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Article: John Gower and the Structures of Confession: A Reading of the 'Confessio Amantis.'
- Article from:
- Medium Aevum
- Article date:
- March 22, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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All students of Confessio Amantis face the question of its coherence. Has the sheer diversity of material escaped Gower's grasp? Or has Gower successfully ordered a moral poetic? Professor Olsson seeks, with exemplary erudition and some success, to argue for the latter.
His key, and starting-point, is to cast Gower as a compilator with Attitude, whose compilatio exploits conflicts of authority: between compilator and auctores, between speakers within the poem, between marginal glosses and Latin verses, between kinds of moral experience. The root of the problems addressed by the poem is division; and solutions are proffered not through an omniscient, stable ...