Abstract
Like the structure of Piers Plowman, the use of glossing and marginalia in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis is a central feature of the work as both styles affect the content’s use of knowledge and nonknowledge. Though different in execution, both seem to share a similar goal. In Piers Plowman the macaronic structure is a form of hiding in plain sight, using a mixture of languages when the vernacular simply does not seem to suffice. In Gower, a similar thing takes place where the historical residue impinges upon the dominating center by literally taking over the margins and crowding the text1; not very different from the (in)visibility of gnosticism in the text(s). But it is more than that since, much like in the other texts discussed, Confessio Amantis emphasizes the role of the female guide2 in this process of Passing along with the importance of passivity in an exercise of storytelling of ethical parables set in dream vision tradition. It not only draws on the classics in both structure and theme, but also depends upon Boethius’ consolation style. At the same time, it has been considered a kind of dream vision, albeit somewhat different from the ones formerly discussed, but above all, a confession, much as the very title indicates.3 On the surface, the scheme seems fairly simple for it presents numerous tales inspired by different traditions on the backdrop of the seven deadly sins with an emphasis on some mode of love, or more particularly, lust.
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Notes
For more on the unique style of the Confessio and the intermittent use of Latin verse and prose on the margins of the “simpler” English, as Robert Yeager puts it, see Robert Yeager, “‘Oure Englisshe’ and everyone’s Latin: The Fasciculus Morum and Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” South Atlantic Review 46.4 (1981): 41–53;
Yeager, “English, Latin, and the text as ‘Other’: the Page as sign in the work of John Gower,” Text 3 (1987): 251–67;
and Derek Pearsall, “Gower’s Latin in the Confessio Amantis,” in Latin and Vernacular: Studies in Late-Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989), 13–25.
On the power of women in the Confessio and their authoritative stance, see Amanda Leff, “Writing, gender, and power in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Exemplaria 20.1 (2008): 28–47. Leff hints at the possibility that Gower’s use of female writing has the potential to “destabilize the social hierarchy” but more concretely, “to reinforce the transformative power of writing itself” (43).
See Winthrop Wetherbee, “Classical and Boethian Tradition in the Confessio Amantis,” in A Companion to Gower, ed. Sian Echard (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 181–96;
Russell A. Peck, “The politics and psychology of governance in Gower: Ideas of kingship and real kings,” in A Companion to Gower, ed. Sian Echard (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 215–38;
William Robins, “Romance, exemplum, and the subject of the Confessio Amantis,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 19 (1997): 157–81;
Kurt Olsson, John Gower and the Structures of Conversion: A Reading of the Confessio Amantis (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1992);
and Robert Yeager, “John Gower and the uses of allusion,” Res Publica Litterarum 7 (1984): 201–13.
See Paul Clogan, “From complaint to satire: The art of the Confessio Amantis,” Medievalia et Humanistica 4 (1973): 217–22;
Russell Peck, Kingship and Common Profit in Gower’s Confessio Amantis, ed. John Gardner (Southern Illinois University Press, 1978);
Robert Yeager, “Pax Poetica: On the pacifism of Chaucer and Gower,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer9 (1987): 97–121;
and Yeager, John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990).
See Russell A. Peck, “John Gower,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Jeffrey Helterman and Jerome Mitchell (Detriot: Gale Research, 1994), 178–90;
George Campbell Macaulay, “John Gower,” in The Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), 133–55. Macaulay argued that each of the “recensions” represented a different stage of authorial revision. He dated the first to 1390, the second c. 1392, and the third to 1393. He also added that certain textual changes—the omission of the reference to Richard II and to Gower’s contemporary poet and “friend,” as well as the addition of a dedication to Henry of Derby—indicated a change in Gower’s political affiliation. However, this has been disputed by Nicholson and Pearsall.
Also see Joyce Coleman, “‘A Bok for King Richardes Sake’: Royal Patronage, the Confessio, and the Legend of Good Women,” in On John Gower: Essays at the Millenium, ed. Robert Yeager (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2007), 104–21. Coleman argues for restoring the first “recension’s” eminence as well as Richard II’s contribution to the poem’s inception.
Alastair J. Minnis, “Moral Gower and medieval literary theory,” in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1983), 50–78.
For more on possible intended audience, see Joyce Coleman, “Lay Readers and Hard Latin: How Gower may have intended the Confessio Amantis to be read,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002): 209–35.
Derek Pearsall, “Gower’s Narrative Art,” PMLA 81.7 (1966): 476.
Steele Nowlin, “Narratives of incest and incestuous narratives: Memory, process, and the Confessio Amantis’s ‘Middel Weie’,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2005): 217–44.
For more on exempla, see Kurt Olsson, “Rhetoric, John Gower, and the late medieval exemplum,” Medievalia et Humanística 8 (1977): 185–200
and R. F. Yeager, “John Gower and the exemplum form: Tale models in the Confessio Amantis,” Mediaevalia 8 (1982): 307–35.
All subsequent quotes are taken from John Gower, Confessio Amantis, 3 vols, ed. Russell A. Peck, with Latin translations by Andrew Galloway (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2006).
See Andrew Galloway, “Gower in his most learned role and the Peasants’ revolt of 1381,” Mediaevalia 16 (1993): 329–47.
See Andrew Galloway, “Gower in his most learned role and the Peasants’ revolt of 1381,” Mediaevalia 16 (1993): 329–47;
Galloway, “Reassessing Gower’s dream visions,” in John Gower, Trilingual Poet, ed. Elisabeth Dutton, John Hines, and R. F. Yeager (D.S. Brewer, 2010)
and Robert Epstein, “London, Southwark, Westminster: Gower’s urban contexts,” in A Companion to Gower, ed. Siân Echard (D.S. Brewer, 2004).
An early Jewish Christian sect that emphasized poverty and whose general tenets were based in Gnosticism. The Church Fathers claimed they used the Gospel of Matthew, The Circuits of Peter and The Acts of the Apostles. For more on this issue see Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed (eds.) The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Paul Mohr Verlag, 2003)
and Joan Taylor, “The phenomenon of early Jewish-Christianity: Reality or scholarly invention?” Vigiliae Christianae 44.4 (1990): 313–34.
For more on Gower’s ethics see J. Allan Mitchell, Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004).
James T. Bratcher, “Gower’s ‘Tale of Three Questions’ and ‘The Clever Peasant Girl’ folktale,” Notes and Queries 53.4 (2006): 409–10.
“The Effendi and the Riddles” retold by Josepha Sherman in Trickster Tales: Forty Folk Tales from around the World (August House, 2005), 68–70.
Walter Scott (ed.) Hermetica: The Ancient Greek and Latin Writings Which Contain Religious and Philosophical Teachings Ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus (Boston: Shambhala, 1985), 33.
Brian P. Copenhaver (ed.). Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation, with Notes and Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Stephan A. Hoeller, “On the trail of the winged god,” Gnosis: A Journal of Western Inner Traditions 40 (1996): 20–8.
For a discussion on Gower’s mirroring technique, see Andrea Schutz, “Absent and present images: Mirrors and mirroring in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” The Chaucer Review 34.1 (1999): 107–24.
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© 2015 Natanela Elias
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Elias, N. (2015). Gower’s Bower of Bliss: A Successful Passing into Hermetic Gnosis. In: The Gnostic Paradigm. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465382_4
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