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This volume offers a novel paradigm for explaining late-medieval Anglo-Latin poetry, showing how the verse of the English poet John Gower (ca. 1330-1408), the pre-eminent Latin poet of the Age of Chaucer, developed over the decades from 1370 to 1400. In addition to writing poetry in and translating amongst English, French, and Latin, Gower invented a plain style for Latin public poetry that was emulated by other Anglo-Latin poets. However, at the end of his career he rejected his own Latin-verse invention to take up the late scholastic style at the moment of its decadence.
About the author
David R. Carlson taught at the University of Texas at Dallas, Southern Methodist University, and York University before joining the University of Ottawa, from which he retired as Professor of English in 2016. He is the editor of Thomas Elyot's
The Image of Governance and Other Dialogues of Counsel (1533-1541) (2018), as well as of
The Deposition of Richard II (2007) and
The Latin Writings of John Skelton (1991) and, with verse translations by A.G. Rigg, of Richard Maidstone's
Concordia (2003) and John Gower's
Visio Anglie and
Cronica tripertita (2011). The author of
English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475-1525 (1993) and
Chaucer's Jobs (2004), his articles have appeared in journals as diverse as
American Journal of Philology, Anglia, Byzantinische Zeitschrift, Classica et Mediaevalia, Mediaeval Studies, and
Scriptorium, among others. His most recent study,
John Gower, Poetry and Propaganda in Fourteenth-Century England (2012), won a Choice 2013 Outstanding Academic Title Award
