Le Code Amoureux d'après la Confessio Amantis de Gower et le Troilus de Chaucer
- Author/Editor
- Crépin, André
- Title
- Le Code Amoureux d'après la Confessio Amantis de Gower et le Troilus de Chaucer
- Published
- Crépin, André. "Le Code Amoureux d'après la Confessio Amantis de Gower et le Troilus de Chaucer." In La 'Fin'Amor' dans la culture féodale. Actes du colloque du Centre d'Etudes Médiévales de l'Université de Picardie Jules Verne; Amiens, mars 1991. Ed. UNSPECIFIED. Greifswald: Reineke, 1994, pp. 67-72.
- Review
- This very brief article considers CA and T&C as illustrations of the "code of love." "The lover must know how to speak of love; . . . The lover and his lady most know how to compose poems and letters, to sing, to dance; . . ." etc. In CA, one discovers the requirements of this code by finding the opposites of the vices that Genius condemns. Not only do the two poems share this code, but they both depict an unhappy love, and both also end in a somewhat unexpected fashion: in CA, contrary to the confessor's recommendations of patience and hope, Venus banishes Amans from the domain of courtly love literature by identifying him as the aging John Gower, bringing the poet into the text in flesh and blood as Chaucer does in his "Retraction." Crépin concludes with a note of disagreement with Katherine Heinrich's argument (in The Myths of Love [1990]), that medieval writers drew upon classical story exclusively for tales of amorous folly. There is too much variety in the interpretation of classical heroes and heroines in medieval poems, and Gower himself is able to use these characters as illustrations of Christian truths. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.2]
- Date
- 1994
- Gower Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
- Confessio Amantis