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 Vox Clamantis, or English, as in the Confessio Amantis. Gower was not content, however, merely to generate cultural thesauri. Well-attuned to the major issues of his day and versed in the current idioms of the court, the legal profession, the schools, and the Church, he drew the old and new together to the end of reshaping the values of Ricardian England. No small task facing the reader of his works, and especially of the Confessio, the most complex of the poems, is to discover how, in that process, he not only retrieved and transmitted, but redefined his culture.

The natural starting point for such an enterprise is to resort to the famous epithet that Chaucer invented for him. Chaucer's “Moral Gower” became “olde Morall Goore” to a later generation, and so he endures to this day in various refinements of that perception. Indeed, there seems little point in trying, as Rosemary Woolf has done, to cancel Chaucer's term by turning the tables, making Chaucer the “moral” and Gower the “kindly” poet.¹ The weight of tradition is against it, and the poetry also is.

The appeal of this catch-phrase lies partly in its imprecision. All poetry is in some sense moral, of course, and that is how it was perceived in medieval literary theory. If the pars philosophiae to which the Confessio belongs is ethica, the same might be said of virtually all poems, ancient and medieval, introduced in medieval accessus ad auctores. Giovanni del Virgilio put it succinctly when, in writing of Ovid's Metamorphoses, he remarked, “As for the part of philosophy to which it belongs, I say that it belongs to ethics, that is, moral philosophy, for all poets deal with behavior.”² Nevertheless, though one rarely finds a medieval critic who claims for a poem a content field other than ethics, the term moral seems especially applicable to Gower because the poetry it describes is, on the surface, so much more “ernest” than “game.” This feature has led many critics to judgments such as D. W. Robertson's indictment of Gower's “plodding seriousness,”³ but recently there has emerged in the criticism a new, and very different assessment of the poetry. When Gower seems to be most earnest, the argument runs, he may very well be engaging in a deeper and most sophisticated “pleie.” Anthony Farnham has remarked on Gower's “keen awareness of the didactic value of misdirected seriousness,” and others have followed this lead in perceiving what Farnham describes as the poet's “almost perverse comic sense.”⁴ Gower is not merely a humorless champion of ethical causes. Indeed, the best grounds for showing him to be a truly moral poet lies in the comedy of his English poem, for it is there that he most fully reveals his deep awareness of the complexities of human behavior and offers his keenest insight into it. This poem is as effectively moral in its “game” as it is in its earnestness, and in both things together Gower will challenge and ultimately reward the careful reader.

Gower makes a “refined” love—a love associated with gentilesse—the subject of his book. As Derek Pearsall has remarked, Gower is not, in a technical sense, a court poet, but “of the qualities that go to the making of ‘courtly poetry’, whether we associate it with the royal court or not, he has all that is essential.”⁵ Genteel, sophisticated, and “well-mannered,” he fashions his work to courtly tastes,⁶ giving a clear indication of that interest in a famous passage opening the original version of the poem, where he describes a meeting with Richard II on the royal barge on the Thames. On that occasion, he writes, the king

          bad me doo my besynesse
That to his hihe worthinesse
Som newe thing I scholde boke,
That he himself it mihte loke
After the forme of my writynge.

“P.” [“Prologue”] 49-53

Whether Gower specifically sought to tailor his new poem to this royal patron's interests must remain a matter of conjecture, but it is clear that he chose a subject that could win Richard's regard, especially if we believe the testimony of Jean Froissart, who in 1395 gave a volume of his own poems to Richard and “shewed hym howe it treted of maters of love; wherof the kynge was gladde and loked in it, and read it in many places.”⁷ Gower's meeting with Richard on the Thames may have been nothing more than a “casual contact,” but his account of that meeting itself suggests that he envisions his readers as people drawn to the “language” of court as inspiring certain preferred modes of behavior. Whatever the specific issues of patronage or readership, this poem explores and celebrates courtly values.

But the Confessio also does much more. Gower works with topoi originally devised by poets of the French court, and this is perhaps no more in evidence than in his portrait of the poem's central character, Amans. The eight books of the English poem recount the confession of this lover to Genius, the priest of Venus, who for his part not only shrives the lover, but teaches him about the vices and many other things, sometimes by means of narrative “ensamples,” sometimes by means of plain exposition, “withoute frounce” (7.1594).

