Aristocratic Antiquaries: Gower on Gower.
- Author/Editor
- Echard, Siân,
- Title
- Aristocratic Antiquaries: Gower on Gower.
- Published
- Echard, Siân, "Aristocratic Antiquaries: Gower on Gower." In Siân Echard, ed. Printing the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 97-205.
- Review
- Echard's book is an extended answer to a question she asks on page 17: "what does it mean to reproduce a medieval author (or text) in 'his own shape and likeness'?" Gower figures in chapter 3, "Autocratic Antiquaries: Gower on Gower"--in this case, George Granville Leveson-Gower, (1786-1861), who produced the Roxburghe Club edition of British Library MS 59495 (olim Trentham), on John Gower the poet (97-98). Echard uses the Roxburghe edition, and to a lesser degree that of G. C. Macaulay, to center a thorough history of Gower's translation from manuscript to print--a history that covers editions by Caxton, Berthelette, and the most modern (e.g., Russell Peck's student edition based on Macaulay). In the process she makes a number of vital points directly responsible for how Gower has been understood for five centuries. She notes that "as soon as he enters the age of print, Gower's status as a multilingual poet disappears" (99), and illustrates how the process begins with Caxton and Berthelette (100-102), although Gower's tomb, with its three volumes, kept the multilingualism prominent into the nineteenth century, lending him "a monumentalism as much literal as literary" (102). Proceeding chronologically, Echard discusses Elizabeth Cooper, John Henry Todd (whose 1810 selective edition included an engraving of the tomb), and--especially--the Roxburghe edition in important detail, clarifying that Leveson-Gower had a handwritten copy made of the manuscript, and this--not the manuscript--was the copy-text for his 1818 edition (117). A major concern of Echard's throughout is "the facsimile impulse," linked "to the emphasis on the physical object over its textual content" (118). Leveson-Gower, Echard makes clear, saw the manuscript as a totem of the family and social class the Roxburghe Club members represented--and in that sense the poet, too (122). The chapter concludes with the four-volume edition of Macaulay who, by dividing Gower's work into separate volumes by language, reflects "the same tendency to concentrate on Gower's English . . . traced in this chapter from the fifteenth century onward" (123). Macaulay's decisions impacted how Gower has been seen in modern times in another way, perhaps more important: "It was Macaulay who divided the manuscripts of the 'Confessio' into three recensions, based on the degree to which they had shifted from Ricardian to Henrician sympathies, and it was Macaulay who decided that the Henrician version should be considered Gower's last word" (124). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1]
- Date
- 2008
- Gower Subjects
- Facsimiles, Editions, and Translation
Manuscripts and Textual Studies
Language and Word Studies