Gower, business, and economy

Because John Gower’s first two major works, the Mirour de l’Omme and the Vox Clamantis, as well as the prologue of the Confessio Amantis, participate directly in estates satire, attentive readers of all three texts have long had occasion to consider Gower’s treatment of economic social structures. That being said, it is only in the past two decades that examinations of Gower’s treatment of guilds, merchants, and the economy have become at all common. This has coincided both with a significant expansion in the amount of Gower scholarship overall, and also with a broader materialist turn in medieval studies, the legacy both of decades of Marxist criticism and of the New Historicism. Though none of the critics most associated with New Historicism were medievalists as such, ¹ there has been recent critical awareness of materialism in medieval studies, notably in Kellie Robertson’s “Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto,” which warns of the dangers of “‘tchotchke’ criticism.” ² There has also in recent years been more attention paid in literary studies to continuing scholarly developments in social and economic history, including a general turn in economic history toward greater attention to social history. ³