Notes
1. Kurt Olsson, John Gower and the Structures of Conversion: A Reading of the Confessio Amantis (Cambridge, 1992), p. 13.
2. Examinations of Gower's political emphasis include George R. Coffman, "John Gower, Mentor for Royalty: Richard II," PMLA 69 (1954), 953-64; Anne Middleton, "The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II," Speculum 53 (1978), 94-114; George B. Stow, "Richard II in John Gower's Confessio Amantis: Some Historical Perspectives," Mediaevalia 16 (1993), 3-31; Judith Ferster, "O Political Gower," Mediaevalia 16 (1993), 33-53; and María Bullón-Fernández, "Confining the Daughter: Gower's 'Tale of Canace and Machaire' and the Politics of the Body," in Figures of Speech: The Body in Medieval Art, History, and Literature, Essays in Medieval Studies 11: 1994 Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Assocation, ed. Allen J. Frantzen and David A. Robertson (Chicago, 1995), 75-85. Examinations of Gower's personal emphasis include Hugh White, "Division and Failure in Gower's Confessio Amantis," Neophilologus 72 (1988), 600-16; James Dean, "Gather Ye Rosebuds: Gower's Comic Reply to Jean de Meun," in John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers presented at the meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-1988, ed. R.F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1989), pp. 21-38; Winthrop Wetherbee, "Latin Structure and Vernacular Space: Gower, Chaucer and the Boethian Tradition," in Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange, ed. R.F. Yeager, English Literary Studies 51 (Victoria, B.C., 1991), pp. 7-35; and Chauncey Wood, "Petrarchanism in the Confessio Amantis," Mediaevalia 16 (1993), 239-55.
3. Proponents of a Christian emphasis in the Confessio see the poem as mainly concerned with religious conversion. Books which express this viewpoint include Olsson, John Gower and the Structures of Conversion, and Georgiana Donavin, Incest Narratives and the Structure of Gower's Confessio Amantis, English Literary Studies Monograph Series 56 (Victoria, B.C., 1993). Proponents of a secular emphasis discuss the poem's concern with earthly, temporal problems. Articles which express this viewpoint include Rosemary Woolf, "Moral Chaucer and Kindly Gower," in J.R.R. Tolkien: Scholar and Storyteller, ed. Mary Salu and R. Farrell (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979), pp. 221-45; Hugh White, "Nature and the Good in Gower's Confessio Amantis," in John Gower: Recent Readings, pp. 1-20; and Winthrop Wetherbee, "Constance and the World in Chaucer and Gower," in John Gower: Recent Readings, pp. 65-93. Many of the articles focusing on the Confessio's political agenda also imply a secular focus within the poem; however, Russell Peck, Kingship and Common Profit in Gower's Confessio Amantis (Carbondale, Ill., 1978) and "John Gower and the Book of Daniel," in John Gower: Recent Readings, pp. 159-87, links politics and Christianity in the Confessio.
4. The "ethical" school sees the Confessio as straightforward and didactic. Articles which express this viewpoint include Charles Runacres, "Art and Ethics in the Exempla of Confessio Amantis," in Gower's Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments, ed. A.J. Minnis (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 106-34; Judith Davis Shaw, "Lust and Lore in Gower and Chaucer," The Chaucer Review 19.2 (1984), 110-22; Gerald Kinneavy, "Gower's Confessio Amantis and the Penitentials," The Chaucer Review 19.2 (1984), 144-61; Götz Schmitz, "Gower, Chaucer, and the Classics," in John Gower: Recent Readings, pp. 95-111; A.J. Minnis, "De vulgari auctoritate: Chaucer, Gower and the Men of Great Authority," in Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange, pp. 36-74; and R.A. Shoaf, " 'Tho Love Made Him An Hard Eschange' and 'With Fals Brocage Hath Take Usure': Narcissus and Echo in the Confessio Amantis," Mediaevalia 16 (1993), 197-207.
The "poetic" school sees the Confessio as ironic or subversive. Articles which express this viewpoint include David W. Hiscoe, "The Ovidian Comic Strategy of Gower's Confessio Amantis," Philological Quarterly 64.3 (Summer 1985), 367-85; Winthrop Wetherbee, "Genius and Interpretation in the Confessio Amantis," in Magister Regis: Studies in Honor of Robert Earl Kaske, ed. Arthur Groos et al (New York, 1986), pp. 241-60; James Simpson, "Ironic Incongruence in the Prologue and Book I of Gower's Confessio Amantis," Neophilologus 72 (1988), 617-32; James Dean, "Gather Ye Rosebuds," pp. 21-38; and Anthony Farnham, "Statement and Search in the Confessio Amantis," Mediaevalia 16 (1993) 141-57.
