Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis (The New Middle Ages) 3031279638, 9783031279638

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THE NEW MIDDLE AGES

Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis Joel Fredell

The New Middle Ages Series Editor

Bonnie Wheeler English and Medieval Studies Southern Methodist University Dallas, TX, USA

The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to pluridisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s history and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections.

Joel Fredell

Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis

Joel Fredell Southeastern Louisiana University Hammond, LA, USA

ISSN 2945-5936     ISSN 2945-5944 (electronic) The New Middle Ages ISBN 978-3-031-27963-8    ISBN 978-3-031-27964-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27964-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Zuri Swimmer / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Any study involving medieval manuscripts builds on work by generations of librarians, archivists, and staff. I have had the benefit of their wisdom and kindness for many years in reading rooms and in remote consultation. For this study my gratitude goes out to the staffs of the Beinecke Library; the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; the British Library; the Bodleian Library (in all three successive reading rooms); Cambridge University Library; Christ Church College, Oxford Library; Columbia University Library; Corpus Christi College, Oxford Library; Glasgow University Library; the Huntington Library; the National Archives of the United Kingdom; the National Library of Wales; the Pierpont Morgan Museum and Library; Princeton University Library; the Rosenbach Museum and Library; Senshu University Library; St. John’s College, Cambridge Library; and Trinity College, Cambridge Library. In some cases readers are surrounded by a remarkable wealth of manuscripts opened enticingly as we walk by; in other cases the reader sits in glorious isolation in a basement room (though the pre-Weston Library basement accommodations were often densely populated) or an undergraduate desk. The pleasure of these encounters is exceeded only by the sheer generosity on offer for researchers. Digital resources have become one of the greatest boons to manuscript studies, and my gratitude also goes out to library staff in image reproduction and web management, and to medieval scholars working with those archives, who together have made so many medieval manuscripts freely available online. My work on Gower manuscripts was supported in part by a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship at the University of York, a Fletcher Jones v

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Foundation Fellowship at the Huntington Library, and various grants from Southeastern University. I am deeply grateful for these opportunities. My times in Cambridge were a much greater pleasure thanks to the generosity, conversation, and ethereal papayas offered by Priyamvada Gopal. The two anonymous readers for Palgrave Macmillan provided clear and helpful suggestions for which I thank them wholeheartedly. Many scholars have inspired and informed this study, but several in recent years have been essential to my focus on Gower, including David Carlson, Joyce Coleman, Siân Echard, Holly James-Maddox, Wim Lindeboom, Daniel Mosser, Peter Nicholson, Sebastian Sobecki, and Estelle Stubbs. Readers will see in two chapters here how great my debt is to the work of art historian Kathleen L. Scott. Gower scholars in general will know how much we all owe to Bob Yeager, whose stream of books and articles has been supplemented by his work in many roles for The Gower Society. The late Derek Pearsall has had a profound effect on Middle English literary studies, pointing the way since the 1980s to scholarship in which manuscript studies and literary analysis illuminate each other. During my year in York it was my great good fortune that Derek was a local resource; at all times and places he has been generous with his sharp insights and the new scholarship on Gower he produced up to a time very shortly before his death, including (with Linne Mooney) the essential new Descriptive Catalogue of the English Manuscripts of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis. I hope this study joins the conversations that have come from his decades of leadership. Linne Mooney sponsored my Leverhulme year at the Centre for Medieval Studies in York, during which much of the early work for this study was done. She continues to be for me a crucial source of information, support, and camaraderie. She also, in a stairwell conversation during an Early Book Society Conference in Lampeter long ago, convinced me to set my sights beyond Chaucer. My greatest Gowerian debt is to Winthrop Wetherbee III. Since the early 1990s over many lunches and cups of coffee Pete Wetherbee among other topics extolled the virtues of the Confessio, gave me a photocopy of Vox with his notations, guided me like Vergil through my extended fascination with Alan of Lille, and told me many jokes that I do not remember, but truly wish I did. This book is dedicated to Susan and Leila, stars in my firmament: For if ther evere was balance Which of fortune stant governed I may wel lieve as I am lerned That love hath that balance on honde Which wol no reson understonde.

Contents

1 I ntroduction: Witness Without Locus  1 1 Reading Variation  1 2 Dream-Vision Variations  8 3 The Polyvocal Page 19 4 Prophet or Propagandist? 22 2 A  Portrait in Laureate Authority 33 1 The Chaucer Problem 33 2 The Inheritors 39 3 Father Gower 60 3 R  evising the Three-Recension Model 83 1 Macaulay’s Model 84 2 Dates in the Confessio Glosses 88 3 The Quia Colophons 93 4 The Henrician Couplet 100 5 The Ricardian and Henrician Passages 103 6 Conclusion 112 4 G  ower’s Late State 1 The Nicholson Demolition 2 Finding New Language for a New King 3 The Late State Model 4 The Added Texts and the Two Presentations

115 116 119 129 133 vii

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Contents

5 Gower’s Margins149 6 T  he First Public Life of the Confessio and Its Decoration167 1 The Manuscript Witnesses167 2 A Brief Overview of the Developments in London Borders ca. 1400–1425170 3 Early London Borders and Major Literary Manuscripts182 7 Ricardian Confessio Manuscripts in Lancastrian England209 1 An Emerging Producer Coterie in London, 1405–1410209 2 London Manuscripts 1405–1410223 3 London Manuscripts 1410–1415238 4 The Confessio Boom Tails Off, 1415–1425258 5 Conclusions260 8 B  inaries of Witness in the Languages of Love and Political Cognition265 1 Witnessing Exile265 2 Love and Politics271 3 Reading the End of the Confessio as a Late-State Text280 4 The Chaucer Connection290 5 Enduring Forms of Witness294 Bibliography297 General Index313 Index of Manuscripts321

About the Author

Joel Fredell  is Professor of English at Southeastern University. His work includes studies of manuscripts in Middle English as well as French and Italian. Among his awards are a Leverhulme Foundation Fellowship, a Huntington Library Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the American Philosophical Association. He lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Ithaca, New York.

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 1.4 Fig. 1.5 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6 Fig. 2.7

New York, Pierpont Morgan Museum and Library, MS M.690, fol. 4v. (Reproduced by permission of the Morgan Library and Museum) Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 3, fol. 2r detail. (© Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford) Macaulay, Works edition of the Confessio Amantis, 3.110–111 London, National Archives, MS DL 41/424 Item 15: Gower’s SS collar. (Reproduced by permission of the Chancellor and Council of the Duchy of Lancaster) DL 41/424 Item 15 detail. (Reproduced by permission of the Chancellor and Council of the Duchy of Lancaster) London, British Library, MS Arundel 38, fol. 37r. © The British Library Board Left: London, British Library, MS Harley 4886, fol. 88r detail. © The British Library Board. Right: Arundel 38 fol. 65r detail. © The British Library Board London, British Library, MS Harley 2278, fol. 6r. © The British Library Board Harley 2278, fol. 4v. Henry VI praying before Edmund’s shrine. © The British Library Board Harley 2278, fol. 9r. Lydgate prays before Edmund’s shrine. © The British Library Board Harley 2278, fol. 10r. King Alkmund and Queen Siware. © The British Library Board London, British Library, MS Arundel 119, fol. 1 detail. Lydgate the pilgrim. © The British Library Board

9 16 20 25 25 46 47 49 50 53 54 55

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.8 Fig. 2.9 Fig. 2.10 Fig. 2.11 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2

Fig. 6.3

Fig. 6.4

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 232, fol. 1r. Troy Book. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford 58 Glasgow, University Library, Hunterian MS 59 fol. 6v. Vox clamantis. (Courtesy of University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections) 63 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 3, fol. 8r detail. Amans/ Gower and Confessor. (© Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford)68 Fairfax 3, fol. 2r detail. Dream of Nebuchadnezzar. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford 73 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 3, fol. 168v. Speaker markers, gloss. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford 150 New York, Morgan Library, MS M.690, fol. 181v. Reproduced by permission of the Morgan Library and Museum 152 London, British Library, MS Additional 59495 (Trentham), fols. 37v-38r. Traitié. © The British Library Board 154 Source: Gallica.bnf.fr. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits. Francais. 848, fol. 2r. Épistre Othéa162 Left: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 3, fol. 2r detail, ca. 1400. Angular bar border with daisy buds. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. Middle: London, British Library, MS Harley 7334, fol. 1 detail, ca. 1410. Rounded gold mounds separating leaves, solid vines originating from trumpet-blossom bells, folded mitten leaves. © The British Library Board. Right: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 158, fol. 36r detail, ca. 1410–1415. Spray bar with folded mitten leaves, penwork leaf lobes, green wash on squiggles. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford 175 London, British Library, MS Egerton 1991, fol. 142 detail. Quatrefoil flowers, trumpet leaves/blossoms, penwork leaf lobes touched with green wash; green wash on penwork squiggles extending from gold balls. © The British Library Board177 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902, fol. 8r detail. Mushroom leaves, folded acanthus leaves, trumpet leaves or blossoms, penwork leaf lobes touched with green wash; green wash on penwork squiggles extending from gold balls. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford 178 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, MS M125, fol. 3v detail. Aroid, acanthus; penwork leaf lobes touched with green wash; green wash on penwork squiggles extending

  List of Figures 

Fig. 6.5

Fig. 6.6

Fig. 6.7 Fig. 6.8 Fig. 6.9 Fig. 6.10 Fig. 6.11 Fig. 6.12 Fig. 6.13 Fig. 6.14 Fig. 6.15 Fig. 6.16 Fig. 6.17 Fig. 6.18 Fig. 6.19 Fig. 6.20 Fig. 6.21

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from gold balls. Reproduced by permission of the Morgan Library and Museum 179 London, British Library, MS Harley 4866, fol. 68r detail. Spiky acanthus leaves folded at corners, folded inside initial in monochrome and extended when originating border vines off initials; penwork leaf lobes touched with green wash; green wash on penwork squiggles extending from gold balls. © The British Library Board 180 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. a (Vernon), fol. 266r detail. Columbines, grotesque originating spray, trefoil leaf originating spray. Hand D. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford183 London, British Library, MS Additional 22283 (Simeon), fol. 45r detail. Hand A. © The British Library Board 184 Left: Vernon, fol. 117ra detail. Hand D. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. Right: Simeon, fol. 52ra detail. Hand A. © The British Library Board 185 Vernon, fol. 100v detail. Hand B. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford 185 Simeon, fol. 81v detail. Hand B. © The British Library Board 186 London, British Library, MS Harley 401. Left: fol. 7r. Right: fol. 1r. Floretum evangelicum. © The British Library Board 187 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 3. Left: fol. 2r. Right: fol. 8r. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford 188 Fairfax 3, fol. 8rb detail. Border leaves painted over. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford 189 Fairfax 3, Left: fol. 2ra detail. Middle: fol. 8rb detail. Right: fol. 168vb detail. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford 190 Left: Simeon, fol. 53vb detail. Hand A. Right: Simeon, fol. 49ra detail. Hand A. © The British Library Board 191 Fairfax 3, fol. 62r detail. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford192 Left: Vernon, fol. 309v detail. © The British Library Board. Right: Simeon, fol. 1r detail. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford 192 Fairfax 3, fol. 8rb detail. Lancaster collar clumsily overwritten. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford 193 San Marino, Huntington Library, MS El 26 A 9 (Stafford), fol. 1r 194 Left: Stafford, fol. 1r detail; right: Stafford, fol. 113r detail 1 195 Stafford, fol. 113r detail 2 196

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List of Figures

Fig. 6.22 Fig. 6.23 Fig. 6.24 Fig. 6.25 Fig. 6.26 Fig. 6.27 Fig. 6.28 Fig. 6.29 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5

Fig. 7.6 Fig. 7.7 Fig. 7.8

San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS HM 143, fol. 1r. Piers Plowman197 Aberystwyth, National Library, MS Peniarth 392D (Hengwrt CT), fol. 2r detail 1. By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wales 198 Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 392D (Hengwrt CT), fol. 2r detail 2. By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wales 199 Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunterian 59, fol. 7v. Vox clamantis. Courtesy of University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections 200 London, British Library, MS Harley 2946 fol. 181r detail. © The British Library Board 201 London, British Library, MS Harley 2946, fol. 244r detail. © The British Library Board 202 New York, Morgan Library MS M.690, fol. 4v. Reproduced by permission of the Morgan Library and Museum 204 Fairfax 3, fol. 82r detail. Summary left column; speaker markers right column. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford206 London, University of London, Sterling Library MS V.88, fol. 1r detail. Piers C 211 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B 15.17, fol. 1r detail. Piers B. Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge 212 London, British Library, MS Harley 2946, fol. 244r detail. © The British Library Board 225 San Marino, Huntington Library MS El 26 C 9 (Ellesmere Canterbury Tales), fol. 1r detail. Dragon drollery 227 Ellesmere fol. 50v detail. Archaizing daisy buds, solid vine with stiff curved tendril, rounded gold mounds separating leaves, gold balls with squiggles extending off sparse leaf tip (side), white band shading on leaves. Hand B 227 Ellesmere fol. 47r detail. Small leaf roundels softening a corner 228 Ellesmere fol. 1r detail. Archaizing daisy buds and interlace (top); contemporary mitten leaf, trumpet flowers, white band shading on leaves, and throated quatrefoil (left). Hand A 229 Oxford, Christ Church College, MS 148, fol. 26v detail. Leaf roundels, monochromatic leaves in central roundel, collared vine, mitten leaves, kidney leaves, circular shading on leaves. © Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford 232

  List of Figures 

Fig. 7.9

Fig. 7.10

Fig. 7.11 Fig. 7.12 Fig. 7.13

Fig. 7.14 Fig. 7.15

Fig. 7.16 Fig. 7.17

Fig. 7.18

Fig. 7.19 Fig. 7.20

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Left: Vernon, fol. 288va detail. Hand G. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. Middle: Christ Church 148 fol. 26v detail. © Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford. Right: Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 67, fol. 2r detail. By permission of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford 233 Corpus Christi 67, f; 2r detail. Monochromatic leaves, extended penwork sprays, detached simple roundels. By permission of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford 234 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 609 fol. 1r. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford 236 Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 609, fol. 81v detail. Collared vine (upper left), extended spray. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford 237 Cambridge, St. John’s College, MS B.12, fol. 1r detail. Simple leaf roundels, sparse leaves, including mitten leaves, collared vines top middle bar, lower right bar. By permission of the Master and Fellows of St. John’s College, Cambridge 238 London, British Library, MS Arundel 38. Left: fol. 37r detail. Middle: fol. 39v detail 1. Right: fol. 39v detail 2. © The British Library Board 239 Left: London, British Library, MS Additional 27944, fol. 8r detail. © The British Library Board. Right: New York, Morgan Library MS M.817 fol. 43v detail. Reproduced by permission of the Morgan Library and Museum 241 London, British Library, MS Arundel 38, fol.39v detail. Regiment of Princes. © The British Library Board 242 Left: New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, MS Osborn fa 1 fol. 175v detail. Right: Osborn fa. 1, fol. 76r detail. Confessio Amantis243 Left: Philadelphia, Rosenbach Museum, MS 1083/29 fol. 54r detail. Confessio Amantis. Right: Cambridge, University Library, MS Pembroke 307, fol. 14v detail. Confessio Amantis. By permission of the Master and Fellows of Pembroke College, Cambridge 244 Tokyo, Senshu 1, fol. 15r detail. Confessio Amantis245 London, British Library, MS Harley 7334, fol. 1r. Canterbury Tales. © The British Library Board 246

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List of Figures

Fig. 7.21 Fig. 7.22

Fig. 7.23 Fig. 7.24 Fig. 7.25 Fig. 7.26 Fig. 7.27 Fig. 7.28 Fig. 7.29 Fig. 7.30 Fig. 7.31 Fig. 7.32 Fig. 7.33 Fig. 7.34

Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 198, fol. 12v. Confessio Amantis. By permission of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford 247 London, British Library, MS Egerton 1991 fol. 142v detail: vine retreating to gold ground with illusionistic puncturing of ground, penwork spray extending from vine, penwork squiggles standing in for leaf lobes touched with green wash. Confessio Amantis. © The British Library Board 248 London, British Library, MS Additional 24194, fol. 36r detail. Polychronicon. © The British Library Board 249 London, British Library, MS Royal 18 C.xxii, fol. 29r detail. Confessio Amantis. © The British Library Board 250 Left: London, British Library, MS Harley 7334, fol. 181v detail. © The British Library Board. Right: Bodley 294, fol. 132r detail. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford 251 London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 851, fol. 2r. Canterbury Tales. © The British Library Board 252 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 693, fol. 1r detail. Confessio Amantis. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford 253 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902, fol. 81r detail. Confessio Amantis. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford 253 New York, Columbia University Library, MS Plimpton 265, fol. 37r detail. Confessio Amantis. Used with permission 254 Princeton, Taylor Collection, Medieval MS 5 fol. 1r. Confessio Amantis255 Left: Taylor 5 fol. 61v detail. Right: Taylor 5 fol. 81r detail. Confessio Amantis257 Cambridge, University Library, MS Mm.2.21, fol. 124r detail. Confessio Amantis. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library 258 Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunterian 7, fol. 87r detail. Confessio Amantis. Courtesy of University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections 259 New York, Morgan Library MS M.125, fol. 141r detail. Confessio Amantis. Reproduced by permission of the Morgan Library and Museum 260

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Witness Without Locus

1   Reading Variation John Gower is a mysterious poet. He has long been saddled with the qualifier “moral” that assumes obviousness and interpretive closure, qualities we would never ascribe to the originator of that epithet: Geoffrey Chaucer.1 Yet in his massive corpus little of Gower’s work is either obvious or closed. Gower’s writing consistently engages questions of interpretive stability, at least as much so as Chaucer’s, though these two poets and friends frame these questions differently in their poetry. Even those works that seem to be Lancastrian propaganda and meant to support the fragile new reign of Henry IV—Cronica tripertita, In Praise of Peace, among others—insist on their own uncertainties.2 Resistance to closure is not, for 1  Troilus and Criseyde V.1856–1857. Citations to Chaucer’s works are to The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, et al., 3rd edition (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1986). 2  On this topic see Frank Grady, “The Lancastrian Gower and the Limits of Exemplarity,” Speculum 70 (1995): 552–575. On the “tension between moral idealism and political reality” in “In Praise of Peace” see Arthur W.  Bahr, “Reading Codicological Form in John Gower’s Trentham Manuscript,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011): 230–232; for broader studies also see David R. Carlson, John Gower: Poetry and Propaganda in Fourteenth Century England (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2012), 204–209; Diane Watt, Amoral Gower: Language, Sex, and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2003). A useful recent overview of the many critical strands of debate about Gower’s voices is Matthew W. Irvin, “Voices and Narrators,” in The Routledge Research Companion to Jon Gower, ed. Ana Saez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R.  F. Yeager (London and New  York: Routledge, 2017), 237–252. On Cronica see further below.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Fredell, Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27964-5_1

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Gower, simply a matter of play within the text, although that play can intimidate in the Confessio Amantis by the sheer multiplicity of options in 30,000 lines and 110 tales that make up Gower’s great poem in English. This work unfurls a vast canvas whose frame-tale structure includes a narrator bookending the poem with social and political criticism, a dream-­ vision sub-frame wherein a lover enters into a Socratic dialogue with a mythopoetic Confessor, and a huge assemblage of tales told by that Confessor as exemplary lessons in love organized by deadly sin. Among these voices and between these three levels of narrative we can see massive possibilities for resonances and tensions within Gower’s text. One result is that critical responses to the Confessio rarely examine more than a handful of the poem’s tales and modes of meaning, even in book-length studies.3 This study will seize on its own handful of questions about the Confessio to understand Gower as a major innovator in ways that leave Chaucer and other Ricardian peers far behind. The fundamental question among this handful shifts away from the main text as the generator for meanings and toward the material book as it was experienced in the social context Gower knew when the Confessio first appeared in public: London after the ascension of Henry IV in 1399. For that appearance Gower developed a page design that deliberately shaped the reading of his poetry as a polyvocal and multilingual experience: Latin headverses for each new section imitating the moralized versions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; long marginal summaries in Latin for the exemplary tales; short marginal notes in Latin that reference current political events—all in tension with each other. Chaucer may have had some hand in book production for his poetry, though little

 The most substantial such study to date (at 450 pages), Peter Nicholson’s Love and Ethics in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), relies on a book-by-book long march to provide a comprehensive view; he gets to most of the tales in each book at least in passing, but relies on a few selections for longer analyses. Also see a cri de coeur on the poem’s enormity from the same period as Nicholson’s book: J. Allan Mitchell, “Gower for Example: Confessio Amantis and the Ethics of Exemplarity,” Exemplaria 16 (2004): 203–204. 3

1  INTRODUCTION: WITNESS WITHOUT LOCUS 

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evidence remains to support this hope beyond the lyric “Adam Scriveyn.”4 Even so Chaucer’s genius for polyvocality and interpretive instabilities, for imbricated narrative voices, enfolds itself within his texts and their narratives rather than spilling out into elaborate page designs.5 Gower builds a complex visual design for the production of his poem that highlights his array of voices, a polyvocal design positioned both inside and outside the main text of the Confessio.6 Again, unlike his Ricardian peers, but much like his Lancastrian followers, Gower probably supervised or influenced directly the material reproduction of this design in some of the earliest

 Questions about Chaucer’s apparent disinterest in putting his poetry before the larger public were reshaped by Linne R. Mooney’s identification of “Adam Scriveyn” as Adam Pynkhurst in “Chaucer’s Scribe,” Speculum 81 (2006): 97–138. Mooney and Estelle Stubbs, in Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature, 1375–1425 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), have gone on to argue that the scribes for the earliest manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales (including Pynkhurst) worked for the London Guildhall. Nonetheless, no manuscripts of Chaucer’s works by these or any other scribes have been securely dated before his death. Guildhall scribes also began producing manuscripts of the Confessio after Gower’s death and after a first burst of surviving Confessio and Vox clamantis manuscripts by scribes with no known associations with the Guildhall but potentially with Gower in the final years of his life. Chaucer’s hand in book production is reconsidered in Stephen Partridge, “‘The Makere of this Boke’: Chaucer’s Retraction and the Author as Scribe and Compiler,” in Author, Reader, Book: Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice, ed. Stephen Partridge and Eric Kwakkel (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2012), 106–154. On the controversies attached to these identifications see further below Chap. 6 and note 7. 5  On Chaucer’s tactic of internalizing commentary within his text, as in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, see Edward Wheatley, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and His Followers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 104–105. On the distinctive design strategies for Canterbury Tales manuscripts apparently imposed by two of the Guildhall scribes, Adam Pynkhurst (identified as scribe B) and John Marchaunt (scribe D) rather than Chaucer, see Joel Fredell, “The Lowly Paraf: Transmitting Manuscript Design in the Canterbury Tales,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 213–280. 6  Gower’s multilingualism in surviving manuscripts of the Confessio also appears in shorter poems in English, Latin, and French attached in some copies. On these attachments see further in Chap. 4 below. For a recent discussion of Gower’s polyvocality in textual terms, see Matthew Irvin, The Poetic Voices of John Gower: Politics and Personae in the Confessio Amantis (Cambridge: Brewer, 2014). 4

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surviving Confessio manuscripts.7 For that achievement alone Gower deserves our attention as a major innovator in English poetry, whose influence has long been underestimated or simply ignored. Scholars specializing in manuscript studies have pointed to the importance of these design features for some years now, but their insights have rarely crossed into literary analysis of Gower’s poetry or his influence on later poets. Beyond the problem of sheer bulk in the Confessio, current readers have little patience for the various texts that can surround the main text. These other texts are in complex verse forms or in allusive language compounded by the inconvenience of translating hard Latin.8 All of these additional texts in the Confessio assert their importance beyond placement on the page: through decorative hierarchies of illuminated borders, initials in ranked sizes, paraphs, rubrication, and display scripts. Such features are extremely rare in modern print Confessios, and even more rare in digital editions desperate for visual real estate on small screens.9 These features for today’s readers also have no comforting familiarity from the modern page, where negative space becomes the main marker for paragraph or section divisions and large blank margins form a comforting buffer that surrounds and elevates the main text. We cannot escape the relationships between a book’s material form, the assumptions of its producers at the historical moment it was produced, and the experience of the text the reader encounters on various platforms in various designs. 7  The fullest discussion of this visual design as an authorial strategy is Derek Pearsall, “The Organisation of the Latin Apparatus in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: The Scribes and their Problems,” in The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector: Essays in Honour of Toshiyuki Takamiya, Ed. Takami Matsuda, Richard A. Linenthal, and John Scahill (Cambridge, UK: Brewer and Tokyo: Yushodo Press, 2004), 99–112. All such recent discussions build on a highly influential article: A. I. Doyle, and Malcolm Parkes, “The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century,” in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts, and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. V. J. Scattergood and Andrew G. Watson (London: Scolar, 1978), 163–210. On Gower’s participation in manuscript production see further in Chap. 5 below. 8  For the argument that Gower’s marginalia were designed for interpretation by expert lectors to an aristocratic 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): 209–235. 9  See the online edition of John Gower, Confessio Amantis (3 vols. Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 2006). https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/peck-confessio-amantisvolume-1 (vols. 2 and 3 at the same site). Only the marginal Latin glosses are included, leaving out speaker markers; these glosses are reproduced with translations in notes provided under a sliding bottom margin, but not included on the digital page with the text.

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These marginal texts and decorative rhetorics show Gower’s hand on his poem in its early states. Medieval book production—the activities of scribes and decorators, the cultural field within which the book emerges— has powerful impacts on meaning. Designs offer readings of a text we can reconstruct from hard evidence. Gower could not be a better subject for this reconstruction, but the evidence has long been overshadowed by a myth of tripartite origins. The poem at large scale attempts to harmonize governance and self-governance with references both direct and indirect to recent political history in England. A century-old theory from Gower’s first great editor, George Macaulay, argued for three versions of this poem across some profoundly turbulent conflict that saw King Richard II challenge the City of London, Henry Bolingbroke emerge as a powerful rival for the throne, Richard send Henry into exile, Henry invade England from that exile, and finally saw Henry on the throne, Richard in his grave. Undoubtedly much can be said about an enormous frame-tale poem like the Confessio without reference to the circumstances of its origins. Nonetheless, assumptions about these royal struggles have loomed over the poem and shaped critical response. These assumptions cannot stand in the face of new scholarship on the poem’s history. This new evidence demands new readings built on what the manuscripts themselves and their contexts can tell us. The Confessio’s material history also requires one further recovery from the era before print publication and from the poem’s fictions of witness: the artifactual status of manuscripts. In the documentary culture of late medieval England manuscripts are historical witnesses to the moments of their creation, so much so that some documents became targets for destruction because of these powers.10 As we will see, old ideas about a trio of revisions for the Confessio entangle themselves with just such attempts to claim witness to a specific historical moment. Authors in Gower’s time took ready advantage of manuscripts’ status as artifacts that bear witness to a historical moment. We know, for instance, that Richard the Redeless was likely to have been written after Henry’s accession, but the poem presents itself as being current with events late in Richard’s reign, a fiction that gives the poem the effect of being a witness to and artifact from this 10  On the famous case of the rebels of 1381 not only burning documents seen as oppressive controls on their lives but also attempting to assert their own artifactual documents such as posted broadsides see Stephen Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 17–38.

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dramatic period.11 Pamphlets from this same period were remarkably conscious of posing in “fronting” genres to create quasi-artifacts: quasi-­ chronicles like Maidstone’s Concordia or Richard the Redeless, quasi-petitions like the Lollard “Petition to the King and Parliament,” quasi-epistles that begin so many texts (possibly including Gower’s supposed epistle to Thomas Arundel at the front of the All Souls manuscript of Vox Clamantis), quasi-prophecies such as Gower’s H. aquile pullus, quasi-transcripts such as the Record and Process of the Deposition of Richard II, and so on. In late medieval England pamphlets were reproducing any number of such ersatz documents from the political troubles.12 The Confessio circulated in Lancastrian London in two versions, whose dedications to the recently dethroned Richard II and to Richard’s replacement Henry Lancaster (Henry’s title before his accession as Henry IV) claim to be witnesses to two very different political moments even though the manuscripts bearing these claims appear after both of these moments have passed. Gower’s poetical acts of historical witness may have originated as fictions as well—another question among the handful for this study—but we will need to look closely at the early manuscript witnesses bearing in mind this artifactual strategy and the tensions between contending political witnesses during a period that includes Gower’s last nine years of life and his substantial poetic activity during that time. If all this were not complex enough, one set of design strategies among the early Confessio manuscripts are strongly associated with manuscripts dedicated to Richard and another set of strategies with manuscripts dedicated to Henry.13 We must also, then, consider the relationships between page  David Carlson, “English Poetry July-October 1399 and Lancastrian Crime,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007): 378–81. 12  For a recent summary of the circulation of the Record and Process see Carlson, “English Poetry,” 376. On labeling of H. aquile pullus as “Prophecia” see R. F. Yeager, John Gower: The Minor Latin Works (Kalamazoo 2005) 46; and Carlson, “English Poetry,” 385 n.16. The broader topic of Lancastrian uses of prophecy is discussed in Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven and London 1998), 1–31. On the question of the sole witness to the epistle to Arundel in Oxford, All Souls College MS 98 see Malcolm Parkes, “Patterns of Scribal Activity and Revisions of the Text in Early Copies of Works by John Gower,” in New Science Out of Old Books: Studies in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in Honour of A.  I. Doyle, ed. Richard Beadle and A. J. Piper (Aldershot, 1995), 92–93, where he argues that its crude handwriting and separate production from the main codex indicate that it was not part of an actual presentation copy here or elsewhere. 13  Joel Fredell, “Reading the Dream Miniature in the Confessio Amantis,” Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 22 (1995): 61–93; Richard K. Emmerson, “Reading Gower in a Manuscript Culture: Latin and English in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999), 143–86. 11

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designs and fictions of witness as mediating lenses for the poem in its early public life. This study, and its handful of questions, focuses on a narrow time frame: the first two decades of manuscript evidence for the Confessio, from ca. 1399 to 1420. Gower was alive and living in London until 1408, a period within which several London manuscripts of his poetry with both dedications can be dated. He was demonstrably active as a poet in those years and as a reviser of his poetry. This study consequently begins with the conviction that the variations in the Confessio’s manuscripts in its early years contain vital information about how Gower imagined his best-known masterpiece and about how its two politically charged versions manifested materially. Furthermore, the poem founds itself in fictions of witness in its visual rhetoric and its literary structure. So much of the Confessio depends on a multitude of poetic witnesses designed on the page along with the cavalcade of voices in the tales themselves: the narrator in English who interjects matters of patronage and contemporary politics in the Prologue and Book 8; the Latin lyric voice philosophizing in the headverses; the pervasive speaking roles of Genius and Amans/Gower within the frame narrative commenting on the tales highlighted by speaker markers; the Latin summaries for each of the many tales; the brief Latin marginal notes that have played a crucial role in attempts to separate and date multiple recensions of the poem; and finally the colophons and additional poems that often gather at the end of the Confessio in one political cluster. All of these voices have their identifying design features—from paraphs and speaker markers to initials of varying sizes to rubrication to major borders and even the occasional miniature—that manifest in material and visual form these multiple perspectives on the content of the poem. This study will examine many forms of witness integral to the grand project that is Gower’s Confessio, not least the internal fictions of witness Gower gives himself as estates satirist, narrator, and dreamer/lover Amans. Still, my arguments must insist on the primacy of manuscript witnesses in all their splendor as the foundation for reading Gower’s poetry rather than as a side project for critical backfill. Codicology, textual studies, and attentive reading are inescapably interdependent when an author not only writes his poem but designs hugely complex page layouts for its release to the public and probably oversees its production in early and influential copies destined for major patrons. As the title of this study argues, the various forms of witness embedded in the Confessio are in all cases inaugurated as fictions by Gower. The following chapters will examine these forms of witness in turn. First, author

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portraits of John Gower in miniatures for two of his major works, produced during his lifetime for manuscripts he may have overseen, embed the author within fictions for a dominant narrative voice: the satiric archer serving as a frontispiece for Vox clamantis, unifying this compendium’s diverse parts as a single attack; and the protagonist Amans/Gower kneeling before Genius in early Confessios that establishes the dream-vision fiction of confession. Second, the distinct authorial voice of the Confessio’s prologue, epilogue, and marginalia positions the poem’s allegory of governance as witness to a list of recent historical moments. This fiction of historical locus interacts with the multitude of other voices on the page claiming their own fictions of witness: headverses, marginal summaries, colophons, and even the observations of the Confessor and Amans themselves. Third, the Confessio manuscripts in Gower’s lifetime (and shortly thereafter) created dueling artifactual fictions through the choice of dedication to Richard or Henry dated back in the 1390s before the great rupture of 1400, but also through the allied choice of specific layouts and added or avoided collections of Gower’s laureate poetry. Finally, the Confessio tales most entwined with the allegory of governance in the poem’s final books are anchored in a fiction that witnesses Richard’s love court from which the equally fictional persona of Amans/Gower is banished, a doubled trope appearing in both Ricardian and Henrician endings of the poem. These fictions can be addressed most clearly in separate chapters. Still, their interdependence is visible on the manuscript page, my anchor for argument throughout. A proper introduction demands at least some sense how Gower’s fictions of witness in the Confessio play out there.

2  Dream-Vision Variations One brief example will introduce Gower’s polyvocal interplay on the page and the distinct modes of reading the Ricardian and Henrician designs invoke. In the Confessio’s Prologue the story of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream (Daniel 2: 31–45) sets up for all versions of the poem a long passage of social criticism in the voice of the narrator (Pro.663–1052). The importance of this section is marked in an early example illustrated here (and commonly in deluxe Confessio manuscripts) by an illuminated border and initial which establish the top of a hierarchy of decoration (Fig. 1.1). In early manuscripts containing the Ricardian dedications, here the very early

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Fig. 1.1  New York, Pierpont Morgan Museum and Library, MS M.690, fol. 4v. (Reproduced by permission of the Morgan Library and Museum)

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Morgan 690, a miniature often appears at this point in the text14; the miniature’s position in texts dedicated to Henry has a strikingly different design effect, as we shall see. Gower’s presentation of the dream in the Ricardian main text, marked by an illuminated two-line initial, begins by emphasizing its prophetic nature for salvation history: The hyhe almyhti pourveance, In whos eterne remembrance Fro ferst was every thing present, He hath his prophecie sent, In such a wise as thou schalt hiere, To Daniel of this matiere, Hou that this world schal torne and wende Til it befalle to his ende. (Pro.585–592)15

The opening passage concludes by anticipating the endless New Heaven and New Earth that will follow the old world’s demise after the apocalypse: And thanne a newe schal beginne, Fro which a man schal nevere twinne. Or al to peine or al to pes That world schal lasten endeles. (Pro. 659–662)

The main text grounds the Dream in an exegetical commonplace: Daniel predicts a rise and fall of empires ending in division and destruction. This sequence of political sine waves that Daniel explicates from Nebuchadnezzar’s dream summarizes salvation history up to the apocalypse.16 In his own review of world history that follows in the next 400 lines, Gower argues that Daniel’s final age of division has come, hewing closely to traditional Biblical exegesis. 14  On the c. 1405 date for New  York, Morgan Library, MS Morgan M.690, see below Chap. 7 and the discussion in Joel Fredell, “The First Emergence of the Ricardian Confessio: Morgan M.690,” in Scribal Cultures in Late Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Linne R.  Mooney, ed. Holly Crocker-James, Margaret Connelly, and Derek Pearsall (York, UK: York Medieval Press, 2022), 200–221. 15  Citations are to John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell Peck, trans. Andrew Galloway, 3 volumes (2nd ed., Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 2004–2013). Also see the online editions for each volume cited above and listed in the Bibliography. 16  A useful overview of these exegetical traditions going back to Irenaeus and Origen is Gerhard Pfandl, “Interpretations of the Kingdom of God in Daniel 2:44,” Andrews University Seminary Studies 34 (1996): 249–268.

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Yet the exemplum attracts a range of interpretations from the other voices on the page that surround its introduction. The Latin summary for the dream appears below the opening lines of the main text and above the miniature, in rubric and marked with a decorated one-line initial to lend an enhanced visual presence and authority (though integrated into the main text column). This voice gives us only the specifics of the Dream, and a sense of the world as variable and divided, without the eschatology: Here in the Prologue he discourses about that Statue that King Nebuchadnezzar had seen in dreams, whose head was gold, chest silver, stomach brass, legs iron, but whose feet were some part iron, some part clay, through which diversity of members, according to Daniel’s exposition, the variation of this world is figured.17

No sense of salvation history nor any timeline at all features in this summary’s figuration of the dream statue. The Latin headverse for the entire section (in rubric above the section head for the main verse and marked with a decorated paraph) offers an analysis even further from the summary’s interpretation of worldly variation without any apparent end. These three couplets emphasize the world’s mutability as if its fall were as common an event as shooting dice or the everyday turning of Fortune’s wheel: Fortunate and adverse, turning through its mazy trail, the unclean, disordered world deceives every sort. The world is overturned in its outcomes as a die in a toss, as quickly as the covetous hand throws at the games. Like an image of man do the ages of the world vary, and nothing besides the love of God stands firm.18 17  “Hic in prologo tractat de statua illa quam rex Nabugodonosor viderat in sompnis cuius caput aureum pectus argenteum venter eneus. tibie ferree. Pedum vero quedam pars ferrea quedam fictilis videbatur sub qua membrorum diuersitate secundum danielis exposicionem huius mundi variacio figurabatur.” Above Pro. 595. Latin text transcribed from Morgan M.690; translations here and following by Andrew Galloway from the Peck and Galloway edition unless otherwise noted. 18  “Prosper et aduersus obliquo tramite versus

Immundus mundus decipit omne genus Mundus in euentu versatur & [ut in other mss] alea casu Quam celer in ludis iactat auara manus Sicut ymago viri variantur tempora mundi Stat que nichil firmum preter amare deum.” Pro. Headverse 5.1–6.

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Nebuchadnezzar and the biblical machinery of antetypes once again are left out entirely here, along with the teleology of salvation history. These three readings could be sorted into harmonious metalevels of interpretation: anagogy and the matter of end times for the main text in English, and allegory and the sublunary life respectively for the prose summary and headverse in Latin. If so, it is interesting to note that Gower’s English vernacular offers the elevated vision and his Latin—the language of God— the mundane operations of chance. However, in this manuscript the miniature also leaves out King Nebuchadnezzar entirely and, effectively, any scriptural context for the figure of the Ages of Man. Only the Statue inhabits the landscape of the miniature.19 Three other interpretations of the Dream on the same page, then, contend with the narrator’s voice within the main text. All these interpretations eschew salvation history, eschatology, and the endless new Jerusalem for a vision of ongoing instability in this world. The iconography in the miniature, in fact, follows fairly precisely a miniature for Machaut’s Remède de Fortune illustrating the dream with the Statue standing alone. Jean II of France, after his capture at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, probably brought to England a manuscript of the Remède with this miniature—the only source known for this iconography.20 In his passage Machaut explicitly associates the Statue with Fortune, Fortune’s Wheel with lovers, and Nebuchadnezzar himself with the L ­over/

19  The one element carried over in the miniature from Daniel that does not appear in Ovid is the stone appearing on the right of the statue, generally described in exegetical traditions as the advent of Christ, although exegetes differed on whether the stone referred to the first appearance for salvation or the second in judgment. A later marginal note also points to the rock in this manuscript (fol. 5r), though without any allusion to its apocalyptic symbolism: “Here he narrates further concerning the certain great stone, which, as appeared in the said dream, rushed from a high mountain onto the statue and utterly crushed it almost to nothing.” [Hic narrat vlterius de quodam lapide grandi, qui vt in dicto sompnio videbatur ab excelso monte super statuam corruens ipsam quasi in nichilum peremptus [penitus in other mss] contruit]. 20  See most recently Joyce Coleman, “Illuminations in Gower’s Manuscripts,” in The Routledge Research Companion to Jon Gower, ed. Ana Saez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 121–124. On the Ovidian function for this miniature in the Remède see further Fredell, “Reading the Dream Miniature,” 70–83; a different view is offered by Russell A. Peck, “John Gower and the Book of Daniel,” in John Gower: Recent Readings, ed. R.  F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1989), 172–177.

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Narrator.21 Machaut does not associate the Statue with Ovid’s four Ages of Man (Metamorphoses 1.89–150), a classical model of human history, which also devolves from gold to silver to brass to iron. However, the broad allegorical construct of lovers subject to Fortune owes much to the long medieval tradition of Ovidian poetry to which Gower also incurs a major debt. This association may explain the surprisingly secular use of Latin voices in the Confessio. After all, the voices surrounding the main text are also Ovidian in their visual presentation as well as in their content. The model for Gower’s striking use of Latin headverses and commentary to surround his English text comes from manuscripts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.22 A common form of this poem circulating in Gower’s England, the Ovide Moralisée, provides Christian commentary in the form of marginal summaries in Latin in the margins and allegorizations in Latin

21  Machaut’s version of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream appears in a Boethian complaint against Fortune (Remède 1001–1012; Consolation 1 met. 1 and pr. 1). Citations for the Remède de Fortune are to Guillaume de Machaut, Le Jugement du Roy de Behaingne and Remede de Fortune, ed. and trans. James I. Wimsatt and William W. Kibler, music ed. Rebecca A. Baltzer, The Chaucer Library (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988); citations for The Consolation of Philosophy are to Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, De consolatio philosophiae, ed. James J. O’Donnell (2nd ed. Bryn Mawr, PA: Bryn Mawr College, 1990), https:// faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/boethius/boethius.html. 22  A strand of the relatively rare scholarly analysis for Gower’s Confessio glosses includes a lively debate about why glossing is largely absent from Middle English works, whether Gower’s glosses are dull, and how Gower’s glosses differ from other vernacular examples in Boccaccio’s Teseida and Chaucer’s Boece. See A.  J. Minnis, “Absent Glosses: A Crisis of Vernacular Commentary in Late-Medieval England,” Essays in Medieval Studies 20 (2003): 1–17, rept. as “Absent Glosses: The Trouble with Middle English Hermeneutics,” in his Translations of Authority in Medieval English Culture: Valuing the Vernacular (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 17–37; Andrew Galloway, “Gower’s Confessio Amantis, the Prick of Conscience, and the History of the Latin Gloss in Early English Literature, in John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts, ed. Malte Urban (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 39–70; and the response by Minnis to Galloway in “Inglorious Glosses?” in John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception, ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2014), 51–75. Left out of this discussion are Gower’s glosses in other works such as the Traitié, discussed below.

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couplets at the heads of tales.23 Critics have long noticed how Ovid’s Metamorphoses pervades the Confessio.24 Medieval Ovid pervades the page design of the Confessio as well. Gower introduces in his English text a scriptural prophecy that anchors his analysis of England’s moment in salvation history. That text, however, comes to the reader literally framed by Ovidian commentary and verse that reimagine the world as an ongoing arena for love and Fortune. Rather than commentators in the margins of the ancients extracting kernels of Christian truth, as in the Ovide Moralisée, Gower’s marginal voices find Ovidian truths in Christian scripture. 25 All 23  These additions combine two commentary traditions in manuscripts of the Ovide Moralisée: allegorized verse from John of Garland’s Integumenta (in the position paralleling Gower’s headverses) and Arnulf of Orleans’s Allegoriae (in the position paralleling Gower’s summaries). On these entwined editions see Frank T. Coulson, “Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the School Tradition of France, 1180–1400: Texts, manuscript traditions, manuscript settings,” in Ovid in the Middle Ages, ed. James G.  Clark, Frank T.  Coulson, Kathryn L.  McKinley (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2011), 51–65. For a complete list of these manuscripts, including twenty-two Integumenta circulating widely from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, see Frank T. Coulson and Bruno Roy, Incipitarium Ovidianum. A Finding Guide for Texts in Latin Related to the Study of Ovid in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Publications of the Journal of Medieval Latin 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000); and Frank T.  Coulson, “Addenda and Corrigenda to Incipitarium Ovidianum,” Journal of Medieval Latin 12 (2002): 154–180.This observation has begun to appear in discussions of Gower’s massive debts to Ovid, as in Galloway, 188. Nonetheless, little direct comparison has been done between the poetry of the Integumenta and Gower’s headverses; as Coulson notes in “Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” 62, John’s language in couplets is “at once highly alliterative, elliptical, onomatopoeic and playful [and] often […] obscures the meaning of a given transformation.” 24  Overviews on Gower’s uses of Ovid (often combined with the discussion of Chaucer) include Andrew Galloway, “Ovid in Chaucer and Gower,” in A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid, ed. John F. Miller and Carole E. Newlands (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 187–201; Kathryn L. McKinley “Gower and Chaucer: Readings of Ovid in late Medieval England,” in Ovid in the Middle Ages, ed. James G.  Clark, Frank T.  Coulson, Kathryn L.  McKinley (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 197–230; Winthrop Wetherbee, “Gower Teaching Ovid and the Classics,” in Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower, ed. R. F. Yeager and Brian W. Gastle (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011), 172–179. 25  Also see T. Matthew McCabe, Gower’s Vulgar Tongue: Ovid, Lay Religion, and English Poetry in the Confessio Amantis (Cambridge: Brewer, 2011), 11–67. Winthrop Wetherbee, “Chaucer and Boethian Tradition in the Confessio Amantis,” in A Companion to Gower. ed. Siân Echard (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), 181–196, concludes, 196, by emphasizing the value of unstable viewpoints for classical antiquity, and for Gower’s Confessio: “Skeptical of its own authority, the Latin tradition is thus normative for Gower, a stable framework for his questioning of the values of his own world.”

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these external perspectives do not contradict the orthodox reading offered in the voice of the main text, but they establish a reverse mythography that reads a central biblical passage stripped of its original mission to generate anagogic meaning, and then repurposed as literary allegory for earthly life. A contending model for this entire discussion appears in the early Confessio manuscripts dedicated to Henry.26 The two earliest surviving manuscripts, Fairfax 3 and Stafford, position the Nebuchadnezzar miniature as a frontispiece for the Prologue and the poem as a whole (Fig. 1.2). In these and subsequent Henrician manuscripts the miniature also shows Nebuchadnezzar in bed (wearing his crown) dreaming, a king soon to face a terrible doom himself. The rock about to strike the golden head of the Statue of the Ages in this image hovers like a harbinger for a royal fall. Although the frontispiece invites readings beyond the literal, in the poem’s opening neither the main text nor marginal voices interpret the image for us. Gower’s opening headverse presents a (notably confusing) modesty topos which sheds no light at all on the Nebuchadnezzar miniature and rejects interpretive impulses: Listlessness, dull discernment, little schooling and least labor are the causes By which, I, least of all, sing things all the lesser […] Let then the boneless one that breaks bones with speeches be absent, And let the interpreter wicked in word stand far away.27

Nor do any marginal voices appear on the opening page in Fairfax or Stafford: marginalia in these manuscripts first appear after the dedication passage in Pro.24–92.28 So the only resonances for this miniature must be in the main text and beyond Gower’s opening meditation on following “the middle weie” (Pro.17). Those resonances begin on the same page with the mention of King Richard’s regnal year and the fragile state of his reign: “What schal befalle hierafterward/God wot” (Pro.26–27). Using 26  On the iconographic differences between versions dedicated to Richard and Henry, see further Joel Fredell, “Reading the Dream Miniature in the Confessio Amantis,” Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 22 (1995): 61–93. 27  “Torpor ebes sensus scola parua labor minimusque/Causant quo minimus ipse minora canam […] Ossibus ergo carens que conterit ossa loquelis/Absit et interpres stet procul oro malus.” Pro.Headverse 1.1–2, 5–6. 28  Stafford does have a full bar border on its opening page, making marginalia more difficult. Nonetheless, the marginal summary on Richard at Pro. 22 often used to date the Confessio’s states of revision only appears in five later manuscripts, and may be a late addition; see further below Chap. 4.

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Fig. 1.2  Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 3, fol. 2r detail. (© Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford)

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the Nebuchadnezzar miniature as a frontispiece for the Prologue (and the poem as a whole) again sets up division and instability in a narrative of devolution, but that narrative is closely linked to the fall of an English king in the immediate past Fairfax and Stafford claim to witness. In sum, the highly discursive page design for the Ricardian Morgan M.690 examines the biblical typology for a fallen king with Ovidian allegories for love and fortune. The Henrician Fairfax design explicitly links this biblical typology with the historic example (and the murky circumstances of Richard’s death at Pontefract Castle) still burning fresh in readers’ minds.29 Another design choice distinguishing Ricardian and Henrician Confessios is the exclusion or inclusion of Gower’s so-called laureate poems that position the poet as a supportive (if not propagandist) loyal subject to the new king Henry IV. Collections of these poems in the first decades of Lancastrian rule are attached only to Confessios dedicated to Henry and to early manuscripts of Vox clamantis deeply critical of Richard.30 None of the Confessios dedicated to Richard have any other poems of Gower attached. This stark difference adds more weight to the contrasts in page design between Ricardian and Henrician Confessios, and our interpretations of those differences: works overtly favoring Henry from the Chronica tripertita to Rex celi deus literally define and stabilize the authorial persona of the Henrician Confessio by content firmly anchored to the contemporary historical world outside the poem, much like the Henrician use of the Ages of Man as a frontispiece. The poet presented by Ricardian Confessios, by contrast, exists only within a historical fiction of the past, subject to the many competing literary voices within the text and its dream-vision world of storytelling. The Ricardian and Henrician designs appear in politically charged moments of history, so that the public life of these early manuscripts offer yet more information on the dueling versions of the poem. The first surviving manuscripts of the Confessio were produced in a flurry of deluxe 29  Although Fairfax’s production could date before Richard’s fall, I will argue in Chap. 5 below that this earlier date is unlikely. 30  On these clusters also see Siàn Echard, “Last Words: Latin at the End of the Confessio Amantis,” in Interstices: Studies in Late Middle English and Anglo-Latin Texts in Honour of A.G. Rigg, ed. Richard Firth Green and Linne R. Mooney (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2003), 99–121. A full list is available in Derek Pearsall and Linne R. Mooney, eds., A Descriptive Catalogue of the English Manuscripts of John. Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2021), 352–358; specific groupings for individual manuscripts are identified in the relevant manuscript descriptions.

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editions for an elite London audience during Gower’s lifetime and the years immediately following his death, a period when the reign of Henry IV faced many challenges and Gower’s late Latin poems entangled themselves with Lancastrian fortunes. Although most of the early Ricardian Confessios were produced in the later part of Henry’s reign, when the king’s illness led to a quasi-regency, the first of this group (including Morgan M.690) appear to date only a few years after the first Henrician Confessios and well within Gower’s lifetime.31 We might expect some obvious political split between owners of Confessios dedicated to Richard or Henry, but the limited evidence on this point is counterintuitive: at least two of these deluxe manuscripts dedicated to Richard were probably owned by sons of Henry IV, not an obvious patronal move by Lancastrian princes.32 Most early London Confessios with the dedications to Richard, those that survive, were also produced to the highest standards in terms of decoration, probably for prominent owners in that same Lancastrian context.33 Early London Confessios dedicated to Henry are similarly deluxe and, at a glance, seem very similar in a common page layout that Derek Pearsall has called “London style.”34 Nonetheless, increasingly over time these two versions are distinguished by differences in marginal design and

31  Some complexities in this record surround a group of London scribes who worked on the early Henrician Confessios and early Vox manuscripts; their additions and alterations will be discussed in detail below. On this dating see below, Chap. 7. 32  According to Doyle and Parkes, “Production,” 208–209, Thomas, Duke of Clarence (or possibly Prince Henry) owned the “first recension” Oxford, Christ Church College MS 148; Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester owned Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 294, a “second recension” manuscript with the Ricardian Prologue and the Henrician epilogue. John, Duke of Pembroke, owned Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 307; see Kate Harris, “The Role of Book Owners and the Book Trade,” in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 137–1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 170 and pl. 16; and Jeanne E. Krochalis, “The Books and Reading of Henry V and His Circle,” Chaucer Review 23 (1988): 55, 57. 33  See below, Chap. 7. 34  Derek Pearsall, “The Manuscripts and Illustrations of Gower’s Works,” in A Companion to Gower, ed Siàn Echard (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2004), 80–82. The design largely disappears in the important recent online edition because the marginalia are relegated to a subordinate position in separate windows. See John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell Peck and Andrew Galloway, http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/ peck-confessio-amantis-volume-1; http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/peckgower-confessio-amantis-volume-2; http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/ peck-confession-amantis-volume-3.

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content.35 Again, we must remember that both of these designs are artifactual fictions: the London style and both versions appear during Gower’s lifetime alongside a similar flurry in the manuscripts of Gower’s Vox clamantis with its own Ricardian and Henrician versions, all some years after the historical moments of Richard’s reign documented in both poems.36 Consequently, the early material life of the Confessio in Gower’s London not only explores the instabilities of contingent points in time, but the instabilities of historical witness in a documentary culture that materializes those moments as fictional artifacts well after the historical moments themselves.

3  The Polyvocal Page These readings of the Gowerian page depend on the assumption that the Latin elements be given close attention. Should we give greater authority to the Latin voices or the vernacular text? The complex presentation of the poem’s pages discussed above provides a hierarchy and ordering for the multiple (and multilingual) voices they interpret whose agency is brought to life, God-like, by the poet. Yet like God’s subjects these voices do not live without a will of their own once they inhabit the body of the book. Not only does Gower build a complex reading experience in two languages for the Confessio, in the process he goes far beyond Chaucer’s experiments in polyvocality and resistance to closure by giving the physical pages their own interpretive agency alongside the operations and resonances of the texts and voices they contain.37 The page gains its agency in 35  A number of differences in the page design appear in the early manuscripts dedicated to Richard, simplifying the vast decorative structure of internal divisions, sifting the position of the miniatures, and gradually eliminating the presence of Latin marginal voices (though not the headverses). These features appear in surviving witnesses later in date than the earliest manuscripts dedicated to Henry and so may move away from a more complex design; they may also represent a lost earlier tradition. See further Fredell, “Reading,” 62; Chap. 5 below. 36  A similar set of passages can be found in Vox clamantis VI.545–590/545*–580* and VI.1149–1202/1149*–1198*. The best discussion of these passages remains Malcolm Parkes, “Patterns,” 81–121. 37  A parallel example of Latin polyvocality, marginal commentaries on Aesop’s fables familiar to medieval schoolchildren, may undercut any presumption that Gower’s headverses and marginal summaries automatically exclude all but the most highly trained Latinists; one contemporary commentator on Aesop, Stephen Patrington, benefited from the patronage of John of Gaunt and had a notable public career in Gower’s time. See the survey in Wheatley, Mastering Aesop, 62–91, 97–98.

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Fig. 1.3  Macaulay, Works edition of the Confessio Amantis, 3.110–111

the reading process, signaling perspectives and modes of meaning in conversation if not in conflict. This agency survives partially intact in critical editions of the Confessio to this day, principally because Gower created them in such a striking visual and material form that later editors and producers of the poem understood the design to be integral to the poem’s meaning (Fig. 1.3). Some credit, still, must be given to Gower’s first great editor, George Macaulay: his careful presentation of headverses and marginalia may not represent the page designs of most early Confessios, but the edition does preserve the ordinatio of the earliest Henrician versions. Despite all the attractive and lurid political associations surrounding these page designs we have not gotten very far in understanding them. Part of the difficulty for the scholarly discussion of this material record lies in confronting the “medieval manuscript matrix” by means of two distinct approaches to textual and visual signs as the field began to negotiate the relationship between textual editing and the broader interests of codicology.38 Much has been said in recent decades about the interplay in medieval 38  In the now-famous special edition of Speculum devoted to “new philology” see Stephen Nichols, “Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture,” Speculum 65 (1990): 8.

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manuscripts between marginalia (including miniatures and other illustrations) and the texts they surround. One line of discussion privileging content sees marginal texts and images taking up a liminal position “on the edge” that challenge the assumptions (and presumably the authorial voice) enclosed in the main text they surround.39 Another line of discussion privileging design sees the entire page, including decorative elements such as initials and paraphs along with marginalia, as evidence for a planned ordinatio or hierarchical system developed by contemporary book producers without direct input from the authors.40 Gower’s manuscripts stand apart among Ricardian poets due to the strong possibility that the poet himself set up most or all of these features fully aware of both strategies. This authorial control may have been a strategy to stabilize mouvance in the publication and circulation of his work, as may be the case in earlier author-­ supervised manuscripts by Machaut and Froissart.41 Whether Gower pursued this strategy, his design undoubtedly enforces a play of dialogues that foregrounds the many ways to make meaning out of narrative.

39  Although not the first such discussion, Michael Camille’s Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992; rept. London: Reaktion Press, 2004), 11–32 and passim, argued influentially for a dominant/subversive relationship between the main and liminal “edge” elements respectively of a manuscript page. This relationship still informs recent discussions such as Erik Kwakkel, “Decoding the Material Book: Cultural Residue in Medieval Manuscripts,” in The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches, ed. Michael an Dussen and Michael Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 60–76. 40  The foundational article on this approach for Middle English literary manuscripts remains Doyle and Parkes, “Production,” 163–210. 41  See the overview in Derek Pearsall, “The Ellesmere Chaucer and Contemporary English Literary Manuscripts,” in The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation, ed. Martin Stevens and Daniel Woodward (San Marino; Tokyo: Huntington Library, 1995), 267–71. R.K. Root, in “Publication Before Print.” PMLA 28 (1913): 417–32, first observed that these French and Italian poets were “publishing” their own works, though Root’s case was much better substantiated for the Italian authors. For more recent discussion on the French authors see Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyric Narrative Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 232–327; and Deborah McGrady, Controlling Readers: Guillaume de Machaut and His Late Medieval Audience (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). Chaucer’s continental models in this respect are also discussed briefly in Laura Kendrick, “The Canterbury Tales in the Context of Contemporary Translations and Compilations,” in Ellesmere Chaucer, 285–286.

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4   Prophet or Propagandist? Not long ago Gower’s use of marginal voices became, for a short period, a topic of scholarly discussion supported by a renewed interest in codicology.42 However, an old and largely exploded surmise by John Fisher about Gower running a scriptorium out of his digs in St. Mary Priory, Southwark, has encouraged scholars to be cautious when discussing Gower’s role in the production and distribution of his poems.43 More recent work has pointed us back toward Gower’s hand in manuscripts of his poetry produced while he remained active as a poet and a laureate figure who may never before have had such a potent authorial persona among elite and royal readers.44 But in order to return to this discussion we need more information on those manuscripts produced in Gower’s London during Gower’s lifetime. We also need to examine these features in the material culture of Gower’s poetry as that material culture embodies a cascade of voices in complex hierarchies of presentation and decoration. Gower deploys design traditions found in academic, legal, and exegetical manuscripts that position competing voices around the main text as commentaries, summaries, footnote-like references, and cross-references. Gower also deploys narrative traditions that embed competing voices in a frame-tale narrative. That narrative establishes a web of dialogues between author and external narrator/complainant, between an internal narrator and the allegorical personae inhabiting his dream vision, between exemplary tales within and across moral categories. The interaction between these material and narrative strategies are all the more compelling a topic 42  This discussion began well before the codicology trend in R. F. Yeager, “English, Latin, and the Text as ‘Other’: The Page as Sign in the Work of John Gower,” Text 3 (1987): 251–267. Studies that examine these designs in terms of interpretive strategies include Winthrop Wetherbee, “Latin Structure and Vernacular Space: Gower, Chaucer and the Boethian Tradition,” in Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange, ed. R. F. Yeager, (Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1991), 7–35; and Siân Echard, “Glossing Gower: In Latin, in English, and in absentia: The Case of Bodleian Ashmole 35,” in Re-visioning Gower, ed. R.F. Yeager (Charlotte, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998), 237–256; and Coleman, “Lay Readers and Hard Latin,” 209–235. 43  The idea of a scriptorium at St. Mary Overys (or Overies) supervised by Gower was advanced by John Fisher, John Gower; Poet and Friend to Chaucer (New York 1964), 71ff. Arguments that seem to have exploded this surmise are in Doyle and Parkes, “Production,” 163–210. In his later article Parkes further demolishes the scriptorium supposition in “Patterns of Scribal Activity,” 81–121. 44  Sebastian Sobecki, “‘Ecce patet tensus’: The Trentham Manuscript, In Praise of Peace, and John Gower’s Autograph Hand,” Speculum 90 (2015): 925–959.

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if we can show that Gower oversaw presentation for the parts of this great metadialogue: polyvocal narratives in elaborately multilingual pages, framed by a bold experiment with the principles of documentary culture itself. In that bold experiment Gower’s primary fictions of witness position the authorial persona speaking to a historical moment and position the manuscript itself as an artifact from that moment despite its production years later in a different context with an elaborate design superstructure of Latin commentary. Two strands of scholarly criticism have for decades obscured these features of the Confessio. Geoffrey Chaucer dominates any discussion about fictions of witness or embedded personae in Middle English poetry generally, principally through his pilgrim avatar in the Canterbury Tales.45 Given the complexities of this topic for William Langland, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate as well as Gower, generalizations based on our understanding of Chaucer are unlikely to be helpful. The Canterbury Tales also emerges into the arena of deluxe London manuscripts after Chaucer’s death and Henry’s accession to the throne, both in 1399. Any Chaucerian jokes that might hint at the artifactual status of his Tales (such as the brief mention of Jack Straw chasing the Flemings) do not cross over into the political arena of a living author negotiating a fundamental change in patronage.46 In Gower scholarship by contrast, critics have long focused on Gower injecting himself into the dramatic political history surrounding him as well as his poem emerging into public view as Henry IV and the house of Lancaster take shaky control of England. However, that scholarship has created a three-stage model of political conversions, all occurring well before Henry takes control and all before any surviving manuscripts of the Confessio were produced.

45  Modern critical discussion of this feature can be said to begin with E. T. Donaldson’s “Chaucer the Pilgrim” PMLA 69 (1954): 928–936. A few other reference points from the vast (though now quite old) bibliography on this topic include H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., “The Art of Impersonation: A General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales,” PMLA 95 (1980): 213–234; Barbara Nolan, “‘A Poet Ther Was’: Chaucer’s Voices in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales,” PMLA 10 (1986): 152–169; Lee Patterson, “‘What Man Artow?’ Authorial Self-Definition in The Tale of Sir Thopas and The Tale of Melibee,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989): 117–175. 46  NPT 3394–3396. Chaucer’s Complaint to His Purse clearly does address this shift, but is unlikely to have any metahistorical intentions beyond its play with the genre of begging poems.

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George Macaulay first defined three “recensions” of the poem shaped by Gower’s initial allegiance to Richard, then to Richard and an emerging Henry Lancaster as well, then finally against Richard and fully to Henry at some point before Henry seized the throne. Macaulay’s view of the evidence still holds remarkable sway a century later.47 An incautious reader might think Gower laid out these three positions in a forthright way within the Confessio each time, but the evidence does not offer any such certainty. Dedications at the opening and close of the Confessio do identify an allegiance to King Richard in one set of manuscripts and to Henry before he becomes king in another set, but no third pair of dedications exists. A vanishingly small set of glosses and variants in two short texts appended to the poem can be singled out, following Macaulay, to argue for Gower’s loyalties evolving over the course of the 1390s. This hopeful storyline of an organic process in three movements for Gower’s politics depends entirely on the thin reeds of these glosses and colophons in a handful of manuscripts. As I will argue below, this modern model offers its own three fictions of witness linked to specific political moments in the 1390s well before the great eruption of 1399. No other substantive evidence exists to support an association between Gower and Henry after Henry’s return from Prague in 1392 beyond a reference to one undoubted but undated sign of Gower’s alliance with Henry’s Lancastrian affinity: an SS collar. Since this collar reference remains the only form of evidence not covered extensively in the following chapters, a moment of attention will show that it, too, vanishes easily as a prop for the second recension theory. The longstanding speculation that this collar came to Gower early in the 1390s, first bruited by Macaulay and advanced most vigorously by John Fisher, rests on an undated memorandum.48 The memorandum itself survives in a small roll of such slips in the National Archives as part of the documents of the Duchy of Lancaster and records a note to repay Richard Dancaster for having given John Gower

47  This speculation continues to hold enough power that its presentation as fact can be seen in an article from 2016, whose opening sentence asserts it as a given: “After having dedicated the Confessio Amantis to Richard II in 1390, John Gower famously rededicated it to Henry Bolingbroke in 1392.” Kimberly Fonzo, “Richard II’s Publicly Prophesized Deposition in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Modern Philology 114 (2016): 1. See further Chap. 3 below. 48  Macaulay, xxii–xxvi; Fisher, 68 and 342 n. 5. Also see the overview in D. Fletcher, “The Lancastrian Collar of Esses: Its Origins and Transformation down the Centuries,” in The Age of Richard II, ed. J. Gillespie (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 191–204.

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Fig. 1.4  London, National Archives, MS DL 41/424 Item 15: Gower’s SS collar. (Reproduced by permission of the Chancellor and Council of the Duchy of Lancaster)

Fig. 1.5  DL 41/424 Item 15 detail. (Reproduced by permission of the Chancellor and Council of the Duchy of Lancaster)

his (Dancaster’s) collar49 (Figs. 1.4 and 1.5). Fisher argued that the memo, though undated, was next in the pile to another memo dated Richard 17 (1392–1393) and thus proved Gower’s shift in loyalties in that year that led to a second recension of the Confessio. However, other items in the bundle surrounding the Gower collar are not dated. All we know (from the clerk’s signature indicating his role in the household of the Count of Derby) is that these memoranda must antedate Henry’s crowning in

49  “Livrez a Richardus Dancastre pour vn Coler a luy doné par monseigneur le Comte de Derby mandatur a vn Esquier John Gower, vynt et sys seldz oyt deniers per hugh waterton chamberlain au conte de Derby” (London, National Archives, DL 41/424.15). That item is undated, one small parchment scrap bundled in a roll of small parchment scraps. Although no description of the collar is given, the Lancastrian SS collar is the likely reference here.

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1399.50 Quite simply, informal bundles of household accounts such as these have no claim to chronological order at this late point in their survival. In fact Gower could have received such a mark of affinity anytime in the 1390s. There is reason to believe that during Richard’s crackdowns during 1397–1399 such badges were more strictly regulated, but also that Henry distributed many of these collars during his 1399 campaign.51 Gower seems to have embraced this badge of livery after Henry assumed the throne, since Gower’s funerary effigy is wearing the SS collar, as is Amans in the Confessor miniature for the Fairfax manuscript (though the collar seems to be a clumsy later addition).52 Nonetheless, Fisher’s assertion that Gower received this collar in 1392 specifically is little more than wishful thinking. Despite the dearth of evidence for Macaulay’s conversion narrative recent critical discussion on the Confessio has focused on a topic that depends directly on these questions around which royal Gower favored and when he changed his mind: Gower’s authorial position as political prophet and as Lancastrian propagandist. Yet again two approaches predominate. Gower the prophet, a figure that has effectively become a meme 50  In this roll items 1–6 and 9–11 are dated Richard 17; the others are not dated. Nor could I detect in my own examination any other sign for a chronological arrangement in what looks like a bundle of random slips. London, National Archives, MS DL 41/424, includes a number of memoranda written and for the most part signed by Hugh Wat[t]terton, chamberlain for Henry from 1386 until he became chamberlain for the Duchy of Lancaster in 1399. All except a short roll of expenses numbered 13, and items 16 and 17 which are also short rolls of brief household expenses, are detached pieces of parchment meant to be given to the Clerk of the Wardrobe, probably for more formal account books. A few of Watterton’s signatures include an address to (quoting item 16) “William Loueney Clerc de la Garderobe du Derbeie Comite.” Watterton was “part of the nucleus of Henry’s household” and companion since childhood; later he served as protector of Henry’s children during Henry’s exile, attorney, a source of loans to the Exchequer, and a member of King’s Council to Henry: see Chris Given-Wilson, Henry IV (New Haven, CN and London: Yale University Press, 2016), 29–30, 102–116–117, 285–287, 299. Loveney was keeper of the wardrobe for Henry from 1390–1398. Loveney went into exile with Henry, and later took the offices of Keeper of the Great Wardrobe and Keeper of the King’s Ships; see GivenWilson 117, 313, 457–458. 51  Given-Wilson, Henry IV, 393. Given-Wilson says further that “England after 1399 was flooded with SS collars, the dozens proudly displayed on the tomb effigies of lords, knights and esquires affording one indication of their ubiquity, the 192 collars handed out by Henry during his 1399 campaign another.” 52  On the Fairfax 3 Confessor miniature and its portrait of Gower see further Chap. 2, n. 63 below.

