WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

immediately, without any revelation from God as if he gathered truth directly from the mouth of
the king. This change to the biblical narrative inevitably prevents any artistic and poetic
presentation of truth—any fable—from portraying a theme through temporal deferral, through
allusion, textual play, puns, etc. It also directly undermines what Jerome sees (and what the Vox
repeats) as the point of the dream, its temporal focus on the task of writing as it portrays a unified
vision of time through “artistic” interpretation.
From this, we can rethink two common scholarly assumptions about the Confessio’s
vernacular structure. The first assumption we can challenge is that Gower’s poem means to
express an exterior truth via a Latin “moral” frame. This is because if the Latin gloss—if it is
indeed an explanation of what is going on in the poem—cannot direct a reader to the “truth” of
the English poem. Given that the English explicitly presents the Latin’s poetic play and
explication as antithetical to its aims, we cannot think of the two languages as connecting a
single authorial message via different means. Conversely, if the English needs a Latin frame to
specify what it means, then it cannot provide a “truth” that would need Latin verses and prose
summaries to “specify.” By saying that “Cristes word may noght be fable,” the Confessio’s
language cannot convey meaning through a poetic gesture.
The second assumption we can revisit is that the Confessio’s use of Latin or English
tailors one message towards different audiences—as if the inclusion of complex Latin phrases
was meant to appeal to more “learned” listeners over lay, English-only readers. As is clear from
the first lines of the Prologue, the English’s text, although certainly more terse and direct than its
Latin counterpart, uses just as much textual allusiveness and textual play to convey meaning.
Conversely, as we saw by looking at Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, the Latin frame does not always
complicate or explicate the English text’s message, but sometimes presents something entirely
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