5. John Gower, Confessio Amantis, in The English Works of John Gower, ed. G.C. Macaulay, 2 vols. (London, 1900), 1, Prologue.121. All further citations are from this edition.
6. Both Russell Peck (Kingship and Common Profit, p. 89) and R.F. Yeager ("Pax Poetica: On the Pacifism of Chaucer and Gower," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 (1987), 105) cite this section of the Confessio as evidence of Gower's pacifistic stance.
7. Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. G.P. Goold, 2 vols., 3rd ed. (London, 1984), 2, 13.59. The translations are my own.
8. Hyginus, Hygini Fabulae, ed. H.I. Rose (Lugduni Batavorum, 1934), 95, pp. 69-70. The translations are my own.
9. Ovid, Metamorphoses 13.301-02.
10. Servius, Servianorum in Vergilii carmina commentariorum, ed. Edward Rand et al., 2 vols., (Lancaster, Pa., 1946), 2.81, pp. 340-42; Lactantius Placidus, Commentarius in Achilleida, in Lactantii Placidi qui dicitur commentarios in Statii Thebaida et commentarium in Achilleida, ed. Richard Jahnke (Lipsiae, 1898), 93, pp. 491-92.
11. Pierre Bersuire, Petrus Berchorius. De formis figurisque deorum. Reductorium morale, liber xv: Ovidius moralizatus, cap. i. Textus e codice Brux. Bibl. Reg. 863-9 critice editu, ed. J. Engels (Utrecht, 1966), p. 167. The translations are my own.
12. Ovid, Metamorphoses 14.472.
13. Hyginus, Fabulae 116, pp. 101-02.
14. Ovid, Metamorphoses 13.296-98.
15. Ovid, Metamorphoses 13.162-69.
16. A great deal of recent criticism has focused on Genius's apparent failure to condemn the incest in this tale. On the one hand, several critics attribute the absence to different motives on Gower's part. William Calin sees the absence as undermining the "process of exemplifying" ("John Gower's Continuity in the Tradition of French Fin' Amor," Mediaevalia 16 (1993), p. 101); similarly, James Simpson sees Gower expressing skepticism towards other moralizations of Ovid ("Genius's 'Enformacioun,'" p. 167). Georgiana Donavin suggests that the absence reveals Genius's moral inadequacy (Incest Narratives, p. 37), while A.S.G. Edwards argues that Gower himself has trouble delineating "any more fulfilling form of sexuality" than incest ("Gower's Women in the Confessio," Mediaevalia 16 (1993), p. 234), and Rosemary Woolf takes Gower's sympathy for Canace as evidence of his "kindliness" ("Moral Chaucer and Kindly Gower," pp. 226-27).
On the other hand, Russell Peck, Kingship and Common Profit, p. 86, C. David Benson, "Incest and Moral Poetry in Gower's Confessio Amantis," The Chaucer Review 19.2 (1984), 100-06 and Thomas J. Hatton, "John Gower's Use of Ovid in Book III of the Confessio Amantis," Mediaevalia 13 (1987), 260-62, all assert that the tale does implicitly condemn the siblings' incest. Finally, Winthrop Wetherbee, "Constance and the World in Chaucer and Gower"; A.C. Spearing, "Canace and Machaire," Mediaevalia 16 (1993), 211-21; and Bullón-Fernández, "Confining the Daughter," all see Aeolus's response as implicitly incestuous--a reading which would explain his dramatic shift from love to hatred.
17. In fact, Georgiana Donavin sees the murder as a result of "the hero's sublimated desire for his mother Clytemnestra" (Incest Narratives, p. 39).
18. Russell Peck sees this tale as a condemnation of both Dido and Aeneas: Aeneas is "hard and too slow," Dido "soft and too quick" (Kingship and Common Profit, p. 91). Peck does not go so far as to attribute Aeneas's "hardness" to his militarism, however.
19. However, Russell Peck, although he takes Genius's anti-Crusade rhetoric in Book Three as evidence of Gower's "strongly pacifistic stand" (Kingship and Common Profit, p. 89), interprets Amans's arguments here as "one further instance of Sloth" (p. 92).