Rethinking the Recensions of the Confessio Amantis.

Author/Editor
Lindeboom, Wim

Title
Rethinking the Recensions of the Confessio Amantis.

Published
Lindeboom, Wim. "Rethinking the Recensions of the Confessio Amantis." Viator 40 (2009), pp. 319-48. ISSN 0083-5897

Review
Lindeboom's long essay marks another attempt to make sense of the confusing evidence concerning the dating, the revision, and the publication of the "Confessio Amantis." Because he moves back and forth from one question to another, it is impossible to summarize his essay point by point, but one can pick out some of the main threads. Lindeboom reconsiders the significance of the dates that appear in the text and marginal notes of the different versions of the poem; he re-examines the evidence supporting Macaulay's classification of the many surviving copies into different "recensions;” he offers some new suggestions about the relation between the various alterations and revisions in the poem, the political events of the last two decades of the fourteenth century, and Gower’s (presumably) shifting relations with his patrons; and he reconsiders the implications of Gower’s suggestion to Chaucer, which appears in some versions of the poem, that he offer his own “testament of love.” Much of his essay is devoted to dismantling what he considers the “preconceptions” (p. 348) of Macaulay and Fisher, and many of his criticisms, particularly with regard to the conclusions that they and others have drawn from the various dates that appear in the margins, have been stated before and are worth consideration. In many cases, however, it is difficult to say that the alternative views that he offers are any less speculative. He dismisses as improbable, for instance, the notion that Gower could have become disenchanted with Richard II in the early 1390s, as Fisher maintained, but he makes much of a supposed hostility between Richard and his cousin Henry during the same period, which, he insists, would have made it impossible for Gower to consider dedicating his poem to Henry at this time (331). He also argues that dedicating a poem to Henry that contains a long discussion of the education of a king (which is how he characterizes the purpose of Book 7) would have been “an essentially seditious political statement” (337) if Richard were still king. He then sees hints of a threat to Chaucer in the invitation to write a “testament of love,” a comment that he interprets as a reminder of the fate of the unfortunate Thomas Usk, author of a poem of that name, who was beheaded in 1388 (338-44). Lindeboom’s arguments lead him to suggest that portions of the poem, such as the address to Chaucer, date from earlier than has been supposed, but that others, such as all of Book 7, may be late additions, inserted only when Henry had become king. At the same time, he declares it “reasonable to assume” (326) and “in all likelihood” true (344) that the poem was intended to be presented orally long before it was circulated in manuscript form. This inference, however, is based on the analogy of arguments made about the "Canterbury Tales" (a work much more easily divisible into individual “performances” than is the CA) rather than on any evidence offered from the CA itself. (In disagreeing with Coleman over Henry IV’s knowledge of Latin in his note 31, Lindeboom complicates his case further by, in effect, dismissing one of the strongest arguments on which her case for oral presentation is based.) In the end, we are left not knowing precisely which version of the poem Lindeboom is trying to date: some early “oral” version or one of the written ones? And a version that contained which parts of the poem as it is now known? In dismantling the poem in this way, Lindeboom pays virtually no attention to the manuscript evidence. It is not merely that he seems not to have examined any manuscripts on his own. He simply passes over the fact that Book 7, which he wants to believe was added for Henry, appears in all surviving copies of the poem in which Henry is not even mentioned. In another vein, while attacking Macaulay’s notion of the three “recensions,” he appears to adopt without reservation Macaulay’s conclusions on the order in which the three different “versions” of “recension 1” arose (e.g. on 324 and on 334, where he calls the “unrevised version” “the earliest one”). He cites a 1985 essay by the reviewer in support of the notion that the differences among these three versions are mostly scribal in origin (322), but he overlooks the conclusion that follows (and hence the principal burden of that essay): that Macaulay got the order wrong, and that the one he called “unrevised” was actually the last in order of time, manifesting the highest degree of scribal corruption. At another point (331) Lindeboom offers the suggestion that the “intermediate” version might in fact be the earliest version of the poem. This suggestion is based on a completely mistaken account of the contents of the different “versions” that he offers on 324, where he claims that in the “intermediate” and “revised” versions, the lines in which Richard II and Chaucer are named are replaced with the passages less favorable to England and more favorable to Henry. This is simply wrong. One has to suspect that Lindeboom has confused the “intermediate version” with “recension two” and the “revised version” with “recension three,” but one can’t be sure. And that is true about much in this essay. One will find here a summary of some of the many questions that we are still debating about the origin and development of the poem, but we are still far from any clear and definite answers. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2.]

Date
2009

Gower Subjects
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Confessio Amantis
Manuscripts and Textual Studies