WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

Yet unlike the Latin mythographers which Minnis catalogues, the Confessio does not call
itself a ‘compilatio’ mostly to limit the scope of its project but to play with a tropic device to
characterize the act of writing. The gloss refers to Gower under a trope of “humilitas,” as a writer
who “quatenus sibi infirmitas permisit, studiosissime compilauit” ‘zealously compiled in as
much as his infirmity would permit him’ various examples and fables. Even as this statement
reflects Gower’s dedication for writing (because he compiles through his own sickness), it also
reads as an ironic take on his work—Gower, in his zeal, compiles literally as an infirm, sickly
man. Consequently, the narrative attention of who guides the voice of the poem thinks of the one
person that stands outside of it “Iohannes Gower” in clearly poetic terms. This is not, what
Patricia Batchelor and others have called the “dynamic ambiguity” of “auctoritas” behind the
Confessio’s idea of authority. 137 The gloss’s double-entendre, in defining Gower’s role as a
compiler, refuses to make clear whether the writer’s humble “compilatio” should be a principle
of admiration or derision. At the very moment in which the poem seeks to say something about
authority, its statement turns into a play of meaning of literary tropes on authority and not of
Gower’s authority itself.
It is precisely the description of Gower’s infirmity as a limiting “author function” that
prevents this gloss from speaking to anything outside a textual play of meaning. Though
“infirmitas” is a common way for medieval writers to describe their work, its use is often a way
to defer responsibility from a writer to the reader or to his sources. Infirmity prevents the
reflectionof the productive and philosophical qualities of “auctoritas” long cultivated in the
137 Patricia Batchelor, “Feigned Truth and Exemplary Method in the Confessio Amantis,” Re-visioning Gower, ed.
R.F. Yeager (Asheville: Pegasus Press, 1998) 1, 9.
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