Name John Clanvowe Role Poet | Died 1391 | |
Sir John Clanvowe (c.1341–1391) was an English diplomat, soldier and poet. He was born to a Marcher family originally of Welsh extraction. He himself was probably of mixed Anglo-Welsh origin. He held lands in present-day Radnorshire and Herefordshire.
Contents
Life
He was a personal friend of Geoffrey Chaucer. In 1386 they were both deponents in the Scrope v. Grosvenor case in the Court of Chivalry, in which Lord Scrope of Bolton and Sir Robert Grosvenor fought over the right to bear a particular coat of arms. Chaucer and Clanvowe testified in favour of Scrope.
He was one of the 'Lollard knights' (with supposedly heretical views) at the court of King Richard II.
In 1390 he was campaigning with Louis II, Duke of Bourbon against Tunis. He was buried with Sir William Neville in a joint tomb discovered in 1913 in Istanbul's Arap Mosque in a way (helmets facing each other as if kissing, shields overlapping, impaled coats of arms), which would suggest a close relationship between the two men.
Works
His best-known work was The Book of Cupid, God of Love or The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, a fourteenth-century debate poem influenced by Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls. In the poem, the nightingale praises love but the cuckoo mocks it for causing more trouble than joy. The poem is written as a literary dream vision and is an example of medieval debate poetry. A concerto inspired by the poem was composed by George Frederick Handel. It apparently also influenced works by both John Milton and William Wordsworth.
Clanvowe also wrote The Two Ways, a penitential treatise.
He is first mentioned in the History of English Literature by F. S. Ellis in 1896. The Cuckoo and the Nightingale had previously been attributed to Chaucer but the Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature notes the absence of direct evidence linking Clanvowe with the work.