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creation of the poem insufficiently explains the material dissemination of the Confessio in
fifteenth-century England and Iberia. 147 First, there is no evidence that Gower’s poem was
understood as a complete work by the time it reached the Iberian Peninsula. The Lancastrian-
owned versions of the Confessio (the so-called “Ricardian recension” from which the Portuguese
translation of the Confessio was translated) were commissioned and completed after the fifteenth
century by Henry IV’s heirs and after Phillipa’s death in 1415. 148 This means either that Phillipa
introduced Gower in an inchoate form or that her progeny copied a work that did not have a
stable tradition of dissemination.
Further, as Bernardo Santano Moreno has shown, there are numanistic references in the
Castilian and Portuguese versions of the Confessio which are impossible before 1433. 149 Since
these are well into the dissemination of the work in Portugal, it is very likely that Gower’s poem
had at least two known textual traditions in the Peninsula—one which was introduced through
the influence of Philippa and one which was the result of the copying efforts of the 1430’s.
Lastly, most of the political allusions included in the Confessio’s Latin glosses, which have been
used to date the Ricardian content to an early fourteenth-century date, appear to be more the
interference by fifteenth-century Lancastrian readers revisiting an unstable text and not evidence
of a unified work projecting an ideal authorial persona to a general audience. 150
Consequently, I do not believe that the physical evidence of the Confessio’s
dissemination (in Iberia or England) reflects a readerly understanding of the completeness of
Gower’s project. Quite the contrary, the concurrence of a wide English and Iberian dissemination
of the Confessio suggests that its narrative structures appealed differently to readers because they
147 Wim Lindeboom, “Rethinking the Recensions of the Confessio Amantis,” Viator, 40.2 (2009): 347-348.
148 Joel Fredell, “Reading the Dream Miniature in the Confessio Amantis,” Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series,
22 (1995): 63, 79, 82.
149 Santano Moreno 31.
150 Lindeboom 344-355.
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