Gower's doctrine is “translated” not merely out of French dits written in his own century, but out of such works as were more certainly familiar to English courtly audiences: the Bible, the Roman de la Rose, political treatises such as Aegidius Romanus' De regimine principum, books of vices and virtues, encyclopedias de proprietatibus rerum, occasional “tretes amoireux & moralitez & de caroll,”⁸ as well as collections of tales and “histories” written by authors ranging from Ovid to Godfrey of Viterbo. Gower orders and reorders what he gathers from these books, fitting that material not only to the structure of a gentle lover's confession, but to other frames of perception as well: in the “Prologue” and epilogue, a tract for the times; in one of the eight books, an outline of an ideal education for a prince, cast in the “forme of Aristotles lore”; in excursus interspersed throughout the poem, treatises on a wide variety of historical, doctrinal, and scientific subjects. Still other frames of perception are provided by the poem's apparatus: at the head of each of the poem's major divisions, Latin poetic epigrams; and in the margins of the text, Latin prose summaries. Each of these fields in the text and apparatus has unique formal attributes, and each provides its own structure or structures of meaning. The “game” or “lust” of the Confessio rests in part on the writer's shifting repeatedly from structure to structure to interpret his matter, and on his not allowing readers to settle comfortably into a single mode of perception or to light on a single thematic “center” as sufficient for explaining the poem. Sometimes inside these structures, and sometimes crossing their boundaries, meanings conflict with each other and with the meanings hinted at in the announced ordinatio or topical arrangement of the work.

Gower's use of topics evolves out of medieval strategies of compilation which, over the past several decades, have been examined and discussed by many scholars. M. B. Parkes, in a seminal article, placed compilatio in the setting of what has since become a popular distinction, Bonaventure's notion of the four ways of making a book. The scribe (scriptor) simply writes the words of others, “nihil addendo vel mutando”; the compiler (compilator) joins together the words of others, but none of his own; the commentator (commentator) writes the words of others as well as his own, but those of others make up the principal part, and his are annexed in order to clarify those words; the author (auctor), finally, writes the words of others as well as his own, but his words form the principal part, and those of others are annexed in order to confirm his own.⁹

This distinction is less important as a prescription—it is doubtful, for example, that Gower had read Bonaventure—than as a description of issues of invention, judgment, and statement that concerned virtually all medieval writers of books. The roles of authoring, compiling, and even commenting are obviously variable and relative to each other, and a question about any of them is often question of degree. One of the great medieval compilers, Vincent of Beauvais, testifies that in putting together the Speculum maius he adds little or nothing of his own to what he gathers from others, for his end is not to feature his own words, but to collect and arrange those of others.¹⁰ At the same time, he does not entirely avoid assertion,¹¹ but offers “sentences” that may effectively become a comment on material compiled. Even when a compiler merely quotes authors verbatim, however, he also “asserts,” or engages in a form of authoring, specifically as he fits their words to new contexts, to a new ordinatio of parts.

My purpose in introducing the term compilatio in this study is not to defend it as a genre, or to pursue at great length its history or the history of terms that surround it in medieval treatises, or even to suggest that Gower himself is an exemplary compilator.¹² It is rather to use it as a means of identifying issues and strategies that become central to Gower in the work; the procedure of compilation impinges significantly on how he understands history and organizes moral experience itself.

Alastair Minnis has provided a very important start to the discussion of compilatio in Gower's poems, and my debt to his inquiry will be evident in the pages of this book. His statement that “Gower was a compiler who tried to present himself as an author”¹³ usefully points out that Gower works between roles of authoring and compiling, and it correctly asserts that Gower privileges authorship. I disagree with the statement, however, to the extent that it also carries an imputation of failure, an implication that the poet succeeds in neither role. Gower writes to an authorial end, but he does not, through some incapacity, become a compilator by default. As we shall see, his activities of compilation do not weaken, but energize his authorship.

A pair of marginal glosses on the Confessio suggest the order of Gower's roles as a writer, including, by their own example, his activity as a commentator. In the revised version of the opening to the poem, a marginal comment at “P.” 22 explains, very simply, that “Iohannes Gower presentem libellum composuit et finaliter compleuit” ‘John Gower composed and finally completed the present book.’¹⁴ This statement is innocent enough: what gives it moment is that the poet, with these words, replaces a gloss at “P.” 34 of the first version suggesting that the poem is chiefly a compilation, its maker a compilator: “Iohannes Gower, … tanquam fauum ex variis floribus recollectum, presentem libellum ex variis cronicis, historiis, poetarum philosophorumque dictis … studiosissime compilauit” ‘from various chronicles, histories, and sayings of poets and philosophers, John Gower … most diligently compiled the present book, as a honey-comb gathered from various flowers.’

