WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

Du Nabugod ce poet om lire,
Qui se vantoit jadys ensi
Qu’il Babiloyne ot establi
En gloire de son halt empire:
Mais ainz qu’il pot au plain suffire
Son grant orguil vanter et dire,
Soudainment tout s’esvany,
Et transmua par le dieu ire
Sa forme d’omme en beste pire
Sept auns, ainz qu’il en ot mercy.
Of Nebuchadnezzar one can read
That he often was vainglorious of himself
Because he had established Babylon
In glory of his high empire:
But before that he could plainly satisfy
His great pride to boast and say,
Suddenly everything vanished
And transmuted, through God’s ire,
Was his form of man into a low beast
Seven years, until God had mercy on him [My emphasis]. 208
In contradistinction to the Confessio, Gower’s Mirour de L’Omme uses the French cognate
“transmua” ‘transmuted’ (from “transmuer” ‘to transmute’) for Jerome’s “transmutare” and not
its synonym “transformer” ‘to transform,’ and also follows the Bible in not specifying what
Nebuchadnezzar’s beastly “forme” could be. Even more, the Mirour parallels Jerome’s moral
frame of the episode by contextualizing the episode alongside other biblical tales against
vanity—like those of Lucifer and Simon Magus—and hence toning down the Ovidean likenesses
and ambiguities which such a tale of transformation could introduce.
Yet Gower’s Confessio takes an ambiguous Ovidean (and not decidedly biblical) turn in
portraying the contrition of a beastly and not of a human Nebuchadnezzar:
And so thenkende he gan doun bowe,
And thogh him lacke vois and speche,
He gan up with his feet areche,
And wailende in his bestly stevene
He kneleth in his wise and braieth
To seche merci and assaieth
His God, which made him nothing strange,
Whan that he sih his pride change. 209
208 John Gower, “Mirour de l’Omme,” The Complete Works of John Gower: The French Works, Vol. 4, Ed.
G.C. Macaulay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899) 1885-1897.
209 Gower Confessio 1.3022-3030.
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