The Merchant Richard Hill and His Book: Using "Confessio Amantis" Tales to Negotiate the Spiritual Marketplace in Henrician London

Author/Editor
Harper, Alison.

Title
The Merchant Richard Hill and His Book: Using "Confessio Amantis" Tales to Negotiate the Spiritual Marketplace in Henrician London

Published
Harper, Alison. "The Merchant Richard Hill and His Book: Using 'Confessio Amantis' Tales to Negotiate the Spiritual Marketplace in Henrician London." In Kristin M.S. Bezio and Scott Oldenburg, eds. Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021). Pp. 32-49.

Review
Richard Hill was a merchant active in London in the early years of the Reformation. His book is Oxford, Balliol College MS 354, "an extensive and varied collection of texts, relating to medicine, household management, business interests, and the practices of Christian religion" along with fourteen tales from the "Confessio Amantis" (32). In four of these--what Harper calls "The Poor Leper" (i.e., "Dives and Pauper"), "Adrian and Bardus," "Constantine and Sylvester," and "King Midas"--Harper identifies "an ongoing discussion regarding the precise value of charity for religious purposes," a virtue she associates with Catholicism (32). Hill purposely altered what he excerpted in various ways (e.g., removing the framing conversation of Genius and Amans) with the intent, Harper argues, "of using these texts for spiritual guidance" (33). Specifically, Hill was a rich man seeking to secure a heavenly afterlife through acts of charity, the theme Harper finds running throughout Gower's tales, suggesting their interest to Hill. However, "during the time that Hill's book was written, charity and other 'good works' were starting to become disassociated from salvation." Thus, "while the majority" of the CA tales here "suggest that he saw the value of using charity as a means of preparing for death, they do not present an unambiguously orthodox Catholic position, but rather an idiosyncratic take on a centuries-old problem that was a mainstay of traditional Catholicism" (43). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2]

Date
2021

Gower Subjects
Influence and Later Allusion
Confessio Amantis
Manuscripts and Textual Studies