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Lordship and Literature: John Gower and the Politics of the Great Household

Online ISBN:
9780191715419
Print ISBN:
9780199542642
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Lordship and Literature: John Gower and the Politics of the Great Household

Elliot Kendall
Elliot Kendall
Lecturer in Medieval Literature, University of Exeter
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Published online:
1 September 2008
Published in print:
8 May 2008
Online ISBN:
9780191715419
Print ISBN:
9780199542642
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This book explores the importance of the great household to late 14th-century English culture and society. A sustained new reading of John Gower's major English poem, Confessio Amantis, shows how deeply the great household informed the way Gower and his contemporaries imagined their world. Encompassing royal government and gentry ambitions, this book views the period's politics in terms of a household-based economy of power, using the work of thinkers such as Pierre Bourdieu and Marcel Mauss. The book argues that myriad political practice and representations, including the Appeal of the Merciless Parliament, contests over livery, retaining, and maintenance, and poetic imaginings of lordship by Chaucer, Gower, and other writers, conformed to definable models of household exchange. The literary force of these competing models is revealed in wide-ranging interpretations of household exchange — of women, hospitality, livery, loyalty, retribution — in Gower's complex and influential poem. The great household rode immense political shockwaves during the reign of Richard II, when royal aggrandizement and economic crisis in the wake of the Black Death challenged dominant modes of aristocratic power. This book locates Gower's poem in this context and, in the process, describes a powerful yet embattled aristocratic politics.

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