Some of the terms Gower uses in this passage—not only recollectum and compilauit, but fauum and floribus—commonly appear in prefaces to late medieval compiled books. Such is the case, for example, in one of Gower's known sources, Brunetto Latini's encyclopedic Tresor:

And I do not say that the book is drawn from my poor wit or my scanty learning; but it is like a honeycomb gathered from different flowers, for this book is compiled exclusively from the marvellous sayings of authors who before our time treated of philosophy, each according to the part of it that he knew.¹⁵

Of these terms, the most important is flores ‘flowers’: it is, of course, a root term for the popular medieval genre of florilegia, and it stands alone in many book titles: Liber florum, Manipulus florum, Flores paradysi, Parva flores. It is, indeed, “the most common medieval name for a collection of extracts.”¹⁶

Having introduced the Confessio in this way, Gower does not repeat the statement, or reintroduce its terminology, but neither do other compilers once they have prefaced their collections. Furthermore, though the poet cancels this gloss in later versions of the work and turns our attention to his generic office as a writer, or perhaps to his office as an author, he does not divert our attention from compilation for very long. In the course of the confession, Genius, in keeping with his task of defining the “vices dedly” and shriving the “contrite” lover, also gathers from a wide range of sources tales that he thinks are aptly designed to “amende” the penitent. Genius is a compilator who often names his sources, but even when he does not, he reminds us that his stories are “found”: “Ovide telleth in his bok” (1.333), “In Metamor it telleth thus” (1.389), “in the tale of Troie I finde” (1.483), “I finde ensample in a Cronique” (1.759), “I finde in the bokes write” (1.2458), “Among the bokes of latin / I finde write” (2.3187-88). Gower's point, of course, is not merely to show that Genius is one of those “who these olde bokes rede / Of suche ensamples” (2.2140-41); by such references the poet opens his work out to the field of books, to a literary heritage.

Gower's process of compiling draws its support chiefly from practices of late medieval writers, but its roots lie in antiquity. The analogy between gathering extracts and culling flowers is itself drawn from a famous letter of Seneca:

We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in.¹⁷

Seneca does not introduce the terms compiling and authoring in this analogy: he is in effect describing a long process of composing, effectively authoring, that includes both gathering and reforming what one has read, until the “separate elements are united into one substance.” In his perspective, one must transform what has been collected: “whatever we have absorbed should not be allowed to remain unchanged.” And thus he describes the entire process:

We also, I say, ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us, in other words, our natural gifts,—we should so blend those several flavours into one delicious compound.¹⁸

The medieval compiler is concerned with form in two senses: the one is the surface structure, the forma tractatus, or the physical division of the work into books and chapters; the other is a deeper structure, the forma tractandi, or the manner of treating the subject, the flow of his thought.¹⁹ Seneca, it appears, is more broadly concerned with the style, the “blend” of the entire work, or, in medieval terms, the forma tractandi, and that is perhaps because he is more concerned that things gathered in reading be fully assimilated. One “sifts” and “keeps” those things “separate” in an intermediate stage of the composing process.

Sifting and keeping things separate are, however, ends of medieval compilers; a product of their ordering material topically is the forma tractatus. This form provides a critical division of the text, and it is to it that Parkes refers when, in discussing the influence of practices of compilatio on vernacular literature, he remarks that “the process of ordinatio at the higher level may be detected in the general schemes of the Decamerone, the Confessio amantis, Les Cent Balades and the incomplete Canterbury Tales.”²⁰ Such a scheme is marked in the Confessio by a marginal comment at 1.59: Gower “varias eorum passiones variis huius libri distinccionibus per singula scribere proponit” ‘proposes to write of [lovers'] various passions one by one in the various distinctions of this book.’²¹ The distinctions, we soon learn, are the “vices dedly.”

Interposed between the late medieval idea of physical division of the book and the Senecan notion of uniting separate elements into one substance is the practice of Macrobius, who in the introduction to his own “literary storehouse,” the Saturnalia, uses the Senecan metaphor to describe his purpose. Claiming that the education of his son Eustachius is his chief care, Macrobius has striven to unify the material he has gathered:

things worth remembering have not been heaped together in confusion, but a variety of subjects of different authorship and divers dates have been arranged to form, so to speak, a body, in such a way that the notes which I had made without any plan or order, as aids to memory, came together like the parts of a coherent whole.²²

Macrobius uses Seneca's metaphor of the bees to describe “a kind of mental fermentation which serves to season the whole,” and testifies that the gathered material is “sometimes set out plainly in my own words and sometimes faithfully recorded in the actual words of old writers, as each subject has seemed to call for an exposition or a transcript.”²³

Unlike Seneca, Macrobius also stresses “the actual process of arrangement.” Arrangement aids the memory, and most notably it serves the reader:

if ever you have occasion to call to mind some historical fact, buried in a mass of books and generally unknown, or some memorable word or deed, it will be easy for you to find it and produce it, as it were, from a literary storehouse.²⁴

The ordinatio of this work serves an end of making gathered material easily accessible. The need “to call to mind” or “to find” something buried provides an even stronger impetus in late medieval collections. As Rouse and Rouse have noted, Thomas of Ireland's emphasis in the preface to Manipulus florum is on sorting, cataloguing, and storing ideas. The work itself is “written not to be read, but to be used—that is, to be searched.”²⁵ Like many other books devised to aid in the writing of sermons, it presents quotations from the Fathers under topics arranged in clear alphabetical order, thereby directing readers back through topics and memorable words to the whole works or originalia.²⁶ Such a compilation is designed for a specific purpose. It is a resource, a reference book: its function “is not to lead people back to the faith or to inspire new ideas; it is to be useful, to serve the reader well.”²⁷

