Many critics have seen Confessio Amantis as a work of reformist rhetoric that, drawing deeply on medieval Aristotelian conflations of ethics and politics, urges readers toward personal moral reform as the crucial means by which to heal the body politic. In such a view, the moral and public interests on full display in Mirour de l’Omme, Vox Clamantis, and elsewhere remain central to Gower’s purpose in Confessio. However, while Mirour and Vox also foreground religious concerns, Confessio is often seen as “secular” in a modern sense. I argue in this dissertation that Confessio indeed bears strong affinities to Gower’s other religious-ethical-political works, and that the main differences that set it apart from them must be understood in connection with Gower’s decision to write this work “in oure Englissh.” Notwithstanding its debt to aristocratic culture, Confessio imagines a broader and more popular audience than do Vox and Mirour. Gower’s novel language choice has major implications especially for Confessio’s uncharacteristically delicate handling of religion. Chapter 1 examines Confessio’s Ovidian debt and suggests that Confessio’s many invocations of Metamorphoses, given that poem’s fourteenth-century reception, align Confessio with Ovidian universal satire in a way that suggests totalizing religious-ethical-political synthesis. However, Confessio departs from the mainstream of fourteenth-century commentated Ovids by stripping Metamorphoses of its clergial patina and, crucially, adopting a markedly lay stance. Investigating Gower’s attitude to English vernacularity, chapter 2 notes Confessio’s association of translation with decay and demonstrates that scientific and theological passages in Gower’s English works adopt a lower register than analogous passages in his Latin works. Chapter 3 investigates the probable causes of these downward modulations, comparing Gower’s sense of linguistic decorum to those discernible in contemporary English vernacular theology. Chapters 4 and 5—on metamorphosis and art, respectively—argue that Gower finds in Ovidian writing rich resources particularly adaptable to the most delicate of Gower’s rhetorical tasks in Confessio: to address, as layman, a lay audience on matters that are unavoidably, and indeed largely, religious. The dissertation concludes by suggesting that Gower’s voice of lay religious critique plays an important role in the histories of laicization and secularization.

Thesis--Heidelberg. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. vi).

Many critics have seen Confessio Amantis as a work of reformist rhetoric that, drawing deeply on medieval Aristotelian conflations of ethics and politics, urges readers toward personal moral reform as the crucial means by which to heal the body politic. In such a view, the moral and public interests on full display in Mirour de l’Omme, Vox Clamantis, and elsewhere remain central to Gower’s purpose in Confessio. However, while Mirour and Vox also foreground religious concerns, Confessio is often seen as “secular” in a modern sense. I argue in this dissertation that Confessio indeed bears strong affinities to Gower’s other religious-ethical-political works, and that the main differences that set it apart from them must be understood in connection with Gower’s decision to write this work “in oure Englissh.” Notwithstanding its debt to aristocratic culture, Confessio imagines a broader and more popular audience than do Vox and Mirour. Gower’s novel language choice has major implications especially for Confessio’s uncharacteristically delicate handling of religion. Chapter 1 examines Confessio’s Ovidian debt and suggests that Confessio’s many invocations of Metamorphoses, given that poem’s fourteenth-century reception, align Confessio with Ovidian universal satire in a way that suggests totalizing religious-ethical-political synthesis. However, Confessio departs from the mainstream of fourteenth-century commentated Ovids by stripping Metamorphoses of its clergial patina and, crucially, adopting a markedly lay stance. Investigating Gower’s attitude to English vernacularity, chapter 2 notes Confessio’s association of translation with decay and demonstrates that scientific and theological passages in Gower’s English works adopt a lower register than analogous passages in his Latin works. Chapter 3 investigates the probable causes of these downward modulations, comparing Gower’s sense of linguistic decorum to those discernible in contemporary English vernacular theology. Chapters 4 and 5—on metamorphosis and art, respectively—argue that Gower finds in Ovidian writing rich resources particularly adaptable to the most delicate of Gower’s rhetorical tasks in Confessio: to address, as layman, a lay audience on matters that are unavoidably, and indeed largely, religious. The dissertation concludes by suggesting that Gower’s voice of lay religious critique plays an important role in the histories of laicization and secularization.

