I’m still dipping into Anderson & Bellenger despite my misgivings about its useability for students. I mean, there is a load of stuff in here that I never read before, mainly because of it being high medieval, and I think it’s probably safe for me to take it in.

So on the day I type this I finished off the section on “The World of the Mind”, which is clearly where at least one of the author’s interests lie as it’s considerably more together than some of the rest. There is a great deal I didn’t really need on the building of cathedrals, but also a lot of stuff from philosophers I haven’t read since I was a second-year undergraduate. This leaves me:

  • firstly joyfully rediscovering Aristotelian causation, which I’ve been meaning to look up again for years, pretty much whenever I see an argument on Usenet (yes, years I said) that mixes some of the four causes up;
  • secondly coming across a nice little translation of Anselm’s claim that there must be that than which there is nothing greater, which is more cunning than I had realised;
  • thirdly remembering that although I definitely didn’t warm to Aquinas when studying him, there is no doubting that he was one of those ones that Ian Dury sang about;
  • and fourthly finding again that, along with John Scottus Eriguena (did I tell you his great medieval pun yet? I didn’t, did I? But you probably know it already), the young Peter Abélard is someone I’d love to share a few bottles of wine with.

Ideally before the little upset to his career, otherwise I fear the conversation might be a bit repetitive, but he was clearly so inspiring to listen to. I’d have got into serious trouble studying under either of those two, because I’d have gone along with it all until made to mend my ways by conciliar verdict. Anyway. There was something else.

There is also some Gower, the section of his Confessio Amantis that deals with the Zodiac indeed. Now, this is all the Gower I’ve read, which I realise is a poor show, but it’s never been my field of study. I did read some of the obvious alternative for my A-Levels a long time ago, and have always enjoyed his stuff, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect here. An odd effect is that I found myself reading it with a tinge of West Country accent to it, the vowels seem to demand it (whereas I always read Chaucer in the manner of Bill Bailey I’m afraid). But mainly, though I would have liked to avoid taking sides in what some might call ‘nat a littel controuersie’: my gods it’s full of filler isn’t it? How many times can a poet get a phrase like “as en bokes we finde”, “as thou myht hiere me divise”, “as it is in bokes told” and so on into one stanza? Verily, the man is a thirteenth-century Eliot writing the precursor to ‘The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (on the subject of which I side with Marlowe (Philip Marlowe, that is): it doesn’t mean “a damn thing. It just sounds good”).

I suppose the art is in the fitting of that padding into the rest of the rhymes and I realise that even our favourite Clerk of the King’s Works was far from immune to this tendency. And maybe this section, being astronomical rather than about matters more human, is not typical of Messire Gower’s work but I did find it very heavy going because of such devices. There are times when one perhaps ought to follow the practice of one of modern England’s better users of the lyric, and know when to just insert a phrase like, “I thought of about twenty different rhyming couplets for this bit, but none of them were any good, so, I’m not going to bother”…