[In the following essay, Peck examines the Confessio Amantis in terms of medieval theories of perception and representation.]

Oure wit may not stiȝe vnto the contemplacioun of vnseye thinges but it be ilad by consideracioun of thinges that beth iseye.

—John Trevisa, De proprietatibus rerum¹

Often we speak of things which we do not express with precision as they are; but by another expression we indicate what we are unwilling or unable to express with precision, as when we speak in riddles. And often we see a thing, not precisely as it is itself, but through a likeness or an image, as when we look upon a face in a mirror. And in this way, we often express and yet do not express, see and yet do not see, one and the same object. We express and see it through another. … An inference regarding it, which can be reached … as it were in a riddle, is not therefore necessarily false.

—St. Anselm, Monologium LXV²

Qui habet aures audiendi audiat.

—Jesus on John the Baptist, Matt. 11:15³

Alle thing that is iwist nis nat knowen by his nature propre, but by the nature of hem that comprehenden it.

—Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy Bk. V, prosa 6⁴

In his recent attempt to define a “new medievalism,” Stephen Nichols comments on the need “to interrogate the nature of medieval representation in its differences and continuities with classical and Renaissance mimesis.”⁵ What strikes him as a feature characteristic of medieval discourse is not simply its strongly traditionalist orientation, but rather its remarkably flexible sense of boundaries within the dynamics of cultural expression. “In the Middle Ages, one senses a fascination with the potential for representation, even more than with theories or modes of representation.”⁶ Nichols acknowledges the powerful shadow of tradition in the Middle Ages, but, following Brian Stock,⁷ suggests that for medieval writers tradition “is far from static.” Rather, it is “very much a phenomenon of the present … and, as such, is also an agent of cultural change.”⁸ To illustrate this vital reciprocity between tradition and the potentialities of representation that lead to cultural change, Nichols points to medieval attempts to extend the range of what was known of the material world through their challenges to ontological boundaries, social boundaries, boundaries of religious orthodoxy and also of gender, even to boundaries between humans and animals.⁹ Human irrationality seems a greater preoccupation than proofs of rationality. The most fascinating area of liminal exploration in fourteenth-century England is, to my way of thinking, the recurrent challenging by various writers not only of humankind's rational-animal nature, but of the very workings of the human mind itself. They explore with sophistication ways in which the mind appropriates languages to represent itself. Characteristically, human thoughts are shown to contain not substantialities, but only linguistic representations of things; the logic of the potentialities of representation is, moreover, fundamentally suppositional, rather than reific.

In this essay I examine innovative uses of tradition that reflect an intense preoccupation with questions of ontology and epistemology among late fourteenth-century English writers, especially the ways in which they represent their powers of representation. The past with its cultural ideologies, even as much as the material world, lies apart from individual human perception. Although in some ways the mind's perception may be said to unite what is outside the mind with what is inside, the converse is likewise true in very basic ways. That is, from the instant of induction, the mind definitively isolates itself from what it beholds by substituting self-generated abstractions for the thing experienced, abstractions that only seem to represent what the mind thought it perceived.

This sort of epistemological preoccupation has been much commented upon in Chaucer.¹⁰ In this essay I wish to demonstrate a comparable fascination with the mind's capacity to abstract signs from things in the fiction making (representation) of Chaucer's contemporary, John Gower, a writer who perpetually boasts about his backward glance toward books, the past, and what they have to tell him. I hope to demonstrate that Gower, even as much as Chaucer, exemplifies Nichols' observations on medieval fascination with the potentialities of representation and with the liminality of human perception. Gower's approach to the processing of ideas is more “conventional” than Chaucer's, but that conventionality illustrates all the more surely Nichols' and Stock's insights into the vitality of tradition as perpetrator of cultural change.

In his recent analysis of Gower's Confessio Amantis, Kurt Olsson explores admirably Gower's skill in creating moral uncertainty through complex voicing.¹¹ Olsson approaches the nexus of uncertainty in the poem through practices of medieval rhetoric, a rhetoric often founded in the conventions of the Roman de la Rose. My point shifts the issues of uncertainty more toward concerns of philosophy. In his bookish traditionalism, Gower aligns himself with the complexities of late medieval reception theory. He acknowledges repeatedly that tradition (history, tales of the past, ideologies of the past) resides in books, books that he re-presents through his poetry. But in the Confessio Amantis he dramatizes radically fresh insights into fourteenth-century empirical semantics, as the recipient of knowledge reencounters in his head whatever the mind intuited, converting that experience into a fiction of his own making through which he then interrogates his desires, predilections, and blind spots. Such a relativistic epistemology was not unknown among the ancients (certainly Boethius had given the matter careful thought), but that sort of nominalist sign theory assumes fresh and distinctively new potentialities for English writers in the latter fourteenth century, particularly the mystics, Trevisa, Langland, Chaucer, and Gower. Empirical sign theory becomes central both to the way they think and, of equal importance, to the ways in which they represent what they think. If there is such a thing as a medieval poetic, it is intrinsically bound up in their theories of perception and the relative interiority of representation.

HOW WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW

Trevisa's proposition, cited in the headnote to this essay, that we know what is hidden in terms of what is seen, is the basic proposition underlying all medieval phenomenology.¹² We see one thing and think another, but what we think we think in images derived from the seen. Corollary to this proposition is its linguistic mirror, namely, that we say things not as they are but in terms of signs and imagined likenesses. That is, to talk about what is, one addresses what is is not—a corollary, a likeness, or even an antithesis.

