The lion's share of critical attention for the Vox Clamantis has come from medievalists interested in Gower's outraged response to the Rising of 1381 in Book I (known as the Visio), particularly his indictment of the peasants in a vicious beast allegory. But beast allegory is not the only genre at work in the Visio. It is also a Boethian account of the relation between self and society, individual and community, dramatized in part by a dialogue between the narrator and Wisdom and cast as a story of exile. These latter aspects of the poem foreground the narrator's emotional response to the catastrophe of the Rising, and thereby produce a structural tension between the representation of individual feelings and the representation of the social whole (embodied by the use of allegory). Gower's use of the conflicting genres of beast allegory and Boethian complaint makes visible the foundational tension between authority and experience, those medieval categories imagined by the Wife of Bath as gendered modes of knowledge. In the Visio, authority and experience can be described as forms of relation to the world. The former is based on detachment, on viewing the world through predetermined categories dictated by social hierarchies; the latter is fundamentally a mode of attachment, which depends on the notion that the subjective experience of the individual – of multiple individuals – constitutes the matter out of which both social relations and the aesthetic are formed.