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in the field, springs inevitably from the three-recension theory and Gower’s presumed prescience about Henry years before his ascent to the throne; this supposed political foresight melds with the apocalyptic tone of the Confessio’s Prologue to forge Gower the prophet.53 On the other hand the figure of Gower the propagandist depends, for the Confessio, on a poet constructing a historical present within the poem that is an intentional fiction based on hindsight.54 Despite the virtues of both approaches, neither results in a convincing reading of the crucial pivot in the Confessio’s Prologue from the apocalyptic destruction envisioned in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream to the restoration of natural and political harmony inaugurated by another poetic alter ego, Arion (Pro. 1053–1088). On a different plane, neither approach is any direct help with two great problems of material history for the Confessio: the altered openings and closings to the poem in what is probably the earliest copy of the poem, Fairfax 3, and the sudden burst of Confessios dedicated to Richard II in Lancastrian England, including copies owned by the sons of the man who proved to be Richard’s bane a decade or so earlier. No one doubts that Gower created within the poem’s fiction a witness to Richard’s glory in one set of opening and closing passages in the Confessio, and a witness to Richard’s tyranny and Henry’s emergence as England’s hope in the other set. Did Gower create these fictions of witness in the historical moment they claim to occupy, or at some later point close to the burst of luxury copies produced in London in early Lancastrian England? This question becomes particularly pointed 53  Recent discussions with an emphasis on Gower’s apocalypticism include Helen Cooper, “Gower and Mortality: The Ends of Storytelling,” in Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower: Others and the Self (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2017), 91–107; Elliott Kendall, “Saving History: Gower’s Apocalyptic and the New Arion,” in John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition, ed. Elisabeth Dutton, John Hines, and R.F. Yeager (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2010), 46–58. Gower the prophet appears frequently; see, for instance Gower’s “prophetic literalism” in Robert R.  Edwards, “Gower’s Poetics of the Literal,” in John Gower, Trilingual Poet, 66–73; or the more skeptical treatment in Nigel Saul, “John Gower: Prophet or Turncoat,” in John Gower, Trilingual Poet, 85–97. Most recently Fonzo, “Richard II’s Publicly Prophesied Deposition,” 1–17, takes a critical look at both positions. 54  The fullest discussion of this figure remains Carlson, Poetry and Propaganda; also see Terry Jones, “Did John Gower Rededicate His ‘Confessio Amantis’ before Henry IV’s Usurpation?” in Middle English Texts in Transition: A Festschrift Dedicated to Toshiyuki Takamiya on his 70th Birthday, ed. Simon Horobin and Linne R.  Mooney (Woodbridge, Suffolk: York Medieval Press/Boydell and Brewer, 2014), 40–74; Nigel Saul, “Prophet or Turncoat?”, 85–97; and Wim Lindeboom, “Rethinking the Recensions of the Confessio Amantis,” Viator 40 (2009): 319–48.

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if Gower were revising the content of his poems more broadly around the time of Henry’s ascent to the throne and wished to present himself as a prescient or even prophetic observer after the regime change had been settled.55 In the closing chapter of this study Confessio Books 7 and 8 will provide new evidence on this question. The old three-recension narrative, which also assumes a tripartite public life for the Confessio in the 1390s, supports another chestnut of Gower scholarship: Gower was an inveterate reviser who also issued his poems to the public in between revisions. However much Gower revised the Confessio (and Gower’s great Latin assemblage known as Vox clamantis), it is another matter to believe that Gower issued his entire poem-in-flux to the public three separate times before Henry’s accession. What is said less often about Gower’s fictions of witness is that we have no evidence that anybody except Chaucer might have read the Confessio in any form before 1399—and what we know Chaucer read remains arguable among two tales and a handful of parallel storylines.56 Beyond that one coterie connection nothing indicates that the Confessio circulated to a broader public before 1399. Any approach to Gower’s revisions must contend with the possibility that these revisions occurred close to or during the period when we know his poems were being reproduced in deluxe editions in London during his lifetime and his revitalized career as a laureate poet. Poets are more likely to go to the drawer when an audience beckons. Yet another fiction of witness can be laid at the feet of a group of scribes producing deluxe Ricardian Confessios in Lancastrian London among a flurry of literary manuscripts in Middle English. It is these scribes, including John Marchaunt (who also copied two of the earliest copies of the Canterbury Tales), who were the first to produce a Confessio with the paean to Chaucer

55  As Peter Nicholson first argued, in “Gower’s Revisions in the Confessio Amantis,” Chaucer Review 19 (1984): 140–143, the two earliest Confessios with the dedication to Henry show clear textual signs that they were extensively revised and assembled “following Henry’s accession” (141). 56  On the best evidence for Chaucer reading Gower see Peter Nicholson, “The Man of Law’s Tale: What Chaucer Really Owed to Gower,” Chaucer Review 23 (1991): 163–181; a recent overview of other possible borrowings (Gower’s “Tale of Florent” for the Man of Law’s Tale and some possible sources in the Confessio for the Legend of Good Women) is in Brian Gastle, “Gower and Chaucer” in The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower, ed. Ana Saez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager (Oxford: Routledge, 2017), 296–311.

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(8.2941*–2957*) around the time that Thomas Chaucer rose to his peak of political power, as we shall see in detail below.57 Again, the entire poem is not directly tangled in contemporary politics by any means. Nor is the persona of the poet, at least for the majority of the poem. As in the Canterbury Tales, the Confessio relies on a poet-­ narrator who exists within the framing tale of the poem on which the vast fabric of exemplary tales depends. Unlike the historical present for the roadside drama in the Canterbury Tales, the Confessio positions the narrator within an ahistorical dream-vision space. This space owes much to Alan of Lille’s Complaint of Nature and prompts a broad allegory of the seven deadly sins: the dreamer (called Amans until named as John Gower in Book 8) confesses his lovesickness and attendant sins against morality to the Genius-like priest of Venus.58 This Confessor builds a framework of moralized tales illustrating the manifestation of sin in worlds both pagan and Christian, until Venus ultimately rules against the worthiness of Amans to remain on Love’s team. Wrapping around this framework, however, the Prologue and the final lines of Book 8 offer critiques of contemporary society along with the state of the state itself. Even here the differences between Ricardian and Henrician passages make up a small percentage of these passages. Only 68 lines change in the Prologue (Pro.24–92); 186 57  According to Doyle and Parkes, “Production,” 163–210 and 208–209, Thomas, Duke of Clarence (or possibly Prince Henry) owned Oxford, Christ Church College MS 148, copied by Marchaunt, with dedications to Richard at the Confessio’s opening and closing; Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester owned Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 294, copied by Marchaunt, the sole “second recension” manuscript with the Ricardian Prologue and the Henrician epilogue. John, Duke of Pembroke, owned Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 37, copied by a scribe who also copied the Petworth Canterbury Tales. Also see Kate Harris, “The Role of Book Owners and the Book Trade,” in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 137–1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge 1989), 170 and pl. 16; and Jeanne E. Krochalis, “The Books and Reading of Henry V and His Circle,” Chaucer Review 23 (1988): 55, 57. 58  On the tradition of Genius developing from Alan through the Roman de la Rose to Gower’s Venusian Confessor, see George Economou, “The Character Genius in Alan de Lille, Jean de Meun, and John Gower,” Chaucer Review 4 (1970) 203–210; Donald Schueler, “Gower’s Characterization of Genius in the Confessio Amantis, Modern Language Quarterly 33 (1972): 240–256; Winthrop Wetherbee, “The Literal and the Allegorical: Jean de Meun and the ‘de Planctu Naturae,’” Mediaeval Studies 33 (1971): 264–291; Denise Baker, “The Priesthood of Genius: A study of the Medieval Tradition,” Speculum 51 (1976): 277–291, repr. in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: A Critical Anthology, ed. Peter Nicholson (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 1991), 145–157; and Alastair Minnis, Magister Amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular hermeneutics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 108–113.

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lines change in Book 8 (8.2986–3173).59 Within these small sections the commentary shifts directly from praising Richard at beginning and end, proclaiming the Confessio a “bok for king Richard’s sake” (Pro.24*) produced on Richard’s own request (Pro.35*-56*), to a declaration that the Confessio was a “bok for Engelonde’s sake” written in Richard’s sixteenth regnal year (1395–1396; Pro.24–25), eventually followed by a brief dedication to Henry (Pro.83–89). The final lines of the Ricardian Confessio are taken up almost entirely by Gower’s long dedication passage in praise of Richard (8.2971–3076). In the Henrician version complaints at the close of Book 8 (8.2985–3105) echo those of the Prologue, but no mention of Henry himself occurs. The broad critique of a world mired in division (Pro.663–1052) otherwise remains the same in textual terms, but reads differently in the light of pro-Ricardian optimism or pro-Henrician hope tempered with fear. The same can be said of Gower’s fiction of witness itself, his position within the poem as an observer of contemporary politics and culture. Scholars have assumed a scrupulous honesty in Gower’s contending creation stories for the Confessio, in the date mentioned above that props up in the version dedicated to Henry (Pro.25), and in the marginalia’s dates whoever might have written them.60 Still, an artifactual impulse might be at play in the various dedications and epilogues here as well. After all, every surviving manuscript with the Ricardian dedications dates from after Henry’s accession. Early textual traditions can pop up in later documents easily enough, but dedications to a recently dead and probably murdered king during the early and unstable reign of his usurper—that sort of emergence seems much less likely to be a random consequence. Given that sons of Henry IV owned deluxe manuscripts dedicated to Richard, the Ricardian dedication clearly does not have the kind of 59  Book 8 in its Ricardian form also includes the 18 lines wherein Venus sends her greetings to Chaucer (8.2941*–2959*) and a following passage of 25 lines (8.2960*–2985*) that is largely identical in both versions. 60  Andrew Galloway (following Malcolm Parkes, “Patterns” on Gower’s revisions) notes that members of Gower’s inner circle such as Sir Thomas Cobham and John Denne (or Donne) may have initiated some of these revisions and “would likely have realized that Gower was carrying out a kind of pious fraud in foisting these views onto his younger self, creating the image of a solitary prophet concerning the king’s inevitable decline.” Andrew Galloway, “The Common Voice in Theory and Practice,” in Law, Governance, and Justice: New Views on Medieval Constitutionalism, ed. Richard Kaeuper, Paul Dingman, and Peter Sposato (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 270–271.

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political potency for Lancastrians presumed by Macaulay’s model and may instead operate as one more artifact of Ricardian times that predicts the advent of Henry.61 Henrician manuscripts of the Confessio may share this strategy in another form, with backdated prescience serving the kind of prophetic function made explicit in the overtly Lancastrian loyalty found in Gower’s Cronica tripertita.62 This study will thus pursue an alternative narrative by examining Gower’s fiction of witness separate from the vastly more well-known fictions of witness in Chaucer’s poetry. To do so, the opening and closing chapters will borrow the framing approach as a key to reading the Confessio throughout as a clash between moments of historical witness and visions of eternal meaning. The following chapter positions Gower’s author portraits as crucial predecessors to those of Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate, by confronting Gower’s identification with the spirit-poet Arion. Despite its vision of poetry as separate from the mundane, the invocation of this mythopoetic figure is couched in the political terms the history surrounding 1399 insists on and Gower’s fiction of witness hopes to elide. The final chapter examines the Ricardian love court encircling the final audience between Venus and the poem’s lover-confessant, now unmasked as John Gower in the specific historical condition of post-erotic old age. The problem of incest, however, opens the final book as the driving logic for both love and history. Consequently, Ovidian and salvation histories, fused in the Prologue by the dream of Nebuchadnezzar, pull apart in Book 8. The framing trope for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales fuses love and salvation in a similar dynamic relationship: the General Prologue’s imagery of pilgrimage closes with the Parson’s prologue and sermon about penitential struggle and eternal salvation. In the Confessio, however, Gower transforms mythopoetic synergy into political fictions of witness by his insistence in one version that Richard is doing God’s work or that Henry IV in the other version is Christ’s anointed envoy. These opening and closing chapters will, I hope, frame my long central discussion on the first twenty years in the material history of the poem as it survives in manuscripts today, with the fictions of witness for the poem created in material form by separate circles of scribes. Abiding by the wisdom that things must get worse before they get better, in the central 61  On the Lancastrian struggle with Richard’s postmortem presence see Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, 101–127. 62  Also see Fonzo, “Richard II’s Publicly Prophesied Deposition,” 1–17.

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chapters of this study I will raise a number of problems with the Gower corpus of texts overall and their relationship to surviving manuscripts—a few that have already lifted their heads, but others that have until now lurked behind Macaulay’s edition. This manuscript evidence argues that Gower’s career was rejuvenated, if not recreated, after the accession of Henry IV when Henry needed a court poet far more than Richard II ever did. That career was based on pamphlet poetry far more than on the major works in three languages that support Gower’s reputation (and literally support his head in Gower’s funeral effigy); on the network of Latinizing literatus far more than on vernacular poetry or Gower’s relationship to Geoffrey Chaucer; on the work of professional scribes far more than any scribe that might be linked directly to Gower. Such a revised history of Gower’s career demands a thorough reassessment of the Confessio at least, and a recognition that the political dimensions of this poem as we have it may be far more a product of Gower’s late period of pamphleteering and Lancastrian literary culture than we have cared to recognize.

CHAPTER 2

A Portrait in Laureate Authority

He broghte hem all in good accord So that the comun with the lord And lord with the comun also He sette in love bothe tuo. (CA Pro. 1065–9)

1   The Chaucer Problem John Gower’s massive body of poetry  demands attention independent from the work of his more famous friend, Geoffrey Chaucer. However, the interpretive lenses we apply to Gower are shaped by the critical discussions of Chaucer that have dominated scholarship on Middle English poetry since the nineteenth century. One such lens is our assessment of the public lives of the poetry itself in the tumult of the 1390s and the early 1400s. In Ricardian and Lancastrian England much of its most celebrated poetry (the work of Langland, Gower, Hoccleve, Lydgate, among others) could be described as “public” in the sense Anne Middleton made familiar fifty years ago.1 In this crucial article Middleton famously excluded Chaucer from an interest in speaking to a general public ascribed to other poets from the period; instead, she argued in a later piece with equal impact,

1  Anne Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,” Speculum 53 (1978): 94–114.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Fredell, Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27964-5_2

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Chaucer spoke to the “new men” of his coterie.2 Although Middleton’s arguments have been challenged and reformulated, a firm faith among scholars remains in Chaucer’s desire to speak to readers of his own time and place in some sense, however limited.3 The manuscript record is not helpful in supporting this point, however, both in the simple terms of copies surviving from the life of the poet (probably none) and the more complex matter of authorial supervision (very limited, at most). A certain schizophrenia consequently attends current discussions of Chaucer’s textual production. Linne Mooney’s identification of Adam Pynkhurst as the scribe of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere Canterbury Tales satisfies our deep need for a stable production team appropriate to Chaucer’s putative reputation in his own time, even though this crucial identification raises more problems than it solves—if Chaucer did have a professional scribe at hand (and a big reputation to sustain), where is the evidence of fair copies in his lifetime even remotely equivalent to those which have survived for Thomas Hoccleve, John Gower, or John Lydgate?4 Why are Hengwrt and Ellesmere not earlier, before Chaucer’s death rather than some years after it? And since Pynkhurst is also identified as the scribe of the Mercer’s Petition issued in 1388, a document carrying its own political controversy, why would Chaucer work directly with a politically suspect figure during a period when Thomas Usk lost his head and many others suffered the wrath of Richard II?5 At the other end of the spectrum Terry Jones has been joined by Robert Yeager and several other scholars who propose that this missing textual record must be evidence that 2  “‘New Men’ and the Good of Literature in the Canterbury Tales,” in Literature and Society, ed. Edward Said (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 15–56. 3  The most substantial discussion of this approach to Chaucer remains Paul Strohm’s Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Later work does emphasize Chaucer’s disengagement: see notably Lee Patterson’s Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991) and Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). Also see recently, though, David Lawton’s discussion of Middleton’s “Habermasian” agenda in Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford and New  York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 73–74. 4  Linne R. Mooney, “Chaucer’s Scribe,” Speculum 81 (2006): 97–138. 5  On Pynkhurst see further Linne R, Mooney, and Estelle Stubbs, Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature 1375–1425 (York: York Medieval Press, 2012), 66–85. On the Mercer’s Petition also see Wendy Scase, Literature and Complaint in England 1272–1553 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 67–77; and Matthew Giancarlo, Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 73–76.

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Chaucer was murdered and the best copies of his work “deliberately destroyed by the usurping regime of Henry IV.”6 Clearly we want this problem in Chaucer’s textual record solved, but neither the identification of Pynkhurst nor the cry of murder accomplishes that. As Derek Pearsall has pointed out, current authors Chaucer was reading in French, Italian, and Middle English (including Gower), and later authors in the “Chaucer tradition” such as Lydgate and Hoccleve, oversaw manuscripts of their work intended for presentation and/or public circulation.7 This widespread strategy among his contemporaries dramatizes the material problem with Chaucer’s authorial persona: despite Chaucer’s apparent prominence as a poet in Ricardian and (very early) Lancastrian England, despite his highly developed skills as a civil servant and courtier in royal service, despite the patronage of no less a figure than John of Gaunt, there is no surviving evidence that Chaucer produced (or oversaw production of) any public manuscript for his poetry, much less any fixed design or marginal autocommentaries.8 We can extend Pearsall’s 6  Terry Jones, Robert Yeager, Terry Dolan, Alan Fletcher, Juliette Dor, Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery (London: Methuen, 2003), 4. 7   Derek Pearsall, “The Ellesmere Chaucer and Contemporary English Literary Manuscripts,” in Ellesmere Chaucer, 267–71. It should be noted that R.K.  Root, in “Publication Before Print,” PMLA 28 (1913): 417–32, first observed that these French and Italian poets were “publishing” their own works, though Root’s case was much better substantiated for the Italian authors. For more recent discussion on the French authors see Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyric Narrative Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 232–327. Chaucer’s continental models in this respect are also discussed briefly in Laura Kendrick, “The Canterbury Tales in the Context of Contemporary Translations and Compilations,” in Ellesmere Chaucer, 285–6. Also see Ardis Butterfield, “‘Mise-en-page’ in the Troilus Manuscripts: Chaucer and French Manuscript Culture,” Huntington Library Quarterly 58 (1995): 49–80; Butterfield (77–80) argues that Chaucer may have absorbed the French lyric forms underpinning the Troilus lyrics, but that later scribes developed these “latent” literary forms in Troilus manuscripts into the French-influenced mise-en-page that marks England’s fifteenth-century fascination with French lyric. 8  Ralph Hanna makes a similar point, though only in brief, before passing on to the problem of editing Chaucer: “For the evidence shows that, whatever Chaucer thought of his own authoriality, he was remarkably negligent about ‘publishing’ and made no efforts at collecting a Works. There is particularly minimal evidence for any supervised publication […];” see Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 176. However, see Martha Carlin, “Thomas Spencer, Southwark Scrivener (d. 1428): Owner of a Copy of Chaucer’s Troilus in 1394?” Chaucer Review 49 (2015): 387–401, for the only known reference to a possible copy of one of Chaucer’s works in his lifetime. Also see Estelle Stubbs, “A new manuscript by the Hengwrt/Ellesmere scribe? Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales MS.  Peniarth 393D,” Journal of the Early Book Society, 5 (2002): 161–168, wherein Stubbs dates a Boece fragment to 1385.

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point to observe that vernacular poets whose books served as contemporary referents for Chaucer not only oversaw production but also constructed authoritative “editions” of their own work, in some cases complete with scholarly apparatus they supplied. Poets around Chaucer (Machaut and Froissart before him, Gower alongside him, Hoccleve and Lydgate after him) developed two notable strategies to contain scribal mouvance, promote stability in their own texts, and in effect “publish” these stabilized works with some authority for future scribes: copies adorned with a careful hierarchy of textual divisions and annotations, and formal presentation copies (which might include hierarchical text design) for major patrons and their libraries.9 The surviving evidence for Chaucer argues that Chaucer himself neither erected a substantial design apparatus for his texts nor produced presentation copies in his lifetime, despite his long associations with John of Gaunt and other potential patrons. In stark contrast, immediately after Chaucer’s death Gower’s Confessio and Vox clamantis manuscripts establish complex page designs during the first decade of Henry’s rule. Derek Pearsall has called this design for the Confessio a “London style” of remarkable consistency.10 This strategy, also pursued assiduously by Hoccleve and Lydgate, depended on presentation copies calculated expressly for the purpose of fixing the texts as they entered the public domain: royal libraries, readings before the court, and the collections of stationers poised to reproduce a fashionable book for their paying customers. The status of a deluxe manuscript generally or a presentation manuscript specifically had the potential to spur reproduction.11 In Gower’s case the evidence from surviving manuscripts argues strongly that he oversaw the production of his poems for presentation in the years up to his death in 1408, for placement in the libraries of the

9  Gower’s awareness of French vernacular models for manuscript design is discussed most fully in Ardis Butterfield, “Gower and the French Vernacular Codex,” Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003): 80–96; also see Joel Fredell, “Reading the Dream Miniature in the Confessio Amantis,” Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s. 22 (1995): 61–93. 10  Derek Pearsall, “The Manuscripts and Illustrations of Gower’s Works,” in A Companion to Gower, ed. Siân Echard (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), 81–85. On the dates and provenances for the earliest Confessio and Vox manuscripts see Chap. 6 below. 11  A.  S. G.  Edwards and Derek Pearsall, “The manuscripts of the major English poetic texts,” in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 261.

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mighty, and for textual stability generally.12 As A.  I. Doyle notes, the Ellesmere Confessio (Sam Marino, Huntington Library MS El 26 A 17 “Stafford”) was produced to the highest current standards of formality; this copy preceded and may have promoted the production of a series of Confessio manuscripts which show clear signs of commercial standardization along with continued patronage from the sons of Henry and other wealthy customers.13 Some changes in this design do occur, apparently in connection with the textual variants which distinguish versions dedicated

12  Pearsall, “Manuscripts,” 268–69. Although the idea put forth by John Fisher in John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New York, 1964), 58–60, that Gower ran his own scriptorium at St. Mary Overby is no longer accepted, there is a broad consensus that Gower actively oversaw the production of his early manuscripts in French, English, and Latin, complete with their complex layouts and apparatus criticus. Even Peter Nicholson, largely responsible for exploding the Gower scriptorium theory, argues for Gower’s oversight of the production of four manuscripts of Vox Clamantis and Chronica Tripertita, and two manuscripts of the Confessio in “Gower’s Revisions in the Confessio Amantis,” Chaucer Review 19 (1984): 136–137. Recently see Sebastian Sobecki’s argument that Gower’s own hand appears in the Trentham manuscript (London, British Library, MS Add. 59,495) in “‘Ecce patet tensus’: The Trentham Manuscript, In Praise of Peace, and John Gower’s Autograph Hand,” Speculum 90 (2015): 925–959. Also see Edwards and Pearsall, 273 n. 15. For a summary on these earlier critical positions also see Siân Echard, “Glossing Gower: In Latin, in English, and in absentia: the case of Bodleian Ashmole 35,” in Re-visioning Gower, ed. R.F. Yeager (Asheville, NC, 1998), 237–239. Just how Gower might have overseen the production of presentation copies remains unclear. Doyle makes the plausible suggestion that Gower employed some of the highly skilled secular clerks he was likely to have known in Westminster or London; see A. I Doyle, “English Books In and Out of Court from Edward III to Henry VII,” in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V.  J. Scattergood and J.  W. Sherbourne (London, 1983), 170. The relationship of the Guildhall scribes identified by Linne R. Mooney and Estelle Stubbs in Scribes and the City to London manuscripts of the Confessio will be taken up at length below. As Malcolm Parkes has demonstrated, Gower’s poetry more broadly was copied by a number of scribes who interacted frequently during and shortly after Gower’s lifetime on manuscripts containing both the Confessio and Vox clamantis; see “Patterns of Scribal Activity and Revisions of the Text in Early Copies of Works by John Gower,” in New Science Out of Old Books: Studies in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in Honour of A.  I. Doyle, ed. Richard Beadle and A. J. Piper (London: Scolar Press, 1995), 86–98. 13  Doyle, “English Books,” 170–171; see further Chap. 6 below. On the status of Stafford as a founding manuscript in the Confessio tradition also see Derek Pearsall, “Early Revision in the Text of Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Journal of the Early Book Society 24 (2021): 247–262.; and Peter Nicholson’s response, “Gower’s Early Revisions Revisited,” forthcoming in the Journal of the Early Book Society.

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to Richard II and Henry IV.14 Nonetheless, the vast majority of the Confessio’s text, with its intricate machinery of rhetorical divisions, remains so inviolate that late fifteenth-century manuscripts and early printed editions mirror to a surprising degree the early manuscripts. In this sense Gower’s production of public poetry is a central influence in the “age of Chaucer” since Hoccleve and Lydgate, unlike Chaucer, follow Gower’s example to engage directly with the material and public life of their poetry. We have at least three autograph manuscripts of verse produced by Hoccleve15; he also copied a portion of a Confessio manuscript himself along with a scribe central to the boom in London Confessios; another incomplete Confessio may be in Hoccleve’s hand as well.16 Consequently, Hoccleve was deeply involved in the production of his poetry for public consumption and well-versed in Gower’s current and highly successful strategies for the material presentation of his poetry. Holograph copies of Lydgate’s poetry do not survive, but manuscripts of at least two major works follow Gower in their use of marginal summaries, complex hierarchies of decoration, even page layout. In Siege of Thebes Lydgate literally inserts himself into the pilgrimage from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Prologue 1–176), and the poem is laid out from its earliest copies in one luxurious column like deluxe copies of Chaucer’s Tales.17 Yet Siege of Thebes in its early manuscripts also includes plentiful marginal summaries and a complex decorative hierarchy much closer to 14  Joel Fredell, “Reading the Dream Miniature in the Confessio Amantis,” Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 22 (1995): 61–93; Richard K. Emmerson, “Reading Gower in a Manuscript Culture: Latin and English in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 143–186. 15  Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile of The Autograph Verse Manuscripts, ed. J. A. Burrow and A. I. Doyle, EETS SS 19 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); on another strong contender see Linne R.  Mooney, “A Holograph Copy of Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011): 263–296. 16  Doyle and Parkes, “Production,” 163–210. The other scribe has been identified as John Marchaunt; see Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, 38–65. Mooney also discusses the incomplete Confessio in “Thomas Hoccleve in Another ‘Confessio Amantis’ Manuscript,” Journal of the Early Book Society 22 (2019): 225–238. On the possibility that Hoccleve’s hand appears in a supervisory role in the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales see Simon Horobin, “Thomas Hoccleve: Chaucer’s First Editor?” Chaucer Review 50 (2015): 228–250. Lawrence Warner contests Mooney’s and Horobin’s identifications of all the above in Chaucer’s Scribes: London Textual Production, 1384–1432 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 115–133. 17  John Lydgate, The Siege of Thebes, ed. Robert R. Edwards (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2001).

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the Confessio page layout. One of the earliest deluxe copies was written by the Petworth scribe, who had earlier produced at least one deluxe copy of the Confessio.18 Along with this direct association, it is likely that Gower’s approach was known and appreciated in London book circles, as I will discuss at length below. Troy Book, a translation of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae, falls closer in content to the Confessio’s tales from the ancient world. Early manuscripts of this poem by Lydgate consistently rely on elaborate decorative hierarchies in a two-column page layout of around 44–48 lines per column that closely resemble early London Confessio manuscripts.19 In this respect, at least, Gower’s explicitly material and worldly publishing strategies must be reimagined as central to the traditions of laureate poetry taking root in Lancastrian poetry after Chaucer’s death.

2   The Inheritors The material forms of poems are not just technical evidence but portraits of their authors: words on the page represent them. This study, for the most part, will examine this argument only in Gower’s works. The court-­ connected poets surrounding Chaucer—John Gower, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate—leave profoundly different material records of their writings and, inevitably, different relationships with those records coming The Siege manuscript is London, British Library, MS Arundel 119, ca. 1425–1450. On this manuscript’s association with Alice Chaucer see Carol Meale, “Reading Women’s Culture in Fifteenth-Century England: The Case of Alice Chaucer,” in Mediaevalitas: Reading the Middle Ages, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Woodbridge, UK: Brewer, 1996), 92–93. The Confessio manuscript is Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 307, ca. 1410–1415; see further below, Chap. 7, on this manuscript and its associations with elite London book production. On the Petworth scribe, who also produced the Petworth Canterbury Tales among ten surviving manuscripts in total, see Daniel Mosser, “The Petworth Scribe,” A Digital Catalogue of the pre-1500 Manuscripts and Incunables of the Canterbury Tales, 2nd edition. https://www.mossercatalogue.net/articles.php?artID=CTPDPetScr. See the early Siege of Thebes manuscript, Cambridge, University Library MS R.4.20 for an example of the summaries; Cambridge, University Library, MS O.5.2, offers a deluxe Troy Book. Both manuscripts can be viewed on the Wren Digital Library: https://www.trin.cam. ac.uk/library/wren-digital-library/ 19  See, for instance, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 232, ca. 1420–1435, with double columns of forty-four lines per column and elaborate decoration that includes a portrait of Lydgate in its presentation miniature—see further below; some page images are available at Digital Bodleian: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ 18 

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before the public while their authors were alive. One body of evidence, however, offers a more focused basis for comparison: representations of the authors within their poems as personae in the text and as subjects in portrait miniatures. We know that major poems by these three authors appeared in public in deluxe manuscripts during periods when they were active as poets and seekers of patronage. In these poems authorial personae appear in their narratives: Gower as Amans as himself in the Confessio, Hoccleve as himself in Regiment of Princes, Lydgate as himself in Troy Book (and other poems). These personae insert not just their textual selves but also their living authors into contemporary history as fictions of witness. This insertion is literally visible from the author portraits included in manuscripts probably overseen by these poets. Gower’s major poems in two languages (Vox clamantis in Latin and Confessio Amantis in English) appeared in deluxe editions well before his death in 1408, produced by some of London’s greatest artisans in a golden period for luxurious books; Hoccleve and Lydgate had similar publishing success in their lifetimes.20 All of these poets can be said to follow Chaucer by experimenting with the relationship between author and persona created by their internal narrators. Critics have long explained these authorial personae as an imitation of Chaucer, though recent attention to these poets has offered more nuance.21 Hoccleve and Lydgate do famously acknowledge Chaucer’s

See further Chap. 7 below. Earlier criticism saw the Chaucer-Hoccleve relationship as contested but essential, as in D.  C. Greethem, “Self-Referential Artifacts”: Hoccleve’s Persona as a Literary Device,” Modern Philology 86 (1989): 241–251; and A.  C. Spearing, “Renaissance Chaucer and Father Chaucer,” English: The Journal of the English Association 34 (1985): 1–38. More recently see Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); John Bowers, “Thomas Hoccleve and the Politics of Tradition,” Chaucer Review 36 (2002): 352–369; Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Eleanor Johnson, Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 202–231. Lydgate’s debt to Chaucer was influentially laid out in Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in LateMedieval England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 22–56. More recently see Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power, 89–95. 20  21 

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influence on their poetry, as I will discuss briefly below.22 However, some of the differences in these experiments are striking, specifically in the willingness of the two later poets to place themselves within a datable historical context. Gower offers a more direct model for constructing the kinds of personae Hoccleve and Lydgate develop in their major poems, anchored by historical relationships with their patrons portrayed in dedication miniatures and dedication passages within the text. Unlike Chaucer, Gower is careful to establish critical distance and poetic authority for his persona in the process, a strategy Hoccleve and Lydgate also adopt. For Gower this strategy shifts from Vox to the Confessio. While the social criticisms in Vox stand outside the historical contingencies its narrator attacks, the identity of Amans in the Confessio, and the fiction of historical witness that persona embodies, must be tied closely to the living man and supporter of Henry IV no matter which dedications appear at the opening and closings of the poem. Before examining Gower’s role in these personae directly, then, the self-presentations of Hoccleve and Lydgate can briefly be untangled from Chaucer. This process could be difficult emotionally. We cherish the portraits of Chaucer in Ellesmere and early manuscripts of Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes. Yet we have no evidence that these portraits come from Chaucer himself, directly or indirectly. They appear in a London literary culture where Gower manuscripts have already set the standard for complex and allusive author portraits. A brief sorting of these influences will be useful before addressing the author portraits more substantially. In Regiment of Princes Hoccleve bases his modesty topos on a failure to learn from Chaucer, convincing in its way but not quite the stout assurance of literary influence one might expect:

22  A scribal hand filling in several blank lines and half-lines in the Hengwrt Canterbury Tales (Hand F) is likely to be Hoccleve’s, raising questions of his interactions with and influence on the earliest reconstructions of Chaucer’s great poem. This likelihood was first identified in A.I. Doyle and M.B.  Parkes, “Paleographical Introduction” in A Facsimile and Transcription of the Hengwrt Manuscript, with Variants from the Ellesmere Manuscript, ed. Paul G. Ruggiers (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979), xlvi. Derek Pearsall, “The Ellesmere Chaucer and Contemporary English Literary Manuscripts,” in Stevens and Woodward, Ellesmere Chaucer, 271, argued that this evidence could indicate Hoccleve had an important role in the production of Ellesmere. A fuller argument for this role can be found in Simon Horobin, “Thomas Hoccleve: Chaucer’s First Editor?” Chaucer Review 50 (2015): 228–250.

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My deere maistir, God his soule qwyte, And fadir, Chaucer, fayn wolde han me taght, But I was dul and lerned lyte or naght. (Regiment 2077–2079)23

We could take this statement seriously. Much can be said about how unlike Hoccleve’s poetic themes and self-presentation are from Chaucer’s even as Hoccleve claims Chaucer as a poetic father.24 Regiment provides remarkable detail about his living circumstances in Chester’s Inn by the Strand (in case readers would like to visit?), his employment history, the amount of his insufficient paycheck in the office of the Privy Seal, and his fears for an impoverished retirement.25 Even the underlying discussion in Regiment summarized in the complaint “Allas, wher is this worldes stablenesse?” (47) marks Hoccleve’s obsession with his economic status rather than the Boethian perspective so characteristic in Chaucer’s work. The Regiment itself presents a poem on governance to the poet’s prince, a public text that bears little resemblance to any poem by Chaucer but shares many resonances with Hoccleve’s “second father” Gower. Hoccleve declares his principal sources in common fürstenspiegel texts such as Aristotle’s letter to Alexander in the Secreta Secretorum and the De regimine principum of Egidius Romanus (Regiment 2038–2053). In Hoccleve’s sphere of influence these choices follow most closely John Trevisa, translator of Egidius and the pro-royal Dialogus inter militem et clericum among his many works.26 Nonetheless, the Regiment’s poetics of direct address owes much to Gower’s career as a laureate poet offering advice to his king. Hoccleve dedicates the Regiment to Henry, Prince of Wales, shortly before Henry ascends the throne which he had in many respects taken up after his father’s illness in 1408, an imposing topic but left unmentioned in Regiment beyond the choice of the Prince of Wales as dedicatee.27 Like 23  Citations are to Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R.  Blyth (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS: 1999), https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/ blyth-hoccleve-the-regiment-of-princes 24  For a recent discussion of Hoccleve’s complex relations with Chaucer manifested in the Regiment, see Sebastian J.  Langdell, Thomas Hoccleve: Religious Reform, Transnational Poetics, and the Invention of Chaucer (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018), 100–137. 25  Regiment, 801–840. 26  On these translations in Trevisa’s extensive career see David Fowler, The Life and Times of John Trevisa, Medieval Scholar (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 145–212. 27  On this period of Henry’s apprenticeship (in the company of a series of strong chancellors) during his father’s long incapacity due to illness from 1408 to 1413, see Chris GivenWilson, Henry IV (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), 464–525.

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Gower, Hoccleve embraces the political context for a community of readers closely aligned with the royal court, unlike Chaucer’s famous unwillingness to situate his poetry in his working world.28 Lydgate’s connection to Chaucer does not, apparently, include any contact with the living man but does encompass a fairly vast set of influences and several direct invocations. References to Chaucer include the trope of master poet among what one critic has called “vague fetishistic invocations of Chaucer’s name,” as in The Life of Our Lady: “my maister Chauser […] the noble Rethor, poete of Brytayne.”29 Lydgate’s poetry indicates a more massive debt in its parallels with Chaucer texts, as Derek Pearsall first pointed out at length.30 His Chaucerian dream-vision poems include The Complaint of the Black Knight (Book of the Duchess), The Flour of Courtesy (Parliament of Fowls), and The Temple of Glas (House of Fame). He offers a continuation to the Canterbury Tales in a companion piece to the Knight’s Tale, The Siege of Thebes. His Troy Book represents a massive expansion of the world of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. On the other hand, Lydgate writes in a living political context that begins in the period of Hoccleve’s Regiment. Lydgate’s dedication in Troy Book occurs at around the same time as Hoccleve’s (Henry IV’s fourteenth regnal year, 1412–1413).31 Yet Lydgate’s historical specificity is much more direct about this moment of impending transition from Henry IV to his son Henry V: both are entreated in the dedicatory passage as if the moment of the poem’s completion and publication coexist in a capacious historical present, while at the same time emphasizing the unsurprising fact that the charge to produce this massive epic known up to now only “in Latyn and in Frensche” (Troy Book Pro.115) comes from the ascendant prince rather than his ailing father: 28  Hoccleve later claims a third source, the Chessbook of Jacobus de Sessolis, a Dominican monk’s moralization of the game that functions much like estates complaint; Hoccleve does not, however, deploy the chess metaphor beyond a brief assertion in his prologue that he knows how a “kynges draght” should be played (Regiment 2109–2128). 29  David Carlson, “The Chronology of Lydgate’s Chaucer References,” Chaucer Review 38 (2004): 248. See also, for example, the extended praise in Troy Book 2.4677–4719, and Carlson, “Chronology,” passim. 30  Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-bibliography (Victoria: University of Victoria Press, 1997); see also Pearsall’s “Lydgate as Innovator,” Modern Language Quarterly 53 (1992): 7–8; and Carlson, passim. 31  Citations are to John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Troy Book, 1412–1420, ed. Henry Berger, EETS ES 97, 103, 106, 126 (3 vols. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1906–1910, rept. 1935).

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[It was] the worthy prynce of Walys […] Whyche me comaunded the drery pitus fate Of hem of Troye in Englysche to translate […] The whyche emprise anoon I gynne schal In his worschip for a memorial. (Troy Book Pro.102–106, 118–120)32

Lydgate completed Troy Book in 1420: seven years after the date specified in the dedication, five years after Henry V’s epochal victory at Agincourt, and near the moment when the Treaty of Troyes declared Henry heir and regent of France. The fiction of witness in the narrator’s present-tense “anoon I gynne schal” may be another bit of delicacy around the death of the old king and ascension of a new king during the writing of Troy Book, emphasizing continuity rather than destabilizing rupture. Certainly Lydgate’s fiction of witness locates the poet-narrator perennially in 1413, the historical moment that emphasizes Lancastrian legitimacy and orderly succession rather than military conquest. In sum, Hoccleve and Lydgate not only operate in a different political climate than Chaucer faced before his death in 1400; they followed Gower by engaging their poetic personae directly with that climate and its center of power. Also unlike Chaucer, these three poets provided visual correlatives for their personae through author portraits in manuscript miniatures. The portraits not only injected a historically specific identity into their books, but for their readers the miniatures linked their physical and historical selves with their poetry in another fiction of witness to a particular moment in time. Hoccleve and Lydgate probably oversaw directly miniatures that document presentations to royal figures, signaling the emergence of the poem into its public life. The moments between author and royal patron celebrated in these images may or may not have occurred in the flesh; in either case the presentation is (in smaller or larger ways) a fiction witnessing an occasion and a power center, standing in for a historical event as dedication passages are created by the poets to stand in for a dialogue that may or may not occur from the patron reading the passage or from a story that narrates the patron commissioning the work.33 32  Troy Book, Pro.69–148. Latin and French predecessors for Troy Book include Guido delle Colonne’s Latin prose Historia destructionis Troiae (1287), cited by Lydgate; and Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s massive French poem Roman de Troie (c. 1160); not mentioned by Lydgate. 33  For a recent examination of producer responses to Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes see Sonja Drimmer, “The Manuscript as an Ambigraphic Medium: Hoccleve’s Scribes, Illuminators, and Their Problems.” Exemplaria 29 (2017): 175–194.

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For the Regiment of Princes Hoccleve’s presentation portrait in Arundel 38 may have been overseen by Hoccleve personally (as is likely for the manuscript itself) before his death in 1426 and probably close to its completion in 141334 (Fig. 2.1). Among its distinctive features is the p ­ ositioning of the twin fictions of dedication and presentation miniature: not as a frontispiece, but at the point some 2000 lines into the Regiment when the poet speaks to prince Henry.35 This unusual strategy insists on weaving together the poet’s life in the world and the emergence of the poem into public view with the poet-narrator’s voice inside the poetic text. Hoccleve clearly wants an interplay between these visual and verbal personae, these two fictions that bear witness to a historical moment of interaction with Prince Henry. The presentation miniature removes the two figures from history into an abstract landscape consisting of a rather plain lawn receding to a flat diapered background: a barely pastoral landscape away from court and its attendants contending for power and competing with Hoccleve, away from any political reference to the impending transition as Henry prepares to take his dying father’s throne. The mirror for princes contained in the book, whose vivid red cover occupies the center of the miniature, is (in this depopulated landscape) a more resonant marker of the historical moment than the portraits of the two men. As in the case of the famous portrait of Chaucer found in two other Regiment manuscripts, the relationship created in the miniature between the figure of reverence and Hoccleve’s poem is absolute; even a drollery used to mark the insertion of a missing passage in Arundel 38 plays on the same dramatic relationship between an isolated figure and the text (Fig. 2.2). Thus Hoccleve positions his dedication passage to Prince Henry and his encomium to Chaucer some distance within his poem (36 folia or 72 pages), rather than at the inaugural moment of the presentation of his 34  A strong case for Hoccleve’s supervision of the presentation miniature for the Regiment in Royal 17 D.vi, fol. 40r (also limited to Lydgate and Henry in front of a diapered background) follows from the argument that this manuscript is in Hoccleve’s hand; see Linne R. Mooney, “A Holograph Copy of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011): 263–296. 35  Regiment, 2017–2079, a dedicatory passage that ends with Hoccleve’s invocation to Chaucer that produces the famous Chaucer portrait in London, British Library, MS Harley 4866 fol. 88r and MS Royal 17 D.vi, fol. 93v; also see the parallel presentation miniature in Royal 17 D. vi, fol. 40r. On the dating for the Arundel 38 presentation miniature and the manuscript itself see Kathleen L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390–1490 (2 vols. London: H. Miller, 1996), 2.261. Discussion of this miniature by literary critics is often overshadowed by the portrait of Chaucer found in other manuscripts; see M.  C. Seymour, “Manuscript Portraits of Chaucer and Hoccleve,” Burlington Magazine 124 (1982): 618–623.

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Fig. 2.1  London, British Library, MS Arundel 38, fol. 37r. © The British Library Board

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Fig. 2.2  Left: London, British Library, MS Harley 4886, fol. 88r detail. © The British Library Board. Right: Arundel 38 fol. 65r detail. © The British Library Board

poem to the reader; the accompanying portrait miniatures are literally and conceptually embedded within his poem rather than in history.36 Using the dedication miniature as a frontispiece would have defined the book it framed as an object representing its patron and its moment of political transition, much as the King Nebuchadnezzar frontispiece in the Fairfax and Stafford Confessios invoke a darker change in royal status. Hoccleve instead chose to embed his fiction of witness not just at the narrative moment of dedication but also within a cushion of universalizing narrative that invokes mirrors for princes. Manuscripts of the Confessio dedicated to Richard similarly position the King Nebuchadnezzar miniature well inside the manuscript at the passage that describes Nebuchadnezzar’s dream and positions the provocative image of imperial collapse within a cushion of general estates complaint.37

Drimmer, “Manuscript as an Ambigraphic Medium,” 175–194. Hoccleve may have seen deluxe Confessio manuscripts with Ricardian dedications produced in Lancastrian London since several of these manuscripts were produced by Guildhall scribes with whom he worked: Hoccleve wrote a bit more than two folia for one Confessio manuscript (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2, fols. 82ra-84ra) which also included the hands of Guildhall scribes B (identified as Adam Pynkhurst) and D (identified as John Marchaunt). It is grouped textually with the second recension, but since it lacks its first forty folia we cannot know whether it had a Nebuchadnezzar miniature nor what position it might have taken. On the Ricardian Confessios produced by Guildhall scribes with whom Hoccleve interacted, see further Chap. 7 below. Thus Hoccleve might also have understood that the references to Richard in the dedications (and by implication in the Nebuchadnezzar miniature) could be de casibus exempla. 36  37 

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Lydgate’s approach stands in sharp contrast to Hoccleve’s in several respects. The presentation miniature for The Lives of St. Edmund and Fremund in Harley 2278 may be the best known of his author portraits, most likely to have been supervised by Lydgate himself in Bury St. Edmunds during Lydgate’s lifetime, and likely to have been overseen by him.38 Unlike Hoccleve’s dedication strategy in Regiment, Lydgate’s presentation miniature is at the center of a series of frontispieces embedded within a fairly elaborate front matter of dedicatory passages rather than the text of The Life of St. Edmund itself (Fig.  2.3). Also unlike Hoccleve’s dedication strategy in Regiment, the Edmund presentation miniature carefully invokes a specific material and historical context by representing the king enthroned and surrounded by courtiers, and Lydgate himself flanked by his fellow monks of Bury. Lydgate hands Edmund to Henry as another book sits on the lectern facing away from the king, presumably a lectionary with the readings for St. Edmund’s day (November 20): the portrait miniatures of Henry and Lydgate respectively praying at Edmund’s shrine bookend the presentation miniature in the front material (Fig.  2.4). In these portrait miniatures again companion figures provide context at Bury’s most important shrine, presumably on the specific day and year chosen for the presentation. At the same time these miniatures suggest a striking equivalency between Henry and Lydgate as devotees of St. Edmund, and an assertion of authorial position equaled only by John Gower’s portrait miniatures. Similarly, the containment of this trio of portrait miniatures within the front matter of Harley 2278 separates Lydgate’s relationship with his royal patron (and any divine grace accruing there) from his relationship to his hagiography (and any divine inspiration) that follows. The presentation miniature begins in the second section below a passage that addresses “alle men present or in absence/Which to seynt Edmund haue deuocion” and ends overleaf with two Latin prayers to the

38  London, British Library, MS Cotton Augustus A.iv, fol. 1r; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 232, fol. 1r and MS Rawlinson C.446, fol. 1r. On the dedication miniatures and dating see most recently Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 2.262. For the argument that both Lydgate and Hoccleve are positioned further from centers of courtly power and patronage than Chaucer and Gower, see Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 89–95. On Hoccleve’s Regiment also see Elisabeth Kempf, Performing Manuscript Culture: Poetry, Materiality and Authorship in Thomas Hoccleve (Berlin and Boston: DeGruyter, 2017), 151–174.

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Fig. 2.3  London, British Library, MS Harley 2278, fol. 6r. © The British Library Board

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Fig. 2.4  Harley 2278, fol. 4v. Henry VI praying before Edmund’s shrine. © The British Library Board

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saint.39 After a blank recto, on the following verso the presentation miniature appears above the opening lines of the dedication to Henry VI by announcing that the following work will be a “noble story to putte in remembrance/ Of seynt Edmund martir maide a king.” The present-day king does not appear in this invocation until the final lines; the accompanying text reinforces this separation. Above the miniature of Henry praying at Edmund’s shrine no mention of the current king appears at all. Instead, Lydgate’s verse appeals to the general public, using Henry to stand in for the laity at large to offer a prayer of special devotion to the saint: To alle men present or in absence Which to seynt Edmund haue deuocion […] Seyn this Anteph[o]ne and this Orison Two hundred daies ys grandid off pardoun. (4v ll. 1–5)40

The prayer itself appears on the following recto, separated by its Latin and its illuminated initials from the vernacular appeal attached to the image of Henry. Its opening words, “Aue rex gentis anglorum […] o Edmunde” (“Hail, King of the English people […] o Edmund”), surely sheds some reflected sanctity on Henry but does not recognize the current king directly. Nor does the invocation suggest a special bond beyond the devotion apparent in the preceding miniature. By contrast, in the parallel portrait for the poet at the shrine Lydgate presents himself in the inaugural act of prayer and inspiration for the Life of St. Edmund: And thouh I was bareyn of eloquence Hauyng no practik fresshley to endite I took upon me vnder obedience Aftir his biddyng me lowly forto quite But yit a forn or I gan to write Vpon my knees riht thus I gan to seie To the holi martyr and meekly forto preie. (9r ll. 1–7) 39  In the first front section a short poem celebrating the Banner of St. Edmund is illustrated by full-page miniatures alternating with full pages of this poem’s text, including a miniature of the Temptation of Adam (fol. 1v) with the banner of St. Edmund, the three crowns of Bury St. Edmunds (fol. 3v). 40  Quotations from the Life of St. Edmund are my transcriptions from Harley 2278.

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The miniature appears in the text column between this passage and the prayer itself (Fig. 2.5). In that vernacular prayer Lydgate asks Edmund to let his “hevenly dewh of grace” fall into “my penne enclosed with rudnesse” (fol. 9r, ll. 10–11). Edmund’s role as divine muse for Lydgate’s hagiography closely ties the poet to Edmund and asserts an immediate special relationship that looms larger than Henry’s distant genealogical claims to the saint. In these closing lines Lydgate himself becomes the center of attention through the story of his inspired transformation in “my translacioun” (fol. 9r, l. 14) that effectively leaves his royal patron behind. The miniature illustrating this passage is followed on the next recto by an image of Edmund’s parents Alkmund and Siware along with the final stanza of the introduction invoking Edmund’s spirit to “[d]irect my penne of that I write shal” (Fig. 2.6). The divinely inspired creation of Edmund himself, the translation of Edmund’s spirit into the corporeal world through his parents, is set in direct parallel with Lydgate’s translation of Edmund’s life into the language of England. These two portraits in the introduction to the Life of St. Edmund balance Lydgate’s authorial relationships between royal patronage and divine inspiration.41 At the same time they mark these representations of the author’s relationship to his poem as separate fictions of witness: the historical moment of publication witnessed by Henry and his court distinct from the inspiration and act of creation witnessed by the beginning narrative embedded in its physical column of text. Hoccleve in the Regiment also offers doubled portraits of a voiced authorial persona within the text and a visual authorial persona in a presentation miniature, though both are positioned within the narrative in manuscript productions he probably influenced, if not directed. Lydgate, however, positions both his personae within a paratext. This opening section offers not simply a frontispiece but a substantial sequence of texts and images that negotiate a separate sphere of power for the poet as a laureate figure elevated in spiritual terms by divine inspiration. The fact that Lydgate is writing about the patron saint of his abbey, and asserting an ownership accruing to his residence as well as his vocation, may also play a part. Still, he establishes an independent 41  For the argument that Lydgate in these portraits “collapses” secular and religious iconographies of submission, see Sebastian Sobecki, “Lydgate’s Kneeling Retraction: The Testament as a Literary Palinode,” Chaucer Review 49 (2015): 265–293. Also see the extended discussion of Lydgate’s presentation portraits in terms of the response of the miniature artists, in Sonja Drimmer, The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature 1403–1476 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 116–133.

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Fig. 2.5  Harley 2278, fol. 9r. Lydgate prays before Edmund’s shrine. © The British Library Board

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Fig. 2.6  Harley 2278, fol. 10r. King Alkmund and Queen Siware. © The British Library Board

position that is nothing like Chaucer’s playful and veiled relationships to patronal power whether it be John of Gaunt, Anne of Bohemia, or the newly ascendant Henry IV. This strategy also differs fundamentally from Gower’s persona-making in its explicit devotional address. A fairer comparison to Gower may be in

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Lydgate’s more secular and massive frame-tale poems that parallel the Confessio or the Canterbury Tales, where Lydgate himself can be playful about his fiction of witness. An early Siege of Thebes manuscript from Lydgate’s lifetime begins with a historiated initial that portrays Lydgate the pilgrim in his monastic robes on a white horse, invoking the Canterbury Tales generally and possibly the Ellesmere portraits specifically42 (Fig. 2.7).

Fig. 2.7  London, British Library, MS Arundel 119, fol. 1 detail. Lydgate the pilgrim. © The British Library Board London, British Library, MS Arundel 119, fol. 1r, ca. 1430.

42 

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This portrait claiming Chaucer’s spiritual patronage neatly sidesteps any question of a political patron in the regency of Henry VI who was crowned at age seven in 1429 and approximately eight years old at the time Arundel 119 was produced.43 The public face of England’s power was further compromised by the competing roles of John, Duke of Bedford, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and Cardinal Henry Beaufort on the regency council. The three earliest Troy Book manuscripts do contain presentation miniatures with the previous king, but here the face of England’s power presented two sets of delicate questions, resolved in a fiction of witness that echoes the Confessio’s dedications in sunnier ways. Lydgate completed Troy Book in 1420, after a monumental process of translation about which he does not hesitate to complain, as we shall see. Yet he dates his dedication to 1412. This fiction, which presents Henry V as his younger princely self, appears to finesse the transition from a difficulty regency during Henry IV’s long illness up to his son’s full assumption of power in 1413. The miniatures that accompany that dedication, however, were produced at some point after 1420, during the crisis in France that led to Henry’s death there in 1422 and the difficult regency for the infant Henry VI that followed. The original dedication strategy, then, addresses the transition of power by insisting on a fiction of witness that locates itself before Henry becomes king. Lydgate’s fiction of witness is developed most fully in Troy Book’s introduction, where the balance between divine muse and earthly patron weighs more in the latter’s favor than in the dedication to the Life of St. Edmund. For his translation of Guido’s story of the Trojan War Lydgate invokes Mars, “that art of knyghthod lord/And hast of manhod the magnificence” (Pro. 36–37). Lydgate goes on to ask for help from a laundry list of supplementary muses and muse-like figures (Othea, Clio, Calliope, and Orpheus) but soon moves to a somewhat vague origin story and dedication to Prince Henry, son of Henry IV: For to obeie withoute variaunce My lordes byddyng fully and plesaunce, Whiche hath desire, sothly for to seyn, Of verray knyȝthod to remembre ageyn 43  For an overview of Henry’s early life see R. A. Griffiths, “Henry VI,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015), https://archive. p h / 2 0 1 8 0 8 1 0 1 7 4 9 0 7 / h t t p : / / w w w. o x f o r d d n b . c o m / v i e w / 1 0 . 1 0 9 3 / ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-12953

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The worthynes, ȝif I schal nat lye, And the prowesse of olde chiualrie, By-cause he hath Ioye and gret deynte To rede in bokys of antiquite. (Pro.73–80)

A long encomium on Prince Henry as an earthly manifestation of martial virtues not only specifies the historical moment when Henry was still a prince, but Henry IV’s fourteenth regnal year in 1412: And of the tyme to make mencioun Whan I began of this translacioun, It was the yere, sothely for to seyne, Fourtene complete of his fadris regne. (Pro. 121–124)

Like Hoccleve, Lydgate insists on locating his dedication shortly before Henry V ascended to the throne. In one sense this choice is surprising, since this massive poem about war follows not only Henry V’s victory at Agincourt in 1415, but also  the triumphal Treaty of Troyes in 1420. The envoi at the end of Troy Book does invoke this new status confirmed by the treaty but claims the “crowne of worþi rewmys tweyne” as Henry’s due from the Lancastrian line: Most worþi prince, of knyȝthod sours & welle, Whos hiȝe renoun þoruȝ þe world doþ shine, And alle oþer in manhood dost excelle, Of merit egal to þe worþi nyne, And born also by discent of lyne As riȝtful eyr by title to atteyne, To bere a crowne of worþi rewmys tweyne. (Envoi 1–7)

To close his epic poem, then, Lydgate employs Henry’s current martial triumphs as king to support a prophetic fiction of witness located during Henry’s princedom. Rather than position his fiction of witness inside the poem like Hoccleve, Lydgate bookends the main narrative with dedication passages that create an exemplary narrative about Henry’s succession from prophecy to triumph. These passages do not convey the kinds of stern criticisms found in and around Gower’s dedication passages that bookend the Confessio, but Lydgate’s dedications rely on similar fictions of witness to navigate the delicate politics of patronal power in transition.

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Fig. 2.8  Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 232, fol. 1r. Troy Book. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

The dedication miniatures for Troy Book continue this strategy by positioning the moment of presentation as a frontispiece for the poem (Fig. 2.8).44 Among the virtues of this positioning is that Henry appears above the first words of the poem “O Mighty Mars,” associating the god 44  All images from Bodleian Library manuscripts are courtesy of Digital Bodleian under Creative Commons Licence: CC-BY-NC 4.0.

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of war with its English avatar—as captured in the book Henry holds in his right hand. Among the confusions is Henry’s apparent status as an enthroned and crowned king rather than a princely figure as in the Hoccleve presentation miniatures.45 This confusion may simply be attributed to the time of decoration, in all cases after 1420 and possibly after Henry’s death in 1422.46 Reinforcing that point is Henry’s act of grasping the open book text with his gloved hand, a marker of completion at least that violates Lydgate’s original fiction of witness but asserts the book’s transfer into the king’s possession before his death—a possible but unlikely scenario for an actual presentation copy given that Henry sailed to his death in France in June 1421. All these miniatures from early Hoccleve and Lydgate manuscripts document the poets’ relationships to the production of a physical book offered to the public as embodied by a royal figure and thus make these self-­ representations performative: these fictions of engagement with the king position their poetry within the public space defined by the Lancastrian patronage system. At the same time the fictions address directly the transitions of Lancastrian power through their dedications, presentation miniatures, and placement of these performative moments within their poems. John Gower’s fictions of witness traffic in, and may originate, most of these strategies for navigating shifts of power. His poetry, however, explores a much more disruptive transition from Richard to Henry, from Plantagenet to Lancastrian. As such, Gower’s fictions of witness would have much to offer for later poets contemplating the delicacies in Henry IV’s long illness and the transfer of power to his son in the years before that son ascended to the throne as Henry V, or the complexities of Henry VI’s position during the regency from 1422 to 1437. One of the many unknowable, but still unasked, questions raised by Gower’s precedence in this whole matter is whether Hoccleve and Lydgate were aware of the two 45  Henry’s royal status can be confusing in the miniatures, particularly in Rawlinson C 446, where Henry appears as a crowned king with a long white beard. Also see the discussion (with illustrations of all three early Troy Book miniatures) in Drimmer, Art of Allusion, 116–120. 46  Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 2.261, dates this miniature ca. 1420–1435 and dates the parallel presentation portrait in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C.446 fol. 1 ca. 1420–1425. On these manuscripts see further A.  S. G.  Edwards, “Lydgate Manuscripts: Some Directions for Future Research,” in Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England: The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study, ed. Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Brewer, 1981), 15–26.

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versions of the Confessio with their dueling dedications to Richard and Henry. Both versions were circulating in deluxe editions among an elite readership by the first decade of the fifteenth century, and the version dedicated to Richard was being produced by scribes and decorators with close connections to the early manuscripts of Hoccleve and Lydgate—and in Hoccleve’s case direct collaboration. Gower’s model for negotiating patronage and fictions of witness becomes all the more essential to a literary history of Lancastrian England. Such an investigation must be grounded in a fuller history of the manuscripts produced and circulating around them all.

3   Father Gower Gower’s famous meeting on the Thames with King Richard II (Confessio Pro. *35-*53) represents a historical moment whose existence in the material world might also be questioned and whose details offer an explicit dedication for his: […] book for King Richardes sake To whom bilongeth my ligeance With al myn hertes obeissance In al that ever a liege man Unto his king may doon or can. (Pro.*24-*28)

This narrative offers an origin story for the Confessio and its Ricardian dedication, suppressed entirely in the poem’s Henrician Prologue. Still, this origin story is not a patronage moment crowned by a physical copy of the poem being put into the hands of its dedicatee. Nor do any manuscripts of the Confessio offer a presentation miniature (for either Richard or Henry) so carefully included in Hoccleve’s Regiment or Lydgate’s Troy Book and Life of Saint Edmund. As this study will argue, there may be very good reasons why no public presentation of the Confessio can be documented before Richard’s overthrow and death in 1399. Confessio manuscripts dedicated to Henry IV dating from Henry’s reign also show no trace of this visual correlative to patronal dedication. Portrait miniatures of Gower do appear in manuscripts produced during his lifetime, but they present different and complex fictions of engagement which position Gower as a witness outside a specific historical moment or political affinity. Gower’s portraits are a crucial topic in several respects. No poet of his era or the previous two centuries had overseen either a portrait miniature

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or any other illustrations to his or her own text.47 As Derek Pearsall has argued, Gower presumably authorized the Confessio miniatures that include a portrait of Gower in the role of Amans, the earliest of which date from Gower’s lifetime.48 The nuanced relationships between Amans the narrator of his dream vision and Gower the poet (to say nothing of the resonant figure of Genius as Confessor serving the court of Venus) argue for a strikingly literary conception for what is already a highly original use of an author portrait. Lydgate’s remarkable series of author and patron portraits for The Life of St. Edmund elevate the author within a process of spiritual and literal translation, but these portraits still seem far less bold and more conventional by comparison. Vox author portraits boasting a high order of painting and complex (even writerly) iconography also occur in manuscripts from Gower’s lifetime.49 In them Gower is an archer

47  Joyce Coleman, “Illuminations in Gower’s Manuscripts,” in The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower, ed. Ana Saez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 117. 48  Derek Pearsall, “The Manuscripts and Illustrations of Gower’s Works,” in A Companion to Gower, ed. Sian Echard (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2005), 86. 49  Five early (ca. 1400, with revisions and additions after 1400) MSS of Vox survive; three incorporate the illustration of Gower the archer: Glasgow, University Library, Hunterian MS 59, fol. 6v; London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A.IV, fol. 9v; Oxford, All Souls College, MS 98; San Marino, Huntington Library, MS Huntington 150, fol. 13v. A later version of Gower the archer survives in simplified penwork drawings in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 719, fol. 21r. On these miniatures see Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 2.65–66. Scott dates Huntington 150 in the decade before 1400, though not on art historical grounds; she notes that unlike the other three early Vox manuscripts with the archer portrait, Huntington 150 does not include Cronica tripertita or other laureate poems attached at the end. However, HM 150 does include a cluster of poems regularly attached to Vox and Confessio manuscripts produced after 1400, one of which includes the “dum vixit” (while [Gower] lived) rubric that dates the rubric, at least, after Gower’s death in 1408. See further Stephanie Batkie, “Gower’s Latin Manuscripts,” in The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower, ed. Ana Saez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager (New York: Routledge, 2017), 102–109. Also see Joyce Coleman, “Global Gower: The Archer Aiming at the World,” Accessus 5.2. (2019), available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/accessus/vol5/iss2/2; and Coleman, “Illuminations,” 118–121. As Coleman, “Illuminations,” 118, points out, the Hunter and Cotton miniatures are likely to be by the same artist; the Huntington archer is more elaborate, but fundamentally the same in iconography and layout as the Hunter and Cotton miniatures. A scribe identified by Malcolm Parkes as “Scribe 10” enters two short Latin poems (Presul ouile regis and Vnanimes esse) on Cotton Tiberius fol. 176v; Parkes 94. As I noted above, Sobecki, “‘Ecce patet’,” 954–957, argues that this hand is Gower’s autograph

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piercing with his satiric barbs those who “live wickedly”—as confirmed by a legend in leonines: I send my darts at the world and simultaneously shoot arrows; But mind you, wherever there is a just man no one will receive arrows. I badly wound those living in transgression, however; Therefore, let the thoughtful man look out for himself.50

This author portrait is distinctive in its iconography, one of several arguments for Gower’s involvement in the design51 (Fig.  2.9). The floating world—containing the three elements of earth, sky, and water organized into an upside-down T-O map—has no direct antecedent.52 The archer and his arrows may refer to preachers and their sermons, as Maria Wickert suggested, but Gower the archer is literally standing on his own ground separate from the world.53 Neither the image nor the legend offers anything but the most anodyne association with religious thought: the righteous confronting the wicked. Gower the archer is dressed in upper-­class secular clothes without a single adornment that might invoke pastoral or hieratic roles. Nor, it is worth pointing out, does Gower the archer in any of these portraits wear any badge of livery such as Richard’s white hart or the Lancastrian SS collar that will show up on a contemporary author portrait in the Fairfax 3 Confessio. The relationship between archer and globe is abstracted on a blank background that, like the portrait itself, refuses to identify a larger context for the role of satirist. Given the prominence of Richard’s relationship with Cheshire archers in his final years of [A]d mundum mitto mea iacula dumque sagitto At vbi iustus erit nulla sagitta ferit Sed male viuentes hos vulnero transgredientes Conscius ergo sibi se speculetur ibi.” Translation from John Gower, The Minor Latin Works, ed. and trans. R. F. Yeager with In Praise of Peace, ed. Michael Livingston (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 2005), 1. 51  Joyce Coleman points out that the Hunter and Cotton miniatures are likely to be by the same artist; the Huntington archer is more elaborate, but fundamentally the same in iconography and layout as the Hunter and Cotton miniatures (118). A scribe identified by Malcolm Parkes as “Scribe 10” enters two short Latin poems (Presul ouile regis and Vnanimes esse) on Cotton Tiberius fol. 176v; Parkes, 94. 52  Coleman, 119–120, notes globes with the three elements in manuscripts of the Bible historiale, but the inverted T-O map design may refer directly to England, and possibly its three estates, particularly in the Huntington miniature. 53  Maria Wickert, Studien zu John Gower (Cologne, 1955), 36; translated in Studies in John Gower, trans. Robert J. Meindl (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2016). 50 

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Fig. 2.9  Glasgow, University Library, Hunterian MS 59 fol. 6v. Vox clamantis. (Courtesy of University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections)

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rule, it is all the more interesting that this author portrait insists on Gower’s identity as a secular figure independent of the specific historical content that pervades Vox through its allegory of recent political history. If, as seems likely, Gower had some role in the genesis of this author portrait he presents himself as an Olympian author/moralist so familiar from his reception up to today.54 In the Prologue to Vox, however, Gower defines himself quite differently from the detached moralist of the author portrait. Gower literally spells out his name to underscore his identity within the text as witness to the events recounted in the Visio Angliae (Visio 19–24); the following passage makes clear that this writer is not in a laureate-like position of detachment but in a state of emotional turmoil that overwhelms his modesty topos: What’s tearful in this work, the reader must Accept, was written wholly from my tears. Often its lines are wet with tears I spill While writing, oft pen too is wet with tears […] Yet all these present ills of our own time Could not be told by me—I could not cope. My heart is so befouled by evil’s slime That what I sing will flow from turgid vein. On crippled legs the route to Rome is long. (Visio Pro.35–49)55

Elsewhere in his poetry Gower offers a range of modesty topoi and even a few tears for his authorial persona, but nothing to compare to a poet whose metrical feet are crippled by their emotional response to the Great See recently on this point Robert Edwards, Invention and Authorship in Medieval England (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2017), 65–66. 55  Text and translation are from John Gower, Poems on Contemporary Event: the Visio Anglie (1381) and Cronica tripertita (1400), ed. David Carlson and trans. A.  G. Rigg (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 2011). 54 

“Omne quod est huius operis lacrimabile, lector Scriptum de lacrimis sentiat esse meis, Sepeque sunt lacrimis de me scribente profusis, Humida fit lacrimis sepeque penna meis […] Hec tamen ad presens mala, que sunt temporis huius, Non michi possibile dicere cuncta foret. Pectora sic mea sunt limo viciata malorum, Quod carmen vena pauperiore fluet. Poplice confracto restat grandis via Rome.”

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Revolt—not even while describing the deposition and eventual murder of the king under whose scepter Gower had lived for so many years.56 A more conventional trope of poetic deficiency, but not at all a traumatized state, drives the opening Latin lines of the Confessio: “Dull wit, slight schooling, torpor, labor less,/Make the themes I, least of poets, sing” (Pro. 1).57 The closest parallel may be at the end of Carmen super pestilencia viciorum: “With weeping eyes, Gower sings [present-day evils] to his reader. [Ex oculo flenti, Gower canit ista legenti]” (308).58 Here, though, the trope of the poet’s weeping eyes is followed by an instruction to readers to memorize his words; rather than invoking his inadequacies as a poet the narrator goes on to identify his emotion with the inspired vox populi: “Vox sonat in populo” (314). The moralist weeps, but only briefly, while his poetry takes wing in its attacks of the evils of the present day. Even closer to the elevated spirit of the archer portrait are moments in the laureate poetry such as Gower’s closing to “In Praise of Peace”: I, Gower, which am al thi liege man, This lettre unto thin excellence Y sende, As Y which evere unto my lives ende Wol praie for the stat of thi persone In worschipe of thi sceptre and of thi throne. (374–8)59

Gower goes on to extend this combination of advice and prayer to “othre princes Cristene alle” (380). The poet is loyal and properly deferential to his king but sends his poem as a document, a “lettre,” that represents in material terms Gower’s distance from the court and the king himself by supplying wisdom universally applicable to Christian princes. Some elements of modesty beyond declarations of loyalty occur in Gower’s 56  Gower offers his simplest version of the weeping poet trope in Cronica: “The kingdom torn apart and crushed by Richard’s rage/I’ve recently bewailed, but now my grief’s assuaged. [Regnum confractum, regis feritate subactum,/Nuper defeui, lacrimas sed abinde quieui.] (Cronica 3.3–4). Text and translation from Gower, Poems on Contemporary Events, 316–317. 57  “Torpor, ebes sensus, schola parua labor minimusque/Causant quo minimus ipse minora canam.” Translation from Sian Echard and Claire Fanger, The Latin Verses in the Confessio Amantis: An Annotated Translation (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1991), 2–3. 58  Text and translation of Gower’s Latin poems here and below from Gower, Minor Latin Works. Also see the similarly brief invocation of a weeping pen in Cronica II.233–234. 59  Text from Livingston in Gower, Minor Latin, 118.

