The Mirour de l’Omme (The Mirror of Mankind) is
a lengthy moral treatise in French verse. It is the
earliest significant work of the major English poet
John Gower, and, while lacking in unity and focus
due in large part to its sprawling length, it introduces the themes of the moral degeneration of contemporary society and the importance of
individual responsibility for virtue that were to
dominate Gower’s later works.
Lost for centuries, the Mirour de l’Omme was
discovered in 1895 by Gower’s modern editor G. C.
Macaulay in a single manuscript, Cambridge University Library Addition MS. 3035. The manuscript contains 26,603 lines of verse. It is missing
four leaves in the beginning, a few at the end, and
seven more at various points throughout the text,
so that the complete poem must originally have
been some 31,000 lines. Gower uses a stanza of 12
octosyllabic lines (known as a Héliland Strophe)
rhyming aabaab/baabaa. Most often the stanzas
contain a pause midway through, and a moral tag
or summary in the last two or three lines. It was a
form common to French moral poets of the time,
and Gower’s versification is extremely polished
and regular.
Calling sin the cause of all the world’s evil,
Gower opens the Mirour de l’Omme with a discussion of the origin of sin. After his fall Lucifer gives
birth to Sin, and drawn to his own vile creation,
he couples with her and gives birth to Death. Driven by the same unnatural lust as his father, Death
engenders with Sin seven more hideous daughters—the Seven Deadly Sins. The ALLEGORY is unmistakably reminiscent of John Milton’s Paradise
Lost (1667), but it is unlikely that Milton could
have known the Mirour de l’Omme (since we know
of no extant manuscript other than the one found
by Macaulay). Still, no common source has ever
been found for the allegory.
As the poem continues, the Devil sets his sights
on ruining God’s creation. Because Man is initially
inclined to follow the tenets of Reason, the Devil
cannot corrupt him, and decides to reinforce his
party. He marries the seven sins to his ally, the
World, pledging Hell as their dowry. Gower gives a
lengthy description of the procession of the seven
sins, drawn from conventional iconography: from
Pride riding her Lion and dressed in elaborate attire to Lechery riding her goat and carrying her
dove, the sins marry World and each of them
begets five more daughters, personifying the different branches of each sin. Man is overcome by
the attack of so many sins, and to aid Man, God
sends seven Virtues to marry Reason and beget
their own daughters as antidotes to the variety of
vices. This section is reminiscent of the catalogues
of virtues and vices found in confessional manuals like CHAUCER’s PARSON’S TALE.
In the next 8,000 lines, Gower goes on to show
the effects of the various sins in the world through
an ESTATES SATIRE in which he considers the three
estates of humankind—clergy, nobility, and common people—and their various occupations, and
finds them all corrupted by sin. In many ways this
is the most interesting part of the Mirour de
l’Omme because of its depiction of life in late 14thcentury London; this section might be compared
to the GENERAL PROLOGUE of Chaucer’s CANTERBURY TALES. Many stock complaints about the various professions form part of the descriptions here,
including that of a monk devoted to food and to
hunting, a corrupt friar who uses the confessional
for personal gain, and a tavern keeper who cheats
customers by providing every wine in Europe from
a single cask.
In the last 3,000 lines of the poem, Gower looks
for the solution to the world’s corruption. In the
bygone former age, human beings were in harmony
with the law of love that held the world in order.
But now man’s rebellion against Reason has thrown
the world into chaos. Human beings—not God or
the Devil or the stars—are responsible for the condition of the world, and to set it right, man must
follow the law of nature. The poem ends with a life
of the Virgin as an example of how human beings
should live in accordance with God’s law of love.
The Mirour de l’Omme is most interesting in relation to Gower’s other major works, the Latin VOX
CLAMANTIS (1379–82) and the English CONFESSIO
AMANTIS (1386–90), with both of which it shares a
moral tone, a concern with the corruption of society, and an emphasis on human responsibility. In
order to suggest the parallels among the three
works, Gower sought later in his life to give the
early poem a Latin title parallel to the other two,
changing his original French title of Mirour de
l’Omme to Speculum hominis and ultimately to
Speculum meditantis. The poem is also valuable for
its picture of London life and for its rhetorical sophistication. Its first English translation was made
available only in 1992.
Bibliography
Fisher, John H. John Gower: Moral Philosopher and
Friend of Chaucer. New York: New York University Press, 1964.
Gower, John. Mirour de l’Omme. Translated by
William Burton Wilson. Revised by Nancy Wilson Van Baak. With a foreword by Robert F. Yeager. East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1992.
Macaulay, G. C., ed. The Complete Works of John
Gower. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899–1902.
Yeager, Robert F. John Gower: Recent Readings. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Press, 1989.