SOURCE: Grady, Frank. “The Lancastrian Gower and the Limits of Exemplarity.” Speculum 70, no. 3 (July 1995): 552-75.

In the following essay, Grady questions traditional estimations of Gower's “In Praise of Peace” as Lancastrian propaganda, claiming instead that the poem features a complex understanding of English politics at the turn of the fifteenth century.

Giving advice to Henry Bolingbroke was a pastime that could be very rewarding or very dangerous. Consider the following two cases. In May 1401, a little over nineteen months after Henry had deposed his cousin Richard and ascended the throne, his friend and confessor Philip Repyngdon, at that time the abbot of St. Mary de Prè in Leicester and chancellor of Oxford, sent Henry a long letter about the condition of the realm. Henry had personally requested such a report, according to the version of the letter preserved in Adam of Usk's Chronicle:¹ “Whereas your singular serenity did...