<p>This dissertation examines the use of personae, the rhetorical artifices by which an author creates different voices, in John Gower's Confessio Amantis. I argue that the Confessio attempts to expose how discourses of sexual desire alienate subjects from their proper place in the political world, and produce artificial personae that only appear socially engaged. The first three chapters consider the creation of the personae in the context of medieval Aristotelian political thought and the Roman de la Rose tradition. The last three chapters examine the extended discourse of Gower's primary personae in the Confessio Amantis, drawing upon Gower's other works and the history of Gower criticism.</p> / Dissertation

The stories we tell give meaning and coherence to our political situation; they reproduce, interrogate, and, at times, challenge the discourse of authority. Thus, when the political situation changes so do our narratives. In the thirteenth century, responding to a majestic rhetoric of vis et voluntas (force and will), the barons strengthened the community of the realm by turning it into a powerful collective identity that fostered political alliances with the gentry. By The Will of the King demonstrates how Ricardian poetry was shaped by and responded to the conflict between majestic and political rhetoric that crystallized in the politically turbulent years culminating in the Second Barons’ War (1258-1265). By placing Gower’s Confessio Amantis and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in dialogue with this political tradition, I demonstrate how narrative became a site of conflict between vertical, cosmic descriptions of power and horizontal realities of power, a conflict from which the contours of a civic habit of mind began to emerge. Over the past twenty years, scholars have begun to investigate the evolution of this habit of mind in the late Middle Ages. By looking at the narrative practice of Gower and Chaucer through the lens of thirteenth-century political innovation, I extend and fill in this depiction of a nascent political imaginary. Each poet responds to the new political circumstances in their own way. Gower, placing the political community at the center of Book VII of the Confessio, rigorously reworks the mirror for princes genre into a schematic analysis of political power. For Chaucer, political rhetoric becomes visible at the moment that the traditional majestic rhetoric of kingship collapses. The Canterbury Tales, as such, restages the conflict of the thirteenth century in aesthetic terms—giving form to the crisis of authority. Ultimately, Ricardian poetry exposes and works through an anxiety of sovereignty; it registers the limits of a majestic paradigm of kingship; and reshaping narrative, aesthetic, and hermeneutic practice, it conjures a new political imaginary capable of speaking to and for a community which had emerged during the reign of Henry III.

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The Confessio Amantis, a poem completed in 1393, opens with its author's pledge to: wryte of newe som matiere essampled of these olde wyse [write anew some matter modeled on these old wise books]. Expressing a commonplace among writers of vernacular literature in late medieval England, John Gower describes authorial activity as the process of translating and assimilating pre-existing narratives. This dissertation argues that such conceptualizations of authorship were embraced by illuminators of vernacular literature in their burgeoning notion of invention before the ascendance of print: as translation and compilation provided a model of creativity founded on the alteration of models, illuminators located an ideal congenial to both the restrictions and freedoms of their own profession. The centerpiece of the study is Pierpont Morgan MS M. 126, a manuscript of the Confessio Amantis produced c.1472 and made for Edward IV and his Queen Consort, Elizabeth Woodville. Although it has been acclaimed as one of the most impressive extant manuscripts of Middle English literature, it has never been the subject of a major study. The aim of the dissertation is to recognize and restore to the illustrator the power of his position between the conception of a text and the consumption of a book. Part One focuses on the illustrator's interactions with the textual voices of the Confessio Amantis, demonstrating how the images in nineteen manuscripts of the poem, including the Morgan Confessio, address the identity of the author of the poem (Chapter One); and how miniatures in the Morgan Confessio reinterpret its Ovidian narratives (Chapter Two). Part Two shifts attention to the illustrator's confrontation with his patrons. Although their impact on the production of this manuscript appears to have been minimal, I observe how, as patrons they furnished a visual context for the Morgan Confessio from within their own library of illustrated historical manuscripts (Chapter Three) and books on science (Chapter Four). Produced just before Caxton printed his first book in Westminster in 1476 and standing at the threshold of standardization, this manuscript offers a complex glimpse into the variance that epitomized creative activity in illustrated vernacular manuscripts.

The purpose of this study is to compare the narrative and framing techniques used by Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. These authors were selected for several reasons. Being contemporaries, they lived through the days of the reign of Richard II, his deposition, and the accession of Henry IV. This was a time change: the age of chivalry and true knighthood was ending; the middle class was establishing commerce, towns, guilds; openly and violently the peasants were beginning to reject their servile positions; the corruption within the organized church was being publicly exposed, and efforts, believed heretical by some, were being made to effect its purification. The discussion in this paper will be limited to the major work of each author. For Gower this is the Confessio Amantis, his only English work of any length; for Chaucer it is the Canterbury Tales, which, incomplete as it is, is generally accepted as the crown jewel of medieval English literature. The discussion wil be limited further to the framing and linking devices and to the four tales which appear in both books: "Constance" (Man of Law's tale), "Florent" (Wife of Bath's tale), "Phebus and Cornide" (Manciple's tale), and "Virginia" (Physician's tales).

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