Especially valuable to this type of book is an apparatus of what Rouse and Rouse have termed “finding devices.”²⁸ Parkes illustrates, once again from a case in vernacular literature: “The most spectacular example is the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales. Here we find almost all the trappings of ordinatio: sources and topics are indicated in the margins, and the word ‘auctor’ is placed alongside a sententious statement. The text is well disposed in its sections, and each section is carefully labelled by means of full rubrics.”²⁹ This apparatus quickly and efficiently guides readers to what they seek, and it lends to the entire work an appearance of other books expressly written to be searched.³⁰

The best manuscripts of Gower's poem have a like apparatus. By the page headings, marginal notations, “chapter” or section divisions in the form of Latin epigrams, the poem becomes a resource easy to consult, and it is hardly surprising that to this day—because that apparatus has been reproduced in the major printed edition—the work continues to be used as a reference tool by those seeking information about medieval attitudes toward many different subjects.

One must take care, however, not merely to equate Gower's Confessio with works of the sort described by Rouse and Rouse as “searchable tools,” even if they share certain features in the layout of their manuscript pages. Its ordinatio certainly serves a number of other distinct purposes. The topics of the confession organize the analysis of Amans's moral condition: they are aids to the fictive characters. Amans knows that he cannot on his own retrieve his history as a lover or moral agent. As he sets out to confess, he admits to Genius his fear that

          schal I moche thing foryete:
Bot if thou wolt my schrifte oppose
Fro point to point, thanne I suppose,
Ther schal nothing be left behinde.

1.224-27

Genius, for his part, makes sure that he proceeds clearly from point to point. After treating the sins of the senses, he introduces the form of confession:

Mi Sone, as I thee schal enforme,
Ther ben yet of an other forme
Of dedly vices sevene applied.

1.575-77

The vices and their species become discrete topoi of discovery, helping the “penitent” Amans remember all that is required for a complete confession. The device of the lover's confession “precludes the narrating of events in chronological order,” John Burrow observes, but its “reference-grid” of topics makes possible an “unusual fulness and penetration” of psychological analysis.³¹ As these topics allow the lover to frame, recover, and reorder his past, they may also “turn” his perspective to spiritual issues and make possible his repentance, conversion, and reaffirmed commitment to “vertu moral.”

These same topics also organize Genius's teaching, of course: a compiling of doctrines is, like a confession, an exercise in recovering and organizing a past. Gower remarks, at the outset of the Confessio, that he is concerned not to lose the heritage presented in books, not to forget: he is sensitive to the past as a source of “ensamples,” and thence of an ordinatio for the present. In the fiction, as the lover wants to proceed “fro point to point” so as to avoid forgetting “moche thing,” so the priest, as compilator and teacher, is given a ready-made structure to ensure his own recollection. The topics of the “vices dedly,” so important to other medieval compilationes, enable Genius to find tales and lore whereby he might preserve the past, enlarge his pupil's knowledge, stabilize perception of a world that “neweth every dai,” and give the lover a device for wisely ordering moral experience, where meanings are not always certain or easily secured.

The point remains, however, that this very ordinatio allows us also to read the work as a compilation. As, inside the fiction, it is important to Genius that the lover be secure in the ordinatio of the confession, that he understand where, in the order of things, the priest now leads him, so it is also important to Gower that readers not miss the forma tractatus: he thus partitions his topics not only in the English text, but in the headings and margins as well.³² While this order serves a full confession in the fiction, it also serves readers by providing access, at virtually any juncture of the work, to subjects that interest them. The grid manifests Macrobius' principle for his own literary storehouse: “things worth remembering have not been heaped together in confusion,” but have been fit to an order. Topics guide the poet to discovery, or help him remember; ultimately, they guide readers to memorable words or deeds that would otherwise remain “buried in a mass of books.”

Unlike the Manipulus florum and other compilations of its kind, Gower's book is not a collection of excerpts. The English poet has advanced further along in the Senecan model of composition:

A true copy stamps its own form upon all the features which it has drawn from what we may call the original, in such a way that they are combined into a unity. Do you not see how many voices there are in a chorus? Yet out of the many only one voice results. … In that chorus the voices of the individual singers are hidden; what we hear is the voices of all together.³³

Gower aspires to be clear, and in that effort he tends to level out the different stylistic features of the authors he consults, thereby making the entire work, in transcript and exposition, speak in “one voice.” It is perhaps consistent with this strategy that he should be seen as conservative in every respect: because he sets out to transmit the doctrine of others in what he describes as a plain style, his work has been judged derivative and threadbare. That might suggest that the Confessio is a work better searched than read. At least it should not be read continuously: such is the opinion of J. A. W. Bennett, who in his edition of selections, advises us to read the work in small doses: “medieval readers,” he contends, “would perhaps have been satisfied with a tale or two at a time.”³⁴ Though Bennett never explains why medieval readers might have been so satisfied, or we so justified in following them, one might suppose that the ordinatio allows the practice: it creates the appearance of a compilatio that its writer has designed to be read piecemeal.

