis as a trans man and allows us to understand the poem as a subversive trans narrative that revolts against cisnormative conceptions of gender. Utilizing Judith Butler’s writing on the medicalization of gender, I explore the relationship between trauma, performance, and gender within the Ovidian and Gowerian versions of Iphis.

Foreword, Georgiana Donavin, Eve Salisbury

Accessus

This is the Foreword to Accessus 5.1

Foreword, Georgiana Donavin, Eve Salisbury

Accessus

The co-editors of Accessus are pleased to present "Intersex and the Pardoner's Body" by Kim Zarins.

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.

Reflection, Interrupted: Material Mirror Work In The Confessio Amantis, Jenny Boyar

Accessus

The Confessio Amantis concludes with a revelatory scene in which Venus holds up a mirror to Amans, allowing him to recognize John Gower the poet— a moment that is often read as a mimetic and healing counterpoint to the Confessio’s sickness and self-questioning. My intention in this paper is to very slightly modify certain aspects of this narrative, to consider how the materiality of the mirror can inform its metaphoric deployments in the Confessio. I organize my discussion around two seemingly contrasting moments in the poem in which the self is seen and in different ways recognized through …

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 …

How The Axe Falls: A Retrospective On Thirty-Five Years Of Sir Gawain And The Green Knight Performance, Linda Marie Zaerr

Accessus

This retrospective represents a new approach to using historical performance as a tool for understanding medieval narrative performance. The core of the article traces how an individual performer’s interaction with a stable medieval text both indicates directions medieval performers may have taken and suggests the limitations imposed by modern performance conventions. The discussion touches on issues of adaptation and translation, variation in troupe composition and audience, expectations of modern audiences, impact of costume choices, and limitations of audio and video recordings as documentation of live performance. Juxtaposing eight performances of a single passage clarifies how performance can transform a text, …

Semper Venalis: Gower's Avaricious Lawyers, Robert Meindl

Accessus

The first three chapters of the sixth book of the Vox Clamantis (lines 1-248) comprise a harsh critique of the many avaricious lawyers who, in Gower’s opinion, have come to dominate their profession to the disadvantage of English society in the late fourteenth century. Driven exclusively by their appetite for possessions, they have forgotten the biblical model presented in Psalm 14 that specifies the obligation of the good man to assist without recompense his neighbor’s search for justice. Falsely claiming to be men of law and inheritors of the biblical model of the good man, the causidici (as Gower calls …

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 …