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Lancastrian-era poetry, as in “Rex Celi Deus”: “I a poor man instead of a gift have offered these words for you to keep [Verba loco doni pauper habenda tuli]” (54). Nonetheless, nowhere in Gower’s later poetry can be found anything like the Visio’s verbal portrait of an author traumatized by current events and consequently producing crippled poetry. How, then, does the archer miniature as one fiction of witness external to the text fit its position near this abject self-description as a separate persona with a much different and historically specific fiction of witness? Critics from Maria Wickert to David Carlson have offered good reasons to believe that the Vox we have in the earliest surviving manuscripts was assembled in the late 1390s from a group of texts written separately.60 The Visio, probably written close to the events it describes in the early 1380s, not only served as an introduction to the following moralizing texts Gower retrieved from somewhere, but also functions as an opening frame that combines the Visio’s older allegory of historical events with the newly written Cronica tripertita as an updating addendum positioned at the end.61 The early manuscripts of Vox were revised in many respects by a distinct group of scribes who may have direct associations with Gower, including the replacement of Ricardian passages with anti-Ricardian passages.62 The archer miniature could have been added at any point in these revisions. The abstracted, unemotional, and ahistorical distance Gower the archer takes from the world whose evils his arrows will pierce best suits laureate Gower in his Lancastrian period: the Cronica Gower whose weeping is well behind him, rather than the Visio Gower still plunged into the hot mess of the revolt he did not want. Gower’s laureate poetry, from “In Praise of Peace” to the many short Latin poems such as “O Recolende,” shows clearly that the poet was not at all distanced from the events in Henry’s early years that prompted Gower’s lofty counsel. Yet the archer portrait creates a fiction of witness to the historical structure the early Vox manuscripts define: the events of the Visio that describe the ill-starred beginnings of Richard’s rule and the events of the Cronica that confirm those early signs of chaos and tyranny. Somehow the archer remains apart and, above it all, in a heavenly orbit apparently reserved for moral satire. 60  Wickert, 30–36; and Carlson’s “Introduction” in Gower, Poems on Contemporary Events, 6–8. Also see Fisher, 99–115; and Matthew Giancarlo, Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 120. 61  On the addition of Cronica in all but Huntington 150 among the early Vox manuscripts, see further in Chap. 5. 62  Parkes, “Patterns,” 82–94.

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This binary of Gower’s witness positions returns in the Confessio, though with important changes. Once again, a framing voice as estates satirist tears into current events at the poem’s beginning and end. However, in the Prologue Gower distances himself from the historical conditions he criticizes by delaying the entry of his Amans persona into the poem until Book 1 and by reserving until the poem’s final book the moment he names his persona as John Gower. In Vox, by contrast, that self-identification occurs promptly and early in its Prologue. Also in Vox, as I have noted above, Gower’s narrative persona insists on his emotional trauma from the wounds of the 1381 Revolt; in the Confessio the character Amans confesses that he is an emotional cripple reeling from unrequited love rather than the nasty and brutish contingencies of history. Consequently, it is no surprise that the Confessio’s author portrait in visual form offers yet another reversal from Vox: Amans/Gower, on his knees before the mythopoetic confessor who will take over virtually all the narrative duties, appears in the earliest Confessio manuscripts (Fig.  2.10). Among the curiosities of the Fairfax Confessor miniature shown here are the details that seem to represent Amans as an old man (principally a white goatee) and as a Lancastrian supporter (an SS collar around the neck of Amans).63 At the end of the poem the naming of Gower, once again on his knees, begins his dismissal as an “olde grisel” incapable of serving Venus (8.2407); the Fairfax miniature anticipates that moment. Age is not important to Gower’s persona in Vox, except in the assumption that a younger self narrates the events of 1381 in the Visio section. The Fairfax Confessio miniature, positioned in one of the two oldest surviving manuscripts of the poem, quite simply suit a Lancastrian laureate poet advanced in years. Such an assumption can be confusing, since the internal voice of Gower as a senex Amans may position this narrative persona not only in the court of Venus, but by implication in the Love Court of Richard II when Gower was twenty years younger.64 As is the case for Vox part 1, the Visio Anglie, 63  These details in the Fairfax portrait are shaky: the beard is obscured by damage to the miniature; the SS collar is a clumsy addition, whether prompted by Gower, a nervous owner, or some other intervening figure in the manuscript’s history. Two later Confessor miniatures, in Bodley 902, fol. 8r and Pembroke 307, fol. 9r, both depict Amans as an old man, but without the SS collar. On these details see further Coleman, 124–125. 64  For the argument that Gower’s Amans serves as a vehicle to criticize Richard’s court in the 1380s, specific to the Ricardian version of the Confessio, see Candace Barrington, “Personas and Performance in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Chaucer Review 48 (2014): 422–431.

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Fig. 2.10  Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 3, fol. 8r detail. Amans/Gower and Confessor. (© Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford)

the origins of the poem and this persona may lie in the historical moments they claim to witness, but the material construction of these portraits in manuscripts all come in a very different historical time, across the boundary formed by the rupture and regime change of 1399. For the Confessio this gap in time between fictional witness and manifestation in parchment

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finally becomes specific in both Ricardian and Henrician versions of Book 8. A tableau of famous young lovers takes place as a kind of spectacle in the court of Richard II (8.2440–2665): the lovers are dressed in the “new guise of Beaume” (8.2470), the Bohemian style made fashionable in that court by Richard’s first queen, Anne of Bohemia. The group is headed by a “lusty Youthe […] a Capitein,” who recalls Richard himself during his marriage to Anne (8.2462–2463). This group of nimble young people dance to “bombard and [...] clarion […] Cornemuse and Schallemele” (8. 2482–2483); they speak punningly: of knyghthod and of Armes, And what it is to ligge in armes With love, whanne it is achieved. (8.2497–2499)

By the time these lines appear before the reading public Richard is dead, probably murdered, and Anne long passed away. A timeless fantasy element returns as an assortment of classical (and a few Arthurian) lovers appear with brief accompanying narratives. Then a delegation of “Elde” lovers appear to petition Venus for Amans to remain in her court (8.2666–2744). Venus nonetheless exiles Amans, in the process identifying him as John Gower (8.2908), and sending him back out into history with (in one textual tradition) greetings to Geoffrey Chaucer, whose superior love poetry itself seems more attached to Richard’s court given that poet’s service to the court of Venus.65 Yet this old man finds himself in a court wherein he was a much younger man. Either this disjunction is a cruel twist of dream-vision logic, heightened by the Chaucer encomium when it occurs, or a vivid representation of the problem posed by dropping this fictional witness into a fantasy version of a moment from the distant past. As for the Chaucer encomium, it may be important that by the time this passage appeared Chaucer was dead while Gower was at the height of his laureate role. What seems in Confessio Book 8 to be a modesty topos for Gower in comparison to his fellow poet, and what seems there to be a humiliating exile from Richard’s court as well: both read

65  The Chaucer encomium occurs regularly in manuscripts with dedications to Richard; the encomium also appears in one early manuscript dedicated to Henry (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 294) that can be described as an outlier in several respects. See the full discussion of this manuscript in Chap. 7 below.

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quite differently after 1399, when the bodies of Richard and Chaucer have been interred and Gower has embraced his role as Lancastrian laureate. By looking at this gap between a particular time in Richard’s reign and the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Confessio, I do not mean to argue that Gower was producing the massive bulk of his great poem shortly before or after Henry IV took the throne. No doubt the 1380s signaled by Richard’s and Anne’s court, along with the troubles of the 1390s, may be evident in the archaeological strata of the Confessio’s composition. Given the enormous size of the poem, it remains eminently reasonable to assume Gower was working at his text for years. Key parts of the work at the beginning and end of the poem, however, seem remarkably attuned to the early Lancastrian period and argue for a poetic persona only fictionally positioned in the late 1380s and early 1390s as a “burel clerk” (Pro.52) or as a courtier invited onto Richard’s royal barge for a poetic commission during a chance encounter. Even the most fundamental passages that establish apparent historical moments read as if they were written in hindsight. It is also true that the very nature of the poetic project the Confessio documents differs profoundly, and famously so, in the contending Prologue passages Pro.24*-92* (dedicated to Richard) and Pro.24–92 (dedicated to Henry).66 The “bok for king Richardes sake” (Pro.24*) becomes a “bok for Engelondes sake” at a moment the poet dates to the sixteenth year of Richard’s reign, that is 1391–1392 (Pro.24–25). The narrator goes on to say that the world “stant al reversed,/As forto speke of tyme ago” (Pro.30–31). We might take the phrase as a general complaint that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. In more specific historical terms we could associate that reversal with Richard’s return to power in 1389 after the Merciless Parliament. However, the opening section of this passage in its Henrician form dramatically shifts the persona of the narrator and that persona’s relationship to power from the pleasantries of Richard’s commission and Gower’s commitment to write a poem which “may be wisdom unto the wise/And pley to hem that lust to pleye” (Pro.*84–*85). In the Henrician passage the narrator extols the need for remembering the “pris of hem that weren goode” standing in stark contrast to the “tirranie and cruelte” of tyrants (Pro.42, 49). The language of knightly pris might suit Henry of Lancaster at any point from the early 66  For an early discussion of this issue that continues to be influential see R. F. Yeager, John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 1990), 10–11.

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1390s onward, but the language of tyranny and cruelty attaches itself to Richard after his draconian turn in 1397, as contemporary chroniclers testify. Gower’s dedication to Henry in this passage has prompted much discussion of the poet’s political foresight in tacking toward the Lancastrian affinity, but the passage itself reads much more like a fictional conversion guided by hindsight to write a book to: stonde at his commandement, With whom myn herte is of accord, I sende unto myn oghne lord, Which of Lancastre is Henri named: The hyhe god him hath proclaimed Ful of knyhthode and alle grace. So woll I now this werk embrace Wit hol trust and with hol believe; God grante I mot it wel achieve. (Pro.84–92)

If we read this passage as a fiction of witness written at the outset of Henry’s kingship, an allegory of achieving “this werk” renders this literal fiction almost transparent: a poetic manual of moral conduct serves the greater project of a new kingship for England’s sake. The Arion passage at the end of the Prologue offers a similar, if more elusive, allegory of witness strikingly suited to a post-1399 moment. Arion’s harp not only brings together in peace the great animal predators with their erstwhile prey, but among humanity: Als wel the lord as the schepherde, He broghte hem alle in good acord; So that the comun with the lord, And lord with the comun also, He sette in love bothe tuo And putte awey malencolie. (Pro.1064–1069)

This new poetic persona moves far from the moral archer whose portrait miniature opens early versions of Vox. Gower opens the passage with the lament “wold god that now were on/An other such as Arion” (Pro.1053–1054). The poet-narrator notably does not claim that he has

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taken on that role for himself.67 Instead, in the following book the poet places his persona inside a separate dream vision as Amans, earthly conduit rather than demigod source of the poem’s music and meaning. Nor does Gower soften the sense of a contemporary world gone mad “wher that wisdom waxeth wod,/And reson torneth into rage” (Pro.1078–1079). Nonetheless, the Latin summary assures us that in this passage the poet “relates an exemplum about stimulating concord and unity among men.”68 In so doing, the poem reverses the Prologue’s dominant image embodied in the other frequent miniature used in the Confessio, the Statue of the Four Ages, which appears in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream (Fig. 2.11). This dream vision follows a long estates satire passage (Pro.93–584) with a biblically sanctioned model for the devolution of society leading to the apocalypse—an eschatology of inevitable doom for the world: For so seith Crist withoute faile, That nyh upon the worldes ende Pes and acord awey schol wende And alle charité schal cesse Among the men, and hate encresce; And whan these toknes ben befalle, Al sodeinly the ston schal falle, As Daniel it hath beknowe, Which al this world schal overthrowe (Pro.1032–1040)

Consistent with the Ovidian model for the Ages of Man, the narrator reports humanity’s downward slide from gold to the steel and clay inaugurated by the Roman empire that produced the current historical moment, “[f]ro thilke day yit unto this” (Pro.819). The cause, as Gower so famously proclaims at the opening and closing of his estates satire, is temporal and spiritual “divisioun” (Pro.851–855, 1029–30).69

67  Echard, “With Carmen’s Help,” 29–30, argues that Gower in the Arion passage emphasizes Gower’s (and poetry’s) inability to reproduce the paradisiacal stability inaugurated by Arion’s song. 68  “Hic narrat exemplum de concordia et vnitate inter homines prouocanda.” 69  The Latin marginalia at Pro.1031 reinforces the relationship between division and the apocalyptic allegory of the Statue of the Four Ages: “Qualiter mundus, qui in statu diuisionis quasi cotidianis presenti tempore vexatur flagellis, a lapide superueniente, id est a diuina potencia vsque ad resolucionem omnis carnis subito conterentur.” [How the world, which is almost daily in a state of division at the present time and is ravaged by punishments, will, by the stone coming down on it (i.e., by divine power), be suddenly crushed, destroying all flesh.]

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Fig. 2.11  Fairfax 3, fol. 2r detail. Dream of Nebuchadnezzar. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

In the face of this prophesied end the hopeful figure of Arion prompts any number of questions. As critics have pointed out, Gower’s version of this mythological figure probably comes from Ovid’s Fasti, a source Gower drew on regularly.70 Original to Gower, however, are Arion’s effects on human life generally and the political sphere specifically: 70  Ovid, Fasti, ed. and trans. James G. Fraser, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: 1989), II.83–90. For Gower’s use of the Fasti in the Confessio also see Andy Galloway, “Ovid in Chaucer and Gower,” in John F. Miller and Carole E. Newlands, A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 196–198; and Yeager, New Arion, 238–239.

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And every man upon this ground Which Arion that time herde, Als wel the lord as the schepherde, He broghte hem alle in good acord; So that the comun with the lord, And lord with the comun also, He sette in love bothe tuo And putte awey malencolie. That was a lusti melodie, Whan every man with other low. (Pro.1062–1071)

Arion does recall Gower’s archer in one critical respect: Arion is not a member of the ruling class or even the Judeo-Christian tradition, unlike King David—that other great harper in medieval allegory. Instead, Arion is a poet who can transform the political order from outside that order, sending dithyrambs of love and peace rather than sharp arrows of satire71: And if ther were such on now, Which cowthe harpe as he tho dede, He myhte availe in many a stede To make pes wher now is hate. (Pro.1072–1075)

Our narrator asserts that the potential for such harmony may be doubtful in the present time: wher that wisdom waxeth wod, And reson torneth into rage, So that mesure upon oultrage Hath set his world. (Pro.1078–1081)

The question remains just what that historical time of division, Gower’s “now” raised in Pro.1072 and repeated for emphasis three lines later, might be.72 71  See further on this point Matthew W. Irvin, The Poetic Voices of John Gower: Politics and Personae in the Confessio Amantis (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2014), 70–72; and Yeager, 23. 72  One provocative word choice for Arion hovers in the Latin marginalia to Pro.1053–1072: nuper. Arion is described as “a harper in recent times [nuper Citharista]” who could stimulate harmony among men. The association with recent times could reinforce Gower’s identification with Arion, though nuper could also be part of a collapsed sense of time for the fourth historical stage in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream as Gower explains it.

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The Arion passage survives in virtually identical form in all textual traditions, so the early manuscripts offer no help here. The Prologue specifies two dates, Richard’s sixteenth regnal year (1391–1392) and the papal Great Schism (1378–1418) as reference points, but neither of these are offered as a specific historical “now” for the poem in its completed form.73 Gower’s meeting on the Thames offers an undated start to the project and a marker that may also be a starting date during Richard’s sixteenth regnal year (1391–1392), but the Confessio simply gives no indication for a completion date. According to the Macaulay-Fisher model Gower had finished his version of the Confessio with the dedications to Richard, containing the Arial passage in textual form identical to Henrician witnesses, by 1392. However, the apocalyptic language that ends the Prologue, including the remedial vision of Arion, reinforces the political division and tyranny in the Henrician dedication passages discussed above, presumably from 1397 or later. Certainly, the tone of the Prologue after the opening dedication passages is unremittingly dark; the estates complaints begin with the loss of a golden age (Pro.93–117) devolved into a state of permanent war where “love is fro the world departed” (Pro.169). Undoubtedly Gower could have been feeling depressed about the state of the world at any point in his life, given his habits of mind throughout a poetic career running from the dotage of Edward III to the tumult of Richard’s reign to the revolts of Henry’s first years on the throne. Still, political conditions in England were much darker in the late 1390s than they were in the early 1390s. The historical moment often used to speculate on Gower’s alleged pivot away from Richard in 1392 is Richard’s conflict with the City of London.74 Our only substantial evidence for literary response to this episode is Richard Maidstone’s Concordia, a poem that celebrates not just Richard’s reconciliation with London but his movement forward from the Appellant crisis to a peaceful reign worthy of Arion’s song: All England sees how many ills, how many deaths, He’s suffered from a tender age, still unavenged. 73  The passage surrounding the mention of Richard’s regnal year in Pro. 25 is in conditional tense: the narrator says he “wolde go” (Pro.17) in a middle path to write his poem, and he “thenke make” (Pro.23) the book in that year. Latin marginalia at Pro. 130, Pro.360–377. 74  The most influential (and substantial) discussion of this alleged pivot is Lynne Staley, “Gower, Richard II, Henry of Derby, and the Business of Making Culture,” Speculum 75 (2000): 68–96.

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What service will he offer God? He’ll always be In peace and joy, and never let the good decline. (29–32)75

Maidstone, a Carmelite friar who apparently served as confessor to John of Gaunt and wrote tracts as a fervent anti-Lollard activist, represents a royalist orthodoxy that might easily be ascribed to the staunchly royalist and fervently anti-Lollard John Gower as well.76 In any case, the “state of England” dedication to Henry discussed above uses language of national catastrophe, not conflicts with a local urban ruling class. That language is far better suited to the period beginning in 1397; the Arion passage shines its ray of hope onto an even more apocalyptic representation of current conditions. Again, one way to explain Gower’s apocalyptic vision in a poem dedicated to Richard is to credit him with actual ability as a prophet in a period when Richard and his kingdom were both relatively stable.77 Another way to explain this vision is as a fiction of prophetic witness that uses backdating as part of its fiction after the prophecy itself is confirmed by events on the ground.78 Furthermore, Arion’s harmony enables a political reconciliation between lord and commons that Gower in his Lancastrian-era poetry asserts has returned to Henry’s kingdom. This passage, if we understand it to have been written by 1392, and preserved unchanged in the Henrician version of the Confessio, forms an important part of the case for Gower “Quot mala, quot mortes tenero sit passus ab evo,Quamque sit inultus, Anglia tota videt.Quid cupit hic servire deo, nisi semper et essePacificum, letum, nilque perire bonum?” Text and translation from Carlson and Rigg, Concordia. Carlson notes the use of “unavenged” (inultus) as evidence that the poem’s text as we have it dates from before 1397. For other positive contemporary views on this reconciliation see also Appendix 1 in Carlson and Rigg. Richard’s removal of his royal administration to York may well have been extortionate, as Caroline Barron argues in “The quarrel of Richard II with London, 1392–1397,” in The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack, ed. F. R. H. DuBoulay and Caroline M. Barron (London, 1971), 181. Ascribing that view to John Gower, however, requires evidence that so far, at least, is not at hand. 76  See Nigel Saul, “John Gower: Prophet or Turncoat?” in John Gower: Trilingual Poet, ed. Elisabeth Dutton, John Hines, and R. F. Yeager (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2010), 90–97, on Gower’s royalist tendencies. 77  For a recent example of the familiar trope that Gower’s conception of authorship includes the role of prophet see Robert R. Edwards, Invention and Authorship in Medieval England (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2017), 71. 78  Kimberly Fonzo, “Richard II’s Publicly Prophesied Deposition in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Modern Philology 114 (2016): 16, argues that “Gower’s narrative voice makes it, perhaps intentionally, unclear when he originally composed [the Confessio].” 75 

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being a legitimate prophet, anticipating both Richard’s tyranny beginning in 1397 and Henry’s deposition of Richard in 1399.79 Gower does celebrate Henry’s assumption of the throne at the end of Cronica tripertita as just this kind of return to political harmony that brings the Commons and their lord together in love under Christ: The people all rejoice to honour and revere The man that Christ wants crowned; they cry with heart sincere.80 (Cronica 3.314–315) The whole land praises God, the jubilee’s their song That Henry’s just and bold and merciful and strong.81 (Cronica 3.330–331) And so he reigned, a lion to the bad, a lamb to meek.82 (Cronica 3.340) Behold the gifts of God: the folk, with just one thought, Arose on every side to give the king support.83 (Cronica 3.418–419)

Cronica may undercut this vision of harmony by its pragmatic insistence on Henry’s triple claim to the crown, and it would be difficult to argue that England entered into a new Eden during the early years of his reign (Cronica 3.332–337). Still, Cronica ends with a vision of harmony whose elaborate animal allegory reduces at last to Henry the lion lying down with the righteous lambs of the people. Gower is careful to emphasize the restoration of political harmony between lord and people without suggesting that newly Lancastrian England is the New Jerusalem. A similar caution pervades Gower’s laureate poetry. Gower structures “Rex celi deus” [King of Heaven] as a prayer for Henry’s success rather than a declaration:

79  For the argument that the Arion passage continues the apocalyptic theme by a prophetic reference to an incomplete chiliasm see Elliot Kendall, “Saving History: Gower’s Apocalyptic and the New Arion,” in John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition, ed. Elisabeth Dutton, John Hines, and R. F. Yeager (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2010), 49–53. 80  “Sicque coronari, quem Cristus vult venerari,/Corditer exultat plebs omnis et inde resultat.” 81  “Omnis terra deum laudatque canit iubileum,/Henricum iustumque piumque ferumque robustum.” 82  “Sic regnat magnus, rebrobis leo, mitibus agnus.” 83  “Ecce dei munus! Populus, quai vir foret, vnus/Surgit ad omne latus, sit vt H. ita fortificatus.”

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O pious king, we praise Christ through you, and Him A revived land worships, who gave us to you. Blessed be that day when you sought the kingship for yourself, And blessed be God who gave you the rule! (21–24)84

Both Cronica and the laureate poems emphasize the return of Christ’s rule on earth through Henry, but the tone is carefully calibrated. One of Gower’s lyrics, “Unanimes esse” [To Be of One Mind], raises the same claims briefly: To be of one mind He who the ages brought into being Orders us expressly, because Love should be supreme; Law and rights are observed, peace rejoices, the people are happy, The kingdom is strong, where true Love rules. As winter destroys the flower, so division destroys love.85 (“Unanimes esse” 1–5)

This poem survives in a cluster of Gower’s Lancastrian poetry and may refer to the divisions in Henry’s early reign—a time of rebellion and instability—rather than those of Richard’s still-recent tyranny and deposition. The language of division healed by love, nonetheless, could be taken directly from the Confessio’s Prologue. Notably, the poem’s later section also returns to the Confessio’s theme of division destroying love and reminds the reader that the events “that happened yesterday teaches that such dangers are to be feared” (5–7).86 Richard’s final days shadow both “Unanimes Esse” and the Arion passage in the Confessio’s Prologue and shape such similar poetic responses that Arion does not seem a product of the distant past separated by the political earthquakes of the late 1390s. In the Confessio’s Henrician passages England’s problems are starkly enumerated, but Henry himself is never part of those problems, only the Among the complexities of “Rex celi deus” is the fact that almost two-thirds of its lines (thirty-four out of fifty-six) are taken from a pro-Richard passage in Vox Clamantis VI.xviii, replaced with pro-Henry passages and repurposed for Lancastrian praise. The four lines quoted here are (as far as we know) new to this poem, and not among the repurposed lines. 85  “Unanimes esse qui secula duxit ad esse Nos iubet expresse, quia debet amor superesse; Lex cum iure datur, pax gaudet, plebs gratulatur, Regnum firmatur, ubi verus amor dominatur. Sicut yemps florem, divisio quassat amorem” 86  “[…] divisio quassat amorem […] Quod precessit heri docet ista pericla timeri.” 84 

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solution. Gower’s narrator never goes so far as to declare Henry England’s savior, but in the Prologue Henry is the poet’s rock of salvation: The hyhe God him hath proclamed Ful of knyhthode and alle grace. So woll I now this werk embrace With hol trust and with hol believe. (Pro.88–91)

In the Henrician passage at the end of the Confessio Henry’s virtues are implied in a comparison that does not need to name names: For what kyng sett hym uppon pride And takth his lust on every side And wil nought go the righte weie, […] Bot what kyng that with humble chere Aftir the lawe of God eschuieth The vices, and the vertus suieth, His grace schal be suffisant To governe al the remenant. (8.3089–3100)

A successor to the throne full of knighthood and grace awaits his time in the fictional present of the Confessio poised between dynasties, not prophecy but well-founded expectation. Similarly, despite Gower’s readiness to offer advice to King Henry in his laureate poetry from “In Praise of Peace” to “O Recolende” no criticism of Henry’s virtues or grace creeps in. The people are drifting into darkness, as “De lucis scrutinio” makes amply clear: If I search our country, I have no hope of finding light for myself there; For the path of the people is corrupted by bitter darkness.87 (73–74)

A critical part of Henry’s job as king is to lead his people out of darkness, as “O Recolende” argues in typological terms that cast Richard and his remaining loyalists as a diabolical force:

87  “Si patriam quero, nec ibi michi lumina spero;/Nam via vulgaris tenebris viciatur amaris.”

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Set up for good things those whom you rescue from Pharaoh Remove from them what is harmful, for whom this land is in conflict.88 (2–3)

Gower is not using the language of prophecy in these poems: Henry has, after all, fulfilled the first stage of his destiny by taking the throne in the present summoned by these lyrics. Gower does, however, temper biblical typology with the language of love and harmony repeatedly to talk about bringing the political conditions of the realm to the next stage, a state of peace. Gower’s laureate voice, in other words, may allude to Richard as a fallen tyrant but turns away from the apocalypticism of Vox and Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. In the Confessio’s Prologue the narrator does explicate at some length Daniel’s prophecy as world history has fulfilled it so far. Yet this explication concludes with hope for human relations: Forthi good is, whil a man may, Echon to sette pes with other And loven as his oghne brother; So may he winne worldes welthe And afterward his soule helthe. (Pro.1048–1052)

This moment pivots away from Daniel and prophecy itself by turning to Arion, who is not a prophet. Arion is that wonderful thing, an artist who becomes an agent of change. Central to that agency is Arion’s position outside the machinations of the world just as Gower the Archer stands apart from the world he targets in Vox. Any claim the passage might have to the status of prophecy fails by the absence there of Henry Lancaster or some allegorical equivalent. Is Gower, then, prophesizing his own agency in Lancastrian England? Neither the Confessio nor the Cronica nor the laureate lyrics build on the apocalyptic dream of Nebuchadnezzar beyond associating the trauma of Richard’s final years with biblical models of tyranny. The ongoing crises of papal schism, Lollardy, and the Commons’ predilection to revolt are, by contrast, described as part of the persistent and general effects of division in human society. The claim that Gower is a kind of political prophet relies 88  “Ad bona dispone quos eripis a Pharaone./Noxia depone, quibus est humus hec in agone.” Also note the language of tyrants applied to remnant rebels: “[Henry h]as broken his enemies, and subjugated tyrannical necks.” [Hostes confregit, que tirannica colla subegit.]

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entirely on his apparent foreknowledge in the Confessio of Henry’s elevation to the throne. That foreknowledge undoubtedly would be much more impressive in 1392 than 1398. What little evidence there might be for this foreknowledge is tangled in the manuscript record of the Confessio, a series of material fictions of witness: all the surviving manuscripts invoke a time before Henry’s ascension to the throne, whether their dedications favor Richard or Henry; these same manuscripts come into being after Henry has taken the throne. The scant few marginalia which offer dates from the early 1390s, the colophons, the Derbeie Comiti envoi, are minor but critical features of these material fictions. The one possible exception among Confessio manuscripts, Fairfax, was reconstructed at the beginning and end in Lancastrian times as well; in that manuscript’s Confessor miniature Amans is likely to have been given his SS collar along with its reconfigured opening and closing passages. Gower’s fiction of witness was embodied in the often-confusing choices of the Confessio’s early producers. Those choices must be re-examined before we can return to the textual fiction of Amans, separating out the Arion-like identity of Gower fulfilled by Henry’s ascension from the old Venusian-like identity associated at the end of the Confessio with Richard and his love court.

CHAPTER 3

Revising the Three-Recension Model

Not much glamor has attached to moral Gower among literary critics, but the one realm where a detectable glow emanates is politics. Gower’s negotiation of the epochal shift from the literary circles surrounding Richard II to those around Henry IV retains its keen interest to this day, but was first woven into a compelling narrative at the founding moments of Gower studies in the work of George Campbell Macaulay. Macaulay is still revered for heroic work on the entire Gower corpus in three languages and for his painstaking thoroughness given the state of knowledge at the beginning of the twentieth century.1 A gathering consensus (whose genesis is credited to Peter Nicholson) argues that Macaulay’s elaborate three-stage creation story for the Confessio no longer seems credible; however, many scholars remain dependent on the shorthand this model has offered for 1  The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G.  H. Macaulay (4 vols. Oxford 1899–1902) include the French Works (vol. 1, 1899), the Confessio and short English Works (vols. 2 and 3, both 1901), and the Latin Works (vol. 4, 1902) clustered around the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. All citations to the text of the Confessio Amantis, as well as Macaulay’s introductory materials, are to this edition. For Macaulay’s dating of the recensions see Macaulay, 2.xx-xxviii; John Fisher, John Gower: Moral Poet and Friend of Chaucer (New York: New York University Press. 1964), 116, follows these assumptions. A very brief and parallel attack on two issues in the Confessio which follow here (the marginal dates and the reference to Henry as Earl of Derby) can be found in Terry Jones, R. F. Yeager, Terry Dolan, Alan Fletcher, and Juliette Dor, Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery (London: Methuen, 2003), 97–103.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Fredell, Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27964-5_3

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more than a century. The recent Descriptive Catalogue of the English Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis states the issue clearly for its own purposes: Macauley’s ‘Recensions’ are of necessity referred to in this Catalogue, but they are not used […] In sum, it is impossible to deduce from the MSS a chronological view of the processes of authorial revision or to divide them into ‘recensions’. Indeed, the Confessio cannot properly be said to have been ‘revised;’ what Gower did, to put it too bluntly, was to tinker with the opening and closing lines.2

No less an authority than the late Derek Pearsall, in collaboration with Linne Mooney, declares in this quote that the Macaulay model is moribund. Three important desiderata arise from this certainty: recognizing the faulty assumptions in many influential studies of Gower that use Macaulay to associate Gower’s poetry with specific dates in the reign of Richard II and specific political affiliations; coming to a new understanding of all the marginal machinery advanced by Macaulay and later John Fisher as evidence for the old model; and sketching a new model for Gower’s engagement with the two rulers he speaks to in his poems. The faulty assumptions of critics will arise here occasionally as needed, but not reviewed systematically: more important are new approaches after one last look at Macaulay.

1   Macaulay’s Model There can be no doubt that the three-recension narrative awakened critics to the sheer potential in Gower’s poetry to explore shifting valences for Ricardian and Lancastrian literary cultures. His large and diverse body of work reveals a commitment to public poetry and political commentary far more overt than any extant declarations by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Thomas Usk, or for that matter the Pearl-poet. Alone among the major Ricardian poets Gower produced substantial new work after the great rupture of 1399. It is thus tempting to tie Gower’s earlier work and its embedded political pronouncements to the fascinating twists and turns of Richard’s public personae in the 1390s. The long dominance of the 2  Derek Pearsall and Linne R.  Mooney, eds. A Descriptive Catalogue of the English Manuscripts of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2022), 3.

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three-recension model, however, obscures the fact that the evidence in the Confessio for this narrative comes down to a single line in a very long poem, a few glosses in later manuscripts that are not ideal witnesses, and a few bits of textual evidence external to the poem itself that are dubious at best. Scholars studying the Ricardian origins of Gower’s poem have gradually come to acknowledge or avoid the problems with the three-­recension model but still use the terms.3 Consequently, the evidence and assumptions that underpin the stories told by Macaulay (and in the mid-twentieth century by John Fisher) about the creation of the Confessio, and its enticingly doubled politics, need to be aired briefly once more. At the end of the Victorian era, a period of massive consolidation for medieval literature into accessible critical editions, Macaulay published 3  The three-recension model remains enshrined in the commentary the most recent and widely used edition: John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell Peck, trans, Andrew Galloway (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 2004–2013). Since Gower’s Confessio is so closely linked to Henry IV’s seizure of the throne, the poem has regularly been cited by historians of the period who accept the Macaulay model without question. Recently see Chris GivenWilson, Henry IV (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), 76, using the second recension as evidence for Gower’s embrace of Henry in 1392; also see Nigel Saul, “John Gower: Prophet or Turncoat?” in John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition, ed. E. Dutton, with H. Hines and R. F. Yeager (Woodbridge, UK: Brewer, 2010), 85–97. Nicholson’s arguments have been most inconvenient for literary scholars making political arguments that require evidence of Gower’s disillusionment with Richard during the early 1390s, a line of investigation explored in the 1990s. Among important but now aging studies James Simpson, in Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Cambridge 1995) 293–294 n. 21, offers a few points of brief rebuttal to Nicholson before embracing Macaulay’s model in the note and the main text (294). Lynn Staley, in “Gower, Richard II, Henry of Derby, and the Business of Making Culture,” Speculum 75 (2000): 68–96, explicitly accepts Macaulay’s multiple-recension model and rejects Nicholson’s “challenge” in a very brief note (78 n. 25). The Peck-Galloway Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell Peck, the most recent version of Peck’s teaching edition, navigates this question carefully, but still argues for a separate Henrician recension existing in the 1390s alongside a circulating Ricardian recension; see particularly their “Chronology of Gower’s Works,” 1.312. After 2000 a more nuanced analysis of the manuscript history is offered by Diane Watt, Amoral Gower: Language, Sex, and Politics (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 11–17; nonetheless, Watt accepts Macaulay’s classifications as “a serviceable and no doubt necessary tool” (13). Joyce Coleman, in “‘A bok for king Richard’s sake:’ Royal Patronage, the Confessio, and the Legend of Good Women,” in John Gower: Essays at the Millennium, ed. R. F. Yeager, (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2007), 104–107, uses the recension terminology but carefully avoids any discussion of Macauley’s second state. Candace Barrington’s “Personas and Performance in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Chaucer Review 48 (2014): 414–433, avoids direct use of the terminology. For recent challenges to the Macaulay model see below.

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Gower’s complete works in four volumes, based on the careful analysis of most of the Gower manuscripts known at the time. Macaulay deduced six textual states of the Confessio, carved into three editions or “recensions.”4 These recensions gave definite shape to a supposed process of rolling revision at a supposed scriptorium ostensibly supervised by the poet himself.5 Macaulay asserts with some confidence that the first recension can be dated to 1390, the second to 1390/1391, and the third to 1392/1393.6 The evidence for dating these recensions occurs only in a single line in the poem itself, along with the handful of glosses and bits of external evidence to be discussed below. The testimony for Gower’s political shifts more broadly occurs at the beginning and end of the massive poem. These passages (sometimes called dedications) contain in total 240 lines that clearly favor Richard II in one case (CA, Pro. *24–*92, VIII.*2941–*3114), and 298 lines that favor Henry IV (styled as “then” Earl of Derby, his title in the 1390s before the death of John of Gaunt in 1399) for the other case (Pro.24–92, VIII.2941–3172). A larger body of variants occur in a set of seven manuscripts that Macaulay assigns to his second recension; these manuscripts contain a common set of textual variants in Books V and VII

 Works, 2.cxxvii–cxxx. Macaulay asserts that Fairfax in particular was produced “in the ‘scriptorium’ of the poet,” 2.cxxx; while Macaulay seems to indicate five textual states at first, his arguments that the “first recension” represents three revisions and “second recension” represents two revisions can be found at 2.cxxxii and 1.cxxxiv, respectively. Fisher, 116, follows these assumptions. 5  The idea of a scriptorium at St. Mary Overys supervised by Gower, also advanced by Fisher, was discredited in the course of the important article by A. I. Doyle and Malcolm Parkes, “The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century,” in Medieval Scribes. Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London: Scolar, 1978), 163–210. In a later article Parkes further demolishes the scriptorium supposition, but does argue for Gower’s habits of rolling revision in the Confessio, using Fisher’s model of a revised epilogue in 1390/1391, followed by a revised prologue in 1392/93; See M. B. Parkes, “Patterns of scribal activity and revisions of the text in early copies of works by John Gower,” in New Science Out of Old Books: Studies in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in Honour of A. I. Doyle, ed. Richard Beadle and A. J. Piper (Aldershot, UK: Scolar, 1995), 81–121. 6  Works, 2.xxi–xxvi. 4

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not found in the other two groups.7 However, none of these variant passages appear to have any direct association with any sort of intermediate stage of political commitments on Gower’s part. In all but one case these witnesses use the Henrician dedications exclusively, and the exception is an outlier in a number of respects.8 Even John Fisher, Macaulay’s greatest champion in subsequent Gower scholarship, acknowledged directly that the manuscript record for the Confessio itself was wholly inadequate to establish the existence of Macaulay’s proposed second recension.9 Consequently, scholars must turn to other quite scanty resources to make a case for the three-recension model rather than opposed Ricardian and Henrician models, and for dates of composition and revision that might align in compelling ways with moments of high political drama in the 1390s. Four kinds of evidence are deployed for these arguments. Macaulay’s collations do suggest three different textual families (they suggest a wider range of genetic relationships as well), if not three different states of political consciousness for our poet.10 What may get lost in that set of categories is the fact that no scholar has found anything in the poetry itself that indicates some intermediate state of Gower’s thinking about Richard or Henry. The only body of evidence connected to the Confessio with any language that might represent an evolving position on Richard occurs in a colophon to the poem in several manuscripts, entitled by its opening words: Quia unusquisque. Scholars have debated the authorial status for any form of this colophon for some good reasons; a close look at the Quia 7  Added Confessio lines: V.*6395–*6438, V. *7015–*7036, V.*7086–*7210, VII. *2329– *2340, *3149–*3180; omitted Confessio lines V.7701–7746. These seven witnesses include Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, MS 63; Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2; London, British Library, MS Additional 12,043; Nottingham, University Library, Middleton Collection, MS WLC/LM 8; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 294; Princeton University, Firestone Library, Robert H.  Taylor Collection, Medieval MS 5; San Marino, Huntington Library, MS EL 26.A.l7 (Stafford). 8  Bodley 294 contains the Ricardian Prologue passage and Henrician conclusion; Stafford, Taylor 5, and Nottingham contain Henrician Prologues and conclusions; in Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, MS 63 and Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2 the Prologue does not survive, but the Henrician concluding passage does. 9  Fisher, 120. 10  Pearsall and Mooney, Catalogue, 3, point to Macaulay’s acknowledgment that his textual apparatus was based on “cursory […] spot-collation,” and the authority of his five different families is undercut by “evidence of shifts in exemplar which would disturb affiliations considerably.”

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variant in question (discussed below) will reveal that this variant is most likely to be a scribal intervention rather than evidence for Gower’s partial shift of loyalties long before the Lancastrian regime took shape.11 Otherwise the argument for three recensions hinges on dates discoverable in the manuscripts of the poem. The one firm piece of dating evidence consists of a single line in the Henrician version of the Confessio’s Prologue that refers to Richard’s regnal year of 1392/1393: “The yer sextenthe of Kyng Richard” (Pro.26). Quite simply, this reference constitutes the only date that occurs in the main text of the Confessio in any form, almost certainly authorial but also almost certainly positioned as a historical marker that may be a fiction generated at some point after that date. By the time the poem appeared in public, to judge from surviving witnesses, that date was well in the past both in years and in events on the ground.

2  Dates in the Confessio Glosses The next bits of evidence come from a small handful of marginal glosses which incorporate dates in some way. Three occur in the Prologue (at Pro.24, Pro.92, Pro. 331), and one in the poem’s concluding passage (at VIII.2972).12 Macaulay declares the evidentiary effect of these glosses as “[h]aving thus every step [of the recensions] dated for us by the author.”13 Yet the authorial status of these glosses is weakened by the scant number, lateness, and relative obscurity of their manuscript appearances. The exact meaning of their dates is strikingly unclear as well. Macaulay confidently asserts dates of composition and revision for the Confessio almost exclusively from dates found in marginal glosses: according to Macaulay a date of 1390/1391 found in a gloss at VIII.2972 indicates that Gower revised his conclusion first, in response to his new interest in the young Henry Lancaster, creating the second recension of the poem in the fourteenth regnal year of Richard; also according to Macaulay  a date of 1392/1393 found in a line of text and accompanying glosses at Pro.24 and Pro.93 indicates that Gower revised his introduction subsequently and produced a third recension of the poem in 11  For Fisher the variants in the Quia summary of Vox, along with the undated grant of the Lancastrian collar discussed in the Introduction above, constitute the main evidence for the existence of an intermediate state of political consciousness parallel to those Macaulay ascribes to a second recension of the Confessio. 12  Note, however, one of these glosses occurs alongside Pro. 24, repeating the date found in the single line of main text mentioned above. 13  Works, 2.xxiii.

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Richard’s sixteenth regnal year fully dedicated to Henry (and fully condemnatory of Richard).14 Two more glosses at Pro. 96 and Pro.331 seem to weave together Richard’s sixteenth and fourteenth regnal years with the calendar years 1392 and 1390 respectively. Compelling as these dates might seem for Macaulay’s model, two problems arise. First, at least some of these glosses could easily be the creation of scribes, not Gower. Second, these glosses appear so infrequently, so inconsistently, and in some cases so late among the manuscript witnesses that their evidentiary status is doubtful. These glosses do certainly work as resonant historical markers, but we are not obliged to believe in them as scrupulous documentation in order to preserve Macaulay’s recension model. In three of these manuscripts (none of them among the earliest witnesses that might have been produced before Gower’s death) a marginal gloss alongside the line in the Henrician opening (Pro. 24) also appears to date the completion of the poem to Richard’s sixteenth regnal year (1392/1393) and dedicates the poem to Henry, addressed as Earl of Derby: Here in the beginning he declares how in the sixteenth year of King Richard II John Gower composed and ultimately completed the present little book, which he especially designated with all reverence for the most vigorous lord, his lord Henry of Lancaster, at that time Earl of Derby.15

The combination in this gloss of a specific regnal date with a dedication to Henry is heady stuff for a literary historian, but it is nonetheless a marginal gloss. What little authority this gloss might offer is compromised by its late  Works, 2.xxii–xxiii.  “Hic in principio declarant qualiter in anno Regis Ricardi secondi sexto decimo Iohannes Gower presentem libellum composuit et finaliter compleuit quem strenuissimo domino suo domino Henrico de Lancastria tunc Derbeie Comite cum Omnia reuerencia specialiter destinauit.” This gloss appears in London, British Library, MS Harley 3869 (s. xv 2/4); Oxford, Magdalen College, MS (lat.) 213 (s. xv 3/4); Nottingham, University Library, Middleton Collection MS WLC/LM 8 (s. xv ¼); Nottingham is likely to be the earliest of these manuscripts, but it specifies the fourteenth year of Richard’s reign (1390/91) rather than the sixteenth year. By contrast, the similar gloss appearing in some Ricardian Confessios at Pro.*34 does not provide any date for completion. On the Henrician version of this gloss also see John Gower: Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck. 3 vols (2nd edition, Kalamazoo, 2006), 239 n. 22, where Peck agrees the gloss “appears to be a late addition;” Nicholson “Dedications,” 172–74, dates the gloss after Henry’s accession. Also see Wim Lindeboom, “Rethinking the Recensions of the Confessio Amantis,” Viator 40 (2009): 319–48. 14 15

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appearance in the manuscript tradition and also by virtue of another later Henrician manuscript that contains the same gloss, but dates the completion to 1390/1391 (along with the dedication to Henry) despite the contradiction with the date in the main text.16 This gloss is uncommon enough, appears late enough, and grapples enough with inconsistent dating that it could be the creation (in whole or part) by a scribe noting this singular and historically useful date in the main text and tying it to a dedication to Henry whether pre-existing or not. Whatever its source, this gloss could be another historical marker that plays into the fiction of witness Gower may establish in this passage for his narrator persona. Again, we are not at all obliged to take either Pro.24 or its accompanying gloss as documentary evidence created at the very date it specifies. At a similar spot in the Ricardian Prologue (Pro.*34) a long marginal gloss appears with an explicit dedication to Richard that explicates what a “book for king Richardes sake” (Pro.*24) means: Here he declares particularly how, because of reverence of the most serene prince, his lord king of England Richard II, his own and humble John Gower, although long wearied in many ways by grave illness, did not refuse to take up the labors of this little work, but instead has most zealously compiled the present little book from various chronicles, histories, and sayings of poets and philosophers, like a honeycomb gathered from various flowers, to the extent that his infirmity allowed him.17

As is the case for all three Ricardian glosses that parallel the three Henrician glosses about the state of the kingdom in Richard’s reign, no date is included. Thus in the Ricardian Confessios a reader’s sense of specific historical moment is not supported by any kind of documentary dating. Instead, the time frame elides and generalizes a period of Richard’s Love court so essential to the topic of the Confessio—a period that stands in stark contrast to the final acts of Richard’s reign. Among the interesting 16  In Cologny, Martin Bodmer MS 178 (c. 1410) the gloss appears at Pro.24 but the regnal year is given as “quarto decimo” rather than “sexto decimo.” 17  “Hic declarat in primis qualiter ob reuerenciam serenissimi principis domini sui Regis Anglie Ricardi secondi totus suus humilis Iohannes Gower, licet graui infirmitate a diu multipliciter fatigatus, huius opusculi labores suscipere non recusauit, sed tanquam fauum ex variis floribus recollectum, presentem libellum ex variis cronicis, historiis, poetarum philosophorumque dictis, quatenus sibi infirmitas permisit, studiosissime compilauit.” Bodley 294 includes this gloss, though with Richard’s name erased and left blank.

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bits of evidence clouding matters for this Ricardian gloss is the reference to Gower’s “long” and “grave illness.” These references principally occur in Gower’s poetry later in life, when he claims to be “old in years” around the time of Henry’s accession, and blinded with crippled hands shortly thereafter.18 Consequently, this moment destabilizes any firm location for a fiction of witness that looks more like a scribal addition than an authorial assertion. The use of a specific date as historical marker again seems to be associated exclusively with the Henrician Prologue in the gloss at Pro.94. In most Henrician manuscripts from Fairfax 3 onward the gloss summarizes the main text in the broad historical terms of a time “[t]hat loue is falle into discord” (Pro.121), anchored by the date established at Pro.24: Concerning the status of kingdoms, as they say, in regard to worldly matters, in the time of King Richard II in the sixteenth year of his reign.19

Here the use of a historical marker—whatever its source—occurs consistently in most Henrician manuscripts. However, in Stafford (the other earliest manuscript of the Confessio) the gloss at Pro.94 is substantially different, emphasizing the creation of the poem in a “time of war” with no mention of dates.20 This gloss in such an important manuscript is, to say the least, interesting: does it refer to the gathering civil war of 1399, or more broadly the unsettled periods any time after 1396 when Richard’s Love Court was no more than a shadow of memory? In either case this gloss establishes a much later historical marker for the Henrician Confessio. 18  “vetus annorum Gower” (Est amor, 26); his blind and crippled state is detailed in the cluster of related texts generally referred to as Quicquid homo scribat, most dramatically in the text preserved at the end of Oxford, All Souls College, MS 98. In the headnote to “O deus immense” Gower is described variously in different manuscripts as “still alive[!]” (“adhunc vivens”) and credited with the poem from “when he was alive” (“dum vixit”). On this theme see further R.  F. Yeager, “Gower in Winter: Last Poems,” in The Medieval Python: The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones, ed. R. F. Yeager and Toshiyuki Takamiya (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 87–103. 19  “De statu regnorum, vt dicunt, secundum temporalia, videlicet tempore regis Ricardi secundi anno regni sui sexto decimo.” 20  “Nota quod tempore creacionis huius libri fuerunt guerre et opiniones guerrarum tam in sancta Cristi ecclesia quam per singula mundi regna quasi vniuersaliter diuulgate. Quapropter in hoc presenti prologo euentus tam graues scriptor per singulos gradus specialiter deplangit.” The only other surviving witness for this gloss is Nottingham, which uses “dei” for “cristi.”

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In Ricardian witnesses this gloss appears in the wording found in Fairfax 3 that associates the following general lament on instability with Richard’s reign, but without any mention of a date that specifies some particular moment in that reign. Embracing the gloss dates as documentary truth gains some weight from the fact that four early Henrician manuscripts add a gloss in the epilogue at VIII.2973 invoking a prayer for England in the fourteenth year of Richard’s reign (21 June 1390–1391): Here in the fourteenth year of King Richard he prays for the estate of the kingdom, which is in danger because of long-held division from excessive adversity.21

This gloss appears in two deluxe London manuscripts from the period around 1400 when Gower’s career was reinvigorated by the change of kings and thus has a more reasonable claim to be created by the poet himself than the gloss at Pro.24.22 Yet this date shows even more signs of being an arbitrary fiction of witness, a marker placed well back in Richard’s reign that has no apparent relationship at all to the Henrician dedication it accompanies in the Confessio’s epilogue. No doubt Richard’s reign suffered from the effects of division at any given point during and after the Appellant Crisis and the Merciless Parliament. Nonetheless, this gloss puts the original date of completion for the Henrician version as 1390/1391, well before any suggested conversion to Henry’s cause. Despite these basic problems in accepting the gloss at VIII.2973 as Gower’s own documentary dating, Macaulay saw this reference to 1390 in light of one other brief gloss (not, in this case, a gloss summarizing a section) accompanying a passage beginning at Prol.331 that discusses the profound division symbolized by the crisis of the dual papacy in Avignon and Rome. The gloss appears in some manuscripts included in Macaulay’s first and second recensions as a simple date: “Anno domini Millesimo CCC Nonagesimo” [In the year of our Lord 1390].23 As one scholar has 21  “Hic in anno quarto decimo Regis Ricardi orat pro statu regni, quod a diu divisum nimla aduersitate periclitabatur.” 22  The gloss appears in Stafford and Fairfax 3, both dating ca. 1400, along with Sidney Sussex 63 and Bodmer 178. Once again the parallel gloss in Ricardian versions at 8.*2973 do not include a date. 23  Stafford and a few other manuscripts add “tunc erat ecclesia divisus.” At this point in Fairfax a gloss in the margin has been erased. See Lindeboom, “Rethinking,” 324–329.

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pointed out, however, 1390 is not a date when anything important in the Schism happened, although a new pope was chosen in 1389, suggesting that the gloss is a late scribal addition after memories dimmed.24 In any case, its status as a terminus post quem for Gower’s completion of the poem seems highly doubtful if only because the manuscripts in which this gloss appears are first recension manuscripts produced well into the fifteenth century. It is possible that some meaningful relationship might exist between one very short gloss at Pro.331 specifying the date 1390 in some Henrician Confessios and another short gloss at VIII.2973 including the date 1390  in some Ricardian Confessios. Far more likely, though, is the possibility that these dates are no more than invented historical markers to invoke a broader period in Richard’s reign before the series of crises in the late 1390s that led to his deposition. To recap, these four glosses bear the entire weight of Macaulay’s dates for the three recensions of the Confessio, and consequently for so much scholarship on Gower’s developing political consciousness placed within a period (1390–1993) when no other evidence supports any kind of poetic and political revolutions in Gower’s thinking. What these glosses do, in manuscripts produced after Henry had taken the throne from Richard, is mark the Confessio’s origins in Richard’s reign in a time easily associated with Richard’s court of Love, and well before the “time of war” cited in a single gloss in Stafford. These glosses overall use dates offering so little documentary value that they are much more likely to be the work of later scribes shaping the Confessio as a Ricardian or Henrician artifact; this strategy may follow Gower’s own backdating given its convenience for the poem’s position after Henry’s accession. The remaining glosses make no reference whatsoever to stages of the poem’s revisions or presentations but function as historical markers from a position long after the fact, and most likely after Henry’s ascension prompted a revision of recent history.25

3  The Quia Colophons The colophon appearing at the end of many Confessio manuscripts, titled by its opening words Quia unusquisque, contains summaries of Gower’s major works in French (Miroir l’Omme), Latin (Vox Clamantis), and 24  Lindeboom, “Rethinking,” 327–328, points out that nothing of importance for the papacy happened in this year that would prompt the gloss date originally. 25  Also see Nicholson, “Dedications,” 172–174.

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English (Confessio Amantis). Textual variations in these summaries seem to offer the best evidence that Gower shifted his thinking about Richard in two stages from the support evidenced in the first dedications. Complicating this evidence, however, is the fact that the clearest argument centers on Vox Clamantis, a poem with its own complex history of textual revision linked to Henry’s overthrow of Richard. Most of the Ricardian manuscripts of the Confessio contain a Quia colophon that includes for Gower’s Vox Clamantis a summary expressing sympathy for Richard’s plight during the Great Revolt of 1381: The second book, composed in Latin hexameter and pentameter verses, discourses about that astonishing event that occurred in England in the time of the lord King Richard II, in the fourth year of his reign, when rustic bondsmen impetuously rebelled against the nobles and magnates of the kingdom. Noting the excusable innocence, however, of the said lord king then on the grounds that he was underage, it declares the blame for these things to fall more clearly elsewhere, from which, and not by mere fortune, such terrible things happen among human beings. And the title of this volume, whose structure contains seven pieces of writing, is named the Vox Clamantis. 26

Bodley 294, a Confessio manuscript Macaulay classed as second recension but exceptional in many ways, contains a version of the Vox summary that describes Richard’s reign in apparently neutral terms: The second book is composed in the Latin language in hexameter and pentameter. It treats about the various misfortunes occurring in England in the time of King Richard II, where the maker devoutly prays on behalf of the

 “Secundus enim liber, sermone Latino versibus exametri et pentametri compositus, tractat super illo mirabili euentu qui in Anglica tempore domini Regis Ricardi secundi anno regni sui quarto contigit, quando seruiles rustici impetuose contra nobiles et ingenuos regni insurexerunt. Innocenciam tamen dicti domini Regis tunc minoris etatis causa inde excusabilem pronuncians, culpas aliunde, ex quibus et non a fortuna talia inter homines contingunt enormia, euidencius declarat. Titulusque voluminis huius, cuius ordo vii continet paginas, Vox Clamantis nominatur. Translation and text here and in the following quotes from Peck and Galloway. 26

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realm’s condition. And the name of this book, which is divided into seven parts, is entitled Vox Clamantis.27

In Fairfax 3, later scribes added the Quia passage (along with the opening and closing dedications), and the passage clearly dates itself post-deposition: The second book, composed metrically in Latin, discourses about the various misfortunes occurring in England in the time of King Richard II. Wherefore not only the nobility of the kingdom and the commons suffered torments, but even the most unfit king himself, because of his own shortcomings rushing down from on high, was thrown into the pit that he had made; and this volume is entitled the Vox Clamantis.28

These descriptions do seem appropriate to Gower’s self-fashioning as he transitioned from Ricardian to Lancastrian loyalties. John Fisher finds these three summaries to be (along with Henry’s grant of a Lancastrian collar to Gower) the best evidence for an intermediate state of political consciousness, if not for a distinct second recension of the Confessio.29 Among the problems in these witnesses, though, is the fact that all these summaries of Vox in the Quia colophons that survive were produced after Henry’s accession to the throne. Consequently, this shifting summary is tangled up with the larger question of how Ricardian sympathies came to be presented within a few years of Richard’s deposition, specifically in numerous deluxe manuscripts for an aristocratic Lancastrian 27  “Secundus liber versibus exametri et pentametre sermone latino componitur. Tractat de variis infortuniis tempore Regis Ricardi secundi in Anglia multiplicitur contingentibus, vbi pro statu regni compositor deuocius exorat. Nomenque volumina huius, quod in septem diuiditur partes, Vox Clamantis intitulat. Other manuscripts in Macaulay’s second recension that contain parallel Quia passages are Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2; Nottingham, University Library, Middleton Collection MS WLC/LM 8; and Princeton University, Firestone Library, Robert H. Taylor Collection, Medieval MS 5. Stafford, the earliest surviving manuscript in this witness group, along with Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, MS 63, has no Quia colophon; BL Add. 12,043 is imperfect at its end. 28  Secundus enim liber sermone latino metrice compositus tractat de variis infortuniis tempore Regis Ricardi Secundi in Anglia contingentibus. Vnde non solum regni proceres et communes tormenta passi sunt, set et ipse crudelissimus rex suis ex demeritis ab alto corruens in foueam quam fecit finaliter proiectus est.7 Nomenque voluminis huius Vox Clamantis intitulatur. Two other manuscripts contain this version of the Quia unusquisque colophon: Bodmer 178 and Harley 3869. 29  Fisher, 88–115.

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audience. In this respect the Bodley 294 summary for Vox is notable for its virtual whitewash of any political valence. Its reference to “misfortunes in the time of King Richard” takes no position on causes for those misfortunes and passes over them with no detail. The phrase in Bodley 294 that replaces the politically sensitive content, “where the maker devoutly prays on behalf of the realm’s condition,” neatly avoids the political problem posed by the contending definitions of Vox (a poem not attached to this manuscript and possibly not available to the scribe) and describes one of the fiercest moral indictments of contemporary society as if it were a judgment-­free prayer—hardly a sufficient description of Vox in any terms.30 It is hard to imagine a less Gowerian passage, or Gower in a state of political consciousness so shorn of social or political observation. Far more likely, a scribe intervened here to balance historical interest with political expediency through the time-honored strategy of bland and agency-free language. Bodley 294 may be the base witness for the few and late witnesses to this version of the Quia colophon.31 It was produced during the major flowering of deluxe Ricardian Confessios emerging  in London ca. 1405–1415.32 It also constitutes an outlier within the entire corpus of surviving Confessios: Bodley 294 alone preserves a Confessio with a Ricardian opening and a Henrician closing. Its sole scribe, London Guildhall clerk John Marchaunt, had excellent access to literary manuscripts in London; a long career of producing luxury editions of the Ricardian literary trio Langland, Chaucer, and Gower; and a willingness to experiment with all three versions of the Vox summary: the same scribe also produced in their entirety four deluxe Ricardian Confessios, the pro-Ricardian summary of Vox surviving in three of them, and the latter part of two Henrician Confessios including the Henrician Vox summary. This evidence alone suggests not only the 30  The hand in Bodley 294 and the additional hands that collaborated with the Bodley 294 scribe in other manuscripts are not found among the twelve or so hands producing Vox manuscripts early in the fifteenth century. The hands of the two scribes associated with the added elements in Fairfax 3, however, do appear in Vox manuscripts; see further Parkes, “Patterns,” 87–91. 31  With Bodley 294, Confessio manuscripts containing this version of the Quia colophon include Trinity R.3.2; Nottingham; and Taylor 5. 32  Among the four surviving manuscripts with the “intermediate” Vox summary only Nottingham was produced without D/Marchaunt’s involvement; Ralph Hanna and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds., The Wollaton Medieval Manuscripts: Texts, Owners and Readers (York, UK: York Medieval Press, 2010), 4, date this manuscript ca. 1425, a decade or more after the flurry of Confessio manuscripts by D/Marchaunt and his associates.

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potential for scribal intervention but the possibility that Confessio producers could play at will with what should be its most politicized components for aristocratic Lancastrian patrons.33 The Ricardian summary for Vox locates its apologetics not in Richard’s actual reign but in his minority during the events of the Great Revolt. Only the summary of Vox in Henrician Confessios contains the ferocity of active partisanship and develops the language of diabolical tyranny that equates deposition with being cast into Hell. Gower himself is likely to have written and/or authorized the text of this Quia passage found in Fairfax around the time of Richard’s fall, at least if his claim to have stopped writing around 1401 due to blindness is true. He is far less likely to have authorized a Ricardian Confessio or written the Ricardian summary for the Vox in the years up to his death in 1408, though he may well have written the standard Ricardian summary of Vox in the Quia colophon at some earlier date. The most compelling explanation for the existence of all the other deluxe Ricardian Confessios in Lancastrian London, as I have argued in Chap. 2, is that a separate group of scribes decided to present the Confessio as a historical artifact of the Ricardian court, complete with a consistent summary in the Quia colophon.

33  An erased ownership inscription by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, places Bodley 294 among the sons of Henry IV, along with Christ Church 198, probably owned by Humphrey’s brother Thomas, Duke of Clarence. In this case the bland language may have a patronal function.  See Doyle and Parkes, “Production,” 208. On Scribe D identified as John Marchaunt see Linne Mooney and Estelle Stubbs, Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature, 1375–1425 (York, UK: York Medieval Press, 2013), 38–65. This scribe’s Ricardian Confessios include London, British Library, MS Egerton 1991 (all); New York, Columbia University Library, MS Plimpton 265 (all); Oxford, Christ Church College, MS 148 (all); and Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 67 (all). Christ Church 148 is missing a number of leaves, including 8.*2956–*3114, and potentially any attached texts such as the Quia colophon. In one other manuscript this scribe produced the first sixteen folia of a Ricardian Confessio, but another hand completed the manuscript and its Quia colophon: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902. Both of this scribe’s Henrician Confessios use the Stafford family text (Macaulay’s second recension). Taylor 5, completed in collaboration with another scribe, possibly the Trevisa-Gower scribe, features Henrician dedications at opening and conclusion; Trinity R.3.2, a collaboration with four other scribes, offers a Henrician conclusion but the opening folia are missing.

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The comparatively brief and colorless Quia summaries of the Confessio offer an even murkier set of historical witnesses for Henry Bolingbroke. In the pro-Ricardian form the summary reads simply enough in its first half: The third book in the English language, divided into eight parts, which was fashioned at the insistence of the most serene ruler the said lord king of England, Richard II, distinguishes the ages according to Daniel’s prophecy concerning the transformations of the world’s kingdoms, from the period of King Nebuchadnezzar up to our own. 34 (St. John’s 34, fols. 214r–214v)

This section is followed by a passage describing the poem’s matters of governance and love whose wording differs somewhat in the three versions of the Quia colophon, but not significantly. Marchaunt’s Bodley 294 version identifies Henry, “tunc Derbeie Comitis” (“then Earl of Derby,” a title Henry held until his father’s death in early 1399), as the poem’s dedicatee: The third book which is fashioned in eight parts in the English language, on account of the reverence of the most serene lord of his lord, Henry of Lancaster, then count of Derby, distinguishes the ages according to Daniel’s prophecy concerning the transformations of the world’s kingdoms, from the period of King Nebuchadnezzar up to our own. 35

The third version, present only in three manuscripts, may be the most familiar form since it is used as the base text by Macaulay and its most recent editor, R. F. Yeager: The third book, which is fashioned in the English language on account of the reverence to the most vigorous lord [of his lord] Henry of Lancaster, then count of Derby, distinguishes the ages according to Daniel’s prophecy 34   ‘Tercius liber iste Anglico sermone in viii partes diuisus, qui ad instanciam serenissimi principis dicti domini Regis Anglie Ricardi secundi conficitur, secundum Danielis propheciam super huius mundi regnorum mutacione a tempore Regis Nabugodonosor usque nunc tempora distinguit.” Texts and translations for all versions of the Quia colophon from Peck and  Galloway; https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/ peck-gower-confessio-amantis-colophons. 35  “Tercius iste liber qui in octo partes ob reuerencia serenissimi domini sui domini Henrici de Lancastria tunc Derbie Comitis Anglico sermone conficitur secundum Danielis propheciam super huius mundi regnorum mutacione a tempore Regis Nabugodonosor usque nunc tempora distinguit.”

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concerning the transformations of the world’s kingdoms, from the period of King Nebuchadnezzar up to our own.36

One minor wording change here—from “most serene” to “most vigorous”—might be parsed for changing views of Henry.37 That wording in fact imitates exactly the gloss at Pro.24, which also dedicates the Confessio to “the most vigorous lord [of his lord] Henry of Lancaster, then count of Derby.”38 Whatever the chronology, clearly these two passages were coordinated directly in the crucial matter of the language used for Henry. Otherwise the summary simply substitutes one king for another with virtually no difference in tone or content. The variant that stands out in both cases is the presence of Henry in an avowedly historical circumstance: “then Count of Derby” (“tunc Derbeie Comitis”). Undoubtedly in this passage Henry exists as a historical figure in his glorious period during the first half of the 1390s. Henry’s courtesy title as Count (also rendered “Earl”) of Derby extends back to 1377 when Henry was ten through the period in his early adulthood (1387–1389) when he and Thomas Mowbray joined with the senior Appellants (Richard FitzAlan, Earl of Arundel, Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, and Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick) against Richard, and up to 1397 when Richard moves against the Appellants a decade later and Henry is compelled to testify against them. Adam Usk reports that Arundel replies to Henry’s testimony in this trial, “You, Henry, earl of Derby, you lie in your teeth!”39 In 1397 Richard gives Henry the title and lands of the Earl of Hereford, probably as a reward for Henry’s testimony; after John of Gaunt’s death in 1399 Henry becomes Duke of Lancaster. In short, this courtesy title applies to Henry up to the beginning of the end for Richard. 36  “Tercius iste liber qui ob reuerenciam strenuissimi domini sui domini Henrici de Lancastria, tunc Derbeie Comitis, Anglico sermone conficitur, secundum Danielis propheciam super huius mundi regnorum mutacione a tempore regis Nabugodonosor vsque nunc tempora distinguit.” Also see text and translation in Yeager, Minor Latin. 37  The “domini sui domini” locution (“lord of his lord,” not included in the Galloway translation for the base text and so added here in brackets) in both Bodley 294 and Henrician base text versions also compares interestingly to the “dicti domini Regis Angliae” (“said lord king of England”) in the Ricardian version of this Quia passage. 38  “strenuissimo domino suo domino Henrico de Lancastria tunc Derbeie Comitis.” See further above and note 15. 39  Chronicle of Adam Usk, 1377–1421, 28–29; see further the discussion in GivenWlson, 45–46.

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One other variant that does not stand out between the Fairfax 3 and Bodley 294 versions is the identification of the poem’s division into eight books, also appearing in the Ricardian version of Quia quoted above. Overall, as I have noted for Bodley 294, any of Quia’s three summaries for the Confessio is brief, bland, and noncommittal—easily written by a scribe to align the summary with the dedication passages rather than by a poet struggling with contending loyalties in the early 1390s. The identification of the Confessio as a work with eight parts follows the Ricardian summary rather than the Henrician summary. It is entirely possible that the scribe of Bodley 294 was working with an exemplar from the Ricardian version along with a Henrician exemplar, since most of the several Confessio manuscripts copied by this scribe were Ricardian. The traditional explanation for this outlier summary in an outlier manuscript that itself probably combines Ricardian and Henrician exemplars—that it illustrates the first stage of Gower’s conversion to Henry—has no real evidence to support it.

4  The Henrician Couplet One last piece of evidence for the three-recension model was developed by Fisher, keen to play up two sets of Latin verses attached to a number of Confessio manuscripts and left undiscussed by Nicholson. At the end of the poem in most manuscripts is an explicit in Latin verse that also serves as an envoi. Some Ricardian Confessios contain a four-line version: Explicit iste liber, qui transeat, obsecro liber Vt sine liuore vigeat lectoris in ore. Qui sedet in scannis celi det vt ista Iohannis Perpetuis annis stet pagina grata Britannis.40 [Here ends this book, and may it, I implore, travel free so that without a bruise it may thrive in the reader’s ear. May He who sits in the throne of heaven grant that this page of John remain for all time pleasing to the Britains.]

40  Works, 3.478; translation from Peck and Galloway. Ricardian manuscripts containing this four-line version of the explicit include Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 307; St John’s College, MS B.12; Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS 6696; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden B.11; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902; Oxford, Christ Church, MS 148; Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 67; Princeton University, Firestone Library, Garrett MS 136.

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Other manuscripts with either set of dedications add two more verses41: Derbeie Comiti, recolunt quem laude periti, Vade liber purus, sub eo requiesce futurus. [To the Earl of Derby, whom the experienced honor with praise, Go, spotless book, find rest beneath him in the future]42

The presence of the Earl of Derby couplet in manuscripts with the Ricardian dedication has been taken, since the earliest scholarship on the Confessio, to indicate the issue of a manuscript with a double dedication to Richard and Henry, possibly in a presentation for Henry himself in the early 1390s.43 Fisher assumes (with no evidence) that this couplet was written after the original dedication to Richard and was attached to a later exemplar of the “first recension” presumably reflecting the poet’s initial leanings toward Henry sometime after Richard’s famous onboard commission of the poem.44 We might hope, then, that the two-line dedication to Henry would then show up in “first intermediate” and/or “first revised” versions—presumed to be later states of Gower’s rolling revision and absent itself from the earliest “first unrevised” manuscripts. However, by the evidence of Fisher’s own charts, both the four-line stanza without the couplet to Henry and the six-line stanza with the couplet to Henry distribute themselves across the earlier two of Fisher’s groupings with no apparent order. The only group that does not have the Henrician couplet among its members is the “first version revised,” the most likely place to 41  Ricardian manuscripts with this dedication include Cambridge, St Catherine’s College, MS 7; London, British Library, MS Additional 22139, MS Egerton 1991, MS Royal 18.C.xxii; London, Society of Antiquaries, MS 134; New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M125, MS M126; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 693. Henrician manuscripts with this dedication include Bodmer 178; Harley 3869; New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, Osborn Collection MS fa.l; Fairfax 3; Magdalen 213; Oxford, New College, MS 266; Oxford, Wadham College, MS 13. For Macaulay’s analysis of this evidence see Works, 2.xxiv–xxv. 42  Works, 3.479; translation mine. 43  Works, 2.xiii–xxiv. 44  Fisher, 123, states “[t]hese lines have been added to an exemplar of the first version dating from before June 1392” with no indication which exemplar, or how this supposed addition might figure into his divisions. Shortly thereafter (124) Fisher argues that, since Gower’s double dedication cannot be attributed to the poet’s timidity, the couplet dedicated to Henry must come from Gower’s production of first recension manuscripts at St. Mary Overeys—the supposed scriptorium supervised by the poet first presumed by Macaulay (60). On this long-lived but now exploded idea see further above, n. 11.