The thinking and saying of one thing in terms of another and of relying upon phenomena of the senses to imply ideas for the mind are fundamental principles of this process of understanding. In Piers Plowman, Will sets out to learn how he might save his soul. Even before he perceives that that is his quest, he discovers himself immersed in the flux of phenomena, in an in-between place, “a faire felde ful of folke … / Of alle maner of men, the mene and the riche, / Worchyng and wandryng as the worlde asketh,”¹³ all engaged in the busyness of phenomena, in looking and lurking. When Holicherche appears and identifies herself, Will asks, “kenne me kyndeli … How I may saue my soule?” (B.I.81-84). Holicherche replies by telling him that “whan alle tresores aren tried … trewthe is the best” (B.I.85). But Will doubts whether he has any “kynde knowing”; he knows not “by what craft in my corps it comseth and where” (B.I.135-36). Holicherche tries through metaphor to explain to him that “triacle of heuene” (B.I.146) called love, then, as last resort, teaches him “somme crafte to knowe the Fals” (B.II.4). The “Fals” is not the “Trewe,” but it helps, at least, in the unknowing of what is not. And, even so, the knowing of false still requires “somme craft.”

Let me shift momentarily to another window, from the twelfth century, that sheds a traditional light on Langland's fourteenth-century problem. In his treatise De Arca Noe Morali, Hugh of St. Victor explains that this weird circumstance, where we know this through the other, providing we have some skill, is a consequence of the fall.¹⁴ Hugh's idea is more realist than nominalist in its assumptions about external reality, but it is akin to nominalism in its perception of the interiority of knowledge. Knowledge is in itself a kind of sin, a perversion of what is that causes instability and anxiety in the human heart. Yet knowledge can also provide a way back toward home. Knowledge creates a world apart from what is, a world in the brain—a world of its own.¹⁵ Knowledge is thus paradoxical. In our anxiety, since we know, even in sin, only through metaphor, through mental signs rather than through the things themselves—does anyone know “love in dede”?¹⁶—stability, or at least the illusion of stability, may be restored, Hugh suggests, through a kind of word game:

Now, therefore, enter your own inmost heart, and make a dwelling-place for God. Make Him a temple, make Him a house, make Him a pavilion. Make Him an ark of the covenant, make Him an ark of the flood; no matter what you call it, it is all one house of God. In the temple let the creature adore the Creator, in the house let the son revere the Father, in the pavilion let the knight adore the King. Under the covenant, let the disciple listen to the Teacher. In the flood, let him that is shipwrecked beseech Him who guides the helm.¹⁷

Hugh's way of counteracting the instability of the heart layers one analogy upon another upon another, then expands each—“no matter what you call it”—requiring the mind to make linguistic leaps between the structures being formulated, between familiar things (temples, houses, pavilions, arks), to perceive in the strange area of the unsaid what can not be said, only implied. The familiar things are not simply things of nature or of the material world, however, but things given a local color, in this instance a biblical color, a color contextualized through the Christian culture of its conception—not just an ark, but Noah's ark, the ark of salvation, etc. The phenomena are not simply things seen, but things read.

The fourteenth-century English mystics offer a variation on this same epistemological idea. Since knowledge is a kind of sin and therefore a condition of non-being, that is, a substitution of what is not for what is, to know is to miss, to miss the highest good. The happiest human exercise thus becomes a procedure not of knowing but of unknowing:

Of alle other creatures and their werkes—ye, and of the werkes of God self—may a man thorou grace haue fulheed of knowing, and wel to kon thinke on hem; bot of God him-self can no man thinke. And therefore I wole leue al that thing that I can think, and chese to my loue that thing that I can-not think. For whi he may wel be loued, bot not thought. By loue may he be getyn and holden; bot bi thought neither. And therefore, thof al it be good sumtyme to think of the kyndness and the worthines of God in special, and thof al it be a light and a party of contemplacion: nevertheless in this werk it schal be casten down and keuerid with a cloude of forgetyng. And thou schalt step abouen it stalworthly, bot listely, with a deuoute and a plesing stering of loue, and fonde for to peerse that derknes abouen thee. And smyte apon that thicke cloude of vnknowyng with a scharp darte of longing loue, and go not thens for thing that befalleth.¹⁸

As with Hugh of St. Victor and Langland, love becomes the only means of possession, or, rather, of approaching and participating, an attempt through locateable feeling to move beyond phenomena toward the source, knowing that the experiencing is simultaneously a kind of having and losing.

In the Confessio Amantis Gower's epistemology shares little with the mystic way. Gower locates knowledge firmly in activities of the phenomenal world, the dark wood in which Amans laments his feelings. He concentrates on “thing that befalleth,” that which exists for the Cloud of Unknowing-author “in special.” Gower's epistemology is akin to the mystic's, however, and Hugh's, and Chaucer's, and Langland's as well, in voicing a cumulative what-is-not fiction to approach what is. Like the lot of them, Gower addresses Truth by exploring False, all the while privileging love as the motivating and guiding intention, the only certain hope. As with the others, Gower's concern is with what goes on inside Amans' head amidst the flux of phenomena. What is in the lover's head is fiction. That is, one does not have rocks in one's head, unless one is Dorigen, and even there the rocks are ideas of rocks, which may be a greater problem than real rocks.¹⁹ Gower's attitude toward the flux of phenomena affecting Amans is fundamentally akin to Langland's, Chaucer's, and the mystic's. Although Gower is, without a doubt, a conceptual realist, he is keenly aware of distinctions between phenomena inside and outside the mind. His Genius will create fictions as phenomenal as Amans' mental extractions from the world around him, fictions to address fictions within the precincts of Amans' and the reader's brain.

