ABSTRACT
"Science" is used frequently by John Gower as a term for "wisdom", "learning", or "a kind of orderly investigation". For Gower, the most significant architect of that landscape is Boethius and his acolytes. Word play between "science" and "conscience" plays a major role in his theory of observation keyed to the possibilities of truth through fiction to locate character intelligently within a specific temporal narrative that can expose hidden ambiguities, if one reads aright. Arguments over what constitutes truth and certitude resonate within an interlocked historical triangle of three somewhat distinct science communities that, in the fourteenth century, are being reconfigured through a budding empirical methodology that qualifies logic with a new Perspectivist sophistication sometimes referred to as suppositional logic. Political science is a focal topic of virtually everything Gower wrote. Gower views Rhetorique as the central component of philosophy, the mediator between theorique and practique.
