Enfeoffment to Use, Legalism, and Humanism in Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme

Abstract

Recent scholarship on medieval English law and literature emphasizes their generic affinities and discusses law and literature as equally fluid “parallel discourses” that illuminate a common culture.1 The preponderance of legal vocabulary in Gower’s Anglo-Norman poem Mirour de l’Omme (finished in the 1370s) has attracted the attention of many literary critics, who have noted the paradoxical juxtaposition of a bitter satire of the legal profession and a heavy reliance on allegorized legal devices for the purpose of moral didacticism. Among his references to legal devices, Gower’s diversification of the concept of “property ownership” is the most noteworthy. At the beginning of Mirour in the devils’ parliament, “the whole metaphoric complex of property ownership is split between the initial presentation of Man as having lost property (Paradise) and his more extensive role as lost property.”2 After losing Paradise, Man is in danger of losing his soul to the devil. Gower’s allegory expands the narrative of mankind’s fall by continually glossing “ownership” and “property rights” throughout the poem, which creates a tension between Man as property at the mercy of external forces and Man as a free creature capable of