A Book of Middle English.
- Author/Editor
- Burrow, J. A., and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds.
- Title
- A Book of Middle English.
- Published
- Burrow, J. A., and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. "A Book of Middle English." Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
- Review
- The twelfth selection in this new anthology, which illustrates the development of literary Middle English from the twelfth to the early fifteenth centuries, is an excerpt from CA (1.2399-2661), containing the warning against Boasting and the tale of "Albinus and Rosemund" (including the preceding Latin epigram, with translation, but not the two Latin side-notes), in a new transcription from Bodley Fairfax 3. The introduction to the selection provides a brief summary of Gower's life and works, his relation to Chaucer, and the structure of CA, highlighting Genius' dual roles and the sympathy with which Gower treats the figure of Amans; it also includes some brief notes on Gower's language, a very selective bibliography, and a reproduction of the page in Fairfax on which the excerpted text begins. The transcription of the text differs from Macaulay's in the regular use of thorn and yogh, and in several dozen minor differences in capitalization (Macaulay follows the MS more closely) and in punctuation (the omission of a single comma results in a slight difference in the sense at 1.2655). The notes to the text offer judicious help with the passages in which Gower's syntax differs from ours, and beginning students may not be the only ones to find them useful; the note to 1.2545 contains Burrow's explanation of the "Gripes ey." In addition to a broad range of selections from Middle English literature, both poetry and prose, the volume contains an unusually detailed linguistic introduction and a general glossary. One section of the introduction (pp. 56-57) contains a brief but very useful treatment of Gower's meter. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2]
- Date
- 1991
- Gower Subjects
- Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations
- Confessio Amantis