This collection gathers in one place the essays that have done most to shape the modern critical discussion of the Confessio Amantis, and illustrates, by the choice of the landmarks of Gower criticism, how the study of the poem has evolved. It also provides representative examples of major approaches to the poem and selected studies of its most important aspects The essays provide a valuable indication of precisely what kinds of challenges the Confessio Amantishas posed for modern readers; they will provide the groundwork for all future study of the Confessio Essays by: G.C. MACAULAY, C.S....

Fathers and daughters are central to some of the most significant tales in Gower's poem. Using feminist and anthropological approaches, Bullon-Fernandez argues that father-daughter relationships, and the associated theme of incest that they sometimes suggest, enable Gower to examine authority relationships in three interconnected spheres: family, state, and text. She suggests that Gower perceived the relationships between kings and subjects and between authors and texts as similar to paternal relationships with a daughter; and further, that Gower regarded the law of exogamy as at the core of...

After establishing his reputation as a literary author by means of his French and Latin verse, Gower came to recognize the possibilities which English held for serious poetry only in the 1380s. This book gives sustained attention to the implications of this language choice for the form, readership, religious position, and lay authority of his best-known work, the Confessio Amantis.The author argues that in all of his moral-political-theological writings, Gower's stance as a satirist and publicist is more markedly lay, and more rhetorically momentous for reasons associated with this lay...

Gower's use of the persona, the figure of the writer implicated in the text, is the main theme of this book. While it traces the development of Gower's voice through his major works, it concentrates on the dialogue of Amans and Genius in the Confessio Amantis. It argues that Gower negotiates problems of politics and problems of love by means of an analogy between political ethics and the rules of fin amour; Amans and Genius are both drawn from and occupied with amatory and ethical traditions, and their discourse produces a series of attempts to find a coherent and rational union of lover and...

John Gower's great poem, the Confessio Amantis, was the first work of English literature translated into any European language. Occasioned by the existence in Spain of fifteenth-century Portuguese and Spanish manuscripts of the Confessio, the nineteen essays brought together here represent new and original approaches to Gower's role in Anglo-Iberian literary relations. They include major studies of the palaeography of the Iberian manuscripts; of the ownership history of the Portuguese Confessio manuscript; of the glosses of Gowerian manuscripts; and of the manuscript of the Yale Confessio...