Gower, John | Kurt Olsson (essay date 1992)
Kurt Olsson (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: Olsson, Kurt. “The Confessio and Compilation.” In John Gower and the Structures of Conversion: A Reading of the Confessio Amantis. pp. 1-15. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992.
[In the following essay, Olsson interprets the Confessio Amantis as a compilation, in which Gower assembled materials from a wide variety of sources and organized them to create new or expanded meanings.]
One of John Gower's undoubted claims to join the company of important late fourteenth-century English poets, including Chaucer, Langland, and the Gawain-poet, lies in the vast knowledge he made available to his public. In three long, encyclopedic poems, he gathered and arranged material from a great number of ancient and medieval sources and, with a consistent stylistic grace, made that material accessible in his chosen language, whether it was French, as in the Mirour de l'Omme, Latin, as in the...
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