SUMMERS, KAREN CRADY, Ph.D. Reading Incest - The University ...

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a book to each of the seven deadly sins, and uses each sin as a way to question Amans
about his moral condition. But the sin of incest crosses book (and sin) boundaries as no
other of the seven sins does; Gower includes incest tales in five of the eight books of
Confessio Amantis, implicitly linking this sin with almost all of the seven deadly sins.
Furthermore, I will examine why Gower presents incest as the quintessential form
of lust and how incest relates to the other deadly sins. Confessio Amantis is structurally
puzzling for, as many have noted 2 , its survey of the seven deadly sins, although derived
from manuals for confession, violates the typical penitential model. The prologue
surveys the corruption of the three estates in the present age and also the decay of society
over time. Book five is a turning point in the work. After this, the link between incest
and the education of Amans becomes clear, and is strengthened through book seven,
which is a summary of Aristotle’s education of Alexander. Finally, and most
problematically, Amans’s confession is to Genius, the priest of Venus, who educates
Amans with 150 tales about love and vice (I.238-48) under the rubric of the seven deadly
sins. The length and complexity of Confessio Amantis renders it a difficult work to
analyze.
Although the seven sins form the framework for the entire work, incest appears in
the majority of the individual books, as I have noted. But what is Gower’s underlying
purpose in selecting this specific topos? Are there many lessons for Amans to learn, or
are the morals of all these incest stories really the same one? How can the ramifications
of so specific a sin be applied in so universal a way? This chapter will work to uproot the
2 See Nicholson, Peter. Love and Ethics in Gower’s Confessio Amantis; Yeager, R.F. John
Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion; and Peck, Russell A., ed., Confessio Amantis.