WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

were actively intervening in the poem’s creation. If anything, the timing and placing of Gower’s
fifteenth-century Iberian and English reception suggests that the experience of the poem’s
fragmentation was part of its internal structure.
In fact, the most common “unifying” marks of the work across England and Iberia reflect
a concern with its audience experience of authority and not with an interpretation of Gower’s
own thematics. It is no coincidence that most “complete” Ricardian manuscripts have miniatures
that date them to Lancanstrian owners after 1415 (after the beginning of Henry V’s colonial
campaign in France), that the sole copy of the Portuguese translation dates the copy to 1430 at
the city of Çeuta (after the Portuguese gained this colonial foothold in Africa), that Duarte wrote
a manual of exempla in 1437 where he explicitly credited Gower’s writing style (after he had
successfully vied for control of the Canary Islands), or that the Castilian translation dates to 1454
(at the beginnings of the Castilian “Reconquista” of the Muslim kingdom of Granada). Although
we cannot conclusively tie Gower to any of these political moments, we can certainly attribute a
correlation to these cultural shifts in the conception of “authority” to the Confessio’s guarded
discursive concerns with specifiying its “author function.”
For even if these events were merely coincidental to the major dates surrounding the
Confessio’s dissemination, the very fact that Gower’s poem was translated across three different
cultures implies that its meaning was not read as a culturally situated “author function.” The
33,000 line Confessio was no small codex to bring across the channel, and given the complexity
of its English and Latinate apparatus, it must have proved a very difficult work to translate
simply for the mere enjoyment of English nobles in Iberian courts. Further, even if Gower’s
work was introduced as a whole by the particular literary tastes of immigrant patrons (like
Philippa of Lancaster), its subsequent copying and citation in various places (like Africa and
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