ABSTRACT
John Gower seems to imagine several of his most important texts as voiced, this chapter considers the critical history of engagement with voice primarily in terms of Gower's creation of a speaker, who is sometimes a narrator, and sometimes not. The consistency of Genius, especially as understood in terms of Christian morality and fin' amors, becomes a central part of the discussion of Gower's voices and narrators for most of the modern critical tradition. Anthony Farnham offered a similar reading, but with greater attention to Gower's production, through the figures of both Genius and Amans, of an ironic and satirical voice. In Patrick Gallacher's formalist reading, Gower's voice is identified almost completely with Christian theological orthodoxy, and Gower's poem speaks to the goals of a rarefied, even mystical, religious discourse. Nonetheless, ethics remained (and remains) a prominent topic, though scholars have cast Gower's ethical voice in new terms.
