Gower's Early Revisions Revisited.
- Author/Editor
- Nicholson, Peter.
- Title
- Gower's Early Revisions Revisited.
- Published
- Nicholson, Peter. "Gower's Early Revisions Revisited." Journal of the Early Book Society 25 (2022): 185-99.
- Review
- As Nicholson points out in a prefatory note (185), his essay responds to Derek Pearsall, "Early Revision in the Text of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,'" JEBS 24, continuing a conversation interrupted by Pearsall's death. "The question before us," Nicholson notes, "is whether the passages in Books 5, 6, and 7 that distinguish MSS S [San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS EL 26.A.17] and P [Princeton University, Firestone Library, Robert H. Taylor Collection, Medieval MS 5] were in Gower's earliest manuscript and later deleted, as Derek Pearsall has proposed, or later additions to as text more like that of A [Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902], as Macaulay presumed" (187). Nicholson comes down on the Macaulay side: ". . . every indication that we find either in the text or in the manuscripts does point to the same conclusion: that Gower revised his poem by making short, selective additions to what was still a fluid portion of the text, and that as Macaulay believed, the shortest of the surviving versions is thus the earliest" (196). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2]
- Date
- 2022
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Manuscripts and Textual Studies