With Carmen's Help: Latin Authorities in the "Confessio Amantis"

Abstract

W A T HEN G. C. Macaulay produced his magisterial edition of John Gower's Confessio Amantis in 1900, his meticulous research and collation left for posterity a standard text of the poem which has not been superseded. Gower may have lacked the persistent editorial interest and revision which characterizes, for example, the Chaucer tradition, but he was blessed with a singularly conscientious editor.' While new manuscripts have been discovered since Macaulay's time, and while later textual scholars have questioned some of Macaulay's assumptions about the production and the grouping of the manuscripts, his text remains the face which Gower presents to the world, and we continue to be indebted to his care and industry. A new critical edition of Gower produced through the same editorial procedures as Macaulay's would not, I think, substantially change the state of the English base text. But two recent articles have demonstrated that a focus on variance in the treatment and presentation of that text can produce significantly new interpretations of the poem. In a study of the miniatures of the Confessio, Joel Fredell argues for two separate versions of the poem, one Ricardian and one Henrician, each with its own, significantly different, deployment of the moral, as

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