Gower and Anglo-Latin Verse

• English language & literature
• Medieval literature (general or comparative)
• Medieval Latin literature
• Medieval Latin Poetry

“Gower’s Latin has received attention and admiration, but this is the first full length study that treats his Latin writing, not in the context of his English or French works, but as the apogee of fourteenth-century Anglo-Latin poetry. In this deeply informed study, David Carlson animates for his readers Gower’s ‘vivid, varied Anglo-Latin,’ and offers a compelling portrait of its idiosyncratic, impassioned, yet controlled style. For Carlson, Gower writes verses that are not in thrall to classical precedent, but ‘retain contemporary shapes.’ Gower and Anglo-Latin Verse models fresh attention to a medieval Latin that is a living poetic language: confident, experimental, and prestigious.” — Ardis Butterfield, Yale University

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.