The Landowner's Book of Courtly Love: Languages of Lordship and the "Confessio amantis."

Author/Editor
Kendall, Elliot. 

Title
The Landowner's Book of Courtly Love: Languages of Lordship and the "Confessio amantis."

Published
Kendall, Elliot. The Landowner's Book of Courtly Love: Languages of Lordship and the "Confessio amantis." Ph.D. Dissertation.  University of Oxford, 2003. Dissertation Abstracts International C70.36. Abstract accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

Review
"John Gower's 'Confessio amantis' is a text deeply informed by concepts of the late fourteenth-century aristocratic household and the social structures it supported. This thesis offers an interpretation of Gower's poem guided by the poem's own language of the great household and its intersection with contemporary texts within this discursive territory. These texts include parliamentary petitions on livery and maintenance, the appeal and impeachments of the Merciless Parliament of 1388, vision poetry of Chaucer and Sir John Clanvowe, and household administrative records. Many critical readings of the 'Confessio' deploy concepts of the political too narrow adequately to illuminate the work's historical situation of production and use. I attempt to locate the 'Confessio' in an aristocratic milieu of magnates and landed gentry. The generic strands blended in Gower's text evince an aristocratic readership (designated and actual), and register a bifurcation of interests within this readership. This splitting, and the literary themes and generic expectations which reflect it, are examined under headings of the 'courtly' and the 'traditionalist.' The 'Confessio' functions as an appropriation of ephemeral, exclusive courtly poetry, endeavouring to refashion it as edifying and socially (that is, aristocratically) responsible, or traditionalist. Evidence of textual usage, including manuscript provenance and Gower's own revisions, suggests accommodation and resistance to this transformation. Theories of symbolic and material exchange, meanwhile, align one-sided 'magnificence' and asymmetrically ordered 'reciprocity' with courtliness and traditionalism respectively. The representation of household-based social relations and exchanges in Genius and Amans's confessional dialogue, in its petitionary frame (which sequesters penance to lay, seigneurial authority), and in the exemplary tales supports the poem's traditionalist politics. It also aligns these politics with the interest in the privileges of a landed community (and magnate responsibility for them) which is manifest in contemporary parliamentary texts. Gower's discussion of kingship, like aspects of these texts, discloses a slippage towards magnificence which casts into relief the tension between reciprocity and hierarchy inherent in traditionalist, reciprocalist discourse."

Date
2003

Gower Subjects
Confessio Amantis
Backgrounds and General Criticism