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find it if it were a deliberate revision as part of a coherent new version of the poem.45 The two lines cited here contain another feature of interest as a fiction of witness. Their basic meaning is quite close to a core passage in the Henrician dedication: This bok, upon amendment To stonde at his commandement, With whom myn herte is of accord, I sende unto myn oghne lord, Which of Lancastre is Henri named. (Pro.83–87)

Notable here is the designation of Henry as “of Lancastre,” which seems to identify Henry as Duke of Lancaster, and if so would date this passage after John of Gaunt’s death in 1399.46 The locution is ambiguous in its reference to ducal title or family origin, possibly an intentional effect: it is worth observing that no gloss specifying Henry as “then Earl of Derby” appears alongside this passage. What is striking, though, about the analogous passage in the colophon dedication is its explicit positioning of the Confessio as the poet’s work before 1397 (and thus before Henry’s complicity in the judicial killings of Arundel and Warwick, if not the extrajudicial killing of Gloucester) that is meant to serve as a foundation for Henry’s future state—again ambiguous, but strongly suggesting the kingship that Gower himself identified with a return to Christian order. The other references in this couplet read like political code, as well: the “experienced” or “experts (periti) who praise Henry suggest those in the aristocracy who supported Henry’s invasion in 1399; Gower’s “spotless book” (liber purus) suggests a work of art not tarnished by the failings of the Ricardian literary world and capable of building the foundation for Henry (sub eo 45  Fisher, 304–305. Otherwise among their “first recension unrevised” and “intermediate” MSS eight witnesses have the Henrician couplet, and several other manuscripts imperfect at the end may have as well. 46  Henry is identified as “dux Lancastrie” (and at one point as “nunc dux Lancastrie,” Record 11.335) throughout the articles detailing Richard’s deposition; see The Deposition of Richard II: ‘The Record and Process of the Renunciation and Deposition of Richard II,’ ed. David R. Carlson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 2007). Peter Nicholson noted a reference to “Henry of Lancaster” in a document describing Henry’s reise in the early 1390s. Also see David Carlson, “A Rhyme Distribution Chronology of John Gower’s Latin Poetry,” Studies in Philology 104 (2007): 104, where Carlson questions the function of the Derbeie lines in the quatrain.

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requiesce) in a new Lancastrian culture. This couplet creates a fictional moment in the 1390s of poetic foresight, if not prophecy. Given the colophon’s appearance in manuscripts after 1400 and Gower’s active role in writing pro-Lancastrian poetry we can date after 1397 at the earliest, the colophon’s literary creation of some vaguely pre-1397 moment instead reveals that it was built with the benefit of hindsight. As such, this colophon reinforces our understanding of the various gloss references to “then Earl of Derby” as historical markers for the Confessio’s broader fiction of witness: a poem created inside the Ricardian literary world that transcends the boundaries imposed by that historical moment through the purity of its vision.

5  The Ricardian and Henrician Passages The text of the dedication passages offer even less documentary specifics, though it is these words scholars have tried most often to map onto the tripartite chronology Macaulay derived from the four glosses discussed above. The main text of the poem is the closest we can get to the voice of the poet and any change in his intentions for the poem whether ideological, patronal, or poetical. In one set of thirty-one manuscripts, Macaulay’s first recension, one opening and one closing passage (CA, Pro. *24–*92; VIII.*2941–*3114) clearly favor Richard, including a passage (Pro.*37– *53) describing at length Richard’s commission of the poem in a delightful encounter between king and poet in boats on the Thames: And so befell, as I cam nyh, Out of my bot, whan he me syh, He bad me come in to his barge. And whan I was with him at large, Amonges other thinges seid He hath this charge upon me leid, And bad me doo my besynesse That to his hihe worthinesse Som newe thing that I scholde boke, That he himself it mihte loke After the forme of my writynge. (Pro. *43–*53)

Though scholars like to imagine the Thames encounter in the later 1380s, no date can be attached to this passage, nor does any date appear in the

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marginal note summarizing the poem’s project here (at Pro. *34) for manuscripts in Macaulay’s first recension.47 In the Henrician form of this opening passage a date connected to the poem’s creation IS given: And for that fewe men endite In oure englissh, I thenke make A bok for Engelondes sake, The yer sextenthe of kyng Richard. What shal befall hierafterward God wot. (Pro. 22–27)

Gower’s specification here of the sixteenth regnal year, 1392/1393, becomes the basis for Macaulay’s contention that Gower completed the third recension then. The date, though, is ambiguous about whether Gower began or completed his poem in that year: “I thenke make” does not favor either possibility. The future-tense phrase “[w]hat shal befall hierafterward” in the following sentence does assume completion. It also, however, introduces the poet’s persona into the poem, looking forward into history as if he has no idea what is to come. The question this moment raises is whether we should take the declaration as a naïve speculation at the historical moment of the poem’s completion or as a fiction of historical witness (i.e., the invention of a specific historical moment by the poet at some later date) by a persona connected to the Poet/Amans figure, a fiction that runs through the rest of the poem. If we accept Gower’s wide-eyed gaze into the future at face value then we apparently must also accept his wholehearted and equally naïve conversion to the cause of twenty-five-year-old Henry Lancaster, newly returned from campaigning in Prussia with no known claims on Gower’s attention at that time.48 Or we could consider this passage to be the work of the poet later on in the decade looking at Richard’s sixteenth regnal year and 47  See, as typical examples two early manuscripts of this type: Bodley 294 fol. 1r and Oxford Corpus 67 fol. 1r; the marginal gloss at Pro. 34* is written in rubric and placed in the main text column. Note that this Ricardian introduction occurs in all manuscripts of Macaulay’s first recension whose opening survives, but also only one manuscript of Macaulay’s second recension: Bodley 294; see the further discussion of Bodley 294’s outlier status below. 48  Experienced Gowerians will wonder about the Lancastrian collar given to the poet, supposedly in 1393; on that dating, effectively made up out of whole cloth, see further in Chap. 1 above.

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Henry’s emergence with the benefit of hindsight, creating a fictional moment for his poet persona that anticipates the troubles Gower now knows will follow after 1393. No final position can be taken on this question from the evidence, but the initial meeting with Richard and/or the original conception of the project might be attached to 1393 as easily as to 1390. For Macaulay, though, these lines indicate a new vision of the Confessio, no longer a book for Richard’s sake, but now for England’s sake and for a new patron, named in the final lines of the passage. Gower now proclaims he wrote: This bok, upon amendment To stonde at his commandement, With whom myn herte is of accord, I sende unto myn oghne lord, Which of Lancastre is Henri named […] So woll I now this werk embrace With hol trust and with hol believe. (Pro. 83–91)

As I noted above, the identification of Henry as “of Lancastre” at the least hints at Henry’s status in 1399 as Duke of Lancaster; the phrase “myn oghne lord” compounds the sense that this passage was written in a time when Henry was in fact Gower’s lord after the change in kings. In any case, gone in this passage is the praise, however tepid, of Richard’s kingship; in its place is a transformation of the poet’s embrace of his own work “[w]ith hol trust and hol believe,” and an attack that does not name names or specify crimes but calls upon the example of books in days past that exposed: “tho that deden thanne amis Thurgh tirannie and crualte, Right as thei stoden in degree.” (Pro.48–50)

Certainly the poet’s shift in tone and dedication call to mind a time when things are going wrong in the kingdom, just as in the Ricardian version of this passage. What changes is the clear implication that current treachery in high places needs exposure (though this poem does nothing of the sort) and needs the new dedicatee who now inspires whole trust and belief.

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We could see this passage, with Macaulay, as a form of prescience directly parallel to his presumed intuition about the young Henry Bolingbroke; in other words Gower completed this passage, accurately predicting England’s disaster and its redeemer long before the compelling events of the later 1390s, thanks to his ability to predict the future. On the other hand, this passage strikes a tone like the voice he assumes in his Latin poetry, particularly Vox clamantis and Cronica triperita, far more explicit in its predictions of godless chaos. This voice clearly does not need the prompting of a young Lancastrian to emerge, or any particular date at all given the range of probable composition dates (from the early 1380s for the Visio Angliae portion of Vox to ca. 1400 for Cronica) for Gower’s two great Latin poems. What the internal date here does establish is a period when things fall apart in England under Richard’s rule. There is no compelling reason to take that date at face value for Gower’s completion of the poem. Gower could easily have added that date much later to indicate in retrospect when he realized things were starting to go wrong, a fiction of witness that offered a greater truth with the benefit of hindsight. The terms Gower uses to characterize the older misdeeds, “tirannie and crualte,” are not those floated by chroniclers or others in reference to Richard during the early 1390s, after Richard had regained control from the Merciless Parliament in 1389, but became common later on in the decade. Scholars have pointed to Richard’s conflict with the City of London in 1392 as the basis for this language and thus as the date of composition for the Henrician opening and conclusion to the Confessio, led by John Fisher’s assertion that this conflict “would seem ample reason for Gower to have altered the conclusion to the Confessio. His sympathies would have lain entirely with his personal and business associates, the London citizens.”49 We do know that the reconciliation between Richard and the City was quite literally performed in a pageant on 21 August, 1392, fairly soon after the conflict erupted (Richard’s first major act—a plan to move some government functions to York—was initiated in May of that year) and well before Henry’s return to England in 1393.50 Furthermore, no evidence exists for Gower taking the side of the City against Richard. Gower undoubtedly knew of the tensions between  Fisher, 118–119.  See further Caroline M. Barron, “The Quarrel of Richard II with London 1392–1397,” in The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack. Ed. F. R. H. Du Boulay and Caroline M. Barron (London: Athlone Press, 1971), 173–201. 49 50

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Richard and London, though we know of no direct connections between Gower and any principal players on the City side of the conflict.51 On the other hand, the language used by chronicler Thomas Walsingham to attack Londoners in this conflict has many affinities with Gower’s criticism of his countrymen in Vox clamantis and elsewhere: Of all peoples (almost), the Londoners were then indeed the most arrogant, self-important, and avaricious, putting little faith in God and His venerable ways; they were supporters of the Lollards, critics of the religious, tithings-­ withholders, and general despoilers of the folk. So puffed up was their pride that they made it a matter of law—in the face of all human reason, of God, and of justice itself—to harass, to burden, and so to grind down all who came there from outlying towns and provinces.52

To assume Gower’s disaffection with Richard grew out of this conflict, we would need some evidence that Gower sided with the City. Not only is there no such evidence, it would not be difficult to see Gower sympathizing with the attitude expressed by Walsingham.53 Furthermore, the aftermath of this conflict and the onerous payments extracted by royal agents  The player Gower might have known would have been John of Gaunt whose confessor, Carmelite friar Richard Maidstone, was the poetic apologist for Richard’s role as the scourge of London’s governors. For a review of this conflict, see most recently the Introduction to Richard Maidstone, Concordia (The Reconciliation of Richard II with London), Trans. A.  G. Rigg and ed. David Carlson. (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 2003). Also see Barron, “Quarrel;” and Lynn Staley, Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 170. This idea was advanced enthusiastically by Fisher, 118–119, whose arguments were effectively dismissed by Nicholson, “Dedications,” 167–68. 52  “erant quippe tunc inter omnes fere nationes gentium elatissimi, arrogantissimi, et avarissimi, ac male creduli in Deum et traditiones avitas, Lollardorum sustentatores, religiosorum detractores, decimarum detentores, et communis vulgi depauperatores. In tantum excrevit eorum supercilium, ut auderent leges condere, quibus adventantes de circumjacentibus villis et provinciis, contra rationem omnem humanum, Deum, et justitiam, molestarent, gravarent, et fatigarent.” Thomas Walsingham, Thomae Walsingham, quondam monachi S. Albani, historia anglicana, ed. Henry Thomas Riley, Rolls Series 28.1, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1863–1864), 2.208. Quoted in Rigg and Carlson, where Carlson discusses parallel justifications in Maidstone’s Concordia for Richard’s confiscatory practices aimed at London’s residents. 53  Also see Nicholson, “Dedication,” 160 and ff., where he points out “how little evidence for either disenchantment with Richard or for a shift of political allegiance is actually contained within the [Confessio].” A fuller discussion of Gower’s criticisms of London is in Craig Bertolet, “Fraud, Division, and Lies: John Gower and London,” in On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium, ed. R.  F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), 43–70. 51

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continued for several more years, as Caroline Barron has discussed in some detail.54 Even if we were to believe that this new language had sprung from the conflict between Richard and the City, it is no obvious matter to fix a date for Gower’s conversion to Henry’s cause within the extended consequences of that conflict.55 A broad consensus among chroniclers, on the other hand, indicates that wide disapprobation in England for Richard begins in 1397 when Richard’s vengeance on the Appellants (and his eventual exile of Henry Lancaster and Thomas Mowbray) was seen by many as tyranny, as historians have long pointed out.56 Walsingham, the best-known contemporary source for these accusations of tyranny, some of which were apparently drawn from the Record and Process, testifies that Richard used loans as a tool against his enemies within the country as a whole rather than just the City of London: [O]ne thing is known for sure, that from that time onwards he began to tyrannise and burden his people with great loans, so that no prelate, no town, no citizen, indeed no one anywhere throughout the whole of England who was known to have any wealth, could find a place to hide, but was forced to loan his money to the king.57

 “Quarrel,” 173–201.  My arguments that Gower had no vision of Richard’s tyranny (potential or actual) in the period 1387–1396 must stand pace an earlier strand of scholarship. George B. Stow, “Richard II in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Some Historical Perspectives,” Mediaevalia 16 (1993 for 1990) 3–29, who sees “incipient Ricardian absolutism” (17) beginning in 1389 supported by the Smithfield tournament of 1390. Staley, “Gower,” 79–90, follows Stow to argue in favor of 1390 as a crucial date in the cultural history of the Ricardian court and Ricardian literature. While Staley makes a convincing case that the Smithfield tournament and John of Gaunt’s machinations mark this cultural moment, neither she nor Stow attempts to read Gower’s revisions (and his emphasis there on divisiveness) as a response to these specific events. Nigel Saul, “John Gower, Prophet or Turncoat?” in John Gower, Trilingual Poet, ed. Elizabeth Dutton, R. F. Yeager, and John Hines (Woodbridge, UK and Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2010), 85–97, also acknowledges the importance of the early 1390s for Richard’s ideas of lordship; however, he points out how Gower’s ideas of kingship accord with Richard’s through this period up to 1396, as well as acknowledging Gower’s ongoing issues with Richard dating back to the early 1380s. 56  See, for instance, A.  K. Gundy, Richard II and the Rebel Earl (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 172–174. 57  Translation of the Annales Ricardi Secundi, from Chronicles of the Revolution 1397–1400: The Reign of Richard II, ed. and trans. Chris Given-Wilson (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1993), 199–239. 54 55

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A variety of other chroniclers describe Richard’s actions from this period in damning detail, though they do not deploy terms such as “tyranny” explicitly.58 The Confessio’s single reference to 1392/1393 as the regnal year when Gower “thenke make” his poem does not, then, necessarily suggests completion of this passage or the poem as a whole in that time; the Henrician Prologue’s references to “tirannie and crualte” in Richard’s England could spring from any time in the 1390s before Richard’s deposition, but they resonate most closely with the language of the chroniclers from 1397 onward. The ending of the Confessio does offer more clues to a political moment for Gower’s shift in loyalties and catalogs specific contemporary crimes, but these once again offer a range of possible dates. In Book 8, the first recension manuscript group provides a passage explicitly supporting Richard’s kingship in what can be seen as a direct response to criticisms from his later reign: In [Richard] hath evere yit be founde Justice medled with pite Largesce forth with charite. In his persone it mai be schewed What is a king to be wel hewed, Touching of pite namely: For he yit nevere unpitously Ayein the liges of his lond, For no defaute which he fond, Thurgh cruelte vengaunce soghte. (VIII.*2991–*97)

Abstaining from vengeance against “the liges of his lond” here indicates the years after May 1388, when Richard was restored to his power after two years with the Lords Appellant in effective control, until July 1397 when Richard finally arrested three of the main Appellants who will be celebrated in Cronica tripertita (Gloucester, Arundel, and Warwick). These lines, then, could have been written in 1390 or in 1393, but could as well be written well after. The passage goes on to compare Richard to the sun, whose light is always “briht and feir” (VIII. *3010) behind the clouds and who “doth what lith in his power” (VIII.*3016) to save his people, before dedicating 58  See Caroline Barron, “The Tyranny of Richard II,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 41.103 (1968): 1–18.; and Given-Wilson, Chronicles.

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the poem to this king in the following lines. Despite the praise there are clear indications in this passage’s allegorical language that all is not well in the kingdom: the dark clouds and “despaired” weather (VIII. *3012), the great debates “appesed” (VIII. *3023), the eschewing of vices (VIII.*3032) all indicate those troubles in England whose management lies within Richard’s powers, but whose continuing existence clearly lies beyond the limits of Richard’s control. This language again presumably precedes Richard’s actions against the Appellants in 1397. A more specific date can only be speculative. Assigning these lines to 1390 is one reasonable guess, but other possibilities abound. At the end of this passage in the Ricardian conclusion the poet prays continually in order “to make [Richard’s] regne stable” and attempts to do his king “pleasance” through “the povre bok” he hereby presents to the king (VIII.*3038–*51). Another trope emerges here, however, connecting John Gower the poet who presents Richard this book to John Gower as Amans inhabiting the text: a sickly old age. Both the Ricardian version and the Henrician version here use exactly the same language: identical lines in parallel positions (VIII.*3053 and VIII.3125) assert that Gower managed to write the poem “[s]o as seknesse it suffer wolde.” Both contain the passage wherein Venus casts Gower/Amans out of her Court of Love and into the category of old men beyond any sensual interests but books (VIII.2908–27). Similarly worded lines in parallel positions (VIII.*3070 and VIII.3127) describe the poet as (respectively) “feble and old” or “feble and impotent.” Quite simply, if Gower wrote this passage in the late 1380s would he present himself as aged and sick? We have no actual dates for Gower’s birth (generally the guess is between 1330 and 1340).59 Our other main reference to Gower’s self-identification as old and sick include “Est Amor,” line 26: “vetus annorum Gower” [Gower old in years]. In the short Latin poem “Quiquid homo scribat” Gower states that he stopped writing because of blindness one year (or two years in some versions) after Henry IV took the throne.60 One more time we are struggling 59  For the Gower life records see John Hines, Nathalie Cohen, and Simon Roffey, “Johanne Gower, Amiger, Poeta: Records and Memorials of his Life and Death,” in A Companion to Gower, ed. Sian Echard (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2004), 23–42. 60  The opening line of the poem specifies the onset of Gower’s blindness in the first year of Henry’s reign in the Trentham manuscript version, in the second year of Henry’s reign in Cotton, Harleian, and Glasgow. For these poems see John Gower, The Minor Latin Works with In Praise of Peace, ed. R.  F. Yeager, with In Praise of Peace, ed. Michael Livingston (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 2005).

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with little guidance in a realm of speculation. This evidence can be no more than circumstantial, as are so many of our arguments about Gower’s dates. We can say that Gower unsurprisingly speaks more about his old age in the final years of Lancastrian rule before his death in 1408; we can guess that references to his feeble old body are more likely to come closer to 1400 than to 1390 given those Lancastrian-era references and common sense about aging.61 The ending in this group also includes a self-contained passage, wherein Venus directs Amans (at that point identified as our poet John Gower) to greet Geoffrey Chaucer: “And gret wel Chaucer whan ye mete, As mi disciple and mi poete: For in the floures of his youthe In sondri wise, as he wel couthe, Of ditees and of songes glade, The whiche he for mi sake made, The lond fulfild is overal: Wherof to him in special Above alle othre I am most holde. For thi now in hise daies olde Thow schalt him telle this message, That he upon his latere age, To sette an ende of alle his werk, As he which is myn owne clerk, Do make his testament of love, As thou hast do thi schrifte above, So that mi court it mai recorde.” (VIII. *2941–*57)

Chaucer in this passage is identified in “his daies olde” and ready to “sette an ende of alle his werk.” Both of these phrases could refer to any time before his death in 1400; the argument for an earlier date (such as the late 1380s) for this passage, though, is inherently more difficult to make than any later point leading up to his demise. Even if we grant a sympathetic sense of traumatic aging for Chaucer after the death of his wife Philippa in 61  Also see R.  F. Yeager, “Gower in Winter: Last Poems,” in The Medieval Python: The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones, ed. R. F. Yeager and Toshiyuki Takamiya (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 87–103; Yeager, in order to explain this passage if it were completed in 1386 when Gower would be in his later forties or early fifties, advances the idea that Gower may be representing himself as old in relation to Richard’s youth.

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1387, the poet that took on in the 1390s a massive frame-tale poem parallel to Gower’s own Confessio might arguably be seen as vigorous and not ready to “sette an ende of alle his werk.”

6  Conclusion From very slim evidence—four brief marginal glosses with an inconsistent record of survival and agreement, one reference to the regnal year 1392/1393 in the main text, and the variants for one short passage at the beginning and another at the end that constitute some 200 of the 32,000 lines in English that comprise the Confessio—Macaulay argued that Gower wrote an initial version dedicated to Richard by 1390, revised his poem and changed his dedication to Henry Lancaster at some point in 1390/1391 after some unspecified acts of Richard offended Gower’s moral principles, then consolidated this prescient move by presenting a third version in 1392/1393, long before Henry’s accession to the throne in 1399.62 Other textual variants prompted Macaulay to subdivide the first two of these three “recensions” so that altogether Gower was credited with revisions leading to six distinct incarnations of the poem across three years. There can be little doubt that some textual variants in the Confessio are authorial and owe their existence to England’s dramatic change in kings; these authorial revisions do not, however, represent three distinct dedications and five or six issues of this massive poem by Gower as declarations of his new positions, whether or not we believe in a scriptorium overseen by the poet himself to support such an enormous enterprise. Macaulay’s arguments for this tripartite model, and for Gower’s supervising hand over the several issues, ultimately fall back on two manuscripts probably produced in Gower’s lifetime—San Marino, Huntington Library, MS Ellesmere 26.A.17 (called Stafford); and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 3—that for Macaulay embodied the second and third recensions respectively and were (in Macaulay’s view) likely to be close to Gower’s own work if not supervised by him directly. These two deluxe manuscripts produced near to Richard’s overthrow and Henry’s accession to the throne do offer a tempting subject for temporal arrangement since they are the earliest witnesses to the poem and since all surviving Ricardian or “first recension” manuscripts were produced later. However, Stafford and  Works, 2.xxv–xxvi.

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Fairfax in fact use the same passages favoring Henry at the beginning and the end of the Confessio; only one early manuscript (Bodley 294) combines a Ricardian Prologue dedication with a Henrician concluding dedication, and that manuscript is an outlier produced by the one scribe in this period who, we can be sure, had access to both Ricardian and Henrician exemplars. The rest of Macaulay’s three-recension model is supposition now over a century old. Textual stemmata are, of course, filled with examples of later manuscripts preserving early readings, so the lateness of the “first recension” witnesses is not conclusive in itself; substantial variant passages in the Confessio could represent rolling revisions by Gower that were not part of distinct public offerings or presentations. Nonetheless, until a new editor produces a revamped critical edition, we cannot say that any more than one authorial form of the Confessio exists with two sets of dedication passages and a few additional body passages, probably authorial. The narrative that emerged from the Macaulay-Fisher model was that of a poet deeply engaged with the shifting politics of the 1390s, issuing to readers in this period at least three distinct versions of a great public poem in the vernacular as responses to Richard’s changing approaches to kingship, and in the process showing great foresight by backing Henry Bolingbroke long before any observer would have predicted the latter’s ascension to the throne. This narrative simply must be abandoned by current and future scholars. The evidence for dates of composition drawn from the Ricardian and Henrician passages is ambiguous at best. A single line in the Henrician Confessio referring to 1392/1393 cannot bear the entire weight of a reconstructed history of three recensions that witness three states of Gower’s political consciousness; the Quia summaries of Vox also reveal the contrasting Ricardian and Henrician apologetics that we would expect, but not a three-stage conversion to the Lancastrian cause. The family of manuscripts Macaulay calls the second recension does contain a unique set of added and canceled passages, but these manuscripts do not contain anything that reveals an intermediate political position beyond some brief blandness in a colophon, probably scribal. Since Gower was alive when the earliest of this group (Stafford) was produced, the more likely conclusion to draw from this evidence is that Gower was actively revising the Confessio as a whole around the time he wrote the Henrician passages for the Prologue and conclusion. Whether Gower intended these changes to be permanent remains an open question, but they do not themselves constitute a separate state of the poem with any political resonances. Furthermore, all surviving Ricardian manuscripts were produced

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after Henry’s ascension to the throne and after Gower’s retirement if not his death; thus it may be the case that all the 32,000 lines of the Confessio that are not those short Ricardian or Henrician passages represent textual variations developed later in the manuscript tradition. Once the proposed dates of the three recensions are uncoupled from the textual state of surviving witnesses, those textual states themselves must be questioned.

CHAPTER 4

Gower’s Late State

The scholarly broom can be gratifying, but limited. Dropping the second recension, and its imagined narrative of Gower’s politics in 1392, is not enough to renew our understanding of the Confessio or its political valences. Uncoupling Macaulay’s or Fisher’s dates from the Ricardian and Henrician passages also leaves us with no clear path toward understanding the dedications in terms of their historical moments or their relationship to the surviving witnesses. It is tempting to throw up our hands at this insecure state of knowledge and simply adhere to Macaulay’s base texts. This approach, however, sidesteps a raft of crucial questions and a growing body of new information about the manuscripts of the Confessio. One consequence of this new information, for instance, is that we have to take into account that the various revisions in Vox and the Confessio surfaced while the crisis of Richard’s deposition and Henry’s troubled early reign played out, and while Gower embraced an emerging career as Lancastrian laureate poet through a striking array of new work. Rather than sorting by politics and prophecy in the unknowable circumstances of Gower’s 1390s, we should sort by the known quantities of manuscript content and dates of production. We would then examine the Confessio and Vox as products of Gower’s late state. Thanks to Peter Nicholson and, more recently, Derek Pearsall, we can dispose quickly of questions about textual families as a basis for the three-­ recension theory. In the following chapters we will assemble much new

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Fredell, Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27964-5_4

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information about scribal circles and decorators that supported what may be the founding moves in the creation of a literary canon for England, built in substantial part by Gower’s early manuscripts. This topic has been prominent, and somewhat controversial, among Middle English scholars in recent years. Little has been said about another important division among these manuscripts: those that compile the Confessio with other poetry by Gower and those that present the Confessio in splendid isolation. These two forms of the Confessio from its earliest days present two portraits of Gower as well: Gower the Lancastrian laureate and Gower the Ricardian love poet. These two versions of Gower, unsurprisingly, align exactly with the Henrician and Ricardian versions of the Confessio in its early manuscripts. Consequently, two substantially different fictions of witness compete in the public identity of the poem from its earliest appearances.

1   The Nicholson Demolition As I mentioned in Chap. 1, it is important to recognize the limits of these differences: the vast majority of this massive poem offers no significant textual changes between the two versions discussed here. A common assertion associated with the Macaulay three-recension model is that Gower is a serial reviser. No doubt passages connected to Richard II and Henry IV were revised, but beyond that this assertion no longer holds. As Derek Pearsall, co-editor of the Catalogue of Gower Manuscripts, has said recently: Gower never ‘revised’ the Confessio, only tinkered with the first hundred lines and with the last two hundred or so in order to demonstrate the new circumstances of his Lancastrian allegiance. Scholars’ attempts to match the different forms of the poem in the manuscripts, on any large scale, to those new circumstances, are misdirected.1

Gower’s reputation among modern scholars for serial revising relies on the only textual collations ever done for the Confessio, again by George Macaulay. Macaulay’s three recensions include six states in chronological 1  Derek Pearsall, “Early Revision in the Text of Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Journal of the Early Book Society 24 (2021): 247–262. On this point Pearsall cites the articles by Peter Nicholson discussed below, and Joel Fredell, ‘The Gower Manuscripts: Some Inconvenient Truths’, Viator, 41 (2010), 1–20 (6).

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sequence so that, for instance, the first recension subdivides into an initial form, an intermediate form “corrected and revised to some extent,” and a “fully revised” form. Presumably the two second recension states and the third recension would stem sequentially off the fully revised form of the first recension, but he attempts no textual analysis to support that.2 Since Macaulay’s edition no scholar yet has stepped forward with an avowed purpose to analyze the textual history of the Confessio anew. It was an act of some bravery, then, when in the 1980s Peter Nicholson began to destroy Macaulay’s tripartite model in a series of articles which uncovered how little authorial revision can be found anywhere in the Confessio—including the dedications themselves. Nicholson’s work speaks for itself, but a brief summary here should clear the way for new discussion. First Nicholson eviscerated Macaulay’s subdivision of the “first recension” into three states, arguing convincingly that the textual variants in question were far more likely to be later scribal error than Gower’s revisions.3 In a second article he pointed out that the vast majority of textual variants defining the “third recension” in MS Fairfax 3 (the base manuscript for Macaulay’s edition and one of the two earliest surviving manuscripts of the Confessio) have no particular textual authority: the first layer of scribal production in Fairfax 3 uses a “first recension” text, as Macaulay himself recognized; the other manuscripts Macaulay calls “third recension” all derive from Fairfax or a parallel exemplar and so (aside from the prologue and epilogue) represent a textual family line rather than one final authorial revision.4 Furthermore, the “second recension” embodied in Stafford (the other of the two earliest surviving manuscripts of the Confessio) owes its existence in Macaulay’s scheme largely to a few passages which could certainly be authorial, but whose reasons for appearing in a cluster of manuscripts seem to be more about issues of layout than content, or indeed ideology, since these passages fit neatly into the page

 Works, 2.cxxxiii-cxxxv.  Peter Nicholson, “Gower’s Revisions in the Confessio Amantis,” Chaucer Review 19 (1984): 123–43. 4  Peter Nicholson, “Poet and Scribe in the Manuscripts of Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” in Manuscripts and Texts: Editorial Problems in Later Middle English Literature, ed. Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 1987), 132–136. See, however, Nicholson’s more recent thinking about Fairfax as close to Gower in “Gower’s Manuscript of the ‘Confessio Amantis’,” in The Medieval Python: The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones, ed. R. F. Yeager and Toshiyuki Takamiya (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 75–86. 2 3

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designs of the manuscripts in question.5 The body of Macaulay’s “second recension” thus is no more than another minor family of textual variants, a family which itself can be divided up into at least two groups that testify to cross-contamination very early in the surviving corpus.6 Fairfax and Stafford remain important early witnesses, but are themselves “complex product[s] of several layers of revision” (in Nicholson’s words) that argue for commercial scribes not necessarily connected to the author and for a later history of cross-contamination.7 Finally, Nicholson opened the question of the dedications themselves, detailing how little difference exists between the content and themes of the two dedications beyond the few lines addressed specifically to Richard and Henry, and how little evidence of contemporary political reference occurs in any of the three supposed recensions otherwise.8 Nicholson uncoupled the textual variants in the body of the Confessio we actually have from a hypothetical structure of separate editions issued by the poet. In the process he reduced the scope of the revised dedications themselves and eliminated most of the traditional support for a scenario in which Gower issued rewritten versions of the poem several times over the first few years of the 1390s.9 If and when the Confessio manuscripts are 5  Nicholson, “Gower’s Revisions,” 138–141. On these passages in Stafford see also Pearsall, “Early Revision.” 6  Three of the added passages that for Macaulay define this stage (V.*6395–*6438, V.*7086–*7210, VII.*3207–*3360) are common to all “second-recension” MSS; however, the first group, consisting of Stafford and Sidney Sussex 63, is missing three added passages that appear in other “second recension” manuscripts: Add. 12,043, Trinity R.3.2, Bodley 294, Nottingham, and Taylor 5. Further complications in this “recension” include Bodley 294’s use of the Ricardian Prologue with the Henrician Epilogue and Nottingham’s use of the Chaucer allusion with the Henrician prologue. The Stafford scribe may have had access to a different exemplar of Confessio Books V and VII at around the same time Fairfax was produced, both during Gower’s lifetime. See Works, 2.cxxxiv. 7  Nicholson, “Poet and Scribe,” 141; at 130, n. 5 Nicholson cites Doyle and Parkes, “Production,” 163–210, in support of a model of commercial copying of Confessio MSS. 8  Nicholson, “Dedications,” 161–165. Simpson, Sciences and the Self, 294 n. 21, challenges this point most substantively, arguing that the “revised epilogue” is still about Richard and drawn from Vox VI. 545–80 and 1159–1200; on these revisions in Vox, however, see further below. 9  John Fisher, in John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New York: New York University Press, 1964), 304–305, provides a list of Confessio manuscripts whose first recension category is divided into three subcategories that follow Macaulay but also postulate a chronology of three authorial revisions within the recension: unrevised, intermediate, and revised: five separate states of revision in all.

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collated and analyzed anew we may have a much firmer grasp of this great poem’s publication history in Lancastrian England; Nicholson’s analysis argues that few (if any) revelations are likely about its history in Ricardian England. The variant passages in Macaulay’s second recension do define a textual family and are likely to be authorial. Still, the earliest witness to these passages, the Stafford Confessio, was issued during Gower’s lifetime and so the variant passages in Books V–VII might easily have come from his pen near to its time of production. As Malcolm Parkes has shown, politically charged revisions to Vox clamantis by a cluster of London scribes were happening during the first decade of the fifteenth century, and around the same time at least two of these scribes replaced the dedication passages in the Fairfax Confessio and made substantial further additions.10 The dedication passages, and their relationship to Lancastrian constructions of the Confessio, deserve re-examination.

2   Finding New Language for a New King Inevitably, the first question to ask is Gower’s role in the remarkable flourishing of his poetry during the rule of Henry IV, crucial periods for Hoccleve and Lydgate as well. Along with substantial numbers of deluxe Confessios produced in London, skilled and professional manuscripts in these years presented Vox clamantis, Cronica tripertita, the long French poetic sequences Traitié selonc les auctours pour essampler les amantz marietz and Cinkante Balades, and a raft of shorter Latin poems. Although there is little support for Fisher’s speculation about a scriptorium under Gower’s supervision at St. Mary Overys, Gower was demonstrably active in producing poetry around the years of Richard’s deposition and Henry’s early rule. He may have overseen manuscripts himself wherever they were produced.11 10  Malcolm Parkes, “Patterns of Scribal Activity and Revisions of the Text in Early Copies of Works by John Gower,” in New Science out of Old Books, Manuscripts and Early Printed Books: Essays in Honour of A.I. Doyle, ed. Richard Beadle, and A.J. Piper (London: Scolar, 1995), 81–121; Parkes summarizes the passages, 83–84, as four “datable stages” of revision that follow Macaulay’s model. 11  One recent study argues that Gower’s hand is in an important collection of his poetry issued near to the time Stafford was produced, both probably in London: London, British

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Overall a dozen or so Gower manuscripts survive that probably came out of London or Westminster after Henry’s accession but before Gower’s death in 1408.12 By comparison a single Gower manuscript (the unique witness for the Miroir de l’Omme) survives from the quarter-century before 1399, in this case around 1380, and thus much earlier in his career.13 The sheer amount of activity demands a new line of investigation into Gower’s work in the last decade of his life and its potential effects on the texts in the manuscripts we have for the Confessio, all of which date from around 1399 at the earliest. This investigation must face a fundamental set of questions about the Ricardian Confessio: do the Ricardian dedications faithfully preserve an unsullied product of Gower’s composition earlier in the 1390s? To what extent, if any, were these dedications revised by Gower or by scribes after 1400? How does the Chaucer Library MS Add. 59,495, known as the Trentham manuscript; see Sebastian Sobecki, “Ecce patet tensus: The Trentham Manuscript, In Praise of Peace, and John Gower’s Autograph Hand,” Speculum 90 (2015): 951–959. There Sobecki follows the identification of “scribe 10” in Parkes, 94, to argue that Gower’s hand also occurs in the early London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A.iv manuscript of the Vox. If so, Gower himself was responsible for adding Unanimes esse and Presul ouile regis to “finish” the cluster of short texts. These poems were supplemented later by two more from Scribe 9, Cultor in ecclesia” and “Dicunt scripture,” the latter poem clearly postmortem as it instructs readers to pray for Gower’s soul. On the status of Trentham as a compendium produced over time see Parkes, 92–96. 12  These manuscripts arguably include the Trentham anthology of short poetry; Confessio manuscripts Fairfax 3, Stafford, Morgan M.690, Christ Church 148, Corpus Christi 67, Laud Misc 609, and St. John’s B.12; Vox and Cronica manuscripts Hunterian 59, Cotton Tiberius A.IV, Harley 6291, All Souls 98, and Huntington HM 150 (which contains Vox and three short Latin poems, but not Cronica). Terry Jones, “Did John Gower Re-Dedicate His Confessio Amantis Before Henry IV’s Usurpation?” in Middle English Texts in Transition: A Festschrift Dedicated to Toshiyuki Takamiya on his 70th Birthday, ed. Simon Horobin and Linne R.  Mooney (Woodbridge, UK: York Medieval Press/Boydell and Brewer, 2014), 40–74, dates all Confessio manuscripts except the original text of Fairfax 3 after Richard’s deposition. On dates for the Confessio manuscripts also see Chap. 6 below. Parkes, 87–94, argues that the four Vox/Cronica manuscripts were probably produced before 1408, but continued to be revised after Gower’s death. Kathleen L.  Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390–1490 (2 vols. London: Harvey Miller, 1996), 2.65–66, argues that the decoration in HM 150 is London work c. 1400; its production appears entirely independent from the other four early Vox manuscripts. 13  R. F. Yeager, “John Gower’s French Audience: The Miroir de l’omme,” Chaucer Review 41 (2006): 111–37, argues that the Miroir was completed in the late 1370s, noting the final (and possibly added) section on the Virgin as an appropriate tribute to the patron saint of his new home in St. Mary Overys. The single surviving manuscript, Cambridge, University Library MS Add. 3035 can be dated c. 1380.

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encomium attached to the Ricardian dedication in Confessio Book 8 fit in to the activities of Gower, or those of scribes who were also copying and promoting The Canterbury Tales, in the years following Chaucer’s death in 1400? Did the vast bulk of the Confessio, apparently untouched by political controversy, remain the same text as that of its presumed composition before 1399, or do the Ricardian Confessios we have witness a later revision with more changes than the replacement of the Henrician dedications alone? Any such revisions would be invisible to us, assuming they were absorbed into (or taken from) the Henrician text. Thus, are the second recension group of variants merely the tip of the iceberg for Gower’s revisions to the Confessio around the time of Richard’s deposition and Henry’s ascension? In this period we already know that Gower was busy revising Vox, though in that case the greatest task may have been assemblage rather than new material.14 At the same time the poet went to the drawer so devotedly that he took a canceled passage from Vox praising Richard’s kingship and with relatively few changes retooled that material into a poem celebrating Henry’s kingship: “Rex celi deus.”15 This strategic recycling offers one clear example of Gower’s revision located with some precision historically. If we were to look outside the Confessio for a model to apply to the question of how Gower revised from some presumptively early Ricardian state to a later Henrician state, Vox to Rex may be our best option, in large part because the changes are subtle enough that they would not be detectable if we did not have the earlier version for comparison. The first eight lines of both sources, reaffirming God’s role as king of kings, are identical. The following lines may provide the most distinct variation, since they identify the kings themselves in a few strokes:

14  John Gower: Poems on Contemporary Events: The Visio Angliae (1381) and Cronica Tripertita (1400), ed. David R.  Carlson, trans. A.  G. Rigg (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 2011), 5–8. 15  Works, IV.416, first pointed out that 34 out of the poem’s 56 lines were adapted from Vox VI.xviii; also see R. F. Yeager in his notes to the poem in The Minor Latin Works of John Gower with In Praise of Peace, eds. R. F. Yeager and Michael Livingston, trans. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Press, 2005), 42. On the structure of Rex celi deus as a version of a legal brief or libellus see Candace Barrington, “The Spectral Advocate in John Gower’s Trentham Manuscript,” in Theorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England, ed. Andrea D. Boboc (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 94–118.

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Humbly I beseech that He spare my youthful king, Whom may his favored realms see sound and old.16 (Vox 6.*1167–*68*) He, the head of kings, by whom kings are justified, I pray that He rule you, pious king, and your kingdom. Gratifying, supervening grace sent you to us.17 (Rex 9–11)

These lines shift Gower’s concern for the young King Richard’s survival to the usurper Henry’s submission to God’s rule, after the “grace” Henry’s deposition of Richard gave to “us.”18 The lines also begin an original passage in “Rex” describing the depths of evil endured by the people and the renewal of the land’s life and health (12–20). After this passage, however, Gower constructs a prayer for the future out of the language of the Vox passage in cento-like form: May He who gave your first realms those to come confirm, That you, a great man, may in honor use.19 (Vox 6.*1187–*88) May He who gave you your first rule confirm your future rule By whom you are great, and able to enjoy great honor.20 (“Rex” 26–27)

Within an almost identical vocabulary is a subtle shift in Gower’s presentation of royal agency from Ricardian to Henrician versions: “Ut poteris” in the first quote asserts Richard’s conditional but unambiguous possession of royal power derived from God; “Quo poteris” in the second quote reiterates that God is the source of Henry’s royal power and honor rather than emphasizing his power manifest in the world.

16  “Ipse meum Iuuenem conseruet supplico Regem, /Quem videant sanum prospera Regna senem; Vox texts are from Macaulay’s edition, translations mine. Rex text and translation are from Yeager, Minor Latin, 42–43. 17  “Ipse caput regum, reges quo rectificantur, / Teque tuum regnum, Rex pie, queso regat. /Grata superveniens te misit gracia nobis.” 18  Yeager, Minor Latin, in his note to this line points out that the Record and Process records Henry accepting the throne “thorgh þat right þat god off his grace hath sent me”; Yeager says further that this cornerstone of Lancastrian propaganda re-emerges elsewhere in “Rex celi deus,” as in lines 19 and 25. The text quoted here for Henry’s speech does not follow Yeager’s cited source but rather Carlson, Record and Process, 58. 19  “Qui tibi prima dedit, confirmet Regna futuri, /Vt poteris magno magnus honore frui.” 20  “Qui tibi prima tulit confirmet regna futura, /Quo poteris magno magnus honore frui.”

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Many of the lines that follow are reconstructed with a similar subtle shift in the relationship of godhead to immanent royal power: May the High One from on high eternal praise (give to you).21 (Vox 6.*1185) May God on high give to you all the good in the world.22 (“Rex” 29)

The shift from God giving Richard praise (laudis) to God giving Henry good(s) (boni) defines not only a change in Gower’s loyalties but a transformation of his position in two senses: the newly Lancastrian poet reasserts God’s role in human events witnessed by Henry’s ascension to the throne, but also reasserts with a newly laureate discourse Henry’s subordination to God’s will: May every evil cease, lest it do harm, and may God give to you the world’s every good.23 (Vox 6.*1173–*74) May all that is evil disperse harmlessly, and all That is honorable may God grant to be yours.24 (“Rex” 31–32)

Richard’s royal entitlement includes every good (omne […] bonum); Henry’s entitlement is to all that is honorable (omne/Est quod honorificum). Not only do Henry’s rewards from God shift notably to conditional status. The poet himself takes a moralizing stance on divine right that may be the consequence of disappointment with Richard but nonetheless moves from an enthusiastic embrace of royal prerogative to advocacy for controlled and scrupulous choice. Similarly, the poet’s wishes for his king’s future transfers agency to the divine: May our leader’s empire increase, and his years.25 (Vox 6.1181*) May Christ increase your empire and your years. (“Rex” 45)26  “Que magis eterne sunt laudis summus ab alto.”  “Quicquid in orbe boni fuerit tibi summus ab alto.” 23  “Omne malum cedat, ne ledere possit, et omne /Est quod in orbe bonum, det deus esse tuum.” 24  “Omne quod est turpe vacuum discedat, et omne /Est quod honorificum det Deus esse tuum.” 25  “Augeat imperium nostri ducis, augeat annos.” 26  “Augeat imperium tibi Cristus et augeat annos.” 21 22

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Vox in the lines surrounding this quote moves beyond any direct mention of God to elaborate a series of wishes or prayers for Richard whose hortatory subjunctives obscure any direct assignment of agency. “Rex celi deus,” however, asserts the role of Christ in Henry’s two bodies: his empire and his mortal life. Gower’s conclusion to this passage of prayers originates an epithet for Richard, “pious king” [pie rex], that would become standard in the poet’s laureate group for Henry, including “Rex celi deus,” though not in this passage27: May you stand even more, O pious king, exalted in conquered orb.28 (Vox 6.*1183) May your end be in peace, may you dominate a dominated world.29 (“Rex” 47)

In the line to Richard Gower’s apposition of pious king and exalted conqueror suggests, if it does not declare outright, an equivalence between these two manifestations of kingship. For Henry, by contrast, the apposition locates a dominating reign within a world already ruled by God and balances a dominated world with a peaceful end or (in another reading of the Latin) peace as a final goal or purpose. Gower’s revisions here in some respects parallel those in the Confessio dedications. In the Prologue it might be surprising to realize that Thames encounter aside, Gower has very little to say about Richard: To whom bilongeth my ligeance With al myn hertes obeissance In al that ever a liege man Unto his king may doon or can […] Prayend unto the hihe regne Which causeth every king to regne, That his corone longe stonde. (Pro. 25*–34*)

These seven lines embedded in the Confessio’s origin story are so lacking in detail that they seem little more than boilerplate laying out the basic 27  In “Rex celi deus” Gower uses this epithet for Henry in lines 10, 21, 33, 51, and 55. Also see below the discussion of “O recolende.” 28  “Stes magis, o pie Rex, domito sublimis in orbe.” 29  “Sit tibi pax finis; domito domineris in orbe.”

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obligation to any king, and hardly the enthusiastic endorsement that we see in the Vox passage. While the story of the Thames encounter and Gower’s discussion of his literary intentions that follow are surely the poet’s own words, the opening passage of praise could easily have been modified by Gower or scribes at any point to create a fictional locus without committing too far to Ricardian sympathies. The dedication to Henry in the Henrician Prologue is even shorter; Gower dedicates the book to him “Wyth whom myn herte is of accord,” knowing that: The hyhe god him hath proclaimed Ful of knyhtehood and alle grace. (Pro. 85, 88–89)

The rest of the Henrician dedication does not include anything else about Henry or an origin story for the poem. Instead it famously assails the instability of the times defined by the reference to Richard’s sixteenth regnal year, or 1392/1393. Much the same effect can be seen in Gower’s revisions in Book 8. Leaving aside for the moment the praise of Chaucer, this passage again in its Ricardian form undoubtedly celebrates the king, but in fairly impersonal terms that emphasize the king’s worldly powers. The headverse to the Ricardian dedication in Book 8 sets up a kind of equivalency between praise of Christ and praise of the king: For the praise of Christ which you, O Virgin, gave birth to, Let there be praise of Richard, whom the leopard’s scepters honor. At his orders I have completed the songs that were undertaken; Let England, born of Brutus, read them, thus made perpetual.30 (after 8.*2970)

The headverse begins as if it were a hymn praising Christ but in the second line turns into an encomium to Richard. That encomium itself becomes embodied and transhistorical in Gower’s poem, hinting at a godlike power in Richard’s original “orders” (precepta).31 The Henrician passage begins

 “Ad laudem Cristi, quem tu, virgo, peperisti, Sit laus Ricardi, quem sceptra colunt leopardi. Ad sua precepta compleui carmina cepta, Que. Bruti nata legat Anglia perpetuata.” Latin text from Works, 2.468. 31  The basic tagline “Ad laudem Christi” is widely used, but also begins early hymns such as “Ad laudem Christi procerum” (to St. Bartholemew) and “Ad Christi laudem virginis” (to St. Cecilia of Rome). 30

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with what seems to be a direct quote from the antiphon Ad laudem Cristi, but in this case invoking Christ to spare an unstable England: Spare, I pray, Christ, the people who rejoice together; England should not undergo severe, supreme king, stay Correct each state, frail absolve our debt Hence, thanks to God, we flourish in this happy place.32 (after 8.2970)

Rather than reading Gower’s poem in an England born (nata) in the ancient world of Felix Brutus and become perpetual (perpetuata), in this Henrician vision England exists in a state of frailty and debt (fragiles […] reatus). As in the parallel Prologue passage, Henry’s name is not invoked directly while the state of the kingdom becomes the focus of attention. The marginal gloss at the opening to the passage that follows (in a few early Ricardian manuscripts) offers another fervent prayer: Here at the end of the book describing with commendable praise, as it is worthy to do, the honorific and virtuous qualities of the most illustrious ruler his lord king of England, Richard the Second, on behalf of the safe preservation of his estate he very devoutly entreats the Almighty in prayer.33 (at 8.*2971)

A few Henrician manuscripts offer here a parallel marginal gloss:

 “Parce precor, Criste, populus quo gaudeat iste; Anglia ne triste subeat, rex summe, resiste. Corrige quosque status, fragiles absolue reatus; Vnde deo gratus vigeat locus iste beatus.” Latin texts and translations from John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell Peck, trans. Andrew Galloway (3 vols. Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 2004–2013) unless otherwise noted. The antiphon referred to here: “Parce, Domine, parce populo tuo: ne in aeternum irascaris nobis.” (Spare, Lord, spare your people: Do not be angry with us forever). Its origins are in Joel 2:17 (given here in the King James Version): “Let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep between the porch and the altar, and let them say, ‘Spare thy people, O Lord, and give not thine heritage to reproach, that the heathen should rule over them’: wherefore should they say among the people, ‘Where is their God?’” 33  “Hic in fine libri honorificos que virtuosos illustrissimi Principis domini sui Regis Anglie Ricardi secundi mores, sicut dignum est, laude commendabili describens, pro eiusdem status salubri conseruacione cunctipotentem deuocius exorat.” 32

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Here in the fourteenth year of King Richard he prays for the estate of the kingdom, which is in danger because of long-held division from excessive adversity. 34

Here as well the gloss points to the fragile state of England while avoiding any mention of Henry, though as we saw in Chap. 3 this gloss includes a date early in Richard’s reign that became the basis for Macaulay’s recension model. The following passage begins with fifteen lines virtually identical in both versions.35 The passage goes on to the praise of Richard as a godlike king: In [Richard] hath evere yit be founde Justice medled with pite Largesce forth with charite. (VIII.*2991–3)

Shortly thereafter Gower compares Richard to the sun, whose light is always “briht and feir” (VIII. *3010). In the main text, unlike the surrounding headverses and Latin gloss, allegorical language signals bad weather and troubled governance, ending with the news that the poet prays continually in order “to make [Richard’s] regne stable” (VIII.*3037). Nonetheless, the poet passes quickly on to the “simple bisinesse” (8.*3053) of his poetic production and its reception as wisdom or play, earnest, or game (8.*3054–*67). This enticing sequence may obscure the huge hierarchical gap between king and poet Gower has just outlined, but what follows is Gower’s argument that his game in the Confessio is love, and “[w]han game is best, is best to leve” (8.*3087). Reading the Henrician version of this passage is not only a longer enterprise due to its additional seventy-two lines, but a far more sober experience from start to finish. Gower may bid farewell to his book by asserting that he tried to “make a book […] betwene ernest and game” (8.3109–10). His final vow, however, to “do pleasance/To hem undir whos governance/I hope siker to abide” (8.3135–87) leads to a final pronouncement on love that is anything but lighthearted: 34  “Hic in anno quartodecimo Regis Ricardi orat pro statu regni, quod a diu diuisum nimia aduersitate periclitabatur.” The gloss appears at 8.2971 in Fairfax 3, Stafford, Sidney Sussex 63, and Bodmer 178. 35  Only one line changes: from “Enspired to himself semblable” (8.*2976) to “Hath schape to be perdurable” (8.2976).

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Such love is goodly forto have, Such love mai the bodi save. Such love mai the soule amende, The hyhe god such love ous sende Forthwith the remenant of grace; (8. 3165–69)

In between these solemn bookends is a stern evaluation of royal power that can demand the allegiance of the various estates of society, but must always strive for virtue first in itself under dread of correction from God (8.3054–3105). Again, nothing in this long passage can be taken directly as support for Henry. Instead, however much it might be criticism of Richard’s rule, both its tone and its content echo the laureate poetry Gower was to write in the turbulent early years of Henry’s reign. One such Latin poem, “O deus immense,” dedicates over 100 lines to a minute examination of these same issues of royal character, ending with the threat of royal destruction: “Therefore let the king see how he travels in his chariot,/And take care lest he lose a wheel and suffer a fall” (101–2).36 Although this poem is generally seen as a product of 1399, the absence of any reference to Henry was enough that one of the poem’s editors was willing to see “O deus” as evidence that Gower “had not yet given up hope for Richard.”37 Scribes in Gower’s own time seem to have had a similar problem. The headnote in one early witness for this poem refers to Gower as a poet “still living” who “composed concerning the most recent rule of princes.”38 The headnote in three other early witnesses assures readers Gower “recently composed” “O deus” “in the time of King Richard, while he lived.”39 The historical qualifier “while he lived” (dum vixit) could in this construction refer to Gower or Richard, adding to the confusion. The ambiguity of “recent rule” in one headnote, the ambiguity of reference to the living and the dead in the other headnote, and the general lack of specific identifiers for relevant princes in the poem itself all establish a hazy but interesting space for the poet as witness and counselor to royalty. “O deus,” like the Henrician passage at the end of  “Rex igitur videat cum curru quomodo vadat,/Et sibi provideat, ne rota versa cadat.”  The Major Latin Works of John Gower, trans. Eric W. Stockton (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1962), 36; cited by Yeager, Minor Latin Works, 16. 38  In All Souls 98 the headnote reads “Carmen quod Iohannes Gower, adhuc vivens super principum regimine ultimo composuit.” 39  In Cotton Tiberius A.iv, Harley 6921, and Hunterian 59 the headnote reads “Carmen quod Iohannes Gower tempore regis Ricardi dum vixit ultimo composuit.” 36 37

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the Confessio, delineates the larger problem of fixing a date for Gower’s assumption of a laureate mantle while speaking his truth to power: not even contemporary scribes seem to be certain of how to locate Gower’s tonal shift, but it is somehow connected to Gower’s position as moral critic along with any change in loyalties.

3   The Late State Model Following Nicholson’s logic and Pearsall’s conclusions almost forty years later, a model for Gower’s revision would identify one basic text of the Confessio (including a few substantial authorial variants, preserved in Stafford and related manuscripts, in books V, VII, and VIII) with dedications to Richard II and Henry IV composed at two stages, probably in the mid-1390s and the end of the 1390s respectively. Such a model, particularly given the substantial variants in the Stafford family, would argue that Gower’s materials were not particularly codified (by, e.g., a series of presentation manuscripts so desired by the Macaulay/Fisher narrative) when the earliest surviving manuscripts appeared around 1400, and that the Confessio did not necessarily have a separate public existence before the accession of Henry IV.40 Since the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Confessio may date from after the deposition of Richard, we must consider the effects of Lancastrian patronage and ideology for all elements of the poem, Ricardian and Henrician, given the inconvenient fact that the texts of the Confessio we have come from those survivors.41 The manuscript evidence also troubles long-held assumptions about the Confessio’s circulation during Richard’s reign. We still have one material reason to believe that before Richard’s deposition Gower’s poem had a public life with the Ricardian dedication: Fairfax, a deluxe manuscript, 40  Works, 2.cxxxvii, clii, argued that Gower’s Henrician prologues and epilogues were originally intended for private circulation during Richard’s reign. This modest claim does not serve well the political arguments made by Fisher and later critics. Staley, “Gower,” 78–79, responds to Macaulay by asserting that Gower was addressing “England” as well, but advances no evidence for the poem’s public circulation in the 1390s. The manuscript record does not offer any evidence that Gower’s poems circulated outside of a coterie readership (probably including Geoffrey Chaucer) before the last years of the 1390s; on possible members of this coterie see Parkes, “Patterns,” 96–98. 41  On the importance of the Confessio for early Lancastrians see Kate Harris, “Ownership and Readership: Studies in the Provenance of the Manuscripts of Gower’s Confessio Amantis.” PhD thesis, University of York, 1993.

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had its opening and closing folia replaced; those replacement folia feature the Henrician prologue and epilogue. Consequently, it seems logical to assume that Fairfax in its original form contained the Ricardian dedications before Henry’s accession to the throne. However, that assumption is partially undercut by the fact that separate scribes replaced beginning and ending folia in Fairfax, so the revisions were not part of one coherent political update prompted by the change in kings.42 Another equally reasonable possibility, for the substituted opening at least, is that the new folia replaced signs of a bespoke manuscript being recycled for another owner rather than politically inconvenient passages. Malcolm Parkes has shown that both scribes involved in the Fairfax replacements (one of whose hands Parkes detected inserting the Vox revisions discussed above) were part of a London/Westminster group regularly producing and revising commercial manuscripts of Gower’s poetry in the first decade of Henry’s rule, including Vox and the Henrician pamphlet poems added to so many deluxe manuscripts in this period.43 The change in folia for Fairfax, then, has no definite material association with 1399; one or both substitutions may have occurred a few years later. Given that Ricardian dedications are common in deluxe Confessio manuscripts during Lancastrian rule (including its princes as owners), there is no evidence that Ricardian dedications had to be suppressed for political expediency; again the excised folia of Fairfax do not bear all the weight of this supposition. Furthermore, the first scribe of Fairfax and the scribe of Stafford (whose hands have not to date been found elsewhere) cannot be dated before Richard’s fall, since their Bastard Anglicana could have been written in the last decade of the fourteenth century or the first decade of the fifteenth. Manuscript decoration in these two cases suffers the same range of uncertainty, particularly the confusing heraldry, though the iconography of the Nebuchadnezzar miniatures might offer some clues.44 Stafford’s opening folio, for instance, has a strange set of symbols that could not be meant as heraldry for a manuscript presented to any of the dignitaries 42  Parkes, “Patterns,” 90, argues that his scribe 5 (also the main scribe of the Trentham manuscript) replaced the epilogue at some point after 1399; his scribe 4 replaced the prologue in a first stint at some indeterminate date, but scribe 4’s second stint, which replaced the last leaf added by scribe 5 and added a series of Latin texts and Traitié, must have come after scribe 5’s work and after Gower’s death in 1408. 43  Parkes, “Patterns,” 86–96. 44  Joel Fredell, “Reading the Dream Miniature in the Confessio Amantis,” Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 22 (1995): 61–93.

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alluded to here. At the least, there is no way to explain in heraldic terms this combination of swan—the symbol of the Bohun in-laws of Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, killed by Richard’s agents in 1397, and the Lancastrian ostrich feathers and scrolls on what looks like the sable livery colors of the Black Prince, let alone the collared lion on a hat above a shield quartered with royal colors but not charged with the royal lions and fleur de lis.45 In fact, David Carlson’s recent work on 1399 offers another way to read this swan, lion, and ostrich feathers—as figures in pamphlet-like allegories, since it is in pamphlet poems like “Ther is a Busch” rather than formal heraldry where Thomas of Woodstock is identified as a swan.46 There are no definites in such a case, but this border is unlikely to indicate a pre-1399 presentation to Henry of Lancaster, particularly since the manuscript ends up in the hands of a family named Downes in the sixteenth century. There are a number of contenders for this identification; none of them elevated, so it is difficult to imagine Stafford deaccessioned from a royal library and reaching such middling hands so soon.47 Instead, Stafford’s decoration is more likely to create a kind of historical artifact linked to the events of 1399 for a wealthy Lancastrian supporter. Parkes identified the revising scribes in Fairfax as part of an active commercial enterprise. Such an enterprise fits Peter Nicholson’s earlier arguments that most of the variant passages in Stafford and later witnesses to the Confessio are sized so conveniently that scribes on their own initiative probably plugged in these variants from multiple exemplars.48 In short, the poem’s variants could, like the heraldry, be evidence of commercial production rather than author-supervised presentation editions. Furthermore, Fairfax or any now-lost near descendants could easily have influenced (or “contaminated”) the scribal production of Stafford and 45  On the heraldry in Stafford see the conflicting views of Macaulay in Works, 2.clii-cliii; Fisher, John Gower, 124–125; A. I. Doyle, “English Books In and Out of Court from Edward III to Henry VII,” in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (London 1983) 163–181; and C. W. Dutschke with R. H. Rouse, et al., Guide to the Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Huntington Library (2 vols. San Marino 1989) 1.40–41. 46  Carlson, “English Poetry,” 388–389, notes the widespread use of animal allegory for the major political players in 1397–1399  in Gower’s Cronica Tripertita as well as pamphlet poetry from the period and suggests that this allegory may have had its basis in heraldry. 47  On the Downes family see Dutschke, 1.40–41. 48  Nicholson, “Poet and Scribe,” 130–142.

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many later manuscripts given the common London/Westminster context. Macaulay simply did not consider that Fairfax could be close in many readings to the “first recension” London, British Library, MS Bodley 902, for instance, because exemplars much like Fairfax were available among the London/Westminster stationers who produced Bodley 902. The relatively minor and localized variant passages emerging first in Stafford at the same time and general location as Fairfax do not necessarily suggest a “foul papers” state of affairs, but do argue for an unsettled state of the text passing into the hands of scribes at some distance from Gower himself during his lifetime and close in time to the change in kings. The only variant passage in Macaulay’s “first recension” aside from the dedication and epilogue is the famous compliment to Chaucer (VIII. 2941–2970), which seems intimately connected to the Ricardian final prayer but in fact is replaced in the Henrician ending by a passage of the same number of lines, indicating that it is a textual unit which could have easily come from an exemplar with either ending; in one early manuscript with the Henrician Prologue and Epilogue the Chaucer allusion is plugged in just this way.49 The fact that the Chaucer passage emerges among Confessio witnesses some years into the Lancastrian period after Chaucer’s death, and primarily in association with the Ricardian dedication, argues instead for an artifactual status for all of these elements: the Chaucer allusion was intended as a historical fiction in the sense that it calls up an earlier literary moment as if it were the present, as if the passage helped to establish the Confessio’s historical moment within Richard’s reign by means of invoking another of its greatest poets—and the one who did not survive Richard’s death by a long enough stretch to test the politics of his laureateship. What begins to emerge from a discussion of the Confessio manuscripts as products of their time is that Gower’s poem was being constructed in two ways during its greatest time and place of production: London from 1400 to 1420. In the first few years of Henry’s reign only Confessios with the Henrician dedications survive, including at least one closely associated with the similar flurry of Vox manuscripts revised, if not written originally, at the same time. A substantial fashion for the Ricardian Confessios emerges soon in deluxe productions by London’s finest miniaturists and border artists—a different group from those who worked on Fairfax and 49  Nottingham, University Library, Middleton Collection MS WLC/LM 8 (formerly Wollaton Hall; Macaulay’s Λ); see Works, 2.466, n. to  *291; also see Nicholson, “Poet and Scribe,” 136.

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Stafford—and a similarly distinct group of scribes. The possibility arises that the poem’s presentation in these two forms in early Lancastrian England reflects different thematic understandings of the Confessio. If we grant these contemporary producers and audiences the potential to read intelligently, they may also have constructed the poem in two forms following the famous interpretive disjunction between a stable, moralizing “bok for Engelondes sake” that stands “at [Henry’s] commandement” (Pro. 24, 84) and a “bok for king Richardes sake” far less determinate in its meaning which “may be wisdom to the wise” but also “pley to hem that lust to pley” (Pro. *24, *83–*84). One version of the poem lends its stern moral stance to the nascent Lancastrian dynasty; the other version takes a step away from current politics by invoking a time when literary play fit into a fiction of love courts centered around Queen Anne and the poets indebted to John of Gaunt. The latter stance not only harmonizes with the Ricardian play of Chaucer’s poetry, but the return to that play in the poetry of Hoccleve and Lydgate.

4   The Added Texts and the Two Presentations The differences between these two versions of Gower’s great English poem need not rest on the dedication passages alone, however. Henrician Confessios in this period regularly had attached at the end a complex set of texts by Gower with potent moral content, while the early Ricardian Confessios added nothing at all from Gower that might obtrude on the great poem’s “pley.”50 The most common attachment to Henrician Confessios was Gower’s Traitié selonc les auctors pour essampler les amantz marietz, an examination in seven French balades of marriage and the consequences of its destruction.51 Traitié’s use of exemplary stories, mostly 50  Three later Ricardian Confessios are compiled with texts by Chaucer, Lydgate, Hoccleve, and others but not with any of Gower’s shorter poems: Harley 3490, Society of Antiquities 134, and BL Add. 22,139. 51  Confessio manuscripts containing Traitié and “Est amor” include Fairfax 3, Harley 3869, Bodley 294, Trinity R.3.2, Wadham 13, Bodmer 178, Wollaton WLC/LM 8, Osborn fa. 1, and Taylor 5. On Traitié see most recently the Introduction to John Gower’s Traitié, ed. and trans, Peter Nicholson (John Gower Society, 2022), https://johngower.org/nicholson-tratie/ [sic]; R. F. Yeager, “John Gower’s French,” in A Companion to Gower, 148–151; and Cathy Hume, “Why did Gower Write the Traitié?” in John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition, ed. Elisabeth Dutton, John Hines, and R. F. Yeager (Cambridge: Brewer, 2010), 263–75. See below for Traitié in two Vox manuscripts.

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tragic, from ancient authors not only parallels the Confessio’s much larger canvas but also emphasizes a moral framework for love in human culture: there is little, if any, “pley” in Traitié, as its very few readers can confirm.52 This interpretive stance is reinforced in a short poem in Latin by Gower, “Est amor,” attached to the end of Traitié in all but a few cases.53 “Est amor” begins with yet another cento-like borrowing from Vox—fifteen lines that define love in some thirty-six oxymorons and other assorted metaphors for warring elements.54 The third stanza begins “Lex docet auctorum” or “the law of the authorities teaches” that due to our carnal natures it is safer to marry. It is hard not to restate these lines as “better to marry than to burn” and make explicit the reference to the famous Pauline passage.55 The authorities, in other words, are the fathers of the Church, and they teach the holy Law of scripture. If anything in these Henrician manuscripts enforce interpretive closure on questions of love, “Est amor” performs that role: moving from the eternal ambiguities of exemplary narratives in the Confessio and Traitié to the fixity of oxymoronic binaries and a final appeal to the Church’s teachings embodied in its law. In the conclusion to the Confessio old Gower leaves the court of Venus for the enclosure of a study; in the conclusion to “Est amor” “Gower old in years” encloses himself within the safe limits of the marriage bed. 56 Among the interesting features of these added poems is that they seem not to have been part of the original presentation for the Henrician Confessio. No early manuscript survives, at least, with these poems added by the scribal hand who wrote the main text. Through these 52  Traitié may play a similar role in the Trentham anthology, though it serves as part of a French diptych with Gower’s Cinkante balades, surrounded by shorter poetry in English and Latin. For an argument that places Cinkante balades at the center of Trentham see Arthur W. Bahr, “Reading Codicological Form in John Gower’s Trentham Manuscript,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011): 219–62. 53  The most notable case is not a Confessio manuscript but Trentham, whose copy of Traitié is followed by the usual Latin explicit beginning “Quis sit vel qualis,” and then the “Lex docet” stanza without the previous two Est amor stanzas 54  “Est amor” 1–15; text and translation from R. F. Yeager, Minor Latin Poems. As Yeager notes here, this passage is drawn from Vox v.ii, though its ultimate source is the famous passage in Alan of Lille’s De Planctu Naturae (Complaint of Nature) met. V; see Alan of Lille, Literary Works, ed. and trans. Winthrop Wetherbee (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 55  I Corinthians 7:9; Yeager in the notes also suggests a reference to 1 Corinthians 7:1–2. 56  “Hinc vetus annorum Gower, sub spe meritorum/Ordine sponsorum tutus adhibo thorum.” “Est amor,” 25–26.

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supplementary texts the Henrician Confessio was made to resemble more closely Vox, whose earliest surviving manuscripts had a similar set of attached short poems by Gower. Traitié and its accompanying cluster of poems make up a substantial part of these additions to Vox, but the additions begin with Cronica tripertita. In early Vox manuscripts this piece of unapologetic Lancastrian propaganda appears as a continuation of Vox by means of a long prose explicit, added along with Cronica, that connects the two poems. Cronica begins, interestingly, with the assertion that its poet has written this poem to follow a recently finished little book, Vox clamantis.57 Both the suggestions that Vox is a “little book” and “recently composed”(libello […] nuper […] composuit) argue that Gower did not see Vox as a work of the 1380s but a recently revised collection whose main emphasis may be on the Visio Angliae section: a historical narrative rendered partially in animal allegory that forms a coherent literary predecessor to Cronica’s tripartite historical narrative in animal allegory.58 Cronica’s Prologue lays out that narrative in three parts: the work of humankind (principally the three Appellants featured as the swan, horse, and bear); the work of hell (Richard’s tyranny from 1397 onward) and the work in Christ (the transfer of power). The “work in Christ is to put proud persons down from on high and to lift the lowly up,” accomplished in the downfall of the “tyrant” Richard and the raising up of the “pious” Henry.59 Echoes from the epithet “pious Henry” featured in “Rex celi deus,” and the human work of sustaining peace central to In Praise of Peace (both probably assembled by Gower near in time to Cronica) preserve the cosmic grandeur of historic change while firmly subordinating Henry’s agency to

57  “After a full treatment in the brief book in verse that John Gower late composed called ‘The Voice of One Crying Out […]” (Postquam, in quodam libello qui “Vox clamantis’ dicitur quem Iohannis Gower nuper versificatum compusuit […]). 58  Three nobles overthrown by Richard and his supporters (Thomas Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester; Richard FitzAlan, Earl of Arundel; and Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick— the only one to escape execution) are added to Vox’s extended animal allegory, signified in the “vulgar” by the swan, the horse, and the bear respectively. On these animal allegories see most recently John Gower, Poems on Contemporary Events, ed. David Carlson, trans. A. G. Rigg (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 2011), 248. 59  “Opus in Cristo est deponere superbos de sede et exaltare humiles […] odiosum Ricardum de solio suo proiecit, et pium Henricum omni dileccione gratissimum cum gloria sublimari constituit.” Cronica Prose Prol. Latin text and English translation (respectively) from Carlson and Rigg, 248–9.