The curiosity of this work that fits so well into the larger genre of compilation, however, is that, in certain respects, it does not fit at all. The explicit ordinatio often seems unequal to its task. Material drawn into the structure of the Confessio, even after Gower's revision, often appears to spill over the distinction or topic introduced to contain it. Gower's tales often do more, and sometimes do less, than elucidate the particular vice they are supposed to elucidate. To illumine a subtopic of Wrath, for example, he recounts the story of Canace that he had found in Ovid's Heroides. The purported topic and moralitas of this famous revision should center the narrative not on Canace, but on her melancholic father. To judge by modern critical readings, however, Gower's tale appears to be about Canace, and its subject appears to be incest. Not only does the story seem to have missed its topic, but it also diverges from its source: the narrative has lost its “history,” the culture that originally gave it meaning. About Gower's telling, and especially its treatment of incest, Rosemary Woolf remarks, “Gower has skilfully and deliberately worked against the moral pattern of his original, worked against the didactic teaching of his age, and furthermore worked against the moral assumptions of all other medieval stories on the same type of subject.”³⁵ In the Confessio, Gower often changes what he inherits from others, and he does not always do so to tighten its fit with a new moralitas, or to affirm a truth latent in his source; “the more aggressive compilare ‘to pillage’” better describes his mode of gathering than does “the rather neutral colligere ‘to collect.’”³⁶ On this occasion, he oversteps what tradition, the original narrative, and his announced ordinatio allow.

Even that is not the end of the difficulty. What Genius here ventures on the subject of incest contradicts what he says about it elsewhere in the Confessio. We can never be sure, before we read the entire work, that Gower has really supplied his doctrine on a given subject in a single tale, excursus, or piece of dialogue, neatly placed within the limits of an announced topic: at another point in the work he might present another, sometimes opposed, and equally tenable reading of that subject, and often without a “finding device” to alert us to it. This makes the poem a snare for the unwary reader, and it obviously limits the work's usefulness as a compilation. Whereas we might be satisfied in reading a tale or two at a time, we cannot be certain that any such reading can provide what the poet actually thought or ultimately wished to convey on that subject.

Gower, in fact, often rewrites stories to disjoin meanings in his text, sometimes when the original would seem to have served his announced topic better. If it is a task of the compiler to organize received material in a new structure and to display that material coherently and accessibly, the poet would seem to have failed in the task. This feature of the work, however, is part of a larger design. In one sense, to be sure, Gower creates an impression that he seeks to imprint his own authorship and sense of coherence on what he gathers; as in the Senecan model of voices in a chorus, he gives a performance where “out of the many only one voice results.” In another sense, however, he works to separate, to create for the work an impression of compilatio, and he does so by authoring divergent outlooks. Indeed, as he breaks his own voice out into many voices in this fiction of a compilation, he does by very different means what Chaucer does through his pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales.

One might expect discord in actual compilationes as the writer quotes authors who have very different, sometimes apparently contradictory, outlooks on common subjects. Such a problem Vincent of Beauvais faced in composing his Speculum, but he “did not attempt to make his auctores agree with one another, to make them all speak with one voice.”³⁷ Like other writers of compilations in the thirteenth century, he seeks not to bring “sentences” into concord (ad concordiam redigere), but merely to recite those sentences, leaving to the reader's judgment (lectoris arbitrio) which one ought to be preferred.³⁸

Vincent's perception of his task forms a double response to a dominant literary activity of the twelfth century, when the authors of the Gloss, the Sentences, and the Decretum sought to “organize inherited written authority in systematic form.”³⁹ For Gratian in composing the Decretum, ordinare means reconciling differences, and Stephen of Tornai sees in the great decretist the activity that distinguished the period: to gather “sentences” in one place, and to bring their contradictions into agreement (in concordiam revocare).⁴⁰ Vincent in his apologia directly addresses that impetus in twelfth-century writers: in his role as an excerptor, he will not reconcile the different opinions of his authors. By leaving to the judgment of the reader which sentence ought to be preferred, however, Vincent creates a work which, in a certain respect, resembles the kind of texts to which twelfth-century writers were responding. Peter Abelard, in the Prologue to his Sic et non, notes that the Fathers “may have reported the opinions of others rather than stating their own conclusions. For instance, in many places the writer of Ecclesiastes introduces contradictory views of differing origin; hence his name is interpreted as meaning ‘one who causes debates’ [tumultuator].” Often the Fathers “have left a question-mark hanging over the problems into which they were enquiring, rather than settling them conclusively. St. Augustine, that highly respected teacher … tells us that he has done exactly that when writing his On the Text of Genesis.”⁴¹ And Jerome “said that he often dictated indifferently his own views or those of other men, so that he might leave it to the reader's discretion [lectoris arbitrio] as to whether they should be approved or rejected.”⁴²

