Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England.

Author/Editor
Gasse, Rosanne P.

Title
Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England.

Published
Gasse, Rosanne P. Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England. Cham, Switz.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.

Review
Gower features in chapter 4, "Monsters and Shapeshifters: The Hybrid Body in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'" (123-153). Gasse's interest in the CA is subordinate to her larger set of claims regarding the essential "hybridity" of the human body, an entity ever capable of transformation, especially via age and/or disability. She considers the tales of "Florent," focusing on the "loathly lady" figure (125-26), "Cambises" in Book VII, who flays a judge, covers a chair with his skin, and makes his son succeed him in office, and sit upon the chair (127), "Albinus and Rosemund" (127-28), which reveals "the monstrous presence of Gurmond" (128), and "the most disturbing alteration of the human form," the "murder of Itys by his mother Procne" (129), in the "Tale of Tereus," "a horror story on multiple levels" (129). Gasse touches briefly upon the tales of Pygmalion, Medusa, the Minotaur, Sirens, centaurs ("the male counterpart to the hybrid female body of the Siren" [133]), leading to very brief commentary on the "Wedding of Pirithous" and "Education of Achilles" (134-35). There follows a sketch of "the Hybrid Masculine Body," covering tales that lead to the conclusion that: "Characters such as Hercules, Nessus, Achelons, and Nectanabus suggest the strengths and the limits of the sexualized and aggressive male body. Unlike the neutered Nebuchadnezzar the ox who is deprived of this aspect of his manhood, these four are all powerful men driven by animalistic heterosexual desire to compete with other males even to the point of violence over the right to mate with a female" (139). Sections on "the Hybrid Gendered Body," the "Hybrid Feminine Body," and the "Hybrid Disabled Body: Tiresias" follow, leading to the conclusion that "Much of Gower's treatment of the malleable human form is to be expected for a late fourteenth-century English text . . . variations on the human body--the aged body, the female body, the prepubescent body, the peasant body, the clerical body, the body missing some of its functioning parts, the body in which the animal is too prominent, the heterosexually impotent body, the body reduced to a small pile of ash and bone, the body made inanimate object, made food, made excrement--are all indicators of cultural anxiety and disability of one sort or another as hybrid examples of the reduced human form" (152). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1]

Date
2023

Gower Subjects
Confessio Amantis