Reading Gower in a Manuscript Culture: Latin and English in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis.

Author/Editor
Emmerson, Richard K.

Title
Reading Gower in a Manuscript Culture: Latin and English in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis.

Published
Emmerson, Richard K.. "Reading Gower in a Manuscript Culture: Latin and English in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999), pp. 143-186.

Review
Macaulay's edition of CA, however useful for the study of the text of the poem, "masks the complexity of the manuscript presentation of the text and thus . . . the variety of ways in which Gower was received by his contemporaries and later-fifteenth-century readers" (p. 146). Emmerson sets out to remedy this fault by studying the manuscripts more closely, to see particularly how they "encouraged different readings of the 'Confessio Amantis' and different representations of Gower as auctor" (p. 147). He focuses on two aspects of their layout: their arrangement of the Latin apparatus that accompanies the English text and their placement of the first two illuminations. In the first part of his essay he summarizes recent studies of the functions of the Latin apparatus, in five categories, adding the running titles and table of contents to the four categories described by Pearsall (1989). The manuscripts differ in the placement of the passages that Macaulay called "Latin summaries" and that Emmerson refers to as "Latin prose commentary," some placing them in the margin, some in the text column, and some omitting them altogether; and in the color of the ink (red or black) used for the apparatus generally. In the table at the end of his essay, Emmerson identifies the relevant features of each of the twenty illuminated manuscripts of the poem. He notes that one color ink is generally chosen for all of the Latin throughout and he observes that the placement of the "commentary" varies according to recension. He postulates two large groups: the "revised first recension," "second-recension," and "third recension" copies place the Latin commentary in the margins and write all Latin in black; the "unrevised" and "intermediate first recension" copies plus some "transitional" copies of the "second recension" place the commentary in the text column and present the Latin in red. The manuscripts also fall into two groups according to the placement of the two introductory miniatures, though rather less perfectly. There are two versions of the miniature of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, one showing just the statue (which occurs only in copies of the "unrevised" version of the "first recension") and the more familiar one showing Nebuchadnezzar himself in bed which appears in all other copies and which must therefore represent the "original design" (p. 167). The manuscripts of the "third recension" uniformly place the miniature at the beginning of the Prologue, while most "first recension" copies reduce it in size and place it later in the text, near the beginning of the account of the dream. (The "second recension" is mixed.) Similarly, the illumination showing Amans kneeling before Genius appears at the beginning of Book 1 in all copies of "recension three,,” while it is placed near line 1:202 in the copies of “recension one.” From this variety of forms, Emmerson argues, we can deduce the different ways in which Gower’s text was received by its earliest readers. The earliest illustrated manuscripts, he argues, were intended for “aural reception” and for public reading: the text column contains only the portions that would be read aloud (including the English poem, of course, but also the Latin epigrams), while the commentary and other apparatus, which was not meant to be performed, was relegated to the margins for the “prelector’s” use alone. The large initial miniatures, moreover, “could be shown to the audience at the beginning of a reading” (p. 175), and would serve to introduce the two major themes of the poem. Later copies suggest that aural reception continued into the mid-fifteenth century, but that there were two other forms of reception as well. The copies in which the Latin has disappeared suggest that CA “was read as an essentially English collection of tales” (p. 176), while the “first recension” copies in which the Latin is written in red and the commentary moved into the text column present Gower as “a highly Latinate poet, . . . a scholarly protohumanist” (p. 177). Emmerson concludes his essay with an examination of the two most fully illustrated copies of the poem. One emphasizes the English character of the poem, he argues, and the other represents the culmination of the presentation of Gower as a protohumanist. Emmerson presents a great deal of information about the manuscripts of CA in accessible form; the table at the end is particularly helpful, as far as it goes. He also provides nine very useful photographs illustrating the variety of manuscript presentations of the poem. In other respects, however, this essay an exasperating mix of weakly supported propositions and missed opportunities. Why, for instance, is the table showing the arrangement of the Latin text limited to the illuminated copies of the poem? To be fair, Emmerson refers to the non-illuminated copies in his discussion but for most he relied upon Macaulay’s descriptions (see note 43) rather than examining them personally, which not only diminishes his credence but also draws attention to the fact that most of the information that he presents is already available in other forms. In his attempt to organize the manuscripts into groups, Emmerson passes over a great many of the details of presentation of individual copies--the fact that in Bodley 902, for instance (which provides his figure 1), the scribe has written not just most of the commentary but also some of the Latin verses in the margin. He is also less than compelling in his presentation of his views of the relations among the different versions of the poem. He claims at the beginning of his essay (p. 145) that he retains Macaulay’s classification of the manuscripts into “recensions” only as a “useful organizational tool,” but it becomes clear that he has also silently adopted all of Macaulay’s views on the development of the text. On page 178, for instance, he refers to a manuscript that Macaulay identified as “unrevised” as containing “the very first version of the Confessio,” though in the very same sentence he goes on to quote from an essay by the reviewer, the main point of which is that this was not the first version at all but a product of scribal corruption. He comes close to the same conclusion himself when he notes that the same group of manuscripts do not seem to contain the “original” version of the illustration of Nebuchadnezzar, but he doesn’t observe the contradiction. Similarly, he adopts Macaulay’s view that Fairfax represents Gower’s “final” intention for his poem (pp. 152 and 170), but the only evidence that he presents for this conclusion is that others have defended it. As for his argument that the early copies of CA were intended for “aural reception,” the best that can be said is that it is purely speculative. We have no other evidence of Gower’s poem being read aloud, particularly not in the court; each of the features that Emmerson points to could easily have some other explanation; and Emmerson makes no effort to compare the manuscripts that he refers to to contemporary copies of other works, either those that we know were read aloud or those that we know weren’t. This essay will be widely read because of its location, but it needs to be used with a great deal of caution. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 19.1.]

Date
1999

Gower Subjects
Confessio Amantis
Manuscripts and Textual Studies