2 - English Writing and Lay Theology

Summary

In the previous chapter, following Scanlon, we explored the possibility that the narrator’s self-description as a “burel,” or lay, clerk should be seen as fundamental to the vernacular project of the Confessio. As we saw there, Gower’s narrator displays extraclerical tendencies which are attributable in part to his distinctive handling of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, whereby myth is presented, like satire in the medieval commonplace, as “naked,” because immediately accessible. But because criticism has so strongly emphasized the poem’s clericity—Scanlon in particular sees the poem as undertaking to remedy the marginalized status of English by effecting a “clericalization” of the vernacular—it is necessary to investigate the marginality of Gower’s narrator more fully. In this chapter and the next I follow Scanlon and Copeland in finding that Gower does indeed present his narrator as a cultural outsider, but I argue that Gower’s main strategies for compensating for this marginality are derived not from academic discourse, but from qualities intrinsic to, and uniquely present in, lay language and lay experience. The present chapter answers Copeland’s argument that Gower’s poem effects “a transference of academic institutional power to the vernacular,” by documenting the extent to which Gower’s poem remains lesser and belated in relation to Latinate academic discourse. As we will see, Gower’s anxiety over writing in English is most clearly seen in his circumspection in treating theological topics in the vernacular.

Vernacular Translation

It is possible to exaggerate the singularity of Gower’s decision, sometime in the mid- to late 1380s, to undertake a major work in English. The decision certainly required less courage than it would have a decade or more earlier. The profile of English was on the rise throughout the latter half of the fourteenth century, as is seen from its increased usage in legal proceedings and in schools. There existed a growing literature on popular science and philosophy in English, and the mere fact that these were written in the vernacular posed no necessary threat to clerical elites. Further, Chaucer had long since finished his Romaunt of the Rose, Book of the Duchess, House of Fame, and Parliament of Fowls; by 1387 Boece and Troilus and Criseyde were in circulation. Nevertheless, Chaucer famously shows anxieties about the “diversitee / In Englissh,” representing English as what Yeager calls a “vernacular-in-process.