WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

makes a text reflect but a temporal plane and not a universal message. An author conceives “of
newe som matiere” only when he has “ben tawht” by assimilating a past that continues as a
future “good.” Authority is temporal through and through in that it makes our concern for speech
also be a close concern for the passage of time. Like Nebuchadnezzar’s wish to indicate a fleeing
dream, the ability to write for “oure tyme among ous hiere” is none other than a collective wish,
“our” desire here, to arrest the flow of time.
This projection of an experience as a collective desire, as Anne Middleton has argued, is
a common feature of late fourteenth-century Ricardian poetry. 174 However, in Gower’s poem, the
narrative’s dwelling upon temporality is best described as an existential and metaphysical
concern for “oure tyme among ous hire” and not as Middleton has argued, as a reflection of the
poet’s social place in history. 175 For the Confessio, it is the “our-ness” of writing—its collective
place in our world and daily lives—and not its structural ability to mark time—its ability to fix
an idea for generations—that allows one to develop temporal agency. Therefore, the poem
initially construes its narrative more like a study of writing itself than as an explicit reflection of
the passing events of history.
This is supported by the Prologue’s poetic structure that only allows a reader to access a
point in time by paradoxically forfeiting his place in it. The poem claims that an apersonal means
of representation, like the writing “of hem,” has being only as a people’s particular language
“among ous hire,” and this idea is exemplified in the Latin colophon’s allusion to the dream of
Nebuchadnezzar that ends the Confessio:
Tercius liber iste Anglico sermone in viii partes diuisus, qui ad instantiam serenissimi principis
dicti domini Regis Anglie Ricardi secundi conficitur, secundum Danielis propheciam super huius
mundi regnorum mutatione a tempore Regis Nabugodonosor usque nunc tempora distinguit.
Tractat eciam secundum Nectanabum et Aristotilem super hiis quibus Rex Alexander tam in sui
regimen quam aliter eorum disciplina edoctus fuit. Principalis tamen huius libri materia super
174 Anne Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,” Speculum, 53.1 (January, 1978): 106.
175 Ibid. 104.
102