John Gower. Confessio Amantis, 3 vols.
- Author/Editor
- Peck, Russell A., ed.
- Title
- John Gower. Confessio Amantis, 3 vols.
- Published
- Peck, Russell A., ed. "John Gower. Confessio Amantis, 3 vols." Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2004
- Review
- When I reviewed the first volume of Peck's new edition of CA for JGN in 2001, I welcomed the opportunity that it gave to teach the poem in entire books rather than just selections, and I praised the choice to put the Prologue, Book 1, and Book 8 together in one volume as an ingenious solution to the problem of presenting the poem to beginners. I also commended Andrew Galloway's translations of the complete Latin apparatus. But I had a few reservations. I pointed out the incomplete and to some extent misleading account of the presentation of the text; I felt that Peck could have done a lot more to update Macaulay's punctuation; and I felt that he gave an overly directive reading of the poem in place of a real introduction. The completion of the edition with the appearance of volume 3 offers a chance to reassess both the scheme as a whole and the details of its execution. In some respects the edition has improved as it progressed. There is evidence of much greater care in the preparation of the text, and there are, for instance, more textual notes in vols. 2 and 3 than appeared in vol. 1, and they are far more detailed. There is still, however, no good account of the editorial procedure, a problem that is now only exacerbated by the inconsistencies between the first and the subsequent volumes. Peck claims to have used the Fairfax MS as his "copy text” (3:485) and to have “consulted” (3:33) six others (Macaulay’s A, B, C, J, S, and T). This is a different list from vol. 1 (which does not cite C or T, but includes Delta), and it is not clear what Peck means by “consulted,” since A, C, and T are cited far less often in the notes than B, J, and S. Even with these latter copies, the notes do not offer a complete record of variants. (Macaulay’s notes offer a much fuller selection.) The emphasis is on departures from Macaulay: in vol. 3 alone there are 42 instances in which Peck follows F where Macaulay chooses to follow a different MS; 17 instances in which Peck follows F where Macaulay’s different reading has no evident MS support (These are evidently Macaulay’s errors of transcription. All are very minor. They include 5.5918, where the note is incorrect.); and 19 instances in which Peck follows Macaulay in departing from F. At least Peck has provided the MS authority for his departures from Macaulay or from F (one of the issues that I had with vol. 1), though he still does not explain what principles guided his choice. (His understanding of the relation among the surviving copies appears to be based only on Macaulay and Fisher; see 3.33.) The text itself appears reasonably accurate. I checked a passage of a little less than 400 lines (5.2859-3246) against both Macaulay and my photocopy of F. I found one instance where Peck follows Macaulay in error (my for mi in 5.2939) and one new mistake (him where Macaulay and F have hem, 5.2884). This is pretty small stuff, on about the same level as the errors that Peck found in Macaulay. I also found that Peck has modernized the capitalization and some of the spelling in his text, following the normal practice for TEAMS editions, and that he has also taken far more liberty with Macaulay’s punctuation than he did in vol. 1, making at least two dozen changes in the passage that I examined. These are welcome, but again I wish he had done more, and there are at least another dozen passages in which I feel that no modern editor, beginning fresh, would have chosen the punctuation that Macaulay did. Again, not a major problem, but it does lead me to the same conclusion that I reached with vol. 1: that Peck’s “copy text” was not Fairfax at all but Macaulay, which he has read against F and some other copies and which he has modernized a bit. This is actually not a new edition of the poem in the usual sense, and I think that Peck could have been a little clearer about it. The introductions to vols. 2 and 3 are very much in the mold of that to vol. 1. They offer us Peck’s reading of the poem. Amans is a lost sinner; the poem is “a study of the self’s effort to reclaim its own estate” (2:39); and Amans’ personal regeneration also has a political and social correlative, in the regeneration of the community. In vol. 2 Peck is somewhat hard-pressed to apply this understanding to Books 2 and 3 except in his discussion of individual tales (which he must treat in isolation from the dialogue), and in Book 4, it emerges only as an unexpressed and ironic counterpoint to what Genius and Amans actually say. In vol. 3 Peck has somewhat more to work with, as “Gower alters his