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God’s housekeeping.60 The collections in early Vox manuscripts in this respect emphasize Gower’s laureate role as political wise man before the addition of Traitié and various pamphlet poems, an emphasis that shifts substantially when the Confessio is the anchor text. Nonetheless, in both cases the moral conversations set up by these collections became complex indeed, pairing the Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilentia, a historicized look back at the “plague” of vice in the time or Richard II, with laureate Latin poetry celebrating the reign of Henry IV, and with a French balade sequence defining an austere and moral space for love narratives.61 In effect, both Vox and the Confessio are reconceived as anchor texts for Gower anthologies like the Trentham manuscript. Not surprisingly, two scribes were at the center of this coherent redefinition of the Gowerian book. The surviving evidence indicates that the earliest manuscripts of both the Confessio and Vox were produced originally to present these great and massive poems alone. Considering the two earliest manuscripts of the Confessio, Stafford does not have any poems added to its copy; Fairfax 3 has a long cluster of attached texts added by a later scribe. Called “scribe 4” by Malcolm Parkes, this figure not only transforms the end of Fairfax 3 but also becomes a principal revising scribe who added changes and supplementary texts to four of the earliest manuscripts of Vox.62 Parkes’s “scribe 5,” who reconfigured Fairfax 3 before scribe 4 added a new set of changes and clusters of shorter texts, principally wrote the Trentham anthology of Gower’s poetry in the early years of Lancastrian reign and worked on two of the early Vox manuscripts after scribe 4.63 If any scribes in London producing early works by Gower may be closely associated with the poet, these two are the most likely ­candidates 60  Compare the opening line of Cronica’s Prologue: “The work of humankind is to seek out peace and follow after it” (Opus humanum est inquirere pacem et persequi eam) to Gower’s first major statement of his theme in In Praise of Peace: “Sustene pes oghte every man alive” (Praise 71). 61  The poem presents itself in a historical present tense, but the prose headnote positions the poem in the past during a plague of vices: “unde tempore Ricardi Secundi partes nostre specialius inficiebantur” [by which our realms were especially infected during the reign of Richard I]. 62  Scribe 4 adds the major clusters of supplementary texts (including Traitié) in Hunterian 59, All Souls 98, and Harley 6291. He begins Cronica in Cotton Tiberius A. iv, but breaks off after 18 lines; a number of Gower’s shorter poems are added (without Traitié), probably after 1410, by another scribe whose hand has only been found in this example. See further Parkes, “Patterns,” 87–90. 63  Parkes, “Patterns,” 90–91.

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by far. As Malcolm Parkes has shown, along with a few other associates scribes 4 and 5 added many small revisions to four early manuscripts of Vox and the Fairfax 3 Confessio; scribe 4 also added the principal supplementary texts in all but one of these five early manuscripts.64 The presence of Traitié in these early Gower manuscripts from London/Westminster may be ascribed to scribes 4 and 5 either directly or indirectly. Scribe 4 added Traitié and “Est amor” to the Fairfax Confessio, along with the Quia unusquisque colophon and two short Latin poems.65 We can also narrow down the dates for this reconception of Gower’s great English and Latin poems in dialogue with later and shorter poems that are overtly connected to the reign of Henry IV. One of those poems, Eneidos bucolis, contains a variant passage that assumes Gower’s death. This variant occurs in scribe 4’s copy of the poem in Fairfax 3, and so scribe 4’s entire set of additions was almost certainly done after 1408.66 This same scribe added these poems, along with Cronica tripertita in the Hunterian 59 manuscript of Vox, probably for the first time since Quia and Eneidos are in their “premortem” versions—containing internal references that assume Gower is alive.67 However, scribe 4 then added another set of poems to this manuscript after Gower’s death, on a bifolium that contains an indulgence for Gower’s soul and a posthumous version of Rex celi deus along with O deus immense, but follows with the posthumous

 Parkes, “Patterns,” 86–94.  Stafford alone among the early Gower manuscripts has no additional texts and no known associations with the Parkes group of scribes. The early Vox manuscript Huntington MS HM 150 contains Vox without Cronica though it also contains in the same textura hand a trio of short Latin works R. F. Yeager calls “poems of social conscience;” see further below. The three short poems in HM 150 are (in order) Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilencia, “De lucis scrutinio,” and “O Deus immense.” 66  Parkes, “Patterns,” 90; the other added poem is the Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilencia. However, as Parkes points out, scribe 4 also wrote the Quia colophon in the same stint, which uses the premortem phrasing described in the note below. 67  Quia’s premortem version includes the phrase “dum tempus […] inter labores et ocia” (in the time between work and leisure), found only in Hunterian 59 among the early Vox manuscripts; its posthumous form substitutes the phrase “dum vixit” (while he lived) in All Souls 98, Cotton Tiberius A.iv, and Harley 6291. Eneidos in Hunterian 59 begins with a headnote containing the phrase “Iohanni Gower super consummacione suorum trium liborum” (John Gower upon the completion of his three books); the other three early Vox manuscripts substitute the phrase “in memoriam Iohannis Gower” [in memory of John Gower] in the headnote. See further Parkes, “Patterns,” 85. 64 65

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form of the “Eneidos.”68 Scribe 5’s interaction with the early Vox manuscripts also argues strongly that he entered his revisions both before and after 1408.69 This evidence is not conclusive, but it does point to a period around Gower’s death for these reconceptions of the Henrician Confessio that emphasize love’s role in defining an orderly moral sphere rather than offering playful disruption.70 The evidence also argues for a set of decisions about how to present the Confessio taken independently from the author, who was either close to death or beyond mortal concerns at the time of these additions.71 In political terms, the probable time scribe 4 was revising these Vox and Confessio manuscripts into overdetermined vessels for moral rectitude was the period during or after Henry’s health collapse in 1405, leading to the formation of a Council on 16 November of that year led by Prince Henry, Archbishop Thomas Arundel, and Sir John Tiptoft, and inaugurating Arundel’s reassumption of the role of Lord Chancellor in 1407–1410.72 Vox, at least, must be associated with Arundel, given Gower’s elaborate dedication of the poem to the Archbishop that begins the All Souls 98 manuscript. Dating the main text of All Souls 98, including the dedication, is difficult, but the assumption that this dedication must have been written before 1399 is undercut by its opening identification of “old and  In the Hunterian 59 version of “Rex” the phrase “dum adhuc vixit […] composuit” (he composed while he yet lived) is added to the headnote; Parkes, “Patterns,” 88. 69  Parkes, “Patterns,” 90, argues that scribe 5 “was a contemporary of Scribe 4, since [scribe 5] worked on [Fairfax 3] before [scribe 4] and [Harley 6291] after [scribe 4].” Scribe 5’s revisions in Harley 3869 include an erasure of scribe 4’s additions after 1408 (91). Parkes Scribe 5 also added revisions to the early Vox manuscript Cotton Tiberius A. iv. No evidence, however, indicates that these two scribes collaborated directly. 70  Notably, Cronica is not included among the texts added to the Henrician Confessios, probably due to its close association with Vox, which it follows immediately in these four early Vox manuscripts. Gower himself apparently calls Cronica a “sequal chronicle” (una cum sequenti cronica que Tripertita est) in the headnote to Quiquid homo scribat found in Cotton Tiberius A. 14, Harley 6251, and Glasgow 59. Huntington HM 150, also an early Vox manuscript, has no known associations with the scribal group Parkes found in the other four, and only three short poems (Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilentiai, “De lucis scrutinio,” “O Deus immense”) included in the same textura hand. 71  The evidence for scribe 4’s activity, for instance, indicates that he added Cronica and Traitié to Hunterian 59 before Gower’s death, judging from the premortem readings in the poems from that stint discussed above (n. 39); however, in All Souls 98 scribe 4 added these two major poems after Gower’s death, indicated by posthumous readings in surrounding poems from the same stint. See further Parkes, “Patterns,” 87–9. 72  On this crisis and Arundel’s return to secular power see most recently Chris GivenWilson, Henry IV, 299–316. 68

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blind John Gower.”73 In “Quicquid homo scribat“ Gower declares “It was in the first year of the reign of King Henry IV/When my sight failed for my deeds.” Although we cannot date the composition of that poem securely, it may be useful to note that the poem survives as a late addition among a cluster of “final poems” put in by later scribes, not scribes 4 or 5.74 One other interesting bit of evidence for examining Gower’s late career is the revision of one of his laureate poems, “O recolende bone.” This poem once again is part of the cluster that scribe 4 added, apparently both before and after 1408.75 However, an unidentified hand has revised the poem in two ways: in all its early witnesses the second word “recolende” (venerable) has been written over erasure, and the original word is lost. This apparent shift to an emphasis on veneration for Henry strongly implies that the revision occurred after the king’s early years and probably during the period of his health crises, when the status of an elder rather than a man in his full vigor would be the appropriate reference for Henry, particularly in a court context where Arundel and Prince Henry had taken effective control of the monarchy. The other erasure, lines 17–21 of O recolende, survives in two witnesses. In a passage following a direct declaration of love by the poet (lines 15–16, the first two lines in the quote below), Gower’s original lines offer laureate counsel to a king assuming the throne of a tyrant: These things, pious king, Gower writes to you as one who loves you: Where mercy will go, there no grace will perish; Whenever one drinks with a solemn vow, he cannot thirst for popular opinion, But will show himself satisfied, when he fully attains glory: Not thus it happens, whenever a tyrant dies; When he makes great claims for himself, he departs smaller by half; Wherever merit is questionable, chance determines a man’s fate.76

 All Souls MS 98, fol. 1, line 1: “senex & cecus Johannes Gower.”  “Henrici quarti primus regni fuit annus/Quo michi defecit visus ad acta mea;” in Yeager Minor Latin, lines 1–2; see further Parkes, “Patterns,” 91–94. 75  In Hunterian 59 scribe 4 added the poem before 1408; in All Souls 98 and Harley 6291 scribe 4 added the after 1408; in Cotton Tiberius A.IV another scribe [Macaulay’s C9] added the laureate group after scribe 4’s revisions. See further Parkes, “Patterns,” 87, 89. 76  “Hec, ut amans quibit Gower, pie rex, tibi scribit: Quo pietas ibit, ibi gracia nulla peribit; Dum pia vota bibit, tua fama satire nequibit, Plena set exhibit, cum laudeque plena redibit: Non sic transibit, vbicumque tirannus abibit; Cum nimis ascribit sibi magna, minora subibit; Vt meritum querit, sors sua fata gerit.” 73 74

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The “solemn vow” (pia vota) plays deliberately on Gower’s familiar epithet for Henry as “pious king” (pie rex) and cautions against a sense of elevated self-worth in comparison to the tyrant predecessor: not only does an inflated persona inevitably bump up against the deflationary slings and arrows of the world, but the very act of stepping away from Christian humility and into questionable merit risks greater exposure to the sublunary forces of fate. Similarly, the poet’s ability (quibit) to love the king is balanced by the assertion that the king’s pious vow cannot desire the full plate of fame (“tua fama satire nequibit”).77 Three of the early witnesses produced by the Parkes scribal group instead offer a substantial variant in lines over erasure, where the poet offers a far more positive sense of a regal life in virtue: He who describes himself well will undergo no evil, But will pass away proudly and return to the mercy of God. Thus, one who passes through this life and approaches the work of mercy God marks him; which can be undone by no enemy; Thus will he end who drinks in the deeds of mercy. 78 (“O Recolende,”17–21)

Now the “pietate Dei” (mercy of God) serves as model for the “opus pietate” (work of mercy or piety) that marks a righteous king for a blessed death despite enemy attacks. The new conclusion also neatly repurposes the image of “drinking with a vow of piety” (pia vota bibit) in the opening lines of the original passage in a line that can be read as “drinks in the deeds of mercy.79 Similarly, the poet’s ability (quibit) to love the king in

77  Here I follow Yeager’s translation, but readers should note the use of “quibit” in the first line quoted, which demands a more literal translation: “as one who is able to love you.” This use of the passive verb queo also forms part of the intense rhyming structure of the leonine hexameters, as well as the repetitive play on “nequibit,” lost in the translator’s decision to play on the metaphor of drinking instead. 78  “Qui bene describit semet mala nulla subibit, Set pius exibit, que Dei pietate redibit. Sic qui transibit opus et pietatis adibit, Hunc Deus ascribit: quod ab hoste perire nequibit; Et sic finibit qui pia vota bibit.” 79  In the translation Yeager follows Macaulay in reading the Latin “pius” as “merciful” rather than “pious” or “dutiful in belief.” This translation does suit Gower’s parallel between divine “pietate Dei” and man’s “opus pietate” but tends to obscure the larger set of harmo-

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the original passage is balanced here by the inability of his enemies to harm him (“ab hoste perire nequibit”). In sum, “O recolende” in its original form (thought to be composed by Gower close to Henry’s ascension) imagined the king moving from an initial state of piety to potential loss at the hands of unkind fate. The revised poem, which shows up demonstrably late in the witnesses, not only recasts the king as “venerable,” but in most witnesses emphasizes the safe harbor of a virtuous death. The revised passage is skillfully done and preserves effectively both the tone and the play of the leonine hexameters: in all, these lines are convincingly Gowerian. It is at least possible that Gower wrote the revised passage as late as 1406; even if her were blind at this point, a Miltonic sort of amanuensis could explain this passage and the many smaller revisions throughout the Gower corpus Parkes has attributed to his scribes 4 and 5. Given its depiction of a final phase of the life— and even, rather gently, the prospective death—of Henry IV, the revised passage in “O recolende” argues that if Gower’s was tinkering with his poetry, the best evidence for it occurs well into his Lancastrian phase. Gower’s two great poems appeared in the public eye around 1400 and were revised thereafter along with many of the lesser poems. These masterworks seem to offer profound contrasts in theme, particularly given the appearance of Cronica tripertita in early Vox manuscripts (though not in early Confessio manuscripts) as a “continuation.”80 Nonetheless, another effect of the London scribes transforming manuscripts of single works is that (with the exception of Cronica) the same clusters appear in both compilations. They added Traitié to these early manuscripts of both Confessio and Vox, (Traitié and Cinkante Balades to the Trentham compilation), demonstrating for Lancastrian audiences both Traitié’s importance and Gower’s late return to French poetry that takes up love and morality in narratives much like those of the Confessio.81 Also added to the early manuscripts of both poems is a cluster R. F. Yeager has called “poems of social nies in this passage set up by “pie rex” and “pia vota” in lines 15–16. See Yeager, Minor Latin, 76–77. 80  Gower’s third great poem in his third language, the Miroir de l’Omme, might be said to be a thematic presence by its citation in the Quia colophon and eventually by virtue of its inclusion under Gower’s head in his funerary monument. However, no manuscript survives of his French monumental poem from this period when so many major manuscripts of Gower were produced. 81  Traitié is added to all four early Vox manuscripts revised by Parkes’ scribal group; Yeager article on Gower and French balades.

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conscience.”82 Henrician Confessios for the most part feature only the Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilencia among these proto-laureate poems.83 Gower anchors this poem in Richard’s twentieth year, the historical moment of Richard’s vengeance on the three main appellants featured in Cronica.84 There the poet declares openly his assumption of the role of wise man: Whence I, not a doctor but a dispenser of medicine, […] propose to identify by clear distinction the wounds that are seriously diseased with rottenness in order to direct the doctors to cure them. 85 (Carmen super multiplici Prose 1)

As in the Henrician Confessio passages and the Henrician Vox passages, Gower here establishes his persona as a historical witness whose literary “medicine” anticipates the work of the “doctors” surgically removing Richard, and then Lollard heretics as well (with the zealous help of Henry’s stalwart supporter and apparent Vox dedicatee Thomas Arundel).86 Although we have no evidence to establish whether this poem circulated before Richard’s fall, its regular addition to the earliest Gower manuscripts during Henry’s reign (and Arundel’s fulfillment of doctor’s orders) depends on a fiction of witness to the period of crisis, dated explicitly to the time of Richard’s “tyranny.” As such it provides a Cronica-like narrative without the machinery of animal allegory or its movement into Richard’s deposition and death. These historical boundaries work particularly well with the Confessio’s own fiction of witness, preserving a literary focus on Richard’s final years after the death of Anne and the court of love, while reinforcing the latter’s Henrician passages of national crisis. The early Vox manuscripts, by contrast, consistently add multiple groups of Gower’s later poems, often in a sequence of insertions. 87 Along with Cronica and Traitié two more proto-laureate poems, “O deus  Yeager, “Introduction,” Minor Latin.  Carmen appears in Henrician Confessio manuscripts Trinity R.3.2, Bodley 294, Nottingham WLC/LM 8, Taylor 5, Fairfax 3, Harley 3869, Bodmer 178; in all cases the poem appears with Traitié. 84  “Anno regni Regis Ricardi Secundi vicesimo;” Carmen super multiplici Prose 1. Text and translation from Yeager. 85  “Unde ego, non medicus set medicine procurator […] ut inde medicos pro salute interpellam consequenter declarare propono.” 86  On the dedication to Arundel at the opening of All Souls 98 see above. 87  On the sequence of insertions see Parkes, “Patterns,” 87–94. 82 83

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immense,” and “De lucis scrutinio,” follow Carmen super multiplici.88 “O deus immense” does not hide its intentions as counsel to the king in its opening lines: O boundless God, under whom rule with the sword Some moral kings, some vicious kings, With diverse merits -- thus peace, thus the agitation of strife Make plain the public deeds of their kingdoms: For whatever folly the kings commit, the people are punished; Where evils prosper, where morals are put to flight. Observing the laws ought to be glory and distinction to kings, To which they are sworn from the first by their allotted calling. I consider good counsel to be a heavenly gift, By which in earlier times the kiss of peace concluded the world’s wars.89 (“O Deus,” 1–10)

The question remains whether this poem addresses Richard or Henry. Its manuscript position following the Carmen super multiplici suggests an ongoing fiction of witness to Richard’s final years.90 On the other hand its headnote in the early Vox manuscripts identifies the poem as “[a] poem that John Gower, while he lived, composed concerning the most recent rule of princes.”91 The headnote is maddeningly ambiguous about which 88  All three poems appear in All Souls 98, Cotton Tiberius A.iv, Harley 6291, and HM 150; “De lucis” does not appear in Hunterian 59. 89  “O Deus immense, sub quo dominantur in ense Quidam morosi Reges, quidam viciosi, Disparibus meritis -- sic pax, sic mocio litis Publica regnorum manifestant gesta suorum: Quicquid delirant Reges, plectuntur Achivi; Quo mala respirant, ubi mores sunt fugitivi. Laus et honor Regum foret observacio legum, Ad quas iurati sunt prima sorte vocati. Ut celeste bonum puto concilium fore donum, Quo prius in terris pax contulit oscula guerris.” 90  See George R.  Coffman, “John Gower, Mentor for Royalty: Richard II,” PMLA 69 (1954): 953–64, for a discussion of this poem’s relationship to the charges leveled against Richard in the “Record and Process.” 91   “Carmen quod Iohannes Gower, dum vixit, super principum regimine ultimo composuit.”

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prince this poem might counsel and implicitly criticize, but one possibility nonetheless is Henry. “De lucis” offers an estates criticism in miniature whose concluding stanza neatly summarizes its thrust: O world so abandoned because of the stain of your manifold guilt, Every class in this world now exists as if in a state of transgression. (89–90)

The darkness suffusing this poem may be far more appropriate to Gower’s critique of Richard’s rule than Henry’s, but neither Gower nor the scribes offer us a definite historical moment here. The ambiguities of both poems recede when read with the firmly dated Carmen super multiplici, though this cluster also must be read with another set that appears regularly in the early Vox clusters. This “final” group of Gower poems—“Presul ouile regis,” “Unanimes esse,” “Cultor in ecclesia,” and “Dicunt scripture”—seem to have been composed between 1402 and 1408. 92 They appear in the early Vox manuscripts after “Quicquid homo scribat,” a poem that notoriously manifests in three fairly different forms in its five witnesses; the four versions attached to early Vox manuscripts all contain a headnote connecting this short statement on the end of Gower’s writing career as a capstone to the sequence of Vox and Cronica, and in the three that contain the “final” cluster what appears to be an introduction93: Note here in the end how from the beginning of the chronicle that is called Vox clamantis, together with the following chronicle, which is the Tripertita, covering the time of King Richard II up to his deposition, as well as the coronation of the most illustrious lord King Henry IV up the second year of his reign, according to the different turns of events I the author, though 92  This cluster of “final” poems appear in three of the four early Vox manuscripts revised by the Parkes group, but not All Souls 98. Yeager, Minor Latin, 7, terms these poems the “1402–1408 group.” “Presul ouile regis” is regularly dated to 1402, the year of a great comet visible in England, based on a marginal note to the poem in Cotton Tiberius A. iv: “Nota de primordiis Stelle Comate in Anglia.” [Note on the arrival of a comet in England.] “Quicquid homo scribat,” a valedictory poem, appears in all four of the early Vox manuscripts from the Parkes circle of scribes, as well as in Trentham. 93  Cotton Tiberius A.iv, Harley 6291, and Hunterian 59 contain a prose headnote and a single stanza; All Souls 98 contains a shorter prose headnote and two stanzas; Trentham contains a single stanza without a headnote, appropriate to its separation from Vox and Cronica in that collection.

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unworthy in comparison to other authors, being long concerned especially over what was happening during this time in England, composed in a brief compendium a series of poems of essential reading concerning the various events that occurred. 94

This headnote, if we accept that it was in fact written by Gower, offers compelling evidence for his direct involvement in Lancastrian London with a coherent anthology for his laureate poetry that includes “essential reading”—whether that confident term refers to the Vox-Cronica sequence, the following shorter poetry, or all of it together. All of these concluding poems are quite brief, however essential (“Cultor” is the longest at twelve lines). Read as a group they move from the strain of complaint running through Vox, Carmen super multiplici, and the proto-laureate poems that precede this cluster to meditations on love and eschatology. “Presul” in its seven lines begins the group with the familiar language of plague and darkness addressed to the church: O shepherd, a disease of spots affects the king’s sheepfold, And while you hide the light their plague darkens all […] Greed, not law, now leads an avaricious world; Thus, wherever you cast your gaze there is nothing but bitterness of heart.95 (“Presul,” 1–6)

 “Nota hic in fine qualiter a principio illius cronice que Vox clamantis dicitur, una cum sequenti cronica que Tripertita est, tam de tempore regis Ricardi secundi usque in ipsius deposicionem, quam de coronacione illustrissimi domini regis Henrici quarti usque in annum regni sui secundum, ego licet indignus inter alios scribentes scriptor a diu solicitus, precipue super hiis que medio tempore in Anglia contingebant, secundum varias rerum accidencias varia carmina, que ad legendum necessaria sunt, sub compendio breviter conscripsi.” Cotton Tiberius A.iv, Harley 6291, and Hunterian 59 headnote to the single stanza that in these witnesses begins “Henrici regis annus fuit ille secundus.” 95  “Presul, ovile regis ubi morbus adest macularum, Lumina dumque tegis, tenebrescit pestis earum […] Velle loco legis mundum nunc ducit avarum, Sic ubicumque legis, nichil est nisi cordis amarum.” 94

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In the following “Unanimes,” equally brief, plague imagery is attached to the failure of love to reign supreme, in a meditation that recalls the Henrician passages of the Confessio: The kingdom is strong, where true Love rules. As winter destroys the flower, so division destroys love, And like the plague fosters error and brings on grief.96 (“Unanimes,” 4–6)

“Cultor” returns to the shepherd trope and a plea to the church to turn away from simony. In one who desires to stand upright as Christ’s shepherd Let not Simon be his mediator with Christ. Let the shepherd guiltlessly seek a pure pasture, For the sheepfold where Simon feeds is excessively vile.97 (“Cultor,” 7–10)

The cluster closes with a poem that seems to be a final farewell, leading its most recent editor to speculate that the poem was written in conjunction with Gower’s will.98 Here poverty aligns with death, a sentiment expanding “Cultor”’s condemnation on simony to the human condition in general: They say in Scripture to remember the end of life. Everyone will pass from this world as a poor man.99 (“Dicunt,” 1–2)

What these last poems witness is a transition away from political to apparently ecclesiastical concerns, a shift that may reflect Thomas Arundel’s return to governmental power in 1407–1410 as Lord Chancellor and then to the great equalizer of Death. The added clusters in these early Vox manuscripts from Traitié to “Dicunt scripture” celebrate Gower’s laureate  “Regnum firmatur, ubi verus amor dominatur. Sicut yemps florem, divisio quassat amorem, Nutrit et errorem quasi pestis, agitque dolorem.” 97  “Qui pastor Cristi iusto cupit ordine sisti Non sit cum Cristo Symon mediator in isto. Querat pasturam pastor sine crimine puram, Nam nimis est vile pascat si Symon ovile.” 98  Yeager, Minor Latin, 81. 99  “Dicunt scripture memorare novissima vite; Pauper ab hoc mundo transiet omnis homo.” 96

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status and his continuing role as witness to Lancastrian kingship. They also create an austere vision of England and earthly life that abjures the English vernacular entirely for England’s two languages of the clerical and aristocratic elite. These compilations of Gower’s short poetry predominate among the earliest manuscripts of both major works and position the larger conversation in Gower’s poetry unambiguously in Henry’s time. The Ricardian past is the principal defendant in the court of moral judgment, but the court is in session under the Lancastrian scepter. Within the compilations these scribes who created the Henrician Confessios rely more fully on two fictions of witness, untethered to the historical specifics of the Lancastrian present: living witness within the Confessio’s world order shaped by God’s love (exemplified by tales of love and their explication), supplemented by Traitié’s living witness within the order of marriage (exemplified by tales of love and their explication). Additions to the Ricardian manuscripts, then, seem all the more directed toward presenting an independent fiction of witness: a version of the Confessio calculated to read as if it were purely an artifact of an earlier time when the poet was alive, cheerful, and interested in the play of love associated with Richard’s court. Early Ricardian manuscripts of the Confessio have few, if any, additional poems attached either by their original scribes or by revisers. By far the most common addition is the Quia colophon in the premortem version, in keeping with the fiction of the Ricardian Confessio’s historical context pre-1399.100 These versions of the Confessio also simply never include Traitié, “Est amor,” or any of the other laureate poetry that sharpened the point of moral Gower, at least not in the first decade or so of their production.101 And as we shall see in the next section, the Ricardian Confessios also do not share in what seems to have been Gower’s original page design for the Confessio, a main text block (arranged on the page in two columns in the typical London design) surrounded with substantial marginal summaries. Even the addition of the Quia colophon in Ricardian Confessios can be seen as one more Latin prose commentary brought into the main text 100  Morgan M.125, Bodley 902, St. Johns 34, Society of Antiquaries 134, Egerton 1991, Royal 18.C.22, Corpus Christi 67, Laud 609, Bodley 693, Add. 22,139, St. Catherine’s 7, Morgan M.126, Selden B.11, and Newberry 33.5. 101  Later Ricardian versions of the Confessio appear in collections with high moral purpose; in Society of Antiquaries 134 a Ricardian Confessio (dated s. XV med. in Pearsall and Mooney, Descriptive Catalogue, 144) is surrounded by Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady and Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, then followed by Walton’s translation of Boethius’s Consolation.

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column and one whose praise of Richard preserves the Ricardian version’s artifactual fiction. In Henrician Confessios this academic, multivocal page design continues into many of the shorter poems attached in the first two decades of Lancastrian rule102; Ricardian Confessios in the same period abandon this design, and their producers simply do not deign to include any shorter Gower poems from the Lancastrian period. Whatever their intentions, the effect of these Ricardian Confessios is to preserve the purity of the poem as an artifact of the previous regime, while the Henrician Confessios are reconfigured to establish a laureate vision of moral love in a Lancastrian world.

102  The same page design or ordination also appears in these shorter poems attached to early Vox manuscripts, including Cronica; Vox itself contains relatively few glosses, most of those indexing glosses rather than prose summaries or commentaries.

CHAPTER 5

Gower’s Margins

One other inconvenient fact that supports a late public tradition for the Confessio can also be found in its famous marginal machinery as a whole rather than the usual handful of disputed glosses. Although Macaulay’s edition may give the impression that the enormous marginal machinery is a constant in Confessio manuscripts of all types, that scenario is far from the case (as Macaulay acknowledges in his manuscript descriptions).1 For the most part only early Henrician manuscripts of the Confessio have this elaborate layout2 (Fig. 5.1). Ricardian manuscripts usually have none or almost none of this layout or the marginal content, starting with the earliest  Works, 2.cxxxviii–clxv.  Princeton University, Firestone Library Robert H.  Taylor Collection, Medieval MS 5; London, British Library, MS Harley 3869; Oxford, New College, MS 266; in addition to Stafford and Fairfax. Other Henrician manuscripts are a mixed bag. Some use marginalia but omit substantial amounts: London, British Library, MS Additional 12,043; Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2; Nottingham, University Library, Middleton Collection MS WLC/LM 8; Cologny, Martin Bodmer, MS CB 178; Oxford, Wadham College, MS 13. One uses a mix of marginalia in the margins and in the main text column as do some early Ricardian manuscripts (Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, MS 63, paralleling Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902 and Cambridge, University Library, MS Mm.2.21). One late example (London, British Library, MS Harley 7184) inserts the marginalia into the main text column, but omits some. This mix is further complicated by vagaries in the placement of speaker markers (for Amans and the Confessor) undocumented by Macaulay in his edition or elsewhere; on these and other features of the margins Macaulay ignores see Siân Echard. “Designs for Reading: Some Manuscripts of Gower’s ‘Confessio Amantis’,” Trivium 31 (1999): 59–72. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Fredell, Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27964-5_5

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Fig. 5.1  Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 3, fol. 168v. Speaker markers, gloss. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

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examples: some, including New  York, Morgan Library, Morgan M.690 preserve modest amounts of the marginalia in the text column; others, generally later, eliminate the marginal machinery entirely. Morgan M.690, probably the earliest manuscript in this group, preserves a small number of speaker markers, but moves all glosses (except a few notae in Book V) into the columns of the main text3 (Fig.  5.2) A few later manuscripts of the Confessio in all textual variants have little or none of the machinery left.4 All in all, our understanding of textual relationships between the Confessio and its Latin marginal machinery demands reconsideration as urgently as does the textual tradition for the main text itself. Still, we do have evidence that the massive Latin machinery of the Confessio appears in full flower in Henrician manuscripts during the first decade of Henry’s rule and fades from there; when Ricardian manuscripts appear, the irregular manifestations of the glosses strongly suggest that these designs are incompletely adapted to a tradition already in decline. Thus we can restart discussion on the manuscript evidence for these marginal texts with powerful evidence that this overdetermined academic design, deploying a massive set of marginalia across eight long books, is associated with Henry IV shortly after his accession. The close association of this design with early Henrician manuscripts of the Confessio argues that 3  On dating for Morgan M.690 see further Chap. 6. Most Ricardian manuscripts insert the marginalia in the main text column, sometimes including speaker markers as well as the “summary” glosses. What remains undiscussed is just how many extant glosses (and speaker markers) actually translate into the text column. A few omit the marginalia mostly or entirely (Cambridge, St John’s College, MS B.12; Princeton University, Firestone Library, MS Garrett 136; Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS 6696—an abridged text); at least one omits some summaries (London, British Library, MS Royal 18 C.xxii); one substitutes English glosses for Latin in the main text column (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 35); In all, only one outlier has the glosses in the margin (London, British Library, MS Egerton 1991). On these varying layouts see further Joel Fredell, “Reading the Dream Miniature in the Confessio Amantis,” Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 22(1995): 61–62; Siân Echard, “Glossing Gower: In Latin, in English, and in absentia: The Case of Bodleian Ashmole 35,” in Re-visioning Gower, ed. R.F. Yeager (Charlotte 1998) 237–256; and Derek Pearsall, “The Organisation of the Latin Apparatus in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: The scribes and their problems,” in The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector: Essays in honour of Toshiyuki Takamiya, ed. Takami Matsuda, Richard A. Linenthal, and John Scahill (Cambridge 2004), 106–111. 4  Garrett 136 and Ashmole 35 among the Ricardian manuscripts; Washington, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS SM.l and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 51 among the Henrician manuscripts.

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Fig. 5.2  New York, Morgan Library, MS M.690, fol. 181v. Reproduced by permission of the Morgan Library and Museum

Gower and/or others attached the Latin marginalia during the early years of Henry’s reign but does not prove the point. Two other bodies of evidence lend further support to this association, however.

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First, an elaborate structure of Latin marginalia also appears in two other places in the Gower canon: the manuscripts of Cronica Tripertita (undoubtedly appearing in the early years of Henry’s reign and strongly associated with the first surviving Vox manuscripts) and the first cluster of manuscripts of the French balade sequence Traitié selonc les auctours pour essampler les amantz marietz (whose first surviving witnesses were produced in the early years of Henry’s reign and strongly associated with Confessio manuscripts)5 (Fig. 5.3). Both of the main texts themselves can be tied to Gower’s later association with Henry, and probably the first years of Lancastrian rule.6 Marginalia also.

5  Cronica survives in five manuscripts: Oxford, All Souls College, MS 98, London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A.iv and Harley 6291; Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunterian 59; and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 92. In the first four manuscripts Cronica follows Vox. In Hatton 92 Cronica appears without Vox but with the prologue, prose prefaces, and explanatory notes; followed by “H. aquile pullus,” “O recolende,” “Rex celi Deus,” and “Quicquid homo scribat.” Carlson, 17, argues that this text represents an earlier state of the work though the scribal hand indicates mid-fifteenth-century production date. Also see Jean-Pascal Pouzet, “Southwark Gower: Augustinian Agencies in Gower’s Manuscripts and Texts—Some Prolegomema,” in John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition, ed. Elisabeth Dutton with John Hines and R.  F. Yeager, (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2010), 20–22; Pouzet argues that a well-informed scribe might have used a copy of Cronica originally attached to Vox and followed by the cluster of short poems and suggests the scribe may Roger Walle, though his documented career (1436–1488) may be late for Hatton 92.  Traitié survives in twelve manuscripts and one fragment. All but three of these witnesses follow the Confessio: Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2, fols. 148–152; Cologny, Martin Bodmer, MS CB 178; London, British Library, MS Harley 3869, fols. 186v–190; New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library Osborn MS fa.1, fols. 196–199; Nottingham, University Library, Middleton Collection MS WLC/LM 8, fols. 201–203v; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 3, fols. 186–190; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 294, fols. 197v–199v; Oxford, Wadham College, MS 13, fols. 442v–446v; Princeton, Princeton University, Firestone Library, Robert H.  Taylor Collection MS Taylor 5, fols. 187–191. Traitié also appears in one apparent anthology: London, British Library, MS Additional 59,495 (Trentham) fols. 34–39. The other two witnesses are attached to early copies of Vox: Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunterian 59; and Oxford, All Souls College, MS 98, fols. 132–135. For a list including fragments and a translation see John Gower, The French Balades, ed. and trans. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2011), 21; a fuller consideration of Traitié witnesses is in John Gower’s Traitié edited from the Trentham MS British Library Additional MS 59495, ed. and trans. Peter Nicholson (John Gower Society, 2022), https://johngower.org/nicholson-tratie/ [sic], xiii-xxii. 6  On the undoubted association of Cronica with Henry see most recently John Gower, Poems on Contemporary Events: The Visio Anglie (1381) and Cronica tripertita (1400), ed. David Carlson and trans. A. G. Rigg (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 2011). On Traitié’s date of composition see most recently Robert Yeager, “John Gower’s Audience: The Balades,” Chaucer Review 40 (2005): 81–105, and his introduction to his edition in French Balades, 22.

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Fig. 5.3  London, British Library, MS Additional 59495 (Trentham), fols. 37v-38r. Traitié. © The British Library Board

surround several shorter poems from Gower’s laureate phase, in one case quite densely.7 As in the Confessio, the presence of elaborate Latin marginalia in Cronica and Traitié is strikingly unusual for literary texts of 7  The short Latin poem “De lucis scrutinio” (attached to five Vox manuscripts: All Souls 98; Cotton Tiberius A.iv; Harley 6291; San Marino, Huntington Library MS HM 150; and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 719) has dense marginalia; for the poem’s date ca. 1402–08 see Chap. 4. Other short poems with less dense marginalia include “Quicquid homo scribat,” Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilencia, “Presul ouile regis” (one Latin nota in margin for the poem’s seven lines), and “Dicunt scripture” (one Latin nota in margin for the poem’s eight lines).

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the time. The overdetermined literatus design may seem sensible enough for a Latin pamphlet like Cronica, asserting big-book authority among the hasty hoi polloi of academic scribblers fighting out ecclesiastic and political positions. Such machinery is, to the contrary, virtually unknown among academic pamphleteers in Gower’s England such as Richard Maidstone.8 The presence of Latin marginalia in a French balade sequence like Gower’s Traitié is undeniably odd and unprecedented in England—though I will discuss a French parallel shortly. Traitié may be the more surprising context for Latin glosses, but they imitate the style and content of Confessio glosses in large part because Traitié sets up a small frame-tale narrative focused on matrimony as a specific condition of human love in a fallen world.9 After an opening discussion of marriage as part of God’s plan, reinforced by repeated final lines for each of the three stanzas in the balade, the sequence transitions to its long series of exempla through the assertion “To breach his oath does not befit an honest man” [Sa foi mentir n’est pas a l’omme honeste] (V.7, 14, 21).10 The following narratives are all given marginal glosses, the first combining summary with a clear directive on the moral reading for the exempla to follow: Note here against those who having violated their marriage fell into a punishment of harsh retribution. And first it tells how Nectanabus, the king of 8  Maidstone was a Carmelite author of the pamphlet text Concordia that sought to spread a reverential pro-Ricardian news report of Richard’s reconciliation with the City of London in 1392; this text is preserved in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS e Musaeo 94. Maidstone was an experienced academic pamphleteer, responding to fellow-pamphleteer John Ashwardby in at least two works: Determinacio contra Magistrum Johannem vicarium ecclesiae Sancte Marie Oxoniensis; and Protectorium pauperum. None of these texts use more than occasional indexing glosses for marginal machinery, or as in the case of Concordia interlinear or marginal phrases to mark sections of narrative. On Maidstone and his interlocutors see particularly the Introduction to Richard Maidstone: Concordia, ed. David Carlson with verse translation by A. G. Rigg (Kalamazoo 2003); some discussion of these and other academic pamphleteers (John Trevisa, Richard Fitzralph, Roger Dymmock, William Woodford) can be found in Fiona Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge 1998). 9  Traitié begins in several witnesses with a headnote in French rather than Latin, but that note (like the Latin headnote for Cronica) seems likely to be a scribal improvisation at the time Traitié was added to pre-existing major Gower texts. In Trentham no headnote appears nor any indicator of a new text beyond a blank line and a two-line initial with the first gloss positioned in the margin (fol 34r). On the virtually unprecedented use of glosses for French balades in Traitié also see Nicholson’s substantial discussion in Gower’s Traitié, iii-xiii. 10  Text and translations for Traitié are from Nicholson’s edition, Gower’s Traitié.

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Egypt, begot in adultery upon Olympias, the wife of Philip, king of Macedonia, Alexander the Great, who later by chance killed his father.11 (Traitié at VI.2)

Traitié ends with a Latin stanza in nine lines, “Quis sit vel qualis,” a final imposition of laureate authority that points to a happier future: “We may fear what is to come by the example of what is past” but: He who will reign immaculate must restrain the flesh. And he whose blessed status will surpass all, He will shine, wholly and broadly pleasing to God. (3, 7–9)12

The use of the verb “reign” (regit) here no doubt encourages self-­ governance; nonetheless, the shift of view to the future and “the blessed status” of the man who “will surpass all” may easily be taken as a quiet compliment to a king who, with God’s help, can strive for perfection in earthly governance as in matrimony. An early date for Traitié would suggest Richard and Anne, but the more likely later date after Gower’s marriage in 1398 argues for Henry’s courtship and marriage (in February 1403) with Joan of Navarre. Also odd is the existence of such machinery in precisely one text each for Gower’s Big Three languages, but not the Big Three texts we would expect. The usual Big Three list, as formulated by Gower and/or his circle, would be the Confessio in English, the Miroir de l’Omme in French, and the Vox in Latin.13 Why doesn’t Gower use elaborate marginalia in the weighty Miroir or the Vox to parallel the Confessio? One feature of this list is that the composition of all the works predate Gower’s association with the newly crowned Henry IV and Gower’s revived career as a pamphleteer and laureate poet in the first decade of the fifteenth century. The emphasis 11  “Nota hic contra illos qui nuper sponsalia sua violantes in penam grauis vindicte dilapsi sunt. Et primo narrat qualiter Nectanabus rex Egipti ex Olimpiade vxore Philippi regis Macedonie magnum Alexandrum in adulterio genuit, qui postea patrem suum fortuito casu interfecit.”. Text and translation from Yeager, French Balades. 12  “Exemplo veteri poterunt ventura timeri […] Carne refrenatus qui se regit inmaculatus, /Omnes quosque status precellit in orbe beatus, /Ille deo gratus splendet ad omne latus.” Text and translation of “Quis sit vel qualis” from John Gower, The Minor Latin Works, ed. and trans. R.  F. Yeager; with In Praise of Peace, ed. Michael Livingston (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 2005). 13  These three works are specified in the Quia unusquisque colophon as Gower’s major works and form the pillow for the head of Gower’s funeral effigy; see Works, 4.360.

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on early works among the Big Three includes the Confessio, whose Henrician revisions explicitly identify the Henry Lancaster of the 1390s rather than the enthroned king (however artifactual these identifications may be). The Miroir was certainly an early text and survives in a single manuscript from the 1380s with no sign of marginal machinery.14 Book 1 of Vox was also certainly written in response to the Great Revolt of 1381, and the following books constitute an estates satire that includes an address to a Richard II who remains identified as a young man (puer) through the various revisions noted above.15 Marginalia in Vox, however, consists only of two brief notae at Vox 1.21 and IV.587.16 Although surviving manuscripts of Vox postdate Henry’s accession, it is by no means an overtly Lancastrian poem, addressing the role of Richard only briefly in a wide-­ ranging attack on contemporary society. So two of the usual Big Three were texts that Gower wrote before the political complexities of changing kings, and their lack of marginal machinery may well be a sign of their limited relevance to Lancastrian cultural identity even if Gower were involved in the flurry of London Vox manuscripts issued after 1399. Of the usual Big Three texts, then, only the Confessio survives with Latin machinery that manifests principally in Henrician manuscripts in the first years of the fifteenth century. Instead the Confessio shares this elaborate machinery with one text (Cronica) that is undoubtedly Lancastrian, if not from Henry’s reign, and another (Traitié) probably late if (as seems likely) it was occasioned by Gower’s marriage to Agnes Groundolf in 1398.17 Manuscripts for these poems and their glosses all date from the early fifteenth century (with the possible exceptions of Stafford and the 14  The Miroir de l’Omme survives in Cambridge, University Library MS Additional 3035; Parkes, “Patterns,” 83, dates Add. 3035 to the early 1380s. 15  Vox VI.522–580. 16  No other marginalia are reported in Vox by Macaulay, nor have I observed any others in my own examinations of Vox manuscripts. Summary-like chapter headings in Vox do parallel some of the marginal summaries in the Confessio, though the vast majority of such headings in Vox are three lines or less. Such chapter headings (another standard feature of academic manuscripts) in Vox parallel in particular summaries in the main text column of Ricardian manuscripts of the Confessio. If chapter headings were the earlier form for the Henrician marginalia (and thus associated with the Ricardian dedications in the Confessio), then closer textual analysis of the marginalia may offer some further clarification on whether Gower or others expanded the marginalia for the early Lancastrian manuscripts. 17  On the possibility that Gower wrote Cronica in the late 1390s see Carlson, “English Poetry,” 388–389. Although all manuscripts of Traitié can be dated after Henry’s accession Yeager, “Balades,” 92–93, speculates that Gower presented a manuscript of the Confessio and Traitié to Henry Lancaster in 1392–1393. For my position on the dating of Traitié see further below.

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first layer of Fairfax); they also constitute a representative sampling of Gower’s poetry in Gower’s Big Three languages of English, Latin, and French appearing at a time when Gower was a prominent and living representative of English culture for the Lancastrians. We do not, however, have any surviving package of the three poems put together in a single production (i.e., without the later additions by commercial scribes so typical of early Gower manuscripts). Cronica manifests as a text added on to Vox;18 together these poems create (intentionally or not) a poetic diptych contrasting Gower’s prophetic vision during Richard’s reign with an apotheosis of salvation history under Henry.19 Traitié survives as a text added on to Henrician versions of the Confessio, in early Vox manuscripts, and in the Trentham anthology; attached to Traitié in most cases is “Est amor,” a Latin poem apparently written to celebrate Gower’s marriage in 1398. “Est amor” ends with a stanza that recapitulates the main theme of Traitié: “The law of the authorities teaches that the fleshly journey of good men / Is safer when they have covenants of matrimony” (20–21).20 These close associations suggest that the Latin machinery in Cronica and Traitié was added to create a consistent design for some unified presentation. Such an association remains possible, but Gower’s use of Latin machinery in his other vernacular, French, casts a different light on Gower’s unprecedented use of Latin marginalia in his major work in English, the Confessio. The parallel becomes particularly suggestive if we accept the usual dating of Traitié to a period after Gower’s marriage in 1398. The marginalia in Traitié do have one important parallel in French manuscripts during Henry’s early years, though not by an English poet. To understand the traditions behind Gower’s French poetry generally, and Traitié’s use of learned machinery specifically, we must begin with the circles of John of Gaunt, as R. F. Yeager has recently reminded us.21 Gaunt 18  Cronica’s one copy not linked to Vox survives in Hatton 92, a composite manuscript from the early fifteenth century whose first part includes a prose summary of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and John of Garland’s Integumenta ouidii; Cronica immediately follows. These interlinked texts have long been associated with Gower’s academic layout of glossing for the Confessio. See further below. 19  On the scribal hands adding Traitié to Fairfax 3 also see Parkes, “Patterns,” 87–91; Derek Pearsall, “The Manuscripts and Illustrations of Gower’s Works,” in A Companion to Gower, ed. Siân Echard (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2004), 73–97; and R. F. Yeager, “John Gower’s French,” 137–51 in the same volume. Also see further below. 20  “Lex docet auctorum quod iter carnale bonorum /Tucius est, quorum sunt federa coniugiorum.” Text and translation from Yeager, Minor Latin. 21  Yeager, “Balades,” 81–104.

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had numerous connections to Eustace Deschamps and other French poets, directly subsidized Oton de Graunson and, of course, cultivated the Francophile poets Chaucer and Gower. But while these connections coexisted well with Gaunt’s nephew Richard II, they did not pass easily to Henry IV upon his accession to the throne and his effective reboot of the Hundred Years’ War. And while French court poets undoubtedly established traditions for collections of lyrics like Gower’s Cinkante Balades and Traitié, the French antecedents do not offer a model for Traitié’s harsh moralizing nor its Latin apparatus.22 Another possibility, though, is that Traitié was produced for Henry’s court to represent continuity with the glory days of French high culture under Richard and the patronage of John of Gaunt. After all, Traitié survives in complete form only in association with the manuscripts of Confessio and Vox, and in Trentham, all dated after Henry’s accession;23 furthermore, most of the balades in Traitié appear to be reworked from narratives in the Confessio.24 On this point we should recall Christine de Pizan and her role in Lancastrian attempts at cultural prestige, a topic also raised by Yeager.25 This topic begins with the rather gossipy story of Christine and John Montagu, third Earl of Salisbury.26 Salisbury was a literary Lollard knight who met Christine in Paris in 1398 while negotiating some details of Richard’s dowry from Isabelle of Valois. Lauded by Christine as a fine poet  On Traitié’s use of a pre-1393 balade form see Yeager, “Balades,” 82–83, 90–91.  Only in the case of the All Souls manuscript of Vox, whose Bastard Anglicana dates from around the turn of the century, could a copy of Traitié survive from the 1390s; in the few other manuscripts whose main text might date before Henry’s accession Traitié is added later. In Glasgow MS Hunterian 59 Traitié is added by Parkes’s scribe 4, along with Cronica and a cluster of pamphlet poems that put the date after Henry’s accession, to a pre-existing copy of Vox (Parkes, “Patterns,” 87–89). In Fairfax the same scribe added Traitié after 1408 to a Confessio manuscript (Parkes, “Patterns,” 90); in Trentham Parkes’s scribe 5 (the main scribe for this manuscript) copied Traitié with poems such as In Praise of Peace which date to the early years of Henry’s rule (Parkes, “Patterns,” 90–91). All occurrences of Traitié in association with Confessio occur in Henrician versions of the latter and include a cluster of Latin pamphlet poems. 24  Yeager, “Balades,” 91–93, uses this evidence to argue that Traitié was completed in the early 1390s, as noted above, aligning its composition with the Macauley/Fisher timetable for the Confessio; in my view Yeager’s excellent evidence on Traitié’s recycling of the Confessio can at least as compellingly argue for a post-accession date of composition. 25  Yeager, “Balades,” 88, 91. Also see further Joel Fredell, “The Gower Manuscripts: Some Inconvenient Truths,” Viator 41 (2010): 1–20. 26  See J.  C. Laidlaw, “Christine de Pisan, the Earl of Salisbury, and Henry IV,” French Studies 36 (1982), 129–143, for fuller details. 22 23

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(apparently he wrote in French), Salisbury was given by her a collection of her balades and her elder son Jean Castel to raise in England with Salisbury’s elder son Thomas. After Salisbury’s execution in January 1400 by supporters of Henry IV, Henry apparently amassed a library of Christine’s books. According to Christine in her L’avision Henry started by seizing Salisbury’s library, including manuscripts of her work, along with her son; Henry liked Christine’s work so well that he invited Christine (while holding on to her son Jean) to take up a position in his court.27 Christine says quite clearly in this passage that she saw Henry as a traitorous thief and his reign as a plague, but pretended to accept Henry’s offer with gifts of more of her books (which at this time she was already producing in her own scriptorium) so that Henry allowed her son to return to accompany her on a journey to England she never took.28 At the same time Henry also grappled with the embarrassing presence in England of Isabella of Valois, Richard’s queen and daughter of then-reigning king Charles VI of France, a grieving widow who was all of eleven when Richard died in 1400. So Henry had a notable problem with France very early in his rule, around 1400 to 1401, exacerbated by Christine’s refusal to grace his court. He also apparently had a number of manuscripts produced by her scriptorium to represent this desirable cynosure of high culture among the literati in Henry’s circle. Some form of her Cent Balades, originally given to Salisbury, must have been one. A likely suggestion is that Christine gave Salisbury the first section she wrote, a 20-balade sequence on widowhood. The most likely poem otherwise is the Épistre Othea (Epistle of Othea). She finished this latter poem around 1400 and sent presentation copies to

27  Christine de Pisan, Le livre de ladvision Cristine, ed. Christine Ruo and Liliane Dulac (Paris 2001), 112–113. 28  The terms for Henry and his reign in L’advision, 112–113 include “grande pestilence” (3.XI.40), “le roy Henri […] qui s’atribua la coronne” (3.XI.41–42), and “desloyal” (3. XI.56); the last term anchors Christine’s assertion that she would never go to Henry’s court because she “cannot believe that traitors come to a good end.” Translations are from The Vision of Christine de Pizan, trans. Glenda McCleod and Charity Cannon Willard (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2005), 106–107.

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crucial royal patrons.29 The poem probably was intended for her son Jean Castel specifically and young men generally since it takes the form of a letter from a mother instructing her noble young son (Hector) on moral conduct. Jean’s presence as a companion for Salisbury’s son and supposed companion for Henry’s son the Prince of Wales (who was around the same age as Jean and Salisbury’s elder son Thomas) would make this poem far and away the most likely choice for presentation to Henry, if not a gift to Salisbury before his death.30 This possible copy in Henry’s hands does not survive as far as we know, but we can look at a contemporary parallel. BN 848 is the earliest witness for the Épistre, dated around 1400, an autograph so that we know its layout is Christine’s explicit intention (Fig. 5.4). The manuscript design sets up an overblown academic ordinatio, with the text in the center column surrounded by commentary texts (both in French) labeled allegory and glose in the imitation of the Ovide Moralisée.31 What Christine’s design offers here in French cultural terms is a dramatized continuity with the great blossoming of vernacular humanism in the court of Charles V, even in the current court of the sporadically insane Charles VI.32 France’s vernacular becomes the vehicle not only for a literary text from classical sources, but for a massive marginal commentary overwhelming the page layout. Is it only coincidence that this strategy is mirrored in Lancastrian manuscripts of Gower’s Traitié, in the Cronica, and in the Confessio itself? Is it any surprise that Gower in laureate mode would use Latin for his 29  On the manuscript history of L’epistre d”Othea see Gianni Mombello, La tradizione manoscritta dell’ ‘Epistre Othea’ di Christin de Pizan: Prolegomeni all’ edizione del testo (Turin: Accademia delle scienze, 1967); Christine de Pizan: Epistre Othea, ed. Gabriella Parussa (Geneva: Droz, 1999), 87–101; and James Laidlaw, “Christine and the Manuscript Tradition,” in Chrisine de Pizan: A Casebook, ed. Barbara K.  Altmann and Deborah L. McGrady (New York: Routledge, 2003), 233–234. A full facsimile online of this manuscript is freely available on Gallica: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b105092969/ f11.item 30  Hector’s age in the Épistre is specified as fifteen, the same as her son Jean (and his English counterparts) in 1400; for the argument that Hector plays a broader allegorical role than this identification offers, see Sandra L. Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s “Épitre Othéa”: Painting and Politics at the Court of Charles VI (Toronto 1986), 38–40. 31  A number of uncertainties in the layout of the gloss and allegory suggest just how new this strategy is for Christine and her scriptorium; see Laidlaw, “Christine,” 233. 32  Hindman, Christine 25–60, discusses the epistolary allegory itself as a new approach beginning in the court of Charles VI around 1400, but she does not consider the marginal texts, whose parallels cannot be found in prototype epistolary allegories she cites by Philippe de Mézières.

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Fig. 5.4  Source: Gallica.bnf.fr. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits. Francais. 848, fol. 2r. Épistre Othéa

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commentary on a vernacular text? Whenever Gower may have originally written the Traitié, our first witness is in the post-1400 Trentham manuscript where a French sequence of eighteen balades uses Ovidian narratives to comment on marriage (like Christine’s twenty-ballade sequence on marriage and widowhood) and an apparatus of marginal commentary that recalls the Ovid Moralisée in masculine Latin rather than Christine’s vernacular. This “publication” in Trentham, then, may be part of Gower’s response to Christine and the need for a French literary presence in Henry’s court whenever Gower’s balades may have been composed.33 One other point of comparative manuscript design arises here. A later version of Christine’s Épistre survives (ca. 1410–1414) as part of an anthology of her works supervised by Christine and possibly containing her autograph in some passages.34 Three design features parallel the later Ricardian manuscripts of the Confessio: the main textblock has been arranged in two columns, as is the case for Gower’s London style (and for Lydgate’s major poetry among others); more notably, the marginalia has been moved into the main text column and written in rubric, and most miniatures are sized to fit within the textblock columns as well.35 As Gower scholars have long noted, the earliest manuscripts of the Confessio incorporate both the dedications to Henry and a page design with marginalia outside the textblock and miniatures larger than a single column, thus equivalent to the earlier BN 848 Épistre.36 Later manuscripts, primarily with Ricardian dedications, move the marginalia into the main text columns, often rubricated, and fit the miniatures into the columns as well, as 33  Yeager, “Balades,” 84–89, proposes a date in the 1390s for Gower’s Cinkante Balades and suggests Christine’s Cent Balades followed in 1401. 34  London, British Library, MS Harley 4431, fols. 95r-141v. A full facsimile of the manuscript is available at Christine de Pizan: the Making of the Queen’s Manuscript(British Library and University of Edinburgh, 2008): http://www.pizan.lib.ed.ac.uk/index.html [accessed 5 November 2022]. Also see James Laidlaw, “Manuscript Tradition,” 243–45; and Kathleen L.  Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390–1490, 2 vols (London: Harvey Miller, 1996), 2.263, 265. 35  This deluxe manuscript also contains some full-page miniatures that are not integrated with the text. However, the vast majority of the many miniatures in Harley 4431 are fit into the text column. 36  See convenient charts by Jeremy Griffiths, “Confessio Amantis: The Poem and Its Pictures,” in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments, ed. A.  J. Minnis (Cambridge: Brewer, 1983), 177–178; and more recently Joyce Coleman, “Dream of Nebuchadnezzar and Confession Miniatures in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” John Gower Society: https://johngower.org/coleman-miniatures/. Accessed 23 October 2022

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in the later anthologized Épistre. This latter strategy for Christine’s Épistre may suit the needs of a large manuscript with multiple long texts in double columns throughout, which do not provide as much space in its margins. However, this layout does require more folia to accommodate the added text in the main columns. What seems to be the case is that deluxe literary manuscripts develop clean margins that contradict the more academic design both Gower and Christine seem to favor around the turn of the century. Let me also return to the observation that the earliest witnesses we have to the Confessio were designed as a compendium of Ovidian narratives with headverses and glosses that invoke the Ovide Moralisée were meant for moral instruction (in part, at least) aimed at ruling-class males (like Christine’s Épistre) and were arguably featured, if not first produced, in Confessio manuscripts after Henry’s accession.37 The first contemporary analogue to Gower’s use of Latin apparatus for both vernacular languages of England, in short, is Christine’s Épistre. Gowerians may speculate that Christine imitated the Confessio and/or the Traitié, but the reverse is equally possible. Either line of influence can only be speculative as long as we cannot date the early manuscripts of the Confessio or the Épistre of BN 848 with more precision than “around 1400.” Clearly, placing manuscripts in chronological sequence remains a daunting challenge for Gower studies. Nonetheless, the existence of this French parallel, the remarkably diverse approaches to these marginal elements in Ricardian manuscripts of the Confessio, and the oddity of Traitié and Cronica as vessels for major marginal machinery must be brought into the discussion of the Confessio’s early history. Whatever influences the designs of the Confessio and the Othea might reveal, the evidence again points to Gower’s deployment of massive marginalia in the early years of Henry’s reign. Most of the problems with the marginal apparatus for the Confessio—its artifactual features and problematic dates, its similarity to machinery in other poems by Gower written and/or produced under the Lancastrians, its parallels with 37  More specifically, among the various medieval commentaries on Ovid, Gower’s layout may replicate John of Garland’s Integumenta to the Metamorphoses, 260 elegiac distichs and prose commentary inserted in chunks at appropriate points. On these antecedents see Winthop Wetherbee, “Latin Structure and Vernacular Space: Gower, Chaucer, and the Boethian Tradition,” in Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange, ed. R. F. Yeager (Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1991) 18–24. On the manuscript tradition see Lester Kruger Born, “The Manuscripts of the Integumenta on the Metamorphoses of Ovid by John of Garland,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 60 (1929): 179–199.

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Christine’s designs created in her own scriptorium—support its creation or development at a date well after the poem’s first composition near 1390 and closer to the poet’s death in 1408. In any case, producing manuscripts of the Confessio was part of the flurry of activity around Gower’s poetry in the first years of Henry’s reign. The marginalia of the Confessio must be examined in relationship to this activity, to the Henrician poems Traitié and Cronica if not Épistre, and to the rapid degradation of the marginal texts in Ricardian manuscripts of the Confessio. Finally, it is fair to ask how much these contending dates of production matter to our reading of the Confessio. If Gower was creating or re-­presenting the marginalia of the Confessio during the early years of Henry IV, he may have been revising the main text as well. If so our reading of the passages on kingship in Book 8, for instance, would demand serious reconsideration. Gower does describe himself there as “feble and impotent” (8.3126), much like his frequent references to his struggle with old age in the late poems, and his persona as senex amans could be read in relationship to Traitié and his marriage to Agnes Groundolf. In political terms the discussion of kingship would resonate with profound differences if we heard in the following passage an address to Henry IV: Yit the symplesse of my poverte Desireth for to do plesaunce To hem undir whos governance I hope siker to abide. (8.3134–3137)

What the full manuscript record of Gower’s poetry, including the overlay of an academic ordinatio for major poems in Gower’s three poetic languages, tells us is that Gower entered a flurry of activity in the late 1390s and early 1400s, when there was an active demand for his works among the commercial scribes of London and Westminster, and when Gower (willingly or not) became a Lancastrian laureate. Gower developed extensive marginalia for Cronica and Traitié in this period, then, whether or not in response to the very similar ordinatio used by Christine de Pisan in a major vernacular work appearing around the same time. What better time for Gower to revise and/or expand the Confessio marginalia, with some discreet touches to make the revisions seem more about prescience and less about opportunism? All these inconveniently late manuscripts may show us that Gower’s poetry is being asked to transform English literature from its Ricardian state under John of Gaunt’s patronage to a new Lancastrian identity and a new late state.

CHAPTER 6

The First Public Life of the Confessio and Its Decoration

1   The Manuscript Witnesses Much has been said about the life of the Confessio Amantis in the 1390s, a period for which we have no hard evidence for the poem’s public or private lives but many assumptions about private circulation, at least. Yet textual evidence for that model, as I have discussed earlier, simply does not exist beyond a few minimal glosses appearing late and infrequently in the manuscript tradition, and some variants in two Latin codas sometimes attached to the Confessio in the fifteenth century. Longstanding speculation about Gower’s conversion process in the 1390s suffers further from the stubborn fact that surviving manuscripts of the Confessio that might support this narrative instead document a surprising burst of deluxe manuscripts with the Ricardian introduction and conclusion. In every case these manuscripts were produced too late to be politically correct: in the midst of the reign of Henry IV, the man who cast Richard off his throne and faced years of revolt as a result. Not only do surviving Ricardian manuscripts of the Confessio appear first during these years of instability, but three of the most luxurious examples were owned by the sons of Henry IV.  Its first surviving witnesses, however, appeared around 1400  in the midst of ongoing political tensions after Richard’s deposition and the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Fredell, Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27964-5_6

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emergence of something that could be called Lancastrian literary culture.1 A central question arises from all this evidence: what was Gower’s own role, if any, in the production of these deluxe manuscripts in London and (judging by the surviving evidence) their shift from Henrician to Ricardian dedications? In this period Gower was approaching his death in 1408 as a sick and blind old man who claimed to give up writing. Nonetheless, he managed to produce substantial longer poetry, such as the Cronica tripertita; important revisions to Vox clamantis (also targeting the problem of succession from Richard to Henry); an accomplished range of shorter poetry in Latin, French, and English, some of which coexist in a standalone anthology whose structure may well be Gower’s; and possibly the long balade collection Traitié, with its own little-examined but substantial marginal glosses. In sum, plenty of ink has been spilled identifying moments in the early 1390s when Gower would theoretically experience the first phase of a prescient new loyalty to Henry Bolingbroke. Yet scholars have directed little equivalent effort at dating the public emergence of the Confessio in Gower’s later life during the supercharged political atmosphere of Henry IV’s reign and Gower’s own elaborate redefinition as a grave counselor for those difficult times. One persistent obstacle facing any attempt to account for the poem’s early public life is the imprecision of our dating for the many manuscripts that appeared in the first twenty-two years of the century that included the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V. Paleography offers some help in mapping the material history of Gower’s poetry onto these years, through dating the hands in manuscripts writing in Anglicana as that script develops during the period.2 However, two major bodies of evidence published in recent years offer new hope for more precise dates. Linne Mooney and Estelle Stubbs have identified a cohort of scribes associated with the London Guildhall who are instrumental in that mysterious burst of Ricardian Confessios during Lancastrian times. As we will see, the Guildhall scribe John Marchaunt is the dominant figure among a group of seven 1  For a recent overview on literature under the Lancastrian regime see Sebastian Sobecki, “Lancastrian Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature, ed. Candace Barrington and Sebastian Sobecki (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 178–187. 2  On the development of Anglicana during this period see Malcolm Parkes, English Cursive Book Hands 1250–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Rept. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), xvii–xxv; Jane Roberts, Guide to Scripts Used in English Handwriting up to 1500 (London: Liverpool University Press, 2006), 161–210.

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long-recognized hands who played a major role in defining a broader Ricardian canon of literary figures during those tumultuous early years of Lancastrian rule: William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Trevisa. Furthermore, this cohort celebrated these Ricardian poets by producing a number of deluxe manuscripts with miniatures by major artists and borders from identifiable workshops and individual hands. Consequently, a substantial body of art-historical evidence—expertly surveyed by Katherine Scott some years earlier than the work by Mooney and Stubbs—offers guidance toward fairly precise dating for most of the early Confessio manuscripts and some ideas about the literary-social context for their production. This art-historical evidence indicates that the two surviving early Henrician Confessios, written by unknown scribes, were decorated close to 1400. The Ricardian Confessio manuscripts, however, were not produced only around the moment in 1413 when Henry V reconfigures Richard’s standing among Lancastrians, a date which would offer some logic to this emergence. Several deluxe Ricardian Confessios were produced well before this time. When seen in the context of the broader presentation of the four major Ricardian poets by Marchaunt and his associates, a more complex picture emerges: a London coalition of book producers begins to build a literary heritage for England during a nexus of cultural crises in the reign of Henry IV, from early rebellions to Henry’s illness and Arundel’s return to the gathering of power and ascent to the throne of Henry V. Mapping the stages of Confessio production directly onto these crises is an ambition beyond this study. Nonetheless, we can begin to get a grip on these stages and their approximate dates. We can also look at implications of this trajectory as a whole. What seems an odd material history for the Confessio becomes, when seen as part of a larger program by various assemblies of London scribes, this great poem’s movement from a mirror for princes in its Henrician form to a metanarrative about negotiating the fraught relationships between love and power in a fallen world without the benefit of Arion’s song. The Ricardian Confessio, in other words, plays its own key role in Lancastrian literary history. Its passages celebrating the recently deposed king step deliberately away from the politics of interpretive closure so central to some of Gower’s Lancastrian poetry in the first years of the fifteenth century, particularly Cronica tripertita. Instead, the Ricardian Confessio joins a cluster of works originating in Richard’s England or, in the case of Hoccleve and Lydgate, works which claim their literary origins there. All emerge from the first two decades of Lancastrian

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London in glorious editions and avoid any obvious suggestion of propaganda for the new regime. The textual history of Gower’s great poem from Henrician to Ricardian, in other words, must be understood as part of an emerging vernacular literature that also featured Gower’s French poetry, original works in English, and translations into English for aristocratic texts from Latin, often written in luxurious page layouts and decorated by a cadre of continental artists arriving in London during the early reign of Henry IV as well.

2  A Brief Overview of the Developments in London Borders ca. 1400–1425 Among the advantages for examining early Confessio manuscripts are their restricted geography and dating. Most of these manuscripts can safely be localized in greater London (including, for my purposes here, Westminster) within the first quarter-century thanks to the presence of known scribes, known decorators, and often both. Furthermore, Kathleen L. Scott’s foundational work on border decoration offers a surprisingly specific chronology for London work in particular during this quarter-century. As a guide to the discussion below, I will summarize and illustrate some of the most useful details for a preliminary taxonomy of London borders in literary manuscripts during this period.3 I also hope to be clear that the discussion which follows is necessarily provisional and richly deserving of much further attention by other scholars. The dates and identifications for border decoration in particular should be taken as an invitation, if not a provocation, to that end. A few cautions must begin this analysis. First, part of the discussion below will associate scribes with decorating hands. Although we are still a long way from identifying all the scribes in important literary manuscripts from this time and place, scribes producing Gower manuscripts in the first twenty or so years of Lancastrian rule can to a gratifying extent be sorted into two groups: the Henrician Confessio and Vox scribes identified by 3  These details come primarily from Kathleen L.  Scott, Dated and Datable English Manuscript Borders c.1395–1499 (London: Bibliographical Society and British Library, 2002); her observations are supplemented by earlier but substantial discussion in Kathleen L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390–1490 (2 vols. London: Harvey Miller, 1996). My research on manuscript decoration largely confirms Scott’s observations; additions and rare minor adjustments will be specified below.

