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Diane Watt, Amoral Gower: Language, Sex, and Politics, Medieval Cultures 38 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). xviii + 206 pp. ISBN 0-8166-4028-9. $21.95.
Diane Watt's ground-breaking analysis of Confessio Amantis boldly engages Gower's work with feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic theory as well as historicist and ethical criticism. There are many notable arguments in this book, but one of its most paradigm-shifting insights is Watt's view of the seemingly conservative 'moral Gower' as a conflicted and divided poet. Rather than expressing a uniform vision of social or linguistic order, Gower's work abounds with multiple readings, discontinuities, and contradictions. For instance, the Confessio narratives resist easy correspondence to their stated morals; Gower takes diverse, even sympathetic, stances on sexual sins like incest, transgenderism, and female homosexuality; and a playful Bakhtinian polyglossia can be seen throughout the poem (e.g. the poem's Latin epigrams can undermine the stated morals of the English narratives). Other writers have made similar arguments, but Watt's approach to the Confessio goes beyond a simple synthesis of previous theoretical approaches. By suggesting that Gower is the agent of the ethical and discursive divisions in the text, Watt really...