earlier structural patterns to shift the focus from confession and impersonation to education--education in good rule” (3:1). Except in his discussion of the treatment of Chastity, however, there is little hint in the third introduction that the poem is actually concerned with love, and Peck arranges his discussion (as Gower does not) to conclude with the tale of Lycurgus and the importance of the rule of law. There is certainly much of value here: a good couple of pages on Nature in vol. 2, for instance, (2:14-17) (though I find the preceding discussion of CA as “drama” to be heavy with anachronism), and some good comments on the folkloric aspect of CA and on the range of Gower’s style in vol. 3 (3:10-15). But overall, Peck has evidently viewed this edition as an opportunity to espouse the same view of the thematic structure of the poem that he has argued for since 1968. Whether or not I agree with this view is unimportant (just for the record: I don’t); what is at issue is whether or not this is an appropriate function for the introductions in an edition that is intended for beginners. I see another missed opportunity here. Not only does Peck close off discussion of such issues as the roles of Genius and Amans (What really does happen in the conclusion? For a view very different from Peck’s, students should be directed to Burrow (1983).), but some of the best of the recent writers on Gower have opened up the poem in ways that couldn’t have been anticipated when Peck and I first studied it, and some have challenged both the necessity and the possibility of a single consistent moral message from beginning to end. Except in his discussion of Nature, however, Peck never acknowledges them. By being a little less prescriptive, by focusing a little more on what still must be regarded as unresolved issues in the reading of the poem, Peck could have done quite a bit more to prepare the way for the next generation of Gower scholars.
Having studied the poem for so long, Peck certainly knows it very well, and there is therefore much of value in the explanatory notes, particularly, I feel, in Book 7. And I must say once again what a fine job Andrew Galloway has done with the Latin apparatus. (Note to the publisher: half of the translation to the gloss at 5.4579 was inadvertently left out.) The notes also record Galloway’s discovery that the twelve Latin glosses to the discussion of the signs of the zodiac in Book 7 are metrically regular and together constitute a “Latin poem on the seasons” (3:449); to which I can add that the second of these, at 7.1015, contains a typically Gowerian quotation of Ovid’s "Fasti" 3.240, the best evidence that I know of that Gower himself actually composed at least some of the glosses to the poem. As for the overall scheme of the edition: it appears to me now that if the original plan was to make each volume independent, it has not been carried out consistently, and if it was not, then there was perhaps much less reason for presenting the poem out of chronological order and placing Book 8 in vol. 1. Vol. 3 contains a subject index (a list of characters and topics) to all three volumes, suggesting that they constitute a single work. Peck seems to have thought of his three introductions as parts of a single composition, and indeed his discussions of such topics as Nature or law are as relevant to any of the volumes as to the volume in which they occur, and his own argument on the structure of the poem depends heavily on reading Book 7 before Book 8. Those who use vol. 1 alone are going to receive a very partial, very incomplete view of the poem, and those who use the complete edition will now have a rather disjointed view. I’m afraid that moving Book 8 to vol. 1 seems much less of a good idea now that the edition is complete than it seemed at the beginning. In sum: this is a very attractive and usable edition of the complete text of the "Confessio Amantis"; it has some very important features (notably Galloway’s translations); and it is very affordable. We have to be glad to have it. But it also has its quirks, notably its arrangement; as a guide to reading the poem, it has to be used with great care; and in several important ways, it leaves me thinking about what might have been. