Historians on John Gower, a large, sturdy, and often foundational (or, at times, re-foundational) set of essays on Gower's life, works, contexts, and outlooks demonstrates many of the virtues of the disciplinary crossover into “history” that literary scholars often invite or instigate but that rarely come from the other side. The volume's editors, Stephen Rigby and Siân Echard, have both, however, long been practitioners of such crossovers, as most recently demonstrated by Rigby's Historians on Chaucer: The General Prologue (2015), co-edited, like this volume, by a literary expert (there Alastair Minnis) on the medieval author in question.

The results here are excellent. Although there is some tendency to extract ideas from Gower's writing rather than, say, consider his works’ features or their relations to contexts in poetically oriented ways, the volume offers significant new information and perspectives, balancing mini-surveys of relevant topics with close attention to Gower's texts, life, and views, along with diligent and often corrective canvassing of prior commentary.

Gower is a particularly apt focus for this volume's assignment. Gower's works often concern history and society, yet situating and dating crucial aspects of his poetry is difficult, most notoriously when and how much he revised his poems’ political views, which claim to trace an arc from endorsing Richard II to denouncing the king in favor of Henry of Lancaster—an inspiring testimonial of political ethics, unless it was all fabricated after Richard's deposition. To be sure, Gower's historical interest, and the challenges we face elucidating its elements, are wider than the much-discussed issue of when and how much he really changed his political loyalties and perspective, and many topics are taken up here before that issue is addressed. Rigby's initial survey of the basic issues in dating Gower's works is followed by Martha Carlin's superb chapter on Gower's life and associates, with newly discovered life records and new prospects for understanding his livelihood and personality. He may have made a substantial part of his wealth as a moneylender, for instance, and he spent much of it on his elaborately self-aggrandizing tomb. His testament appears unusually self-absorbed as well, naming among his beneficiaries only his wife Agnes. And she seems more educated and socially respectable than scholars have assumed.

Chapters on Gower's social vision highlight his ideological complexities and blind spots but also our uncertainties. Mark Bailey's comparison of peasant culture and the 1381 Rising to Gower's views authoritatively shows how little Gower understood the world of peasants and smallholders, however quick he was to portray their monstrous rebellion. David Green's assessment of Gower's views of chivalry shows Gower grappling with dissolving boundaries between the higher estates. James Davis argues for a civically astute Gower, whose Mirour de l'Omme seems to echo London's political discontents concerning commodity prices in the 1370s. Anthony Musson uncovers unnoticed subtleties in Gower's legal language while expanding the possibilities for what it means to be a “man of law,” beyond the assumptions in many claims that Gower was a lawyer. Just what Gower meant by saying he has worn “the striped sleeve” is, consequently, less clear than ever. Might some early readers have also been uncertain?

Chapters on Gower's ecclesiological satire converge in showing his vigorous critique but reluctance to propose practical, much less revolutionary, solutions. David Lepine shows that Gower parallels Wyclif's denunciations of the pope and church's wealth but avoids Wyclif's radical conclusions. Martin Heale sifts anti-monastic satire to show how conventional were Gower's criticisms, though Gower never rejected monasticism as such—unsurprisingly given his residence alongside the canons of St. Mary Overy, Southwark, which holds his tomb. Jens Röhrkasten observes, astoundingly, that Gower collects the largest quantity of criticism of friars of any satirist (314). Yet Röhrkasten shows that Gower overlooks the original purposes of such criticisms while offering only “simplistic” (317) ideas for fixing the hypocrisies he rails against.

Many of these essays note Gower's failures to formulate solutions. Thus Musson remarks that Gower's only answer for legal abuses was a tax on lawyers’ profits (238). Such criticisms, while fair, may not fully appreciate the literary modes Gower seems to have presumed. Gower was a satirist, not a politician or social reformer, even if he sometimes seems an irresolute version of the last. We do not expect Jonathan Swift to solve the problem of famine in Ireland, nor are we scornful of Swift for his only serious solution for English poverty: giving identification badges to beggars.

Some, but for my tastes not enough, of these chapters show how Gower's writings offered resources for new kinds of social imagination. Gower's ideas of women, for instance, are deftly treated by Katherine Lewis, who tracks not only how fully Gower developed his portrayals of learned and noble women in the English Confessio Amantis but also how many fifteenth-century royal and noble women read or owned that work. This brings Gower into the center of an active modern discussion of women as readers and patrons of early English literature. Christopher Fletcher treats Gower's presentations of masculinity, focusing on diction as well as narrative to demonstrate the tricky balance Gower sought between military honor and Christian humility. Gower's significance for gender studies is well served by both essays.

Gower's much-debated political views are treated from two directions. Rigby magisterially situates Gower in medieval theories of kingship, showing that Gower balanced the idea that kings were subordinate to the law with the idea that only God could actually enforce that. For Rigby, Gower's position was that nothing could be done, at least by him, although in the end, Gower could see the hand of God in Richard's deposition. Michael Bennett focuses more locally on the evidence for Gower's evolving political commitments. Bennett not only argues, using heraldic evidence, for a pre-deposition date of one “Henrician” copy of the Confessio Amantis—a compelling counter to skeptics seeing Gower as merely pretending to have approved of Henry before he was Henry IV—but also speculatively advances what might be called a progressivist view of the Confessio Amantis and Chronica Tripertita. Bennett sifts the latter for evidence that it was composed in stages, reflecting Gower's doubts, confusion, and eventual political clarity in affirming Henry IV's ascent.

Finally, Seb Falk investigates Gower's astronomical interests: Gower used not only the “courtly encyclopedia” of Brunetto Latini (as has been known) but also an arcane academic work attributed to Alchandreus, a combination showing Gower's encyclopedic aspirations, although the results verge on heretical determinism. Yet Gower never entirely crosses that line. The volume aptly ends with this demonstration of Gower's ideological complexity, establishing, as throughout, essential terms for further discussions of its topic.