Al université de tout le monde
Johan Gower ceste Balade envoie;
Et si jeo n’ai de François la faconde
Pardonetz moi qe jeo de ceo forsvoie:
Jeo suis Englois, si quier par tiele voie
Estre excusé;
- Traitié balade XVIII, closing stanza
Abstract
John Gower’s French verse has been seen as diverging from that of his Anglo-Norman predecessors, and he has often been considered as more continental in his affiliation. In this study we consider how distinctive Gower was, linguistically, in terms of the system levels of language, i.e. phonology and syntax. These aspects are investigated with respect to linguistic variables which show that where insular French diverged from continental usage, Gower’s practice was to follow Anglo-Norman rather than continental French. These findings are assessed from the perspective of his presumed authorial stance, as it developed from his earlier to his later work. Throughout his writing in French, Gower’s latent English identity remains a constant in his use of insular language forms.
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Notes
The Traitié consists of only 18 21-line, 3-stanza ballades, while the Cinkante Balades contain 54 3-stanza ballades, most them with an additional 4-line envoi). In these poems there are thus far fewer instances of quel and its inflected forms than in the Mirour.
Recognised e.g. by thirteenth century scribes who rendered Anglo-Norman manuscripts into ‘regular’ Old French, see Brereton (1939).
Ian Short, personal communication, 17th November 2014.
This does not include forms of the long relative pronoun lequel, which were considered in the previous section.
The spelling form qu’ was never used in relative function, but always as an abbreviation for conjunction que (‘that’) before a vowel-initial word such as il.
An anonymous reviewer mentions the fact that in the Trentham ms the text of the Cinkante Balades is in secretary hand, unlike the rest of the Ms. (Hanna 2005, 227) and suggests that this indicates the work was perceived differently, as continental rather than insular: secretary hand was imported from France c. 1380 onwards. We do not find this a convincing argument for a contemporary perception of Gower’s work as continental in affiliation, since by 1400–1410, the date of the Trentham ms, the secretary hand was being used for Latin documents in the 1380s and for a copy of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde written c. 1410, and a form of secretary hand was used for an ms of Confessio Amantis c. 1390 (Parkes 2008). It can hardly be claimed that the use of secretary hand for a work implied that it was perceived as affiliated to continental French.
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Ingham, R., Ingham, M. ‘Pardonetz moi qe jeo de ceo forsvoie’: Gower’s Anglo-Norman Identity. Neophilologus 99, 667–684 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-015-9442-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-015-9442-8