ABSTRACT
Criticism on the Mirour de l'Omme begins with G. C. Macaulay's discovery of the poem in 1895 and his subsequent 1899 edition of it. Compared with the growing body of scholarly work on the Latin Vox Clamantis and the English Confessio Amantis, the scholarly work on the Mirour is small. Paul Miller has more recently placed the Mirour in the tradition of classical and medieval satire, while Kurt Olsson finds in the poem's structure four mirrors or perspectives, each perspective corresponding to one of the four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. John Gower's achievements in French prosody have fared better, by way of disproving the argument that Gower's Mirour is a text inferior to his later works. Rather than thinking of the poem as the product of the Edwardian court, the Mirour now seems to have had for Gower more flexibility of application in its purposes and intended audiences.
