Remembering Antiquity in the Castilian "Confessio Amantis."
- Author/Editor
- Pascual-Argente, Clara.
- Title
- Remembering Antiquity in the Castilian "Confessio Amantis."
- Published
- Pascual-Argente, Clara. "Remembering Antiquity in the Castilian Confessio Amantis." In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception. Ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager. Publications of the John Gower Society X. (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014). Pp. 153-64.
- Review
- The Castilian "Confesión del amante" is a collection of classical materials that, for Pascual-Argente, represents "the European secular nobility's cultural capital and collective memory" (154) and competing ideas about the classical past. The scribe of the unique manuscript introduces his table of contents with Gower's Latin gloss concerning how bees assemble their honeycomb from various flowers, emphasizing the book as a compilation: a memorial work that selects from and preserves antiquity. Refashioned stories concerning Alexander the Great and the Trojan War would have appealed to "literary circles close to the royal court" (160). Castilian aristocrats were also interested in classical rhetoric and secular ethics. The CA may have influenced later Castilian works such as "El Victorial," a chivalric biography written by Gutierre Díaz de Games in the 1430s, being especially relevant for the Castilian court during the first half of the fifteenth century, when "the debate about knightly access to classical culture was at its most heated" (164). [MPK. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2]
- Date
- 2014
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations
Influence and Later Allusion