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The significance of nature for Gower is apparent simply in the frequency with which he uses nature terms. This chapter deals mainly with Confessio Amantis, Gower's great English work. Most of this work consists of speech by characters and this raises the question of whether what is said here about Nature is wholly reliable, or whether it should be subjected to a scrutiny informed by an apprehension of shortcomings in the speaker. The final directions of the poem suggest that one might do well not to put too much trust in the fact that love and nature are permitted their power over humankind by God. The same is true of the devil himself, but to succumb to his power means damnation. In the background here are alarmed questions about the purposes of God which would have to be met by sheer faith in God's mercy.

This chapter turns to the exemplary narratives of Confessio Amantis and examines their household-based economics of power through the theme of the exchange of women. Interpretations of Gower's tales are contextualized by discussion of the politics of aristocratic marriage in the late 14th century. The representation of lordship and female will is considered in relation to various challenges to a ‘reciprocalist’ traffic in women, including female independence, rape, and incest. The chapter argues that Gower's tales sponsor a reciprocalist model of marriage exchange that is apparently non-coercive but securely governed by household, seigneurial interests. There are extended treatments of the tales of Rosiphelee, Jason and Medea, Apollonius of Tyre, Jephte's Daughter, and Alboin and Rosemund.

This chapter brings together all the arguments presented in the book regarding the importance of the great household to late 14th-century England. It summarizes the political positions developed in Gower's Confessio Amantis and the poem's profound influence on contemporary ways of thinking regarding the roles of the gentry, nobility, and royalty and their feelings of responsibility to the political economy, and the subsequent impact of this view of society.

The English poet John Gower has long been recognized as a Ricardian, that is, a poet in the artistic orbit of England’s King Richard II. This essay explores the importance of Richard’s Queen Anne of Bohemia as a patron in her own right and even more essential than her spouse to the special qualities of Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Anne’s pervasive presence in Gower’s English masterpiece is discovered in its engagement with the legacy of Machaut, especially his two judgment poems, Le Jugement dou roi de Behaingne and its “palinode,” Le Jugement dou roi de Navarre. These poems were dedicated (respectively) to Anne’s grandfather John of Luxembourg and (mostly likely) her aunt Bonne, the latter referenced through honorific wordplay on her name. Gower pays homage to Anne with the traditional pun on her name (in the tale of Alcestis, a figure also associated with Anne in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women), the honor paid to Bohemian culture, and most important, the prominence of good women (especially faithful wives) throughout the Confessio. The final section delves deeper into the literary strategies and ethics of love as embodied by the English poem, especially its commonalities to the defense of women in Machaut’s Navarre.

This chapter anticipates the broad argument of the book. It cites historians' recognition of the importance of the late medieval great household and aristocratic affinity, and proposes including literary discourse in this new awareness. It presents theory of the economics of power as a method for such enterprise and Gower's Confessio Amantis as a focus, discussing the power of a household-based approach fully to explore the poem's otherwise elusive politics.

The second of two chapters on the Confessio Amantis frame narrative, this chapter analyses political dimensions of courtly love and the relationship between Venus, Cupid, Genius and Amans, or the lover, in Gower's poem. First, it argues that Gower laicizes penitential discourse in his technical but minimally ecclesiastic representation of confession and of Genius as confessor, which crucially embeds confession in an allegorical, great household narrative of lay lordship and petitioning. The chapter is principally dedicated to interpretation of the poem's closing scenes, in which Venus can be seen to act as the lover's good lord, to bestow on him a livery collar, and to overmatch Cupid's unilateral lordship at the climax of the poem's contest between ‘magnificence’ and ‘reciprocalism’. Venus's and Cupid's politics are illuminated by readings of The Romance of the Rose, Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls and Legend of Good Women, and Sir John Clanvowe's Boke of Cupide.

This chapter expands the previous chapter's discussion of attitudes to law and justice by investigating the politics of uncentralized, household-based dispute resolution in the tales of Confessio Amantis. There is discussion of writing as a technology of justice, and a livery ordinance of 1390 that is invested in the king's law offers a counterpoint to parliamentary livery complaint and Gower's poem. The chapter argues that Gower's tales promote a distinctly unofficial model of justice rooted in the great household but regulated by oppositions between public and private, lordship and ‘prive’ revenge, hall and chamber. There are extended treatments of the tales of Tereus, Mundus and Paulina, Constance, the False Bachelor, Tarquin and Aruns, Lucrece, Virginius, and Orestes.

