ABSTRACT
In the Confessio Amantis, John Gower writes a very different kind of visionary text, turning to English and to the secular genre of romance – a genre the innate fluidity of which offered him considerable creative potential. Yet the book he has written remains deeply enmeshed in the two forces of lust and lore, and balanced between love and loss. Gower's exploration of feeling, like Chaucer's, is highly sophisticated. Gower's imaginative fiction looks towards the novel as well as back to ancient romance. The disordering force of love is characterized repeatedly as supernatural, an enchantment, and it is fitting that the dream vision frame should center on an encounter with the goddess of love. Transformation is connected in still another prominent group of tales with the theme of testing, which leads to moral lessons concerning gentillesse – also an archetypal romance pattern.
