WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

of today’s condition has overcome the love of charity, the author presently intends to compose
his little book, whose name is The Confession of a Lover [My emphasis].’ 128
The Latin gloss, in not naming Gower as an “auctor,” does not mean to construe the
writing of the poem as a mere act of copying. However, it does suggest that the Confessio and its
readers did not think of the name “Gower” as a limiting factor for the “concomitant utilization”
of tropes or themes for an idealized or unifying authorial principle beyond the development of
the Confessio proper. In short, the Confessio’s structure deconstructs its author’s place as a
unifying presence and through its deconstruction is able to fashion itself as a work worth
disseminating. As I will argue, Gower’s project thinks of writing without its ability to represent
any outside discourse to end its own play of meaning. And—as Duarte’s anonymous labeling of
the poem suggests—the Confessio’s disassociation of the abstract “authority” of a writer’s
persona from a poetic “authorial” language became integral to the dissemination of the Confessio
and to its reception in the Iberian Peninsula.
1. Stylizing “Joan Goer”: Authority as Infirmity in the Confessio Amantis
It appears counterintuitive to start from the premise that the Confessio divorces the
persona of its writer from its concern with “authority.” From the naming of Gower in the gloss to
the framing of the work as a confession of sins of love, it seems that who Gower is and how he,
as an idealized or discordant narrator, relates to his subject matter unifies the Confessio’s text as
a whole—whether it be through the work’s two fictional characters of the poem (the confessing
“Genius” or the penitent “Amans”) or through the third person Latin apparatus that frames the
poem. This concern with personal authority, as Winthrop Wetherbee and A.J. Minnis have
described, seems an integral part of the Confessio’s narrative framework which, following Ovid
and Boethius, uses the tension between dialoguing personas as a principle to aid in the poem’s
128 Gower Confessio 1.9.Latin marginalia, trans. Andrew Galloway.
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