John Gower, Confessio Amantis, Volume 2 is the latest installment in Russell A. Peck's triparte edition, produced by TEAMS, of Gower's great Middle English poem. The Confessio Amantis is a series of biblical, classical, legendary and popular narratives, told in over 30,000 lines by Genius, Priest of Venus, as he confesses the lover Amans of sins against love. Within the confessional frame, the tales are organized according to the seven deadly sins so that the whole Confessio Amantis consists of a Prologue narrated by "John Gower" and eight books, one book for each mortal sin, and Book 7 summarizing Aristotelian lore at the lover's request. Volume 1 of Peck's edition, appearing in 2000, includes the Prologue, Book 1 and Book 8, presenting the frame of the poem first. This scheme is justified by the fact that those who teach the Confessio Amantis often focus in class on the Prologue and books 1 and 8 as a way of comparing the Confessio's structure with that of the Canterbury Tales or of providing hints about the integrity of the whole when the term may not allow for a discussion of the entire poem. Volume 2, the particular subject of this review, is comprised of books 2-4, and Volume 3 will soon present books 5-7.
Peck's edition is a testimony to his expertise in the field and a wonderful service to the community of Gower scholars. The production of these three volumes is a fitting culmination of Peck's many years spent in considering and making editions of Gower and other Middle English texts. In 1968 he published a teaching edition of the Confessio Amantis with Holt, Rinehart & Winston, reprinted by Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching in 1980, 1986 and 1989. With tales from each book, paraphrases of long dialogues between Genius and Amans, and a helpful glossary, this is a magnificent classroom text. The latest three volume edition from TEAMS will serve not only for instruction, but also for scholarship and will replace the standard edition by G. C. Macaulay in The Complete Works of John Gower, Volumes 2 and 3. Like Macaulay, Peck uses Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 3 as his base text. First published by Clarendon Press in 1899-1901 and reprinted as The English Works of John Gower by EETS (e.s.81-82) in 1900-01 and again in 1957, Macaulay's edition and its reprints are antiquated and unavailable. Peck's great service is in making the Confessio Amantis easily accessible and in updating the scholarship for his edition. Although Macaulay's research and manuscript collation were impeccable, Peck has mastered the daunting task of integrating more than a hundred years of scholarship, including a renaissance in Gower studies that began in the 1980s. Peck contributed to this renaissance with Kingship and Common Profit in Gower's Confessio Amantis (Carbondale: S. Illinois UP, 1978) and articles on irony, phenomenology and the references to the Book of Daniel in the Confessio. To this latest edition of Gower, Peck also brings his vast experience as General Editor for the Middle English Texts series. That TEAMS can bring Peck's scholarly experience to the Gower reader in such a reasonably priced volume is a great benefit. Similar to Volume 1, Volume 2 of Peck's Confessio Amantis includes an extended Introduction with an original interpretation of the books under consideration and a select bibliography. In the right hand margin of the text, a glossary provides modernizations of more obscure Middle English words and at the bottom of the page, expert translations of the Latin verses heading up a number of sections of the poem are offered by Andrew Galloway. At the back of the edition are thorough and well-contextualized Explanatory Notes, including Galloway's translations of Gower's Latin marginalia, and also Textual Notes.
The Introduction addresses the performative nature of the poem, returning with newly theorized observation to an issue that has long been productive for medieval textual criticism. Since the mid-twentieth century, medievalists such as R.M. Lumiansky have worked on the dramatic nature of the Canterbury Tales, catalyzing critics to look for parallels between Chaucer's multivocal narrative and the exchanges between Genius and Amans in the Confessio Amantis. In his 1965 dissertation for Tulane University, entitled A New Reading of John Gower's Confessio Amantis, one of Lumiansky's students, Robert J. Meindl, who is well known as the English translator of Maria Wickert's Studies in John Gower (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1981) analyzes the dramaturgy of the poem. Meindl argues that the dramatic scene of the Confessio Amantis is like that of a debate poem in which the quarrel leads dialectically to Christian conclusions. With an early understanding that Genius's advice to Amans must be evaluated within its particular narrative context, Meindl shows how "a priest of love, paradoxically and in spite of himself, leads a lover from earthly to divine love" (Diss ab. 1). Referring also to the dialectical nature of the poem, Peck posits that the "play" of the Confessio Amantis allows for the speaking of divergent voices; it has a "capacity of ethopoesis to create an open address for ideas not easily confined by philosophic or polemic modes". (8) Peck notes that in the Confessio Amantis, the confessional frame is a stage, references to nature stage properties, rhetorical delivery a means of conveying fine distinctions and the progress from books 2 to 4 a movement toward dialogics. While Book 3 includes an amplified ethical and moral debate about war, Book 4 connects to its tales on Sloth discussions on love, labor and inventors. Expanding the conversations between Genius and Amans, Book 4 looks forward to the more extended "digressions" in books 5 and 7 about the history of religions and Aristotelian teachings, respectively. As Peck concludes, the theatrical nature of the Confessio Amantis "situates the activity in an artificial, rhetorical space...as if to remind us that the whole posture of this 'confession' is staged within a...culturally patterned idea" (12)-- an idea reached ultimately through dialogues among courtly, religious, philosophical and historical discourses, among others.
