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

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on how troublesome it is to have a child as a king.” 4
This deletion shows that Chaucer
knew the tale could be taken as a reference to Richard II’s accession to the throne when
he was still a young boy” (93). The well-known Regement of Princes by Gower’s and
Chaucer’s contemporary Hoccleve similarly encodes advice to the prince (Henry IV).
For instance, on the subject of the king’s finances, Hoccleve relates the story of the
Chaldean kings, who spent so much of the nation’s money that God sent a terrible wind
which the people interpreted as a sign to justify their revolt (Ferster 142). Machiavelli’s
The Prince, though not a collection of tales, continues the tradition of offering advice to
the king in the next century. Writers of advice manuals and popular literature were thus
able to comment on, criticize, and advise about issues impacting the land in relative
safety.
Gower’s concern with temporal affairs was not first addressed in Confessio
Amantis. Macaulay, in his introduction to Gower’s French works, says that “From a
statement [of Gower’s] in Latin . . . we learn that the poet desired to rest his fame upon
three principal works” (xi): Speculum Meditantis (Mirour de l’Omme), written in Anglo-
Norman; Vox Clamantis, written in Latin; and the “bok for Engelondes sake,” Confessio
Amantis. The concerns, political and societal, familiar from a study of the Confessio are
echoed in the other two. In addition to advising kings, critiquing the condition of the
three estates, and using exempla to illustrate the effects of sin, all three works employ the
analogy of the microcosm: man is both a miniature world and a metaphor of the world
and as disorders occur in the man, they occur in the wider world. Man as microcosm was
4 “Et Salemon dit, ‘Doulente la terre qui a a enfant a seigneur. . . .” Renaud de Louens in Sources and
Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. W.F. Bryan and G. Dempster, 581, ll.381-2.