Gower and Anglo-Latin Verse

This study offers a novel paradigm for explaining the late-medieval Anglo-Latin verse, by analyzing the development of the writings of the English poet John Gower (ca. 1330-1408), who made major contributions to English- and French-language poetry, in addition to being the pre-eminent Latin poet of the Age of Chaucer. In addition to translating amongst the three languages in which he worked, Gower invented a plain style for Latin public poetry that was like his better-known English-language Confessio amantis in emphasizing regular prosodic simplicity; and his plain style was emulated by other Anglo-Latin poets. Gower’s Latin public poetry contradicts the other kinds of Latin verse in use in England at the time: on the one hand, the demotic accentual-syllabic rhymed verse in use amongst clerical controversialists and other kinds of social polemicists, characterized by language-mixing and prosodic fluidity within individual poems; and on the other, the hyper-sophisticated poetria nova of the schoolmen. At the end of his career, however, Gower rejected his own plain-style Latin-verse invention to take up instead the late scholastic style, but only at the moment of its decadence, when the humanist neo-classicism that disdained scholasticism would already have begun to arrive in England.