PRE-TEXTS: TABLES OF CONTENTS AND THE READING OF JOHN GOWER'S "CONFESSIO AMANTIS"

Abstract

The forty-nine surviving English manuscripts1 of John Gower's Confessio Amantis are noteworthy for their remarkably high quality and consistency, features which have shaped much of the investigation of the manuscripts since. In his goo edition, G. C. Macaulay detected in the early history of the text 'a steady tendency to rid itself of error', and added that `the process of corruption in the ordinary sense [could] hardly be said to have set in until after the death of the author'.2 The suggestion of authorial control which underlies these remarks was amplified by John Fisher into the theory that Gower oversaw his own scriptorium at St Mary Overeys.3 While the particulars of Fisher's theory are no longer accepted,4 many modern readers continue to believe that Gower maintained an unusual level of control over the production of the earliest copies of his poem.5 It is perhaps a result of this unusual level of textual consistency that the individual characteristics of most Confessio manuscripts - and the implications of those characteristics - have been discussed relatively rarely.' While, for example, the huge variations among manuscripts of the Roman de la Rose allow Sylvia Huot to argue for the understanding of individual witnesses of the Roman as essentially 'new' or independent literary works,7 Gower manuscripts seem to hold no comparable riches. Yet there is considerable variation in the Confessio manuscripts: not perhaps in their reproduction of the English text,8 but certainly in their overall design. The significance of manuscript design as an indication of textual reception has been illustrated by Malcolm Parkes and A. I. Doyle. Writing of the difference between the Hengwrt and Ellesmere copies of The Canterbury Tales, Parkes and Doyle stress the significance of presentation in vernacular texts: Layout and decoration function like punctuation: they are part of the presentation of a text which facilitates its use by a reader. With the development of the mise-en-page of texts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, layout and decoration became more important: they not only facilitated use by readers but also interpreted the text transmitted to the scribe.9 There is, as Parkes and Doyle note, an editorial dimension to decisions made about the presentation of texts.10 Chaucer's collection of tales posed one kind of editorial challenge; Gower's long text, with its extensive apparatus, posed another. It is in the solutions of various scribes to the problem of presenting the Confessio that we find the sorts of variation which produce, if not completely different texts, then at least very different readingexperiences. Once attention is shifted from the (relative) consistency of the text in Confessio manuscripts to the differences in their presentation, it becomes clear that, like Huot's Roman they invite our consideration as unique responses to the poem they contain. There are several areas one could explore in a consideration of the manuscript presentation of the Confessio. The layout of Gower's apparatus of Latin verses and glosses may tell us something about the perceived relationship between the parts of the text, or it may reveal ways in which, deliberately or not, the manuscript presentation of that relationship might affect a reader's experience of the text. Equally interesting are the added interventions, such as the tables of contents which will be my concern here. While such features may be relatively unimportant in the establishment of textual affiliations among manuscripts, I shall argue that these incidental features are in fact central to the establishment of the contemporary reception of Gower's poem; that they show us how different that reception might be, depending upon the actual form in which the poem was presented to a particular reader. The Confessio is a long and complex work, and there is considerable evidence that from the time of its first appearance readers have sought ways to make it more accessible. …

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