David R. Carlson: John Gower. Poetry and Propaganda in Fourteenth-Century England

• Elliot Kendall

In this book, David R. Carlson sets Gower in a context in which he has not been set before. Usually discussed as, in Anne Middleton’s phrase, a ‘public’ poet, a commentator on the condition of English society in the last decades of the fourteenth century, Gower appears here as a state propagandist. Carlson takes Gower’s less-read works, especially Cronica tripertita and “In Praise of Peace”, and places them within a selection of Latin and vernacular texts which he associates with propaganda and which stretches back to 1314 and the battle of Bannockburn. Carlson’s political interest in Gower’s Lancastrian poems is akin to discussions of the Cronica such as Helen Barr’s in Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England, but his interpretative approach and his book’s chronological scope are entirely different. Poetry and Propaganda puts together an inventory of texts discussing royal political events that stud the fourteenth century and caps this inventory with Gower’s Lancastrian poetry.