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 25.1.] - FOR ALMOST 40 years--from 1966 to the year 2004--Russell Peck’s edition of selections from Gower’s "Confessio Amantis" has been the best hope of teachers wishing to introduce Gower’s great poem to undergraduate readers. There were other excerpted editions, but none was as ambitious as Peck’s nor, from the time it was taken up by the MARTS series, so neatly combining availability and affordability. Nevertheless, the first version of Peck’s Gower left many gaps. As a collection of excerpts, it privileged the stories in the poem, excising much of the frame. That excision also necessarily removed the Latin from the poem--most of the Latin verses and all of the prose glosses disappeared. And as a one-volume edition of the poem, Peck’s first edition was limited in terms of introduction and explanatory notes. Then, in the year 2000, Peck’s new Gower began to appear, and by 2004 the three-volume set was complete. It still has the undergraduate student very much in mind: Volume 1 contains what one might think of as the essence of the poem, while Volumes 2 and 3 offer all the rest of--one could still assign a one-volume, partial Gower. But a quick glance at Volume 1 shows how differently we now approach the question of the essential Gower. This volume offers the poem’s frame--the Prologue and Book VIII, and Book I, the introduction of the confessional structure. Like the other volumes, it now includes all the Latin: the verses, on the page with translations in the notes, and the glosses in both Latin and translation in the notes, indicated in the text by the presence of pointing hands. The speaker markers found in many manuscripts of the poem have been included as well. The poem no longer ends with the "Explicit iste liber," but rather, with the "Quia vnusquisque," a restatement of Gower’s whole poetical career. Even in this single volume, then, the poem is presented as a complex, ornately structured, multi-layered and multi-lingual text, the work of a highly self-conscious public poet. There are gestures towards its textual tradition as well: the first volume offers 5 illustrations drawn from the manuscripts, and prints the Ricardian and Henrician versions of the Prologue side-by- side. The first edition drew on Macaulay, checking the venerable editor’s work against the Fairfax manuscript, then understood to show signs of Gower’s personal intervention. This new edition continues to draw on Macaulay, but has sampled from seven manuscripts (note a typo in the reference to Trinity R.3.3--Peck of course consulted R.3.2), and the results of that sampling appear in the (relatively brief) textual notes at the end of each volume. Volume 1 is a reimagination of what one might teach if one were teaching part of the CA--but the edition as a whole is much more. It represents a lifetime’s work on the poet, and thus is in many ways a very different beast from that first collection of excerpts. Each volume has a meaty introduction, often consisting of two parallel texts--Peck’s reading of the poem, and a second critical conversation taking place in the extensive footnotes (there was little room for engagement with criticism--and of course, much less criticism with which to engage--in 1966). The extensive notes add further critical depth: where in the 1966 excerpted edition they consisted largely of brief references to sources and analogues, here they range widely through both medieval texts and modern critics. The notes to the Latin material, provided by Andrew Galloway, who also did the translations, are extremely thorough and thoughtful, restoring this part of the poem to its full role in the CA as a whole. And Peck’s introductions, ranging as they do through medieval theoretical, social, political and literary contexts, and drawing extensively on Gower’s other works, give a clear sense of many different ways one could approach the CA. Excerpted editions in the first part of the last century often gave the impression that they existed simply to allow a reader to compare Gower’s stories (usually unfavorably) to Chaucer’s. This new student edition of Gower, whether represented by its first volume or by the whole set, makes Gower’s own claims central. The introduction to Volume 1 sets out the plan of the CA, reading it as a confessional text in the Boethian mode. Some of this material appeared in the first edition as well, but here the argument is enriched with considerable detail, for example from St Augustine and other medieval thinkers on the subjects of memory, history, and learning. Peck argues that Gower’s “middle weie” is in part a reflection of a new, 14th-century mode of reading, one which attends to the gaps in fictions. He takes up the question of Gower’s various authorial impersonations as part of this discussion of reading and reception. In Volume 2 (Books II-IV), he shifts his attention to what he sees as Gower’s dramaturgical mode, in which confession is shown to be a performative art. Book IV, the last book in this volume, is read as the culmination and structural center of what Peck comes to call the “play”--before Gower shifts his attention to education, and takes on the mantle of this historian, a shift discussed in the introduction to Volume 3 (Books V-VII). Peck argues that by Book VII, Gower’s legal and historical interests come to the fore, and