10 - Letters of Old Age: The Advocacy of Peace in the Works of John Gower and Philippe de Mézières

Summary

Since Paul Strohm's 1992 study demonstrated Gower's reliance on the rhetoric of the official Lancastrian justification of Henry IV's accession in “In Praise of Peace”, this poem has been read primarily within the context of the turbulent political climate of the first years of Henry's reign. Whereas recent scholarship has done much to enrich our understanding of the poem by uncovering the complex layers of meaning generated by Gower's paradoxical attempts simultaneously to advocate peace and to defend Henry's forcible seizure of the throne, there is another dimension to “In Praise of Peace” that has hitherto received relatively little critical scrutiny: Gower's ardent pleas for the resolution of the papal schism and for a permanent peace between England and France. In explicating the central factors that led to the oppression of “Cristes pes” (IPP 253), Gower identifies the Schism as the root cause of the prolonged conflict between the two countries, which in turn makes all of Europe vulnerable to external threats. Gower's repeatedly expressed concern over the disunity of the Church, coupled with his insistence on the responsibility of secular rulers to restore peace to Christendom, invites comparison with the writings of his continental contemporaries, such as Philippe de Mézieres, Eustache Deschamps, Honorat Bovet, and Christine de Pizan, who all gave voice to their anxiety and frustration over the divided papacy and its consequences for European peace.

The primary aim of this essay is to situate Gower's poetry in a cross-Channel literary movement committed to the promotion of peace in Europe. To this end I will analyze “In Praise of Peace” in comparison to Philippe de Mézieres’ Epistre au roi Richart and Songe du vieil pelerin, both of which bear affinities to Gower's poem in their construction of an authorial self-image as an old sage ideally suited to offer wisdom to a king, their prominent use of pathological imagery in their reflections on the perilous state of Christendom, their treatment of Alexander the Great as a negative exemplum of uncontrolled belligerence, and their representation of kingship as the single source of authority capable of providing a “cure” for Europe's socio-political “illness.”