The Exemplum in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis."
- Author/Editor
- McNally, Joseph Augustine.
- Title
- The Exemplum in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis."
- Published
- McNally, Joseph Augustine. "The Exemplum in John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." Ph.D. Diss. University of South Carolina 1982. DAI 43(4): 1154A.
- Review
- "The exemplum is the basic unit of the 'Confessio Amantis,' since each of Gower's tales in the poem is presented as a moral story, but in order to understand the role of the exemplum in the work it is necessary to know the history of the form and its varied uses. For that reason, this study of the 'Confessio Amantis' traces the development of the exemplum from classical literature to Gower's time and proceeds to an analysis of certain major tales in the 'Confessio Amantis' to show that Gower often used rhetorical figures in adapting his exempla from original sources. An important result of the rhetorical analysis of certain tales is the discovery that, in writing his exempla, Gower utilized rhetorical figures to enhance the morality of the tale, i.e., to make good and evil more obvious in each exemplum. There is, however, a wider significance to the exemplum in the 'Confessio Amantis,' and that significance is found by comparing Gower's collection of exempla with three other collections: the exempla gathered by Jacques de Vitry, the collection of moral tales by Etienne de Bourbon, and the 'Speculum Morale' by Vincent of Beauvais. Each of these collections contains numerous exempla which are, with the exception of Jacques' tales, subsumed under various divisions of the seven deadly sins. A comparison of Gower's poem with the three Latin collections shows that Gower arranged the subdivisions of each of the main sins in a much more imaginative way than the French monks did, and an analysis of the two main parts of the 'Confessio Amantis,' Books I-IV and V-VIII, shows how the structure of Gower's work differs from the three other works mentioned as well as differing from Robert Mannyng's 'Handlyng Synne,' whose exempla are also abstracted in this study. Thus, by approaching Gower as an exemplarist and by comparing him with other exemplarists, some of the genuine significance and artistry of the 'Confessio Amantis' becomes evident, just as it also becomes evident that John Gower was a far more clever and talented poet than centuries of misreading have allowed him to be." [eJGN 39.1]
- Date
- 1982
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification