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Romance, Exemplum, and the Subject ofthe Confessio Amantis William Robins University ofToronto T,ve,s;on of the story of Apollon;u, of Tyre that John Gowe, presents in book 8 of the Confessio Amantis is an ancient romance con strued according to the expectations for an exemplum.1 Many of the other medieval adaptations of this ancient romance may have been "ex emplary" in a wide sense ofthat term, referring in a loose fashion to any stories that were presented so as to engage the reader morally. Gower's version, however, is the first to be couched in the more precisely defined structure of an exemplum, such as was developed in late thirteenth century sermons and thence introduced into fourteenth-century narra tives as a device for linking a story to a specific moral argument.2 Employed as one element in a sermon or moral treatise, an exemplum bears both a narrative and a rhetorical burden: through a narrative em plotment it must present a particular case of the operation of some abstract vice or virtue, while at the same time it is also meant to warn A slightly different version of this paper originally appeared in my "Ancient Romance and Medieval Literary Genres: Apollonius of Tyre" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1995), pp. 167-200. I wish to thank John V. Fleming, Robert Hollander, Seth Lerer, Thomas Pavel, and the members of the Seminar on Contemporary Critical Theory at Princeton for their comments and advice. 1 Citations of the Confessio Amantis are by book and line number from John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. G. C. Macaulay, vols. 2-3 of The Complete Works ofJohn Gower (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899-1902). 2 "This is the first version . . . in which the story is presented explicitly as a moral ex emplum, albeit in a style which owes much to romance conventions"; Elizabeth Archibald, Apollonius ofTyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), p. 192. On the history of the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri and its adaptations see Archibald, Apollonius ofTyre; G. A. A. Korrekaas, ed., Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri (Groningen: Brouma's Boekhuis, 1984); and Elimar Klebs, Die Erzahlung von Apollonius aus Tyrus: eine geschichtliche Untersuchung iiber ihre lateinischen Urform und ihre spciteren Bearbeitungen (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1889). On the history of the exemplum, the standard work remains J.-Th. Welter, L'Exemplum dans la litterature religieuse et didactique du moyen age (Paris: Guitard, 1927). 157 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER listeners from, or exhort them to, a course ofbehavior through the moral isatio following a tale. Gower's "Tale of Apollonius" has such a moralisa tio and is set within a larger exemplary framework, yet there is a strik ing dissonance between the emplotment inherited from this ancient romance and the moral attached to it. For a reader who might be determined to find a moral in every story, the moralisatio of this tale will seem no more exceptionable than other tenuously linked conclusions common in medieval literature, and might appear, as it does to A. J. Minnis, "obvious."3 But for a reader mindful of the way an exemplum ought to match its narrative and ex hortatory purposes ("solum quodfacit ad rem est narrandum"4), as is gen erally the case in the other tales ofthe ConfessioAmantis, the relation be tween this romance and its proffered moral seems, as it does to Charles Runacres, "uninformative and confusing."5 Dramatically opposed strat egies of reading, according to which this moralization of ancient ro mance can appear as obvious or as confusing, are already present within Gower's poem, voiced respectively by the teller, Genius, and the lis tener, Amans. This opposition, I will argue, produces the conditions by which ancient romance becomes a tool with which Gower can investi gate the nature ofexemplarity, both in the "Tale of Apollonius" and in the Confessio Amantis as a whole. I will claim that the goal of Gower's strategy to contrast romance and exemplum is to prompt his readers to recognize their situation at the intersection of two discursive modes, a situation which I will describe, in the terms of recent theories of sub jectivity, as the...
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