ABSTRACT
The variety of languages employed by Gower in his writings is more than matched by the variety of styles which they display. In his Latin works, the plain prose of the sidenotes to Confessio Amantis contrasts sharply with the elaborate and difficult manner of the elegiac couplets and Leonine hexameters of its headnotes; and these verses themselves contrast, though less sharply, with the rather easier couplets and Leonines of the longer Latin poems, Vox Clamantis and Cronica Tripertita. The first printer of the Confessio, Thomas Berthelette, spoke of Gower as a model for a modern writer, ‘that as a lanterne gyue hym lyghte to wryte counnyngly’; and another sixteenth-century reader, John Leland, praised him as ‘the first polisher of native language, before whose time no English writer had produced work ‘worthy of a discriminating reader’. Grammar and syntax are the other areas, besides metre, where Gower may be understood as conforming to available standards of correctness in his English writings.
