GOWER'S KNOWLEDGE OF POETRIA NOVA

概要

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Did Gower know Poetria Nova (hereafter PN) of Geoffrey Vinsauf? This paper is an attempt to answer this question. This question, besides being simple, may sound as anachronistic or even absurd, for now a long time has passed since J. Murphy in his "A New Look at Chaucer and the Rhetoricians" (RES, XV (1964), 1-20) put an end to what he called in it the "Cult of Vinsauf" which had enjoyed a long-more than thirty years'-popularity. Murphy surprised us with his provocative opinion that Chaucer learnt rhetorical devices not from such rhetorical manuals as PN and Ars Versificatoria, as Manly and his followers believed, but from the grammatical works taught at schools or directly from the contemporary French literature, and he warned us not to overestimate the influence of PN upon Chaucer because in England it was only as late as fifteenth century that the influence began to appear. In addition to this, in his doctoral thesis, "Chaucer, Gower and the English Rhetorical Tradition" (Stanford, 1956), Chap. 7, Murphy had also attempted to separate Gower from Vinsauf, and he appears to have had an easy success, since both the researches on Gower's rhetoric and the evidence for Gower's indebtedness to Vinsauf are much less than in the case of Chaucer, and therefore, he had few enemies to fight with.
財団法人日本英文学会の論文
1975-03-30