he appears as the social counselor, concerned above all with the importance of right rule. It is a peculiarity of the non-sequential structure of these three volumes that the introduction to Volume 3 does not end explicitly with reference to the poem’s frame--when surely it matters, as Peck makes very clear elsewhere, that the poem situates itself so clearly in Ricardian/ Henrician England. There are many references to this context throughout the three volumes--a student possessing all three would come away with a very clear sense that Gower imagined a public, political role for poetry. But the particular final moment at the end of the introduction to Volume 3 does seem to leave one hanging. I understand the decision to split the CA as has been done, and I can easily imagine, as I hope I’ve made clear above, how one would make use of Volume 1. I have a little more difficulty putting the three volumes together--I think what I’d most like would be either Volume 1 on its own, or three volumes which offered the poem--and thus Peck’s many stimulating readings– in order. There are a few other decisions with which I might quibble. Apart from the side-by-side printing of the Prologue versions discussed above, most of the significant variation between versions is relegated to the notes, sometimes printed out and sometimes simply described– Macaulay’s decisions about the relative status of the versions is still largely intact, in other words. Nevertheless, there is much more acknowledgement of variance here than was the case before, and Peck never claims to be providing a new scholarly edition to replace Macaulay’s. There are many features of the texts intended to help students--words are glossed in the margins, difficult passages are translated at the bottom of the page, and there is even a brief glossary at the end of the third volume. But one feature of the 1966 excerpted edition, a long discussion of Gower’s language, has been largely omitted--some teachers might miss this aspect of the text. These are minor points. There is no doubt that Russell Peck has done teachers and students (of many levels) of Gower a great service by so significantly re-imagining and reworking his old edition. Both the one- and three-volume versions present Gower as a vital, engaging and important poet. We all of us owe Peck and TEAMS a debt of gratitude for providing us the wherewithal to make that case to new generations of students. [SE. Copyright. The John Gower Newsletter. JGN 25.1.]
- LET ME SAY first of all that the production of this new edition of the "Confessio Amantis" is a remarkable achievement, and Russell Peck deserves every praise for his energy and erudition, and for his expedition in bringing the project to completion in such a comparatively short time. This praise must be added to the admiration he has won from all scholars and students of Middle English for his Herculean efforts in master-minding the TEAMS series (of which these Gower volumes are part) over the years since 1990. We should also add a word of praise for the team of helpers he has gathered around him at Rochester, and whom he is so generous in acknowledging, and for the Gower volumes a special commendation to Andrew Galloway, since it is he who has contributed the translations of the Latin (both the Latin verses and the marginal summaries and annotations) which are the single most important feature of the new edition. The lay-out of the fairly large format page, with good-sized print, wide margins, side-glosses, translations of the Latin verses at the foot of the page (the translations of the Latin marginal summaries and annotations are among the Explanatory Notes at the end of each volume), is very pleasing, and the volumes, though large, are easy to use. I like the little medieval-style hands with pointing fingers that signal the presence of marginalia, as translated in the Notes; the form of the speech-markers and of the titles for stories and subjects inserted at the beginning of ‘chapters’; also the simple, unfussy way in which the text of revisions like those at Prologue 24 are set out. There are some changes and improvements in format in Volume III, and I presume that these and other changes will be extended to and incorporated in the other volumes in later reprints. In this context of overall praise, there are some issues to take up. In the first place, the organisation of the three volumes, with Prologue and Books 1 and 8 in the first volume, Books 2-4 in the second, and Books 5-7 in the third, now looks a little bizarre. Russell Peck associates me with the idea of doing things in this way, and thanks me, and so I can hardly complain. I think what I had in mind was that students should have the general shape of the poem made available to them from the start. I suppose I was assuming that