ABSTRACT

The period of John Gower's artistic productivity was also a period of important developments in English courts, both in baronial-noble households and in the legal system. Understood broadly, "court culture" has an irreducibly judicial core to its historical and synchronic character, even in cultural production. This chapter focuses on Gower and not Chaucer as the imaginative predecessor of the critical and accomplished secular courtier-poets of the early tudor period and later Renaissance, a not-too-distant antecedent of a Wyatt or a Spenser, at a lower rung of the social scale. The politics of Gower's poetry, and hence its significance in its eventful contemporary context and legal setting, has been an area of particular interest in recent decades. In a wider context, Gower continues to provide excellent material for reconsidering the developments of political thinking and ideology in late medieval England.