When we think about the inheritance of a classical past, we tend to think towards Greece and towards Rome. Of course, as medievalists, there are very many good reasons to do so. The dominance of ecclesiastical Latinity, its works disseminated through the network of the Roman church, tied the most significant intellectual trends of the era to a culture that was palpably rooted in the shared inheritance of this Greco-Roman past. And in the world of vernacular literature the varied romance traditions laboured mightily to tell the story of the descent of contemporary aristocratic cultures from their progenitors in Rome, in Thebes and in Troy. The twin pillars of ‘translatio studii’ and ‘translatio imperii’ frame the ‘longue durée’ that organizes much of our work, helping us feel history as, say, a Chaucer or Gower certainly would have done.

In more recent years there has been a great deal of re-examination of these narratives, often under the rubric of locally adapted post-colonial studies. Work by scholars such as Christine Chism, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Geraldine Heng and David Wallace has called into question the westward drift of medieval culture, asking many vital questions about the impact of non-European cultures on writers whom we had often read within a relatively hermetic European tradition. Inspired in part by Edward Said's brilliant work on the formation of Orientalism, such scholars, and many others, have drawn our gaze Eastward, asking us to re-examine the medieval thirst for marvels of the East and the impact of both mercantile networks and Crusading campaigns on the literature produced on the fourteenth-century home front. But in the present essay I want to look neither West nor East, but South, and ask about the place of Egypt in the medieval imagination, specifically the place of Egypt in Gower's work. And even to call it South is something of a misdirection here, as I will want to argue that, even more than the mutually fashioning dialectic of East and West, Egypt appeared to Gower as a historical problem in that it was both utterly alien and yet utterly intrinsic to the crucial theological and political inheritances of the classical Mediterranean world.