GOWER'S “MIDDEL WEIE”: FICTION AS MEDIATOR

Like the Cloud of Unknowing-author, Gower, in The Confessio Amantis, approaches knowing through love, but as he sets out his fiction he is careful, in his Latin voice, to differentiate kinds of love:

Postquam in “Prologo” tractatum hactenus existit, qualiter hodierne condicionis diuisio caritatis dileccionem superauit, intendit auctor ad presens suum libellum, cuius nomen Confessio Amantis nuncupatur, componere de illo amore, a quo non solum humanum genus, sed eciam cuncta animancia naturaliter subiciuntur. Et quia nonnulli amantes ultra quam expedit desiderii passionibus crebro stimulantur, materia libri per totum super hiis specialius diffunditur.²⁰

[Now that the treatise has shown thus far in the “Prologue” how the present division of the conditional situation has overcome love of charity, the author intends at present to write his book, the name of which is called Confessio Amantis, on that love by which not only humankind, but also all animals are naturally subjected. And because all lovers are repeatedly aroused by the passion of desire more than is good for them, the matter of the book as a whole will be laid out according to these particular passions.]

Gower says he will speak quasi in persona aliorum, quos amor alligat,²¹ “as if in the dramatic role of others whom love binds.” The love he addresses is passionate love, naturatus amor, a love that “is blind and may noght se” (I.47). The fiction will be exemplary “of my woful care, / Mi wofull day, my wofull chance, / That men mowe take remembrance” of what they read and “ensample take / Of wisdom” (I.74-80). That is, his poem will become phenomena for the eye and ear of the reader from which brain food may be digested.

Gower stresses emphatically that the epistemology of naturatus amor works through the senses, particularly the eyes and ears.²² Venus sends Amans to Genius, who begins by instructing him “touchende of my wittes fyve … the gates / Thurgh whiche as to the herte algates / Comth alle thing unto the feire / Which may the mannes Soule empeire” (I.296-302). Genius begins with sight, since it is “moste principal of alle” (I.307). Genius's admonitory advice is largely against “misloke”—“Betre is to winke than to loke” (I.384)—repeatedly warning Amans, “That thou thi sihte noght misuse” (I.436-37). The ear too is a powerful source of error if turned toward anything but the good. Amans must guard ears as well as eyes, if the approximations he conceives are to accord with what is; otherwise he will be deceived and subject to fear.

Genius's admonitions acknowledge a vast discrepancy between what lies inside and outside the orifices of the body. Amans needs some kind of interior defense for dealing with the prejudicial interpretations his desires impose upon what the senses convey. Since reason, or charity, or higher love has been somewhat arbitrarily excluded from the fiction of naturatus amor, that is, none is the starting point or the impetus, what we are perpetually entertained with in Gower's dialogue is lies, lies addressing lies, fictions measuring fictions in search of a moderating accord. It is not a lofty way, but in its mediocrity it sustains a pleasing balancing act. Amans will respond to Genius's stories with glimpses into the ways he views himself, glimpses which are quite wonderful fantasies in themselves that are answered with Genius's equally fantastic stories, brought with a fresh warp from the past, as the two weave together a politics of make-believe.

GOWER'S EPISTEMOLOGY OF MAKE-BELIEVE

To explore more precisely Gower's uses of False, I would like to examine two sections of the Confessio, the latter part of Book II (those sections dealing with Falssemblant, Fa Crere, and Supplantation—all sub-species of Envy), and the latter part of Book VI (the discussion of sorcery as a delicate kind of Gluttony). In both sections the agencies of “sin” use the same rhetoric as Gower the poet in constructing make-believe as a means of instructing and thus controlling their victims (read: audience, those who give ear); or, to put it another way, as a means of fulfilling their pleasure (their love)—of making the outside seem to accord with will on the inside. These internal, imagined structures may not be exactly the temples, pavilions, or arks of the covenant that Hugh of St. Victor spoke of, but the processes of mental architecture are the same. Genius imagines Envy as a barge on a stormy sea, “Wher Falssemblant with Ore on honde / It roweth” (II.1902-5), making the wind seem soft to man's ear and the weather fair through “faire wordes”; “Bot thogh it seme, it is noght so” (II.1889—emphasis mine).

The literary source of Genius's Falssemblant (in part the source for Genius himself) is the Roman de la Rose. Kevin Brownlee has recently explored Faux Semblant's narrative functions in the Roman in terms of his diegetic status, his historical subtext, and his linguistic-poetic significance,²³ placing that discourse in the historical context of debate between the secular masters and the mendicant orders for control of the University of Paris in the mid-1250s. Gower's adaptation of Jean de Meun's monster has nothing to do with the University of Paris, but it does serve his purposes in ways akin to Jean's uses of his creation. Gower's Falssemblant is recontextualized in terms of the incipient capitalist economy that he, and Chaucer, too, for that matter, sees as a threat to traditional morality. Genius would have Amans “Let thi Semblant be trewe and plein” (II.1911) and use “thi conscience” (II.1926) as helpmate, “If thou were evere Custummer / To Falssemblant in eny wise” (II.1928-29). Semblant, as Genius uses the term, equates perhaps with good intention. That is, Genius is suggesting that Amans attempt to see without prejudice what is being intuited, knowing that that is impossible. Conscience might help the perceiver to be objectively self-critical, but that fact will inevitably reveal that Amans' investment is in false-seeming.