it would be a good many years before the other volumes came out (perhaps with the experience of being on the Council of the EETS in mind) and that meanwhile this was a good interim measure. In the event, Russell has surprised us all with his speed in moving to completion, and all I can say is that what looked like quite a good idea at the time has turned out a little oddly. No matter: it is all there. The text is not a great problem with Gower. One could follow Macaulay exactly and produce a perfectly satisfactory text. Peck goes back to MS Fairfax 3, follows Macaulay in some of his few emendations, though not in some others that are necessary (e.g. bore for MS both at 1.397, "worldes" for MS "worldee" at 5.5552), and not in his attempt to standardise Gower’s grammar, spelling and metre on a systematic basis (e.g. standardisation of "here" and "hire" respectively as "their" and "her", and elimination of otiose final -e). Peck introduces a few emendations of his own, based on the small number of manuscripts he seems to have consulted, and also substitutes "agein" for "ayein," "forgat" for "foryat," "thee" for "the," etc., presumably to help the reader (Peck may explain his editorial practice somewhere, but so far I have not found where). Generally speaking, Peck favours the idea that the variations between manuscripts mark the progress of Gower’s opinions rather than the day-to-day realities of manuscript production, as argued consistently by Peter Nicholson (see, for instance, the discussion at Vol. I, pp. 286-7). He tends still to assume that Gower himself supervised the production of MS Fairfax 3 (see Vol. I, p.69). The punctuation of the text is generally too heavy, a common fault in modern texts of Middle English verse, where there is the modern tendency to punctuate by the clause rather than the pause and to neglect the function of the line-end as a form of punctuation. I count twelve superfluous commas at line-end in eighty lines at 4.1118-93 (and two further unnecessary medial commas, at 1179 and 1180) in the lover’s eager outpouring of his puppyish devotion to his lady, a passage which above any must run freely and without impediment. Side-glosses can be for ever taxed with omission and superfluity, often on the basis of personal preference, but there is one general point worth making. Side-glosses are always in danger of providing too many contextualised senses for common words which are not really needed and which may deter the reader from doing the normal and necessary work of reading in context. For instance, "To stonde" in "To stonde at his commandement" (Prol.84) is glossed "To submit to," where the extended sense of "stand" is familiar and easy to come to through the context; likewise with "mot stonde" in "For trowthe mot stonde ate laste" (Prol.369), glossed "must remain" (see the very relevant note on the frequency of the verb "stand" in Gower at Prol.143, Vol. I, p.291). This kind of contextual explicitness will sometimes also lose the lively possibility of personification that is always present in Gower’s poetry. In Prol.223, "Humilité was tho withholde," withholde is glossed "practiced (held with)," which misses the (for me) vital sense of "retained" (as a retainer) which is preserved a few lines later in the gloss to :Which coveitise hath now withholde," (Prol.263, where there might be some debate too about the capital letter). So in Prol.130, "And lawe hath take hire double face," the side-glosses are "lawyers" and "put on (donned) their," which miss the personification and violate the rule that Macaulay at least insists on that "hire" in Gower means "her" (while "their" is always "here"). Another kind of over-explicitness is present in the translation of "conquestes" in Prol.709, "Gaf the conquestes that he wan" as "booty," which obscures the point that "conquestes" include kingdoms, as the subsequent lines make clear. Kingdoms, to me, don’t sound like "booty," and it would have been better to leave the word unglossed. These are general points, worth observing; though of course one could disagree also about particulars in the these first few hundred lines, e.g., "plit" (Prol.676) as "plight" (better, "manner"), "franchise" (Prol.761) as "sovereignty" (better, "freedom"), "redely" (Prol.948) as "skillfully" (needs no gloss), "saulf" (Prol.1016) as "safe" (better, "saved," especially since Noah is being referred to). Here, too, over-explicitness is often the problem. The translations of the Latin verses are sometimes very weird-sounding. At Vol. I, p. 70, Tempus preteritum, ‘Legibus vnicolor tunc temporis aura refulsit’ is translated "then the unicolored air of the times was aglow with laws" (compare Siân Echard and Claire Fanger, "The Latin Verses in the Confessio Amantis," p. 5, "The air of that age shone, one-hued, with laws," with