In the Sic et non, Abelard himself follows a procedure modelled by early canon lawyers who, on practical grounds, understood the urgency “of bringing discordant or apparently discordant canons into concordance.”⁴³ The sayings of the Fathers which Abelard has gathered are “surrounded by some degree of uncertainty,” and perusing them “may encourage inexperienced readers to engage in that most important exercise, enquiry into truth, and as a result of that enquiry give an edge to their critical faculty. For consistent or frequent questioning is defined as the first key to wisdom. … By doubting we come to enquiry, and by enquiry we perceive the truth.”⁴⁴

The conflict of authorities is central for Abelard; for Vincent it is not. Abelard models strategies for reconciling differences; Vincent does not. What happens in the fourteenth century, in Gower's poem, is effectively a combination of the procedures of these writers. The Confessio has all the trappings of the compilatio. The magnitude of the undertaking is encyclopedic, and there is, even within its superficially clear ordinatio partium, a seemingly random, often highly imaginative introduction of material, frequently generating conflict where we cannot anticipate it. Gower is, at one level, a tumultuator, one who causes debates. Inside the fiction, such a practice could betray a moral condition in Amans, perhaps even in Genius: in tradition the term applies in malo to Cain, the type of unregenerate man, or the soul which, “alienated from the peace of the sons of God, is confused in itself [in seipsa tumultuatur].”⁴⁵ More relevant for the moment is its application, in bono, to authorship of the sort Abelard sees exemplified in the writer of Ecclesiastes. Gower as tumultuator seeks to generate an uneasiness, to the end of giving edge to our critical faculty. He also does more: his method is not precisely that of the dialectician, but he works towards concord in a program that continually introduces new authors, new issues. He does not allow us a security at any single juncture of this exercise, and that is to his point of making us wise: out of the discord he generates, we might come to a greater, extra-textual understanding. The form of the compilatio is suited to this imaginative play or “game,” for it does not allow us to settle prematurely into a superficially “correct” judgment. The conflict is enriched, moreover, because Gower does not merely oppose doctrine to doctrine, but also frames each opinion in a structure of perception that lends to that opinion an appearance of truth. It is now also important to note that these structures are not merely the formal divisions of the Confessio, but also frames of perception generated within and across arguments.

Gower introduces and even generates discordant “sentences” not to distance readers from wisdom, but better to ensure their achieving it. We have already remarked that he uses the distinctio, a division of a term into an array of its possible meanings, to organize the contents of the separate books of the Confessio: the “seven vices dedly” or the various passiones of lovers are, in that sense, distinctions. Inside this announced ordinatio, however, Gower also evolves other distinctions for major recurrent concepts in the poem, including, for example, kinde or nature, love, honesty (honestas or honestum), gentilesse, profit, grace, and fortune. He does not display or develop the latter distinctions in any explicit order, but introduces new meanings as the context allows. The concepts and meanings often do not appear in Gower's immediate source for a given passage, but are taken instead from other originalia, or from medieval dictionaries, collections of distinctions, and other compilations.⁴⁶ These shifts of meaning have the effect of weaning readers away from the false security of a single-valenced argument, or from a facile morality and illusory wisdom, and they represent a certain mode of writing that Abelard also observed in the works of the Fathers: “very often the same words have different meanings, when one and the same word [vox] has been used to express now one meaning [significatio], now another.”⁴⁷ Like the Fathers, Gower is not always explicit about his significationes, though the context will often disclose them; nor does he ever openly reveal how they are interrelated, but we ignore this feature of the Confessio at our peril.

Notes

1. Rosemary Woolf, “Moral Chaucer and Kindly Gower,” in J. R. R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller: Essays in Memoriam, ed. Mary Salu and Robert T. Farrell (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979), pp. 221-45.

2. Fausto Ghisalberti, “Giovanni del Virgilio, espositore della Metamorfosi,” Il Giornale Dantesco 34, n.s. 4 (1933) 19; trans. Judson Boyce Allen, The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages: A Decorum of Convenient Distinction (Toronto, 1982), p. 53 n. 14.

3. D. W. Robertson, Jr., Chaucer's London (New York, 1968), p. 170.

4. Anthony E. Farnham, “The Art of High Prosaic Seriousness: John Gower as Didactic Raconteur,” in The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature, ed. Larry D. Benson, Harvard English Studies, 5 (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), pp. 164-65.