In presenting Falssemblant, Gower takes a character from his books and conflates him with a local situation (the Lombard bankers, to whom the English throne is much endebted) as part of his analysis of the moral welfare of his distraught lover, that fiction called Amans. The mercantile metaphor (“if thou were evere Custummer to Faussemblant”) is important to Gower's purpose, since the lover's fantasy is what he buys into. That capitalist metaphor in turn establishes a political context for ethical behavior. Falssemblant flourishes most, Genius says, among Lombards and merchants, who make profit from other people's land (II.2093 ff.). They are especially versed in Fa crere “To voide with a soubtil hond / The beste goodes of the lond / And bringe chaf and take corn” (II.2125-27). They are like the master rhetorician who “makth believe / … Er that he mai ben aperceived” (II.2136-37).

In Book II, especially, Gower presents the phenomonology of desire as a commerce in make-believe and political aggression. Envy, the topic of Book II, is the most politic of sins, always preoccupied with others' domains. As such, it exemplifies precisely the phenomenology of fantasy's juxtapositioning of inside-outside that is my essay's concern.²⁴ Amans responds to Genius's discussion of Falssemblant with an enthusiastic celebration of his guilt, explaining how he feigns friendship in order to get information about his lady and to keep others from having access to her. Amans is deeply committed to a politics of power. He would find out what he can about those with whom she converses so that he can slander them “in forthringe of myn oghne astat” (II.2048). From a moral point of view his confession illustrates admirably the subtle workings of Envy and its crafty displacements. But his confession also demonstrates the political complexity of Gower's epistemology of make-believe, as the lover intuits evidences and attempts to negotiate what he conceives intuited images of others to be in order to affect the imaginations of his Lady and his rivals, those complex phenomena outside himself that so infect (or seem to) his own imagined structures. This lover is indeed a shaper of politic fictions. Amans acknowledges his preference for his own make-believe, but in doing so he must recognize that others likewise dwell within their own interiority which he, with his antics, hopes to infiltrate, perhaps even own. Genius attempts to modify Amans' aggression by introducing to his ken the ancient story of Deianira and Nessus, a tale that juxtaposes a host of agents vying for control and dominion within the imaginations of others.

In the Tale of Deianira and Nessus, the giant Nessus meets Hercules and Deianira as they come to a river, but don't know how to cross. As Nessus reads their dilemma he feigns good cheer, but in his heart he “thoughte al an other wise” (II.2198). He shows Hercules the wrong way to cross while volunteering to carry Deianira himself, hoping to enjoy her on the far bank while Hercules founders in deep water. But Nessus's interior scenario misfires as Hercules' bow does not, and he is slain by Hercules' long shot. At his death, however, Nessus invades Deianira's mind with another feigned “chiere,” promising her a guarantee of love (his blood-soaked shirt), which he claims will make whoever wears it return the love of the giver. What he has done, of course, is to read Deianira's anxiety and to play upon it. His words prove potent because of her desire: “Who was tho glad bot Deianira. / Hire thoughte hire herte was afyre / Til it was in hire cofre loke, / So that no word therof was spoke” (II.2255-58). Gower's point is nicely articulated here, what with the exchange and storage of goods and hot ideas. But Deianira's eager heart is none so hot as Hercules' soon will be, once he puts on the shirt. He will be so hot as to be consumed by fire. The prefigurative irony through the juxtapositioning of interior and exterior phenomena sets nicely the incongruities of the several individuals' interior readings as they cheer themselves with their private thoughts, heedless of what is going on before their very eyes. Hercules is shortly self-beguiled as he puts Deianira aside to take a new love, Eolen:

                    sche made Hercules so nyce
Upon hir Love and so assote,
That he him clotheth in hire cote
And sche in his was clothed ofte.

(II.2268-71)

As with the fire allusion, so too here the clothing imagery is cozy in its figuration of private enraptures and anticipates the conclusion where Deianira presents to Hercules the charmed shirt, confident in her fantasy that it will restore his love to her. Both Hercules and Deianira are caught up in false-seeming and are self-destroyed through false dress. In balance they are as much victims of their own staged fantasies as they are of Nessus's agenda.²⁵

Genius calls his story of Deianira a “grete conceite” (II.2311); with it he imagines that he will change Amans' behavior. But Genius is less “successful” in his mental invasion than were Nessus, Hercules, or Deianira; his fiction produces no result at all in Amans, except for a momentary feeling. Amans' self-determined infatuation insulates him from all remedies. Genius thought to introduce his conceit so that Amans might “be more war / Of alle tho that feigne chiere” (II.2142-43). Genius is himself feigning “chiere,” of course, but his conceit can guarantee no success, for the listener hears only what he is predisposed to hear. “He that mysconceyveth, he mysdemeth,” May warns Januarie, as she leaps down from the tree (Merchant's Tale IV (E) 2410). Amans claims to be so moved by Deianira's pitiful sorrow that he will make no more feigned cheer. But he has learned nothing. He supplants his anxiety by simply asking to be filled in on what comes next. Amusingly, the next topic is Supplantation, the fifth form of Envy.

