ABSTRACT
As with so much else, the courtly aspects of John Gower’s work bear direct comparison to those of Geoffrey Chaucer. In different ways, each was a “court man” for life. The relative lack of early biographical records does little to lessen this surmise in the case of Gower. Both developed their arts in the world of Edwardian and Ricardian courts, and as Fisher remarked, “the circumstantial evidence is strong in both cases, and the different bodies of material show Gower moving in the same two worlds as Chaucer, the upper middle-class society of the franklin, merchant, and lawyer, and the aristocratic society of a trusted retainer in a noble household.” 1 For Gower, given his probable economic independence and freedom from direct service, this class and occupational identification had a markedly different impact, making the court contexts of his work a rich area for inquiry. The period of Gower’s artistic productivity was also a period of important developments in English courts, both in baronial-noble households and in the legal system. The ways in which these two institutions were fundamentally related – and in turn were strongly related to the cultural production of imaginative literature – can provide useful points of entry for considering the full range of Gower’s poetry.
