John Gower Poetry and Propaganda in Fourteenth-Century England

John Gower has been criticised for composing verse propaganda for the English state in support of the regime of Henry IV at the end of his distinguished career. However as the author of this book shows using evidence from Gower's English French and Latin poems alongside contemporary state papers pamphlet-literature and other historical prose Gower was not the only medieval writer to be so employed in serving a monarchy's goals. Professor Carlson also argues that Gower's late poetry is the apotheosis of the fourteenth-century tradition of state-official writing which lay at the origin of the literary Renaissance in Ricardian and Lancastrian England