Matter and Making in Early English Poetry: Literary Production from Chaucer to Sidney.

Author/Editor
Cowdery, Taylor.

Title
Matter and Making in Early English Poetry: Literary Production from Chaucer to Sidney.

Published
Cowdery, Taylor. Matter and Making in Early English Poetry: Literary Production from Chaucer to Sidney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Review
Cowdery is aware that the six writers he chooses to study here--Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Skelton, Wyatt--"have been received as the early foundation of a high-prestige English literary tradition" (13), and he seeks an original approach to them via the twin elements of his title, "matter" and "making." While the latter is clear enough--it's the writing--the former takes several shapes, i.e., "this book will follow Aristotle in arguing that 'literary matter' is . . . a relative term . . .that designates whatever a given text was understood to be made of" (6), i.e., its "source," one might say. Cowdery argues that "late medieval and early modern court poets followed the same basic procedure" when composing: "(1) the use of pre-existing matter and (2) the remaking of that matter into some new form" (10-11). He applies these definitions to Gower in chapter 2, "Gower and the Crying Voice" (52-82). Gower's habit was to work from the rhetorical figures "figura," "distinction" ("figura" expanded), and "exemplum," all of which are described and illustrated (61-64); Gower's purpose is to "draw out of these materials a set of structural principles, which then serve as the framework for an allegorical and exegetical elaboration upon some moral truth" (64). As many have noted, Gower's exegeses don't always cohere rationally, locus to locus, and so, Cowdery argues, Gower "pursues feeling alongside thought," seeking "to foster an affective connection between the reader and the text": "the voice of a literary character who cries out for mercy" (67). This voice has a special claim on the power of God (69) and is well exemplified in the "Tale of Constantine and Sylvester"--but although "the crying voice" is "a very powerful ethical tool," it too doesn't always seem to work (70-72). Such inconsistencies can be read as allegories, Cowdery asserts, reading the "Tale of Tereus" as just such an allegory critical of Richard II: a superimposition of a "microcosm of erotic greed onto the macrocosm of economic and social greed" (73). For Cowdery, the tale (which he discusses at length) is akin to political protest: "Philomela's woven cry for pity becomes an act of protest speech, and Procne's plot for personal revenge is reimagined as the lead-up to a putsch" (75). But "Tereus" also makes his point, that the matter of the tale can be remade to "allow us to hear the voices of those we cannot hear in our day-to-day lives" (76), as exemplified by Philomela's weaving; and its making "around those voices" (77) is evident throughout his work. Gower's position as himself/as poet at the conclusion of the CA presents the same crying, petitioning stance to Henry (78), Cowdery says--though perhaps here mixing up monarchs and poems, Richard with Henry, the CA with "In Praise of Peace"? Gower did not attempt to "reinvent his materials," Cowdery concludes, "but to draw out what is notable from within them" (82), thereby making something new. Despite several slips of fact (i.e., Gower was not "granted a right to live within the priory precincts of St. Mary Overie"--rather, he sub-let a house there; the priory had no "active scriptorium"; there is no evidence that Gower "once had been a lawyer" [57-58]; the confusion of monarchs, as noted above), and the difficulty of stretching a single thesis to fit six disparate poets across two centuries, Cowdery on Gower provokes thought. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1]

Date
2023

Gower Subjects
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Confessio Amantis
In Praise of Peace