5. Derek Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry (London, 1977), pp. 208-209.

6. Although Gower's poetry, like Chaucer's, “appears to have been written, on occasions, with an aristocratic courtly audience in mind … its more significant readers appear to have been career diplomats, civil servants, officials and administrators who were attached to the court and the government” (V. J. Scattergood, “Literary Culture at the Court of Richard II,” in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne [London, 1983], p. 38).

7. The Chronicle of Froissart, trans. Sir John Bourchier, Lord Berners, ed. William Paton Ker (London, 1901-03), 6:147. Though we know little about Richard's reading, we do know that a number of French romances, a two-volume bible, and a copy of the Roman de la Rose were presented to him in 1379. By 1384 […], however, these books were no longer in his possession. See D. W. Robertson, Jr., Chaucer's London, p. 208; Edith Rickert, “King Richard II's Books,” The Library, 4th ser., 13 (1932-33): 144; Richard F. Green, “King Richard II's Books Revisited,” The Library, 5th ser., 31 (1976): 235-39; Scattergood, “Literary Culture,” pp. 32-33.

8. Such are the works listed in the inventories of books owned by members of the aristocracy in fourteenth-century England. See Scattergood, “Literary Culture,” pp. 33-36; A. I. Doyle, “English Books In and Out of Court from Edward III to Henry VII,” in English Court Culture, ed. Scattergood and Sherborne, pp. 163-81; A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes, “The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century,” in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts, & Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and A. G. Watson (London, 1978), pp. 163-210, esp. pp. 177, 208.

9. Bonaventure, Commentarius in librum primum sententiarum, prooemium, q. 4, S. Bonaventurae opera omnia (Quaracchi, 1882-1902), 1:14; quoted by M. B. Parkes, “The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book,” in Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to R. W. Hunt, ed. J. J. G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson (Oxford, 1975), pp. 127-28; this paraphrase is adapted from the translation of A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 1988), p. 94.

10. Vincent of Beauvais, “Apologia totius operis,” cap. 4, ed. Anna-Dorothee v. den Brincken, “Geschichtsbetrachtung bei Vincenz von Beauvais: Die Apologia Actoris zum Speculum Maius,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 34 (1978): 470. On the “Libellus Apologeticus,” see J. B. Voorbij, “The Speculum Historiale: Some Aspects of Its Genesis and Manuscript Tradition,” in Vincent of Beauvais and Alexander the Great: Studies on the Speculum Maius and Its Translations into Medieval Vernaculars, ed. W. J. Aerts et al., Medievalia Groningana, fasc. 7 (Groningen, 1986), pp. 18-20.

11. Minnis, Authorship, pp. 191-94, 200.

12. On compilatio as a genre, see Alastair J. Minnis, “Late-Medieval Discussions of Compilatio and the Role of the Compilator,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Literatur 101 (1979): 386-87.

13. Minnis, Authorship, p. 210.

14. All quotations from Gower are from the edition of G. C. Macaulay, The Complete Works of John Gower, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1899-1902).

15. Brunetto Latini, Li Livres dou Tresor, 1.1.5, ed. Francis J. Carmody, University of California Publications in Modern Philology, vol. 22 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1948), pp. 17-18; trans. Minnis, Authorship, p. 192.

16. Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons: Studies on the Manipulus florum of Thomas of Ireland, Texts and Studies, vol. 47 (Toronto, 1979), p. 113; see also Henri-Marie Rochais, Philippe Delhaye, and Marcel Richard, “Florilèges spirituels,” Dictionnaire de spiritualité, fasc. 5 (Paris, 1964): 435-512.

17. Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae morales 84.3, trans. Richard Gummere, Loeb (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1962-1967), 2:277.

18. Ibid., 84.5, p. 279; on the importance of Seneca's statement to medieval florilegists, see Rouse and Rouse, Preachers, pp. 115-17.

19. On this distinction, and the usefulness of both senses of form in determining the intent of an author, see Rouse and Rouse, Preachers, p. 38.

20. Parkes, “Ordinatio,” p. 130.

21. Trans. Minnis, Authorship, p. 189.

22. Macrobius, Saturnalia, 1, preface, 3, trans. Percival Vaughan Davies (New York, 1969), p. 26.

23. Ibid., 6, 4, p. 27.

24. Ibid., 2, p. 26.

25. Rouse and Rouse, Preachers, p. 3.

26. Ibid., pp. 36-37.

27. Ibid., pp. 115-17.

28. See Rouse and Rouse, “Statim invenire: Schools, Preachers and New Attitudes to the Page,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), pp. 201-25, passim; idem, Preachers, pp. 27-34.

29. Parkes, “Ordinatio,” p. 134.

30. Rouse and Rouse point out that “virtually every twelfth- to fourteenth-century aid to study that has a prologue” uses “expressions like sine labore, facilius occurrere, presto habere, and citius or even statim invenire” (“Statim,” p. 207).

31. J. A. Burrow, “The Portrayal of Amans in ‘Confessio Amantis,’” in Gower's Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge, 1983), p. 8.

