A Companion to Gower. Edited by Siân Echard. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004. Pp. x + 286. $110.

A companion is designed to travel with a reader, a friendly guide along the journey of reading difficult works, providing a rich and accessible store of information, anticipating potential moments of confusion or factual ignorance and filling in gaps in common (and even uncommon) knowledge, steering the misadvised reader toward good authority, and bringing him back from any brink of inexperience or bad judgment. Providing such friendly and measured company is a task at which the Cambridge Companion to Gower utterly succeeds. the essays are uniformly clear, readable, informative; the notes are responsible and usually brief; an appendix giving a chronology of Gower criticism from pre-1800 to 2003 is accompanied by its own index of scholars, and the general index of names is thorough and usable. A range of younger to more senior scholars shed light on new aspects of Gower's life and work.

Elizabeth Allen
University of California, Irvine