Gower's Revisions in the Confessio Amantis.
- Author/Editor
- Nicholson, Peter
- Title
- Gower's Revisions in the Confessio Amantis.
- Published
- Nicholson, Peter. "Gower's Revisions in the Confessio Amantis." Chaucer Review 19 (1984), pp. 123-143. ISSN 0009-2002
- Review
- The three groups into which Macauley divided the manuscripts of the first recension do not represent three stages of the author's revision but scribal corruption instead, and the version that Mcauley considered fully revised was actually Gower's original. This conclusion has a number of consequences for the study of the poem. Since MS B, which contains the Ricardian dedication but the revised conclusion, draws its opening from a late and corrupt (rather than an early, "unrevised") manuscript of recension one, B is not derived from an author's working copy in the midst of revision, as Macauley believed, but is instead an editorial composite, combining separate manuscript traditions into a single continuous text. Macauley's beliefs about the order of composition of "recension two" an "recension three" are therefore brought into question. [PN. Copyright the John Gower Society. JGN 4.2]
- Date
- 1984
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
- Manuscripts and Textual Studies