Supplantation is a political consequence of Falssemblant. Like Falssemblant, Supplantation uses the rhetoric of make-believe for territorial aggrandizement—“chalk for chese / He changeth with ful litel cost / Wherof an other hath the lost / And he the profit schal receive” (II.2346-49). The Supplanter is a manipulator of forms. Through deceit he hopes to appropriate dominion in the mind of his consort, as the Tale of the False Bachelor exemplifies. But Genius's grand example of all forms of Envy, but especially of Falssemblant and Supplantation, is Cardinal Boniface's displacement of Pope Celestin by placing a “Trompe into his Ere, / Fro hevene as thogh a vois it were” (II.2873-74) to infect his conscience “thurgh fals ymaginacioun” (II.2845).²⁶

As Genius explains these matters with his well-formed stories, he would place in Amans' head fictional forms that address the fantasies of “mislok” and miss-hearing that have usurped the lover's sanity. The effect of Genius's strategy is to create a comic warfare by means of complication. If the fiend would in his duplicity use knowledge to divide and conqueror (I'm thinking of those passages in the “Prologue” to Confessio Amantis where sin is “modor of division”), then so too would Genius immobilize sin's conquest of Amans' fractious mind with further, less harmful, multiplication. Gower's “middel weie” is a most gentle mode of psycho-political infiltration by exemplification, a rhetorical re-orchestration that may not prove what is, or even show what should be, apart from traditional stories. But his bookish fictions revitalize potentialities in precisely the way Nichols says medieval tradition might do, thus making more possible the reordering of Amans' inward territories through a kind of proto-colonialist policy.

At the end of Book VI Gower focuses such pleasant conjurings of his Genius by introducing another form of make-believe—sorcery. In Gower's scheme the discussion of sorcery offers Amans a means of deconstructing potentially harmful mental conjurations in preparation for Genius's sermon on the instruction of the King (i.e., the wise architect of mental phenomena) in Book VII. Here, as prelude to embarking upon his most ingenious device of resurrecting Aristotle to address the hopeless lover, Gower assails the very proposition of the Confessio, namely, the conjuring of images for purposes of mind control. As in Book II, Gower focuses on processes of inception and manipulation of what one hears, sees, and, thus, thinks. At first it may seem odd to the reader that Gower would introduce his discussion of sorcery in a book disposed to Gluttony, at least until we recognize in this anatomy of naturatus amor that the mind is a creature of appetite whose food is images and whose happiest digestion is the processing of images into food for the mind.²⁷ “Thoght” is a “lusti coke” (VI.913-14), Genius says, who ever keeps “hise pottes hote / Of love buillende on the fyr / With fantasie and with desir” (VI.913-15), a cook who works with ingredients supplied by eye and ear. Amans' lady's voice “is to min Ere a lusti foode,” a “deynte feste” (VI.846-48), a food delicate enough to make Amans think he is in Paradise before the Fall (VI.867-72). Certainly, in the delicate habitation of Amans' fantasy, it seems a food sufficient to sustain life.

Genius tells two stories to exemplify the dangers of such mental conjuring and beguilement, the Tale of Ulysses and Telegonus and the Tale of Nectanabus. Both tales demonstrate how “he that wol beguile / Is guiled with the same guile, / And thus the guilour is beguiled” (VI.1379-81). Both narratives focus on the interiority of reading signs. In both, Ulysses and Nectanabus have dreams, but neither sees well how their dreams apply to themselves, largely because of the cluttered foreground and their engrossed desire. Ultimately, both conjurers are destroyed by their children, children who were products of their fantasies.

Nectanabus foresees an attack upon Egypt by an enemy against whom he thinks he has no defense. So, assuming a disguise, he flees to Macedoine. It thus seems he has looked after himself well. But it is not so simple. His sorcery is mainly a matter of self doom (see note 27). Like the fiend in Chaucer's Friar's Tale, who having lost his own form must go in someone else's, the dispossessed Nectanabus, to make up for his own lack, now fiendishly seeks to possess others. He invades Olympias, Queen of Macedoine, first through her eyes, then through her ears, stepping towards the utter invasion of her body in his would-be rape:

The queene on him hire yhe caste,
And knew that he was strange anon:
Bot he behield hire evere in on
Withoute blenchinge of his chere.

(VI.1864-67)

In this instance Olympias would perhaps have been better off had she remembered that “betre is to winke than to loke” (I.384). With Nectanabus's strange image in her mind she summons him to her. He comes equipped with images of power—his astrolabe and instruments for reading the heavens—which assist him through her eyes in establishing his authority. She listens “with gret affeccion” (VI.1898) as he plants in her mind the idea she desires, an idea she will subsequently translate into dream. As she sleeps, Nectanabus makes subtle images to appear before her that seem to confirm the prophesy.

Gower's narrative sequence is particularly interesting here as he takes the reader through the event twice, first outside Olympias's head, and then a second time inside her dream. So it is that guile works, as the beguiled relives the scenario of the beguiler. The Queen worries what King Philippe will think, but Nectanabus takes care of that by beguiling him through a “See foul” (a gull, I presume), who addresses the king, according to Nectanabus's agenda, through images in a dream, then, upon his return, through “facts” (Olympias's pregnancy), and, finally, through a miraculous display of further images at court and in the field—foul seeing, indeed. Like Olympias, the king too is taken in by his eyes and ears (“al this [he] sih and herde” [VI.2247])—impregnated, so to speak, as he too comes to believe. These are miraculous conceptions, indeed.

Nectanabus has, of course, no real power over his victims. His success is utterly dependent upon their willingness to believe, or, rather, to make-believe. He, like the poet Gower, is only a manipulator of illusions. In fact, he is twice removed as an agency of power. He is dependent upon the will of his victim, but also, as Gower presents it, upon the licence of God. Genius acknowledges that “The hihe creatour of thinges, / Which is the king of alle kinges, / Ful many a wonder worldes chance / Let slyden under his suffrance; / Ther wot noman the cause why, / Bot he the which is almyhty” (VI.1789-94). The issue is not simply that God permits weird things to happen that people cannot explain. God has foresight, and thus is able to know and, presumably, to judge accurately. The sorcerer also has a kind of foresight. But he lacks discretion to read well what stands before him. He, despite his preview, is not able to “tak hiede how that it is” (VI.1779) for himself. His conjurings blind him to his own inner welfare in the same way they affect the perceptions of his victims. That is, he follows his desire and, like those he manipulates, imagines it for the best.

