“The bokes duelle”: John Gower, Futurity, and the Development of the Late Medieval Archive

Abstract: Over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, English archives became increasingly well organized. Late medieval record keepers catalogued collections and moved legal documents, chronicles, and poetry from cupboards and chests into newly built library rooms. More searchable and centrally located, archives began to loom large in the consciousnesses of late medieval poets such as John Gower, who confronted the possibilities and pitfalls of archival memory in his verses. This article argues that in the Confessio Amantis , the Vox clamantis , and “Henrici quarti primus,” Gower exhibits an archival poetics as he anticipates the material endurance of his literary works into the future. Thinking like an archivist, Gower fantasizes about shaping his legacy under the archive’s auspices in the prologue to the Confessio , imagining that his books will “duelle” (dwell) in its collections. In the Vox , Gower represents the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381—in part a struggle over control of archives—as an antitextual, anarchivic apocalypse. He leverages the prologue genre to stage the power of prolepsis and assert his capacity to shape future narrations of history through his writing. Gower’s works thus invite us to participate in a mutual gaze that spans centuries, and to reconsider transhistoricism as a two-way endeavor. Though today we may look back on medieval literature, when medieval authors considered how archiving would shape future memory, they looked forward to us too.