The language of the great household operates in Gower's Confessio Amantis in manifold areas, including the metaphorical discourse of the confessional frame narrative. This chapter argues that the allegory of the deadly sins and vices, and the courtly love allegory of Danger, that structure the frame narrative are deeply informed by the great household imaginary. The metaphorical retaining of vices such as Parsimony, and the contest between Amans and Danger extend the poem's political dialectic between ‘reciprocalism’ and ‘magnificence’, strengthening the former. The imagination of Danger as a household chamberlain is analysed with reference to his heritage in The Romance of the Rose and parliamentary attacks on historical royal chamberlains, including Sir Simon Burley.

The book's final chapter explores the theorization and narrative representation of kingship in Confessio Amantis Book Seven. It contextualises Book Seven in relation to salient ideas of medieval kingship, particularly involving counsel and Aristotelian theory of princely virtues and princely reason. The chapter argues that deep contradictions are produced by Book Seven's attempt to secure an ideal of uncentralized, ‘reciprocalist’ politics by means of royal sovereignty. These contradictions are concentrated in the curious, violent representation of royal pity in Book Seven. In the discussion of pity, kingship thus tends towards ‘magnificence’, although it is elsewhere more securely reciprocalist.

This chapter examines the captivity of James I of Scotland, and discusses how the ‘I’ voice of The Kingis Quair may be read as James I's autobiographical identity. It examines how the identity James I sculpts for himself is linked to the specifics of his actual situation, and how James's political self-portrayal often rests upon his redeployment of other texts. The chapter also discusses how the Quair borrows from Gower's Confessio Amantis, an influence that has been ignored in the text's critical history. The Quair's reference to Gower and Chaucer is not merely a mock-modesty topos, but has a political basis. The chapter examines how James presents his successful love-suit in dual form: as the conclusion to his imprisonment in England; and as the culmination of his reaching self-governance and maturity, as James appears to have read Gower's text within the 'governance of princes' tradition.

Exchanges of justice lay at the heart of the late medieval aristocratic political economy. This chapter discusses the respective positions of formal law and household-based modes of dispute resolution, including arbitration and the loveday, in the period and in Gower's more abstract statements about law and order in Confessio Amantis. The chapter finds a conservative aristocratic interest represented strongly both in Gower's poetry and in the contemporary debates over livery and maintenance (especially in relation to livery badges). This interest favours an (idealized) unofficial, consensual, aristocratic mode of justice supported by the law and a personal sense of trouthe, above the centralized administration of the king's law.

This chapter aims to illustrate three simple points: first, that medieval love-debate poetry is centrally concerned with a conflict between idealism and pragmatism; second, that Machaut’s Jugement du roy de Behaigne foregrounds this aspect of the love-debate genre and explores its implications; and third, that Gower’s Confessio Amantis is also structured around the juxtaposition of idealistic and pragmatic views of love. While the two narrative poems may seem to distinguish themselves from earlier love-debates by “settling” the conflict presented with a conclusive judgment, they also retain the fundamental ambivalence of the un-concluded jeux-partis. Machaut and Gower invest sympathetically in the idea that worldly pleasures, and specifically the pleasures of love, can be idealized and given enduring value, and the energy and persistence of this fantasy constitute a significant part of these poems’ appeal. It is a fantasy nonetheless, because both poets also figure the attempt to align love with virtue as essentially futile.

By the end of the fourteenth century, a sizeable audience for poetry in English among the gentry and the commercial classes had emerged. Chaucer wrote for this readership, and his poetry shows a successful absorption of French and Italian models. This chapter scrutinizes his work for evidence of the manner in which it was performed and received. Throughout his oeuvre, Chaucer appeals to both hearers and readers, using images both of books and of oral performers. His invention of the English iambic pentameter made possible a fuller embodiment in verse of the speaking voice, unlike Gower, who chose to write his major work, Confessio Amantis, in strict tetrameters. In the fifteenth century, the changing pronunciation of English made writing in metre a challenge, as is evident in the work of Hoccleve and Lydgate. The chapter ends with a consideration of the Scottish poets Henryson, Dunbar, and Douglas.

The introduction sets out the main questions the book will address. It gives a working definition of both ‘gloss’ and ‘diverting glossing’, provides an overview of the diverse traditions out of which self-glossing emerges and, with reference to Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve, discusses the practical and theoretical difficulties of identifying self-glossing in manuscript. It concludes by summarizing the argument of the book.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen deftly pairs ‘heavy atmosphere’ – ideas about weather and mood – in Chaucer’s works, while at the same time unsettling received ideas about a unidimensional human and elemental world. In Cohen’s exploration of them, the ‘weighty’ atmosphere of the Reeve’s Tale and the fate of Arcite in the Knight’s Tale contrast sharply with Troilus’s celestial transcendence.