Another Woman Reader of John Gower's "Confessio Amantis": Jacquetta of Luxembourg and Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 307.
- Author/Editor
- Watson, Sarah Wilma.
- Title
- Another Woman Reader of John Gower's "Confessio Amantis": Jacquetta of Luxembourg and Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 307.
- Published
- Watson, Sarah Wilma. "Another Woman Reader of John Gower's Confessio Amantis: Jacquetta of Luxembourg and Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 307." Journal of the Early Book Society 21 (2018): 159-70. ISSN 1525-6790
- Review
- Watson notes that "examples of counseling women . . . abound in the Confessio Amantis" and that "it should not surprise us that a number of powerful women owned copies of Gower's poem" (160). One of these (as Kate D. Harris discovered in 1993) was Jacquetta of Luxembourg, widow of John, Duke of Bedford, wife of Richard Woodville, and mother-in-law to Edward IV. Harris pointed to Jacquetta's signature and motto three times inscribed in the margins (see plates in Watson at 163-64) as evidence that she owned, and apparently read at least in part, Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 307. Watson speculates on when and why Jacquetta inscribed the manuscript. A signature at the foot of a column on fol. 141r that includes a dramatic shift of fortune suggests to Watson the fall of the Lancastrians and the rise of the Yorkists, and prompts her to muse: "It may have been at this moment of uncertainty that Jacquetta marked [this] passage in the Confessio Amantis" (165).] [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 38.1.]
- Date
- 2018
- Gower Subjects
- Manuscripts and Textual Studies
Confessio Amantis