As its title indicates, Lordship and Literature bridges the fields of literature and history in a study of the specific social and political valences of the magnate affinity, or “great household,” in later medieval England. Its focus is the poetry of John Gower. Gower is an interesting choice since, as far as we know, he was not closely allied with any magnate affinity for most of his life, although in 1393 he received liveried preferment from Henry of Derby, the eventual Lancastrian king Henry IV and, after Henry's ascent in 1400, received further royal grants until his death in 1408. But as Elliott Kendall argues, Gower's interest in the structure and dynamics of the great household probably predates all of this and forms a central element in his greatest work, the Confessio Amantis. Kendall seeks to perform “the twin exercise of excavating and historically situating the Confessio's politics” (6) by way of a critically informed historicization of “the great household imaginary” in the poem (10). Kendall's book thus joins a body of recent scholarship—including work by Wendy Scase, Paul Strohm, Marion Turner, Helen Barr, and others among literary scholars and by Gwilym Dodd, Mark Ormrod, John Watts, Christine Carpenter, and others among late medieval English historians—in creating a rapprochement between literature and history that is both rigorous and lively. Lordship and Literature can be warmly recommended as among this company.

Borrowing from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, in the first two chapters Kendall establishes a “general model of economic practice” (18) that contrasts two modalities of exchange, “reciprocalism” and “magnificence,” as the primary forms organizing the aristocratic practice of medieval household politics. Broadly speaking, these are the contrasting practices of exchange characteristic of smaller and local and centrifugal interests, on the one hand, and centralized or royal or “magnificent” interests, on the other. Where reciprocalism creates networks of mutual debt and exchange, “magnificence strives to be unanswerable” in its actions (24). This general model is then extended for understanding the structure of the Confessio's frame narrative and for analyzing its tales’ representations of the dynamics of household exchanges and “the logic of the reciprocalist critique of magnificence” (63). Chapters 3 and 4 closely read the framing allegory of the Confessio, the “confession” of the Lover Amans to the priest Genius. Kendall argues that it represents a “service allegory” thoroughly suffused both with the language of household affinity—especially in Gower's altered figure of “Dangier”—and with the overall organizational structure of a great household's domestication of penitential theology and practice within the domestic ideology of reciprocalist lordship. Moving into Confessio's tales themselves, chapter 5 focuses on women as objects of exchange and as “signs of the great household's political economy” (133) in their subordination and circulation. Chapters 6 and 7 analyze the dilemmas of livery and maintenance in the context of reciprocalist demands for political justice and retribution and, more broadly, in the demands for both trouthe and social order in the tales. The last chapter takes up the familiar problem of Gower's perspectives on kingship as a particular dilemma for the desire for a “reciprocalist redresser-king” (244) who is also unavoidably a magnificent figure and a sovereign will, one whose acts of mercy or sovereign pity can be figured only as both totalizing and excessive and as essentially corrosive of “reciprocalist substance” (252).

There is much to consider here. At its strongest points, especially in chapters 3 and 4, Lordship and Literature offers a remarkably cogent and compelling reassessment of the importance of a particular kind of late medieval politics for the specific manifestations of literary form in the Confessio. Indeed, the alignment of the Confessio's confessional frame with the structural and petitionary-political setting of a reciprocalist great household offers an interpretive framework that is radically illuminating. The text simply makes more sense, as Kendall explains, when we see that “Venus’ resolution of the frame narrative laicizes penance and the institutional authority to which the penitent is accommodated. In other words, it makes penitential reform a product of good lordship” (112). Similarly, the troubled model of unreciprocal royal magnificence in other courtly texts (“Cupid's lordship demands everything of its servants, but is at the same time unreciprocal” [125]) is more clearly seen through this historical contrast in the household-centered anxieties of exchange. As Kendall notes, the differences must have been immediately palpable to Gower's readers. The later chapters of the book are somewhat less compelling than this, if at times only because many of Gower's classical tales seem less specifically subject to the context of the late medieval great household as an ideologically formative force. And occasionally the attempt to apply this rubric to other very broad social tensions and long-running conflicts—the exchange of women between households or the identification of “household revenge” as a category of reciprocalist lordship in such troubling stories as “The Tale of Orestes”—raises as many questions as it can presume to answer. But here as well there is fresh insight and analysis, as with the recognition of the curious prevalence of vicious bachelers among the tales and the consistent anxieties about chamber relationships they display (206–7). Kendall's analysis is also in a productive dialogue with the work of other scholars, particularly the work of R. F. Green in chapter 7.

Occasionally the book displays its recent vintage as a dissertation in the awkwardness of its internal arrangements and its periodically difficult phrasing. By the end I wished Kendall had taken the time to expand his purview to include other immediately relevant texts such as Gawain and the Green Knight. As the author himself suggests in the conclusion, this text and others would benefit from a similar analysis. Indeed, this is not so much a shortcoming as an acknowledgment of the study's suggestiveness and paradigmatic applicability. While it might be a bit much to claim that “the aristocratic household and affinity … are the key to the politics of the Confessio” (1; my emphasis), Kendall's work has gone a long way toward unlocking many of their complexities. Lordship and Literature is thus a welcome addition to the growing body of solid scholarship and creative criticism of late medieval literature and politics in general and of John Gower's poetry in particular.