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Malcolm Parkes and discussed above, and the (mostly) Ricardian Confessio scribes now associated with the London Guildhall discussed primarily in Chap. 7.4 The original identification of the latter begins from a now-­ legendary article by Ian Doyle and Malcolm Parkes. There Doyle and Parkes analyzed five scribal hands in a manuscript of the Confessio (Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.2), two of which could be found in multiple Chaucer and Gower manuscripts, and a third named directly as the poet Thomas Hoccleve.5 These identifications laid the groundwork for what one scholar has called “the creation of a field” wherein the other two scribes, known from Doyle and Parkes as B and D, were renamed as Guildhall clerks Adam Pynkhurst and John Marchaunt. Linne Mooney and Estelle Stubbs have expanded the manuscripts attributed to this pair and identified more Guildhall scribes.6 Simon Horobin has proposed more identifications among the flurry of other literary manuscripts in that time

 Early Gower manuscripts written entirely by scribes who have not been identified or connected to either group include (for the Confessio) Stafford, Taylor 5, Nottingham WLC/LM 8, Bodmer 178, St. John’s B.12, Morgan 690, Osborn fa. 1 and Cambridge Mm 2.21. 5  A. I. Doyle and Malcolm Parkes, “The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century,” in Medieval Scribes. Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London: Scolar, 1978) 163–210. 6  Linne R.  Mooney first identified scribe B as Adam Pynkhurst in “Chaucer’s Scribe,” Speculum 81 (2006): 97–138. On 98–99 Mooney lists three other surviving witnesses in this hand, all Chaucer manuscripts; on 102–103 Mooney argues for the possibility that fragments of Troilus and Boece in this hand may represent copies from Chaucer’s lifetime, potentially under Chaucer’s direction. The hand in the Boece manuscript was identified tentatively as Pynkhurst’s in Estelle Stubbs, “A New Manuscript by the Hengwrt/Ellesmere Scribe? Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales MS Peniarth 393D,” Journal of the Early Book Society 5 (2002), 161–168. Scribe D is identified as Marchaunt in Linne Mooney and Estelle Stubbs, Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature, I375-I425 (York Medieval Press, 2013), 38–65. This scribe’s Ricardian Confessios include London, British Library MS Egerton 1991; New York, Columbia University Library MS Plimpton 265; Oxford, Christ Church College MS 148; and Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 67. The “creation” assertion is by Sarah Tolmie, “The Professional: Thomas Hoccleve,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007): 271. 4

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and place.7 In Chap. 7 I will look at a cluster of forty such manuscripts whose decorations and other features place them in London in the first two decades of the fifteenth century and whose texts are predominantly Gowerian: twenty-four of these deluxe manuscripts are devoted to Gower’s poetry; only six to Chaucer’s poetry. These identifications have produced questions and pushback, principally an article by Jane Roberts challenging the Pynkhurst identification and a book by Lawrence Warner attempting to debunk most of the claims made by Mooney, Stubbs, and Horobin.8 While these two scholars raise important questions and remain central to the debate, it is important to remember that the original identifications by Doyle and Parkes were quickly and vigorously challenged: those challenges have now faded almost entirely from view.9 Judgments in the field on paleographical 7  One Piers Plowman manuscript, Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.17, had earlier been ascribed to Hand B (not yet named as Pynkhurst) in Simon Horobin and Linne R. Mooney, “A Piers Plowman Manuscript by the Hengwrt/Ellesmere Scribe and its implications for London Standard English,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 (2004): 65–112. Also see Horobin’s further identifications, and responses from Alan Fletcher. Simon Horobin, “Adam Pynkhurst and the Copying of British Library MS Additional 35287 of the B Version of Piers Plowman.” Yearbook of Langland Studies 23 (2009): 61–83; “Adam Pinkhurst, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Hengwrt Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer Review 44 (2010): 351–67; and “The Criteria for Scribal Attribution: Dublin, Trinity College MS 244 Reconsidered,” Review of English Studies 60 (2009): 371–81. Alan J.  Fletcher, “The Criteria for Scribal Attribution: Dublin, Trinity College MS 244, Some Early Copies of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Canon of Adam Pynkhurst Manuscripts,” Review of English Studies 58 (2007): 597–632; and “What Did Adam Pynkhurst (Not) Write?: A Reply to Dr Horobin,” Review of English Studies 61(2010): 690–710. 8  Jane Roberts, “On Giving Scribe B a Name and a Clutch of London Manuscripts from c. 1400,” Medium Aevum 80 (2011): 247–270; Lawrence Warner, Chaucer’s Scribes: London Textual Production, 1385–1432 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Warner’s original response appears in “Scribes, Misattributed: Hoccleve and Pinkhurst,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015): 55–100. An upcoming discussion on this issue edited by Kathryn Kerby-Futon has been submitted to Speculum as a “Cluster” entitled “Communities of Practice: New Methodological Approaches to Adam Pinkhurst and Chaucer’s Earliest Scribes.” 9  For a sustained attack on this original Doyle and Parkes identification (and the dialectological work of M. L. Samuels that effectively supported Doyle and Parkes) from near the time of its publication see R. Vance Ramsey, “Paleography and Scribes of Shared Training,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 8 (1986): 107–144, which provides a fairly full set of references to a controversy that resembles in some ways the Warner/Roberts response to Mooney, Horobin, and Stubbs detailed below; and “The Hengwrt and Ellesmere Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales: Different Scribes,” Studies in Bibliography 35 (1982): 133–154, the most developed attempt to refute Doyle and Parkes’s identification of their Hand B.

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identifications seem to be best made in the fullness of time.10 This study does not require names for scribes and identifications beyond those now broadly accepted from Doyle and Parkes and unchallenged in recent discussions. Although I agree with and will use the scribal identifications by Mooney, Stubbs, and Horobin, those who disagree may simply substitute the Doyle/Parkes nomenclature. Connecting the second group of scribes to the Guildhall clearly offers coherence and interest to their important body of work, which in many respects created the first canon of literature in English. Nonetheless, since this group is doing their work whoever they are, my study is not the place to air the current disagreements at length. In the next chapter I will, however, discuss the hand of Doyle and Parkes scribe D using the identification of John Marchaunt.11 Second, dating the writing of a manuscript from the evidence of its borders can be hazardous. Decoration of a manuscript does not have to be completed, or even begun, close to the time of its scribal production. The manuscripts discussed here, however, are the products of a bookmaking industry in London that may use teams of producers who shift around but, in many cases, join the same or similar projects that involve great expense for which the producers would want to be made whole as soon as possible. Whether these books were principally designed and overseen by a patron or a stationer, or by an ambitious scribe functioning as a contractor, any of these figures acting separately or in concert are less likely to isolate the stages of production for each luxury manuscript over a long time. In any case, my discussion of border decoration here will offer evidence for a likely sequence for the early Confessio witnesses; however, we might associate that evidence with scribal production of these manuscripts.12

10  Among paleographers well-versed in Chaucer manuscripts supporting the Pynkhurst identification, which has attracted the most attention, see Daniel W.  Mosser, “‘Chaucer’s Scribe,’ Adam and the Hengwrt Project,” in Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, ed. Margaret Connolly and Linne R.  Mooney (York, UK: York Medieval Press, 2008), 11–40. 11  I hope to discuss this identification fully in an upcoming study focused exclusively on scribe Marchaunt/D. 12  Also see Scott’s similar interest in the value of dating borders for codicological ends, and similar cautions at the outset, in “An Hours and Psalter by Two Ellesmere Illuminators,” in The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation, ed. Martin Stevens and Daniel Woodward (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1995), 87–89.

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The evidence from border decorations demands another preface in terms of dating, as well. The stylistic features which reach back furthest in the past must be used with caution in determining the earliest possible date for a manuscript border. Border artists demonstrably incorporate elements from earlier times and training, as we can see in manuscripts which we can date precisely from scribal signatures or other evidence. New elements and stylistic features, however, provide a much more reliable terminus post quem for a manuscript border because they emerge so visibly on the page when they start to appear. Finally, pinpointing a place for the production of manuscripts is often difficult, and the purpose of this chapter is assuredly not to provide an overall survey for England. The advantage of the body of Gower manuscripts below is that most employ scribes and decorators known to be working in London and so are certainly produced in the London area. Others employ either a scribe or a decorator from these coteries, and so are quite likely to be working in London. This chapter, then, will argue for dates associated only with these specific groups working in London in a twenty-year period. Some attention to miniatures will be part of the discussion, but these are few and to some extent rare in literary manuscripts. I will happily leave those identifications and dates to the art historians. Border decorations, however, are quite common in these London literary manuscripts and offer a body of evidence largely untouched by anyone besides Kathleen Scott. To begin our chronology, we can cite a basic principle of border design. Scott points out that for English manuscript borders in the period from the late 1390s to the early 1400s, “the most fundamental change […] is a movement from rigid, straight, and attached designs to curling, circular, and dissociated designs.” Stiffer bar frames with rigid details, persisting through around 1400, give way gradually to curving border frames with softer curling details that develop rapidly in the first two decades of the fifteenth century13 (Fig. 6.1). By Gower’s death in 1408, the colored vines that emerged off border bars recede back toward their origins in a pool of gold ground, using penwork sprays to extend the borders. Gold spikes emerging between leaves on bars are a standard feature of illuminated borders in the late fourteenth century; these spikes disappear by 1405, leaving more rounded gold forms that often simply described a semicircle under arching leaf roundels. Vines on the border bar that had been dense with leaves become, by 1405, sparsely populated with occasional leaves  Scott, Dated and Datable, 8–9.

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Fig. 6.1  Left: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 3, fol. 2r detail, ca. 1400. Angular bar border with daisy buds. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. Middle: London, British Library, MS Harley 7334, fol. 1 detail, ca. 1410. Rounded gold mounds separating leaves, solid vines originating from trumpet-blossom bells, folded mitten leaves. © The British Library Board. Right: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 158, fol. 36r detail, ca. 1410–1415. Spray bar with folded mitten leaves, penwork leaf lobes, green wash on squiggles. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

from which gold balls with pen squiggles and other motifs spring (Fig. 6.1 middle). Later, around 1416, spray borders originating entirely from a large illuminated initial began to appear at major divisions, for the most part  replacing bar designs.14 Also in London starting around 1410, a trumpet-like form appears in borders with sprays originating out of its  Scott, Dated and Datable, 11.

14

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bell, and green wash begins to appear on pen squiggles extending from gold balls, leaves, vines, and other elements15 (Fig. 6.1 right). In practical terms these border features allow some initial rough dating of our literary manuscripts produced in London in a period around 1400, another period closer to 1405 through around 1416, and after 1416. Specific motifs, from particular leaves and flower blossoms to the details of penwork feathering, add further granularity to this chronology in London manuscripts. This movement is particularly well-represented in deluxe copies of the Confessio, whose earliest witnesses provide a clear sequence that begins near the turn from the fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Around 1400  in London grotesques, and inhabited borders more generally, almost entirely disappear; when they do appear after that date in deluxe London manuscripts, as in the case of the dragon drolleries in Fairfax and the Ellesmere Chaucer, they are likely to play a deliberate archaizing role (as I will discuss later).16 Flowers, aside from the ubiquitous daisy buds, are relatively uncommon in the period 1400–1425; daisy buds themselves disappear in London work after 1405. 17 Eventually a new range of flower forms emerge in London borders: first cinquefoil blossoms (along with a common thimble or trumpet form) over the period 1405–1420, then various bulbous flower forms termed aroids from 1420 onward18 (Figs.  6.2, 6.3, 6.4, and 6.5). Most leaf forms immediately  Scott, Dated and Datable, 42.  See, for instance, the bas-de-page dragons in the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales: San Marino, Huntington Library MS El 26 C 9, fols. 1r, 87v; and in Fairfax 3, fol. 139r. Similar drolleries, one more birdlike in form, appears in the Fairfax 3 Confessio on fols. 8r and 82v; for the latter see Fig. 6.30 below. 17  Scott, Dated and Datable, 11–12; also on 13 see Scott’s discussion of a few exceptional treatments of naturalistic forms in borders before 1440. In London examples these daisy buds occur only around 1400 or shortly thereafter, as in Ellesmere, probably as an archaizing feature. Scott, “Hours and Psalter,” 90–94, sees the Ellesmere daisy buds as a holdover from earlier training, but also identifies two border hands in that manuscript with a substantially later manuscript, Bodleian Hatton 4. Another example of grotesques and daisy buds as a probable archaizing feature can be found in a book of Hours produced in London, Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.11.7. Scott, LGM, 2.153, argues that these (e.g., the cleverly shaded grotesques in corner roundels on Trinity B.11.17, fol. 7r and daisy buds on fol. 33r) and other features were used by a border artist clearly aware of fifteenth-century decorative elements (such as folded acanthus leaves and quatrefoils) to harmonize the manuscript with its opening late-fourteenth-century calendar, along with stiffer, straighter vines and heavy use of gold bars. 18  Scott, Dated and Datable, 12; on 46 Scott argues for a specific flattened form first appearing in 1415. 15 16

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Fig. 6.2  London, British Library, MS Egerton 1991, fol. 142 detail. Quatrefoil flowers, trumpet leaves/ blossoms, penwork leaf lobes touched with green wash; green wash on penwork squiggles extending from gold balls. © The British Library Board

familiar from the natural world disappear almost entirely from 1400 to 141019; replacing these leaves are forms that seem far less interested in natural antecedents and more interested in visual effect: pointed trefoils, kite-­shaped leaves, mushroom-top leaves, mitten leaves (both flat and curled), among others. One form in particular, kidney leaves, occurs commonly in London manuscripts from the first decade of the fifteenth century 19  These leaf forms, including maple, rounded trefoil (probably clover), and oak, disappeared almost entirely; holly appears sporadically at most. See Scott, Dated and Datable, 12.

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Fig. 6.3  Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902, fol. 8r detail. Mushroom leaves, folded acanthus leaves, trumpet leaves or blossoms, penwork leaf lobes touched with green wash; green wash on penwork squiggles extending from gold balls. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

and thereafter.20 Another form, the penwork leaf in multiple feathered lobes, appears in this same period and eventually is touched with green wash. This same green wash becomes a distinctive feature around 1410 not only on the penwork lobes, but the green-washed squiggles that accompany gold balls and (again in this period) begin to exist independently as a decorative element at the end of penwork sprays, sometimes 20  Scott, Dated and Datable, 45, says that these kidney leaves “were only beginning to be used in the beginning of [the fifteenth] century.” Earlier Scott (Dated and Datable, 12) confusingly includes kidney leaves in the list of forms from the fourteenth century; these may be what Scott calls (45) a “rounder form.” My own observation confirms Scott’s on the kidney leaf pictured here emerging as a very common form in the first decade of the fifteenth century in London manuscripts, while an almost circular leaf can be found in manuscripts from the end of the fourteenth century such as the Simeon anthology; see further below.

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Fig. 6.4  New York, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, MS M125, fol. 3v detail. Aroid, acanthus; penwork leaf lobes touched with green wash; green wash on penwork squiggles extending from gold balls. Reproduced by permission of the Morgan Library and Museum

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Fig. 6.5  London, British Library, MS Harley 4866, fol. 68r detail. Spiky acanthus leaves folded at corners, folded inside initial in monochrome and extended when originating border vines off initials; penwork leaf lobes touched with green wash; green wash on penwork squiggles extending from gold balls. © The British Library Board

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substituting for the penwork leaf lobes21 (Fig.  6.2). One final leaf—the acanthus—can claim natural antecedents and becomes a distinct feature in London borders after 1411 in folded, twisted, spiky forms that often dominate designs up to ca. 143022 (Figs. 6.3 and 6.4). Acanthus leaves also appear in a folded and highly shaded monochrome form inside initials and border roundels in London work around 1410 and later, and during the same time as a form that originates a vine running along the border23 (Fig. 6.5). These borders in London show a remarkably rapid development of new elements and ideas. After 1405 these developments are relatively easy to trace, but the period 1395–1405 can be as puzzling a transition as the political events that surround it. One feature of this transition is the persistence of older border design elements among emerging motifs whose presence can be subtle and/or relegated to borders deeper into the manuscript. In particular, opening folios from this time regularly have full bar borders that are conservative and backward-looking, as in the case of the Stafford Confessio discussed below. Despite the political upheavals leading up to 1399, the book trade offered many glories and notable artists well before international stars such as Hermann Scheerre and Johannes became dominant figures. During the later fourteenth century the book trade in London and elsewhere in England produced outstanding deluxe manuscripts, including the magnificent Vernon (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Poet. a.1) and Simeon (London, British Library, MS Add. 22283) anthologies of English poetry.24 These manuscripts offer elaborate bar borders with interlace, striking flowers such as the Vernon columbine along with the more common daisy buds, embedded masks, grotesques, and other decoration.25 21  Scott, Dated and Datable, 12, 40, where Scott dates the introduction of this feature to between 1408 and 1413. My own observations support this dating for London manuscripts, but not Yorkshire manuscripts. See further Joel Fredell, “The Pearl-Poet Manuscript in York,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 36 (2014): 17. 22  Scott, Dated and Datable, 12, 50. 23  Scott, Dated and Datable, 42; this feature appears frequently in the London literary manuscripts discussed below. 24  For several comparable luxury manuscripts from around 1400  in England see the Bodleian Library digital facsimile of the Vernon Manuscript: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac. uk/objects/52f0a31a-1478–40e4-b05b-fddb1ad076ff/; 25  Scott, Dated and Datable, 120, dates the trellis band border with columbine to 1394–1397.

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The Vernon and Simeon manuscripts establish that poetry in Middle English was already considered suitable for luxury treatment before the surviving manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio emerged in the opening years of the fifteenth century. Our discussion of the later manuscripts thus must begin with them.

3  Early London Borders and Major Literary Manuscripts The manuscript that scholars have long suspected to be the earliest surviving copy of the Confessio, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 3, is a good example of a manuscript decorated in the simple, straighter forms associated with the last decade of the fourteenth century such as Vernon and Simeon. As such, Fairfax 3 is also a good example of manuscript borders that contain both conservative elements and subtly new features in relatively simple forms. Full borders in this time can have elaborate bands, inhabited roundels, complex leaf forms, and interlace integrated within wide border bars. Nonetheless, half-bar and three-quarter-bar borders in the 1390s often were much simpler: thick, club-like border bars terminated at ends or corners in simple block forms with two or more concave sides; sprays were thick illuminated strands with relatively few leaves and/ or gold balls inset with penwork squiggles. In this period the two greatest literary manuscripts surviving from England (though where in England is a matter of active debate), Vernon and Simeon, have long been dated in the 1390s in part due to their magnificent decoration. Nonetheless, many of the borders in these manuscripts illustrate these simpler bars as well. Vernon is more spectacular visually due to its wealth of miniatures, its subtle grotesque heads, and naturalistic motifs in the border decoration— columbine flowers and sycamore leaves among them—rare to find at the

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Fig. 6.6  Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. a (Vernon), fol. 266r detail. Columbines, grotesque originating spray, trefoil leaf originating spray. Hand D. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

time and not to be found after 140026 (Fig. 6.6). Vernon’s most impressive borders (and its columbines) are produced by an artist with great skill and range in both his color palette and his forms, possibly based in London, a level of work not appearing in Simeon.27 Simeon, on the other hand, features a profusion of borders and illuminated initials throughout with a smaller cluster of decorators. What Vernon and Simeon share in quantity with manuscripts produced close to 1400 are partial bar borders whose simple bands of color extend along the margins vertically and then terminate in horizontal vines at the 26  Grotesques in Vernon are drawn by at least two border hands, following the identifications in Scott, LGW, 2.22. In addition to the grotesques by Border Hand D on fols. 237r (Fig. 6.6) 265r, and 279v, Border Hand G1 also adds grotesques whose mouths originate vines, as on fol. 332v. Simeon includes comparable small grotesque heads originating vines, on 33v, by Simeon’s Border Hand A. Scott, Dated and Datable, 13, observes that maple-like leaves (which would include sycamores) disappear after 1400 in English borders; columbines also disappear at this time, after appearing in another flourishing category of literary manuscripts during this decade: luxury copies of Higden’s Polychronicon. Scott, Dated and Datable 27 pl. II, illustrates a border from this group in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 316 (ca. 1394–1397) with prominent use of both sycamore leaves and columbine blossoms in the bottom borders; also see similar combinations in Bodleian Library, MS Canon misc. 110, fol. 123r. Sycamore leaves also appear in other luxury Polychronicons from this decade, including London, British Library, MS Royal 13 D.i and MS Royal 14 C.ix. MS Royal 6 E.v, a manuscript from this period whose borders Scott, LGM 2.23, associates with Vernon and Fairfax, also uses the sycamore-leaf motif. 27  Scott, LGM 2.22, argues that Border Hand D in Vernon also produced a border in London, British Library MS Harley 401; see further below.

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Fig. 6.7  London, British Library, MS Additional 22283 (Simeon), fol. 45r detail. Hand A. © The British Library Board

corners (Fig. 6.7). The bars are often club-like in their endings and depend for visual drama on highlighting in white and a central band of gold that often terminates with its own club-like finial at top or bottom (Fig. 6.8). The vines themselves are relatively thick, generally in the shades of red or blue used for the bar bands. A few simple leaf forms (here trefoil leaves) sprout from the vine, along with gold balls, pen-stroke short tendrils, and in this case small daisy buds (Fig. 6.8). What these borders in Vernon and Simeon anticipate is a falling away from complexity around the turn of the century in terms of what inhabits or sprouts from the borders. By 1400 the varied leaf forms visible throughout Vernon become a handful of standardized shapes (a trend also apparent in Simeon): abstract trefoils, thimbles, or kites; the only blossoms to be found (with rare exceptions, again also apparent in Simeon) are simple daisy buds. Even the lavish Vernon borders, in other words, anticipate the more austere kinds of design we will see in Fairfax and Stafford, though the state of development for those latter two manuscripts date them later than Vernon and Simeon. One complication for these observations must be acknowledged: Vernon and Simeon were decorated by numerous hands, some with notably different styles. However, these observations about borders in Vernon and Simeon can be tested in at least one instance wherein the hand is the same. This hand, shown in Figs. 6.9 and 6.10, uses for Vernon and Simeon

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Fig. 6.8  Left: Vernon, fol. 117ra detail. Hand D. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. Right: Simeon, fol. 52ra detail. Hand A. © The British Library Board

Fig. 6.9  Vernon, fol. 100v detail. Hand B. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

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Fig. 6.10  Simeon, fol. 81v detail. Hand B. © The British Library Board

a virtually identical design for leaves and vine origins over a gold ground spreading under two columns. The clearest identifier, however, is the peculiar trilobed leaf favored by this decorator: like a child in a snowsuit raising its arms. Vernon’s most skilled border decorator, Hand D, may bring a third manuscript into this circle: London, British Library MS Harley 401, a copy of the Floretum evangelicum dated in its explicit to 1396 (Fig. 6.11). In the border for the table of contents (by a different hand) an initial “I” forms the base for a club-like bar with a few eruptions of daisy bud pairs and gold balls decorated with squiggles; straight penwork sprays extend horizontally top and bottom with more daisy buds and gold balls. The other decorated border in the manuscript, which Kathleen Scott identifies as possibly by Vernon Border Hand D, occurs at the opening of the main text and grows out of an initial inhabited by a dragon-like figure, whose bar extends to thick vines with shaded trilobed leaves and decorated gold balls. 28 Whether or not this border is in fact the work of Vernon’s Border Hand D, a set of shared features for English borders in the 1390s emerges from the several hands involved in these three examples. The club-like bars, the simple vines, the limited assortment of leaves (single- and trilobed) and flowers (daisy buds only) all present a more modest effect than that found in grand examples like Vernon’s full bar borders by Hand D. Nonetheless, these elements are distinctive to English borders at the end of the fourteenth century and apparent in our earliest Confessio manuscripts. The Fairfax 3 manuscript of Gower’s Confessio manifests this end-of-­ the-century design throughout its several borders29 (Fig. 6.12). On fol. 2  Scott, LGM, 2.22.  Scott, LGM, 2.23, includes the Fairfax 3 borders in a list of those similar in type to Vernon’s borders. 28 29

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Fig. 6.11  London, British Library, MS Harley 401. Left: fol. 7r. Right: fol. 1r. Floretum evangelicum. © The British Library Board

a simple double bar in red and blue extends from the initial to a block-like terminus at the bottom, adorned simply with pairs of daisy buds. The next border, below the Confessor miniature, is slightly more elaborate in terms of the shading, the bar terminals, the leaf forms, the minimally decorated gold balls, and the dragon-like grotesque.30 Since we know that the first folio of Fairfax was replaced, one question that arises immediately is whether the miniaturist and border decorator for fol. 1 are the miniaturist and decorator for the rest of the manuscript. The evidence here may not be decisive, particularly for the miniatures, but the likely conclusion is that the hands are the same throughout the manuscript in both cases. 30  Two more dragon-like grotesques occupy most of the upper and lower borders of fol. 47r, the lower border of fol. 82r, and one forms the lower corner of fols. 27r and 139r, in Fairfax: in fact, all of the borders that originate in the left column are given dragons. A dragon-like creature also inhabits the initial on fol. 62rb for the opening of Book 4: see Fig. 6.17.

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Fig. 6.12  Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 3. Left: fol. 2r. Right: fol. 8r. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

The two miniatures are difficult to compare in a number of ways. They use different color palettes; their frames are highlighted with distinct decorative techniques; and few direct parallels appear in the figures or facial characteristics, since Nebuchadnezzar is sleeping and the Dream Statue’s features are rubbed away. However, the drapery treatments for Nebuchadnezzar’s bedding and the Confessor’s robes are very close; also the bulbous, looping line that defines the mountain off which the boulder rolls in the Dream miniature bears some resemblance to the bulbous, looping line that sketches in the greenery behind the Confessor and Dreamer. In addition, both miniatures eschew a fourth bar for the picture frame, though in different positions. While there is not enough evidence here to draw hard conclusions, the two miniatures are close enough to assume that they could have been created at the same time by associated hands. One other detail is useful here: the Confessor miniature overlaps the border decoration on its page, the left frame cutting off the tips of two leaves facing right (Fig.  6.13). Consequently, we can assume that the

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Fig. 6.13  Fairfax 3, fol. 8rb detail. Border leaves painted over. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

miniature was inserted after the border decoration in the main text of the manuscript, at least. The replacement folio at the beginning of the manuscript does not have any such convenient indicator to establish a sequence between border and miniature, however. Border decorations offer more evidence. Again, the first page does not immediately appear to be like the decoration in the rest of the manuscript, due to the simplicity of that first border, though the border decorations after the opening are unambiguously by the same hand. 31 The design and palette of the decorated initials throughout the manuscript, including its first leaf, do appear to stay the same (in particular a washed-out reddish tint), arguing for a single workshop at least. The bars themselves, blue and red with some white decoration on the first leaf as well as throughout the manuscript, are also similar. Simeon’s Border Hand A, by comparison, 31  Bar borders occur on fols. 2r, 27r, 34r, 47r, 62r, 82r, 125v, 139r, and 168v. Two ink bars, particolored in red and blue, also occur on fols. 23rb and 167vb, associated with major internal divisions in the text.

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Fig. 6.14  Fairfax 3, Left: fol. 2ra detail. Middle: fol. 8rb detail. Right: fol. 168vb detail. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

uses both simple club-like bar motifs decorated with daisy buds and more complex bar-and-vine combinations, so Fairfax’s opening bar with daisy buds is not necessarily a separate conception or even a separate hand. Still, the only detail that argues positively for the same hand rather than a workshop is the turned end to the gold bars inside the initials themselves: a peculiar and idiosyncratic trait that occurs in three places in Fairfax beginning with the opening initial (Fig. 6.14). Although such a turned end is common in manuscripts of the period, and in fact a standard tactic in Simeon’s Border Hand A, in Simeon these finials stand outside the ground of the initial itself32 (Fig.  6.15). Simeon’s borders regularly include the gold finial, but not within the ground of the initial in any way. In addition, the daisy bud pair sprouting from the opening initial in Fairfax bears a close resemblance to bud pairs on two other borders, though this motif is too common to bear much weight.33 Despite the simplicity of Fairfax’s first border, it shares enough features with borders later in the manuscript that the cumulative evidence argues for one hand or studio producing all

32  Another example of this standard detail can be observed in London, British Library, MS Arundel 331 fol. 223 (ca. 1392); the club end to the internal bar appears more logically in the squared-off end to the outer bar at the bottom of the page, echoing the latter’s quality as a kind of finial, not inside the structure of the illuminated initial itself as in Fairfax. An illustration of the Arundel border is available in the British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts at http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN. ASP?Size=mid&IllID=3042. 33  Daisy bud pairs occur in Fairfax on fols. 2ra, 27ra, and 125va. The quick penstrokes along the stem (indicating leaves) is a consistent feature in all cases as well (in contrast to the buds on Harley 401 in Fig.  6.12 left or Simeon in Fig.  6.9 right), but again not determinative.

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Fig. 6.15  Left: Simeon, fol. 53vb detail. Hand A. Right: Simeon, fol. 49ra detail. Hand A. © The British Library Board

the borders in Fairfax at the same time, after the replacement of the manuscript’s first folio. Dating for these borders rests largely on the more generous examples later in Fairfax, which do at first glance resemble the earlier decorations found in Harley 401 (Fig. 6.11) and other English manuscripts from the end of the fourteenth century. Among the features that indicate a date at the end of the fourteenth century: straight vines with relatively few and simple leaves sprouting; the fondness for dragons; daisy buds surrounded by basic penstrokes to indicate small leaves along the vine; the palette limited to the standard blue and red particoloring next to gold with some limited green; the uncomplicated bars originating the vines. In a few places, however, are signs of a slightly later date for the Fairfax border decoration. In most of the borders gold rounds appear between leaves sprouting off the vine, and these rounded tops follow a post-1400 style, along with one example of kidney-shaped leaves that look as if they have not yet been standardized—also beginning in the same time period34 (Fig.  6.16). Rounded leaves also appear in the 1390s manuscripts discussed above, though they have not yet begun to show the kidney-like concavity at the axil of the stem (Fig.  6.17). These features in Fairfax 34  In addition to the example here, similar gold rounds appear between leaves (usually in roundels) in the borders on fols. 4r, 27r, 47r, 62r, 82r, 125v, 139r, 168v. On these gold rounds (which sometimes have short penwork squiggles attached as in Figs.  6.23 and 6.24) see Scott, Dated & Datable, 32, and below on Stafford’s and Harley 2946’s gold points ca. 1405.

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Fig. 6.16  Fairfax 3, fol. 62r detail. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

Fig. 6.17  Left: Vernon, fol. 309v detail. © The British Library Board. Right: Simeon, fol. 1r detail. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

argue for a decoration date post-1400, though probably within a few years of the turn of the century. One last detail demands consideration here. In the Confessor miniature in Fairfax Amans (Gower’s alter ego) wears a collar of “S” forms, which clearly alludes the Lancastrian livery collar associated with Henry IV35 (Fig. 6.18). This detail might argue that the miniatures are likely to have been inserted after 1399, at least. Close examination of the collar in the miniature shows that it is a somewhat clumsy insertion, however, overwritten on what look like metal bosses or badges originally decorating the collar and spilling off the collar itself at the top left. This collar, in other 35  On the SS collar associated with Henry both before and after his accession to the throne see the Introduction above.

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Fig. 6.18  Fairfax 3, fol. 8rb detail. Lancaster collar clumsily overwritten. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

words, is almost certainly inserted by a later hand. Since Gower’s funerary portrait had a Lancastrian collar one simple explanation was that the inserting hand used that public image as a model. No other Confessor miniatures, in either Ricardian or Henrician Confessios, include this detail, so it cannot be as easily attributable to a visible declaration of Gower’s (or the owner’s) Lancastrian loyalty. In any case, this “S” collar is not particularly useful for dating the other decoration, though it does offer interesting territory for speculation about its origins. The other border in a Confessio manuscript from around the turn of the century is the Stafford MS, which on its opening folio offers a full bar border with a highly regular interlace leaf-and-vine design on a gold ground with interlace corners and solid-colored vines extending in simple forms away from the bar (Fig. 6.19). Borders at the fronts of manuscripts in this period must be viewed with some caution generally, however. These borders are often conservative in style, incorporating more standard elements from the recent past than those later in a manuscript. This conservatism may be associated with work for distinguished patrons but also with what are in effect frontispieces for authors with some claim to a recent historical past, such as the great trio of Ricardian poets whose poetry enjoys a marked efflorescence in London during the early fifteenth century: Langland, Chaucer, and Gower. The Stafford Confessio seems to satisfy the first criterion here given the overabundance of heraldic devices

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Fig. 6.19  San Marino, Huntington Library, MS El 26 A 9 (Stafford), fol. 1r

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that has attracted substantial commentary itself.36 As in the case of the Fairfax Confessio, a few details in Stafford indicate that the border is more likely to have been produced after 1400 than before. On the bottom bars the solid vine extensions shift to a simple spray based on penwork, not unprecedented at the end of the fourteenth century in London37 (Fig. 6.20). The interlace patterns decorating the bars and defining the corners also recall earlier decorating styles. However, later in the manuscript the leaves on the spray extensions are overtly kidney-­shaped, a step further in defining an axial concavity than those in

Fig. 6.20  Left: Stafford, fol. 1r detail; right: Stafford, fol. 113r detail 1

36  On the heraldic devices decorating the first folio of Stafford see most recently Terry Jones, “Did John Gower Rededicate His ‘Confessio Amantis’ before Henry IV’s Usurpation?” in Middle English Texts in Transition: A Festschrift Dedicated to Toshiyuki Takamiya on his 70th Birthday, ed. Simon Horobin and Linne R. Mooney (Woodbridge, UK: York Medieval Press/Boydell and Brewer, 2014), 40–74; there Jones dates the decorations ca. 1403. The discussion more broadly can be found in the conflicting views of Macaulay, Works, 2.clii-cliii; Fisher, 124–125; A.  I. Doyle, “English Books In and Out of Court from Edward III to Henry VII,” in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (London 1983) 163–181; and C. W. Dutschke with R. H. Rouse, et. al., Guide to the Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Huntington Library (2 vols. San Marino 1989) 1.40–41. Carlson, “English Poetry,” 388–389, notes the widespread use of animal allegory for the major political players in 1397–1399 in Gower’s Cronica tripertita as well as pamphlet poetry from the period and suggests that this allegory may have had its basis in heraldry. 37  See, for instance BL Harley 401 (Fig. 6.11), dated by Scott (Dated and Datable, 31) as produced in 1396; the border artist uses single-line penwork vines (fol. 1r) and short penwork extensions of solid illuminated vines (fol. 7r, whose initial is inhabited by a dragon-like grotesque).

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Fairfax—developing the leaf form emerging in the first decade of the fifteenth century in London border work, as Scott notes.38 Similar sprigs and kidney leaves appear in the simpler and less antique-­ looking borders that divide the books later in the manuscript, along with the side-lobed “mitten leaf” form that becomes a dominant type in the early fifteenth century. Also, simple roundels of four or five leaves on a rounded golden ground define the corners, another feature emerging in London manuscripts in the first few years of the fifteenth century, standard parts of the border decorating vocabulary in Stafford for all the borders after the opening bar border39 (Fig. 6.21). On the other hand, some gold protrusions between leaves in the Stafford borders remain pointed (also visible between the pair of mitten leaves on the top bar in Fig. 6.21), and generally the later bar borders also indicate a restrained simplicity typical of London work after 1400, but not long after. A similar combination of elements can be seen in the Huntington 143 Piers Plowman (Fig. 6.22). The whorls at the corners of the bar and initial indicate a date post 1400, though other details indicate a conservative style again after 1400, but only by a few years. The leaf whorls are positioned on a gold ground that emerges in golden balls between leaves; the vines are thick and only slightly wavy; the leaf forms are simple. Although decoration in the Hengwrt manuscript of the Canterbury Tales (Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 392D) has received very little attention, it contains an unfinished full bar border on Fig. 6.21  Stafford, fol. 113r detail 2

 Scott, Dated and Datable, 45.  Scott, Dated and Datable, 32 offers a comparable example of this early form of roundel firmly dated 1403. 38 39

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Fig. 6.22  San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS HM 143, fol. 1r. Piers Plowman

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Fig. 6.23  Aberystwyth, National Library, MS Peniarth 392D (Hengwrt CT), fol. 2r detail 1. By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wales

its opening folio (Fig. 6.23). This border also features the restraint typical of the very first years of the fifteenth century and slightly evolved forms of simplified leaf roundel: the center of the corner roundel is infilled with a leaf, other roundels are sprouting off the bar and extending into the outer margins with rounded gold globes between their leaves, and a few hairlines extend from the leaf tips. An older detail, an interlace medallion, appears on the midpoint of the bottom bar, but is surrounded on both sides by these slightly more advanced features (Fig. 6.24). A similar interlace medallion flanked by leaf roundels appears in an English manuscript dated 1403 by its scribe William Morten, though the latter’s roundels and other details are closer to the earlier features in Stafford’s borders: simpler roundels restricted to the corners and pointed gold spacers between the leaves in the roundels.40 In short, the Hengwrt CT border fits into the  Scott, Dated and Datable, 32.

40

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Fig. 6.24  Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 392D (Hengwrt CT), fol. 2r detail 2. By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wales

early development of these features around the same time or slightly later than Stafford, probably around 1403–1405. One early manuscript of Gower’s Vox clamantis has a notable bar border, Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunterian 59 (Fig.  6.25). Here leaf whorls at the corners combine with daisy buds, putting this decoration in the range of ca. 1405 as well. One last comparable example, dated 1405 by its scribe and likely to be from London, is London, British Library, MS Harley 2946, a Breviary and Psalter that exemplifies this new simplicity and use of restrained corner roundels (Figs. 6.26 and 6.27). On the bars only a few leaves and gold balls occur, while roundels at the corners show a profusion of leaves extending from a single vine-like stem with no gestures toward interlace or any other forms of corner medallions found in older styles, as in Stafford’s or Hengwrt’s interlace medallions on the full bar border on the first folio (Figs. 6.18, 6.19, 6.20, 6.21, 6.22, 6.23, and 6.24). A later three-fourth border in Harley 2946 looks even more like Stafford’s partial borders, including golden points protruding between the leaves.41 Stafford’s old-­ fashioned interlace bars and corners in its full bar border on the opening  Also see Scott, Dated and Datable, 34.

41

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Fig. 6.25  Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunterian 59, fol. 7v. Vox clamantis. Courtesy of University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections

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Fig. 6.26  London, British Library, MS Harley 2946 fol. 181r detail. © The British Library Board

folio might seem to suggest an earlier date or at least separate hands for the decoration further into the manuscript. Nonetheless, there can be little doubt that the same hand produced all the borders in Stafford; a close examination of the vines in Figs. 6.18, 6.19, and 6.20, for example, reveal many similarities in line. While this stylistic shift from the first border to the later borders might simply be due to the border artist’s training in earlier styles, the exclusive use of the dramatic interlace and other older border features on the opening folio might also be a conscious attempt to archaize the manuscript or suggest through this design the poem’s claims to the authority of age: Gower’s own age and the ancient wisdom of the poem’s moral framework. The Stafford miniaturist has not been identified, nor associated with any other manuscripts, and clearly represents a different artist than the Fairfax miniaturist. Still, Stafford’s artist illustrates Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream on the opening folio with the same elements (including Nebuchadnezzar in bed and the boulder threatening from above) as the equivalent miniature that opens the poem in Fairfax 3—an iconography

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Fig. 6.27  London, British Library, MS Harley 2946, fol. 244r detail. © The British Library Board

that will vary substantially in the next decade of London Confessios.42 It is a slim reed, but one more parallel between Fairfax and Stafford that may reflect a similar date of production and possibly a similar association with Gower. That specific date for both manuscripts is hotly debated; Stafford’s later borders, at least, argue for decoration during the first few years of the fifteenth century. That strikingly different iconography appears in the Confessio manuscript most resembling an outlier in several respects: New York, Morgan Library, MS M.690. Its partial borders are quite similar to those in Vernon, Simeon, and Fairfax in terms of the presentation of vines on the bar: the 42  On the miniatures of Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream see Jeremy Griffiths, “Confessio Amantis: The Poem and Its Pictures,” in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1983), 163–178. Joyce Coleman, “Illuminations in Gower’s Manuscripts,” in The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower, ed. Ana Sáez-­ Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R.  F. Yeager, (Oxford and New  York: Routledge, 2017), 122–123, provides an updated version of Griffiths’ chart; for more art-historical detail also see Joyce Coleman, “Dream of Nebuchadnezzar and Confession Miniatures in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” John Gower Society: https://johngower.org/coleman-miniatures/. An older view by this author is Joel Fredell, “Reading the Dream Miniature in the Confessio Amantis,” Medievalia et Humanistica 22 (1995): 61–93.

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extensions on the vine, leaf forms, highlighting, and palette.43 However, the vines extend notably beyond the boundaries set up by the text blocks, both top and bottom; this visual strategy becomes a pronounced feature of London border work around 1405 and thereafter44 (Fig. 6.28). Here the rounded gold balls between leaves at the top and bottom of the bar and the small roundel of leaves visible about two-thirds of the way down the bar indicate a post-1400 date for the borders, though certainly in the first decade and probably in the first five years.45 The miniature, however, poses an interesting problem: the figure of the Ages of Man occupies the space without any sign of Nebuchadnezzar, though a substantial mountain on the right supplies the boulder that is fallen well below the statue’s head. This iconography becomes standard in the manuscripts produced by the Guildhall group later in the following decade but stands quite distinct from the Dream miniature as it appears in the two manuscripts with borders of a comparable style: Fairfax 3 and Stafford. Scott suggests that the Dream miniature in Morgan M.690 may be the work of the Carmelite-­ Lapworth master (one of the greatest London decorators emerging in the 1390s and continuing into the next decade) or an associate; a striking marine blue in the background certainly resembles the unusual shade in miniatures more definitely ascribed to this hand.46 Similarly, Morgan M.690 appears to be the first Confessio manuscript whose ordinatio eliminates virtually all the marginal machinery that becomes a major feature of the page design in Fairfax 3 and Stafford.47 Derek Pearsall has pointed out that most Confessio manuscripts (including all Confessio manuscripts discussed in this study) are laid out in what he calls a “London style”: a deluxe two-column page with Gower’s elaborate

 Similar partial borders appear in Morgan 690 on fols. 5r, 25r, 48r, 64r, 88r, and 152v.  Scott, Dated and Datable, 34, noting this feature in Harley 2946, discussed above and dated 1405 by its scribe. Many more examples of these more extravagant vines can be found in the borders discussed in the next chapter, dating from 1405 to the 1420s. 45  Scott, LGM II.23, includes Morgan 690 in a list of borders similar to Vernon including Fairfax 3 and Simeon; Scott later (LGM 2.28) dates Morgan M.690 ca. 1400. The single decorator’s use of leaf roundels coming off the bar increases and elaborates later in the manuscript; see, for instance, fol. 48r. A few initials on fol. 153r in Morgan M.690 feature some green wash on decorations in a style only found on this page, probably added later. 46  Scott, LGM, II.28, where she identifies this limner as Hand A of the Carmelite Missal. 47  On this feature of some Ricardian Confessio manuscripts also see Siân Echard, “Glossing Gower: In Latin, in English, and in absentia: The Case of Bodleian Ashmole 35,” in Re-visioning Gower, ed. R. F. Yeager (Charlotte, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998), 237–256. 43 44

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Fig. 6.28  New York, Morgan Library MS M.690, fol. 4v. Reproduced by permission of the Morgan Library and Museum

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system of text divisions represented in great detail.48 One part of that elaborate system is the host of marginal summaries for the many embedded narratives and encyclopedic entries, along with markers to indicate change of speakers in the frequent dialogues between Amans and Genius. In some Confessio manuscripts these summaries and speaker markers appear in the margins; in others the summaries appear in the main columns, with the speaker markers either in the margins or in the main text column; in yet other cases the summaries and speaker markers mostly or completely disappear. Summaries and speaker markers appear in the margins of Fairfax 3 and Stafford, probably the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Confessio (Fig. 6.29). Aside from one pair of brief indexing marginal notes early in the manuscript, the substantial summaries which appear in the margins of Fairfax and Stafford are subsumed into the main text column in Morgan M.690, written in red; speaker markers are rare and few throughout.49 This version of the London ordinatio for the Confessio becomes standard in the productions of the Guildhall group, but Morgan M.690 apparently anticipates that layout strategy.50 As yet we have no idea who the main scribe for Morgan M.690 might have been, nor have we found another manuscript written by this hand.51 The manuscript’s apparent use of a major decorator and adherence to a distinct layout for the Confessio’s copious marginalia both anticipate the pervasive choices of the Guildhall scribes and argues for some kind of association however unclear at this point.52 48  Derek Pearsall, “The Manuscripts and Illustrations of Gower’s Works,” in A Companion to Gower, ed. Siàn Echard (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), 80. 49  The brief marginal notes appear in Morgan M.690 on fol. 5r; some speaker markers are scattered throughout, though not consistently. A separate hand has added marginal “chapter” numbering in several places. 50  Bodley 294, a production by Marchaunt and Scheerre ca. 1410–15, differs in this matter as in its textual affiliations. See further below. 51  The main scribe wrote fols. 2–152vb and 161ra-204vb. A second hand wrote a single quire, fols. 153ra-160vb—not a crucial portion of the text for political considerations. 52  Among the striking features of this design change is its need to reconfigure the column for column copying used by Confessio scribes, a substantial help for layout in a long poem such as the Confessio; on this feature of scribal practice in the Confessio see recently Linne R. Mooney, “Thomas Hoccleve in Another Confessio Amantis Manuscript,” JEBS: Journal of the Early Book Society 24 (2019), 227–240. On the design in Morgan M.690 see further Joel Fredell, “The First Emergence of the Ricardian Confessio: Morgan M.690,” in Scribal Cultures in Late Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Linne R. Mooney, ed. Holly Crocker-­ James, Margaret Connelly, and Derek Pearsall (York, UK: York Medieval Press, 2021), 200–221.

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Fig. 6.29  Fairfax 3, fol. 82r detail. Summary left column; speaker markers right column. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

What remains to be explored is the relationship between early Confessio manuscripts indicated by the dating for these decorations. Probably within the first five years of production for Gower’s masterpiece in English, during the most troubled years of Henry IV, London book producers offered startlingly different deluxe editions of the poem: with two profoundly different and politically charged dedications; with two substantial variations in the presentation and use of the massive marginal machinery; with readings that outline two different textual families in all the other variants. These trends continue into the coming decades for London editions of the

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Confessio, though among the survivors a clear trend toward the Ricardian type deepened its incongruous popularity in Lancastrian England as Henry IV retreated into illness and Henry V gradually took the reins of power from Thomas Arundel and other stand-ins. The next efflorescence of luxury Confessios offers its own parallel history for this secondary, but complex, transition in England under the Lancasters.

CHAPTER 7

Ricardian Confessio Manuscripts in Lancastrian England

1   An Emerging Producer Coterie in London, 1405–1410 As in the period 1400 to 1405, the next five years in London saw border decoration that can seem a confusing combination of elements due to a mixture of border artists with training from different periods and what seems to be less consensus on what constituted current border styles. A much clearer consensus develops from 1410 on, and that latter date is substantially more reliable in the chronology of London borders. Nonetheless, useful distinctions can be drawn among borders whose features put them before 1410 but almost certainly after the great political rupture of 1399. The new leaf forms appearing in the first few years of the fifteenth century become pervasive, leaf roundels develop into more elaborate forms, vines terminating in penwork sprays gradually become standard and more fully elaborated in the margins, along with several other features discussed below. This period includes not only Gower’s death in 1408 (and some manuscripts of his poetry apparently clustered around that date), but also Henry IV’s health collapsing from 1405 onward and the rise of Prince Henry as heir in waiting, Thomas Arundel as Lord Chancellor, and Thomas Chaucer as frequent Speaker of the House. In this environment the Ricardian Confessio emerges as the primary form of the dying Lancastrian’s great poem in deluxe London editions, and the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Fredell, Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27964-5_7

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scribes associated with the London Guildhall emerge as principal inventors of a literary canon that draws heavily from Ricardian authors. The first examples of literary manuscripts from the scribal coterie gathered around John Marchaunt occur in this period as well, though both are versions of Piers Plowman, a poem whose manuscript record survives from well before 1400, and both borders could be dated that early. The Ilchester Piers (Sterling V. 88), written by John Marchaunt, has one three-quarter border, incomplete and surviving in a fragmentary state (Fig. 7.1). From this example features that would probably date it before 1405 are the early leaf whorls, the use of points along the bar usually filled in with gold leaf, and the blobs between leaves on the outer left-hand arch. Adam Pynkhurst’s early production of Piers B, Cambridge, Trinity College MS B 15.17, also has a single three-quarter bar border on its opening folio, and again the decoration shows the features of London work from around 1400: a sparse and simple decorated bar, extending into an equally sparse vine with daisy bud pairs and trilobed leaves, accompanied by a few gold balls with squiggles1 (Fig. 7.2). Along with the sheer simplicity of the design, the roundel-­ like arches at the right corners can be found in Harley 401 (securely dated 1396) well before the explosion of new design features beginning in the first decade of the fifteenth century.2 Apparently neither Marchaunt nor Pynkhurst had yet established relationships with the highest levels of London decorators they worked with subsequently. Instead, these two Piers manuscripts align with an already-established tradition: the public circulation of Langland’s poetry before the deposition of Richard II in 1399, most of which was outside London and had no associations with Chaucer or Gower. The Ilchester and Trinity Piers manuscripts are likely to be among the first shots fired in a lengthy campaign to publish the work of a quartet of Ricardian writers in deluxe editions: Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and Trevisa. These two manuscripts are, however, vastly less deluxe than later work by the Guildhall coterie. Nor will Langland’s great poem appear again in the surviving record of work by Marchaunt and his 1  On the identification of Hand B (soon to be named Adam Pynkhurst) as the scribal hand for TCC B 15.17 see Simon Horobin and Linne R. Mooney, “A Piers Plowman Manuscript by the Hengwrt/Ellesmere Scribe and its implications for London Standard English,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 (2004): 65–112. 2  London, British Library MS Harley 401, fol. 7r, available online at http://www.bl.uk/ catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/record.asp?MSID=4494&CollID=8&NStart=401. Note the proto-roundel device in the historiated initial. On fol. 1r is a conservative and old-­ fashioned bar border with sprigs of daisy buds. Also see Scott, Dated and Datable, pl. III.

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Fig. 7.1  London, University of London, Sterling Library MS V.88, fol. 1r detail. Piers C

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Fig. 7.2  Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B 15.17, fol. 1r detail. Piers B.  Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge

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associates, while Thomas Hoccleve enters the group as both producer and author lavishly produced.3 One of the basic problems for discussions of the Confessio’s tangled history in material terms is that only Fairfax 3 and Stafford can be dated close to 1400, or for that matter securely within Gower’s lifetime. While both of these manuscripts are likely to have been produced in the London area, they have no known association with the London scribes and artists who produced the next generation of deluxe manuscripts of the Confessio.4 Morgan M.690 may, as I have argued above, be a transitional version of the poem as indicated by its textual family and page design. This manuscript does not contain either dedication section, and so we must turn to the later burst of Ricardian Confessios as the primary source of evidence for this version’s emergence in London. One crucial and, at present, unanswerable question is what could have been the textual source for the Ricardian dedications in these Confessios. The most likely scenario is that there were Ricardian versions of the Confessio floating around London outside the control of Gower (or representatives of the Lancastrian government). John Marchaunt and Thomas Hoccleve, two members of the coterie of scribes responsible for these early Ricardian Confessios, were also producers of early manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales (though Hoccleve’s role is still under debate).5 Geoffrey Chaucer is a likely source among this group not just for their access to the membra disiecta of his tales, but for some early form of the Confessio given the strong potential the Gower’s

3  Also see Simon Horobin, “Adam Pinkhurst and the Copying of British Library MS Additional 35287 of the B Version of Piers Plowman.” Yearbook of Langland Studies 23 (2009): 61-83-generally dated around 1400 but without any substantial decoration beyond penwork initials. Horobin also identifies Pynkhurst’s hand in a third Piers manuscript in “The Criteria for Scribal Attribution: Dublin, Trinity College MS 244 Reconsidered,” Review of English Studies 60 (2009): 371–81. 4  Cologny, Switzerland, Fondation Martin Bodmer MS CB 178 is another Henrician Confessio with claims to be among the earliest surviving copies. Bodmer has spaces left for the Dream and Confessor miniatures at fols. 1ra and 7ra. Otherwise initials at book divisions have modest illuminations (fols. 1ra, 7rb, 26va, 46ra, 58rb, 78va, 121va, 135ra, 164vb). The sprays are built on solid and fairly straight vines, indicating a date after 1400 but probably close to 1405. Pearsall and Mooney, Catalogue, 261, dates the penwork flourishing for initials to the first decade of the fifteenth century from a single hand. 5  On the contending positions on Hoccleve’s potential role as an editor of the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales see Chap. 3 above.

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Tale of Constance influenced Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale.6 Noting that Marchaunt (like Pynkhurst) had a strong sense of agency in his presentations of the Canterbury Tales, it seems likely that he would have used materials at hand for his versions of the Confessio.7 Marchaunt worked with outstanding illustrators and decorators whose miniatures and borders offer some of the best evidence we have for dating the emergence of the Ricardian Confessio. The identities of the miniaturists in all these luxury editions of the Confessio have been the subject of long investigation and, at this point, a large degree of consensus beyond some dispute over just what the relationship between “followers” and/or similar hands with the well-known masters might be. The border artists, however, have largely been identified up to now through the work of a single scholar, Kathleen L. Scott, the undisputed expert in this area for the period (1390–1425) in question 6  Peter Nicholson, “The ‘Man of Law’s Tale:’ What Chaucer Really Owed to Gower,” Chaucer Review 26 (1991): 153–174; and “Chaucer Borrows from Gower: The Sources of the Man of Law’s Tale,” in Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange, ed. R. F. Yeager (Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1991), 85–99. Also see discussion of Chaucer’s use of Gower’s “Tale of Apollonius” in the same tale: Wetherbee, Winthrop. “Constance in the World in Chaucer and Gower,” in John Gower: Recent Readings, ed. R.  F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989), 65–93; and María Bullón-Fernández, “Engendering Authority: Father and Daughter, State and Church in Gower’s ‘Tale of Constance’ and Chaucer’s ‘Man of Law’s Tale’,” in Re-visioning Gower, ed. R. F. Yeager (Ashville, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998), 129–146. 7  On Marchaunt’s distinctive arrangements of the tale order for his two copies of the Canterbury Tales in London, British Library MS Harley 7334 and Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 198, including the Tale of Gamelyn, see most recently Charles A. Owen Jr., The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1991), 7–14. For the differences between Marchaunt’s and Pynkhurst’s layout of the Canterbury Tales see Joel Fredell, “The Lowly Paraf: Transmitting Manuscript Design in the Canterbury Tales,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 213–280. On these manuscripts more broadly, also see C. Paul Christianson, “A Community of Book Artisans in Chaucer’s London,” Viator 20 (1989): 207–18; and A. S. G. Edwards and Derek Pearsall. “The Manuscripts of the Major English Poetic Texts,” in Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall, eds. Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 257–78; Ralph Hanna, Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and their Texts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 115–129; and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice, “Scribe D and the Marketing of Ricardian Literature,” in The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower, ed. Kathryn Kerby-­ Fulton and Maidie Hilmo, English Literary Studies 85 (Victoria, BC: U. of Victoria Press, 2001), 217–237.

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here. I will add some further manuscripts and detail, but most of the foundations and much of the specifics for border identification and dating have been laid down by Scott.8 Occasionally Scott offers a definite view as to date for the manuscripts from this London cohort of scribes and decorators, but far from always. Since this study is deeply concerned with the dates for Confessio manuscripts in particular, and the abiding contradiction of a literary canonization of Richard’s cultural heritage during a very difficult political period for the dynasty that had overthrown him, firmer dates for these borders would be helpful. Accordingly, I have looked carefully at the borders for all these manuscripts and can offer some further guidance on dates. Again, it must be acknowledged from the start that decoration may occur years after scribal production of a manuscript, and so my observations cannot determine a date for the writing through border decoration alone. Still, as I have argued above, these manuscripts are large luxury productions of very long texts by teams with close professional associations: the sheer cost and effort would make extended production on pure speculation less likely and coordinated work for a known buyer or patron more likely. Also, in many cases (as in Fairfax 3, discussed above) the borders are executed before the miniatures, placing the border dates at least marginally closer to scribal production. The vast majority of the Confessio manuscripts that survive from the first twenty-five years of the poem’s material history were produced by a related group of London scribes and decorators. This cohort, all of whom chose a text with dedications to Richard II in the years immediately after the initial two witnesses dedicated to Henry, consists of seven scribes (already identified to a greater or lesser degree) who produced deluxe editions of multiple texts by Langland, Chaucer, Gower, and Trevisa. All of these authors emerged as important literary figures in Ricardian England, though what little we know about the circulation of their work is

8  Also see Scott’s discussion of the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales border work, distinctive for its lack of hierarchy in divisions: Kathleen L. Scott, “An Hours and Psalter by Two Ellesmere Illuminators,” in The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation, ed. Martin Stevens and Daniel Woodward (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library; and Tokyo: Yushodo, 1995), 86–121.

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dependent largely on manuscripts from the Lancastrian period.9 The sheer ­quantity and quality of manuscripts featuring these four authors, produced in London (mostly around 1410) by a tightly associated group of scribes and decorators, raises the possibility of a concerted campaign by this group to create what became a literary canon lasting to this day.10 Not only do we face the well-known problem of Gower’s Ricardian version of the Confessio being established as the dominant form in this Lancastrian court context (including ownership of this politically incorrect version by the sons of Richard’s bane Henry IV), but the larger specter of four major literary figures from Richard’s reign enshrined in deluxe manuscripts by the best artists—and probably the best scribes—in London at the time. We cannot know whether the driving force behind any or all of these manuscripts were patrons still largely in the shadows, but the sheer quantity and quality of the manuscripts associated with this group argues for a conscious participation in the celebration of Ricardian poets that this body of work presents. Eight of these scribes are associated in one or more of three ways: by their shared employment at the London Guildhall, by shared training, or 9  On a Piers manuscript owned by Walter de Brugge before 1396, see Simon Horobin, “Mapping the words,” in The Production of Books in England 1350–1500, ed. Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 71. Estelle Stubbs, ed. The Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile (CD-ROM) (Leicester, England: Scholarly Digital Editions, 2000), “Observations on the Hengwrt Chaucer, Section IV,” argues for the possibility of surviving Chaucer manuscripts datable before his death in 1399, specifically for two quires in Hengwrt that might be taken from draft fair copies. Among Gower manuscripts Cambridge, University Library, MS Additional 3035, the unique witness for Gower’s Miroir de l’Omme, has been dated ca. 1380 by Malcolm Parkes; see further Add. 3035 “Manuscript Description,” at Late Medieval English Scribes, ed. Linne R. Mooney and Estelle Stubbs, medievalscribes.com. For Trevisa one manuscript survives that was arguably produced shortly before 1400: Manchester, Chethem’s Library MS 11379, which includes the Polychronicon translation, Dialogus, and the Epistola; its border on 60r (which does not look like London work) supports a date ca. 1400. The text is in a single column, and generally this manuscript does not resemble the later, more luxurious manuscripts by the Guildhall coterie, as well as being distinct in other ways. See further Ronald Waldron, “The Manuscripts of Trevisa’s Translations of the Polychronicon: Towards a new edition,” Modern Language Quarterly 51 (1990), 288, 314. 10  The following discussion will not include important manuscripts in this process written wholly or in part by Guildhall scribes, such as the anthology of Middle English poetry (including Piers and Chaucer’s Troilus) in San Marino, Huntington Library MS HM 114, since these manuscripts are not substantially decorated. Nor will it include manuscripts with incomplete decoration, such as Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd.8.19, a Ricardian Confessio in the hand of John Carpenter.

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by collaboration on one or more of these important manuscripts.11 More broadly these scribes share an additional web of relationships with three major miniaturists, and a number of border artists working in London at the same time who themselves organize into three defined clusters of decorators for the golden age of literary manuscripts largely created by this London cohort of book producers. This network is presented for convenience in table form, though the relationships will be teased out at some length here (Table 7.1).12 The most prolific figure in this material recreation of Ricardian poetry, John Marchaunt (also known as Doyle and Parkes Scribe D), seems to be at the center of the cohort, in part because his hand is found in the largest number of literary manuscripts among them, and in part because his hand represents a model for three other scribes now known provisionally as Delta, Gower 3, and the Trevisa-Gower Scribe.13 These two latter scribes exhibit hands so close to that of Marchaunt that scholars have argued that one or the other is Marchaunt himself at a different period, though other features (such as spelling) demonstrate convincingly that both disputed hands represent separate individuals. Consequently, these three scribes are very likely to have shared training in some capacity close to Marchaunt, presumably in London, whether or not the other two scribes also worked at the Guildhall. Two other now-identified Guildhall scribes, Adam Pynkhurst (formerly Doyle and Parkes Scribe B) and John Carpenter, bookend Marchaunt’s main period of productivity: Pynkhurst at the earlier 11  These scribes are identified in Table 1 as Adam Pynkhurst, John Marchaunt, Thomas Hoccleve, John Carpenter, scribe Delta, the Trevisa-Gower scribe, and the Petworth scribe. For a discussion of these identifications and recent challenges to them see Chap. 3 above. Full descriptions for all these scribes and their manuscripts are available at Mooney and Stubbs, Late Medieval English Scribes. 12  Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, 136, offer a table linking Guildhall scribes to manuscripts of the Confessio, including those without illuminations. Also see the table from Joyce Coleman on Gower manuscripts, “Dream of Nebuchadnezzar and Confession Miniatures in Gower’s Confessio Amantis” on the John Gower Society site at https:// johngower.org/coleman-miniatures/; and see further her overview in “Illuminations in Gower Manuscripts,” in The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower, ed. Ana Saez-­ Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R.F. Yeager (Routledge, 2017), 117–131. This table also does not include manuscripts without substantial border decoration, such as Trinity R.3.2. 13  Doyle and Parkes, “Production,” 178 and 206–208, point out the similarity between their scribe D (Marchaunt) and the Delta scribe, arguing for shared or supervised training. Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, 136, identify the Gower 3 scribe as Marchaunt or a scribe trained by Marchaunt.

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Table 7.1  Decoration and scribe clusters in deluxe London literary manuscripts, 1400–1425 Manuscript

Main text

Earliest Decoration ca. 1400–1405 Fairfax 3 Confessio H

Scribe

Miniatures

Borders

Pre-­international Style No miniatures Pre-­international Style Carmelite-­ Lapworth Master? none none

ca. 1400

English International none Pentecost Master Unidentified

Hatton 4

None Royal 1 E.ix workshop

Unidentified Border Cluster 2 Border Cluster 1 Border Cluster 1 Border Cluster 1 Border Cluster 1 Border Cluster 1 Border Cluster 1 Border Cluster 1 Border Cluster 1 Border Cluster 2

Hengwrt 392D Stafford

Cant. Tales Confessio H/S

Unknown, Parkes 4&5 Pynkhurst 1 Unknown

Morgan M.690

Confessio R?

2 Unknown

Sterling V.88 Piers Trinity B.15.17 Piers Next-earliest Decoration 1405–1410 Ellesmere Cant. Tales

Marchaunt Pynkhurst

Christ Church 148 Confessio R Laud Misc 609 Confessio R Taylor 5 Confessio H/S

Marchaunt Trevisa-Gower Marchaunt, TrevisaGower?, 1 unknown Unknown Marchaunt

St. John’s B.12 Corpus Christi 67

Confessio R Confessio R

Pynkhurst

Decoration 1410–1415 Arundel 38 Reg. Princes

Unknown

Bedford A

Harley 4866

Reg. Princes

Unknown

Bedford A

Add. 27944

De Propriet

1 historiation

St. John’s H.1

Polychronicon

Marchaunt, 2 unknown Delta

Osborn fa 1

Confessio R

3? unknown

Rosenbach 1083/29 Pembroke 307

Confessio R

Carpenter

Confessio R

Petworth

Morgan M.817

Troil. and Cris. Carpenter

Aberdeen 21

Polychronicon

Delta?

Johannes follower none Johannes-style Bruss IV1095 C Johannes follower Johannes-style Neville C St. John’s H.1-like

ca. 1405 ca. 1405 ca. 1405

ca. 1405 Unidentified

Unidentified Unidentified Border hand 1 unidentified

(continued)

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Table 7.1 (continued) Manuscript

Main text

Scribe

Miniatures

Borders

Senshu 1 (olim Schøyen 194) Harley 7334

Polychronicon

Trevisa-Gower

Scheerre

Cant. Tales

Marchaunt

None

Corpus Christi 198 Egerton 1991

Cant. Tales

Marchaunt

No miniatures

Confessio R

Marchaunt

Royal 18 C.xxii

Confessio R

Delta

Add. 24194

Polychronicon

Delta

Bodley 294

Confessio H/S

Marchaunt

Scheerre-­ influence Bedford B? Scheerre-­ influence St. John’s H.1-like C-L master Scheerre

Border Cluster 2 Border Cluster 3 Rennes 22 A Border Cluster 3 Border Cluster 3

Bodley 902

Confessio R

Marchaunt, 2 unknown

Johannes

Lansdowne 851

Cant. Tales

unknown

Scheerre

Bodley 693

Confessio R

Trevisa-Gower

Cambridge Mm.2.21 Plimpton 265

Confessio R

5 unknown

Scheerre-­ influence Not a master

Confessio R

Marchaunt

Garrett 151 Polychronicon Decoration 1415–1425 Hunterian 7 Confessio R Morgan M.125

Confessio R

Delta Gower 3/ Marchaunt? Gower 3/ Marchaunt?

Border Cluster 3 Border Cluster 3 Border Cluster 3 Border Cluster 3 Royal 1 E.IX Border Cluster 3 Border Cluster 3? Unidentified

Scheerre-­ influence No miniatures

Unidentified

No miniatures

Unidentified

Not a master

Unidentified

Unidentified

end close to 1400 and Carpenter at the later end.14 Marchaunt produced in the first two decades of the fifteenth century deluxe books reproducing all four major Ricardian writers, including no less than seven copies of Gower’s Confessio. In that enterprise he worked directly with three other 14  On the identification of John Carpenter see further Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, 86–106; and the response by Warner, Chaucer’s Scribes, 72–95. Carpenter died in 1437, and his latest surviving manuscript dated near the end of his life is a shortened Ricardian Confessio: Cambridge, University Library MS Dd.8.19.

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scribes: Pynkhurst and Hoccleve (Trinity R.3.2), and two other collaborators for Taylor 5. Delta, by contrast, seemed to specialize in Trevisa manuscripts, which constitute four of his contributions to this cluster of deluxe London editions, along with one copy of the Confessio. The Trevisa-Gower scribe more or less reverses those proportions, with at least three deluxe Confessios ascribed to him (at least one in collaboration with Marchaunt) and one deluxe Trevisa manuscript.15 The Petworth scribe, possibly another Guildhall scribe, produced manuscripts of Chaucer and Gower after 1415; Petworth’s Confessio, again judging by its decoration, comes early in Petworth’s career, not long after the burst of production from the Marchaunt cohort, with a border datable around 1415, though in this case with miniatures by a London hand directly influenced by the Johannes Confessor miniature from Marchaunt’s Bodley 902.16 One or two other scribes appear to have been latecomers to the party, judging from the decoration, at least. “GowerAIGower scribe 3 scribe 3” produced two deluxe copies of the Confessio whose decoration is later than 1415 and not associated with any hand seen otherwise in the MarchauntAIMarchaunt, John (Scribe D) cohort. 15  Mooney has recently reconsidered her identifications of the hand of the Trevisa-Gower scribe. For our purposes, she now argues that she considers the hand of scribe B in Taylor 5 to be very similar to the Trevisa-Gower scribe, but not unequivocally that scribe. Mooney’s new position was presented to the New Chaucer Society in 2022; a published version is forthcoming as “The Trevisa-Gower Scribe: Another London Literary Scribe of the Early Fifteenth Century,” in a festschrift for Kathryn Kerby-Fulton. 16  On the Petworth Scribe as clerk of the Skinner’s Company of London see Jeremy Griffiths, “Thomas Hingham, Monk of Bury and the Macro Plays Manuscript,” English Manuscript Studies 5 (1995):214–219 at 214; and Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, 120–121. London, British Library MS Sloane 3501 (Master of the Game), judging from its border on fol. 3r, probably was produced in the same period; other surviving manuscripts by this scribe such as Petworth, National Trust, MS Petworth 7 (Canterbury Tales); Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 18.1.7 (Nicholas Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ); and London, British Library, MS Arundel 119 (Lydgate, Siege of Thebes) are clearly later. On the manuscripts associated with Petworth see further Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, 120–121. Scott, LGW, 2.71, (following Otto Pächt) says that miniaturist of Pembroke 307 copied the Johannes miniature in Bodley 902. Some doubts about the hand in Pembroke 307 were expressed by A. I. Doyle, “The Study of Nicholas Love’s Mirror, Retrospect and Prospect,” in Shoichi Oguro, Richard Beadle, and Michael G. Sargent, eds. Nicholas Love at Waseda: Proceedings of the International Conference 20–22 July 1995. Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Rochester NY: D. S. Brewer, 1997, 163–74. Daniel Mosser suggests that variations in the witnesses now generally attributed to the Petworth scribe were based on the long career of this scribe, and Doyle himself, 173, suggests that a high level of production and decoration (certainly found in Pembroke 307) argues for a professional hand like Petworth. See further Daniel Mosser, Digital Catalogue of the Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, “The Petworth Scribe,” http://www.mossercatalogue.net/articles.php?artID=CTPDPetScr.

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Among the web of miniaturists for this scribal cohort are three major figures from London in the period 1400–1415: the Carmelite Missal-­ Lapworth master (active 1398–ca. 1414), Hermann Scheerre (active in London 1405–1422?), and Johannes (active in London ca. 1400–1410).17 A variety of other miniaturists found in these manuscripts have been identified as followers or artists influenced by these major figures.18 Two of the major miniaturists, the Carmelite-Lapworth master and Scheerre, collaborated on the Lambeth Breviary ca. 1408–1414, the period when most of the Marchaunt/Guildhall cohort produced manuscripts associated with these miniaturists.19 Borders by three groups of London hands 17  Scott, LGW, 2.87, identifies the miniaturist for the historiated initial in the All Souls 98 Vox clamantis as “probable” Scheerre work. 18  These dates have evolved principally from the work of Margaret Rickert, Painting in Britain: The Middle Ages (2nd ed. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1965); Gereth Spriggs, “The Nevill Hours and the School of Herman Scheerre,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 37 (1974): 104–130; her “Unnoticed Bodleian Manuscripts Illuminated by Herman Scheerre and His School,” Bodleian Library Record 7 (1964): 193–203; and Scott, LGM. Here I follow Scott’s attributions and dates unless otherwise indicated. On the Carmelite Missal-Lapworth master, see Scott, LGM, 2. 26–28; 35–36. On Scheerre see Scott 2.86–87 for the earliest identification she accepts, and 2.166–167 for the possibility that signed miniatures in the Bedford Hours ca. 1420–1422 might indicate Scheerre’s supervision if not his direct participation; otherwise Scott, LGM, 2.157–158, more confidently identifies a terminus ad quem for Scheerre’s work in London when she attributes miniatures in Huntington 19913, ca. 1410–1420, to Scheerre. On Johannes see Scott, LGM, 2.68–72; on 2.72 Scott rejects the three other attributions to Johannes made by previous scholars; consequently, Scott’s range of 1400–1410 for the decoration of Bodley 264 must also stand for the known period of activity in London by Johannes. I use the term “followers” here to include the possibilities of artists in a workshop with these masters as well as artists more loosely associated but strongly influenced by these masters. 19  Scott, LGM, I2. 36, 112–13. Miniature attributions in Table 1 from Scott, LGM (where Scott also credits earlier identifications in agreement), include Morgan M.690 (2.28); Corpus Christi 67 (2.110); Laud misc. 609 (2.94); Aberdeen 21 (2.82); St. John H.1 (2.82); Schoyen 194 (2.82); Additional 24194 (2.87); Additional 27944 (2.170); Arundel 38 (2.185); Egerton1991 (2.110); Harley 4866 (2.161); Lansdowne 851 (2.87); Royal 18 C.XXII (2.87, 110); Bodley 294 (2.87); Bodley 902 (2.110); Plimpton 265 (2.96); Morgan M’817 (2.94); Rosenbach 1083/29 (2.156); Senshu 1 (olim Schøyen 194) (2.82); and Pembroke 307 (2.71). The miniatures in Bodley 693 are identified with artists influenced by Scheere in Spriggs, 193–194. In some cases Scott dates miniatures earlier (1407 for Bodley 294, 1407–1410 for Lansdowne 851, at 2.87, for instance) than she would date the borders based on her later book, Dated and Datable. I have followed Scott’s later dating here for three reasons: borders are my main concern; the dates for miniaturists Scheerre and Johannes extend to 1415 so there is no reason to disallow the later dates for manuscript decoration; and borders are regularly executed before miniatures and so in general provide a date closer to scribal production.

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also grace this group’s manuscripts.20 Let me note, before plunging into a substantial discussion of borders in many important literary manuscripts, that I will not identify every border hand in every manuscript. Instead, I will look at “clusters” which often do include the same hands but also similar hands or in some cases distinct hands included in the same manuscripts. My purpose is not to provide a full accounting of border decoration but to offer dates and working associations with identifiable scribes wherever possible.21 As Table 7.1 reveals, here again Marchaunt is at the center of the web, producing manuscripts with miniatures by Scheerre, Johannes, and associates of those masters, and borders by all three of the border clusters (though borders in other Marchaunt manuscripts represent at least three more distinct hands).22 The Trevisa-Gower scribe associates only with Scheerre and his followers for miniatures, but all three border clusters; Delta also associates with all three border clusters, though he shares a more eclectic group of miniaturists. Carpenter, Gower scribe 3, and the Petworth scribe produce Confessio manuscripts that are late enough that their miniaturists who follow the earlier masters do not lend a particularly strong connection; nonetheless, Carpenter manuscripts do have borders 20  For border cluster 1 in my table Scott, LGM, 2.165 identified the same border hand in Arundel 38, Harley 4866, Royal 18 C.XXII; and possibly (in other words, a closely related hand at least) St. John’s H.1 and Morgan M.817. For border cluster 2 in my table Scott identified the same or related border hands in Corpus Christi 67, Aberdeen 21, Additional 24194, and Senshu 1 (olim Schøyen 194); aee LGM, 2.83. For border cluster 3 in my table Scott identified the same or related border hands in Bodley 294 and Lansdowne 851 (LGM, 2.87). The ca. 1413–1415 border cluster 3 may be the most contentious and will be discussed at length below. Scott, LGM, 2.87 calls the borders of Bodley 294, Lansdowne 851, and Senshu 1 “similar,” though she does not attribute them to the same hand, and in fact also considers Senshu possibly to be in the border cluster 2 group. Border cluster 3 in my table includes two manuscripts, Corpus Christi 198 and Egerton 1991, whose border decoration neither Scott nor any other authority to my knowledge has discussed; in the passages noted above from LGM Scott connects some border hands in the remaining manuscripts for my border cluster 3 to borders in other manuscripts not included here; these connections are identified briefly in the table. 21  I have not been able to view the Confessio manuscript in private hands previously designated as Mount Stuart, Rothsay, Marquess of Bute MS 1.17. 22  Scott, LGM, 2.109–110, attributes the miniatures in Corpus Christi 67 to the workshop of the Big Bible (Royal 1 E.IX), a manuscript in which Scott, LGM, 2.104 identifies the Hand A miniaturist as the Carmelite-Lapworth Master. In this respect Marchaunt can be seen to work with associates of all three major miniaturists, if not the Carmelite-Lapworth Master himself.

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with two of the common hands whereas Petworth and the Gower 3 scribe manuscripts do not. Border clusters 1 and 2 clearly have the closest association with the three identified master miniaturists, while border cluster 3 is notably spread among several miniaturists.23 Border clusters are in many ways useful for dating the manuscripts of the Marchaunt cohort. Border cluster 3, for example, contains two copies of Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, which can be securely dated between 1411 (when the work was completed) and 1413 (when Henry V came to the throne).24 All of these general observations support a shifting but largely coherent set of artisans and scribes during the first major flurry of deluxe literary manuscripts in London. The devil, as always, will be in the details.

2   London Manuscripts 1405–1410 To begin, let me note that I will not use miniatures as evidence for dating beyond mentioning general ranges for the artist’s known period of work as termini post quem or ante quem. For the most part I will be discussing borders, which can be dated more precisely. Scott in Later Gothic Manuscripts rarely gives any specific indication for dates for the borders, though when she gives dates for miniatures then possible dates for borders can be implied, at least. In a later work, Dated and Datable Borders, Scott provides some clear and surprisingly granular dates for London borders in particular, which I apply and supplement here in five-year segments following the discussion of 1400–1405 in the chapter above. These dates are provisional, and I hope that what I offer here will stimulate further work on a critical time period for the emergence of Middle English literature.

23  Scott, LGM, 2.83, identifies three borders in the four manuscripts listed here as “border cluster 1” to be by the same hand; a fourth, Senshu, is “possibly” by the same hand. The border decorations in border cluster 3 Scott, LGM, 2.165, identifies as the work of Hand A in the Bedford Psalter, “one of the premier decorators of books in the first quarter of the 15th century.” Morgan M.817 and St. John’s H.1 Scott considers “possible attributions”; Add. 27944, according to Scott, LGM, 2.170, has a frontispiece border and historiated initial “almost certainly by one of the Bedford craftsmen.” Osborn fa.1 and Rosenbach 1083/29 (which Scott had not considered) are my identifications. 24  This secure dating led Scott, Dated and Datable, to use Arundel 38 as a reference point for her chronology of English border decoration. M.  C. Seymour, “The Manuscripts of Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes,” Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions 4.7 (1974): 253–97, argues (269) that Harley 4866 is “an almost exact replica of Arundel 38” and possibly a presentation volume for Edward, Duke of York or John, Duke of Bedford.

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A useful marker for the group of borders from 1405 to 1410 is the breviary discussed above and dated 1405, Harley 2946, though its provenance is unclear. Borders in this manuscript include a somewhat developed version of the semicircular leaf roundels, on a gold ground projecting rounded bumps between individual leaves (and a few vestigial gold spikes) that appear in the first few years of the century and can be seen in simpler form in the Fairfax and Stafford Confessios, though not the Vernon and Simeon borders from a few years earlier25 (Fig. 7.3). These three-quarter borders also use penwork sprays extended from the illuminated vine curling into a semicircle, elaborated with tiny penwork lobes. This design feature emerges in the first decade of the fifteenth century and will become a far more dramatic presence in London borders into the next decade. In the next group the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales (hereafter CT) remains by far the best-known manuscript, decorated around the same time (1405–1410) as the first Marchaunt/Guildhall versions of the Confessio. Ellesmere throughout its many major divisions of the CT features a rigid adherence to the basic structure of the three-quarter border found in Harley 2946, though the decorative features are more advanced and elaborate. Decoration in the Ellesmere CT has been the subject of massive discussion for decades, particularly its famous set of miniatures.26 Once again the most authoritative recent (though now twenty years ago) discussion of its borders is by Kathleen L. Scott. Scott points out a feature that jumps out for those with some experience of contemporary manuscript decoration: Ellesmere borders are remarkably standardized. No matter what sort of narrative division is involved—prologue, tale, or roadside interlude—Ellesmere offers the same basic three-quarter bar border, with strikingly similar visual designs and many of the same decorative elements despite the fact that at least three hands are involved.27 This unusual design decision, and the presence of the famous miniatures offering portraits of the pilgrims at the heads of their prologues or tales, 25  See Chap. 6 above on Fairfax and Stafford. Scott, Dated and Datable, 32–33, offers one example of an early leaf whorl along with older interlace devices in a manuscript of unclear provenance but dated 1403, Eton, College Library, MS 108. 26  The first major statement on these miniatures is Margaret Rickert, “Illumination,” in The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed, J. M. Manly and E. Rickert (8 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1940) 1:561–605. 27  Kathleen L.  Scott, “An Hours and Psalter by Two Ellesmere Illuminators,” in The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation, ed. Martin Stevens and Daniel Woodward (Tokyo: Yushodo, 1995), 89–92.

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Fig. 7.3  London, British Library, MS Harley 2946, fol. 244r detail. © The British Library Board

constitutes powerful evidence that a supervising figure is involved and keen to impose a distinctive visual organization for the work. The scribe, Adam Pynkhurst, is involved in this visual display in one crucial sense: he imposes a system of minor divisions in small capitals and paraphs, literally thousands of them, almost identical to the divisions he provides in the Hengwrt CT (probably written before Ellesmere). This massive structure of divisions is unmatched in the CT manuscripts written by his colleague John Marchaunt (Harley 7334 and Corpus Christi 198), by the unidentified scribe of the contemporary and probably London-produced

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Lansdowne 851, and by the still-mysterious scribe Wytton (Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd.4.24) shortly thereafter.28 Ellesmere’s organization and presentation are quite different from that of Hengwrt (another famous topic long plumbed by scholars), whether or not Pynkhurst was the lead contractor or supervisor on the manuscript;29 one major difference is, simply, that Ellesmere’s decoration is deluxe and complete, whereas Hengwrt has no decoration beyond a full bar border on its opening folio, small initials, most with penwork flourishing, and those thousands of paraphs (Fig. 6.24 above). Dating the Ellesmere borders is complicated by two factors. As Scott argues, the probable supervising decorator for Ellesmere imposed not only an inflexible pattern of three-quarter bar borders but also a set of visual conventions that seem to derive from earlier training in the 1390s. Interlace appears with some regularity, along with the daisy buds, gold grounds, trefoil leaves, and stiff vines that typify London decoration in the last decade of the fourteenth century. Dragon drolleries show up not only on the opening border (Fig. 7.4) as a prominent archaizing effect, but also in the border for the opening of the Clerk’s Prologue (fol. 87v).30 On the other hand, vines in the Ellesmere borders only occasionally create roundels at the corners as so often happens in London manuscripts up to the turn of the century, and what roundels appear are for the most part small, multiple, and delicate rather than an anchoring medallion-like circle as in Harley 2496 in Fig.  7.3 above (Fig.  7.5). Otherwise vine motifs often  Joel Fredell, “The Lowly Paraf: Transmitting Manuscript Design in the Canterbury Tales,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 213–280. In her edition of the Dd.4.24 manuscript Orietta da Rold argues that scribe Wytton’s hand “is remarkably similar to New York, Morgan Library, MS M 818, a copy of the A version of Piers Plowman;” The Dd Manuscript. The Norman Blake Editions of The Canterbury Tales, Orietta Da Rold, ed. (University of Sheffield, 2013). Available at: http://www.chaucermss.org/dd. 29  On the central role played by scribe Pynkhurst in the design of Ellesmere, and the evidence that portraits were inserted both before and after the border decoration, see Malcolm B. Parkes, “The Planning and Construction of the Ellesmere Manuscript,” 41–47 in Ellesmere Chaucer. A useful overview of the complex and contending arguments about the relationships between Hengwrt and Ellesmere, both copied by Pynkhurst, can be found in Ellesmere Chaucer as well: Norman F.  Blake, “The Ellesmere Text in the Light of the Hengwrt Manuscript,” 205–224; Ralph Hanna III, “(The) Editing (of) the Ellesmere Text,” 225–243; and Helen Cooper, “The Order of the Tales,” 244–261. 30  On Ellesmere’s dragon drolleries see recently Tara Williams, “The Ellesmere Dragons,” Word & Image 30 (2014): 444–454. Note the similar dragon motif in the ca. 1405 historiated initial of Harley 401, fol. 7r, discussed in Chap. 6 above. 28

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Fig. 7.4  San Marino, Huntington Library MS El 26 C 9 (Ellesmere Canterbury Tales), fol. 1r detail. Dragon drollery

Fig. 7.5  Ellesmere fol. 50v detail. Archaizing daisy buds, solid vine with stiff curved tendril, rounded gold mounds separating leaves, gold balls with squiggles extending off sparse leaf tip (side), white band shading on leaves. Hand B

dissolve the corners into the softer angles found among London decorators in the middle of the first decade of the fifteenth century, as in the 1405 Harley 2946 (Fig. 7.6). A number of specific decorating elements from the early fifteenth century show up prominently in the hand of the

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Fig. 7.6  Ellesmere fol. 47r detail. Small leaf roundels softening a corner

apparent supervising decorator, and in other hands as well: kidney leaves, mitten leaves, white band shading on leaves, trumpet flowers, barbed quatrefoils, and throated quatrefoil along with daisy buds (top bar)31 (Fig. 7.7). Although the three border decorators occur in what seems to be a chronological sequence based on familiar fragment boundaries in the Canterbury Tales, collaboration runs through the entire manuscript: Hand A decorates the six quires of Fragment A (fols. 1–48); Hand B principally decorates quires 17–21 (fols. 49–167, through Melibee) with a few contributions from Hand A; Hand C completes the majority of the remaining borders (fols. 168–232) with some help from both A and B.32 A somewhat 31  Kidney leaves appear on El 47r (Hand A, fols. 63r and 90r (Hand B), and fol. 203r (Hand C); aside from the throated quatrefoil, which seems to be peculiar to Hand A, the other motifs appear throughout in all three hands with some frequency. Scott, Dated and Datable, 120, dates the first white band shading of leaves to ca. 1403. 32  See Scott, “Ellesmere,” 92, for a list that assigns borders to each hand; A contributes to the sections mostly completed by B and by C; B also contributes to C’s section. Scott’s list misses five borders, which I supply here with my own identifications: fols. 102v (A), 115r (A), 123r (A), 185v (C), 232v (C).

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Fig. 7.7  Ellesmere fol. 1r detail. Archaizing daisy buds and interlace (top); contemporary mitten leaf, trumpet flowers, white band shading on leaves, and throated quatrefoil (left). Hand A

similar division of labor defines the three hands contributing the pilgrim portrait miniatures, reinforcing the idea that Ellesmere was illuminated in a complex arrangement that was more parallel than linear in chronology.33 We cannot be sure what the relationship between scribal copying and border illuminating may be, but what seems least likely is that the decorating occurred well after the copying or over an extended period, since the  Miniature artist 1 painted the portraits appearing in Ellesmere quires 1–19, along with the Parson’s portrait opening quire 26; artist 2 painted only the Chaucer portrait at the beginning of Melibee in quire 20, artist 3 painted the portraits in quires 21–25, and added to the Parson’s portrait. See further Richard Emmerson, “Text and Image in the Ellesmere Pilgrim Portraits,” 151–153, in Stevens and Woodward; also see Scott, LGM, 2.141–142, where she adds the observation that artist 3 contributed to the Parson’s portrait and that the artist brought in to paint Chaucer’s portrait was “among the best painters at the turn of the century (142).” 33

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illuminating was distributed in definite sections, probably overseen throughout by a single figure and held to a strict (though oddly simplistic) pattern for major divisions. Given the deluxe nature of the decoration, in addition, which makes work on speculation less likely, the most plausible scenario is that scribe Pynkhurst and Border hand A collaborated directly on what was to be the most spectacular presentation of a single vernacular author’s work yet to appear in London. Given the London border features which place the decoration around 1405, this major project seems to have been undertaken not long after Hengwrt’s decoration—though the latter manuscript’s single border cannot be so firmly connected to its scribal production.34 All three miniature artists in Ellesmere are clearly influenced by the “international style” emerging in London miniatures during the first decade of the fifteenth century.35 As such Ellesmere joins a broader pattern of deluxe London manuscripts in this period featuring Gower’s Confessio Amantis and John Trevisa’s translation of the Polychronicon, along with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. These manuscripts enter into a circle of high-­ level bookmaking that featured the Anglicana bookhand largely perfected by Pynkhurst and Marchaunt, along with decoration by artists of the first rank whose work can be found in psalters and other works created for aristocratic patrons. A burst of four surviving manuscripts written in the same period as Ellesmere—three by Pynkhurst’s Guildhall colleague John Marchaunt and one by the Trevisa-Gower scribe who collaborated with Marchaunt directly—show the advances in border decoration that appear less consistently in Ellesmere. Oxford, Christ Church College, MS 148, is a typical example of a London Confessio in many ways. A deluxe manuscript in Pearsall’s London style, it contains a Ricardian version of Gower’s poem in two columns with all of its summaries rubricated in the main column aside from a very few exceptions.36 Its full bar borders include traditional features, such as gold grounds that form lumpy (and sometimes pointed) protrusions, though only between leaves in roundels that are a mix of earlier and later features of the first decade of the fifteenth century in London borders: the leaves 34  Also see Scott, “Ellesmere,” 105–106; there she dates the Ellesmere decoration 1400–1405. In LGM, 2.142 Scott dates the borders to “before 1410.” 35  See further Scott, LGM, 2.142. 36  Exceptions include brief rubricated summaries in the margin on fols. 37r, 143r, 144r, 148v, 163v–166v; these occurrences may reflect scribal error in layout. Also a few rubricated speaker markers appear in the margins at fols. 54v and 55r.

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form only semicircles whether at a corner or sprouting off the inside of a bar (the latter itself a trait associated with earlier borders): not as simple as the leaf roundels visible in the Stafford Confessio, for instance, but simpler than the leaf roundels in the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales; vines are illuminated out to their termination rather than morphing into penwork halfway out. However, other features that align the Christ Church borders with the period around or shortly after 1405 are current leaf forms: trefoils both rounded and pointed, kidneys, kites, mushrooms, folded mittens, and one trumpet. Also included in these borders are a few features that point toward a slightly later date than 1405: some leaf roundels at the corners of the bars hold monochrome leaves inside, and circular bands wrap around vines like a collar—a feature that will develop by 1410 into a distinctive, trumpet-like origin point for vines. Also the leaves have not only white band shading on the leaves, but circular shading in their centers37 (Fig.  7.8). These features reappear regularly in London borders among the manuscripts of Chaucer, Gower, and Trevisa. This border hand, which includes some distinctive forms such as the fleur-de-lis leaves (visible in blue and gold near the left bar in Fig. 7.8), has not been found elsewhere; Christ Church 148 does not contain any miniatures, so that the line of inquiry is also blocked. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that Marchaunt is collaborating with an expert London border hand in this early example of his Confessios, a hand equivalent to that of the border artist for Harley 7334.38 Another useful indicator for chronology in this period is the development of monochromatic leaves inhabiting roundels. Among the dramatic illuminated leaves at the end of the fourteenth century, as in a sycamore leaf from Vernon (Fig.  7.9 left), these leaves may be richly colored and shaded with white, but they rest on a contrasting ground of color, often gold. The Ellesmere borders use this device in roundels regularly across all three border hands (Fig. 7.6). A different effect, however, develops early in the fifteenth century, based on illusionistic shading. Onto the ground color in a roundel, elements of a leaf form are sketched in white. In skillful  Scott, Dated and Datable, 120, dates this feature starting in 1406.  Scott, LGM, 2.133, identifies the border hand on fol. 1r of Harley 7334 with Border hand A in Rennes, Bibliothèque Municipale MS 22, a decorator also found in London, British Library MS Royal 2 B.VIII. These two latter manuscripts are Psalters offering some of the highest workmanship to be found in London later in the first decade of the fifteenth century and probably under the supervision of the miniaturist Johannes; see further Scott, LGM, 2.72. 37 38

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Fig. 7.8  Oxford, Christ Church College, MS 148, fol. 26v detail. Leaf roundels, monochromatic leaves in central roundel, collared vine, mitten leaves, kidney leaves, circular shading on leaves. © Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford

hands the shading creates an almost three-dimensional effect so that a leaf in the base color appears to be lifting out of the ground. Christ Church 148 offers a minimal and less skillful version of the technique (Fig.  7.9 middle); Corpus 67 presents a successful and evolved form that pushes the dating of its borders closer to the end of the period (Fig. 7.9 right). Not surprisingly, this border hand in Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 67 (also written by John Marchaunt), is part of a London group of decorators associated with the highest level of book production in London in this period. Corpus 67 represents what may be the earliest example of the kinds of working relationships between the Guildhall-associated scribes and the top tier of London artists. The borders for this manuscript position it as the earliest representative of a cluster of manuscripts (called Border Cluster 2 in Table 7.1) decorated by a closely associated group of hands first noted by Scott.39 This group of hands to some extent basks in the reflected glory of major 39  Scott, LGM, 2.110, identifies the group as indicated in Table 7.1, along with hand A in the Big Bible (London, British Library, MS Royal 1 E.IX), where she dates the Corpus 67 borders 1405–1410.

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Fig. 7.9  Left: Vernon, fol. 288va detail. Hand G. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. Middle: Christ Church 148 fol. 26v detail. © Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford. Right: Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 67, fol. 2r detail. By permission of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford

London miniaturists whose works identified in this cluster of manuscripts have attracted the most attention: Johannes, the Carmelite-Lapworth master, and Hermann Scheerre. In this case, Corpus 67 continues the basic design of London Confessio manuscripts: its luxurious two-column layout, its use of the Ricardian version of Gower’s poem, and its movement of the Latin marginalia into the main text column.40 Its Nebuchadnezzar and Confessor miniatures, according to Scott, are not the work of any of the three major miniaturists cited above; nonetheless, the iconography and visual design show the influence of the International Style for which these three miniaturists are famous.41 Furthermore, these miniatures are very close in iconography and design to a cluster of later Confessio manuscripts whose miniatures are the work of these well-known artists, to be discussed in detail below.42 In terms of border decoration, Corpus 67’s long penwork sprays coming off a short, illuminated base, a feature from later in the first decade, coexist with gold bar borders with old-fashioned foliate features and vine swirls on medallion-like spots on 40  In this case the glosses are included in the main text column, written in red. In many of the early Ricardian Confessios the marginalia (summaries of the tales and speaker markers primarily) can mostly or completely disappear rather than join the headverses in the main text column. 41  Scott, LGM, 2.109–110. 42  Scott, LGM, 2.110, specifies parallel miniatures in Oxford, Bodleian Library MSS Bodley 294, 693 and 902; and London, British Library MSS Egerton 1991 and Royal 18. C. 22; she also states that “Corpus 67 was almost certainly illustrated in the workshop of the Big Bible.”

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Fig. 7.10  Corpus Christi 67, f; 2r detail. Monochromatic leaves, extended penwork sprays, detached simple roundels. By permission of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford

the border (Fig.  7.10). The leaf roundels are often simpler than those gracing the borders of its contemporaries, sometimes giving up the illusion of a running vine for simple circles lodged on the bar. Still, the monochromatic leaves that function as a standard part of this artist’s repertoire also point to a date in the second half of the decade. We know fairly little about the Trevisa-Gower scribe beyond the manuscripts listed in Table  7.1 and that this scribe (or one with very similar training) collaborated with Marchaunt on a later Confessio manuscript, Princeton University, Firestone Library Robert S.  Taylor Collection Medieval MS 5 that demands more detailed discussion below. Judging by

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its decoration the earliest surviving manuscript definitely by the Trevisa-­ Gower scribe is Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 609 (Fig. 7.11). A huge and beautiful book, Laud 609 parallels the Marchaunt manuscripts in its London layout, its use of the Ricardian form of the Confessio, and its rubricated summaries in the main text column.43 The opening page offers a full border with regular intervals of leaves or roundels of leaves, and some solid sprays into the margins, all in blue, purplish-red, and gold. The simplicity and limited palette of this border argues for a date around 1405. Later in the manuscript three-­quarter borders become the standard marker for divisions, similar to Ellesmere (Fig. 7.12). Here more contemporary features come into play, including collared vines and sprays extending well beyond the limits of the text blocks into the outer margins. While these features do not argue for borders close to 1410, they do indicate a date after 1405. Furthermore, the two miniatures in Laud 609 are clearly influenced by the International Style.44 If these miniatures are, as seems likely, not the work of any member of the miniaturist triumvirate, their similarities to the design and iconography found in the parallel miniatures in Corpus 67 establish that the two sets were executed around the same time, probably in the period 1405–1410. One final Confessio manuscript from this group has no miniatures nor scribal identifications to help place it: Cambridge, St. John’s College MS B.12. In some respects its use of the standard London layout for the Confessio, its choice of Ricardian text, and its absent marginalia all connect this example to the manuscripts of the Marchaunt cohort.45 However, St. John’s B.12 has only one full bar border on its opening page: fairly simple, but vines extend into penwork hairlines, and collared vines also appear, indicating a date after 1405 (Fig. 7.13). Oddly, in the rest of the Confessio no real sign of book divisions appear beyond three-line initials, blue with

 Speaker markers are also absent from the margins of Laud 609.  See further Scott, LGM, 2.110; Spriggs, “Scheerre and His School,” 198, argues for influence from Scheerre specifically on the Laud 609 miniatures. 45  In St. John’s B.12 a few brief survivals appear on fols. 2r, 3r, 4r in the hand of the scribe, all to right of right-hand column. Otherwise, the only remnants are a few speaker markers and some brief summaries in Book V that often survive where the rest of the summaries migrate into the main text column and/or disappear entirely. Headverses appear in smaller script, in the hand of the scribe and ink of text. 43 44

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Fig. 7.11  Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 609 fol. 1r. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

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Fig. 7.12  Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 609, fol. 81v detail. Collared vine (upper left), extended spray. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

red penwork.46 Overall the St. John’s B. 12 is not large, so it looks like a more economical copy and outside the immediate circle of deluxe book production favored by the Marchaunt/Guildhall cohort. In this period, then, Marchaunt and the Trevisa-Gower scribe have helped to initiate the flurry of Ricardian Confessios and employed (in two cases) top-flight miniaturists. However, among these miniaturists and border artists only one will return in the next period with an expansive production of deluxe literary manuscripts. 46  Other divisions are indicated with undecorated one-line initials in mostly alternating blue and red. Punctus appear at the end of each line of verse, another rarity among Confessio manuscripts in this period.

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Fig. 7.13  Cambridge, St. John’s College, MS B.12, fol. 1r detail. Simple leaf roundels, sparse leaves, including mitten leaves, collared vines top middle bar, lower right bar. By permission of the Master and Fellows of St. John’s College, Cambridge

3   London Manuscripts 1410–1415 Manuscript decoration in London around 1410 takes on some notable features that serve effectively for dating. Three features in particular will appear predominantly in the literary manuscripts produced by the Marchaunt/Guildhall cohort: vines shooting out of trumpet-like shapes, possibly a development from the collared vines that appeared in 1405–1410; green wash accenting the pen squiggles that surround the inevitable colored balls coming off sprays and leaf points; and acanthus leaves that dangle from initials, curl around bars, fold themselves over the corners of borders, and even become the origin point for vines and smaller sprays. A number of new flower forms also begin to make frequent appearances: trumpet flowers with their “bells” recurved into dentate and banded forms; four-petaled flowers seen head-on with attendant sepals that have been called “thimble flowers” or “barbed quatrefoils”; four-petaled

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239

flowers seen in partial profile to show a hollow calyx, rocket-like; fourpetaled flowers with irregular petals and hollow calyx, salvia-like. Kite leaves, mitten leaves, trumpet leaves, monochromatic leaves all remain popular in this period, though the sprays themselves become more elaborate and dominant in the margins around the texts. Again, borders often present combinations of older and newer elements, but the newer elements are the marker we need to establish a reasonably firm date. Since we have one manuscript in border cluster 1 that is firmly dated in the period 1410–1415 and discussed at some length by Scott, that manuscript will be our starting point: London, British Library, MS Arundel 38 (Fig.  39). This early copy of the Regiment of Princes brings in Thomas Hoccleve as the fourth major player, both author and scribe, in the Guildhall cohort. As Scott points out, the Arundel 38 Regiment (including its presentation miniature) must date between 1410 and 1413: Hoccleve did not complete the poem until after 1410, and Henry V is depicted in the presentation miniature as prince, thus before his accession in March 1413.47 These borders, by a skilled hand also on view in the Harley 4866 Regiment, include most of the new features cited above: acanthus leaves in various functions (originating a vine at the bottom of Fig. 7.14 left, wrapping around a bar in Fig. 7.14 middle), green wash on

Fig. 7.14  London, British Library, MS Arundel 38. Left: fol. 37r detail. Middle: fol. 39v detail 1. Right: fol. 39v detail 2. © The British Library Board

 Scott, Dated and Datable, 42.

47

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J. FREDELL

pen squiggles, vines originating from trumpet bells (not visible in the figures here), salvia-like flowers, trumpet flowers with recurved bells, barbed quatrefoils, along with skilled and elaborate monochrome leaves48 (Fig.  7.14 right). Another feature is this border artist’s regular use of green in his palette, unusual before this time. The other manuscripts around it from the Marchaunt coterie can be understood as more or less developed in relationship to the Arundel 38 style. All of them have the characteristic acanthus leaves curling around the border bar and wrapping around each other to form a roundel in the corners and a virtually identical palette of colors with a strong use of green in particular.49 London, British Library, MS Additional 27944 in its elaborate front border shows the curled acanthus leaves at the corners (visible in Fig. 7.15 left at the top left), the curled mitten leaves, the monochromatic flowers in the corner roundel, vines originating in trumpet flowers, and the omnipresent green wash on squiggles. Morgan M.817 uses acanthus leaves curled around the bar in the Arundel 38 mode, along with many of the other features found in Arundel 38 in this period (Fig. 7.15 right). One Confessio manuscript whose borders were not considered by Scott is New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library MS Osborn fa 1. Even a quick glance should confirm that the latter border work is the same hand as that in Arundel 38 (Figs. 7.16 and 7.17). The most obvious point of similarity is the rondel at the top left created from two folded acanthus leaves with a sprig running off to the left, a characteristic feature of this hand. Other borders in Osborn fa 1 include acanthus leaves wrapping the bar, shaded just as in Arundel 38 borders (Fig. 7.17). Another closely related border hand can be found in a Confessio manuscript whose borders are not discussed by Scott, Rosenbach 1083/29 (Fig. 7.18 left). Here the acanthus leaves are formed, positioned, and shaded almost identically to those in Osborn fa 1, along with several other close similarities in leaf forms, sprays,

48  Scott, Dated and Datable, Plate VIII illustrates Arundel 38, fol. 86v, whose border includes a vine originating in a trumpet blossom. Scott II. 160 says borders are by border artist of Harley 4866, artist who later worked on Bedford Hours and Psalter. Seymour, 263, identifies the textual family of Arundel 38 with Group A manuscripts (and a presentation manuscript to the FitzAlan family—arms appear on the first folio; see Seymour, 264), along with Harley 4866, Harley 7333 (late), and Rosenbach 1083/29 (no borders). 49  Scott, LGM, 2.165, identifies Arundel 38, Harley 4866, Morgan M.817, and Osborn fa. 1 borders by the same hand, St. John’s H.1 “possible.”

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241

Fig. 7.15  Left: London, British Library, MS Additional 27944, fol. 8r detail. © The British Library Board. Right: New York, Morgan Library MS M.817 fol. 43v detail. Reproduced by permission of the Morgan Library and Museum

and palette.50 A similar, though not identical, hand decorates Cambridge, University Library, MS Pembroke 307 (Fig. 7.18 right). This cluster of borders has little to do with Marchaunt directly, who joined two other scribes in writing London, British Library, MS Additional 27944 (a copy of Trevisa’s translation of De Proprietatibus Rerum).51 As Table 7.1 indicates, Delta wrote the St. John’s H.1 Polychronicon, and John Carpenter wrote the Morgan M.817 Troilus and Criseyde. Marchaunt clearly does not dominate manuscripts with this border artist. In terms of scribal associations border cluster 2 similarly includes three manuscripts of

50  Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes, 100, follow Scott to date Rosenbach 1083/29 before 1413 because of the absence of green wash on squiggles, though the borders do, in fact, use green wash as shown in Fig. 7.18 left; the penwork leaves are also touched with the same wash as is common in this period. 51  Marchaunt wrote fols. 2–7v and 196r-335vb in Additional 27944. The other scribes remain unidentified.

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Fig. 7.16  London, British Library, MS Arundel 38, fol.39v detail. Regiment of Princes. © The British Library Board

Trevisa’s translation of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon by Delta (possibly Aberdeen 21, probably Add. 24194) and the Trevisa-Gower scribe (Senshu 1). Only an early Ricardian Confessio copied by Marchaunt, Corpus Christi 67, is included in this border cluster by Scott.52 As is typical for this group, borders in Tokyo, Senshu 1 exhibits many of the traits from 1410 to 1415 (Fig. 7.19). Green wash abounds, and vines emerging from trumpet blossoms include throated quatrefoils with three-dimensional shading. 52  Scott, LGM, 2.83. For another border decorator Scott includes with this group but I include with border cluster 3, see the discussion of Additional 24194 below.

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Fig. 7.17  Left: New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, MS Osborn fa 1 fol. 175v detail. Right: Osborn fa. 1, fol. 76r detail. Confessio Amantis

The third border cluster group has a more extensive association with Scheerre and artisans influenced by Scheerre. Marchaunt’s second Canterbury Tales manuscript, London, British Library, MS Harley 7334, looks like it was decorated later than the Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 67 CT, whatever the sequence in scribal copying might have been (Fig. 7.20). Harley has a massive border at opening with a mixture of elements. Both interlace (lower right corner) and leaf roundel corners (upper right and lower left corners) dizzy the eye; old-fashioned gold points stud the bold border bars surrounding a vine band interior; leaves occur in pairs over heavy gold ground; floating gold balls are marked with squiggles. On the other hand, quatrefoil flowers abound; trumpet blossoms appear on all sides, some of whose bells originate sprays (as below the center of the bottom bar and above the center of the right bar); flowers feature recurved mouths and ovaries; sprays (in right and bottom borders) are elaborated with a complex of penwork, gold balls, and illuminated flowers; leaves are consistently half-shaded, curled in mitten shape, and beginning to be used in corners in monochrome with shading creating illusions of 3-D. A probable date here would be 1410 or thereafter, roughly equivalent to the decoration for Marchaunt’s Corpus 198 Canterbury Tales but using a

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J. FREDELL

Fig. 7.18  Left: Philadelphia, Rosenbach Museum, MS 1083/29 fol. 54r detail. Confessio Amantis. Right: Cambridge, University Library, MS Pembroke 307, fol. 14v detail. Confessio Amantis. By permission of the Master and Fellows of Pembroke College, Cambridge

different border artist.53 Again here in Corpus 198, as in the case of Harley 7334, we see a mixture of elements (Fig. 7.21). The sprays coming off the border look fairly old-fashioned, but three features date this hand’s decoration not long after 1410. On the top border to the right are trumpet-­ shaped flowers with recurved petals, along with a peculiar use of trumpet flowers in a whorl at the top right corner as a variant on the leaf whorl. 53  Scott, LGM, 2.133 says that Border Artist A of Rennes BM 22 (a deluxe psalter probably produced in London ca. 1410) also occurs in Royal 2 B.viii (The Prince Joan Psalter, containing some miniatures by Johannes; see Scott, LGW II.74) and fol. 1 of Harley 7334. I would argue (though not at length here) that the rest of the borders in Harley 7334 are by the same or a closely associated hand.

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Fig. 7.19  Tokyo, Senshu 1, fol. 15r detail. Confessio Amantis

245

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J. FREDELL

Fig. 7.20  London, British Library, MS Harley 7334, fol. 1r. Canterbury Tales. © The British Library Board

Another feature that can be dated in this period is the use of green wash on squiggles, a detail also featuring notably in Arundel 38 that provides a terminus post quem of around 1413 for London borders.54 54  On the use of green wash on squiggles as a reliable detail for dating London borders after 1413 see Scott’s discussion of Arundel 38, Dated and Datable, 38.

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247

Fig. 7.21  Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 198, fol. 12v. Confessio Amantis. By permission of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford

A similar argument can be made for Marchaunt’s Egerton 1991 Confessio (Fig. 7.22). The borders in Egerton 1991 share a few features that suggest this border artist comes from the same workshop as the border artist for Corpus 198. Unusual for London work of this period,

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J. FREDELL

Fig. 7.22  London, British Library, MS Egerton 1991 fol. 142v detail: vine retreating to gold ground with illusionistic puncturing of ground, penwork spray extending from vine, penwork squiggles standing in for leaf lobes touched with green wash. Confessio Amantis. © The British Library Board

blossoms whose petals are backed by pointed green sepal leaves (quatrefoils in Egerton 1991, cinquefoils in Corpus 198) stud the border bars. The bars themselves consistently use a pattern of alternating blue and pink sections running alongside a gold bar whose alternations are marked by those blossoms. Another example in this group is London, British Library, MS Additional 24914, a Polychronicon manuscript written by scribe Delta. The border illustrated here adds six-petaled flowers (on the right and bottom bars) to the usual quatrefoil; the latter (center bar), though, is drawn and shaded precisely as the quatrefoils in the examples above, and the penwork vines take their characteristic curl (Fig. 7.23). One more example

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249

Fig. 7.23  London, British Library, MS Additional 24194, fol. 36r detail. Polychronicon. © The British Library Board

of this type is the Royal 18 C.xxii Confessio, whose flowered bar and curling vines on the base follow the same style (Fig. 7.24). Another manuscript whose borders are by the same or closely related hand, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 294, in at least one border (fol. 179r) has blue flowers on all three vertical bars with precisely the same rendering and shading, vines in the familiar curl found in Egerton 1991 and Royal 18 C.xxii, along with a vine device on the center-left bar. The device, very similar to the device on center-left bars for Corpus Christi 198 (Fig. 7.21 above) and Harley 7334 (Fig. 7.25 left), may be a more reliable indicator of the Border cluster 3 hand(s) than the flowers, or shading and palette similarities that also associate this group of borders. This feature appears repeatedly in Bodley 294, more so than any other manuscript in this group55 (Fig. 7.25 right).

 Other borders that use this device appear on fols. 1r, 50v, 66v, 148r, 179r, and 187v.

55

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J. FREDELL

Fig. 7.24  London, British Library, MS Royal 18 C.xxii, fol. 29r detail. Confessio Amantis. © The British Library Board

One other notable use of this device is in the opening full border in London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 851, which Scott considers to be by the same hand as in Bodley 29456 (Fig. 7.26). Once again the green wash alone dates the Bodley 294 borders to 1413 or later, along with the use of some throated flower forms similar to those in Arundel 38. Borders in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902 (another Marchaunt production) and possibly Oxford, Bodleian Library,  Scott, LGM, 2.87.

56

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251

Fig. 7.25  Left: London, British Library, MS Harley 7334, fol. 181v detail. ©  The British Library Board. Right: Bodley 294, fol. 132r detail. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

MS Bodley 693 (by the Trevisa-Gower scribe) share many of these features57 (Figs. 7.27 and 7.28). Borders for three other Confessio manuscripts do not fall into an identifiable group. They all, however, can be dated to this period by features shared with the three groups discussed above. New  York, Columbia 57  Scott LGM, 2.103–104, argues that Border artist B of London, British Library, MS Royal 1 E.ix possibly produced borders in Bodley 902.

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J. FREDELL

Fig. 7.26  London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 851, fol. 2r. Canterbury Tales. © The British Library Board

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Fig. 7.27  Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 693, fol. 1r detail. Confessio Amantis. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

Fig. 7.28  Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902, fol. 81r detail. Confessio Amantis. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

University Library, MS Plimpton 265 borders include green wash, illusionistic shading for flowers inside corner rondels, a similar shading for curled acanthus leaves in the illuminated initial in the left-had column, bands wrapping around the right and bottom bars, and leaf and flower forms typical of the period (Fig.  7.29). The other outlier, Princeton, Taylor Collection, Medieval MS 5, has two border hands that appear to be from different time periods, along with a unique arrangement of miniatures. The Ages of Man appears here at the opening of the poem in a single-­column miniature. To the right of the miniature an old man, dressed

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J. FREDELL

Fig. 7.29  New York, Columbia University Library, MS Plimpton 265, fol. 37r detail. Confessio Amantis. Used with permission

in blue, stands on a plinth (Fig. 7.30). This figure might be Nebuchadnezzar, or it might be the aged Gower as if the poet were being memorialized in the House of Fame style. Below the miniature the historiated initial contains a young man also dressed in blue and pointing to bookshelves. Neither Confessor miniature, nor any space for one, appears in Taylor 5. The border on this page is also unusual. Its floral forms and acanthus-like leaves wrapped around the left bar in particular indicate a date in the 1405–1410 period.58 As I have argued above, this manuscript is one of a cluster of three involving John Marchaunt (the others are Bodley 294 and 58  Scott, personal communication, attributes the decoration for this page in Taylor 5 in a broad time frame from 1395 to 1407. Some of the decoration is distinctive and suggests an artist who mixes some earlier motives with more current practices, as Scott notes. I estimate a date around 1405 or shortly thereafter.

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255

Fig. 7.30  Princeton, Taylor Collection, Medieval MS 5 fol. 1r. Confessio Amantis

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J. FREDELL

Trinity R.3.2) that are unusual in various ways. The first gathering of Taylor 5 (fols. 1–8) was produced by two other hands, the rest by Marchaunt. Consequently, we do not know if a manuscript originally copied in full by Marchaunt was reconfigured at its outset for the surviving decoration, for a change to the Prologue dedication, or some combination.59 The internal borders for book divisions are certainly by a different hand and generally appear earlier in style (Fig.  7.31). Nonetheless the unusual leaf forms, the very peculiar throated flower in the left-hand example, and the collared vine in the right-hand example argue for a decoration date in the 1405–1410 period if not later.60 One other illuminated Confessio from this period, Cambridge, University Library, MS Mm.2.21, may not be London work. Its borders are in many respects old-fashioned, and its miniatures do not indicate the high level of skills found in London examples from this period. The vines are straight and thick, and the leaf forms mostly simple standards in form and shading (Fig. 7.32). However, in isolated spots are more recent features such as the acanthus leaf wrapped around the central bar near the top in this example, vines emerging from trumpet blossoms (not pictured here), and a quatrefoil flower like those in Border cluster 3, though here with golden sepals. This manuscript varies from the London Ricardian Confessios of its period in other significant ways. Its Ages of Man miniature (fol. 4r) includes both Nebuchadnezzar and the Statue, though Cambridge Mm.2.21 follows the Ricardian norm in its placement of the miniature above the Dream passage. The Confessor miniature, by contrast, appears awkwardly in the outer margin (fol. 8r), with no sign that the scribe had designed a place for it. Also note that some of the Latin summaries and some speaker markers appear in the margin, also varying from the Ricardian norm. All of these elements indicate some awareness of London Confessios, their design and decoration, but the borders and miniatures in Cambridge 59  We have evidence in Bodley 294 that Marchaunt’s inclusion of dedications to both Richard and Henry may have been an experiment with a Henrician textual tradition and page layout different from he had used for several Ricardian Confessios. For further discussion of this theory see Chaps. 4 and 5 above. Here I disagree with the arguments on Taylor 5 in Kerby-Fulton and Justice, “Scribe D and the Marketing of Ricardian Literature,” 217–222; they argue that the production of the opening quire was supervised by scribe D (Marchaunt) and note the disparities in decoration but not the disparities in date for the borders. 60  On the production of Taylor 5 also see Linne R. Mooney, “The Trevisa-Gower Scribe: Another London Literary Scribe of the Early Fifteenth Century,” forthcoming in the festschrift for Kathryn Kerby-Fulton.

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Fig. 7.31  Left: Taylor 5 fol. 61v detail. Right: Taylor 5 fol. 81r detail. Confessio Amantis

Mm.2.21 argue that it was not produced in association with Marchaunt or the other London scribes working with the elite decorators connected to Scheerre and Johannes.

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J. FREDELL

Fig. 7.32  Cambridge, University Library, MS Mm.2.21, fol. 124r detail. Confessio Amantis. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

4  The Confessio Boom Tails Off, 1415–1425 Only two Confessio manuscripts in the next ten years come close to the level of border decoration from the previous decade of London work; only one of these has miniatures despite the fact that both are copied by the same scribe, and those miniatures do not stand in comparison with the work of Scheerre, Johannes, and their followers. However, a number of new border features in these two Confessios taking hold after 1415 will serve to provide an end marker for the main period of development and experimentation with Confessio manuscripts. Among the striking visual effects in this period that continue to develop past 1425 are the exuberant sprays that curl and dominate the space they occupy and the strange

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259

Fig. 7.33  Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunterian 7, fol. 87r detail. Confessio Amantis. Courtesy of University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections

fantasy flowers with protuberant interiors called aroids.61 Hunterian 7 illustrates this move beyond acanthus leaves and curly penwork vines to new levels of visual dominance on the page (Fig.  7.33). Embedded in those vines, as here on the left and right, are aroids of various kinds. Morgan M.125 offers a similar border style, here with balancing aroids on each style (Fig.  7.34). Neither has any known association with a major London decorative studio, though the borders in Morgan M.125 bear some resemblances to earlier Border cluster 1 examples in the frequent whorls of acanthus leaves. Otherwise deluxe Confessio manuscripts after

61  Scott, Dated and Datable, 44–48; on 121 Scott defines aroids (whose protuberant interior she calls a “spadix”) in border decorations.

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J. FREDELL

Fig. 7.34  New York, Morgan Library MS M.125, fol. 141r detail. Confessio Amantis. Reproduced by permission of the Morgan Library and Museum

1415 decline in number, if not always in quality.62 Literary manuscripts by Lydgate and, to a lesser extent Mandeville, emerge after 1425 to dominate the elite market in London.63

5  Conclusions The Confessio indisputably occupied the center of a phenomenon we are only beginning to trace: the creation of an English literary canon advanced and validated by deluxe manuscript production. The dates ascribed here to border decorations in London Confessios and some of their counterparts from Chaucer, Trevisa, and Hoccleve are, similarly, a first step. Most of these dates are built on earlier work as are the associations between what seem to be loose affiliations of scribes. Again it must be emphasized that 62  The Cambridge, St. Catherine’s College, MS 7 Confessio also resembles this style, but its borders are probably after 1425. Unlike earlier Ricardian Confessios, St. Catherine’s 7 (like Cambridge Mm.2.21) has a Dream miniature including both Nebuchadnezzar and the Statue; its Confessor miniature shows Amans as a beardless young man. 63  The last of the magnificent Confessios, New York, Morgan Library, MS M.126, with a massive program of miniatures and elaborate borders, is dated ca. 1450–1475, after the appearance of Lydgate and Mandeville manuscripts with equivalent miniature programs: for Lydgate see London, British Library, MS Harley 2278 and MS Harley 1766; for Mandeville see London, British Library, MS Harley 3954 and MS Royal 17 C.xxxviii.

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261

decorations happen after scribal copying, sometimes long after, and replaced quires at beginnings and ends are for the Confessio a critical part of complex codicological histories. With these provisos in place, the evidence from border decoration tells us several important things about the public life of the Confessio. First, the public Confessio in London follows a clear timeline of development and popularity. Its initial appearance in Henrician form linked the Confessio with Lancastrian aspirations but also with Gower’s three-pronged claims to laureate status in the early days of Henry IV.  In the earliest Confessio manuscripts a major literary allegory built on Latin and continental sources. Its elaborate frame-tale structure combined a polyvocality in some senses beyond Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales with Ovidian humanism in some senses beyond the scope of contemporary French court figures such as Christine de Pisan. In the earliest Vox manuscripts a major literary satire (in combination with the oft-appended Cronica tripertita) summarized two decades of international and national crises for England’s recently deposed king. In three clusters of shorter poems (those attached to Henrician Confessios, those attached to Vox, and those gathered into the Trentham anthology), a body of laureate public poetry addressed marriage, leadership, and ongoing struggles with spiritual deviance. This initial stage was supported by a group of scribes whose work regularly overlapped, possibly in association with Gower himself, and extended beyond Gower’s death. Based on the evidence of border decorations this same group did not, however, produce complete manuscripts of Vox or the Henrician Confessio after 1405, the period when Henry IV began succumbing to a series of health crises.64 This major dropoff in Lancastrian support, or at least engagement, in the public life of Gower’s poetry may have been a direct result of Henry’s consequent retreat from his own public representation of royal power. Some confusion would be inevitable, and the odd textual problems in three Marchaunt-associated manuscripts may reflect that confusion directly.65 Still, out of forty-nine more or less complete Confessios, thirty-one are Ricardian. These numbers argue for a powerful literary set of preferences that follow the work of the Marchaunt/ 64  Henry’s last major revolt, the Scrope rebellion, concluded in the hands of Thomas Arundel, who was put in the position of executing his colleague along with Thomas Mowbray. For a recent overview on Archbishop Scrope of York see P.  J. P.  Goldberg, ed. Richard Scrope: Archbishop, Rebel, Martyr (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2007). 65  Bodley 294, Taylor 5, and Trinity R.3.2, all incorporating text from the Huntington (Stafford) family rather than the Fairfax family.

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Guildhall group for a major poem set in a distant Ricardian love court rather than among the immediacies of Henry’s political problems. The appearance of the Confessio in Ricardian form may have begun before 1405 if we depend purely on textual collations rather than dedications for Morgan M.690, or if we posit a substantial gap between copying and decoration for manuscripts produced by scribe John Marchaunt and his associates. Nonetheless, border decoration tells us that this group of scribes left behind Piers Plowman to concentrate on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Ricardian Confessios (which include Venus’s envoy to Chaucer) no later than 1410 and probably after 1405. Those efforts expanded no later than 1415 and probably after 1410 to include deluxe Trevisa and Hoccleve manuscripts, along with Marchaunt’s experimental tale orders and text (Gamelyn) in his two Canterbury Tales manuscripts (Corpus 198 and Harley 7334), his experimental combination of dedications and added texts in at least one Confessio manuscripts (Bodley 294; his role in the opening of Taylor 5 is less certain) and more Ricardian Confessios among the many deluxe London examples from this period alone. After 1415 an almost total dropoff in elite Confessios anticipates the arrival of John Lydgate as the new laureate figure who will create his own lineage by ignoring Hoccleve completely, and largely passing over Gower to link his work to “father” Chaucer. Although these dates are necessarily approximate, it may be useful to note that these four stages of development roughly follow not only Gower’s final years given his death in 1408, but also political developments. These include, in the first stage, Richard’s abdication in 1399 and eventual death. The second stage followed this political trauma with a period of instability and rebellion up through 1405—the period of the early Vox and Henrician Confessios. In stage three Henry V’s major illness beginning in 1405 prompted a Council led by Prince Henry, Archbishop Thomas Arundel, and Sir John Tiptoft, and inaugurated Arundel’s reassumption of the role of Lord Chancellor in 1407–1410—around the time of the first Guildhall Ricardian cluster, along with the Ellesmere and Harley 7334 Canterbury Tales. Finally, 1410 begins stage four, the year Arundel gives up his post, Prince Hal becomes effective ruler, and Thomas Chaucer is returned as Speaker of Parliament for two years and becomes a major player at the highest level; these developments lead to the watershed year of 1413, when Henry V is crowned and brings Richard II to Westminster Abbey—all during the explosion of London Ricardian Confessios among many other deluxe literary manuscripts. It is too soon, and beyond the scope of this study, to draw explicit

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parallels between shifting coalitions of Gower scribes and shifting political winds. Nonetheless, dating border decorations offers some basis for making connections between literary production and political conditions for a laureate whose body of poetry links itself firmly to a public face and a political valence to its moral examinations. At the least these dates question assumptions about the “relegitimation” of Richard by Henry V, or at least argue that Henry is responding to a cultural movement created by the Ricardian Confessio and the Chaucer tradition rather than inaugurating that movement.66 Surviving manuscripts of the Confessio, and a broader view of the work of John Marchaunt and his associates, argue that the Ricardian Confessios we have are in crucial ways produced in the later years of Henry V; Macaulay’s speculative second recension dissolves into a Henrician textual subfamily whose dueling dedications only exist thanks to experimentation by John Marchaunt. This timeline envisions a late-state model for the Confessio in two larger phases corresponding to the clusters of deluxe manuscript witnesses. First, a circle of scribes close to Gower constructed a Lancastrian laureate gravely engaged with the issues of the day; second, scribes with a different agenda produced a Confessio that trades on nostalgia for a lost literary golden age where even Venus reads Chaucer, led by a flawed but lovestruck king among a fantasy court of famous lovers. Whether Marchaunt and his associates had specific associations with political figures such as Thomas Chaucer or Arundel that may have driven their agenda, as their efforts moved from Langland to Chaucer and Gower to Trevisa and Hoccleve: that is a question left to future scholarship. If we move our model for the finished form(s) of the Confessio to the time of Gower’s late career, then we should expect to see, in the stable mass of the Confessio outside its dedications, the late-state issues that occupy Gower’s laureate poetry from 1397 to his death. Books 7 and 8, with their focus on kingship, offer a good starting place.

66  For the argument that Henry V instigates this “relegitimization see Paul Stohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 101–127.

CHAPTER 8

Binaries of Witness in the Languages of Love and Political Cognition

These olde worldes with the newe Who that wol take in evidence, Ther mai he se th’experience, What thing it is to kepe lawe, Thurgh which the wronges ben withdrawe And rihtwisnesse stant commended, Wherof the regnes ben amended. —Confessio 7.2702–2708

1   Witnessing Exile A little-discussed scene near the end of the Confessio Amantis in Book 8 sets up a tableau vivant of famous young lovers (8.2440–2744). This tableau takes place as a spectacle in a visionary court of Richard II: the lovers are dressed in the “newe guise of Beawme” (8.2470), the style of Bohemia made fashionable in that court by Richard’s first queen, Anne. The group is headed by a “lusty youthe,” a “capitein” who stands “[t]ofore alle othere upon the pleine” (8.2462–2465) who recalls Richard himself during his youthful marriage to Anne. Into this crowd comes another set of distinctly old male lovers—two Old Testament figures along with various classical philosophers and poets—who petition Venus for mercy for the Lover now revealed as poet John Gower. Venus bans Gower from this love

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Fredell, Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27964-5_8

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court, sending him off to his books with black beads to pray for the peace. This scene clearly allegorizes the Ricardian court as a kind of love court familiar from works by Clanvowe and Chaucer. What do we make, then, of Gower’s literal extraction from that court as Cupid removes the lance of love from the wound in Gower’s aged body, replaced by black prayer beads dedicated to peace? Is this an allegory of Lancastrian conversion? If so, why does this scene remain the same in all versions of the Confessio? Why does it literally introduce, in the Ricardian version, Venus’s apostrophe to Chaucer’s own testament of love and then the Ricardian (or in Bodley 294 and Nottingham the Henrician) State of England passages that follow? Why does it echo so well the language of the Henrician Prologue to the Confessio on Arion as the restorer of peace in the natural order and accord between lord and commons if it was written originally without reference to the Arion passage that appears in the Henrician Prologue but not the Ricardian Prologue? This court of love, and Gower’s painful removal from it, constitutes the climactic ending to the Confessio in all versions, and as such the scene is more important than a simple biographical trope about our poet as senex amans. In allegorical terms it could be Gower’s inversion of the final siege of the Romance of the Rose, the Confessio’s great predecessor, where the Lover finally inserts his own lance in the Rose. In terms of poetic structure it completes the opening moments of Book 1: Gower’s original complaint to Venus about instabilities in the world’s governance due to Love sets up the poem’s entire framework and ends in Book 8 with the Lover’s final complaint that brings back Venus and Cupid to exile Gower the Lover from their court. Nonetheless, this final scene also could be Gower’s integration into his great love frame-tale of the dominant allegory in the Confessio’s Prologue: the political critique that shadows the operations of Love in the main text. In these terms Gower’s traumatic vision in Book 8 as an old man replaces the old king Nebuchadnezzar’s traumatic dream vision in the Prologue; Gower’s exile from the court of Love and its Venerian forms of instability at the end of the Confessio replaces the parallel allegory beginning the poem, a dream about political forms of instability embodied in the impending destruction of Nebuchadnezzar’s Statue, an opposition reinforced in the miniatures of dream vision and Confession gracing some Confessios. In any case, the Confessio ends in all versions with its Lover/author turning away from an unstable and apparently Ricardian love court to a new life of reform, restoration to his books, and the pursuit of peace. As I

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have mentioned, this passage comes just before the section that largely defines the poem’s identity as a poem meant to invoke Richard II or Henry IV and to establish a fiction of witness at two profoundly different times in recent English history. The political problem this ending poses, then, is straightforward enough. If it is an original part of a pro-Richard poem written in the early 1390s, why is Amans/Gower’s movement away from this court so crucial a part of the conclusion? If it is part of a pro-Henry poem written near the time of Henry’s accession to the throne, why is Richard’s love court appearing when all such traces are expunged from contemporary manuscripts of Vox clamantis, the other Gower poem enjoying a burst of popularity after 1399? If we assume that this passage was written before 1392, the date long proposed as Gower’s prescient conversion to the cause of Henry Lancaster and Gower’s consequent revisions in the Confessio, then the whole allegory sounds like Gower being tossed off Richard’s barge into the Thames, whether that barge is a Love Boat or not. After 1399, a period which arguably includes every surviving manuscript of the Confessio and undeniably includes Gower’s renewed career as a Lancastrian partisan, any such Ricardian allegory would be intimately tied with the seizure of England’s green and pleasant land by a vigorous new king. This concluding passage, then, embodies the shifting political valences that lie at the heart of the Confessio as a literary project, but is not part of the obvious textual problem of dueling passages aligned with the two kings, a problem that has dominated so much of our thinking about the poem’s history. Like the problem of Ricardian Confessios produced for Lancastrian elites a few years after the Lancastrians take power, Gower’s exile from the Love court in the form we have it here makes no immediate sense as part of an earlier Ricardian poem. Instead, both of these contradictory circumstances support the idea that Gower revised more of the Confessio in the late 1390s than the dedications and State of England passages, including this passage, and that the Ricardian Confessios as we have them now were a later intervention. We cannot depend only on the manuscript evidence detailed in the previous chapters for an understanding of Gower’s literary project. Two bodies of literary evidence argue that the whole great poem we have, not just the passages dedicated to Henry, may be the product of revisions to the Confessio in the late 1390s and after. Book 8, when taken as a whole, reproduces Gower’s visionary moment of political cognition during that time: first, the conversion of Gower from Lover to poet, from love courtier to aureate counselor after a very long

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tale about incest and political restoration; second, Book 8’s language of peace adopted as the final response to worldly instability. The various early experiments with the Ricardian Confessio, beginning with Morgan 690 and extending through Bodley 294 and Taylor 5, are likely to be editorial creations outside Gower’s control however much they drew on lost earlier forms of the poem. What we have for both textual and manuscript evidence tells us that Gower himself probably went to his drawers in the late 1390s to revise and reintroduce his major poetry, both the Confessio and Vox clamantis. John Gower’s reputation as a serial reviser was forged long ago, yet the evidence for any such revision before the late 1390s is inescapably thin. We know that late in his career Gower assembled the separate texts collected under the title Vox clamantis, that Gower culled at least one Ricardian passage from that collection to repurpose in a paean to Henry IV, that Gower paradoxically wrote at least three separate versions of a statement about why he has stopped writing.1 Peter Nicholson has pointed out in his recent work that the latter section of the Confessio has a number of textual instabilities despite its massive center being remarkably stable between manuscripts otherwise as different as Fairfax 3 and Bodley 902; these instabilities indicate Gower’s ongoing revisions during the first decade of the fifteenth century.2 The question of revision in the latter part of the Confessio may seem to be restricted to Book 8, specifically the dedications and the Chaucer encomium in Ricardian manuscripts. However, another source of instability that has received far less attention is the clutch of narratives associated with a textual family Macauley termed the “second recension.”3 1  The assembly of Vox is discussed above. On the repurposed Ricardian passage, constituting 34 of the 56 lines in “Rex celi deus,” see The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, (4 volumes, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899–1902) 4.416; and David Carlson, John Gower: Poetry and Propaganda in Fourteenth Century England (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2012), 209–214. For the three versions of Gower’s farewell to writing, “Quiquid Homo Scribat,” see the edition and notes in John Gower, The Minor Latin Works with In Praise of Peace, ed. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2005), 74. 2  Peter Nicholson, “Gower’s Manuscript of the ‘Confessio Amantis’,” in The Medieval Python: The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones, ed. R.  F Yeager and Toshiyuki Takamiya (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 75–86. 3  In an important new discussion on this question Derek Pearsall proposed a new term for this textual family to replace the recension model: the Huntington group; see “Early Revision in the Text of Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” JEBS: Journal of the Early Book Society 24 (2021): 247–262; and a reply from Peter Nicholson, “Gower’s Early Revisions Revisited,” forthcoming in the Journal of the Early Book Society.

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The first surviving witness for this clutch dates from the first few years of the fifteenth century during Gower’s lifetime. This version of the Confessio does not reappear until John Marchaunt and his various collaborators revive it after 1405 for unknown reasons, when Gower is passing away and Henry IV has slipped into his long illness.4 Although Nicholson’s evidence focuses on brief passages and page design, it also raises the question of whether more substantial content on tyranny and justice in the latter half of Book 7, and on marriage and lawless love in Book 8, could have been composed or substantially revised much later than the time frame for Gower’s revisions of Confessio Amantis built into the edifice of Macaulay’s three recensions. Gower’s continuing interest during this time in creating his poems as historical artifacts splits itself into two distinct fictions of witness: first, the problems of love and marriage linked to his own late alliance with Agnes Groundolf in 1398 but also to a mythology surrounding the “love court” of Richard II; second, the problems of governance that permeate Gower’s writing around and after 1399. A revised account of the revisions in Books 7 and 8 also needs to take into account another longstanding view of the end of the Confessio, one that seeks to harmonize the Confessio’s grand structure through the Confessor’s reconciliation of the contending realms of love and politics as “counseil” on royal governance and self-governance: For conseil passeth alle thing To him which thenkth to ben a king; And every man for his partie A kingdom hath to justefie, That is to sein his oghne dom. If he misreule that kingdom, He lest himself, and that is more Than if he loste schip and ore And al the worldes good withal […] Thogh he hadde at his retenue The wyde world riht as he wolde, Whan he his herte hath noght withholde Toward himself, al is in vein. [8.2109–2125]

4  This textual family appears (with modifications) partially or wholly in Marchaunt’s hands in Bodley 294, Taylor 5, and Trinity R.3.2.

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Love and desire are subsumed into the broader category of self-­governance, which then becomes essential to the success of just rule in the world; otherwise “al is in vein.” This binary of governance asserts that “every man” is king in “his oghne dom,” that political misrule engenders personal disruption, and that a bad moral state in a man’s heart will cripple any attempt at just and legal action.5 However, these broad ethical certainties coexist with an ending that emphasizes not just the problem of tyranny in Book 7, but Book 8’s sheer oddity and incoherence. The Confessor’s final framework for the ethical project of the Confessio falls into ruins at the hands of Venus: repression and exile are her tools to manage Amans/ Gower, not ethical self-improvement; the poem’s final act of dream-vision narrative features the now-lost Ricardian love court surrounded by famous lovers from myth and legend; marriage itself is the only ethical topic for Book 8, understood through incest as its God-­sanctioned predecessor for modeling the containment of desire. The revisions and additions in the Fairfax 3 and Stafford Confessios argue for a date for the poem we now have near the end or after Richard’s reign, including the added tales in Stafford’s Book 7. The dedications to Richard likely originate from an earlier period, since they resemble in tone and vocabulary the canceled passages praising Richard in Vox clamantis. Nonetheless, they reappear, along with the famous message to Chaucer by Venus, in Confessio manuscripts during a time when John Marchaunt and his associates are actively creating a Ricardian canon of poetry in deluxe editions for elite patrons, and a time when Geoffrey Chaucer’s son Thomas was Speaker of the House of Commons and an important player in the governing group surrounding Henry IV in his illness. Both Henrician and Ricardian forms of the Confessio, however, contain a long description of Richard’s love court that concludes the poem’s enormous allegory of love and sets up the final collapse of the twin fictions of the dream-vision Lover and the aging but newly married John Gower. The politically driven “second recension” additions to Book 7, and the vision of Ricardian love in Book 8, define the twin poles of Gower’s concerns in the last decade of his life. These elements are more likely to have been finalized in that same 5  Foundational discussions for this binary include Elizabeth Porter, “Gower’s Ethical Microcosm and Political Macrocosm,” in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments, ed. A.  J. Minnis (Cambridge: Brewer, 1983), 135–162; and Russell Peck, Kingship and Common Profit in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978).

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period before two groups of scribes established the Henrician and Ricardian traditions soon afterward. In the seven manuscripts we now can call the Huntington group the added texts, particularly in Book 7, focus on pity and tyranny among rulers, using language aligned with Gower’s writings shortly before and after Richard’s fall and Henry’s ascension to the throne. Only two tales are added in these seven manuscripts, both included in Stafford. “Lucius and the Statue” in Book V offers an exemplar of sacrilege whose content offers little for dating this revision. “The Jew and the Pagan” in Book 7, however, initiates and reinforces a long discussion on pity and tyranny that extends into Book 8. In Bodley 294 and Taylor 5 Marchaunt adds another passage in Book 7 whose message is that the king who says “none is above me” should show pity. These sections, in combination with the closing scenes in Book 8, argue that the final two books of the Confessio were revised by Gower in the late 1390s or shortly thereafter.

2  Love and Politics Before turning to the less familiar texts of Book 7 some time with the far better-known Book 8 will establish late-state themes of governance in politics and love. Gower’s binary for governance in the Henrician Confessio seems destined to fuse into an earthly unity, the promise embodied by Arion’s earthly paradise. That unity in Gower’s late laureate poetry, however, is a dream deferred. Gower regularly holds out this vision for Henry’s reign in works as different as Cronica tripertita and In Praise of Peace, but will not grant that Henry has attained that state of governance. The ending of the Confessio in both versions examines the same problem in the person of the poet/lover himself, a reminder of a second binary failing to unify in Arion’s terms: the personal and the communal. The departure of Amans from the court of Venus begins by acknowledging the failure of harmony between Amans and his confessor due to a conflict in governance between yet another binary—reason and desire: “Tho was betwen mi prest and me/Debat and gret perplexete” (8.2189–2190; 2191–2199).6 Then communal governance and self-governance, politics and love, 6  As Peck notes in his edition at these lines, Amans here steps away from a position inside the narrative of the poem to “that of an onlooking narrator” ready to detach himself from his immersion in desire: https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/peck-gower-confessioamantis-book-8, note to 8.2190.

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dominate the scenes that follow. These binaries are each pushed apart by fictions of witness that isolate themselves in public and private lives respectively. A temporary resolution to the initial conflict comes when Genius offers to carry the written supplication of Amans to Venus. Venus responds to Amans’ plea by pulling the curtain on the poet’s persona, and revealing her power over him and his presence in her love court, which we will soon discover to be the love court of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia: Sche caste hire chiere upon mi face, And as it were halvinge a game Sche axeth me what is mi name. “Ma dame,” I seide, “John Gower.” “Now John,” quod sche, “in my pouer Thou most as of thi love stonde. [8.2318–2323]

Venus then declares Amans/Gower too old for the love court and tells him to leave in language that invokes a political allegory of a threatened court, deceptive courtiers, and an imperious command of exile based on debatable logic about who is allowed to experience love: Venus, which stant withoute lawe In noncertein, bot as men drawe Of Rageman upon the chance, Sche leith no peis in the balance, Bot as hir lyketh for to weie; The trewe man ful ofte aweie Sche put, which hath hir grace bede, And set an untrewe in his stede. [8.2377–2384]

Her explicit order to Amans/Gower follows this logic of an absolutist ruler protecting her own interests: Forthi tak hom thin herte agein, That thou travaile noght in vein, Wherof my court may be deceived. [8.2421–2423]

The Lover/Poet Gower swoons in despair at his exile. In this swoon Gower has a vision within his dream vision which reveals a court of young

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and entitled lovers led by a young captain, all adorned in the manner of Bohemia with garlands and pearls. Me thoghte I sih tofor myn hed Cupide with his bowe bent, And lich unto a Parlement […] I sih wher lusty youthe tho, As he which was a capitein, Tofore alle othre upon the plein Stod with his route wel begon, Here hevedes kempt, and therupon Carlandes noght of o colour, Some of the lef, some of the flour, And some of grete perles were; The newe guise of Beawme there, With sondri thinges wel devised, I sih, wherof thei ben queintised. [8.2452–24572]

Richard’s queen Anne, despite some well-known difficulties, across her twelve years with Richard did prompt court fashions which imitated the manner of Bohemia, including the famous pearls.7 Richard himself was well-known for a youthful and almost effeminate beauty, celebrated by Gower in early versions of Vox clamantis, along with various chroniclers: “You, most beautiful of Kings” and “O youthful glory, regal praise, the flower of all boys!”8 Once we acknowledge this scene’s identification with the court of Richard and Anne the question, as always with Gower, becomes one of 7  Anne of Bohemia, and her pearls, as they influenced Ricardian literature is discussed in John Bowers, The Politics of Pearl: Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2001), 57–70. On Anne’s court culture and Gower also see Linda Burke, “Bohemian Gower: ‘Confessio Amantis,’ Queen Anne, and Machaut’s Judgment Poems,” in Machaut’s Legacy: The Judgment Poetry Tradition in the Later Middle Ages and Beyond, ed. R. Barton Palmer and Burt Kimmelman (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), 192–216. On Anne’s effects in Richard’ court more broadly see most recently Alfred Thomas, The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture: Literature and Art in the Age of Chaucer and the Gawain Poet (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2020). 8  “[…] tu, pulcherrime Regum” Vox clamantis (Ricardian version): 7.1177*; “iuuenile decus, laus Regia, flos puerorum!” 6.1197*. Text from Works, 4 for Vox clamantis; Minor Latin Poems. For a recent discussion of this trope, including its homosexual overtones, see Sylvia Federico, “Queer Times: Richard II in the Poems and Chronicles of Late FourteenthCentury England,” Medium Aevum 79 (2010): 25–46.

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time frame. Although Lynn Staley, among others, has argued for the 1380s as a central moment for Ricardian poetry of love, the most likely time frame for the love court invoked here is 1389–1394, after peace with France was finally established at Calais and in the period when Richard and Anne in their early twenties gathered what Nigel Saul has called a “courtier nobility” of the Hollands (Thomas and John), Thomas Percy, and William Scrope, among others; a reported “throng of ladies”; and a broader affinity of lesser young courtiers bound together by that Ricardian innovation, the royal badge.9 The likely reference in Clanvowe’s Boke of Cupid to Anne at Woodstock Palace in Oxfordshire may date that love court of birds to 1389 specifically, when Anne was in residence at Woodstock: And this [judgment] shal be, withouten any nay, The morowe of Seynt Valentynes day, Under the maple that is feire and grene, Before the chambre wyndow of the quene, At Wodestok, upon the grene lay.10

Youthful glamour and the Ricardian poetry of love are Gower’s emphases in this vision within a vision, and I do not mean to link this passage to a specific historical moment any more than we should rely too much on the familiar references in Gower scholarship to the Smithfield tournament or Richard’s conflict with London or Henry Lancaster’s return from Vilnius or Jerusalem. In any case, Gower’s presentation of a specifically Ricardian love court seems inescapably direct, and so the unmasking of Gower as an exile from that court sets off resonances much more appropriate for a Henrician Confessio even if (as in Marchaunt’s Bodley 294) the poem begins with the meeting of Gower and Richard on the Thames. Back in our passage, a long list of ancient poets and philosophers immersed in love follows, and some of these “olde men” plead for mercy 9  Lynn Staley, “Gower, Richard II, Henry of Derby, and the Business of Making Culture,” Speculum 75 (2000): 69–86; Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 235–269. 10  John Clanvowe, The Boke of Cupide, God of Love, or The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, in Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints, ed. Dana Symons (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2004), ll. 281–285.

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for Gower (8.2726–2729). Mercy in this case apparently means a literal withdrawal from the court. Gower has the arrow, his badge that marks his membership in the affinity of the court of love, removed by Cupid: This blinde god which mai noght se, Hath groped til that he me fond; And as he pitte forth his hond Upon my body, wher I lay, Me thoghte a fyri lancegay, Which whilom thurgh myn herte he caste, He pulleth oute. [8.2794–2800]

Amans/Gower is instead “cast” black beads to pray for peace rather than love, a sign that he has been “cast” out from the court of Venus—a point emphasized by identical rhyme: “Lo,” thus sche seide, “John Gower, Now thou art ate laste cast, This have I for thin ese cast, That thou no more of love sieche. Bot my will is that thou besieche And preie hierafter for the pes, And that thou make a plein reles To love. [8.2908–2915]

A second crucial rhyme in this passage is “pes”” and “reles,” implying that the poet’s release from court demands the pursuit of peace. These lines invoke another of Gower’s poems, “In Praise of Peace,” a letter of complaint sent to Henry IV that shares a few parallels with the letter of complaint sent to Venus in Book 8 of the Confessio. In the eighteenth stanza Gower turns from listing the “sothe essamples that the werre hath wroght” to the need for peace as a new salve for an old wound: Forthi, my worthi prince, in Cristes halve, As for a part whos feith thou hast to guide, Leie to this olde sor a newe salve, And do the werre awei, what so betide. Pourchace pes, and set it be thi side,

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And suffre noght thi poeple be devoured. So schal thi name ever after stonde honoured.11

It may be oversimple to identify this poem’s imagery of bloodletting and poverty with Amans/Gower’s love wound in the Confessio, but in both cases the salve is the basis for renewal and a pursuit of peace which in the shorter poem to Henry Gower develops for thirty-six subsequent stanzas. Although Gower scholarship has long imagined the passage in Book 8, along with the bulk of the poem, as a product of Gower’s early drafts, both the specific appeal to peace and the larger allegory of exile point more clearly to a late-state composition in a section of the Confessio where Gower undoubtedly made other revisions close to or during the rule of Henry IV. Readers of Gower know that any investigation of a chosen theme will produce evocative results across most of his works, so this kind of analysis is hardly conclusive: Gower brings up peace (though briefly) in Ricardian passages as well.12 The language in the exile scene sees Cupidinal love as disruptive, but love under the proper governance of marriage and higher authority is interwoven with renewal and peace. That language has an undeniable power and presence in the poetry most associated with Lancastrian Gower and with his thinking on governance. One such example, unsurprisingly, is the balade sequence attached to Henrician manuscripts by the scribes responsible for so many similar manuscripts of Vox and the Henrician Confessio: Traitié selonc las auctours pour essamler les amantz marietz: In private, conscience spells out to the wanton lover the love in which he acts foolishly. He must also answer for it in the end before the one who reveals what is advised. Oh, how the good husband enjoys his reward

In Praise of Peace, 93 and 120–126. See the passage in the Ricardian conclusion, 8.2993*–3035*, which focuses on Richard’s refusal to take revenge on “the liges of his lond” and argues finally that the way of “pes” is Christ’s way, 8.3029*–3035*. 11  12 

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when the other wanton one must leave his wanton amie. He isn’t a lover who misdirects his love.13 (Traitié 18.15–28)

Another late lyric poem (possibly written around the same time as Traitié) regularly attached to Gower manuscripts by this same set of scribes takes up the theme of love and personal governance: The law of the authorities teaches that the fleshly journey of good men Is safer, when they have covenants of matrimony; As the rose of the garden smells more fragrant than a bud of the fields, The condition of the wedded is the beginning and the end of love.14                “Est Amor” 20–24

Other late lyrics take up these themes, most substantially “Ecce Patet Tensus,” where Gower repurposes a series of lines from Vox clamantis to tell us that “whoever wishes to hold in check the fire of his flesh/Let him look out for the bow from which the arrow flies.”15 Although the bow in question is in Cupid’s hands, the association with Vox reminds us (discussed above in Chap. 2) that its frontispiece in three manuscripts from Gower’s lifetime is an author portrait of Gower as archer shooting his satiric barbs at the world. Again the governance of desire intertwines itself with political controls and the fiction of witness brought before our eyes repeatedly in the poet’s personae. 13  Translation from John Gower, Traitié edited from the Trentham MS British Library Additional MS 59495, ed, and trans. Peter Nicholson (John Gower Society, 2022) https:// johngower.org/nicholson-tratie/ [sic].

son recoi la conscience exponde fol amant l’amour dont il foloie. Si lui covient au fin q’il en responde Devant celui qui les consals desploie. O com li bons maritz son bien emploie, Qant l’autre fol lerra sa fole amie. N’est pas amant qui son amour mesguie.” 14  Translation here and in the following lyric poems from Yeager, Minor Latin. “Deinz A

docet auctorum quod iter carnale bonorum est, quorum sunt federa coniugiorum, Fragrat ut ortorum rosa plus quam germen agrorum, Ordo maritorum caput est et finis amorum.” 15  “Qui vult ergo sue carnis compescere flammam, Arcum prevideat unde sagitta volat.” (34–35) “Lex

Tucius

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For the macrocosmic focus on love integrated with poetic persona no better example can be found than the famous passage on Arion, part of the Henrician Prologue to the Confessio, a fusion Robert Yeager so eloquently pointed out.16 This pagan vision of a Christian peaceable kingdom sets up a political allegory that shadows the overt allegory of love and literary music restoring peace: The hinde in pes with the leoun, The wolf in pes with the moltoun, The hare in pees stod with the hound; And every man upon this ground Which Arion that time herde, Als wel the lord as the schepherde, He broghte hem alle in good acord; So that the comun with the lord, And lord with the comun also, He sette in love bothe tuo […] And if ther were such on now, Which cowthe harpe as he tho dede, He myhte availe in many a stede To make pes wher now is hate. [Pro.1059–1075]

This passage ends the Confessio’s Henrician Prologue and carries the weight of Gower’s attack there on the world’s political governance while serving as the linchpin to Gower’s even more weighty discussion of love and worldly governance. As such, Gower’s vision of paradise here fuses not only the Christian utopia of Isaiah 11.6 with the pagan myth of Orpheus, but also the love harmony of the natural world with the political relations between lord and commons. Gower scholarship tends to read the Arion passage as if it positioned poetry above the fray of politics.17 In fact, the Arion passage as political allegory again uses the language of Gower’s 16  R. F. Yeager, John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 1990), 238. In contrast, an explicitly political allegory is offered by Ann W. Astell, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 73–93. 17  See, for instance, Simon Meecham-Jones, “Prologue: The Poet as Subject: Literary Selfconsciousness in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” in Betraying Our Selves. Early Modern Literature in History, ed. H.  Dragstra, S.  Ottway, and H.  Wilcox (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 14–30; and Elliott Kendall, “Saving History: Gower’s Apocalyptic and the New Arion,” in John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition, ed. Elisabeth Dutton, John Hines, and R. F. Yeager (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2010), 46–58.

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Lancastrian poetry and recalls the almost obsessive parallels that Gower draws between the salvation of mankind from Christ’s incarnation and the salvation of England from Henry’s elevation to the throne, as in “Rex Celi Deus”: O pious king, we praise Christ through you, and Him A revived land worships, who gave us to you. Blessed be that day when you sought the kingship for yourself, And blessed be God who gave you the rule!18 [21–24]

The vision of Arion, like the Lover Poet’s vision of a Venerian love court, may at first glance seem like a product of an early Ricardian Confessio, but since Arion appears only in Henrician manuscripts the language and imagery for both the Arion passage and “Rex Celi Deus” indicate they are more likely to have been written or rewritten in the late 1390s. What these passages ask us to do, then, is to reread the Confessio as a whole with the critical awareness that everything outside the explicitly Ricardian passages may have been the product of late revisions by Gower. The Ricardian passages themselves may have surfaced outside Gower’s control in this same period, and in the hands of John Marchaunt and his associates become a tool for repurposing Gower’s literary project with direct reference to another author they championed by means of the Chaucer encomium. I think we should become agnostic rather than deniers on the question of whether early versions of the poem circulated in public from 1386 onward (or from 1390 onward), some dedicated to Richard and some eventually to Henry as Earl of Derby. Any such versions are, quite simply, lost. We cannot forget that we have not a single scrap of hard evidence for what those versions may have contained beyond the “Tale of Constance” or other possibilities suggested by influence studies.19 We do know that Gower, whom Malcolm Parkes has memorably dubbed

“O pie rex, Cristum per te laudamus, et ipsum Qui tibi nos tribuit terra reviva colit; Sancta sit illa dies qua tu tibi regna petisti, Sanctus et ille Deus, qui tibi regna dedit!” Text and translation from Yeager’s edition. 19  On the “Tale of Constance” as Gower’s narrative before Chaucer’s see most recently R. F. Yeager, “‘The Tale of Constance’ in Context,” in Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower, ed. R. F. Yeager and Brian W. Gastle (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2011), 159–171. 18 

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a “serial reviser,” recycled his own materials.20 Confessio narratives seem to infiltrate parts of the Vox and balades 6 through 15 of the Traitié, Gower’s long poem on marriage; there are good reasons to believe that this recycling occurred in the late 1390s or thereafter.21 We know as well that Gower’s literary star rose with Lancastrian ascendancy, a perfect time to go to the drawers and revive his big poems. And we know that there was a major burst in the production of both the Vox and the Confessio after Henry became king, with political updates and additions to bolster Gower’s poetic credentials, whereas nothing at all survives from before that time except a single manuscript of the Mirour de l’Omme.22 The manuscript evidence supports a late-state approach to Gower’s poetry beyond the Mirour far more than speculations about the early 1390s.

3   Reading the End of the Confessio as a Late-State Text Only one tale precedes the final scenes of the Confessio in Book 8, but it is long: “The Tale of Apollonius” (8.271–2008). The tale has attracted attention in many respects, including a political reading which understands it as counsel for Richard II on the need for love as a guiding principle of governance.23 This approach makes sense if we see Book 8 as a text written early in the later 1380s or early 1390s when the love court of Richard and Anne held sway, as the Macaulay-Fisher model prompts scholars to assume.24 However, the tale follows a long series of narratives in Book 7 about just rule, supplemented in the Huntington textual tradition with two other exempla shaping that theme. Also, the problem of incest central to the Apollonius narrative frames a second counter-­narrative Parkes, “Patterns,” 81. R.  F. Yeager, “Gower’s Triple Tongue (2): Teaching the ‘Balades’,” in Approaches, 100–103. 22  Parkes, “Patterns,” passim. The Mirour de l’Omme survives in Cambridge, University Library, MS Additional 3035. 23  Sebastian I. Sobecki, “Educating Richard: Incest, Marriage, and (Political) Consent in Gower’s ‘Tale of Apollonius’,” Anglia 125 (2007): 205–216; Diane Watt, “Oedipus, Apollonius, and Richard II: Sex and Politics in Book 8 of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002): 180–208. 24  Sobecki, “Educating Richard,” 206, begins with just such an assumption in an otherwise incisive essay: “It was at that time, in 1385 or 1386, that Gower decided to step into the breach and help Richard’s political education [by composing the Confessio].” 20  21 

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in which mythography combines with new covenant ideas of worldly renewal through Christ, much like the framing trope of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (the General Prologue’s pilgrimage and the Parson’s prologue and sermon) and Gower’s repeated insistence in his late poetry that Henry IV is Christ’s anointed envoy. Book 7 offers the familiar trope of a mirror for princes taken from Aristotle’s lessons for Alexander the Great, though Gower’s version is largely based on the Livre de Trésor by Brunetto Latini.25 As Matthew Giancarlo has pointed out, the focus of this book on just law and its application closely resembles Gower’s In Praise of Peace, a poem written in Gower’s late state addressed directly to Henry.26 The three “parts of philosophy” (7.1–1710) are followed by sections on Truth (7.1711–1984), Largesse (1985–2694), Justice (7.2695–3102), Pity (7.3103–4214), and Chastity (7.4215–5438). All of these sections lay out important policies for righteous governance whether in a kingdom or an individual life. The texts added to Stafford and then supplemented by Marchaunt and associates, however, occur in the section on justice and enlarge a line of discussion that is explicitly political and focused on kingship. The section on justice sets the tone in its opening headverses “Law without justice makes the people deviant under the shadow of the ruler, so that no one will see the straight path.”27 The English verse follows with what Russell Peck calls “a magnificent use of anaphora”28: 25  This topic in Gower goes back at least to George G. Fox, The Mediaeval Sciences in the Works of John Gower (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1931). The fullest examination of Book 7’s discussion of kingship in relationship to broader ideas of governance, though in virtually all cases with the assumption that this advice is aimed at a young Richard II, remains Peck, Kingship and Common Profit. Also see discussions of book 7  in Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 108–134; Kathryn McKinley, “Lessons for a King from John Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” in Metamorphoses: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Allison Keith and Stephen Rupp (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 107–128; Samantha Rayner, Images of Kingship in Chaucer and His Ricardian Contemporaries (Cambridge, UK: D.  S. Brewer, 2008), 5–34; and Kurt Olsson, “Composing the King, 1390–1391: Gower’s Ricardian Rhetoric,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 141–173. 26  Matthew Giancarlo, “Gower’s Governmentality: Revisiting John Gower as a Constitutional Thinker and Regiminal Writer,” In John Gower: Others and the Self, ed. Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2017), 225–259. 27  “Lex sine iusticia populum sub principis vmbra/Deuiat, vt rectum nemo videbit iter.” Headverses 3–4 before VII.2695; translation by Galloway in the Peck/Galloway edition. 28  Peck and Galloway online edition, note to 7.2695–2701.

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What is a lond wher men ben none? What ben the men whiche are alone Withoute a kinges governance? What is a king in his ligance, Wher that ther is no lawe in londe? What is to take lawe on honde, Bot if the jugges weren trewe? (7.2695–2701)

This impassioned series of rhetorical questions moves immediately to a position that advocates reform rather than revolution: These olde worldes with the newe Who that wol take in evidence, Ther mai he se th’experience, What thing it is to kepe lawe, Thurgh which the wronges ben withdrawe And rihtwisnesse stant commended, Wherof the regnes ben amended. (7.2702–2708)

The rule of law here does not contemplate an orderly defense against common theft or fraud, but the amendment of royal rule through the withdrawal of wrong action and the commendation of righteousness. A series of brief exempla with no discussion (7.2765–3028) reinforces the point that this ethical system stands apart from the king who must unify with it for the common profit, concluding with the “Tale of Lycurgus” that shows: […] that a worthi prince is holde The lawes of his lond to holde, Ferst for the hihe Goddes sake, And ek for that him is betake The poeple for to guide and lede.” (7.2911–2916)

Lycurgus establishes righteous laws, extracts a promise from his people to obey them always, and then disappears from view to enforce that permanence: “To do profit to the commune,/He tok of exile the fortune” (7.3011–3012). In some respects Gower can be said to follow this pattern at the end of the Henrician Confessio, a modified Arion who has established an ethics and then exiled himself from court life to assure their permanence.

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Soon, however, the discussion turns to tyranny in the section nominally devoted to pity. The headnote to this section sets the tone: Lacking all reason, a tyrant’s will strips bare the kingdom, and the people’s love roams as an exile there. But Pity, and the kingdom it will preserve for eternity, is pleasing both to the people and to God.29

Among the notable features of the arguments that follow is that: Pité may noght be conterpeised Of tirannie with no peis; For Pité makth a king courteis Bothe in his word and in his dede […] It sit a king to be pitous Toward his poeple and gracious Upon the reule of governance, So that he worche no vengance, Which mai be cleped crualté. Justice which doth equité Is dredfull, for he no man spareth. Bot in the lond wher Pité fareth The king mai nevere faile of love. (7.3118–3133)

Pity transforms a ruler so that he cannot be a tyrant; instead he will be gracious, not tempted by vengeance, and suffused with unfailing love. Reading this section as a commentary on Richard is easy enough, since the grace and love associated with Richard’s love court effectively do not function for governance when pity fails and vengeance takes over, as in Richard’s attack on the Appellants and their local associates during what was called his “tyranny.”30 One additional anecdote is included here in Marchaunt’s Bodley 294 and later manuscripts in the same textual family: a knight tells a king who says “none is above me” that the king should “Nil racionis habens vbi velle tirannica regna Stringit, amor populi transiet exul ibi. Set Pietas, regnum que conseruabit in euum, Non tantum populo, set placet illa deo.” Headnote before 7.3103. 30  Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 203. On the use of this term in the Record and Process, reflected in Gower’s Cronica tripertita, see Poems on Contemporary Events: the Visio Anglie (1381) and Cronica tripertita (1400). Ed. David Carlson. Trans. A. G. Rigg (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 2011), 12–14. 29 

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show pity (7.*3149–*3180). Oddly, the entire anecdote is repeated in the marginal Latin.31 Here the Stafford Confessio adds a more substantial tale, “The Jew and the Pagan” (7.*3207–*3360), which portrays a tyrant God must overthrow: Of crualté the felonie Engendred is of tirannie, Agein the whos condicion God is himself the champion, Whos strengthe mai no man withstonde. Forevere yit it hath so stonde, That God a tirant overladde. Bot wher Pité the regne ladde, Ther mihte no fortune laste Which was grevous, bot ate laste The God himself it hath redresced. (7.*3249–*3259)

This passage not only declares that God intervenes to overthrow a tyrant, but that a king who reigns with pity will eventually benefit “ate laste” from God’s redress of grievances. Gower could have written this passage at any time in his life, but the resonances with the period surrounding 1399 are striking in this added tale. These exempla precede a section on to the necessity for war in a good cause, accompanied by a marginal note from Ecclesiastes 3:8: “Solomon: A time of war, a time of peace.32 The voice of Book 7 (whose relationship to Genius fades with the total lack of dialogue through the vast majority of this book) assures us33: Betwen the simplesce of Pité And the folhaste of crualté, Wher stant the verray hardiesce, Ther mote a king his herte adresce, 31  In Bodley 294, Trinity R.3.2; Nottingham Mi LM 8. This passage does not occur in Additional 12483 (defective) or Taylor 5. All five of these manuscripts are related otherwise to the textual family Macaulay and Fisher call “first recension unrevised”; Stafford and the later (ca. 1425–1450) Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College MS 63, are substantially closer to Fairfax 3 in textual terms. 32  “Salomon. Tempus belli, tempus pacis.” At 7.3594. 33  Amans at the end of Book 7 cries out “Do wey!” and demands a return to the matter of love (7.5408–5429). Otherwise Amans does not speak in Book 7.

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Whanne it is time to forsake, And whan time is also to take The dedly werres upon honde, That he schal for no drede wonde, If rihtwisnesse be withal. (7.3605–3613)

The “Tale of Gideon” that follows illustrates “hou Goddes grace/Unto the goode men availeth” (7.3782–3783) to win righteous wars, whereas God can “soffre a wickid king to falle/In hondes of his fomen alle” (7.3805–3806). This point is driven home further by short exempla “Saul and Agag” and “David and Joab,” before returning to the fate of wicked kings in the discussion of Solomon’s wisdom: Fulofte er this it hath be sein, The comun poeple is overlein And hath the kinges senne aboght, Althogh the poeple agulte noght. (7.3929–3932)

This section closes with another series of short exempla emphasizing the power of wisdom to reform a king on the wrong path (7.4147–4214), but returns at this closing to the critical judgment that “A king is holden overall/To Pité.” For governors pity is the remedial virtue for the vice of tyranny. These general arguments could come from any point in Gower’s poetic career. Nonetheless, throughout this section and in the additions from both Stafford and the Marchaunt/Guildhall associates, the focus on vengeful and tyrannical rulers, and the need for just war to remove them, suits Gower’s late-state writings and the characterizations of Richard there. In four lines apparently addressed to Henry, Prince of Wales, Gower alludes directly to the defeat of tyranny by Henry the father’s overthrow of Richard: H[enry] son of the eagle, than whom no one is ever more graceful, Has broken his enemies, and subjugated tyrannical necks.

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H. the eagle has captured the oil, by which he has received the rule of the realm; Thus the new stock returns, anointed and joined to the old stem.34

These lines are appended by Parkes Scribe 4 to two early Vox manuscripts after the Cronica tripertita in his earliest stint on each of these manuscripts; the same lines, in the hand of Parkes Scribe 5, are attached in the Trentham anthology at the end of “O recolende” as an introduction to the French balade sequences Cinkante Balades and Traitié.35 That paean to Henry links these balades to the new king and describes Henry’s early rule as troubled in just the terms described in the exempla from Book 7: O venerable, good, and pious King Henry, patron, Set up for good things those whom you rescue from Pharaoh. Remove from them what is harmful, for whom this land is in conflict, So that the people of the realm may live under the rule of reason. Establish peace, moderate the powers of the crown, Bridle the laws unconditionally, Confirm rights by your command, admonish your people to keep them.36

Richard in this address becomes “Pharoah,” a tyrant doomed to fall by the workings of salvation history; Henry can only be the righteous king who “moderates” kingly powers and puts his people on a straight path to peace by admonishment rather than vengeance. In Trentham once again the interlude between Cinkante Balades and Traitié is the short Latin poem “Ecce Patet Tensus” (Lo, the Taut Bow), 34  “H. aquile pullus, quo nunquam gracior vllus,/Hostes confregit que tirannica colla subegit./ H. aquile cepit oleum, quo regna recepit;/Sic veteri iuncta stipiti nova stirps redit uncta.” Text and translation from Yeager, Minor Latin, 46–47. As Yeager notes there, 77, these lines are followed in two early manuscripts by two quotations from scripture meant to further authorize Henry’s seizure of the throne. 35  Parkes, “Patterns,” 87–91. 36  “O recolende, bone, pie Rex Henrice, patrone, Ad bona dispone quos eripis a Pharaone; Noxia depone, quibus est humus hec in agone, Regni persone quo viuant sub racione; Pacem compone, vires moderare corone, Legibus impone frenum sine condicione, Firmaque sermone iura tenere mone.” “O Recolende,” 1–7. Text and translation from Yeager, Minor Latin, 49.

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thirty-six lines of meditation on the power of Cupid taking a dark view of human passion much like that of the Traitié which follows: “O human nature, which no one can abolish,/Nor yet excuse the evils it does!”37 This poem may have been put together around the time Gower was revising Vox, since a number of its lines reappear in this poem.38 The same sentiments about Cupid’s power pervade the climactic moment in Confessio 8.2808–2940 when Cupid pulls his lance from the wound of Gower/ Amans and Venus sends the poet/lover off with black prayer beads of peace hung around his neck as the lance’s replacement. The parallels between Gower’s late laureate poetry and Confessio Books 7 and 8 tell us that we can step away from the Macaulay/Fisher assumption that the Confessio as we now have it was created in the early years of Richard’s reign. We can face directly the material evidence that the earliest versions we have of the Confessio are dedicated to Henry and likely to have emanated from the great reviser himself at a time in Lancastrian London when Gower’s career reached new heights addressing Henry through a spate of new poetry. In doing so, we liberate ourselves from longstanding assumptions that the vast bulk of the Confessio, including Book 7 and all but the final few lines of Book 8, survived untouched from the early 1390s. We also allow the possibility that Gower’s extended discussion of pity, tyranny, God’s readiness to overthrow a wicked king and take some time to allow redress to the people from a new king—all could be the product of Gower’s writings and revisions during the period from the crisis of 1397 through Henry’s own difficulties establishing peace in 1399 and the years immediately following. The final section of Book 7, Chastity, may not resonate as well with Richard’s last few years in power, but its emphasis on the problems of lechery, adultery, and rape (the only substantial tale in these final lines is “The Rape of Lucrece,” followed by the almost-rape avoided by child murder in “The Tale of Virginia,” 7.4754–5306) hew closely to the exempla in Traitié. Any reader of that poem will be struck by how little it seems an appropriate presentation poem for a new bride and how much it argues

37  “O natura viri, poterit quam tollere nemo,/Nec tamen excusat quod facit ipsa malum!” “Ecce Patet Tensus,” 23–24. Text and translation from Yeager, Minor Latin, 40–41. 38  Vox, V.iii.147–92; see Yeager’s comments on this poem in Minor Latin, 72; the only surviving witness for this poem is in Trentham.

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for masculine self-control.39 In that respect Traitié seems to answer the optimistic love conventions of Cinkante Balades much as Book 8 of the Confessio answers the Lover’s hopes and dreams in his first conversations with Genius. One of the opening balades in Traitié, for instance, extols the “great marvel” (grant mervaile) a proposal of marriage represents, but takes as its concluding line for its stanzas “to breach his oath does not befit an honest man.”40 This deflating sentiment is followed in the next balades by the examples of Nectanabus (rapist), Ulysses (adulterer), Hercules (bigamist), Jason (bigamist), and Agamemnon (adulterer) through a cavalcade of mostly married ancient and medieval men mistreating women. It may be too much to ask for a catalogue of happy lovers: to modify the old saying, all happy lovers are happy in the same way. Although the love court gesturing to Richard and Anne seems happy enough, the catalogue of exemplary lovers who cohabit with them include Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere, Jason and Creusa, Hercules and Eolen, Theseus and Phaedra, Paris and Helen, Troilus and Criseyde: love tragedies waiting to happen. An accelerating list of lovers like Dido follows, portrayed in the midst of their tragedies. Even three of the four virtuous wives added at the end include only one (Penelope) who offers something like a happy ending (8.2500–2656). In short, several of the same unhappy lovers from Traitié also appear in Book 8’s parliament of lovers; overall the failures of human desire permeate both. Book 7 and Book 8 may have distinct catalogs of exemplary figures— representations of tyranny and pity versus representations of sexual desire and peace in exile—however much both feature prominently in Gower’s late poetry. Love remains essential in both cases, but the only extended discussion between these two late sections of the Confessio is the “Tale of Apollonius.” Unbridled desire, in this case Antiochus’s incestuous 39  Cathy Hume, “Why did Gower Write the Traitié?” in John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition, ed. Elisabeth Dutton, John Hines, and R. F. Yeager (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2010), 263–275. Also see the broader discussion in R. F. Yeager, “Twenty-First Century Gower: The Theology of Marriage in John Gower’s ‘Traitiė’ and the Turn toward French,” in The French of Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Jocelyn WoganBrowne, ed. Thelma Fenster and Carolyn P.  Collette (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2017), 257–271. On dating the Traitié see most recently Peter Nicholson, “The French Works: The Ballades,” in The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower, ed. Ana Saez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager (New York: Routledge, 2017), 312–320. 40  “Sa foi mentir n’est pas a l’omme honeste.” Traitié V.7, 14, 21. Text and translation from Gower, Traitié, ed. and trans. Nicholson.

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possession of his daughter, creates political chaos: Antiochus  refuses to yield  to the throne’s rightful claimant by sexually controlling the very body of his heir. Apollonius, who won the hand of that heir, goes into exile and must gather his people again far from home to return and claim that throne. The discussion of incest that opens Book 8 (over the vociferous objections of Amans) provides guidance, surprising for moderns, to understand the place of this tale in Gower’s final model of love: free from desire and wisdom, free from courtly politics.41 A brief review of the world’s beginning turns quickly to an assurance that incest was inevitable at the founding moment of humankind: Forthi that time it was no sinne The soster for to take hire brother, Whan that ther was of chois non other. (8.68–70)

Whether or not carnal relations between Adam and Eve constituted incest, for their children in the First Age incest was not only acceptable but necessary due to limited choice. Similarly, after the flood inaugurates the Second Age incest was again necessary for the same reasons. In the Third Age, from Abraham to the coming of Christ, marriage between first cousins met the standard of moral acceptance—though not sibling incest. Finally, after Christ no marriages or sexual liaisons between blood-related partners (and partners related through godparents, though Gower does not mention that detail) can be countenanced (8.48–141). This Hobbesian model for evolving boundaries of desire naturalizes the taboo of incest in a social context that depends on salvation history and the coming of Christ to move humanity’s governance of love from incest as a Hobson’s choice to an act “every man […] sholde drede” (8.265) under the new covenant.42 Within the “Tale of Apollonius” a similar evolution takes place from the incestuous attachment of Antiochus to the moment when Apollonius receives in the darkness of his room a beautiful young maiden whose touch angers him but whose presence engenders a natural (“kindely”) love that prompts his discovery that the maiden is his 41  For a review of previous scholarship on Gower and incest, including this opening and the Tale of Apollonius see Sobecki, “Educating Richard,” 208–212. 42  Also see Maria Bullón-Fernández, Fathers and Daughters in Gower’s “Confessio Amantis” (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2000), 14–15. On Antiochus as a “wylde” or savage progenitor (Confessio 8.309) see Sobecki, “Educating Richard,” 210.

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long-lost daughter Thaise (8.1705–1735).43 This encounter literally lifts Apollonius “out of his derke place” and “ up into the liht” (8.1740–1741) from where he can initiate legal proceedings against his daughter’s betrayers, rediscover his long-lost wife, and regain his kingship. As Sebastian Sobecki points out, in this tale bad kingship and incest are reformed by marriage and good governance.44 This advice may be aimed at Richard if we accept that Gower’s final book was written before 1397, a point when Gower is likely to have given up on the king’s reform.45 On the other hand, a narrative founded on wrongful exile and triumphant return after the passing of a wicked king “with al his pride” (8.2004) works particularly well after 1399, whenever Gower might have written it. Kingship and governance are undoubtedly the central concerns of Genius in Books 7 and 8; if we consider the public context when we know the Confessio appeared, then the angle of witness for Amans/Gower and underlying assumptions of the poem’s readers both change dramatically. Love and governance struggle to unite forces under conditions Gower has described at length in his late poetry: an opportunity for renewal under Henry IV rather than an instant paradise, offered by Christ in the same terms as the new covenant that reconfigured the boundaries of incestuous desire.

4  The Chaucer Connection We return, unsurprisingly, to Chaucer for one important passage in Ricardian Confessios that seems to date from before 1397. Venus both elevates Chaucer above Gower, apparently discards Gower’s poem, and asks Gower to ask Chaucer to write a poem to replace the Confessio: And gret wel Chaucer whan ye mete, As mi disciple and mi poete: 43  On this scene also see Watt, Amoral Gower, 138–140. On the tale’s focus on incest also see Larry Scanlon, “The Riddle of Incest: John Gower and the Problem of Medieval Sexuality,” in Re-visioning Gower, ed. R. F. Yeager (Charlotte, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998), 93–127; and Georgiana Donavin, “Taboo and Transgression in Gower’s Apollonius of Tyre,” in Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts, ed. Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn-Price (Gainesville FL: University Press of Florida, 2002), 94–121. 44  Sobecki, “Educating Richard,” 212–216. 45  This assumption stands behind the discussion of this passage not just by Sobecki, “Educating Richard,” but also Peck, Kingship and Common Profit, 167–172; by Porter, “Gower’s Ethical Microcosm,” 135–162; Bullón-Fernández, 45–64; and Diane Watt, “Oedipus, Apollonius, and Richard II,” 181–208; and Watt, Amoral Gower, 138–140.

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For in the floures of his youthe In sondri wise, as he wel couthe, Of ditees and of songes glade, The whiche he for mi sake made, The lond fulfild is overal […] For thi now in hise daies olde Thow schalt him telle this message, That he upon his latere age, To sette an ende of alle his werk, As he which is myn owne clerk, Do make his testament of love, As thou hast do thi schrifte above, So that mi court it mai recorde. [8.2941*–2957*]

Somehow Chaucer escapes Gower’s own commitment to the Ricardian love court figured as a fiery lance in a deep wound. As long as a last testament remains unwritten, Chaucer can be another cheerful advocate of well-regulated love and a good fit for a post-Gower aureate language focused on young aristocratic couples rather than, say, a cranky old moralist and an obscure woman with the suggestively earthy name of Agnes Groundolf. These sixteen lines praise Chaucer, but also offer to publish and preserve Chaucer’s “testament of love” in some kind of immortal sphere that includes  the love court of Venus, an offer not extended to Gower even though Gower has made his “schrifte” to her confessor. Gower’s alter ego Arion and, it seems, Gower himself are displaced at the bitter end of the Confessio with another poet championed by the scribes choosing this passage. This passage does not occur in the early Henrician Confessios but appears first in manuscripts written by John Marchaunt along with two others.46 The Chaucer encomium, only sixteen lines long, could have been a separate passage pieced into the Ricardian ending, which itself is a patchwork of sections virtually identical in the Henrician ending, some substantially longer than sixteen lines.47 By my estimate from dating manuscript 46  These manuscripts, dated from decoration ca. 1405–1410, include Christ Church 148 and Corpus Christi 67 written by Marchaunt, Laud Misc 609 written by the Trevisa-Gower scribe (who may have collaborated with Marchaunt on the Taylor 5 Confessio) and the as-yet unidentified scribe of St. John’s B.12. On these dates see further above Chap. 6. 47  Largely identical lines and passages in this section of Book 8 noted in the Peck/Galloway edition: *2962 / 2942, *2969*70 / 2969–70 (now inverted), *2971*85 / 2971–85, *3061*63 / 3109–11, *3065*66 / 3115–16, *3067*68 / 3121–22, *3087*3106 / 3151–64, *3111*14 / 3169–72.

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decorations, the Chaucer passage first reappears in the period beginning in 1405, when Henry IV succumbed to his long illness to the extent that a quasi-regency emerged with power centered mostly in Prince Henry, Thomas Arundel as Chancellor (1407–1410), and Thomas Chaucer (elected Speaker of the House in 1407).48 In this period Marchaunt and his Guildhall associate Adam Pynkhurst undertook some serious reconstruction and reshuffling for Chaucer’s great frame-tale poem The Canterbury Tales: Pynkhurst’s Ellesmere tale arrangements are substantially different from those in Pynkhurst’s Hengwrt; Marchaunt’s tale arrangements in Harley 7334 and Corpus Christi 67 offer yet another arrangement, along with a substantially different mise-en-page in terms of text divisions.49 These activities alone should give us some perspective on how easily a Ricardian Confessio could be a product of some scribal patchwork on top of a text Gower had already revised to its Henrician form. The Chaucer encomium first emerges in these Confessios, reconfiguring Gower’s Ricardian love court as aureate nostalgia of the kind sponsored so effectively by Lydgate later in the same period, and by Marchaunt and his associates themselves in the manuscripts of Chaucer, Trevisa, and other Ricardian literary figures. The other Ricardian passages cast a soft aura over the Lover/Poet’s exile and Richard’s youthful failings. The Parliament of Lovers, when combined with these passages, spotlights a benign young Richard, patron of literature and loving husband to Queen Anne. As such they are both a literary restoration of the continuity of ordained kingship across the rupture of 1399 and a celebration of the marital love symbolized by Henry V’s movement in 1413 of Richard’s body to join that of Anne of Bohemia in the splendid bronze tomb in the chapel of Edward the Confessor at Westminster Abbey. This reuniting of Richard and Anne, and Hoccleve’s poetic celebration of it, has not gotten enough attention. Paul Strohm’s well-known thoughts 48  On this crisis, Prince Henry’s apprenticeship, Arundel’s return to secular power, and the political ascent of Thomas Chaucer, a Lancastrian loyalist dating back to his service to John of Gaunt, see most recently Chris Given-Wilson, Henry IV (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), 299–316; 464–525. 49  On this major topic see most recently Daniel Mosser, A Digital Catalogue of the Pre-1500 Manuscripts and Incunables of the Canterbury Tales, Second Edition: https://www.mossercatalogue.net/; also see Charles Owen, The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 1991), 7–14. On page design differences see Joel Fredell, “The Lowly Paraf: Transmitting Manuscript Design in the Canterbury Tales,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 213–280.

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on moving Richard’s body could bear some adjusting to consider the cultural transformation of the language of love in the first years of Henry IV, a process wherein Gower’s poetry was central.50 However, that language was at first conveyed entirely by works associated with the poet’s Lancastrian loyalties: attached to Henrician Confessios, and manuscripts of Vox clamantis after Cronica tripertita, integral to the structure of the Trentham anthology. In that poetry of love are allusions to the horrors of past times and the need to overcome divisions: The kingdom is strong, where true Love rules. As winter destroys the flower, so division destroys love, And like the plague fosters error and brings on grief. What happened yesterday teaches that such dangers are to be feared, So that men of true wisdom can learn to heal the times.51 (Unanimes esse 5–8)

This poetry builds a vision of “true love” which replaces the disruptive desire tormenting the Lover in the Confessio with a political plague and a healing of wounds through wisdom rather than the extraction of Cupid’s spear. In its Henrician form the Confessio serves as a poetic bridge between the vision of an earlier language and culture of love—the Venerian court allegorically represented by Richard and Anne, poetically represented by Valentine’s Day and bird debates in Chaucer and Clanvowe—and the vision of a new Arion whose language and culture of love interweaves with the renewal of peace and stable governance Gower explicitly associates with Henry. However, the Ricardian passages so favored by Marchaunt and his associated scribes (and, apparently, the sons of Henry IV) disrupt that distinction and shape a vision of Richard’s love court more easily reconciled to an unbroken tradition of royal dignity and joyous marital love.

50  Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 101–127, 183; also see Thomas Hoccleve, Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, vol. 1, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS ES 61 (rept. EETS, 1970), VIII, 47 51  “Regnum firmatur, ubi verus amor dominatur. Sicut yemps florem, divisio quassat amorem, Nutrit et errorem quasi pestis, agitque dolorem. Quod precessit heri docet ista pericla timeri, Ut discant veri sapientes secla mederi.” Text and translation from Yeager, Minor Latin, 50–51.

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This movement in the role of aureate wisdom on love may not be as counterintuitive as it seems at first glance. Henry’s first queen, Mary of Bohun, died the same year as Anne of Bohemia died, though Mary had produced four living heirs and two daughters by that time. Despite being told that they could not consummate their marriage until Mary was 16, she became pregnant with Prince Hal at age 14.52 So this couple may also be seen as a royal exemplar of young love thriving within the bounds of marital order and moral governance. Even the portrait of Richard can work as an exemplum for Lancastrians embracing their power: And thogh the worldes chaunce in broghte Of infortune gret debat, Yit was he not infortunat, For he which the fortune ladde, The hihe God, him overspradde Of His Justice, and kepte him so, That his astat stood evere mo Sauf, as it oghte wel to bee; Lich to the sonne in his degree. [8.*2999–*3007 Ricardian ending]

This young version of Richard in the Confessio, in short, could be seen as a good king whose political cognition went dark in a dark time, a figure worthy of a love-based mirror for princes rather than the tyrant Gower eventually presented in Cronica Tripertita and late versions of Vox. And this love-based mirror could be put into effect by the insertion of a few short sections of text, an initiative Marchaunt was happy enough to take with Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, with tale order and bridge passages, and with the Tale of Gamelyn among many other such moves in the Canterbury Tales.

5  Enduring Forms of Witness In all versions of the Confessio Gower ends his poem with an allegory of exile from Venerian love that hews closely to a political allegory of Lancastrian conversion but also declares a poetic identity allied to the harmonies of Arion and that figure’s Lancastrian allusions. Gower develops a language of ordered love and unregulated desire that flowers in his assuredly late Latin poetry and his probably late French poetry that one set of 52  On the marriage of Henry and Mary, arranged with the help of John of Gaunt, see Given-Wilson, Henry IV, 24–28.

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London scribes in the first decades of the fifteenth century were regularly attaching to his major works along with partisan political revisions. That poetry was built on one fiction of witness: observing England’s transformation at the hands of a falling tyrant and a rising redeemer. The other set of scribes—who probably began their work in Gower’s last days of blindness, illness, and retreat—produced Ricardian manuscripts that did not attach these kinds of love poems but used a fiction of historical witness to the kinder days of Richard and Anne of Bohemia which altered the valences of Gower’s great poem and its vision of personal and communal governance. Central to that shift in valence was an aureate adjustment to the language of love and governance soon to be taken up by Hoccleve, Lydgate, and other Lancastrian poets. In many ways Gower’s meditations on these great questions of personal and state life shadow the dramatic politics and cultural transformations across 1399, but in terms so large that political cognition itself is framed in an epistemology structured by love. This accomplishment transcends the many fictions of witness to which the Confessio is heir, as the sublunary authority of Venus cannot hold against the greater operations of the transcendent divine foreshadowed by Arion’s song. The material history of Gower’s Confessio expands the possibilities of his poetry. The complexities of these manuscript traditions do not compromise his vision because the great and complete body of his work finds its own harmonies and scribal champions in Lancastrian London. Variations only enrich the melodies of England’s founding poet of desire and love, politics and governance.

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General Index1

A Alan of Lille, De Planctu Naturae (Complaint of Nature), 29, 134n54 Annales Ricardi Secundi, 108n57 Anne of Bohemia, Queen of England, 54, 69, 272, 273n7, 292, 294, 295 Arundel, Thomas, 6, 45n35, 99, 102, 109, 138, 138n72, 139, 142, 146, 169, 207, 209, 246n54, 250, 261n64, 262, 263, 292, 292n48 Ashwardby, John, 155n8 B Bahr, Arthur W., 1n2, 134n52 Baker, Denise, 29n58 Barrington, Candace, 67n64, 85n3, 121n15, 168n1 Barron, Caroline, 76n75, 107n51, 108 Batkie, Stephanie, 61n49 Beauchamp, Thomas, Earl of Warwick, 99, 135n58

1

Beaufort, Henry, 56 Bertolet, Craig, 107n53 Blake, Norman F., 226n29 Boccaccio, Giovanni, Teseida, 13n22 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus, 13n21, 147n101 Bohun, Mary, Queen of England, 131, 294 Born, Lester Kruger, 164n37 Bowers, John, 273n7 Brugge, Walter de, 216n9 Bullón-Fernández, Maria, 214n6, 289n42, 290n45 Burke, Linda, 273n7 Butterfield, Ardis, 35n7, 36n9 C Camille, Michael, 21n39 Carlin, Martha, 35n8 Carlson, David R., 1n2, 6n12, 27n54, 66, 76n75, 102n46, 107n51,

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Fredell, Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27964-5

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GENERAL INDEX

107n52, 122n18, 131, 131n46, 135n58, 135n59, 153n5, 155n8, 195n36 Carmelite-Lapworth Master, 203, 221, 222n22, 233 Carpenter, John, 216n10, 217, 217n11, 219, 219n14, 222, 241 Castel, Jean, 160, 161 Charles VI, King of France, 160, 161, 161n32 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 1, 32, 33, 84, 118n6, 129n40, 159, 169, 213, 270 Boece, 13n22, 35n8, 171n6 Canterbury Tales, 3n4, 3n5, 21n41, 23, 28, 29, 29n57, 31, 35n7, 38, 43, 55, 86n5, 121, 172n7, 182, 196, 213, 214, 224, 228, 230, 231, 243, 261, 262, 281, 292, 294 Complaint to His Purse, 23n46 Gamelyn, 262, 294 House of Fame, 43 Troilus and Criseyde, 43, 241 Chaucer, Thomas, 29, 209, 262, 263, 270, 292, 292n48 Christianson, C. Paul, 214n7 Christine de Pizan, 159 Épistre Othea, 160, 162 Le livre de ladvision Cristine, 160n27 Clanvowe, John, 266, 274, 293 The Boke of Cupid, 274 Coffman, George R., 143n90 Cohen, Nathalie, 110n59 Coleman, Joyce, 4n8, 61n49, 62n51, 62n52, 67n63, 85n3, 202n42, 217n12 Cooper, Helen, 27n53, 226n29 Coulson, Frank T., 14n23

D Dancaster, Richard, 24, 25 Delta (scribe), 217, 217n11, 217n13, 220, 222, 241, 242, 248 De Machaut, Guillaume, Remède de Fortune, 12, 13, 21, 36 De Sainte-Maure, Benoît, Roman de Troie, 44n32 Dolan, Terry, 83n1 Donaldson, E.T., 23n45 Donavin, Georgiana, 290n43 Dor, Juliette, 83n1 Doyle, A. I., 4n7, 18n32, 21n40, 22n43, 29n57, 37, 37n12, 37n13, 38n16, 41n22, 86n5, 97n33, 118n7, 171–173, 172n9, 195n36, 217, 217n13, 220n16 Drimmer, Sonja, 44n33, 52n41, 59n45 Dutschke, C. W., 195n36 Dymmock, Roger, 155n8 E Echard, Siân, 14n25, 18n34, 36n10, 37n12, 72n67, 149n2, 151n3 Economou, George, 29n58 Edwards, A. S. G., 36n11, 37n12, 59n46 Edwards, Robert R., 27n53, 76n77 Emmerson, Richard K., 229n33 F Federico, Sylvia, 273n8 Ferster, Judith, 281n25 Fisher, John, 22, 22n43, 24–26, 37n12, 83n1, 84, 85, 86n4, 86n5, 87, 88n11, 95, 100, 101, 101n44, 102n45, 106, 107n51, 115, 118n9, 119, 129, 129n40, 159n24, 195n36, 284n31, 287

  GENERAL INDEX 

FitzAlan, Richard, 4th Earl of Arundel, 99, 135n58 Fitzralph, Richard, 155n8 Fletcher, Alan J., 83n1, 172n7 Fletcher, D., 24n48 Fonzo, Kimberly, 24n47, 27n53, 76n78 Fowler, David, 42n26 Fox, George G., 281n25 Fredell, Joel, 3n5, 15n26, 19n35, 36n9, 151n3, 181n21, 202n42, 214n7, 226n28 G Galloway, Andrew, 11n17, 14n23, 30n60, 85n3, 94n26, 99n37, 100n40, 126n32 Gastle, Brian, 1n2, 28n56, 61n49, 202n42, 217n12 Giancarlo, Matthew, 281 Given-Wilson, Chris, 26n50, 26n51, 42n27, 85n3, 292n48 Goldberg, P. J. P., 261n64 Gower, John, 1, 33, 83, 115, 149–165, 167, 209, 265 apocalypticism, 27n53, 80 Arion, 27, 31, 71, 72n67, 73–76, 74n72, 77n79, 78, 80, 169, 266, 271, 278, 279, 282, 291, 293–295 Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilentia, 136, 143 Chaucer encomium, 69, 120, 268, 279, 291, 292 Cinkante Balades, 119, 134n52, 141, 159, 163n33, 286, 288 Confessio Amantis, 2, 2n3, 4n7, 24n47, 28n55, 37n12, 40, 67n64, 76n78, 85n3, 94, 108n55, 126n32, 149n2, 151n3, 167, 230, 265, 268n3, 269

315

Cronica tripertita, 1, 31, 61n49, 66, 77, 109, 119, 131n46, 135, 137, 141, 153, 168, 169, 195n36, 261, 271, 283n30, 286, 293, 294 “Cultor in ecclesia,” 120n11, 144 “De lucis scrutinio,” 79, 137n65, 143, 154n7 “Derbeie Comiti,” 81 “Dicunt scripture,” 120n11, 144, 146, 154n7 dream of Nebuchadnezzar, 31, 73, 80 “Ecce Patet Tensus,” 277, 286 “Est amor,” 91n18, 110, 134, 137, 147, 158, 277 glosses, 4n9, 13n22, 24, 85, 86, 88–93, 112, 127, 151, 151n3, 155, 155n8, 155n9, 157, 164, 167, 168 H. aquile pullus, 6, 153n5 “The Jew and the Pagan,” 271, 284 “laureate” poems, 8, 17, 39, 61n49, 65, 66, 77, 78, 139, 147, 263, 271, 287 London style, 18, 19, 36, 163, 203, 230 meeting with Richard II on Thames, 60, 274 Mirour de l’Omme, 280 “O deus immense,” 91n18, 128, 137, 137n65, 142, 143 “O recolende,” 66, 79, 139, 141, 153n5, 286 polyvocality, 3, 3n6, 19, 19n37, 261 In Praise of Peace, 1, 37n12, 65, 66, 79, 110n60, 120n11, 135, 136n60, 156n12, 271, 275, 281 “Presul ouile regis,” 61n49, 120n11, 144, 154n7

316 

GENERAL INDEX

Gower, John (cont.) prophet, 22, 26, 27, 27n53, 30n60, 76, 76n77, 77, 80, 85n3, 108n55, 158 Quia colophons, 94–98, 97n33, 137n66, 141n80, 147 “Quicquid homo scribat,” 91n18, 139, 144, 153n5, 154n7 “Rape of Lucrece,” 287 recensions, 7, 24, 25, 27, 28, 86, 88, 93, 95, 101n44, 104, 112, 113, 115, 116, 121, 269 “Rex celi deus,” 17, 66, 77, 121, 124, 135, 137, 279 scriptorium at St. Mary Overys, 22n43, 86n5 SS collar, 24–26, 62, 67, 67n63, 81 “Tale of Apollonius,” 214n6, 280n24, 288, 289n41 “Tale of Gideon,” 285 “Tale of Lycurgus,” 282 “Tale of Virginia,” 287 Traitié, 13n22, 130n42, 133–137, 133n51, 134n52, 136n62, 138n71, 141, 142, 142n83, 146, 147, 153–159, 153n5, 153n6, 155n9, 157n17, 159n23, 159n24, 161, 163–165, 168, 277, 280, 286–288 Trentham manuscript, 37n12, 110n60, 120n11, 121n15, 130n42, 136, 163 “Unanimes esse,” 78, 120n11, 144 Visio Angliae, 64, 106, 135 Vox Clamantis, 3n4, 6, 8, 17, 19, 28, 36, 37n12, 40, 63, 78n84, 93–95, 106, 107, 119, 135, 144, 145n94, 168, 199, 267, 268, 277, 293 Gower scribe 3, 222 Grady, Frank, 1n2

Greethem, D. C., 40n21 Griffiths, Jeremy, 18n32, 29n57, 36n11, 202n42, 214n7 Griffiths, R. A., 18n32, 29n57, 36n11, 163n36, 202n42, 214n7, 220n16 Groundolf, Agnes, 157, 165, 269, 291 Guido delle Colonne, Historia destructionis Troiae, 39, 44n32 Guildhall (scribes), 3n4, 3n5, 37n12, 47n37, 168, 171, 205, 216n9, 217, 217n12, 220 Gundy, A. K., 108n56 H Hanna III, Ralph, 35n8, 96n32 Harris, Kate, 18n32, 29n57, 129n41 Henry IV, King of England, Duke of Lancaster, Earl of Derby, 1, 2, 6, 17, 18, 23, 26n51, 30–32, 35, 38, 41, 43, 54, 56, 57, 59, 60, 70, 83, 85n3, 86, 97n33, 110, 116, 119, 129, 136, 137, 139, 141, 144, 151, 156, 159, 160, 165, 167–170, 192, 195n36, 206, 207, 209, 216, 261, 267–270, 275, 281, 290, 292, 293 Henry V, King of England, Henry Prince of Wales, 43, 44, 56, 57, 59, 168, 169, 207, 223, 239, 262, 263, 292 Henry VI, King of England, 50, 51, 56, 59 Hindman, Sandra L., 161n32 Hines, John, 108n55 Hoccleve, Thomas, 31, 33–36, 38–45, 41n22, 43n28, 45n34, 45n35, 47, 47n37, 48, 48n38, 52, 57, 59, 60, 119, 133, 133n50, 169, 171, 213, 213n5, 217n11, 220, 223, 239, 260, 262, 263, 292, 295 Regiment of Princes, 40, 41, 45, 223, 239

  GENERAL INDEX 

Holland, John, 1st Duke of Exeter, 274 Holland, Thomas, 3rd Baron Holland, 3rd Earl of Kent, 1st Duke of Surrey, 274 Horobin, Simon, 41n22, 171–173 Hume, Cathy, 133n51, 288n39 Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 56 Huot, Sylvia, 21n41, 35n7 I Irvin, Matthew W., 1n1, 3n6, 74n71 Isabella of Valois, 159, 160 J Jacobus de Sessolis, Chessbook, 43n28 Johannes, decorator, 181, 220n16, 221, 221n18, 221n19, 222, 231n38, 233, 257, 258 John, Duke of Pembroke, 29n57 John of Garland, Integumenta, 14n23, 158n18, 164n37 John of Gaunt, 19n37, 35, 36, 54, 76, 86, 99, 102, 107n51, 108n55, 133, 158, 159, 165 Johnson, Eleanor, 40n21 Jones, Terry Justice, Stephen, 281 K Kempf, Elisabeth, 48n38 Kendall, Elliott, 27n53, 77n79, 278n17 Kendrick, Laura, 35n7 Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, 220n15, 256n59 Knapp, Ethan, 40n21 Krochalis, Jeanne E., 18n32, 29n57 Kwakkel, Erik, 21n39

317

L Laidlaw, James C., 159n26, 161n29, 161n31, 163n34 Langdell, Sebastian J., 42n24 Langland, William, Piers Plowman, 23, 33, 84, 96, 169, 193, 210, 215, 263 Latini, Brunetto, Livre de Trésor, 281 Lawton, David, 34n3 Leicester, Jr., H. Marshall, 23n45, 216n9 Lerer, Seth, 40n21 Lindeboom, Wim, 27n54, 89n15, 92n23, 93n24 Loveney, William, 26n50 Lydgate, John, 23, 31, 33–36, 38–41, 39n19, 43, 44, 48, 48n38, 51, 52, 52n41, 55–57, 59–61, 119, 133, 163, 169, 260, 260n63, 262, 292, 295 Complaint of the Black Knight, 43 Flour of Courtesy, 43 Life of Our Lady, 43 Life of St. Edmund, 48, 51, 52, 56, 60, 61 Siege of Thebes, 38, 43, 55 Temple of Glas, 43 Troy Book, 39, 40, 43, 44, 56, 58 M Macaulay, George, 5, 20, 24, 26, 31, 32, 83–89, 83n1, 92–94, 95n27, 97n33, 98, 101n44, 103–106, 104n47, 112, 113, 115–119, 118n6, 118n9, 122n16, 127, 129, 129n40, 132, 140n79, 149, 149n2, 157n16, 195n36, 263, 269, 284n31, 287 Maidstone, Richard, Concordia, 6, 75, 76, 107n51, 107n52, 155, 155n8 Mandeville, John, 260, 260n63

318 

GENERAL INDEX

Marchaunt, John (Scribe D), 3n5, 28, 29n57, 47n37, 96, 96n32, 98, 168, 169, 171, 173, 173n11, 210, 213, 214, 214n7, 217, 217n11, 217n13, 219–225, 222n22, 230–232, 234, 235, 237, 238, 240–243, 247, 250, 254, 256, 256n59, 257, 261–263, 269–271, 274, 279, 281, 283, 285, 291–294, 291n46 McCabe, T. Matthew, 14n25 McGrady, Deborah, 21n41, 161n29 McKinley, Kathryn, 14n23, 14n24, 281n25 Meale, Carol, 39n18 Meecham-Jones, Simon, 278n17 Mercer’s Petition, 34 Meyer-Lee, Robert J., 40n21, 48n38 Middleton, Anne, 33, 34 Minnis, A. J., 13n22, 29n58, 163n36, 202n42, 270n5 Mitchell, J. Allan., 2n3 Mombello, Gianni, 161n29 Montagu, John, 3rd Earl of Salisbury, 159 Montagu, Thomas, 160 Mooney, Linne R., 3n4, 34, 84, 87n10, 168, 169, 171–173, 171n6, 172n9, 213n4, 217n11, 217n13, 220n15, 241n50 Mosser, Daniel W., 39n18, 173n10, 220n16, 292n49 Mowbray, Thomas, 1st Duke of Norfolk, 99, 108, 261n64 N Nichols, Stephen, 20n38 Nicholson, Peter, 2n3, 83, 85n3, 100, 115, 116, 129, 131, 268, 269 Nolan, Barbara, 23n45

O Olsson, Kurt, 281n25 Oton de Graunson, 159 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 2, 12n19, 13, 14, 14n23, 73, 158n18, 164n37 Fasti, 73 Metamorphoses, 2, 13, 14, 14n23, 158n18, 164n37 Ovide Moralisée, 13, 14, 14n23, 161, 164 Owen, Charles A., 214n7, 292n49 P Parkes, Malcolm, 22n43, 37n12, 119, 130, 130n42, 131, 136, 137, 137n66, 140, 141, 144n92, 171–173, 172n9, 217, 217n13, 279, 286 Partridge, Stephen, 3n4 Patterson, Lee, 23n45, 34n3 Pearl-poet, 84 Pearsall, Derek, 18, 18n34, 35, 36, 37n12, 41n22, 43, 61, 84, 87n10, 115, 116, 129, 203, 213n4, 230, 268n3 Peck, Russell, 11n17, 18n34, 85n3, 94n26, 98n34, 271n6, 281 Pentecost Master, 218 Percy, Thomas, 1st Earl of Worcester, 274 Petworth scribe, 39, 217n11, 220, 220n16, 222 Pfandl, Gerhard, 10n16 Porter, Elizabeth, 270n5, 290n45 Pouzet, Jean-Pascal, 153n5 Pynkhurst, Adam (Scribe B), 3n4, 34, 35, 47n37, 171, 171n6, 172, 173n10, 210, 214, 217, 217n11, 220, 225, 226, 226n29, 230, 292

  GENERAL INDEX 

319

R Ramsey, R. Vance, 172n9 Rayner, Samantha, 218n25 Record and Process of the Deposition of Richard II, 6 Richard II, King of England, 5, 6, 24n47, 27, 32, 34, 38, 60, 67, 69, 83, 84, 86, 89–91, 94, 95, 98, 116, 129, 136, 144, 157, 159, 210, 215, 262, 265, 267, 269, 272, 280, 281n25 Richard the Redeless, 5, 6 Rickert, Margaret, 221n18, 224n26 Roberts, Jane, 172 Roffey, Simon, 110n59 Romance of the Rose, 266 Root, R.K., 21n41, 35n7 Rouse, R. H., 195n36

Staley, Lynne, 108n55, 129n40, 274 Stow, George B., 108n55 Strohm, Paul, 292 Stubbs, Estelle, 168, 169, 171–173

S Saul, Nigel, 108n55, 274 Scanlon, Larry, 290n43 Scase, Wendy, 34n5 Scheerre, Hermann, decorator, 181, 221, 221n18, 221n19, 222, 233, 243, 257, 258 Schueler, Donald, 29n58 Scott, Kathleen L., 61n49, 120n12, 169, 170, 174, 178n20, 183n26, 186, 196, 203, 203n44, 214, 215, 221n19, 222n20, 223, 224, 226, 232, 233, 239, 240, 240n48, 241n50, 242, 254n58 Scrope, William, 1st Earl of Wiltshire, 274 Scrope rebellion, 261n64 Seymour, M. C., 223n24 Simpson, James, 85n3 Sobecki, Sebastian, 290 Somerset, Fiona, 155n8 Spearing, A. C., 40n21 Spriggs, Gereth, 221n19

U Usk, Adam, Chronicle, 109n58

T Thomas, Alfred, 273n7 Thomas, Duke of Clarence, 29n57 Tiptoft, John, 138, 262 Tolmie, Sarah, 171n6 Trevisa-Gower scribe, 97n33, 217, 220, 220n15, 222, 230, 234, 237, 242, 251 Trevisa, John, 42, 155n8, 169, 210, 215, 216n9, 220, 230, 231, 241, 242, 260, 262, 263, 292 Polychronicon, 216n9, 230, 241, 242

W Waldron, Ronald, 216n9 Walsingham, Thomas, Annales Ricardi Secundi, 108n57 Warner, Lawrence, 172, 172n9 Wat[t]erton, Hugh, 26n50 Watt, Diane, 85n3 Wetherbee, Winthrop, 22n42 Wheatley, Edward, 3n5, 19n37 Wickert, Maria, 62, 66 Williams, Tara, 226n30 Woodford, William, 155n8 Woodstock, Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, 99, 131, 135n58 Y Yeager, R. F., 34, 98, 141, 158, 159

Index of Manuscripts1

A Aberdeen University Library, MS 21, 221n19, 222n20, 242 Aberystwyth National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 392D (Hengwrt), 196, 198, 199 C Cambridge, UK Pembroke College, MS 307, 18n32, 39n18, 100n40, 244 Sidney Sussex College, MS 63, 87n7, 87n8, 95n27, 149n2, 284n31 St Catherine’s College, MS 7, 101n41, 260n62 St John’s College, MS B.12, 100n40, 151n3, 235, 235n45, 238

1

St. John’s College, MS H.1, 221n19, 222n20, 223n23, 240n49, 241 Trinity College, MS B.15.17, 172n7 Trinity College, MS R.3.2, 47n37, 87n7, 87n8, 95n27, 149n2, 153n5, 171 University Library, MS Additional 3035 (Miroir de L’Omme), 120n13, 157n14, 216n9 University Library, MS Dd.8.19, 216n10, 219n14 University Library, MS Mm.2.21, 149n2, 256, 258 University Library, MS O.5.2, 39n18 University Library, MS R.4.20, 39n18 Cologny, Switzerland, 90n16, 149n2, 153n5, 213n4 Martin Bodmer, MS CB 178, 90n16, 149n2, 153n5, 213n4

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Fredell, Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27964-5

321

322 

INDEX OF MANUSCRIPTS

D Dublin Trinity College, MS 244, 172n7, 213n3 E Eton, UK, 224n25 College Library, MS 108, 224n25 G Glasgow, UK University Library, Hunterian MS 7, 259 University Library, Hunterian MS 59 (Vox clamantis), 61n49, 63, 153n5, 199, 200 L London, UK British Library, Additional MS 12043, 87n7, 149n2 British Library, Additional MS 22139, 101n41 British Library, MS Add. 22283 (Simeon), 181, 184 British Library, MS Additional 24194, 221n19, 222n20, 242, 249 British Library, MS Additional 27944, 221n19, 223n23, 240, 241, 241n51 British Library, MS Additional 35287, 172n7, 213n3 British Library, MS Add. 59495 (Trentham), 37n12, 119n11, 153n5, 154 British Library, MS Arundel 38, 45–47, 45n35, 221n19, 222n20, 223n24, 239, 240, 240n48, 240n49, 242, 246, 250

British Library, MS Arundel 119, 55, 56, 62n52, 220n16 British Library MS Arundel 331, 190n32 British Library, MS Cotton Augustus A.iv, 48n38 British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A.IV (Vox clamantis), 61n49, 120n11, 153n5 British Library, MS Egerton 1991, 97n33, 101n41, 151n3, 171n6, 177, 233n42, 248 British Library, MS Harley 401, 183n27, 186, 187, 190n33, 191, 210, 226n30 British Library, MS Harley 2278, 48–50, 51n40, 53, 54, 260n63 British Library, MS Harley 2946, 199, 201, 202, 203n44, 224–226 British Library, MS Harley 3869, 89n15, 149n2, 153n5 British Library, MS Harley 4866, 45n35, 180, 221n19, 222n20, 223n24, 239, 240n48, 240n49 British Library, MS Harley 6291 (Vox clamantis), 153n5 British Library, MS Harley 7184, 149n2 British Library, MS Harley 7334, 175, 214n7, 225, 231, 231n38, 243, 244, 244n53, 246, 249, 251, 262, 292 British Library, MS Lansdowne 851, 221n19, 222n20, 226, 250, 252 British Library, MS Royal 6 E.v, 183n26 British Library, MS Royal 13 D.i, 183n26 British Library, MS Royal 14 C. ix, 183n26

  INDEX OF MANUSCRIPTS 

British Library, MS Royal 17 D.vi, 45n34, 45n35 British Library, MS Royal 18.C.xxii, 101n41, 151n3, 250 London, British Library MS Additional 22283 (Simeon), 181, 184 National Archives, MS DL 41/424 Item 15, 25 Society of Antiquaries, MS 134, 101n41 University of London, Sterling Library, MS V.88, 211 M Manchester, UK, 100n40, 151n3, 216n9 Chetham’s Library, MS 6696, 100n40, 151n3 Chethem’s Library, MS 11379, 216n9 N New Haven, US, 101n41, 153n5, 240, 243 Yale University, Beinecke Library, Osborn MS fa. 1, 101n41, 153n5, 240, 243 New York, US Columbia University Library, MS Plimpton 265, 253, 254 Pierpont Morgan Museum and Library, MS M.125, 101n41, 147n100, 179, 259, 260 Pierpont Morgan Museum and Library, MS M.126, 101n41, 260n63 Pierpont Morgan Museum and Library, MS M.690, 9, 10, 11n17, 17, 18, 120n12, 151, 151n3, 152, 171n4, 202–205,

323

203n43, 203n45, 205n49, 213, 221n19, 262, 268 Pierpont Morgan Museum and Library, MS M 817, 221n19, 222n20, 223n23, 240, 240n49, 241 Nottingham, UK University Library, Middleton Collection MS WLC/LM 8, 87n7, 89n15, 95n27, 149n2, 153n5, 171n4, 284n31 O Oxford, UK All Souls College, MS 98 (Vox clamantis), 6n12, 61n49, 91n18, 153n5 Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden B.11, 100n40, 147n100 Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 35, 151n3 Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 294, 18n32, 29n57, 69n65, 87n7, 87n8, 90n17, 94, 96, 96n30, 96n31, 97n33, 98, 99n37, 100, 104n47, 113, 118n6, 133n51, 142n83, 153n5, 205n50, 221n19, 222n20, 233n42, 249, 250, 254, 256n59, 261n65, 262, 266, 268, 269n4, 271, 274, 283, 284n31 Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 316, 183n26 Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 693, 101n41, 147n100, 221n19, 250–251, 253 Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902, 67n63, 97n33, 100n40, 132, 147n100, 149n2, 178, 220, 220n16, 221n19, 250, 251n57, 253, 268

324 

INDEX OF MANUSCRIPTS

Oxford, UK (cont.) Bodleian Library, MS Canon misc. 110, 183n26 Bodleian Library, MS Digby 232, 48n38, 58 Bodleian Library, MS e Musaeo 94, 155n8 Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. a (Vernon), 183 Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. a.1 (Vernon), 181 Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 3, 15, 16, 27, 62, 68, 73, 91, 92, 92n22, 95, 96n30, 100, 101n41, 112, 117, 120n12, 127n34, 133n51, 136, 137, 138n69, 142n83, 150, 153n5, 175, 176n16, 182, 186, 186n29, 188–190, 192, 193, 201, 203, 203n45, 205, 206, 213, 215, 268, 270, 284n31 Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 51, 151n4 Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 609, 120n12, 221n19, 235–237, 291n46 Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 719 (Vox clamantis), 61n49, 154n7 Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C.446, 48n38, 59n46 Christ Church College, MS 148, 18n32, 29n57, 97n33, 100n40, 171n6, 230, 232 Corpus Christi College, MS 67, 97n33, 100n40, 171n6, 232, 233, 243 Corpus Christi College, MS 198, 214n7, 247 Magdalen College, MS Lat. 213, 89n15, 101n41 New College, MS 266, 101n41, 149n2 Wadham College, MS 13, 101n41, 149n2, 153n5

P Paris Bibliothèque Nationale, MS fr. 848, 162 Philadelphia, US Rosenbach Museum and Library, MS 1083/29, 221n19, 223n23, 240, 240n48, 241n50, 244 Princeton, US Princeton University, Firestone Library, MS Garrett 136, 151n3, 151n4 Princeton University, Firestone Library, Robert H. Taylor Collection, Medieval MS 5, 87n7, 95n27, 149n2, 234, 253, 255 S San Marino, US Huntington Library, MS EL 26.A.l7 (Stafford), 87n7 Huntington Library, MS El 26 C 9 (Ellesmere), 176n16, 227 Huntington Library, MS HM 114, 216n10 Huntington Library, MS HM 143, 197 Huntington Library, MS HM 150, 61n49, 120n12, 137n65, 138n70, 143n88, 154n7 T Tokyo Senshu University Library, MS 1, 219, 245 W Washington, DC Folger Shakespeare Library, MS SM.1, 151n4