The following sixteen essays originated as part of the Third International Congress of the John Gower Society, held at the University of Rochester, June 29–July 3, 2014. The Third Congress represented both a kind of homecoming and an evident evolution for the Society: a homecoming because, in part out of conversations initiated in Rochester thirty years ago, the John Gower Society began to take shape; and an evolution for reasons that, it is hoped, the essays collected here will provide ample evidence. About half of the attendees and presenters at the Third International Congress were under thirty-five years of age. “Who are all these people?” Derek Pearsall is reported to have said, amazed at the number of younger scholars writing with such commitment and enthusiasm on Gower, expanding the conversation into fresh areas of inquiry and looking at familiar topics with keen, contemporary eyes. This reconceptualizing of Gower studies figures into the title and the contents of the present collection. John Gower: Others and the Self presents fruits of the rich and varietous––but profoundly cohesive—scholarly interchange that marked so strongly the Third International Congress. All the essays here have been included because in one manner or another they comment on facets of selfhood: views of the inside, the personal, and of the exterior, the outside in its interaction with the “other,” defined in several ways. Commissioned from long- established scholars and from Gowerians of the next generation as well, all the work included here has been produced specifically for this volume, and appears for the first time in print.

The book is divided into three sections. Part I, “Knowing the Self and Others,” consists of five essays that, taken together, reflect on multiple aspects of self-encounter. In the opening essay, “The Materiality of Cognition in Reading, Staging, and Regulation of Brain and Heart Activities in Gower's Confessio Amantis,” Russell A. Peck grounds the volume in a broad-ranging examination of the materiality of thought and feeling as Gower delineates them in his Middle English poem.