This latter point is rather subtle. Nectanabus makes much of his being the agent of Anubus. What he does not perceive is that God permits these things to happen for reasons of his own, a point Gower is insistent upon. That is, Nectanabus's lie—that he is God's agent—is not a lie, though he doesn't know it. He just imagines it through make-believe. In his presentation of the tale Genius is careful to keep the reader aware that although it seems that Nectanabus is the instigator of most of the action, he is not, in fact, the power that enables it to happen. When Nectanabus does his will with Olympias and Olympias conceives, she, we are told, is only “in part deceived” (VI.2085). The point seems to be that God permits this to happen, and Alexander will become a world conqueror. But also, she is perhaps more savvy of Nectanabus's craftiness than she lets on, even though Genius does conclude that she has been beguiled. She admits the entrance. Subsequently, the people of the court, including Nectanabus, are treated to a strange sight as a flying pheasant drops an egg from which a small serpent emerges only to be shrivelled by the burning sun. The event is interpreted as one further prediction of the miraculous birth of Alexander and his death in an alien land. But this latter demonstration, which Nectanabus does not invent, could stand as well for the fate of Nectanabus himself, who likewise dies, ignorant of his fate, in an alien land.

Genius concludes his narrative with an explicit moral: “Lo, what profit him is belaft” (VI.2346). Rather than being a maker of fictions harmful to others, Nectanabus is self-destructive: he becomes an exile from his own land, a thrall rather than a king, a deceiver on behalf of his foolish lust, an invader of others' domains, and he dies an inglorious death. The make-believe that seemed to help him escape proved ultimately, in Gower's view, to be only a kind of escapism. In the words of Chaucer's Miller, “Men may dyen of ymaginacioun, / So depe may impressioun be take” (CT I [A] 3612-13). In Gower, everyone creates his own fate, even in ignorance, as false is mistaken for true.

A fitting contrast to Nectanabus is the figure of Apollonius in Book VIII, a man who is likewise in possession of a great talent, who is forced into exile and who, through his wisdom, obtains new possessions. But Apollonius's politics of possession are quite different from those of Nectanabus. Though he plays upon the ears and eyes of others he meets in an effort to secure himself, he is not a manipulator with the same intent as the sorcerer. Rather than being an invader of others' territory to supplant them, he is more concerned with maintaining his own inner kingdom, which he takes with him. In his ship he brings grain, not chaff. He learns to understand the relativity of his perceptions as Nectanabus does not do. Thus, rather than being destroyed by his own generation, he is mysteriously saved by it. He is restored to his throne and full family, rather than dying from an ignominious fall.

The crucial difference between the two protagonists lies in their attitudes, their “semblant,” toward the people around them as the phenomena is projected in their own heads. In his conclusion Gower seems to be working with the Boethian proposition “that alle thing that is iwist nis nat knowen by his nature propre, but by the nature of hem that comprehenden it” (Boece V.pr.6.2-3). Although Genius tells hundreds of exemplary stories to Amans (and thus hundreds for us as readers), the stories make little impression upon Amans until he wills that they do. That is, Amans cannot be said to be victim of Falssemblant or Supplantation or Sorcery except by his own choices. The phenomena (i.e., that which comes from the outside), for all its pluralism, simply passes by, unknown in its “nature propre.” Amans himself is aware of the problem. At the end of Book VII, even after all Genius's good instruction on kingship and just governance, he responds: “The tales sounen in myn Ere, / Bot yit myn herte is elleswhere, I mai miselve noght restreigne” (VII.5411-13). What matters is what Amans (seer/reader, hearer/audience) chooses to “comprehend.”

This distinction between inside and outside explains why it is that Gower as poet/sorcerer, manipulating so craftily all these fictions with which he hopes to enter the minds of his readers, finally puts his magic aside at the end, when Genius, Venus, Amans, and the stories disappear, and he becomes once again “John Gower” (VIII.2908). All the poet can, in fact, do is to present himself humbly as a man of loving conscience, of “Semblant trew and plein” (II.1911), a supplicant rather than a supplanter, praying charitably for the welfare of the domain he loves—England. Knowing that he cannot effect change in his audience (only they can do that), he dramatizes instead a change from naturatus amor to caritas within himself, and takes another name—John Gower. This new fictive voice, who seems to be none other than the historical man himself, would be a grain supplier whose desire for the good, like that of Apollonius, is made plainly evident. How that desire of this new voice might be accomplished is left hidden, however, not only to the audience of Gower's poem but to Gower himself. We, as readers, are simply left with his riddles which, though lies, are not necessarily false. Their truth lies solely in the audience's capacity to understand them.

This relativistic conclusion of the Confessio Amantis shares much in common with the conclusion of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, or Troilus and Criseyde, or The Book of the Duchess and The Hous of Fame. In fact, it seems likely to me that Gower may have gotten many of his ideas of phenomenology and the relativity of knowing and comprehending from Chaucer. Certainly there was not much of this sort of preoccupation in the Vox Clamantis. The shift away from the fictive voices of Amans and Genius to a fiction in his own “John Gower” voice, after the elaborate instruction on kingship in Book VII, is comparable in its function to the Parson's Tale and Retraction as conclusion to the Canterbury Tales. Although Gower lacks the brilliance of Chaucer in incorporating philosophical matter into fictive comedies (I'm thinking of the ludicrous perspective of Geoffrey dangling from the claw of the eagle, or May pronouncing scripture from the pear tree), his understanding of the relativity of perception to inception and intention is subtle indeed and lies at the heart of the poetic against which the Confessio Amantis is framed. Like Chaucer, Gower's sense of incongruity and irony is highly refined,²⁸ and his awareness of the politics of fiction making, albeit quite different from Chaucer's practice, is, nonetheless, richly sophisticated. Both poets delight in the phenomena of comprehension and celebrate through wit the relativity of what is known. Both recognize how much of what we call judgment hinges upon just such matters. And both, sometimes with a wry wit, turn to faith as the only source of true knowledge—“O Crist,” thoughte I, “that art in blysse, / For fantome and illusion / Me save” (HF 492-94).

