The Authority of Impersonation: Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and the "Secretum Secretorum."
- Author/Editor
- Walling, Amanda.
- Title
- The Authority of Impersonation: Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and the "Secretum Secretorum."
- Published
- Walling, Amanda. "The Authority of Impersonation: Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and the 'Secretum Secretorum'." Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 47.3 (2016): 343-64.
- Review
- Walling investigates the "paradox" that, "while Gower was clearly intrigued by the possibilities of Aristotelian pedagogy, very little of the 'Confessio Amantis' is based directly on the 'Secretum secretorum'" (343). Gower "specifically avoids dramatizing or voicing Aristotle as a character," using instead Nectanabus as a "darker alternative" to Aristotle (358) "to emphasize the distancing effect in his handling of Aristotle"--a strategy which shows "the complexity of his literary personae and his understanding of the pedagogical and psychological workings of literary fictions" (344), as well as, Walling suggests, "his misgivings about the risks and the efficacy of offering counsel to [Richard II]" (353). She briefly traces the origins and spread of the "Secretum secretorum" from the Orient through Roger Bacon and thence into the mainstream of Western European literature (345-46). Walling is reluctant to see Gower using the "Secretum" to forge a "speculum principis," as has been suggested by many; instead, he diffuses his own voice through several characters (rather than adopting an Aristotelian one), and provides Nectanabus as an alternative. In the conflicting pairing of Alexander's two counselors, Walling finds important evidence of Gower's strategy: "Gower's negotiation of the opposing literary poles of Aristotle and Nectanabus in the final books of the 'Confessio Amantis' helps us to see the drama of pedagogy at the poem's core, and the struggle to establish a way of relating to received textual authority that can plausibly lead to moral and psychological transformations" (364). What the CA ultimately offers readers, whether king or commoner, is "mediated access to Aristotelian knowledge for readers or students who wish to seek it, the poem's most effective lesson is its dramatization of self-transformation in the pursuit of knowledge . . . not an encyclopedic treatise of readily digested political wisdom, but a meditation on how to seek out wisdom and self-realization" (367). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]
- Date
- 2016
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations