1. The stories of Pheton, Icarus, and Pygmalion are from Ovid. Iphis is the daughter of
King Ligdus, whose mother disguises her as a boy to prevent her from being killed by her father;
she is married to Iante and on their wedding night Cupid compassionately changes the bridegroom
into a man. Rosiphelee is a king's daughter who refuses to love until she sees a richly dressed
company of ladies followed by one poorly mounted and dressed lady; when she learns that the
former are rewarded for their service to love and the latter punished for her rejection of it,
Rosiphelee vows to fall in love. Jepthah's Daughter is the Biblical story of the general who swears
to sacrifice the first person he sees on coming home; that person is his young, virginal daughter
(emphasis Gower's). Phillis is the beloved of King Demophon; she hangs herself in grief (and is
changed into a tree) when he does not return to her at once from the Trojan War. Of these stories,
all but Rosiphelee and Jepthah's Daughter are at least partially from Ovid. Rosiphelee is similar to
a story in Andreas Capellanus' De Amore, though Gower has altered it considerably, and
Jepthah's Daughter is from Judges xi. All are also stories of love, war, and/or growth.
2. Amans' premise is that "Crist bad thei scholden preche / To al the world and h{~ feith
teche" (1667-1668); the heathen should therefore be converted, not slain in battle. That this
reasoning apparently has little to do with the story of the pagan love affair he then describes does
not seem to occur to him.
3. Statius' Achilleid is of course incomplete, but Benoit's Roman is not;
since the
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former does not contain the Polixena
story and the latter does not contain the education, the narrative distinction between Gower' s two
is quite clear.
4. Protesilaus is the king who is warned by his wife that his destiny will be death if he
fights at Troy. Being apparently young and daring, he prefers dying as a knight to living as a king
and does so; the source is Ovid. The Biblical King Saul is warned by Samuel that he and his son
Jonathas will die on the first day of battle if he chooses to fight. For pride in his knighthood, Saul
does not listen, and he and his son die; the source is I Samuel xxviii.
5. The lengthy Achilles reference in Book III (the Tale of Telaphus and Teucer, 2639-2717) is from Benoit, and Gower does use it as a positive example. But the greater part of the
narrative deals with Telaphus, who argues Achilles into behaving positively by telling his own
story. On the whole, when the source is Statius, Genius approves of Achilles, while when the
source is Benoit, Genius either disapproves or does not explicitly give his opinion. In Book VII,
3581-3593, Genius commends Achilles' "knyhtliheide" over that of Tersites but gives his source
as Horace. Macauley comments that the source is really Juvenal. This source-confusion leads me
to consider the reference as separate from Gower's general use of Achilles.
6. Statius tells the education story as a flashback; Gower has placed it into correct
chronological order. It is curious, though perhaps not unduly significant, that this narrative
represents one of the few times Gower has Genius recounting a life history more in sequence than
his source. The exception to Genius' order is the mention of Pirrus as
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Achilles' son in IV, 2161, in the story of the death of
Penthesilea. I do not discount this reference: it may be that Gower (through Genius) implies by it
that even Achilles' attempts at generation must end in more destruction. Pirrus is a noble hero in
his honorable slaying of Queen Penthesilea, but he remains anti-generative, a killer of women. The
conflict becomes even clearer when we consider that Pirrus is also the slayer of Polixena, Achilles'
childless love. The relative chronological order of the history of Achilles in the Confessio
may indicate the importance of the figure of Achilles; Pirrus' misplacement may then stress the
contradictions in the history and character of Achilles, though that may be reading too deeply.
7. Statius describes Achilles as young but rough and masculine, already coming into
manhood; when Thetis carries him away, Pelion's nymphs "sperata diu plorant conubia" (I, 24).
8. The male rite of passage almost invariably involves the ritual use of blood or some red
substance representing blood. It may also include the dressing of the boy as a girl and his
seclusion (Bettelheim, 211-214).
9. Genius' stories of Alexander do not depict him as a particularly wise or even rational
king. See the Tale of Diogenes and Alexander and the Tale of Alexander and the Pirate in III,
1201-1311 and III, 2366-2416, respectively; see also the Tale of Nectanabus in VI, 1989-2366. In
Book VII, Genius does not mention Alexander's response to Aristotle's teaching.