The philosophical context of Gower's phenomenology of make-believe was commonplace, especially after the epochal success of Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose. In his revision of the opening section of the Confessio, written after he had completed the poem, he added a passage about the “wyse” man's understanding of the particularities of the world:

                    yit woll I fonde
To wryte and do my bisinesse,
That in som part, so as I gesse,
The wyse man mai ben avised.
For this prologe is so assised
That it to wisdom al belongeth:
What wysman that it underfongeth,
He schal drawe into remembrance
The fortune of this worldes chance,
The which noman in his persone
Mai knowe, bot the god al one.

(“Prol.” 62-72)

The “wysman” intuits wisdom, may draw it into his remembrance, but he does not understand it “in his persone.” The point is like Geoffrey's not knowing “Love in dede” in the Parliament of Fowls (8). Man “mai ben avised,” but that avisement is relative, a configuration of potentialities. Troilus sees “with ful avysement” only after death, when he has moved beyond the “erratik sterres” (TC V.1811-12). On earth, in Fortune's domain, only God may know the “worldes chance.” In mutability's domain people are left with only likenesses stored in their brain. But Gower goes on to assert that “this bok schal afterward ben ended / Of love, which doth many a wonder / And many a wys man hath put under” (“Prol.” 74-76). The “wys man … put under” reminds one of the Lay of Aristotle, with the philosopher on his hands and knees playing horse to the mistress of his fantasy, which is simply a variation of Amans lying in the bush lamenting to Venus—a matter of love in special. But the line also anticipates the conclusion to the Confessio Amantis, where the wise man (once Venus has fled) moves beyond naturatus amor and, in his prayer of submission to God for England's sake, is put under love in another way. There the implication is that although he may not know “this worldes chance … in his persone,” through make-belief (i.e., love of God, who alone knows all), he has the potentiality to participate in full knowledge, even without knowing. In the meantime, we, like Gower, have other potentialities, stories of the past—all lies—with which to fill our brains and amuse our own fantasies—good commerce indeed. Such pastime engages phenomena of the present through traditions of the past in a manner of representation akin to that which permitted Gower to represent old men as new and thereby reopen his culture to the vital changes Stephen Nichols, with his new medievalism, sees as characteristic of that tradition-rich society.²⁹

Notes

1. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa's translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum, ed. M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), I, 41.

2. St Anselm: Basic Writings, trans. S. N. Deane (La Salle, IL: Open Court Classics, 1962), 129-31.

3. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear”—Douai translation. This citation of Matt. 11:15 occurs at the end of Trevisa's initial epigram to his translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus's De proprietatibus rerum and functions as the rhetorician's admonition to read well.

4. Chaucer's translation, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 466. The Boece in this edition is edited by Ralph Hanna III and Traugott Lawler.

5. “The New Medievalism: Tradition and Discontinuity in Medieval Culture,” in The New Medievalism, ed. Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 1-26. The lines quoted are found on pp. 1-2.

6. Nichols, “The New Medievalism,” 2.

7. Nichols draws particularly on the opening chapter of Brian Stock, Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). “One of the features of traditionalistic action is that norms are consciously selected from the fund of traditional knowledge in order to serve present needs. … Viewed in the light of their [the traditional models'] common features, they constitute one of the period's strongest endogenous forces for change” (38-39).

8. Nichols, 10.

9. This medieval representation of animality's challenge to social ratiocination is a topic that bears on fourteenth-century English intellectual topology, not just in such discourse as John Gower's Tale of Adrian and Bardus or his story of Nebuchadnezzar's instruction as an ox, but in English “Breton Lays” like Sir Orfeo, where the king leaves his throne to dwell with beasts until he learns to see in a new way, or Sir Gowther, where the monster becomes the saint of civility through discourse with animals as he's fed by dogs, or in the Middle English adaptation of Chrétien's Ywain and his lion. That is, in the latter fourteenth century, English writers challenge human rationality from all sides.

10. See, for example, my “Chaucer and the Nominalist Questions,” Speculum 53 (1978): 745-60; Judith Ferster, Chaucer on Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); J. Stephen Russell, The English Dream Vision: Anatomy of a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988); and Robert R. Edwards, The Dream of Chaucer: Representation and Reflection in the Early Narratives (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989). See also Peggy Knapp, Chaucer and the Social Contest (London: Routledge, 1990), on Chaucer's exploration of boundaries between traditions and insight.

11. Kurt Olsson, John Gower and The Structures of Conversion: A Reading of the Confessio Amantis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992).

