Venus' Owne Clerk: Chaucer's Debt to the "Confessio Amantis."
- Author/Editor
- Lindeboom B. W.
- Title
- Venus' Owne Clerk: Chaucer's Debt to the "Confessio Amantis."
- Published
- Lindeboom B. W. Venus' Owne Clerk: Chaucer's Debt to the Confessio Amantis. (Amsterdam: Academic Publishers; Open Humanities Press; Editions Rodopi B.V., 2007).
- Review
- Lindeboom takes up the question of why Chaucer would write the prologues and tales of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner as both confessions of personal sinfulness but "encompassing all of the Seven Deadly Sins" (1). His answer (of 460 pages) can be summarized thus: contrary to John Fisher's guess that Gower and Chaucer were friends, they were in fact rivals, and for a period of "about a year" (i.e., 1390-91) antagonists in a literary "duel," encouraged by the Ricardian court, even perhaps judged by Richard and/or Anne of Bohemia: " . . . coming and going of a brief court entertainment, whose effectuation took close to one year, during which time Chaucer used part of the 'Canterbury Tales' to put Gower in his place" (450). The intricate revisions Lindeboom describes include rewriting/redirecting tales (especially the Parson's along with the Wife's and the Pardoner's), recasting the Man of Law character, his prologue and tale--much of which takes place in CT Group II--and then, once the "court entertainment" was complete with Chaucer the clear winner, much revision was shuffled to return to "business as usual." The "debt" Chaucer owes to Gower, highlighted in the title, is essentially an important element of high seriousness enforced on the CT by the need to counter Gower on his home ground. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2]
- Date
- 2007
- Gower Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Influence and Later Allusion
Biography of Gower