A Knight at the Roxburghe (Club): George Granville Sutherland-Leveson-Gower and the Textual Transmission of "Balades and Other Poems by John Gower."

Title
A Knight at the Roxburghe (Club): George Granville Sutherland-Leveson-Gower and the Textual Transmission of "Balades and Other Poems by John Gower."

Published
Watt, David. "A Knight at the Roxburghe (Club): George Granville Sutherland-Leveson-Gower and the Textual Transmission of 'Balades and Other Poems by John Gower.'" In William Green, Daniel Helbert, and Noëlle Phillips, eds. Textual Traditions and Medieval Literary Culture: Essays in Honour of Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2025), pp. 152-65.

Review
Watt describes the making of Earl Gower's Roxburghe Club edition of London, British Library MS 59495, olim Trentham, "one of nine books printed by club members in 1818" (162), a manuscript on the library shelves of his father, the Marquis of Stafford, at Trentham Hall. The Earl used a transcription made by Henry Stachey in 1764 for the printer's copy (152), but corrected the proofs from the manuscript itself (156). The Roxburghe Club edition prints the Latin and French poetry, but deliberately leaves out the one Middle English poem in the manuscript, "In Praise of Peace," an omission explained by Earl Gower that this had been previously edited "in Urry's edition of Chaucer's works" (154). Oddly, Watt suggests that the Club members would have thought the character Gower in Shakespeare's "Henry IV, Part 2" was the poet: "Roxburghe Club members might nonetheless have enjoyed making the more subtle connection between the Trentham Manuscript's (now London, British Library MS ADD.59495) ostensible dedication to Henry IV and Gower's cameo appearance in "Henry IV, Part 2" (though it is not entirely clear what they might have thought of Gower's refusal to dine with Falstaff in Act 2, Scene 1" (163-64). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1]

Date
2025

Gower Subjects
Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations
Manuscripts and Textual Studies