12. At the risk of “doing the magpie” (the phrase is David Aers', in “Medievalists and Deconstruction: An Exemplum,” in From Medieval to Medievalism, ed. John Simons [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992]), my use of the term “phenomenology” is deliberately anachronistic. The Greek word phaenomenon, meaning ‘to show’ or ‘make apparent,’ is, according to the OED, first derived into French as phénomène (1570), and then into English in Bacon (1625) as a term for external data which the mind attempts to accommodate. Phenomenology, the science of observing the mind's processes of intuiting and generalizing, is a late eighteenth-century designation that is juxtaposed to ontology. That distinction is not unlike the juxtaposition of nominalism and realism, insofar as it is restricted to a mental science. Phenomenology is particularly useful to the medievalist as a term because of its distinction between phenomena inside and outside the brain, and its focus on intuition and appearance, these being precisely the considerations of medieval epistemology as it is commonly explored. My magpie would borrow the term and its etymology, not the readings of Wittgenstein and Husserl as well.

13. Piers Plowman, B Prol. 17-19.

14. De Arca Noe Morali, I.2, Hugh of St. Victor: Selected Spiritual Writings, translated by a religious of C.S.M.V. with introduction by Aelred Squire, O.P. (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 46. As quests in understanding, De Arca Noe Morali and Piers Plowman share many common concerns. I recognize that the juxtaposition of Hugh and Langland might be construed as more “doing of the magpie,” but such elision works well, it seems to me, not as an attempt to universalize ideas but rather to juxtapose phenomena in a manner whereby tradition butts in to open up and clarify the potentialities of representation.

15. A good fourteenth-century literary example of the relativity of brain-knowledge may be found in Chaucer's Hous of Fame, where Geoffrey, caught up in the images in his head, cries out for divine help to save him from “fantome and illusion” (492-94), and, subsequently, in a take-off on Dante's celebration of his powers of thought, ridicules through hyperbole the great capacity of the brain (523-28). For discussion of Chaucer's play with mental relativities, see my “Chaucer and the Nominalist Questions.”

16. My allusion in this aside is to Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, line 8, where the implication seems to be that humankind knows love only in fantasy, rather than in deed, despite the sore strokes Cupid so insistently inflicts upon us as individuals.

17. Noah's Ark I.5 (Squire, 51); emphasis my own.

18. The Cloud of Unknowing, ch. vi, ed. Phyllis Hodgson, EETS o.s. 218 (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 25-26, emphasis my own.

19. The allusion is to Chaucer's Franklin's Tale, where Dorigen sees the crux of her problems as lying in nature rather than in her comprehension and scolds God for making “this werk unresonable” (V [F] 872).

20. Confessio Amantis, adjacent to lines I.9-26. All references to Confessio Amantis are taken from The English Works of John Gower, in 2 volumes, ed. G. C. Macaulay, EETS e.s. 81-82 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1900; rpt. 1957), and are cited hereafter by book and line number within the context of my argument. Volume I includes Prologue to V.1970; volume II, V.1971 to the end.

21. Adjacent to CA I.59-60.

22. See Olsson, 63-72, for an excellent discussion of Amans' vulnerability through his eyes and ears.

23. Kevin Brownlee, “The Problem of Faux Semblant: Language, History, and Truth in the Roman de la Rose,” in The New Medievalism, ed. Brownlee, Brownlee, and Nichols (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 253-71.

24. In working through this idea I have come to a renewed admiration for R. A. Shoaf's study of the language of commerce in Chaucer's poetic, Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word: Money, Images, and Reference in Late Medieval Poetry (Norman, Oklahoma: Pilgrim, 1983).

25. This proposition is in keeping with Gower's notion that people shape their own fates: “Each man shapes for himself his own destiny, incurs his own lot according to his desire, and creates his own fate (fata). In fact, a free mind voluntarily claims what it does for its various deserts in the name of fate (sortis). In truth, fate (sors) ought always to be handmaiden to the mind, from which the name itself which will be its own is chosen” (Vox Clamantis, II.iv.203-8, in The Major Latin Works of John Gower, trans. Stockton [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962], 102). The idea lies at the heart of Gower's treatment of sorcery at the end of CA VI and reflects his notion of the ethical implications of the individual's isolation within his own interiority.

26. It is perhaps noteworthy that several of Genius's key exemplifications in Book II are taken from chronicles—the tales of Constance, Celestine, Constantine, and Silvester. That is, they are “histories.” Gower ends Book II, as he had done Book I, with a summary tale that ties felicitously together all aspects of Envy: As an antidote to the dispossessions effected by Envy, Genius tells the Tale of Constantine and Sylvester, where conscience, guided by charity and pity, heals the Emperor's leprous deformity to establish a healthy community, where all parts pray for rather than prey upon each other. But unlike the Tale of Three Questions at the end of Book I, in this wrap-up the voice of history intrudes like an arctic chill, as Genius recalls the evil effects upon the Christian Church of the donation of Constantine. Tradition, which had enabled Gower to achieve his rosy fiction of Constantine's cure, simultaneously introduces the voice of complaint for which Gower had become famous in his Vox Clamantis, which pipes up now even through his more courtly Genius as a chilly warning to the reader of how tricky the commerce of the world and language can be amongst greedy people.

27. See R. F. Yeager on a tradition linking necromancy, sorcery, and witchcraft as sins of the mouth, and, thus, as subdivisions of gluttony, in John Gower's Poetic: The Search for a New Arion (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), 187-95. Gower's phenomenological approach shifts the focus from mouth to brain, but still in terms of lusty ingestion.

28. I have recently explored the subtleties of Gower's use of irony in “The Problematics of Irony in Gower's Confessio Amantis,” Mediaevalia 15 (1993): 207-29.

29. An early version of this essay was presented at the 1991 International Congress at Kalamazoo. A revised version was presented at Pennsylvania State University in the fall of 1992. I am grateful to Eve Salisbury for discussion of “the new medievalism” and to Gerald Bond for comments on the general goals of the essay.