WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

Portugal) and other works of literature (such as Duarte I’s Leal Conselheiro) suggests that the
work’s “auctoritas” rested in something besides an interpretation of an ideal theme. 151 No other
medieval English or Iberian work written in the vernacular has had the geographical or political
reach of Gower’s Confessio. Gower’s work may very well have been the first English work to be
copied outside of Europe and certainly one of the first European works to be copied in a colonial
outpost. This is evidenced by the scribal colophon to the sole copy of the Portuguese translation
to the Confessio, MSS Palacio II-3088: “Este lyuro por graça do muy alto Sor./Deus screueo por
mandado de dom Fernando de castro o moço na çidade de cepta.” ‘This book by grace of the
high Lord God, I wrote by command of Don Fernando de Castro, the younger, in the city of
Ceuta [North Africa].’ 152
It was more than Queen Philippa’s interest in morality or desire to hear romantic stories
that helped the Confessio achieve what other Iberian or English cosmopolitan writers (like
Geoffrey Chaucer who actually traveled to Castile, France, and Italy) and other vernacular
English works in languages more amenable to Iberian readers (like Gower’s Latin Vox Clamantis
and his French Mirour de l’Omme) have yet to show: a translation into not one but two Romance
tongues. 153 A fact that is proved that John Manly’s 1933 and R.F. Yeager’s 2003 predictions that
Chaucer would be the next English writer translated into an Iberian language have yet to
materialize. 154 Given the Lancastrian ties between Iberian and England, the continued absence of
any other literary authors bespeaks of the structural place of the Confessio beyond literary
enjoyment. The correlation between important but distinct political moments in Iberian and
151 Santano Moreno 29-30.
152 Qtd. in Antonio Cortijo Ocaña, “O Livro do Amante: The Lost Portuguese Translation of John Gower’s
Confessio Amantis (Madrid, Biblioteca de Palacio, MS II-3088),” Portuguese Studies 13 (1997) 3.
153 R.F. Yeager, for one, has speculated that the Mirour and the Vox were not translated for Philippa’s court because
they were not suitable for “ladies’ reading” (“Gower’s Lancastrian Affinity” 42).
154 See Manly 472 and R.F. Yeager, “Chaucer Translates the Matter of Spain,” England and Iberia in the Middle
Ages, 12th-15th Century: Cultural, Literary, and Political Changes, ed. María Bullón-Fernández (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 199.
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