ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the study of the two Iberian manuscripts of the Confessio (Portuguese and Castilian) has revolved – and largely continues to do so – around some issues. The volume described by Pérez Bayer in 1788 is a modest, unadorned, fifteenth-century manuscript at the Royal Library of the Monastery of El Escorial (RBME), MS g-II-19, and contains a single work, the Castilian translation of the Confessio Amantis. John Gower's "carefully designed layers of textual interaction in the Confessio Amantis" are lost in the Castilian and Portuguese texts. The study of the Portuguese manuscript of the Confessio Amantis, or Livro do Amante, has followed a very different course. The Portuguese translation is in a paper manuscript, a big quarto, also unostentatious, though somewhat more carefully designed than the Castilian. Faccon has noted, without follow-up, certain features seemingly common to the ornamented capitals in the Portuguese manuscript and others produced in the fifteenth century – a provocative observation worthy of exploration.
