Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations and Citation Forms
- Introduction: Gower in History
- I Fourteenth-Century Panegyric Verse and Official Writing
- 1 Official Verse: The Sources and Problems of Evidence
- 2 The State Propaganda
- 3 Occasions of State and Propagandistic Verse in Mid-Century
- 4 Walter Peterborough's Victoria belli in Hispania (1367) and its Official Source
- 5 Compulsion in Richard Maidstone's Concordia (1392)
- II Gower's State-Official Late Poetry
- Bibliography
- Index
- VOLUMES ALREADY PUBLISHED
4 - Walter Peterborough's Victoria belli in Hispania (1367) and its Official Source
from I - Fourteenth-Century Panegyric Verse and Official Writing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations and Citation Forms
- Introduction: Gower in History
- I Fourteenth-Century Panegyric Verse and Official Writing
- 1 Official Verse: The Sources and Problems of Evidence
- 2 The State Propaganda
- 3 Occasions of State and Propagandistic Verse in Mid-Century
- 4 Walter Peterborough's Victoria belli in Hispania (1367) and its Official Source
- 5 Compulsion in Richard Maidstone's Concordia (1392)
- II Gower's State-Official Late Poetry
- Bibliography
- Index
- VOLUMES ALREADY PUBLISHED
Summary
The culminating case will be that of Gower's Cronica tripertita in early 1400: a verse apology for the secular state, no matter that explicit evidence for its commission is wanting – unreliable and so unremunerative anyway – yet so closely dependent on a particular official source, otherwise widely promulgated by the state, that Gower's work must be regarded as state-official panegyric. Meanwhile come two other cases likewise having evidence of poets' dependence on official sources, and so possibly of commissioning. Remains the problem of establishing these poets' connections to particular sources of information, which may not survive in direct evidence but only as refracted through the work of other writers, pursuing different purposes, attesting in something like parallel. And matters of style again interpose difficulty, especially in the form of the problem of the linguistic-idiomatic differences that render close verbal parallelisms scarce. Nonetheless: more ambiguously, Richard Maidstone's Concordia in 1392, and, more emphatically, Walter Peterborough's 1367 Victoria belli in Hispania set precedent for what Gower was to take on in 1400, making what he was to do not surprising or innovative, but perhaps only better and more effective, with the way having been prepared in advance by these near-contemporary local poets.
By this later part of the fourteenth century – post-famine, post-plague, only intermittently war-active – the Anglo-Latin poetry had come to occupy itself predominantly with events of secular-state import. What surprises is that “poets wrote of nothing else,” as A. G. Rigg has it, and the point bears reiterating.
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- Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012