A Descriptive Catalogue of the English Manuscripts of John Gower's Confessio Amantis.

Author/Editor
Pearsall, Derek and Linne Mooney, eds.

Title
A Descriptive Catalogue of the English Manuscripts of John Gower's Confessio Amantis.

Published
Pearsall, Derek and Linne Mooney, eds. A Descriptive Catalogue of the English Manuscripts of John Gower's Confessio Amantis. Publications of the John Gower Society, XV. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2021. xx; 385 pp. ISBN 978-1-84384-613-0.

Review
One of the brightest signs of growing interest in Gower is the recent attention to the manuscripts of his work: their fascinating political valences, their luxurious design, their position in current discussions about certain London scribes and canon formation in the book worlds of London and beyond. Those lines of investigation now have a splendid and solid foundation in Pearsall's and Mooney's Catalogue. The forty-nine surviving manuscripts and six fragments of the "Confessio Amantis" are fully described in entries that meet and regularly exceed contemporary practice in their sheer fullness of detail. As the Foreword notes, the project began in 1978 (xiii), with significant early work by Jeremy Griffiths and Kate Harris. Four decades on, the Catalogue benefits from recent work on the CA to update the heroic labors of George C. Macaulay now a century old. Macaulay's brief manuscript descriptions are in some cases markedly less complete than in others (also true for his collations), and he did not see nine CA manuscripts in Middle English now known to scholars. That inconsistency has now been rectified. In this Catalogue manuscript contents are described with lacunae fully annotated and additions listed; illustrations and decorations are discussed at length. Physical description in general is extensive, offering information on scribal hands, page design, and punctuation. Substantial discussions of provenance are the rule, not the exception: for London, British Library, MS Harley 3490 the discussion of provenance extends over five pages (105-109), and that example is not the exception. In many places consultations with A. I. Doyle, Kathleen Scott, and other scholars have enriched the entries. Current scholarship is well-enough represented that the Works Cited alone is worth the attention of Gowerians. The appendices include an authoritative summary list of the manuscripts, Macaulay's sigla, and an overview of Gower's shorter poems in Latin often added to the end of the CA, along with poems not attributed to Gower that appear in CA manuscripts. The French poem "Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz" also finds its way into the third appendix, a bit surprising but helpful, since one or more of three short Latin poems seem to attach themselves to this "ballade" collection in several early manuscripts. A small gathering of color plates offers glimpses of the two standard miniatures (the Dream of Nebuchadnezzar and the Confession) and the two main layouts in what Pearsall has called the "London style" for the poem in the first decades of its public life. The Catalogue does not include the two Iberian translations of the CA; the editors note that these manuscripts have been well-discussed recently. Nor does it include the nine independent manuscripts of "Vox clamantis," the Trentham anthology (London, British Library, MS Add. 59495), or the sole copy of the "Mirour de l'Omme" (Cambridge, University Library, MS Add. 3035). We can turn to other sources for the latter two, but a full contemporary description of the VC manuscripts remains an important and incomplete task. In all other respects this long-awaited treasure-house fulfills its promise. [JF. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1]

Date
2021

Gower Subjects
Manuscripts and Textual Studies
Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference
Confessio Amantis
Minor Latin Poetry
Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz