ABSTRACT
Gower’s choice of Latin for his most intense political writings is no doubt determined by rhetorical calculations concerning the educated and influential audience he hopes to reach. Although his first extensive analysis of England’s social and political issues is in French – likely a concession to Edward III’s court, which in part would have been its intended audience 1 – Latin is the language he subsequently preferred for direct political commentary. From at least the moment he began work on the Vox Clamantis in 1377, through the composition of the Confessio Amantis and its head verses in the 1380s and the completion of the Cronica Tripertita in 1401, culminating in a scattering of short poems written close to the end of his life in 1408, he is fruitfully engaged with the language that possessed an intellectual prestige beyond the French and English in which he likewise wrote with ease. Although the trajectory of Gower’s linguistic development as a poet takes him inevitably to English, when he sets out to school Richard II early in the king’s career and when he finally rejects him at its end, Latin is his language of choice for the analytical discussion of theoretical and practical issues pertaining to what we today call political science. It would follow that Gower valued highly his efforts in what he perhaps perceived as his learned and classical manner in his “mother tongue,” in the sense Christopher Cannon derives in a recent commentary on medieval archives, “the language in which an educated person first learns to read and write, which he or she then, ever after, reads and writes most ‘naturally’ as the language ‘indigenous’ to his or her literacy.” 2