As the Introduction to Volume 2 persuasively renders an old approach in a fascinating new light, the Explanatory Notes (327-412) combine Peck's helpful reading of difficult or more allusive lines with scholarship about them. These Notes are particularly thorough and clear; in them and also in the "Select Bibliography" that concludes the Introduction (40-53), Peck shows a deep conscientiousness about documenting new readings of the Confessio Amantis by both senior and junior scholars. The best aspect of the Notes is the way in which they stress intertextuality. While Macaulay recorded sources, Peck also includes analogues, remarking, for instance, in the note at Book 3, lines 783 ff. how "The Tale of Phebus and Cornide" relates to the Manciple's Tale (361). Peck's approach to the Explanatory Notes shows not only the tradition of inheritance of one text by another, but also the fourteenth-century context of literary influence. The Textual Notes that follow (413-416) provide a complete list of lines in which spelling and dialect have been brought into uniformity.
Special attention to accuracy is paid by Andrew Galloway in his translations of the Latin verses heading up sections of the poem. Peck might have chosen to use translations such as Sian Echard and Claire Fanger's The Latin Verses in the Confessio Amantis: An Annotated Translation (East Lansing, MI: Collegues Press, 1991), but elected instead Galloway's more literal renderings. A comparison of a single sentence will suffice to show Galloway's increased focus on verba, in comparison with Echard and Fanger's on res. For instance, for the first two lines of the Latin poem introducing Book 2 on Envy, Gower writes: "Invidie culpa magis est attrita dolore, / Nam sua mens nullo tempore leta manet...." Echard and Fanger translate: "Envy is all bruised and torn by pain, / For envious mind in gladness never dwells" (35), creating memorable images of suffering and a mansion for happiness. In doing so, however, they employ two English words ("bruised" and "torn") for "attrita" and render the adjective "leta" a noun. In contrast, Galloway translates: "The sin of Envy is greatly chafed by sorrow, for his mind does not stay happy for any time at all..." (55). Without the expectation of achieving poetry, Galloway stays closer to Gower's words. This "word for word" approach is more suitable to an edition seeking to meet the demands of both teaching and scholarship and therefore rightly assuming that some of its audience is inexpert in Latin.
Galloway also translates the Latin glosses that feature in the margins of Macaulay's edition, but are relegated to the Explanatory Notes in Peck. As precise as the verses, the Latin marginalia would be even more useful if brought back into the margins of the poem. Sometimes, the marginalia present mere summaries of the tales conveyed, but other times, they add new points of view and produce what Sian Echard has called a multivocal, multilingual narrative ("Glossing in Gower: In Latin, in English and in absentia: The Case of Bodleian Ashmole 35" in Revisioning Gower, ed. R. F. Yeager [Asheville, NC: Pegasus, 1998], p. 238). For instance, the gloss for Book 3, lines 847 ff, in which Genius explains "Hate" to Amans reads: "...Hatred, whose nature, summarizing all enmities of Wrath in its mind like the devil's scribe, inserts them into the hearts' paper as memoranda until the time of inflicting them" (Galloway's translation, 363). Here, the imagery of a sinful scriptorium is a novel picture not presented in Genius's definition of "Hate" and serves to imprint this transgression in the memory. While Peck's edition marks the manuscript presence of marginalia with a hand pointing toward a parenthetical suggestion to see the Explanatory Notes, it cannot present the Latin glosses as a voice on stage in this way.
Other minor inconveniences arose when I was employing Peck's Volume 2 for an essay about the Confessio's Book 3. I missed the headings Macaulay supplied for each page bracketing the sin or tale under discussion. In a poem of more than 30,000 lines, an editorial aid such as this is a great benefit to the reader who is quickly turning pages for a desired reference. Furthermore, because of inconsistencies in spelling Greek names and entitling the narratives, some of the tales were difficult to cite. For instance, for Book 3's tale about Phoebus and Cornide, Peck uses Gower's spelling of the Greek god's name ("Phebus"), but for Orestes' tale, Peck uses the classical spelling for "Orestes" rather than Gower's ("Horestes"). Sometimes the title of the tale includes "The Tale of...", for instance "The Tale of Alexander and the Pirate;" other times, the tales are named simply after their main characters, as in "Jupiter and Laar."
These are very slight criticisms, however, of an otherwise excellent volume in a masterful edition. Besides the strengths already mentioned--Peck's interpretation and documentation as well as Galloway's Latin--the volume offers an extensive glossary of Middle English words in the margins of the text, which much expands on the glossary from Peck's earlier classroom edition and in its positioning improves greatly on Macaulay's, which is only in the back of his volume 3. Overall, John Gower, Confessio Amantis, Volume 2, edited by Russell A. Peck, is a model text for both teaching and scholarship.