no loss, as far as I can see, of accuracy). At p.84, Prosper et aduersus, ‘Mundu in euentu versatur’ is translated "The world is overturned in its outcomes" (compare Echard and Fanger, "The world is tossed and turned by chance," with maybe some loss of specificity). At p.134, Flectere quam frangi, ‘olle/ Fictilis ad cacabum pugna valere nequit’ is translated "the attack of the earthen pot cannot prevail over the cauldron" (Echard and Fanger, "the blow/ Of claypot ‘gainst the kettle is in vain"). At p.173, Gloria perpetuos, ‘Scandere sellata iura valebit eques’ is translated "will succeed in mounting up the saddled laws as a knight" (Echard and Fanger, "The knight . . . mounts the saddled laws"--I suspect "mounted up" is the problem here). And so on. I think Galloway may be trying to convey something of the contortions of Gower’s Latin verse, the ostentation of opacity, the straining of metaphor, the tortured verse-forms, the Hisperican cleverness that undoes the ambitious Latinitator. It is all very painful. Strangely enough, the clouds clear as Volume II begins, and the translations begin to run much more fluently, almost as if Galloway had seen the light, or had just gradually got the knack of doing it. The Explanatory Notes are enormously full and informative (Peck has made good use of the mass of material in Peter Nicholson’s invaluable "Commentary," and acknowledges too his extensive use of Macaulay’s notes, e.g. Vol. I, p. 329). They are generally even-handed in matters of interpretation, and Peck does not grind too many of his own axes. They are perhaps at times too expansive; if they had been at the foot of the page, I think there might have been more economy. Sometimes, for instance, they draw in references to critical works of comparatively little importance, often making points that are of only general relevance or sometimes hardly worth making at all (e.g. at Prol.196, 1022, 1.1769, 3, 213, 1193--Peck seems fond of this quotation, and repeats it in the note to 8.2339). I think such notes, though I consider them superfluous, are a tribute to Peck’s collegiality, his generosity to all who have written on the poem and his desire to acknowledge them by including them somewhere; the same would be true with the more indulgently lengthy quotation from the seminar-paper of a Rochester graduate-student (at 3.1375). The recurrent notes on what is happening in "Chaucer’s Ghoast" (1672) are a whimsical addition to the already expansive annotation. The Introduction to Volume I takes a few passages from Peck’s 1968 edition of "Selections" from the CA, but is greatly expanded. It is a fine piece of writing, instinct with a deep knowledge of and a deep feeling for the poem. Peck is particularly good on the Augustinian physiology and psychology of reading and perception, on ‘reading as therapy’, on the stories as exercises in maturing understanding, on the long dramatic narrative of self-discovery. His views have not changed much over the years. He sees Gower as a moral poet rather than a love-poet, indeed a moralist before a poet, and considers Book 7 the king-pin of the whole. It is not my view of the poem, but I have to acknowledge it to be closer to the modern consensus of critics like Kurt Olsson, Winthrop Wetherbee and James Simpson. Volume II has another long Introduction, stressing the nature of the CA as a "psychological drama of reading," and making good analysis of approaches to the poem in terms of performance-theory, the frame-narrative, and the use of visual imagery in narrative. There is also lavish explication of the stories in Books 3-5. Volume III has another long Introduction (I think Russell may now have said all that he wants to say about the poem), especially important in marking the shift from the confessional mode of earlier books to the more explicitly educational mode made evident in Book 7. There are some reflections on "Gower the Historian" and then, as before, extended summary and explication of the matter of the three books in the volume. There are a good many changes in format in this volume, presumably the model for future revisions of the whole. Innovations include the valuable List of Contents with itemized titles for each story and "chapter," an Index of Subjects (for Vols. I-III) and an Index of References for Vol. III only.One or two startling moments: "novelly," as adverb (Vol. I, p.303); "ficticious" (sic, Vol.I, p.344), "breech" (for "breach," Vol. I, p. 354). And how did "Let he who . . . . (Vol. I, p.201) get past so many distinguished professors of English? Some moans and disagreements therefore, inevitably; but a magnificent achievement. [DP. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 25.1.]
- Date
- 2004
- Gower Subjects
- Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations
- Confessio Amantis