"[I]nvestigates the importance of the great household to late fourteenth-century English culture and society.... shows how deeply the great household informed the way Gower and his contemporaries imagined their world. Exploring royal government and gentry ambitions, this thoroughly interdisciplinary book views the period's politics and literature in terms of a household-based economy of power." —The Publisher.
Click here to buy this book at Amazon.co.uk

"Offers essays by scholars from Britain and North America, covering Gower's works in all three of his languages; they consider his relationships to his literary sources, and to his social, material and historical contexts; and they offer an overview of the manuscript, linguistic, and editorial traditions. Five essays concentrate specifically on the Confessio Amantis, Gower's major Middle English work, reading it in terms of its relationship to vernacular and classical models, its poetic style, and its treatment of such themes as politics, kingship, gender, sexuality, authority, authorship and self-governance. A reference bibliography, arranged as a chronology of criticism, concludes the volume." —The Publisher.
Click here to buy this book at Amazon.co.uk

"Study of key works in the Western literature of love from Classical Rome to the late Middle Ages. The study focuses on the evolution of the ideologically-saturated discourse of love’s labor contained in these works and thus explores them in the context of ancient and medieval theories of labor and leisure." —The Publisher.
Click here to buy this book at Amazon.co.uk

"Watt focuses on the language, sex, and politics in Gower's writing. How, she asks, is Gower's Confessio related to contemporary controversies over vernacular translation and debates about language politics? How is Gower's treatment of rhetoric and language gendered and sexualized, and what bearing does this have on the ethical and political structure of the text? What is the relationship between the erotic, ethical, and political sections of Confessio Amantis? Watt demonstrates that Gower engaged in the sort of critical thinking more commonly associated with Chaucer and William Langland at the same time that she contributes to modern debates about the ethics of criticism." — The Publisher.
Click here to buy this book at Amazon.co.uk

"Nicholson offers a comprehensive and accessible reading of Gower's Confessio, as well as a guide to the issues that it poses, linking all of the diverse elements of Gower's complex poem into a single broad view of its purpose and structure. Beginning with an investigation of the literary antecedents of the poem, the author then distinguishes the Confessio from its predecessors in order to discover what is most unique about it. In viewing the Confessio both as a poem and as a work of moral instruction, Love and Ethics illustrates the work's concern with the laws that govern human love, and its understanding of the elusiveness of moral certainty in a fallen world." — The Publisher.
Click here to buy this book at Amazon.co.uk

"Argues that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Gower's Confessio Amantis attest to the vitality of a narrative - rather than strictly normative - ethics that has roots in premodern traditions of practical reason and rhetoric. Chaucer and Gower are shown to be inheritors and respecters of an early and unexpected form of ethical pragmatism - which has profound implications for the orthodox history of ethics in the West."
— The Publisher.
Click here to buy this book at Amazon.co.uk

"Gower's Confessio, according to Peck, is a restatement of late fourteenth-century ideas of good and bad behavior, and is designed to illuminate and re­shape the minds and hearts of men. Peck sees the concepts of "kingship" — the governance of souls as well as kingdoms — and "common profit" — the mutual enhancement of such kingdoms — as the poem's unifying ideas."
— The Publisher.
Click here to buy this book at Amazon.co.uk

"The originality of the juxtaposition is one measure of the provocativeness and occasional brilliance of Simpson's vigorous and ambitious new study, which offers radically novel readings of both poems at the same time that it draws them together in an intriguing exploration of the nature of the humanist poetics of the Middle Ages." — John Gower Newsletter.
Click here to buy this book at Amazon.co.uk

"[A] new study of Gower's complete poetry.... Yeger demonstrates that Gower — far from being the lugubrious moralist and journeyman craftsman as which he is often portrayed — was in fact a writer of broad learning and ambition, whose work was consistently shaped by a poetic theory of profound originality.... re-examines Gower's work from the basic levels of orthography, grammar, vocabulary, and metrics, to his enduring macrocosmic themes; in the process, Yeager shows that Gower saw himself as an 'auctor', or 'poete', in the manner of Dante, Machaut, Froissart, and Deschamps. The book concludes with an extensive, fresh reading of Gower's greatest poem, the Confessio Amantis." —The Publisher.
Click here to buy this book at Amazon.co.uk

"This collection gathers in one place the essays that have done most to shape the modern critical discussion of the Confessio Amantis, and illustrates... how the study of the poem has evolved. It also provides representative examples of major approaches to the poem and selected studies of its most important aspects." —The Publisher.
Click here to buy this book at Amazon.co.uk

"[A] broad and detailed account of the structure of Confessio Amantis, in two different senses: first the relationship among (between) among the many components of its form, and second, its thematic structure, as Gower develops his argument from the Prologue to the conclusion." — John Gower Newsletter
Click here to buy this book at Amazon.co.uk

"Using feminist and anthropological approaches, Bullon-Fernandez argues that father-daughter relationships, and the associated theme of incest that they sometimes suggest, enable Gower to examine authority relationships in three interconnected spheres: family, state, and text. She suggests that Gower perceived the relationships between kings and subjects and between authors and texts as similar to paternal relationships with a daughter." —The Publisher.
Click here to buy this book at Amazon.co.uk

A collection of critical essays; Wetherbee on the poets and Boethian traditions, Alastair Minnis on their sense of 'auctoritee', Chauncey Wood on Gowerian influence on the Parson's Tale; Peter Nicholson on Gower's influence on the tale of Constance, Peter Beidler on the relationship of the tales of Florent, Yeager on trilingual culture, and Carolyn Dinshaw on the poets' tales of rape.
Click here to buy this book at Amazon.co.uk

"[Donavin] istinguishes between stories in which incestuous feelings are acted upon, and those in which they are transcended, and understood as a trope for mystical union. Emerging in the wake of the scholarship of Otto Rank and Elizabeth Archibald on the subject of incest, it draws connections between specific tales of incest, and the broader issue of Amans's role as servant in the Court of Love." — Deanne Williams, N&Q.