ABSTRACT
John Gower and his contemporaries set the terms of his literary reception in the late fourteenth century. In the mid-1380s, Geoffrey Chaucer coined the epithet “moral Gower” in a specific narrative context at the end of Troilus and Criseyde (V. 1856). 1 He evidently had in mind Gower’s two didactic poems, the Anglo-French Mirour de l’Omme and the Anglo-Latin Vox Clamantis. 2 The epithet became a general rubric for Gower’s work and for work that Gower had yet to complete or even begin writing, including the Confessio Amantis. “Moral Gower” defines a horizon of expectations from the medieval to the early modern period and beyond, even as the meaning and resonance of “moral” undergo historical, conceptual, and semantic shifts over time. Moreover, Gower seems to endorse and confirm Chaucer’s description. At the end of the Confessio Amantis, in both the Ricardian and Henrician recensions of the poem made in the early 1390s, Venus dismisses Gower from her service as a lover and returns him to his earlier, overtly moral writings: “Bot go ther vertu moral duelleth, / Wher ben thi bokes, as men telleth, / Whiche of long time thou hast write” (VIII. 2925–7). Gower’s hand in preparing his literary reception is apparent not just in his narratives but also in the paratexts of his major works and in the sequence of poems written at the end of his career to position him as an author. 3 Gower exerted a strong measure of control over the initial production and transmission of his works, which structured and potentially limited his reception. He likely influenced the design of his tomb in Southwark Cathedral, for which sixteenth-century writers offer several descriptions. The effigy of the poet resting his head on volumes of his three major poems, each with a Latin title, preserves a material image of how Gower presented himself and wanted to be received.
