SUMMERS, KAREN CRADY, Ph.D. Reading Incest - The University ...

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to his family and nation. Apollonius does not lose his reason to wrath or grief as he
patiently endures years of separation between himself and his wife and daughter, and
their reunion and reunification into a family unit is the reward for his propriety. The
division of Antiochus from his reason and governance brings about his ruin and the loss
of his family and his kingdom. Conversely, the trials of Apollonius could not cause him
to lose his reason, and through him his family and his kingdom prosper.
Gower’s eighth book, on the sin of lechery, prepares the way at last for Amans’s
reintegration into a unified, undivided, and reasonable man. It accomplishes this in part
by focusing on the varied ways that lechery, the unkynde aspect of love known as
cupidity, causes division within the self. The book begins with the beginnings of all
things: the story of Adam and Eve and the peopling of the newly formed earth. Cain and
Abel married their sisters Calmana and Delbora; “Thus was mankinde to beginne; /
Forthi that time it was no Sinne / The Soster forto take hire brother, / Whan that ther was
of chois non other” (VIII. 66-9). Once again, in the second age of man, the age of Noah,
brothers married sisters by necessity and the earth was repopulated. In these times, kynde
caused men and women, even if they be siblings, to reach for each other, much as Canace
and Machaire had. By the time of Abraham there were enough people that siblings need
not marry, and much later, by order of the Pope, marriages within the fourth degree were
prohibited. Man had grown in reason, away from his animalistic beginnings, and learned
self-governance and to continue the practices of the pagan would mean loss of hard-won
progress toward fuller humanity, closer to the divine. The short story of Lot and his
daughters, in contrast to the Tale of Apollonius, is a matter-of-fact narrative of early