Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising

Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising examines the transmission of Greco-Roman and European literature into English during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, while literacy was burgeoning among men and women from the nonruling classes. This dissemination offered a radically democratizing potential for accessing, interpreting, and deploying learned texts. Focusing primarily on an overlooked sector of Chaucers and Gowers early readership, namely, the upper strata of nonruling urban classes, Lynn Arner argues that Chaucers and Gowers writings engaged in elaborate processes of constructing cultural expertise. These writings helped define gradations of cultural authority, determining who could contribute to the production of legitimate knowledge and granting certain socioeconomic groups political leverage in the wake of the English Rising of 1381. Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising simultaneously examines Chaucers and Gowers negotiationsoften articulated at the site of genderover poetics and over the roles that vernacular poetry should play in the late medieval English social formation. This study investigates how Chaucers and Gowers texts positioned poetry to become a powerful participant in processes of social control.