WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

varied presentation of the Confessio’s themes, which, for scholars, often can be resolved via an
idealization of Gower’s exterior “authorial voice.” 182
Yet if Nebuchadnezzar is merely an example of what Michel Foucault calls an “author
function”—that is of another contextual delimitation by which Gower conveyed one message to
his audience—and if his readers even assumed that the king represented Gower’s general
“moral” attitude about his work, how did they come to this conclusion? What part of the text
would have signaled a reader to attribute to Nebuchadnezzar such a privileged state of
encapsulating the poet’s entire thematic outlook while ignoring what longer and more amenable
tales, like that of Apolonius of Tyre, could say about the Confessio as a poem or Gower’s
authorial role in it? Even more, why does the colophon witness to a reader focus on
Nebuchadnezzar when modern readers and critics tend to think that the Confessio’s narrative
themes are better exemplified and more fully developed in other stories? 183
These are especially vexing questions when, for Gower’s medieval readers, the two
episodes described by the colophon literally represent the metonymic image of the Confessio.
The poem’s manuscripts are usually illuminated with either of these stories: with the penitent
lover kneeling before Genius like an author of a speculum presenting a book before his king, or
with a picture of Nebuchadnezzar dreaming or of his dream vision of the monster of time. The
earliest copies of the Confessio begin with the passage of Daniel as a frontispiece to the poem. 184
182 For an example of how major scholars use Gower’s “authorial voice” to resolve narrative ambiguities, see
Russell A. Peck “The Phenomenology of Make Believe in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Studies in Philology,
91.3 (Summer, 1994): 267; R.F. Yeager, “English, Latin, and the Text as Other: The Text as Sign in the Work of
John Gower,” Text: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship, Vol. 3 (New York: Ams Press, 1987) 259-
260); and Wetherbee “Genius” 260.
183 While Nebuchadnezzar has drawn its share of modern critical attention (R.F. Yeager, “The Body Politic and the
Politics of Bodies in the Poetry of John Gower,” The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature, eds. Piero Boitani
and Anna Torti (Cambridge: Brewer, 1999) 158), neither it or Book 7—which contains the advice to princes cited in
the colophon—have been considered as “interesting” as Gower’s other Ovidean stories, like that of “Florien,”
“Mundus and Paulina,” the “Tale of Lucrece,” or even the brief example of the musician, “Arion.”
184 Fredell 74.
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