8 - Monastic Life

Summary

John Gower and the Monastic Orders

John Gower's writings about monasticism present a paradox. On the one hand, they appear to cohere closely with the anticlerical discourses circulating in late fourteenth-century England. Indeed Gower's stern critiques of the late medieval clergy were sufficient to earn him a place in John Foxe's sixteenth-century roll call of proto-Protestant members of the ‘true church’. Yet, on the other, what details we know of John Gower's later life, and of the preparations he made for his death, imply a strong regard for monastic practices and prayers. He spent his final years dwelling within the precinct of St Mary Overy Priory in Southwark. He requested, and was accorded, interment in a prominent location within that monastery's conventual church; and there is no reason to doubt his subsequent reputation as, in the words of the inscription on his tomb, a ‘distinguished benefactor of this building’. Gower also established a chantry within the monastery centred on his tomb, presumably to be served by the Southwark canons; and he made generous bequests to the prior, subprior and brethren of the house for their attendance and prayers at his funeral. Indeed, of the major literary figures at work in late medieval England, only the Benedictine monk John Lydgate is known to have had stronger personal connections to the religious orders.

The monastic context of John Gower's writings, and its potential significance for their coverage and dissemination, has received episodic attention from scholars. John Fisher argued that the Augustinian canons of St Mary Overy played a central role in Gower's literary career, placing their facilities at his disposal. Fisher's suggestion that Gower's works were produced in the monastery scriptorium has more recently been strongly challenged by detailed manuscript studies, which point instead to London scribes – whether commercial or otherwise – as the most likely copyists. Yet debate continues over the relative importance of John Gower's connections with court, city and monastery in the shaping and spreading of his oeuvre. While several scholars regard a London literary community of civil servants and minor courtiers as the principal context for Gower's work, Jean-Pascal Pouzet and – more cautiously – Robert F. Yeager have sought to reassert the significance of the poet's monastic associations.