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different. Therefore, if there is some unifying principle between Latin frame and English content,
we can only say that it comes across as a disjunctive, schizophrenic poetic project.
By reassessing these two scholarly positions, we may however reach one conclusion: the
poem’s use of Latin and English forms a radical disjunction between meaning and presentation
that fulfills the idea that “Cristes word may noght be fable.” In this formula, no poetic project
can be “truthful” because the writing truth is an un-translatable act. This project does not deny
truth but simply its ability to be represented or fabled via poetic play. In using glosses,
marginalia, or even direct explanation to compliment its stories, the Confessio wishes to present
two concurrent forms of aesthetic presentation without referencing an exterior “author function.”
As James Simpson astutely has noted, the Confessio “is effectively a representation of reading
remembered,” a work by which the conscious separation of meaning from artistic representation
pushes the act of reading to reflect upon itself. 199
8. Nebuchadnezzar’s Silence: Separating Authority from Writing
I think that the Confessio’s separation of meaning from writing helps explain why it was
consistently reproduced, disseminated, and marketable with a seeming unified authorial guidance
despite variant channels of scribal reproduction. 200 Gower’s Confessio was consistently
reproduced, with illuminations, Latin verses, prose summaries, colophons, etc., even as these
reproductions did not come from one textual tradition, because it was not read as a solely English
poem but as an authorial and perhaps non-English presentation of authority. Because it refused to
translate Latin “truth” into vernacular presentation, the poem was understood as a replication of
universal authority and so disseminated widely and also as variably as a text like the Bible or
199
James Simpson, “Breaking the Vacuum: Ricardian and Henrician Ovidianism,” Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies, 29 (1999): 337.
200
See M.B. Parkes, “Patterns of Scribal Activity and Revisions of the Text in Early Copies of Works by John
Gower,” New Science out of Old Books: Manuscripts and Early Printed Books: Essays in Honour of A.I. Doyle, eds.
Richard Beadle and A.J. Piper (London: Scolar, 1995).
121