Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis (The New Middle Ages)

Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis details the first years of the Confessio’s material history and offers a major revision to a century’s old narrative of political revision and conversion around the trauma of 1400. Joel Fredell argues for “late stage” revisions by Gower to his great poem in Middle English from the late 1390s up to Gower’s death in 1408. This approach, new to scholarship for Ricardian and Lancastrian literature, demands profound re-evaluation of Gower's poetic persona and its entanglement in the opening and closing books of the Confessio . It offers a reassessment of the political and literary relationships between versions dedicated to Richard II and Henry IV. It repositions Gower's laureate status in a London world of deluxe book production that created a canon of Ricardian poets linked to their fifteenth-century inheritors. Finally, it identifies for the first time how late medieval authors designed their poetry as fictional artifacts that witness history from quasi-chronicles like Maidstone’s Concordia or Richard the Redeless , quasi-petitions like the Lollard “Petition to the King and Parliament,” quasi-epistles that begin so many texts, quasi-transcripts such as the Record and Process of the Deposition of Richard II , and so on. Acknowledgments 6 Contents 8 About the Author 10 List of Figures 11 Chapter 1: Introduction: Witness Without Locus 17 1 Reading Variation 17 2 Dream-Vision Variations 24 3 The Polyvocal Page 35 4 Prophet or Propagandist? 38 Chapter 2: A Portrait in Laureate Authority 49 1 The Chaucer Problem 49 2 The Inheritors 55 3 Father Gower 76 Chapter 3: Revising the Three-Recension Model 98 1 Macaulay’s Model 99 2 Dates in the Confessio Glosses 103 3 The Quia Colophons 108 4 The Henrician Couplet 115 5 The Ricardian and Henrician Passages 118 6 Conclusion 127 Chapter 4: Gower’s Late State 130 1 The Nicholson Demolition 131 2 Finding New Language for a New King 134 3 The Late State Model 144 4 The Added Texts and the Two Presentations 148 Chapter 5: Gower’s Margins 164 Chapter 6: The First Public Life of the Confessio and Its Decoration 181 1 The Manuscript Witnesses 181 2 A Brief Overview of the Developments in London Borders ca. 1400–1425 184 3 Early London Borders and Major Literary Manuscripts 196 Chapter 7: Ricardian Confessio Manuscripts in Lancastrian England 222 1 An Emerging Producer Coterie in London, 1405–1410 222 2 London Manuscripts 1405–1410 236 3 London Manuscripts 1410–1415 251 4 The Confessio Boom Tails Off, 1415–1425 271 5 Conclusions 273 Chapter 8: Binaries of Witness in the Languages of Love and Political Cognition 277 1 Witnessing Exile 277 2 Love and Politics 283 3 Reading the End of the Confessio as a Late-State Text 292 4 The Chaucer Connection 302 5 Enduring Forms of Witness 306 Bibliography 308 Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations 308 Secondary Sources 310 General Index 324 Index of Manuscripts 331