ABSTRACT
Two very different traditions of late-medieval writing are combined in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis: ecclesiastical treatises on confession, and courtly love poems stemming from the Roman de la Rose, especially the dits amoreux of such French poets as Guillaume de Machaut and Jean Froissart. Gower’s debt to the fourteenth-century French dits amoreux has been generally neglected. English critics commonly treat these poems as mere fricassees of the Roman de la Rose, preferring to look in the great thirteenth-century poem itself for the origins of Gower’s courtly manner. The artist of MS Bodley 294 found the right pictorial equivalent, suggested, for Amans’ verbal portrait of himself as a lover. Rightly objecting to the suggestion that Gower thought of the lover’s advanced age only at the last minute, he maintains that it is ‘expressed explicitly and implicitly throughout the Confessio Amantis’.
