ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys scholarship that examines moments in which John Gower's poetry itself seems to investigate forms of history and their uses. James Dean notes a similar doubleness in Gower's conceptualization of temporal progression: on the one hand, "time rushes toward its consummation as mankind declines morally from day to day", but time "also has a redeeming and a healing function", via memory and reflection which develops over time and through poetry. Gower, Dean argues, productively complicates the statue's conflation of the macro – and microcosmic by making himself the person grown old at the end of the Confessio. Larry Scanlon argues that Gower's vernacular exempla usurp this power of authoritative enactment from ecclesiastical discourse. By enacting his "clericalization of the vernacular", Gower establishes vernacular exemplary narrative as the new regulator of the relationship between the past and the present.
