Fictions of Witness in the "Confessio Amantis."

Author/Editor
Fredell, Joel.

Title
Fictions of Witness in the "Confessio Amantis."

Published
Fredell, Joel. Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis. The New Middle Ages. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. xvi, 324 pp.

Review
Fredell's "Fictions of Witness" studies the manuscripts of the "Confessio Amantis"--the Latin as well as the English portions, along with their layouts, marginalia, illustrations, and accompanying texts--and interprets how the presentation reflects not only the supervision and production of the manuscripts, but the political conditions and intentions to which these manuscripts bear witness. Fredell discusses the dates of the manuscripts--an important issue throughout his study--against the events and chronology of Lancastrian usurpation and the subsequent transfer of power from Henry IV to Henry V. "Since the earliest surviving manuscripts of the 'Confessio' may date from after the deposition of Richard," Fredell tells us, "we must consider the effects of Lancastrian patronage and ideology for all elements of the poem, Ricardian and Henrician" (129). Fredell negotiates, but does not wholly resolve, several important uncertainties covered by the qualifying phrase "'may' date from after the deposition" (my emphasis added here), though he goes on later to offer what he calls "a clear timeline of development and popularity" for the "public 'Confessio'," treating Henrician material first and linking it with "Lancastrian aspirations," but also with "Gower's three-pronged claims to laureate status in the early days of Henry IV." In Fredell's timeline the Ricardian version, as we have it in the manuscripts, dates from after the Henrician version--after "Henry IV began succumbing to a series of health crises" in 1405 (261)--and reflects the preferences of a Guildhall group of scribes (John Marchaunt foremost among them) who set the poem "in a distant Ricardian love court rather than among the immediacies of Henry's political problems" (262) as part of a larger program of promoting English literature by Gower, Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate. Fredell later complicates the notion of a simple distinction between Ricardian and Henrician versions of CA by arguing that some portions of the work (e.g., the "Parliament of Exemplary Lovers," 8.2440ff.), usually assumed to be "Ricardian" originals are more likely to have been written by Gower at or about the same time as he produced the "Henrician" revision--"that the whole great poem we have . . . may be the product of . . . the late 1390s and after" (267), labelled by Fredell the "late-state model" (263), a phrase that seems to conjoin historical, thematic, and textual concerns uncomfortably, and one used to call into question whether the poem ever circulated in a form that preceded it (279). Extracted from "Fictions of Witness" in this way, my reduction of Fredell's timeline does an injustice to the breadth of his study, which integrates aspects of Gower's life and death, wide-ranging events and trends in English political history, and numerous questions of codicology and manuscript study. The textual history of the CA is not the fundamental concern here, but Fredell criticizes G. C. Macaulay's three-recension theory at length (following Peter Nicholson and Derek Pearsall) as it underlies so much traditional (and inferential) understanding of Gower's political views--which Fredell largely anchors, instead, in interpretations of Gower's brief poems and marginalia that frame and/or accompany the body of CA (and VC) in manuscripts. These interpretations support Fredell's somewhat fuzzy idea of Gower's "laureate status"—the term here associated with John Fisher's grouping of four Gower poems as "laureate"—leaving unclear what this "status" may have entailed in the very early Lancastrian court (as do other studies; but see Robert J. Meyer-Lee, "Poets and Power" [2007] on Lydgate's importance in the application and understanding of the term, a caution against applying it too early in the fifteenth century). Fredell's timeline, however, does make clear that the extant "Confessios" (a plural he uses recurrently, sometimes confusingly: 2 versions? three recensions? forty-nine manuscripts?) are, for him, propaganda for this court rather than prophecy of Richard's demise, as some followers of the Macaulay theory would have it. Fredell bases his most detailed dating of the CA manuscripts on examination of illustrations and layout (a discussion lavishly accompanied by more than 100 color reproductions of pages and details), relying heavily on Kathleen L. Scott's "Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390–1490" (1996). He includes cautions about overly specific dates and dating techniques generally but, it must be said, he treats dates less cautiously at times--posing dates, qualifying them, and then reprising them or generally taking them for granted when pursuing his political readings and structuring his timeline. His provocative title prompts a need to understand how literary works pose, or can be posed, as "artifacts" of, or as "fictional witnesses" to (both are used throughout), particular political outlooks or attitudes, so dating is important to the entire study--more precise dating, perhaps, than is possible when based on approximations from manuscript illustrations reinforced by thematic interpretation. Nevertheless, this intricate study offers fresh, provocative assessments of the manuscripts and why they were produced when they were, informed by capacious knowledge, generally thorough attention to relevant scholarship, and sensitivity to historical context. It is a big task, one well worth doing, and one that might have been done better with tighter editing and proofing--better overall organization, more sharply defined terminology, less repetition, fewer rhetorical questions, unheeded qualifications, and more careful attention to relatively minor issues of execution, such as gaffs in layout, e.g., pp. 54 and 151; "Arial" for Arion(?), p. 75; residual mark-up, e.g., "'GowerAIGower'" and "MarchauntAIMarchaunt," p. 220; bolded "and," p. 160; LGW for LGM abbreviating Scott's work on several occasions, e.g., 184n26, 220n16, 221n17, and 244n52; etc.[MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1]

Date
2023

Gower Subjects
Confessio Amantis
Minor Latin Poetry
Manuscripts and Textual Studies
Biography of Gower