32. See, for example, the marginal comments at 1.9, 1.59, and 1.576.

33. Seneca Epistulae 84.9-10, trans. Gummere, pp. 281, 283.

34. J. A. W. Bennett, Middle English Literature, ed. and completed by Douglas Gray (Oxford, 1986), p. 415.

35. Rosemary Woolf, “Moral Chaucer and Kindly Gower,” p. 227.

36. Rouse and Rouse, Preachers, p. 41; the terms that Papias links with “compilare” suggest this distinction: “furari, depopulari, expoliare, depilare” (Vocabulista [Venice, 1496; rpt. Turin, 1966], s.v. “compilare,” p. 72); see also Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 10.44, s. v. “conpilator,” ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1911); on the basis of a unique statement of Nicholas of Lyra, Minnis suggests that the terms may also reflect a genre difference: the compilatio has an ordinatio, but the collectio does not (“Compilatio,” p. 417).

37. Minnis, Authorship, p. 158; on Vincent, see Minnis, “Compilatio,” pp. 387-90, 404-408.

38. Vincent of Beauvais, “Apologia totius operis,” cap. 8, ed. v. den Brincken, p. 477.

39. Rouse and Rouse, Preachers, p. 4.

40. Die Summa des Stephanus Tornacensis, ed. J. F. von Schulte (Giessen, 1921), p. 5; quoted by Minnis, “Compilatio,” p. 397.

41. Peter Abelard, Sic et non, prologus, 88-93, trans. A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, in Medieval Literary Theory c.1100-1375: The Commentary Tradition (Oxford, 1988), p. 90; ed. Blanche Boyer and Richard McKeon (Chicago, 1976-77), pp. 92-93.

42. Ibid., 132-33, trans. Minnis and Scott, p. 92.; ed. Boyer and McKeon, p. 94.

43. Richard McKeon, “Rhetoric in the Middle Ages,” in Critics and Criticism, Ancient and Modern, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago, 1952), p. 283.

44. Sic et non, prologus, 188-89, 333-39, trans. Minnis and Scott, pp. 94, 99; ed. Boyer and McKeon, pp. 96, 103.

45. William of St. Thierry, De natura corporis et animae 2, PL 180:725.

46. Of the earliest dictionaries, the most important are Papias, Elementarium doctrinae erudimentum (mid-eleventh century), Hugutio of Pisa, Magnae derivationes (late-twelfth century), William Brito, Summa Britonis (ca. 1270), and John Balbus, Catholicon (ca. 1286); see Lloyd W. and Betty A. Daly, “Some Techniques in Medieval Latin Lexicography,” Speculum 39 (1964): 229-39.

    The distinction collections which began to appear in the late twelfth century guided readers to key scriptural terms, a range of figurative meanings for those terms, and biblical illustrations of those meanings. They were, as Rouse and Rouse have remarked, “the earliest of all alphabetical tools, aside from dictionaries,” written to assist preachers in composing sermons (Preachers, pp. 7-9, 69, 75). Included among the popular late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century distinction collections are Peter the Chanter, Summa Abel; Peter of Poitiers, Distinctiones super Psalterium; Prepositinus of Cremona, Summa super Psalterium; Alan of Lille, Distinctiones dictionum theologicalium; Peter of Capua, Alphabetum in artem sermocinandi; and the anonymous collections Angelus and Distinctiones monasticae. With the distinction collections of the Franciscan Maurice of Provins and the Dominicans Nicholas de Gorran and Nicholas de Biard in the mid- to late thirteenth century, the entries become increasingly more elaborate, and interest shifts to broad moral topics. Rouse and Rouse write that “At times, the entries seem not so much to be scriptural terms in want of definition, as to be topics in search of scriptural discussion; so that their collections are in fact part distinctions, in the traditional sense of the term, and part biblical subject concordance, though with no attempt at being exhaustive” (“Biblical Distinctions in the Thirteenth Century,” AHDLMA 41 [1974]: 34). By the fourteenth century, “the term distinctiones, having lost any precise connotation, survived as a catch-all title meaning little more than ‘alphabetical compendium for preachers’” (“Biblical Distinctions,” p. 37). Later collections, of considerable use to preachers, include John Bromyard, Summa praedicantium, Pierre Bersuire, Dictionarium seu Repertorium morale, and Thomas Hibernicus, Manipulus florum. For fuller discussions of this history, see Rouse and Rouse, “Biblical Distinctions,” pp. 27-37, and André Wilmart, “Un répertoire d'exégèse composé en Engleterre vers le début du XIIIe siècle,” Mémorial Lagrange (Paris, 1940), pp. 307-46, especially “Note sur les plus anciens recueils de distinctions bibliques,” pp. 335-46.

47. Sic et non, prologus, 11-13, trans. Minnis and Scott, p. 87; ed. Boyer and McKeon, p. 89.